“Why are you keeping us here?” I asked. As the gunman approached us from the forge, I turned slightly to face him. Thus I had all three of Boris’ henchmen in a curving line shaped like a question mark, with little Boris for the dot. All this, as Myshkin would probably have said, was probably highly symbolic, but the maneuver might have gone unobserved except for Siegman’s reaction. He had guessed what I was up to.
“A frame-up,” said Boris, in candid answer to my question. By then Siegman’s panic had been communicated to Harriet. Boris caught it there and quickly traced it back. He had been saying, “It’s a simple arrangement, really—” but he broke off and looked at me.
I sometimes wonder what his next words would have been if we hadn’t had an interruption. Interruption may not be quite the word, but at least it’s no overstatement, because what happened was that the house almost fell in. There was an instant’s warning accidentally provided by Boris’ pause in the conversation, then a wild, tootling horn growing louder—then suddenly, very close, the sound of a roaring motor. Next came the shuddering crash as Suddsy’s truck plowed into the house, smashing and splintering its way through the wide arch-shaped wooden door on the ground floor. Fortunately the truck’s impact against the door had turned its front wheels. It swerved, hit the forge, swerved again and came to a sudden stop—crushing Myshkin’s machine against a wall. That was what almost tore the house down. The walls trembled and the motor rattled in death throes.
The sounds of the crash seemed very slow in fading away. Then, like it is in those dreams where you can’t move, the truck door swung open and out tumbled the elevator operator, then Gladys, and finally Suddsy, all a little dazed, but none the worse for wear.
“Mr. Myshkin, darling!” Gladys screamed.
I had the test-tube out of my pocket. I yanked the stopper and whipped the contents across the question-mark of the three gunmen and Boris. They were getting ready to crow when it happened. I remember Boris falling back from the others, his face reflecting an agonized struggle, his little hands working like mad. That and his leap when Gladys had called him Mr. Myshkin was what saved him—or postponed his fate—whichever it turned out to be. Because Boris wasn’t touched by the compound, and I’m not sure it would have harmed him anyway, in spite of Myshkin’s beliefs. But he didn’t escape the impact and those explosions either. The other three went up, of course. There must have been three explosions, but it turned into one prodigious blinding, golden blast with three black dots swimming away into the back of one’s eyeballs. The wonder of it was that it was almost silent—a very soft swoosh!—as if a breeze had run through the house from the street. Only this one ran out and left us floating in a room filled with weightless, golden particles, like prisoners inside one of those glass balls you shake to make a snow storm.
The first sound that came through to us was Boris’ shriek of pain and fear. There was pain after the three tiny puffs of smoke in his hands, and his tiny, scorched palms had opened and let fall to the floor three small, strange objects that had once been gleaming silver and were now blackened and twisted enigmas. The fear was not so much because Boris was dazed, but because he knew it, and it was probably the first time in his brief existence that he realized there could be times when he was not in control of his faculties. A dozen bells must have rung memories deep in his memory as he shook his head, trying to clear his funny little brain, memories of green walls and quilted velvet ones, of old hopes succeeded by old despairs.
“It’s no use,” he kept saying. “It’s no use. Myshkin’s done for anyway.”
“Mr. Myshkin, darling!” Gladys let go again.
Then Roscoe made a pass at her. She ran toward us and I caught her and held her off while Siegman got Boris safely out of the room. When Roscoe took over Gladys, I followed Siegman upstairs.
We could hear police sirens converging on the house. There was no time to lose, but we wasted some in useless effort to get Boris to talk. To all our pleading to tell us where Myshkin was, or what was happening to him, Boris only shook his head.
“Wait,” he whispered weakly. “On my word, you haven’t long to wait…”
Little Boris was right, but it was a minor accomplishment. The way things were happening now there couldn’t be much waiting for anything. I remembered Siegman talking about the whirlpool. This was it. We were spinning faster and faster as we neared the vortex.
Now the whole house was ringing with police sirens and brakes as squad cars came to skidding stops in front of the house. Through these sounds a single scream from below cut through everything—then another—then shooting broke out in the street. There were two shots, a scattered volley, then another scream farther down the street, while closer to us there was shouting among the cops to hold their fire. A moment later there were more shots in the distance and some of the squad cars in front of the house took off. I could only hope that whoever they were shooting at, even if it wasn’t Myshkin, had gotten away.
But as I started down the stairs Roscoe came up under a full head of steam. He practically collapsed in my arms. When I asked him what the shooting had been about, he gasped something that sounded like: “A pair of pants chased Gladys down the street.”
The next moment Siegman took hold of Roscoe. “Henry, get me a few minutes!” he said urgently. “I have an idea. Say anything, but get me a little time!” Then he pushed me downstairs.
When I went into the wrecked room I walked in upon the scene that was to become famous within twenty-four hours as Nulty’s Nightmare…
* * * *
I suppose you know the rest from what you’ve read. Still, possibly I can enlarge on some details that seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle. I could add a few that haven’t even been mentioned yet, but as you know, there’s been so much controversy about the Myshkin affair that we’ve all pledged to keep quiet—for a while longer, anyway. So about Nulty’s Nightmare…
To begin with, Nulty had been in one of the squad cars outside. Thus, unfortunately, he was in the forefront of those who witnessed the episode in which practically no one places any credence—the bewildering, if edifying, spectacle of Gladys dashing out of the house, hotly pursued by a pair of trousers. I violate no confidence in stating that five police officers, besides Nulty, filed official reports on the matter, describing the scene in detail; Time quoted from two of the reports in its article. These were the officers who yelled for the shooting to stop. Their reason was that the trousers offered so poor a target that Gladys was in jeopardy. The officers who were shooting didn’t know what they were shooting at, according to these others, but all argument surrounding the episode—including the two police who maintain that Gladys was doing the chasing—all such arguments are useless, and only add confusion to an already supremely chaotic series of events.
At any rate, the nightmare proper began a moment later when Nulty marched through the splintered door at the head of a police phalanx and began taking stock. There were four of us—Harriet, Suddsy, the elevator operator, and I—and we were, as one officer wrote: “in a clearly dazed and/or shocked condition.” In addition, there was: “one light truck, badly damaged in a recent crash, its back doors split open.” When he looked inside the trunk, Nulty had discovered Suddsy’s neatly stacked merchandise.
I would like to remark, in passing, that the various estimates of the number of corpses found in the truck, attributed to “reliable sources” are uniformly extravagant. I understand the truck was rather crowded, but all talk of three or four dozen is nonsense.
Well, to complete the picture, conveniently close to where I was standing, Nulty encountered the six bars of gold that had been turned into statuettes.
Nulty’s Nightmare was in full bloom. Not only he, but the other police were so completely lost for the first few minutes, that the problem of keeping them from going upstairs never really arose. The first they knew of Siegman’s presence in the house was when he came te
aring down the stairs and burst into the room. “Police!” he shouted, then seeing Nulty, dashed over, grabbed his lapels and began pouring out the story of where Myshkin was.
He was still yelling at Nulty, trying to make himself understood, and I think, almost frightening him, then the first commotion at the sea wall was heard. After that it didn’t make any difference because the cops in the house rushed out, and others were already running toward the place from where Myshkin’s first hoarse shouting had been heard.
Here again I’d like to make an observation. It has been pointed out that Siegman’s effort to make Boris talk succeeded too late, and that Myshkin really saved himself. This is true, but it tends to obscure one of the most far reaching results of Siegman’s effort. What Siegman had done was somehow to induce and manage Roscoe’s participation in tricking Boris. The star-spangled robe and the ice cube turban had suggested the idea to everyone who’d seen Roscoe—including, as you recall, Boris. It was hardly a difficult matter, therefore, in Boris’ stricken condition for Roscoe Cramwell, the accomplished actor, to play crystal gazer with compelling authority and rapid success.
Siegman says he doubts Cramwell ever gave a better performance in his life. He sat beside Boris, Siegman told me, crooning softly to him “of a future in which Boris reclined full length in a warm climate, beautifully dressed, tenderly watched over…”
These words sound quite horrible, if one takes the more gloomy view of Boris’ probable fate. Frankly I don’t share it; I’ll say why in a moment. But at the point where Myshkin’s story merges with that of the police, we have one of its most surprising elements.
One might have expected the very name of the street would have been enough for the police—after all, Force Tube Avenue should have meant something to somebody. Actually, it referred to an ancient conduit buried under the length of the street. It ran from the sea wall to a sealed end a block and a half away. Once it had continued some distance farther and was part of the drainage system in the old city, but with both ends sealed, apparently it had been completely forgotten. Not even the fact that six men had vanished within a known, absurdly small compass, had been enough to stir official inquiry or recollection. The two entrances to the tube, via small cast-iron manhole covers at either end, were a profound source of chagrin to the police when they were finally established, but their very obscurity—especially the one in the sea wall—was probably the determining factor that saved Myshkin’s life.
The gang, you see, knew about the tube and about the manhole at the inland sealed end. It was essentially what had made the idea of the robbery so irresistible, so seemingly foolproof, to them. After they pulled the job, they had only a short run to the deserted street—then down the tube, manhole cover pulled back over them, and there they were. There was plenty of room inside—the tube has been said to be anywhere from 15 to 21 feet in diameter—and they’d already put in supplies enough for a month’s stay, if necessary.
Evidently some of their advance provisioning had taken place on one of the nights following the rebellion of the chicken-men. The best evidence is that one of the chicken-men fleeing Myshkin had dropped into the manhole while it was briefly open that night. Finding himself among men, he silently retreated farther down the tube, with no one the wiser—but when the gangsters were gone, the replaced manhole cover had trapped him. Hopelessly, he wandered along the tube until he reached the sea wall end. On the other side of the metal lid, he could hear water lapping. It told him that not all of the lid was submerged, and indeed, an upper segment almost three feet high at the high point of its arch, was above the surface of the river because the tide was out. The manhole was at the top of the lid, within that unsubmerged segment. Moreover, rusted and frail with decades of neglect, it yielded to the chicken-man’s desperate onslaught.
After his escape, naturally, he communicated this discovery to his compatriots. It suited them perfectly, and they established the sea wall end of the tube as their headquarters and all purpose laboratory. In addition to a good camouflage job on the lid’s exterior, they’d obviously also done a little construction work on the manhole cover, because it was operating on hinges when Myshkin found it.
Myshkin had been led to its vicinity more than once in his relentless pursuit of the rebels, but it was only that last night he found the opening. That was after he’d escaped Nulty’s surprise visit by making it up the chimney to the roof; later a bit, when we’d all left, and the coast was relatively clear, Myshkin had come down for a moment’s examination of the scattered powder outside the front door, and using his glasses, discovered Boris’ trail. The trail, of course, was made up of those countless, minute particles of yellow powder that Myshkin realized were constantly being shed by the chicken-men. Following his first fiasco, Boris had speedily retired to his secret headquarters; his trail led almost straight to it.
That was when Myshkin caught the surviving rebels and slaughtered them all—all but Boris, who had left again in the interim, and very likely for another attempt at Myshkin. What Myshkin wanted to do was make it easy to be found, but not without Gladys nearby—unless he took the chance of going back inside his own house and getting the green compound. It seemed too risky, and Harriet’s apartment was a natural destination, so he phoned to ask Gladys to come downtown. When Harriet bollixed that up for him, he came uptown and confidently awaited Boris there.
When Boris broke and ran for the second time, Myshkin took off for the secret headquarters. He had gotten there before Boris and was still waiting for him when he saw us turn on the light upstairs in his place and came to join us. Finally, when Boris didn’t show up, Myshkin went out again to investigate the headquarters.
He was aware, of course, that the chicken-men had had some sort of contact with the missing robber gang after he’d found the gold statuettes the first time he’d gone into the tube, but not knowing how long the tube was, it never occurred to him that the gang was actually using the same place to hide in. The acoustics experts are trying to figure out how it was possible for the chicken-men and the robbers simultaneously to inhabit opposite ends of the tube and not hear each other—but knowing of them beforehand, while the chicken-men may very well have heard voices and not been frightened away—how is one to explain the gangsters’ unawareness of the chicken-men?
After all, they had built and assembled two or three machines inside the tube and used them there. However, badly wrecked as they were when the police swarmed into the tube in response to Myshkin’s shouting from the manhole in the sea wall (he had explored far enough to hear the gang; the trouble was, they also heard him; without the black automatic that Boris had stolen, and which Myshkin still had, he’d never have held them off long enough) those machines may still be reconstructed.
If only they’ll leave Myshkin alone long enough to do it, maybe they’ll find out whether the machines really did work in complete silence; maybe they’ll find out about some of the other things Myshkin says their machines did. Like the developments he says they made on his invention, using it hooked up with an enlarging and reducing circuit.
That, by the way, is how Myshkin explains Boris’ henchmen. Myshkin says when the chicken-men were finally ready with their machine, they used the gangsters at the other end as models for their tests. Picked them up easily with infrared, he says, using six stolen bars of stolen gold to stuff into the machine. The statuettes had been the result. Then, according to Myshkin, they proceeded to more important experiments, and for these they used eggs. On the one hand they whipped up large life-like representations of the gangsters. At the other extreme they made tiny ones, the size of fleas. Boris controlled the large ones, says Myshkin, by means of minute radio transmitters—the silvery objects we had seen in his hands. Unfortunately these will also require reconstruction before they can be better understood.
But in the light of this explanation the explosions themselves become quite understandable. The gunmen were only blown-up suspensi
ons of egg. If you like bad jokes you might go so far as to call them soufflés. That was why one of them had felt so very odd brushing past me—and why he had been unable to lift the gold bars. Holding the gun that Boris had snaffled from the real gangsters was about all the egg versions could do. They probably couldn’t have squeezed the trigger. Boris himself exploded the first three by radio impulses when they failed and he had to get going, but I got the same, if more spectacular, results from the green compound. When it touched it was like a needle fired at a nice fat balloon.
The tiny ones—the ones like fleas—are more difficult to understand, I think. Myshkin says Boris made them to be hidden in his (Myshkin’s) clothes. He was supposed to have been wearing those clothes when he escaped from the hospital—which was why the escape was arranged at all. Myshkin supposes that if he’d ever put on those clothes, he’d have been overwhelmed, like Gulliver and the Lilliputians. It was very fortunate that the clothes had moved and Myshkin didn’t find them at the hospital—especially because when Boris showed up later, dragging that worthless bundle all the way to Myshkin’s place, the circumstance was so suspicious that Myshkin resolved not to go near it, even before he fully understood why. And this, like so much else in the case, must be left undetermined for the present.
You see, the pants never were caught. They were supposed to have been shot once or twice—“mortally wounded” said one report; “they staggered,” said another—but nobody knows what became of them. All that can be said so far is that they’ve stayed away from Gladys—the new, reformed Gladys she’s been since she got engaged to Myshkin—but it may be a long time before the Institute finally lets go of Myshkin and anything might happen.
The Mad Scientist Megapack Page 20
