Read Ebook: Storm Cloud on Deka by Smith E E Edward Elmer Morey Leo Illustrator

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Ebook has 266 lines and 13204 words, and 6 pages

"Whaddya mean 'thin'?" the manager demanded. "The Patrol inspectors are ours--enough of them, anyway. Our records are fixed. Faked identities, trips, all that stuff, you know. Everything's on the green."

"That's what you think," Fairchild countered cynically. "Our accident rate, in spite of everything we have been able to do, is up three hundredths of one percent; industrial hazard rate and employee turnover about three and a half; and the Narcotics Division alone knows how much we have upped total bootleg sales. Those figures are all in the Patrol's files. How can you give such facts the brush-off?"

"We don't have to," Graves laughed comfortably. "Even a half of one percent would not excite suspicion, and our distribution is so uniform throughout the galaxy that they can't center it. They can't possibly trace anything back to us. Besides, they wouldn't suspect us. With our reputation, other firms would get knocked off in time to give us plenty of warning. Lutzenschiffer's, for instance, is putting out heroin by the ton."

"Um--" This was a distinctly disquieting thought, in view of the impossibility of concealing anything from a Gray Lensman who was really on the prowl. "That might not be so good. What would you advise, then?"

"Shut down Two Seventeen--and preferably the whole hush-hush end--until we can get our records absolutely honest and our death rates down to the old-time ten-year average," the scientist insisted. "In that way only can we make ourselves really safe."

"Oh, I don't mean without permission. Talk him into it. It's best for him, as well as everybody else, over the long pull."

"He couldn't see it. I can't either, really," grunted the manager. "If we can't dope out something better than that, things have got to go on as is."

"I suspected so--but you asked me. The next best thing is to use some new form of death, openly explainable, to clean up our books."

"Wonderful!" Graves snorted contemptuously. "What can we possibly add to what we are using right along?"

"A loose atomic vortex."

"Whoooosh!" The fat man deflated in an exclamation of profound surprise, then came back up for air, gasping. "Man, you're nuts. There's only one on the planet, and it's--or do you mean--but nobody ever touched one of those things off deliberately! Can it be done?"

"Yes. It isn't simple, but we Fellows of the College of Radiation know how--theoretically--the transformation can be made to occur. The fact that it is a new idea makes it all the better. It has never been done because it has been impossible to extinguish the things. But now 'Storm' Cloud is putting them out."

"I see. Neat, very neat." Graves' agile and cunning brain was going over the possibilities. "Certain of our employees, I take it, will be upon a picnic in the upper end of the valley when this unfortunate occurrence is to take place?"

"Exactly--and enough mythical ones to straighten out our bookkeeping. Then, later, we can dispose of suspects as they appear. Vortices are absolutely unpredictable, you know. People we don't like can die of radiation or of any one or a mixture of various toxic gases and vapors and the vortex will take the blame."

"And later, when it gets dangerous, Storm Cloud can blow it out for us," Graves gloated. "But we'll not want him for a long, long time!"

"No, but we'll report it and ask for him the hour it happens--" Fairchild silenced the manager's expostulations. "Use your head, Graves! Anybody who has a vortex go out of control wants it killed as soon as possible. But here's the joker--Cloud has enough Class A prime urgent demands on file right now to keep him busy for the next ten or fifteen years. Therefore we won't be able to get him--see?"

"I see. This is nice, Fairchild, very, very nice. But the head office had better keep an eye on Cloud, just the same."

Vortex Buster

Robert Ryder, Bachelor of Hydroponics from the University of Newspoke, was also, maritally, a bachelor. For a year or so after graduation, while he was making good with Tellurian Pharmaceutical, Inc., he had no reason to be dissatisfied with that state of affairs. However, Mother Nature went to work upon him in her wonted fashion, and, never averse to feminine society, he began to go in for girls in a large and serious way.

In the hydroponics office there was an eminently personable and yet level-headed young filing clerk named Jacqueline Comstock, who was all unconsciously--or was it?--working much more toward her Mrs. degree than for the good of the firm.

It was inevitable, then, that these two should single each other out; that each should come to behold in the other all that made life worth while. They planned, breathtakingly happy.

They saved their money, instead of indulging in expensive amusements; they took long hikes.

Thus they discovered many choice spots affording the maximum of privacy, of comfort, and of view; thus they came to know almost as individuals the birds and beasts and reptiles in the far-flung pens.

They sat blissfully, arms around each other, upon a rustic seat improvised from rocks, branches, and leaves. Below them, almost under their feet, was a den of venomous serpents, but they did not see the snakes.

Before them, equally unperceived, there extended the magnificent vista of stream and valley and mountain.

All they saw, however, was each other--until their attention was literally wrenched to a man who was climbing frantically toward them with the aid of a stout cudgel which he used as a staff. The girl gazed briefly, stared, and then, with a half-articulate moan, shrank even closer against her lover's side. Ryder, even while his left arm tightened around his Jackie's waist, felt with his right hand for a club of his own and tensed his muscles in readiness for strife--for the climbing man was all too apparently mad.

His breathing was horrible. Mouth tight-clamped, in spite of his terrific exertion, he was sniffing--sniffing loathsomely, lustfully, each whistling inhalation filling his lungs to bursting. He exhaled explosively, as though begrudging the second of time required to empty himself of air. Wide-open eyes glaring fixedly ahead, he blundered upward, paying no attention whatever to his path. He tore through clumps of thorny growth; he stumbled and fell over logs and stones; he caromed from boulders, as careless of the needles which tore clothing and skin as of the rocks which bruised his flesh to the very bone.

He struck the gate of the pen immediately beneath the two appalled watchers, and then stopped. He moved to the right and paused, whimpering in anxious agony. Back to the gate and over to the left he went, where he stopped and sent forth a blood-curdling howl. Whatever the frightful compulsion was, whatever it was that he sought, he could not deviate enough from his line to go around the pen. He looked, and for the first time saw the gate and the fence and the ophidian inhabitants of the den. They did not matter--nothing mattered. He fumbled with the lock, then furiously attacked it and the gate and the fence with his club--fruitlessly. He tried to climb the fence, but failed. He tore off sandals and socks and, by dint of thrusting fingers and toes ruthlessly into the narrow meshes of the woven wire, he succeeded in getting through.

No more than he had minded the thorns and the rocks did he mind the eight strands of viciously-barbed wire surmounting that fence. He did, however, watch the snakes. He took pains to drop into an area temporarily clear of them, and he pounded to death the half-dozen serpents bold enough to bar his path.

Then, dropping to the ground, he writhed and scuttled about, sniffing ever harder, nose plowing the ground. He halted; he dug with his bare hands at the hard soil. Thrusting his face into the hole, he inhaled tremendously. His body writhed, trembled, shuddered uncontrollably, then stiffened convulsively into a supremely ecstatic rigidity, terrible to gaze upon.

The horribly labored breathing ceased. The body collapsed bonelessly, even before the outraged serpents crawled up and struck.

Jacqueline Comstock saw very little of the outrageous performance. She screamed once, shut both eyes and, twisting about within the embracing arm, burrowed her face into the man's left shoulder.

Ryder, however--white-faced, jaw set, sweating--watched the whole ghastly thing to its grimly cataclysmic end. When it was over he licked his lips and swallowed hard before he could talk.

"It's all over, dear--no danger now," he finally managed to say. "We'd better go. We ought to turn in an alarm--make a report or something. They'll want us as witnesses."

"Oh, I can't, Bob!" she sobbed. "If I open my eyes I just know I'll look, and if I look I'll ... I'll just simply turn inside out."

"Hold everything, Jackie! Keep your eyes shut. I'll pilot you and tell you when it's safe to look."

More than half carrying his companion, still gripping unconsciously his heavy club, the man set off down the rugged trail. Out of sight of what had happened, the girl opened her eyes and they continued the descent in a more usual, more decorous fashion until they met a man hurrying upwards.

"Oh, Doctor Fairchild! There was a--" But the report which Ryder was about to make was unnecessary; the alarm had already been given.

"I know!" the scientist puffed. "Stop! Stay right where you are." He jabbed a finger emphatically downward to anchor the couple in the exact spot they occupied. "Don't talk! Don't say a word--until I get back."

Fairchild returned after a time, unhurried and completely at ease. He did not need to ask the shaken couple if they had seen what had occurred. It was plainly evident that they had.

"But--but, Doctor--" Ryder began.

"Keep still! Don't talk at all!" Fairchild ordered brusquely. Then, in an ordinary conversational tone, he went on: "Until we have investigated this extraordinary occurrence thoroughly--sifted it to the bottom--the probability of spying cannot be disregarded. As the only eye-witnesses to what actually happened, your reports will be exceedingly valuable. But I do not want to hear a word until we are in a place which I am sure beyond peradventure is proof against any and all spy-rays. Do you understand?"

"Oh yes, I understand."

"Pull yourselves together, then. Act unconcerned, casual--particularly when we get to the Administration Building. Talk about the weather, or, better yet, about the honeymoon you are going to take on Chickladoria."

Thus it was that there was nothing noticeably abnormal about the group of three which strolled into the office building and entered a private automatic elevator. The conveyance, however, went down instead of up.

"I am taking you to my private laboratory, not to my office," Fairchild replied to Ryder's unspoken question. "Frankly, young folks, I am a scared--a badly scared man."

This statement, so true and yet so misleading, resolved thoroughly the young engineer's inchoate doubts. Entirely unsuspectingly the couple accompanied the Senior Radiationist along the grim corridor. They paused as he unlocked and swung open a door of thick metal; they stepped unquestioningly into the room in response to his gestured invitation. He did not, however, follow them. Instead, he swung shut the heavy slab, whose closing cut off completely the filing clerk's piercing scream of fear.

"Cut out that noise!" came raspingly from a speaker in the steel ceiling of the small room--a room which was very evidently not Doctor Fairchild's private laboratory. "It won't do you any good. You're sound-proofed. Talk all you please, but any more of that yelling and I'll have to put you out of your misery."

"But Mr. Graves, I thought--Dr. Fairchild told us--we were to report on that--" Ryder's words came confusedly from the maze of his surprise.

"You're to report on nothing. You saw too much and know too much, that's all."

"Why? Just because she's got a face and a shape?" the fat man sneered. "There are thousands of women as good-looking as she is, but I've got only one life--" Graves broke off as Fairchild entered the office.

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