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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Astounding Science Fiction, January 1944,
with "The Leech"
He had need of only one invention; thereafter, any invention, any wealth, any action he wanted carried out was his to command—
THE first premonition of trouble came to Cranborne when Jim Skelly shot at him.
It is always disconcerting to be shot at unexpectedly, but especially when the shooter is a trusted employee and friend, and a crack shot as well. But as it happened, Skelly missed. Cranborne's reflexes were too fast for him. There was also the impression that somehow Skelly managed to pull his punch at the very instant of firing.
It occurred in the morning, at the main gate of the Cranborne Labs. Skelly was on guard and Cranborne was driving in on his way to work. And then, just as Cranborne nodded good morning, he saw Skelly whip his gun out. His face was strangely contorted, like that of a man doing a set of calisthenics that taxed his strength, for it was red and twisted and registered pain and indignation rather than anger, but his arm came up nevertheless. Cranborne ducked just as the trigger was pulled, and when the bullet crashed through the windshield he rolled out of the car on the far side and gathered himself for the dash on the watchman.
By the time he rounded the rear of the car. two engineers coming to work had grabbed Skelly and disarmed him. Skelly was struggling with them, protesting it was all a mistake and he could explain everything. The pistol still spun on the ground where it fell. From then on everything was anticlimactic.
"For Pete's sake, Jim," demanded Cranborne in amazement, "what's got into you? Are you drunk or crazy?"
"Crazy, I guess," said Skelly sheepishly, as the men pinning him let his arms go and stood away. "Like those other nuts we've been hearing about. I swear by all that's holy I didn't mean to and tried not to, but to save me I couldn't help that arm from coming up and pulling the trigger. It was like being in a dream. Something outside of me that was stronger than I was making me do it."
Cranborne simply looked at him. Skelly's record was spotless, and to challenge his personal loyalty was unthinkable. Twice during the war just finished he had thwarted Nazi spies in attempts to sabotage the labs, killing five in single-handed fights against odds. And as he spoke now there could be no doubt of his sincerity. The act had been a compulsive one—motiveless, unpremeditated and irresistible. Cranborne picked up the gun and handed it to him.
"All right, Skelly," he said. "Forget it."
While he was parking his car alongside the small office building, Cranborne thought of the incident in connection with the wave of similar ones Skelly alluded to. He was trying to fit the latest occurrence into a pattern with the rest. Except there was no pattern. There was just a jumble of unrelated impulsive acts, mostly of a foolish nature. Their appearance was sporadic, random. and whimsical. Psychologists attributed them to post-war hysteria and said it was a compensatory letdown of inhibitions forced on the public by the war. The police, on the other hand, contended that most of the episodes were the work of practical jokers, utilizing the current press publicity as an excuse for their pranks.
Cranborne considered both theories and decided neither made sense. There was the case of the ferry captain. for example, a staid man of unblemished record. At the end of his run, instead of docking his boat in the slip, he went on down the river and out to sea, heedless of the angry protests of his unwilling passengers. It was not until a coastguard cutter overhauled him and tore him away from the wheel by force that he desisted. Then he broke down and actually wept. He said he could not help it. Some inner force made him do it, and though he resisted with all his might every mile of the way, simply had to carry on.
Then there was the instance of the notoriously greedy moneylender who sent out notices to his debtors that they might regard their accounts as paid in full. He repented almost instantly and tried to retract, alleging he had been under some kind of alien influence at the time. And so... but there were many such cases, all more or less silly and innocuous. But the one characteristic they had in common was that the perpetrators invariably pleaded compulsion from some mysterious outer force.
Cranborne mounted the steps to his office. Cranborne Labs was a small plant, but well laid out for its work. Its work was invention. To the right lay the technical buildings, where chemists, physicists and engineers did research. To the left lay the shops, where models were built and tested. It was Cranborne and his detailer Gibson who knitted the whole together, and they held forth in a tight little building of their own, assisted only by a secretary.
By the time Cranborne reached the door of his office he had decided to put the Skelly affair from his mind. Since an epidemic of momentary madness seemed to be abroad in the land, it was no more than to be expected that sooner or later it would reach his outfit, though admittedly the Skelly outburst was of a more dangerous nature than the others. And then he turned the knob and walked into Miss Nevers' office, which lay outside his own.
It was full of acrid smoke, and at one end a fire of torn papers blazed. Miss Nevers knelt nearby it, surrounded by stacks of letters and carbons. The wide-open drawers of the file-cases lining the walls told where they came from. The girl was sobbing spasmodically, but as she sobbed she was rending the letters into scraps and feeding the scraps to the fire. If Cranborne had been startled by what happened at the gate, his feeling now was blank amazement. For here was a case of hateful compulsion in continuous motion.
He yelled at her, and grabbed her up from the floor. She gasped once—a curiously mingled gasp of fright and relief—and collapsed in his arms, only to burst into a fit of uncontrolled weeping. He crossed the room swiftly and laid her on a couch. Then he snatched an extinguisher off the wall and went about putting out the fire. After that he opened the windows and surveyed the damage.
The building was none the worse for it, for its floors and walls were concrete and its furnishings metal. But he pawed through the charred scraps of papers ruefully. They were all that was left of a voluminous correspondence with the patent office and a number of industries in relation to licenses and royalties. The inconvenience their loss would cause would be vast, and the monetary cost incalculable, for many of the papers missing were important, since they dealt with matters pending.
Meantime, Miss Nevers had gained some control of herself. Now she was wailing in self-upbraiding. She had done a hideous, an awful, an inexcusable thing, and she was going to end it all. But she couldn't help it. Something made her—it was like being under the influence of a drug—and now she was disgraced and wanted to die.
"Now, now," he soothed, "don't let this get you down. It is happening all over town, and you just happened to be the next victim. No real harm has been done. There is nothing here that Gibson or I can't replace from memory."
"O-o-oh," she moaned, and went off into another spasm of self denunciation. But after a little he calmed her with assurances, and told her she was obviously suffering from overwork. At length her snifflings stopped and she agreed to go away and take a short vacation. Cranborne saw her out the gate, and then summoned the janitor to finish cleaning up the mess. By the time Cranborne was ready to cross the hall to the drafting room he felt he had already done a full day's work.
Gibson did not acknowledge his greeting, but went ahead with what he was doing. Cranborne spoke again, but Gibson did not seem to hear him. Cranborne shot him a curious look, then perched himself silently on a stool in a corner to watch, For clearly something was wrong in here, too. Gibson's preoccupation with what he was doing was only the first symptom that caught the eye, for he was not a fellow to lose himself completely in concentrated thought.
To begin with, the vault was open. The significance of that was that only Cranborne knew the combination, an arrangement agreed upon by common consent of the associates. The vault contained drawings for hundreds of inventions not yet released for patent or sale, economic uncertainty after the war being what it was, and their potential value ran into millions. A leak could be very costly. So, to limit responsibility, Cranborne only was to have access to the vault. And yet it was open!
How? By Gibson, obviously, since he was dragging rolls of drawings from it. But where did he get the combination? It was locked in Cranborne's head, never having been committed to paper.
Another disturbing feature was that Gibson was examining minutely the plans for a station to transmit electric power on tight beams, one of the most jealously hoarded secrets of the Cranborne Associates. It was no secret to Gibson, of course, but what bothered Cranborne was the zombielike behavior of his chief assistant. He acted like a man in a trance, going about with an absolutely deadpan face. The only live thing about him was his eyes, which bored eagerly into the sheets before him as if they had never seen one of them before. Yet Gibson, as draftsman, had executed them all! And then, from time to time, as if to fix some detail in memory, he would snatch up a pad and sketch furiously, only to crush the sketch and hurl it into a wastebasket.
Cranborne stood it as long as he could, and then went over and shook the man.
"Hey," he yelled, "snap out of it! Are you hypnotized, or what?"
"Huh?" said Gibson, stupidly, lookingly blankly up at him. Then, not slowly, but with startling abruptness, Gibson came alive.
His reaction was about that of a sleepwalker suddenly awakened in an unauthorized place. He started violently, passed his hand agitatedly across his eyes, blinked, and mumbled a question as to where he was. Then he sat trembling for a minute, staring helplessly at Cranborne. His eyes roamed over to the clock on the wall, and he started again.
"Two hours," he said weakly.
Cranborne waited.
Gibson glanced at the tracings spread out on the table, then toward the yawning vault door.
"I did it," he said, simply, "but I don't know how or why."
"Go on," said Cranborne grimly. "Tell me all about it. Especially how you felt."
"How I felt?" echoed Gibson blankly. "Why, sort of numb and helpless, like I did once when a doctor gave me a heavy shot of morphine. It happened to me just after I came in. Something compelled me to go over to the vault and open the door—"
"How?"
There was a hardness in the tone.
"I don't know how. My fingers did it. I wasn't there, so to speak, but somewhere off in the back of my head. I don't know what the numbers were, or anything."
"Go on."
"Well, I went on taking drawings out, looking at them, and putting them back again. I don't know how many. Or which."
There was a long, painful silence. Cranborne was frowning, and Gibson plainly scared.
"I suppose this washes me up," said Gibson hesitantly. "I wouldn't blame you if you thought—"
"I'm not thinking anything," snapped Cranborne, "but I'm doing a lot of wondering. Skelly tried to kill me as I came in. Miss Nevers has just burned the patent files. Now this. It is beginning to look as if someone was out to get me, and is employing you as tools."
"Oh, not that," Gibson cried out in anguish, "you know—" Cranborne shook his head.
"I know all of you. And I trust you to the hilt. Still. But I believe what I just said. You are being used. How, I don't know. Nor why. Nor by whom. But the answers to those questions are our No. 1 priority from now on."
They were interrupted by the ring of the telephone. Cranborne took it. It was McKeller, their legal associate, calling from Washington.
"Say, Steve," were McKeller's first words, "there's something down here with an awfully putrid smell. The patent office says no go on that new superplastic process. Some skunk has beat us to it, and that's not the half of it."
"Keep talking," said Cranborne, wearily.
"I saw the drawings on file and the rest of the dope. Get this. They are exact reproductions of ours—to the umptieth decimal point and to the comma. The only difference is that they were filed three weeks before ours."
"By whom?" demanded Cranborne, now really upset. The superplastic idea was already as good as sold, and the price ran into six figures down and royalties without end. Cranborne Labs needed every cent, for throughout the war they had worked exclusively on war weapons, handing everything to the government gratis.
"That's the funniest part of it," replied McKeller. "The patentee is a guy named Joaquin Jones. Remember him?"
Cranborne cursed vigorously. He did.
"Why, that big lummox couldn't invent a better mousetrap," he concluded, "and anyway, I kicked him out of here five years ago. He couldn't have stolen the idea, if that is what you mean."
"Somebody sure did," insisted McKeller ominously. "You had better do a little checking around where you are. There's a leak."
"Thanks," said Cranborne simply, and hung up. There must be a leak, but it was no ordinary leak, he was sure of that. The entrance of Jones' name into the picture was proof enough of that.
Joaquin Jones had come to him early in the war period, well equipped with references as to character and bearing a diploma from an outstanding scientific college. He was a good-looking, matinée-idolish sort of fellow, but much too dumb and easygoing to ever make a name for himself in a high-powered organization such as Cranborne Associates. Cranborne stood him just two weeks and then let him go. It was a routine incident, and easily forgotten. But Jones could not have been a spy, for at that time the superplastic process had not been so much as thought of. Nor was it conceivable that anyone would use him as a go-between for a stolen invention. He was too inept. The last Cranborne heard of him was that he had settled down as a draftsman in a third-rate architect's office.
"Well," said Cranborne, turning to Gibson, "the superplastic deal is shot. Somebody stole it. And since it may be that all the other stuff we have in the vault is compromised, we'll have to think up something new for ready money."
"What do you mean, compromised?" asked Gibson, still tingling with embarrassment from having been found sleepwalking outside a mysteriously opened vault.
"Look," said Cranborne, "we are high-grade adults, you and I. We can stare an unpalatable fact in the eye and admit it's there. Somebody—and it wasn't you or McKeller or Miss Nevers—had access to those drawings months ago, yet they were never out of the vault until the day we sent them off by registered mail to Washington. Therefore someone has been in the vault and could have seen everything. Now as you know, that vault has a very special lock of my own contrivance that has defied the best safe experts of the country. Yet you opened it this morning without knowing how, or that you were doing it. You were in a daze, under alien control. The same thing may have happened before, it may have happened to me. How are we to know? I am beginning to think we are up against something pretty uncanny. And pretty ominous. My hunch is that we are going to have to work fast from now on if we are going to hold our own."
"Maybe you're right, chief. I'd bet my last dollar on your intuition."
He meant it. Cranborne was no great shakes as an engineer and less of a scientist. But he had the happy knack of being able to look at a lot of jumbled facts and see what would happen if they were hooked together in a certain unorthodox way. The business of the Cranborne Associates was to dig out bizarre facts; it was Cranborne's job to mull over them and come out with a startling invention. Nobody could analyze his methods, least of all himself.
"All right, then," said Cranborne, "let's get going. Trot out those rough notes on the stereoscopic televisor and I'll take a fling at it. I had a dream last night."
In a few minutes the queer happenings of the morning were forgotten. Cranborne promptly immersed himself in dreamy thought, letting his mind roam as it would. Twice he started forward, then slumped back.
"Hell, Gibson," he said, suddenly, "I don't know what we've been waiting for. Grab a pencil and sketch pad. Look, it is as simple as this—"
A diagram swiftly took form.
"See. Stick a bank of omegatron tubes here, lead in your booster circuit there. Now a tripolar condenser here—"
"Oh, sure," grinned Gibson, "I've got it now. And if you add this gadget to the hook-up," and he sketched in more detail, "you kill static, cut out distortion, and can add odor sensations if you want. It'll be a lulu."
"Good work," said Cranborne, and sat back to watch Gibson develop the idea.
Minutes rolled by in silence as the sketches for the finished drawings grew. The silence was broken when Gibson broke off to look up at his chief as if expecting some sign of approval.
"Say, chief," he cried out, appalled, "what's wrong with you now? You look like—"
It was like a dash of ice water. Cranborne started as if pricked with a pointed electrode, for tingling thrills rippled his scalp and he felt the short hairs on his neck stiffen and rise. His muscles were cramped and his eyes felt as if they were starting from their sockets. He suddenly realized that he had been staring fixedly for unknown hours at something he had not seen except remotely. He had the weird feeling that somebody else had pushed him out of the way and was looking through his eyes.
With considerable effort he broke himself out of the rigid pose he found himself in. Then he got up and walked over to the wall, where he stood a moment with his nose pressed against the blank surface. In a moment he felt normal again, but slightly weak and dizzy, as if having just come out from under the influence of an anaesthetic.
"Something had hold of me, too," he explained to his anxious partner. "Now that I've experienced it myself I know my hunch is right. Either an intellect of undreamed-of power is loose in the world, bent on some purpose of its own, or—"
"Or?"
"Or that devilish thing, the spy ray, has been invented."
"Now we're all nuts, chief," laughed Gibson, but uneasily. "You worked on one once and we nearly went crazy? Remember? You said then the thing was demonstrably impossible."
"I know. But that was because we clung to the electronic approach. That track leads nowhere. We should have tackled telepathics. What better spy ray would you want than the ability to look into another man's mind? It is true that you couldn't see through concrete and steel into a closed vault, but you could transmit the impulse to your agent and make him open it for you and see what was there."
"I don't know," objected Gibson. "It sounds good, but it doesn't gibe with what we know about telepathy. Telepathy is an uncertain phenomenon. It occurs in a limited number of people, and is weak and erratic when it does. Nobody yet has been able to control it consciously. Take your hunches. They're good, we all admit. But can you turn them off and on? No!"
Cranborne admitted grudgingly that that was right.
"After all," pursued Gibson, bucked up by his minor triumph, "what is telepathy but long-range sympathy? You won't agree that if somebody is making us steal our own ideas for his benefit that we are in sympathy with us. would you?"
"You are splitting hairs now, Gibson. There are a lot of sympathies other than idealistic ones. Or emotional. Certain mental powers can be transmitted by those who know how, willy-nilly. It has been done, though not as scientifically as I would have liked. Do you recall back in '43 when there was a fellow on the air who claimed he could hypnotize by radio at any distance? He had some fool theory that that was the secret of Hitler's power. Nobody took him seriously, but I think there is the germ of an idea there."
The conversation went no further. At that moment Faber, the biological research man, rushed in, angry and excited. He waved a newspaper wildly.
"This burns me up!" tie shouted. "Read it!"
It was the afternoon edition of the Daily Enquirer, owned and edited by one of Cranborne's buddies, Max Hartwell. They had had dinner together only the night before. But there was nothing friendly about what was printed on the first page of today's issue. For under screaming headlines a signed editorial replaced the usual quota of news items.
THE "GREAT" INVENTOR EXPOSED!
How Brainsucker Cranborne Gets Away With It!
The text was a mass of scurrility, as venomous and libelous an attack as was ever penned. It described the Cranborne Labs as a place where bright young scientists were lured and tricked into signing away their intellectual futures, after which they were kept in a state of mental peonage. Stephen Cranborne was denounced as a ruthless exploiter, and the editorial went on to cite instances. There followed an astonishing expose of the institution, describing many of the better-known inventions and stating just who played what part, though all the patents had been issued in Cranborne's name. There was much truth in that portion, though it was not also told that the contributors received their proportionate share of the profit. What hurt was the mass of falsehood interwoven with it. Fully half of the famous processes, the paper alleged, had been originally conceived by the greatest and least recognized figure of modern science—Joaquin Jones!
"This is outrageous," growled Gibson, who was reading over Cranborne's shoulder. The last paragraph had completed with the assertion that even now the Cranborne vault was stuffed with unreleased inventions pirated long ago from the said Jones.
Cranborne stared at the sheet glumly, and his hands shook a little.
"Gentlemen," he said, "this is bad, and I do not pretend to understand it. But what is behind it is worse. Max Hartwell would go to hell and back for me, and now he's done this. But I know one thing, it was not his doing. He was manipulated by some malign force. But wait—"
He reached for the phone, but before his hand touched it, it rang.
"Cranborne?" came the voice. "This is Smithers of the Enquirer. I want to explain that editorial."
"It needs it," was Cranborne's grim reply.
"We can't understand what happened, but we're doing our best to rectify it. Boys are out trying to pull in the edition, and I'm going to press with a full retraction right now. It was Hartwell who did it. He wrote the thing and stood over us until It was out and on the streets. Then he went to his office and shut himself in. He seemed to be desperately worried—"
"Never mind that," snapped Cranborne, "put him on. I want to talk to him."
"Sorry, sir, but I was coming to that. Five minutes ago Mr. Hartwell jumped out the window, and it's nineteen floors down."
"Holy Moses!" exploded Cranborne.
There was not the slightest doubt that a malign power was working toward his ruin, but Cranborne could not fathom the motive or the means. He had always been a square shooter and had no known enemies. His organization had proved itself proof against bribery or cunning during the war. Yet the affair of the superplastic process showed that secrets did leak, and the attacks on him by Skelly and his friend Hartwell indicated someone was out to take his life and besmirch his reputation. It called for drastic action, but first he must have information.
Two days later Gibson rushed off to Washington with the completed plans for the new televisor. He carried with him all the other inventions formerly held in the vault, without regard to whether the market was ripe for their reception. Cranborne was insistent on making the test.
His worst fears were confirmed. Not only had all the vault inventions been patented to others, some as far back as six months before, but the new televisor had been submitted as well—the day before. A few of the patents had been issued to Joaquin Jones, the remainder to a miscellany of companies, some of which McKeller's investigation found to be controlled or owned by the same Jones.
"I don't get it," frowned Cranborne. "Jones couldn't pour sand out of a boot with the directions written on the sole."
Yet Jones seemed to have them, and with their files destroyed there appeared little they, could do about it. Cranborne was deeply troubled. He was convinced by the snatching of the televisor plans from under his own eyes that he had to deal with some form of spy ray, and that therefore it was useless to struggle in the conventional manner. Cranborne Labs faced a crisis. The stuff held in the vault was its sole asset, and now that was stolen. Its future income depended on a stream of continuing inventions, but it looked as if those could now be lifted at their source. Worst of all, Cranborne owed a note of a hundred thousand dollars at the First National Bank. The superplastic patents would have cleaned that up and to spare. That deal was out the window.
"This is what comes of being grubbing scientists," muttered Cranborne moodily. "We haven't been keeping track of what goes on in the world. I am going to look up Mr. Joaquin Jones."
It was an amazing and baffling trail. Cranborne took it up where last he had seen it—at the architect's office where Jones had been a draftsman.
"Jones?" said the architect, with a wry smile. "You bet I remember him. A good-looking brute, but dopey as they come. He falls on his feet though. After I let him out he married a beautiful girl with scads of money. I understand he's a big shot now. Ask anyone in the financial district or city hall."
Cranborne did, with startling results.
"He is a big shot," confirmed Leffingwell, a broker Cranborne knew, "but don't ask me how he got that way. He's a stuffed shirt if I ever saw one. However, I'm told he is political boss of this city now and hands out judgeships and memberships in Congress to the right people—meaning people who will play his game. There's no way to get at him legally. He's czar. He has feathered his nest, too. Nobody knows how many big holding companies he owns outright, or what he controls through them. It is pretty hush-hush business. The only big job he holds in the open is at the First National. He took over the presidency of that last week."
"It looks as if he was out to get me," said Cranborne gloomily.
"If he is, you're all washed up," was the cheering answer.
There was nothing else to do but dissolve Cranborne Labs, for on his return to the office Cranborne found a letter from the bank saying the note coming due would not be extended. It was cold and curt. It was signed by Joaquin Jones.
"This persecution is directed at me," Cranborne told the associates when they assembled. "All of us have been hit in the pocketbook, but since I am singled out for murderous attack as well it would be better for the rest of you to cut loose and fend for yourselves. I'm sorry."
There was a hubbub of protests and offers to pass the hat and meet the note among them. But Cranborne pointed out the futility of it.
"I'm sticking," announced Gibson, when the rest filed out. "What do we do next?"
"I am going to call on Mr. Joaquin Jones."
Jones was in his luxurious office suite in the penthouse atop the bank building. His waiting room was crammed with important men—industrial tycoons, renowned bankers, and political leg-men. Cranborne knew them from their published pictures. He expected to be kept waiting hours, if seen at all.
The contrary happened. His name had hardly gone in when the inner door opened and Jones stepped out, beaming an oily, fatuous smile.
"So glad you came," he said heartily, "I knew you were on the way. Right this way, please." Jiggs, president of Consolidated Traction and a daring Wall Street operator shifted himself testily in his chair and glared at Cranborne. Jiggs evidently did not like being passed over. But big, handsome, stupid-looking Jones either did not notice, or care, for he ushered his newest caller into his private office. He then waved affably to an empty chair. Cranborne did not sit down. Jones shrugged and smiled good-naturedly.
"You know, of course, that we intend to foreclose and smash your outfit," he said calmly, "and that there is no use whatever in protesting."
It was not a question, but a statement.
"You seem to know everything," said Cranborne dryly.
"A man in my position has to know," answered Jones. His face was entirely devoid of expression except for a meaningless half smile. He rattled off the words in a wooden, parrotlike manner, as if he had learned them by rote and was merely getting them out of his system. "I also know that your purpose in coming here was to size me up and find out, if you could, why you have been attacked."
"That is correct."
"Well," he said, with a curious self-deprecatory whimper, "I have nothing against you whatever."
"You have stolen the accumulated work of fifteen good men. You have wrecked a fine-going organization—"
"Oh, no. Please! Not I. I am only the beneficiary. It was another who did that. A man whom you made the disastrous error of underestimating. A man whom you grievously wronged. It was not the money he cared about. He wanted to teach you your place."
Cranborne could only stare into that bland, witless face and marvel. There was neither rage nor cold arrogance. There was not even the explanatory glitter of the madman's eye. There was nothing but a zombielike puppet mouthing words.
"Now that your back is broken and your fangs drawn," Jones went on in the same deadpan way, "he wants you to know who did it and why. He is finished with you now and inaccessible to you, but he directed me to summon you here and remind you of the last words he spoke to you, so that you can think them over for the rest of your blighted life. The man you recklessly flouted was none other than Neville Bronson, the greatest man of all times!"
"Bronson!"
Cranborne had completely forgotten the fellow. Now the incident came back to him. He recalled with great distinctness the ugly, dwarfish little fellow, high-strung and nervous to a fault, dancing about his office and pounding on his desk. "Mark my words," he had yelled in frenzy in that final interview, "I am going to be master of the world, and when I am you'll bitterly regret this day. Who helps me I will befriend, who hinders me I will crush." That was all there was to it. A disgruntled former associate with a childish grudge. A man of admitted scientific capacity, not to say genius, but one who was hopelessly vain, arrogant, and over-ambitious.
"Oh, Bronson," repeated Cranborne, after a second. "Yes, I know the little runt. And I know his limitations. Very well, he has declared war. War it will be. And if you, Jones, get hurt in the course of it, so much the worse for you. Good day."
Joaquin Jones chuckled. It was a normal, hearty chuckle, without a single overtone of malice in it.
"Bronson will enjoy that, I am sure," was all he said.
Cranborne had a hard time getting to sleep that night. In fact, he did not sleep at all. He was thinking about that curious man, Neville Bronson. The first impulse was to think of him as a madman, but he was not mad. Neurotic, yes, but not insane. His trouble was that he was undersized, ugly and deformed. One leg was shrunken and there was the hint of a back hump, and his long pendulous nose gave him a gnomish appearance that drew giggles or aversion from women. To offset this—or perhaps to heighten the effect of it—was a keen mind that leaped all technical obstacles at a rush. The resultant was a bitter psychic conflict, the sense of intellectual superiority on the one band and physical inadequacy on the other. It manifested itself in a quarrelsome and arrogant disposition that immediately estranged any rash enough to try and work alongside him. Tt was his obnoxious personality that was the real reason for his leaving the Labs. The other associates had voted him out.
Cranborne had difficulty in recalling the exact pretext employed in dismissal. Bronson had. come into his office full of fire and unquenchable energy to announce gloatingly that he had hit upon an idea that would make him master of the world. He refused to divulge any detail of it other than to say the preliminary work would require vast sums of money. He offered to proceed with it and cut in the Lab associates as assistants, provided they furnished all the money, asked no questions, and gave him full control.
"Too vague." Cranborne told him, "and we have more pressing things to do. We are at war. We'll talk about this later."
"We'll talk about it now!" shouted Bronson venomously.
That was how Cranborne recalled Bronson—an overcompensated inferiority complex with a grievance against the world, highlighted by pointed hatred for certain individuals. Such a man might easily become a menace to civilization, as witness the career of the creature Hitler.
Cranborne pommeled his brains for fragments about the mysterious invention that was to give the mastery, but nothing came up. There was only the recollection that after Bronson's departure they found some crumpled papers in the bottom of his locker. The recollection of those snapped Cranborne wide awake.
He rolled out of bed and turned on the light. It was near to dawn, but after a little he found what he was looking for. It was among the dusty notebooks in the bottom of the closet—books in which he had jotted down the salient aspects of all the duds and false starts he had ever worked on. He found the sheaf of folded sheets, still marked with the creases where they had been crumpled. Cranborne spread them out on the bed and looked them over.
They were on cross-section paper, and such data there was, was in the form of tremulous curves. Each of the curves was different, but their general trend was the same. Faber had examined them once and rendered the opinion that they were tracings of electrical currents in the human nervous system, such as are made in electrocardiograms and cephalagrams. Some bore cryptic notations such as, "oc," "aud," "cal" and there was a group marked "mot-36K" and other numerical variations.
Cranborne turned them over in his hands and scrutinized the backs carefully. He found one sheet on which there had been some pencil scribblings, now erased. In a moment he had rigged his ultraviolet lamp and was studying the paper under a glass. The words that had been erased all began with the root "psycho," as if Bronson had been groping for a tentative title for his embryo invention. The clearest one remaining was the word "psychodet."
"Ah," thought Cranborne, and gazed at the word. "Psycho," having to do with human mental processes; "det" meaning, apparently, detection. So that was the secret of Bronson's spy ray. But how—
Then he was on the phone, calling Faber first, Gibson next. Their sleepy voices quickly snapped to alert. Yes, they said, they were ready for anything. Neither had made other connection yet, and Gibson had a neat little laboratory in the outbuildings of his country cottage. Cranborne was welcome to use that. After which it was only a question of getting dressed, finding a taxicab, and picking up Faber on the way.
Having said only enough to arouse their interest, Cranborne thought hard about bees and flowers and the price of wheat. If he was in a fight with a mind reader, he would have to guard his mind. It was not until they had washed down Gibson's impromptu breakfast of ham and eggs with good strong coffee that he let down the veil.
"You know about brain currents, fellows," he said, "and that any kind of oscillating electric current sets up magnetic waves. My hunch is that Bronson has worked out a way to tune in on what we feel and think. Can you devise an umbrella of static to jam our thoughts in case he is listening in?"
"I guess so," grinned Gibson. "Where are you going to do your thinking? In my lab?"
Within the hour they had constructed a sort of electric chair, in which they sat in turns while their characteristic brain waves were recorded. Then Gibson threw together an oscillator-amplifier combination and started it humming, scrambling the field about them hopelessly.
"Let him tune in on that," said Gibson, cheerfully, after testing it. "It covers all of us. What he'll get is an earful of noise."
Then Cranborne unloaded.
"We are up against a man with hatred in his heart," he said, "and out to get us. He is clever. He knows all about neural currents, and he was a whiz at applied radionics. He did all his dirty work very cagily. He first stripped us of our secrets and put them beyond our reach, so slyly that we were unaware. As long as he worked his spy ray discreetly we were in the dark. But his egotism got the best of him. He wanted us to know about him, and his fiendish cleverness. So he went further. Instead of being content with receiving our sensations, he started to send out motor impulses. We might also have been unaware of that, but we happen to be strong-minded folk. While he was trying to make Skelly shoot me, Skelly's tendency was to let his arm hang and greet me in the normal way. The result was conflict. Skelly was caught off guard to the extent that Bronson succeeded to a point, but the shot missed me just the same.
"That gives us a pretty good clue as to the nature of his machine. He tunes in on our neural fields just as people do with ordinary radio. But with this difference. He not only sees and listens, but he can send. That is what we have to work out."
"That is all very well," remarked Falter, "but how did he do either? We worked a long time on a spy ray and couldn't get it to work. It wasn't selective enough. We could pick up brain waves—millions of them, piled one on another—but we could never unsnarl them or identify them."
"Because we never went deep enough into analysis. The human brain is constantly busy with a myriad of activities—automatic and otherwise—all utilizing current. Muscle tonus keeps up a steady roar, no matter what else is happening. A man can be eating and conversing at the same time. Note what is brought into play—olfactory and taste sensations, the sight and sound of his friend, and the intellectual interpretation of what he says. Demands are made on the memory files, and signals are sent to the blood vessels and gastric glands. It's a forty-ring circus. When we tune in on that we have a jumble, as when you hang out a window over Times Square and hear the roar of the crowd. Tt tells you nothing about any individual."
"So?"
"So we'll take the hint left us by Bronson himself. These sketch curves. 'Oc,' I take it, signifies the optic nerve, 'aud' the auditory, and so on. We'll leave the motor impulses out for the time being, as an unnecessary complication. If we can tune in on him as he has done on us, we can learn that with minimum effort. All right. Now suppose we rebuild our original spy-ray set—the one that flopped—but with the addition of a bank of resonators tuned to the kind of curve we want to select. We thereby filter out all the body impulses but chosen incoming main sensory nerves—sight, hearing and feeling."
"Why feeling?"
"We might want to test texture," said Cranborne. "Sight is often deceptive."
They went to work immediately. The first job was left to Faber—the identification of the desired curves, each of which had its own characteristic form. He did this by means of a brain probe they threw together after hours of discussion. It was an ingenious needlelike gadget which sent out impulses for variable distances from millimeters to inches. The impulses returned boomerang fashion, but grouped according to the interference they had encountered. They could thus sound the skull and locate nerve trunks. The identification of particular ones was a matter of trial and error. Cranborne acted as guinea pig. Oscillographs told the story.
Faber touched the probe to Cranborne's forehead and pressed the foot switch. A curve showed on the paper. Gibson jabbed a needle into the subject's arm. "Yow," said Cranborne, flinching. But the tracing did not vary.
"Not sensory," cracked Gibson, lighting a firecracker behind Cranborne's back. When it popped, Cranborne jumped again, but still not the tracing.
"Not auditory," said Gibson, and flicked an unseen switch. A ruby lamp on the instrument board came on, then went out. The curve rose sharply, wobbled, then fell back to the norm.
"One down," said Faber, joyfully, and took down the tracing and labeled it.
By the end of the week they had all the data they needed for the first step. There were three complete sets of curves, alike, but different.
"Like fingerprints," observed Faber. "When we acquire a big enough library of these we can dope out a classification system. In the meantime we will have to work hit or miss."
"Good enough for a starter," grunted Cranborne. "Let's get busy building our machine."
The finished contraption looked like a surrealistic conception of a pipe organ minus pipes. There was a triple keyboard consisting solely of stops, not keys, and there were pedals. Where the dummy pipes should have stood was a bank of indicators and tuning dials. It was an instrument both complex and simple. The operator sat on a stool before it, wearing a set of headphones without ear pieces. It merely held induction coils close to the skull bone.
"Here goes," said Cranborne, and sat down to make the first try. He twiddled with the starting switch and waited for the machine to warm up. "Too bad the directories don't list people by their mental wave lengths. Finding one certain man among ten millions may take time."
That could come later. The main thing was to find out whether the psychodet spy ray would work at all. He pulled the stop marked "optical" and grasped the tuning dial. He knew Faber's wave length, so he tried that first, and was treated to a Faber's-eye view of himself—the nape of his neck, with the machine as background, for Faber was standing directly behind him. So far, so good. He twisted the dial again, blinking as a kaleidoscope of passing mixed and amorphous color blinded him. Then he remembered and eased off on the pedal, cutting down the volume. Suddenly he stopped and frowned. All he saw then was a dull glowing red. He put on more power, hut the effect was only to intensify the red. No detail would come out. He smiled.
"I've got somebody distinctly," he said. "I think the guy's asleep." He pulled the auditory stop and his ears were promptly assaulted by a tremendous roar. "A shirker snoozing in the corner of a boiler shop is my guess," he ventured, "or maybe a blind man."
He was at once disabused. The flat red disappeared. The unknown subject's eyes had opened. Cranborne was looking at three men sitting in a row a few feet in front of him. They were staring down at his knees, or where his knees should be. Then the eyes he had preempted turned downward in the same direction. He saw the lower half of a brief skirt and two plump silk-stocking knees protruding front under it. Two well-modeled hands promptly came into the field of vision and gave a futile tug at the inadequate skirt hem.
"I'm a girl!" said Cranborne. "Not bad-looking, either. I'm in a subway, going somewhere."
"String along," howled his helpers. "See what happens."
The girl got out when the subway stopped and climbed some stairs. She turned down a side street, Cranborne seeing what she saw as she went. It gave him an eerie feeling to be drifting along that way without sensation other than sight, for he had long since cut the sound wave to save his ears. He missed the swish of wind on the cheeks and the gentle jar when her heels hit the pavement. It was spring, too, and he wondered how she felt. He yanked the "sensory" full-skin combination.
"Crickets!" he yelped, and promptly shoved the stop back in.
"Now what?" came the eager questions.
"Tight shoes," Cranborne explained.
Then his subject entered an office building, and a few minutes later was at a typewriter knocking out a letter from notes. Cranborne followed the text of it shamelessly. Apparently her boss was a bookmaker or in some other occupation on the fringe of legality, for the letter was to the district attorney about some matter recently discussed. It was not the kind of letter whose publication would have done either one of them good. Cranborne had seen all he needed for the time being. He shut off the machine and whirled around.
"It works," he said. "And it's the most—or next to the most—hellish device man has invented so far. No wonder Bronson said he could master the world. We've all heard the expression 'knowledge is power' often enough to come to think it a cliche. Well, it's awfully sound."
There was no need to elaborate the idea. One had only to imagine the applications. Blackmail alone is a potent weapon, but a spy-ray's fullest uses transcend that by far. The spy has but to listen in on directors' meetings to find out the condition and intentions of a given company. He can then buy or sell stocks accordingly. Or land, or raw material. The inside story of what went on in a smoke-filled hotel room during a national convention would be of value to the politicians on the other side—or of another faction of the same party. The possessor of it could thereby curry favor. Money and political power is a hard combination. But those were the larger uses of the spy ray. The more intimate, personal ones would be of still greater value to the egotistical, and also to the—shall we say?—prurient.
"The problem now is to find Bronson and smash him," Cranborne concluded.
The how of it was not easy to find. Nobody had the same wave length, and no waves were registered. It was hard even to identify the subjects they picked up at random. By working night and day in shifts they managed to reach an immense list of known persons by their tuning numbers. But neither Jones nor Bronson was on the list. They knew where Jones hung out, but not Bronson. Outside investigation could not turn him up. He had walked out of the world's ken the day he left Cranborne's Labs in his magnificent huff.
"We'll have to go deeper than sensation. We have to dig into the thought processes and the memory field."
That was what they decided. It led to more brain probing, a necessity that was embarrassing to them all. But they framed a very curious oath of mutual respect, confidence, and advance forgiveness for any jarring thought, and they solemnly swore to it. After that they searched for each other's seats of memory. Then they modified the psychodet by adding other tubes and stops, and resumed their hunting.
One fine day when Cranborne and Faber were off duty and sunbathing in the yard, a series of wild yells brought them upstanding. Gibson had hit on something. They ran in to see what.
"I've got Jones. Just blundered onto him," he said, greatly excited. The two companions grabbed auxiliary headsets and listened in. It was disappointing. There was nothing to listen to. Such thoughts that came through were listless, incoherent and wandering. The man was fretting because he had to spend so much time at his desk. Off and on his mind would wander backward with relish to a steak eaten the night before, or forward in anticipation of tonight's dinner. There were warming flashes, too, as he occasionally thought of his adorable wife. The man's mind was not a blank, but its contents were distinctly not worth while. His conscious thoughts were those of and healthy moron—on the fleshy side. His perceptible memory was virtually blank. They had no way of exciting it, and it seemed he had no desire to do it of himself.
"As I suspected," said Cranborne grimly. "He's just a stooge, waiting for his master's voice. Now that we've got him, hang on. Sooner or later we'll learn something."
The break came sooner than they expected. Ten minutes later there was a sharp increase in the intensity of thought, and it came through with great clarity. To sharpen their perception they had already shut off all the outside sensory channels. The thought they heard now was worded this way:
"There is a young man named Heard on his way to see me. He will arrive in ten minutes. He wants my intercession with the law to keep him out of jail. He has been directed to come and ask for it, but I shall advise him to give himself up and plead guilty, promising to see that he receives a pardon. The crime is murder—"
"Quick," yelled Cranborne, for Gibson was still in the saddle, "pull the visual stop. I want to see."
The field of vision was blurred at first and Cranborne had trouble untangling it. It was a double exposure. Superposed on what Jones was looking at was what someone else was seeing. The first image was a desktop, the second the operating panel of another psychodet, resembling in the main the one they were operating. Cranborne whipped a pad of paper off the table and began sketching furiously. He concentrated on what he saw, leaving it to the others to do the listening. Then, suddenly, the vision clarified to a single image, and the thought stream dropped back to its normal level. Cranborne snatched off his headgear and reached for a slide rule.
"We've got him!" he exulted. "Bronson himself! His own conceit has betrayed him. Look!" They crowded around and examined his sketch. The other psychodet, being further developed than their own crude attempt, was simpler in its corresponding features. but it had added buttons and panels for sending various motor impulses, including those of thought. Their workings were not apparent, but they were plainly labeled. What had excited Cranborne was the table of code numerals. Bronson had hung them before him for convenience. It was a list of his principal stooges and victims. Joaquin Jones' number was there, as well as Cranborne's own and Gibson's. But the priceless detail of the sketch was a framed item let into the operating panel, an outstanding example of the man's colossal ego. It was a wiggly curve done in gold ink on a black mat. Under it was its tuning symbol, and the legend "Formula for Greatness." The curve was a thought curve, having the characteristics of abstract reasoning.
"How did you come to think of it?" clamored the others, admiringly.
"The thoughts he was impressing on Jones were coming in on Jones' wave, and they told us nothing about the whereabouts of Bronson on the band. But since we know these are two-way waves, it occurred to me that if we switched on the vision we could see past Jones and into the sender. It probably went through a scrambler at the other end, wrong side to, but it bounced back again as I hoped. Also our waves went through Jones both ways, but since he can perceive only what Bronson wants him to perceive, he was unconscious of it. It was lucky for us Bronson has such an inflated idea of himself. Otherwise we would only have had the picture of his machine."
The stated machine settings differed, but Cranborne had his Rosetta Stone. There were his and Gibson's and Jones' tuning numbers in both codes. It was a relatively easy matter to reconstruct the dialing system of the Bronson set and translate his directory into terms they could use. The most magnificent gift of all was that of Bronson's own call. Now they had him.
"What are we going to do about Betty Nevers?" asked Faber, abruptly, once Cranborne had satisfied himself with a brief spell of gloating.
"What about her?" snapped Cranborne. He had not given the girl a thought since the day he sent her away.
"Were you concentrating on that sketch so hard you didn't hear? She has been brutally killed. Heard did it. That is why he came to see Jones."
"No," said Cranborne, sitting up and looking stern. "Start at the beginning."
"We infer that Bronson also held a grudge against both Heard and the girl. At least he prompted Heard to kill her, just as he tried to make Skelly do in your case. Heard beat her to death with a hammer. It seems they were lovers. Now Heard is going to the chair. What do you make of it?"
"I don't know who this Heard is," said Cranborne slowly, "but I can throw some light on the rest of it. Bronson tried hard to date Miss Nevers while he was with us. She laughed at him, and he probably hates her for it. Pique and jealousy, leavened with unlimited quantities of sadism. We've got to stop that beast and quickly. Never mind Jones from now on. When we pull his prop from under him his phony empire will collapse like a house of cards. Tune in on Bronson now and let's see what his filthy mind holds."
Delving into the black soul of Neville Bronson, proved to be a far from pleasant chore. There were times when the operator on watch gave up and quit out of sheer disgust. But they were convinced the man was sane, in a cold, calculating, inhuman way. Only a handful of his acts had been committed from pure spite. Most of them were to gain power. His craving for power was unlimited, and he knew he had the means to achieve it. He did not care a whit who got the nominal credit, so long as it was he who had the thing done his way. His looting of the Cranborne Labs was only incidentally to seek revenge, and his attempt to slay Cranborne was simply out of fear of the one intellect he regarded as possibly superior to his own.
There was an amusing sequel to that. Like himself, who lived hidden away they knew not where, Cranborne had disappeared from sight when he went to the Gibson place. Bronson's angry curses, when he would tune in only to pick up the howl of the umbrella of static, often brought stern smiles to the faces of the watchers.
It was one thing to be convinced of the man's villainy and another to undo it. The three inventors knew the histories of a dozen major crimes and countless instances of badly concealed blackmail, but there was nothing they could do. By then the machinery of the law was under Bronson's thumb, via his proxy Jones. If the lie detector is not received in honest courts, how could they expect the evidence of their psychodet to be accepted? No prosecutor would listen to it.
"We'll have to take the law into our own hands," said Cranborne, savagely. "I would like to see him convicted in the open, but with that machine in his hands he is invulnerable. All we know about his hideout is how it looks inside, and that he lives like a king with a single Japanese house boy to serve him. We do not even know what state he is in."
The next step was obvious. They fished the secret from his unaware brain of how to send impulses. It was a much more complicated device than a mere receiver, and required an abundance of power. It took three months to build and test on one another. Then they were sure it would work.
"Now what?" was the question at the next council of war.
"Make him go berserk and smash his machine," suggested Faber.
"Yeah," agreed Gibson, "and then force him to go to the nearest police station and give himself up."
"With the machine smashed the police would never believe him," said Cranborne, sitting down on the stool and tuning in. The machine was still set to receive Bronson's perceptions, and as it warmed up Cranborne's face grew tense. The hour was near to midnight and the others were watching closely.
"Good Lord," he gasped, and his face went white. Then it set in granite lines and his eyes hardened. Gibson and Faber did not say a word. They watched.
Suddenly they saw Cranborne's hand go out and push in the sending switch. What thoughts he was impressing on the waves they could not know, but Cranborne's face was iron and his eyes intent. Then he jammed the pedal down hard and locked it, and jumped up from the seat.
"Outside, all of you! I don't know what will happen next."
His urgency was contagious, and they hurried after him out into the starlight of the yard, and did not stop until Cranborne said they might—a hundred feet away.
"What did you do?" whispered Gibson, awed.
"I made him shove in his full sensory reception and step up his set to full power, then lock it. When he had done that. I paralyzed him where he sat."
Cranborne mopped his brow and glanced apprehensively toward the shed.
"Yes, go on. What was he doing?"
"Eavesdropping on one of his victims, as usual. But with a difference. Tonight the cold, merciless, curious scientist is topmost in him. He is out to learn the unlearnable—something about bodily sensations never before studied. He was going to do it on low power, with due precautions. Well, he'll learn something, all right. I'll guarantee that."
"Quit being so cryptic," growled Gibson. "What are you driving at?"
"Neville Bronson," said Cranborne slowly, "is tuned in on State Prison. There is an execution there tonight. Heard goes to the chair any minute now—"
A blare of violet light turned night into day for a split second, and circuit-breakers screamed. There was the smell of burning insulation. The psychodet was collapsing in a flaming shed. Nobody thought of calling the fire department. They did not want it. Their spy ray had served its purpose.
"Fair enough," Shrugged Gibson. The three turned their backs on the blaze, and walked away toward the house.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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