Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (116 page)

Down, down went the machine amid an upsurging fountain of waggling bubbles. It vanished, leaving on the troubled surface a thin, multicolored film of oil over which ten baffled luminosities skimmed a temporary defeat.

It was fortunate that he’d had the foresight to fling open his door the instant before they struck, Graham realized. Inward pressure of water would otherwise have kept him prisoner for several valuable seconds. Sinuously moving his tough, wiry body, and with a mighty kick of his feet, he got free of the car even as it settled lopsidedly upon the river’s bed.

Making fast, powerful strokes, he sped downstream at the utmost pace of which he was capable, his chest full of wind, his eyes straining to find a way through the liquid murk. Wohl, he knew, was out—he had felt the thrust upon the car as the police lieutenant got clear. But he couldn’t see Wohl; the muddiness of the river prevented that.

Bubbles trickled from his mouth as his lungs reached point of rebellion. He tried to increase the rate of his strokes, felt his heart palpitating, knew that his eyes were starting from their sockets. A lithe swerve shot him upward, his mouth and nostrils broke surface, he exhaled, drew in a great gasp of fresh air. He went down again, swimming strongly.

Four times he came up with the swiftness of a trout snatching at a floating fly, took a deep, lung-expanding gulp, then slid back into the depths. Finally, he stroked to the shallows, his boots scraped pebbly bottom, his eyes rose cautiously above the surface.

The coruscant ten now were soaring from a point on the bank concealed by the bridge. The hidden watcher followed their ascent with calculating eyes, followed them until they were ten shining pinpoints under the edge of the clouds. As the blue specters changed direction, drifting rapidly eastward, Graham staggered out of the water and stood dripping on the bank.

Silently and undisturbed the river flowed along. The lone man regarded its placid surface with perplexity that quickly changed to open anxiety. He ran upstream, his clothes still shedded water, his mind eager yet fearing to see the other side of the bridge.

Wohl’s body grew visible through the concrete arch as the runner came nearer. Moisture squelched dismally in Graham’s boots while he pounded along the shred of bank beneath the arch and reached the police lieutenant’s quiet form.

Hastily combing wet hair from his forehead, Graham stooped over the other’s limp legs, wound his arms around them. His hands gripping the back of Wold's cold thighs, Graham heaved himself upright, his muscles cracking under the other’s weight.

He hugged the body, looking downward at its dangling head. Water drooled from Wohl’s gaping mouth and over Graham’s boots. Graham shook him with a jerky upward motion, watching resultant drops. When no more came, he laid Wohl face downward, squatted astride him, placed wide, muscular hands over breathless ribs, began to press and relax with determined rhythm.

He was still working with an utterly weary but stubborn rocking motion when the body twitched and a watery rattle came from its throat. Half an hour later, he sat in the back of a hastily stopped gyrocar, his arms supporting Wohl’s racked form.

“Got a hell of a crack on the noggin, Bill,” wheezed Wohl. He coughed, gasped, let his head loll weakly on the other’s shoulder. “Stunned me at the start. Maybe it was the door. It faced upstream, and it slapped back on me. I sank, came up, sank again. I was breathing water.” His lungs made faint gurgling noises. “I feel like a month-old floater.”

“You’ll be all right,” Graham comforted.

“Goner . . . thought I was a goner. Said to myself this was the end. Hell of an end . . . just rubbish . . . garbage ... in the river. Up and down, up and down, amid muck and bubbles, for ever and ever and ever.” He leaned forward, dribbling. Graham pulled him back again. “I was up . . . fighting like a maniac . . . lungs full. Broke top . . . and a goddam Viton grabbed me.”

“What?” shouted Graham.

“Viton got me,” Wohl repeated dully. “Felt its ghoulish fingers ... feeling around . . . inside my brain . . . searching, probing.” He coughed harshly. “All I remember.”

“They must have lugged you in to the bank,” declared Graham, excitedly. “If they’ve read your mind they’ll anticipate our next moves.”

“Feeling around ... in my brain,” murmured Wohl. He closed his eyes, breathed with vibrant, bronchial sounds.

Pursing his lips, Leamington asked, “Why didn’t they kill Wohl as they have done the others?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps they decided that he knows nothing really dangerous to them.” Bill Graham returned his superior’s steady stare. “Neither do I, for that matter—so don’t take it for granted that I’m apt to die on you every time I go out.”

“You don’t fool me,” Leamington scoffed. “It’s a marvel how your luck’s held out so far.”

Letting it pass, Graham said, “I’ll sure miss Art for the next few days.” He sighed gently. “Were you able to get me that data on Padilla?”

“We tried.” Leamington emitted a grunt of disgust. “Our man down there can discover sweet nothing. The authorities have their hands full and no time to bother with him.”

“Why? Have they got the usual attack of
manana?”

“No, it’s not that. Buenos Aires was badly blitzed by the Asians shortly after we cabled. The city’s in a bad state.”

“Damn!” swore Graham. He bit his lips in vexation. “There goes one possible lead.”

“That leaves us the ham stations to check,” observed Leamington, dismally. “We’re on that job right now. It’ll take some time. Those blasted hams have a fondness for hiding themselves on mountain tops and in the depths of jungles. They pick the darnedest places.”

“Can’t you call them on the air?”

“Oh, yes, we can call them on the air—like I can call the wife when she’s someplace else. They listen out when the spirit moves them.” Sliding open a drawer, he extracted a sheet of paper, handed it across. “This came in just before you returned. It may mean something, or it may not. Does it convey anything to you?”

“United Press report,” read Graham, rapidly scanning the lines of type. “Professor Fergus McAndrew, internationally known atom-splitter, mysteriously disappeared this morning from his home in Kirkintilloch, Scotland.” He threw a sharp glance at the impassive Leamington, returned his attention to the sheet. “Vanished while in the middle of enjoying his breakfast, leaving his meal half eaten, his coffee still warm. Mrs. Martha Leslie, his elderly housekeeper, insists that he had been kidnapped by luminosities.”

“Well?” asked Leamington.

“Kidnapped—not killed! That’s queer!” The investigator frowned as his mind concentrated on this aspect. “It looks as if he could not have known too much, else he’d have been left dead over his meal rather than snatched. Why snatch him if he was no menace?”

“That’s what gets me down.” For once in his disciplined life, Leamington permitted his feelings to gain the upper hand. He hammered on his desk, said loudly, “From the very beginning of this wacky affair we’ve been tangled in a mess of strings all of which lead to people who are corpses, or people who aren’t anything any longer. Every time we run after something we trip over a fresh cadaver. Every time we make a grab a vacuum. Now they’ve started hoisting evidence clean out of existence. Not even a body.” He snapped his fingers. “Gone—like that! Where’s it going to end?
When
is it going to end—if ever it does end?”

“It’ll end when the last Viton ceases to be, or the last human being goes under.” Graham flourished the United Press report and changed the subject. “This McAndrew, I reckon, must have a mind fairly representative of the world’s best talent at this particular time.”

“So what?”

“They won’t content themselves with probing his mind, as they’ve been doing up to now. They’ll take his entire intellect to pieces and find what makes the wheels go round. I can’t see any other reason for making a snatch rather than the usual killing. My guess is that the Vitons have become uneasy, maybe scared, and they’ve taken him as a suitable subject for their super-surgery.” His eyes flamed with intensity that startled his listener. “They’re trying to measure an average in order to estimate probabilities. They’re losing confidence and want to know what’s coming to them. So they’ll weigh this McAndrew’s brain power, and from that they’ll deduce the likelihood of us being able to discover whatever they’re afraid of us finding.”

“And then?” Leamington hissed the question.

“We suspect that Padilla found something, maybe by design, or perhaps by accident, but we must also allow for the possibility that he was no more than a wild guesser who got wiped out deliberately to mislead us. A South American red herring.” Graham stood up, his tall form towering above his chief’s desk. He wagged an emphatic finger. “This kidnapping, if I’m right, means two things.”

“Those are what?”

“Firstly, that there
is
a lethal weapon waiting to be discovered by us—if we’ve the ability to find it. The Vitons are vulnerable!” He paused, then said carefully, “Secondly, if their study of McAndrew’s mind satisfies them that we have the talent to find and develop this weapon, they’ll take every possible action to meet the threat—and damn quick! Hell is going to pop!”

“As if it isn’t popping already!” remarked Leamington. He waved an all-embracing hand. “Can you conceive anything more desperate than our present situation?”

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” Graham riposted. “We
know
what’s popping now. We don’t know what they’ll start next.”

“If they think up any new hellers,” said Leamington, “by God, they’ll about finish us!”

Graham made no reply. He was buried in thought, deep, worried thought. One, now dead, had credited him with extrasensory perception. Maybe it was that, or perhaps it was second sight—but he knew that a bigger and better hell was on the way.

Darkness, deep, dismal darkness such as can swathe only a city once lurid with light. Apart from firefly flashes of gyrocars hurtling with masked headlamps through New York’s glassless and battered canyons, there was nothing but that heavy, depressing, all-pervading gloom.

Here and there circles of wooden posts coated with phosphorescent paint gleamed greenly in the night and warned drivers of immense pits left by blasting rockets. That sour stench of war was stronger than ever, the smell of upheaved earth and fractured mains, broken bricks and torn bodies.

On uptown Sixth a small red flashlight waved to and fro in the darkness, causing Graham to brake his speedster. It slowed, stopped, and he got out.

“What’s the idea?”

A young officer emerged from concealing blackness. “Sorry, mister, your machine’s wanted.” He remained silent while Graham revealed his identification, then declared, “I can’t help it, Mr. Graham. My orders are to commandeer every vehicle attempting to pass this point.”

“All right, I will not argue the matter.” Reaching inside the gyrocar, Graham hauled out his heavy topcoat, writhed into it. “I’ll walk.”

“I’m really sorry,” the officer assured. “There’s serious trouble out west and we need every machine on which we can lay our hands.” He turned to two of his olive-drab command, barely visible in the dark. “Rush this one to the depot.” Then, as the pair clambered in, he pressed the button of his red-lensed flashlight, signaled another approaching gyrocar to stop.

Graham paced hurriedly along the road. There were tottering walls at his side, some temporarily shored with timber braces. On the other side gaunt skeletons of what once had been great business blocks stood in awful solitude.

An anti-aircraft battery occupied the square at the end. He passed it in silence, noting the aura of tension emanating from the quiet, steel-helmeted figures surrounding the sleek, uplifted muzzles. A duty of appalling futility was theirs; the guns, the cunning proximity fuses, the more cunning predictors couldn’t beat to the draw a rocket traveling far ahead of its own sound. The most they could hope for was an occasional robot-bomb, or a crazy Asian with ambitions of honorable suicide. Nothing else.

Beyond the square, precariously poised on a shattered roof, was a combined listening-post and radar unit. The quadruple trumpets of the former angled uselessly toward the westward horizon; the hemispherical antenna of the latter rotated dutifully but to little effect. Although he could not see them, he knew that somewhere between the roof-post and the guns were more tensed, silent figures waiting by the Sperry predictor—waiting for that banshee wail announcing the approach of something slow enough to detect and, perhaps, bring down.

A bright pink aurora sparkled for one second over the Palisades, and the bellow of the explosion drifted in eons later. Whatever caused it sent a tidal wave racing up the Hudson. Another sparkle came a moment later, higher up the Jersey side of the river, near Haverstraw. Then silence filled the sky.

But the road was not silent. From the depths immediately beneath came a strange, persistent sound: the sound of a mighty gnawing. That subterranean
scrunch, scrunch, scrunch
was audible all the way along, and accompanied the stealthy walker for a mile.

There, far down below the very foundations of the city, great jaws of beryllium steel were guzzling the bedrock. Mechanical moles were chewing through the substrata, forming the arteries of a new and safer city beyond reach of rockets and bombs.

“When all that’s finished,” mused Graham, whimsically, “the former subway will be the El!”

Turning left, he saw a blotch of solid darkness in the less material dark. The dim form was on the opposite side of the road, hurrying nearer on steel-shod heels that clanked noisily.

They were almost level, and about to pass, when from a swollen cloud hidden in the general blackness there plunged a ball of cold blue light. Its sudden, ferocious onslaught was irresistible. The vaguely seen human figure sensed imminent peril, whirled around, gave vent to a blood-freezing shriek that ended in a gasp.

While Graham clung close to the deeper shadows, his hard eyes registering the incredibly swift attack, the luminosity bobbed around its victim, illuminating him in pale, sickly light. He saw the fine, brilliant streamers of its tentacles insert themselves in the body. The thing burped a couple of rings like immaterial halos that spread outward and faded away. The next moment, the shining devil soared, bearing the body aloft.