Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“More marks against Barter,” he muttered to himself. “How long will the list be before I’ll be able to drag him down?”

On and on went the two cars. People packed the sidewalks, but they kept close against the buildings. The streets were almost deserted now, for that warning had got ahead. Three other police cars were careening down the street, too. Bentley saw them with pleasure. Other cars would be coming in to head off the fleeing limousine. This one puppet of Barter’s, at least, would be pocketed before he could find time to leap from his car and escape.

“Barter’s sweating blood as he saws with both hands at an imaginary driver’s wheel,” thought Bentley. “When will he give up—and what will his driver do when Barter relinquishes control?”

For the first time the grim thought came to him. He knew that the creature there had the brain of an ape. What would an ape do if he suddenly found himself at the wheel of a car going down Broadway at eighty miles an hour? He would chatter, and jump up and down. The plunging car, with accelerator full on, would be out of control.

“God Almighty, I never thought of that!” yelled Bentley. “As soon as he sees he can’t save his puppet he’ll let him get out the best way he can, himself… and that car will be traveling, uncontrolled, at eighty miles an hour.”

As though his very statement had fathered the thought, two police cars swept into the intersection at Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue. The fleeing limousine was turning right to go down Fifth Avenue.

The police cars were brought to a halt to effectively stop the further progress of the speeding limousine. Three other cars plunged in to make the box barrage of cars effective. The fleeing car was trapped. Barter must know that. If he did know, it proved that he could see everything that transpired. The next few seconds would show.

Bentley gasped as he put his hand on the driver’s arm to have him slow down to prevent a wholesale pile-up in the busy intersection. He gasped with horror as he did so, for the fleeing car was now going crazy. It zigzagged from side to side. Now it rode the two right wheels, now the two left.

And suddenly the driver swung nimbly out through the left window, his hands reaching up over the top, and in a moment he was on the roof of the careening car.

“I’ve seen apes swing into trees like that,” Bentley thought.

While the car plunged on, the creature stood up on the doomed limousine, and in spite of the fact that the wind of the car’s passing must have been terrific, the ghastly hybrid jumped up and down on the top like a delighted child viewing a new toy or riding a shoot-the-chutes.

Suddenly the creature’s right leg went through the top’s fabric. It struggled to regain its footing as an ape might struggle to regain position on a limb in the jungles.

At that moment the fleeing car crashed mercilessly into the two nearest police cars ahead. The men inside had expected the driver to slow down to avoid a collision. How could they know what sort of brain lurked within the driver’s skull? They couldn’t… and three policemen paid with their lives for their lack of knowledge as their bodies were hurled beneath a mass of twisted wreckage, crushed out of human semblance.

The hybrid atop the fatal car was hurled through the air like a thunderbolt. His body passed over the railing of the subway entrance before the Flatiron Building and Bentley knew he had crashed to his death on the steps.

The police car had already come to a stop, and Bentley was running toward the subway entrance.

The shapeless bleeding bundle on the steps no longer even resembled a man. Fortunately nobody had been struck by the hurtling body; and, miraculously enough, Barter’s pawn was not yet quite dead.

Moans of animal pain came through his bleeding lips. The eyes scarcely noticed Bentley, though there was a slight flicker of fear in them. Then, in the instant of death, even that slight expression passed from them. Bentley saw the scarline about the skull.

And now Bentley knew that Barter was missing no slightest move, that he saw everything….

For the ghastly hybrid on the steps raised his right hand in meticulous salute… and died. It was an ironic, grotesque gesture.

Plain-clothes men gathered around.

“Take his fingerprints,” said Bentley quickly. “Then telegraph the fingerprint section, U. S. Army, at Washington, for this man’s identity.”

An ambulance was taking aboard the three mangled policemen as Bentley stepped back into his car for the ride down to Washington Square to see what dread thing had happened to Ellen Estabrook.

Ellen Estabrook was almost in hysterics when Bentley reached her. She had been immediately picked up by plain-clothes men and had thought herself captured by minions of Barter. She had been panic-stricken for a moment, she told Bentley, and it had taken her some little time to be persuaded that she was in the hands of police.

But Bentley’s heart was filled to overflowing with gratitude that he had been able to safeguard Ellen against Barter. He never doubted it had been Barter who had telephoned her. And even now he fancied he could hear Barter’s chuckle of amusement. Barter was watching, perhaps even listening. Bentley felt that the madman was just biding his time. Barter could have taken Ellen in this attempt, but hadn’t tried greatly, knowing himself invincible, knowing that he could take her at any moment if it was necessary. And he might take her even if it were not necessary, since he had warned Bentley she must be removed.

The police car raced back uptown so that Bentley could inform himself of any new developments in the Hervey case. Ellen snuggled against him gratefully. “You’ll have to stick close to me,” said Bentley, “until something happens, or until the exigencies of service draw me away from you. Then it will be up to Tom Tyler to look after you.”

“I can look after myself,” she retorted spiritedly. “I’m over age and not without brains….”

“Yet you went to Washington Square,” said Bentley gently. “Didn’t it even seem strange to you that I would have selected such a place as a rendezvous?”

Ellen turned away from him and her lips trembled. His gentle thrust had hurt her.

“But I would have sworn it was your voice, Lee,” she said. “And—I still think it was!”

“I tell you I didn’t phone you to meet me in Washington Square!”

“But you told me you had talked with Barter for a long time on the headquarters phone, didn’t you? Remember that you are dealing with the cleverest and maddest brain we know of to-day. What if he had merely talked with you to get a record of your voice? Suppose a voice were composed of certain ingredients, certain sounds. Suppose those ingredients could somehow be captured on a sensitized plate of some kind! Edison would have been burned as a sorcerer a few centuries before he invented the wax record. Twenty years ago who would have thought of talking pictures… voices permanently recorded on celluloid?”

“But the talkie films merely parrot, over and over again, the words of actual people. When I talked with Barter this morning I certainly said nothing about meeting you at Washington Square.”

“But the tone, the timber, the frequency of your voice! Lee, suppose he had gone a step further than the talkies and had found a way to break the voice apart and put it back together to suit himself…?”

“Good Lord, Ellen! It sounds crazy… but if you would have sworn that voice was mine, then mine it may have been, speaking words with my voice that I never spoke personally. But wait until we find out for sure. We’re just guessing.”