The Mindwarpers Read online

  “What, with that paunch?”

  “It will add to the interest,” said Berg, patting it fondly.

  “Have it your own way.” Bransome pondered a short time, then went on, “Now that I come to think of it, this place has been getting its knocks of late.”

  “Anything regarded as a burden upon the taxpayer is sure to be kicked from time to time,” offered Berg. “There is always somebody ready to howl about the expenditure.”

  “I wasn’t considering the latest cost-cutting rigmarole. I was still thinking about Haperny.”

  “His departure won’t wreck the works,” asserted Berg. “It’ll be no more than a darned inconvenience. Takes time and trouble to replace an expert. The supply of specialists isn’t unlimited.”

  “Precisely! And it seems to me that these days the time and trouble are taken more often.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “I’ve been here eight years. For the first six of those our staff losses were no more or less than one would expect. Fellows reached the age of sixty-five and exercised their right to retire on pension. Others agreed to continue working but fell ill or dropped dead sometime later. A few young ones pegged out from natural causes or got themselves killed in accidents. Some people were transferred to more urgent work elsewhere. And so on. As I said, the losses were reasonable.”

  “Well?” prompted Berg.

  “Take a look at the last couple of years and you’ll see a somewhat different picture. In addition to the normal sequence of deaths, retirements and transfers we’ve had sudden disappearances for unusual reasons. There was McLain and Simpson, for example. Took a vacation up the Amazon, evaporated into thin air and no trace of them has been found.”

  “That was eighteen months ago,” Berg contributed. “It is a good bet that they’re dead. Could be anything: drowning, fever, snake-bite or eaten alive by piranhas.”

  “Then there was Jacobert. Married a wealthy dame who had inherited a big cattle spread in Argentina. He goes there to help manage the place. How’s that for a round peg in a square hole? As an exceptionally able chemical engineer he wouldn’t know which end of a cow does the mooing.”

  “He can learn. He’d be doing it for love and money and I cannot imagine better reasons. I’d do the same myself, given the chance.”

  “And Henderson,” continued Bransome. “Another case like Haperny’s. Took off on a whim. I heard a rumor that some time later he was found operating a hardware store out west.”

  “And I heard another rumor that immediately he was found he took off again,” said Berg.

  “Which reminds me, talking about rumors: there was that one about Muller. Found shot. The verdict was accidental death. Rumor said it was suicide. Yet Muller had no known reason to kill himself and definitely he wasn’t the type to be careless with a gun.”

  “Are you suggesting he was murdered?” asked Berg, giving the other a quizzical look.

  “I’m suggesting only that his death was peculiar, to say the least. For the matter of that, so was Arvanian’s a couple of months ago. Drove his car off a dockside and into forty feet of water. They said he must have suffered a blackout. He was thirty-two, an athletic type and in excellent health. The blackout theory doesn’t look plausible to me.”

  “What are your medical qualifications?”

  “None,” Bran some admitted.

  “The fellow who came up with the blackout notion was a fully qualified doctor. Presumably he knew what he was talking about.”

  “Not saying he didn’t. What I am saying is that he made an intelligent guess and not a diagnosis. A guess is a guess is a guess, no matter who makes it.”

  “Could you offer a better one?”

  “Yes—if Arvanian had been a heavy drinker. In that case I’d think it likely he met his end as result of driving while drunk. But he wasn’t a boozer as far as I know. Neither was he a diabetic. Maybe he fell asleep at the wheel.”

  “That could happen,” Berg agreed. “I did it myself once. It wasn’t brought on by tiredness, either. It was caused by the sheer monotony of driving on a long, lonely road in the dark, hearing the steady hum of the tires and watching the headlight beams swaying. I yawned a few times, then—ker-rash! Found myself sprawled in a ditch with a large lump on my head. The experience shook me up for weeks, I can tell you!”

  “Arvanian hadn’t done a long, monotonous drive. He’d covered exactly twenty-four miles.”

  “So what? He could have been drowsy after a hard day’s work. Possibly he hadn’t been sleeping well of late. A few spoiled nights can make a man muddle-minded and ready to bed down anywhere, even behind a wheel.”

  “You’re right about that, Arny. As the father of two kids I’ve had a taste of it. Lack of sleep can pull a man down. It shows in the way he does his work.” Bransome tapped the table by way of emphasis. “It didn’t show in Arvanian’s work.”

  “But—”

  “Furthermore, he was supposed to be on his way home. The dockside was out of line from his direct route by three miles or more. He must have made a detour to get there. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I. It looks rather like suicide. Quite possibly it wasn’t. Nobody knows what it was. I feel entitled to say there was something decidedly strange about it and that’s as far as I go.”

  “You’ve got a prying mind,” said Berg. “Why don’t you set up in business as a private investigator?”

  “More hazards and less security,” responded Bransome, smiling. He glanced at his watch. “Time we returned to the treadmill.”

  Two months later Berg disappeared. During the ten days preceding his vanishing he had been quiet, thoughtful and uncommunicative. Bransome, who worked closest to him, noticed it and for the first few days put it down to a spell of moodiness. But as the other’s attitude persisted and grew into something more like wary silence, he became curious.

  “Sickening for something?”

  “Eh?”

  “I said are you sickening for something? You’ve become as broody as an old hen.”

  “I’m not aware of it,” said Berg, defensively.

  “You’re aware of it now because I’ve just told you. Sure you feel all right?”

  “There’s nothing the matter with me,” Berg asserted. “A fellow doesn’t have to yap his head off all the time.”

  “Not saying he does.”

  “Okay, then. I’l talk when I feel like it and keep shut when I feel like it.”

  After that the silence increased. On his last day at the plant Berg uttered not a word other than those strictly necessary. The next day he failed to appear. In the mid afternoon Bransome was summoned to Laidler’s office. Laidler greeted him with a frown, pointed to a chair.

  “Sit down. You work along with Arnold Berg, don’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you particularly friendly with him?”

  “Friendly enough but I wouldn’t say especially so.”

  “What d’you mean by that?”

  “Bransome and Berg Incorporated is what the others jokingly call us,” Bransome explained. “We get on very well together at our work. I understand him and he understands me. Each knows he can depend upon the other. As partners in work we suit each other topnotch—but that’s all it amounts to.”

  “Purely an industrial relationship?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have never extended it into private life?”

  “No. Outside of our work we had little in common.”

  “Humph!” Laidler was disappointed. “He hasn’t reported today. He hasn’t applied for official leave. Have you any idea why he’s not here?”

  “Sorry, I haven’t. Yesterday he said nothing to indicate that he might not turn up. Maybe he’s ill.”

  “Doesn’t seem so,” said Laidler. “We’ve had no medical certificate from him.”

  “There hasn’t been much time for that. If one has been mailed today you wouldn’t get it unti
l tomorrow.”

  “He could have phoned,” Laidler insisted. “He knows how to use a telephone. He’s grown up now and has the right to wash his own neck. Or if he’s bedbound somewhere he could have got someone to phone for him.”

  “Perhaps he’s been rushed to the hospital in no condition to give orders or make requests,” Bransome suggested. “That does happen to some people occasionally. Anyway, the telephone operates both ways. If you were to call him—”

  “A most ingenious idea. It does you credit,” Laidler sniffed disdainfully. “We called his number a couple of hours ago. No answer. We called a neighbor who went upstairs and hammered on the door of his apartment. No reply. The neighbor got the super to open up with his master key. They had a look inside. Nobody there. The apartment is undisturbed and nothing looks wrong. The super doesn’t know what time Berg went out or, for the matter of that, whether he came home last night.” He rubbed his chin, mused a bit. “Berg’s a divorcee. Do you know if he has a girl friend currently?”

  Bransome thought back. “A few times he’s mentioned meeting some girl he liked. About four or five in all. But his interest didn’t seem to be more than casual. As far as I know he didn’t pursue them or go steady with any of them. He was rather a cold fish in his attitude toward women; most of them sensed it and reciprocated.”

  “In that case it doesn’t seem likely that he’s overslept in a love-nest.” Laidler thought again and added, “Unless he has resumed relations with his former wife.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Has he mentioned her of late?”

  “No. I don’t think he has given her a thought for several years. According to him they were hopelessly incompatible but didn’t realize it until after marriage. She wanted passion and he wanted peace. She called it mental cruelty and heaved him overboard. A couple of years afterward she married again.”

  “His personal record shows that he has no children. He has named his mother as next of kin. She’s eighty years old.”

  “Perhaps she has cracked up and he’s rushed to her bedside,” Bransome suggested.

  “As I said before, he’s had all day to phone and tell us. He hasn’t phoned. Moreover, there’s nothing wrong with his mother. We checked on that a short time ago.”

  “Then I can’t help you any further.”

  “One last question,” persisted Laidler. “Do you know of anyone else in this plant who might be well-informed about Berg’s private life? Anyone who shares his tastes and hobbies? Anyone who might have gone around with him evenings and weekends?”

  “Sorry, I don’t. Berg wasn’t unsociable but he wasn’t gregarious either. Seemed satisfied with his own company outside of working hours. I’ve always regarded him as a very self-contained kind of individual.”

  “Well, if he walks in tomorrow, wearing a big, fat grin, he’ll need all his self-containment, I can tell you. He’ll be on the carpet for playing hookey without telling anyone. It’s against the rules and it gives us trouble. Rules aren’t made to be broken—and we don’t like trouble.” He eyed Bransome with irritated authority and ended, “It he fails to reappear and if you should hear about him from any source whatever, it will be your duty to inform me at once.”

  “I’ll do that,” Bransome promised.

  Leaving the office, he returned to the green area, his mind mulling the subject of Berg. Should he have told Laidler about Berg’s recent surliness? Of what use if he had? He could not offer an explanation for it; he couldn’t imagine a reason except, perhaps, that all unwittingly he had done something or said something that had upset Berg. But most definitely Berg was not the type to nurse a grievance in silence. Even less was he the kind to spend a day sulking in some hiding-place, like a peevish child.

  Pondering these matters, he remembered Berg’s odd remark of two months ago, “Someday I may vanish myself—and make good as a strip-teaser.” Had that been an idle comment or did it have a hidden significance? In the latter case, what had Berg meant by “strip-teaser”? There was no way of telling.

  “To blazes with it!” said Bransome to himself. “I’ve other things to worry about. Anyway, he’s sure to turn up tomorrow with a plausible excuse.”

  But Berg did not appear next day or any day thereafter. He had gone for keeps.

  TWO:

  IN THE next couple of months three more top-graders took their departure in circumstances that could and should have set all the alarm-bells ringing—but didn’t. One, like Berg, lit out for the never-never land, apparently on a whim. The other two left more formally after offering weak, unconvincing excuses that served only to arouse the ire of Bates and Laidler. The latter felt impotent to do anything about it but gripe. In a free country a man makes his own moves to suit himself without being arrested and imprisoned for incomplete candidness and without being compelled to undergo a prefrontal lobotomy.

  Then came the turn of Richard Bransome. Appropriately enough, the world fell about his ears on Friday the Thirteenth. Up to then it had been a pleasant, comfortable world despite its shortcomings. There had been, on occasion, routine and boredom, rivalries and fears, the thousand and one petty pinpricks such as most men have to endure. But life had been lived, a life full of those little taken-for-granted items that are never fully appreciated until suddenly they vanish forever.

  In the morning the regular departure of the 8:10 train. The same faces in the same seats, the same rustle of unfolding newspapers and low mutter of conversation. Or in the evening, the anticipatory homecoming along a tree-lined avenue where always some neighbor was polishing a car or cutting a lawn. The pup gamboling around him on the front path. Dorothy’s face, flushed with kitchen-heat, smiling a welcome while the two kids hung from his wrists and demanded that he rotate and make carnival noises.

  All these petty but precious treasures that made each day: at one stroke they lost solidity, actuality, realness. They blurred and went right out of focus, fading like reluctant ghosts undecided whether to stay or go. They retreated from him, leaving him in an awful mental solitude. He made a frantic grasp at them with all the desire of his shocked mind and momentarily they came back—only to fade away again.

  Words started it, plain, ordinary words in an overheard conversation. He was homeward bound on a cool evening that held first hint of coming winter. Thin streamers of mist crawled through the growing dark. As always, he had to change trains and wait twelve minutes for the connection. Following his long-established habit, he went to the snack bar for coffee. He sat at the counter, on the right-hand stool, and gave the order he’d given times without number.

  “Coffee, black.”

  Nearby two men sat nursing cups of coffee and talking in desultory manner. They looked like long-distance night truckers soon to go on duty. One of them had a peculiar drawling accent that Bransome could not identify.

  “It’s fifty-fifty,” said the drawler, “even if it had been done yesterday. The cops never solve more than half the murders. They admit it themselves.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” argued the other. “Figures can be misleading. For instance, how many times have they pinched a character who has done more than one job, maybe a dozen jobs?”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Look, let’s see things as they really are and not as they ought to be. Nobody is executed for committing murder and that’s an incontrovertible fact. If a fellow is sent to his death it’s for quite a different reason. It’s because they know he’s a murderer and can prove it and have proved it. He’s guilty of the one and only real crime there is, namely that of being found out. So they fry him.”

  “So?”

  “For all they know he’s done several other murders that they haven’t heard about or can’t prove. Those remain in the limbo of unsuspected or unsolved crimes. What difference would it make if they could pin them on him? None whatever! They can’t exeute him several more times. When he pays the price for one killing he pays for all his killings.” The speaker sipped coffee meditatively.
“The true facts aren’t available and never will be; but if they were they might show that a murderer’s chances of getting away with it are as good as eighty in a hundred.”

  “I’ll give you that,” conceded the drawler. “They reckon that this one was done about twenty years ago. That gives the culprit a whale of a start.”

  “How’d you come to get mixed up in it?”

  “I told you. The floods had undermined this big tree. It was teetering over the road, at a dangerous angle. Made me duck my head in the cab as I edged past. A few miles farther on I found a prowl-car. I stopped and warned its crew that fifty tons of timber were threatening to block the road. They raced off for a look.”

  “And then?”

  “A couple of days later a state trooper came clunking into the depot and asked for me. He told me the tree had been pulled down, cut up and hauled away. Said they’d found human bones under its roots, believed to be female and buried about twenty years. They’re waiting for some expert to look them over, the bones I mean.” He gulped coffee and scowled at the wall. “He said the skull had been bashed in. Then he stared at me as if I was the very guy they were looking for and he wanted to know how many years I’ve been driving along that particular road and whether I can remember seeing anything suspicious ‘way back when he was trundling around in his kiddie-car.”

  “But you refused to squeal?” asked the other, grinning.

  “Couldn’t tell him a thing. He took my home address in case I’m wanted again. Maybe they’ll be watching for me next time I go through Burleston. That’s what I get for looking after the public interest.”

  Burleston.

  Burleston!

  The listener at the other end of the counter gazed blankly at his coffee cup. It drooped in fingers from which strength was flowing away like invisible water. Burleston! The cup threatened to spill. He prevented it from slopping over only by a great effort of willpower, lowered it to its saucer, then slid off his stool and went out. The truckers ignored him as he left. He walked slowly, weak at the knees, with cold thrills lancing up his spine, his brain awhirl.