Twenty minutes passed; a half-hour; three-quarters—and nothing happened. The menacing silence of the night was unbroken by any sound that he could not place. His nerves were on edge. The blood in his veins tingled.
Ahead of him now was the Garwick mansion, a huge yellow brick house of French colonial style, surrounded by wide lawns. Victor Garwick was one of Branford’s leading citizens.
As “X” approached the house, following the secret hunch that had brought him to Branford, there came the sudden sound of a high-pitched human cry.
It was somewhere at the other side of the big house, and it electrified the Agent into swift action. He heard the crashing, rending noise of breaking glass—then that terrible cry again. When he bounded around the building on the velvet-smooth lawn among flower beds and ornamental shrubs, he saw a leaping shadow in the blackness ahead. It was no more than a flashing blur of darkness, blotting out for an instant the glint of the river water.
He gave pursuit, grasping the small gas pistol that was one of his weapons. But the shadow had disappeared. He did not waste time searching. If what he feared had happened, it was more important to get into the house.
LIGHTS were blazing in rear windows now. He heard excited voices, some one moaning hysterically. He ran around to the front door, knocked loudly. When a frightened servant opened it, he heard some one talking excitedly on the telephone.
The servant seemed dazed. He stared at Agent “X” with dark, unseeing eyes. His face was dough-colored.
“I was passing,” said “X.” “I heard a scream. What’s happened? I am Doctor Smith.”
The servant stood humbly, did not answer; but a terrified looking woman came running toward him.
“You are a doctor, you say? Come at once! Something horrible has happened! One of those apes—”
She did not finish. Her voice broke in a frightened sob. Agent “X” strode after her. A big man stood in the room they entered, staring helplessly at a young man who was leaning against a chair, holding his arm. The young man’s face was ashen. He looked at Agent “X” with fear-glazed eyes. The woman seized the big man’s arm.
“A doctor, Victor! Perhaps he can do something. Perhaps it isn’t—too late!”
Victor Garwick spoke quickly to “X,” neglecting even to introduce himself.
“My son was attacked just now! A gorilla broke into the house. If you are a doctor, for God’s sake do something before—”
“My medicine case,” said Agent “X.” “I left it behind me in the car.”
A groan came from Garwick’s lips. The woman spoke tremblingly.
“Doctor Allen will come anyway, Victor—”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said “X.”
The younger man, Victor Garwick’s son apparently, seemed too paralyzed for speech. His father babbled on:
“The ape raised the window. Dave found him here. We scared the beast off—but not before he had bitten Dave!”
“Let me see your arm,” said Agent “X.” His tone was professional. He had studied medicine along with many other sciences. He could do as much as any physician in Branford to check the inroad of encephalitis.
David Garwick rolled up his sleeve and displayed the livid flesh wound on his arm. With a sudden sharp exclamation, “X” drew the boy nearer a bridge lamp. His eyes began to burn with a strangely intent light. He gazed for seconds at the marks on the young man’s arm, then took a small measuring device from his pocket. He bent down, went over the tooth marks with minute scrutiny. Then he straightened abruptly.
He did not betray his sudden, violent excitement to the boy or his parents, but he was tingling. Cleverly simulated as these marks were, they did not fool Agent “X.” Fang marks he had seen many times before. And these were not the abrasions of an animal’s incisors. They were wounds made by some double-pronged injection instrument. They were concrete evidence of the black shadow of crime that he had already guessed at.
Chapter II
Hairy Menace
“YOU actually saw the gorilla?” Agent “X” asked the boy sharply.
“Yes—and dad saw it, too.” David Garwick glanced toward his father, who nodded swiftly.
Mrs. Garwick touched “X’s” arm, raised worried, appealing eyes.
“What is it?” she demanded. “Why don’t you do something, doctor?”
Agent “X” said quietly, “You say your own doctor is on the way here. It will be better for him to take the case. He undoubtedly knows your son’s constitution—which is an important factor in treating the disease.”
The woman’s fingers tightened on his arm.
“You mean that David will come down with sleeping sickness?”
Her agonized voice touched “X’s” heart. She was a mother—and her only son had come under the shadow of the dread epidemic. His voice was husky as he said:
“Doctors are working now to find a serum. The Public Health Service is at work—”
“At work!” Mrs. Garwick’s eyes blazed. “They had those horrible apes down there—and they let them escape. If my son comes down with the disease—they are to blame!”
Victor Garwick cried harshly, “And I was asked to contribute! I helped them financially! I wish now I hadn’t!”
“The whole city blames the doctors at Drexel for what has happened,” said Mrs. Garwick. “They shouldn’t have let those apes get out!”
Agent “X” did not argue the point. He could not blame the stricken parents for being prejudiced. He turned from them to the boy.
“Do whatever your own doctor says,” he told him. “Keep cheerful and everything will turn out O.K.”
“You think then that I will come down with—”
David Garwick’s quivering lips could not frame the dread word. Agent “X” was silent. His discovery that the disease was being spread, in some cases at least, by injection, drove all doubt from his mind. David Garwick had been inoculated with the germs. His boyish face would before long set in the terrible contours of rigidity—the Parkinsonian Mask.
Two weeks was the usual incubation period; but the germs of this dread epidemic seemed to be unusually virulent. In a matter of days or even hours David Garwick would feel the clutch of those silent microbe invaders, would sink slowly into the horrible listlessness from which he might never be aroused.
Agent “X” was filled with deep, silent fury—fury against the inhuman fiends who were responsible for this.
“You’ll come through all right,” he said huskily. He wished he could feel the confidence he tried to put into his voice. “I’m going directly to the institute,” he said. “I understand they are working night and day there, trying to develop a serum. Your own family doctor will do all that can be done.”
The haggard eyes of the Garwicks followed him. He passed the trembling servant in the hallway, went out into the night. A few hundred feet from the gate a green-crossed car roared past him and into the Garwicks’ drive. Apparently their family doctor had arrived. “X” hoped he would be able to bolster up their morale for the ordeal to come.
HE strode swiftly to his own car, climbed in, and retraced his route back along the avenue. His disguised features were set as he drove through the gloom. Fury had become a white-hot resolve to fight this hideous evil. For a moment, Agent “X” pressed a hand to his side where an old scar, received on a battlefield in France, gave him a momentary twinge of pain. Excitement sometimes made the wound throb as though the piece of shrapnel that had caused it were freshly imbedded.
It seemed the sign and symbol of the Agent’s amazing courage. For the scar had drawn the flesh into the semblance of a crude “X.” Years ago, physicians had predicted that it might cause his death; but his extraordinary vitality and indomitable will had cheated the Grim Reaper. The scar remained as an ever-present reminder of death—but death was no longer feared by Secret Agent “X.” He had come to grips with it too often. His only fear was ever that death might overtake him before his strange hazardous work was d
one. With horror hovering like a dreadful shadow over a whole great community, the “Man of a Thousand Faces” must fight as never before. And, with death on all sides of him, he must hold death at bay.
He sped down the street toward Drexel Institute. The massive white stone building was set on a slight hill surrounded by spacious grounds. It was a temple of science upon which its founder, Alfred Drexel, had lavished millions until the stock market crash of ’29 had wiped out his fortune.
Now the great building stood in all its grandeur, paradoxically bearing the name of a ruined man. It had sucked up the greatest proportion of Drexel’s wealth and energy. Drexel, still a resident of Branford, had had to sell his own huge estate. He lived in modest apartments in the very shadow of the huge institution he had created.
What an ironic blow that the citizens of Branford had turned bitterly against the very thing that had been their chief cause for civic pride. The words of Mr. and Mrs. Garwick had shown that feeling against the institute ran high. This was proved too by the presence of an extra armed guard of police around the grounds.
They stopped “X” at the gate. His papers were examined before he was allowed to drive in. An armed institute guard asked for his credentials again at the door. Then he was shown into the building and taken to the office of the director, Doctor Gollomb.
A round-faced, shrewd-eyed man, with the high forehead of a scholar, Gollomb gave him a brusque welcome. Worry had deeply lined the director’s face. His fingers kept up a restless tattoo on his desk.
“I’ve had only four hours sleep a night since this epidemic started, Doctor Smith,” he said. “We’re still hoping to find a serum—but with the apes gone it’s damned difficult. What the people don’t understand is that the development of serum therapy requires time and patience. I’m helpless. Not only my apes are gone—but one of my best men has disappeared as well.”
Agent “X” leaned forward. Tense interest brightened his eyes.
“Who is that, doctor?”
“Just a student here—a young man named Hornaday. He’s a strange, moody chap, but close to being a genius. When he worked at all he had the patience of Job. With an ultra-microscope and a filter using polarized light he thought he had isolated the encephalitis germ. We were counting heavily on his findings. He was working on a new kind of serum—a radical method of treatment consisting of bacteriophage that would kill the virus-producing organisms.”
SECRET AGENT “X” started. Doctor Gollomb’s words told him that the student Hornaday had apparently been on the right track.
“How do you account for Hornaday’s disappearance?” he asked suddenly.
Doctor Gollomb leaned forward, tapped “X’s” arm. “He wandered away once before. I’ve said Hornaday was moody. He was the type who would submit to no discipline or restriction. When the wanderlust struck him he would drop everything and go. That’s the simple explanation.”
“You’ve made no mention of this to the police or the public?”
“The police—no! Why should I? I kept it from the papers purposely. They’d be sure to circulate wild stories. I don’t want any more scandal attached to the institute! It’s bad enough as it is!”
Doctor Gollomb paused. A troubled frown wrinkled his forehead. “There’s only one thing that puzzles me,” he continued slowly. “And it is another reason for keeping silent on the question of Hornaday’s—ah—voluntary vacation. He took all his notes and some of his equipment with him!”
“That’s incredible!” snapped the Agent.
“Yes! And if he reads reports of this epidemic and doesn’t come back when we need him so desperately I shall never forgive him,” said Doctor Gollomb. “Brilliant as he is, I’ll see him expelled from the institute!”
The director’s eyes snapped with anger. But Agent “X’s” glowed for a different reason. Drexel’s most brilliant student of encephalitis missing—staying away at a time like this. The Agent shot another question:
“Just when did he leave—before or after the gorillas escaped?”
“About a week before, doctor—but if you’re trying to insinuate anything, it’s preposterous!”
“X” raised a hand. “I’m trying to insinuate nothing. I just wish we could locate Hornaday. He might be most—useful.”
“I agree with you, Smith. But we have other brilliant men here and I’ve sent for Doctor John Vaughton, the English expert on sleeping sickness. If only we had some of the gorillas! Even one would help. I am hoping hourly that a capture will be made. I’ve instructed the health commissioner and the police to do all in their power to bring the animals back alive.”
“Rather a difficult feat,” said “X” dryly, “since the gorillas’ claws and teeth are impregnated with disease germs. It is doubtful if the police will feel as idealistic about it as you scientists.”
“Doctor Traub, our health commissioner, has the welfare of the community at heart,” said Gollomb.
Agent “X” rose. “I’d like to take a look around the institute, Gollomb.”
The director nodded. “I’ll show you over the place myself.”
HE showed “X” the steel cages from which the gorillas had escaped. The explanation of how the animals had got out was simple. One had contrived to break the lock on his door. Naturally imitative, he had opened the doors of the others from the outside as he had seen their attendant do. Then a window had been raised and the band of huge jungle creatures had trooped out into the night.
“A late spring freeze-up had made the ground hard,” explained Gollomb, “but there was no snow. That prevented us from tracking them down.”
Gollomb and “X” visited the bacteriological room with its glittering microscopes, centrifuges, incubators and cultures; the vast chemistry department under the charge of Doctor Ritchie, the Institute’s treasurer. There was a physics department, another devoted to biology.
Agent “X” met the staff, too—or those of them doing night work. These were principally in the departments of medicine, chemistry, and biology, co-operating now in an effort to combat the ghastly epidemic.
It was after nine when the Agent left. He went directly from the institute to city hall to see Doctor Traub, Branford’s health commissioner. But the commissioner was not in his office. A weary-eyed secretary told “X” that he was supervising sanitary precautions in distant parts of the city, and might not be back until midnight. Since the spread of the sleeping sickness he had given up all semblance of regular hours.
As he went down the steps of the city hall to his roadster, “X” decided again to take an active part in the gorilla hunt. It might be three hours before he could see Traub.
His pulses quickened as he slid behind the wheel. He had a dual reason for wanting to capture one of the hairy beasts that menaced Branford.
He must if possible gain concrete proof that the animals were being trained to carry and use an injection device leaving a mark like teeth. His brain hammered at the problem of why such a device should be used, since the beasts’ claws and teeth carried the infection—but that must wait until he had proof that the thing was actually being done. That the apes could be trained to use such an injector was a startling but not utterly fantastic idea.
He must also, somehow, capture one of the animals alive and take it back to the institute. The lack of adequate media for experimentation was crippling the work of those at the institute. Some sort of serum, made from the spinal fluid of one of the apes, on the order of rabies serum, might save hundreds of lives.
“X” guided the powerful roadster through Branford’s business section and headed for the suburbs. He felt he was better fitted than the police to make a live capture. The police were armed with death-dealing automatics, machine and riot guns. “X” had his ingenious gas pistol. At short range it would knock out an ape as well as a man. That was the weapon he intended to use.
His eyes gleamed with excitement as he approached the vicinity of the Garwick mansion again. This open section with its lawn
s and wooded patches seemed the logical place for the apes to prowl. And he was definitely sure now that the rich of Branford were being preyed upon.
Accident alone had caused the disease to spread to the poorer sections; even the most cunning criminal mind could not control the flights of germ-laden mosquitoes.
He passed other cars filled with men hunting the apes. These he avoided, and parked at last in a dark side street. Unseen, silent, he struck off across the wide lawn of a big house that was tightly shuttered.
“X” slipped a square of black cloth over his face. He remembered that gorillas were supposed to be able to see in the dark. With his gas gun in one hand, a concentrating flashlight in the other, he prowled across many lawns.
Once a night watchman hailed him. Agent “X” retreated swiftly into a clump of shrubbery, half expecting to hear a charge of buckshot whistle by. But he saw the watchman turn and dash into the house. “X” moved quickly on to a section several blocks away.
A moment later two police cars flashed by. They had, “X” assumed, come in response to the watchman’s telephone call. He turned his back to them, continued his own lone way. Fighting single-handed, he had been able to achieve some brilliant results in his warfare on human menaces to society. Tonight he was pitting his trained alertness against the instinctive cunning of animals.
At the rear of a group of rich men’s estates “X” paused and tensed. Had something moved over by the low wall that separated one lawn from another? He strained his eyes. Yes—there it was! An instant’s glimpse of a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.
He crouched low to the ground to get a better view. The silhouette showed again, an ungainly blob on the top of the wall. Then the Agent’s heart raced. For his straining eyes made out a massive, furry head.
He gripped his gas pistol more tightly, moved forward. The dark blot against the sky had disappeared. Had it gone over the wall? Was it coming stealthily his way? Agent “X” was not sure, but cautiously he moved on.
Close to the wall, at a point fifty feet below the spot where he had seen the moving shadow, he crouched again. Nothing was in sight. No faintest sound broke the peaceful stillness of the night. And yet he was positive he had not been mistaken. Prickles raced along his skin. Alone in the blackness, he was close on the trail of one of the great, germ-spreading apes. Horror was somewhere ahead of him, watching him perhaps, waiting to spring.
Secret Agent “X” – The Complete Series Volume 2 Page 2
