Manly Wade Wellman - Chapbook 02 (16 page)

 
          
“Come
where?” asked Buckalew.
“To Brome Fielding's quarters.”
“Brome Fielding’s!” cried Stover, his voice shaking in spite
of himself.
“Is he—
”

           
He had almost asked if Brome
Fielding had survived that plunge out of the wrecked car. He broke off in time,
and Congreve unwittingly answered the question for him.

 
          
“Fielding
has found the will of Mace Malbrook in a safe at the office they both shared.
Since everybody here is mixed up in the murder somehow, I want you to sit in on
the hearing of it. We’ll pick up Amyas Crofts and go right now.”

 
         
THE
room was dim as they entered it, dim and quiet, with chairs for all and a blank
televiso screen against the rearmost wall. Two figures sat in a corner behind
some radio apparatus with a projector attached. One of these stood up and
spoke. It was Brome Fielding.

 
          
“Phogor
and Reynardine,” said Fielding, “take these two chairs in the center. Buckalew,
sit just behind Miss Reynardine. Congreve, you’re here to investigate and
protect. Maybe you’d like to sit next to the door, where you can keep an eye on
everybody? Mr. Crofts, you may take the chair on the other side of the door.
Mr. Stover,” and Fielding’s voice became an unpleasant growl, “I suppose you’re
to be congratulated from escaping from that wreck.”

 
          
“You
didn't expect me to live through it?”

 
          
“As
a matter of fact, I rather did,
It
was myself that
surprised me by surviving. Thank all the gods of all the planets for that
automatic parachute.”

 
          
“You
two are talking in riddles,” said Congreve coldly. “Better tell me the
answers.”

 
          
“I’ll
explain fully when we’ve had the will,” promised Fielding. “Probably you'll be
glad to hear the whole truth about that accident which you tell me finished
poor Sharp. Sit next to me, Stover.”

 
          
“Why
next to you?” asked Stover.
“Because I don’t trust you.
I want to keep watch over you.”

           
“Isn’t Congreve here to do the
watching?” mocked Stover.

 
          
Amyas
Crofts said: “Put Stover next to me, and turn off the lights. Once he
threatened me.”

 
          
Stover
looked at Fielding, then at the silent, hulking figure that sat half- hidden
behind the radio machinery.

 
          
“My
bodyguard,” volunteered Fielding, as he saw the direction of Stover’s glance.
“I hired him at once when I heard that you were still alive.”

 
          
“Not
very complimentary to the police,” rejoined Stover. “Well, if he’s an honest
bruiser, let him sit between us. I don’t think I trust you, either.”

 
          
Fielding
was silent for a moment. Then: “Not a bad idea.
Lubbock
, will you trade chairs with me and keep
watch over Mr. Stover? If he acts strangely at all, you will know what to do.”

 
          
The
bodyguard made no reply, nor did he move until Fielding put a hand on his
shoulder. Then his great hulk shifted smoothly to the chair nearest Stover.
Fielding switched off the last dim light, and they heard him fumbling with the
controls of his machinery.

 
          
“This
is a televiso representation, with transcribed sound track,” he announced in
the gloom. “It depicts the verbal making of the last will and testament of my
partner, the late Mace Malbrook.”

 
          
A
click,
and the screen lighted up.

 
          
They
all saw the image of Mace Malbrook, in full color. He sat beside a table on
which was placed a microphone to pick up his voice. In one hand he held a glass
that seemed to be full of
guil
. A
powerful drink, thought Stover, to be sipped while he recorded an important
legal document.

 
          
Malbrook’s
pictured face looked pale and sardonic, and his mouth was set in the tightest
of smiles.

 
          
“My
name,” came his formal voice, “is Mace Malbrook. The date, Earth time, is May
eighteenth, twenty-nine hundred and thirty-six.”

 
          
“May
eighteenth!” breathed Stover. It was the day on which he had come to Mars, the
day before the night in which Mace Malbrook had died. Malbrook’s voice went on:

 
          
“The
extent of my property holdings and controls can be ascertained by consulting
the public records of the community of Pulambar. I make this statement at this
time, recognizing that I may possibly come to my death at the hands of one
Dillon Stover.” Stover heard a sigh from someone, perhaps Reynardine Phogor. He
divined, rather than saw or heard, a leaning forward of Congreve. In the mind
of the police head, Stover’s guilt was again confirmed, though probably
Malbrook had said what he had said simply in looking forward to a duel. Again
the voice of the dead man:

 
          
“In
the event of my death, I request that this recording be properly observed by my
two heirs-at-law, Brome Fielding and Reynardine Phogor; and they
be
accompanied by reputable and responsible witnesses.”

 
          
That
was the usual introduction to a will so recorded. The image of Malbrook sipped
from the glass, and the voice added:

 
          
“I
hearby make definite statement that, although each of these two heirs expects
to receive at my death the overwhelming bulk of my holdings and interests, I am
obliged to neglect one of them in order to treat the other as I consider
deserved. I now make my formal bequests and decrees. First: That all my debts
be paid, and a funeral service be conducted for me in a manner befitting one of
my standing and reputation. Second—”

 
          
A break in the speech.
The figure of Malbrook rose from its
seat, as if to lend emphasis to what would follow.

 
          
“Second,”
came
words in a louder and sterner voice, “I direct
that my former partner, Brome Fielding, be arrested, and charged with my wilful
murder for his own selfish profit!”
Loud, raucous confusion.
With a loud buzz and snap, the radio mechanism shut off and the screen
darkened. But the voice of Dillon Stover rang on the air that still vibrated
with the accusation.

 
          
“Let nobody move!”

           
Stover was on his feet, near the
door where sat Congreve and Amyas Crofts. He flashed on his radium torch, which
he had never put aside since his adventure at Malbrook’s, and it filled the
room with brightness.
 
 
         
 
It showed all the others
risen
,
all but the mantled bodyguard Fielding had called
Lubbock
. Fielding himself had moved back from the
radio controls, toward a blank-seeming wall.

 
          
“Don’t
try to duck through any hidden panel, Fielding,” warned Stover, and his free
hand whipped out his ray thrower. “Someone turn on the room lights . . .
Thanks, Congreve. Now, while Fielding is still pulling himself together, let me
say that I pulled a trick to get this case out in the open, and it’s succeeded.
I added my voice to that of Malbrook. Fielding murdered his partner and the
others, for the reason you have just heard. He wanted all of Malbrook’s
holdings for himself. And he tried to lay the blame on me.”

 
          
“Mr.
Stover—” began Congreve angrily.

 
          
“Don’t
interfere now,” spoke up Buckalew suddenly and clearly. “I respect the law, but
not all the decisions of all its representatives. Stover must be allowed to
finish.”

 
         
HE
MADE a grab at the front of Phogor’s tunic, and possessed himself of the
Venusian’s electro-automatic. Congreve subsided.

 
          
Fielding
had jumped forward again, standing close to Stover. He seemed to dare an
assault from the ray-thrower.

 
          
“You’re
convicting yourself, Stover,” he charged. “I wanted this will—which has been
tampered with —to be heard, and properly witnessed, before the final bands
tightened around you. But now—Congreve! This man is armed and desperate, but I
know he’ll never defeat the law. Before you all, I want to tell what happened
earlier tonight.”

 
          
He
pointed a finger at Stover. “He and Captain Sharp accosted me. I took them into
my flying machine, intending to turn them over to the police. When we were in
the air, and I announced my intention, Stover set off some kind of a bomb. I
only escaped because I was strapped in the pilot’s seat and had an automatic
parachute.”

 
          
“Certainly
you had, since it was you who did the bombing;” Stover
 
shouted him down. “That pilot’s seat was
the best possible protection, Fielding. It had a high metal back to fend off a
blast. The blast itself kicked you loose, seat and all, and the parachute let
you down. I escaped by chance and desperation and the luck that wouldn’t let a
swine like you get away with this dirty string of murders! And there was
another figure in the car with us.”

 
          
“You
mean Sharp?” put in Congreve who has been trying to edge in a word for some
time.

 
          
“No,
not
Sharp
.
Someone—something else.”

 
          
“Preposterous!”
snorted Fielding.

 
          
Stover
turned back to him. “Get back a little, Fielding. I want to look at this
bodyguard of yours, the fellow you said you’d hired to protect you from me? Why
is he so silent? Why doesn’t he get out of the chair?”

 
          
When
Fielding refused to move, Stover pushed him violently aside. “Look!” he cried
to the others.

 
          
They
looked.

 
          
“That’s
no bodyguard,” said Congreve at once. “It isn’t a man at all.”

 
          
“It’s
nothing alive,” put in Amyas Crofts, stepping forward.

 
          
“No,”
said Stover.
“Certainly not.
Just what is the thing?”

 
          
THEY
were all staring now.

 
          
The
draped hulk was not a man. It was a dummy. Its head, rising above the folds of
the mantle, was flesh-colored and lifelike, but the full light that now flooded
the room showed it up for a painted sham. Its eyes and lips were flat
stencil-like
blotches,
its skin looked taut and puffy.

 
          
“It
seems to be some sort of hollow shell,” commented Stover. “You moved it very
easily from chair to chair, Fielding. I wonder if it isn’t an inflated shape of
thin elascoid— like a toy bolloon at a
carnival?
” He
lifted his ray thrower, as though to send a beam at the thing.
 
 
         
“Don’t!” Fielding almost screamed.

 
          
“Why
not?” demanded
Stover,
and his weapon drew a bead on
the lumpy, inflated head. “Why so compassionate over a big air-blown doll? I
think I’ll just deflate your friend the bodyguard.”

 
          
His
finger seemed to tremble on the trigger-switch of his weapon. Fielding gave
another cry, wordless and desperate, and flung himself forward. He caught
Stover’s wrist, deflecting the aim of the ray thrower.

 
          
“You
can’t do that!” he chattered. “You don’t know—you can’t know!”

 
          
Stover
threw him clear, with an effortless jerk of his arm.

 
          
“I
didn’t know,” he agreed, “but I’m beginning to find out. Up to now it’s been
guesswork. Fielding, you’ve given your show away. If I shot that image—as
Malbrook shot the one that was painted to look like me, as poor Gerda slapped
the unknown shape that jostled her in the dark closet— or if it received the
slightest jar, as the trigger-devices gave to the image of Buckalew at my
apartment, and to the dummy in your flying car—it would explode. The detonation
would blow us all to bits, including you who figured to explode it if worst
came to worst here—but who also figured to escape yourself.”

 
          
Fielding
had recovered himself. He stood between Stover and the dummy.

 
          
“I
protest at this farce!” he cried to Congreve.
"Arrest
Stover.
If you can’t do it alone, deputize these others to overpower and
disarm him. I accuse him of tampering with the recorded will of Mace Malbrook
and of trying to saddle me with the blame for these dreadful crimes. Probably
you’ll find, from this additional evidence, that he’s definitely the murderer.”

 
          
“Let
me get a word in edgewise,” spoke up Reynardine Phogor. “All these recriminations
are whizzing by mighty fast, but Fielding is right about one thing. Those last
words that came from the television screen weren’t in the voice of Mace
Malbrook. They were in the voice of Dillon Stover.”

 
          
“You’re
right,” Stover admitted.

 
          
He
put away his radium torch and produced another thing from his pocket, a small
microphone. “I was near enough to the radio to reach out and switch off the
sound track at what I thought was a good moment. And with this mike I
substituted my own voice. But I spoiled no will. Fielding had done that
already. Look at this.”

 
          
Reaching
into his pocket again, he dug out the ragged coil of film he had found in
Malbrook’s cupboard.

 
          
“Damaged, but partially salvageable.
It’s
Malbrook’s true spoken will, undoubtedly cut away from this transcription. Take
it, Congreve.” And he passed it over.

 
         
PHOGOR
was looking into the opened radio mechanism. “Stover has spoken truth. This
film has been cut and spliced, a new track worked in.”

 
          
“Probably
Fielding’s substituted piece of film is beautifully faked to sound like
Malbrook’s voice.”

 
          
“That
will,” said
Fielding,
“leaves everything to me.”

 
          
“It
would. That’s why you faked it,” charged Stover. “Sound laboratories can
diagnose and show the truth of all this.”

 
          
Congreve
put away the coil of film. "Everybody’s been taking my job out of my hands
lately,” he growled. “Now I ask, with all the courtesy in the world, to be
allowed back into the police business. I pronounce you all under arrest until
this
is
cleared up.” “Let me finish,” cried Stover.

 
          
“I
demand a proper court hearing,” Fielding began.

 
          
“You’ll
be heard—and condemned —right here!” Stover said tersely. “This explosive dummy
you’ve brought in among us is the evidence that answers the riddle.
A fabric of thin, strong elascoid, made into an airtight form that
can be inflated into a very lifelike man.
Without air in it, the tube is
so slim that it can be inserted into a locked room through as narrow a hole as
a ventilator pipe. But the inside’s coated with a nitroglycerin oil, enough to
wreck a small area. When inflated from the other side of the hole by a small
pump or a tank of compressed air, it becomes a shape that scares the victim,
makes him strike or shoot— and brings about his own death.” “You’re crazy as
well as criminal,” raged Fielding. “You can’t prove that fantastic theory.”

           
“But I can,” said Stover. “You
seemed to be in the clear at Malbrook’s because I knocked you down before the
explosion. But you’d just finished inflating the elascoid balloon that looked
like me. Inside the room, Malbrook saw it and fired. It finished him and poor
Prraal.”

 
          
From
his pocket he drew out a shred of elascoid, the bit he had salvaged from the
ventilator of the closet where Gerda had died. “Take charge of this, Congreve.
It’s Exhibit A, a piece of such a figure. I’ll explain more fully in a moment.”

 
          
Again
he turned on Fielding. “Most of the fabric of those dummies can be traced as
stains—little smears left by the violence of the explosion. And we can examine
this one which is still intact. Fielding, you long envied Malbrook his half of
the great enterprises you ran together. You long planned this sort of
murder—had elascoid dummies ready to finish him and any others you might need
to kill.

 
          
“When
Malbrook decided to fight a duel with me, you struck, figuring I would be found
guilty. But you struck too late. For one thing, you found out what Malbrook’s
will
provided
. That was why you wanted to marry
Reynardine Phogor. When she refused you, you faked the will. Congreve brought us
all in to hear it. And you prepared a specimen of your
elascoid-and-nitroglycerin handiwork to kill us all if anything went wrong.
Instead of which, it’s going to convict you!

 
          
“You
have proved your point,” snarled Fielding without further subterfuge.

 
         
FIELDING
was backing toward the far wall, and in front of him he held the elascoid
dummy, divested of its robe. Buckalew, Stover and Congreve pointed their
weapons, and Fielding only laughed.

 
          
“You
daren’t shoot at my elascoid friend,” he warned. “That would dispose of all of
us. But I’ll take the risk, if you force me.”

 
          
“By
your actions you are confessing, Fielding,” said Congreve sharply.

 
          
“Yes,
and I’m escaping,” snarled Fielding. “A few more deaths won’t make my
punishment any tougher.”

 
          
“Not
after the people you’ve already killed,” agreed Stover. “Better grab him,
Congreve, before he cracks.”

 
          
“How
far do you expect to get, Fielding?” demanded Congreve.

 
          
“You’ll
never know. I know Pulambar—hidings, strongholds, disguises. Stand still, all of
you. There’s a hidden panel, as Stover surmised. If you move before I get
through I’ll explode my elascoid friend.”

 
          
Putting
a hand behind him, he pressed a stud on the wall. A dark section slid away,
revealing a rectangle of darkness.

 
          
“Good-by,”
he taunted them. “Here, now you may have the evidence Mr. Stover so cunningly
puzzled out.”

 
          
And
he hurled the inflated figure across the room.

 
          
Strover
realized later that what followed had been packed into a very brief interval.
It was only that his mind was working at rocket-ship speed, outrunning his
muscles and
reactions, that
made everything seem to
transpire in slow-mation.

 
          
He
sprang to catch the elascoid dummy. It was in his thoughts that if someone
should die to save the others it might as well be himself who took the
explosion against his big body. But somebody else moved more swiftly.

 
          
Buckalew!

 
          
From
the side of the room, Buckalew leaped at an angle. He caught the thing in his
arms, and rushed it into the secret passageway by which Fielding was trying to
escape. At that instant, the blast came.

 
          
Reynardine
Phogor screamed, her stepfather caught and steadied her. Stover and Congreve
recovered from the blast of air and pushed their way through the gaping,
smoke-filled panel.

 
          
The
passageway was bulged as to walls and ceiling, but had not sprung apart
anywhere. Stover stumbled over the prostrate form of Buckalew, and recovered in
time to keep from stepping upon the manifestly dead body of Fielding. Of the
dummy remained only another of the elascoid stains.

 
          
Stover
felt heart-sick as he drew back from Fielding’s corpse. Then he heard Buckalew
speak.

 
          
“I’m
all right, Dillon.”

 
          
As
he spoke, Buckalew struggled into a sitting posture. His clothes were in rags,
but he smiled cheerfully.

 
          
“All
right?” repeated Congreve, fumbling around in the passageway. “All right when
that nitroglycerin blew a leg off of you?”

 
         
HE
POINTED to where it lay, foot, knee and part of the thigh, in a corner. Stover
stared miserably. But Buckalew laughed. He drew up the knee he had left, and
clasped his arms around it.

 
          
“It’s
not as bad as it looks,” he told Congreve gently. “Pick it up and see.” The
police investigator did so, gingerly. He uttered a startled exclamation as he
dropped the leg in surprise. The limb fell with a metallic clank.

           
“Artificial!” he snorted, as though
this were a prank played deliberately on him. “What next in this space- dizzy
case?
An artificial leg on a man.”

 
          
“In
a manner of speaking,” agreed the victim of the accident. “Stover can help me,
Congreve. My leg can be repaired. Don’t you think you had better call the
coroner for Fielding— and then see about releasing Bee MacGowan right away so
she can get in touch with my young friend here?” Congreve glanced from one to
the other and then took a swift look at the body of Brome Fielding. “Yeah,” he
said a bit sourly. And he stalked out, herding the incoming group back out
ahead of him.

 
          
Dillon
Stover knelt anxiously beside his injured friend. For a few moments the two
were alone with only the dead Fielding for company.

 
          
“Robert,”
said Stover, marveling, “you shouldn’t have taken such a chance with a—a game
leg. I was going to try to capture that dummy and prevent an explosion. And
your

 
          
—your
agility amazes me. I’ve lived intimately with you, and I never dreamed you had
an artificial leg.” “Listen, Dillon,” said Buckalew in the saddest accents
Stover had ever heard him use, “I talked Congreve into going out so I could
tell you something that only your grandfather and Malbrook and Fielding knew.
I’ve tried to keep it from you, but you are the one person really entitled to
know —and, besides, I need your help now.” “Of course, and you shall have it!”
cried Stover vehemently. “I owe you a lot—including my life. Are you sure you
aren’t injured elsewhere, Robert!
Perhaps internally?”