The Frosted Death

CHAPTER XII The Automatons

The shack was about forty feet square. It was sided with tarpaper, and in the gloom of the forest, was impossible to see for more than a hundred yards. On top of the squat, one-story structure, were tree branches in a perfect camouflage from eyes that might peer down from a plane.

A corner of the building was walled off into a kind of crude office about eight feet square. In this, Veshnir met the submarine captain.

The captain gave Veshnir, without a word, a blue-green slip of paper of the type checks are printed on. But it was twice as large as our ordinary checks. It was a foreign draft on a New York bank, made out to Carl Veshnir, for “crude drugs.”

“This,” said the sub captain, voice hard and humorless and efficient, “is a token payment, only, to guarantee our good faith. The real payment, shortly to follow, will be placed in our name in your bank, and later switched to your account secretly and over a period of months so that its size will rouse no comment. That was your wish, I believe?”

Like the plane pilot, he treated Veshnir as an inferior. But Veshnir didn’t notice that. His hand was greedy as he clutched the draft. His fingers closed like a miser’s clasp on a stack of gold coins. Only this represented many, many golden stacks.

It was a check for one million dollars!

“The radio,” said the captain, “has brought code messages of trouble in your New York. Trouble, I gather, directly resulting from your — work. There has of course been much excitement. Some have been sacrificed, and more will be. I trust you won’t let sentimentality interfere with our plans?”

“What do you mean?” said Veshnir, looking at the check.

“I mean that the most natural thought would be for one to disclose the whole secret of the… er… trouble to police headquarters, in an effort to prevent more deaths. Yet that cannot be, my friend. Publicity, at this point, would ruin our great, historical program beyond repair.”

“There will be no publicity,” said Veshnir.

“You swear that? You promise that… er… sympathy for those unfortunate enough to have come in contact with our weapon won’t move you to tell what you know in an effort to stem the spread?”

“I’m sorry for the people,” said Veshnir. And in some queer way he managed to express real regret in his tone. “But — talk to the police? Try to help? With nineteen more million dollars to be mine in a few days if I keep still? Hardly! It isn’t necessary to swear, with nineteen million to glue my lips shut!”

“It is good,” grunted the sub captain, with a veiled look in his fanatical eyes. “After we have concluded our vast program, it will be all right to help the authorities. By then some thousands may have felt the white death. But after that it will be all right. And your part will never be guessed.”

He bowed like a hinge, in the middle, and walked to the door of the eight-by-eight cubicle.

“May I look around before I go back to my ship?”

“Of course,” said Veshnir.

He showed the captain what the tarpaper building contained. And it was like a look into the deepest inferno.

The tarpaper shack was a temporary factory. In it were about ten workmen, and in it a product was being efficiently, rapidly manufactured and stored twenty-four hours a day. But the characteristics of the workmen, and the nature of the product, differentiated this from all other factories, whatsoever.

There were twelve long benches, in rows in the low shed. At ten of them stood a man each. But they didn’t look like humans. Their appearance made you believe, suddenly, in zombies — or living dead.

Their eyes were dull and seemed almost incapable of sight. Their faces were vacant and pallid, and indicated that the brains behind them were certainly incapable of thought. Their hands moved like the tentacles of automatons; and like automatons they never slackened their movements. Minute after minute they made the same moves, without slackening pace, and almost, it seemed, without looking.

The moves made by them were bizarre in the extreme.

Before each was a long, shallow tray which was half filled with chopped meat. Over the meat was growing, with incredible rapidity, the white mold. Beside each pan was a smaller tray. In these trays were piled little glass capsules about as large as the tip of a man’s thumb.

The robotlike workers were filling these capsules with the mold.

With a small instrument much like a tiny teaspoon, white mold was skimmed from a bit of the chopped meat, and packed in a glass container. Then the little glass capsule was sealed with a drop of collodion. After that it was set aside, to be taken to a rack that covered one whole wall. In that rack was tray after tray of the capsules. Unguessable thousands of them, with the swift-growing white stuff reproducing itself endlessly and fantastically in the meat trays — to be made into still more death pellets incased by glass.

A curious thing was to be noted. The glass capsules freshly packed looked as if they were filled with snow. The capsules that had been packed for several hours or more, seemed, instead of fine snow, to have silver-gray dust in them.

That was because the mold, deprived of food and forced into suspended animation in the capsules, shriveled into dormant spores just waiting to be released again — in the vicinity of meat — or flesh.

“It is good,” said the sub captain, staring with bleak eyes at the thousands of capsules in the rack. “How long has it taken to produce these?”

“Two days,” said Veshnir, face never looking more kindly and benevolent than then.

“Five days more should be sufficient,” the captain said. “By then we should have twice enough for our needs. It is very, very good—”

He stopped abruptly and stared into a corner he had seen for the first time. One of the twelve long tables had hidden it before.

He glared at two men. One was a freckled, homely Scotchman with bleak blue eyes and ears that stuck out from his sandy head like sails. The other was an extremely gangling Negro who managed to look sleepy and disinterested even in such circumstances.

The circumstances being that both the Scot and the Negro were tied so tightly that flesh at arms and ankles bulged. They were lying like sacks on the rough plank floor.

“Who are dose two men?” snapped the submarine captain, in his agitation forgetting some of the precision of his English.

“Two who tried to interfere,” said Veshnir. “Men from your country’s offices in New York captured them. We brought them here.”

“Why?” demanded the captain.

“Eh?” said Veshnir, puzzled. “Well, it wasn’t safe to keep them around New York—”

“Why did you not kill them at once? But no matter. Shoot them now! While I watch. It is very bad to keep living prisoners.”

“Oh,” said Veshnir. “You mean why didn’t we kill them instead of capturing them. Well, it happens I need workers in here. Two of the ones I had died prematurely. As you see, two of my work tables are vacant. So I brought these men to fill them.”

“They will never work for you,” stated the captain. “You have but to look into their eyes to see that.”

“They will,” said Veshnir complacently, “when I am through with them. And that reminds me. You have a powerful weapon in the white death. But how are you going to control it? The mold is deadly to all life — not just the inhabitants of some one country.”

“We shall cross that bridge when we come to it,” said the-sub captain. “In my homeland are many scientists. We can develop an antidote to the frosted death before taking over our new slave states in person.”

“Your scientists,”’ said Veshnir, “can work on other things. I have an antidote.”

“Then,” said the captain, “your fortune will be doubly large! We shall pay you for that as well as for the white death when the time comes to use the antidote.”

He went on. Veshnir, eyes glittering at all the money he was going to collect in the next few months, came back, after locking the door, and stood over Mac and Josh.

“Ye skurlie,” said Mac, through set teeth. “Ye not only let a terrible epidemic spread in ye’r own city, to gain a few measly millions; but ye now have the antidote to it — my antidote — which ye’ll hold in the face of spreading death for a few more million!”

It is probable that Veshnir could not have watched a rabbit killed without wincing at the blood. But he could think of many human beings dying, with no wince at all, as long as they died out of his sight. There are many men like that, and probably all have the philosophy Veshnir expressed.

“Look,” he said, as if arguing with himself rather than his prisoner, “there’ll be war soon. There have always been wars, and there always will be. In the war, millions will be killed. But nobody gets excited about that, do they? Then why get excited if a few hundreds, or maybe thousands, have to die in New York over a war weapon? There are a hundred and thirty million people in this country. Do you really think a few thousand more or less will make any difference?”

“Skurrrlie!” burred Mac, writhing in his bonds.

“Suppose I made cannons,” Veshnir went on. “They would kill as many as this new weapon. But I would be respected and looked up to just the same. I don’t see that I’m doing anything so wrong.”

“A few minutes ago I’d have called ye a gangster,” grated Mac. “But ye’re worse.”

Veshnir shrugged, then turned to the table nearest the men. There was a tray on the table. And rubber gloves, elbow length. Veshnir began working the gloves up over his forearms.

“A little damage will be done,” he said, “till the nation buying the mold has captured what territory they please. Then they will spread the antidote over there, and I will see that it is passed around over here. After that, everything will be all right. My customer wins a war, and I live out my life in a vast fortune.”

“A fortune built on the foundation of thousands of your own countrymen’s bodies!”

“Think what you like,” said Veshnir. “You’ll help in my plans just the same.”

Josh spoke up, holding his eyes open as if by a great effort from the claims of peaceful slumber.

“How’s that, boss? We goin’ to wuhk fo’ you-all?”

“That’s right,” said Veshnir. He stared curiously at the Negro.

“The report is that you are a trusted aide of this man, Benson,” he said perplexedly. “And you were trusted with one of the two jars of the antidote. That seems odd to me. You don’t look very bright.”

“Oh, I’se smaht ’nuff,” said Josh smugly.

Veshnir shrugged.

“It must be that Benson thought you were so inconspicuous that you’d be a good messenger boy. But thanks to the method and efficiency of my foreign friends, it didn’t work. If that jar of antidote had gotten to State hands, all our plans would have failed.”

“What you-all pay fo’ wuhkin’ here?” said Josh.

Veshnir smiled coldly.

“That’s rather humorous, if you had intelligence enough to realize it,” he said. “You won’t be in condition to appreciate wages while you’re with me.”

Mac stared with new eyes at the ten men working in the low building. Their automaton actions. The lack of intelligence in their eyes. Their clay-colored faces and lead-colored lips.

“The white mold,” Veshnir said, “is primarily a war weapon. The little glass capsules of it, rained down from planes, will capture a nation in short order. But Targill and I discovered a curious little incidental use for it.”

The gloves were in place. Veshnir took up a long, slim glass tube, about the size of a soda-fountain straw. He dipped it into the mold on the meat tray.

“Targill and I,” he went on, “discovered, by experimenting with animals, that if a small bit of the mold is lodged at the base of the nasal cavity, the spores work up into the brain. There, they devour the surface cells. In the process, the person’s power of conscious thought is taken away from him, as in certain types of brain illnesses. The spores work much more slowly on the nerve cells than on muscle fibers. The person will live four days to a week, after lodgement of the spores in the nasal cavity, where he would die in a few hours if the spores started on the body surfaces.”

“But during the four days to a week,” Mac said steadily, “the victim is a kind of robot? Like these men in here?”

“That’s right,” said Veshnir.

“And ye intend to make automatons out of Josh and me? And worrrk us at those two vacant tables?”

“Right again,” said Veshnir, looking kindly and benevolent. There was whitish mold in the end of the glass tube now.

He stepped to Mac’s side, with the glass tube in his hand directed toward Mac’s face.

Mac promptly seemed to explode into writhing limbs and bucking body. The bonds held him powerless, but they didn’t keep him from wriggling around like a cat on a hot stove.

“Everybody. Here,” called Veshnir, raising his voice as if for the benefit of slightly deaf ears.

The ten dull-eyed human machines in the place left their tables and came to the dour Scot. With ten pairs of hands on him, Mac was held as moveless as a rock.

Veshnir inserted the tube, and blew into Mac’s nostrils. Just once. Very lightly.

He turned to Josh with what was left of the stuff that looked like fine snow in the little glass tube.

Josh was still. There was no need for the ten to hold him. Veshnir repeated the process.

“There,” he said, pleasant-voiced, straightening and stepping back. “In about four hours you will be ready to obey orders, without a thought of your own to interfere.”

He went to one of the dull-eyed men, already back to their worktables and filling little glass capsules with the frosted death.

“When the clock strikes three in the morning,” he said, “release those two and put them to work at the two empty tables.”

He went out. Mac glared at him with raw murder in his bitter blue eyes.

But Josh seemed strangely still, and resigned.