The Spider-Robot Titans of Gotham

by Norvell Page

  Manning swore, then answered, "Some of these docs are damfools when they get away from medicine. Fellow named Borden—a big doctor, they say—is boss in there. He's been talking high, wide and handsome, about what the department ought to do to you for the Mid-City Hospital fire."

  Jeffrey gasped, and Manning continued, "Of course, there's nothing for you to worry about. We'll settle that headache before it gets to you."

  Jeffrey's lowered eyelids almost concealed the hard thoughtfulness of his gaze. Borden! Borden, whom the monsters in his own basement had accused of almost unbelievable malpractice . . . Borden, whom he himself had elevated to a position of trust and importance in that ruined hospital . . . Borden, head of this mysterious Committee . . . the streets were violet with filtered light, but the lights in Jeffrey's brain were red.

  He thanked Manning, and pushed back toward the entrance. If he could make Tom Wiley, the Commissioner, understand what was going on . . . the Mid-City Hospital had been Jeffrey's, and at the core of Borden's guilty soul, there must be a desperate, snakelike urge to accuse before he was accused himself.

  Borden couldn't be dismissed as a medical man gone haywire out of his own sphere.

  There was a man behind Borden—maybe a devil, the monsters had told Jeff. And that could only be the Octopus himself! Everything Borden said or did would be calculated to dupe organized medicine and organized justice until it was too late to retrench, until New York was delivered over to the enemy. . . .

  But it wasn't yet too late. It couldn't be. There'd been no report to the public of an official investigation, and Jeff could reach Tom Wiley before one was made. . . .

  But what if Tom Wiley never came out of that building? No—the man he had to reach was Borden! And the report that must be made was the revelation promised by the Skull Killer!

  Jeffrey found himself in the great entrance hall of the Victory Building. He had seen other skyscrapers when they were new, he had seen the Queen Mary when that giant floating palace had first docked in New York; he was accustomed to the city's newest and finest hotels. But he had never—not in all his life—seen an interior like that great hall.

  It was lofty, nearly five stories high, with starkly subdued indirect lighting that gave the impression of unfathomable violet depths and heights. Each wall panel held its mural—and so cleverly had the murals been designed, that the figures represented there also gave that topless, boundless impression. Jeffrey realized that the representations were simple, most of them merely huge, realistic, portraits or impressions, of contemporary scenes from the city. Yet somehow, they seemed to be the work of an artist with torture in his eyes. . . .

  Then it came to him. They were exactly like the thing the city was fast turning into! An eerie and uncertain place, with limitless possibilities of stark tragedy, of malformed beings with crippled, tortured souls!

  Jeffrey shuddered, and made for an elevator. The crowd that had been so dense in the street outside had ample room in the hall. . . . Here, even those incredibly warped figures seemed dwarfed to inconspicuousness by the chamber's shadowed proportions.

  "I want to see Dr. Borden," Jeffrey told the uniformed elevator man, whose hard eyes measured him.

  A denial seemed to hover on the other's lips.

  Jeffrey said, "I'm Mr. Fairchild—Jeffrey Fairchild."

  If Manning's warning hadn't been unfounded, and if the things he himself suspected of Borden were true, that name should have an effect on a henchman of Borden's—and it did. The hard look in the elevator man's eyes was replaced by a queer purposefulness. "Fortyfifth floor, sir," he muttered.

  Jeffrey entered the car. He noticed that he was the only occupant of the elevator, which made no stops between the first floor and the forty-fifth.

  In the gleamingly sterile corridor of the forty-fifth floor, a woman in white sat at a desk. The place looked exactly like a hospital, Jeffrey thought. This must be the headquarters of the Citizens' Emergency Medical Committee. But a queer sort of hospital, for no sound echoed through the long corridors, there were no red-cheeked young girls in blue-and-white uniforms wheeling trays and smiling at internes. About it all was that ominous sterility which seemed to

  extend farther than germ life.

  "I'd like to see Dr. Borden," Jeffrey told the woman at the desk.

  Mechanically, she inquired, "Who's calling, please?"

  "Jeffrey Fairchild."

  The woman's eyes stared up at him. "Straight down that corridor, then turn to your left."

  Uneasily, Jeffrey strode down the long hallway. No lamps were visible, but the windowless hall was bright as the sky at early dusk. . . .

  After narrow yards of walking, he came to a cross-hall, and took a left turn. He had met no one, heard no one. It was almost too easy, this entrance of his, and he sensed some abrupt reception that must have been waiting in these silent offices for him.

  The left hall ended after twenty yards it a sort of booth where a young man in white sat cleaning surgical instruments. Jeffrey asked him, "Can you tell me where to find Dr. Borden?"

  A small dagger-like scalpel slipped from the young man's hands, but he did not look up. In a strangely monotone voice, he countered, "Who did you say you were?"

  Jeffrey again gave his name—and the young man looked at him through eyes as opaquely sharp and radiant as the steel of his surgical blades. "Straight ahead," he directed, pointing down a turn in the corridor. "Fifth door on your right. Just walk in."

  The young man did not look up again as Jeffrey passed. . . .

  He opened the fifth door on his right, looked about before he entered. The room seemed empty, but there was a curtain stretched across its width, and he guessed Borden might be behind that curtain.

  Jeff left the door ajar and stepped softly inside. . . .

  Then behind him the heavy door clicked quietly.

  He wheeled about, pulled at the inside handle. The door was locked. Jeffrey cursed aloud, and darted behind the curtains.

  There was nothing. Not a chair, not a stick or a straw to indicate that the windowless square chamber had ever been entered before. The walls were white, and gave somehow the impression of porous-ness, like the sound-proofed walls of a broadcasting studio. Jeffrey had been locked inside a white square box, with ten cubic feet of air and a curtain.

  He tried shouting, and the sound of his own voice hit back at his eardrums with hammer-force in that sealed chamber. From a distance of a few feet he fired his revolver at the invisible door-lock, and the detonation nearly deafened him, while his bullet caromed harmlessly from a steel plate beneath that porous white substance.

  He felt at those walls with his hands, searching a weak spot, and suddenly felt the walls warm under his touch. That warmth was increasing. . . .

  Jeffrey stepped back, and then, from under the white porous wall-covering there shone a violet radiance, a strange pulsing light that seared his eye-balls and radiated heat that seemed to penetrate with rhythmic sequence beneath his skin, into the very marrow of his bones!

  Now the walls seemed alive with that shimmering fluid glow, the light and the heat were somehow rendered indirect by that asbestos-like substance that coated the walls, so that his skin did not break, but he felt the veins in his body swelling with excruciating pain, as though his blood were reaching a boiling point. Then, as he fought for breath to find release through his vocal chords, that seething irradiance died, and the walls once more became dull and white.

  The insufferable heat was seeping out of his veins, his heart, which had momentarily seemed to cease beating except in harmony with that pulsing glow, slowly came back to normal. Jeffrey found himself crouching unnaturally in the middle of the room, as though his flesh had shrunk, causing contraction in all his muscles, dried and seared by the heat.

  Slowly, with infinite effort, he was able to knead his limbs to normal semblance, then he stood silently—and waited.

  For he knew now that the "treatment" would be repeated. It would be repeated
over and over, until he—Jeffrey Fairchild—had become a monster, a dried and rotting corpse, requiring for its abnormal functions the indigo glare of the ultraviolet light—needing for sustenance the warm blood of his fellows.

  The cause and the cure were the same—ultra-violet radiance differently directed first caused these malformations, and later enabled the monsters to survive. Penetrating into the very marrow of the bony structure where blood corpuscles were manufactured, its heat brought about an aberration of functions, broke down the stages of evolution, reduced blood to its simplest elementals, and at the same time effected the necessary changes in the living cells to enable them to survive, provided they were subjected to that very radiance which had first caused their distortion.

  Far back, in the very first stages of evolution, when the simplest forms of life had crawled out of the primordial swamps, the ultraviolet contained in sunlight must have caused parallel changes in the structure of living things—distorted them, changed them into what their fellows must have felt were monsters, until sunlight had become a necessity, without which their life could not continue.

  It was a matter, in some respects, of resistance, which culminated in the building of a new type of life. The process would not be too rapid, Jeffrey knew, as he experienced his breathing spell. These things having become clear to him, certain elements of the fiendish activities of his enemy were more understandable, also.

  The Mid-City Hospital fire, and the purple glow which had seemed to bathe the walls of certain parts of the building, had emanated from walls built as the walls of his chamber were built, from rooms in which transformations such as he was about to undergo had been effected on other unfortunate humans. . . .

  Borden was behind it, and Borden had been ready to resume operations elsewhere! The Mid-City Hospital had been destroyed so as to obliterate all evidence of those indigo walls. . . .

  Borden, then, Jeff figured, had found another backer for his nefarious activities than the philanthropic patron of the Mid-City Hospital, and that backer was the builder and owner of the Victory Building. He must be the Octopus himself!

  But the other hospitals—the other sick-wards whence also human malformations had emanated—what about them? Would they too be destroyed tonight so that there would be no evidence, so that the enemy would remain triumphantly unsuspected, entrenched in the very heart of Manhattan in the guise of a philanthropic organization which stamped out its own corruption and bled society in the process?

  The walls were cool again, and Jeffrey moved painfully about the room. Like a trapped animal he sought desperately for an opening in his trap, a means of escape from this locked, white-walled hell. . . .

  Chapter Nine

  Jeff Plays A Lone Hand

  IT SEEMED A LONG WHILE before he could actually bring his mind to bear on any practical plan of escape. The torture he had undergone seemed almost to have induced amnesia in his brain. Then he went berserk, and, brutishly, desperately, insanely clawed at the walls of his prison, while something he had meant to remember teased agonizingly at the back of his mind.

  Too many other things intruded. There was the futility of his own plight, the ominous threat to all decency, all peace in this greatest of all cities—all these things seemed to batter like a million fists at his consciousness and prevented his concentration. He knew he was wasting precious seconds, and was unable to do anything about it.

  There was something he had anticipated, and desperately he tried to think of what it had been. It hadn't been capture—at least, not this kind of capture—but something else. Almost mechanically his hands explored his person. There should be something, he felt, some precaution he had taken. . . . And then he found it.

  It was a long flat tube of make-up grease. There, in his hands— Jeffrey's mouth quirked a little crazily at the thought—he held nearly all of the identity of Dr. Skull. And Dr. Skull was completely unrecognizable, compressed, as it were, in this little tube!

  Feverishly, Jeffrey's hands tore into his clothing, ripping open the inner seams. Concealed in the shoulder padding of his coat, in the upper seams of his trousers, were other tubes of make-up, but these were the things he always carried . . . yet there was something else, something important. . . .

  As he threw his coat aside, with a puzzled gesture, the thing he sought rolled out of the inside breast pocket—a long, narrow flask. . . .

  His brain suddenly clear, Jeffrey looked hastily at his watch. It had stopped, the glass had smashed at some point in his struggles. He tried to compute, from his knowledge of ultra-violet rays, how long it would be before they would judge he could stand another dose, but all concept of time had fled him and he set to work.

  He undressed completely, and tore his inner garments to shreds. Then he wound puttee-like over as much of his anatomy as they would cover. Bits of handkerchief he trussed into his mouth, inside the cheeks. Then he attacked the curtain which had been hung in the middle of the room, presumably to lure him in, and with thread-thin strips of this managed to cover the rest of his torso.

  Then he went to work, covering himself with the substance of the various make-up tubes. The stuff sufficed barely to give him a coating of tenuous grease, like a transparent, oily outer skin, through which his bandages showed. Over his face spread the pale-yellow color of age—and then Jeffrey Fairchild paused.

  His fingers held the long black flask while his ears sought desperately to detect some sound beyond the room. But there was only silence.

  He took a deep breath, and uncorked the flask. From it he shook some of that thick, tarry substance with which he had experimented in the plane—a zinc composition. Carefully, he began to smear himself with that, then put on his coat and trousers.

  The stuff congealed into a flexible, airtight covering over his body. He wouldn't last long with that, even with the loose padding of porous strips of cloth next to his skin, for it would close his sweat pores. Somberly he hoped it would do what he meant that it should—protect him at least to some extent, from those penetrating rays. . . .

  He had barely time to slip on trousers and jacket, when it came again. The room began to grow warm. Jeffrey threw himself flat on the floor, and cradled his unprotected face in the shelter of his arms. He could feel the heat sweeping over him, feel his body struggling futilely to exude moisture, and almost a wave of insanity crossed his brain at this violence to his body processes.

  It was worse than the first time, and as the heat abated Jeffrey lay limp, unable to move. But there wasn't that dry contraction in his muscles that the first treatment had given him. . . . And then the door opened.

  Jeffrey Fairchild could hear it, though he didn't dare to look. Somebody was coming for him, as he had expected they would. If they didn't intend to kill him, they had to come in, as soon as they thought him powerless, to prepare him for future treatments.

  As the footsteps neared him, Jeffrey felt the enervating limpness disappear from his muscles at the approach of danger. When the newcomer came to a stop beside him, he rolled, groaning, on his back. Then, almost in the same movement, his hands shot out to grasp the ankles which came to his view, and he heaved with all his strength.

  There was a startled exclamation from the other man, as Jeffrey swarmed over him, but the yell was cut short by Jeffrey's hands closing the other's windpipe. The man sputtered, tried to smash something he held in his hand into Jeffrey's face, but Jeffrey dodged the blow, and his own fist sent the object spinning from the other's fingers.

  Then the cold rage in him settled him grimly to his task. His adversary's eyes grew wide and popping, then assumed that familiar purple glow. Convulsively the other rose half-way in a last desperate gesture, as though the evil spirit symbolized by that unearthly gleam in his eyes were giving him strength to the last, and then the man fell back limply.

  Jeffrey rose to his knees. Caution against disclosing his identity precluded his marking the corpse with the mark of the skull— besides, the Skull Killer was stalking bigger
game! But where was his deadly quarry?

  Jeffrey, as he staggered to his feet and out of the room, into the lofty, medically clean corridors of the Victory Building, did not know.

  * * *

  He wondered a little at the emptiness of this part of the building. Peering cautiously up and down the gleaming hall, he could see no living soul, but slightly to the left and across the hall he saw a door marked WASHROOM.

  Lurching towards it, he made it, still unseen, and once inside, again stripped himself. Carefully, he peeled off as much of the zinc coating as he could, and then dressed once more, again emerged into the empty corridors.

  From the death-like silence of this part of the building, he drew one important conclusion. It must be near that section of the Victory building which was purposely kept secluded. He wondered if even the police, in conducting their baffled and openly invited investigation, had penetrated here. . . .