THE PURE EVIL.
A Doc Savage Adventure.
by Kenneth Robeson.
Chapter I.
HE drove his little roadster lickety-split to work that morning. His age was twenty-four, and he was a long boy with freckles and all grin.
He got whistled at warningly by a traffic cop on Pollard Avenue, but Gail smiled at the cop. "h.e.l.lo, Gordon," she said to the cop. And so the cop waved them on.
And he in turn whistled at a girl at the corner of Truce and Lansing. Gail laughed at that. "That"s the Riles girl," she said. "Her boy-friend is Nick Pardo, and he will take you apart if you don"t watch it."
His grin shone all over his face.
"You always take care of me, don"t you?" he said.
Gail smiled. Gail was his sister. It was probably true, what he said.
His name was an easy Yankee one. Daniel Adams. Dan Adams, and he drove his little car with dash and pulled a cloud of the grey coastwise dust along the road to A.A.E. Station 3. He stopped before the tan brick building and the effect was that of a kid who had slid down a bannister.
Gibble was standing there. Gibble threw away his cigarette.
"Good morning, Gail," he said with enthusiasm.
"Good morning."Dan Adams hopped out and palmed the roadster door shut and pointed his finger at his sister. He said, "You be careful of that car, baby. Was you to ding one fender, I"d be ruined."
"I"ll be careful of the car," Gail said. "I"m always careful of the car."
"Sure," he said. "But be special careful."
"I"ll be extra one-hundred-and-ten-volt careful," his sister said, and she put the car in gear and drove way and down the road. She and the car were going approximately seventy-two miles an hour when they disappeared.
"Careful, she said!" he complained.
Gibble grinned. He said, "She"s quite a girl, that Gail."
Dan looked at Gibble. Gibble was a fairly average-sized man who looked small, and a moderately neat man who looked sloppy. The color of his face, eyes and hair were all shades of sand.
"Gibble, you make it out here every morning when she brings me to work, don"t you?" Dan said.
"Huh?"
"Your time worth much, Gibble?"
Gibble said, "Huh?" again.
"Don"t waste it, Gibble, if it is," Dan said. "And you"ll be wasting it, boy. I can tell you that."
Gibble didn"t say anything, and Dan went into the Station and sailed his hat onto a hook and got his schedule sheets and tracking data forms from the locker and went into the tracking room. Not the tower one where the radio equipment was, but the one where they were conducting the experiments in short-range tracking. He told Steigel, the man working the early trick, h.e.l.lo and goodbye. He settled himself, spread out his cigarettes and matches, and that was the way Steigel saw him when he said his so-longs and see-you-tomorrows from the door.
That was the last time anyone saw Dan Adams when he seemed to be exactly right.
The tracking statistician was fortyish, thin-faced, brainy, wore prim mannish suits the year around, and was named Miss Bradley. Miss Bradley"s job was correlating all the figures and graphs from the radar experiments, putting them in shape for digestion by the men with the large brains. She had formed the habit of dropping around to the trackers every two hours to pick up their sheets.
Miss Bradley came in, leaned across Dan"s shoulder and got the sheets, turned away, and was at the door when she did a double-take. She wheeled back and frowned at Dan.
"Watch out, that expression might freeze on your face," she said.
Then Miss Bradley"s lips slowly parted. Her mouth made itself into a hole and remained so.
Dan Adams neither moved, spoke, breathed. His complete suspense was impressive. He was-Miss Bradley thought of this now, and remembered it later-like a man who had found a poisonous snake in his hands, six inches from his eyes. In the radar scope, for example. The scope screen was about six inches from his eyes.
Time pa.s.sed. A great time, it seemed to Miss Bradley. Twenty seconds or so. Then Miss Bradley startedtrying to say something, and tried for a while, and succeeded in making a kind of hiss. She was shocked.
It was odd to see a man so frightened that when you tried to make words you only made a hiss.
Now Dan arose slowly and stiffly in his chair. In rising, he could have been pushing against weight, hundreds of pounds of weight. His terror weighed that much. And now he brought both hands in front of him and pointed at the radar scope. Pointed wordlessly with both hands.
Pointing, he made a few wordless sounds. Miss Bradley couldn"t have identified them.
Miss Bradley, from where she stood at the door, couldn"t see the scope screen because of the external illumination control hood. Actually, only from a position directly in front could the scope be viewed successfully. So Miss Bradley started to move-frightened, fascinated, the nape of her neck getting cool-to a spot where she could see the screen.
And now Dan screamed. He shrieked, high and girlishly, as if terror had taken all the virility from him. It was a raw thing, that yell, a b.l.o.o.d.y nerve torn out, a shred of living flesh.
Now Dan"s intensity took to frenzied action. His hands clamped to his chair. He swung the chair. A heavy thing, serviceable steel, it ruined the scope with the first wild overhead blow. But he didn"t stop. He struck and struck, and gla.s.s whizzed in the air and skated on the floor and the place was full of guttering purple light from electrical shorts and the acrid lightning-bolt odor of voltage discharges. The man, white-faced, his cheeks all gouts of muscle, continued to swing the chair, beating the scope as if it were a reptile.
"Oh my G.o.d," whimpered Miss Bradley, and she wheeled and ran for help. She found Gibble and a man named Spencer who was a maintenance technician.
"Dan-he saw something in the scope-oh, hurry!" wailed Miss Bradley, grabbing her own words out in unstable groups.
Gibble said, "Huh?"
But the other man, Spencer, was quicker, and he ran into the scope room. Dan was still wielding the chair. There wasn"t much left of the scanning part of the scope, wires, battered metal and gla.s.s dust, but he was at it yet.
"Cripes, eleven thousand bucks worth of scope!" Spencer blurted. Not that he cared that much about eleven thousand of a.s.sociated Aircraft"s Experimental"s money. Being maintenance, that was merely what he thought of to say. Then he yelled, "Dan! What in the h.e.l.l!"
Dan didn"t turn. He stopped pulverizing the wreckage. He stepped back, holding the chair c.o.c.ked, staring at the mess on the floor as if it was still dangerous.
Gibble came in now. Gibble varied his routine slightly from "Huh," and said instead, "Whew! Whooeee!"
"Dan!" Spencer called. "Dan, what happened?"
Dan still didn"t turn his head, didn"t take his eyes from the unidentifiable conglomeration that had been the radar scope and cabinet. But he knew they were there. He began backing away-one step at a time, the chair still c.o.c.ked for defense.
Spencer said, "Dan, what on earth got into you."
He watched Dan begin shaking, a trembling at the knees first; then a progressive increase in tremor setthe young man"s entire body to twitching. There was, or seemed to be, an accompanying loss of color, a greater gouting of facial muscles. Dan came to the wall, his back against it, and he began to slide his shoulders along the wall toward the door.
"Spencer," he said, vaguely and as from a distance.
"Okay, Dan. Take it easy."
"I want to go to a church."
"What?"
"I want to go to a church. I want to go quick. You take me there, will you? You got your car here."
"What church?"
"I don"t know. The first one you think of."
"Don"t you go to a church?"
"No, but I got to go to one now."
He had said all this without noticeably taking his eyes off the scope ruin, and he had not lowered the chair nor loosened the tension in any way.
"Sure, Dan, sure," Spencer"s voice had gone up a little. "Sure, I"ll take you. If you have any particular church in mind, that"s where we"ll go."
In a tone of thin high tension, Dan Adams said, "Isn"t any house of G.o.d a refuge from evil? That"s what I want, a refuge from evil."
"Okay, I"m a Presbyterian. I"ll take you there," Spencer said. Then he went over and cautiously laid hold of the chair Doc held. He said, "You won"t need this chair, will you? Be all right to leave it here, won"t it?"
Dan was silent for a while, back jammed against the wall, shaking. In the most defeated, hopeless voice Spencer had ever heard, he said, "A chair wouldn"t be any defense, would it?"
"Defense against what?"
Dan hesitated again, silently. Spencer didn"t think the pause of particular importance at the time, but later he realized the other man had made a hair-raising decision.
"You wouldn"t want to know what," Dan said sickly.
"Want me to take the chair, Dan?"
"What? . . . The chair? Oh, all right."
Spencer took the chair and put it in Gibble"s hands, using the act as an excuse to whisper, "I"m taking him to the First Presbyterian. Get on the phone and have a doctor there."
"Maybe the police-" Gibble began.
"Don"t be a d.a.m.ned fool! If you were sick like that, would you want the cops hammering on you with questions?"Gibble said unsympathetically, "If I busted up a scope, I would sure expect somebody to ask questions."
But he didn"t telephone for the police.
The car ride that followed aged Gibble. He found, toward the end of the trip, that he had to stop glancing at Dan Adams, because he was getting the creeps.
Reverend Pollard, pastor of the First Presbyterian, was out on a parishoner call. He did not return until the medico Gibble had phoned for, a Doctor McGreer, had completed an examination with somewhat unsatisfactory results. The two had a private conference.
"Reverend, I don"t know what to think about this," the Doctor said. "Prior to the examination, from what had been told me, I thought I would find a more or less clear-cut case of neurasthenia."
"Nervous breakdown, you mean?"
"Well, the term nervous breakdown is so general that we don"t use it. But a nervous disorder is what I expected."
"And you found?"
The doctor frowned. "A perfectly healthy body, normal nervous responses, and apparently an extreme case of terror."
"But from what Mr. Gibble and Mr. Spencer tell me, I imagined-"
"Reverend, the man isn"t insane. The man is scared stiff."
"Frightened?" the pastor said wonderingly. "Well, fright is the product of a stimulus. Where there is fear, there is a reason for it. This shouldn"t be so difficult."
"I hope it"s as easy as you think it is," the doctor said, shrugging. "I can"t do anything for the boy, except give him a sedative, which I did, and which won"t do him much good."
"Has he told you of what he is terrified?"
"Not a word. He clams up on it."
"Perhaps he will tell me, then, and be better for the telling. The fact that he came to the House of G.o.d indicates he wished solace and counsel."
"He"s your baby, Reverend," said the doctor dubiously.
Dan Adams was sitting silently in the secluded dimness of the church, and Reverend Pollard went to him alone-went, he soon discovered, to a baffling experience. Because Dan gave blank stares, silence, head-shakes, to all questions and words of comfort.
Fifteen minutes later, the Reverend retired to consult with Gibble and Spencer. "You say this man suffered his attack while at work?"
"That"s right," Spencer explained. "He was at the scope today doing short-tracking and-"
"Excuse me, but what is a scope, and what is short-tracking?" the minister asked.
Spencer gave a light dose of radar technology, finishing, "It"s the same radar that was used in the war, only improved. Very high-frequency emissions are sent out, bounce back when they encounter an object,and are received on a scope where they can be seen. Short-tracking is a project of a.s.sociated Aircraft Experimental, which is a research agency financed by the government and the airlines. We"re trying to develop a better method of following aircraft at very close range, perfecting the landing system for blind flying landings on airports."
"I believe I understand that," said the minister. "But what could have frightened this man? Could he have caused, or nearly caused, an airplane crash, for instance?"
"Not a chance," Spencer said flatly. "He was tracking seagulls."
"What?"
"Oh, it"s not as silly as it sounds. The idea of the research was to see whether individual birds, or flocks of birds, could cause errors in tracking data."