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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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The Spider, April 1940, with "Doc Turner Meets the Angel of Death"
Doc Turner undertook to save a sick old hermit from a heart attack. Instead, he was called upon to gamble his life against a genius of destruction, in a desperate attempt to save seven million people from sudden death!
IN the prescription room at the rear of Andrew Turner's ancient pharmacy, a tall, tired-faced man watched the old druggist count brownish tablets into a vial. "What a fool I was to choose medicine as a profession," he yawned. "Here it is long past midnight and I've been on the go since eight this morning. Nine chances out of ten when I finally get home I'll have to trot right out again because Mrs. Obstgarten's gall bladder is acting up, or one of the O'Hare brood has come out in spots."
"Very likely." Grimy light from a fly-specked bulb glimmered in Doc Turner's silky white mane. "Look, Doctor Westfield." He screwed on the vial-top with fingers that though gnarled and acid-stained were deft. "I'm closing up now. It won't be taking me out of my way to deliver these digitalis tablets to your patient." From under their grizzled brows, his faded blue eyes glanced quizzically at the physician. "Surely you can trust me to instruct him in their use."
"Naturally. But it's one of those desolate basement rooms that rents for five dollars a month, and I've noticed some rather tough-looking characters hanging around that particular cellar late at night."
The old pharmacist's bushy grey mustache moved in a grim smile. "I'm hardly afraid of dark basements," he murmured, "and somewhat less of tough characters."
"I don't imagine you are," the physician nodded. "I've heard often enough of your locking horns with shrewd and vicious crooks, and that it was not you who came off the worse for the encounters."
"Yes," Turner shrugged. "There have been a number of such incidents." He was writing a label in tiny, copperplate characters. "There are certain criminals who think it quite safe to victimize the helpless poor of whom there are so many around here. And so," he sighed, "I have been compelled to take steps to disabuse them of that notion."
"Rather forcibly, I've been told." Westfield chuckled. "I understand that you've added considerably to the population of our prisons. Well," he broke off, "that being the case, I'm going to take advantage of your offer. Anton Porkas lives all alone. I took his key along so I wouldn't have to get him out of bed." He laid a rusty bit of metal on the white-scrubbed dispensing counter. "The address is Four-sixteen Hogbund Lane and his door is the second to the right as you go in." The Doctor bent, picked up a battered black bag. "Many thanks, Turner. Good night..."
DOC TURNER, a stooped, shabby little figure of a man, shambled
wearily down Morris Street. Of the pushcarts that had lined the
slum thoroughfare only a debris of rotted fruits and browning
cabbage leaves remained in the gutter. The day's raucous turmoil
had diminished to the rumble of the "El" train passing overhead,
the petulant whine of a sick infant behind some tenement's drab
facade, the distant thud of a cop patrolling his beat.
Even these sounds died away when Doc turned the farther corner into Hogbund Lane, and the brooding silence of the slum night engulfed him. He passed a street lamp that struggled feebly to dispel the miasmic gloom, glanced at a scabrous number over a vestibule door, turned to a gateless opening in a decrepit basement railing beside the shabby stoop.
Stone steps rocked, broken and slippery, under his descending feet. An arched recess beneath the stoop was filled with blackness so unrelieved that it seemed solid, and a nauseous reek of garbage came from an aperture he sensed rather than saw to his right.
Despite his bravado, the old man was uneasy, vaguely aware of something ominous in this place that had nothing to do with either its fetor or darkness. He shrugged the feeling away, fumbled in the side pocket of his threadbare jacket.
His fingers encountered the vial of tablets, the key, a paper match-book. He brought the last two out, opened the match-book. A wordless exclamation of exasperation rasped in his throat. All the matches used up.
"Well," he thought, "it doesn't matter. Westfield said the second door to the right." He moved cautiously in that direction and his hand found the partition of splintered boards, gritty with grime and old whitewash. He felt along the wall, found a door, went on a little way and found another.
AN indistinguishable murmur of talk came through to him.
Queer, Turner thought. Porkas is supposed to be alone. Perhaps
some friend had dropped in to take care of him. But it was so
late, and besides if there was a light in there it should be
shining through the cracks he could feel in the ramshackle
doorway. The man must be delirious.
This conclusion reversed his first impulse to rap. His fingers trailed across the wood. At the whisper of sound they made, the murmur inside ceased. Turner located the keyhole, started to put the key into it, the clink of metal on metal startlingly loud. His fingers froze as something small, hard, prodded his spine and a low, harsh voice behind him demanded:
"What you after?"
Careful to make no sudden motion, Turner said, "The doctor sent me with something for the man inside."
"So?" The voice was guttural and foreign, but it would have been surprising if it were not, in this neighborhood. "Why you no make the knock then?"
"Because he gave me the key. He—"
"Why you no say so?"
The prod of gun-muzzle fell away and the voice, though still cautious, rose a little. "Awright, Mox. He from doctor."
The knob rattled. The door was opening and a bulky form was outlined against a dazzle of light from the widening aperture.
"Quick." The man behind the Doc grunted. "You want somebody see light?" And a shove in the small of his back impelled him through the opening. Before he quite realized what was happening the door was shut again and he was blinking around a small room with a low ceiling which seemed to rest right on top of the head of the fellow who'd admitted him.
"You new comrade?" Max growled. He towered over the little druggist, his hair a bristling, yellow pompadour, his face rock-jawed, knobby as though kneaded out of dough by an unskilled sculptor. He was in shirt sleeves, tieless, but a revolver butt protruded from a holster at his belt, over which his ham-like hand hovered. "Doctor not say nothing to me."
"Why should he?" Doc Turner saw a rumpled cot, but there was no patient in the room, delirious or otherwise. Instead, an oblong table was strewn with papers and maps, and over these, seemingly oblivious of all else, pored a little hunchback. His rumpled shock of black hair merged with a wild black beard so that most of his face was invisible except for two fierce eyes magnified by iron-rimmed spectacles that rode a hawk beaked nose.
"Who are you that the doctor should tell you about me!" The old pharmacist flung this at the blond giant with a sneer. His own eyes were coldly challenging, but an iron band was tightening around his chest. This certainly was not the sickroom to which Doctor Westfield had directed him. What it was, whoever these men were in it, was a secret carefully guarded by their guns, by blankets hung over the partitions to keep light from seeping out. Some crazy prank of circumstance had brought him into this room. If its occupants suspected the truth, he would not leave it as easily.
"If you had any brains," he snarled, continuing the bluff on which he had seized to forestall their inquiries, "you would know that a new comrade would not have this key." He held up the bit of metal, dropped it into his pocket. "Or even an old one whom you may dare to question. Any questions that are to be asked here will be asked by me, and I expect to be answered promptly. Who is this man?" he whirled, jabbed a finger at the hunchback. "What is his name?"
THE shaggy head lifted, too huge for its frail body and
somehow other than human. "Who am I?" The voice was thin and
piping, a child's voice indescribably macabre coming from that
black beard's hirsute depths. "I am Israfel, little man. I am the
Angel of Death and Destruction." The words were mad, but the eyes
were not. They were tremendous behind thick lenses, a black and
baleful gleam glowing within them. "I am hated and feared of men
because I love Man better than he loves himself."
He delivered himself of this pronouncement and then his head lowered again to the papers on the table. His clawed left hand traced the lines of a map, while his right made notations with a chewed stub of a pencil. Doc saw that the map was one of the city, saw that the hunchback's crooked fore-finger was following the branching of a network of lines that started at an irregularly square black splotch on the waterfront and feathered out through the streets.
Invisible fingers squeezed Doc's heart. "So you are the genius," he sneered, "who claims to know more than the engineers about the city's electrical distribution system." It was a wild enough guess, but he'd recognized that this was what the black tracery depicted. The hairy cripple obviously was not studying it for amusement, and suddenly it had become tremendously important for Doc to find out the reason for his interest. "I told the doctor I thought you were a faker and he sent me here to see for myself."
"A faker," squealed the hunchback, his head snapping up again. "You called me a faker!" Twisted fingers tugged at his beard and his red-veined nostrils flared. "Me, Rudolf Gorchin, whom the world of science has acclaimed as greater than Steinmetz and Nikola Tesla and that fool Michelson rolled into one? Phui!" He threw his pencil across the room. "I spit on you."
"Your spitting on me," Doc Turner's calmness was underlined by the other's excitement, "might be unpleasant, but would prove nothing. If you are a scientist, as you claim, you should be able to defend your theories."
"Defend!" Gorchin was fairly dancing now in his rage. "I need not defend my knowledge against the attack of a nincompoop, an imbecile, a moron." His thin squeal filled the room. "Against one who would not know a farad from an ohm, to whom Planck's Constant is a standard size of a piece of wood."
"Look at me," Turner commanded, "Look closely at me, Gorchin." Something in the calmness of his voice stopped the hunchback's antics. "Do I seem to you someone who is quite ignorant of the Quantum Theory? If I do, then it is you who are the imbecile, when it comes to an estimation of your fellow man."
Rudolf Gorchin stood very still, fingers tangled in his beard, enormous eyes glittering. He saw a white-maned little man wrapped in a strange dignity—a man whose high forehead and deeply wrinkled face marked him as a scholar.
"Forgive me," the hunchback sighed at last. "I have dealt so long with those to whom the language of science is a gibberish that I have lost the ability to know when I have met one who speaks and can understand my own tongue. Come here, friend, and I will show you that for which Gorchin's name will go resounding down the corridors of Time."
HE was already scrabbling furiously among his papers as Turner
moved to his side. He pulled one out, thrust it at the
pharmacist. "There. There it is all set out, my great discovery,
in the precise and beautiful language of mathematics.
I—"
"Professor," Max's enormous hand came across the table, grabbed the hunchback's wrist. "Doctor no like you show that. He say—"
"The doctor said that you were to guard me," Gorchin squealed. "Not to interfere with me." He wrenched at the imprisoned hand and the paper fell from it. "He told you that I was to have everything I wanted, didn't he? Didn't he, you lumbering Troglodyte?"
"Yes," Turner heard the blond giant rumble, but he was engrossed in the paper that he had picked up. "Yes, he tell me take care of you, keep you happy." The paper was closely covered with plus and minus signs, differential and integral signs, mus and sigmas, in a cabalistic mélange that meant nothing at all to the druggist. "But I think—"
"You think!" the hunchback squealed. "You are no more able to think than this table. By Galileo, you robot, if you do not release me by the time I count three I'll blast you into quivering primordial protoplasm."
"Listen me, professor," Max pleaded. "I no want—"
"One," Gorchin panted. "Two. Here it comes, Max. The—"
"No," the big blond husked, letting go of the thin wrist he had clutched, his gorilla-like countenance writhing with terror. "No do nothing to me, professor." His gargantuan arms were up before him, as if to ward off some Jovian thunderbolt the shaggy cripple might loose in the next second. "I no mean no harm." He brought up against the blanketed door. "I keep quiet."
"See that you do," Gorchin snarled and turned to the old druggist, his mouth opening in a sparse-toothed and cavernous, but silent laugh. "Well," he said proudly to Doc. "What do you think of that my friend?"
Turner looked at him. "Wonderful!" he exclaimed admiringly. "This tiny bit of paper should be encased between thin, transparent sheets of platinum and framed in gold, to be preserved for all posterity."
"Indeed it should," the hunchback strutted. "In those few symbols, my dear man, civilization has made a gigantic stride forward. Do you perceive the implications? Do you fully comprehend them?"
"Not fully," Doc shook his head sadly. "That would require prolonged study, which I shall certainly devote to it. But I am particularly interested at the moment in the practical application of your magnificent discovery to our present problem. Would you be good enough to explain it to me?"
"Of course." Gorchin sounded pleased. "These chuckleheads have perforce taken it on faith. It will be gratifying to demonstrate it to one who can appreciate the beautiful simplicity of a device that can, by the mere throwing of a two ampere switch, envelope a great metropolis in flames."
The old druggist's skin constricted to a tight, icy sheath for his body. He tried to tell himself the hunchback was crazy as a loon. But he knew it was not so. Gorchin might be evil incarnate or he might be an unworldly genius exploited by the mysterious "doctor" to whom everyone kept referring with awe, but he was no maniac.
"Ah yes," Doc said, keeping the creeping horror out of his voice. "When the doctor told me you could do that, as I said before, I decided that you were an impostor. Now I am only eager to comprehend your method."
"Come then." The hunchback's talons gripped his forearm. "Come and see." With febrile excitement Gorchin was impelling him toward a door he had not noticed before, in the sidewall to the left of the entrance toward the rear of the basement.
"Professor!" Max pleaded, but without moving from the spot to which he had retreated. "Professor. Please—" and then Gorchin had the door open and they were through it. The hunchback had released Doc's arm, was going down on his knees on the wet concrete, making just such little mirthful gurgles in his throat as a child might make over a new and marvelous toy.
"You see," he gurgled. "You see how small it is, and how perfect?" From the unshaded, two hundred watt lamp behind them brightness struck in and filled the stone-walled vault with harsh shadows. "I have just completed it." The bearded cripple was like a gnome out of an ancient legend, kneeling there, like a very modern gnome, for his crooked fingers were fluttering about gleaming glass radio tubes poised upright on a polished oaken board and connected by a precisely right-angled, varicolored maze of wires. "One foot wide and two feet long," he crooned, "and more power for devastation compact within it than in ten thousand cubic feet of the most terrible explosive man has yet devised."
At the farther end of the board was a small black switch-box, and from the outer terminals of this two black wires ran upward to an arm-thick lead cable that writhed in through the foundation wall and out of the vault again through the ceiling. "Look, my friend. This is a delayed-action switch, set to close the circuit two hours after I press this button. Soon I will press it and go away, and two hours later the tubes will come alight. Five seconds while the filaments warm to redness, the energy—the new type of energy whose formula you have just read—is created. Then it flows out through this same switch, out through these wires and out into that cable, which brings electric current into the building from the great dynamos on the waterfront.
"In that cable, my gamma-mu force builds up, feeds upon itself and builds up again, megavolt upon megavolt, and megavolt upon megavolt again, too rapidly for thought to follow. Instantaneously a surge of monstrous power flashes back to those dynamos and melts them into a cascade of coruscating copper. But so swift does it travel that before they have had time to melt it is out again in the mains, in every home, in every factory in the city and roundabout. It is there in bursts of blinding light, in blue and sputtering arcs so hot that everything within fifty feet of them bursts into flame. As though all the lightnings of all the storms since the dawn of time had struck it, a holocaust, such as the world has never known, blasts this swarming hive of humans from the face of the earth."
THE hairy black head lifted, and the weirdly enlarged eyes
were alight with a great and terrible vision. "A gasp of horror
runs through the world, and then the world shall hear who has
done this. I, Rudolph Gorchin, have loosed this horror, and I
shall loose it again and again unless all wars are stopped. And
they will stop, my friend, forever, and civilization shall have
been saved, and it shall be Rudolph Gorchin, the hunchback, the
cripple, the outcast of men, who shall have saved it. That is why
I call myself Israfel, the Angel of Death, he who is hated and
feared of men because he loves Man better than he loves
himself."
Somehow, he did not quite know how, Doc Turner was convinced utterly that this man could do what he threatened. And he must stop him! For the moment the appalling vision of wholesale destruction that thin, piping voice had brought to him, turned his muscles water-weak so that he could not move, and dried his throat so that he could not speak. He gagged, fighting for control...
"Very beautifully told," a new voice said behind him. "Very dramatically, my dear Professor Gorchin." A quite intonation-less voice that was cold with menace. "The only trouble is that you have told it to someone who had no right to hear it."
Somewhere within him the old pharmacist found the strength to turn. Just inside the outer room stood a tall, cadaverous man. His completely hairless head was like a skull over which parchment had been tightly drawn.
The man's lipless smile was a death's-head's grin. "You seem surprised to see me. Strange. You told my men here that I had sent you."
"You—you are the doctor."
"I am known to them as the Doctor," the other agreed, giving the word a capital initial by the way he said it. "And you too, may as well call me that." In his bony hands a shining automatic snouted pointblank at Turner's midriff. But it seemed a puerile toy after what had just been said. "I am rather curious to know just where you got the information that led you here."
"It was no trick." Doc was too skilled a judge of human nature to expect any bluff to work with this man. "I am Andrew Turner, the druggist from Morris Street, and I came here to deliver medicine to a sick man."
"You came here to deliver medicine! You hardly expect me to believe that."
"Believe it or not, it is so. Look." He brought the little vial out of his pocket, unscrewing its cap as he did so. "These are tablets." He spilled a few of the brown pillules into his palm. "A Doctor Westfield asked me to bring them to a patient, Anton Porkas, in the basement of Four-sixteen Hogbund Lane, and—"
"Four-sixteen! But this is Four-four-teen."
"Oh Good Lord!" A light suddenly dawned on Doc. "The next house! I saw the number over the stoop, but the basement entrances are to the left of the stoops, not the right. It was a mistake—"
"That unfortunately will cost you your life."
"My life—" Turner managed a twisted smile, though he was surprised that he could do so. "That is hardly a threat," he murmured. "It seems that I should have shortly lost it whether I'd made the mistake or not. Together with a million odd others. A matter of two hours more or less seems scarcely to make enough difference to worry about."
"That is another mistake." The Doctor shook his head slightly. "The other residents of this city will be permitted to finish out their mortal spans. You—"
"What—" Gorchin squealed. "What was that you said?" He rushed past Doc, clawed at The Doctor's sleeve. "I have not changed my plans."
"But I have others," the pale eyes sunken in brow-less sockets did not move, "that I shall explain to you later, when I have finished with this interloper."
"You'll explain to me now," the hunchback screamed, his little eyes reddening. "I have a right to know!"
"Stop acting like a hysteric woman, Gorchin. You—"
"A woman!" the little hunchback crouched, snarling. "The greatest scientist of the century you call a hysteric woman!"
"Or a puling infant—"
Gorchin squealed something unintelligible, leaped, his talons clawing for the thin man's eyes. A crack cut off that thin scream. Turner clapped his hand to his mouth in horror as the hunchback crumpled in mid-air—thudded to the floor, in an unmoving, dreadfully sprawled heap.
The tang of cordite was in the old druggist's nostrils. "A pity," The Doctor murmured. "He really possessed a great intellect, the greatest perhaps, of our generation." But there was no regret in his eyes. "Fortunately, his work for the nation I serve is finished. He would have been a hindrance from now on."
Andrew Turner fought nausea, and a wild desire to spring at the man and clamp throttling fingers on his throat. "The nation you serve?" That would only bring him a bullet in his own heart. "What nation is that?"
"You hardly expect me to tell you that," The Doctor was answering him. "Though you might guess that I intend to use Gorchin's device to destroy the factories that are turning out munitions, tanks, airplanes for shipment across the seas." The deathlike smile was once more in evidence. "Applying it to power transmission lines miles from the sentries that guard them. And duplicates will go abroad to the countries that war with my own, to paralyze their military industries. Yes," he sighed, "the poor fellow's invention will end war, but it will end it with us masters of the world."
"I think," Doc Turner responded, the room swimming around him in a dizzy haze, "I should rather choose the general annihilation Gorchin threatened."
"What you think," the other's voice seemed to come from a great distance, "or choose will make no difference to you or anyone else after I press this trigger." A sodden chill was sinking into Turner's every fiber. He could no longer see, could barely hear that grim voice murmuring. "Which I shall now—" In his last moment of consciousness the old druggist managed to sway backward. He fell. Somewhere there was a crash of glass, and oblivion claimed him.
"He's smashed the whole thing!" The Doctor whispered, his finger frozen on the trigger it had not quite pressed. "He fainted before I could shoot, and he's smashed Gorchin's invention."
He went forward, bent to the white-haired, limp form that lay atop a jumble of gleaming splinters, the brownish digitalis tablets strewn all around it. "No." There was a strange, bluish tint to the old man's lips, and no quiver of breath to his nostrils. "He didn't faint." The thin man transferred his automatic to his left hand, reached down with his right and pressed fingertips to a flaccid wrist. "There is no pulse," he said to Max who had come into the vault and stood above him. "None at all. He's dead. The old fool's heart gave way when he saw me pressing the trigger. Well," he sighed. "That saves me shooting again. The shot that did for Gorchin was undoubtedly taken for a backfire if anyone heard it. Someone might decide to investigate if they heard a second one."
"But what matter, if thing all smash?" Max rumbled. "Professor dead now, no can make another."
THE Doctor straightened, expressionless as ever. "We don't
need him to, Max. The wiring on that board is still intact. True,
he built some of those tubes himself and the elements inside them
are too crushed for recognition, but I know that he wrote down
the basic principle of his invention, and we have good enough
scientists in our employ to be able to reproduce the whole thing.
This accident will only delay us a week or so, and that is
nothing after the long years we have been waiting for final
victory."
He stared down at Andrew Turner's face, over which the waxen sheen of dissolution was already creeping. "Even in the moment of death you still tried to defeat me," he murmured, a hint of something that might almost be admiration creeping into his cold voice. "But it was useless." He holstered his automatic, turned to the blond giant, "Come, Max. The first thing we've got to do is find the paper on which Gorchin wrote his formula. Then we'll burn the others and get out of here."
At the Doctor's direction Max searched the hunchback's sprawled body, reported failure and dropped it as if it were a meaningless pile of rags.
They went to the table. The maps were folded up, put to one side. Hundreds of papers remained. The Doctor started examining each one very carefully. Max took them as they were discarded, set fire to them on the stone floor. The Doctor's shell of impassivity cracked a little as the pile of sheets yet to be examined grew smaller and smaller. He was snatching them up almost feverishly now, was flinging them at Max with a muttered curse. The last one fluttered from his fingers.
"Another mess of meaningless scrawlings," he husked. He controlled himself with a visible effort.
The yellow-haired colossus shrugged. "I see no paper with writing on. Only one with numbers, letters, funny marks."
A tiny muscle twitched in the thin man's sunken cheek. "That's it, you fool," he purred. "Gorchin wouldn't have written out his discovery in words. Do you know what became of it?"
"Sure. Sure I know. Professor show to old man, old man put in pocket."
"One of these days," the Doctor said very quietly, "I'm going to saw off the top of your skull and see if there is any brain inside at all." He was not joking.
He prowled back to the vault-entrance, but Max reached it before him, went in. Stooping to Turner's body, he rolled it over, started to fish in the old druggist's pockets. The thin man, coming up behind, vented a sudden exclamation.
"The wires!" He stared at the board on which Rudolph Gorchin's device had been set up. "They're torn away from—" A muffled explosion interrupted him. The blond giant was falling sideways, blood reddening his shirt, across his abdomen.
Before the Doctor's hand could quite close on his shoulder-holstered automatic an orange-red flash streaked to him from Andrew Turner's lifted hand, slammed him against the door jamb. The revolver that the pharmacist had slipped from the holster at Max's belt boomed again. The Doctor slid slowly down the wall.
TURNER tried to shove himself up to a sitting posture, could
only get up on one elbow. The outer door rattled and thudding
footfalls came across the room. A gorilla-shouldered, shaven-pated
individual appeared in the opening to the vault, his mouth
open. Doc's third shot smashed that mouth into a smear of red and
the guard who'd been out in the hall collapsed on top of Rudolf
Gorchin's twisted corpse.
The revolver dropped from the old druggist's feeble fingers. His lips pursed and a grayish pulp came out from between them.
The Doctor twitched. His eyes opened and there was amazement in them. "You were dead." His voice was the merest whispered sound. "You had no pulse."
"That was your mistake," Turner answered, his own tones scarcely stronger. "I had a pulse, but it was so shallow your fingertips could not perceive it. That was because my heart action had been slowed down by the three tablets I swallowed when I put my hand to my mouth at the moment you shot Gorchin. The depressive action of digitalis on the cardiac muscles is powerful, but I took a chance that the dose would not quite kill me."
"Lis—listen." Only sheer will-power was keeping the Doctor alive. "Gorchin's secret—Our consul will pay you a mill—million dollars for it. He is—"
"Gorchin's secret," Doc Turner interrupted. "This—" His hand strayed to the grey stuff dribbling over his chin. "The first thing I did when I recovered consciousness was to get it into my mouth and chew it to pulp. I couldn't be sure I'd have a chance to—"
He stopped talking. No one was listening to him. The Doctor's eyes had glazed. The bony knob that lolled on his shoulders was a veritable death's head now leering in ghastly slumber.
Andrew Turner sank back with a sigh. He would have to wait a while yet until enough strength returned to enable him to rise. As he waited a faint smile of content lingered on the bluish lips under his bushy grey mustache.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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