Chapter 2: Ultimatum

How terribly far-fetched it seemed! It was unbelievable enough that Bentley had once reposed in the body of an ape. That had been in the African wilds. But the idiocy of the thing now rested in Bentley’s belief that here, immediately upon landing, he was again facing something just as horrible.

But the coincidences were too clear. The palaver about “brains,” and “Mind Master”--and those ape hairs in Bentley’s hands. He wished he knew all that had led up to that story he had read in the paper just prior to the appearance of the naked man from the west door of the Flatiron Building. However, the killing would get front page position now, due to the importance of the dead man--Bentley never doubted it was the man whom, in the paper, the “Mind Master” had promised to slay.

Great apes in the heart of New York City! It sounded silly, preposterous. Yet, before he had gone through that dread experience with the mad Barter, Bentley would have sworn that brain transplantation was impossible. Even now he was not sure that it hadn’t all been a terrible dream.

Should Bentley go at once to the police to give them the benefit of whatever knowledge he might have of Caleb Barter? He wasn’t sure. Then he decided that sooner or later he must come out into the open. So he caught a cab and went to police headquarters.

“I wish,” he said, “to talk to someone about the Mind Master!”

If he had said, “I have just come from Mars,” he could scarcely have caused a greater sensation.

But his calm statement got him an instant audience with a slender man of thirty-five or so, whose hair was prematurely gray at the temples, and whose eyes were shrewd and far-seeing.

“My name’s Thomas Tyler,” said the detective. He certainly didn’t look the conventional detective, but Bentley knew instantly that he wasn’t the conventional detective. “I work on the unusual cases. If you hadn’t sent in your name I wouldn’t have seen you, which means that as soon as you leave here you are to forget my name and how I look.”

He motioned Bentley to a seat. Bentley sat back. Suddenly Thomas Tyler was around his desk and had pushed back the hair from Bentley’s temples. He drew in his breath with a sharp hiss when he saw the white line which circled Bentley’s skull.

“It’s not exactly proof,” he said, as though he and Bentley had been in the midst of a discussion of that awful operation Barter had performed on Bentley, “but I’d take your word for it.”

“The story, in the main, was true,” said Bentley.

“I thought so. What made you come here?”

“I saw that naked man run across Fifth Avenue from the door of the Flatiron Building. I saw the officer subdue him, helped him do it in fact, and saw the man die. Since there was no detective there, I took the liberty of removing these from the fingers of the dead man.”

Bentley gave Tyler the coarse hair, stained with blood. Tyler looked at it grimly for a moment or two.

“Not human hair,” he said, as though talking to himself. “Not like any I know of. But ... ah, you know what sort of hair, eh? That’s what sent you here!”

“It’s the hair of an ape or a gorilla.”

“How do you know, for sure?”

“Once,” said Bentley grimly, “for several horrible hours ... I was a giant anthropoid ape.”

Tyler’s chair legs crashed solidly to the floor.

“I see,” he said. “You think this thing has some connection with your own experiences. How long ago was that?”

“Slightly over two months.”

“You think the same man... ?”

“I don’t know. But who could want, as a newspaper story I just read says, to steal the brains of men? What for? It sounds like Barter. I’ve never heard of anybody else with such an obsession. I’m putting two and two together--and fervently hoping they’ll add up to seven instead of four. For if ever in my life I wanted to be wrong it’s now.”

Tyler pursed his lips. Bentley saw that his eyes were glinting with excitement.

“But there’s a possibility you’re right. Do you know what the Mind Master’s first manifesto said? It was published by a tabloid newspaper as a sort of gag--a strange crank letter. Here it is.”

Tyler tossed Bentley a newspaper clipping a week old. Bentley read quickly:

“The white race is deteriorating physically at a dangerous rate. In fifty years, if nothing is done to prevent it, the world will be filled with men whose bodies are so soft as to be almost worthless. But I shall take steps to prevent that, as soon as I am ready. I need a week. Then I shall begin my crusade to make the white race a race of supermen, whom I alone shall rule. They shall keep the brains they have, which shall be transferred to bodies which I shall furnish.

(Signed) The Mind Master.”

Tyler squinted at Bentley again.

“You see? Brains are all right, he says, but the white race needs new bodies. If he isn’t suggesting brain substitution, what is he suggesting? Though I confess I never thought of your story until your name was sent in to me a while ago. For the world thinks of Barter as having been killed by the great apes.”

“Yes, I told newspaper reporters that. I thought it was true. But this Mind Master must be Barter. There couldn’t be two persons in the world with mental quirks so much alike.”

“Tell me what Barter looks like. Oh, there are plenty of pictures extant of the famous Professor Caleb Barter who disappeared from the world some years ago, but he’ll know that, of course, and he won’t look like the pictures.

“Alteration of his own features should be easy for a man who juggles brains.”

“He may have changed his features since I saw him, too,” said Bentley. “But I’m sure I’d know him.”

Tyler’s telephone rang stridently.

He took down the receiver. His mouth fell slackly open as his eyes lifted to Bentley’s face. But he recovered himself and slapped his hand over the transmitter.