Collected Short Fiction, page 229
They returned shortly. “We canvassed the whole floor, Chief. There’s no one home in any of the apartments along this side of the corridor, and no one on the other side knows anything about anything.”
“Okay,” Feuerman said. He looked at me. “We’ll get right to work. These damned New York apartment houses, where people could be getting sawed in half alive and no one would bother to notice! Can I have some photos of your wife, Mr. Martin?”
Eventually, they left, promising to find Kate immediately if not sooner. I didn’t put much faith in their assurances, but it made me feel better to know someone was looking.
I realized I had forgotten to show them the green substance on the side of the skillet. Just as well, I thought. They’d only ignore it.
I moved around the apartment methodically, straightening up some of the mess. When I was through, I called the lab, and informed the switchboard operator I wasn’t coming back that afternoon.
Then I slumped down in my big armchair and let the nervous reaction sweep over me.
Kate was gone, just like that. And so, I was willing to bet, were Mrs. Cowan, Mrs. Ludwig, and the rest of the people on this side of the floor. It was as if they had been collected.
Collected. Fishy odor in the air. Green stuff on the skillet. Take it easy, Dave, I warned myself. It’s only 1962. The spacemen haven’t invaded us yet.
Or have they?
I went to the sideboard and poured a drink with shaky fingers, wondering if Kate were dead or alive or halfway to Alpha Centauri by now. Detective Feuerman would have a nice job trying to find her—
Ease up, Dave. Ease up.
I gulped the drink, and poured another. Then I corked the bottle and put it away. I was loopy enough by now without getting drunk on top of it.
Kate—
Green blood. Fish-smell. And half a floor of people kidnapped.
I decided I needed some fresh air. I locked up the place and went out into that lovely September day. Only it didn’t seem so lovely now.
The street seemed sickeningly familiar. Sickeningly, because life went on calmly all around, in the apartment houses that mushroomed up on every side, in the laboratory building across the street, in the park and in the stores. Everywhere but in my house, where the normal flow of life had come to a jarring break-point.
I started to walk, just to be moving, just to be doing something. Down the block, across the street, up again—silly mechanical motions. I wondered if I should return to the apartment and wait there, wait for the phone to ring and Detective Feuerman to say, “We’ve found your wife and she’s okay.”
But I didn’t want to go back to the apartment we’d lived in together. Not yet. Not just yet. I wanted to walk around, to let the shock drain out of my system, to—
I stopped and looked down at the colored bit of cloth that lay at my feet. It was a strip of green iridescent cloth about three feet long or so, and a couple of inches wide: the belt from some woman’s housecoat, no doubt.
With trembling hands I picked it up and examined it. It was made of reylon, that new, practically indestructible plastic that went on the market last year. Kate owned a reylon housecoat, in green. I bought it for her birthday, six months ago.
And this was the belt of Kate’s housecoat lying here. I looked up. I was in front of a big, closed door, and the sign over the door said, Northern General Laboratories, Employees Only.
The lab was new; a year ago, the building had been an abandoned warehouse. No one quite knew what sort of research was carried on inside it. No one cared, in fact.
But suddenly I cared. I knew with all my heart that Kate was inside that building, and I wanted in.
Stuffing the housecoat belt into my pocket, I walked around the building, looking for the front entrance.
There wasn’t any. So I went to the employees’ entrance, and tried to open the door. No dice. I knocked, and no one heard. It was like trying to storm a fortress.
But there were other ways of getting inside a laboratory, I knew.
I waited a few minutes, glancing at my watch. It was a little after one in the afternoon. Maybe an employee returning late from lunch—
Yes. A man appeared as I stood there, youngish-looking, probably a technician of some kind. He touched a key to the door and it sprang open. I stepped swiftly in behind him, before the door closed.
He turned. “I’m sorry, but—”
Smoothly I said, “I’m the sales representative for Consolidated Labs. I-have an appointment with your director. I wonder if you—”
A girl came gliding up to us, wearing a severe one-piece dress without ornament. “I’ll handle this,” she murmured to the man who had inadvertently let me in. Turning to me she said, “Yes, please?”
I produced my Lab identification badge. “I’m David Martin of Consolidated Labs. Your director is expecting to see me on a very urgent matter.”
I hoped it would work. The place looked busy, what I could see of it: men moving back and forth on mysterious errands, carrying boxes, tubes, apparatus. Further in the background I saw a staircase and a closed door.
“Our director? Very well, Mr. Martin. Come with me.”
She moved away, gliding as if her feet were oiled, and led me through a winding passageway and down a long corridor lined with office doors.
“Which floors are used in active research?” I asked. “I’d very much like to look around the place, if regulations permit—”
“In here, please, Mr. Martin,” she said, ignoring my hopeful question. She pressed a panel and one of the office doors opened.
I entered. The room was totally bare—not even a desk or a chair in it. Just four empty walls, and no window.
I didn’t like it.
“Hey! What’s the idea of—”
“Our director has no appointments for this afternoon, Mr. Martin. Therefore, you’re here for some other purpose. Please don’t attempt to escape; you’ll find it’s quite impossible.”
I made a leap for the door, but too late. It slid smoothly closed, and the last thing I saw before it clanged shut was the girl’s smiling face.
I pounded on the door. No go. It was sealed without a crack, and there was no handle. I was neatly trapped, in an escape-proof cell.
But one thing was certain: Kate was somewhere else in the building. That fishy odor was all over the place, that repugnant smell I’d first encountered in our apartment.
Only how to find her? How to get out?
A sudden sweetish odor hit my nostrils. I heard a hissing sound coming from above. I looked up.
There was a grille in the room’s ceiling, twelve feet above me. A yellowish gas was issuing from that grille, coming hissing out and filling the room.
I coughed. There was no way to reach the grille, no way to prevent the gas from filling my lungs, no way . . .
I remember slumping over, retching, sucking in breath, thinking, This is what the gas chamber’s like. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
But I didn’t die.
I woke up, instead—feeling as if I’d been disemboweled, or drawn and quartered and put back together again. I knew I’d been gassed.
I dragged in breath, trying to clear the gas from my lungs, and blinked my eyes. For one dizzy moment I thought I was back in my lab: there were lab benches, tablesful of apparatus, lockers, paraphernalia.
But as my mind cleared I saw I was still somewhere in the building—in lab. I was in a cage of some sort, made of a transparent, nearly invisible substance.
“Dave?”
I turned. “Kate!”
She was in the next cage. Her clothing was torn, and her eyes were red from crying. Further down I saw Mrs. Cowan, still in her wheelchair, and two or three of our other neighbors. I was in the end cage, since I was the newest acquisition to the collection.
“How did you get here, Dave?” The walls of the cages didn’t seem to inhibit transmission of sound.
“I—came home and found you were gone. Then I went for a walk. Your belt was in the street outside this building.”
“Oh.” In whispers, she told me what had happened: how the doorbell had rung, how four young men had forced their way in, trapped her in the kitchen, dragged her away. “I hit one of them with the skillet,” she said. “He bled—green.”
“I know. I saw it. What is this place, anyway?”
“We’ve been here almost two hours,” Kate said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m afraid, Dave! I—don’t think they’re human!”
“We’ll find out.” I looked around. A few of the smoothfaced labmen were moving around, with equipment of a strange and incomprehensible sort. My skin grew cold. I was an engineer; I was trained to deal with electronic apparatus. But I didn’t recognize any of the gadgets I saw here. They were alien, frightening, bizarre.
Right in the middle of Manhattan, I thought. The aliens have landed and no one even bothered to look.
“What do you think they want with us, Dave?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know.”
But I had seen too many labs not to know. We were penned in these cages like experimental animals.
We were guinea pigs. Human ones. Lord only knew how they planned to use us.
I counted eight of us, in a row of cages. Waiting. Waiting—for what?
Pressing my finger against the wall of the cage, I noticed an interesting blurring effect—as if my finger were sinking into the wall, to the depth of a couple of molecules. I pushed harder, but no go.
My electronics-engineer mind started clicking. The wall might behave that way if, instead of being a new plastic, it were a force-field of some kind.
And if it were a force-field, there would have to be a generator—
“Attention, please,” said a calm, dispassionate voice. I glanced up and saw a smoothfaced young man facing the row of cages.
“That’s him,” Kate whispered. “One of the ones who came to get me!”
“Doubtless you eight have been wondering why you are here,” the young man said. “Since you are about to take part in a most important experiment, I think it’s only fair you know what is going to happen.”
“Experiment?” Kate repeated.
I nodded coldly. I had guessed as much.
“To begin,” the young man said, as coolly as if he were delivering a scientific lecture, “to begin, I should inform you that we of Venus have had this laboratory in operation for some three months now.”
Venus!
“I think I should add that this is not our natural form, but a carefully-devised imitation of your bodies. Our real appearance is something quite different.”
It all hung together now, the green blood and the fishy odor, the smooth way these people walked, the alienness of the laboratory equipment. But—why?
“The basic situation is this: Venus is greatly overcrowded, and we must expand our living area. Earth seems an ideal world for this purpose. But, of course, Earth is inhabited—and so, if we are to colonize here, we must first dispose of those inhabitants.”
Just so, I thought. Cool, scientific, emotionless—and utterly evil.
He went on: “In order to do tills most efficiently, without causing widespread confusion and possibly touching off a lengthy and costly struggle, we have established this laboratory as our first beachhead on Earth. For the past three months, we have been experimenting with various organic life extinguishers: virus diseases of one type or another, cancers, and so forth. The aim is to produce a short-lived, quick-acting airborne disease which will wipe out all Earthly life in a period of hours, leaving it free for Venusian colonists and livestock.
“Most of the methods we have devised have been too slow-acting or too easily counteracted. However, you have been brought here today to serve as living test-animals for the method we feel stands the greatest chance of success. Experiments indicate that XV-106 will cause destruction of life within minutes after infection, in the most efficient manner. XV-106 has yet to be tested on human beings, of course, but should it prove successful we intend to circulate it in Earth’s atmosphere by nightfall. In less than 24 hours we may control Earth.”
Just as simple as all that, I thought. The scientific attitude carried to the utmost: even to the point of delivering a little lecture to the guinea pigs before experimenting on them.
Kate’s pale, frightened face turned to me. “Dave—”
“Don’t worry, honey. At least . . . at least it’ll be quick. They say so.”
But it was a pretty feeble attempt at humor. I stared at that smug human mask and wondered what alien horror was behind the youthful, handsome face of the “technician.” Then I looked back at Kate. “We’ll get out of here,” I said. I ran my fingers along the cage wall, feeling the intermolecular penetration. It had to be a force-field; there was no other explanation . . .
“Above each of you, you will notice a globe containing blue vapor. This represents a concentrated solution of XV-106, in a quantity sufficient to extinguish life. We will open these globes by remote control and observe the results.”
I saw half a dozen other aliens appear, looking interested and serious. They were carrying notebooks. It was fantastic: they looked like earnest college kids doing a chemistry experiment, not like alien beings going about the job of destroying a world.
“We will now open the first globe.”
I looked up. The globe was sitting about two feet above my head, embedded in the top of the force-field cage. It looked like a little blue tomato, but I could see the hinge lines where it would split to release its deadly poison.
I tried to ignore Kate’s sobs of fear. I was scared silly myself, but I was trying to stay level-headed, not to give up, not to stop thinking of a way out . . .
If only they didn’t begin with me! If only I had a few minutes more!
“Look!” Kate screamed.
I looked.
They had opened the eighth globe, the one furthest from me. There was a woman in that first cage, someone from our building. I never knew her name. I wasn’t ever going to get to know it, either.
The blue cloud came spiralling down and dissipated itself in the atmosphere of the cage. I counted five seconds—thousand-one, thousand-two . . .
On thousand-five the woman in the cage let out a piercing shriek.
And fell apart.
It was the only way to describe it. Her skin turned gray in one second and sloughed away like so much modelling clay the next second. The devils from Venus knew their biochemistry, all right. A quicker-acting biological poison had never been imagined.
I stared numbly at the pile of bones in Cage Eight. The alien observers were gathered around, clucking approvingly, scribbling notes. The project was a howling success. I compared it with a group of biologists examining white mice they had successfully injected with leprosy, and nodding over their triumph. They felt no guilt—why should they?
And neither did these Venusians.
“We will now open the second globe,” the calm voice said.
Globe two hung over the head of a plump woman in her fifties. This time, I didn’t look—but I knew from Kate’s little gasp what had happened.
I pictured the stuff spreading out in billowing waves through Earth’s atmosphere. Within hours, the world would be a charnal-house.
Closing my eyes for a moment, I tried to think, tried to remember that paper I’d read in the electronics journal a couple of months before: Force-Field Theory and Its Applications, or something like that. I hadn’t read the piece too carefully; force-field work is so new and so experimental that I never expected to be dealing with it.
“The experiment is going quite well. Globe three, now.”
I remembered one concept from that article: essential nature of a force-field is such that the projector must be located within the system itself.”
“Dave, it’s horrible! They are killing them one by one . . . and soon it’ll be our turn.”
“Maybe they won’t get to us,” I said. “Maybe the experiment is such a success they won’t need to test us all.”
They were empty, foolish words, and I knew it. But they soothed her and they calmed me for the moment, which was all that mattered. My trained engineer’s fingers explored the cage, fumbled over roughness, pried and sought . . .
“Globe four, now.”
We were apparently in globes seven and eight. Unless they didn’t intend to proceed right up the row.
“Globe five.”
Four of the cages contained only skeletons, now. My blood chilled at the thought of a world exposed to this stuff all at once.
“Globe six.”
Kate’s cage was next . . . and mine after that. We had only minutes, seconds left.
And I found what I was looking for.
The woman in Cage Six—she was poor Mrs. Cowan—was staring in horror at the cloud of blue gas filtering into her compartment when I went into action.
I leaped high, snared the little globe dangling above my head, and shuddered at the thought of what I held in my hand. Then I stamped down on the generator of the forcefield.
It was a tiny knob embedded in the floor—but it had to be within its own field, according to force-field theory, and that was the flaw in the use of force-fields as cages. The aliens hadn’t counted on that.
There was a blue flicker in the air and I knew I was free. Kate’s cage and mine had shared a wall in common, and for an instant her cage was open before her generator filled in the gap. I reached in and yanked her through.
The aliens were busy observing Mrs. Cowan’s last seconds of life, and for three or four seconds they didn’t know what was happening. After that, it didn’t matter.
“Come on!” I whispered, and dragged Kate after me, nearly pulling her arm out of its socket. We must have set an Olympic record spurting across the floor and into the open elevator that loomed up some thirty feet away.
The aliens saw us, then. One of them shouted and went for his gun. The elevator door began to close.
I was a pretty good pitcher in high school. I hurled that deadly little globe of blue gas to the ground about a foot in front of the nearest alien, and the elevator door closed.
