The Haploids

by Jerry Sohl

  "You won't be seeing me for a year," Travis said. "I'm on leave right now."

  "Then what are you doin' down here?"

  "Just a little request I want to make."

  "Sure. What is it?"

  "Let me see your police car record for yesterday."

  The sergeant went into the radio room, returned with several sheets of paper and handed them to him. Travis let his eyes travel down the log through routine prowl car reports, dispatches to pick up drunks, to stop a fight, to direct traffic, to escort a funeral—and then he came to the item he wanted.

  5:33 p.m. Car 302 to Ridgeway and Leland. Naked man.

  A little farther down the sheet he saw another entry.

  5:42 p.m. Thompson in 302 reports naked man out of his head and ill. Taken to Union City Hospital.

  There were no other entries regarding the man. He handed the book back to the desk sergeant and thanked him. He left the police station and headed for Ridgeway Avenue and Leland Street.

  He took a cross-town bus and got off on Leland, walked three blocks to Ridgeway. It was in an industrial neighborhood, and Ridgeway marked the dividing line between factories and the residential area, although there were a few houses among the plants. On the residential side of Ridgeway there was a small grocery store on the corner and Travis headed for it.

  Inside, a portly woman came from the rear of the store to wait on him.

  "What's yours, mister?" She had the trace of an accent, but Travis couldn't identify the language.

  "Know anything about the old man the police picked up here yesterday afternoon?" he asked.

  "I know they shoulda thrown him in the clink, a man runnin' around like that without a stitch on. It ain't decent, it ain't. And such carryin' on, yellin' and runnin' the way he was."

  "Which way was he running?"

  The woman pushed a lock of greasy, black hair off her forehead. "He was runnin' down Ridgeway, yellin' like the devil was after him and then all of a sudden he stopped and fell down. That's when I called the police. I seen Lila here lookin' at him. She was out in front."

  Travis hadn't noticed a tiny girl who had come from the back of the store and stood behind the counter, peering over it at him curiously.

  "Why you want to know about him?" the woman asked.

  "I'm trying to find out where he came from."

  "I know where, I know where," the little girl exclaimed excitedly.

  "You shut your mouth, Lila, before I slap you one." The woman turned- to him. "She don't know nothin', mister."

  "Maybe she does know," he suggested cautiously.

  "I'm tellin' you she don't. Now, Lila, run back and play." When the child didn't budge, she clouted her on the side of the head. "I said run back, good-for-nothin'." The child ran.

  Travis brought out his billfold, put a five dollar bill on the counter.

  "You gonna buy somethin'?"

  "Some information."

  The woman's eyes were greedy and she wiped her hands on her apron, but she didn't pick up the money.

  "You just stick that back in your pocket, mister. I don't want no trouble. Now you better get out of here."

  Travis put the five back. "Thanks, anyway," he said, looking hopefully toward the back of the store before he left. The child was nowhere to be seen.

  It was a bright summer day outside and he drew in big drafts of air. So far, no soap, he thought. But the old lady said the old man was running down Ridgeway and her daughter was in front of the store where she could see him. That would be down the street away from the store along Ridgeway Avenue. So he must have come from the other direction.

  Travis set out in the direction from which the man had evidently come. There were rows of rather neat bungalows along his side of the street, a wire mesh fence running around a large industrial plant on the other. He continued walking, wondering where the old man could have come from in that neighborhood.

  Suddenly a child ran out from between two houses. It was Lila.

  "Mister, you follow me," she said. "I know where the man came from. I saw him come out of a building over there." She pointed to a group of buildings around the corner on the next street.

  He walked beside her to the corner where a street sign proclaimed Winthrop Street. They turned and crossed Ridgeway. Halfway down the block Lila stopped, turned big black eyes to him and grinned.

  "He came out of that one," she said, indicating a two-story flat with a large lot on either side of it. Beyond the lots were two brick buildings that looked like warehouses.

  "Thanks, honey," Travis said, dipping into his pocket and getting a quarter. "This is for you."

  She eyed it, then took it. "The other man gave me a half a dollar."

  "The other man? What other man?"

  Something of the urgency of his voice frightened her and she scooted away. He let her go, wondering what she meant. Then he turned to the building and looked it over.

  Number 1722 Winthrop Street was an old building with a brick foundation. The basement windows were gone, but the others were intact. In fact, the other windows were clean and bright, though he could see nothing in the interior. Wooden stairs went up to a porch and a doorway that opened onto a sort of hallway he could see from across the street.

  He went over and up the stairs. The knob of the door was of bright metal that showed recent use. He tried the door and it opened easily. Inside he had a choice of taking the stairway to the second floor or of opening the door of the first floor apartment.

  The two mailboxes on the wall bore no nameplates. The shade on the first floor was drawn. He knocked on the door, since he saw no bell. There was no answer. Then he tried the door. It opened on well-oiled hinges.

  There was nothing inside. Only a rubble-strewn floor and sunshine. He went in. The rubble, he discovered, was glass and pieces of metal, wires, wood and a number of broken items he recognized as laboratory equipment. Then he noticed that the air smelled in a sweet way with a touch of acrid; it reminded him faintly of his high school chemistry days.

  He walked inside, crunching glass under his feet. The front room contained some five-gallon bottles intact, but there were test tubes, beakers and a few graduates broken and lying around. The dining room contained several packing boxes and filing cabinets he had not seen from the front door. They contained books, sundry laboratory items. Oddly enough, next to one of the filing cabinets was a powder puff.

  The kitchen was a maze of wires, some of them still in plaster, others pulled out and piled on the floor. Some broken pieces of electrical equipment—an instrument he recognized as an ohmmeter or ammeter, a soldering iron, and broken radio tubes—and several other items he did not understand were lying around amid the plaster.

  A large beaker on the kitchen sink caught his eye. There was considerable plaster dust on one side of it and fingerprints showed up plainly on this side. The fingerprints, in fact, showed up a bit too obviously and something clicked in his mind. He looked at the plaster-strewn floor again and noticed that there were plenty of footprints. Big footprints.

  He was not surprised, then, to see the door to the kitchen open and Captain Tomkins step in.

  "Do you mind, Mr. Travis," the captain said, "if I ask you why you're here?"

  "No, I don't mind," Travis said. "I got here the same way you did. Except you gave the kid a half dollar. You set a dangerous precedent. Little Lila expected a half from me."

  THREE

  "You've told me how you got here," Captain Tomkins said. "Now tell me why you came."

  Travis kicked at a broken retort and it skittered across the floor, -shining as it went through one area of sunlight.

  "Just mark it up to curiosity, Captain." He saw the policeman wasn't going to be satisfied with a simple answer, so he went on: "Look, Captain. I'm in the hospital when they bring the old guy in. I'm there when the girl comes in and tries to knock him off in advance of his intended departure. For the past ten years I've been beating deadlines. I've been covering political
speeches, sometimes crime, I've written up successful businessmen. Somebody has been telling me what to do for ten long, weary years. Now this is something I can do myself. I don't have to report to anybody. I can do as I damn well please. So, suiting the action to the word, I'm here. I am just as anxious fo get this thing figured out as you are."

  The captain walked through the kitchen to the dining room. "Maybe you are at that, Travis. But you're making unnecessary work for the police department, such as our tailing you just now. If you really get down to it, you haven't any business here at all. It's strictly Police business."

  "How long have you been here, Captain?"

  The captain stopped at the packing boxes and picked out a few books and looked at their titles, threw them from one box to another.

  "We got here early this morning. The boys have gone through the place. The filing cabinets are empty, but there are a lot of fingerprints around. We'll find out whose, if there are records. The tail called in when you got to the grocery and I came out. Mac's out in back in the squad car. I thought I'd wait to see what you did when you got in here.

  "Here's an odd title," the captain said, indicating the book he was holding. "Die Neuen Vererbungsgesetze. Must be German. A lot of them are. Wonder what it means."

  "Beats me. I took German once, but I don't remember much about it. What's upstairs?"

  "Living quarters. Only mattresses and tables and chairs left. We figure whoever lived here moved out last night. Maybe they figure the guy had the plague or something, and they'd have to take the rap for him.

  "Here's another odd one. Narcoanalysis. Judging from the price marks on these things the people are well heeled. Ten bucks for a little book like that. The rest here are physiologies, biology books, some on botany, a few on electronics. The whole apartment reminds me of prohibition days when we'd raid an innocent-looking home and find they'd built a vat or still on the first floor. Wonder what they were doing?"

  "I'd like to know," Travis said.

  The captain paused to light his pipe. "Come over here," he said then, moving to another part of the room near the kitchen. "The wires from the kitchen, which came in from the outside power lines, ran to a machine that stood here. You can tell it was heavy from the marks on the floor. They must have worked hard and fast to get it and the other stuff out of here. There are truck marks in the earth just outside. We're having those examined."

  Travis's eye caught sight of a piece of white jutting out from beneath a crate of rubbish. He stooped down, drew out a 3 x 5 filing card, put it in his pocket without the captain's knowing. Then he noticed some writing on the wall near the kitchen.

  "Have you figured out what this stuff is, Captain?"

  The captain came over to the marks.

  "Mostly radio stuff, I guess. Circuits and wires and tubes, I gather. Wouldn't ordinarily put much stock in the diagram, but the fact that they tried hard to erase it and found it wouldn't come off and then tried to scrape the wallpaper off shows they put some value on it. Some of it, as you can see, is missing, where they succeeded in getting the paper off.

  "We've got a man from the university coming down this afternoon to take a look at it." The captain headed back to the kitchen. "It must have been illegal, whatever it was. Otherwise they wouldn't have been in such a hurry to get out."

  "But how could such a pretty girl get mixed up in this?"

  The captain turned and looked at him levelly. "She might be pretty, Travis, but she's dangerous, too. I wouldn't trust a girl like that regardless of what motive she had for getting rid of the old man."

  He continued to look at Travis, studying him. Then he said, "I've got something else to show you." He led the way to the rear of the kitchen and opened the door to the basement. They went down.

  The basement was in-as much disorder as the first floor. There were broken boxes, books were scattered about, and a lot of debris around the furnace door showed much of whatever the occupants had wanted to get rid of had been burned.

  "You see that corner over there?"- Captain Tomkins said, pointing to a dark and dirty section of the basement.

  "There's nothing there," Travis replied.

  "That's right. Nothing there right now. Do you know what was there when we got here this morning?"

  "How the hell would I know . . ."

  "All right, don't blow your top. I don't mean it that way, although I don't know why I'm taking the time to tell you this."

  "Well, what was there?"

  "A dead man."

  "Who was he?"

  "A bum. Chester Grimes was his name. We've had him in time and time again. He'd go through police court with regularity and often get sidetracked for a month or two at the state penal farm for vagrancy. Always drunk. We never figured where he got the dough to go on those benders."

  "That's not unusual, is it? The guy gets a load and sleeps it off here. Except it's his last sleep. Maybe the people living here didn't even know he was down here and couldn't do anything about him once they started to clear out."

  The captain shook his head. "You don't understand. I haven't made myself clear. This guy was a dark gray. He was turning black. He had big red scabs all over him and around his neck and on his chest he had big purple blobs of flesh. Remind you of anything?"

  Travis drew in his breath. "Another!"

  "Exactly. Chester Grimes, address unknown. He hadn't been in trouble for two or three months. His fingerprints were as hard to get as the old man's at the hospital because something was wrong with his flesh. But even though they were pretty smudgy they checked out all right. The identification sergeant had him pegged in about five minutes."

  "He and the old guy in the hospital must have been guinea pigs in some awful experiment."

  "I thought at first they might have been the experimenters themselves, but of course this Grimes had no training at all. Besides, he'd be too boozed up to come to his senses long enough to experiment on anything."

  "And remember the guy at the hospital kept yelling about not wanting to be taken back."

  "He could have been out of his head."

  They both jumped at the sound of breaking glass. They heard the clatter of it on the floor over their heads. The captain turned and rushed for the stairs with Travis right behind him.

  There was no one upstairs and for a while they didn't see anything unusual, since there was plenty of broken glass around the floor. But then the captain spied the broken window. He walked toward it, then suddenly fell to the floor as another section of glass gave way and some of it tinkled to the floor.

  At the same time there was a dull snap on the opposite wall and Travis, who had also fallen to his knees, noticed a round, black hole in the wallpaper.

  "It's coming from over there," the captain said, nodding his head in the direction of the warehouse across the lot. "I saw a head and the burst of, fire as whoever it was fired the gun. Where in hell is Mac?"

  As if in answer to his question, the rear door opened and the patrolman rushed in, gun drawn.

  "Put that damn thing away and get down, Mac," Captain Tomkins said. "The shots are coming from the next building. You get back to the car and call headquarters. I'm going out the front way after whoever it is."

  The captain put his pipe away and crawled along the baseboard toward the living room. Travis crawled with him and together they made their way through the wreckage on the floor to the front door and outside.

  Travis marveled at the police captain who did not hesitate but drew his gun and started running down the sidewalk toward the other building. Travis did not welcome the idea of being a target but he started to run after the captain and did not dare stop once he started.

  They reached the building which bore a sign, "Morris No. 3." Captain Tomkins tried the door which was flush with the sidewalk. It was locked, so he broke the window with the butt of his revolver and reached in and unlocked it.

  In a moment they were inside running up the stairs.

  "The shots came from
the second floor," the captain yelled, taking the steps two at a time.

  There was no wondering what to do, whether or not he might be hit or that there might be someone upstairs waiting for him. Travis's respect for the captain's courage increased as he saw him reach the top of the stairs, open the door and walk in.

  When Travis got through the door he" saw the captain standing in the center of a large room, surveying it. There was no one there. Only an empty open window.

  "Not even an empty shell," the captain said, looking around the floor.

  Travis had come up behind him and was looking at the window when he chanced to look beyond it across the lot to the house from which they had just come. He saw something red and glowing through the window. A moment later the window exploded outward in a blast of billowy, black smoke. He had not time to tell the captain before he, too, noticed the smoke which was now flecked with flames.

  "The bastards," the captain muttered. "They got us out of the way."

  Together they ran down the stairs and cut across the lot to the alleyway where the police car was parked.

  "I got headquarters, all right," Mac told Captain Tomkins, getting out of the car. "They're on the way. I was just coming over to where you'd gone when I saw the blast. I ducked back in the car and radioed Joe to call the fire department."

  "Better get that car out of here," Captain Tomkins said. "This place is really going. Come along, Travis."

  All three got in the car and they backed it out of the alley with only seconds to spare before the fire department converged on the scene already cluttered with police cars arriving.

  "Headquarters to Car 22," the radio squawked. "What's going on out there?"

  "I'll take it," Captain Tomkins said, reaching for the hand mike. "This is Tomkins. The lab where we got Grimes this morning is going up in smoke right now. There were some shots from an adjacent building that got us away from it. Somebody got in and started it really roaring. I don't know how."

  "Must be something there they didn't want us to get," the captain said later. "Well, Travis, I think I'll be going back to the office. You going uptown or are you going to stick around for some more detective work? If you want to do that we could put you on the force for a year. But no, I can see you'd never pass the physical."