Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

The whole police organization was in a turmoil.

Sirens screamed as police cars flashed after the fleeing limousine which carried Saret Balisle away. Doors slammed and windows crashed as two score policemen scattered through the building, armed with riot guns and pistols, seeking the ape.

Tyler, after barking the staccato orders which set his men in motion, turned to Balisle’s secretary.

“Quickly, the number Balisle calls when he wants his automobile sent around.”

The girl gave it, and Tyler called the number.

“Are Mr. Balisle’s car and chauffeur there?” he asked.

He swore explosively and hung up the receiver.

“Another killing,” he said. “Balisle’s car is gone and the garage people have just found his chauffeur, almost ripped to pieces, in another car left at the garage for storage.

“That means this ape is armed with metal fingernails, just like the one that killed the insurance man in the Flatiron Building. That means he’ll be doubly dangerous when caught. The murdered chauffeur will have to wait for a few moments while we capture the ape.”

Shouts and shots rang through the Clinton Building. The ape was going wild, crashing through doors and windows as if they weren’t there. His mad bellowing sounded terrifying in the extreme, so deep and rumbling that the air seemed to tremble with its menace.

But in the end there came a chorus of triumphant shouts which told that the giant ape had been surrounded.

Bentley and Tyler raced in the direction of the sounds. From all directions came the sounds of footfalls as other plain-clothes men raced to be in at the death. Bentley held his automatic tightly gripped in his right hand. He knew exactly where he was going to aim if the ape were not dead when he reached him.

The creature had been cornered in the areaway between two banks of elevators and had climbed up the cage as high as he could go. He was just out of reach of human hands, even had there been any men there with the courage to try to take him alive. A white foam dripped from the chattering lips of the anthropoid. His red-rimmed eyes flashed fire. Bentley noted the little metal ball on top of the creature’s head.

Deliberately he stopped, raised his automatic, and held it steady while he pressed the trigger with the extreme care which a sharp-shooter knows to be necessary… and a bullet ploughed through the top of the ape’s head.

The little ball vanished, and the ape released his grip suddenly. His chattering died away to an uncertain murmur, the fire went out of his eyes, and he fell to the floor. No bullet had yet actually struck him, for he had whirled into the window from the second-story ledge simultaneously with the barking of the policemen’s rifles and pistols. He had escaped there—but here he was not to escape.

Bentley and Tyler both lifted their voices to shout warnings to the policemen, but their voices were drowned in the savage explosions of a dozen weapons, in the hands of men who probably thought the creature was in the act of charging… and the ape sprawled on the floor, his legs and arms quivering.

Half a dozen men rushed forward, weapons extended.

“Keep back!” yelled Bentley, rushing in.

He stood over the ape, staring intently at his glazing eyes.

“Tyler,” snapped Bentley, “have everybody fall back beyond earshot.”

Tyler issued the orders. Bentley shouted, “Quickly, quickly!” knowing he had little time.

Then, with Tyler beside him, he knelt beside the ape.

“I know you can’t talk, but you can answer me by nodding or shaking your head. You are Harold Hervey, aren’t you?”

The eyes of the ape were hopeless. Tyler gasped, staring at Bentley as though for a moment he thought him crazy. But in the next instant he doubted his own sanity, for the ape, slowly and ponderously, nodded his head.

“I’m going to name a number of places where I think you might have been taken,” went on Bentley. “In each case nod or shake your head. Is it near Sixth Avenue?”

Slowly the great head moved, more slowly even than before; but it nodded.

“Where? Below Twenty-third Street?”

Again the ponderous, agonizing nod.

Bentley went on.

“Below Fourteenth Street?”

Again the nod, barely perceptible this time.

“Below Christopher Street?” asked Bentley.

This time the head shook from side to side, ever so slightly.

“Two blocks above Christopher?”

But this question was never destined to be answered. The giant anthropoid in whose skull-pan was the brain of Harold Hervey, entirely controlled by Caleb Barter, until Bentley had shot the little metal ball from his head, had died.

Bentley rose and looked down at the anthropoid for several seconds.

“Barter will hate to lose this creature,” he said. “He probably has just the number of apes he needs—and Tyler, here’s a hunch: he’ll need an ape to take the place of this one! Get me the best surgeon to be found in Manhattan, and get him as fast as you can!”

“Good God!” ejaculated Tyler. “What do you want a surgeon for? What are you going to do?”

“Barter needs an ape to take the place of this one. I shall be that ape!”

It would be difficult to comprehend the nervous strain under which Manhattan had been laboring during the past thirty-six hours. The story of the kidnaping of Harold Hervey had not been given to the newspapers, for an excellent reason. If Hervey’s financial enemies knew of his kidnaping and death they would hammer away at his stocks until they fell to nothing and his family, accustomed to fabulous wealth, would have been reduced to beggary.

The Mind Master himself, up to a late hour, had given no word to the newspapers in his “manifestoes.” The Hervey family held its breath fearing that he would—for the newspapers would have played the story for all the sensationalism it would carry. Bentley, when this matter was called to his attention, wondered. Barter had kept his own counsel for a purpose, but what was it? There was no way of asking him.

The story of the mad race down Broadway in pursuit of the limousine which had returned the lifeless body of Hervey to his residence had been a sensational one, and the tabloids had given it their best treatment. The chauffeur who had crawled out like a monkey atop his careening car, to lose his life when catapulted into the entrance to the Twenty-third Street subway station: the three policemen whose lives had been lost because the chauffeur hadn’t stopped as they had expected him to, the kidnaping of Saret Balisle by a great ape hadn’t yet broken as a story, nor the murder of Balisle’s chauffeur.

But everybody knew something of the story of the naked man of the day before. Many were the speculations as to what had ripped and torn his flesh from his body, along with his clothes. What manner of claws had it been which had sliced him in scores of places as though with many razors?

Men and women walked the streets apprehensively, and many of them turned at intervals to look behind them. No telling what they would do when the story of Balisle’s kidnaping by an anthropoid ape and a queer mute chauffeur got abroad. To top it all the police pursuers lost the Balisle limousine and Saret Balisle had taken his place among the lost.

Bentley knew as soon as the disgruntled and rather frightened police officers returned to the Clinton Building with the news that Balisle had got away from them in the stolen Balisle car, that already the ill-fated young man was probably under the anesthetic which Caleb Barter used on his victims.