Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (123 page)

“You know what you’re to do?” he asked. They nodded. He jerked a thumb upward, reminding them of the observers twenty floors above, peering across two streets and a wrecked block, and into Sangster’s office.

“The boys say there are no luminosities in that office, so it’s evident that we have to deal only with dupes. I’m going in. You fellows have got to help me get out.

Again they nodded. None could see any reason why Graham should be so keen to risk his life, but it was enough for them that he intended to do just that; They were prepared to play their part.

“All right, fellows—I’m on my way.”

“Me, too,” announced Wohl, stepping forward.

“For heaven’s sake, keep out of this, Art. We don’t know what sort of reactions these proxies have. Hetty was a pal of mine, but she doesn’t know you from Adam. If you barge in with me you may ball up the works. ”

“Oh, damn!” said Wohl.

With a grin for his disappointed companion, Graham hastened out, crossed the intervening space under the watching glasses of his observers above, entered Bank of Manhattan. Five men were lounging around the dusty, neglected foyer. Disregarding them, he walked boldly to the pneumatic levitators, ascended to the twenty-fourth floor.

No more loungers were in sight on this level, but he felt that crazy and somewhat corpselike eyes were watching him as he thrust open the door of the Department of Special Finance.

With a casual, “ Lo, Hetty!” he closed the door behind him. His keen eyes examined the room, noted the closed door of Sangster’s private sanctum, the closed doors of a large cupboard nearby. Sangster himself was not in evidence. Perhaps the girl had told the truth about him.

Outside, a war-worn clock struck twenty in cracked and off-tone chimes. It was precisely five.

Seating himself on a corner of her desk, he swung a nonchalant leg to and fro. “I’ve been busy, Hetty, as busy as the very devil, else I’d have been in to see you before now. Things are shaping for the showdown—I hope!”

“In what way?” She didn’t add, “Bill,” as was her habit.

“We’re about to produce an anti-Viton weapon at last.”

“In short waves?” she asked. Her eyes looked into his, and hair erected on the back of his neck when he saw the emptiness of her formerly lively pupils, a dreadful, soulless emptiness that made her no longer interested in masculine small talk, feminine fripperies or any of her oldtime conversational subjects. Her interests now were different, appallingly different—anti-Viton weapons, and short waves, plus Graham himself as her masters’ fall guy.

“Sure!” He stared fascinatedly at her mechanical features. It was hellish to think that this was no longer the vivacious girl once he had known, that this familiar form had become a fleshly robot. “We’re searching way down in the centimeters. We’ve divided a broad band between many groups of experimenters. An army like that can’t fail to strike oil.”

“That is heartening,” she commented in a voice totally devoid of tone. Her pale, blue-veined hands fumbled in her lap, below the edge of her desk, out of his sight. “Do you know where these groups are, and which lines they’re trying?”

Triumph mounted within him as she put this childishly apparent question. It was as he’d expected—this poor, warped brain was working obediently along a single track, mechanically following the course on which it had been set. There was cunning here—but no cleverness. Even a moron would have seen through her query.

A twofold duty had been placed upon her: firstly, to bait the trap; secondly, to obtain essential information before giving the death signal. Obviously, the fearful operation to which her protesting mind had been subjected had not endowed her with telepathic powers—if luminosities could so endow their victims. At any rate, she was quite unaware of his shrewd perception.

Hard put to it to conceal his eagerness, he told her, “Although there are a lot of experimental groups, Hetty, I know the location of them all, every one of them.” It was a downright, thumping lie, and he told it with no compunction, making it in boastful tones. “You’ve only got to suggest a wavelength and I can tell you who’s about to try it, and where.”

The dummy responded by betraying her manipulators; her poor, distorted brain was too automatic for guile. “Point five centimeters,” she responded, speaking the words as if they had been engraved upon her tortured mind. Her hands slid forward, reached under her desk. She was making ready for the information—and his reward.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Graham growled. He was on his feet and around her desk before she could move.

Putting out his hands to grab her, he saw the door to Sangster’s room whip open, and a menacing figure charge toward him. He flung himself forward and down; his automatic was in his hand as he hit the floor. The maniacal invader paused, took sloppy aim, and the sound of his shot was terrific in the confined space.

Things catapulted over Graham’s flat back. The cupboard door swung wide. Momentarily ignoring the first attacker, he blasted at the gap in the cupboard, saw splinters fly from the edges, knew that all four bullet sections had gone inside.

A whooping figure bowed low in the opening, bent farther, spewed a bloody froth. It toppled full length, its gory torso a sudden barrier in the path of his crazy fellow.

Profiting by his peril, Hetty lugged out a drawer, snatched something from it. She leaned over her desk toward Graham, her blank, unemotional eyes lined along the sights of a tiny old-fashioned revolver. Her knuckles whitened. The desk erupted beneath her when with a desperate thrust Graham heaved it over from his side. The little gun spat upward as Hetty toppled in her chair, and its slug went into the ceiling.

Feet were hammering along the passage outside, and someone was bellowing oaths near the levitator shafts. Graham swayed upward with the lithe grace of a striking cobra, fired simultaneously with his first attacker. His left arm jumped involuntarily and went red-hot, but his assailant dropped like a slaughtered steer.

Behind him, the door burst inward, revealed two intelligence operatives, weapons in hand. Hard, explosive noises twanged from the end of the passage. One missile struck metal, whined shrilly as it went on end over end. Two more thudded into the wooden frame of the door; a third clunked softly into flesh. The shorter of the two operatives choked, spat, choked again, leaned weakly against the wall, slid down. He finished in a sitting position, the gun sliding from his fingers, his head lolling forward.

“Full of them!” swore the other. “The place is crammed with them.” Peering leftward around the weapons, he sent two quick shots down the passage. A volley of shots from the right went in the same direction, and in the following few seconds of silence, four more operatives slipped into the room.

“Move fast!” urged Graham. “I want this girl out!”

Whirling around with the intention of grabbing Hetty and bearing her away bodily, he caught a glimpse of distant blue through the open window. “Vitons!” There were about twenty of the shining spheres, shooting along one behind the other like a string of immense beads, aiming directly for the room, and nearing swiftly. The shepherds were coming to the aid of their dogs.

More feet thundered recklessly along the passage. His companions opened fire as he sprang toward the door. The sitting operative pawed blindly for his gun, fell on his side, closed his eyes and dribbled blood.

Thumps, groans and mad, pathetic mouthings sounded in the corridor. The next instant, a swarm of staring dupes were in the room. They made their assault with complete disregard for personal safety and with the energetic lack of organization of automatons on the loose. They were robots conditioned only to kill, somehow, anyhow.

A colorless face in which blank eyes goggled ghoulishly came close to Graham’s own. Its lopsided mouth was oozing saliva. He hit it with every ounce he possessed. The face vanished as if snatched into the cosmos. Another replaced it and he promptly smacked it to the floor.

Somebody lifted a crazy, face-twitching body, hurled it halfway across the room. A stricken dupe writhed snakishly on the floor, snatched at Grahams left leg. He used his right to kick the other’s schnozzle into something resembling a squashed strawberry. An operative’s gun roared close to his ear, deafening him, and filling his nostrils with the stink of cordite.

The mad melee swept him out of the uproarious office, along the passage to the levitator shafts. A weight descended crushingly on his shoulder, a thousand hands seemed to be reaching for him at once.

He saw Sheehan, an operative, shove the muzzle of his gun straight into a slobbering mouth and let her blow. Gobs of noggin, slop and goo flew in all directions as the part-headless victim toppled under his stamping feet. Far behind him, or in front, or in some direction—he didn’t know where—a voice was hollering something about Vitons. He bulled into the horde of dupes, his struggles more maniacal than their own. Then the whole of existence became an inferno of raging fire through which he sank and sank and sank until every sound had ceased.

Easing the bandage around his head, Graham gazed at the distant pile of the Bank of Manhattan, then turned to the others.

“How the devil did we manage to get out of that mess? What happened?”

“Me and my pair had five on our hands in the foyer,” explained Wohl. He fondled a damaged knee, winced. “We heard the shenanigans upstairs come echoing down the levitator shafts as the other six went to your aid. A short time later, two of them came down like bats out of hell, bringing you with them. You’d been conked, and I’ll say you looked lousy!” He favored the knee again, muttered an oath. “Your stretcher-bearers said they’d got out one jump ahead of visiting luminosities.”

“And Hetty?”

“There!” Wohl handed him a pair of field glasses. “She went Mayo’s way.”

“What, flung herself out?” Wohl’s answering nod plunged him into thought.

So the duty imposed upon that poor, warped mind had been a threefold one— she was to end herself with her usefulness.

He was moody as he looked at the tragic bundle on that far sidewalk. In a little while, they’d pick her up and send her to decent repose. Meanwhile, it was fortunate that they’d got out fast and in the nick of time, for once again they were unidentifiable among New York’s slinking, wary millions.

Short of sheer chance, or the aid of a dupe, they were as difficult to pick out as individual bees in a mighty swarm. There was good parallelism in an imaginary revolt of the bees. The same elusiveness would protect from superior mankind the few intellectual insects who were seeking a means of replacing formic acid with Black Widow venom. If it came to that, they were bees—bees whose nervous honey was not for others.

He said to Wohl, “Two brought me down? Only
two
?” His inquiring eyes moved to the four disheveled operatives standing near, and two of them fidgeted uneasily, “What of the other four—were they killed?”

“A couple of them were.” One of the restless pair waved his hand toward the Bank of Manhattan. “Bathurst and Craig stayed behind.”

“Why?”

“Most of the dupes were scattered, wounded or dead, but the Vitons were entering. They were coming in at the top while we were trying to get you out at the bottom. So Bathurst and Craig hung back, and—” His voice trailed off.

“Decoyed them, knowing there could be no escape?” Graham suggested. The other nodded assent.

Two had remained to attract the still invincible but overeager foe; to run and shriek and shriek and die—or become dupes in their turn. They had raced higher in the building, knowing that they would never reach the top, but knowing that by the time their recoiling minds were seized and analyzed, the others would be safely merged in the concealing mass of humanity.

It was a sacrifice made for him. There was no comment Graham could make that would not sound fatuous, and he knew that none was asked or expected. In the tradition of the service, two intelligence operatives had done their duty as they deemed it—and that was that!

Rubbing his throbbing left arm, he lifted the thin bandage beneath the sleeve. A mere flesh wound.

Wohl said, “Let that be a lesson to you: don’t rush in where angels fear to tread. It buys you nothing but grief.”

“I’m hoping it’s bought us salvation,” Graham retorted. Taking no notice of Wohl’s mystification, he turned to the four operatives.

“You two,” he said, selecting a pair, “beat it out to Yonkers. You won’t be able to get there direct—there’s hard radiation across the route. It may be necessary to take a roundabout road. But you must get there at all costs.”

“We’ll make it, never worry,” assured one.

“Okay. Tell Steve Koenig he’s to try point five centimeters sooner than immediately, and that’s a hot tip. You’d better split and go different ways if you can: it will double your chances of getting through. Remember—point five centimeters. That’s all that Koenig will want to know.” He addressed the other couple. “Marconi’s have established their underground plant at Queens end of the low-level city. They’re fiddling around on their own, without orders from Washington, but they could use the information I’ve got. So rush along and tell Deacon we’ve reason to believe that point five centimeters is the critical wavelength.”

“Yes, Mr. Graham,” answered one.

He spoke to all four. “You’d better say, too, that if either of them gain success they’ll have to move fast if they want to stay in business. They’ll have to protect their own plant with the first installation they produce, and then the stations from which they draw power. Then—and not until then!—they can supply official demands. Tell them it’s absolutely essential that they refuse to be moved by any bureaucratic panic until they’ve protected their own plants and power stations. D’you understand?”

“Sure, Mr. Graham.” They went out, cautiously, yet fast.

Grimness was in the set of his jaws when he remarked to Wohl, “If we discover a way to turn out suitable weapons, we’re not going to have them destroyed at the source.”

“That’s logical,” agreed Wohl. He cocked a questioning eye. “You’ve found something, Bill?”