Michael Kurland - Professor Moriarty Omnibus

"I think I'm beginning to get the idea," Barnett said.

"Why are you here?" she asked. "Did they abduct you, too?"

"Sort of. Only I came and knocked on the door and practically invited them to."

The girl twisted on the bed. "These ropes are cutting into my wrists," she said. "I don't think this is very funny. My poor father must be worried to death about me. He gets positively furious if I go anywhere alone, as though I were still quite a baby. You're an American, aren't you?"

"Quite right," Barnett said. "Is it that obvious?"

"I like Americans," she said. "What are they going to do to us? They're not going to let us go, are they? I mean, ever."

"I don't know what their plans are," Barnett said, trying to sound cheerful, "but don't lose hope. We'll get out of here somehow."

"I've been here for weeks. You just arrived. I hope you have something in mind, Mr. Barnett, to get us out of here. Because the Lord knows I've tried everything I could think of. And I wasn't even tied up. But now I'm tied up, and they put you in here. And you're tied up, and I don't even know you, and we can't even move, so how can we possibly ever get out of here?" And she turned her face away and sobbed quietly into the pillow.

"I'm sorry," Barnett called softly. "Really, I'm sorry if I upset you. I was trying to cheer you up."

She turned back. "How can you possibly cheer me up?" she demanded.

Barnett considered. "I can wiggle my ears and imitate a rabbit," he said. "If my hands were untied I could do wonderful shadow pictures."

"Shadow pictures of what?"

"Hands."

"Oh." She sniffed and then giggled. "Can you really do a rabbit?"

Barnett wiggled his ears and twitched his nose and turned his head in little, rabbitty motions.

"That's very nice," the girl said, smiling. "What do you do, Mr. Barnett, when you're not tied up?"

"I am a journalist."

"How did you get here?"

"I knocked on the front door, and here I am."

"Oh, dear," the girl said, twisting her head on the pillow. "My nose itches." She tried to twist around far enough to scratch her nose against the pillowcase, but the ropes holding her arms were too tight. After fighting her bonds futilely for a minute, she gave up and burst into tears.

"Listen," Barnett said, "it's going to be okay."

"No," she said. "No, it isn't. I can't even scratch my own nose. It's horrible. And those people — they're going to kill us! They've kept me here for six weeks, cooped up in that little room. And now they're going to kill me. It isn't fair! And you, too."

Barnett didn't know what to say. He couldn't argue against it without her thinking him feebleminded, and he couldn't agree to it without depressing her even more.

-

Further speech was rendered pointless when the man behind the mask came into the room. "Greetings," he said.

"What do you want with me?" the girl sobbed.

"Patience, woman," the man said. "In five minutes it will be seven o'clock."

"Thank you," Barnett said sarcastically. "I had been wondering."

The man behind the mask gestured behind him and the man with wire-rim glasses came in carrying the musical box that had lured Barnett to that house. "This is somehow fitting," the man with the mask said. "I hope, Mr. Barnett, that you enjoy classical music, and that you don't mind the rather tinny sound of the musical box."

"Why?" Barnett asked.

"Because it will be the last thing you hear on this earth," the man told him.

The other man placed the musical box on a table and, taking a large brace-and-bit from his belt, drilled a hole in the floor by that table.

"What's happening?" Barnett demanded.

"I think you should know," the man behind the mask told him. "In the room directly below this one there are several hundred pounds of explosive. Much more than we need, actually, but we can't cart it away with us anyway."

The bit went through the flooring and the man with the glasses knelt down and peered through the hole.

"The explosives," the man behind the mask said, warming to his subject, "are tightly packed around a central core in such a fashion as to direct the main force of the explosion up, rather than out. With any luck we shouldn't demolish more than two or three buildings on either side of this one."

The man with the wire-rim glasses said something in a guttural foreign language and left the room. The man behind the mask snapped something at him in the same language as he went, and then pulled out his pocket-watch and shook his head in annoyance.

"A problem there, Trepoff?" Barnett asked.

The man behind the mask looked up at him. "No man may say that name and live," he said. "Which, in your case, is not the most powerful threat I can imagine."

A muffled shout sounded from the room below, and Trepoff walked over to the drilled hole and thumped his cane on the floor by the hole. "They have to drill a hole in the ceiling below to line up with the one in this floor," he told Barnett. "Although why they couldn't have thought of that before… This is liable to put us off schedule."

"There are incompetents in every line of work," Barnett told him. "Even in yours."

Trepoff turned to him. "A shame you won't be able to write this up in your best humorous style, Mr. Barnett," he said. "A companion piece to your miraculous escape from the Turkish prison."

"You are going to kill us!" the girl cried, twisting in her bonds to face Trepoff. "Why? What have I ever done to you?"

"You were born," Trepoff said. "Think of it this way, woman: your death is to be useful in a great cause. How many people go through their entire dull, drab lives and die meaningless deaths without ever having been useful to anything beyond themselves? But you, mademoiselle—" There was an impatient rapping from below, and Trepoff broke off to bend down and grasp two wires that had appeared in the newly drilled hole. He pulled the wires up through the hole and attached them to two brass screws that had recently been screwed into the wood of the musical box.

"You are about to participate in a great experiment," Trepoff said. "When I start the musical box, the little pianist on top will turn to his piano and play sixteen tunes, each one precisely three minutes and forty-five seconds long. Thus, in exactly one hour he will be finished, the machine will turn itself off, and the pianist will once again turn away from the piano. In doing so, he will complete an electrical connection between these two wires, and a current will pass from the galvanic batteries in the room below through a voltaic arc apparatus inserted into a tube of compressed guncotton. This will serve to detonate the explosive mass. At that moment the two of you will cease to exist. Have you any last words?"

"It does seem a shame, Mr. Trepoff," Barnett said, "to destroy that beautiful musical box."

"Ah, yes," Trepoff said. "But let us console ourselves with the thought that art must die so that ideals may live." He thumped his cane on the floor three times and received a three-thump reply from below. "It is time to leave you now," he said, turning back to the musical box and releasing a catch on the side. The metallic notes of J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier wove a pattern of sound around him as he left.

"He's gone," Barnett said.

The girl did not reply. Barnett turned to her and saw that she had her face turned away and was crying softly into the pillow.

Bach faded away, to be replaced by Handel, and the girl screamed, putting into that one sound all the fear, frustration, and anguish of six weeks of imprisonment ending in an afternoon of death.

"Here, now!" Barnett cried, hopping his chair closer to the bed by jerking his body forward. "You mustn't—" Suddenly he realized what he had just done. He had moved the chair! If he could do it to go three inches closer to the bed, then, with work, he could do it across eight feet of floor to get to the two wires.