Vigilante 21st Century, page 1
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THE GIRL
WAS A
WEAPON. . . .
In the lab, smoke still lingered. The walls and the ceiling were black from the effects of the explosions. From the debris, the physician dug out bits of broken glass and a dangle of tiny wires, which he held up for Bright’s examination. “I’m afraid they are badly damaged.”
“I see,” Bright said. “We’ll turn them over to our lab men and see what they can make of them. In some way or other, a current of intense energy was controlled and discharged by these wires. And that bomb in her back . . .” The vigilante shook his head.
“I gather she was sent out to kill,” the physician said. “She was given the stuff in her finger as a weapon. If she failed or refused to do her job, the bomb in her back went off?”
“That’s about the way it was,” Bright said.
The physician shuddered. “Somebody ought to be dead,” he said.
“I know,” Bright said. “But until Carole risked her life to come over to our side, we did not know who was doing these things. Now we can begin to make plans . . .
A LANCER BOOK • 1967
VIGILANTE—TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Copyright © 1967 by Robert Moore Williams
All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S.A.
LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 185 MADISON AVENUE • NEW YORK, N.Y. 10016
chapter
ONE
MOVING THROUGH the crowded lobby of the El Dorado Hotel toward the bank of elevators, the fat man moved with the slow motion of a space liner cautiously setting down—or like a very drunk man trying to convince himself and everybody else that he is sober. The fact is, he was drunk. Quite. Later inquiry would reveal that he had spent the whole evening in the pump room of the hotel, sipping Martian teng, that smooth bland drink now being imported from Mars and merchandised under the appealing—and misleading—slogan “As tender as a sweetheart’s good-night kiss.”
The bartenders in the pump room would later tell the investigating detectives and the alarmed and bewildered public-health officials that they had warned him that anyone who drank teng all evening would likely spend the next week under the delusion that he was lost on the sandy plains of bitter Mars, but that the fat man had waved away their warnings and had ordered more of the drink. The teng itself, they would testify, was the house’s standard mixture of one part of the essence brought from the Red Planet mixed with nine parts tap water. No, nobody else had had any strange reactions from drinking it. No, nobody drinking at their bar had turned red. Was this the strange reaction they were asking about?
Making his way ponderously across the crowded lobby, the fat man heard a sound behind him.
The sound was a simple pow, such as any person might make by opening his mouth suddenly and blowing out air.
Turning his head, the fat man saw a tall man standing directly behind him, a man who looked like a walking skeleton, or like a neurotic in the last stages of an anxiety neurosis, or like a cancer case ready to lie down and die.
“You!” the fat man said.
“Me!” the skeleton answered.
“You . . .” The fat man glanced down at the right hand of the skeleton. He saw that the index finger was extended. Held stiff, it was pointed toward him. “You already have!” he finished.
The skeleton nodded.
The fat man’s face went completely gray. Turning his back on the skeleton, he continued toward the bank of elevators. Now his walk was that of a robot clumping on metal feet toward certain death, a death that the robot did not understand.
Perhaps the fat man did not understand death either. But he knew it had come. The thought in his mind was, “I’ll lick this, by mental effort!” He set his mind to work on this idea.
Reaching the elevators, he clumped into the first one that was available.
Behind him, the skeleton merged into the crowd and was gone.
Outside the huge hotel building, the skeleton took from his pocket a small notebook and consulted it. Several names were written on the second page. Through the top name he drew a black line. Then he checked the second name.
His manner was that of a man who has finished one errand and has checked it off his list and is now going on to the second.
Inside the huge hotel, the fat man went directly to his room. He knew he should be dreadfully drunk. He had been drunk—this was clear enough—but something had happened and shaken him sober. What had happened? Already the incident was fading from his mind. He could not remember skeletons when he had to use all his brainpower in an effort to stay alive.
He went to the bathroom. In the mirror there, his face was pudgy and gray.
“You’re going to stay alive!” he told the image in the mirror. “Do you hear me? You’re going to stay alive!”
Leaving the bathroom, he was saying over and over again, “Going to stay alive. . . . Going to stay alive . . . going to stay alive. . . .”
He lay down on the bed. Were ants walking on his skin? This idea was silly and he knew it. Ants couldn’t exist here in this modern, antiseptic hotel. Then why was he feeling them? Or, on second thought, maybe the feeling was like the sucking cups of tiny octopi, thousands of them, on his skin.
He wasn’t quite sure what the feeling was like. Now it was like the feet of ants, now it was like the sucking cups of thousands of tiny octopi.
“Going to stay alive . . .
Sweat was on his face.
Feeling the sweat, he rose from the bed and went into the bathroom. There he let the spray of radiant energy clean and disinfect his face.
“Damned ants!” he said. “That’ll fix you!”
He looked into the mirror again. The sweat was back on his forehead. Also—something new—now his face looked distorted.
“You’d think they’d put good mirrors in a swell place like this,” he said.
The distortion was not in the mirror, but in his eyes, and he knew it.
Again the ants walked on his body.
“Going to stay alive . . . going to stay alive . . . going to stay alive. . . .”
Hastening into the other room, he threw himself on the bed. Pulling pillows behind his head, he flipped on the TV set on the wall across the room. The screen came alive with a concert of colors. Soft background music throbbed from the speakers.
The colors rippled across the screen, now flowing upward in wide streams of gold and red, now spreading from centers of blue and green. The effect was beauty. For a moment, caught in the snare of such living beauty, the fat man forgot he was going to stay alive.
In that split second when he forgot to give the commands to himself, he also relaxed the iron controls he had clamped on his nervous system, his emotions, and his body. Instantly, sweat spurted from every pore of his skin. His stomach jumped convulsively, pain became a probing knife in the region of his heart, and he screamed.
As he screamed, as the sweat spurted from him, his face began to lose its pasty-gray color and started to turn red. The effect was as if each sweat gland had suddenly begun to secrete blood. Feeling the wetness, he dabbed at it with his fingers, held his hand away from his face, saw the red color on the fingers, saw also that his hand and forearm were turning red.
He leaped from the bed. At least, he intended to leap from the bed. The leap was only a surge of his stomach, a convulsive movement of his legs, and a shake of his outflung hand. Most of his huge body was paralyzed.
All he could do was to reach for the telephone button that would connect him with the desk. Reaching the button, he pushed it.
“Yes, sir,” a cool, feminine voice said.
“Get the hotel detective up here fast!” the fat man yelled.
The cool note vanished from the feminine voice. “Yes, sir! Is—is there anything wrong, sir?”
“I’m being killed!” the fat man screamed.
“What?” the girl gasped. “I mean . . . Sir!”
“Send the house doctor, too!” the fat man added. Now his voice had lost its keen edge and had become a rasping croak. “Maybe . . . maybe the doc can still save me . . .
“Yes, sir! Right away, sir!” die now frightened hotel operator said.
Sent by the telephone operator, one of the staff of hotel detectives already present on the floor entered the room with his pass key.
The fat man had fallen off the bed and was lying on his back with his hands outstretched. The hotel detective took one look at him and hastily backed away.
The face of the fat man was bloodred. His hands and forearms were the same color. His feet and legs, where he had taken off his shoes and socks, were also red.
At a glance, the hotel detective knew this man was dead.
As he stood in the door and looked down at the fat man with the bloodred face, it seemed to the hotel detective that suddenly ants were walking on his skin. Hastily drawing his gun, he looked wildly around for something to shoot and saw nothing.
“I . . . I feel as if there were cobwebs in the air,” the young woman said nervously. “Don’t you feel them, Jonny?”
“No,” the young man answered. Having his mind on other matters, he hardly noticed what she had said.
They were walking in the moonlight through Fern Dell in Griffith Park. Below them, the vast gl
Here in Fern Dell the night was quiet. Occasionally, from the shadows, came the voice of a woman or a man raised in laughter. Above them, visible through the leaves of the sycamore trees, the moon glinted from the rounded roof of the planetarium.
The young man had a question on his mind.
“Sometimes the spiderwebs feel as if they had little feet and were walking on my face,” the girl said. Her voice had suddenly become a little shrill.
“Aw, don’t be getting any funny ideas,” the young man said, his voice gruff. “Spiderwebs don’t have feet, and you know it.”
“They feel like they do,” the girl insisted. “Don’t you feel them too?”
“Naw,” the young man answered. He still had his mind on another question, whether or not she had taken her pills. Facing this uncertainty, he was finding it difficult to pay any attention to nonexistent spiderwebs with feet. “There’s a good place over there, Flo,” he said, motioning toward the shadows at the base of the big sycamore tree. “Nobody there, either.”
She did not even glance in the direction he had indicated. He took this as a sign she had not taken her pills. This annoyed him. When would he find a girl who had the good sense to take the pills regularly?
They walked on. The night was beautiful. Jonny kept watching the young couples moving toward the shadows of the trees. He took Flo’s arm, to urge her toward the shadows—and found she was shaking.
“What’s the matter, honey?” he asked in sudden alarm.
“I don’t know, Jonny,” she answered. “It’s just that I’m scared.”
“What of? There’s nothing to be scared of, if you’ve taken your pills—”
“It’s not that, Jonny. I took them.”
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I’ve got. Maybe it’s because . . .” She hesitated, wondering what to say. “Well, I was on the switchboard today, filling in for one of the girls who was off sick. Mrs. Kether called—she owns the company, you know—”
“She owns more than just one company, from what I hear,” the young man said.
“At first I didn’t know who she was. Even after she had given her name, it still didn’t click. I told her she’d have to wait until the person she wanted to talk to was available, that he was talking on another line at the time, which was true. She bawled me out and made me cut in on the conversation. Then, when I put her on the line with the man she wanted, I got confused and cut her off too soon. It was a mistake. I tried to explain it.”
“What did she do?”
Tm not going to tell you what she said, but I never did hear such language. She finally told me that discipline in our company had been lax for some time and that she was going to make an example of me as a lesson to the others!”
“Gee! What did she do?”
“She didn’t do anything. Or she hasn’t yet,” Flo said. “But I guess I’m a little shaken by her bawling out. And they do say that when you cross her, she turns into the meanest old witch that ever lived!”
“Don’t worry about it, Flo,” Jonny said.
“I guess I was silly to be so scared,” the young woman answered.
“There’s another good place,” the young man said.
“Sh! Someone’s coming up behind us,” she interrupted.
Behind them on the gravel walk, brisk steps were audible. Crunching into the gravel, the stride was that of a man going somewhere.
The young woman turned to look behind. The man following was tall and walked with a vigorous stride. She moved to one side to let him pass. As he walked past, he pointed his finger at her.
Pow! something said.
She grabbed Jonny’s arm.
The tall man kept on walking.
“What is it, Flo? What happened? Jonny asked.
“Nothing. I guess. It was just that he . . . well, he sort of looked like a walking skeleton.”
“There’s a good—” he began, then broke off to stare at her. “What happened to your face, Flo?” he asked.
“I . . .” She brushed her face with her hand. “Nothing. I . . . Nothing.” She looked again at her hand.
Suddenly he drew back from her.
“Your face, Flo!” Alarm was in his voice. “It’s all red!”
“Red?” Again her hand went across her face, again she stared at what she saw on the fingers. “Blood!” she whispered.
She clutched at her escort, who backed away from her.
“How would I get blood on my face?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
His eyes bulging, he stared at her. Horror was rising in him.
“We’ve got to get you to a doctor,” he said.
“A doctor?” She stared at him. “I don’t need a doctor.”
“You do, Flo! You’re bleeding all over.”
“I need a minister,” she said.
“A what?” he gasped.
“A minister,” she answered. “I’m dead!”
Like a rag doll, she collapsed to the ground and lay there, an unmoving heap of flesh. Without knowing how he knew it, he knew she was dead.
Screaming, he ran from the park. On Western Avenue, he hailed a passing squad car. Almost inarticulate, he tried to tell the police what had happened. They accompanied him back to the lifeless body, then called an ambulance. Him, they took to their station, to get his story. When he had finished telling it, he was asked one question.
“Why’d you kill her?”
Over and over again, the words were pounded at him. When he tried to protest that he had not killed her, his voice was shouted down. Some hours later, the question was changed to, “How’d you kill her?”
He could not answer this question either. He was held on a murder charge. The police had a body to account for. Since they did not know who had committed the murder or how it had been done, they held the nearest person to die scene of the crime.
Outside the park, the man who looked like a skeleton drew a line through the second name in his notebook, then consulted it for the next name.
The young mother cooed to her baby, rocked with it in the rocking chair, sang to it, cuddled it. Eight months old, it was a girl, her first child. It was a good baby, never fussy about its food, rarely crying in the night. She and her husband thought it was the most wonderful child that had ever been born on earth.
The baby went promptly to sleep. The young mother laid it in its basket and went into the living room to rejoin her husband. Sitting as close together as they had when they were courting, they watched the color concert on TV. Both always had an ear tuned for a cry from the nursery. No cry came.
“She’s so good!” the mother whispered.
After the color concert was over, they played Scrabble. Losing the game, the husband began to yawn. He was nodding when he went to the bedroom. Slipping into his pajamas, he heard his wife tiptoe into the nursery to cover the baby for the night. Then he heard her scream.
“Who are you? What do you want? You get away from here! . . .”
At this point, the husband was in the nursery. His wife’s scream had brought up the animal in him, and he was an enraged beast prepared to fight to the death for his mate and their offspring.
“Where is it?” he demanded. “What’d you scream about? What happened?”
“It was at the window!” his wife gasped. “Like a skeleton looking in!”
“A skeleton?” He started toward the window, then hesitated. “There’s nothing . . .” He looked around at his wife, to see if she was out of her mind.
“It pointed a finger into the room and said, ‘Pow!’ ” the wife said. “It was standing on the ground just outside the window. It ducked down when it saw me.”
“A joker!” The husband’s voice was hot with anger. “Some damned kid playing smart-alec jokes.”
He started toward the front door, his intention being to catch the joker who had frightened his wife and to beat hell out of him. His wife caught his arm and pulled him back. She was pointing toward the basket that held the baby.
His first impression was that the child was wearing a Halloween mask made of some kind of red plastic that fitted her face very closely. As he wondered where the baby could have found such a mask, he noticed that she was not breathing. It took him a moment to react.
