The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  Bell smoked comfortably. And suddenly hangings parted, and Ribiera came into the room. He smiled nervously, and then, as Bell blew a puff of smoke at him and nodded casually, he scowled.

  “I came,” said Bell deliberately, “to make a bargain. Frankly, I do not like to break my word. I was under obligations to deliver a package from Senhor Canalejas to a certain messenger who will take it to my government. I have done it. But I am not, Senhor Ribiera, a member of the Secret Service. I am entirely a free agent now, and I am prepared to consider your proposals, which I could not in honor do before.”

  He smiled pleasantly. Effrontery, properly managed, is one of the most valuable of all qualities. Especially in dealing with people who themselves are arrogant when they dare.

  Ribiera purpled with rage, and then controlled it.

  “Ah!” he rumbled. “You are prepared to consider my proposals. There are no proposals. The Master may be amused at your cleverness in escaping. I do not know. I do know that I am ordered to make you my slave and send you to The Master. That, I shall do.”

  “Perhaps,” said Bell blandly: “but I can go without food and drink for several days, which will delay the process. And while I cannot honorably tell you how to stop the man bearing Senhor Canalejas’ package to my government, still… If I willingly accepted a dose of yagué in token of my loyalty to The Master.…”

  Ribiera’s good humor returned. He chuckled.

  “You actually mean,” he said jovially, “that you think you were given some of The Master’s little compound, and that you wish to make terms before your hands begin to writhe at the ends of your wrists. Is not that your reason?”

  Bell’s eyes flickered. He had been horribly afraid of just that. But Ribiera’s amusement was reassuring.

  “Perhaps,” said Bell. “Perhaps I am.”

  Ribiera sat down and stretched his fat legs in front of him. He surveyed Bell with an obscene, horrible amusement.

  “Ah, Senhor,” he chuckled, “some day we will laugh together over this! You yet hope, and do not yet know how much better it will be for you if you cease to hope, and cultivate desires! The Master is pleased with you. You have just those qualities he knows are necessary in dealing with your nation. He is not angry with you. It is his intention to use you to extend his—ah—influence among the officials of your nation. You know, of course, that in but a little more time I will hold all Brazil—as I now hold this city—in the hollow of my hand. Four of the republics of this continent are already completely under the control of The Master’s deputies, and of the rest, Brazil is not the most nearly subdued. A year or two, and The Master will become Emperor, and his deputies viceroys. And it is his whim to give you the opportunity of becoming the first deputy and the first viceroy of North America. And you come to me and offer—you, Senhor!—to make terms! I believe even The Master will laugh when he hears of it.”

  “But,” said Bell practically, “do you accept my terms?”

  Ribiera chuckled again.

  “What are they, Senhor?”

  “That you release the daughter of the Senhor Canalejas and pledge your word of honor that she will not be enslaved.”

  * * * *

  Ribiera’s word of honor, of course, would be worth rather less than the breath that was used to give it. But his reception of the proposal would be informative.

  He chuckled again.

  “No, Senhor. I do not accept. But I will promise you as a favor, because my uncle The Master admires you, that within a few weeks you shall enjoy her charms. I do not,” he added with amused candor, “find that any one woman diverts me for a very long time.”

  “Oh,” said Bell, very quietly.

  He sat still for an instant, and then shrugged, and looked about as if for an ash tray in which to knock the ashes from his cigarette. He stood up, carrying the tube of tobacco gingerly, and moved toward one by Ribiera’s elbow. He knocked off the ash, and crushed out the tiny coal. He fumbled in his pockets.

  The next instant Ribiera choked with terror.

  “Let me explain,” said Bell softly. “I did not give your major-domo my word that I was unarmed. I merely gave him a weapon. I got these from two policemen who tried to arrest me an hour or so ago. And I also remind you, Senhor, that if the armed men you have posted to prevent my escape try to shoot me, that the inevitable contraction of my muscles will send two bullets into your heart—even if I am dead. I am a dead man, Senhor, if you give the word, but so are you if you give it.”

  Ribiera gasped. His eyes rolled in his head.

  “Send for her,” said Bell very gently. “Send for her, Senhor. I estimate that she has been in this house for less than half an hour. Have her brought here at once, and if she has been harmed the three of us will perish very promptly, and half of Rio will go mad after our death.”

  And the muzzles of two revolvers bored into the fat flesh of Ribiera’s body, and a gasp that was almost a wail of terror came from the watchers—armed watchers—who dared not kill the man they had been posted to guard Ribiera against.

  Ribiera lifted his hand and croaked an order.

  CHAPTER VI

  In this room the electric lights were necessary at all times. And it occurred to Bell irrelevantly that perhaps there were no windows because there might be sometimes rather noisy scenes within these walls. And windows will convey the sound of screaming to the outside air, while solid walls will not.

  He stood alert and grim, with his revolvers pressing into Ribiera’s flabby flesh. His fingers were tensed upon the triggers. If he killed Ribiera, he would be killed. Of course. And men and women he had known and liked might be doomed to the most horrible of fates by Ribiera’s death. Yet even the death or madness of many men was preferable to the success of the conspiracy in which Ribiera seemed to figure largely.

  Ribiera looked up at him with the eyes of a terrified snake. There was a little stirring at the door.

  “Your friends,” said Bell softly, “had better not come close.”

  Ribiera gasped an order. The stirrings stopped. Paula came slowly into the room quite alone. She smiled queerly at Bell.

  “I believed that you would come,” she said quietly. “And yet I do not know that we can escape.”

  “We’re going to try,” said Bell grimly. To Ribiera he added curtly, “You’d better order the path cleared to the door, and have one of your cars brought around.”

  Ribiera croaked a repetition of the command.

  “Now stand up—slowly,” said Bell evenly. “Very slowly. I don’t want to die, Ribiera, so I don’t want to kill you. But I haven’t much hope of escape, so I shan’t hesitate very long about doing it. And I’ve got these guns’ hammers trembling at full cock. If I get a bullet through my head, they’ll go off just the same and kill you.”

  Ribiera got up. Slowly. His face was a pasty gray.

  “Your major-domo,” Bell told him matter-of-factly, “will go before us and open every door on both sides of the way to the street. Paula”—he used her given name without thought, or without realizing it—“Paula will go and look into each door. If she as much as looks frightened, I fire, and try to fight the rest of the way clear. Understand? I’m going to get down to a boat I have ready in the harbor if I have to kill you and every living soul in the house!”

  There was no boat in the harbor, naturally. But the major-domo moved hesitantly across the room, looking at his master for orders. For Ribiera to die meant death or madness to his slaves. The major-domo’s face was ghastly with fear. He moved onward, and Bell heard the sound of doors being thrust wide. Once he gave a command in the staccato fashion of a terrified man. Bell nodded grimly.

  “Now we’ll move. Slowly, Ribiera! Always slowly.… Ah! That’s better! Paula, you go on before and look into each room. I shall be sorry if any of your servants follow after you, Ribiera.… Through the doorway. Yes! All clear, Paula? I’m balancing the hammers very carefully, Ribiera. Very delicate work. It is fortunate for you that my nerves are
rather steady. But really, I don’t much care.… Still all clear before us, Paula? With the servants nerve-racked as they are, I believe we’ll make it through, even if I do kill Ribiera. There’ll be no particular point in killing us then. It won’t help them. Don’t stumble, please, Ribiera.… Go carefully, and very slowly.…”

  Ribiera’s face was a gray mask of terror when they reached the door. A long, low car with two men on the chauffeur’s seat was waiting.

  “Only one man up front, Ribiera,” said Bell dryly. “No ostentation, please. Now, I hope your servants haven’t summoned the police, because they might want to stop me from marching you out there with a gun in the small of your back. And that would be deplorable, Ribiera. Quite deplorable.”

  With a glance, he ordered Paula into the tonneau. He followed her, driving Ribiera before him. There seemed to be none about but the stricken, terrified servant who had opened the door for their exit.

  “My friend,” Bell told the major-domo grimly, “I’ll give you a bit of comfort. I’m not going to try to take the Senhor Ribiera away with me. Once I’m on board the yacht that waits for me, I’ll release him so he can keep you poor devils sane until my Government has found a way to beat this devilish poison of his. Then I’ll come back and kill him. Now you can tell the chauffeur to drive us to the Biera Mar.”

  He settled back in his seat. There were beads of perspiration on his forehead, but he could not wipe them off. He held the two revolvers against Ribiera’s flabby body.

  The car turned the corner, and he added dryly:

  “Your servants, Ribiera, will warn your more prominent slaves of my intention of going on board a yacht. Preparations will be made to stop every pleasure boat and search it for me. So…tell your chauffeur to swing about and make for the flying field. And tell him to drive carefully, by the way. I’ve still got these guns on a very fine adjustment of the trigger-pressure.”

  Ribiera croaked the order. Bell was exactly savage enough to kill him if he did not escape.

  For twenty minutes the car sped through the residential districts of Rio. The sun was high in the air, but clouds were banking up above the Pao d’Assucar—the Sugarloaf—and it looked as if there might be one of the sudden summer thunderstorms that sometimes sweep Rio.

  Then the clear road to the flying field. Rio has the largest metropolitan district in the world, but a great deal of it is piled on end, and Rio itself built on most of the rest. The flying field is necessarily some miles from even the residential districts, for the sake of a level plain of sufficient area.

  The car shot ahead through practically untouched jungle, interspersed with tiny clearings in which were patchwork houses that might have been a thousand miles in the interior instead of so near the center of all civilization in Brazil. Up smooth gradients. Around beautifully engineered curves.

  Bell put aside one revolver long enough to search Ribiera carefully. He found a pearl-handled automatic, and handed it to Paula.

  “Worth having,” he said cheerfully. “I wonder if you’d mind searching the chauffeur: with that gun at his head I think he’d be peaceful. You needn’t have him stop.”

  Paula stood up, smiling a little.

  “I did not think I lacked courage, Senhor,” she observed, “but you have taught me more.”

  “Nil desperandum,” said Bell lightly. He relaxed deliberately. Matters would be tense at the flying field, and he would need to be wholly calm. There was little danger of an attempt at rescue here, and the necessity of being ready to shoot Ribiera at any instant was no longer a matter of split seconds.

  He watched, while, bent over the back of the front seat, she extracted two squat weapons from the chauffeur’s pockets.

  “Quite an arsenal,” said Bell as he pocketed them. He turned pleasantly to Ribiera. “Now, Ribiera, you understand just what I want. That big amphibian plane of yours is fairly fast, and once when I was merely your guest you assured me that it was always kept fueled and even provisioned for a long flight. When we reach the flying field I want it rolled out and warmed up, over at the other end of the field from the flying line. We’ll go over to it in the car.

  “And I’ve thought of something. It worried me, before, because sometimes if a man’s shot he merely relaxes all over. So while we’re at the flying field I’m going to be holding back the triggers of these guns with my thumbs. I don’t have to pull the trigger at all—just let go and they’ll go off. It isn’t so fine an adjustment as I had just now, but it’s safer for you as long as you behave. And you might urge your chauffeur to be cautious. I do hope, Ribiera, that you won’t look as if you were frightened. If there’s any hitch, and delay for letting some fuel out of the tanks or messing up the motors, I’ll be very sorry for you.”

  The car swooped out into bright sunshine. The flying field lay below, already in the shadow of the banking clouds above. Hangars lay stretched out across the level space.

  Through the gates. Ribiera licked his lips. Bell jammed the revolver muzzles closer against his sides. The chauffeur halted the car. Paula spoke softly to him. He stiffened. Bell found it possible to smile faintly.

  Ribiera gave orders. There was a moment’s pause—the revolver muzzles went deeper into his side—and he snarled a repetition. The official cringed and moved swiftly.

  “You have chosen your slaves well, Ribiera,” said Bell coolly. “They seem to occupy all strategic positions. We’ll ride across.”

  The gears clashed. The car swerved forward and went deliberately across the wide clear space that was the flying field. It halted near the farther side. In minutes the door of a hangar swung wide. There was the sputtering of a not-yet-warmed-up motor. The big plane came slowly out, its motors coughing now and then. It swung clumsily across the field, turned in a wide circle, and stopped some forty or fifty feet from the car.

  “Send the mechanic back, on foot,” said Bell softly.

  Again Ribiera found it expedient to snarl. And Bell added, gently, while the throttled-down motors of the big amphibian boomed on:

  “Now get out of the car.”

  Tiny figures began to gaze curiously at them from the row of hangars. The mechanic, starting back on foot, the four people getting out of the car, the big plane waiting.…

  * * * *

  With his revolver ready and aimed at Ribiera’s bulk, Bell reached in the front of the car and turned off the switch. The motor died abruptly. He put the key in his pocket.

  “Just to get a minute or two extra start,” he said dryly. “Climb up in the plane, Paula.”

  She obeyed, and turned at the top.

  “I will cover them until you are up,” she said quietly.

  Bell laughed, now. A genuine laugh, for the first time in many days.

  “We do work together!” he said cheerfully.

  But he backed up the ladder. There was a stirring over by the hangars. The mechanic who had taxied the plane to this spot was a dwindling speck, no more than a third of the way across the field. But even from the distant hangars it could be seen that something was wrong.

  “Close the door, Paula,” said Bell. He had seated himself at the controls, and scanned the instruments closely.

  This machine was heavy and large and massive. The boat-body between the retractable wheels added weight to the structure, and when Bell gave it the gun it seemed to pick up speed with an irritating slowness, and to roll and lurch very heavily when it did begin to approach flying speed. The run was long before the tail came up. It was longer before the joltings lessened and the plane began to rise slowly, with the solid steadiness that only a large and heavily loaded plane can compass.

  Up, and up.… Bell was three hundred feet high when he crossed the hangars and saw tiny faces staring up at him. Some of the small figures were pointing across the field. The big plane circled widely, gaining altitude, and Bell gazed down. Ribiera was gesticulating wildly, pointing upward to the soaring thing, shaking his fist at it, and making imperious, frantic motions of command.

/>   Bell took one quick glance all about the horizon. Toward the sea the sun shone down brilliantly upon the city. Inland a broad white wall of advancing rain moved toward the coastline. And Bell smiled frostily, and flung the big ship into a dive and swooped down upon Ribiera as a hawk might swoop at a chicken.

  Ribiera saw the monster thing bearing down savagely, its motors bellowing, its nose pointed directly at him. And there is absolutely nothing more terrifying upon the earth than to see a plane diving upon you with deadly intent. A panic that throws back to non-human ancestors seizes upon a man. He feels the paralysis of those ancient anthropoids who were preyed upon by dying races of winged monsters in the past. That racial, atavistic terror seizes upon him.

  Bell laughed, though it sounded more like a bark, as Ribiera flung himself to the ground and screamed hoarsely when the plane seemed about to pounce upon him. The shrill timbre of the shriek cut through the roaring of the motors, even through the thick padding of the big plane’s cabin walls that reduced that roaring to a not intolerable growl.

  But the plane passed ten feet or more above his head. It rose, and climbed steeply, and passed again above the now buzzing, agitated hangars, and climbed above the hills behind the flying field as some men went running and others moved by swifter means toward the shaken, nerve-racked Ribiera, on whose lips were flecks of foam.

  Bell looked far below and far behind him. The incredible greenness of tropic verdure, of the jungle which rings Rio all about. The many glitterings of sunlight upon glass, and upon the polished domes of sundry public buildings, and the multitudinous shimmerings of the tropic sun upon the bay. The deep dark shadow of the banking clouds drew a sharp line across the earth, and deep in that shadow lay the flying field, growing small and distant as the plane flew on. But specks raced across the wide expanse. In a peculiar, irrational fashion those specks darted toward a nearly invisible speck, and encountered other specks darting away from that nearly invisible speck, and gradually all the specks were turned about and racing for the angular, toy-block squares which were the hangars of the aeroplanes of the city of Rio de Janeiro.