Synthetic Men Read online

  Trembling from head to foot and chilled to the marrow with a cold, clammy feeling, he softly got out of bed and glided to the door. A skylight over the hall bathed it in a pale, phosphorescent glow from a high moon. At a glance he saw that Dr. Pontius' door was open. His room was beside Allanna's and the scientist had closed his door on entering. Douglass had seen that, but why was it open now? Was Dr. Pontius prowling around the house? He wondered if the scientist had made the unnatural sounds.

  AS he watched the open door, Douglass thought he saw a green ghastly face appear in it for a moment. His blood ran cold and his knees banged together. Not a sound reached his ears, altho he listened with his hands cupped behind them.

  "Clang! Clang! Clang!" The great antique clock in the living room chimed suddenly. Douglass almost screamed. Then a grotesque face appeared in the scientist's doorway. The reporter recoiled like a snake. Almost at once he heard the pad of bare feet in the hall and by sheer force of will was he able to look out again.

  The hulking form of Jack Agar was retreating slowly down the hall! From his wrists and ankles dangled the torn straps that had held him to the table in the laboratory!

  "My God!" Douglass groaned through dry, parched lips. As though hearing, Jack Agar paused abruptly and turned his fiery eyes back from whence he had come. They seemed like the orbs of a tiger flaming in the night. Then he turned suddenly and entered another room, two doors beyond the one occupied by the scientist. More silence followed, beating down upon the reporter like the blows of a triphammer.

  What had Jack Agar done in the scientist's room? It seemed to Douglass that his hunch had materialized in the dead of a horrible night. But had the synthetic man actually killed his creator? The reporter could wait no longer to find out. With a bound he leaped into the hall and ran silently to the opposite room. Without hesitating he entered, fumbled for a lightswitch near the frame, and found it. The switch snapped.

  As part of his duty as a reporter, Douglass, had seen men hanged. But now as he crouched against the wall, he was terrified and appalled at what his eyes beheld. Dr. Pontius lay in a corner beside his bed, his head crushed like an eggshell!

  The reporter suddenly heard another dull thump and a hiss of air from a dying man's lungs. Swiftly his mind searched for a possible meaning to this. Then it dawned upon him that the butler must have fallen victim to the terror that was slinking like a mad gorilla through the house. He again heard the indistinct pad of feet. His blood throbbed at his throat and temples, sending cold, clammy chills over him. Where would the beast of the test tubes go next? To his or Allanna's room?

  Douglass crouched just inside the death-room door. A great shadow, ghastly and spectral, fell across the sill. He felt an urge to scream and smothered it. The murder-beast slunk past, his long arms dangling strangely at his sides, his lips curled into the same ominous leer, his nude body glistening under the light that filtered into the hall.

  The reporter was so utterly appalled that his wits seemed dull. It was fully a minute before he overcame his horror and stole a glance into the hall. The synthetic man crouched before the closed door of Allanna! He looked toward the reporter as if by instinct. Douglass dodged back out of sight and waited, expecting to see the beast tracking him down. After a few seconds he looked out again.

  Jack Agar had vanished. Douglass' heart almost stopped. Before he could control himself, he had leaped out into the hall. Instantly there came a blood-curdling scream from Allanna's bedroom. With terror striking at his mind, the reporter ran for her door. It was open wide and her room was filled with beastly muttering and stifled cries. Then he heard plaintive pleadings coming from the darkness. Pleadings from horrified feminine lips.

  Young Mr. Morton Douglass could stand no more. Mumbling dire things he bounded into the room, pausing to switch on the lights and take stock of the situation.

  The synthetic man was bending over Allanna as she lay in fear on her bed, her arms outstretched to ward off his deadly, murderous fingers. Douglass saw at a glance that he had her by the throat now and in a twinkling would beat her head to a pulp. The beast paid not the slightest attention to the sudden flood of illumination, but seemed bent only on murder.

  Douglass had a glimpse of pleading eyes peering at him through the beast's arms. For the first time in her life, Allanna was in mortal fear. The expression on her features caused the reporter to go stark mad. With the roar of a beast he flung himself forward, felt his nerveless fingers touch the clammy flesh of Jack Agar, and gain a hold.

  The Secret Destroyed

  IT seemed to him then that nobody could be closer to death, but in his insane fury it mattered not whether he came out victorious or had his head smashed in, so long as he gave Allanna a chance to escape. Gaining momentary control over his reeling, infuriated senses, he yelled loudly to the girl.

  "Run Allanna!" he shouted, using precious breath that he knew would be needed to protect himself from Jack Agar. "Call the police!"

  Allanna needed no urging. Like a wood nymph she sprang from her bed and ran, terrified, into the hall. Douglass heard her calling desperately but futilely to her uncle. Her feet sounded on the hall floor and then the reporter heard her scream again. He did not doubt but that she had discovered her uncle's gruesome form, stilled in death.

  Jack Agar's lips became discolored with a green, ghastly foam giving him the appearance of a rabid animal, as he turned slowly to face his antagonist. From his throat came the startling snarl of a jungle brute making a kill. But his actions were sluggish because of his dull, undeveloped wits. His great arms writhed through the air like serpents and the reporter ducked under them.

  Douglass stepped nimbly aside and delivered a clean, right-handed blow on his adversary's unwholesome chin. The synthetic man's eyes went strangely dull and listless, losing much of their savage, murderous lust. He faltered a trifle and ambled backward. The newspaper man followed like a trained pugilist and led again with a vicious left.

  The delicate flesh of Jack Agar's chin split in a horrible gash. A green liquid sprayed over the reporter, smelling like the damp, sour weeds of the sea. His eyes blazing furiously he lashed out with a potent savageness. Across his vision was a curtain of red and he cast caution aside to deliver another terrific right. Then Jack Agar's waving arm caught him in the grip of a boa. He sobered in the instant and was amazed at the supernatural strength of the creature. Jack Agar seemed to have the power of steel vises in each arm and they closed around the small of his back with menace.

  The newspaperman felt an agonizing pain through his middle. His blood seemed to turn to ice and his heart appeared to have suddenly stopped. Something told him he was going to explode. Then he looked into those terrible, fiery orbs. He tried to scream, but his voice was dead. Great balls of fire danced before him and he knew he was going into unconsciousness, for a fathomless black abyss yawned under them like open space. He felt himself falling, falling with a terrific wind racing past his ears.

  Then as it seemed he was at last going to strike terra firma at the bottom of the pit, he heard a terrific explosion. Through his reeling head ran the thought that he had actually exploded and his astral body was floating over his mortal remains. Something hit his ghost and knocked it strangely aside. Then he thought that he was gloating over something.

  And that something looked very much like the still form of Jack Agar with a round hole in the center of his brow from which poured a smelly green liquid. Other forms moved about like weaving ghosts; then he felt a cold, icy something on his forehead. Gradually objects began to assume definite shape and finally out of a jumbled nothing he recognized Allanna. From her deep-blue eyes ran glistening tears.

  "Oh, Mr. Douglass!" he heard her sob tearfully. "He did not kill you! Oh ...!" He saw her shudder violently and then a blue-uniformed man lifted her erect.

  "Take it easy, young lady," advised the officer. "It won't do to go into hysterics. He's alright!"

  Eager hands lifted the reporter to his feet. His head r
eeled and he lurched sideways. Hands caught him. Water was forced down his parched lips. Rapidly he emerged from the cloud behind which hovered death and oblivion.

  "W-what happened?" he managed to ask as he stood, tottering. A bluecoat glanced to a heap on the floor and nodded.

  "He had you in a bad way, young fellow!" the officer said with a grin. "In another second he'd have bashed your head like an eggshell! Murphy's slug got him right between the eyes."

  Allanna shivered and hid her face against the police captain who supported her. She sobbed convulsively. Douglass had a sudden thought.

  "Did he kill the butler, too?" he blurted, feeling the strength returning to his trembling legs. He searched the officers' eyes. The bluecoats nodded as one.

  "And the old man in the other room," said one of them smoothly. "Bashed in ..."

  "I know all about that," the reporter cut in quickly to save Allanna from hearing further. "The beast will never kill another man, I hope!"

  "Aye!" interjected the captain. "He's as dead as a door-nail!"

  "I had a hunch something like this would happen," said Douglass shaking his head sadly. "Dr. Pontius violated all the unwritten laws of nature by creating synthetic human life. Man should not try to duplicate the work of the Master Creator. I am sorry for Dr. Pontius, but glad that he will carry his secrets to the grave." Douglass instinctively glanced toward his room across the ball where his coat containing his papers reclined on a chair-back. He wondered if the papers had been touched. Without hesitation he went to the room, removed the notes from his inner pocket and strode to the open fireplace near the foot of the bed. His hands trembled and he muttered softly to himself.

  "He told me he had no written formula," he mumbled, glancing at a paragraph in his notes that revealed the secret of synthetic life. "So here goes the works. The secret will remain a secret as far as I'm concerned!"

  A match scraped along the fireplace stones. It was held to the sheaf of foolscap. A flame illuminated the drawn features of the reporter. He held the burning documents until the flame reached his shaking fingers; then dropped the twisted mass into the grate with a feeling that he was doing mankind a great favor.

  Within a year the house of horror had been transformed into one of sunniness. The pickled bodies of Jack and Joe Agar had been sent to Tyburn and with them had gone everything scientific Dr. Pontius had possessed. Allanna had fallen into the wealth her uncle had left, but her husband, the young Mr. Morton Douglass, continues to be the right hand man of Amesbury of the Globe.

  The End

  [1] Radiant energy is classified according to the wavelengths of the rays. There are the visible light rays whose wavelength is between .000029 and .000015 inches. Wavelengths of energy longer than the longest light wave gives us the infra-red heat waves and still longer waves gives us radio. Waves shorter than the short waves of light are the ultra-violet, still shorter are the X-ray which are about .0000004 inches in length. Gamma, rays of radium are still shorter being about 1/1000 the length of the X-ray while at very end of the spectrum we have so far discovered, are the cosmic rays being less than a thousandth of the length of the gamma rays. The Q-ray therefore is an extremely short wavelength lying between the gamma ray and the cosmic ray.

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  Song of Death,

  by Ed Earl Repp

  Amazing Stories November 1938

  Short Story - 5799 words

  CHAPTER I

  Time for Murder

  It never occurred to Vance, until the morning when Dyson’s car rolled up before the house, that there might be a practical use of the thing he had discovered. But as he stood there in the second story window looking down onto the graveled horseshoe drive, the plan hit him with such force that he trembled visibly. His face became alive with an intensity that made his sallow skin grow tight over his cheek-bones.

  A practical use—there was the test of every laboratory achievement, to determine whether or not it was a worthwhile one. He had thought this one just a freak of acoustical science. He had toyed with it in the laboratory until he knew it had great possibilities as a show-trick, but such a use as the one that now occurred to him had been undreamed-of. But there is always a useful purpose for any new discovery, he had found, however impractical it may seem.

  And the purpose to which Vance was going to put his discovery was murder.

  He turned, now, and left his bedroom. His face was still sleep-wrinkled and his hair tousled, though it was ten o’clock. He hurried down the hall, descended the stairs, and went to open the front door. Dyson stood there, framed blockily in the portal, when he opened it. His face was sullen and contemptuous, and his clipped gray moustache seemed to bristle with distaste. Dyson’s skin was healthy-looking and firm, and his eyes, though he was over sixty, were as clear and sharp as those of a much younger man.

  Vance put a smile on his lips as he invited, “Come on in. It’s good to see you, Father.”

  “Don’t ‘Father’ me,” Dyson clipped. “Just remember Ellen’s dead, now. I’m no longer any kin of yours, in-law or otherwise.”

  Vance moistened his lips. Within one second of their meeting for the first time in a year, the old trouble had risen again and left them both standing tense and angry. They stood for a second glaring at each other. Then Vance raised his shoulders and let them fall. “As you like,” he said. “But don’t forget that I’ve suffered too. I loved Ellen. Her death was as much a shock to me as it was to you.”

  Dyson’s fine lips lifted in a sneer. “I’d smash your yellow face in for that,” he breathed. “But I don’t even want to soil my hands with you. You loved Ellen, did you? You loved her so much you broke her heart and sent her back to me after two hellish years with you! Two years! I wonder how any woman could stand two days!”

  A cold rage built up in Vance’s thin body. His skinny fists clenched as he faced the older man, and then he turned and muttered, “Let’s sit down, anyway. No use digging up old grievances.”

  But as he led the way to the library he would have liked to have turned on Dyson and beaten the life out of him. Only he knew he couldn’t. His father-in-law was an ex-military man, and certain life-long habits, such as physical fitness, he had carried into private life when he retired. He knew that Dyson, with all his sixty-three years, could whale the daylights out of him, though he was scarcely thirty. But then he remembered the way those rats had died up in his laboratory—without a sign on their bodies—and he smiled thinly.

  He knew that his father-in-law had never liked him, any more than he had cared for him. He remembered, too, the ill grace with which he had given his daughter to him in marriage four years ago. Well, maybe it had been a mistake at that.

  Though, for the first few months after they were married, Vance and his wife had got along very happily. But after that a hundred little things had arisen between them that gradually turned Vance’s love to hate, though Ellen still followed him around with a dog-like devotion that disgusted the scientist. She was one of those persons who are disgustingly cheerful in the morning, whereas Vance was never ready to wipe the scowl off his face before ten o’clock. Then, too, she carried the “married-lover” business to an extreme; every time he had to go down town for a few hours, she had to kiss him good-bye as though he were leaving for a year. God knows, there were many times when he wished he were!

  In the first place, Vance reminded himself, he had only married her as a matter of convenience anyway. He needed money to carry on his laboratory work in physics, and the idea of teaching in a university to get money for his experiments was distasteful to him. So, when he met the pretty young daughter of wealthy Henry Dyson, he got the idea of marrying her and letting her allowance support him in luxury.

  A pang of regret gripped him as he offered Dyson a seat in the library. For the first time he wished he had put up with Ellen and not made life such a hell for her that she went back to her father. Because now, with her dead from an automobile accident, her father
was going to throw him out…

  Only the girl’s intervention, for a love that she still had not lost, had made Dyson allow him to stay on here, with an allowance of a hundred a month. With Ellen dead, that intervention no longer mattered.

  Dyson’s low voice brought him out of his remorseful thoughts. “I only wish I were about ten years older,” he was saying. “If I were, I’d kill you the way I would step on an ant. At that age, I wouldn’t care so much about being hung for it. God knows you deserve killing if anyone ever did!”

  Vance bristled, “You’re going a little too far when you say that. After all, the worst you can say of me was that I told her I didn’t love her any more. And women don’t die of broken hearts these days.”

  “No,” Dyson agreed, shaking his head slowly. “They don’t die of broken hearts—but sometimes they kill themselves over scoundrels like you!”

  “Kill themselves!” Vance gasped. He felt a cold feeling in his stomach. They’d told him Ellen died in an automobile accident.

  “Yes. That accident could have been avoided. There wasn’t a trace of skid marks on the road where her car went off the cliff. Ellen deliberately drove over the edge.” Dyson’s brown eyes burned into the other man’s.

  The scientist went rigid. His nature was shocked to its very bottom by the terrible news, for he could not escape the thought that it was he who had caused Ellen to kill herself.

  Dyson went on grimly, “That’s why I came here this morning, to tell you that. Perhaps you have human feelings enough to realize what kind of a thing you’ve done.” He stood up and reached for his hat. “There’s another reason I came here, Vance,” he went on with obvious relish of his position. “I came to tell you to be out in two weeks. This is my property, and my house. If you aren’t out in two weeks I’ll come in and break every damned piece of equipment you’ve got here.”