Fiction complete, p.67
Fiction Complete, page 67
Until his death, his file would remain under unsolved crimes. In my own mind I was no longer sure of anything, except that if there was a nickel in Calvin Baxter’s discovery, his mercenary brother would wring it out.
And he did. Even before Calvin died.
Some seven weeks later Leo marketed the “MYSTERY i-GUN” as a combined, toy, trick and puzzle, and it set the whole damned world on its ear!
I located Leo Baxter in his new suite of offices on the 34th floor of the State Building. He peeled back his lips in a sneery grin. “I thought you’d be showing up.”
He waved away his male secretary who was still clinging to my arm trying to tow me back to the reception room. I said, “I kept your secret, then you pull an irresponsible thing like this! A kid’s toy! Good Lord, man, that device might be dangerous!”
“I appreciate your professional ethics, Lieutenant. I’ve applied for a patent, so you can tell all your friends now. And stop worrying. The “Mystery i-Gun” is quite harmless. I experimented a week before going into production.”
“A week?” I could scarcely believe my ears. “What happens when some lad jams his gun against a light-pole or an automobile . . . or the night lock on the First National Bank?”
“Nothing. It punches no holes. A large metallic object simply dissipates the field. The largest object it will handle is about a half-inch steel screw—”
“Baxter, your brother’s accident is connected to that device—and you turn it loose as a novelty!”
“Nonsense. It’s safe as a knothole. It simply makes things disappear. Little things, like tacks, ball bearing, old rusty nuts and bolts—”
“And dimes and mamma’s earrings and the front door key,” I snapped back. “Until you know how to bring those things back you had no right to market that rig.” He laid his small hands before him on the desk. “Lieutenant, I’m sick of working for other people. This is my chance to get a bankroll to back my own contracting firm. Yes, I financed Calvin’s research because he’s brilliant, and I knew he’d come up with something some day. Now he’s done it, and I’m merely protecting his interests and my investment in him. See here.” He shoved some documents at me. There was the patent application, a declaration of partnership for purposes of marketing the Mystery i-Gun, and the articles of incorporation of the Baxter Construction Company.
“Okay,” I said. “So you’ve cut your brother in on all this. Who’s his beneficiary when he dies?”
“Still looking for a motive for murder, aren’t you, Lieutenant?”
I didn’t admit it to him, but he was right. Galvin’s “accident” seemed too convenient to the purposes of his practical little brother, Leo. What’s more, the lab and medical men on the force were just as mystified today as they were when we brought Calvin in with the needle-thin hole in his skull. Old Doc Thorsen had admitted to me that he could name no implement—not even a surgical instrument—that could have inflicted such a narrow gauge hole. It had to be caused by a fragment, but there was no fragment in the brain!
“Leo,” I said, “I know you consider this case closed, but I want you to do me a favor. I want to go over your brother’s lab once more.”
“But you’ve—” He stopped, shrugged and nodded his head. “Okay. I’m interested in finding out what hurt Cal, as much as you are. I’ll tell you, I’m busy the rest of this week, but HI meet you at the old house next Monday evening at eight. You see, I closed up the place and moved downtown.”
I agreed, with the feeling that he was deliberately making me wait just to annoy me. Leo Baxter was an important man now, a man graciously willing to cooperate with the police—at his own convenience. I stood up. “Your brother has been calling your name. I suppose they told you that?”
“They phoned. Doctor said it was just mutterings.”
“You haven’t even been to see him?”
“What’s the use? He wouldn’t recognize me.”
Well, it wasn’t any of my business, really, but it’s funny how you get to hate a man for his attitude. I don’t know what I expected to find by going over that lab-workshop again, but whatever it was, I hoped it would incriminate Leo. On the face of it he was guilty of nothing more than a premature marketing of a new device, but the way he was cashing in on Galvin’s genius certainly did the dying man no honor.
Cash in was right! The toys sold like bubble-gum. The papers, radio, and TV picked up the sensational gimmick and gave it a billion bucks worth of free advertising. And the profitable part of it was that the i-Gun was so simple to mass-produce that Leo’s fifteen contracting manufacturers were almost able to keep up with the astronomical demand.
Before that week was up, the Wall Street Journal estimated there were already more i-Guns in the hands of the juvenile public than all the yo-yos ever produced. They retailed at eighty-five cents, made of plastic with a hole in the back where you could change the pen-light battery. They sold, all right. They sold in drugstores and toy stores and dime stores and department stores. Toddler’s, tykes and teen-agers went for them. And adults. Maybe 30 million of them were in the hands of the public before I saw Leo Baxter next.
Which was almost two weeks instead of the one week he had promised.
I finally got an appointment. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been tied up with government people all week. The A.E.G. tried to get me in trouble.”
I said, “Skip it. You promised for tonight. Now let’s go.”
“I can’t possibly make it tonight.” He pointed at his desk. It was littered with correspondence, orders and contracts. “Give me one more week, Lieutenant.”
It was an order, not a request.
There was nothing to do but wait the third week. It was not, however, uneventful. It was the week the accidents began to happen.
At 4:14 of a Tuesday afternoon, a man was admitted to a local hospital with a perforated belly. Straight through, hide, guts and liver. A newsman got hold of it and wrote a scare story about an attack with a pellet gun that must shoot needles.
Before the edition was sold out the hospitals were loaded with emergency cases. People with holes in them. Tiny little holes, mostly, but holes that went right through them. Then dogs. Then automobiles, trucks and busses. Holes in their radiators. Holes in windshields that always went straight back, through seats and sometimes passengers—right out through the rear end.
THE CITY panicked. Then the county, state and nation. In two days, yes, the whole nation!
At first everyone thought we were being attacked by some secret weapon. By some miracle of statesmanship, the President of the United States prevented a “massive retaliation” attack by the army upon our most likely enemy—long enough for Intelligence to affirm that no enemy on Earth was that mad at us.
Then all thoughts turned to extra-terrestrial space. A bombardment from the sky? It was ridiculous to even consider, because none of the holes that appeared in people and things came from above. The holes were almost entirely in the horizontal plane.
Strangely enough during those first two days, nobody thought of the Mystery i-Gun. No one but me.
Leo Baxter had disappeared into thin air, as completely as if he’d turned to metal and crawled into the muzzle of one of his own “toys”.
I had every known place he frequented staked out with a pair of plain-clothesmen, but it was the morning of the second day of accidents before I got a radio call from the squad car stationed near the old Baxter home.
Leo had come home at last. He was a sad looking midget when I got there. Obviously no sleep, unshaven, deep hollows under his eyes.
“I figured you’d be waiting for me, Lieutenant, but you know what?” he demanded. “I don’t give a damn! I kept waiting for them to figure out the answer to these accidents and string me up. How come you didn’t tell anybody?”
I said, “Shut up and let’s go inside.”
Sure, I figured the i-Gun was the cause, but the last thing I wanted was for Leo to get strung up before I laid my hands on that other device—the one that wouldn’t work. I wanted that rig and all the plans and formulae, and Leo undoubtedly had them hidden deeper than Fort Knox.
He unlocked the door, and I told the others to wait outside. We went into the hall and closed the door behind us. “So your little toy was harmless?” I said, grabbing him by his wrinkled lapels. “So it just shoots stuff off into another dimension?”
He stared at me, his eyes half glazed. “I don’t—know. That’s what the notes said.” He sank into a chair. “I guess it doesn’t, though. It must ball up the metal object and shoot it out—infinite velocity—reduced in size—infinite mass-infinite inertia—keeps circling the globe like—like a satellite. Goes right through anything it hits. Goes on and on. Forever. Little bullets. Right through steel. Right through flesh and bones—”
“Simmer down,” I said. “You’ve been reading the papers. I’ve been checking the facts.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you were right the first time. It does shoot metal objects into another dimension. But they don’t stay there. They ooze back. Slowly. Real slow, so the first edge or comer that sticks back into our dimension is only a few millionths of an inch thick. Then a few ten-thousandths, then a few thousandths—and that’s about the time they start making holes in people and objects that run into them “
“Run into them?”
“Certainly. There are no holes in buildings or other stationary objects. The holes are all horizontal. Now look, Baxter, our only chance is to work on that other device and your brother’s notes, and maybe we can develop an extractor of some kind.”
“No. No, you don’t understand,” he said shaking his head like a sleep-walker. “It balls up the metal. Shoots it out. Infinite mass. Infinite veloc—”
“Knock off that nonsense, and tell me where those plans are.”
“Trying to steal my brother’s other invention, are you? It’s not patented yet. You know that, don’t you? Couldn’t patent it because I can’t make it work yet. You’re smart, but you won’t get it from me—”
I had a fair hold on him, but the pure insanity that flared in his eyes shocked me for just the instant it took him to wrench out of my hands. He stumbled to the door of the study and burst through it heading for the window. I didn’t hurry after him too fast, because I knew the boys outside would take him.
Leo Baxter was only three paces into the stale air of the unused library when he screamed, clasping his hands to his chest and dropped. A peculiar grating, plucking sound came faintly before he thudded to the carpet.
I stopped hard in my tracks and wiped the sweat from my face while Leo Baxter twitched almost at my feet, his heart shredded and bubbling its last in his perforated chest.
The paper clips. The ones I had propelled into nothingness weeks ago.
Hat in hand I advanced slowly, waving it before me chest high. Then it caught suddenly, grated for a split second and passed on in its arc. Now there were several tiny holes in it. I backed away a foot and brought my hat down slowly on the same lethal spot of air. Chest-high it caught and hung suspended.
Leaving it there as a marker I took off my suitcoat, held it before me and inched forward toward the desk. Something plucked at the dangling garment, and a chill froze my spine. Had I been walking forward normally, the tiny speck of metal that barely caught the glint of light from the window, would have pierced my skin at just about the site of my appendix. I circled the spot continuing to feel forward with my coat. That was the paper clip Baxter had fired to demonstrate to me that first day.
At the phone I called headquarters and told the chief what to do.
“You’re so right,” he told me, his voice slurring strangely. “Only you’re a little late. The order went out to confiscate the i-Guns. They think the damned toys might have something to do with the accidents. And I bought one of the first ones for my little Jerry!” His voice sounded hollow.
So they were figuring it out! The next question was, how to extract the deadly particles from the other dimension, or how to keep them from bleeding back slowly into ours.
I moved cautiously through the old house fanning every inch of air ahead of me with a phone book. When I got to Calvin Baxter’s workshop I was especially careful, but I needn’t have been. The only metal particles stuck into the thin air seemed to be over his workbench where he had been experimenting with his device. All but one.
It was right where I expected to find it—better than six feet in the air, just fore-head high for a man tall as Calvin Baxter. He had fired his proto-type of the i-Gun just once into the middle of the room.
How long ago? Eight—ten weeks ago?
It seemed impossible that all this horror had occurred in such a short time.
But there it was, stuck in space, protruding about a hundredth of an inch from nowhere into clear visibility. So little was showing that I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the tip of an ordinary little nail or wood-screw.
This was my “murder-weapon”, the cause of Calvin Baxter’s accident, He’d run into it, jerked his head back, and the speck had come out the same hole it went in.
In twenty minutes by the clock I had the lab crew out from headquarters, and had explained the whole business to them. First they measured the length of the protrusion, and my guess was about right. It measured .0095 inches on the micrometer caliper.
If it were a screw an inch long, at that rate of “bleedback” it would take another 98 weeks to come the rest of the way out. Almost two years!
Paul Riley, the lab chief, was sharp. He caught it about the same time I did and turned to look at me. “We’ve got to figure a way of getting those things out of the way.”
I nodded. “But quick.”
Collins, our print man, said, “Why not just shoot them back into wherever it is they go, with another i-Gun?”
“And have them come bleeding back after a few weeks?” Paul frowned him silent.
He picked up a hammer from the bench and tapped the tiny, glinting speck. The point flattened out a bit, but the thud of the hammer indicated how solidly it was stuck. Then he walked around behind the point and struck it a hard blow from the cross-section side.
The hammer shivered in his hand and he dropped it, rubbing his numbed fingers with his other hand.
“Lieutenant,” he said slowly, “we are up against something.”
We found we could file away the metal easily enough. Sure it filed away until the file cut into empty space. But cold comfort that was. In a few hours, we knew, molecule by molecule, the screw buried in the other dimension would come oozing back, a minute but lethal speck ready to ambush the first very tall man who walked toward it.
Tall man!
That’s why Leo Baxter and I had failed to find it in the first place. I had criss-crossed that room half a thousand times in my previous examinations. If I had been taller, or the speck of metal lower—
“We’ve got to bring Calvin Baxter back to consciousness somehow,” I said. “We’ve got to find out how that extractor of his works.”
“Right!” Jerry said, dropping his hands in resignation. We’d run out of ideas at the same time, and the senior Baxter appeared to be our only hope.
WE FANNED our way out of there, into the squad car, and proceeded at a gingerly five miles per hour back to headquarters. On my insistence, Calvin Baxter had been set up in a private room at the jail with Doc Thorsen in attendance. The city hospitals were so jammed with accident victims and frantic relatives that it was no place to work with a man who was our only salvation.
When I explained everything to Dr. Thorsen and told him how important it was that we bring Calvin back to consciousness he shook his head. “It might be done, but it would probably kill him—”
“But you said he’d never recover anyway,” I argued.
Thorsen seemed to be considering that. “Yes,” he said at last. “That’s more apparent now than ever. He’s beginning to suffer the usual complications of immobility. Probably won’t last more than a few weeks anyway. But can’t you get the dope you want from his brother?” he stalled while he weighed his ethics against the necessity of the moment.
“His brother,” I told him, “is dead. Paper clips. Right through the heart.”
“I see. Well, we could operate, but as I said, Calvin wouldn’t survive for long. Maybe only hours or minutes. And maybe not even long enough to regain consciousness after we remove the clot.”
I said, “I’ve left a crew at the Baxter house to tear it apart, board by board, until we find this so-called extractor that Leo hid. But even after we find it, we need Calvin to tell us how to make it work. There must be a part missing.”
We had wandered into Calvin’s room and were talking over his great, supine body, covered to the chin with a white sheet. The speck of scalp on his forehead had dried up and dropped off leaving only a faint white spot.
As I mentioned the missing part, his lips began moving and a grunt issued from his throat. “Listen,” I said. “He hears me! He’s trying to talk!”
“No, Lieutenant.” Thorsen said, putting a hand to his eyes. “He’s been grunting like that for days. The only word that ever comes out is his brother’s name, Leo.”
The name struck anger and frustration in me. “Leo,” I half-shouted. “That stinking little—never even visited his brother!”
“Relax, Gene. That won’t do any good. The man’s dead,” he reminded me.
“Relax? When all over the country people are tearing their bodies to pieces? Innocent people. Little kids—”
“I know, I know. I just spent nine hours in the emergency ward. Peritonitis. Cardiac injury. Lungs. Tom eye-balls. And it’s probably just the beginning.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” I demanded. “Our only chance is to bring Calvin Baxter to consciousness long enough to explain how his extractor works.” Doc ran trembling hands through his fuzz of white hair. For the first time I noticed that the pupils of his eyes were moving back and forth in little quick, darting motions like a wild animal looking for escape. “I—don’t know, Gene. I suppose you are right. Only—we need permission—we must—you see, he might die, and—”
