Read Ebook: Bleedback by Marks Winston K Winston Kinney Emshwiller Ed Illustrator

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Ebook has 205 lines and 10895 words, and 5 pages

Leo briefed me further. The thing worked only on metallic conductors. It was harmless to human flesh and other organic matter. Then he removed the cover that ran the length of the rather crude, hand-carved, wooden barrel. From front to back, were: One pen-light cell, a lumpy-looking coil of wire hand-wound on a spindle-shaped iron core, and a short, cylindrical bar-magnet.

"In mass production," he said, "About 40 cents worth of material and maybe 50 cents worth of labor! Do you see why I wanted to keep it a secret until I could patent it?"

"No!" I said flatly. "Unless you consider a paper-clip disposal unit an item of commercial importance."

"But it's a whole new scientific principle--the rotation of matter completely out of our space-time continuum!"

"That much I grasp, but what good is it except as a demonstration of a piece of pure scientific research?"

"Good Lord, man, have you no imagination?"

"Okay, okay! Get rich," I said and slammed the front door behind me as I stomped out. I had been so certain that the missing gadgets would give me a motive for the attack on Leo's brother, or at least the method of inflicting the fantastic wound, that I was about ready to turn in my badge in frustration. All I could pin on Leo was a desire to cash in on his brother's gimmick--which, presumably, he could have done whether Calvin lived or died.

Suppose, I mused on my way back to the station, that Calvin had refused to let Leo commercialize on his discovery? Perhaps Calvin was preparing a paper for publication in scientific circles. Maybe cool-headed little Leo tried to knock off his brother to keep the secret in the family until it could be turned to a selfish dollar.

All right, suppose a jury would accept such an impalpable theory as a motive, then what? No murder weapon. No witnesses. Not even a genuine murder yet, because Calvin was still alive.

Yes, old Doc Thorsen had kept the mathematician alive somehow. The elder Baxter lay on his back across two, white iron beds pushed together in the City Hospital, and Thorsen came in to report to me.

"The clot seems to be absorbing better than I expected, but it's doubtful that we could operate to remove the paralyzing pressure. The puncture is deep into the brain tissue, and he's too nearly gone to survive such an ordeal."

"Any chance that he might recover consciousness?"

"Pretty remote," Thorsen told me. "We'll keep a special nurse with him as you ordered, just in case he does."

I left Calvin Baxter pale and motionless as some great statue supine amid the tangle of plasma, glucose and saline hoses, under his transparent oxygen tent. The wound that had laid him low was no more than a dot of dried blood on his massive forehead.

Until his death, his file would remain under unsolved crimes. In my own mind I was no longer sure of anything, except that if there was a nickel in Calvin Baxter's discovery, his mercenary brother would wring it out.

And he did. Even before Calvin died.

Some seven weeks later Leo marketed the "MYSTERY i-GUN" as a combined, toy, trick and puzzle, and it set the whole damned world on its ear!

I located Leo Baxter in his new suite of offices on the 34th floor of the State Building. He peeled back his lips in a sneery grin. "I thought you'd be showing up."

He waved away his male secretary who was still clinging to my arm trying to tow me back to the reception room. I said, "I kept your secret, then you pull an irresponsible thing like this! A kid's toy! Good Lord, man, that device might be dangerous!"

"I appreciate your professional ethics, Lieutenant. I've applied for a patent, so you can tell all your friends now. And stop worrying. The "Mystery i-Gun" is quite harmless. I experimented a week before going into production."

"A week?" I could scarcely believe my ears. "What happens when some kid jams his gun against a light-pole or an automobile ... or the night lock on the First National Bank?"

"Nothing. It punches no holes. A large metallic object simply dissipates the field. The largest object it will handle is about a half-inch steel screw--"

"Baxter, your brother's accident is connected to that device--and you turn it loose as a novelty!"

"Nonsense. It's safe as a knot-hole. It simply makes things disappear. Little things, like tacks, ball bearing, old rusty nuts and bolts--"

"And dimes and mamma's earrings and the front door key," I snapped back. "Until you know how to bring those things back you had no right to market that rig."

He laid his small hands before him on the desk. "Lieutenant, I'm sick of working for other people. This is my chance to get a bank-roll to back my own contracting firm. Yes, I financed Calvin's research because he's brilliant, and I knew he'd come up with something some day. Now he's done it, and I'm merely protecting his interests and my investment in him. See here." He shoved some documents at me. There was the patent application, a declaration of partnership for purposes of marketing the Mystery i-Gun, and the articles of incorporation of the Baxter Construction Company.

"Okay," I said. "So you've cut your brother in on all this. Who's his beneficiary when he dies?"

"Still looking for a motive for murder, aren't you, Lieutenant?"

"Leo," I said, "I know you consider this case closed, but I want you to do me a favor. I want to go over your brother's lab once more."

"But you've--" He stopped, shrugged and nodded his head. "Okay. I'm interested in finding out what hurt Cal, as much as you are. I'll tell you, I'm busy the rest of this week, but I'll meet you at the old house next Monday evening at eight. You see, I closed up the place and moved downtown."

I agreed, with the feeling that he was deliberately making me wait just to annoy me. Leo Baxter was an important man now, a man graciously willing to cooperate with the police--at his own convenience. I stood up. "Your brother has been calling your name. I suppose they told you that?"

"They phoned. Doctor said it was just mutterings."

"You haven't even been to see him?"

"What's the use? He wouldn't recognize me."

Well, it wasn't any of my business, really, but it's funny how you get to hate a man for his attitude. I don't know what I expected to find by going over that lab-workshop again, but whatever it was, I hoped it would incriminate Leo. On the face of it he was guilty of nothing more than a premature marketing of a new device, but the way he was cashing in on Calvin's genius certainly did the dying man no honor.

Before that week was up, the Wall Street Journal estimated there were already more i-Guns in the hands of the juvenile public than all the yo-yos ever produced. They retailed at eighty-five cents, made of plastic with a hole in the back where you could change the pen-light battery. They sold, all right. They sold in drugstores and toy stores and dime stores and department stores. Toddler's, tykes and teen-agers went for them. And adults. Maybe 30 million of them were in the hands of the public before I saw Leo Baxter next.

Which was almost two weeks instead of the one week he had promised.

I finally got an appointment. "Sorry," he said. "I've been tied up with government people all week. The A. E. C. tried to get me in trouble."

I said, "Skip it. You promised for tonight. Now let's go."

"I can't possibly make it tonight." He pointed at his desk. It was littered with correspondence, orders and contracts. "Give me one more week, Lieutenant."

It was an order, not a request.

There was nothing to do but wait the third week. It was not, however, uneventful. It was the week the accidents began to happen.

At 4:14 of a Tuesday afternoon, a man was admitted to a local hospital with a perforated belly. Straight through, hide, guts and liver. A newsman got hold of it and wrote a scare story about an attack with a pellet gun that must shoot needles.

Before the edition was sold out the hospitals were loaded with emergency cases. People with holes in them. Tiny little holes, mostly, but holes that went right through them. Then dogs. Then automobiles, trucks and busses. Holes in their radiators. Holes in windshields that always went straight back, through seats and sometimes passengers--right out through the rear end.

The city panicked. Then the county, state and nation. In two days, yes, the whole nation!

Then all thoughts turned to extra-terrestrial space. A bombardment from the sky? It was ridiculous to even consider, because none of the holes that appeared in people and things came from above. The holes were almost entirely in the horizontal plane.

Strangely enough during those first two days, nobody thought of the Mystery i-Gun. No one but me.

Leo Baxter had disappeared into thin air, as completely as if he'd turned to metal and crawled into the muzzle of one of his own "toys".

I had every known place he frequented staked out with a pair of plain-clothesmen, but it was the morning of the second day of accidents before I got a radio call from the squad car stationed near the old Baxter home.

Leo had come home at last. He was a sad looking midget when I got there. Obviously no sleep, unshaven, deep hollows under his eyes.

"I figured you'd be waiting for me, Lieutenant, but you know what?" he demanded. "I don't give a damn! I kept waiting for them to figure out the answer to these accidents and string me up. How come you didn't tell anybody?"

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