The Mindwarpers Read online

  “Pretty good reasons, if you ask me.”

  “I am not asking you. The reasons were not the whole truth and we know it—but we don’t know what the whole truth is. We first found Henderson in Calumet. He was questioned. A month later he sold his business and cleared out. A couple of weeks ago we managed to trace him again. We got a lead to another small hardware business at Lakeside and sure enough he was running that one. So we’re keeping an eye on him from a discreet distance. He has an ulterior motive for avoiding official attention. So have you!”

  Bransome simulated complete boredom and silently gazed through the window.

  “You were in a jam and had to go to Buries ton to find a way out. I don’t know what shape or form that escape was supposed to take but it’s my bet that you didn’t find it. So where does that put you? It puts you right back where you started. You’re still in a jam. You scooted from home and ran around Burleston like a trapped rat and it hasn’t done you one bit of good.”

  “Oh, shut up!” Bransome growled.

  “The devil on your back did not obligingly dismount in Burleston as you’d hoped he would. He hung on tight and he’s still riding you. He’ll go on riding until you come to your senses and let someone else pull him off, someone better able to get at him. For a start, all you need do is open your mouth and name him.”

  “Pardon me.” Bransome stood up and offered a weary smile. “I want to see a dog about a man.”

  With that he got up from the seat before the surprised Reardon could decide what to do about it. A pretext for stopping him or insisting on accompanying him was not easy to think up in a split second. After all, he was not under arrest and had not been charged with a crime. As of that moment he was free, adult and ordinary, with the status of a normal passenger on a normal train.

  Out of one eye as he turned to hasten along the corridor he saw Reardon come to his feet, slowed by indecision. Speeding up, he went to the toilet, fastened its door, opened its window and had a quick look out. Then he clambered through the window. For a couple of seconds he stood with his feet on the window-ledge, his fingertips hooked in the guttering of the coach roof, his body buffeted by the train’s slipstream. He flung himself away.

  SEVEN:

  HE HIT a heavily grassed bank sloping steeply downward. Although he managed to land on his feet his forward momentum and the sharp angle of the bank sent him tumbling diagonally down the slope in a series of violent rolls during which he did his best to keep himself curled into a ball. The world rotated around him and thumped him all over. The bank seemed to be a mile high and he thought he was never going to reach the bottom of it. Eventually he landed with a crash in a dry ditch, breathless and dirty, his nostrils choked with dust.

  For a short time he lay there gasping for air, sneezing repeatedly and listening to the dying vibrations along the overhead track. The train showed no sign of stopping; steadily it pounded onward bearing a thwarted Reardon who was losing distance with every second that it took him to swing into action. Reardon might well be carried twenty miles or more before he could make sure of Bransome’s getaway and do something about it.

  Or had the sharp-eyed agent anticipated the leap for liberty and taken a dive himself? Bransome came erect in the ditch, straightening himself slowly and apprehensively lest he suddenly feel the agony of a broken bone. He felt himself all over, finding no damage other then to his clothes. The escape could not have been better performed had he been doing it for the movies.

  That last thought came back a second time as if to lend itself emphasis: it couldn’t have been better performed had he been doing it for the movies. His mind gave another jolt, one hard enough to make him pause as he was about to scramble from the ditch. The movies? The movies?

  Strange that a random idea about motion pictures should hit him like that. Once upon a time he’d considered the movies in an absent kind of way much as one thinks of dogs or doughnuts, hats or hamburgers or any other commonplace appurtenances of civilization. But now it was different without any obvious reason for the difference. Now he though of movies with a peculiar sense of strain that wasn’t exactly fear or terror; it was something else, something he couldn’t quite identify. The nearest he could get to defining his mental attitude was to say that the concept of motion pictures was accompanied by a sense of basic incongruity or of something that violated a fundamental law in a way that hurt him personally.

  Perhaps Reardon had been right in suggesting that he was off his head or rapidly going that way. Perhaps as his mental condition became worse he would experience weird thoughts and have cockeyed reactions every hour instead of a few times a week. Then in the end he would live in a hell of illusions beyond the bars of which a tearful Dorothy would be seen only in rational moments.

  Climbing from the ditch, he scrambled up the bank and looked along the railroad track. The train had gone from sight and no scratched and dust-covered Reardon was visible to provide unwelcome company. Satisfied with that, he took another inward look at himself and decided that no matter what might be wrong with him it wasn’t insanity. When he made the effort to control his emotions he could study himself objectively and decide that he was not crazy, he was merely a man with an abnormal load of worry on his mind and he had to get rid of it by any means he could devise.

  Walking back along the track he came eventually to a bridge over a dirt road. He left the track, went down the bank and onto the road. Which direction would be best to take was a matter of guesswork and he had no time to sit around and wait for information from a rare passer-by. It was a sure bet that before long Rearaon’s inquisitive gaze would be going over a large-scale map while he figured out the points at which the fugitive might be intercepted.

  So he turned to the left and half-walked, half-ran for two miles along the narrow, rutted way. Here he joined a better surfaced secondary road, turned left again and ten minutes later was picked up by a farm truck overloaded with vegetables. Showing no interest whatever in his passenger’s identity or purposes, the laconic driver took him twenty miles to town and dropped him with a curt nod.

  This place, the nearest to his escape-point, was or soon would be a dangerous area in which he’d be foolish to linger. He caught the next bus out, thanking the gods because—having abandoned his suitcase on the train—he still retained his wallet and his money.

  The bus covered sixty miles before reaching a fairly large town. Conscious of his scruffy appearance, Bransome stopped there long enough to wash, shave and brush up. It did much to help his confidence. He followed it with a meal that restored his energy. From the restaurant he returned to the bus terminal, passing two cops on the way. Both policemen were idling on corners, and neither took undue note of him or registered so much as mild curiosity. Evidently the alarm had not yet reached this far, though it might come at any time.

  An express bus was soon to leave for a city seventy-five miles to the east. He took it and arrived without incident and became an elusive unit in the crowds. Nothing helps anonymity more than to become lost in a very large herd.

  In this city he was quite a jump nearer home. Home! He found himself longing to hear and talk to the voice that personified home. For all he knew his domestic phone might be tapped, its incoming calls monitored and suspicious ones traced. A call to Dorothy might give official listeners a rough idea of his present whereabouts. But it was a risk he wanted to take for the sake of the lift it would give to his morale. Besides, this city would be difficult to search, far more so than small places like Burleston and Hanbury. If he used his wits he could live here for a month with every cop in the place looking for him.

  A bank of phone booths stood in the hall of the central post office. Choosing the middle one, he put his call through. Dorothy answered at once.

  He did his best to make his voice sound cheerful and heartening as he greeted, “Hi, sweet! This is your absent lover.”

  “Rich!” she exclaimed. “I was expecting to hear from you last night.”

 
; “You had a narrow escape. I intended to call but couldn’t make it. A gabby character monopolized my time. So I decided to phone today. Better late than never, eh?”

  “Yes, of course. How are you making out? Are you feeling better?”

  “Topnotch,” he lied. “What goes there?”

  “We’re okay. Everything is as usual—except that there’ve been a couple of odd incidents.”

  “What happened?”

  “The day after you left somebody phoned, allegedly from the plant, and wanted to know where you’d gone.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The query seemed strange to me seeing that you’d gone on official instructions. So I told this caller to ask in the appropriate department.”

  “How did he like that?”

  “I don’t think he did like it,” said Dorothy, her tones expressing a touch of anxiety. “He cut off as if annoyed. Oh, Rich, I hope I haven’t riled someone important.”

  “You did quite right,” he soothed.

  “That’s not all,” she went on. “A couple of hours later two men called here. They said they were from the plant’s security Section and showed me a document to prove it. One was a tall, lean, beady-eyed type, the other a dose-cropped and slightly over-muscled character. They told me I had no cause for alarm and that they were doing some routine cross-checking. Then they asked whether you’d told me where you were going and, if so, what you’d said about it So I told them you’d gone to Burleston but had not offered any reason. They said that was quite satisfactory and they chatted a short time and left. They were pleasant enough in a deadpan kind of way.”

  “Anything more?”

  “Yes. The following morning a big, heavily built man knocked at the door. He asked for you and somehow I felt that he knew quite well that you weren’t here. I told him you’d gone away for a short while. He wanted to know where and for how long. He wouldn’t give me his name or state his business and I didn’t like his evasiveness—so I suggested he go ask his questions at the plant. I got the impression that he didn’t care to do that, I can’t imagine why. Anyway, I got rid of him.”

  “Probably it was the fellow who’d phoned the day before,” guessed Bransome, mulling it over.

  “I don’t think it was the same man. His voice sounded quite different.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Being observant, she was able to describe the visitor in some detail. The resulting picture bore a close resemblance to the individual who had stared at him in the snack bar’s mirror and had followed him home a couple of times. Offhand, he could not think of anyone else coining closer to Dorothy’s description.

  “And he wouldn’t say why he wanted to see me?”

  “No, Rich.” She paused, went on, “Perhaps I’m being silly about this but at the time I felt convinced that he didn’t really wish to see you at all. He wanted to make sure that you weren’t here, that you’d actually gone away. I got the definite impression that he expected me to refuse further information and wasn’t surprised or disappointed when I did.”

  “Could be.”

  “He was most polite, I’ll give him his due for that He was smooth and courteous in the way that some foreigners are.”

  “Huh?” Bransome pricked up his ears. “You think he was a foreigner?”

  “I’m sure of it. He had the mannerisms. He spoke with complete fluency but had a slightly guttural accent.”

  “Did you phone the two from the plant and tell them about this?”

  “No, Rich, I didn’t. Should I have? There didn’t seem to be anything worth telling.”

  “Forget it—it’s not important.”

  He gossiped a bit more, learned how the children were behaving, swapped a little badinage, warned her that his return home might be delayed a few days. Hanging up, he left the booth in a hurry, feeling that his call had taken dangerously long. He walked the streets while stewing over this latest information and wondering what it really meant.

  If the last mysterious visitor were in fact the person he suspected him to be, and if Dorothy’s instinct ran true in identifying him as a foreigner, his original diagnosis must be wrong. The fellow was not a cop in plain clothes or an official agent of any kind. He was a watcher, no doubt of that, but not one appointed by authority.

  So firstly someone had phoned, supposedly from the plant, and got no satisfaction. Then Reardon and a stooge had called in person; therefore, for reasons unknown, the former had not followed him from the station but had gone to Hanbury a day or two later. Possibly Reardon had considered it advisable to report back, discuss the matter with somebody and double-check with Dorothy before taking off in pursuit.

  Then there was this final caller, a foreigner. The only logical conclusion was that two separate and distinct groups were mutually interested in his movements.

  Neither of them were police.

  Yet the police were the only ones with a right to be interested and with a motive for nailing him down. The more he thought it over the crazier it seemed. There must be method in all this madness. A solution lay somewhere if only it could be found.

  Bransome spent the night in a small rooming-house in the suburbs. It was a sleazy dump a few grades better than a rat-hole but its owner, a sour-faced, angular female, looked fully capable of keeping her trap shut and minding her own business. This virtue, Bransome suspected, brought her a steady clientele of people who had reasons for wanting above-average privacy. He had found the place by asking the advice of the corner newsboy, a wizened and toothless character who evidently regarded a straw mattress as a status symbol.

  By ten o’clock Bransome was back in the center of the city. He sought and found the public library, applied for an almanac and settled down to consult it in the reading room. It turned out that there were numerous Lake Thisses and Lake Thattas, several Laketowns, Lakevilles, Lakehursts, Lakeviews, and no less than four Lakesides. Only the latter interested him. He dug out more details about them. One had a population of four hundred, another a mere thirty-two. Although he knew nothing about the hardware trade he considered it an intelligent guess that neither of these two was large enough to support a business of that type. The other Lakesides looked more promising, each having approximately two thousand citizens. Which of the pair should he try?

  After some thought he decided that there was no way of identifying the right one here and now, not even by phone calls. He’d have to take a chance and go and look at them. From the expenditure point of view it was sensible to choose the nearer of the two for first inspection. It would be a waste of valuable time and hard-earned cash to travel farther than he had to.

  He made his way to the main-line station, keeping watch around him on the approach road, at the ticket office and on the departure platform. All stations, bus or train, were focal points of cross-country movement and therefore, he theorized, the favorite haunts of watchers and seekers. They were like water-holes in arid country: they functioned as common meeting-places for the hunters and the hunted. So he remained on the alert until his train arrived. By the time he climbed aboard he had discovered nobody paying him extra-special attention.

  The journey took a large part of the day. In the early evening he walked into the main street of a small, easy-going town set in heavily wooded country. A long, narrow lake glistened on the southern side. Bransome entered a cafeteria, had coffee and sandwiches, spoke to the attendant.

  “Know of a hardware store near here?”

  “Addy’s,” responded the other. “One block up and around the corner.”

  “Has it changed ownership recently?”

  “I wouldn’t know, George.”

  “Thanks!” said Bransome, thinking that in a place this size everybody usually knows everything about everybody else.

  Leaving, he looked along the street and found it impossible to tell which way was “up” and which “down.” Oh, well, it didn’t matter; he’d make a guess at it Turning right, he walked one block, rounded the corn
er and found he had chosen correctly. He was facing a small store that carried on its signboard the words: Addy’s Hardware. Pushing open its door, he went inside.

  There were two customers in the shop, one buying a coil of fence-wire, the other inspecting an oilstove. The former was being served by a lanky youth with a duck-tail haircut. The latter was being attended by a thickset, bespectacled man who glanced up as Bransome entered, gave a brief flash of surprised recognition and continued talking about the oilstove. Bransome sat himself on a keg of nails, and waited until the buyers had been served and taken their departure.

  Then he said, “Hi, Henny!”

  Far from delighted, Henderson growled, “What do you want?”

  “That’s what I call a hearty welcome,” said Bransome. “Aren’t you pleased to see an old colleague?”

  “I was under the impression that I knew you only by sight and name. If we’re close pals it’s news to me.”

  “Sight and name are plenty good enough to start an everlasting friendship, aren’t they?”

  “You didn’t come all this way just to kiss me,” Henderson gave back nastily. “So get down to brass tacks. What d’you want?”

  “A talk with you—in private.”

  “Who sent you here?”

  “Nobody. Not a soul. I’ve come entirely on my own initiative.”

  “A likely story,” commented Henderson, openly irked. “I presume you found my address in your crystal ball?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Then how did you get it? Who gave it to you?”

  “I can explain in full and to your satisfaction if we can have a discussion somewhere nice and quiet.” He held up a stalling hand as Henderson was about to make a retort, and added, “This is no place for chewing the fat or coming to blows. How about my seeing you later, after you’ve closed the store?”