“Here!” Lionel reached out a slender, blue-veined hand to a nearby table and picked up a small glass tumbler. “Take some port with me before you faint, you ninny. Go on go on, pour it out,” he commanded, as Luke hesitated. Was this some trap?
Apparently not, for although Luke watched carefully his uncle made no attempt to switch glasses. Instead he waited impatiently for Luke to finish pouring the red wine from the decanter. Together the two raised glasses to their lips. Only after Luke had drained the tumbler did he realize that his uncle’s glass was still filled.
Instantly fear lanced through him. He put down the tumbler quickly, staring at his uncle with bloodshot eyes. The old man deliberately tilted his glass and poured his wine to the floor.
“Why did you cut the rope on the dumbwaiter?” he asked very gently. “Did you think you could murder me, Luke?”
A wizard. The old man was a wizard! He had stared into Luke’s eyes with his own ice-folue orbs and read the secrets of the mind behind them. Lionel Holland was a wizard and this was proof. Something he had read swam into Luke’s mind. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live . . .
He tried to speak, but only a low, choking gasp came from his lips. Little flecks of foam appeared at the corners of his mouth.
“You fool, Luke.” The old man’s voice was mocking. “You’re a superstitious, wicked fool, like the rest of your breed. Only I, the black sheep of the family—have had the strength to throw off the weakness in our blood. There’s genius, but there’s decadence, too. Your righteous ancestors were white sheep, bleating in their pulpits. I am a black sheep, and I have had the courage to learn that a black sheep can be sacrificed in return for certain boons. And now you, the last little superstitious, decadent white sheep, come seeking to slay me.”
HE LAUGHED gently, and Luke knew he was quite mad. Luke was mad, too—he felt that something had happened to his body, numbing it to ice that bit like needles at his throat. He gasped: “Have you—poisoned me?”
“I took precautions. Poison? No, nothing as crude as that; not your stupid trick here. I’ve dealt with you in a manner I learned from my experiments. Experiments with life and death, Luke, and with that strange trace of life that remains after a body is dead. D’you know what tetanus is, Luke?”
The younger man did not answer. He was staring horrified at his uncle, his eyes all whites.
“I suppose you don’t. It’s a contraction of the muscles, like rigor mortis, only that comes after you’re dead. That is—it usually does.” Lionel Holland smiled, tapping the arm of his chair with withered fingers. “I wonder what poison you put in my glass, Luke? Strychnine? That causes tetanus, you know; tonic tetanus, in which all the muscles of the body are rigid. By experiment I found a drug much more effective than strychnine. It causes rigor vitae—the rigor of life rather than the rigor of death. Slowly your muscles become rigid, and your body becomes paralyzed. But not your brain, Luke. You’ll be able to see and hear quite clearly—when they put you in your coffin.”
A strangled cry burst from Luke’s throat. For a moment he was no longer Luke Holland, product of the twentieth century—he was a fanatical Puritan, stamping out the black and evil foulness of witchcraft; the sin that the Scriptures cursed.
“You devil—you had powder at the bottom of the glass you gave me,” he panted.
He lunged at Lionel Holland, his hands rising swiftly.
A mad rhythm jangled in his brain. As his fingers closed around the neck of the startled old man the rhythm screamed louder, into words.
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Everything dissolved into a red haze, and nothing seemed to exist but his hands, closing very slowly around his uncle’s throat. It was oddly difficult to move them, and they seemed strangely cold. He, threw all his strength into the effort of sinking stiff fingers into the wrinkled flesh. It was queer his hands were so cold and stiff—very queer. He was surprised to hear himself laughing gently and quite insanely. He forced himself to stop thinking and listen to the tune in his head as he choked and choked. . . .
Then it was very still. The only sound was the faint creaking of the chair as Luke shook his uncle’s body back and forth. He did not see the blue pallor on the wrinkled face, nor the bulging, agonized eyes. He was trying to remember something. It was very important that he remember. Oh yes—he had it now. Something to do with a drug; with paralysis. What had Lionel said? “Slowly your muscles become rigid, and your body becomes paralyzed.” His feet were cold, lifeless. And his throat ached. Luke felt stiff all over.
Suddenly the haze cleared and he stared down at his hands gripping the wrinkled throat. He tried to relax his grip, remove his hands. And—he could not. His muscles were rigidly contrasted about the neck of the dead man, as though in rigor mortis.
Luke began to whimper like a hurt dog.
AN HOUR later Luke Holland still crouched over his uncle’s corpse in the big dark room where now the shadows crept away to secret caverns in the night. Time after time he had attempted to free his fingers from their grisly embrace, but to no avail. They were deeply imbedded in the rapidly cooling flesh—ten white links in a necklace of death.
He wondered how long he had been lying here. Five minutes? No, an age, a century, seemed more accurate. The dull ache in his throat had increased, and the strange cold had penetrated his knees.
It was apparent that he could not free himself from the ghastly grip without tools to assist him. At the thought hope shot through him. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He must get rid of the body. A knife would pry his fingers free.
Luke tried to crawl to his feet, but fell heavily. His legs were encased in blocks of ice. Breathing in hoarse gasps, he hitched himself laboriously on his knees, painfully dragging his monstrous burden behind him. There seemed to be no knives in his uncle’s room; he dared not waste time searching further.
Into the hall he crawled, dragging the ghastly prisoner between locked fingers. Down the great staircase he clambered. Almost at once he lost balance and plunged forward, wheezing. Down they came, dead and halfdead together. And slowly, slowly, Luke felt the icy tide of doom creep through his veins.
How could he handle the knife? His feet were useless; his hands trapped in their frightful grip of horror. Yet there remained his mouth; he could grip the hilt of the knife in his teeth and pry his fingers free.
Blood smeared his face before he managed to drag a kitchen drawer from its place and let the cutlery cascade to the floor. There it was—a slender-bladed carving knife. Now—
He deliberately rolled over on the floor until his lips brushed the bone handle of the knife. The dull ache had subsided from his throat now, but there was a sensation of icy cold in his jaws. . . .
He could not open his mouth! The jaws were rigidly clenched! The muscles worked in hard knots, the knife lay mockingly against his lips, but he was powerless to grip it between his teeth. Whimpering, he tired to catch it between shoulder and cheek, but this was impossible. And all through his body the cold crept slowly. . . .
Luke knew then that this was the end. He could not leave the house, chained to the evidence of his crime. He could not eat, nor sleep, nor stand erect. He was as dead as the corpse between stiffened fingers; the corpse with the mocking face that seemed to smile upwards in triumphant appreciation of the grim jest.
What had the old wizard said? That Luke’s body would become rigid and paralyzed. “But not your brain, Luke. You’ll be able to see and hear quite clearly—when they put you in your coffin.”
Luke visualized what searchers would find when at last they broke into the house. Two dead men, stiff in rigor mortis, the icy fingers of one sunk into the cold throat of the other. But one of those men would be living within that dead shell. . . .
“No!” gurgled the stricken murderer. “No!”
And he painfully rose to his knees, crawling along the floor with his grisly Nemesis dragging behind.
HE MADE the stairs, somehow; cut a
nd bruised, with blood flowing sluggishly from wounds he could not feel. It took ages to ascend the staircase with his monstrous burden, and more than an hour to reach Lionel’s room with the open windows through which sea-borne twilight seeped.
The icy bonds were tight on Luke now. He could scarcely move his stiffened body, and the hideous bulk he dragged made his task almost an impossible one. Very slowly he crawled toward a window. He had to make it. There was only one way to break the bond, to sever his linkage with the dead. Only one way to kill himself and not be buried alive. A fall from a height would loose his fingers, kill him. He’d escape the wizard’s planned vengeance yet.
Somehow Luke propped himself up against the wall, reached the windowsill with his knees, and dragged the smiling thing up beside him. Only the ghastly thrill of triumphing over his uncle animated him, for the cold was gripping his heart now, stopping it. Soon he would be merely a living mind in a dead body, unless he fell out into the street, quickly. He must.
He stared down between his fingers at the smiling sardonic face that leered insanely upwards. He felt it stiffen. Six hours dead, and rigor mortis was actually setting in on his uncle’s body. It was nearly as stiff as his own. Luke wanted to smile, but his face was ice. And now he had to will himself to lean forward and topple out, dragging the stiff body with him. He had to. He felt the cold stop his heart. Now he was only a living mind in a dead body.
He leaned, plunged—tried to drag the body after him.
NEXT morning the hastily-summoned police broke into the Holland mansion and invaded the second-story bedchamber. There they found what had attracted a crowd to the streets below—the body of a man, dangling from a window, hands clutched in an inflexible grip of death about the throat of Lionel Holland. Lionel Holland’s body had become wedged in the narrow window-opening; rigor mortis had kept it from becoming dislodged and squeezing through. Apparently rigor mortis had held Luke’s grip firm on the dead throat of his uncle so that he had hung there in midair, attached to the rigid body of the old man.
The mystery was never solved, and the undertaker seemed singularly disinclined to speak of what measures he had taken to loosen the hands of Luke from their iron grip.
The two were buried with modest obsequies a few days later. The funeral was for the most part quiet and dignified, as befitted services for one of the oldest families in the region. A brief disturbance, however, was occasioned when a youthful artist attending the funeral suddenly went into hysterics over the rigid smile on Lionel Holland’s face—and because of a certain look he swore he glimpsed in the glazed eyes of Luke Holland as the coffin-lid swung into place.
SUICIDE SQUAD
In the Wake of a Meteor Crack-up, the Loyalty of Spacemen Is Put to a Test!
CHAPTER I
Meteor Crack-Up
IT was ironic that I should have been due for a promotion just when the Caribee cracked up in space and they broke Jimmy Sloane. After piloting STC crates from Venus to Jupiter for five years and getting two gold bars on my sleeve, I’d been cited for another bar and a master pilot’s berth. I deserved it, though.
If you ask in the right places, they’ll tell you that Mike Harrigan’s log and record were things to brag about. That is, up to the night the Caribee was towed into Newark and J. C. Gayley, Director of STC, got the hardest jolt of his crooked career.
STC—that’s Space Transport Company, the biggest interplanetary freight and passenger line going. It’s called, more or less jokingly, the Jersey West Point; but getting a job with STC is no joke. The company’s run like an army. The only difference is that they don’t shoot the offenders in their ranks. They only crucify ’em, after an informal court-martial. They crucified Jim Sloane, and that’s, why J. C. Gayley got his jaw busted.
Talk about cramming for exams—why, for weeks before I passed the entrance tests at STC I racked my brain over the intricate spatial mathematics of interplanetary navigation.
My buddies were astonished when I got through, and I didn’t blame them, for with my face and physique—okay for Pithecanthropus Erectus, maybe—I don’t look much like a university graduate. Then, too, I spent a couple of years in the ring, and that didn’t help my beauty any. But I got into STC finally, and discovered that I was under a stricter regime than an army in wartime.
STC blurbs its lines all over the worlds—“Space-travel the Safe Way!”
SAFE! That’s a laugh. There haven’t been many wrecks in the Transport history, but that isn’t because of the company’s precautions. Instead of spending a million or two to perfect the rocket-tubes and safety-devices, the big shots decided it was cheaper to tell their pilots, “Bring your ships in safe—or lose your jobs!”
And losing your berth with STC meant sheer unadulterated hell. The company, with steel and oil and radium interests, is a world power. To be blacklisted means virtually becoming a criminal. No job is open to you. I remember one snow-frigid night on Broadway being accosted by a broken down derelict who croaked a hoarse plea for a dime.
I recognized the guy. I’d flown with him in the Earth-Venus war ten years before, and, seeing him now, I remembered that he’d cracked up an STC ship. Over a restaurant table, gorging himself with steak and french fries, he told me something of himself.
“It wasn’t my fault, Mike—that business. The tubes back-blasted. They were choked with slag melted off the lining. But the Star was wrecked and you saw the papers?”
I nodded, eying the man’s haggard ruin of a face. He coughed rackingly, gulped coffee, and went on, his faded eyes held an abject plea for belief that made me feel a little sick.
“Not my fault at all—you see that, don’t you, Mike? Yeah—well, the papers were full of the story. The company blew my testimony to bits with their experts. When they’d finished the whole world knew my name and my face, and what I’d done. What they said I’d done. Killing thirty people—I couldn’t get a job. I tried other transport lines first. Then I went down the line. Anything—but it wasn’t any good. Maybe—maybe you could stake me, Mike—”
I staked him, and he went to Arizona and died in a few months. And now, three years later, the televisor in my gyroplane was blaring out the name of Jim Sloane, who had run an STC ship into a meteor two hours out from Jersey.
I changed the controls and leaned out, my face chilled by the cold wind at this upper, level. Far below the Hudson was a black winding line on which tiny lights moved slowly. Beyond was the blazing jewelcase of New York, listening, like me, to the wrecking of Jim Sloane’s career. I lit a cigarette, took a nervous puff, and crushed it out. I was wondering where Andy Sloane was.
Captain Andrew Sloane, STC’s ace flyer and highest ranking pilot, was Jim’s elder brother. The kid always idolized Andy, and nearly went crazy with delight when he, too, was put on the company’s payroll.
Jim had acquired something of his brother’s attitude toward STC—a sort of idealism, something I didn’t have that I could respect. And now—well, my stomach, felt tied into a knot, it knew what Jim’s crack-up would mean to Andy.
Ever since we flew together in the war Andy had built up his brother to me. The kid was going to be a world wonder, according to him. I’d kidded Andy a lot, but he’d only jerk up his chin with a quick, habitual gesture and grin at me, his gray eyes narrowed a little. Up till now—
For when I landed at the spaceport Andy was there, his olive-drab uniform creased and rumpled, lines bracketing his mouth. He was hurrying away from the administration buildings, but halted when I hailed him, I grabbed his arm. “What about Jimmy? Is he okay?”
Andy’s face didn’t change, it was stone.
“Safe, yeah. Aren’t you flying tonight?” he asked.
“I was,” I said. “Listen, what’s the lowdown on this?”
“Jim’s washed up,” Andy’s voice was grim. “That’s all there is to it.” He started to turn, but I held on to him.
“The kid’s a good pilot,” I said.
“He missed the red signal. A wom
an was killed tonight, Mike. Her porthole went out.”
THIS needs explanation, I guess.
Studded over the shell of every spaceship, just under the hull, are Detectors—delicate instruments which instantly react to the approach of any object which has sufficient mass to register.
In space, these are set so that if a body—a meteor, say—comes too close, an automatic circuit is closed and compensating rocket blasts are fired. Thus, if a meteor comes in to starboard, its mass activates a set of starboard Detectors and the rockets go off, shooting the ship safely out of its path.
There’s a double check on this: the pilot of the boat sits before a map of the hull, with red lights showing each Detector, and if he sees some of the lights go on and doesn’t feel the jolt of the tubes blasting off, it’s his job to operate the rockets manually. It takes split-second thinking, but pilots usually have hair-trigger reactions. That’s a matter of habit and training.
A meteor had come in at the Caribee; the tubes hadn’t blasted; and Jim had failed to fire the rockets. As a result, the ship’s nose had been crumpled and a passenger had died when her port had cracked open, letting the air escape.
One word from her as she lay in her berth would have brought a safety helmet, robot operated, down over her head and sealed but for some reason she didn’t say the word. So she died.
Andy told me of this, cold lights deep in his gray eyes, his face strained. I rubbed my chin thoughtfully, mulling over the various angles.
“Where’s Jim now?” I said finally.
“I don’t know,” Andy clipped out, “And I don’t care.”
“Don’t be a. damn fool, fella,” I said quietly.
He didn’t resent my words.
“You know how I feel about the company, Mike,” he just said, looking hard at me. “I pulled a lot of wires to get Jim in. Now he’s—killed a passenger.”
“You haven’t heard his side of it yet.”
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