He looked quickly at his wrist watch and saw that it was half past nine which was one half hour before the demonstration in the square. And the wheel and its owner would be there, surely.
His aching muscles forgotten, Lieutenant Rod Caquer started to run back toward the center of town. The streets were deserted. Everyone had gone to the square, of course. They had been told to come.
He was winded after a few blocks, and had to slow down to a rapid walk, but there would be time for him to get there before it was over, even if he missed the start.
Yes, he could get there all right. And then, if his idea worked. . .
It was almost ten when he passed the building where his own office was situated, and kept on going. He turned in a few doors beyond. The elevator operator was gone, but Caquer ran the elevator up and a minute later he had used his picklock on a door and was in Perry Peters' laboratory.
Peters was gone, of course, hut the goggles were there, the special goggles with the trick windshield-wiper effect that made them usable in radite mining.
Rod Caquer slipped them over his eyes, put the motive-power battery into his pocket, and touched the button on the side. They worked. He could see dimly as the wipers flashed back and forth. But a minute later they stopped.
Of course. Peters had said that the shafts heated and expanded after a minute's operation. Well, that might not matter. A minute might be long enough, and the metal would have cooled by the time he reached the square.
But he would have to be able to vary the speed. Among the litter of stuff on the workbench, he found a small rheostat and spliced it in one of the wires that ran from the battery to the goggles.
That was the best he could do. No time to try it out. He slid the goggles up onto his forehead and ran out into the hall, took the elevator down to street level. And a moment later he was running toward the public square, two blocks away.
He reached the fringe of the crowd gathered in the square looking up at the two balconies of the Regency building. On the lower one were several people he recognized; Dr. Skidder, Walther Johnson. Even Lieutenant Borgesen was there.
On the higher balcony, Regent Maxon Barr was alone, and was speaking to the crowd below. His sonorous voice rolled out phrases extolling the might of empire. Only a little distance away, in the crowd, Caquer caught sight of the gray hair of Professor Gordon, and Jane Gordon's golden head beside it. He wondered if they were under the spell, too. Of course they were deluded also or they would not be there. He realized it would be useless to speak to them, then, and tell them what he was trying to do.
Lieutenant Caquer slid the goggles down over his eyes, blinded momentarily because the wiper arms were in the wrong position. But his fingers found the rheostat, set at zero, and began to move it slowly around the dial toward maximum.
And then, as the wipers began their frantic dance and accelerated, he could see dimly. Through the arc-shaped lenses, he looked around him. On the lower balcony he saw nothing unusual, but on the upper balcony the figure of Regent Barr suddenly blurred.
There was a man standing there on the upper balcony wearing a strange-looking helmet with wires and atop the helmet was a three-inch wheel of mirrors and prisms.
A wheel that stood still, because of the stroboscopic effect of the mechanized goggles. For an instant, the speed of those wiper arms was synchronized with the spinning of the wheel, so that each successive glimpse of the wheel showed it in the same position, and to Caquer's eyes the wheel stood still, and he could see it.
Then the goggles jammed.
But he did not need them any more now.
He knew that Barr Maxon, or whoever stood up there on the balcony, was the wearer of the wheel.
Silently, and attracting as little attention as possible, Caquer sprinted around the fringe of the crowd and reached the side door of the Regency building.
There was a guard on duty there.
"Sorry, sir, but no one's allowed-"
Then he tried to duck, too late. The flat of Police Lieutenant Rod Caquer's shortsword thudded against his head.
The inside of the building seemed deserted. Caquer ran up the three flights of stairs that would take him to the level of the higher balcony, and down the hall toward the balcony door.
He burst through it, and Regent Maxon turned. Maxon now, no longer wore the helmet on his head. Caquer had lost the goggles, but whether he could see it or not, Caquer knew the helmet and the wheel were still in place and working, and that this was his one chance.
Maxon turned and saw Lieutenant Caquer's face, and his drawn sword.
Then, abruptly, Maxon's figure vanished. It seemed to Caquer-although he knew that it was not-that the figure before him was that of Jane Gordon. Jane, looking at him pleadingly, and spoke in melting tones.
"Rod, don't-" she began to say.
But it was not Jane, he knew. A thought, in self-preservation, had been directed at him by the manipulator of the Vargas Wheel.
Caquer raised his sword, and he brought it down hard.
Glass shattered and there was the ring of metal on metal, as his sword cut through and split the helmet.
Of course it was not Jane now-just a dead man lying there with blood oozing out of the split in a strange and complicated, but utterly shattered, helmet. A helmet that could now be seen by everyone there, and by Lieutenant Caquer himself.
Just as everyone, including Caquer, himself, could recognize the man who had worn it.
He was a small, wiry man, and there was an unsightly wart on the side of his nose.
Yes, it was Willem Deem. And this time, Rod Caquer knew, it was Willem Deem. .. .
"I thought," Jane Gordon said, "that you were going to leave for Callisto City without saying goodbye to us."
Rod Caquer threw his hat in the general direction of a hook.
"Oh, that," he said. "I'm not even sure I'm going to take the promotion to a job as police coordinator there. I have a week to decide, and I'll he around town at least that long. How you been doing, Icicle?"
"Fine, Rod. Sit down. Father will be home soon, and I know he has a lot of things to ask you. Why we haven't seen you since the big mass meeting."
Funny how dumb a smart man can be, at times.
But then again, he had proposed so often and been refused, that it was not all his fault.
He just looked at her.
"Rod, all the story never came out in the newscasts," she said. "I know you'll have to tell it all over again for my father, but while we're waiting for him, won't you give me some information?"
Rod grinned.
"Nothing to it, really, Icicle," he said. "Willem Deem got hold of a Blackdex book, and found out how to make a Vargas Wheel. So he made one, and it gave him ideas.
"His first idea was to kill Barr Maxon and take over as Regent, setting the helmet so he would appear to be Maxon. He put Maxon's body in his own shop, and then had a lot of fun with his own murder. He had a warped sense of humor, and got a kick out of chasing us in circles."
"But just how did he do all the rest?" asked the girl.
"He was there as Brager, and pretended to discover his own body. He gave one description of the method of death, and caused Skidder and me and the clearance men to see the body of Maxon each a different way. No wonder we nearly went nuts."
"But Brager remembered being there too," she objected.
"Brager was in the hospital at the time, but Deem saw him afterward and impressed on his mind the memory pattern of having discovered Deem's body," explained Caquer. "So naturally, Brager thought he had been there.
"Then he killed Maxon's confidential secretary, because being so close to the Regent, the secretary must have suspected something was wrong even though he couldn't guess what. That was the second corpse of Willim Deem, who was beginning to enjoy himself in earnest when he pulled that on us.
"And of course he never sent to Callisto City for a special investigator at all. He just had fun with me, by making me seem to meet one and having the guy t
urn out to be Willem Deem again. I nearly did go nuts then, I guess."
"But why, Rod, weren't you as deeply in as the others-I mean on the business of conquering Callisto and all of that?" she inquired. "You were free of that part of the hypnosis."
Caquer shrugged.
"Maybe it was because I missed Skidder's talk on the televis," he suggested. "Of course it wasn't Skidder at all, it was Deem in another guise and wearing the helmet. And maybe he deliberately left me out, because he was having a psychopathic kind of fun out of my trying to investigate the murders of two Willem Deems. It's hard to figure. Perhaps I was slightly cracked from the strain, and it might have been that for that reason I was partially resistant to the group hypnosis."
"You think he really intended to try to rule all of Callisto, Rod?" asked the girl.
"We'll never know, for sure, just how far he wanted, or expected to go later. At first, he was just experimenting with the powers of hypnosis, through the wheel. That first night, he sent people out of their houses into the streets, and then sent them back and made them forget it. Just a test, undoubtedly."
Caquer paused and frowned thoughtfully.
"He was undoubtedly psychopathic, though, and we don't dare even guess what all his plans were," he continued. "You understand how the goggles worked to neutralize the wheel, don't you, Icicle?"
"I think so. That was brilliant, Rod. It's like when you take a moving picture of a turning wheel, isn't it? If the camera synchronizes with the turning of the wheel, so that each successive picture shows it after a complete revolution, then it looks like it's standing still when you show the movie."
Caquer nodded.
"That's it on the head," he said. "Just luck I had access to those goggles, though. For just a second I could see a man wearing a helmet up there on the balcony-but that was all I had to know."
"But Rod, when you rushed out on the balcony, you didn't have the goggles on any more. Couldn't he have stopped you, by hypnosis?"
"Well, he didn't. I guess there wasn't time for him to take over control of me. He did flash an illusion at me. It wasn't either Barr Maxon or Willem Deem I saw standing there at the last minute. It was you, Jane."
“I?”
"Yep, you. I guess he knew I'm in love with you, and that's the first thing flashed into his mind; that I wouldn't dare use the sword if I thought it was you standing there. But I knew it wasn't you, in spite of the evidence of my eyes, so I swung it."
He shuddered slightly, remembering the will power he had needed to bring that sword down.
"The worst of it was that I saw you standing there like I've always wanted to see you-with your arms out toward me, and looking at me as though you loved me."
"Like this, Rod?"
And he was not too dumb to get the idea, that time.
THE ANGELIC ANGELWORM
I
Charlie Wills shut off the alarm clock and kept right on moving, swinging his feet out of bed and sticking them into his slippers as he reached for a cigarette. Once the cigarette was lighted, he let himself relax a moment, sitting on the side of the bed.
He still had time, he figured, to sit there and smoke himself awake. He had fifteen minutes before Pete Johnson would call to take him fishing. And twelve minutes was enough time to wash his face and throw on his old clothes.
It seemed funny to get up at five o'clock, but he felt swell. Golly, even with the sun not up yet and the sky a dull pastel through the window, he felt great. Because there was only a week and a half to wait now.
Less than a week and a half, really, because it was ten days. Or-come to think of it-a bit more than ten days from this hour in the morning. But call it ten days, anyway. If he could go back to sleep again now, darn it; when he woke up it would be that much closer to the time of the wedding. Yes, it was swell to sleep when you were looking forward to something. Time flies by and you don't even hear the rustle of its wings.
But no-he couldn't go back to sleep. He'd promised Pete he'd be ready at five-fifteen, and if he wasn't, Pete would sit out front in his car and honk the horn, and wake the neighbors.
And the three minutes' grace were up, so he tamped out the cigarette and reached for the clothes on the chair.
He began to whistle softly: "I'm going to marry Yum Yum, Yum Yum" from "The Mikado." And tried-in the interests of being ready in time-to keep his eyes off the silver-framed picture of Jane on the bureau.
He must be just about the luckiest guy on earth. Or anywhere else, for that matter, if there was anywhere else.
Jane Pemberton, with soft brown hair that had little wavelets in it and felt like silk-no, nicer than silk-and with the cute go-to-hell tilt to her nose, with long graceful sun-tanned legs, with . . . damnit, with everything that it was possible for a girl to have, and more. And the miracle that she loved him was so fresh that he still felt a bit dazed.
Ten days in a daze, and then-
His eye fell on the dial of the clock, and he jumped. It was ten minutes after five, and he still sat there holding the first sock. Hurriedly, he finished dressing. Just in time! It was almost five-fifteen on the head as he slid into his corduroy jacket, grabbed his fishing tackle, and tiptoed down the stairs and outside into the cool dawn.
Pete's car wasn't there yet.
Well, that was all right. It'd give him a few minutes to rustle up some worms, and that would save time later on. Of course he couldn't really dig in Mrs. Grady's lawn, but there was a bare area of border around the flower bed along the front porch, and it wouldn't matter if he turned over a bit of the dirt there.
He took his jackknife out and knelt down beside the flower bed. Ran the blade a couple of inches in the ground and turned over a clod of it. Yes there were worms all right. There was a nice big juicy one that ought to be tempting to any fish.
Charlie reached out to pick it up.
And that was when it happened.
His fingertips came together, but there wasn't a worm between them, because something had happened to the worm. When he'd reached out for it, it had been a quite ordinary-looking angleworm. A three-inch juicy, slippery, wriggling angleworm. ,It most definitely had not had a pair of wings. Nor a-
It was quite impossible, of course, and he was dreaming or seeing things, but there it was.
Fluttering upward in a graceful slow spiral that seemed utterly effortless. Flying past Charlie's face with wings that were shimmery-white, and not at all like buttery-wings or bird wings, but like-
Up and up it circled, now above Charlie's head, now level with the roof of the house, then a mere white-somehow a shining white-speck against the gray sky. And after it was out of sight, Charlie's eyes still looked upward.
He didn't hear Pete Johnson's car pull in at the curb, but Pete's cheerful hail of "Hey!" caught his attention, and he saw that Pete was getting out of the car and coming up the walk.
Grinning. "Can we get some worms here, before we start?" Pete asked. Then: " 'Smatter? Think you see a German bomber? And don't you know never to look up with your mouth open like you were doing when I pulled up? Remember that pigeons- Say, is something the matter? You look white as a sheet."
Charlie discovered that his mouth was still open, and he closed it. Then he opened it to say something, but couldn’t think of anything to say-or rather, of any way to say it, and he closed his mouth again.
He looked back upward, but there wasn't anything in sight any more, and he looked down at the earth of the flower bed, and it looked like ordinary earth.
"Charlie!" Pete's voice sounded seriously concerned now. "Snap out of it! Are you all right?"
Again Charlie opened his mouth, and closed it. Then he said weakly, "Hello, Pete."
"For cat's sake, Charlie. Did you go to sleep out here and have a nightmare, or what? Get up off your knees and- Listen, are you sick? Shall I take you to Doc Palmer instead of us going fishing?"
Charlie got to his feet slowly, and shook himself. He said, "I . . . I guess I'm all right. Something funny h
appened. But- All right, come on. Let's go fishing."
"But what? Oh, all right, tell me about it later. But before we start, shall we dig some-Hey, don't look like that! Come on, get in the car; get some fresh air and maybe that'll make you feel better."
Pete took his arm, and Pete picked up the tackle box and led Charlie out to the waiting car. He opened the dashboard compartment and took out a bottle. "Here, take a snifter of this."
Charlie did, and as the amber fluid gurgled out of the bottle's neck and down Charlie's the felt his brain begin to rid itself of the numbness of shock. He could think again.
The whiskey burned on the way down, but it put a pleasant spot of warmth where it landed, and he felt better. Until it changed to warmth, he hadn't realized that there had been a cold spot in the pit of his stomach.
He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said, "Gosh."
"Take another," Pete said, his eyes on the road. "Maybe, too, it'll do you good to tell me what happened and get it out of your system. That is, if you want to."
"I . . . I guess so," said Charlie. "It . . . it doesn't sound like much to tell it, Pete. I just reached for a worm, and it flew away. On white, shining wings."
Pete looked puzzled. "You reached for a worm, and it flew away. Well, why not? I mean, I'm no entomologist, but maybe there are worms with wings. Come to think of it, there probably are. There are winged ants, and caterpillars turn into butterflies. 'What scared you about it?"
"Well, this worm didn't have wings until I reached for it. It looked like an ordinary angleworm. Dammit, it was an ordinary angleworm until I went to pick it up. And then it had a . . . a-Oh, skip it. I was probably seeing things."
"Come on, get it out of your system. Give."
"Dammit, Pete, it had a halo!"
The car swerved a bit, and Pete cased it back to the middle of the road before he said "A what?"
"Well," said Charlie defensively, "it looked like a halo. It was a little round golden circle just above its head. It didn't seem to be attached; it just floated there."
"How'd you know it was its head? Doesn't a worm look alike on both ends?"
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