Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

Then the goggles jammed.

But he did not need them any more now.

He knew that Barr Maxon, or whoever stood up there on the balcony, was the wearer of the wheel.

Silently, and attracting as little attention as possible, Caquer sprinted around the fringe of the crowd and reached the side door of the Regency building.

There was a guard on duty there.

“Sorry, sir, but no one’s allowed—”

Then he tried to duck, too late. The flat of Police Lieutenant Rod Caquer’s shortsword thudded against his head.

The inside of the building seemed deserted. Caquer ran up the three flights of stairs that would take him to the level of the higher balcony, and down the hall toward the balcony door.

He burst through it, and Regent Maxon turned. Maxon now no longer wore the helmet on his head. Caquer had lost the goggles, but whether he could see it or not, Caquer knew the helmet and the wheel were still in place and working, and that this was his one chance.

Maxon turned and saw Lieutenant Caquer’s face, and his drawn sword.

Then, abruptly, Maxon’s figure vanished. It seemed to Caquer—although he knew that it was not—that the figure before him was that of Jane Gordon. Jane, looking at him pleadingly, and spoke in melting tones.

“Rod, don’t—” she began to say.

But it was not Jane, he knew. A thought, in self-preservation, had been directed at him by the manipulator of the Vargas Wheel.

Caquer raised his sword, and he brought it down hard.

Glass shattered and there was the ring of metal on metal as his sword cut through and split the helmet.

Of course it was not Jane now—just a dead man lying there with blood oozing out of the split in a strange and complicated but utterly shattered helmet. A helmet that could now be seen by everyone there, and by Lieutenant Caquer himself.

Just as everyone, including Caquer himself, could recognize the man who had worn it.

He was a small, wiry man, and there was an unsightly wart on the side of his nose.

Yes, it was Willem Deem. And this time, Rod Caquer knew it was Willem Deem…

“I thought,” Jane Gordon said, “that you were going to leave for Callisto City without saying goodbye to us.”

Rod Caquer threw his hat in the general direction of a hook.

“Oh, that,” he said. “I’m not even sure I’m going to take the promotion to a job as police coordinator there. I have a week to decide, and I’ll be around town at least that long. How you been doing, Icicle?”

“Fine, Rod. Sit down. Father will be home soon, and I know he has a lot of things to ask you. Why, we haven’t seen you since the big mass meeting.”

Funny how dumb a smart man can be, at times.

But then again, he had proposed so often and been refused, that it was not all his fault.

He just looked at her.

“Rod, all the story never came out in the newscasts,” she said. “I know you’ll have to tell it all over again for my father, but while we’re waiting for him, won’t you give me some information?”

Rod grinned.

“Nothing to it, really, Icicle,” he said. “Willem Deem got hold of a Blackdex book, and found out how to make a Vargas Wheel. So he made one, and it gave him ideas.”

“His first idea was to kill Barr Maxon and take over as Regent, setting the helmet so he would appear to be Maxon. He put Maxon’s body in his own shop, and then had a lot of fun with his own murder. He had a warped sense of humor, and got a kick out of chasing us in circles.”

“But just how did he do all the rest?” asked the girl.

“He was there as Brager, and pretended to discover his own body. He gave one description of the method of death, and caused Skidder and me and the clearance men to see the body of Maxon each a different way. No wonder we nearly went nuts.”

“But Brager remembered being there too,” she objected.

“Brager was in the hospital at the time, but Deem saw him afterward and impressed on his mind the memory pattern of having discovered Deems body,” explained Caquer. “So naturally, Brager thought he had been there.”

“Then he killed Maxon’s confidential secretary, because being so close to the Regent, the secretary must have suspected something was wrong even though he couldn’t guess what. That was the second corpse of Willem Deem, who was beginning to enjoy himself in earnest when he pulled that on us.”

“And of course he never sent to Callisto City for a special investigator at all. He just had fun with me, by making me seem to meet one and having the guy turn out to be Willem Deem again. I nearly did go nuts then, I guess.”

“But why, Rod, weren’t you as deep in as the others? I mean on the business of conquering Callisto and all of that?” she inquired. “You were free of that part of the hypnosis.”

Caquer shrugged.

“Maybe it was because I missed Skidder’s talk on the televis,” he suggested.

“Of course it wasn’t Skidder at all, it was Deem in another guise and wearing the helmet. And maybe he deliberately left me out, because he was having a psychopathic kind of fun out of my trying to investigate the murders of two Willem Deems. It’s hard to figure. Perhaps I was slightly cracked from the strain, and it might have been that for that reason I was partially resistant to the group hypnosis.”

“You think he really intended to try to rule all of Callisto, Rod?” asked the girl.

“We’ll never know, for sure, just how far he wanted, or expected to go later. At first, he was just experimenting with the powers of hypnosis, through the wheel. That first night, he sent people out of their houses into the streets, and then sent them back and made them forget it. Just a test, undoubtedly.” Caquer paused and frowned thoughtfully.

“He was undoubtedly psychopathic, though, and we don’t dare even guess what all his plans were,” he continued. “You understand how the goggles worked to neutralize the wheel, don’t you, Icicle?”

“I think so. That was brilliant, Rod. It’s like when you take a moving picture of a turning wheel, isn’t it? If the camera synchronizes with the turning of the wheel, so that each successive picture shows it after a complete revolution, then it looks like it’s standing still when you show the movie.”

Caquer nodded.

“That’s it exactly,” he said. “Just luck I had access to those goggles, though. For a second I could see a man wearing a helmet up there on the balcony—but that was all I had to know.”

“But Rod, when you rushed out on the balcony, you didn’t have the goggles on any more. Couldn’t he have stopped you, by hypnosis?”

“Well, he didn’t. I guess there wasn’t time for him to take over control of me. He did flash an illusion at me. It wasn’t either Barr Maxon or Willem Deem I saw standing there at the last minute. It was you, Jane.”

“I?”

“Yep, you. I guess he knew I’m in love with you, and that’s the first thing flashed into his mind—that I wouldn’t dare use the sword if I thought it was you standing there. But it wasn’t you, in spite of the evidence of my eyes, so I swung it.”

He shuddered slightly, remembering the will power he had needed to bring that sword down.

“The worst of it was that I saw you standing there like I’ve always wanted to see you—with your arms out toward me, and looking at me as though you loved me.”

“Like this, Rod?”

And this time he was not too dumb to get the idea.

There were six letters in Bill Garrigan’s box, but he could tell from a quick glance at the envelopes that not one of them was a check. Would-be gags from would-be gagmen. And, nine chances out of ten, not a yak in the lot.