Miss Powers started to laugh, a high-pitched, hysterical laugh.
“But suppose he is telling the truth, my dears. For God’s sake! Stop the act and get down to business. If he is Taine, let’s be sure of it. If it is Lucy, it just means that one more of the poor girls has gone off her head. Can’t one of you tell? Please find out in some way. If something is not done soon, I shall scream!” Several went to quiet her. One by one the Directors seemed to draw away from the San Francisco man, the physician whom they called in such a familiar fashion, “Lucy.” He seemed undisturbed, and yet, at the same time, he glanced in an uneasy manner from one side to another, and both of his hands were now in his tuxedo pockets.
Finally, the room became quiet. Dr. Hamilton looked at Lucy. “Where did you get that ring?” he asked.
“Oh! That was my ring one time in China. Do you remember that little Chinese girl whom you saved and thought so much of in the hospital? She gave you all a piece of expensive jewelry. She gave you a piece of jade, Dr. Hamilton, and she gave the doctor whom you call Lucy this ring. Lucy thought the little China girl rather nice. Well, to make a long story short, I was that little girl. I lived in the hospital with you for some months. The Government sent me over to find out what you girls were doing there. I had some ideas then and during all these years those ideas have been slowly working into definite form. I suspected some of the things you spoke of tonight, yet, at the same time, you went a lot further than I thought sensible people would go. I know a lot about women, but I cannot understand what’s the matter with you, unless you really are insane.”
Dr. Hamilton shook her head gravely.
“I guess he is right, girls. I remember that little Chinese girl, and she did give me the jade. He would not have known about that unless he had been there. I have heard about him, but I had no idea that he was so damn clever. But is he clever? To get the best of Lucy and come here dressed to impersonate her? Well, he says he is Taine, and I really do not think he has harmed Lucy, just locked her up somewhere. So, the best thing we can do with him is to kill him right away. He knows too much—we can handle this chorus girl, but this man… the only way to keep him quiet is to kill him. I hate to commit murder, but I have been working on this plan for years and I am not going to have it go to pieces just on account of a man.”
Miss Patricia Powers agreed with the Doctor.
“You are right, Hamilton,” she said. “He knows too much. If he is dead, we will put through our financial coup, and in a week it will not make any difference if they do find out he died here at the Club.”
Suddenly the San Francisco doctor, Lucy, who was really Taine, seemed to change. His face grew hard, and his hands, within his coat pockets, twitched.
“Now, you sit down, ladies, and listen to me talk. You are not going to kill me or anybody tonight. There are about five hundred policemen around this building. If I am not out safely by midnight, they are going to find out why. No one is going to leave. You women have played a great game, but it was a selfish, inhuman sort of a game, and you are going to lose out and it’s not your fault or my fault, but just one of those happenings that make me believe in predestination. You want to run this world, and have all the men die off and make it a female Paradise, and you forgot there was a God and that He made man just the same as He made woman. I admit that some men are rather bad sort of fools, but some of us are really rather good sorts. Take me, for example. My wife thinks I am wonderful—of course, all my children are girls, but, at the same time, she would have been tickled had the last one been a boy. You go and change your bodies, and try and make men out of yourselves, and all the rest of what you call your programme, and now you think that you are going to win out by killing me. If it were not for the Missus and the kids, I would not mind much if you did, but even if you were able to, what good would it do you?
“I think your Dr. Hamilton is a rather bright expert. I always shall be indebted to her for operating on Ming Fu. She had a wonderful plan and she has worked it our in a wonderful way, but she did not know the Chinese people, not the way I do. I have lived with them and slept with them and I know a little more about them than you would think, just by looking at me. During these last two weeks I have been having long talks with scientists from all over the East. Perhaps your detectives know who they were, though they could not tell what we talked about. But I wanted to learn all I could about the medicine Dr. Hamilton prepared in that hospital, and these men told me. I said so and so and they agreed with me that my idea might be right. What you have said tonight convinces me that I was right.”
“You went on with your plans, but you forgot God. He liked certain plans for the human race, and it was not part of His plan that women should live on, century after century, without men, as you were preparing them to do. So this is what happened. For thousands of years, over in China, they have had a deadly disease. They have had it so long that by this time practically the entire nation has it without knowing it or without having many signs of it. They have just become accustomed to it, so that it is a very mild disease… but, at the same time, it is all through their bodies. Once in a while a white man contracts that disease, and then he dies a rather unpleasant death in a few years. Most of them become insane before they die. Now, when you girls operated on those poor Chinks for so many pieces of gold, you were operating on men who had that disease. Every ampule of medicine you prepared from their glands had the germs of that disease in it. You took five thousand of your smartest women, the ones you were counting on to lead in this feminine revolt, and you injected this disease into their blood. You gave them what you called male characteristics, but you gave them something else. You infected every one of them with this disease. Dr. Hamilton flirted with this idea—she even went so far as to test each Chink with a Wasserman test, but she did not know that the disease was so mild in the yellow people that it does not show on a Wasserman. So she lost sight of the danger. Of course, she realizes it now. She is not a specialist in mental diseases, but she sees now that your comrades who are going insane have paresis. I suspected all this—I have talked about all this to the specialists—and tonight I find, by your own statements, that I am right. Ladies, the harvest you planted ten years ago is just beginning. Inside of another year every one of your brilliant five thousand financial leaders will be insane. Your movement will fail because there will be no brains left to carry the gospel of what you call feminine supremacy to the nation.
“One of the great men I talked to a few nights ago said that you had performed a feminine metamorphosis. He told me that meant changing a woman into a man. You did better than that. You took five thousand of our best women, girls who would have made loving wives and wonderful mothers if they had been well advised. You took the best that we have bred, and, through your desires to rule, you have changed them into five thousand insane women.
“There is no need of Johnson’s trying to fight you. There is no need of his ever knowing what happened. I am ashamed to tell him—ashamed to tell anyone, because you belong to the same sex that my mother and wife and daughters belong to. I did not really think women could be so peculiar. I really thought women like us men. My womenfolks are wild about me. You ought to see the neckties my wife selects for me, and the scarf-pin. I am not going to say a word about this to anyone. I will just tell Johnson that he need not worry—and my advice is to give those poor girls some of the new arsenic preparations that sometimes work so well in these mental cases. Now, I am going to take my chorus girl and leave, and please be sensible and do not try to stop us, because, if you do, there are going to be a lot of us get hurt, and you, poor fools, are hurt bad enough as it is, if you believe what I tell you, and I guess you do—you look as if you did. You need not worry about Lucy. I will send her back just as soon as I am safe.”
So, Taine and Flossie Ruffles walked out of the room and out of the Club, and out into the realities of little old New York.
That same night Taine called on Johnson.
�
�You owe me,” he said to that worthy, “twenty-seven thousand dollars expense money. That is in addition to the money you had to pay those college professors. Me, you don’t owe me anything except this expense money. I have your million and that is enough. The work is done. It was being done before I started. You need not worry about those people at the Bridge Club. In another year there won’t be one of them that will know the minimum requirements for the dealer to bid club. You can just take my word for it that they are through. But, at the same time, don’t gamble on the stock exchange for a week or two, because they may try to get you.”
Johnson looked at the little man in amazement.
“I suppose,” he said, “that you will give me a full report?”
“No,” replied Taine. “No use. You would not believe me if I did.”
The Dictator
Stanley G. Weinbaum
(Amazing Stories, October 1938)
(ed. Note: This story was originally titled The Revolution of 1960)
Chapter I
STEEL JEFFERS, PRESIDENT OF America, was not a large man. But no one thought of size, when confronted with his fiery eyes, his thin implacable lips, and his firm jaw.
At the moment, however, as he sat at his desk in the bay window of the Blue Room of the White House, he permitted himself to relax a little, and his face lost some of its grimness. No one else was present except his athletic military aide, Lieutenant Jack Adams, in the trim black uniform of the Federal Guards; and the hawk-faced, bearded Secretary of State, James Dougherty. Two soldiers were pacing up and down on the sunlit lawn outside.
President Jeffers passed a tired hand across his eyes, then looked up inquiringly at the scowling Dougherty. “Do you, really think, Mr. Secretary, that I should sign the death warrant of those two young men?” he asked, with a touch of sadness “They thought they were influenced by patriotism. Isn’t there some other way in which we can maintain our regime, without putting to death everyone who plots against us?”
Lieutenant Adams tensed. These men awaiting sentence had been closely associated with him—secretly, of course. Adams was an important cog in the conspiracy to rid the country of its undemocratic President. Was there nothing he could do to save his pals?
“Excellency,” he ventured eagerly, “would not a little mercy-?”
“Nonsense!” snapped Secretary Dougherty, his red lips leering through his black beard. “Mercy, bah! What mercy would this rabble show to us, if they ever got the upper hand. Excellency, we must be firm.”
The President sighed. “I suppose you are right; but, even so, I hate to do it.”
A white-coated, bullet-headed man, with thick-lensed glasses, appeared in the doorway of the Blue Room, and announced with a Teutonic accent, “Excellency, your medicine.”
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said President Jeffers, rising with what Adams could almost swear was a trapped expression, and stepping out into the hall.
Adams had witnessed the rubbing-out of a number of patriots in the two years during which he had served as personal aide to this autocratic President. And to think that he himself had been one of the large number of young enthusiasts who only four years ago had helped elect Steel Jeffers to the presidency, as a reaction to the autocracy of President Hanson!
The rise of Steel Jeffers had been spectacular. Elected Governor of Iowa in the same election at which John R. Hanson had been made President, Jeffers was among the first to protest against Hanson’s attempted increase in executive powers. Meanwhile his astute campaign manager, State Senator Dougherty, had been building political fences. In the election Of 1956, Jeffers defeated Hanson on this issue of executive usurpation, and had carried into office scores of yes-men—Senators, Congressmen, Governors, and minor officials—all carefully handpicked because of their subserviency.
Two years later, in the Congressional election of 1958, opposition candidates were intimidated or bought off, or else mysteriously disappeared. Vacancies in the judiciary, as they occurred, were filled with willing tools. The pay of the Army was raised, its size increased, and the ranks gradually padded with high-grade mercenaries. The F.B.I. Was disbanded; and the Intelligence Service of the Army expanded to an extent unknown because they now went about dressed as civilians.
Yet because of his espousal of popular causes and his ingratiating personality, Steel Jeffers had retained and increased his hold on the proletariat; he had carefully studied his predecessors, adopting their outstanding characteristics from the charming manner and pseudo-liberalism of Roosevelt to the inflexible and ruthless egotism of Hanson.
After the 1958 election placed him in undisputed control of all three branches of the government, and he had arrogantly established the Roman salute and put the Army into black uniforms, there came the first rumblings against his dictatorlike power. But a few ruthless blood-purges, followed by his persuasive voice on television attacking the character and loyalty of the deceased, quickly drove the opposition to cover.
Lieutenant Jack Adams, participating in some of these, purges, had helplessly witnessed independent newspaper editors and statesmen lined up before machine-guns in the soundproof basement of the State War and Navy Building. He could now vividly picture to himself the end of his two pals. Their death would be of the clear-eyed, defiant variety. Well, if they had the courage thus to die for American freedom, he could have the courage to keep a stiff upper lip and let them die. The success of the conspiracy depended on his continuing in the good graces of President Jeffers.
Just then Jeffers strode back into the room, once more seating himself at his desk. A strange Jekyll-Hyde sort of personality Jeffers! A few moments ago human, almost wavering, now fierce and ruthless. Briskly he scrawled his flowing signature across than foot of the death warrant. Then he turned his cold eyes toward his aide. “Here, Adams, take this paper over to the War Department.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the Lieutenant, raising his right hand in a Roman salute. His fine features were expressionless, but he could not conceal the deep pain in his gray eyes.
“I know how you feel, Adams,” said the President. “But you must be a good soldier—for the Cause.”
As Adams left, with the warrant clenched in his fist, he muttered to himself, “If Steel Jeffers only knew what a good soldier I’m being… for the Cause.”
Returning to his house on P Street that evening, Adams changed from his trim black uniform into a loose gray Norfolk suit and hastened down into the cellar. The brick wall at one side was interlaced with many crisscross cracks. One irregular seam now swung open like a door. Adams felt a gust of cool musty air. A light shone dimly in the distance through the dark hole. Presently there crawled out a stocky dark young man with a serious face. Adams shook his hand.
“Well, Godfrey, no one yet seems to have discovered that we know each other, even though we do live in adjoining houses. Have the rest of the crowd arrived?”
“Here’s Liam and Sim.” Two men, one tall and dark, the other short and roly-poly, crawled out through the hole.
“Had a devil of a time getting here!” the former announced. “Black-coated soldiers everywhere, damn them! No offense to you, Adams.”
The short fat fellow chuckled. “Never mind the black-coats, Liam,” he said. “It’s the Secret Service we ought to worry about.”
Several more men emerged from the hole in the wall.
Adams solemnly shook hands with everyone. “Tom and Bill are dead,” be gravely announced. “Shot against a wall. I myself carried their death-warrant over. Jeffers would have let them off with mere imprisonment, if it hadn’t been for that fiendish Secretary of State of his.”
“Don’t make excuses for Jeffers!” snapped Liam Lincoln, his dark eyes glittering with fanatic light. He brushed back a trailing lock of black hair. “Jeffers is a heartless usurper, though doubtless his experience in college theatricals when he was at Princeton enables him to put on an act. Sometimes, Adams, I begin to wonder if you—”
“Well, you needn�
��t,” the Lieutenant interrupted. “I risk my life daily for the Cause, while you boss things in comparative safety.”
“For cripes sake!” cut in roly-poly Simeon Baldwin. “If we can’t trust each other, fellows, who can we trust?”
“You’re right, Sim. I’m sorry, Jack,” Lincoln graciously apologized. “Well, to business. Very gratifying secret reports are coming in from all over the country. Our organization is growing by leaps and bounds. The Governors of nearly half the states are either active members, or at least in sympathy. Patriotic leading citizens everywhere are waiting for the word from our little Washington group that the time has come for action. Meanwhile Sim here has completed his study of Jeffers’ early life.”
“I’ll skip what you already know,” said Baldwin. “What I’ve lately been working on is his sister.”
“You mean the one who died on the day of Jeffers’ election?” Adams asked.
“Did she? I wonder,” Baldwin replied enigmatically.
“Did she what?”
“Did she really die? That’s the angle I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. If she did die, old Svengali Dougherty killed her, and Steel Jeffers wouldn’t have stood for that. So I believe she is hidden away somewhere to prevent her from influencing her brother.”
“But why should Dougherty fear her influence?” asked one of the others. “The three of them were hand-in-glove.”
Liam Lincoln laughed harshly, and tossed back his long locks of black hair. “That was back in the days when even we were following Jeffers toward ‘the better economic day’ for America.”
“You’re right, Liam,” Adams chimed in. “The change in the President seems to date from the death—or disappearance—of his sister. You’re on the track of something, Sim. Go on.”
Gynomorphs Page 7
