Synthetic Men Page 10

  Norris Tapley dismissed the thought with a grunt of disgust. His dinner—pressed duck, truffles, champagne, and all the trimmings—was being brought on a little glass-and-chromium cart, and he turned his attention to it.

  The food was excellent, the best in the city. Soft music put him in a mood conducive to reflection and good digestion. And so he was able to partake heartily of this, his last meal; but his enjoyment was that of a condemned killer eating his final dinner—rather a bitter one.

  For Tapley wasn’t kidding himself that his abominable luck had in any way veered from its heartless path. Facts remained unchanged: he was jobless, wearing his only suit, hopeless of work. Tonight he was going to put the period on his haphazard life.

  In his abysmal self-pity, Tapley ignored the part shiftlessness and selfishness had played in his failure. It had been his way to spend his spare time in idleness, his spare cash on Sweepstakes tickets and craps. But those who fail never think of those things; and that was why he himself had failed.

  Tapley left the Colonial Club with the manager’s good wishes ringing in his ears, and warm food in his stomach. Only one thing was lacking—an after-dinner cigarette. He stepped into a saloon, walked over to the cigarette vending machine and put in his dime and nickel. At the last moment, he retrieved the coins and deposited them in the slots for a different brand from his usual one. He didn’t know why.

  When he shoved in the plunger, packs of cigarettes began to strike him in the stomach like corks from a popgun. They were literally geysering from the machine. Something had gone wrong. After the machine had gutted itself of that particular brand, Tapley counted twenty-nine packages of cigarettes at his feet.

  More than anything else, Tapley was frightened. He grabbed a couple of double handfuls of the smokes and left. Oddly, he was resentful of these peculiar twists of Fate. It was as though they had deliberately planned to disturb his last evening. Deeply troubled, he made his way home.

  * * *

  Suicide was a very simple matter. There was one bathroom on the fifth floor that held his dumpy fleabag of a room. Into it he locked himself, then drew a tubful of water. He unscrewed the bulb from the socket that dangled on a long cord above the bathtub. Light, coming mistily through the dirty window, cast an eerie glow over the tiny room.

  Tapley removed trousers, shoes and socks. At this final moment of life, fear suddenly smote him. Death—would it be quick and painless? What was it like to die? Would he be plunged into a typical evangelist’s hell, with brimstone bubbling on every hand and devils to prod him with pitchforks? Swearing softly at his weakness, the engineer stepped into the tub.

  He fumbled for the socket. Gripping the porcelain case with one hand, he prepared to insert his finger into the socket. One thrust—and death!

  Then he froze that way, as someone pounded on the door.

  “Herr Tapley! Herr Tapley!” It was the guttural voice of his German landlady. “Is you dere, Herr Tapley? It gives a man wants to see you about somet’ings!”

  “Hell!” Tapley hissed the word through locked teeth. “Well, who is it?”

  A man spoke. “Are you Norris Tapley?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Did you buy an Irish Sweepstakes ticket in the name of ‘Never Wynne’?”

  Shock hit the would-be suicide right in the solar plexus. Grotesquely, he kept standing there in the ankle-deep water, hands dangling.

  “I—yes, I did. Did I—” He couldn’t say the word.

  “Win?” the man laughed. “Boy, I’ll say you did! I’ve got a check for seventy-five thousand dollars for you! What’s more, you drew Blue Boy for the race, the favorite. If your horse wins, you’ll get one hundred and fifty grand!”

  * * *

  The next two hours were a whirlpool of excitement in which the jobless man was borne like a chip of wood, helplessly. He hadn’t realized he possessed so many friends. Too, there were legions of automobile salesmen, insurance salesmen, inventors. At midnight, he escaped out the back entrance and started walking, trying to realize his great good fortune.

  It was not strange that his thoughts should conjure up the vision of Dave Frazier. Nor that Frazier’s words should glow in his mind.

  “Luck isn’t a divine blessing—it’s an acute ability!”

  An acute ability! Maybe he had heard Andre, at the Colonial, whispering with the head waiter as he hesitated before the café! Maybe his eyes had somehow seen through the very mechanism of that cigarette vendor, to know that it was ready to go haywire.

  Maybe the flash of light from his ring had jarred his brain into that special sensitivity of which Frazier had spoken!

  “I like to think that something could happen at any time,” the physicist had said, “that would jolt a man’s consciousness into the plane where he’d have that boundless luck some individuals possess!”

  Tapley stood in the shadows with the whole thing flooding him with wonder. Then, suddenly, he knew that the thing of which Frazier had spoken had come to pass. He was one of those lucky people; he had that luck—and he couldn’t lose it. He couldn’t lose! With the idea blossoming magically in his being, he began to walk, then to trot, finally to run—toward Central Park.

  After he got to the park, it was forty minutes before he found Frazier. Covered with newspapers, the young physicist had draped his lanky frame on a bench. Tapley sank rude fingers into his arm and shook him from sleep.

  “Wh—what the devil!” Frazier sputtered, sitting up with a great rustling of papers.

  The lean, swart man who stood over him was grinning like a fiend.

  “Frazier!” he blurted. “You were right. I’m lucky. Lucky as sin. The whole world’s mine! I can’t lose any more even if—”

  Dave Frazier’s eyes went narrow and his lips firm.

  “Get hold of yourself, man,” he advised. “You’ve let bad luck ride you until—”

  “Oh, to hell with that!” Tapley laughed. “Listen, my friend!”

  In jerky, potent sentences, he told the whole story, finally waving the check in Frazier’s face.

  “So what do you think of that?” he concluded jubilantly.

  Frazier shook his head. “I think just like I did,” he said. “Any jolt might work the miracle. In your case, your ring did it.”

  “Talk about good luck rings!” Tapley beamed, and held the stone off to stare at it. “But look here!” He was frowning, abruptly. “That Sweepstakes ticket—what did my brain have to do with that?”

  “Nothing. That was pure luck—the old-fashioned kind. You were just in line for a break, after all these years. But the agent’s coming at that particular instant wasn’t luck. You heard him coming and knew the thoughts in his mind, unconsciously. And you delayed your suicide until he got there.”

  * * *

  Norris Tapley nodded slowly. “Whatever it was, in this case my luck is yours. You were talking about an invention. I’m going to back it for you, Frazier!”

  Frazier’s eyes lighted up like stirred coals. But then he shook his head.

  “I can’t let you risk that windfall on any idea of mine,” he said glumly.

  “Risk—ha! I don’t know what a risk is. I could back a buggy whip factory and make money. I’m going to sink all of my hundred and fifty thousand in your crazy idea when Blue Boy romps home. Now, just what was that notion of yours?”

  Frazier pushed strong fingers through thick blond hair. Emotion wrestled with his well-formed features.

  “I’m not man enough to refuse such an offer,” he murmured, “though I know the risk in bucking an outfit like Space-Craft. I’ve got faith in my idea, but—we’ll be using thousands where they’re backed by millions. You’re buying trouble, Tapley.”

  “We’ll break them and their millions,” said the other. His face was brutally cold and vigilant. “Something more than money is on our side. My luck! Bank on it, Frazier. It saved me from death tonight and gave me a hundred and fifty grand to start out new again. I’m going to run that m
oney to the sky. You figure out what you’ll need, right now. I’ll promote it. You and I are going places, Mister!”

  Needless to say, the afternoon the race was run, Blue Boy crossed the finish line three lengths to the good.

  Chapter III

  Lightships, Inc.

  Tapley and Frazier went to town, all right. Within three months, a new, experimental space ship appeared on the market. Weeks were all that were needed to skyrocket it to the peak in rocket-ship sales. Small, sturdy and fast, it had one advantage that all other makes lacked—cheapness of operation.

  Where Space-Craft’s luxury cruisers required tons of rocket fluid for a trip to Mars or Venus, Lightships—as the new trans-spatial vehicles were named—needed only a few hundred pounds of a powder as easily handled as sacks of flour. A lighting engineer of years before had given the clue upon which Frazier based his invention. [1] It enabled the partners to build ships capable of carrying a thousand passengers, yet smaller than a ten-passenger Space-Craft. The inevitable took place. Lightships drove all competitors out of business. With savage ruthlessness, Norris Tapley blocked Space-Craft at every turn in their fight for survival. And in the end, he won out. Frazier, wrapped up in his laboratory work, knew little of the deliberateness with which his partner had ruined the company which once refused them work.

  Soon, the Lightship plant spread over a thousand acres. A small city sprang up to house all the workers. And back of it all loomed—Tapley’s luck.

  Several times it had saved them from ruin. Once, when they were about to invest all their capital in the big, new plant, Tapley refused to agree to the site that seemed most logical. He took one look at it and shook his head. A month later, the land began to sink, and a gaping hole showed how right he had been.

  Sometimes he knew these things because the ring on his finger would begin to glow, until the warning almost frightened Tapley himself.

  But the first time he had to ride in a Lightship, something strange happened. The green stone began to burn. It seemed as live as a live coal. It burned through its setting and ate into Tapley’s skin, and would have burned the finger through the bone if Tapley had not turned back.

  From that day Tapley knew he must not ride in a Lightship—not in any ship, not even his own.

  Even in love, his luck held. He fell hard for a beautiful chorus girl whom every playboy in New York had been courting. But Tapley won her. He couldn’t lose, with his good fortune.

  Came the day when Norris Tapley sat in his luxurious office, looking down on the humming plant ten stories below his window. Money was pouring in like water through a head-gate. But it seemed slow to his greedy fingers.

  “I wish,” he mused, “that we’d get a chance at some real money. Something in the ten millions.”

  At that instant his televisor buzzed. Idly he flipped the switch and the office girl’s face appeared.

  “A gentleman to see you and Mr. Frazier, Mr. Tapley,” she informed him. “Will you step into Mr. Frazier’s office and talk to him there?”

  Tapley grunted, snapped off the televisor, and went through the door that joined their twin offices. His eye was immediately caught by a tall, solidly built man seated beside Frazier’s desk. There was a military set to the man’s shoulders, and his gray, clipped mustache looked white against a florid face.

  Frazier waved a hand. “My partner, Mr. Bruning. Norris, meet Mr. George Bruning, who says he’s got an offer for us that’ll make our ears perk up.”

  Tapley knew a quick tug in the region of his heart. He shook hands with the visitor. Bruning spoke.

  “Would twenty million dollars mean anything to you gentlemen?” he inquired softy. “An order for one thousand of your fastest ships?”

  At that moment, as Tapley withdrew his hand, he noticed the ring was glowing. He stared at it intently, then took a deep breath. He spoke slowly.

  “Is that real money you’re talking about?”

  * * *

  Bruning drew from an inside pocket a blue slip of paper, laid it on the desk. It was a check made out for twenty million dollars and endorsed by a solvent European country. Bruning said:

  “I’ll countersign that check the day you turn over to me one thousand ships, built to specifications.”

  “And what are your specifications?” inquired Dave Frazier, toying with his cigarette.

  Bruning looked sharply at him; then at Tapley.

  “Each ship must be equipped with ten heavy-caliber guns we will furnish you. The ships must be maneuverable within ten miles of the ground, not comparatively helpless, as is the case with ordinary ships. They must provide accommodations for 1500 men each.” Frazier stood up angrily. “Do I need to remind you—” he began; but Bruning’s hand halted him.

  “That the International Arms Agreement forbids construction of armed flying craft? Of course not. But, gentlemen, we are all business men. And confidentially, these ships will never fire a gun within thirty million miles of Earth. They will leave this planet secretly, destined for a far-distant world.”

  “Not interested,” Frazier clipped.

  “Wait a minute!” Tapley interrupted heatedly. “Of course we’re interested. I can’t see that we’d be breaking the letter of the law—”

  “That’s it exactly!” Bruning snapped his fingers. “The law forbids fighting ships, to forestall any such conflagration as took place in 1950. These ships will do all their fighting on Venus. Perhaps their guns will not be needed; we hope not. But in the interest of Venus, that backward planet, my country aims to put it under a modern, progressive rule—”

  “Like the type of rule that makes the International Arms Agreement necessary,” Frazier drawled. “Mister Bruning, you can sink your twenty million dollars in the bottom of the ocean for all I care. Lightships, Incorporated, is definitely not interested in this butchery of yours!”

  Involuntarily, Tapley looked at his ring. Its light was like a serpent’s eye, glowing coldly, warning him. He felt his blood run cold—until he thought of the millions in his grasp. He turned to Frazier and moved swiftly to his partner’s side, gripped his arm wrathfully.

  “Don’t be a damned fool!” he rasped. “This is our chance for some real profits. Don’t forget where you’d be if I hadn’t staked you. Sleeping under newspapers in the park! I’ve never asked for thanks before, but I do now. We’re accepting that offer, Frazier!”

  Frazier crossed his arms, glaring at his partner.

  “If you sign with Bruning, it will be my duty to the whole world to report it. And I won’t shirk. Good day, Mr. Bruning. And don’t forget your hat.”

  Tapley could only stare furiously as the foreign agent turned stiffly and left. Alone in the office, the two men seemed on the point of a physical battle, when the door reopened. It was a girl’s face which showed in the portal—the face of Evelyn, Tapley’s wife of three months.

  The engineer faced her sullenly, finding little of the pleasure in her beautiful, spoiled face that he had known at first.

  “You know I haven’t time for you during the day, Evelyn,” he snapped.

  “Not even for lunch with me?” Evelyn pouted. “You used to take me every day.”

  Frazier clapped him on the back good-naturedly.

  “Sure he has!” he laughed. “Come on, Norris. Let’s all run down to the Colonial Club for a celebration. Do you realize this is just one year since you walked in there and started a new life?”

  Tapley hadn’t. However, it did seem to call for some kind of blowout. He glanced at the ring. It had stopped glowing. Together, the three of them drove downtown and lunched sumptuously. But driving back afterward, Tapley’s temper went sour again. Surlily, he brought the argument up once more. Evelyn was horrified when she learned of the proposition.

  “Why, it would mean thousands of innocent lives!” she gasped. “Those poor Venusians; the most ignorant and yet the happiest beings on the four populated planets. Why can’t they leave them alone?”

  “That’s not our
problem,” her husband snapped. “You two talk like Sunday school teachers. Twenty million dollars!”

  Recklessly, he swung the car through a turn.

  “And maybe twenty million lives,” Dave Frazier flared. “Forget about it, Norris. I’ll never consent.”

  * * *

  Evelyn gave Tapley a cold-eyed stare. “Sometimes I wonder what kind of a man I married.”

  Tapley’s foot grew heavier on the accelerator.

  “You make me sick!” he snarled. “I wish to hell you were both dead and out of the way—”

  Fate selected that moment to send a taxi slewing wildly out of control around a corner. Had Norris Tapley been driving carefully, he might have dodged the thing. But he was driving fast and recklessly. Panic claimed the interior of the car.

  Evelyn shrieked and grabbed for the wheel. Dave Frazier threw himself across the dashboard, trying to shield the girl against the crash. Tapley suddenly swung the wheel. Rubber screamed and smoked. The street gyrated before their eyes as the machine flung itself headlong into the careening taxi. Tapley felt the door-catch give and knew he was flying out the door and into the air.

  The crash was heard for blocks. Tapley never knew when the cars collided, because he had landed, unaccountably, on his feet, and was running like mad to keep up with his racing body. Eventually he went down. Shaken, but unhurt, he picked himself up.

  Flames were boiling from the machines. They had meshed like crumpled toys. Broken glass, oil, gasoline and water doused everything within fifteen feet. With horror in his heart, the engineer staggered back to the curb and watched the spectacle.

  He knew Dave Frazier and Evelyn could never come out of the holocaust alive. It was ominously silent out there, save for the crackling of the flames. Someone touched his arm.

  “Mister, you were plain lucky!” a hatless, portly man breathed.