Sinister Barrier (6 page)

“There is no evidence of such a connection,” Graham pointed out.

“Nothing—until you uncover something!” Leamington riposted. “In view of what has gone before, I feel mighty suspicious. Unless he is one of the few survivors, Beach is now the twentieth on the list exactly as you feared. He is a mouth closed before you could reach him precisely as all the others were closed. I don’t like it!”

“Maybe, sir, but—”

“Graham, I repeat most emphatically that if you stumble on any sort of a link between this holocaust and the work on which you’re engaged, you must give up at once and report to me without delay.”

“Very well, sir.”

“In that event, the best brains in the country must be conscripted to meet the issue.” Colonel Leamington’s voice trailed off, then came back strongly. “What do you think of the situation yourself?”

Graham hesitated before replying. He knew that he was as far from the truth as he’d been at the start, but he could not force aside the strange, uncanny feeling that had obsessed him since the death of Mayo. It seemed ridiculous to attach importance to sensations which, though strong and persistent, were elusively vague. Was that feeling akin to the hunch which had put him on the track of something yet to be found? Were those psychic warnings somehow related to his investigatory insight? Was it intuition, or empty superstition, or merely jumpy nerves?

Coming to a decision, he spoke slowly and deliberately. “Chief, I’ve still not the slightest idea of what is behind all this, but I’ve a notion that there are times when it’s dangerous to talk about it.” A thought became born in his mind, and he added, “I believe there are times when it’s dangerous even to
think
about it.”

“Absurd!” scoffed Leamington. “True telepaths don’t exist, hypnotism is very much overrated, and there are no known mechanical means of tapping anyone’s secret thoughts. Besides, how the devil can any investigation be conducted without thought?”

“That’s the hell of it,” responded Graham, dryly. “It cannot. Therefore I must take the risk.”

“Are you serious, Graham?”

“Never more so! I believe, or rather I feel that there are times when I can stew this affair in my mind, freely and with profit. Just as positively, I feel that there are inexplicable moments when so to think would be sticking out my neck with a vengeance. Why I feel that way is something I can’t explain. Maybe I’m nuts—but the deeper I get into this case the more I respect my own nuttiness.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said Graham, “I’m still perpendicular—while the others are horizontal!”

He put down his receiver, a queer light in his eyes. Somehow, he knew that he was right in his estimate of danger. He must take a risk, an awful risk, against odds infinitely terrible because completely unknown.
Eternal vigilance is the impossible price of liberty.
If he, like Webb, must succumb in vain effort to pay that price, well, so be it!

Police Chief Corbett eventually found one in the top ward of the overflowing Center Hospital. According to him, this fellow was the only employee of the National Camera Company among three thousand survivors rescued from what was left of Silver City.

The patient was bandaged from head to feet, his eyes being covered, only his mouth exposed. A strong odor of tannic acid exuded from him, bore mute witness to his extensive burns. Graham sat at one side of the bed, Corbett at the other.

A weary nurse said, “Five minutes—no more! He’s very weak but stands a chance if you’ll give him one.”

Putting his lips close to a bandage-covered ear, Graham asked, “What exploded?”

“The tanks,” came a faint whisper.

“Silver nitrate?” inquired Graham, doing his best to convey incredulity in his tones.

“Yes.”

“Can you explain it?”

“No.” A dry, swollen and discolored tongue licked along cotton fringes over the burned lips.

“What was your job?” Graham put quietly.

“Lab worker.”

“Research?”

“Yes.”

Graham wasted a meaning glance on the listening Corbett, then said to the man on the bed, “On what work were you engaged at the time of the disaster?”

There was no reply. The mouth closed under its wrappings, the breathing became inaudible. Alarmed, Corbett signalled a nurse.

Hurrying up, the girl fussed over the patient. “He’s all right. You’ve got two more minutes.” She dashed away, her face pale, lined with long duty.

Graham put his question again, got no answer. With a frown, he signed to Corbett to take over.

“This is Police Chief Corbett, of Boise,” declared that official, severely. “Your questioner is a member of the United States Intelligence Service. More than thirty thousand people died in yesterday’s blast, and the few remaining are in no better shape than you. The discovery of the cause of this tragedy is more important than your loyalty to your employers. I advise you to speak.”

The mouth remained stubbornly closed.

“If you refuse to speak,” Corbett continued, “means may be found to—”

Waving him into silence, Graham brought his own lips near the recumbent form, and murmured, “Doctor Beach authorises you to tell all you know.”

“Beach!” exclaimed the man on the bed. “Why he warned me to say nothing!”

“He warned you?” Graham was thoroughly startled. “He warned you when? Has he seen you
here?”

“An hour before you came,” admitted the other, in a low voice.

With a mighty effort, Graham suppressed a desire to shout, “Then he’s alive!” but kept his wits and said, coolly, confidently, “Much may happen in an hour. You can speak without fear.”

The other stirred feebly. “We found the new emulsion the day before yesterday,” he told them, reluctantly. “Under Beach’s supervision, we’d been looking for it for nearly three months. It was an intensive, three-shift, night-and-day job pushed through as if it were costing someone a thousand bucks a second. Beach never let up. It would have taken an individual worker ten years to develop the stuff, but there were sixty of us on the job with all the company’s resources at our disposal. Wyman eventually found it Wednesday morning, but we didn’t know for certain that he’d actually got it until we tested it a few minutes before the explosion.”

“What kind of an emulsion was it, and how did you test it?” Graham encouraged.

“It was a photographic emulsion susceptible to frequencies far into the infra-red, farther than any commercial plates have been able to reach. It touched the ultra-radio band. According to Beach, such an emulsion ought to record things like suns—I don’t know why; none of us knew why. We made routine exposures with Wyman’s compound and, sure enough, we developed negatives recording things like little suns.”

“Go on! Go on!” Graham urged.

“We looked them over curiously and talked about them a lot. These suns were small spheres of invisible radiation, three or four of them, floating high above the roof of Number Four Extraction Shed. Somehow—I can’t explain how or why—the sight of them made us greatly excited in a sort of horrible, heart-leaping way. Beach was home at the time the test proved positive, so Wyman phoned him, and was in the middle of telling him about it when—
wham!”

“But Beach definitely knew of the existence of these phenomena before you succeeded in photographing them?”

“Of course! I don’t know where he got the information, but he had it all right—from somewhere.”

“He never gave you any clue to the nature of these objects?”

“No. He told us only what they ought to look like on a negative. Nothing more. He was tight-mouthed on the subject.”

“Thanks!” said Graham. “I guess you’ve helped me plenty.”

Leaving his chair, he paced slowly out of the ward, followed by the deeply puzzled Corbett. Continuing along the curved drive leading to the road, they stopped by the police chief’s gyrocar.

In response to some weird impulse, some strange but urgent notion he could not identify or explain, Graham drove his thoughts away from the recent examination and compelled them to concentrate elsewhere. It was difficult to govern his own mind in such dictatorial fashion, and for several seconds he sweated in mental agony while he forced his stubborn thoughts into an innocuous path. He drew a woman from his memory, let his mind enjoy her picture, the curl of her crisp, black hair, the curve of her hips, the tranquil smile which occasionally lit her heart-shaped face. Doctor Curtis, of course. Being male, he had no trouble in considering her unprofessionally. She’d no right to expert status, anyway; not with a form like that!

His memory was still conjuring her calm, serene eyes for him to look into when Corbett got into his car and rumbled, heavily, “Pity that guy couldn’t tell us what those sun-things might be.”

“Yes,” agreed Graham, hardly hearing. He closed the car’s door upon the burly chief. “I’ll call at your office soon after dinner.” He walked hastily away, the vision still firmly held in the grasp of his own peculiarly vivid imagination.

Lowering his plastiglass window, Corbett called after him, “Those little suns need investigating, I reckon. They’ve got plenty to do with all this—I’ll gamble my life on that!” Receiving no comment, the chief cast a disgusted look at Graham’s broad back, and proceeded to gamble his life by prodding the starter-switch with a broad forefinger.

The gyrocar whined like an eager dog, slid easily forward, built up speed. Its velocity increased until the machine was screaming along and splitting wind in a way that flapped the sunblinds along the street. Bulleting through a narrow gap in cross traffic, it beat the automatic signals at the intersection, sent shocked pedestrians scuttling in all directions. Madly, it plunged past another block, made a slight curve when crossing the second intersection, plunged headlong into the concrete wall of a corner building. The car crushed itself down to half its normal length, and a two-ton concrete block cracked right through. The sound of the impact was a minor explosion that reverberated time and time again through surrounding streets.

The noise battered imperatively on the ear-drums of the self-hypnotized Graham. He fought fearfully, desperately, half-insanely to hold a feminine face before his mental vision, to reject, keep out, beat off the knowledge that yet another had paid the terrible penalty for being curious about little suns.

While crowds—unconsciously protected by their own ignorance—milled and gaped around the distant wreck, Graham, made vulnerable by his own suspicions, threatened by the unseen, battled with himself as he walked steadily away—battled to view a mirage to the complete exclusion of everything else. He paced onward, grimly onward, fighting to camouflage his own betraying mind; and as he fought, he won.

Chapter 6

THE PATH WAS A CRAZY SNAKE, MOTTLED in the moonlight, twisting and turning as it crawled upward, ever upward. The few hours that had gone since Corbett became paste now seemed a year. Graham pushed the memory away, ducked into the shadow of a natural obelisk that poised at one side of the track. A bilious moon let its sickly beams fall over sullen rocks and brooding pines, illuminating the rough landscape in pale ghastliness.

The hidden man’s feverish eyes searched the pools of shadow that lined and pitted the route he had just traversed; his ears strained to catch sounds different from the sibilant rustling of branches, scrape of boughs, burble of distant waters—sounds he could attribute only to things that invariably were silent. Involuntarily, for no other purpose than to soothe his too-alert soul, he was looking for the unseeable, listening for the unbearable, waiting for that which lets no man wait when his time is due.

For a full five minutes he stood thus, his nerves strained, his muscles taut, his mind and body prepared to meet whatever menace might explode from the silence and the dark. But there was nothing, nothing—only harsh rocks that thrust ragged outlines toward equally ragged clouds, only sentinel pines standing guard around the camp of night.

Several times had he stopped and stood thus, examining the trail behind, and each time the path remained empty, undisturbed.

Those stalkers in the ebon hours, slinking in his steps, skulking furtively through the gloom, were creatures of his overwrought mind. He had enough self-possession to know that they were fantastic products of his tired and regimented imagination, yet he could not forbear to seek occasional vantage posts and compel his sleep-hungry eyes to seek confirmation of the nightmares haunting his brain.

He stared until he had convinced himself of his own misapprehension, emerged from the black bar of shadow cast by the obelisk, continued up the trail. Stumbling over broad cracks, slipping in deep ruts, tripping over loose stones part-hidden in the inadequate light, he hastened along.

The path curved tortuously around the mountain, ended in a tiny, elevated valley surrounded by towering walls on all sides but one. A building squatted at the farther end of the valley, hugging low to the ground, architecturally cowering. It was no ramshackle erection, but a sturdy conglomeration of concrete and local rock, low-slung, drab, ominous in its complete seclusion.

At the valley’s mouth stood an ancient, decrepit fingerpost, its faded board bearing in awkward scrawl the words: MILLIGAN’S STRIKE. He looked at the board, eyes narrowed, peering closely, then glanced back along the trail. Nothing stirred.

Jet shadows cast by surrounding cliffs swallowed his own shadow as he stole through the valley, reached the silent building, surveyed its cold, impassive windows. No light blazed welcome from those glassy squares, no noise of human movement came from within those grim walls. There was no sound save that of a loosened stone rolling somewhere back along the trail. That tiny, distant clatter set him back against the wall, one hand in his pocket. He watched the moonlit mouth for fifteen minutes.

Giving it up, he rapped heavily upon the armor plate door, tried its handle, found it locked. He knocked again, using a large pebble to increase the noise. There was no response. Turning his back to the door, his bloodshot eyes staring through the gloom toward the distant, moonlit finger-post, he swung a heavy, steel-shod boot at the armor-plate, hammering it like a gong until the entire building echoed and re-echoed its urgent clamor.

Horror clawed at his heart while he battered frantically for entry. Perhaps others had got in before him: others who had not knocked or opened, yet had passed silently and insidiously inside; others at whom it was futile to shoot, from whom it was useless to run.

Fighting off his panic, he gave the door a final, tremendous blow. If there was no response within one minute, he was going to bust a metal guard off a window, using a good, heavy rock for the purpose. At all costs he must get in, even if it were necessary to wreck the place. Putting his ear against the armor plate, he listened intently, heard a faint humming that grew into a low whine.

Frank relief brightened his features as the whine ceased. A short, metallic rattle followed; slow, deliberate feet approached the door. A chain clanged, a battery of bolts creaked aside, the lock snapped back, the door opened a bare six inches.

From the blackness a deep, rich voice demanded, “Well?”

Graham introduced himself in six swift words, then asked, “Are you Professor Beach?”

The door opened wide, and the man hidden in the interior gloom said quickly, “Come in, Graham. We’ve met before. I could not identify you in this infernal darkness.”

Entering, Graham heard the door slam and lock behind him. A hand grasped his arm, steered him across a completely obscured floor, stopped him at the other side. Metal grated and clanged before his face, the floor sank under his feet. An elevator, of all things, in such a place as this!

Light floated upward, the floor ceased its descent. Graham saw the other’s face in revealing rays. The scientist was still the same tall, thin-featured, dark-haired personage that he used to be. The burden of time rested lightly upon this man, for Graham could note little difference in the face he had not seen for several years. But there was one difference, a startling one—
the eyes.

Beach’s thin, curved, hawklike nose jutted between a pair of cold, hard optics unearthly in their brilliance. There was a hint of mesmerism in their deliberate, calculating and penetrating stare, something overpowering in their weird glow.

“Why the darkness upstairs?” queried Graham, still fascinated by those uncanny orbs.

“Light attracts nocturnal creatures,” replied Beach, evasively. “They can be a nuisance.” He studied his visitor. “How did you come to look for me here?”

“The editor of the local sheet in Boise knew that you’d been spending a lot of time in this place. He said he was sending a reporter here in the morning, to see whether you were alive or dead. I beat him to it.”

Beach sighed. “I suppose a horde of snoopers is inevitable after what has happened. Oh, well—” He ushered Graham into a small, book-lined room, gave him a chair. Carefully shutting the door, he took a seat opposite. His long, slender fingers built a church and steeple while his odd eyes bored steadily into the other. “I am indeed sorry that we should meet again in such terrible circumstances. I presume that your visit is connected with the Silver City disaster?”

“It is.”

“But since the department of special finance is not involved, it cannot have an interest in the matter?” Beach’s dark, finely curved brows lifted questioningly.

“No,” agreed Graham. Taking off his ring, he handed it across. “Probably you’ve heard about those even if you haven’t seen one. Its inner surface bears a microscopic inscription which is my warrant as a member of the United States Intelligence Service. You may check it under a microscope, if you wish.”

“Ah, the Intelligence!” The eyebrows sank into a thoughtful frown. Beach rolled the ring to and fro between his fingers, gave it back without bothering to inspect it. “I’ll take your word that it is what it purports to be.” His frown deepened. “If you want to know why the silver nitrate exploded, I cannot tell you. In the next few weeks I shall be asked for an explanation by policemen, factory inspectors, industrial chemists, press reporters, time and time again. They’ll all be wasting breath. I am totally unable to offer an explanation.”

“You lie!” declared Graham, flatly.

With a resigned sigh, the scientist came to his feet, walked slowly to the door through which they had entered. Finding a hooked rod, he used it to drag a large screen down from its slot in the ceiling. Satisfied that the screen completely covered the door, he returned to his seat.

“Why do I lie?”

Back hairs were erect on Graham’s neck as he answered, “Because you, and you alone, know that the stuff was mysteriously disrupted by some weird phenomena that you were trying to photograph. Because someone working under your command finally took a forbidden picture—and Silver City died in the counterblast!”

He swallowed hard, feeling certain that in speaking thus he had signed his own death warrant, and amazed to find that he still lived. Studying Beach for the effect of his words, he noted only the spasmodic tightening of the folded hands, an almost indiscernible flicker in the burning eyes.

“Whatever wiped out that town,” continued Graham, “were the same thing or things that have eliminated an unknown number of the world’s best scientists. It is my investigation of the deaths of some of those scientists—American ones—that has led me to you!”

Producing his wallet, he extracted a telegram, passed it to Beach. The latter murmured its words as he read them.

GRAHAM CARE OF BOISE POLICE: SOLE COMMON DENOMINATOR DASH ALL WERE FRIENDS OF BJORNSEN OR FRIENDS OF HIS FRIENDS STOP HARRIMAN.

“That refers to last month’s quota of dead.” Graham stabbed an accusing finger at the scientist. “You were a friend of Bjornsen’s!”

“True,” admitted Beach. “True.” He looked down at his hands, ruminated awhile. “I was a very old friend of Bjornsen’s. I am one of the few such who still remain.” He raised his gaze, looking his opponent straight in the face. “I will also confess that I have much information which I intend to keep entirely to myself. What are you going to do about it?”

The other’s bold defiance might have beaten individuals less persistent than Graham, but the investigator was not to be so easily defeated. Leaning forward, arms akimbo on broad knees, his muscular face intent, the Intelligence man did his best to convey the impression that he knew far more than the other suspected, more than he was ready to state at that moment.

Earnestly, he said, “Irwin Webb left a concealed message that we deciphered, a message telling much of what he had discovered. He declared that it was a picture which must be shown the world—if it can be shown without massacre.”

“Massacre!” Beach’s voice was harsh. “Is not the fate of Silver City enough? One man finds the picture, looks at it,
thinks
about it—and in a lightning flash thirty thousand pay the penalty with their earthly bodies and perhaps with their very souls. Why, even now your own thoughts are your most dangerous enemy. Knowing what little you may know, thinking about what you know, pondering it, turning it around in your mind, you invite destruction at any given moment, you tag yourself as a child of perdition, you are doomed by the involuntary activity of your own mind.” His gaze slid toward the door. “If that fluorescent screen over the door happens to glow, neither I nor the strength of the civilised world can save you from instant death.”

“I am aware of the fact,” responded Graham, evenly. “My risk is no greater than your own, and cannot be increased by knowing the things you know. I cannot die
more
by knowing more!” He refrained from looking round at the screen, kept his whole attention upon the brilliant eyes opposite. If anything illuminated that screen, he would see it in those eyes. “Since there has been massacre despite the fact that the truth is not generally known, matters could hardly be worse if the truth were known.”

“An assumption,” scoffed Beach, “based on the erroneous premise that whatever is bad cannot be worse.” He kept his gaze on that screen. “Nothing was worse than the bow and arrow—until gunpowder came. Nothing worse than that—until poison gas appeared. Then bombing planes. Then supersonic missiles. Then atom-bombs. Today, mutated germs and viruses. Tomorrow, something else.” His laugh was short, sardonic. “Through pain and tears we learn that there’s always room for further improvement.”

“I’m willing to argue that with you when I’m in possession of all the facts,” Graham retorted.

“The facts are beyond belief!”

“Do you believe them?”

“A fair question,” Beach conceded, readily. “With me, belief does not enter into the matter. Faith has no relation to what one learns empirically. No, Graham, I don’t believe them—I
know
them!” Moodily, he massaged his chin. “The incontrovertible evidence already accumulated leaves no room for doubt in understanding minds.”

“Then what are the facts?” demanded Graham, his expression urging the other to speak. “What blotted out Silver City? What cut short the experiments of a clique of scientists, ending their lives in manner calculated to arouse no suspicion? What murdered Police Chief Corbett this afternoon?”

“Corbett? Has he gone too?” With his blazing eyes directed over his listener’s shoulder toward the screened door, Beach pondered lengthily. There was silence in the room except where a tiny clock numbered the moments toward the grave. One mind worked hurriedly, while the other waited with phlegmatic grimness. Finally, Beach got up, switched off the lights.

“We can observe that screen more easily in darkness,” he commented. “Sit here next to me, keep your eyes on it, and if it glows, force your thoughts elsewhere—or heaven itself won’t help you!”

Shifting his chair next to the scientist’s, Graham gazed through the gloom. He knew that at last the case was about to break, and his conscience kept nagging him unmercifully.

“You ought to have obeyed orders!” silently screamed the still, small voice within him. “You ought to have made contact with Leamington as you were instructed! If Beach becomes a corpse, and you with him, the world will learn nothing except that you have failed—failed as have all the rest—because you refused to do your duty!”

“Graham,” commenced Beach, his voice rasping through the darkness, cutting short the investigator’s mental reproaches, “the world has been given a scientific discovery as great, as important, as far-reaching in its implications as the telescope and the microscope.”

“What is it?”

“A means of extending the visible portion of the spectrum far into the infra-red.”

“Ah!”

“Bjornsen discovered it,” Beach went on. “Like many other great discoveries, he stumbled across it while seeking something else, had the sense to realize what he’d found, developed it to usability. Like the telescope, the microscope, it has revealed a new and hitherto unsuspected world.”