Collected Fiction Read online

  Edwin Nelson paid from the bank, rustling the green sheaves crisply.

  Jerry Ward stood up. “Thank you, gentlemen.”

  “We’ll see you next week?” Edwin Nelson asked.

  “Hell yes; this party is becoming traditional.”

  He turned from the table and walked out of the room; for a moment his bulk shut off the camera eye.

  Once again the table was in full view. “Hold it!” the Chief ordered again, and again the figures halted in mid-motion.

  “Count them now!”

  THERE WAS a pause as the aide approached the screen. “Better run it back a couple of frames, Fred,” he told the projectionist. Fred complied. He counted the chips carefully, “Only fifteen now,” he said.

  “He did pocket one: good. Start it again.”

  Action resumed on the screen, the hum-drum action of a friendly poker game. But the missing blue chip did not come back into play. And, at the end of the game, Edwin Nelson got back all the chips he started with.

  The film went off and the lights came on.

  “Whew!” the Chief said. “That’s that. But for rotten luck, Ward blocking the camera at the crucial moment, we’d have had it long before this . . . Still, but for good luck, we’d never have looked at the film this close.”

  “How’s that, Chief?” asked Fred. He was new on the case.

  “Well, we knew that Jerry Ward encoded a message in his apartment, just before leaving for the poker game. He didn’t stop-off on his way. Our agent picked him up when he left Nelson’s—and that’s where the good luck came in, altho it didn’t seem like it at the time. We’d been watching him for months, waiting for him to act, to contact the top man. We were thorough. Tapped wires, even this camera to record his customary Saturday night poker party. We didn’t overlook anything. And then when Ward spotted our agent tailing him, it looked like all our work was for nothing.

  “Because Ward killed himself. Didn’t even bother to park his car. He’d been carrying poison with him for some time. When he saw our man he took it, without even hesitating. Piled the car, and by the time our man got to him, he was plenty dead.”

  The Chief mused, almost to himself, “It takes a man with a lot of guts to kill himself just to keep from answering a few questions.”

  ,He paused, and then continued. “We searched him, and he didn’t have the message. But for that we might have followed him for weeks, waiting for him to pass it. Ironic, isn’t it? By killing himself, he told us what we would never have found out—at least in time—while he was alive. Because his death meant two things. It meant that the message was plenty important. And it meant that one of the men at the party had received it. That narrowed the field. But all the men were top government men, and we couldn’t grill them all. We had to find out which one had it. We had to take it slow. Check every foot of the film.”

  He smiled again, with a large measure of self-satisfaction.

  “All we need now is to tie up a few loose ends. That will take a little time. I’ll check into the Senator’s past.

  “And meanwhile, we’ll keep an agent on him. He won’t suspect anything.

  At the first sign of something suspicious we’ll haul him in and have him red handed.”

  The Chief looked around.

  “Those boys are smart. We’re smarter. When we pick up the Senator from the great and noble state of California, we’ll move in and break up the whole net-work.

  “But this is big. Plenty big. We have to be doubly careful. The men are desperate and—well—publicity would mean—literally—suicide.”

  No one said anything. “I can’t quite understand how a Senator could be mixed up in this, but I intend to find out.”

  The Chief started to leave, and then turned back for a final word. “I told you we knew what that message said. We do. And it’s so important to the security of the country that I can’t even tell you men what it was.”

  With that he walked out of the room.

  THE SENATOR’S face was heavy; his beard shone bluely, under freshly shaved skin. His jowls had begun to sag from rich living. His lips were heavy, sensuous. And his eyes were alive with ambition.

  He was sitting at his desk; he had just finished decoding the message. The code was kept in his locked safe, and there was never any great hurry about it. He laid the paper to one side; his hand was shaking. He tried to control himself.

  It was unbelievable, and yet . . .

  Blind exultation began to rise in him.

  He stood up and began to pace the office. Finally he walked to the window and stared put over the city, his hands, behind his back, clasping and unclasping. His eyes caught fire from some deep emotion.

  He stood unmoving for a long moment. The desk buzzer finally shocked him from his reverie. He flinched. He crossed rapidly to the desk and flicked the switch.

  “Yeah?” he asked. And could feel his stomach tightening. Perspiration blossomed on his forehead.

  “A Mr. Lodge to see you, Senator. He’s from the seventh district.”

  “Send him—” the Senator began and then bit his lip. Long years of unquestioned security had made him careless. Those years were passed, now. He could no longer afford any risk. Because the Day was practically upon him. “No . . . have him wait, please.”

  The Senator glanced nervously at the panneled door. After a moment of indecision, he picked up the paper from his desk, held it over the flame from his cigarette lighter. When the fire touched his thumb, he dropped the charred remains into the ash tray. Smoke curled for a moment and then there was nothing but dead ash. This he ground into an inky pulp with his sweaty thumb. He carried it to the window and emptied it down into the teeming street below. He wiped his hands carefully, looked after the ashes, and then returned to his desk.

  Action was part of his philosophy. Another part was never to underestimate the enemy. He forced himself to assume, now, that they knew all about him. Whether or not they did was quite beside the point. He could afford no risk. The courier ship was due shortly. He would have to meet it. He could not trust a messenger. And, even if he could, it would be wise to get out of the country—now. This was so important that he could sacrifice the twenty-seven years of labor that he had exerted to elevate him to a position of authority. If he could get this message out of the country, he would return to command a position far more influential than one of one hundred senators. His position might lack tradition, but it would not matter.

  He had to play it calm. If they knew, they would pick him up at the slightest sign of flight. They would have to! He would have to assume that he was being watched every minute. And act accordingly.

  “I’ll see—Mr.—ah—Lodge, the gentleman from the seventh district, now,” he told his secretary.

  Relax, he told himself. Relax. Act natural.

  THE SENATOR began to act in a new phase of the play. He had been well prepared for the part.

  His political philosophy was not so much the product of thought as it was of passion. It provided an idealistic goal so completely divorced from the possibilities of human existence that it became believable according to the same principle that the bigger the lie, the more people who can be made to believe it.

  Indeed the Senator frequently considered, with no little satisfaction, how supremely lucky he was to be in intimate contact with the Ultimate Truth of reality. And, as he saw it, it was this contact, this almost religious faith, that the American form of democracy lacked. This righteous identification. For surely American democracy was far too shallow, insipid, and uninspiring to incite great passions. His faith shone untarnished throughout the long years.

  He was not alone. There were others, too. There were different levels of it.

  There were the pathetic little people—the malcontents, the neurotics, men and women beaten by life, hounded by fears, by doubts, by impossible dreams, men and women seeing in the sprawling giant of organized society veiled demons, men and women turning outward in search of certainty to fill
the vacuum left by spiritual, moral and philosophic failure—there were these little people, the unadjustable, who carpentered up a house of faith around themselves from the moondust of abstract ideas; these pathetic people were the ones who stormed the cannon’s mouth, who beat against the ramparts in bloody, futile rage, in their breasts burning the light of the universal panacea.

  But the ones, like the Senator, were more insidious, more subtile. They did not storm ramparts. No. They were men who felt no inner vacuum. They were men of indominable will, hardened by the fires of training, by an undying ambition to victory, and by complete confidence in self.

  Like bitter seeds these men were sown in the land. Some of them sank evil plant—the organization of the pathetic people. But some rose, by virtue of natural ability, training, and ruthless purpose, to positions of authority in a government that must forever remain alien to them. Of these, some reestablished contact with the spy net-work, the sour roots of an evil plant—the organization of the pathetic people. And others played the lone hand, divorcing every external bond but loyalty that connected them with the Enemy: Men whose very names had been forgotten by the government for whom they worked.

  But all of them, each after his own fashion, each as it was given him to see the light, striving continually for the Day.

  In original conception, it was to have been a Glorious Day of military conquest. Of sudden armed attack, aided by disorganization from within. But with the arrival of the satellites, that plan was forgotten. Because the enemy homeland was always in direct line target from at least one of them, and attack would be merely an invitation to death.

  Only the method changed; the goal remained an ever fixed mark. No longer did the Party look for outside deliverance. It came to look introspectively inward. For there must be found the method. And the method was revolt. Well planned, sudden revolt.

  The pathetic people proselytized unceasingly, actively, directly, to that end.

  THE OTHER people, the changlings, worked by indirection. Take the example of the Senator. His route was devious. But effective. He worked always to accentuate the ills of the system; he incited revolt by pushing democratic processes to their absolute in corruption. His aim was to oppress. And nothing pleased him more than universal discontent, or a debilitating plague, flood, fire or famine. He was intent to force the people to rebel. His technique was perfect; all his measures were executed under a chauvinistic exterior: ostensible unity that only created vicious disunity.

  One columnist, with heightened perspicuity, once wrote:

  “One cannot question his intentions, or his loyalty; and yet, were he a dozen foreign agents, bent on sabotage, he could scarcely accomplish more for the Enemy.”

  And now the Senator had, locked up within his mind, the secret that would make armed attack again possible. Strange fruit was hanging ripe on the boughs of an atom blast. If he could get it out of the country.

  The Chief checked into the Senator’s background. And slowly but surely, the fantastic became clear to him.

  The man had been born in Arkansas. Little formal schooling. Showed little ability, in fact. Shiftless. Left his home town at twenty. Went west.

  There was a six month blackout for the record.

  Then he showed up in Los Angeles.

  The conclusion became inescapable. The man who had begun such a brilliant political career in Los Angeles was not the same man who had left Sweetwater Springs. Somewhere, somehow, in those dark six months, a changling had been substituted.

  The Chief’s mind reeled under the implications. As long as twenty-seven years ago—as early as 1932—the Enemy was preparing a subtile, well organized Fifth Column. Even before Adolph Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany!

  And for 27 years a man had posed as an American, and won high elective offices, while he was master-minding a network of spies. Complacent, unknown, unsuspected.

  While the Party was sabotaging, inciting, proposing, opposing, protesting, and making a superficial show full of sound and fury, he was working along quietly, undercover, in the very innards of the government.

  The Chief, for the first time, was a frightened man.

  “Better pick him up,” he said.

  Which they would have done. But for the fact that they couldn’t find him.

  When the Chief viewed the latest film from the Senator’s office, he had reason to be puzzled.

  The Senator had, quite matter-of-factly, placed a coil of rope, a bulky automatic, and a pistol in his brief case. Those articles had come from his safe, and one would scarcely expect to find things like that in a Senator’s safe. He had zipped the brief case shut, and, as if this were the commonest thing in the world, carried it out of his office like a man taking home a sheaf of paper work for the week end.

  The agent who rode down the elevator with him reported that he showed no signs of nervousness. He spoke pleasantly to the operator, an old man named Jimmy who held his job largely due to the Senator’s influence.

  HE WALKED out of the Senate Office Building and signalled the first cab. The cab driver was one of the Chief’s agents. And he never reported. The last the Chief knew of the spy was when the cab was swallowed up in the south bound traffic . . .

  “Drive me around town,” the Senator instructed the cabby.

  “Yes, sir. Any place in particular?”

  “Just drive.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Winter was coming and the cherry trees were dying.

  “Drive slower, please.”

  The Washington Monument was a dull finger against the slate sky. No car was following; the Senator took his time, made sure.

  “Now drive to the Naval Airport,” he told the cabby.

  Then, after several miles, “Turn off here.”

  The driver looked around, startled. He was looking into the face of the Senator’s automatic. He turned off onto the side road.

  “Park,” the Senator ordered harshly.

  The cabby stopped the car.

  And the Senator swung the gun in a vicious arc. The agent tried to duck, failed, as a ripe thud testified, and slumped limply over the wheel.

  The Senator worked fast. He stripped off the man’s coat, slipped into it, and dragged the man from the car. He pulled him some distance from the road and knelt over his limp form. He placed the gun just below the man’s ribs, slanted up the muzzle. It didn’t make so much noise, that way, when he pulled the trigger.

  The Senator drove slowly back to Washington. He left the coat in the cab when he parked it on a side street. He took another cab to the railroad station. He bought a ticket to Easton, boarded the train, and left it at South Street Station, Philadelphia.

  And while the Senator was on the train, the Chief swung the vast organization that he headed into action.

  He sent out a general alarm. There was no name given. Just description.

  Until now the Chief had never considered, even for a moment, that the Senator could have escaped his organization. And it was a frightening consideration.

  Most of the day Saturday he paced his office, smacking the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left, all the while cursing in a low monotone.

  It was late in the afternoon when the news broke. It had been, again, a matter of luck. Just outside of New London a motorcycle officer had stopped a car for speeding. The officer had recognized the Senator; he made the mistake of reaching for his gun, and the Senator shot him. A passing motorist had taken him to the Emergency Hospital where, with his last breath, he coughed out the license number and description of the car.

  At least they had something to work with.

  As night fell, road blocks sprung up.

  The Chief ordered out the Coast Guard boats; he alerted the Air Force.

  His agents picked up the trail again, north of Boston, At eleven o’clock they located his abandoned car. And it began to rain.

  It was then, and only then, that the Chief thought about notifying the Director of Satellites. Fortuna
tely, the Chief knew how to break red tape. Within five minutes he had the Director on an extension in a famous night club.

  “Hello . . . This is Arnold . . . Right.” The Chief took a deep breath. “Listen: All hell’s broke loose . . . How soon can you re-arm the satellites?”

  The Director, at the other end of the line, gasped. Top secret information had just sputtered over a public phone.

  “I . . . Just a moment.”

  The Chief could hear the Director say something to somebody. The Chief gripped the phone in a grip of steel; his hands were sweaty. His heart was pounding like war drums.

  “Hello, Arnold . . . It would take three days to get the first—war-head installed.”

  “You haven’t got that much time,” the Chief almost spat at him.

  “It would take twenty-four hours to get a rocket loaded and ready. Longer than that, jockeying for position. A good six—maybe ten—hours to arm a satellite, once we got the war-head there. This is a technical operation: it takes time.”

  The Chief said nothing for a long moment. “I’m afraid . . .” He began, and then let the phone drop into its cradle. “Too late,” he said to no one.

  THE CHIEF walked over and sat down. He began to laugh. If the Senator got out of the country, approximately twenty-four hours would remain before the Enemy attacked. And how would he spend those hours?

  In prayer and fasting? Drunk, trying to forget? No.

  He would spend them explaining, in a closed door hearing, before the President and the Cabinet, exactly how it had happened.

  What could he say? Only: I was careless. A hollow, empty thing.

  “And sir, with the life of the nation at stake, how could you afford to be careless?”

  There could be no answer. Failure has no excuse. “I under-estimated the Enemy.” God! How awful it sounded. “You fool, you fool,” he told himself.

  And they would ask him how this man Ward got the information in the first place. As if it made any difference.

  But he would have to explain it.