Death Quest

by L. Ron Hubbard

  I couldn’t see or hear a thing!

  I swore. But Torpedo could find them and I knew that even if they moved, they would be easy to trace, for I had their destination: “Stone wall” could only mean Stonewall Biggs, the County Clerk of Hamden County, Virginia. And only one major highway and then a few country roads could take them to Fair Oakes. They could be followed or intercepted with ease.

  I had one other vital thing to do. I picked up the phone and called the Service Department of the telephone company.

  “This is the butler of Dr. Agnes Morelay,” I said. “I have a mobile telephone,” and I gave the number. “Dr. Morelay has instructed that the service be put on vacation status as it is not in use.”

  “Right away, sir,” the girl said. “We will take it out of service.”

  I smiled. Heller would not be able to call them. They would not be able to call. And they probably wouldn’t even find out their phone was disconnected now.

  It would take Mike Mutazione plenty of time to set them up to get going. They were sitting ducks.

  It was time for my evening stint. I threw a blanket over the viewers. This was one project which, all said and done, was going extremely well!

  Enjoy your last hours on Earth, Countess Krak. Shortly you will be out of the way for keeps!

  PART FORTY-FIVE

  Chapter 5

  I peeked into the front room. The next lesbian couple had arrived. The husband—a thin, American Indian girl—was apparently named Chief Malcomb. The wife was a plump high-yellow they were calling Bucket.

  Miss Pinch was taking a stylish blanket coat off the husband. She was saying, “You’re going to love this, Malcomb. Psychiatric Birth Control is for the (bleeps). It’s as big a fraud as psychiatry itself, and that’s saying something! You just have NO idea how marvelous natural sex can be!”

  Malcomb said, “I’m scared half to death.”

  That did it! I rushed into the room. I yelled, “I don’t want to see any dead, staring eyes! I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it! I can’t STAND IT!”

  They looked at me with some alarm. But I was not to be gainsaid!

  I knew what I had to do. I made Miss Pinch phone out right then for a rental electrocardiograph. Only when it had arrived and I had it fastened on Malcomb’s wrists, with the portable machine positioned beside the bed where I could watch the needle clicking and drawing on the paper the heartbeat of the girl, would I consent to remove my clothes and begin to do my duty.

  Even then, I had my attention on that needle to such an extent, making sure that she was not a corpse, that I hardly knew what I was doing.

  Miss Pinch, with pursed lips, didn’t approve at all.

  But the needle swung when the woman screamed and I watched it carefully. Her heart was still beating.

  I mopped off my brow, sitting at last on the side of the bed. I felt it had been a near thing. Maybe I should also have one on my wrist: my heart was beating fast enough!

  It was even worse with Bucket, the lesbian wife. She was certainly no virgin but, even so, I had to bat the needle several times to make sure it wasn’t stuck.

  Frightening!

  All in all, they must have found it pretty unsatisfactory, even though they admitted afterwards that they had never had anything feel that way before.

  After they’d gone, Miss Pinch lectured me about my duties and how I lacked gratitude for the huge pay I had been drawing.

  “We almost didn’t make it, Inkswitch,” she said reprovingly. “You don’t understand the critical situation with that Bucket woman. That’s twice we’re having to change the mind of that poor thing. She used to do it every day with her Great Dane and sex is a big thing for her. You’re a soldier in a hard campaign and this is not the time to go soft!”

  “With a Great Dane?” I said. “You mean a Danish man.”

  “No, no. A Great Dane is a dog and dogs have peculiar (bleeps): they swell up huge with a bulb in them and lock in. It’s one of the Psychiatric Birth Control methods and it’s pretty big competition. You have no idea how that psychiatrist worked on her. He was so solicitous for her plight, he went to the greatest possible lengths. He even gave her the Great Dane out of a government grant from the National Institute of Mental Stealth—they help the needy, you know. And we had an awful time: the Great Dane bit everybody who came near her and we had to get him run over with a hit car. Then the psychiatrist caught her on the bounce and got her enamored with Malcomb, using a policeman’s billy as a dildo. And Malcomb had to do so many weight-lifting tongue exercises to build it up that she sprained her jaw. And your poor performance tonight, that was aimed to get into her with natural sex, might have sent that poor woman to the dogs again. It’s a hard campaign, Inkswitch, and you’ve got to stiffen up and fill the gap!”

  I was pretty contrite. But when bedtime came and I insisted Miss Pinch and then Candy wear the machine straps, they kept getting passionate and their writhing around disconnected the straps. This, of course, stopped the electrocardiograph needle, and supposing in horror that I was now doing it to a corpse, I would leap off.

  Miss Pinch acidly declared that I had not earned my money that day and refused to pay me. They even made me sleep by myself on a sofa in the back room.

  I was lying there wondering what could possibly have gotten into me when the phone rang.

  “Torpedo here,” he said.

  Expecting some marvelous good news, I said, “Are you calling from Hairytown?”

  “No. I’m in Harlem.”

  “WHAT? Listen, you idiot. The target is in a huge land yacht with paper-thin aluminum sides that wouldn’t stop a spitball!” And I gave him the license number and description. “It’s parked right this minute in Kingsland Point Park, seven-tenths of a mile due west of North Hairytown, overlooking the Hudson. You could walk right in, put the rifle against her head and bango, your job is done. You better get going! For Gods’ sakes, what delayed you?”

  “I had to get a rifle and I got a beauty. It’s a Holland and Holland double-barreled elephant rifle, .375 H & H Magnum. Blow the side off a barn! It’s got a Bausch and Lomb superpower night scope, hit anything up to a thousand yards. It took time to steal them, but they work great.”

  “Work great? How do you know?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t want me to use an untested gun on a real hit and mess it up, would you? I’m a craftsman. I really lay into my work.”

  With acid sarcasm, I said, “Well, I hope it tested all right.”

  “Sure did,” he said. “I come up to Harlem after it got dark. There’s this alley, see, right next to a joint that’s got the world’s loudest band. So I waited until a black girl passed and drilled her. Almost blew her spine out. Then I dragged her into the basement and ripped the clothes off the corpse and had her. She sure was juicy. Just laid there staring at me with those sightless eyes, staring at me. I must have done it six times. She cooled down, though, and got too stiff, so I thought I’d better phone in.”

  “You are being paid to do a job!” I railed at him.

  “Of course, of course! I was just practicing. Also, I didn’t want to go out on a real job. Up to an hour ago, my hands were still shaking from the shots.”

  “They ought to shoot you,” I said bitterly.

  “Oh, hell, yes,” he said. “They have to. You see, this prison psychologist had syphilis and he gave it to me in the (bleep) and mouth and told me to spread it around. So I have to have arsenic shots to keep the sores from running. But it was a waste of time on his part because a corpse don’t care if you give it syphilis: it just lies there stiff and stares at you and don’t say a word.”

  “SHUT UP!” I screamed at him. “Get on the job!”

  “Oh, you bet. I hardly took the edge off at all with that black girl. I know exactly where the target is now. I’ll grab a car, go right up, shoot her dead, lay it into the corpse and when it gets too cold to (bleep) I’ll phone in again and report. I hope you’re having a good time, too!” He hung u
p.

  I tried to get some pleasure out of knowing now that the Countess Krak would shortly be a defiled corpse.

  But suddenly I got to worrying. That girl the night before, Butter. She had said that she had had coitus with a goat.

  I had read somewhere that the Spaniards, when they came to America, had picked up syphilis and taken it back to the Old World. And modern research had found that the disease had been generated by an American beast known as the llama that was a sort of long-legged goat.

  Had that goat given her syphilis?

  Did I now have the disease?

  I tore into the tattered books on the library shelf. I found a medical text. It said the onset was very mild and the first sign occurred in from ten to thirty days, at which time a small bump appeared and then went away. But skin eruptions then occurred; one went totally to pieces internally and usually went crazy. I searched further in horrified frenzy. Nothing like this existed on Voltar. There probably wasn’t a doctor around who could touch it. I had to know all I could about it, realizing that I had ten days at least to wait before I would know. I calmed myself with an effort. I had no real evidence I was in trouble.

  Then my eye chanced to light upon a fatal paragraph. The disease was named from a character in a poem: Syphilus! The man was a SHEPHERD!

  And shepherds tend GOATS!

  Oh, believe me, I spent an awful and restless night! I knew I was doomed to break out in sores and go crazy.

  The pale horror of dawn spread its contaminating fingers through the window. The phone rang!

  I jumped like I was shot.

  Maybe it was good news, I told myself, to still the small screams that tried to rise from my diseased body. Maybe Krak was dead.

  “Torpedo here,” he said. “Look, I got bad news for you. That land yacht wasn’t there. I found a lot of package wrappings in the litter bin close by: Newark stores and quite fresh. And one had marked on it `Land yacht steaks, put in freezer at once’ and another with the license number you gave me and ‘cook uniform’ scribbled on it. So they were there all right just hours ago. They must have been the convoy of a huge motor home followed by a smaller one that I saw waiting at the westbound toll line to cross the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson. That’s only a mile or so south of Hairytown. I remember saying to myself, ‘Jesus, look at that huge motor home and all the chrome,’ when I exited off from the New York State Thruway onto US 9 to enter Hairytown. So I know what it looks like all right. But that ain’t the bad news.”

  Oh, Gods, what now?

  “You know that envelope you gave me with the money in it? Well, a few hours ago the message and paper simply evaporated. That wouldn’t be so bad because I remembered your phone number. But the money that had been in it evaporated, too! There’s nothing left of it but some green powder.”

  Oh, (bleep)! The timed disintegrator spray had gotten on the money in the envelope!

  “So I’m broke.”

  Oh, that idiot! He had had the land yacht right in view and missed it! I knew at once what I would have to do. He was too dumb to do anything but kill.

  Impetuously, I said, “Drive down to Eleventh Avenue and 50th Street. Start now. I will meet you on the northwest corner!”

  He said that he would be there.

  I stole out into the front room. I found Miss Pinch’s purse. It had two thousand dollars in it! I took it.

  I wrote a note. I told her I was haggard with worry that I hadn’t pleased them last night. I was going to go find a mountaintop and sit on it and work out what was wrong but in a week or less I would be back, ready to go again.

  I took my Federal credentials. If I was apprehended with a hit man I could say I was on a government project and had hired him to execute a government contract, “in the national interest,” like they had executed on Martin Luther King and President Kennedy and Lincoln and lots more that had gotten in the government’s road.

  I armed myself.

  I took my viewers and some clothes.

  I stole out of the flat.

  I would make sure, personally, that Torpedo found the right target and that the Countess Krak would die!

  PART FORTY-FIVE

  Chapter 6

  With rifle ready and my hit man’s finger itchy on the trigger, I spent the next three days combing the highways for the Countess Krak.

  There were only a limited number of routes she could take south, and working back and forth, cross-country, asking service stations and toll bridge people, we patrolled every one of them.

  On the very first day, about noon, I caught a glimpse on my viewer. She was standing on what seemed to be a hill crest, gazing at mountains that were shrouded in blue mist. She looked at no signs and shortly afterwards interference came on again. But the clue was unmistakable: she was somewhere inland where the Atlantic coastal plain rises into the Appalachians. That eliminated any roads nearer the coast. I felt we were zeroing in.

  I was personally having a very poor time of it and was held to my search only by my sense of duty as an Apparatus officer. I couldn’t stand to be near Torpedo Fiaccola.

  Not only did the filthy beast stink, he kept whining that I wasn’t being fast enough. He wanted to get on his kill and he twisted and agonized about how frustrated he was and how he had to have it. He kept stroking his rifle barrel and unloading the gun and spitting on the cartridges and reloading it, crooning to the slugs to get him his next orgy. My disgust rose like vomit in my throat just to hear him.

  On the second day, beside a road we were alertly watching, I took a moment out to get a look at Heller.

  He was still in Florida, totally oblivious of the gruesome fate that was stalking his darling.

  He was walking toward a ramshackle hotel that stood amongst palms on a sandspit. A high wind bent and threshed the trees. An alligator scuttled across the road ahead of him.

  A contractor, in khaki that was stained black under the armpits with sweat, was saying to him, “Mr. Floyd, how in HELL do you lay out those foundation corners so accurate? Most engineers use a transit. Never seen anybody do it with a watch.”

  “It’s timing,” said Heller, his mind obviously on other things.

  They entered the hotel. A black bartender saw Heller coming and set out a Seven Up. Heller said to him, “Have there been any phone calls for me?”

  The bartender went to yell at somebody. In the mirror I could see construction men strung along the bar. And down at the end, who was that? Raht! Very inconspicuous, dressed in sweaty khaki like the rest, mustache unmistakable: at least he was on the job and obviously undetected by Heller.

  A switchboard girl, a Mexican by the looks of her, phones on her head and disconnected jack plug in her hand, walked up to Heller. “Nada, nada, Mistaire Floyd,” she said. “I try all morning while you gone and they don’t answer. The Norteamericano telefonista operador dice que—excuse me, I have not been in country long—the operator say they on vacation. They no answer.”

  “Yes,” said Heller, “I know they’re on vacation. But look, keep trying.” And he gave her a ten-dollar bill.

  She grinned and looked him up and down speculatively. But he shooed her away.

  For a moment it occurred to me that if I had not disconnected their phone by putting it on “vacation,” I might have picked up her whereabouts from Heller’s mushy interchanges with his sweetheart. But it was too late to worry about spilled milk. I had every confidence I could find her.

  The second day, as we combed the mountains of Pennsylvania, I got another glimpse of her. She was sitting by a lake looking pensively at the reflections of an island in the still water. There were a lot of shrubs about that had white, leathery-looking flowers and others that were budding in purple. I did not know the flowers and it seemed too soon in the year for such display but the weather had been unseasonably warm this very early spring.

  We looked for lakes along the route and, with Torpedo whining and drooling and stroking his bullets and pants, inspected three. No land yach
t. No Countess Krak.

  On the third day, after a fruitless morning between Hagerstown, Maryland, and Winchester, Virginia, covering US 81, I got a clue. I noticed I was entering an area where the same types of shrubs I had earlier seen her looking at were now in bloom. We were getting closer.

  And then a break! Just after lunch I eagerly hunched in the back seat of the Ford we had and turned on the viewers. There she was! She was staring into a shallow valley where a small brook ran. All about her were flowering shrubs. What a target if we could just find her!