The Box from Japan Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  CHAPTER XXX

  CHAPTER XXXI

  CHAPTER XXXII

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  CHAPTER XXXV

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  CHAPTER XXXIX

  CHAPTER XL

  CHAPTER XLI

  CHAPTER XLII

  CHAPTER XLIII

  CHAPTER XLIV

  CHAPTER XLV

  CHAPTER XLVI

  CHAPTER XLVII

  CHAPTER XLVIII

  CHAPTER XLIX

  CHAPTER L

  CHAPTER LI

  CHAPTER LII

  CHAPTER LIII

  CHAPTER LIV

  CHAPTER LV

  CHAPTER LVI

  CHAPTER LVII

  CHAPTER LVIII

  CHAPTER LIX

  CHAPTER LX

  CHAPTER LXI

  CHAPTER LXII

  CHAPTER LXIII

  CHAPTER LXIV

  CHAPTER LXV

  CHAPTER LXVI

  CHAPTER LXVII

  CHAPTER LXVIII

  CHAPTER LXIX

  CHAPTER LXX

  CHAPTER LXXI

  CHAPTER LXXII

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1932, renewed 1960 by Harry Stephen Keeler.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

  DEDICATION

  To My Friend and Physician, DR. FRANK L. ANDREWS of Chicago who, when my ills are imaginary, chides me out of them, and, when they are real, pilots me therefrom with the precise methods of modern medicine!

  CHAPTER I

  Something for Nothing!

  Carr Halsey, coming up out of the dark subway, this bright morning of Sol 18, 1942, first glimpsed the huge hand-lettered placard in the window of the Associated Express Companies. Indeed, he noticed at once that there were two similar placards, one fronting on Madison Street, and one on State Street, so that the maelstrom of humanity that ever surged about this busiest corner of Chicago, known at times as “the London of the West,” might be properly lured into getting something—for nothing! Its curious proclamation, part lettered in jet black and part in flaming red letters, ran:

  SOMETHING FOR NOTHING!

  This is YOUR Chance.

  The annual auction sale, for 1942, of unclaimed express packages from all over the world, held by the Chicago branch of this company, takes place inside on the morning of Sol 18th. A Hyde Park man last year secured a $1,000 diamond sunburst for $1.25. An Evanston woman, for $1.10, secured a sacred mummified toad, with authoritative documents establishing that it came from a secret crypt in the Pyramid of Cheops, and she was enabled to sell it to the Boston Egyptological Museum for $70. Three years ago a young boy from the ghetto secured, for 40 cents, a parchment chart designating the location of the Royal Treasure, hidden in the mountains of Wales by King Edward II when he fled from his triumphant queen and her paramour; he was paid £2000 reward for this chart by England. All parcels purchased are the legal property of the purchasers, as this auction is held by authority of the Circuit Court.

  WHAT WILL YOU WIN?

  THE AUCTION STARTS AT 9 a.m.

  Wednesday, Sol. 18th.

  Something for nothing!

  It wasn’t far from 9 a.m. now, and Carr Halsey flattened his back with great resoluteness against the very show window in which reposed this enticing sign, for his bump of gambling instinct was fully as large as his bump of inquisitiveness. And so that Satan might be kept well behind him, he commenced a meticulous search through all his pockets for the singular and alarming letter which had brought him downtown this early morning. And, searching, he fell into a curious train of reflection.

  Something for nothing!

  Life did not change, it seemed, any more than did this famous street corner, which looked today about the same as it had looked ten long years ago in 1932, or even twenty longer years, in 1922, when Carr Halsey had been but a small boy towed along with his hand clasped tightly in his mother’s. Apple sellers, last lingering relics of that war, almost mythical now to younger men, that war said to be waged to end all war, still sold apples on the curb. Yellow taxicabs still flashed colorfully back and forth in the streets, except to be sure, that today all taxicabs were yellow, for Yellow, by some curious process of accelerated vehicular birth and rebirth—or perhaps some process analogous to biological cell fissure!—had completely extirpated and exterminated Blue, Green, Super, DeLuxe, Heart, Gold and Checker taxicabs, as even the yellow race itself must someday outgrow white man, with his modest birth rate, and, so it was claimed, would someday swarm over all the territory now held in fanciful security by him. True, Carr Halsey ruminated, as his fingers emerged empty from his breast pocket, the world had a new month, and had had for some three years now, that queer sounding month Sol, intercalated between the old June and July according to the new International Fixed Calendar, so that every one of the present 13 months in the year would have an even 28 days, with the same days of the week falling on the same dates. Convenient, indeed, for business and social matters; even indispensable now, after three years of trial. But that was about all the change there was, wasn’t it? The same street cars moved about the streets—except—yes—their gears were noiseless now, and they moved dignifiedly, silently, like ghosts. The same early morning shoppers shrewdly surveyed articles in department store windows priced at $1.79, with many, many times the interest they would have accorded to the identical articles priced at $1.80! The same honking automobiles and motor trucks made the corner where he stood a din and roar of traffic. The same clerks poured out of subway entrances and off of street cars, scurrying madly, elbowingly, as of old, for offices and stores in Chicago’s Old Loop. The same stenographers, barelegged in high-heeled shoes, and with skirts several inches above knees, with huge flapping picture hats covering bobbed hair that had superseded the back and side biscuits of hair which had marked the past few years, chattered—but wait!—they didn’t dress like that even five years ago—however, they were indubitably the same stenographers doing the same old kind of work and—still no!—they all operated electric typewriters now instead of the old cumbersome mills of 1932. But they chattered along in pairs, or fluttered alone towards offices, in the same old rushed-to-death, early-morning manner. Pickpockets still infested this corner which originally got its fame from that light-fingered talented gentry; and even as their father and mother pickpockets in the fabulous early 1900’s no doubt lived in hopes of the day when they mig
ht unexpectedly extract from some victim who appeared only to have a pocketful of silver, a fat roll of bills, so too did the similar pickpockets of today doubtlessly live in identical hopes of an identical killing. And Carr Halsey, fingers emerging empty from the side pockets of his coat, devoutly wished that he might for the second attain the sentience of some psychic pickpocket who knew instinctively where much-wanted articles were kept. Yes, pickpockets picked pockets as of old, and automobiles—yet take automobiles! They weren’t much different, but where was the red-faced traffic policeman with shrill whistle and anathema? Gone! For now the stream of cars in the street was decently and perfectly regulated, a car passed neatly at any moment through any break in the opposing line of cars, by a “robot-policeman,” that simple strip of rubber set across the entire pavement with its sunken row of vehicle-sensitive photo-electric “eyes” coupled through grid-glow tubes to the traffic towers. People still gazed apprehensively aloft for impending rain when they sniffed moisture in the air; but where they once gazed into perhaps an unbroken leaden sky, Carr Halsey’s automatic gaze upward, as he started in with his trousers pockets for that strange and alarming letter, met a pure azure sky, yes, but one literally speckled with moving objects, silhouetted blackly against it, buzzing intently and insistently above the roar of traffic, with a continuous drone of propellers. A huge five-motored metal plane, gleaming silvery white, grimly businesslike, towing three gliders laden obviously with “fast’ freight for points west, plowed in that direction, no doubt for the Mississippi Valley. At least a dozen and a half slow-speed “doodle-bug” safety planes, affected now most widely by cautious business men who disliked climbing unexpectedly into a parachute jacket, with exaggerated wing flaps and equally exaggerated wing slots, buzzed eastward across Old Loop, no doubt from the aristocratic suburbs of the Fox River valley, sixty miles to the west, and heading no doubt for the landing stations on the 55-story Collossus Building on Michigan Avenue, or the 62-story Behemoth Building on the same thoroughfare, or perhaps the plebeian Grant Park landing field on the lake front, to lie parked against tattered and patched airplanes of the vintage of 1935. A single duck plane, with reversed tail, zoomed along among its conservative brothers, a literal clown among aircraft to be sure, yet foolproof to 100 percent, so it was claimed. Two auto-gyros with very short wings but enormous revolving horizontal blades, the blades in each case somewhat longer than the squat machine itself, crept along at a snail-like speed which five years ago would have tumbled plane and all into the center of Madison Street; and an older-fashioned helicopter of 1937, with tub-like fuselage and multiple revolving blades consisting of three parallel planes to each blade, and making it resemble somewhat the old tri-plane of 1912 now on exhibition in the Aeronautical Museum, advanced, lowered itself, advanced again, lowered itself, as it too prepared to land its owner on some precise area somewhere in Chicago’s 525 square miles—and probably on the Lake Front.

  Yes, Carr Halsey reflected, as his fingers now explored his hip pockets, his gaze remaining on that humming, live patch of sky, life was changing. Had changed. When one checked up, one found it was so. But it was only mechanical life that had changed, and not humanity. That was all. For one thing, Mr. Carr Halsey was as anxious to step into that auction directly behind him, as he would have been ten long years before. Humanity all, judging from that placard behind him, was interested in diamond necklaces, mummified Egyptian toads worth $70, and charts for Welsh treasure buried by English Kings—if it got them for nothing! Humanity still loved, hated, lied, cheated, chased the dollar, murdered its fellow-man, was captured by shrewder men with shrewder brains, was thrown into sanitary prisons with sunlighted cell-blocks, by a two-thirds vote of juries now, to he sure, according to the revised Criminal statutes code drawn up in 1937 by the American Law Institute, but still served the same old court sentences. Crime, indeed, was still highly organized and the law was even still more organized. Humanity still married humanity of the opposite sex, and had tiny bawling wiggling mites of humanity who in due course, despite the relentless mechanical march of events, would become geniuses or criminals, plodders or highly paid executives, artists or workmen.

  And humanity, searching for a lost object in 10 pockets, still found the missing object in the 10th and last pocket!

  Carr Halsey unfolded that disturbing letter. Was it 9—or 9:30—when he was to answer the summons contained in it? If it were 9:30, he might yet step in behind him and purchase a mummified toad! And was it the Lindbergh Building where he was to go—the Lindbergh Building, named by public acclaim after some youngster who in the dim past had fluttered across the Atlantic Ocean like Columbus himself—the first building in Chicago to have a landing stage in a day when there was nothing much in the air to land upon it. Or was it the Lundbergh Building, named by its Scandinavian owner after the Swedish marine engineer whose marvelous helical excavating machine and shifting-pivot lock gates had made it possible for Great Britain to dig and complete her canal across the Central American isthmus in three short years? Lindbergh—or Lundbergh? The older building commemorating the almost forgotten trail blazer who had first jumped the great pond without anything whatever for his fragile plane to land upon? Or the more recent building, commemorating the new trail blazer who was now adding to his Central American canal laurels by designing the nine huge floating mechanical islands which next year were to mark the Atlantic Air Lane that was to connect Europe and America for those lucky ones who could afford to pay $500 passage money to step from New York into London in 32 hours instead of 5½ days as at present?

  Against the somewhat stiff breeze which swept around the corner, Carr Halsey straightened out the now unfolded letter which he held in his hands.

  The embossed heading on the crisp bond paper constituting page one of the missive was something very newly gotten up; to Carr Halsey who had received more than one communication in past years from this same writer, the newness of the very wording was itself confounding, quite aside from the contents of the letter itself. The extensive heading, conveying as it did a curiously composite business announcement dealing with the most ancient, archaic devices known—devices now almost suitable only as exhibits in museums, and the most ultramodern triumphs of mechanical ingenuity, specified the Lindbergh Building, after all, and not the Lundbergh, and it read, in entirety:

  THE AMERICAN PROJECTISCOPE COMPANY, INC.

  (International Monomark K 155682)

  Manufacturers, Since 1870, of Magic Lanterns and Projecting Cameras

  for

  Recreational and Educational Purposes, Makers of Photographic Slides

  Of All Sorts for Educational Purposes. Co-Patentees, Co-Owners and

  Sole Manufacturers of the Cebrey Shutter, Used in Talking-Picture

  Projectors

  And

  Sole Owners and Patentees of the Zell Process, Usable in Conjunction with

  the New Ion- Screen Color-Television Process of the Consolidated

  Projection Corporation, for Wireless Transmission and Reception

  Across Space of Dramatic Performances and News Events in

  Actual Color and Correct Perspective, and Perfecting to

  the Ultimate Degree Actual Transmission of Visible

  Action of all Sorts.

  LINDBERGH BUILDING, CHICAGO

  Below this elaborate, and perhaps slightly bombastic commercial announcement were the words Roger T. Halsey, President. Carr Halsey bent his attention to the typed words of the missive. They were dated Sol 17th, yesterday, and they ran:

  MY DEAR NEPHEW:

  How would you like to actually view a performance of Hamlet, to be specially played at the Regent Theatre, London, with Sir Alfred Leets, the most noted Shakespearean actor in the world, in the title role, without the irksome necessity of sailing Londonward and using up a couple of weeks? I mean, by this, to see and hear the performance under conditions of a scientific illusion, known as th
e Zell Process, an illusion so perfect that to all intents and purposes you will be actually sitting in the dress circle of the Regent Theatre, but a few feet from the very footlights themselves.

  You undoubtedly have heard that the Consolidated Projection Corporation, of New York City, officially releases, on September 2nd, its new Ion-Screen method of color television; indeed, it is already so adequately developed that the parts themselves have for quite some months now been obtainable by amateur experimenters the world over. In pursuance to your request of two years back that I take your name off our stockholders’ mailing list with respect to all business matters, other than our extremely modest checks for dividends, I have done exactly as you requested, and therefore there are several things that you do not and cannot know. Indeed, in view of the fact that certain publicity anent a secret deal entered into by our company here leaked partially into the newspapers some months ago, a deal which indicated that considerable money would be eventually going into your pockets, but that you never called up, as you most assuredly would have done had you seen it, to ask wherein and how much your financial interests would be bettered, I can only assume that you did not even see the story, and that you don’t know anything at all about what has transpired. Such as, for instance, that we here, who have been in the projecting business ever since the first crude magic lantern, decades and decades ago in your grandfather’s day, threw a blurred image on a sheet, control a trio of extremely simple patents which now combine perfectly with the television plans of the Consolidated Projection Corporation. These three patents, Nos. 2,109,203, 2,109,204 and 2,109,205, carrying International Registration Certificates Nos. 1001, 1002, and 1003 respectively, which complement each other, and which we call, all in conjunction with each other, the “Zell Process,” were developed by us in reality for use with talking pictures only. Insofar, however, as the Consolidated Projection Corporation controls, by its patents, and its stock control in the International Theater and Motion Picture Combine, the entire chain of talking-picture theaters in the world, they become our logical—indeed, our only customer—for our process, regardless of whether it is used in films or used in television, At any rate, to state very roughly what it accomplishes, I may say that what would ordinarily be at best the mere transmission to an audience by radio of a moving, but flat colored scene, life-size, the Zell Process makes it absolutely possible for that audience to receive the depth of that scene, indeed the whole scale of varying and shifting depths which make up the concavities and convexities appearing in any object or participant in it, and the relative shifting positions of all in the perspective. You may imagine for yourself the amazing effect this can produce!