The Living Death

VIII

My first move in Zurich was to contact the AXE front there for financial arrangements for Middle Europe. I got enough money for new clothes and shoes. The dip in the lake had just about ruined every bit of paper currency I'd had on me. After making do with some ready-to-wear stuff, I debated whether to drop in on Karl-boy for a friendly visit. It could serve a purpose. It would reveal how surprised he was to see me, for one thing, and he might pull a boner or two. But then, I had an advantage now, why fritter it away? He had sicked his Russian friends on me and had heard nothing since. He'd figure they did their job. I decided to wait for dark and pay him a nocturnal visit.

As darkness fell, I took a taxi out to the address I'd gotten and had the cab stop a block away. Krisst lived in a modest private house, and I was glad I'd taken the precaution of approaching on foot. I almost ran into him as he was leaving, just managing to duck behind a tree, feeling somewhat like a character out of an animated cartoon. I watched his roly-poly figure go down the street and once again noted, as he passed a few other people, that his roundness was deceptive. He was close to six feet. He appeared dressed for at least a dinner out, perhaps a night on the town. I gave his house a careful once-over, circling it on all four sides. The lights were out. He was, I was glad to see, a bachelor. The windows were low and provided the most inviting method of entrance. I tried the ones at the rear first, out of sight of strollers passing by. Surprisingly, they were unlocked, and in fifteen seconds I was inside the house. I closed the window after me. He had also thoughtfully equipped each room of the house with softly glowing night lights. Not very much illumination but enough for a cursory examination. The living room, bedroom and kitchen revealed nothing out of the ordinary. I found what appeared to be a small study leading from the living room, closed the door and switched on a lamp. It revealed nothing out of the usual, either. ISS correspondence and financial reports made up most of the papers on the desk. I flicked off the lamp and went out into the hallway where I saw a door and a flight of steps leading to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs I found a light switch.

The light bathed a large, rectangular room paneled with soundproof wallboard. In the center of the room stood a laboratory table with a series of corked test tubes and neatly arranged vials. But it was the device lying on the table, partially disassembled, which caught my eye. A blueprint lay alongside it, and I felt my pulse quicken. I'd only seen two or three of them before, but I recognized it at once as a high-power compressed-air gun. It was one of the latest models, and suddenly tie lights were going on in my head. Compressed-air guns were the newest device for giving injections, eliminating the actual physical and the psychological pain of the hypodermic needle. The gun was pressed against the patient's skin and under extreme pressure, the injection itself, the very fluid, was shot directly through the skin into the veins. Under the extreme compression, the fluid itself became a jet-stream, a needle of fluid that penetrated painlessly and instantly. Except for one important fact, I was looking at the device that could shoot a poison or a virus or an electrical current into a man he wouldn't know it The one important fact was that the compressed-air injection guns I'd ever seen were like this one — big, heavy, unwieldly. The injection itself might be painless but you'd sure as hell notice someone using one of these things.

I was studying the blueprint of the gun and wondering about a number of small figures that had obviously been noted in pencil on the diagram. I was concentrating on the blueprint, but nonetheless I suddenly noticed the hair on the back of my hand standing up. My never-fail, built-in alarm system told me I wasn't alone. I turned slowly, to see Krisst standing at the foot of the stairs, gun in hand. The round face was unsmiling and the little eyes were darting pinpoints of bright anger. I saw that he was in his stockinged feet which explained his silent approach. It was only a partial explanation, I found out.

"I am surprised, I must admit," Karl Krisst said. "I am disappointed, too, in my Soviet friends. I thought they had done their job."

"Don't be too hard on them," I answered. "They tried. I'm hard to get rid of, like a bad penny, you know."

"You have also underestimated me," Krisst said, moving down to the floor, keeping the gun trained steadily on my belly. "You are no different than the rest of them in that respect. I have always been underestimated. I knew someone had entered my house the minute you went through the window. I have every window and door protected by an electric eye that sets off a small alarm, a buzzer, in a receiving unit I always carry with me. Of course, I didn't know it was you, Carter."

"I was right then," I said. "You are the one behind it all. You use a compressed-air injection gun."

Krisst smiled his usual unctuous smile. I was still unable to understand how he did it, though. There was no possible way he could have made use of such a big, clumsy device on Professor Caldone without my seeing it. I got my answer as he went on.

"Of course, I don't use anything as large as that. You were studying my calculations on the blueprint as I came upon you. They are reductions. I've had the entire principle reduced to the size of a book of matches or a small cigarette lighter." He held up his hand and I saw the small, square object cupped in his palm. It made a tidy — and hideous — destruction machine.

"You got him during the session at the beach," I said, realization suddenly flooding over me. The compressed-air injection gun had to be pressed directly against the persons skin. All that backslapping hid his special purpose.

"Correct," he admitted. Reducing the unwieldly compressed-air injection gun was a piece of applied science that somehow didn't fit Krisst. I couldn't see him having that land of skill or knowledge.

"Where'd you have the gun reduced in size?" I shot out.

"An old friend right here in Switzerland," he said, his smile suddenly an evil, gloating thing. "He was a leading craftsman for the watch industry. You forget, miniaturization has been a part of our precision watchmaking for generations."

"Your old friend, where is he now?" I asked, having a nasty idea what the answer would be. I was right again. The round bastard smiled that unctuous smile.

"He had a sudden mental collapse one day," he chuckled. "A real tragedy."

"Why?" I asked directly. "Why all this?"

"Why?" he repeated, his little eyes growing still smaller. "Because they needed to be taught a lesson. Yes, a lesson in humility. It was quite a good number of years ago that I applied to the International Science Scholars for membership. They turned me down. I wasn't good enough. I hadn't the credentials to belong to their elite little group. I was only a self-taught physics teacher at a private school. They looked down on me. Later, when I conceived my plan, I applied for my present position with them. They were glad to have me for that, their paid lackey, a glorified servant."

Krisst was a fifteen-carat, first-grade psychopath. It was plain to see he'd been harboring his monumental grudge all these years.

"Why only those men working with the Western powers?" I probed further. That one still eluded me.

"Those who rejected me were all men belonging to the Western powers or working with them," he answered with some heat. "The Russian and Chinese scientists did not join the ISS until some years later, under the International Science Agreement. I am about ready now to go to the Soviets and reveal myself. The world will see how eagerly they will accept me into the Soviet Academy of Sciences. They will recognize me for the genius that I am."

I gestured to the vials on the laboratory table. Maybe he was nutty as fruit cake but he seemed to have come up with something horribly effective.

"Is what you use in those vials?" I asked. He nodded in triumph. "Yes, indeed it is," he smiled. "It is a concentration which specifically attacks the brain tissue, causing a fungus to grow in twenty-four hours which chokes off the oxygen supply to the brain cells."

I felt myself frowning. A fungus that specifically attacked the brain tissues. It rang a bell for me. A few years ago I knew of a Doctor Forsythe who had been working with such a fungus in an effort to develop a growth that would halt the spread of braindamaged or cancer cells. I gave Krisst a hard look.

"Isn't that what Dr. Howard Forsythe had been working on for positive purposes when he had his heart attack a few years ago?" I questioned. Krisst's round jaws began to shake and he reddened. "Yes, and I managed to get his formulae," he shouted. "But I developed my own use for them."

He was apoplectic. "I made it into a powerful instrument… I unleashed its force!

"They tried to rob me of my rightful place in the scientific community. But I showed them! I stole the minds of their so-called brilliant men. I'm better than all of them — better, do you hear, the best!"

About that time I stopped listening to his ranting. Clearly, the man was mad. Deluded — but dangerous, making deadly use of a respected physician's research findings. I wondered how Krisst got hold of someone to miniaturize the compressed-air injection gun. What luck, for him to have a friend in the watch industry — certainly he himself was totally incapable of accomplishing such a complex feat. His voice rose to a screech and I came alive to his words again.

"I'll get you too!" Krisst shouted, lunging for me. His shot, fired in insane fury, went wild. I had Hugo in my palm and slicing through the air in the flash of an eye. Krisst twisted away and the stiletto went right through the wrist of his gun hand. He cried out in pain and the gun dropped to the floor. I dived for it, but he kicked out and I had to roll away from the kick. Before I had another chance he kicked the gun away and I saw it slide into the narrow space beneath the lab table. I grabbed for him but, like so many fat men, he was surprisingly light on his feet and he avoided my grasp. Then, in his weird, twisted way, he did something I hadn't expected. Instead of pulling the stiletto out of his wrist, he struck out, flailing with the arm. The sharp point of the stiletto sticking through the wrist acted as a kind of spear tip at the end of an arm instead of a lance. I backed up, ducking under the thrusts of his arm, and got in a hard right to the mid-section. My arm sunk in and though he felt the blow, he had natural padding for protection. He swung a vicious right at me. I ducked under it and grabbed for his wrist to get a judo hold on him. I had to pull back to avoid getting my hand run through by my own weapon. Krisst came at me again, flailing with the right arm. I gave ground and we circled around the edge of the lab table. Suddenly I saw an opening and I stepped in with a right that was partly uppercut, partly right cross. I threw it from a crouch and saw it lift him off his feet and send him sprawling across the smooth table. His body crashed into the vials and the sound of smashing glass echoed as the entire row was swept onto the floor. I reached across the table for him. He drew back and kicked out with both feet I turned enough to avoid catching the kick full force but it knocked me backwards. He dropped off the other side of the table and raced for the stairway in an unexpected move. It took me an added two seconds to get around the long table. I reached the bottom of the steps just as he slammed the door shut and I heard the lock click. I stepped back and looked around for something to use to break the door open. Using a shoulder when you have to hit upwards from a flight of steps is pretty ineffective. I heard a hissing sound and looked up at an air vent near the ceiling. A whitish cloud was blowing into the cellar through the vent. I felt my lungs starting to contract already. Desperately, I looked around but there were no windows whatever. The room was a rectangular box. I flung myself against the door but it held. The gas was being blown through the vent in huge quantities. I felt my eyes tearing and the room was starting to swim. It was with a combination of apprehension, surprise and relief that I realized the gas was not one of the killing types but the disabling land. I clutched at the stairway bannister as the room circled faster. The thought raced through my fuzzy mind. Why is disabling gas? Why not the real deadly stuff? As I ditched forward I knew it wasn't because he was kindhearted. I wondered if I would become a vegetable in twenty-four hours. An incongruous thought minced through my mind before I passed out. If it had to be, I hoped I'd become a cucumber.