Sinister Barrier (12 page)

The glossy parquet was treacherous. Wohl’s military boots hit the polish, he slipped in mid-flight, fought to retain balance, went down with a thud that shook the walls. Unable to stop, Graham leaped over him, slid along the glossy surface, crashed violently into the facing door. The door creaked, groaned, burst open.

His shoulder muscles taut with expectation, he whirled around to face the inevitable. Surprise filled his glittering eyes. Bending down, he hauled Wohl to his feet, gestured toward the end of the passage.

“By God!” he breathed. “By God!”

“What’s up?”

“They came around that corner, then stopped dead. They hung there a moment, went deeper in color, and departed as if the devil himself was after them.”

Gasping for wind, Wohl said, “Boy, we’re damn lucky!”

“But what made them scram?” persisted Graham, looking puzzled. “It has never been known for them to give up like that. I’ve never heard of them letting up on a victim once they’ve got his number. Why did they do it?”

“Don’t ask me.” Grinning in unashamed relief, Wohl dusted himself vigorously. “Maybe we weren’t good enough for them. Maybe they decided we’d make a lousy meal and they could do better elsewhere. I don’t know—I’m no fount of wisdom.”

“They often depart in a hurry,” said a cool, even voice behind them. “It has occurred repeatedly.”

Swivelling on one heel, Graham saw her standing by the door with which he had collided. The light from the room behind made a golden frame for her crisp black curls. Her serene eyes looked steadily into his.

“Surgery’s sugar-babe,” he told Wohl, with unnecessary gusto.

Wohl gave her an appraising up-and-down, and said, “I’ll say!”

Miffed, she put a slender hand on the door as if to close it. “When you pay a social call, Mr. Graham, please arrive in seemly manner, and not like a ton of bricks.” She tried to freeze him with her glance. “Remember that this is a hospital and not a jungle.”

“You’d hardly find a ton of bricks dumped in the jungle,” he pointed out. “No, no, please don’t close that door. We’re coming in.” He marched through, followed by Wohl, both ignoring her iciness.

They seated themselves by her desk, and Wohl studied a photograph thereon. Pointing to it, he said, “To Harmony from Pop. Harmony, eh? That’s a nice name. Was your pappy a musician?”

The ice broke a little. Taking a chair, Doctor Curtis smiled. “Oh, no. I guess he just liked the name,”

“So do I,” Graham announced. He threw her the I-spy eye. “I hope it’ll suit us.”

“Us?”
Her finely arched brows rose a trifle.

“Yes,” he said, impudently. “Someday.”

The temperature of the room sank five degrees. She tucked her silk-clad legs under her chair away from his questing eyes. The whole floor quivered, and a distant roar came down from the sky. All three sobered immediately.

They waited until the roar died away, then Graham began, “Look, Harmony—” He paused, added, “You don’t mind if I call you Harmony, do you?” and without waiting for her reply, went on, “What’s this you were saying about the Vitons beating it frequently?”

“It is very mysterious,” Doctor Curtis admitted. “I don’t know of any explanation for it, and so far I’ve had no time to seek one. All I can tell you is that immediately the hospital’s staff became equipped to see these Vitons we discovered that they were frequenting the hospital in fair numbers. They were entering the wards and feeding on pain-racked patients from whom, of course, we carefully kept this knowledge.”

“I understand.”

“For some reason, they did not bother the staff.” She looked questioningly at her listeners. “I don’t know why they didn’t.”

“Because,” Graham told her, “unemotional people are just so many useless weeds from their viewpoint, especially in a place containing so much fine, ripe, juicy fruit. Your wards are orchards!”

Her smooth, oval face registered the brutality of his explanation with a look of distaste. She continued, “At certain periods, we have noticed that every luminescent sphere in the hospital has hurried away as rapidly as possible, not returning for some time. It happens three or four times a day. It has happened just now.”

“And very probably it saved our lives.”

“Possibly,” she admitted with calculated disinterest which deceived neither.

“Now, Doctor… er…
Harmony”
—he wiped out Wohl’s grin with a hard glare—“do you know whether each exodus coincided with some consistent feature in hospital routine, such as the administering of certain medicines to patients, or the operating of the X-ray apparatus, or the opening of particular bottles of chemicals?”

She considered awhile, apparently oblivious of her questioner’s intent gaze. Finally, she got up, searched through a file, dialled her telephone, consulted somebody in another part of the building. There was satisfaction in her features as she ended the call.

“Really, it was most stupid of me, but I must admit that I did not think of it until your questions brought it into my mind.”

“What is it?” Graham urged.

“The short-wave therapy apparatus.”

“Hah!” He slapped his knee, bestowed a look of triumph on the interested Wohl. “The artificial fever machine. Isn’t it screened?”

“We’ve never been able to screen it completely. We’ve tried to do so, because it interfered with the reception of local television receivers, sending checkered patterns racing across their vision plates. But the apparatus is powerful, its short waves are penetrating, it has defied all our efforts, and I understand that the complainants have had to screen their receivers.”

“On what wave-length does it operate?” pursued Graham.

“One and a quarter meters.”

“Eureka!” He bounced to his feet, alight with the fire of battle. “A weapon at last!”

“What d’you mean, a weapon?” Wohl was not overly impressed.

“The Vitons don’t like it. We’ve seen that for ourselves, haven’t we? Heaven alone knows how its emanations appear to their alien senses. Perhaps they feel it as unbearable heat, or sense it as the Viton equivalent of an abominable smell. Whatever the effect may be, we’ve the satisfaction of knowing they like to get away from it as fast as they can travel. Anything that makes them want to go someplace else is,
ipso facto,
a weapon.”

“I reckon maybe you’ve got something,” Wohl conceded.

“If it is a weapon, or a potential one,” remarked Doctor Curtis, seriously, “surely the Vitons would have destroyed it? They never hesitate to destroy where they deem it necessary. Why should they leave untouched this threat to their existence—if it is a threat?”

“I can imagine nothing better calculated to draw despairing humanity’s attention to the properties of therapy cabinets than to go around destroying them.”

“I see.” Her large, dark eyes were thoughtful. “Their cunning is indeed great. They think way ahead of us all the time.”

“All the time so far,” he corrected. “What of yesterday when we’ve still got tomorrow?” He reached for her telephone. “I must pass this information to Leamington without delay. Maybe it’s dynamite. Maybe it is what I hope it is—and God help us if it’s not! Besides, it may be enough to permit some of his gadgeteers to throw together an apparatus which will give protection to tonight’s meeting.”

Leamington’s tired, worn features grew into the tiny visor. They relaxed somewhat as he listened to Graham’s hasty flow of data. Finishing, Bill Graham turned to Doctor Curtis.

“This meeting is a scientific one to be held at nine o’clock this evening in the basement of National Guarantors Building, on Water Street. I’d like to take you along.”

“I’ll be ready at eight-thirty,” she promised.

Professor Chadwick already was in the middle of his speech when Bill Graham, Harmony Curtis and Art Wohl moved quietly down the center aisle, took their seats. The basement was full, the audience silent, attentive.

At one end of the front row, Colonel Leamington twisted around, attracted Graham’s attention, jerked an indicative thumb toward a large cabinet standing guard by the only door. Graham nodded his understanding.

With a rolled newspaper in one hand, the other left free for his frequent gestures, Professor Chadwick was saying, “For a couple of months the
Herald-Tribune
has been exhuming masses of data and still hasn’t dug out the half of it. The amount of material is so enormous that one cannot help but marvel at the barefaced manner in which the Vitons were able to operate with complete confidence in humanity’s lack of suspicion. To them, we must have seemed witless beyond words.”

“Which we were,” commented a cynical voice from the rear.

Chadwick signed hasty agreement and went on, “Their method of ‘explaining’ their own errors, omissions, mistakes and oversights by insinuating superstitious notions to ‘account’ for them, backing up those notions by the performing of so-called miracles when required, and the production of poltergeist and spiritualistic phenomena when asked for, does full credit to the hellish ingenuity of these creatures whom we call Vitons. They have made the confessional-box and the seance-room their centers of psychic camouflage; the priest and the medium have been equally their allies in the devilish work of seeing that the blind masses stay blind.” He brushed a sardonic hand from left to right. “Thus the wide-sighted always have been able to take their pick: visions of the holy virgins, or saints, or sinners, or the shades of the late lamented. Step up, boys, they’re all yours!”

Someone laughed mirthlessly, a cold, grating laugh that jarred on the hearers’ nerves.

“The
Herald-Tribune’s
data is, in grim fact, a record of human gullibility, a record of how men in the mass can look facts in the face—and deny them! It is a record of how people can see fish and call them flesh or fowl, according to the conventionalisms of dogmatic tutors as purblind as themselves, according to their personal fears of losing invisible shares in non-existent heavenly mansions, according to their credulous belief that God may deny them wings if they, in turn, assert that a sight authoritatively declared to be straight from heaven may indeed have come straight from hell.” He paused, added in a bearable undertone, “Satan was a liar from the first—they said it!”

“I agree,” boomed Leamington, not giving a damn whose personal idiosyncrasies were being kicked around.

“I’ve discovered a good deal of cogent data, myself,” continued Chadwick. “For example, things we now know to be Vitons were frequenting the Fraser River district of British Columbia early in 1938. They got into the papers time and time and time again. A British United Press report dated July 21, 1938, says that the huge forest fires then ravaging the Pacific coast of North America were caused by something described as ‘dry lightning,’ admitted to be unique phenomena.

“In 1935, in the Madras Presidency of India, was reported an esoteric sect of floating-ball worshippers who, apparently, could see the objects of their devotions which were quite invisible to non-believers. Attempts to photograph what they were worshipping invariably failed, though I know and you know what might have been recorded had the photographers been able to employ Beach’s emulsion.

“The
Los Angeles Examiner
of mid-June, 1938, reported a case paralleling that of the late Professor Mayo. Headed: FAMOUS ASTRONOMER LEAPS TO DEATH, it stated that Doctor William Wallace Campbell, president emeritus of the University of California, had met his end by flinging himself from the window of his third-floor flat. His son ascribed his father’s act to his fear of going blind. Personally, I feel that while his fear may have had direct connection with his sight, it was not in the manner then believed!”

Disregarding supporting murmurs from his audience, Professor Chadwick said, “Believe it or not, but one man’s extra-sensory perception, or his wide-sightedness, was so well developed that he was able to paint an excellent picture showing several Vitons floating over a nightmarish landscape and, as if somehow he sensed their predatory character, he included a hawk in the scene. That picture is Mr. Paul Nash’s
Landscape of a Dream,
first exhibited in 1938, and now in the Tate Gallery, in England. Nash himself died very suddenly a few years later.”

Turning his eyes toward Graham, the speaker declared, “All the evidence we have been able to gather shows beyond doubt that the Vitons are creatures of primal energy held in a form both compact and balanced. They are neither solid, nor liquid nor gas. They are not animal, vegetable or mineral. They represent another, unclassified form of being which they share with fireballs and like phenomena, but they are not matter in the generally accepted sense—they’re something else which is strange to us but in no way supernatural. Maybe they’re a mess of wavicles complex beyond all possibility of analysis by any instruments we have today; we know they’re so peculiar that our spectroscopic tests of them have proved worthless. It seems to me that the only possible weapon we can bring against them is something influencing their own strange matter-state, namely, a form of energy such as a radiation having a heterodyning effect, something that might interfere with the Vitons’ natural vibrations. The discovery made only today by Mr. Graham, of the Intelligence Service, amply confirms this theory.” Raising his hand and beckoning to Graham, he concluded, “So I now ask Mr. Graham to give you the valuable information he has obtained, and I feel sure that he will be able to assist us still further with some useful suggestions.”

In a strong, steady voice, Graham recounted his experience of a few hours before. “It is imperative,” he told them, “that at once we should undertake intensive research in short waves projected on the radio-beam system, and determine which particular frequencies—if any—are fatal to Vitons. In my opinion, it is desirable that we set up a suitable laboratory in some faraway, unfrequented spot distant from war areas, for our evidence is that Vitons congregate where humanity swarms most thickly, and very rarely visit uninhabited regions.”

“That is an excellent idea.” Leamington stood up, his tall form towering above his seated neighbors. “We have ascertained that the Vitons’ numerical strength is somewhere between one twentieth and one thirtieth that of the human race, and it is a safe bet that the majority of them hang around fruitful sources of human and animal energy. A laboratory hidden in the desert, a locality sparse in emotional fodder, might remain unobserved and undisturbed for years.”