The 22nd Golden Age of Science Fiction Read online

  Martha tried to shoot. Her finger tightened around the trigger and lines of decision dug into her face. But she couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t shoot him. The muzzle of the gun wavered, then dropped.

  “See, I told you I was in no danger,” Agar jeered. “But if you want to be able to say the same for the both of you, I suggest that you give my proposition your very careful consideration.”

  With that he turned and walked out of the office.

  He was no sooner gone than I grabbed the gun from Martha’s trembling hand.

  “W—what are you going to do, Jimmie?” she gasped.

  “I’m going to follow that devil,” I said. “I’m going to find out what’s back of this.”

  Sticking the gun in my pocket, I dived out of the office.

  CHAPTER III

  The Secret of Death

  That I was taking a hand in a game in which death held the stakes, I well knew. But I also knew I had to find out who Agar was and what incredible power he possessed. I didn’t mind so much when he had threatened me, but when he had threatened Martha— He was striking at me through her. He had guessed or had known how I felt about her, and he was taking full advantage of that fact. And I could not protect her. I did not for an instant doubt that if Agar chose, she would die just as Samuel Winters had died, just as my uncle had died.

  Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed him to a block of old, abandoned office buildings. He entered a narrow door opening flush on the sidewalk. When I tried to follow him, I found the door was locked. I went around to the back. There was a narrow, littered alley. The back door was locked.

  I got in through the building next door, went to the roof, crossed over to the building Agar had entered, pried open a skylight, and dropped down into a dingy, dirty hall way on the third floor. The place was musty. The floor hadn’t been swept in years and the windows were so dirty the light scarcely showed through. The building smelled or rats, and desolation, and death.

  Where was Agar?

  I looked in all the rooms on the third floor, my hand on the gun in my pocket. He wasn’t there. I went down to the second floor. In the hall, the dust was thick. There were footprints in it. Agar had been there. The footprints led toward a room at the rear. Walking on tiptoes, I started down the hall.

  I didn’t hear the door open behind me. Suddenly something round and hard was thrust into the small of my back and a voice rasped in my ear.

  “Get your hands up, Ellery!”

  Agar’s voice! He had come up behind me and had thrust a gun against my back. I raised my hands. I was caught! Caught like a fly in a trap.

  He took the gun out of my pocket.

  “You can turn around now,” he said.

  I turned. He had my gun in one hand. In the other hand he had a short length of copper tubing. It was this that he had held against my back. He hadn’t had a gun.

  “Guns are unpleasant things,” he said. “They’re messy, and inaccurate, and unscientific. I prefer not to use them unless I have to.” He grinned in a way that made me want to retch. “There are other ways of accomplishing the same purpose, ways that leave no evidence behind them.”

  “Such as accidents!” I spat out.

  “Naturally,” he nodded.

  His words sent a cold chill to the marrow of my bones. He had caused those accidents! He admitted it.

  “Since you have called,” he continued, “no doubt you will want to see my laboratory. I don’t mind showing it to you. No doubt, after you have looked it over, you will fully appreciate that certain securities which I have for sale are a bargain at three hundred thousand dollars.”

  The price had gone up again.

  * * * *

  The lab was filled with a conglomeration of the weirdest instruments I have ever seen. But perhaps the weirdest of all were the photographs. He seemed to have hundreds of them, of himself, of me, of Martha, of my uncle, of Samuel Winters, of people whom I didn’t recognize but who were caught in the net that this diabolical devil was weaving.

  The pictures were on glass slides about six inches square. The material really wasn’t glass. It was a clear, gelatin-like film, several inches thick. The images in the film seemed to be three-dimensional. They were perfect. The picture of my uncle seemed to be alive. It had been snapped in front of our office building, and I am quite certain he had not known it was taken. Nor had any of the others known that their image was being caught in this inch-thick gelatin film. Agar had taken them secretly.

  “The images are designed to fit into this projector,” Agar explained. “Without going into technicalities which I am sure you would not understand, I might say that once I have a picture of an individual, that individual is completely in my power. Ah—you would no doubt like a demonstration. Which picture shall I choose? Shall it be, say— Ah, of course. You would like to see a projection of your picture.”

  I didn’t want to see it, because I was already beginning to have horrible fears of how that device operated, but as long as he had my gun there wasn’t anything I could do. Alternate waves of perspiration and of icy chills were sweeping over me. One second I was sweating. The next second, I was colder than ice.

  There was a large screen in the back of the room. The projection was focused on that. I expected to see my own picture appear on the screen. But I was mistaken. Instead the screen showed a series of moving lines. Branching from a parent line, they spread out like the spokes of a wheel. Each spoke in turn branched into other lines.

  The lines looked like tangled paths. Some of the paths were white. Others were red.

  Agar explained to me the difference between the red and the white lines.

  “There,” he said, pointing to a spot where a red and a white path joined, “is a decision point. One path continues white. The other becomes red. The red path, you will note, rather abruptly disappears.”

  He chuckled horribly. Then he told me what the red path meant, and what the decision point meant. In that explanation I saw clearly why those accidents had not been accidents at all, why they had been premeditated murder instead.

  If Agar had taken a gun and put a bullet through my uncle’s head, he would not have been more guilty of murder than he was.

  “I don’t mind telling you this,” he said. “Because, even if you should decide to go to the police with the information, I am afraid they would not believe you.”

  He was right about that. If I tried to tell this story to the police, it would get me a bed in the psychopathic ward. Agar was beyond the law. He could commit murder and no jury in the land would ever find him guilty.

  “So, Mr. Ellery,” he said. “You see why my stocks are worth the price I am charging for them. Between us, of course, the stocks are worthless, and my sale of them to you is only a rather neat method of getting around the laws on extortion. But I am sure you understand why I have set such a high price on them.”

  I nodded dazedly. I understood that point only too clearly. I was watching that red path on the screen. My picture was in the machine and that abruptly-ending red path meant that I—

  Agar took my picture out and put his own image into the projector.

  At the same time a red light on a switchboard in the corner winked on. Agar jumped when he saw it.

  “Ah,” he said. “So we have another visitor. Those photo-electric cells have come in handy today, very handy, indeed.”

  So that was how he had trapped me! I had crossed a beam of invisible light, and a warning had flashed here.

  Keeping my pistol ready, he tiptoed to the door and listened.

  I tensed myself. Whoever this unknown visitor was, if Agar permitted his attention to be distracted for an instant I intended to jump him.

  He waited, then suddenly jerked the door open.

  Martha almost fell into the room.

  Martha! I had followed Aga
r, and she had followed me. My heart leaped at the sight of her. It was a brave thing she had done, but she had only succeeded in putting herself into Agar’s power. Now he had both of us.

  He began to point the gun at her.

  At the same instant I leaped toward him.

  Out of the corner of his eye he must have seen me coming. He leaped backward and away, swinging the pistol toward me at the same time. Flame lanced from it. Powder stung my face, and the flash almost blinded me, but the bullet missed. It screamed past my shoulder and thudded into the wall behind. Before Agar could shoot again, I was on him.

  I hit him harder than I ever hope to hit another man in all my life. Every ounce of strength that I possessed was behind the driving ball of my fist. If it had caught him flush on the point of the jaw, it would either have broken his neck or knocked him out cold. But it didn’t land solidly. It landed on the side of his jaw and glanced off.

  He reeled backwards from the blow. Shaking his head to clear his vision, he was trying to bring the pistol up again. I grabbed his arm. He was as squirmy as an eel and as lithe as a cat. Writhing like a snake, scratching, clawing, butting, he fought me. How long we fought I do not know. It seemed to be hours. At the end I had the gun and was pointing it at him.

  I had the gun. I had Agar. I had won this fight. If he made a move, I’d shoot him. Candidly, I was hoping he would resist. But he didn’t. He just backed against the wall and began to laugh.

  “Laugh while you can,” I said. “We’ll see how much laughing you can do after the police get hold of you. For that’s where you’re going—to the nearest police station. If you escape the electric chair, you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.”

  All I could think was that I had a gun covering him. I had him in my power. The police would be able to take over.

  “Go on,” he jeered. “Take me to the police.”

  His manner jarred me. “That’s exactly where you’re going,” I rasped.

  “All right,” he snapped. “I’m ready. But what are you going to tell them? Where is your evidence? Are you going to show them the equipment in this laboratory? You poor blundering fool! Don’t you realize there aren’t two other scientists on earth who could even begin to understand the way it operates? And you’ll have to explain to the police how it works. You’ll have to explain it to a jury. They will throw your evidence out of court and release me, and then what will you do, Mr. Ellery? You’ve seen the decision points ahead of you, Mr. Ellery. You’ve seen how many paths turn red and end abruptly. You’ve seen what I can do. How will you like life during the next year, not knowing from one hour to the next when death is coming, only knowing that it is coming? That’s what it means to take me to the police, Ellery. How do you like it?”

  He had me. He was right, damnably right about going to the police. They couldn’t do a thing. He was above the law beyond it.

  There was only one way to buy my own and Martha’s life. For I knew, if I tried to pay him the blood money he demanded, he would take it, but he wouldn’t release the awful power he had over me. He would come back for more money. Eventually it would be my life or his.

  The only thing I could do to protect myself was to kill him—here and now. Shoot him, like the mad dog that he was. Shoot him down. Put a bullet through his brain.

  I heard Martha catch her breath as she grasped what I was going to do.

  “No, Jimmie, not that,” she begged.

  “He’s got it coming.”

  “Please.”

  I honestly tried to shoot him. But I just couldn’t do it. Even though my own life was forfeited if I didn’t, I just couldn’t shoot him down in cold blood. It wasn’t in me. I think I could kill a man, if I had to, in self defense, but I couldn’t put a bullet through Agar. I let the pistol muzzle drop.

  He laughed at me.

  I was whipped. I was a walking dead man.

  Then, out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the screen. Hope leaped up in my heart.

  “Agar!” I snapped. “Look at that screen. Your picture is in the projector.”

  Almost all the white lines on the screen were gone. A decision point had been reached, and passed. Only one main path led to the future, a red path. It ended abruptly.

  Agar seemed paralyzed as he stared at it. Suddenly he screamed, a harsh, shrill sound alive with terror. He dashed toward the machine.

  If he could get to that machine in time, determine another decision point, and from it plot another path, he would be safe. If he could get to the machine!

  The gun jerked in my hand as I put bullet after bullet into the heart of the machine. His image in the gelatin film shuddered under a bullet. Another slug tore through a bank of vacuum tubes. Glass tinkled. Sparks flashed from suddenly broken circuits. Transformers throbbed under a sudden overload. The screen went blank.

  “I couldn’t shoot Agar. But I could sure as hell shoot the lights out of his machine.

  His face went ashen white.

  “Now laugh, damn you,” I said. “How do you like it now, when you’re face to face with some of your own medicine?”

  He screamed and started toward me. Simultaneously a shrill whistle echoed through the building and heavy feet pounded on the stairs outside the room.

  “It’s the police,” Martha whispered. “I called them before I came in. They’ve finally arrived.”

  Agar seemed to lose his head completely. He forgot all about me. He darted out the door. There was a scuffling sound outside and then a harsh voice ordered. “Grab him down below, boys.”

  Agar had gotten past the officers on the stairs. I leaped to the window and jerked it open just in time to see him run out of the building. He had escaped the police on the sidewalk.

  I saw him dart across the street. A streetcar was coming from the north. A truck was coming from the east on a side street. Agar ran into the middle of the intersection.

  I pulled Martha away from the window so she wouldn’t see what was going to happen.

  * * * *

  Before the police came in, I tried to explain to Martha what Agar had done. The man must have been a brilliant scientist. He had discovered a method of foreseeing the future. Not the future in general, but the future of any given individual. And he had also discovered that the future is not fixed. Definitely it is not. Since the dawn of history men have sensed that this is true. The future of an individual is subject to change. There are varying paths he may take in life. One path leads to wealth, success, happiness. One path leads to bad luck and failure. No man knows what path he is on, whether he is moving toward success or toward failure, toward life or toward death. But Agar had discovered a method of seeing into the future. He needed a picture of the individual in whom he was interested. Then his instruments showed him the possible future paths of that individual. The white lines on his screen meant paths that led to life. The red lines were paths that ended, abruptly, in death.

  Each individual, at countless times during his life, has to make decisions. These decisions will lead him to life or death, he doesn’t know which. He may make the decisions without knowing he has done it. The decisions may seemingly be of no importance—the broken shoe string that causes a man to take a later train on which he is killed.

  Agar could, by his instruments, foresee those decision points. He could tell whether a man was on a life path or a death path. And he could, at the decision points, nudge an individual from a life path to a path that led to death. A telephone call might do it. A stranger stopping you on the street to borrow a match might be Agar nudging a victim over on a death path. It might be anything.

  He had nudged Winters on a death path when Winters had refused to pay off. He had done the same thing to my uncle. Both men had died in accidents, but Agar, by indirectly putting those men on paths that led inevitably to death by accident, had murdered them. It was as simple—and as devilishly complic
ated and ingenuous—as that.

  Meanwhile, he was safe. The law couldn’t touch him. And by paying attention to his own decision points as shown on the screen, he could always keep on a life path himself.

  Martha’s entrance into the laboratory must have been the decision point where he was nudged from a life path to a death path. Before she had entered, his picture had been in the instruments and the screen had showed alternate life and death paths ahead of him. But the instant she entered, he was forced to make a decision. He made it. The instant he had made it, the screen showed a red path ending abruptly. Even when he forced himself past the police, he must have known the ending was a foregone conclusion. His machine smashed, he couldn’t discover another decision point that would lead to a life path.

  He raced across the intersection. The street car bell clanged. He dodged out of the way—and ran directly in front of the truck. He screamed when the truck hit, screamed once. The scream was choked into silence as the heavy wheels of the truck went over him.

  The police reported his death as an “unavoidable accident.”