“You devil!” swore Dr. Blain at this recital of his thoughts.
“Let this Mercer come. He will be of use—to us! There are enough of us for two bodies—and even a live fool is better than an educated corpse.” Anemic lips twisted in a snarl that revealed dry teeth. “Meanwhile, get busy with that body.”
“I don’t think I have any ether,” Blain protested.
“You have something that will do. Your cortex shouts it! Be speedy, lest we lose patience and take you at the cost of your sanity.”
Swallowing hard, Blain opened a drawer and extracted a nasal frame. He clipped on its cotton-gauze pad, placed the frame over the frightened girl’s nose. He felt safe in giving her a reassuring wink. A wink is not a thought.
Opening the cupboard once more, Blain stood in front of it, summoned all his faculties, and compelled his mind to recite, “Ether, ether, ether.” At the same time, he forced his hand toward a bottle of concentrated sulphuric acid. He made a mighty effort to achieve his dual purpose, urged his fingers nearer and nearer to the bottle. He got it.
Straining every fiber of his being to do one thing while his mind was fixed upon another, he turned around, withdrawing the glass stopper as he turned. Then he stood still, the open bottle in his right hand. The figure of death was immediately in front of him, gun raised.
“Ether,” sneered the vocal cords of Clegg. “Your conscious mind yelled ‘Ether!’ while your subconscious mind whispered ‘Acid!’ Do you think your inferior intelligence can cope with ours ? Do you think you can destroy that which is already dead? You fool!” The gun inched forward. “The anesthetic—without further delay.”
Offering no reply, Dr. Blain rammed the stopper into its neck, replaced the bottle whence he had taken it. More deliberately, moving with utmost slowness, he crossed the floor to a smaller cupboard, opened it, took out a small bottle of ether. He placed the bottle on the radiator and started to close the cupboard.
“Take it off!” croaked the uncanny voice with high-pitched urgency. The gun emitted a warning click as Blain snatched the bottle. “So you hoped the radiator would make the stuff vaporize rapidly enough to burst the bottle, eh?”
Dr. Blain said nothing. Taking as much time as possible, he conveyed the volatile liquid to the table. The girl watched his approach, her eyes wide with apprehension. She gave a low sob. Blain flung a glance at the clock, but, quick as the glance was, his tormentor caught the thought behind it and grinned.
“He is here now.”
“Who is here?” demanded Blain.
“Your man, Mercer. He is outside, just about to enter the front door. We perceive the futile wanderings of his sluggish mind. You have not overestimated what little intelligence he does possess.”
The front door opened in confirmation of the speaker’s prophecy. The girl struggled to raise her head, hope in her eyes.
“Prop her mouth open with something,” articulated the voice under alien control. “We shall enter through the mouth.” He paused, as heavy feet scuffled on the front door mat. “And call that fool in here. We shall use him also.”
His veins bulging on his forehead, Dr. Blain called, “Tod! Come here!” He found a dental gag, toyed with its ratchet.
Excitement thrilled his nerves from head to feet. No gun could shoot two ways at once. If he could wangle the idiotic Mercer into the right position, and put him wise— If he could be on one side and Tod on the other—
“Don’t try it,” advised the animated Clegg. “Don’t even think it. If you do, we shall end up by having you both.”
Tod Mercer lumbered into the room, his heavy soles thumping the rug. He was a big man, with thick shoulders jutting below a plump, moonlike face that sprouted two days’ growth. He stopped when he saw the table and the girl. His great, wide, stupid eyes roamed from the girl to the doctor.
“Heck, Doc,” he said, with an uneasy fidget, “I got me a puncture and had to change tires on the road.”
“Never mind about that,” came a sardonic rumble right behind him. “You’re in plenty of time.”
Tod turned around sluggishly, twisting his boots as if each weighed a ton. He stared at the thing that had been Clegg and said, “Beg pardon, Mister. I didn’t know you was there.”
His cowlike eyes wandered disinterestedly over the living corpse, over the pointing automatic, then slewed toward the anxious Blain. Tod opened his mouth to say something. He closed the mouth; a look of faint surprise came into his fat features; his eyes swiveled back and found the automatic again.
This time, the look didn’t last one tenth of a second. His eyes realized what they saw. He swung a hamlike fist with astounding swiftness, slammed it into the erstwhile Clegg’s awful features. The blow was dynamite, sheer dynamite. The cadaver went down with a crash that shook the room.
“Quick!” screamed Dr. Blain. “Get the gun.” He vaulted the intervening table—girl and all—landed heavily, made a wild kick at the weapon still gripped in a flabby hand.
Tod Mercer stood abashed, his eyes turning this way and that. The automatic exploded thunderously; its slug nicked the tubular metal edge of the table, ricocheted with a noise like that of a buzz saw, and ripped a foot of plaster from the opposite wall.
Blain kicked frantically at a ghastly wrist, missed it when its owner jerked it aside. The gun boomed again. Glass tinkled in the farther cupboard. The girl on the table screamed shrilly.
The scream penetrated Mercer’s thick skull and brought action. Slamming down a great boot, he imprisoned a rubbery wrist beneath his heel, plucked the automatic from cold fingers. He hefted the weapon, pointed it.
“You can’t kill it like that,” shouted Blain. He jabbed Tod Mercer to emphasize his words. “Get the girl out of here. Jump to it, man, for heaven’s sake!”
Blain’s urgency brooked no argument. Mercer handed over the automatic, moved to the table, ripped the straps from the weeping girl. His huge arms plucked her up, bore her from the room.
Down on the floor, the pilfered body writhed and struggled to get up. Its rotting eyes had disappeared. Their sockets were now filled with swirling pools of emerald luminosity. Its mouth gaped as it slowly regurgitated a bright green phosphorescence. The spawn of Glantok was leaving its host!
The body sat up with its back to the wall. Its limbs jerked and twitched in nightmarish postures. It was a fearful travesty of a human being. Green—bright and living green—crept sinuously from its eyes and mouth, formed twisting, swirling snakes and pools upon the floor.
Blain gained the door in one gigantic leap, snatching the ether bottle from the table as he passed. He stood in the doorway, trembling. Then he flung the bottle in the center of the seething green. He flicked his automatic lighter, tossed it after the bottle. The entire room boomed into a mighty blast of flame that immediately became a fiery hell.
The girl clung tightly to Dr. Blain’s arm while they stood by the roadside and watched the house burn. She said, “I came to call you to my kid brother. We think he’s got measles.”
“I’ll be along soon,” Blain promised.
A sedan roared up the road, stopped near them with engine still racing. A policeman put his head out and shouted, “What a blaze! We saw the glare a mile back along the road. We’ve called the fire department.”
“They’ll be too late, I’m afraid,” said Blain.
“Insured?” asked the policeman sympathetically.
“Yes.”
“Everybody out of the house?”
Blain nodded an affirmative, and the policeman said, “We happened to be out this way looking for an escaped nut.” The sedan rolled forward.
“Hey!” Blain shouted. The sedan stopped again. “Was this madman’s name James Winstanley Clegg?”
“Clegg?” came the driver’s voice from the other side of the sedan. “Why, that’s the fellow whose body walked out of the morgue when the attendant had his back turned for a minute. Funny thing, they found a dead mongrel in the morgue right by where the missing
body ought to have been. The reporters are starting to call it a werewolf, but it’s still a dog to me.”
“Anyway, this fellow isn’t Clegg,” chimed in the first policeman. “He’s Wilson. He’s small, but nasty. This is what he looks like.” He stretched an arm from the automobile, handed Blain a photograph. Blain studied the picture in the light of rising flames. It bore not the slightest resemblance to his visitor of that evening.
“I’ll remember that face,” Dr. Blain commented, handing the photograph back.
“Know anything about this Clegg mystery?” inquired the driver.
“I know that he’s dead,” Blain answered truthfully.
Pensively, Dr. Blain watched flames leap skyward from his home. He turned to the gaping Mercer and said, “What beats me is how you managed to hit that fellow without his anticipating your intention and plugging you where you stood.”
“I saw the gun, and I ‘it ‘im.” Mercer spread apologetic hands. “I saw ‘e’d got a gun, and I ‘it ‘im without thinking.”
“Without thinking!” murmured Blain.
Dr. Blain chewed his bottom lip, stared at the mounting fire. Roof timbers caved in with a violent crash; a flood of sparks poured upward.
With his mind, but not his ears, he heard faint threnodies of an alien wail that became weaker and weaker, and presently died away.
<
~ * ~
David Grinnell
TOP SECRET
Personally, the Editor thinks this one is Bible truth. . . .
~ * ~
I CANNOT say whether I am the victim of a very ingenious jest on the part of some of my wackier friends or whether I am just someone accidentally “in” on some top-secret business. But it happened, and it happened to me personally, while visiting Washington recently, just rubbernecking you know, looking at the Capitol and the rest of the big white buildings.
It was summer, fairly hot, Congress was not in session, nothing much was doing, most people vacationing. I was that day aiming to pay a visit to the State Department, not knowing that I couldn’t, for there was nothing public to see there unless it’s the imposing and rather martial lobby (it used to be the War Department building, I’m told). This I did not find out until I had blithely walked up the marble steps to the entrance, passed the big bronze doors, and wandered about in the huge lobby, wherein a small number of people, doubtless on important business, were passing in and out.
A guard, sitting near the elevators, made as if to start in my direction to find out who and what the deuce I wanted, when one of the elevators came down and a group of men hustled out. There were two men, evidently State Department escorts, neatly clad in gray double-breasted suits, with three other men walking with them. The three men struck me as a little odd; they wore long, black cloaks, big slouch hats with wide brims pulled down over their faces, and carried portfolios. They looked for all the world like cartoon representations of cloak-and-dagger spies. I supposed that they were some sort of foreign diplomats and, as they were coming directly toward me, stood my ground, determined to see who they were.
The floor was marble and highly polished. One of the men nearing me suddenly seemed to lose his balance. He slipped; his feet shot out from under him and he fell. His portfolio slid directly at my feet.
Being closest to him, I scooped up the folio and was the first to help raise him to his feet. Grasping his arm, I hoisted him from the floor— he seemed to be astonishingly weak in the legs; I felt almost that he was about to topple again. His companions stood about rather flustered, helplessly, their faces curiously impassive. And though the man I helped must have received a severe jolt, his face never altered expression.
Just then the two State Department men recovered their own poise, rushed about, and, getting between me and the man I had rescued, rudely brushed me aside and rushed their party to the door.
Now what bothers me is not the impression I got that the arm beneath that man’s sleeve was curiously wooly, as if he had a fur coat underneath the cloak (and this in a Washington summer!), and it’s not the impression that he was wearing a mask (the elastic band of which I distinctly remember seeing amidst the kinky, red, close-cropped hair of his head). No, it’s not that at all, which might be merely momentary misconstructions on my part. It’s the coin that I picked up off the floor where he’d dropped his portfolio.
I’ve searched through every stamp and coin catalogue I can find or borrow, and I’ve made inquiries of a dozen language teachers and professors, and nobody can identify that coin or the lettering around its circumference.
It’s about the size of a quarter, silvery, very light in weight but also very hard. Besides the lettering on it, which even the Bible Society, which knows a thousand languages and dialects, cannot decipher, there is a picture on one side and a symbol on the other.
The picture is the face of a man, but of a man with very curiously wolfish features: sharp canine teeth parted in what could be a smile; a flattened, broad, and somewhat protruding nose, more like a pug dog’s muzzle; sharp, widely spaced, vulpine eyes; and definitely hairy and pointed ears.
The symbol on the other side is a circle with latitude and longitude lines on it. Flanking the circle, one on each side, are two crescent-shaped moons.
I wish I knew just how far those New Mexico rocket experiments have actually gone.
<
~ * ~
Allan Lang
AN EEL BY THE TAIL
The dividing line between science fiction and science fantasy is a tenuous one indeed; many pundits, in fact, hold that there is none. Although under ordinary circumstances the Editor is firmly of the belief that the two are separate and distinct entities, a story like the one below tends to shake his faith.
The surroundings are mundane, the science properly complex, the results perfectly preposterous. Which is, perhaps, why the tale is so charming. And yet, can you think of any particularly good reason why it couldn’t have happened in some rural schoolroom during the past year or so? Einstein to the contrary?
~ * ~
THE strip-teaser materialized in the first-period physics class at Terre Haute’s Technical High School.
It all happened just because Mr. Tedder was fresh out of college and anxious to make good in his first teaching job. He’d been given Physics II, a tough class for a new teacher. His pupils, a set of hardened 11-A boys, were sure of themselves, and so were the few girls in the class. It was with hopes of shaking that assurance that Mr. Tedder had spent a month of after-school hours studying an article on Ziegler’s Effect. He also hoped, but with less faith than wistfulness, that a demonstration of Ziegler’s Effect might shock his class into staying awake. Above all, Mr. Tedder felt that his Junior boys might be considerably edified by an electrical phenomenon that was not yet understood by the best physical theorists of three planets.
Mr. Tedder wanted to give his class a good show. So, with more feeling for dramatic effect than for scientific good sense, he’d wound the three solenoids with heavy, insulated silver wire rather than with the light copper wire Ziegler had reported using. On the theory that, if he were to demonstrate the Ziegler Effect, it would be best to demonstrate a whole lot of it, Mr. Tedder contrived a battery of the new lithium reaction cells. The direct current from this powerful battery was transformed by an antique, but workable, automotive spark coil.
The bell rang as usual that morning, marking the beginning of the first class. Twenty pupils filed into the physics classroom and took their seats. Eighteen of them slumped down in an attitude which suggested that, although they were prepared to accept stoically the hour’s ordeal, they weren’t going to allow themselves to be taught anything. After all, Tech had lost last night’s game to Walbash: what physical phenomenon could hope to shake off that grim memory? There was a shuffling of papers as the boys in the back seats pulled comic books from their notebooks. Guenther and Stetzel, sitting up front, pulled sheets of paper from notepads and headed them “The Zieg
ler Effect.”
The classroom settled into an uneasy silence. Mr. Tedder waved an instructive hand toward the apparatus set up on the marble top of the demonstration bench. “As you can see, I have a set of three solenoids, or coils of insulated wire, connected to a source of alternating current. A sudden surge of this current through the outermost solenoid will give an iron-cerium alloy bar placed at the center of the apparatus an impetus toward horizontal motion.” Stetzel and Guenther, who were conscientious, took rapid notes. The rest of the class was divided between those students who were surreptitiously catching up on the adventures of “The Rocket Patrol” and those who were quietly sinking into sleep.
Mr. Tedder continued. “The alloy bar’s initial movement will be frustrated, as it were, by the action of a second solenoid placed within and at right angles to the first. A third coil, within and at right angles to each of the outer two, completes the process. The winding ratios of the three solenoids are 476:9:34.” Stetzel and Guenther scribbled the numbers rapidly; Ned Norcross, in the back row, stirred in his sleep, and two members of the Class of ‘95 who shared a volume of the Rocket Patrol’s exploits agreed to turn the page.
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