Читать книгу Satan's Incubator - Randall Craig - Страница 3

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WHEN Dr. Skull came back to his office that morning, the dust was unusually thick on his desk. He looked about him with oddly young brown eyes. The bust of Galen on his bookshelf, the books themselves...No, Mrs. Timiny had not been in to clean, which was strange, for she had not missed a morning before in six years. Absently, then, Dr. Skull employed the black sleeve of his neat and ancient coat to rub the city grime from his desk top.

The old man frowned. He had seen much dust that morning during his calls, dust that lay unheeded in houses where misery had ended all thought of daily chores. He thought too, while his back straightened as against some invisible burden, that thus it must have been at the destruction of other cities, with the dust at last burying outraged ruins from the eyes of the future.

And now there was dust in his own office...Suddenly he wheeled about, at the whoosh of a falling weight hurtling through the half-open door. A cry died in the doctor's throat--for the thing that lay inside his threshold had once been a little boy.

He was Michael Timiny, one of the doctor's great army of godsons. Four years ago, Skull had brought him into the world--and now, with a great icy blast of outraged sorrow, the doctor knew he would see little Michael out of the world. One of the child's eyes was a gaping red hole; the left arm, clawed and tooth-marked, hung limp and gory at his side, and in at least one spot, through that torn little linen suit, Skull could see how the vitals had broken out of the skin.

"Michael!" He thought he must be screaming, but the name came out in a gentle whisper, as he lifted the moaning child and carried him to a couch. "Michael, boy....Who--what?" And then he clenched his lips against further questioning.

He guessed what the answer would be, if the child could still make an answer. He had seen other mangled human wrecks in the past fortnight, heard a dozen horrible, unbelievably shocking accusations.

It wasn't only he. It was everyone in New York who had eyes to see. This was new, this attack on the threshold of a doctor's office--but then, some of the doctors had gone mad themselves, turning, bare-toothed and blood-lusting, on the very patients they had been called in to help.

One tiny hand was reaching up toward him. From the small flecked lips, working spasmodically against the approach of death, came faintly terrified, incredible words: "Mamma--Mamma hit me...Hurt me..."

So that was why the office hadn't been dusted. That was why every simple routine in the City's vast life had been disrupted by the forerunning events of terrifying, complete collapse. Men were turning on the women they loved, people tortured children and cats and dogs, anything helpless they could lay their hands on. The infection had spread to widowed Kitty Timiny, who had sworn she would get on her hands and knees to lick the streets clean, if she had to to provide for her beloved Michael. Now she had become the carrier of this pestilence of mad brutality and violence. Skull whispered to the child, "Where is your mamma?"

"Mamma--gone..." He was talking in a dream before death, was Michael Timiny, in an infant nightmare of pain and treachery. Skull filled a hypo needle and gave him the blessing of morphine. It was all a human being could have done.

DR. SKULL stepped to his threshold and looked up and down the hall for some sign of Kitty Timiny. Neither she nor anyone else was there. The attacks had always happened that way, when attacker and victim were alone. Always, afterwards, the attackers had disappeared, and not one of all the hundreds had been found for questioning, though police were working night and day.

He straightened and shut his door. The office was dark, with its thick curtains muffling the blazing Indian Summer heat outside. A neat, modest, but well-equipped office, with no sign of disturbance save the ominous dust and the child's blood on the couch.

A metallic hatred came into those oddly young brown eyes. Kitty Timiny? It was impossible for him to believe Kitty Timiny criminally responsible. No, something had been done to her, and to all those others who had committed unspeakable atrocities and then vanished.

Ordinary homicidal mania would not take the same pattern, always, with this terrifying frequency of occurrence--surely, unless a single brain were behind the whole monstrous epidemic of murder and torture, some of the maniacs would have been found! It was too hard to believe that hundreds of persons, insane enough to kill their loved ones, should suddenly become clearheaded enough to effect a complete escape from New York's trained police force!

In all his medical study and research, Dr. Skull found only one phenomenon which might account for the murder epidemic. He remembered a quotation from the article he had actually written, intending it for the American Medical Journal, but then he had decided not to send it, believing it too fantastic for men of science to accept:

The recurrence of garnet-purple pigmentation in the irises of such persons as I have mentioned above should be taken as a grave warning to the world at large.

During every great social catastrophe in ancient history, purple eyes have made their appearance as eternal harbingers of destruction. They have been either the cause or effect of terror among a people already ravaged by war or pestilence, inducing an unaccountable mass hysteria, often leading to wholesale atrocities.

This mass hysteria reduced the population in some cases as high as seventy percent in certain districts of Central Europe after barbaric invasions, and ruined entire sections of civilized society. By dint of incredible and impoverishing taxes, terrorized peoples have sometimes bought off self-claimed leaders of the purple eyes, who many insist to have been the same person, living through centuries.

For some time, the phenomenon of changeable garnet-colored eyes had been observed in New York, and commented upon by some of Skull's colleagues. But none of them had made any connection between that phenomenon and the wave of murder threatening the City, for the good reason that no one but Skull had tapped the ancient books which contained the little-known legend of the Purple Eye.

Superstition? Certainly. But--Dr. Skull thought back to the single human agency he suspected behind these multiple atrocities.

At his desk--the desk Kitty Timiny had not cleaned and would never clean again--he wrote another of those death certificates which had so annoyed authorities to whom the matter was obvious. It was for Michael Timiny, aged four, giving as cause, murder--by person or persons unknown.

Sooner or later, that unknown murderer would attempt to silence the one doctor who sought to pierce the screen hiding his existence. So engrossed was Dr. Skull that he did not hear the garbage truck pulling to a noisy stop just outside his door.

And then the door opened again.

THE man on the threshold was short and he wore a battered grey suit, and a low-pulled cap that shielded half his face. Two other male figures, dressed with similar anonymity, their eyes like-wise shielded, hovered behind him.

The man in grey snapped, "I know what's on that certificate. Change it. The mother did it."

And for emphasis, he steadied the revolver in his hand.

Dr. Skull put his pen down slowly. Was this the direct attempt at silencing him that he had expected? His brown eyes were intent and unafraid as he returned the stranger's scowl. If he could only fathom the color of the man's eyes--but the very fact that he and his comrades kept their eyes covered was a sign in itself.

"You're sick, my friend," Skull said.

"Sick?" The man turned to those behind him, snorted, then took a further grip on his revolver. "Listen, Doc, you got us wrong. We're not sick. But you're going to be sick--if you don't make out a new certificate." They advanced.

Skull did not move. His eyes were fixed on those cap visors. The cold bore of a revolver touched his temple.

"I'm afraid you lose," he said simply. "Dead men don't write--and while I'm alive, this certificate stands."

They must have known that, there must have been more planned than the mere bravado of threatened murder. And then he smelled the chloroform coming. It was that split-second of recognition, for which he could thank his medical training, which saved him. Had he waited an instant longer...but he didn't wait. The man who held the chloroform-soaked handkerchief felt that handkerchief jerked upward into his eyes.

Skull ducked, and the self-appointed anaesthetist's howl of rage rang out simultaneously with the gunman's shot. He had learned before that the odds are not always on the side of numbers, and in the brief instant before the three disentangled themselves from one another, Skull tackled the gunman with surprisingly modern football tactics, floored him and hurled the weapon from his grasp.

He flung himself toward the gun, seized it just before the third stranger's foot covered the spot where it had landed. Another bullet buried itself in the floor moulding, missing Skull by less than an inch...and then the doctor was facing them, armed himself.

A humorless grin played over his old mouth as he stood erect at last. What they had planned for him after the chloroform, he didn't know, but he knew it would have been unpleasant. The scrap was his own impromptu addition to the proceedings, and he was having the best of it. Before the trio recovered from their astonishment at this coup by a scholarly old doctor, the gun in his hand spat a muffled finis to the encounter, and a would-be killer dropped with a hole in his kneecap.

Three against one, and the odds were swinging the wrong way. The pair who were left scurried from the room, and Dr. Skull let them go.

"No! Don't, Doc, don't--" The wounded man shrieked as Skull bent over him, and his words ended in a groan.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Skull began. Then he stopped, frowning, for the man had fainted. It wasn't recrimination Skull wanted of him. So far, the melee had been private--the roar of a big motor outside drowned out that last shriek, and the mufflers on the killers' guns accounted for a satisfactory lack of investigation from without. But soon the others would come back with reenforcements, to cancel just such a confession as Skull hoped to extract from their wounded comrade.

That the wounded man could give him information, he was positive. When he rolled back the unconscious man's eye-lids, the irises shone at him like twin garnets!

HE LOOKED again at the rigid tiny body of Michael Timiny on the couch. Twenty years later, there would be an empty place in the world that Michael Timiny might have filled...Skull thought of dreams that would never be dreamed, work that would remain undone till the end of time because Michael Timiny was dead. There would not be too many such empty places, he swore silently, his eyes tragic with compassion.

Then he picked up his phone, and reported Michael's death at the precinct. The voice at the other end was harried, almost bored. It was that bad--death by torture in the City had become a commonplace.

In half an hour, maybe less, he could expect the police. The wounded man on the floor was moaning aloud again; soon he would come to. Skull flung him over a powerful shoulder, and walked through the back entrance of his office, down a dark narrow staircase into the basement. Through a mouldy wooden door at the back of the bin, he entered a windowless chamber furnished with cot, bureau, chair and mirror. It was an inglorious enough chamber in which to begin a city's salvation, but it would serve.

He laid the limp body on the cot, and began a systematic search through the pockets of the shabby grey suit. Suddenly he stood bolt upright. Could Kitty Timiny...? But that was impossible. It contradicted the reasoning which had already led him this far.

For what he had found was a page from his own calendar, rumpled and soiled, but unmistakably his--and he had thrown it away three days ago! The purple-eyed stranger hadn't picked it up that same morning, because Skull knew that the slip of paper had been out of his office since Saturday.

Into what hands it had passed in the interim, he did not know, but it was obvious that they had not been friendly hands. He looked again at his own blunt handwriting. "Suggest medical investigation, possibly under Victory Hospital auspices, into wave of murder-mania. How many persons with purplish eyes still in city? Will their apprehension prevent further atrocities."

It was only the scribbled rough germ of an idea that was to end in war between the forces of life and death--but it had been important enough to warrant this recent attack. The enemy had been apprised, had opened fire. Now, more than ever, Skull knew he was on the right track.

Suddenly, the man on the couch came to life. He scrambled to the end of the cot, backed into a huddled shape against the wall. His shriek echoed with peculiar hollowness through the underground chamber.

"The Scorpion! Oh, God, he's after me! He--he's coming!"

Skull wheeled as the sound of a slow, dragging footstep approached. It was as though some monstrous beast were advancing on deliberate, crooked claws...

And then in the doorway he saw something that shouldn't have been a man, but was. He was of normal height, but his body was unnaturally lean. His dark face was vicious, a wrinkled screwed-up area on the enormous head, and his hands were covered with the strangest gloves Skull had ever seen. They were of flexible brown metal, and the fingers ended in claws.

He paused there for a moment, and then he said in a thin arrogant voice, "I have been sent for you, Dr. Skull. You will come with me."

IN THE split-second before the stranger darted at him, Skull found the revolver in his side-pocket. He fired but strangely the bullet ricocheted off the being's chest. The man must have come protected against such an eventuality--that gruesome accoutrement on his hands could not be the only metal he wore. Only the little dark face was vulnerable.

Before he could fire again, his throat was tightened by the grip of a metal claw. He struggled furiously, guessing that it was more than his own battle he fought now--but the breath was ebbing in his lungs, and his heart was pounding tortuously, as though for escape from its cage of ribs. He managed a short vicious kick that sent his attacker momentarily off balance, and loosened the death-like grip. Skull backed, his lungs sucking desperately for air, and aimed at the small ugly face.

The man on the cot shrieked again, in pain and revulsion that scratched like a cat's-claw down the doctor's spine. Skull saw a four-inch-long living arc of deadly venom loosening its claws from the wounded man's face--a live scorpion! It fell to the floor, started crawling...In the next instant, it died under the doctor's heel.

Skull's fingers still clutched the drawn pistol, but that momentary distraction of his attention had been enough. One of the cruel claws was tracing a red line under Skull's chin...And it was as in a dream that he saw the evil smile of the man who had been sent for him.

"Not deadly venom, Dr. Skull--don't be alarmed, this scratch won't kill you. It will only make you quite, quite harmless."

WITH a mighty effort, Skull freed his arms from the predatory clasp, shoved the man from him again, and fired. His enemy dropped, hideous fingers clawing at a gaping hole in his jaw. The face--Dr. Skull knew he had hit that vulnerable face at last. He knew from the direction of the bullet that it should have traveled upward, toward the brain--any movements the man made now would be reflexive, and would end within minutes in death.

The stranger laughed, and it was inhuman laughter that he might have used seconds later in hell. "Dr. Skull--you have not won yet! I am only the Scorpion's emissary--but the Scorpion himself cannot die at your hands, or at any man's! You will have him to deal with."

The hysterical braggadocio suddenly quieted, and the evil figure humped into dead flesh. Skull turned to look at the man whose life he had spared earlier, upstairs, but that wounded kneecap had been fatal, for it had not permitted escape from a poison-insect.

Bitterly, Skull rifled the dead hand in his. He stared fixedly at it.

Branded into the palm was the outline of a scorpion.

He removed the gloves from the man he had killed. Concealed on the inside of each metal finger was a tube containing a clear, colorless liquid. Like the sting of the scorpion, those fingertips were venomous. Probably not immediately fatal, that transplanted venom--but certainly paralyzing. Under the gloves, the man's hands were normal and human. But the palm was branded.

Branded with the mark of a scorpion!

The doctor's mouth was grim as he took a steel stamp from his shiny suit pocket. Its harmless-looking handle was hollow, and contained the acid which moistened the die. Between the eyes of the Scorpion's henchman--eyes that gleamed even in death with a tell-tale purple light--he pressed the outline of a human skull.

That night, he knew, the papers would announce that the mysterious Skull Killer had resumed operations.

Six years ago, the legend of the Skull Killer had come to flagrant life when three insurance policy racketeers were found one by one, in various lonely corners of New York, with raw outlines of skulls burned into their foreheads.

In the underworld, the Skull Killer was a dread legend, and the Mark of the Skull was known as a declaration of war to the death. Among the police, he was regarded benevolently, though each fresh killing brought assurances from the Commissioner's office that the Skull Killer would shortly be brought to justice.

The big shots whose convictions wouldn't stick, the nasty small fry who were protected by crime's big shots one by one, during the past six years, fifty of them had been found with the Mark of the Skull on their brows. And so the police, who know their business, talked loudly of investigation, patrolled their beats, and did absolutely nothing about the matter.

No one suspected a connection between the name of a harmless, scholarly Eastside doctor and the elusive Skull Killer. True, from time to time, sundry men had made that connection, but they were now in a world from which none can return.

Dr. Skull left the dead emissary with his dead underling, the mark of a scorpion burned into his palm and the Mark of the Skull on his brow. He had closed the door on that room, when a remote clangor through the wooden corridor told him the police were coming.

When they entered his office, Dr. Skull was again seated at his desk.

"AND that's all I know," Dr. Skull concluded. For minutes he had been answering their questions mechanically, and now the medical examiner had gone, and he was left with the plainclothesman.

"No idea where we can find the kid's mother? That's pretty damned funny. The kid's murdered, and his mother doesn't show up. Maybe she didn't want to show up. How long did you say she worked for you?"

Dr. Skull hadn't said. For the moment, he was not listening to the big, harried-looking and perspiring detective. Outside, through the freshly--drawn curtains, he saw one of the city's huge grey garbage trucks. Its motor idled ominously, reminiscently. A motor had drowned out the scurried escape of his two morning visitors with their guns and chloroform, and he could have sworn this was the same motor.

The conclusion that dovetailed in his brain should have been incredible. But it was also incredible that Kitty Timiny should have turned on her own son. Incredible, horrible things were happening. That three-day-old calendar page in a madman's pocket, wherever else it had been in the interim since it left Skull's office, had left by only one agency--the only agency which collects the things which a man throws into his scrap-basket. And that agency was the Sanitation Department!

"Doc!" The detective was weary, impatient. "You know this neighborhood. Now, had the kid any other relatives? Will someone else take care of the funeral, if we don't find the mother?"

"I will," Skull said quietly. "I was Michael's godfather. And now, if you'll excuse me...A doctor is kept fairly busy these days, as you must be, yourself."

He turned toward the open window, and threw his voice forward, so that the gaping men on the garbage truck outside might hear every word. "If you should find it necessary to get in touch with me later, I'll be at the Victory Hospital within an hour." He reached for his pad, and wrote the address.

The detective grunted, "I know where it is," and left, not taking the note.

It had not been intended for him. Skull rolled it into a crumpled ball, and tossed it out of the window. Covertly he watched and saw a white-wing leap from the garbage truck, grab at the note, and pocket it.

The doctor's mouth was almost smiling. He had no tenable ground as yet for making a wild-sounding accusation against the City's own employees, but if he gave them enough rope, he would have grounds enough and more.

There was a good chance that he might have more company now, and he didn't want it just yet. He went down the back stairs to the chamber where he had left his dead. There was a message he wanted the corpse to deliver for him--that was why Skull had been so loud and clear about his destination.

He gathered, from the faint thuds that sounded above the cellar chamber, that someone was already searching Dr. Skull's office. Not for the doctor--though he would have been a profitable end, to their murderous way of thinking--but for that tell-tale corpse, with the mark of the scorpion branded into his palm, and the garnet glint of evil in his eyes.

When they found their corpse, he considered, it would be even more revealing. For then they would know that the City was championed by the Mark of the Skull, stamped clearly on the brow of a dead killer.

IF THERE was little about the aging Dr. Skull to suggest the phantom killer, there was even less about the man he was about to become. He faced the mirror, and began to towel his face. As he toweled, the wrinkled disappeared.

He stripped a flesh-colored band from his forehead, and the grey wig from his head. Then the removal of two pieces of padded wire from his lower jaw radically altered the shape of his face.

The man in Dr. Skull's mirror was as young as his strong brown eyes. Black-haired, lean-cheeked, obviously no more than thirty, he had the look of a man who had learned much and forgotten nothing, who had dealt with matters of life and death, executed responsibility--and had known tragedy.

He put the neat, shiny black suit into a bureau drawer, and donned in its place an impeccably tailored navy serge. He would have been welcomed at any exclusive club in New York, but his business now was grimmer. He spread the decency of a plain cover over the stiff figure on the couch--later, he could dispose of the corpse through automatic medical means. Then he slung over his shoulder the body he had branded, and went out by another door.

Through a series of twisting corridors and sagging cellar doors, he made his underground way through the cellars of the block. Undetected, his burden still heaving with every step, he entered an abandoned gas-main which ran beneath the Second Avenue traffic.

In such fashion, he came to the enormous cement basement of the Victory Hospital. Here he thrust the marked body into a large, half-filled ashcan and covered it with debris. It would surprise the garbage collectors, who had manned the truck in front of his office, to find a message from the Skull Killer so conveniently in the course of their daily work. And they, and their leader would know of the old doctor's double life--which knowledge, in times past, had always proven fatal.

He brushed his coat-sleeves, made sure that he was unobserved, and sauntered out into the September sunlight.

Even if he had been observed, the young man knew he would have aroused nothing more than casual wonder at his presence in the basement, and that wonder would likely have gone unexpressed--for the Victory Building, a fifty-story skyscraper whose size and facilities had made it the medical center of not only New York but of the entire East Coast, was owned by Jeffrey Fairchild, who was now using this strange mode of entrance to the building.

Jeffrey had used his enormous inherited fortune to purchase the building on Columbus Circle shortly after its erection, and had endowed the famous Victory Hospital on its premises. The best available doctors comprised the hospital staff--patients all over the country for whom no other hope was left, were sent to the Victory Hospital, and there, often enough, they were cured.

A twentieth century miracle, people called the Victory Hospital--and sometimes they wondered why rich, idle Jeff Fairchild had sponsored so idealistic a project. There were some who praised him for it, and others who cynically pointed out that he could well afford so generous a gesture for the pampering of his easy conscience. Jeff disregarded the applause and the cynics alike--he had presented the Victory Hospital to humanity, purely and simply for the good it would do.

HIS own younger brother, Robert Fairchild, was almost a permanent patient in the Victory Hospital. Jeff's eyes clouded a little at the thought of Robert. The boy hadn't been born an incurable cripple--no, that had come later. Robert had been strong and handsome and very young when it happened. It was something that might have happened to any headstrong boy, he thought defiantly. The boy hadn't been really bad...

Just a gambling debt, such as any youngster might contract. And he'd been too proud, that year at school, to write home for additional allowance to cancel his foolishness. Proud, and maybe a little desperate, for only utter desperation could have made him consent to be an accomplice for a fake accident insurance policy ring. He'd pretended to be injured by a truck belonging to a well-known company, in a staged accident. He was to get a cut of the money paid by the company in compensation. The company had been insured against such eventualities, and the insurance company investigated before paying off. By that time, Robert was ashamed of his connivance--he was ready to forego the money, ready even to face just prosecution for his single slip from grace.

Not so Robert's crooked sponsors. Rather than reveal the true state of affairs, they themselves had crippled Robert for life, made the faked injuries pitifully, lastingly, real. Again Robert's pride had kept him from accusing his attackers. He had come home to a heart-broken family, ashamed, irrevocably lame, with a bare chance for life. Robert wasn't bad, Jeff assured himself, only weak. And how strong or stable is the morale of a boy of sixteen? What chance had he had?

That had happened six years ago. Robert had never confided the truth to his older brother Jeff--but he had confided in his doctor, Dr. Skull. Had anyone been interested, he would have discovered an odd lack of record in Dr. Skull's career before that time, for Jeffrey had assumed the guise only that he might gain his brother's confidence. It was six years ago, too, that the Skull Killer had first begun operations with the unsolved murder of three accident policy racketeers.

From that date, Jeffrey Fairchild's interest in crime-fighting had started. Years before, he had graduated at the top of his class from the best medical school in the East; medicine had been his first love. Robert's illness taught him healing must go deeper than he had imagined. Disease can be a moral contagion as well as a physical one--and a man with true physician's ardor for health and normalcy in others must needs find himself pitted against those who stalk by night, maiming and killing the well; against criminals in high places who starve the hungry and poison men's minds so that they turn against their brothers and do them injury; against the unhealthful presence of crime in society from the outset.

As Dr. Skull, Jeff had cured the poor in his slum neighborhood who suffered in mind or body; as the Skull Killer, he had rooted out malignant growths from the body of the community. It was violent surgery, he knew--but there were times when nothing short of a radical operation could keep the patient alive.

JEFFREY FAIRCHILD looked up and down Broadway. Traffic was almost at a standstill, and he was in a hurry. Best way to get downtown today was the subway.

Few New Yorkers, he found, shared his opinion. No one else waited for the local at the Fiftieth Station, formerly one of the busiest stations in the City. People were afraid. Not that the streets were any safer than the subway, but out of the general panic induced by the murder wave, had grown a mass claustrophobia; a terror of shut-in spaces.

Either the panic must end soon, Jeffrey thought, or the city would collapse of sheer fear hysteria, if from nothing worse. He had traced the trouble's root so far to a broad source in the New York Sanitation Department. At least one of those innocuous trucks had been manned by devils. But how, and through what means, could the Sanitation Department be used by a demoniac intellect to bring about a mass wave of murder and torture? Was the whole department involved, and did officials know more than they told? How could operations have progressed thus far without arousing the remotest public suspicion?

One man among Jeffrey Fairchild's extensive acquaintances might possibly answer those questions. He was William Hawkins, a former classmate, and at present, assistant deputy commissioner of the Sanitation Department. Yet Bill Hawkins wasn't the man anyone else might have picked as the clue to an endemic horror.

He'd settled down, done well in a secure job, married a Junior League girl with more blue blood than money, and seemed more than contented with his work, his home and his seven-year-old daughter. Nevertheless, Jeffrey expected to learn something from the visit.

There were few enough people in the subway car for him to notice the bare-headed pair who sat opposite him, talking heatedly of European politics and ancient architecture. Jeffrey Fairchild smiled. By the big blue C on the boy's sweater, by the library stamp on the books under the girl's arm, he knew them. College students, from Morningside.

His mind relaxed from the concepts which had oppressed it so long, and he thought musingly of those happier dead years when he too had walked bare-headed in the sunlight. He remembered a Thanksgiving Day, eleven years ago, when he had stopped the ball carrier in that last decisive touchdown march, with seconds to go...

And then, as though the long-dead-day had come to sudden life, Jeff Fairchild tackled again.

IT WASN'T that the tall, bare-headed boy had done anything--yet. It was that even while the young man watched his companion fondly, a weirdly familiar purplish gleam had come into the boy's blue eyes. And the tackle was pure reflex, the instinctive decision of a trained mind and strong body.

He heard the girl scream, realized that the boy had thrown a bottle of chemical into her face, and knew he had at last caught one of the murder-maniacs. A desperate, fighting hope surged in his brain--if he could only keep this one from vanishing!

Things happened quickly after that. There were screams, and the trampling feet of passengers from other cars, and the terrified voice of a conductor shouting, "You're hurt, miss, you're hurt!"

The cry, "Help me hold this fellow!" was torn from Jeff's throat by the impact of a heavy shoe in his face. He reached upward, caught the boy by his trouser-belt, and then he felt himself swept sideward as though caught by the slipstream of an aeroplane propeller. The boy was his connection with that powerful pull; he heard a faint exclamation from the boy's lips...

And then the train door was slamming against his shoulders, threatening to cut him in two. He had lost his grip on the maddened boy, and his arms felt half-ripped from the sockets. With a last desperate jerk of the shoulders, he forced the door wider, and flung himself back into the moving train.

"Clear away!" he roared at the passengers, lurching to his feet.

The white-faced group backed from him, hysteria in their eyes. A woman began to sing a hymn in a loud, crazed voice, and the conductor was working the injured college girl's arms up and down in a pitiful, ludicrous effort to bring her to.

But it wasn't bringing to she needed--for she was conscious, horribly and painfully conscious. A choked moan swelled and died again, from the lurid burned gash that was her mouth.

Jeff Fairchild pushed past the conductor and grasped the girl's shoulders. There was nothing to do, not till they got her to a hospital. He turned to the passengers again, and shouted, "Who opened that door?"

The melee of hysteria answered him, and as the train pulled into another station, a regular stampede for the platform left him alone with the girl. Even the conductor had gone, searching no doubt, for a company guard.

Jeff picked her up, got her into the street, and with the half-sullen, half-despairing glances of pedestrians following him, he hailed a taxi and left her at the nearest hospital.

"Attack?" asked the nurse at the desk. Jeffrey Fairchild nodded.

"That's Case Nineteen for today," said the nurse. Her eyes rolled upward at Jeffrey, and she seemed to wince.

It was that way all over. You hated strangers as you hated snakes, because any stranger might kill you. And it didn't even have to be a stranger. It could be any human being.

ANOTHER two weeks of this, Jeff thought grimly, and there won't be any nurses at desks. People won't dare go to work, there won't be markets open for food, no policemen keeping order, no doctors to tend the dying...

He saw a garbage truck making its slow way down the hot avenue and finished his thought--there'll only be the trucks, carting away desolation. And everything will be--desolation. Unless...

Unless one man stopped it. But how? Of one thing he was sure now. The murder-maniacs hadn't vanished of their own free will. No, that tug through the open subway door hadn't been accomplished by the college boy's muscles, for the boy had been as surprised as anyone. The attackers had not been found for questioning, because--someone was afraid to have them found.

Jeffrey thought of the brand he had found on the palms of two dead men. Could there be some pointed evidence on the persons of the murder--maniacs, something the real criminal was not yet disposed to reveal?

Who had burned a scorpion into the flesh of kill-crazy men?

Jeff brushed off his disarrayed person in the men's room of a nearby hotel before proceeding downtown as he had planned. If Bill Hawkins couldn't clarify the vague conclusions in his mind, who could, and where would he turn next? But that was impossible--the department couldn't hide so great an inner corruption from the notice of its own officials. So Bill must have at least some slight information, unless--unless he refused to give it.

And that refusal would be, in itself information of a kind.

The City of New York houses its Sanitation Department and its Board of Health on Worth Street, in the same building. As he went upstairs to the office of the Assistant Deputy Commissioner of the Sanitation Department, Jeffrey saw bulletins outside the clinics of the Board of Health.

Warn all patients against entering the West Eighties: Murders reach week's peak in West Eighties. Warning to all doctors: Pistol permits will be issued on demand since the death of Dr. Wayne at the hands of a patient's father. Advise housewives to boil all water before using. THE CITY MUST BE SAVED.

Jeffrey Fairchild looked at that futile, hopelessly inspirational bulletin, and suddenly he felt that he either wanted to find something to murder, or else to get very, very drunk. He thought of the City as it had been--raucous, busy, and to one of its natives, beautiful. He thought of the laughter of Michael Timiny, now stilled; he thought of the wise, homely faces of women in the market-places, whose mother-wisdom had not availed against this scourge...

But there was no one to murder, and, Jeffrey did not like to drink. He murmured, "Damn them! Damn them, and help me, God..."

On the third floor, he walked briskly down the corridor, and announced himself to a secretary. "Mr. Hawkins, please. Jeffrey Fairchild calling."

The girl said wearily, as though she were used to saying it, "Mr. Hawkins isn't in just now. Do you care to leave a message?"

"I'll wait," said Jeffrey Fairchild, his lips a grim, set line.