Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (101 page)

“I’m on my way,” said Graham.

Doctor Curtis had a strict, professional air of calm efficiency which Graham liked to ignore. She also had a mop of crisp black curls and a curvaceousness which he liked to admire with frankness she found annoying.

“Irwin had been behaving strangely for more than a month,” she told him, unnecessarily eager to keep his attention on the subject about which he had come. “He would not confide in me despite my concern for him, which, I’m afraid, he chose to regard as feminine curiosity. Last Thursday, his peculiar attitude strengthened to a point of such ill-concealed apprehension that I began to wonder if he were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I advised him to take a rest.”

“Did anything occur last Thursday which might have caused him to worry unduly?”

“Nothing,” she assured with confidence. “Or nothing that might affect him so seriously as to make him unbalanced. Of course, I must admit that he was extremely upset by the news of the death of Doctor Sheridan, but I don’t see why that—”

“Excuse me,” Graham interrupted. “Who was Sheridan?”

“An old friend of Irwin’s. A British scientist. He died last Thursday, of heart disease, I understand.”

“And still they come!” Graham murmured.

“I beg your pardon?” Doctor Curtis opened large, black eyes inquiringly.

“Just a comment,” he evaded. Leaning forward, his muscular features intent, he asked, “Did Irwin have a friend or acquaintance named Fawcett?”

Her eyes widened more. “Oh, yes. He is Doctor Fawcett, the resident specialist at the State Asylum. Surely he cannot be involved in Irwin’s death?”

“Not at all.” He noted the obvious puzzlement which now overlay her normally tranquil pose. He was tempted to take advantage of it and put several more questions he wished to ask, but some queer subconscious quirk, some subtle hint of warning, made him desist. Feeling himself a fool to obey his inward impulses, he went on. “My department has a special interest in your brother’s work, and his unfortunate end has left us with several features to clear up.”

Apparently satisfied, she gave him her cool hand. “Do let me help you.”

He held it until she had to drag it away. “You help by boosting my morale,” he chided.

Leaving her, he ran down the steps leading from the twentieth floor surgery, reached the skyway which ran past mighty building-piles at a level three hundred feet above the ground.

A police gyrocar whined along the skyway, stopped before the surgery just in time to meet him as he got to the bottom of the steps. Lieutenant Wohl thrust his head out of its side window.

Wohl said, “Sangster told me you’d be here. I’ve come to pick you up.” Clambering into the sleek machine, Graham asked, “Has something broken loose? You look like a hound-dog on the scent.”

“One of the boys discovered that Webb’s and Mayo’s last phone calls were both made to some big brain named Professor Dakin.” He pressed the accelerator stud, the two-wheeled speedster plunged forward, its encased gyroscope emitting a faint hum. “This Dakin lives on William Street, right near your own hideout. Know him?”

“Like my own hands. You ought to know him, too.”

“Me? Why?” Wohl whirled the wheel, took a skyway bend with a cop’s official recklessness. The gyrocar kept rigidly upright while its occupants rolled sidewise in their seats. Graham clung to the handrail. Four other drivers on the skyway got the momentary meemies as they bulleted past, glaring after them.

Pulling in some breath, Graham said, “When did the police abandon the moulage method of making casts?”

“Five years back.” Wohl aired his knowledge. “We now photograph impressions with stereoscopic cameras. Impressions on fibrous surfaces are recorded in relief with the aid of the parallel light beam.”

“I know all that. But why is that method now used?”

“Because it’s handier and absolutely accurate.”

“Take it on from there,” suggested Graham.

“It’s been used ever since they found a way to measure stereoscopic depth by means of. .. heck!”—he risked a swift and apologetic glance at his passenger, and concluded—“the Dakin stereoscopic vernier.”

“Correct. This fellow is the Dakin who invented it. My department financed his preliminary work. Frequently we get results for our money.”

Wohl refrained from further comment while he concentrated on handling his machine. William Street slid rapidly toward them, its skyscrapers resembling oncoming giants.

With a sharp turn which produced a yelp of tormented rubber from the rear wheel, the gyrocar spun off the skyway and onto a descending corkscrew. It whirled down the spirals with giddying effect.

They hit ground level still at top pace, and Wohl straightened out, saying, “Those whirligigs sure give me a kick!”

Graham swallowed a suitable remark, his attention caught by the long, low, streamlined, aluminium-bronze shape of an advancing gyrocar. It flashed toward them along William Street, passed with an audible swish of ripped air, shot up the ramp to the corkscrew from which they’d just emerged. As it flashed by, Graham’s sharp eyes registered the pale, haggard face staring fixedly through the machine’s plastiglass windshield.

“There he goes!” exclaimed Graham, urgently. “Quick, Wohl—that was Dakin!”

Frantically spinning his wheel, and turning the gyrocar in its own length, Wohl fed current to the powerful dynamo.

The machine leaped forward, hogged a narrow gap between two descending cars and charged madly up the ramp.

“He’ll be about six turns above us and near the top,” Graham hazarded.

Grunting assent, Wohl muscled his controls as the police speedster spiralled rapidly upward. The fifth twist brought them behind an ancient, four-wheeled automobile holding the center of the chute and laboriously struggling along at a mere thirty.

They gave an impromptu demonstration of the greater mechanical advantage of two wheels with power on both. Cursing violently, Wohl swerved, fed juice, shot around the antiquated obstruction at fifty, leaving its driver jittering in his seat.

Like a monster silver bullet, their vehicle burst from the corkscrew onto the skyway, scattered a flock of private machines, dropped them behind. The speedometer said ninety.

Half a mile ahead, their aluminium-bronze quarry hummed full tilt along the elevated artery and maintained its lead.

Moving his emergency power lever, Wohl grumbled, “This is going to make junk of the batteries.”

The gyrocar surged until its speedometer needle trembled over the hundred mark. The gyroscope’s casing broadcast the angry sound of a million imprisoned bees. A hundred and ten. The tubular steel supports of the skyway railing zipped past like a solid fence, with no intervals apparent between them. One-twenty.

“The Grand Intersection humpback!” Graham shouted, warningly.

“If he hits it at this crazy pace he’ll jump more than a hundred feet,” growled Wohl. He narrowed his eyes as he squinted anxiously forward. “His ’scope will give him a square landing, but it won’t save his tires. One of them will burst for sure. He’s driving like a blithering maniac!”

“That’s what makes it so obvious that something is damnably wrong.” Centrifugal force held Graham’s breath for him as they cut around another decrepit four-wheeler whose driver managed to gesticulate within the split-second available.

“Every jalopy ought to be banned from the skyways,” Wohl snarled. He stared ahead. The shining shape of their quarry was whirling headlong around the shallow bend leading to Grand Intersection. “We’ve gained a bare hundred yards. He’s driving all out, and he’s got a special sports model at that. You’d think someone was chasing him.”

“We
are,” remarked Graham dryly. His eyes sought the rearview mirror while his mind considered the likelihood of Dakin being pursued by someone other than themselves. What was Dakin running from, anyway? What did Mayo take a death-dive to escape? What did Webb shoot at as his dying act of defiance? What wiped out Bjornsen and made Luther expire with a gabble on his lips?

He gave up the fruitless speculation, noted that the road behind was clear of other chasers, raised his eyes as something threw a dark shadow over the gyrocar’s transparent roof. It was a police helicopter hanging from spinning vanes, its landing wheels a yard above the hurtling car.

The two machines raced level for a few seconds. Wohl jabbed an authoritative finger at the police car across his vehicle’s bonnet, then waved urgently toward the crazy car ahead.

Making a swift gesture of comprehension, the helicopter’s pilot gained height and speed. Hopping great roofs, his machine roared through the air in desperate attempt to cut the skyway bend and beat Dakin to the intersection.

Without slackening pace in the slightest, Wohl hit the bend at full one-twenty. Tires shrieked piercingly as they felt the sidewise drag. Graham leaned heavily on the near-side door; Wohl’s bulk pressed crushingly on him.

While centrifugal force held them in that attitude, and the tortured gyroscope strove to keep the machine upright, the tires gave up the battle and the car executed a sickening double-eight. It swooped crabwise across the concrete, missed a dawdling phaeton by a hairsbreadth, flashed between two other gyrocars, wiped the fender off a dancing four-wheeler and slammed into the side. Miraculously, the rails held.

Wohl gaped like a goldfish while he dragged in some air. He nodded toward the hump where the skyway curved over another elevated route which swept past it at right angles.

“Holy smoke!” he gasped. “Look at that.”

From their vantage point four hundred yards away the crest of the hump appeared to bisect the midget windows of a more distant pile of masonry. Dakin’s machine was precisely in the center of the crest with the police helicopter hovering impotently over it.

The fleeing car did not sink in perspective below the crest as it should have done in normal circumstances. It seemed to float slowly into the air until it reached the tops of the bisected windows and exposed a line of panes between its wheels and the crest. There, for one long second, it poised below the helicopter, apparently suspended in defiance of the law of gravity. Then, with still the same uncanny slowness, it sank from sight.

“Mad!” breathed Graham. He dabbed perspiration from his forehead. “Utterly and completely mad!”

He rolled his window downward until a deep dent in its plastiglass prevented it from descending farther. Both men listened intently, apprehensively. From over the crest came a short, sharp sound of rending metal, a few seconds of silence, then a muffled crash.

Without a word they struggled out of their battered gyrocar, sprinted along the skyway, over the long, smooth hump. They found a dozen machines, mostly modern gyrocars, drawn up beside a thirty-foot gap in the rails. White-faced drivers were grasping twisted railposts while they bent over and peered into the chasm beneath.

Shouldering through, Graham and Wohl looked down. Far below, on the side of the street opposite the lower and transverse skyway, a mass of shapeless metal made a tragic heap on the sidewalk. The face of the building that reared itself ten floors from the spot bore deep marks scored by the wreckage on its way down. The ruts of the road to oblivion.

A rubbernecking driver jabbered to nobody in particular, “Terrible! Terrible! He must have been clean out of his mind! He came over like a shell from a monster gun, smacked the side-rails, went right through and into that building. I heard him land down there.” He licked dry lips. “Like a bug in a can. What a wallop! Terrible!”

The speaker’s emotions were voiced for the rest. Graham could sense their awe, their horror. He could sense the excitement, the sadistic thirst, the corporate soul-stirring of the inevitable mob now gathering three hundred feet below. Mob hysteria is contagious, he thought, as he felt it rising like an invisible and hellish incense. One could get drunk on it. Men who were cold sober individually could be drunk collectively; drunk on mass-emotions. Emotions—the unseen intoxicant!

Another feeling drove away these morbid thoughts as fascinatedly he continued to stare downward: a feeling of guilty fear, like that of a man holding dangerous and punishable opinions in some far country where men are hanged for harboring the wrong thoughts. The sensation was so strong and emphatic that he made a mighty effort to discipline his mind. Dragging his gaze from the scene beneath, he nudged Wohl into attention.

“There’s nothing we can do. You’ve reached the end of Dakin’s trail and that’s that! Let’s get going.”

Reluctantly, Wohl backed away from the gap. Noticing the defeated helicopter landing on the skyway, he hastened toward it.

“Wohl, homicide squad,” he said, briefly. “Call Center Station on your shortwave, will you, and ask them to have my machine towed in for repairs. Tell them I’ll phone a report through shortly.”

Returning to the still gaping group of drivers, he questioned them, found one who was bound for William Street. This fellow had an ancient four-wheeler capable of a noisy fifty. Wohl accepted a lift with becoming condescension, climbed in crinkling his nose in disgust.

“Some move with the times, some jump ahead of the moment, and some just stay put.” He picked disdainfully at the worn leatherette on which he was sitting. “This hell-buster has stayed put since Tut built the pyramids.”

“Tut didn’t,” Graham contradicted.

“Tut's brother, then. Or his uncle. Or his sub-contractor. Who cares?” His head jerked backward as the driver let in a jumpy clutch and the car creaked forward. He uttered a potent name, looked aggrieved, said to Graham, “I’m letting you tote me around because, being just another wage-slave, I’ve got to do as I’m told. But I’ve still no notion of what you’re seeking, if anything. Does your department know something special that isn’t for publication?”

“We know nothing more than you do. It all started with me having some vague suspicions, and my superiors backing them up.” He gazed speculatively at the cracked and yellowish windshield. “I first smelled the skunk. For my pains, I’ve now got to dig out the stinker—or sing small.”

“Well, I’ve got to hand it to you for getting hunches and having the nerve to play them.” He bounced around on his seat, said complainingly, “Look, homicide on the job, in a jalopy! That’s where it gets us. Everybody dies, and even we’re in a corpse-wagon.” He bounced again, hard. “I can see by the way things are shaping that I’ll finish up playing with feathers and treacle. But I’m with you as long as I stay sane.”