Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 14, No. 71, October 1949

The Singing Diamonds by Helen McCloy

Like Q. Patrick, Helen McCloy has won a prize in all four EQMM contests to date — and may she continue to, ad infinitum. The Q. Patrick foursome of stories was distinguished by a remarkable level of quality; Helen McCloy’s “Chinoiserie,” “The Other Side of the Curtain,” “Through a Glass, Darkly,” and now, “The Singing Diamonds” rival the Q. Patrick quartet in sheer, all-around excellence...

The tale of “The Singing Diamonds” was born in July 1948 when the author followed with great interest the successive news reports of the “flying discs.” When Helen McCloy sees something unusual in a newspaper, she generally forgets to cut it out until the paper has become so old that another member of the family has disposed of it in the interests of good housekeeping. But as source material for Helen McCloy the “flying discs” were not to be denied: this time the other member of the family carefully saved the clippings, after Miss McCloy had mentioned their fictional possibilities.

But all that the clippings really gave Miss McCloy was a basic idea. Read consecutively, the “flying disc” reports created more mysteries than they solved. The last two reports in her file were distinctly different in tone and content from the earlier news accounts — a fact which crept into Miss McCloy’s final story, as you will see. Also, the so-called scientific explanations — every one of them — contained within themselves their own refutations — just as in Miss McCloy’s fictionized version.

The really difficult problem of adapting the “flying discs” to the “singing diamonds” was to invent some reasonably plausible explanation which would cover all the facts and still give the author a satisfactory ending for her story — an explanation, moreover, that would be different from all the other possible theories suggested in the newspaper reports. This was so difficult a problem to solve that more than once Helen McCloy came near casting the idea aside and looking for an entirely different plot idea. But the “flying discs” were not to be denied: Miss McCloy persisted until she had given her psychiatric detective, Dr. Basil Willing, all the clues and deductions he needed.

Do you want a layman’s psychiatric explanation for Helen McCloy’s persistence? It goes back to her childhood, as so many psychiatric explanations do. Miss McCloy recently came upon an old diary of hers — a childish, misspelled daybook — in which she found this entry, dated November 16th, 1914: “Read and read Sherlock Holmes.”

How many of us were doing the same thing at about the same time! Surely the Old Maestro was a persistent man, and many of us learned well under his ’tec tutelage...

Her name was Mathilde Verworn. She came to Basil Willing’s office at the hospital one day in July when Manhattan panted under a sky the hot, throbbing blue of an alcohol flame. Her face was a stolid mask of meat. Where bone structure showed through, it was meagre — buttonhole mouth, knobby nose, small, round eyesockets. It was not the first time Basil had seen an apparently healthy figure in his patient’s chair. Agile, wiry types had resilience. It was these solid, unyielding men and women who came to the psychiatrist.

“Dr. Willing, is there such a thing as collective hallucination?” Her speech had a faintly foreign flavor.

“It’s never been proved. If two people had precisely the same hallucination it would be as strange as if two people had the same dream.”

“What about all those people who saw and heard the Singing Diamonds?”

“Probably malobservation — a different thing. The newspapers called it ‘mass hysteria’ but hysteria doesn’t begin and end with one incident. I’d call it the effect of suggestion on unstable imaginations. Like the Flying Disc scare a year ago. Why do you ask? Were you...?”

“Yes.” At last she looked at him directly.

“Surely that isn’t why you came to me?”

“No. I came because of what happened... afterward. If you followed the newspaper stories you may recall that there were five circumstantial eye-witnesses — MacDonald, Sanders, Flaherty, Dr. Amherst, and Mrs. Kuzak. Counting me, that’s six. I never heard of them before. I don’t suppose any of them ever heard of me, as my story wasn’t printed. But, Dr. Willing, in the last thirteen days four of us six have... died.” Her eyes fled before his gaze. Her wide face blanched. Even her blood was fleeing... “Sanders, Flaherty, Amherst, and Mrs. Kuzak. MacDonald and I seem to be the only ones left. What’s going to happen to us?”

“What makes you think these people have died?”

“Think? I know!” She took a bundle of clippings out of her handbag. “I’m one of those who read every page of the morning paper. Even the obituary page.”

He spread out the clippings on his desk.

Suddenly at her home in East Orange, N. J., on July 13, Sarah Ann (Sally) beloved wife of Samuel Kuzak, and daughter of Prosper and Maria Morelli. Funeral private...

N. Y., July 15

Clarence V. Flaherty, retired police sergeant, formerly attached to the 15th precinct, died suddenly at his home, 93–48 Mimosa Boulevard, Jackson Heights, last night. After dinner Mr. Flaherty, who lived with his widowed mother, went out in his backyard to cool off. When Mrs. Flaherty finished washing the dishes and went out to sit with him, he was dead. Mr. Flaherty will be remembered as the police sergeant who captured two members of the Harsch gang of jewel thieves after a gun battle on Madison Avenue three years ago...

Charleston, S. C., July 20 —

A Columbia Airlines passenger plane burst into flame shortly after it crashed here tonight killing the pilot, co-pilot, and fourteen passengers. The only survivor was Miss Eleanor Godfrey, airline hostess, thrown out of the plane before fire broke out. “/ had just been to the pilots’ compartment to ask for help in quieting one of the passengers, a sailor, who had been drinking before he boarded the plane,” Miss Godfrey told reporters. “The pilot, Captain Sanders, was at the controls. The copilot, Lieutenant Becker, came back with me and talked to the sailor. Then an earthquake seemed to hit the plane and all the lights went out...”

Boston, Mass., July 21 The Reverend Dr. Alexander Amherst, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, was found dead in his bed by a chambermaid this morning at seven when she knocked on his door to wake him. He is survived by a daughter, Mrs. Lawrence Llewellyn...

Basil laid the clippings aside. “What makes you think these were four of the people who saw and heard the Singing Diamonds?”

“But, Dr. Willing, it is so! Look!” Again Mathilde Verworn laid a bundle of clippings on his desk.

N. Y., July 6 —

Scientists yesterday were unable to explain the alleged Singing Diamonds reported by observers in several states. The A.P. states that Captain F. L. Sanders, ex-Navy pilot now with Columbia Airlines, reports seeing “nine flat, elongated squares, like the pips on a nine of diamonds, flying in V-formation at 1,500 miles an hour, at 10 p.m. last night, six miles north of Chicago. He was alone in a plane flying at 20,000 feet to test a new high octane gas.

The first published account came from Donald MacDonald, rancher of Deep Gulch, Montana. On July 1st at 11:55 p.m. he saw “three objects, bright, flat and diamond-shaped,” flying over his ranchhouse at a speed he claims to have calculated exactly as 621 miles an hour. They flew at a great height with a strange resonance like the humming or singing of a high tension wire in the wind.

Dr. Anders Verworn, Professor of Astrophysics at Manhattan University, suggested crystallized ice, formed far above the earth’s surface, as a possible explanation. “Artificial ice crystals have been made in the laboratory two feet wide,” he said. “Natural crystals are only a few thousandths of an inch wide. They are not diamond shaped. They do not make a humming sound. As I said a month ago in my address to the graduating class at McGill University, people who insist on seeing mysteries in nature should be more careful about spreading stories based on insufficient data, inaccurately observed and uncritically analyzed.”

Basil looked up. “This Dr. Verworn is your husband?”

“Yes. Anders tells reporters there is no such thing. Then suppose I, his wife, should say I had seen them? It would have been bad for his career. He didn’t understand that. He urged me to give my story to the papers. But I knew better. I kept silent. Success means much to my husband. When we married we were fellow students at the University of Vienna and poor, so poor! I gave up my own studies to take care of him. I marketed, cooked, mended, washed — more like a mother than a wife. We saved money to come to America. He worked his way up to a full professorship and got a job as technical adviser to Glueck & Riddle, makers of astronomical instruments. The salary he invested in their stock and became a partner. When another partner sued him once he was so frightened, like a little boy. I told him to put the stock in my name so they couldn’t take it away from him and he did. But it was then I first realized how our long struggle had left its mark on him.”

Basil went on reading.

N. Y., July 7 —

Six P-515 from Mitchell Field with cameras and radar scoured the sky from New York to Poughkeepsie for Singing Diamonds last night without success. A spokesman for Army Air Force Public Relations said: “All these witnesses saw and heard something, but I cannot believe that any foreign power has developed a radio-guided missile that will go 1,500 miles per hour as Singing Diamonds are said to do.”

New York’s first celestial diamonds appeared yesterday evening when a retired police sergeant, Clarence V. Flaherty, formerly of the 15th precinct, Manhattan, described his view of “twelve, brilliant, fiery objects” flying from north to south above his home in Jackson Heights an hour after sunset. “I heard the humming,” he told U.P. “Sweet and shivery like the plucking of harp strings.” Mrs. Sally Kuzak, housewife of East Orange, New Jersey, said she saw and heard two of the strange objects above her home yesterday at 4:00 p.m. — their first appearance by daylight. Mrs. Kuzak, trained as an airplane spotter for Civilian Defense during the war, described them as “streamlined diamonds, bright as spun aluminum, speeding at 1,000 miles per hour at a height of 30,000 feet with an almost supersonic humming, shriller than an airplane engine.” The Reverend Dr. Alexander Amherst of the Church of the Ascension, Boston, Mass., told A.P. he was walking in his garden at Brookline before breakfast this morning when he heard a humming sound “sweet, high, and clear.” He looked up and saw a procession of six diamondshaped objects flash across the sky “bright as silver.” He said they crashed on a hillside and he telephoned the local office of the FBI.

Dr. Tamara Radanine, assistant professor of Social Psychology at Manhattan University, told reporters that the whole affair threw a lurid light on the hysterical imagination of the American people, drugged as they are by comic books, radio, movies, and detective stories. “Motivation is obscure,” added Dr. Radanine. “But everything is interpreted in terms of personalistic dimensions suggesting widespread egoinvolvement and pseudologica phantastica. Like Orson Welles’ Martian broadcast, it illustrates their highly consistent structuration of the external stimulus world.”

N. Y., July 8 —

Though the “Singing Diamonds” contrive to bypass meteorologists, astronomers, and anyone else equipped with a telescope and common sense, they are still blazing and humming before the popeyes of John Q. Public and his gullible missus. Two men coming home from a poker party in Milwaukee at q a.m. were rumored to have seen two “Singing Diamonds” in a dogfight “like a couple of fighter planes.” And a rumor alleged that a woman in a Detroit suburb said a “Singing Diamond with hands” came right down out of the sky to slap her in the face. A good reason for NOT seeing “Singing Diamonds” was proffered by Clarence V. Flaherty, first New Yorker to report one: “This kidding is getting pretty hard to take.”

A spokesman for the Frelinghuysen Research Corporation told reporters that octagonal sheets of metal which can stand a pull of 200,000 times their own weight before they disintegrate are being exploded daily in an underground workroom there. These objects revolve at 1,200 miles an hour and an untrained observer might mistake an octagon for a lozenge or diamond. The octagonals are never allowed outside the underground workroom, even at night.

A Manchurian report relayed by Reuters states that Ching Fu, a rice exporter’s son formerly a student at Leland Stanford, claims to have seen “six brilliant lozenges that flew fast enough to make a singing in my ears” while he was piloting his private plane from Peiping to Shanghai to escape the advancing Communists.

N. Y., July 9 —

“Singing Diamonds” had gone the way of “Flying Discs” and sea serpents yesterday when a Chicago jeweler tried to cash in on the mass hysteria by advertising: “Our diamonds don’t sing but how they shine!” Billy Brush, the song-writer, has composed a new song that begins: “My heart is a diamond that flies and sings when I see you!” In Philadelphia a toy manufacturer admitted sending aloft dozens of diamond-shaped kites as a publicity stunt in the last few days. Soviet military attaché, Grigori Nyetchkoff, explained the “Singing Diamonds” to reporters by saying: “Either Americans are importing too much vodka or some Russian Paul Bunyan is breaking up the old Imperial crown that was crusted with diamonds.” Kurt Verworn, associate professor of Political Economy at Manhattan University, had his own theory: “Just propaganda for war. People are being stirred up so they’ll believe some foreign power is testing a new device in preparation for another Pearl Harbor.”

“Well, Dr. Willing? Am I right?” demanded Mrs. Verworn. “Didn’t four of six people who talked as if they had really seen and heard something they called ‘Singing Diamonds’ die less than two weeks afterward?”

“Counting Ching Fu and yourself there were seven credible witnesses,” amended Basil. “And apparently you’ve spotted something all the wire services missed — four of the seven have died, apparently three natural deaths and one accident. Why come to me?”

“I have heard that you are a psychiatric consultant of the district attorney’s office. I thought you might tell me if these people were killed because they had seen Singing Diamonds and how it was done. It seems the act of a maniac and... I want to protect myself, since I saw them, too.”

Basil leaned back, studying the frightened eyes in the heavy, unimaginative face. “Tell me what happened when you saw them.”

“We live on Morningside Heights in a little house with a garden. We dine late in summer because of daylight saving. My husband will not dine before candlelight, as he calls it. I was alone on a window-seat in the living room waiting for dinner and eating a little candy because I get hungry at the same hour all the year round. It was just after sunset. The air was a lovely blue color like smoke. Suddenly I saw five, bright, diamond-shaped objects pass swiftly across a clear patch of sky between two clouds. All the time I saw them I heard a humming — like the unearthly murmuring when you cover your ear with a seashell. They were larger and brighter than stars. I didn’t think much about it then but now — after all these deaths... Dr. Willing, what shall I do?”

Basil hesitated, then: “Mrs. Verworn, you’ll have to face every possibility however fantastic and disconcerting. There were Japanese who died several weeks after they were exposed to radioactivity from the atomic bomb. If by any chance these deaths were caused by some new form of radiation, I can’t help you. We don’t know enough about the effects of radiation yet. It seems more likely that you and the other witnesses saw some device no one was supposed to see — a military or trade secret, which you had not the technical knowledge to recognize for what it was. Of course you might describe it eventually to someone equipped to recognize it from your description and the owners of the secret, reading the newspaper accounts, would realize that possibility. If they were sufficiently criminal and their secret sufficiently important, it’s not entirely inconceivable that they might arrange to liquidate the involuntary eye-witnesses before they talked too much. They could get the names from the newspapers.”

Her relief was enormous, pathetic. ‘‘Then I am safe? I did not give my story to the newspapers! These people cannot know my name!”

“Did you give your story to anyone else besides your husband?”

“I told Kurt and—”

“I was going to ask you about Kurt Verworn. A relative?”

“Our adopted son. Like many immigrants we had cousins who came to America a generation earlier. After Anders made his success here we looked them up. We found a family living on an Ohio farm and adopted the son. He is twenty-eight now, but — more like a guest than a son. Born in this country, all his ideas are American — even his manners or lack of manners. I also told Tamara Radanine, a young Russian-American who teaches at the University. She was mentioned in one of those clippings, too. Reporters always telephone University people when something inexplicable occurs. Like the reporters, I thought Tamara might be able to explain the Singing Diamonds because she is a psychologist. The only other person I told was Clare Albany.”

“Any particular reason for telling her?”

“She is a member of the Fortian Society. They make a hobby of collecting strange happenings. Clare, like the others, promised not to tell anyone else.”

Basil summed up: “Then any harm that comes to you as a consequence of your seeing the Singing Diamonds must come from one of these four since no one else knows you saw them.”

“Harm to me? From my husband, my son, and my two best friends among women? Impossible, Dr. Willing!”

“I should like to meet these four without their knowing why I wish to meet them.”

“Clare is coming to dinner tonight. Anders and Kurt will be there. I could invite Tamara. If you would come, too?”

“I shall be delighted. Meanwhile, stay with crowds until dinner time. Each person who died was alone at the moment of death...”

That afternoon, in a little office on Pine Street, Basil showed Mathilde’s clippings to his former commanding officer, Admiral Custis Laidlaw of Naval Intelligence. He reached for a telephone, asked for “File 29-B.” When it came, he selected two clippings and handed them to Basil.

Wilkens County Chronicle

Deep Gulch, July 13

We regret to announce the sudden death of our respected fellow citizen Donald MacDonald, proprietor of the Three Star Ranch thirty miles south of Deep Gulch. Mr. MacDonald, who lived alone with two cowhands, was found dead early this morning at the entrance of his corral by one of the hands — Josiah Horton. He and the other hand, Arthur Drake, said that the death must have occurred while they were still asleep in their bunk; house...

San Francisco Journal

S. F., July 10 —

Memorial services will be held today at the Bhuddist Temple of the Golden Lotus for Ching Fu, nephew of Ching Sheng, of this city. The nephew was killed in an airplane crash in China two days ago...

“We’re jittery about surprises from the air,” said Laidlaw. “Subconscious memories of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Unfortunately, Army Air Force failed to keep its search for the Singing Diamonds secret. A new and shiny lieutenant in Public Relations spilled the beans. I cannot believe that any foreign power has developed a radio-guided missile that will go 1,500 miles per hour — could the fool have put it more plainly?”

Basil grinned. “He might have mentioned the initial of the foreign power’s name.”

“About as smart as shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. I’m happy to say that young man is now stationed on a lonely Pacific island, and Naval Intelligence has taken over. Pretext: Sanders, a Navy Reserve pilot. These clippings are a lesson in the manufacture of public opinion. The first stories are skeptical hut open-minded. In the last two, after we took over, what a difference! The words Singing Diamonds are always printed in quotation marks. Nice touch, that. The ‘reports’ have become ‘rumors’ overnight. The most improbable are chosen for publication. Other witnesses are discouraged by Flaherty’s complaint about ‘kidding,’ and John Q. Public is reminded that most modern mysteries are advertising gags. Hasn’t a toy manufacturer ‘admitted’ — another nice word, implying accusation — that he sent up diamond kites?”

“Did he?”

“There was no toy manufacturer. Billy Brush did write that song — at my suggestion.”

“You might have done better with your scientific stuff,” ventured Basil. “The story on the octagonals at the Frelinghuysen laboratories is spoiled by the last sentence, saying the octagonals are never let out of the workroom, even at night.”

“You just can’t teach scientists to slant things for propaganda purposes!” complained Laidlaw. “The Wave who mimeographed their report for press release was told to omit that last sentence. She forgot.”

“What Pacific island is she on now?”

Laidlaw laughed. “She’s still here. The Navy is always gallant even to its own women. And it was no worse than the stuff the scientists themselves were putting out, Verworn and Radinine. Anyway we made Singing Diamonds ridiculous so the public would forget and no foreign power would guess we were interested. Then this Russian, Nyetchkoff, talks to reporters and he jokes about it, too. That didn’t make us happy. Was he as anxious to discourage public interest as we were?”

“Of course it was you who kept the wire services from picking up those six deaths,” said Basil. “Did you get any information about them?”

“A little. We looked for some connection with... a foreign power. There wasn’t any. Then we looked for some personal connections among the people who had died. Nothing there, though come to think of it now, MacDonald went to Manhattan University fifteen years ago. Must have been about the same year as Kurt Verworn, but there were seventy-three students in the class and there was no mention of Kurt Verworn in MacDonald’s papers. Finally, we looked for something — anything — which these six people, apparently so various and scattered, had in common. There were just two things. First, all those who died had asthma, except the pilot, Sanders, and — this is a curious detail — he had a fiancée who had asthma. Second: three of the six — Amherst, MacDonald, and Mrs. Kuzak — had a box of candied ginger in the house.”

“Any autopsies?”

“Sanders and Ching Fu were burned in the plane crashes. MacDonald and Mrs. Kuzak were cremated before we got to them. Mrs. Flaherty and Amherst’s daughter agreed to autopsies. We found nothing.”

“What did you look for?”

“Radiation burns. Apparently Flaherty and Amherst died from the effect of chronic asthma on the heart. We examined the wreckage of Sanders’ plane and the hillside where Amherst said Singing Diamonds had crashed. No soap. The airport was in radio-telephone communication with Sanders two minutes before the crash. Their records report the conversation.”

Basil read the slip of paper Laidlaw took from the file. Sanders speaking. Coming down in 40 minutes and — Listen, Jim! Something bad is going to happen. I’m losing control and — God! the Singing Diamonds!

“Anyone else on that plane report Singing Diamonds?”

“Only the hostess survived. She was too busy quieting that drunken sailor to notice anything else. We asked her if the sailor could have been faking drunkenness — a plant to get the co-pilot away from Sanders. She wasn’t sure. Every lead we followed was a blind alley. Even Flaherty and the Harsch gang. Every member of the gang is now in Sing Sing.”

Basil rose to go. “It seems a pretty coldblooded business. Exterminating everyone who saw and heard Singing Diamonds.”

“War is a coldblooded business.”

“If it is war... Have you no other theory?”

Laidlaw smiled. “Rather believe in voyagers from outer space? If that’s it, Naval Intelligence is going to seem very provincial, interpreting everything that happens in terms of this planet and its miniscule wars...”

“What Dr. Tamara Radanine would call ‘consistent structuration of the external stimulus world.’ ”

“Who? Oh, the she-psychologist. We asked her for some dope on this and she gave us the usual hooey.”

“Then this is what it boils down to: Science fiction or E. Phillips Oppenheim?”

“What do you think?”

“I have glimmerings of a third explanation that would cover all the facts.”

“Even Ching Fu?”

Basil weighed the question. “Yes, even Ching Fu. The Chinese are fond of ginger...”

The Verworns’ living room overlooked a yard cunningly planted to increase the sense of space. A half-moon of close-cropped turf at the center, its chord the house wall. Along its curve the neat grass gave way to a tangle of flowering shrubs and trees. On one side was a vacant lot without any wall. There the tangle of cultivated shrubs had been infiltrated by wind-blown weeds so that the garden blended almost imperceptibly with the wasteland beyond.

Mathilde welcomed Basil warmly and introduced her husband — a slender, brown man with an ancient Roman face — predatory nose, narrow lips, watchful eyes. His bow was Continental. Basil almost caught a ghostly clicking of heels.

After he had acquired a cocktail, he sat on the window-seat beside a girl in plain black with a string of crystal beads. Her brown hair was braided, wound around her head. Her gray eyes were speculative. “What do you think of the academic world?” she asked abruptly.

“Is this the academic world?”

“A cross-section.” Merriment glinted in her eyes. “A full professor of astro-physics, Anders Verworn, and an associate professor of political economy, Kurt Verworn. Even I am a humble assistant professor of social psychology. My name is Tamara Radanine.”

“What about Mrs. Albany?” Basil asked.

“Clare? She is a mystery.”

Clare Albany’s figure was small and well proportioned, her flesh still firm and slenderly rounded. Platinum rinse made the smooth scrolls of hair a uniform silver. The brilliant petunia-pink of lips and nails drew the eye away from wrinkles in her cheeks, veins on the backs of her hands. Her dress was a distracting fantasy of hyacinth lace. In either ear she wore an enormous star ruby. Against all this paleness her eyes stood out — dark, lustrous, passionate.

“She says she is the widow of a shoe manufacturer,” Tamara was saying. “His lungs were bad and they had to live in Arizona. When he died she came to New York and took an apartment on Park Avenue. That was a year ago.”

“Nothing very mysterious there.”

“No? Then perhaps you can tell me why a woman like that — a woman of the restaurant, theatre, and night club world — wants to make friends with people like us, scholars and hermits?”

“She is a friend of yours?”

A little color came into the lean cheeks of Dr. Radanine. “You think I’m dreadful to talk this way about my hostess and my fellow guest, but it’s my occupational disease — social psychology.”

“As your accomplice, I have no right to object. I’m interested for several reasons. And you make it interesting. I’m surprised at that.”

“Why?”

“I read an interview with Dr. Tamara Radanine about the Singing Diamonds.”

“Oh, that!” She laughed. “Isn’t ‘consistent structuration of the external stimulus world’ a beautiful phrase?”

“I like ‘pseudologica phantastica’ better.”

“Some boy in Navy Public Relations asked me for a statement. I gave him the sort of dope they expect from a professor. Clare was furious. She’s a Fortian.”

“Did you meet her through the Verworns?”

“I forget where I first met her. She enrolled in the summer school when she first came to New York, and soon she knew everyone on the faculty. That is, everyone she considered worth cultivating. Everyone she takes trouble with is selected for some particular reason.”

“What’s the reason here?”

“It could be Mathilde. She’s so respectable and in some subtle way Clare wouldn’t be quite respectable unless she had someone like Mathilde along. Or it could be Kurt. He’s the kind of man Clare would like to marry. His book — What Inflation Means To You — was a bestseller.”

“Perhaps he will be the lucky man.”

“I think not.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Only one. Kurt is engaged to marry me.”

Basil took another look at the young man, tall, angular, loose-jointed with a shock of sandy hair. His speech was almost aggressively American and Middlewestern. Basil recalled Mathilde’s complaint. His ideas are American, even his manners or lack of manners...

Double doors were sliding back. A maid appeared in the doorway to announce dinner. Beyond her a long table laid with glass and silver glittered like ice in the candlelight. Basil was placed on his hostess’ right, with Tamara on the other side, Clare and Kurt opposite. His start was almost guilty when Clare’s light, rapid voice lanced across the table: “What were you two talking about so quietly on your window seat?”

He responded swiftly: “The Singing Diamonds.”

There was a sudden hush — the hush that follows a blunder. Basil went on: “All the explanations offered at the time were ingenious, yet none were true for there was one fact that none of them took into account. The fact that everyone of the six coherent witnesses who saw and heard Singing Diamonds died a few days afterward.”

This time the hush was more pronounced. Anders Verworn spoke ponderously. “You do not make that statement without factual basis?”

“I can prove it.” Basil took Mathilde’s clippings from his breast pocket. Briefly he gave them the facts. “All but Sanders were subject to asthma,” he concluded. “And, rather curiously, Sanders had an asthmatic fiancée. Three of the six had a box of candied ginger in the house, at the time. Incidentally, three of you were among those who gave the press conflicting explanations of the Singing Diamonds. I’d like to know what you think now.”

Again Anders took the floor as if he were spokesman for the whole company. “Dr. Willing, you cannot realize how shocking your revelation is to the rest of us at this table. Everyone present has promised my wife not to discuss the matter but... My dear, you will release us now, will you not?”

“Yes, of course, Anders.” Mathilde’s voice was quaking a little as she spoke.

“Briefly, Dr. Willing, my wife was one of those who saw or thought she saw the Singing Diamonds, though her story was not published. You will observe...” His voice sharpened. “... that she is very much alive.”

“But...” Clare’s voice was a little shrill. “Mathilde has asthma and she likes candied ginger.”

“Absurd!” put in Kurt. “Just coincidence, all of it.”

Tamara lifted one slanting brow, eloquently quizzical. “Kurt, my darling, and you a political economist with some knowledge of statistics and mathematical probability! Mathilde, if I were you, I should ask for police protection.”

“I am not afraid.” Mathilde spoke with dignity. “Dr. Willing is a criminologist as well as a distinguished psychiatrist.”

“Are you serious?” Kurt was studying the clippings. He took out a small notebook and a tiny gold pencil, scribbled a moment, then tore a page loose and tossed it across the table to Basil.

“I cannot believe in a murderer who travels so far and so fast!” protested Kurt.

Tamara was looking over Basil’s shoulder at the timetable. “If he had a plane it would be almost possible physically — all but the hop from China to Montana. Of course it wouldn’t be psychologically possible to combine such fast travel with so many successful killings. No one could stand the strain.”

“If there were more than one killer...” Kurt was thinking aloud. “In other words, a world-wide criminal organization...”

“That also is psychologically absurd,” retorted Tamara. “Oh, I know there are criminal organizations of political fanatics but they kill politicians like Jean Jaures and Carlo Tresca. They don’t bother with Loch Ness monsters or Singing Diamonds.”

“I’m sure some people would do anything!” Clare fingered the cluster of rubies and diamonds on her left hand as if she expected “some people” to snatch it at any moment.

“That would be a job for Military Intelligence or the FBI,” said Anders. “No individual could solve such a case. You’d have to travel all over the country, question dozens of witnesses.”

“I wonder if it couldn’t be done more... academically?” suggested Basil. “By us, here, tonight. We have the main details of the six deaths from these clippings. We have also the one surviving eye-witness of Singing Diamonds, Mrs. Verworn, her family, and her closest friends. We are all used to solving problems intellectually. Perhaps we might arrive at the truth if we pooled our wits and our specialized knowledge. Suppose we try.”

Tamara laughed. “Once you identify your criminal or criminals will you catch them by such purely cerebral methods?”

“Why not? You should know, Dr. Radanine, how the guilty mind cracks under psychological pressure. Physical violence excites resistance, but once you get hold of a man by his mind, you really have him.”

“I should know? Why?”

“As a psychologist. Suppose we each volunteer a new solution of the Singing Diamonds based on these new facts. Dr. Verworn, will you begin?”

“This is fantastic!” Verworn frowned. “However... let us go into the garden for our coffee and then...”

In the starlit garden, as they sat waiting for the maid to bring coffee, Anders began. “The Singing Diamonds were not radiosondes, used to test air currents, for they must drift with the wind and these other things flew in formation. They were not planes because the one competent judge of velocity, Sanders, the pilot, said they flew at 1,500 miles per hour and even the thousand-mile-an-hour plane is still an engineer’s dream. What could fly in formation at such an impossible speed? I can think of only one thing — a radio-guided missile, fueled by atomic energy, sent here by a hostile foreign power to intimidate us. Radio-activity might kill the eye-witnesses a few days later.”

Basil’s gaze shifted. “Mrs. Albany?”

“Isn’t it just barely conceivable that it was not a foreign power that sent these things but somebody on another planet, Mars or Saturn? Anders, you told me that since radar was invented they’ve been able to pick up noises that come from outside the earth’s atmosphere. Poor old Pythagoras was right. There is a music of the spheres, only it’s modern music — just noise. Didn’t they use to believe there was something between the stars that would carry light, but not sound? Something they decided to call ether? I don’t know whether you need air for sound to travel through or not, but if you do — why, then there’s air between us and the other stars and anything that can go through air might come here from another planet — even radio-guided missiles!”

Basil turned to Kurt. “Your explanation?”

“Father’s probably right about radio-guided missiles but aren’t we the only country that knows enough to experiment with atomic fission on a big scale right now? Why drag in Mars or a foreign power? I say this thing was a secret experiment of our own technicians that got out of hand. They didn’t expect anyone to die. They’re sorry as hell, but — there’s nothing they can do now. So they’re keeping mum and minimizing the Singing Diamonds as ‘mass hysteria.’ It was a military experiment because—”

Basil interrupted. “Dr. Radanine?”

Again that flippant brow arched in quizzical disagreement. “You’ve all forgotten one thing. None of these missiles landed anywhere. No explosions, no fragments. A missile has to land. The law of gravity is still operating, I believe. Singing Diamonds were supposed to have crashed near Dr. Amherst’s home. Dr. Willing tells us nothing was found there or near the wreckage of Sanders’ plane after he sent that radio-telephone message about Singing Diamonds.”

She took out a cigarette case. Basil was the first to provide a light. “Thank you.” Her crystal beads winked in the brief flame. “All three of you chose the same explanation,” she went on. “The objective explanation. You take into consideration such things as velocity, flying formation, sidereal noises picked up by radar, even the political situation! That is natural, scientific, and American. It is also silly.

“Dr. Willing, you laughed at my phrase ‘consistent structuration of the external stimulus world.’ It may be clumsy but it is true. When T. E. Lawrence made a plain sketch of an Arab chieftain, not one of his men could recognize him. Only one ventured an opinion and he said the foot might be a fig-tree. Mohammedans have lost all pictorial sense because Mohamet forebade pictures long ago. In other words, nine-tenths of your so-called reality is confected by your own eyes and your own brain. Occasionally they confect things that aren’t there at all. That is called hallucination. It can be collective. Years ago everyone in a whole village of illiterate Russian peasants believed he was smelling roses in winter, when there were no roses. You see?

“Therefore I suggest the subjective explanation — malobservation abetted by imagination. If you look fixedly at the sky about a mile away you see objects in the air — usually dots or circles. They are supposed to be red corpuscles passing across the retina. That is enough stimulus for an active imagination fed on newspaper stories of Singing Diamonds. Since asthma is an allergy, a symptom of an unstable nervous system, it may be asthmatics are more susceptible to this sort of thing than others. The first witness saw the spots as diamonds because diamonds had some subconscious association for him. Once that case was published the others would see the same thing — unconscious mimicry, like the homicidal maniac who imitates the murder method of another case just reported in the press. Shock and fear might account for the two plane accidents. The others died because their asthma was severe enough to affect the heart in a state of shock.”

“Very neat, Dr. Radanine,” said Basil. “I am glad someone else brought up the subjective explanation. But you’ve forgotten three points I consider vital — the candied ginger, the fact that not Sanders but his fiancée had asthma, and the fact that MacDonald, the first witness, estimated the speed of the Singing Diamonds at 621 miles an hour.”

Mathilde’s hands were busy with the coffee service which the maid had just brought. “Your explanation, Dr. Willing?”

“I propose an experiment,” he answered. “I propose to arrange things so that every one of us shall see and hear Singing Diamonds in a few moments.”

Basil strolled across the lawn to the spot where weeds from the vacant lot had infiltrated the shrubbery. He plucked two flowers and came back to the coffee table. Every eye was on him as he stripped a trumpet flower of white petals down to a sort of pod and took out the seeds.

“What an unpleasant odor!” said Clare, fastidiously.

“The taste is not so noticeable in coffee.” His tone was casual. “Or in candied ginger.”

Clare gasped. “Are you going to put seeds in our coffee?”

“Why not? Mrs. Verworn, will you be good enough to pour?”

Mathilde’s hand shook as she lifted the silver pot, but she obeyed. The wondering maid was well-trained. She passed the cups without a word.

Tamara turned to Basil. “I am not a botanist. What is this?”

“Jimson weed. A corruption of Jamestown weed. Years ago little country boys were paid to collect it by patent-medicine firms.”

Kurt leaned toward him. “Then Tamara was right? The thing is subjective, hallucination induced by a drug in the candied ginger? But who chose Ching Fu, MacDonald, Flaherty, Sanders, Mrs. Kuzak, and my stepmother? Why was it done? And how? No drug will produce the same hallucination in various people!”

“Sure?” Basil looked at him. “Why not drink and find out?”

Anders spoke hoarsely. “Dr. Willing, have you forgotten these other people... died?”

“I have not forgotten.” Basil met his gaze levelly. “Mrs. Albany, why are you hesitating?”

Clare Albany’s dark eyes burned as she lifted the cup to her lips.

“Clare!” Anders’ arm shot out, dashing the cup to the ground. It struck a leg of the metal table, and sang as it splintered. Clare gasped as the hot coffee stung her knee.

Anders stood over Basil, eyes blind with rage. “You devil! How did you know?” Anders crouched, clasping Clare’s hands as they lay in her scalded lap. “When it’s all over, Clare, I want you to remember: I did it for you. That horrible old woman wouldn’t let me go. I married her when I was young, inexperienced. She took over my whole life, managing me — ‘mothering’ me, she called it. When she let herself get old and fat and stupid, she held me by appealing to my pity and gratitude — the shabbiest weapons a woman can use. I couldn’t divorce her. She had tricked me into putting my money in her name long ago. Another way of chaining me if ever pity and gratitude should fail — as they did when I met you. I had to smash that cup. I couldn’t take the chance that Willing seemed ready to take — the chance that it was not a lethal dose...”

Clare Albany was sobbing. Mathilde sat still as a dead woman.

Later that evening Basil talked to Kurt Verworn and Tamara Radanine.

“Suppose you wish to kill someone, but your motive is so obvious that if your victim dies mysteriously you are sure to be suspected. You can’t risk buying poison. Jimson weed grows in your backyard. As stramonium, it is burned and inhaled by asthmatics. Your victim is asthmatic, so stramonium in her body would not excite suspicion. But unfortunately it is notorious for causing hallucinations and that might rouse suspicion. As datura, it is used traditionally by faithless Hindu wives who give it to husbands, then entertain lovers before their eyes. The husband waking in a dazed state from hallucinations more vivid than any induced by opium has no idea what he saw or didn’t see. You feel sure a death preceded by hallucinations will be suspect.

“Just then your telephone rings. You are a professor of astro physics. Reporters call you whenever there is something unexplained in the skies, this time to ask you about Flying Discs... It was then that the Singing Diamonds were born.

“What is the best way to hide a valuable pearl? Put it with a hundred other pearls less valuable. What is the best way to hide the murder of someone you have a strong motive for killing? Put it among a dozen other deaths of people whom you have no motive for killing. How lump all these deaths together? By having each preceded by the same hallucination. That would suggest an inhuman agency — a freak of nature or, at worst, a homicidal maniac. Is there any way you can create such an epidemic of hallucinations?

“First, you need a list of people who have no personal contact with you at all. That’s easy. Have you never received an advertisement in the mail and wondered how the company got your name and address? Direct mail advertising is big business nowadays. For ten dollars you can buy a few thousand unclassified names. For a hundred dollars or more, you can buy a list of names classified by age, sex, occupation, incomes, tastes, and habits. Lists of people with chronic asthma are prepared for patent-medicine companies — names and addresses sneaked out of hospital and pharmaceutical records.

“You are a mathematician — an astro-physicist, so you are using the law of averages. If you send an attractive-looking box of candied ginger anonymously to several hundred people, there will be at least five or six who will like candy and who will assume the ginger is either a gift from some friend who forgot to enclose his card or a gift sample from some confectioner who wishes to enlarge his trade. You can afford to go slow. You can buy a few boxes every day and you can mail a few every day at several of the substation post offices in the midtown commercial section where hundreds of packages are mailed every day and there is always a long line at the parcel window. No one will notice or remember you. None of your five or six random victims will have reason to suspect poison. Probably each leads a dull, respectable life with no enemies, so each will eat some of the candy you have doctored with datura seeds. The result depends on how much is eaten at one time — another element of chance that will confuse the trail back to you. Some will just have hallucinations. Others will have hallucinations followed by death. The candy is packed in layers with waxed paper between. In the first layer each piece contains enough datura to create illusions without killing, unless the victim is greedy enough to eat many pieces at one time. In the second layer each piece contains a lethal dose. In that way there sure to be some among your victims who will suffer optical delusions first and die a few days later.

“If death is not attributed to the apparent agency of the hallucinations, it will be attributed to the effect of chronic asthma on the heart or to the inhalation of too much stramonium — since that is a remedy for asthmatic spasms.

“You still have two more details to work out — important details. In order to repeat the Flying Disc scare your victims must all see the same hallucination and it must be published in the newspapers. Asthmatics are nervous, susceptible to suggestion. So are people under the influence of a drug. And the Flying Disc scare showed the contagion of an illusion even among normal people. All the murderer needed to do was to plant his suggestion in newspapers.

“Apparently you have forgotten, Mr. Verworn, but Donald MacDonald was a classmate of yours fifteen years ago. Your stepfather looked over alumni records and selected MacDonald for two reasons. He lived alone with two cowhands who would not know your stepfather by sight. He had majored in psychology but economic necessity had made him a rancher in Montana — just as the young man who sets out to be an artist or a poet so often ends as a grocer or a stockbroker. MacDonald was just the man who would be flattered and delighted to participate in what your stepfather must have described to him as ‘a little psychological experiment’ to test the contagion of mass delusions. As an astro-physicist he wished to discover how reliable the layman is in reporting celestial phenomona. Or so he would tell MacDonald.

“Your stepfather had an excuse to go to Canada — he was invited to speak at the graduation exercises at McGill. He went alone — so he could drive across the Border to Montana alone and see MacDonald without anyone else knowing about it. MacDonald was sworn to secrecy. He promised to give a fake story — in apparent good faith — to the nearest newspaper that subscribed to a wire service. A story sufficiently startling to be picked up by that wire service as a sequel to the Flying Discs. Your stepfather gave him precise instructions about the Singing Diamonds — their supernormal speed, their dazzling brightness, their humming sound — all similar to the natural effects of the exaltation which is the first symptom of stramonium poisoning. There was no letter or telephone call to incriminate Anders Verworn. MacDonald himself would not mention the visit. That might spoil the ‘psychological experiment.’

“Before Anders left he promised to send MacDonald a box of candied ginger. And he did send such a box, each piece loaded with a lethal dose of datura, as soon as MacDonald had planted the story so he would never be able to talk about it afterward.

“Once the thing was started, it snowballed. Six of the several hundred victims Anders Verworn had chosen at random were sure they had seen and heard Singing Diamonds — while under the influence, mind you, of the drug without knowing it. Dozens of other unbalanced, suggestible minds were equally sure they had seen and heard Singing Diamonds without any drug at all. In one case a victim gave her box of ginger to her fiancée, a pilot, and in his drugged state he crashed a passenger plane...

“But Anders Verworn made two slips.

“It is said that a man always reverts to the language of his birth at three times — when he prays, when he makes love, and when he counts or does a mathematical problem. When Anders gave instructions to MacDonald, Anders was fearful and excited. So, in calculating the alleged speed of the Singing Diamonds, he gave it to MacDonald as a thousand kilometres an hour instead of a thousand miles an hour. MacDonald realized that the word ‘kilometre’ would rouse suspicion coming from him, so he attempted to translate the velocity into miles. He was stupid enough to translate it literally as “621 miles per hour.” When I saw that figure — 621 — I suspected the story had been planted through MacDonald by a foreigner who thought in kilometres, and I was pretty sure that foreigner was not a Russian, since a thousand Russian versts equals 662.9 miles, not 621.3. For a while my suspicion was evenly divided between you, Mr. Verworn, and your stepfather. Then it settled on him because of his second slip.

“His whole scheme was based on the assumption that his wife would give her story of the Singing Diamonds to the newspapers — so that her death would be one among many that were preceded by hallucinations. But she did not give her story to the papers because she was afraid it would damage her husband’s reputation as an astro-physicist. This bothered him so much that he urged her to talk to reporters. She came to me instead and happened to mention that he had urged her to talk to reporters about it. A man of his training, profession, and published views on the Singing Diamonds should have been opposed most violently to the idea of his wife giving such a story to the press. Naturally I asked myself why he had taken the precisely opposite position — and I began to suspect him.

“Then, when I came here this evening and saw he had access to jimson weed in his own yard, it was a simple matter of association — jimson weed — datura — stramonium — candied ginger — asthma — hallucination — Singing Diamonds. The contrast between a simple housewife like Mrs. Verworn and the beautiful Mrs. Albany supplies an obvious motive. And I knew Mrs. Albany would be the first to drink the coffee after I pretended to drug it. A woman who dresses like that at her age is enviously an exhibitionist. She would drink the coffee before anyone else out of sheer bravado. And I suspected that would put tremendous pressure on Anders Verworn — psychological pressure he could not possibly resist.”