The Mindwarpers Page 16

  Then a mess of stars exploded in his left eye and he went down for the second time. He fell knowing that he had made a major blunder in entering this building and would be denied the chance ever to make another mistake. There were at least six men in the room, all ruthless. The odds were far too heavy. He’d had his fun and this was the payoff. One does strange things in desperate moments; his was to emit a sigh of regret as he hit the floor.

  Somebody either jumped on him or kicked the breath out of him. Wind expelled from his lungs and stomach in one great whoosh. Instinctively he knew that the next vicious wallop would break a rib but he was too near the knockout to roll sideways and avoid it. Perforce he waited for it, lying flat on his back and fighting for air.

  There sounded a loud thumping in the hall, followed by the crash of a door, a waft of cool night air and a harsh voice that bawled, “Hold it!”

  Resulting silence almost could be felt. The rib-shattering kick did not arrive. Making a gigantic effort, Bransome turned over, face downward, and tried to be sick. Failing, he turned back, struggled into a half-sitting position, nursed his stomach and stared blearily out of one eye. He had been wrong; his opponents numbered not six but eight. They stood together in a glowering bunch, facing him but looking at the doorway behind his back. They posed like figures in a waxworks, stiff, unspeaking, motionless.

  Hands slid under Bransome’s armpits. He came slowly to his feet with the hands helping him upward. For a moment his legs felt rubbery and about to give way but strength flowed back into them. He turned around and saw four men in plain clothes and one uniformed cop, all holding guns. One of the former was Reardon.

  Unable to think of anything suitable to the occasion, Bransome said, “Hi!” Then it struck him that nothing could have sounded more silly. He smirked with the uninjured side of his face, the other side refusing to cooperate.

  Reardon refused to see the humor of it. He spoke sourly. “You all right?”

  “No—I feel like death warmed up.”

  “Want hospital attention?”

  “I’m not that bad. Only knocked around a bit. Give me time and I’ll be okay.”

  “You sure asked for what you got,” Reardon opined. “First you refuse us a chance of getting anywhere. Next you want it all to yourself. Look what it’s bought you.”

  “Would have bought me a damn sight more if you hadn’t rushed in.”

  “Lucky for you that we did.” Reardon turned to the man in uniform, made a gesture at the silent eight. “That’s the wagon by the sound of it. Take ‘em away.”

  By now blank-faced and impassive, the eight departed. Not even Kossy showed the slightest expression as he went out. He was massaging his throat and holding his mouth open like a hungry carp, but for all the emotion he displayed he might have been caught in the act of reciting his prayers.

  Reardon’s sharp eyes examined the room before he spoke to the men in plain clothes. “Right, boys, give this dump the treatment. Go through every other apartment as well. If any amateur lawyer yaps about search warrants, book him on suspicion and bring him in. Make a thorough job of it and pull down the walls if you have to. Phone me at headquarters if and when you find anything that looks good.” Then he signed to Bransome. “You come with me, Sherlock.”

  Bransome obediently followed, full of aches and pains and a little dizzy. Clambering into the rear seat of the car, he grunted with agony as he bumped a bruise, and gently rubbed the side of his face. His cheekbone burned and throbbed, and he had a fat eye, a thick ear and a split lip. His stomach felt full of little green apples and his whole abdomen was sore. If Dorothy could see me now, he thought, there’d be hell to pay.

  Getting into the front seat, Reardon had a few words with the driver, and used the radio before they moved off. Three more prowl-cars were now lined up outside the gray stone building and a small crowd of curious spectators had gathered around, some in their night-clothes. The car sped along the street. Cocking an elbow over the back of his seat, Reardon twisted to one side to address his passenger.

  “If I wanted to know the characteristics of alloy-creep at very high temperature, I’d come and ask you. If you want to know who’s looking through your bedroom keyhole, you’re supposed to come and ask me.” Bransome said nothing.

  “As a scientist I don’t doubt that you’re highly competent,” Reardon went on. “But as a crook you’re a dumb bum. And as a detective you stink.” “Thanks!” said Bransome, glumly. “When you dived out of that train you might have killed yourself. A stupid thing to do. And it served no useful purpose that I can see. Certainly it did not get us oft your neck.”

  “No?”

  “No! From that moment we had you located within a theoretical progress-circle that expanded hour by hour. We knew that some segments were likelier than others because of better transport facilities.” He paused, hung on as the car swung around a sharp corner. “Chief Pascoe had been asked to report without delay any odd datum remotely concerning Burleston. So when he called us long-distance and said that someone had been asking about an unknown murder there and we found that the query came from a point on the main route back here—”

  “You put two and two together, eh?”

  “And made it four. It was highly unlikely that anyone else but you would call from that particular place at that particular time to chew the fat about mysterious bones said to have been dug up near Burleston. Didn’t need second sight to tell us who Robert Lafarge was—he was the same chump as Lucius Carter. We began to see daylight. In effect, you were telling us by proxy what you had refused to confess face to face, namely, that you had—or believed you had—a killing on your conscience.”

  Bransome grimly nursed his bruises and offered no comment.

  “It made everything add up,” Reardon continued. “Yet there was no such crime. Pascoe vouched for that. What’s more, he’d told you as much. It made your resultant moves obvious. Having got rid of a deadly burden on your mind, you’d be wildly delighted or coldly furious, according to the state of your liver. In either case you’d head back here. If delighted, you’d return to the bosom of your family and forget everything. If on the boil you’d come back to try to take it out of somebody’s pants. We couldn’t do anything about it ourselves because we didn’t know the identity of that somebody. But you did—and you could lead us to him. We watched incoming trains, buses and cars. It was easy to pick you up at the station and wander around with you.”

  “I didn’t see anyone following me.” Bransome tenderly licked a lip that seemed as thick as a rubber tire and rapidly growing thicker.

  “You weren’t supposed to see. We don’t make a sloppy job of it.” Reardon bared his teeth at him. “You didn’t go home. You ran around thirsting for blood. That suited us topnotch. You got a lead from that coffee-slinger in the snack bar, then from the skinny runt in the barber shop, then from the oily boy at the garage. When finally you took root outside that poolroom we figured that you were all set to point to somebody for us—and you did!”

  “Two of them skipped,” said Bransome, seeking some small source of satisfaction. “I couldn’t follow three ways at once.”

  “We could and we did. They’ll be grabbed after they’ve taken us wherever they’re going.”

  The cruiser pulled in alongside an office building with lights showing only on the second floor. Reardon got out, Bransome following. Entering the building, they disregarded the elevators and used the stairs, passed many clearly lit offices, and reached one marked only by a number on its door. The entire floor had the air of being active twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week.

  Taking a chair, Bransome gazed around, seeing with one eye and half-seeing with the other. “This doesn’t look like police headquarters.”

  “Because it isn’t. The police are called in as and when required. Espionage, sabotage and other crimes against the constitution are our business, not theirs.” Seating himself behind a desk, Reardon flipped an intercom switch. “Send in Casasola
.”

  A man arrived within a minute. He was young, olive-skinned and had the brisk air of a doctor with little time to waste.

  Reardon nodded toward the battered-looking Bransome. “This man has been deservedly mauled. Patch him up and make him resemble a human being.”

  Casasola smiled and led Bransome along a corridor to a first-aid room. There he set to work and painted the rainbow around Bransome’s eye, sealed the split lip, and swabbed the thick ear and swollen cheek with an ice-cold liquid. He worked swiftly and in silence, obviously accustomed to repairing the beaten-up at any hour of the day or night. By the time he’d finished and returned the patient to the office, Reardon was fidgeting in his chair.

  “You still look like something the cat dragged in,” he greeted. He waved toward a wall clock. “It’s the unearthly hour of two o’clock and still we’re on the job. By the looks of it we’re going to be horsing around all night.”

  “Why? Has something else happened?”

  “Yes. Those other two fugitives led us to a couple more addresses. There’s been some strife at one of them. A copper’s been hurt. Got a slug through his paw. They took four prisoners. I’m still waiting to hear about the other address. Maybe it’ll blow up when they knock.”

  He scowled at the desk-phone, which must have felt sensitive about it because it promptly shrilled. Reardon snatched it up.

  “Who? McCracken? Yes? Three more, eh? What’s that? A mess of apparatus? Don’t bother to try to make head or tail of it. I’m coming out right away with experts competent to handle it. Send in those three and keep a guard on the joint.” He reached for a scrap of paper. “Give me that address again.” Racking the phone, he stuffed the paper into his pocket and stood up. “I think this is the end of the trail. You’d better come along.”

  “Suits me,” said Bransome. “Might find somebody else I can sock in the jaw.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Reardon asserted. “I’m taking you in the hope that you can tell us something about this apparatus. We want to know exactly what it is, how it works and what it does.”

  “I’ll be a big help. I know nothing about it.”

  “You must know something. Maybe when you see it you’ll wake up and remember.”

  Calling at another office on their way out, they picked up two men named Saunders and Waite. The former was middle-aged, plump and ponderous; the latter elderly, thoughtful and myopic. Both had the quiet self-assurance of characters who’d never had trouble estimating the number of beans in a bottle.

  They piled into a cruiser, which took them at a fast pace across town to a tiny warehouse and office located in an obscure back street. A big-jowled, over-muscled individual opened the door and looked out as they pulled up.

  “Mac’s taken away the three we found here,” he informed Reardon as they went inside. He jerked a thumb toward the door at the back of the office. “Two were asleep in there, snoring like hogs. The other was the mug who led us here. They took a dim view of being snatched. We had to ruin their health somewhat.”

  “Anyone else shown up since?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Somebody might before morning. Have to get two or three more men. We’ll need a better welcome committee.” Reardon gazed around expectantly. “Where’s this gadgetry Mac was talking about?”

  “Through there.” Again he indicated the rear door.

  Reardon shoved it open and went through, the others following. Dirty and tattered posters on the walls showed that once upon a time the warehouse had held toys and cheap fancy goods. Now it was divided by plasterboard partitions to provide a sleeping room for three, a small and roughly furnished recreation room with kitchen and toilet attached and, finally, a section holding the apparatus.

  Standing in a row, they examined the shiny contraption. Its insides were concealed behind detachable casings that would have to be unbolted to reveal its mechanism. It stood six feet high by six long by three wide and may have weighed a couple of tons. A pair of hooded lenses projected from its front and an electric motor was linked to its back. The lenses were aimed at a black velvet curtain hung on the facing wall.

  Reardon said to Saunders and Waite, “Get busy on it and see what you can discover. You can have as long as you need—but the sooner we know, the better. If you want me I’ll be in the office.”

  Motioning to Bransome, he led him back to where the guard was sitting in semi-darkness with his attention on the front door.

  The guard said, “We won’t get any more rats scuttling into this hole. The prowl-car outside is a giveaway.”

  “I know.” Reardon dumped himself behind a dilapidated desk and put his feet up on it. “Take it away and bring back two or three more men. Dump the car out of sight a few streets along and leave a man in charge—we don’t want it pinched while we’re resting our corns here. Get the others as soon as you can. I guess there’ll be enough of us then.”

  “Right!” The guard opened the door and departed. They heard the car roar away.

  Bransom asked, “Enough of us for what?”

  “Until we’ve finished questioning the characters we’ve grabbed, we won’t know whether their mob numbers twenty or two hundred. It’s possible that we’ve got all of them but we can’t be sure about it. Any still running loose are likely to take alarm when they call the roll and find a number missing. In that event they may rush here to remove or destroy that contraption in the back. Or they may abandon it and take to the boats and planes. I don’t know what the heck they’ll do—but I can’t overlook a possible attempt to swipe the evidence.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  Reardon bent toward him, eyes intent. “Do you remember this dump?”

  “No.”

  “Well, did you recognize that apparatus?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You absolutely sure you’ve never seen it before?”

  “Not that I can recall.” The other’s disappointment was so visible that Bransome raked his mind in effort to dig up a vague memory. “I’ve a queer feeling that it ought to be familiar to me—but it isn’t.”

  “Humph!”

  They went silent. The office remained without lights lest illumination scare off wanted visitors, but a street lamp shining through the upper windows gave gloomy visibility within. For three hours they waited, during which time two more guards arrived and sat with them. At five o’clock in the morning someone rattled the front door and tried its lock. A guard whipped it open, gun in hand, while the others shot to their feet. It was only the cop on the beat.

  Twenty minutes later Waite appeared from the back. He was holding in his right hand a long, dangling strip of shiny substance. His features were strained and his glasses sat halfway down his nose.

  “That thing in there,” he announced, “should not be used on a dog. It’s a stroboscopic horror. The fellow who thought it up would do the world a favor by having his head amputated.”

  Reardon demanded, “What does it do?”

  “Half a minute.” Waite eyed the back door.

  Saunders came through, sat on the edge of the desk, and mopped his plump face with a handkerchief. His complexion was dark red and he looked far from happy.

  “Being forewarned and not drugged, I got away with it. Otherwise I certainly wouldn’t.” Saunders wiped his face again. “In that torture-chamber I’ve just killed a fellow. I finished him off good and proper and I did it with the greatest gusto. I pinned him on his bed and cut his throat from ear to ear.”

  “That’s right,” chipped in Waite. “It was a deliberate and thoroughly cold-blooded murder, as juicy a crime as you could witness in a thousand years. There was one thing wrong with it.”

  “Namely?” asked Reardon studying him beady-eyed.

  “He couldn’t possibly have committed it—because I did it myself. Ear to ear, just like that!”

  Unimpressed by these rival claims to bloody slaughter, Reardon said, “Same victim, same place, same techniqu
e, same motive?”

  “Of course. Same picture.” Waite waved the shiny strip around. “This is a slice of the killing. Take a look at it.” He tossed it onto the desk. “That gadget in the back room is a very special movie projector. It throws a stereoscopic picture in natural colors. The image is shown on a screen composed of thousands of tiny pyramid-shaped beads and the three-dimensional effect is visible without need of polarized glasses.”

  “Nothing new in that,” scoffed Reardon. “It’s been done before.”

  “There’s more to it,” explained Waite. “First, the picture is made so that the camera identifies itself with the audience. Its viewpoint is that of the onlooker.” “That’s been done too.”

  “Second, it runs frames in side-by-side pairs with three-inch angular shift to give the stereoscopic effect. The frames aren’t standard 35-mm stuff. They’re a bastard caliber. They whiz through at three thousand three hundred frames a minute. At every fifth frame the illumination momentarily boosts sky-high. The result is intense light-flare at the rate of eleven pulses per second—which approximates the natural rhythm of the optic nerves. Know what that means?”

  “No—go on.”

  “It’s the rotating mirror effect all over again. The pulsations shove the viewer into a state of hypnosis.”

  “Hell!” said Reardon. He held up-the strip of film and examined it by the light of the outside street-lamp. Waite offered, “Unless he’s been doped—and it’s highly likely that a victim of this gadget would first be doped—the viewer starts seeing the picture knowing full well that it is only a picture. But he soon slides into a condition of hypnosis after which, in effect, he becomes the camera. Or, if you like it better, the camera becomes himself. His mind is then compelled to accept and register a false memory. The brain just won’t accommodate it in a time and place where a contrary memory already exists. However, plenty of empty spaces are available, those being attributable to times in the past when one experienced nothing worth remembering. This apparatus creates the crime, the characters, the motive, the place, the circumstances and the approximate period in the past. It gets rammed into the brain and fills a previously empty place where, for one reason or another, nothing has been recorded.”