Chapter 12

Frank Corson entered the office of Wilson Maynard, Superintendent of Park Hill Hospital. Maynard looked out over the tops of his old-fashioned pince-nez glasses and said, “Oh, Doctor Corson. You phoned for a chat.”

It was the rather pompous superintendent’s way of saying he was happy to give Frank Corson a little time. He considered all the doctors and nurses at Park Hill his “boys and girls,” and he did the “father” bit very well.

“Yes, I--”

Maynard peered even harder. “You don’t look well, Frank. Pale. You’ve been working too hard.”

“Nothing important, Doctor Maynard.”

“Sit down. Will you have a cigarette?”

“No, thank you. I just wanted to ask you about a transfer.”

“A transfer!” This was amazing. “Aren’t you happy at Park Hill?”

“I’ve been very happy.”

Maynard went swiftly through a card file on his desk. “You have--let’s see--five more months of internship. Then--”

“Then I’d planned to enter private practice. But something personal has come up and I think a change is for the best.”

“I’m certainly sorry to hear that.”

“One of the men I graduated with went to a hospital in a small Minnesota town. We’ve corresponded and he’s given me a pretty clear picture--a nice town, a need for doctors and physicians--”

“But we need them here in the East, too.”

“I realize that, and I’m making the move with some regret. But, frankly, New York City no longer appeals to me. I think perhaps a small hospital is more suited to my temperament.”

“I’m certainly sorry to hear this, Corson. But I won’t try to dissuade you. Normally, I might bring a little more personal pressure to bear, but I sense that your mind is made up. We’re sorry to see you go, but the best of luck to you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

After Frank Corson left, Superintendent Maynard sorted a memo out of the pile on his desk. The memo concerned Frank Corson. Superintendent Maynard reread it and thought how well things usually worked out. Now it wouldn’t be necessary to have that talk with Corson about sloppy work. Obviously there had been something on the young intern’s mind for weeks now. Too bad. But let the Minnesota hospital, wherever it was, worry about the trouble and perhaps put Corson on the right track again.

He was their baby now.

Maynard took Corson’s card from the files and wrote across it: Transfer approved with regret.

Brent Taber stood in the shelter of a doorway on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and watched an entrance across the street. He had been there for over an hour.

Another hour passed and Taber shifted from one aching foot to the other as a man in a blue suit emerged from the entrance and moved off down the street.

When the man had turned a corner, Taber crossed over and looked up at the brownstone. It was a perfect place to hide--one of the many rooming houses in the city where, if you paid your rent and kept your peace, no one cared who you were or where you came from.

Not even, Taber reflected, if you had been born in a laboratory and had come from someplace among the stars.

He climbed the steps of the brownstone and tried the knob. The door opened. He went inside and found himself in a drab, dark hall furnished with an umbrella stand, a worn carpet, and a table spread with mail.

There was a bell on the table. He tapped it and, after a lazy length of time, a shapeless woman came through a door on the right and regarded him with no great show of cordiality.

“Nothing vacant, mister. Everything I’ve got is rented.”

“I wasn’t looking for a room. I’m just doing a little checking.”

“My license is okay,” the woman said belligerently. “The place is clean and orderly.”

“That’s not what I’m checking about. There’s been some counterfeit money passed in this neighborhood and we’re trying to trace it down.”

The woman had a pronounced mustache that quivered at this news. “Counterfeit! My roomers are honest.”

“I’m sure they are. But some people carry counterfeit money without knowing it. Do they all pay in cash?”

“Only two of them.”

“Men or women?”

“One girl--Katy Wynn.”

“Where does she work?”

“Down in Wall Street.”

“Not much chance we’re interested. This money has been turning up around Times Square.”

“The other’s a man--quiet, no trouble, pays his rent right on the dot every week. John Dennis his name is and he doesn’t look like no counterfeiter.”

Taber took a forward step. “What’s his room number?”

“Six--on the second floor. But he isn’t in now. He just went out.”

“Okay. Maybe I’ll be back. As I said, we don’t suspect anybody. We’re just checking for sources.”

Taber turned toward the door. The woman vanished back into her own quarters as Taber snapped the lock. He stood in the vestibule for a minute or two, studying some cards he took from his pocket, and when she did not reappear, he opened the door, went back in, and climbed the stairs.

The door to number six was not locked. Taber went inside. The window was small and gave on an areaway. He could see nothing until he turned on the light. Even then, he could see nothing of interest--the room was ordinary in every sense.

But as Brent Taber checked it out, some unusual aspects became apparent. There were two pieces of luggage in the closet. One, an oversized suitcase, stood on end.

And jammed neatly down behind it was the body of Les King. His throat had been cut.

Brent Taber stared down into the closet for what seemed like an interminable time. His eyes were bleak and his mouth was grim and stiff as he passed a slow hand along his jaw.

He took a long, backward step and closed his eyes for a moment as though hoping the whole improbable mess would go away. But it was still there when he opened them again.

He turned, went downstairs, and took the receiver off the phone on the wall by the front door.

The shapeless landlady came out again. She scowled at Taber. “What are you doing here?”

He regarded her with a kind of affectionate weariness. “Have you got a dime, lady?”

Gaping, she pawed into her apron pocket and handed him a coin.

“Thanks much.” He dialed. “Is Captain Abrams there?”

There was a wait, during which Brent Taber asked the oddly bemused landlady: “Are you afraid of the dead?”

But before she could decide whether she was or not, Taber turned to the phone. “Captain? ... That’s right, Brent Taber ... No, right, here in Manhattan. There’s been a little trouble. You’d better come over personally.”

He turned to the landlady. “What’s the address here, sister?”

And later, with the landlady back in her lair, Brent Taber sat down on the stairs to wait; sat there with surprise at the feeling of relief that filled his mind. He had no feeling of triumph about it; no sense of a job well done. But there was no great guilt at having failed, either.

Mostly, he thought, it was the simplification that had come about. There had been so many confusing and bewildering complications in the affair; improbability piled on the impossible; the ridiculous coupled with the incredible.

But now, with one stroke of a knife, it had been simplified and brought into terms everyone could understand; into terms Captain Abrams of the New York Police Department would grasp in an instant.

A killer was on the loose.

One of Senator Crane’s priceless gifts was a sense of timing. Much of his success had sprung from the instinctive knowledge of when to act. He had a sense of the dramatic which never deserted him. As a result, he had been known to turn in an instant from one subject to another--to dodge defeats and score triumphs with bewildering agility.

His preoccupation on this particular day was with a home-state issue--the location of a government plant. After he obtained the floor, he counted the house and noted that only a bare quorum was present. Gradually, the members of the Senate of the United States would drift to their seats. So Crane began reading letters which tended to support his state’s claim to the new plant and the benefits that would accrue therefrom.

Crane droned on. The Vice-President of the United States looked down on the top of Senator Crane’s massive head and became fruitfully preoccupied with thoughts of his own.

Then, quite suddenly, the line of Crane’s exposition changed. The Vice-President wasn’t quite sure at what precise point this had come about. He wasn’t aware of the change until some very strange words penetrated:

“ ... so, therefore, it has become starkly apparent that the American people have been denied the information which would have made them aware of their own deadly danger. Invasion from space is now imminent.”

The Vice-President tensed. Had the stupid idiot gone mad? Or had he, the Vice-President, been in a fog when vital, top-secret information had been made public?

He banged the gavel down hard, for want of a better gesture, and was grateful when a tall, dignified man with a look of deepest concern on his face rose from behind his desk out on the floor.

“Will the Senator yield to his distinguished colleague from Pennsylvania?”

Crane turned, scowling. “I will yield to no man on matters of grave import.” With that he turned and continued with his revelations. “The people of this nation have been deprived of the knowledge that the invasion from space has already begun. A vanguard of hideous, half-human creatures have even now achieved a beach-head on our planet. Even now, the evil hordes from beyond the stars...”

The Vice-President looked around in a daze. Had someone forgotten to brief him? Had that project come to a head overnight? The last he’d heard there had been much doubt as to--

“ ... The injustice perpetrated on the American people in this matter has been monstrous. And this is not because of any lack of knowledge on the part of the government. It has been because of the petty natures of the men to whom this secret has been entrusted. Jealousies have dictated policy where selfless public service was of the most vital importance...”

The floor was filling up. The visitor’s gallery was wrapped in hushed silence. Newsmen, informed of sensational developments, were rushing down corridors.

And the Vice-President was wondering why he hadn’t had the good sense to refuse the nomination.

“ ... These invaders from another planet are not strangers to the men in power. It is on record that they are inhuman monsters capable of killing without mercy--yet they are quite ordinary in appearance. They walk the streets, unsuspected, among us. It is on record right here in Washington that these creatures are not human but, rather, soulless androids, manufactured to destroy us, by a race so far ahead of us in scientific knowledge that we are like children by comparison...”

“Will the Senator yield to the Senator from Alabama?”

“I will not. I refuse to be gagged in the process of acquainting the American people with facts upon which their very survival depends.”

The floor was crowded now. The press and the visitors’ galleries were packed as Senator Crane’s words continued to boom forth.

And in the press gallery a reporter from the Sioux City Clarion looked at a representative of the London Times, and said, “Good God! He’s gone off his rocker!”

The Englishman, aloof but definitely enthralled, touched his mustache delicately and answered, “Quite.”

Frank Corson rang the bell and waited at the door of Rhoda Kane’s apartment. The door opened. She wore a pale blue brunch coat. Her hair glowed in the light of midmorning, but her face was pale and a little drawn.

Her eyes were slightly red, as though she might have been crying.

“Hello, Rhoda.”

“Hello, Frank.”

“I really didn’t expect to find you. I was going to write a note and slip it under the door.”

“I didn’t feel well today so I didn’t go to work.”

“May I come in?”

“Of course.”

Inside, a shadow of concern moved like a quick cloud across her beautiful face. “You don’t look well, Frank.”

“I’m quite all right, really. Haven’t been sleeping too well, but there’s been a lot on my mind.”

“I’ve been hoping you’d phone.”

“I wanted to but there didn’t seem to be anything to say. Nothing except that I’m sorry I let you down so miserably.”