Дэймон Найт: Orbit 3

But the matter really had no relation to the problem still nagging him, he realized. The problem of Timothy’s disappearance.

I’ve been there. The woman’s words stayed in his mind the rest of the evening. What could they possibly mean?

Dutifully he recorded the unusual affair in his diary, then put in some time on the notes for his book. The dream of the dog at his heels was even more intense than usual. He awoke near dawn, wringing with sweat. Three cups of caffeine water were required before he was fully awake and free of the grip of the nightmare.

As he went to work he remembered once having read something about Madame Kagle’s brother. Later in the day he had to go to the paper’s morgue on another story. He looked up the Kagle name just out of curiosity. In addition to much material on Madame Wanda, there were several clips on her younger brother. The last of them stated that Dr. Frederic Kagle, a renowned neurosurgeon, had resigned from the World Institutes of Health to enter private practice. The clip was three years old.

Maybe, Cassius laughed to himself, the poor old woman had been put through the wringer by her brother in the cause of science. He laughed again, envisioning the usual horrific collection of apparatus, electrodes and blue lightnings that leapt from point to point while the demon doctor looked on and tittered.

The wool-gathering did have one solid result, surprisingly. It got Cassius to speculating again about a new angle on Timothy’s fate.

Originally Cassius had wondered whether the body had been purloined by some unspeakable sex ring. Now he had another notion, no doubt equally off base but at least remotely possible. There was no connection with Dr. Frederic Kagle. It was only that Kagle’s obscurity suggested scientists who, for one reason or another, were forced to work in absolute anonymity.

A third time Cassius laughed at himself in the gray loneliness of the morgue’s reading cubicle. The medical body-snatcher bit in this day and age? Ridiculous.

Or was it?

Was the government, for instance, preparing some new superweapon in fear of possible disintegration of the tenuous Sino-Caucasian Peace? Something compelled him to take down the morgue index book. He leafed through until he located the proper heading. Disappearances, Unsolved.

He used the keyboard to code the paper tape. The tape vanished down a slot. A humming. Cassius was startled when not one but three microfilm spools popped from the tube.

There was always a routine number of unexplained disappearances within any given period. Distraught offspring. Erring husbands. Crimes that never saw the light of day. So he expected one spool at the most. He fed the first spool into the view box.

He did find that customary expected number of accounts of vanishing humanity. He also found thirteen instances of the disappearance of dead bodies within the last twenty-four months.

His brother Timothy was the last of the thirteen. He was represented by his obit and a two-paragraph item in the Capitol World Truth. The item covered the jetport incident. Cassius had seen it several times.

He double-checked each spool again. He hadn’t misread. The thirteen who were gone had died in a uniform way.

By violence.

Almost one year to the day after the theft of Timothy Andrews’ body, the sovereign and somewhat backward state of New York prepared to let Butcher Balk have five hundred thousand volts. Cassius was waiting.

He was waiting in the prison burial ground on the Hudson bluffs, hunched down in his Ford Aircoupe. The vehicle was parked in a growth of budding maples to one side of a small service road. The time was 10:05 p.m.

Theoretically, Butcher Balk had been dead five minutes. April snow swirled, a quaint effect, courtesy of the weather bureau. Cassius was glad for the white scatter. It would afford him extra concealment in the dark, he hoped.

In order to be here this evening Cassius had been forced to lie both to Joy and his editor Hughgenine. He complained of a spell of male post-equinoctial depression, a common burden of urban life any more. Three other times in the year that had just passed he had also gone off following his elusive suspicions. On those occasions he had pleaded acute hangover, g.i. distress and bucket-seat hip, respectively.

Each time he’d figured that at last he was right. Each time he had been wrong. Worse, there was nothing to suggest tonight would be different.

But he refused to give up.

The first time, he’d traveled all night to reach Watkins Glen. The Continental driving star Baron von Pfalz had smashed up his Sonic Special in the Grand Prix, dying in a multi-car wreck on the chicane. Cassius had felt like a ghoul loitering around the little chapel where the other racers and mechanics held a memorial for the Baron. A sobbing woman, three children in tow, took von Pfalz’s corpse away in a hearse. Cassius drove home keenly disappointed.

The following week the sports section of the Capitol World Truth carried a photo of the little family beside the Baron’s grave plot. The woman and children, then, had not been actors.

So it went twice more: complete failure in outguessing them. Whoever they were.

The second occasion, no one tried to snatch the corpse of Dolly Sue Wei, the first non-American ever to register at the University of Levittown. She entered her first class flanked by the drawn pistols of U.N. marshals. Cassius had been sure the situation would produce violence. It did. Next night someone threw a sharp rock and Dolly died of brain damage.

But she was buried in a routine way in a free cemetery in Manhattan’s Oriental ghetto. Cassius was there.

He had also rushed to a mortuary in New Jersey just last February. The Great Rococo, a stage magician, had died with the back of his head shot off while performing the bullet catch before a convention of Moose. Buried without incident in Tenafly.

The three blind alleys might have led another man to abandon the search. But Cassius had access to the paper’s morgue. There he convinced himself he wasn’t a lunatic.

In the interval during which he’d guessed wrong and gone on fruitless chases, the bodies of five other men—a film star, a slum pastor, an insurance salesman pushing his car to two hundred on the Interstate, a hunter after possum in Kentucky, a suicide in Cleveland—had all disappeared before interment.

Now, in the snowy night, Cassius brooded over his lack of success in outguessing them. Yet he was certain they were still in operation, and it was merely a matter of time before—

Thinking, he failed to see the drop of the translucent gray force wall of Ossining’s new Bartlow Martin wing. He saw the headlights, though. They threw yellow up the hillside. The burial gang was on its way.

The outer wall shimmered up into place again, hiding a ghostly flag on the nine-hole therapy course. Speedy and efficient, the corpse handlers parked the truck on the other side of a low knoll. They rolled the gravedigger from the truck. They lowered the plain poly coffin containing the remains of Butcher Balk into the pre-dug hole. They turned on the digger and stood back while it went to work pitching on earth, its eight metal arms wigwagging black across a spotlight on the truck’s cowl.

Unobserved, Cassius spied from his Aircoupe. He’d selected Butcher Balk as a likely target because the killer had received so much publicity. Of course, that might frighten them away. But the publicity said Butcher Balk had no living relatives. And. that was another part of the pattern Cassius thought he’d discovered.

In six instances the disappearing dead people had also been survivorless. In other cases Cassius couldn’t tell; no mention was made in the printed obits, but since they were wire service items, that didn’t necessarily rule out the possibility of no relatives,