Johnny Graphic and the Etheric Bomb (6 page)

A little over an hour later, he and Mel found themselves in a windowless meeting room in the bowels of the National Office Building. The man who had taken them off the aeroboat—Managing Agent Wilton Crider of the National Police Bureau—trod through the door. Behind him came a tall, meaty man in a black suit. Except for a little white pencil mustache, he didn’t have a hair on his head, not even eyebrows. The man’s left hand twitched constantly.

“This is Assistant Director Santangelo of the Ministry of Etheristics,” said the pugnacious, red-haired Crider. He plopped down across the table from Mel. “Miss Graphic, I need you and your brother to tell me—”

“We haven’t done anything wrong!” Johnny snapped.

“No one said you did,” replied Crider.

Johnny didn’t care for this situation one bit. It was terrifically unfair. He was a member of the press and they couldn’t haul him off like this unless they were going to arrest him. They couldn’t keep Mel and him from talking with their Uncle Louie and Johnny’s colleagues from the
Clarion
. But they had.

“Then why’re you keeping us here?” Johnny grumbled.

“You and your sister are material witnesses in a criminal investigation,” said Crider. “Let’s just begin at the beginning,
Miss Graphic. Tell me about the Hausenhofer Gesellschaft.”

Mel nodded tiredly. “Before he died in the Great War, Oskar Hausenhofer posed a question: Just how, scientifically speaking, can wraiths touch and affect the physical world? Some kind of physics is operating here and there has to be a rational answer. Our small group looks for that explanation.”

“And what have you actually discovered?” sneered Santangelo. “Scientifically speaking.” His left hand continued to twitch incessantly.

Johnny, as a rule, liked most of the people he met—alive or dead. He thought of himself as a friendly sort of person. But this Santangelo character somehow gave him the creeps. And not just because he was showing Mel that snotty attitude. This guy wasn’t to be trusted.

“Have we uncovered the basic secrets of the ether?” asked Mel, scowling at the bald man. “No. But thanks to the work of my parents, we’ve harnessed the intrinsic glow of ghosts to allow them to prospect for metals far underground and to diagnose illness inside living human bodies. I was flying to La Concha to work on an etheric photo film that might let us photograph wraiths.”

“But you still don’t know the basic science,” the bald man said. “You still can’t tell us why an oral contract between etherist and ghost allows the ghost to operate in this dimension.”

“That may be true,” Mel allowed. “But I fail to see how that has any bearing on this series of terrible murders. Or on the attempted mass murder of the innocent people on the Night Goose.”

“There’ve been two more Gesellschaft killings overnight, Miss Graphic,” Crider said grimly.

Mel almost came up out of her chair. “No! Who?”

Crider took a telegram out of his pocket and unfolded it. “John Addison in Neuport. Machine-gunned to death by a gangster ghost. And Hans Wallin in the Duchy of Steinberg. You would have been the ninth.”

Mel’s chin began to quiver and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Johnny reached over and patted her arm. She sure has had a bad night, he thought. But there would be no “I told you so” from his direction.

Crider let Mel collect herself, then continued. “Is there anything that members of your group could have done or written about that could be perceived as a threat by others? I’m trying to get at the possibility of a motive for these crimes.”

Still sniffling a bit, Mel said, “I’ve read every article ever published in
The Annals of the Hausenhofer Gesellschaft
, and I can’t imagine anything our members have said that could provoke others.”

Johnny looked across the table at Crider and Santangelo, and felt pretty proud of Mel. She was holding her own against these two tough guys. But then, he always knew she had guts. He’d seen plenty of that in the days after Mom and Pop were lost.

“Here’s an idea,” Mel said, sitting up straighter in her chair. “Why would a ghost be willing to do such bloody work? What reward would motivate him? Of course, the ghost of a psychopath or some other monster might enjoy killing again. But most of these murders are being done by dead soldiers—men of discipline. What would motivate them? I’m wondering if we have to consider the Two Impossible Things.”

Crider looked puzzled. “The Two Impossible Things?”

“They’re practically an obsession for ghosts,” Mel explained in a rush. “Approximately ninety-seven percent of living humans who die move on to heaven or the great unknown or whatever you want to call it. Their spirits, souls, essences are gone, vanished from this world and the ether. No one knows where they go or how. But the remaining three percent end up as ghosts.”

“And the Impossible Things?” asked Crider.

“The First Impossible Thing is to become alive again. The Second Impossible Thing is to pass over to the great unknown. No human or animal ghost has ever returned to life, nor passed from the ether into the unknown realm. So far as we know.”

Johnny regarded his sister with admiration. Did that girl have a big brain, or what? It made perfect sense. What else would a ghost really want, but to get out of the ether?

“You’re suggesting that someone has figured out how to achieve one of the Impossible Things?” said Crider. “And he’s using that to reward these wraiths?”

Mel thought about it for a few seconds, then nodded. “I suppose I am.”

Chapter 11

The very moment Johnny sauntered into the sprawling
Zenith Clarion
newsroom, his fedora tipped at a rakish angle, people started shouting from all over.

“Johnny-boy, glad you’re okay!”

“Way to go, kiddo!”

“We got the exclusive, right?”

Reporters, editors, copyeditors, copy girls and boys, secretaries, and sub-editors mobbed Johnny as if he were a baseball hero or a movie star. His back was slapped too many times to count. I could get used to this, he thought. All that’s missing is the brass band.

No one paid much attention to Uncle Louie, Nina, and Mel, who trailed in after Johnny. Uncle Louie and Nina had extracted the two siblings from a scrum of reporters and photographers on the front steps of the National Building. Then they drove directly over to the Clarion skyscraper on First Avenue.

From the far end of the newsroom came a hoarse, powerful bellow. “Back to work, people.”

Johnny’s eyes swiveled around.

Standing in front of his glassed-in office was Carlton Cargill, the
Zenith Clarion
’s editor-in-chief. An unlit cigar rolled from one side of his mouth to the other, and back again. His face looked flushed and angry. But Johnny remembered that the chief’s face always looked flushed and angry. Maybe it was because he always wore suits that fit his fireplug figure a little too tightly.

“Blast it, let the kid through,” Mr. Cargill ordered. “We’ve got business to conduct.”

Out of nowhere, Maude Beale appeared and took Johnny by the arm, shooing the crowd out of their way. “I haven’t seen Mr. Cargill this excited since the Vivaldi quintuplets story,” the managing editor whispered in Johnny’s ear.

Johnny turned back around and gestured to Mel, Uncle Louie, and Nina to follow him.

They all trooped across the newsroom—its dozens of typewriters now clacking away—and Johnny introduced the others to Mr. Cargill and Miss Beale. The chief ushered them into his office, which looked out on the skyline of Zenith. The four visitors plopped down on the sofa.

“Hamburgers, fries, and sodas are on the way,” Mr. Cargill said, sitting down facing them. “Thought you might be hungry after your little powwow with Agent Crider.”

The chief turned to Miss Beale, who perched on the corner of his desk. “Have you briefed Johnny and his sister yet?” His cigar was still rolling back and forth.

“Not in any detail, Chief,” Miss Beale said. She briefly readjusted her loden green felt cap, with its gorgeous pheasant feather angled jauntily to the rear.

Mr. Cargill took the cigar out of his mouth and held it like a pencil. “I admit I was dubious about you at first, Johnny,” the gruff editor said. “A twelve-year-old kid shooting news? But you’ve produced the goods. Never seen a young shaver take to the business so quickly. And that trick of yours, riding the ghost horse. Splendid! Swell picture, too—those goofball sewermen playing their cards and drinking their beers on the city’s dime.”

Johnny shrugged modestly. “Just doing my job, Chief.”

“Now, Melanie, Johnny,” the editor continued, suddenly looking very serious. “You kids don’t have to give the
Clarion
an exclusive for the Night Goose story. You could walk down the street to the
Herald-Tribune
or the
Journal
and get a couple of nice, fat checks. But what happened last night is the biggest news out of Zenith since the Vivaldi quintuplets were born here last year.”

Miss Beale winked at Johnny:
see, toldja
. Johnny grinned back.

“And I want your story in the
Clarion,
” Mr. Cargill said. “We’ll give you both contracts and a nice hunk of cash.”

Johnny was excited, almost vibrating. This could be a huge break, a dream come true. A contract meant he was halfway to getting on the
Clarion
payroll as a staff photographer. And there was hardly anything he wanted more.

“I think we should do it, Mel,” he said. “I think something big’s going on, and it’s real important that people find out what happened. Nobody could tell this story better than you and me.”

Johnny knew Mel had hoped that when the Gesellschaft hit the front pages, it would be with some huge discovery that would benefit mankind. She had told him—as the Night Goose limped back to Zenith—that she didn’t approve of the idea of writing about ghosts as thugs and assassins. It would only reinforce the bad feelings that many of the living had toward specters. And Johnny understood that prejudice against ghosts was way too common. Was it their fault they died and got stuck in the ether?

So he was surprised and cheered by Mel’s response.

“I think Johnny’s right when he says something big is going on,” the exhausted etherist agreed. “This’ll give us a chance to explain why the Hausenhofer Gesellschaft matters. And why we have to get to the bottom of this terrible plot.”

She looked from Johnny to Uncle Louie to Mr. Cargill and gritted her teeth.

“Let’s do it,” she said. “Do you have a typewriter I can use?”

Chapter 12

Late that evening Mrs. Lundgren greeted her two “babies” on the front porch with hugs and kisses and blubberings. She said she’d listened to radio news reports and had been dreadfully worried. “But you’re safe now,” said the ghost housekeeper, as they all trooped inside.

Within a matter of minutes she had whipped up some chicken sandwiches and plopped the plates down on the kitchen table. Uncle Louie filled everyone’s glasses with root beer, then nodded to Nina. “Old Bean, you do the honors.”

Nina hoisted up her glass. “A toast to the illustrious Miss Melanie Graphic, for valor and bravery in the face of extraordinary danger.”

“To my big sister,” Johnny added with a grin.

They clinked their glasses all around and took hearty slurps.

Johnny heard a mild “harumph” from the far corner of the kitchen. He and Mel turned their heads simultaneously. Colonel MacFarlane stood next to the pantry door, snapping to attention and saluting. “To the commander,
huzzah!”
he barked in that odd, papery voice of his. “The bravest woman I’ve ever known, alive or dead!”

Mel forced a weak smile. “Well, it didn’t seem brave at the time. Stupid, more like.”

Everyone tut-tutted her and said that no,
brave
she had been and they would take no guff on that point.

After the sandwiches and potato chips had been thoroughly demolished, Mel yawned a prodigious yawn. “Johnny and I have been mostly awake for forty hours. I just want to climb into bed and sleep for a year or two. But first, I have a question for my kid brother.”

Johnny sat up straighter. He had a bad feeling about this.

“Why,” Mel asked, narrowing her eyes, “did you put that mustache on me?”

Mel was scowling at him and so were Uncle Louie and Nina. Even the colonel and Mrs. Lundgren didn’t look too happy with him.

Feeling his cheeks redden, Johnny knew he had no one to blame but himself. “You were out like a light. And it was
soooooo
tempting. And…” He trailed off. “You’re not still mad, are you?”

“Normally, a stunt like this means you’re washing dishes every night for a month,” Mel said, still looking grim.

Uncle Louie nodded gravely and took a long sip of his root beer.

Johnny was genuinely appalled.

“And no radio,” Mel continued.

“No radio?” A shock wave went through Johnny’s body. How could a guy live without his radio? No
Duke Donegan Show
? No
Gang Buster Adventures
? No football games?

Mel crossed her arms sternly. “But right now what you’re going to get is—”

Johnny cringed.

Mel jumped out of her chair, pulled her brother to his feet, and gave him a bear hug. Then she planted a big, embarrassing kiss on his forehead.

Johnny squirmed out of his sister’s grasp. She’s gone totally crackers! Rubber room material!

Suddenly, everyone was laughing.

“Okay, Mr. Graphic,” Mel teased. “Let’s go over what happened when the Steppe Warrior was getting ready to slice and dice me.”

Johnny thought back to those very memorable moments on the Night Goose. “Okay, you were at the front of the cabin and shouted at the ghost. The Steppe Warrior turned and walked toward you. He had his sword out. But instead of moving in for the kill, he stopped and laughed. If he hadn’t stopped—”

“And why did he stop and laugh?” asked Mel.

Johnny thought about it, then a big grin burst out. “He was surprised by the mustache. On a girl!”