"We wouldn"t think of scaring Henry," Slim said.
Miss Farrar had said nothing. I had tried to give her a reprimanding frown, but it had no effect on her. It was difficult to be severe with her for striking me and taking the ape suit. Too many other greater fears beset me. . . . And clearly Lila was also a captive.
"How did you get here, Lila?" I asked.
She said nothing in a wooden speechless way.
Short-bandit, the one named Pokey, took it on himself to answer that. "Why, Henry, we were waiting outside your place when she came out with the monkey suit. We just picked her up, and sent her alonghere." He nodded at the one who had warned him about my reactions to fear. "Ossie brought her."
Ossie cursed him very blackly. "Whatcha usin" my name for?" Ossie demanded.
"Why," said Pokey, "Ossie ain"t your name."
"Well, quit usin" any names!" Ossie snarled.
"Okay. Okay, if you feel that way about it. Okay, Nameless."
Slim grinned. He had been looking about. "We the only ones here yet?"
Ossie jerked his head at another room. "Yeah. Except in there."
Slim strolled to the door which Ossie had indicated. He peered through. "Do you wanta be Nameless, too?" he asked someone in there.
A voice called him a genial name. Not a nice one. "You two hooligans took your time gettin" here," the voice added.
"It rained. We was beset by the elements." Slim listened to the awful uproar of the storm a moment. "I hope the resta our party don"t get lightning-struck."
"You get Henry?"
"We got Henry. Sure."
"Bring Henry in here," the voice said. "We might as well acquaint him with his purpose in life."
Slim came back, seized me, propelled me at the door, through it.
The voice belonged to a lean, lazy-looking man in a tweed suit, a fellow who did not look either particularly intelligent or vicious, although on the latter point his looks were obviously deceiving.
Dido Alstrong, the other man in the room, I knew, of course.
DIDO ALSTRONG was certainly in a deplorable condition. There had always been about Dido a certain garish neatness that went with his acquisitive manners-he did not have it now. They had been beating Dido. Not with fists, either. When he looked at me, his mouth sagging open with surprise, I saw that they had knocked out, or pulled out, at least three of his lower teeth and two uppers. One of his fingernails was completely missing also, the end of the finger a b.l.o.o.d.y stump. Much as I detested Dido Alstrong, the way he looked made me a little ill.
"Henry! Good G.o.d!" said Dido Alstrong hoa.r.s.ely. "Then they weren"t lying!"
"Lying?" I asked unsurely.
"Oh my Lord!" cried Dido.
There had been something vaguely familiar about the lazy-looking man in tweeds, and now it dawned on me why this was. The chap had been at some of the same places where I was yesterday-standing in front of my laboratory building, and in the c.o.c.ktail bar, and standing in the street in front of the Farrar apartment. The fellow had been functioning as an observer, a lookout. Now he was serving as DidoAlstrong"s captor.
Suddenly, from the other room, came a bit of confusion. Feet clattered. Lila Farrar cried out, a whimpering sound.
Slim jammed his gun into my side, said, "Easy, Henry. No fits out of you, pal." And he guided me hastily back into the other room to see what had happened.
Lila Farrar had endeavored to make a break for the outer night. She had been unsuccessful. The man referred to as Ossie, or Nameless, had recaptured her.
"h.e.l.l, she worked them ropes loose," Ossie said.
"Somebody oughta work some of your hide loose, make ya a little more careful," said Slim. To Lila, Slim added, "Baby, you don"t wanta do things like that. We"d sure hate to have to shoot a pretty tootsie like you."
Lila, in a voice which desperation made hardly understandable, cried, "So my own father would have me shot!"
Slim"s jaw fell. "Huh?"
Ossie snorted.
Slim pulled his jaw up, asked, "What"s she mean by that, Ossie?"
"She thinks her pop is stud duck," Ossie said. "Ain"t that somethin"?"
"What?" yelled Slim. "She thinks old Farrar is engineering this? What makes her think that? What gave her such an idea?"
Ossie shrugged. "d.a.m.ned if I know. Who can figure how a woman thinks!"
Lila stared at them bitterly. "You"re not fooling me," she said.
THEY guided me forcibly back into the room where Dido Alstrong was seated on a chair. I noticed that his ankles were tied to the heavy chair legs.
"Henry," said the tweed-suited man. "You"re a chemist, ain"t you?"
"Y-yes," I confessed shakily.
"How good a chemist are you?"
"I-quite good."
"Better than Dido Alstrong?" he demanded.
"I knew more than Dido Alstrong will ever know," I said grimly, "when I was ten years old.
"Watch out, Henry!" Dido Alstrong yelled.
Slim hit Dido on the head. Dido"s eyes rolled until they were all whites.Tweed-suit looked at me thoughtfully. "You"re the boy for us, Henry. You"re our lad. Dido Alstrong was able to invent the thing, so you can surely figure it out. Don"t you think so?"
"I-well-I don"t believe I understand," I said uneasily. I had no wish to serve these people.
He crossed his tweed-clad legs casually. "Tell you what, Henry. Here"s the whole story. Dido Alstrong, here, works for Farrar who has a company that makes food packaging units, and that got Dido Alstrong interested in means of preserving foods. You know about frozen foods packages, don"t you?"
"Oh, yes," I said. "You see them everywhere-"
"Kinda profitable, wouldn"t you say?"
"Yes, indeed. I imagine-"
"Dido Alstrong," he interrupted me, "had developed a process by which almost all perishable foods can be preserved for up to six months by subjecting them to a supersonic ultra-short sound wave gadget-I guess you"d call it that, anyway. I ain"t a scientist enough to know the name of it."
I considered this. "Such a device would probably be bulky and impractical," I said. "Of course, scientists have long understood that ultra-short sound waves have odd effects on molecular structure. But-"
"As we understand it," said tweed-suit, "the machine ain"t so big nor expensive. And it preserves food just about as fast as it pa.s.ses through on a conveyor belt."
I thought of this.
"Good Lord!" I gasped.
It was incredible. Such a discovery would be worth a fabulous sum. . . . Gradually, like trees falling, the significance began to grow on me. Each fresh realization was a crashing impact. Why, such a discovery would revolutionize the food packaging industry; it would have an effect on the entire way of life of men.
To say nothing, naturally, of the millions of dollars that would pour into the pockets of Dido Alstrong in the way of royalties. I thought of Dido Alstrong, the obnoxious fellow that he was, and I have never been sicker.
"That"s-that"s-why, Dido Alstrong isn"t ent.i.tled to any such good fortune!" I croaked.
Tweed-suit laughed. "We had the same idea, sorta."
"You-"
He nodded. "We"re relieving him of it. Of course, we haven"t got our hands on it yet, but I think we will."
"What happened?" I blurted.
"Well, we were a little careless and Dido Alstrong found out we were after the secret, so he decided to put them where we wouldn"t be able to get them."
"And where was that?"
"He gave them to you, Henry."
"Me?" I yelled. This was unbelievable. It could hardly be true either."The monkey suit," the man said.
"But I don"t understand!"
"The monkey suit," he explained patiently, "is the key to the formula."
"I"m so confused!" I said.
"We ain"t exactly in broad daylight ourselves," tweed-suit informed me. "There"s one little hitch-making Dido Alstrong tell us the formula or where it is. But we"ll get that done." He wheeled on Dido Alstrong.
"Won"t we, bub?" he demanded.
DIDO ALSTRONG had been listening to this with all the emotions of a selfish man who was terrified about his own safety. It did not seem to me that he was at all worried about my own welfare, and I resented this, because after all he had something at stake-millions of dollars no doubt-and I had nothing. I was the bystander. I was Dido Alstrong"s sucker. I wouldn"t have been in this if it hadn"t been for Dido.
Now Dido said, "Henry, don"t believe that story."
"Isn"t it true?" I asked anxiously.
"Not exactly," Dido said. "You see, Henry, there isn"t any food preserving supersonic gadget. There never was. I-well-I told some people there was, and that got me into this trouble."
"Who did you tell you had such a thing?"
"I-uh-Mr. Farrar," Dido replied grimly. "And Lila, and maybe one or two others."
"You lied?"
"Yeah."
"But why?"
He said bitterly, "Old man Farrar didn"t think much of me as a prospective son-in-law. I wanted to marry Lila and he was nixing it. So I told the lie about a food preserving process to fix myself up, make him think I was some guy."
"But Dido, what good would that have done you?" I demanded.
"Hah! He would have let me marry Lila."
"But he would have found out later!"
"After I was one of the family, maybe," Dido said carelessly. "What could he do then? If he got tough, I could sue him for a potful of dough for alienating my wife"s affections. It wouldn"t have come to that, though-I would have slid out of it by saying the process had a flaw in it that I hadn"t discovered earlier."
"Then there isn"t any food-preservation machine?"
"No." He eyed me anxiously. "You"ve got to believe me, Henry. You know I"m quite a liar."
I did know he was quite a liar, all right.But I had no idea what to think. If there was a food-preserving machine, Dido would doubtless lie to these men, who were trying to steal the secret, and say there wasn"t. On the other hand, the tissue of falsehoods and four-flushing was exactly the sort of thing Dido Alstrong would perpetrate. So I had two stories that seemed equally logical. In either case, Dido deserved the mess he was in. I wished I wasn"t in it with him.
"Henry," said tweed-suit, "I"ll make you a proposition. A business deal. You check this supersonic gadget for us when we get it or the plans-if there"s plans, you may have to build a model-and we"ll cut you in on it."
"Give me a share?" I asked.
"That"s right."
It was awfully tempting. "How much?"
"Ten per cent," he said.
"Oh, I"d have to have fifty per cent, at least," I said.
Dido Alstrong laughed bitterly. "Brothers, Henry is a child where everything but a dollar is concerned.