The Lost Master - The Collected Works

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  'Let's stop for a bite in this coffee shop,' suggested Jeffers, and soon they were seated at the counter.

  The radio was playing a stirring march. Adams straightened his broad shoulders, and a wistful light crept into his companion's eyes.

  The music hushed slightly, and a voice announced, 'This is the Federal Radio Control. The Allied troops are just marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, with Vice President — er, President now — Nieman at their head. Oh, what a day! What a day!'

  Jeffers shuddered.

  'Please turn it off!' snapped Adams. 'The lady would like something lighter.'

  Surprised, the proprietor switched on some dance music. 'You two ain't pro-Dictator, be you?' he asked suspiciously.

  Adams smiled whimsically, and shook his head.

  For a while they ate in silence. Some advertising matter obtruded itself on the program, and the proprietor twirled the dials to another station. '–radio newscast. Liam Lincoln, leader of the Young Patriots, says that he now has positive proof that Lieutenant Adams, supposed hero, is a traitor; and that the supposed woman whom he brought through the Allied lines as 'Mary Calvert' is really Dictator Jeffers — ex-Dictator Jeffers, we should say — in disguise.'

  Without waiting to hear more, Adams hurriedly paid the bill, and piloted his companion out to their waiting car.

  A gray-shirted member of the Pennsylvania constabulary, with his motorcycle drawn up on the curb, and a broad smile on his tanned face, was leaning against the front door of the car.

  'Well, well!' he announced. 'Stolen car, and Mary Calvert, and little Jack Adams, and everything.'

  Adams gasped, and his hunted eyes swept rapidly around for means of escape.

  'Why, officer,' he said, 'I don't know what you're talking about.' His right fist suddenly flashed out squarely to the trooper's chin, knocking him back against the car. Then Adams' left fist swung, and caught the man on the car sweeping him off the car onto the sidewalk. 'Quick!' Adams shouted.

  In an instant, he and Jeffers were in the car, streaking down the road.

  A sharp crack sounded behind them. Something seared the side of Adams' head. Everything went black, and his hands dropped from the wheel.

  Adams, in a daze, felt strong capable hands reach across him, and seize the wheel. Nausea and unconsciousness swept over him in waves. He slumped down in a heap. Then oblivion.

  CHAPTER XI

  Ages later he came half awake again. It was night. Starlight. The cool windiness of high places.

  The car stopped. Voices: 'Uncle Eph.'

  'Aunt Martha.'

  'Steel, lad.'

  'Helen.' That name cut through the fog of his delirium. 'Helen!'

  Strong rawboned male arms were carrying him. Into a house. Up some stairs. Onto a bed. Then capable feminine fingers loosened his clothing, and tucked him in. Receding footsteps. Silence.

  Many days of illness, fever, delirium. Recurrent dreams of a mad flight from state troopers.

  And then, one afternoon, Jack Adams awoke as from a deep sleep, and looked around him. He was lying in an old-fashioned high-post bed in a tiny room. On him was a patchwork quilt, covered by a tufted spread of homespun linen. Straw-matting on the floor. Quaint old furniture all around.

  Very gingerly he pushed down the covers, and swung his long legs out of the bed. Shakily he walked to the window. Rolling tree-clad hills, bathed in sunlight, stretched away beneath his view. Where was he, anyhow? He went to the door of the room, and called down the stairs, not too loudly, 'Hi, there!'

  No one answered. He opened the door to a closet, found his clothes, and put them on. Then he essayed to descend the stairs.

  In the living-room he found a radio, turned it on, and sank exhausted into a chair. As the tubes warmed up, he caught, 'and this alleged hero had been sincere, would he not have turned Steel Jeffers over to the Allied Generals? Would he have fled with the Dictator in a stolen car belonging to the State of Maryland? Would he have kept in hiding? Only traitors hide, my friends. Patriots do not fear the light of day–'

  Loud handclapping. Then, in another voice, 'You have just been listening to the Federal Radio Control's debate on the subject: 'Was Lieutenant Adams a patriot or traitor?' And now for a news flash. The secret hide-out of Steel Jeffers has been found. Troops have surrounded it, and are closing in. This is the F. R. C. network.'

  Adams gasped. Surrounded even now? Closing in? With sudden resolution, he forced his fever-weakened body to stand. He must find and warn Steel Jeffers!

  'Why, what are you doing downstairs?' asked a sweet feminine voice, filled with concern.

  Adams wheeled. A young girl in a print dress and sunbonnet stood in the doorway. Her checks were smooth and unrouged. Her figure was delicately rounded. She took off her sunbonnet, and a wealth of brown curls fell about her high forehead.

  'You are Helen Jeffers?' he breathed.

  'Of course!' she exclaimed. 'Who else?'

  Helen! Alive and real! Helen Jeffers, as her brother Steel had promised him!

  But even in his joy at finding her at last, he did not forget the ominous news which he had just heard over the air. 'Where is your brother? I just got a news flash that the troops are closing in on us.'

  'My brother Steel? Steel is dead,' she replied with a touch of sadness.

  Adams sobered. 'Did that State Trooper get him?'

  'No, Jack.' Smiling sweetly, she stepped forward and placed her hands in his. 'Let's talk of other things, for Steel is safe from his enemies.'

  'But, Helen! Here we are talking together as though we had known each other for years. And yet I've never met you. Never even seen you. Fell in love with your photograph. Did Steel tell you–'

  Helen Jeffers smiled whimsically. 'We have known each other a long time, for I was the Dictator.'

  'You!' Adams stared blankly.

  'Yes, my brother Steel died on election-day four years ago. He and James Dougherty and I had pledged ourselves to put through our program at any cost. I closely resembled my brother. And so James Dougherty conceived the fantastic idea of turning me into a man. We reported that it was I who had died. Then I retired to a shack in the mountains; and there two biological experts, Admiral Southworth and Franz Vierecke, injected a certain derivative of the hormone testosterone into my veins–'

  'So that is what the letters 'T-E-S-T' meant on the little bottles!' Adams exclaimed.

  The girl nodded, and continued, 'This hormone made me to all outward appearances a man, and even made me ruthless.'

  'I see,' said Adams grimly, drawing away from her.

  'Don't blame me too much,' she begged. 'I did it all for the Cause to which my brother had been pledged, not foreseeing where dictatorship and the unprincipled ambition of my Secretary of State would lead me. Well, anyway, Franz Vierecke had worked with the great Ruzicka, when the latter discovered how to produce testosterone synthetically out of cholesterol.'

  'But, if the method was known,' Adams interrupted, 'then why all the mystery?'

  'If the White House had bought large quantities of testosterone, our secret might have been suspected. Furthermore, different derivatives react differently, some even have the opposite effect from the effect which we wished. I myself discovered this to my horror, when doing some frantic experimentation on my own hook, during Admiral Southworth's illness. So, the secret died with the Admiral and Vierecke, and my masquerade was at an end. Fortunately the sinister Dougherty did not long outlive them. Then I struggled on alone, a woman again, double-crossing even you, my only friend.' Her eyes fell.

  Adams tried to hate her, but be could not. She had been no more to blame for it all than Trilby had been under the spell of Svengali.

  'You poor girl!' he breathed, taking her in his arms. He kissed her as she clung close to him. Then gently he released her.

  An hour or so later, after he had met Uncle Eph and Aunt Martha, and had had a shave, he and Helen sat hand in hand on the front piazza of the little farmhouse, gazing off over the b
eautiful rolling mountain view. And waiting, silently waiting, for what they knew was closing in on them.

  Finally a cavalcade of cars drew up on the highway in front. Out of the front car leaped the fanatic Liam Lincoln, his black hair awry, his dark eyes flashing. 'There's the traitor!' Lincoln shouted, pointing a skinny finger at Adams. 'Seize him.'

  State soldiers poured out of the other cars, and cautiously approached the piazza. Also roly-poly Sim Baldwin, tall Phil Nordstrom, chunky Godfrey Cabot, and others of Adams' old crowd. Even Giuseppe Albertino, the peanut man.

  Studiously ignoring Lincoln's inflamed words, Adams casually remarked, 'Hello, fellows! Meet my fiancée, the girl whom I called 'Mary Calvert'. Her real name is Helen Jeffers.' Adams chuckled. 'I told you fellows that I'd get her in the end. And doesn't this explain a lot of things, Liam, which were puzzling you? For example, why the Dictator gave her and me a pass out of Washington, and why I was so anxious to keep her identity a secret, until peace was concluded.'

  Several of Adams' pals laughed — a nervous relieved laugh.

  Lincoln angrily thrust back his black forelock. 'That's all very well, but why did you steal the State car, and assault that trooper? You threw us off the trail for days and days!'

  'Well, you see, Liam, I didn't want to risk having a fanatic such as you butting in on my honeymoon.'

  More laughter.

  Liam Lincoln's prestige was rapidly slipping. He made one last attempt to regain it. 'Where is the Dictator?' he demanded.

  Adams shrugged his broad shoulders. 'How should I know?' he replied. 'I can truthfully say that I haven't seen or heard from Steel Jeffers since his sister Helen and I left the White House together on the day the Dictatorship ended.'

  THE END

  Authors Note: Ruzicka and Wettstein in 1935 succeeded in synthesizing the male secondary hormone, testosterone, from cholesterol. See Tice's loose-leaf encyclopedia, The Practice of Medicine, vol. VIII, pp. 351 and 357.

  Deansley and Parks in 1937 made the remarkable discovery that various testosterone derivatives act entirely differently from each other, not only in degree but also in kind. Some accentuate male characteristics; and others, strange to say, accentuate female characteristics, although this is a male hormone. Others accentuate either, according to the sex of the patient. See 'Comparison of Testosterone Derivatives,' Biochemical Journal, July, 1937, p. 1161.

  It is only a matter of time before the accomplishments of Southworth and Vierecke in the story will be duplicated in real life, perhaps by Drs. Vest and Howard, who are already working on the problem at Johns Hopkins.

  (Ed. Note: This story is also known as 'The Revolution of 1960.')

  ORDON announced, “Well, we’ve done it. Ketchie, we’ve insured a gem.”

  Bill Ketchall didn’t even withdraw his eyes from the fog-dimmed facade of Child and Co. and the Temple Bar memorial, visible through the moist window and the London murk. There was nothing in the least surprising about Gordon’s statement, considering that the sole business of the vast firm of Simon’s was insurance. So Bill stared in utter boredom at the September fog and wished himself somewhere else; he had been employed by the great marine insurance company for four years now—long enough to make an American feel expatriated— and that in spite of the fact that an investigator for Simon’s never lacked excitement. There were too many crooks and near crooks who considered an enormously wealthy insurance firm their proper prey.

  “A titillative situation,” continued Gordon.

  “Titillative!” snorted Bill. “Talk American instead of English, will you?”

  “Ticklish to you,” grinned his superior. “As I say, we’ve insured a gem.”

  “Extraordinary! That’s only the eighth or ninth thousandth time, isn’t it?”

  “Not for this sort of money, Ketchie. You see we’ve insured it for a hundred and forty thousand pounds!”

  Bill forgot London and America alike. “Whew! When’d they sell the Kohinoor?”

  “It isn’t the Kohinoor. It’s the Waterbury emerald.” Gordon paused and squinted at him. “Doesn’t mean a thing to you, I see.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Well, Ketchie, that goes to show the weakness of Yankee education. The Waterbury came back with the Crusades, and it’s been the property of one of our more important titles practically ever since, and if you don’t know which, I’m not tellin’. But here lately, what with Labor governments and Coalition both pilin’ taxes on ‘em, some of our titles are hard to put to keep a little gilt on the crest. So they sell their heirlooms to bloated American millionaires, and that, Ketchie, is the way of the Waterbury.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “Now,” observed Gordon, “we come to the titillative, or ticklish, part of it. Absolute secrecy is a condition of the sale on both sides. You see, the title is havin’ a synthetic copy made, so the neighbors won’t know. It’s very important that no news of the sale leaks out, understand, or the friends that think they’re flat might think they’re really flat, if you see what I mean. And as for the purchaser, he’s a collector, therefore balmy; so he wants his name kept out of it too, though I can’t blame him, seein’ he lives in the States. He probably wants to keep the stone a while since he’s paid for it.”

  Bill grunted. “It’d be Marlow or Jake Bromberg,” he said. “There aren’t many others could pay that price. Anyway, what do I do? Deliver it?”

  OT EXACTLY. This secrecy angle complicates it. The stone was purchased through an agent— name of Oliver—and the insurance is in his name, though doubtless the real purchaser has an air-tight assignment of the indemnity to himself in case of loss. So as far as you’re concerned, Oliver bought the thing, and Oliver’s secretary is takin’ it across. A woman, name of Arlene Lowell. What you do, Ketchie, is sail on the Arcturus tomorrow and nurse our premium. Your job lasts from dock to customs; once the stone’s across, we’re through.”

  Bill groaned. “One of these hatchet-faced business women, I suppose.”

  “Don’t know, Ketchie. I never saw her, since the transfer is through the bank.”

  “Do I get acquainted with her?”

  “As you like. Just get our Waterbury safe across.”

  “You sound a bit doubtful. What’s the rest of the story?”

  “Well,” said Gordon, frowning, “it’s this, Ketchie. About five years ago we insured another item for the same purchaser, to be taken across by this same Oliver. A neat rope of pearls—and that was stolen. We had to settle.”

  “I see. You think it might have been faked.”

  “I’m not sayin”, though he could have had the pearls scot-free that way. Collectors are a balmy lot anyway, and you can’t tell.”

  “I used to collect stamps.”

  “Then you’re balmy the same way.” Gordon grinned. “Get your papers at the office, Ketchie, and don’t miss the Arcturus. It sails tomorrow.”

  Bill Ketchall didn’t miss the ship, but be had little enough time to spare. He scurried up the gangplank on the heels of a man in an ulster, who whistled as he walked. Bill glared at his plaid back; he detested people who whistled in public.

  The excitement of sailing left him indifferent from long experience, so he sought out the passenger list. A Miss Arlene Lowell was listed, true enough; her stateroom was on the same side as his, and the third door away, which was doubtless Gordon’s doing. Simon’s had ample influence to encompass such matters.

  And Gordon’s hand appeared again at luncheon. Bill found himself at the table with the chief engineer, a tall gaunt Scot named McKittric, but five minutes after the commencement of the meal he was staring into a pair of cool laughing, violet eyes, and listening nonplussed to McKittric’s gruff introduction of Miss Lowell.

  Back on deck in the afternoon, he scowled inwardly over his thoughts. Insurance is a queer proposition; people otherwise strictly honest will often cheat an insurance company without a qualm. Any sort of insurance; you dent a fender and have the whole car overha
uled. In Bill’s line one had to suspect anybody, but he growled to himself that there were common sense limitations to any general thesis, and if there were any crooked work in this proposition, one thing he’d swear to was that Arlene Lowell wasn’t in it. And if she were— Best way to handle the affair, he mused, was not to get too friendly with her. Keep up a conversational acquaintance, watch her as closely as convenience permitted, and let things take their course. Then, if nothing happened, well and good. And having decided on this procedure, he blithely spent the entire evening in her company, talking and acting as he had not done since certain spring evenings at Columbia, five years in the past. The girl talked freely about herself; she was Oliver’s secretary, it appeared, but as to what Oliver’s affairs were she seemed more than a little vague.

  T WAS PAST eleven when she rose to retire. Bill followed her down the companion way, bade a reluctant good-night, and moved on the few yards to his own door. He had scarcely opened it when a low cry brought him up short, staring back into the corridor.

  Arlene’s door was closed, but it opened instantly. The girl backed into the passage, her eyes wide in a glare of horror. She spun, saw Bill Ketchall as be emerged, and dashed frantically toward him, clinging wildly to his arm.

  “There’s a—there’s—” she gasped.

  He pulled her into his stateroom. “Easy!” he snapped sharply. “What is it?”

  “There’s a—a—dead man—in my room!”

  “A dead man!” echoed Bill, appalled. “Y-yes. On—the floor!” The girl sank pallid to the edge of his berth. “Oh!” she gasped weakly.

  “Wait here!” snapped Bill. He darted into the corridor to where the girl’s door still swung quietly on its hinges in the gentle roll of the ship. He pulled it wide and stared into an interior lighted only by the glow of the hail lamps. He saw nothing.

  He switched on the lights. Still nothing. Only the grained oaken furnishings, a suitcase open on the bench, and a bag on the berth. A dark mass caught his eye, and he started, but it was only a small steamer trunk below the berth.