The Mindwarpers Page 4

  “Be nice if I could.”

  “They’re riding Hilderman,” put in Potter. “If his department can stabilize this bang-stuff the way they want”—he gestured toward the gun—”we can sling this piece of junk into the river. The missiles will be self-propelled and all we’ll need to build will be a great grand-daddy of a belt-fed, radar-controlled bazooka.”

  “Not being in the explosives line I don’t know what’s wrong with it for that purpose,” said Cain. “You can bet it’s been given a trial and found wanting in some important respect.” He walked four times around the gun, then complained loudly, “This thing is the victim of its own efficiency. We’ve got to find some way of cutting out the grief while retaining all the pleasure. Why don’t I become a bookie and take life easier?”

  “It’ll have to be multi-barrels,” observed Potter.

  “Only as an admission of defeat. I refuse to admit defeat and so do you. No surrender. Ils ne passeront pas. I helped build this ugly futility. It’s my life. It’s my love. Criticism be damned.” He sought sentimental support from Bransome. “Would you destroy the object of your affection merely because she was giving trouble?” Then he watched Bransome turn white and walk away without answering. After a few pregnant moments he turned to Potter and asked in surprised tones, “What did I say wrong? Hell’s bells, I couldn’t tell if he was going to kill me or jump through the window. I’ve never known him to behave like that before. What did I say wrong?”

  Potter stared at the door through which Bransome had gone and hazarded, “You must have trampled on one of his pet corns.”

  “What corn? All I said was—”

  “I know what you said. I heard it with both ears. Evidently it meant something to him, something special and touchy. Perhaps he’s having trouble at home. Maybe he and his wife have had a battle and he’s invited her to drop dead.”

  “He’d never do that. I know him pretty well. He’s not the kind to play-act in a domestic drama and emote all over the house.”

  “His wife may be. Some women can work themselves up into a state of hysteria over nothing at all. What if his wife is making things unbearable for him?”

  “My guess is that he’d keep his mouth firmly shut and refuse to add fuel to the flames. If in spite of that she pushed him too far he’d quietly pack his bags and walk out for keeps.”

  “Yes, that’s how I weigh him up,” agreed Potter. “But we could be wrong. No man really knows what another might do in a major crisis. Every disaster brings the most unexpected reactions. The big, tough, loud-mouthed types dive into foxholes while some quiet and weedy little guy does something heroic.”

  “To blazes with him, anyway,” said Cain, impatiently. “Let him solve his own problems while we try to get a grip on ours.”

  Moving to the drawings on the bench, they considered them afresh.

  THREE:

  BRANSOME LEFT at five, exchanged nods with the guards and started home. It had been a bad day, the lousiest day he could recall. Everything had gone wrong, nothing right. He seemed to have spent a large part of his time looking over his shoulder, beating away his fears and making unsatisfactory attempts to concentrate on his work.

  Ability to concentrate is the prime virtue in any scientific research establishment. How can a man do it with a death-cell depicted in his mind? Up to now he had suffered approximately twenty-four hours of nervous strain merely because a couple of truck-drivers had gossiped about an unknown crime at some unspecified place near Burleston. The tree they had discussed was not necessarily his tree, the bones not necessarily those of his victim. It might be that belatedly somebody else’s misdeed had been brought to light. Right now the hunt might be in full cry after some other quarry.

  A pity, he thought, that he hadn’t had the gumption to join the truckers’ conversation and steer it deftly around until he got the details he needed to know. Would that have been wise? Yes—if their information had proved of a nature calming to his fears. No—if it confirmed his worst apprehensions. And in the latter case his interest might arouse suspicion. The grouchy trucker who had been personally involved might display a dangerous shrewdness.

  “Say, what’s this to you, mister?”

  How could he answer? What could he say? Only something silly and unconvincing that might invite further trouble.

  “Oh, I once lived around those parts.”

  “Did you now? Burleston, eh? Do you remember a woman disappearing in that locality? Or can you name anyone who might recall it? Maybe you know something about this, huh?”

  If those two were in the snack bar again this evening would it be best to ignore them or would it pay to join them and entice them to talk in a more revealing way? For the life of him he couldn’t decide.

  These considerations fled from his mind when he turned a corner and found a cop standing there. His pulse gave a jump. He walked past trying desperately to look casual and unconcerned, even pursing his lips in a silent, carefree whistle.

  The cop’s eyes bored at him, glittering in the shadow beneath the visor of his cap. Bransome paced steadily on, feeling or imagining that he could feel the other’s stare burning into the back of his neck. He wondered whether he had drawn attention to himself by overdoing the indifference, much as a naughty child betrays himself by exaggerated innocence.

  Moving onward with nerves drawn taut, he knew that a sudden, authoritative bellow of, “Hey, you!” would get him on the run. He’d race like mad across streets, through traffic, along back alleys, with feet pounding after him and whistles blowing and people shouting. He’d run and run and run until he dropped exhausted. And then they’d take him.

  No shout sounded to start him off. Reaching the next corner he could not resist taking a wary glance behind. The cop was still there and still gazing toward him. Rounding the corner, Bransome counted a slow ten, had another look back. The cop was in the same place but his attention was now turned the opposite way.

  Sweating with relief, he continued to the station. There he bought an evening paper, sought hurriedly through it for any item of news vital to him, failed to find one. But that meant nothing. The police give reporters a handout only when it suits them and not before; often it does not suit them until they’re able to name the culprit and invite the press to aid the hunt.

  His train rolled in and carried him to the junction. Dismounting, he went to the snack bar. The two truckers were not there. He didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. The only other customer was a huge, blank-faced man sitting astride a high stool and gazing boredly at the mirror back of the counter.

  Ordering black coffee, Bransome sipped and after a while met the big man’s eyes in the mirror. It seemed to him that the other was not idly glancing at him but rather examining him with more than usual interest. Bransome looked away, let a minute go past and then looked back. The big man was still watching him in the mirror and making no effort to conceal the fact. He had a kind of massive arrogance as if in the habit of staring at people and openly challenging them to do something about it.

  A railroad worker came in, bought two wrapped sandwiches and took them out. The big man remained firmly on his stool and kept his inquisitive gaze fixed on the mirror. Drinking his coffee with studied unconcern, Bransome tried hard to avoid looking at the mirror but his attention kept drifting back to it as if drawn there by a form of hypnosis. Every time he met the other eye to eye.

  I’ll have to avoid this place, he decided. Been coming here too regularly and too long. Set up an unbroken routine and the pursuers know exactly where to look for you. All they need do is go sniffing along your self-created rut and pick you up at one end or the other. Destroy the routine and they no longer know where in hell you are.

  “They”?

  Who are “they”?

  The various officers of the law, of course. This bull-sized starer could be just such a one. Yes, that was a definite possibility. He could be a cop in plain clothes, lacking enough evidence to justify £n i
mmediate arrest but hoping that guilt could be made to ferment like yeast so that he, Bransome, would get the jitters and betray himself in some fatal manner.

  Well, he wasn’t going to betray himself, not while he remained in full possession of his senses. The police had found a collection of human bones and they were welcome to handle the resulting problem without any help from him. So far as he was concerned he’d give them a gallop for their money—because life is sweet even with a major burden on the mind and death is full of terror no matter how deserved.

  Leaving his drink unfinished he edged off his stool and walked to the door. The big man twisted around and slowly came to his feet, his full attention on the other. His manner was that of one giving the quarry a slight lead merely for the fun of it; a professional pursuer unable to relish the chase when capture became too easy.

  If the idea was to make Bransome bolt like a startled rabbit, it didn’t work. Though the rawest of amateurs at this game of evading the law, Bransome was no dope. He was a man of high I.Q. trying to deal with a situation all too familiar to members of the underworld but quite strange to himself. He was willing to learn and slowly but surely was learning. One petty scare over that uniformed cop earlier had taught him not to react too swiftly or too openly. Everyone chases an obvious fugitive.

  The correct concealing tactic, he decided, is to behave normally when one is feeling far from normal, to maintain an unswerving pretense that one is an insignificant part of humanity when one is beyond the pale of it. That is hard, terribly hard, when one has had no training as an actor, no conditioning in deceit, and bears in his skull a brain that tends to keep sounding shrill warnings like an intermittent alarm clock. But it had to be done.

  So as he went out he forced himself to give the big man stare for stare. Reaching the station’s departure track, he boarded his train, getting into the rearmost car. This gave him a vantage point from which he could watch later comers while pretending to read his paper.

  He sat tensely, looking, over the top edge of the paper, until he saw the big man lumber down the platform and board the train a couple of cars nearer the front. That was the car that he, Bransome, usually occupied, the one in which Connelly and Farmiloe would now be seated.

  Why had the big man picked on that particular car? Was it sheer coincidence or was he betting on the quarry’s known habits? In the latter event he was likely to do something about it when he discovered that Bransome was not among those present. Just what would he do? Obviously he’d be in something of a quandary since there would not be enough time to explore the entire train before it departed. He’d have to make his choice between staying on the train and searching it or getting off to snoop around the station.

  The train hooted, gave a slight jerk, trundled forward with gathering speed, clanked over switches and sped onward. There was no evidence that the big man had gotten off. He must have remained aboard. If he stayed put and did not get off at Bransome’s station, all would be well. The brief series of events would serve to show that a guilty mind can be suspicious of a stray cat.

  But if the big man took a walk along the train’s aisle or maintained a watch at various stops and got off with Bransome …

  Perhaps even now he was engaging Connelly and Farmiloe in conversation, cunningly steering the talk the way he wanted it to go, prying out items of information that meant nothing to the tellers but plenty to the listener, doing it with the disarming dexterousness of the professional snooper. Maybe he would learn that this was the first evening in months that Bransome had failed to travel with the pair of them, that yesterday evening his manner had been strange, that he had been preoccupied and ill-at-ease and so on.

  This kind of thing brought another dilemma to the hunted. Stay in a rut and one is tracked; jump out of it and one immediately attracts attention. Behave with absolute normality and one can be followed along his chosen path of habitude; break away from the path and one is harder to find but more surely wanted.

  “Innocent, are you? Then why did you take pains to give us the runaround?”

  Or, “We had a to chase you. Only the guilty-minded give us a chase. Talk your way out of that.”

  And they’d take it from there.

  “Why did you kill Arline?”

  “Come on now, quit this horsing around. Tell us all you know about Arline … Arline—”

  It hit him like a brick.

  Arline who?

  The train rolled into his station and stopped. He got off automatically, without being fully aware of what he was doing. He was so occupied with the puzzle of his victim’s surname that he quite forgot to look for the big man.

  “Surely I should know the identity of the woman I buried? I may have become fuzzy-minded—but not to that extent. The name must be located at the back of my brain but for some reason I can’t bring it forward. Twenty years is a long time. I know I tried hard to expunge that episode from my memory, to treat it as something that never really happened, a bad but meaningless dream. Yet it’s strange that I cannot recall her family name.”

  Arline—?”

  The big man hove enormously into view as the train gave a raucous hoot and moved on. The name-problem promptly fled from Bransome’s mind as he passed through the exit and walked steadily along the approach road. There was a coldness in his back hairs as he heard the slow, deliberate tread of the other’s feet a mere twenty paces behind.

  He turned a corner. So did the other. He crossed the street. So did the other. He entered his own street and the big man followed suit.

  Problems were piling upon problems. Now he had a new one. Question: did the big man know his address or was he following for the purpose of discovering it? In the former case Bransome might just as well walk boldly into his own home. In the latter case to do so would be to provide needed information.

  Reaching a decision, he tramped right past his house and frantically hoped that the kids would not see him and rush out yelling and thus reveal what he preferred to conceal. Not for a moment did it occur to him to wonder why a shadower should make so careless a job of his shadowing. If he had given the matter any consideration he’d have concluded that the purpose was to make him panic and that the shadower was functioning as a stimulator of self-betrayal.

  No familiar figure endangered his walk-onward tactic until young Jimmy Lindstrom came round the top corner. Bransome immediately avoided an encounter by turning down a side street. The heavy footsteps faithfully followed.

  At the other end of this street a cop was lounging under a lamp. The sight of him made Bransome hesitate for a moment. Then it struck him that here was a situation where boldness might pay.

  Speeding up his pace, he reached the cop and said, “A big fellow has been following me for most of half an hour. I don’t like it. He may be after my wallet.”

  “Which fellow?” asked the other, peering along the street.

  Bransome looked back. The subject of his complaint was nowhere to be seen.

  “He was right behind me as far as the last corner. I heard him turn it.”

  The cop sucked at his teeth and suggested, “Let’s go back there.”

  He accompanied Bransome to the corner. There was no sign of the shadower.

  “You sure you didn’t imagine him?”

  “I’m positive,” said Bransome, feeling foolish.

  “Then he must have gone into a house or dived down an alley,” the cop decided. “If he did enter a house, well, you’ve nothing to worry about. He followed you because he uses the same way home.”

  “Could be. But I know most of the folks around here. He was a complete stranger.”

  “That means nothing,” scoffed the cop. “People come and go all the time. If I got the jumps every time I saw a new face I’d have been white-haired ten years ago.” He studied Bransome curiously. “Are you carrying a big wad or something?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Where d’you live?”

  “Just over there,” said Bransome,
pointing.

  “All right, mister. You go home and take it easy. I’ll be watching and I’ll be around for quite a piece.”

  “Thanks,” said Bransome. “Sorry to have troubled you.”

  He headed for home, inwardly wondering whether he had done the right thing. For all he knew he might still be within observation of the big man who, because of the cop, had become more discreet. True, the suspected shadower might be an innocent newcomer to the locality, but if he were not …

  This business of being on the run, mentally at any rate, was like playing superfast chess with his own life as the stake. A false move here and another there and the game inevitably must lead to checkmate. It seemed to him incredible that other wanted men could endure such a situation for months, even for years before they gained psychological relief by giving themselves up. The intensity of the strain, he felt, was a feature that most men could handle—but the prolongation was something else again.

  For the first time he began to speculate about the question of just how long he would last and in what manner he would precipitate the dreaded end.

  Dorothy said with wifely concern, “Why, Rich, your face is flushed and hot. And on a cool evening like this.”

  He kissed her. ‘‘I’ve been hurrying. Don’t know why. Just felt I wanted to put a move on”

  “Hurrying?” She frowned in bafflement and glanced, at the clock. “But you’re a few minutes later than usual. Was the train late?”

  He bit back an affirmative before it could pop out. So easy to tell lies and so easy to be found out. Problems still were piling up. Now he was being tempted to deceive his own wife. Even in such a minor matter as this he couldn’t do it and wouldn’t do it—or not yet.

  “No, dear, I wasted a bit of time talking to a cop.”

  “That needn’t have made you race like mad. Dinner can wait a while, you know that.” She put a slender hand on his cheek. “Rich, are you telling me the truth?”

  “The truth about what?”

  “About yourself. Are you sure you feel all right?”