Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (121 page)

“Vitons rarely find their way down here,” Graham observed. “We ought to be able to phone in comparative safety. Take the booth next to mine, Art. Phone every scientific plant, depot and individual you can find listed in the directory. Tell them the secret may be polarization of some sort, probably elliptical. Don’t let them argue with you. Tell them to spread it around where they think it’ll do the most good—then hang up.”

“Right!” Wohl stepped into his booth.

“How long had you been waiting when I arrived?”

“About fifteen minutes.” Snatching the directory, Wohl leafed it to page one. “I’d finished dressing only a couple of minutes when you arrived like a guy shot out of a cannon.”

Taking the adjoining booth, Graham dialed, got his number. As usual, the visor was out of order, but he recognized the voice at the other end. “Try polarization, Harriman,” he said, quickly. “Maybe it’s elliptical. Toss it around as fast as you know how—if you want to live!” He disconnected, giving Harriman no chance to comment.

Seven more calls he made, repeating his suggestion with economy of words. Then he rang Stamford Center Hospital, asked what time Wohl had left. The reply made him sigh with relief. The former police officer could not have been snatched and perverted—his time was fully explained.

He had not really suspected the other of being a dupe, particularly since Wohl had shown himself willing to help spread the very information which the enemy was desperately anxious to suppress. But he could not forget Sangster’s glum statement that “others display the very essence of cunning.” In addition, there was that persistent and sometimes frightening feeling of being the especial object of widespread search. The enemy, he sensed, knew of him—their problem was to find him.

Shrugging, he dialed again, rattled hurriedly through his information, and heard the other say, “Your buddy Wohl’s on our spare line right now. He’s giving us the same stuff.”

“It doesn’t matter so long as you’ve got it,” Graham snapped. “Pass it along to as many as you can.”

An hour later, he left his booth, opened Wohl’s door. “Chuck it, Art. I reckon we’ve thrown it too far to be stopped.”

“I’d got down to the letter P,” sighed Wohl. “A gezeeber named Penny was the next. ” His sigh was deeper, more regretful. “I wanted to ask him if he could spare a dime.”

“Never mind the wit.” Graham’s features registered anxiety as he noted the hands on the huge turret clock over the booths. “Time’s flying quicker than zip, and I’ve got to meet those—”

A faraway roar interrupted him. Ground trembled and shuddered in quick, tormented pulsations, and a tremendous blast of warm, odorous air swept through the area. Things plunged down the transparent levitator shafts, crashed noisily at bottom. Fine powder trickled from the roof. There was the sound of distant shouting.

The uproar spread, came nearer. Shouting, bawling men raced from the tunnels, made a clamorous, gesticulating crowd that packed the subterranean junction. A gargantuan drummer thumped the ground overhead, and more powder streamed down. The drumming ceased; the crowd milled and cursed.

Somebody drove his way through the mob, entered a phone booth, emerged after a minute. He silenced the others by sheer superiority of lung power, gained a hearing. His stentorian tones bounded and rebounded around the junction, fled in dismal wails along the tunnels.

“The exit’s blocked! The phone cable is intact, and those on the surface say there’s ten thousand tons choking the shaft. Dupes did it!” The crowd howled, flourished fists, looked around for rope and a few victims. “It’s all right, boys,” roared the speaker. “The cops got ’em! They were dropped on the run.” His authoritative eyes roamed over the mass of weary faces. “Get back to Number Four— we’ve the shortest dig for a bust-through there.”

Muttering among themselves, scowling as they went, the workers poured into a tunnel. Before the last one had been swallowed by its gloomy arch, distant thumps and rumbles burst forth with doubled fury. The beryllium-steel jaws resumed their gnawing.

Catching the speaker as he was about to follow, Graham identified himself, asked, “How long?”

“It’ll be quickest through Number Four tunnel,” replied the other. “There’s about ninety feet of solid rock between us and another gang working to meet us. We’re joining systems through this hole, and I reckon we can’t make it in under three hours.”

“Three hours!” Graham had another look at the turret clock and groaned.

Ten of his precious eighty already had drifted away, leaving behind nothing but a shrewd guess yet to be confirmed experimentally. Three more were to be wasted in waiting—waiting for release from earthly depths which, at least, were safer than the perilous surface. Once again a Viton strike had been well-timed ... or yet again the devil had looked after his own!

It was some small compensation to find that the adjoining system had its exit on West Fourteenth, for it was in the basement of the Martin Building that Graham had arranged to meet the governmental experts along with several others.

Sixty-four of them were fidgeting apprehensively in this deep hideout immediately below the spot where Professor Mayo’s crushed body had started the whole series of ghastly events. It was fitting, Graham thought, that the stain of this tragedy should mark the scene of humanity’s last boom-or-bust conference.

“You’ve been tipped about polarization?” he asked. They nodded. One stood up, intending to offer an opinion. Graham waved him down. “No discussions at the moment, gentlemen.”

His eagle eyes weighed them individually as he went on, “In spite of their immensely superior powers, we’ve outwitted our adversaries twice. We’ve done it with this polarization hint of Farmiloe’s, and we did it when first we broadcast news of the enemy’s existence. We beat them despite everything they could bring against us. On both those occasions, we succeeded by taking advantage of the Vitons’ chief weakness—that they can’t be everywhere at once. We’re going to use the same tactics again.”

“How?” demanded a voice.

“I’m not telling you that in full detail. There may be some among you who are not to be trusted!” His lean, muscular features maintained their grimness as his eyes carefully went over them again. Uneasily, his listeners shifted in their seats, each casting sidelong, wary glances at his neighbors. Their thoughts were readily apparent: what man can I call man—when no man can I call brother? Graham continued, “You’re going to be divided into eight groups of eight apiece. You’ll be scattered, and no party is going to know the location of any of the other seven. Those who don’t know, can’t tell!”

More fidgeting, more mutual suspicion. Wohl grinned to himself as he stood at Graham’s side. He was enjoying the situation. If among this crowd of reputed bigbrains were a dozen enforced converts of the Vitons, helpless but supremely crafty spies in the human camp, their identity was completely unknown, and there was no ready-made means of detecting them. Any man in this audience might well be sitting between a pair of dreadful proxies.

“I’m taking a group of eight, giving them their instructions in private, and sending them on their way before I deal with the next lot,” informed Graham. He selected Kenney Veitch, leading ray expert. “You’re in charge of the first group, Mr. Veitch. Please select your seven.”

After Veitch had picked his co-workers, Graham led them to another room, told them hurriedly, “You’re going to the Acme plant, in Philadelphia. When you get there, you’re not merely to carry on with experimentation designed to blot out a few luminosities, for that means—if you happen to be successful—you’ll be promptly eliminated by other, nearby globes, and we'll be left wondering why in hell you died. We’re sick of wanting to know why guys have died!”

“I don’t see how immediate retaliation can be prevented,” opined Veitch, his face pale, but his lips firm.

“It cannot—just yet.” Graham minced no words, didn’t care whether he sounded brutal or not. “You and your men may be blasted to blazes
—but
we’re going to know exactly what you’ve been doing right up to the moment of the blast.

You may be blown to Hades, and we may be impotent to prevent it—but we’ll know
why
you’ve been blown!”

“Ah!” breathed Veitch. His group crowded around him, wide-eyed, possessed of that curious silence of men facing the zero hour.

“You’ll have microphones distributed all over your laboratory and they’ll be linked through the city’s telephone system. You’ll also be connected with the police teletype system, and you’ll have a police operator in attendance. The army signals corps will provide you with two boys with walkie-talkie sets. There will be fine-definition scanners tied to far-off television receivers. Adjacent buildings will hold observers who’ll watch your laboratory continually.”

“I see,” said Veitch, slowly and doubtfully.

“Every single thing any of you are about to do you’re to describe in full detail before you try it. You’ll send it through all available channels, the mikes, the teletype, the radios. The scanners will then watch you do it. Distant observers will watch results. If you suffer, we'll know exactly why you suffered.”

Veitch offered no remark, and Graham went on, “If you succeed in smearing a luminosity, the technical details of how you accomplished the feat will be known fully and accurately to a large number of people spread over a large area. We’ll know the sort of equipment required to repeat the blow, we’ll rush it out in quantities, and nothing in heaven, earth or hell will stop us.” He studied them steadily. “On your way—and best of luck!”

He turned to Wohl. “Ask Laurie to choose his seven, and bring them in here.”

“I didn’t like the little runt, the one staring over Veitch’s shoulder,” remarked Wohl, pausing by the door. “His eyes had hoodlum’s heebies.”

“And what may those be?”

“A fixed, animal glare. Didn’t you notice him? Go have a look through the police art gallery—you’ll find dozens with the heebies, usually deranged or hopped-up killers.” Wohl looked expectantly at the other. “Not all of them have it, but most do. It depends on the state of their minds at the time they were photographed.”

“Yes,” agreed Graham, thoughtful. “Come to think of it, I’ve noticed it in studies of some of those old-time gangsters: Dillinger, Nelson, the Barrow boys, Louie the Lep, and others. Who knows that they weren’t sorry instruments of unseen drinkers, human swizzle-sticks used to stir up more emotion—when there weren’t enough honeymooners around.”

“By cripes!” said Wohl. “Do you suggest that every bridal room is somebody else’s soda-fountain?”

“Not every one. Of course not! But some—some!”

“I’d be in a living hell if I had your mind. Why don’t you go hang yourself sometime?”

“We are in a living hell, and you know how many cracked up when they discovered it.” He made an impatient gesture. “Veitch won’t be out of the building yet. Go catch him, Art, and put him wise.” He went toward the door. “I’ll call Laurie myself.”

His frown was still serious, worried, when he got the next group of experts, conducted them to the room.

The Faraday Electrical Equipment Company’s laboratory claimed to be the biggest on the American continent; its size suggested the building of airships rather than the evolving of the more efficient iconoscopes, tubes, and stereo screens.

A battery of enormous Diesel-electrics occupied one end of the hangarlike shed. Mighty transformers reared alongside them; the main switchboard was plenty large enough to serve the chief distributing station of a great city.

Tall, complex tubes of every conceivable type were ranged along one wall, some half finished, many completed but not yet tested. Queer frames formed of bars, rods and tubular loops—experimental models of ultra-short wave beam antennae—were propped against the opposite wall.

No production lines ran through this great hangar; it was the company’s playground for the most imaginative of its gadgeteers. A veritable litter of scanners, photo-sensitive cells, partly assembled stereo screens, radio components, wire golliwogs and schematic diagrams marred with doodles lay scattered over tables the size of rooms.

Faraday’s thought nothing of pouring a million dollars a year into the wackier channels of research. When the war began, who’d been about to market six-color stereoscopic television-deluxe. Faraday!

Duncan Laurie moodily weighed up the technical junkpile at the disposal of his little band, and said to Graham, “Plane polarization ought not to be overlooked. It should be tried in case Farmiloe was slightly off the mark.”

“It’s being considered,” Graham assured him. “We are letting no chances slide, no matter how remote they seem. Why, we’ve got one crowd out west investigating a report that the Vitons duck around rainbows, like men portaging past rapids.”

“Ye gods!” exclaimed Laurie.

“All the work is properly coordinated. Your gang is to concentrate on hyperbolic polarization.”

“Okay.” Laurie pulled meditatively at one ear. “These luminosities seem to reflect over a wave-band running from about three million Angstrom units up to four or five. They’re damnably difficult to analyze spectroscopically: we can’t line an instrument on one long enough to get anywhere. But it’s obvious that they’re energy in compact and balanced form, and are inertialess.”

“Are fish inertialess?” asked Graham.

“Fish?” Laurie was frankly puzzled.

Graham pointed to an overhead skylight. “We’ve got to forget our conditioning and try looking at things from a novel angle. Up there is the atmospheric ocean which may be infinitely more tangible to the Vitons than it is to us. It’s full of blue, shining fish swimming around in their natural habitat, swimming by some propulsive means not given to us creatures crawling around on the bottom.”

“But energy—”

“Ordinary light’s a form of energy, and has weight,” Graham went on. He heard the rattle of the police teletype as he talked. “Being made of prime forces—wavicles or whatnot—I think these Vitons have a sort of substance, though they’re not matter as matter is generally understood. We’re faced with a fourth and unfamiliar form of matter, a force-form. They have weight, even though it may be minute from our viewpoint. They have inertia, and have to expend energy to overcome it. That’s why they suck us like so many lollipops—to renew their tissues.” He smiled at Laurie. “Only my own opinions, mind you.”