The Second Randall Garrett Megapack Page 37

  Will be better not to wait until I have to ask him twice!’”

  The theory behind the heat projector was simply an extension of the laser theory, plus a few refinements. Inside a ring made of the proper material, the light, acted upon by exterior magnetic fields, tended to move in a circle, so that the photon cascade effect was all in one direction instead of bouncing back and forth between a pair of mirrors. That light could be bent around corners by making it travel through a glass rod was well known, and the Malekrinova Q-tube took advantage of that effect.

  In a way, the principle was similar to that of the cyclotron, except that instead of spinning ions around in a circle to increase their velocity a beam of coherent light was circulated to increase its intensity.

  Then, at the proper moment, a beam of intense coherent light shot out of the tangent that formed the tail of the Q-tube. If the material of the Q was properly constructed and contained atoms that fluoresced strongly in the infra red, you had a heat beam that delivered plenty of power. And, since the radiation was linear and “in step,” the Q-tube didn’t heat up much at all. The cascade effect took most of the energy out as radiation.

  “Then a Royal Proclamation was dispatched throughout the nation,

  Most imperatively calling to appear before the King.

  Under penalties most cruel, every man who sold a jewel

  Or who bought and bartered precious stones, and all that sort of thing.”

  But knowing all that didn’t help Raphael Poe or the United States of America one whit if the information couldn’t be gotten out of Russia and into Colonel Spaulding’s hands. Lenny had told him of the trouble the colonel was having with Dr. Davenport.

  If he could only communicate with Lenny! But if he did, Dr. Malekrinova would pick up every bit of it, and that would be the end of that. No, he had to figure out some way to get himself and the information both out of the country.

  Meanwhile, he had to keep thinking of an animated necktie. And he had to keep singing.

  “Thereupon, the jewelers’ nether joints all quaked and knocked together,

  As they packed their Saratogas in lugubrious despair.

  It was ever their misfortune to be pillaged by extortion,

  And they thought they smelled a rodent on the sultry desert air.”

  Lenny Poe shoved open the door of Colonel Spaulding’s outer office with a violence that startled Sergeant Nugget.

  “Is Spaulding in?” he barked.

  “I think he’s expecting you,” she said. There was no time to buzz the colonel; Poe was already opening the door.

  “Rafe’s in trouble!” Lenny said hurriedly, slamming the door behind him.

  “Where have you been?” snapped the colonel.

  “Never mind that! Rafe’s in trouble, I said! We’ve gotta figure a way to get him out of it!”

  Colonel Spaulding dropped all thought of bawling out Poe. “What’d he say? What’s the trouble?”

  “All he’s doing is broadcasting that necktie—like an animated cartoon in technicolor. And he’s singing.”

  “Singing? Singing what?”

  “As they faced the Great Propylon, with an apprehensive smile on,

  Sculptured there in heiroglyphics six feet wide and nine feet high

  Was the threat of King Rameses to chop every man to pieces

  Who, when shown the Royal diamond, would dare refuse to buy.”

  Colonel Spaulding blinked. “That’s pretty. What does it mean?”

  “Nothing; it’s a song, that’s all. That female Russian scientist can read Rafe’s mind, and he’s broadcasting this stuff to cover up!”

  Quickly, he told Spaulding what the situation was as he had been able to piece it together from Rafe’s secondary thoughts.

  “Ye Gods!” Colonel Spaulding slapped at his brow. Then he grabbed for the telephone and started dialing.

  Lenny dropped into one of the chairs, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

  Rafe! Rafe! Listen to me! Rafe!

  “Then the richest dealer, Mulai Hassan, eyed the gem and coolly

  Said, ‘The thing is but a common tumbler-bottom, nothing more!’

  Whereupon, the King’s Assassin drew his sword, and Mulai Hassan

  Never peddled rings again upon the Nile’s primeval shore.”

  But below the interference came Rafe’s thoughts. And the one thing of primary importance to him was to get the information on the heat-beam generator to the United States.

  No bigotry, no matter how strong, is totally impregnable. Even the most narrow-minded racial bigot will make an exception if a person of the despised race risks his own life to save the life of the bigot or someone the bigot loves. The bigotry doesn’t collapse—not by a long shot. But an exception is made in that one case.

  Lenny Poe made an exception. Any information that was worth his brother’s life was Important! Therefore, it was not, could not be, scientific gobbledegook, no matter how it sounded.

  Rafe, give it to me! Try me! I can copy it!

  “Then Abdullah abd Almahdi fainty said the stone was shoddy,

  But he thought that, in a pinch, he might bid fifty cents himself.

  There ensued a slight commotion where he could repent the notion,

  And Abdullah was promoted to the Oriental Shelf.”

  Rafe! Stop singing that stupid song and give me the stuff! She can’t learn anything if you just think about that theory stuff. She already knows that! Come on! Give!

  Lenny Poe grabbed a pencil and a sheaf of paper from the colonel’s desk and began writing frantically as the Song of the Egyptian Diamond stopped suddenly.

  * * * *

  Words. Nonsense words. That’s all most of the stuff was to Lenny. It didn’t matter. He spelled them as he thought they should be, and if he made a mistake, Rafe would correct him.

  Rafe tried to keep a picture of the words as they would look if printed while he thought them verbally, and that helped. The information came across in the only way it could come across—not as concepts, but as symbols.

  Lenny hardly noticed that the Secretary of Defense and the President had come into the room. He didn’t even realize that Colonel Spaulding was feeding him fresh sheets of paper.

  Lenny didn’t seem to notice the time passing, nor the pain in his hand as the muscles tired. He kept writing. The President left with the Defense Secretary and came back again after a while, but Lenny ignored them.

  And when it was over, he pushed pencil and paper aside and, massaging his right hand with his left, sat there with his eyes closed. Then, slowly, a smile spread over his face.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said slowly and softly.

  “Mr. Poe,” said the President, “is there any danger that your brother will be captured within the next hour?”

  Lenny looked up with a startled grin. “Oh. Hi. I didn’t notice you, Mr. President. What’d you say?”

  The President repeated his question.

  “Oh. No. There’s nothing to worry about. The little men in white coats came after Dr. Malekrinova. She started screaming that telepathic spies were stealing her secret. She smashed all her apparatus and burned all her papers on top of the wreckage before they could stop her. She keeps shouting about a pink-and-purple orgy and singing a song about glass diamonds and Egyptian kings. I wouldn’t say she was actually insane, but she is very disturbed.”

  “Then your brother is safe?”

  “As safe as he ever was, Mr. President.”

  “Thank Heaven for that,” said the President. “If they’d ever captured him and made him talk—” He stopped. “I forgot,” he said lamely after a moment.

  Lenny grinned. “That’s all right, Mr. President. I sometimes forget it myself. But it was his handicap, I guess, that made him concentrate on telepathy, so that he doesn’t need his ears to hear what people are saying. Maybe I could read minds the way he does if I’d been born that way.

  “Come to think of it, I doubt if the Russians woul
d have believed he was a spy if they’d caught him, unless they really did believe he was telepathic. A physical examination would show immediately that he was born without eardrums and that the inner ear bones are fused. They wouldn’t try to make a man talk if an examination showed that he really was a deaf-mute.”

  The buzzer on the colonel’s intercom sounded. “Yes?” said Spaulding.

  “Dr. Davenport is here,” said Sergeant Nugget. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Send him in,” said Colonel Spaulding gleefully. “I have a nice scientific theory I want to shove down his throat.”

  NOR IRON BARS A CAGE… (1962)

  Her red-blond hair was stained and discolored when they found her in the sewer, and her lungs were choked with muck because her killer hadn’t bothered to see whether she was really dead when he dumped her body into the manhole, so she had breathed the stuff in with her last gasping breaths. Her face was bruised, covered with great blotches, and three of her ribs had been broken. Her thighs and abdomen had been bruised and lacerated.

  If she had lived for three more days, Angela Frances Donahue would have reached her seventh birthday.

  I didn’t see her until she was brought to the morgue. My phone chimed, and when I thumbed it on, the face of Inspector Kleek, of Homicide South, came on the screen. His heavy eyelids always hang at half mast, giving him a sleepy, bored look and the rest of his fleshy face sags in the same general pattern. “Roy,” he said as soon as he could see my face on his own screen, “we just found the little Donahue girl. The meat wagon’s taking her down to the morgue now. You want to come down here and look over the scene, or you want to go to the morgue? It looks like it’s one of your special cases, but we won’t know for sure until Doc Prouty does the post on her.”

  I took a firm grip on my temper. I should have been notified as soon as Homicide had been; I should have been there with the Homicide Squad. But I knew that if I said anything, Kleek would just say, “Hell, Roy, they don’t notify me until there’s suspicion of homicide, and you don’t get a call until there’s suspicion that it might be the work of a degenerate. That’s the way the system works. You know that, Roy.” And rather than hear that song-and-dance again, I gave myself thirty seconds to think.

  “I’ll meet you at the morgue,” I said. “Your men can get the whole story at the scene without my help.”

  That mollified him, and it showed a little on his face. “O.K., Roy, see you there.” And he cut off.

  I punched savagely at the numbered buttons on the phone to get an intercommunication hookup with Dr. Barton Brownlee’s office, on the third floor of the same building as my own office. His face, when it came on, was a calming contrast to Kleek’s.

  He’s nearly ten years younger than I am, not yet thirty-five, and his handsome, thoughtful face and dark, slightly wavy hair always make me think of somebody like St. Edward Pusey or maybe Albert Einstein. Not that he looks like either one of them, or even that he looks saintly, but he does look like a man who has the courage of his convictions and is calmly, quietly, but forcefully ready to shove what he knows to be the truth down everybody else’s throat if that becomes necessary. Or maybe I am just reading into his face what I know to be true about the man himself.

  “Brownie,” I said, “they’ve found the Donahue girl. Taking her down to the morgue now. Want to come along?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said without hesitation. “I’ll get all the information I need from the photos and the reports. The man I do want to see is the killer; I need more data, Roy—always more data. The more my boys and I know about these zanies, the more effectively we can deal with them.”

  “I know. O.K.; I’ve got to run.” I cut off, grabbed my hat, and headed out to fulfill my part of the bargain Brownlee and I had once made. “You find ’em,” he’d once said, “and I’ll fix ’em.” So far, that bargain had paid off.

  * * * *

  I got to the morgue a few minutes after the body was brought in. The man at the front desk looked up at me as I walked in and gave me a bored smile. “Evening, Inspector. The Donahue kid’s in the clean-up room.” Then he went back to his paper work.

  The lab technicians were standing around watching while the morgue attendant sluiced the muck off the corpse with a hose, watching to see if anything showed up in the gooey filth. Inspector Kleek stood to one side. All he said was, “Hi, Roy.”

  The morgue attendant lifted up one small arm with a gloved hand and played the hose over the thin biceps. “Good thing the rigor mortis has gone off,” he said, “these stiffs are hell to handle when they’re stiff.” It was an old joke, but everybody grinned out of habit.

  The clear water from the hose flowed over the skin and turned a grayish brown as it ran down to the bottom of the shallow, waist-high stainless-steel trough in which the body was lying.

  One of the lab techs stepped over and began going through the long hair very carefully, and Doc Prouty, the Medical Examiner, began cleaning out the mouth and nose and eyes and ears with careful hands.

  I turned to Kleek. “You sure it’s the Donahue girl?”

  He sighed and looked away from the small dead thing on the cleaning table. “Who else could it be? She was found only three blocks from the Donahue home. No other female child reported missing in that area. We haven’t checked the prints yet, but you can bet they’ll tally with her school record.”

  I had to agree. “What about the time of death?”

  “Doc Prouty figures forty-eight to sixty hours ago.”

  “I’ll be able to give you a better figure after the post,” the Medical Examiner said without looking up from his work.

  A tall, big-nosed man in plain-clothes suddenly turned away from the scene on the table, his mouth moving queerly, his eyes hard. After a moment, his lips relaxed. Still staring at the wall, he said: “I guess the case is out of Federal jurisdiction, then. We’ll co-operate, as usual, of course.” He looked at me. “Could I talk to you outside, Inspector Royall?”

  I looked at Kleek. “O.K., Sam?” I didn’t have to have his O.K.; it was just professional courtesy. He knew I’d tell him whatever it was that the FBI man had to say, and we both knew why the Federal agent wanted to leave.

  Sam Kleek nodded. “Sure. I’ll keep an eye out here.”

  * * * *

  The FBI man followed me into the outer room.

  “Do you figure this as a sex-degenerate case, Inspector?” he asked.

  “Looks like it. You saw the bruises. Dr. Prouty will be able to tell us for sure after the post mortem.”

  He shook his head as if to clear it of a bad memory. “You New York police can sure be cold-blooded at times.”

  The thing that was bothering him, as Kleek and I both knew, was that the FBI agent hadn’t been exposed to this sort of thing often enough. They deal with the kind of crimes that actually don’t involve the callous murder of children very often. Even the murder of adults doesn’t normally come under the aegis of the FBI.

  “We’re not cold blooded,” I said. “Not by inclination, I mean. But a man gets that way—he has to get that way—after he’s seen enough of this sort of thing. You either get yourself an emotional callous or you get deathly sick from the repetition—and then you have to get out of the job.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” He quit rubbing his chin with a knuckle, looked at me, and said: “What I wanted to say is that there’s no evidence that she was taken across a state line. Whoever sent that ransom note to the Donahue parents was trying to throw us off the track.”

  “Looks like it. Look at the time-table. The note was sent after the girl was murdered, but before the information hit the papers or the newscasts. The killer wanted us to think it was a ransom kidnaping. It isn’t likely that the note was sent by a crank. A crank wouldn’t have known the girl was missing at all at the time the note was sent.”

  “That’s the way it seems to me,” he agreed. The color was coming back into his face. “But why would he want to mak
e it look like a kidnaping instead of…of what it was? The penalty’s the same for both.”

  My grin had anger, pity, and disgust for the killer in it—plus a certain amount of satisfaction. Some day, I’d like to see my face in a mirror when I feel like that.

  “He was hoping the body wouldn’t be found until it was too late for us to know that it was a rape killing. And that means that he knew that he would be on our list if we did find out that it was rape. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered. If I’m right, then he has outsmarted himself. He has told us that we know him, and he’s told us that he’s smart enough to figure out a dodge—that he’s not one of the helplessly stupid ones.”

  “That should help to narrow the field down,” he said in a hard voice. He felt in his pocket for a cigarette, found his pack, took one out, and then held it, unlit, between the fingers of his right hand. “Inspector Royall, I’ve studied the new law of this state—the one you’re working under here—and I think it’ll be great if it works out. I wish you luck. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to call the office.”

  As he went out to the desk phone, I gave him a silent thanks. Words of encouragement were hard to come by at that time.

  I turned and went back towards the clean-up room.

  She didn’t look as though she were asleep. They never do. She looked dead. She’d been head down in the sewer, and the blood had pooled and coagulated in her head and shoulders. Now that the filth had been washed off, the dark purple of the dead blood cells showed through the translucent skin. She would look better after she was embalmed.

  Doc Prouty was holding up a small syringe, eying the little bit of fluid within it. “We’ve got him,” he said in a flat voice. “I’ll have the lab run an analysis. We’re well within the time limit. All we have to do is separate the girl’s blood type from that of the spermatic fluid. You boys find your man, and I can identify him for you.” He put the syringe in its special case. “I’ll let you know the exact cause of death in a couple of hours.”

  “O.K., Doc. Thanks,” said Inspector Kleek, closing his notebook. He turned to one of the other men. “Thompson, you notify the parents. Get ’em down here to make a positive identification, and send it along to my office with the print identification.” Then he looked at me. “Anything extra you want, Roy?”