The Thing in B-3 Page 8

  The greeting was both gentle and rough. It reminded Bill of a long-ago experience, when, as a very small boy, he had sneaked off with some older boys to explore a woods. He’d got separated and lost, wandering in circles until descending darkness had frightened and chilled him. Briar-scratched and exhausted, he’d stumbled on and on, fighting the rustlings and strange night shadows of the woods. Then his father’s stalwart figure had loomed, arms outstretched. “Boy, I ought to whale the socks off you!” But the big, capable hands had quickly swept the small figure up and anxiously explored for damage.

  Bill glanced beyond his father, toward the doubledoor entry.

  “No,” his father said, “don’t surmise that Pat Connell tattled. He should have. I think he stretched his prerogatives. But it was Mrs. Hofstetter who put me onto you.”

  “Dad, the last thing I wanted was to upset you and Vicky.”

  They moved aside, clearing the steps for the occasional student or faculty member who came and went.

  “I know.” Dr. Latham nodded. “And if you didn’t want to stand on your own feet, I’d be disappointed.”

  “It must have been quite a morning for you,” Bill said.

  “Quite a morning,” his father agreed. “It could have been avoided—with a word from you. Or did you think I’d haul you off to the nearest padded cell?”

  “I wasn’t too sure.” Bill matched his father’s bluntness. In really important discussions, they could lay it on the line without stretching the bond between them.

  “If you’d thought twice, you would have known better,” Dr. Latham said. “I’m not a crusty-brained savant burying my own ignorance behind a know-it-all front.”

  “I know that, Dad.”

  Bill met his fathers gaze. Dr. Latham’s eyes probed. With quickened feeling, Bill sensed the full measure of his father’s concern, bewilderment, and helplessness in the face of the unknown. He must have felt the same way, Bill thought, when Mom was so sick and there was nothing he could do.

  Bill gripped the sturdy old shoulder in a gesture filled with warmth. “Dad, how about trusting me— and Pat Connell—for just a little while?”

  Dr. Latham’s chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh. “I’d have but one other choice, wouldn’t I? Connell told me his theory. I either buy it”—his words faltered for the first time—“or assume that my son’s mental machinery went haywire without any of the usual warning signals.”

  “I wish none of it had happened,” Bill said. “Its rougher than your hunch about your heart patient.”

  Dr. Latham studied the trees, lawns, the first streams of students from far-flung buildings toward an early lunch. The locale seemed to drive into him the strangeness of the conversation.

  “I don’t know that I buy Connell’s theory,” he said finally. “All this talk of a psychic experience . . . parapsychology is too young a science.”

  “They all were, once,” Bill said. “They all had their scoffers, their witch burners.”

  “I’m hanging on to the thought.” The old doctor’s lips clamped grimly. “I’m remembering that Pat Connell is quite a man and scientist—unless he’s let his psychic researches carry him over the deep end.” A friend of Bill’s came out of the faculty building. But he caught the gravity between Bill and his father and passed down the steps with only a nodded greeting.

  “But my suspicions of Connell”—Dr. Latham gusted a mirthless laugh—“are less painful than thoughts of the alternative.” The iron gray head glinted in a shake. “Maybe I’m thinking of myself, but I seem to be very much in a bind. I can’t fully accept Connell’s ideas—and I can’t deny them flatly, either.”

  “Then give them a chance, Dad, to work or fail.” Dr. Latham’s stout hand was a white-knuckled pressure kneading the iron rail. “That’s what it comes down to. But if I delay and anything happens to you....” His jaw muscles clamped off the words. Bill offered the only comfort he could think of.

  ‘‘Remember that Pat Connell is a trained psychiatrist, and more.”

  “Infallible, I hope,” Dr. Latham said wryly.

  “And as far as Vicky is concerned....”

  “I know,” Dr. Latham broke in. “And I agree. Hie moment may arrive when we have to jar her out of her dreams of Fortesque Fifth Avenue. But until then . . . well, borrowed trouble usually carries a high rate of interest.”

  Dr. Latham peeled his fingers from the rail and took a step down. He paused and looked up. Bill felt the full power of his fathers eyes. “I’m risking something very near and dear to me, Bill. I hope it’s the lesser of alternative risks. But I won’t give you and Connell much leeway or time to play with this thing.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to feel any differently,” Bill said.

  He watched as his father turned and went down. Dr. Latham’s movements to the walkway were heavy and uncertain.

  Bill wished he could rush and overtake his father. He longed to laugh and say, “You buying lunch?” But B-3 had happened. B-3 couldn’t be wished away.

  B-3 was between them, and no hand could reach across the gulf.

  8

  Unexpected Visitor

  PATRICK CONNELL WAS CLOSING HIS OFFICE WHEN Bill entered the corridor.

  In the act of turning, Pat saw him. Pat poised in awkward balance, face twisted toward Bill, right hand clamped on the door handle.

  He jerked to life and shoved the door open as Bill neared. His hand flashed as if he would literally propel Bill inside.

  “Where have you been all morning?”

  Pat's ire jarred Bill to a stop. “Hey, I didn’t mean to rattle everybody.”

  Pat motioned him in, almost trampling his heels. “You didn’t,” Pat said. “But the disappearing act had me privately throwing questions all over my fine theories. I had to sit here and talk as if I knew it all—while I wondered if I were a phony.”

  “I’m really sorry about that, Pat. But I wasn’t out chasing hallucinations or voices in my head.” “Okay.” Pat banged the door shut. “But how about a little closer cooperation in the future? Were not playing a hand of bridge, you know, or shaking a known substance in a test tube.”

  Pat went around his desk and flopped in his chair. “You can imagine the turn it gave me, when your father and Betty....”

  Bill started. “Betty was here, too?”

  “She left a few minutes before your father.”

  “Was she....”

  “She was,” Pat said. “Worried as all get-out.”

  Bill glanced toward the door. “I’d better let her know I’m okay.”

  “Yes, you had better.” Pat stabbed a finger at the Windsor chair near the comer of his desk. “But first —you’re making with some words.”

  Bill sat down slowly. “I started for school this morning, but I ended up in Harlandale.”

  Pat blinked. “Harlandale! Why Harlandale, of all places? How did that happen?”

  “I was driving along to school,” Bill said, “when the idea hit me to find out who was last in B-three. I stopped by the morgue and checked the record.” Pat strained an inch taller in his chair. “Was the last B-three a young woman? Like the image, the impression that you receive?”

  “Young woman... young woman image...Bill paled slightly. “It sure fits.”

  “Beyond the mathematical laws of probability,” Pat said.

  “It seemed so natural I didn’t think about it.” Bill stifled the shiver that quaked through him. Frightful thoughts lashed him. What’s happened to me? Am I some kind of psychic freak?

  In every nation psychic researchers were exploring the frontiers of the human mind. Many would have welcomed a personal experience. Even Pat, Bill suspected, would have jumped at the role of guinea pig, the unique chance to probe and analyze. But not me, Bill thought. I would give anything if B-three had picked on somebody else.

  Pat was looking at him closely. “You all right?” “Hardly,” Bill admitted. “B-three isn’t a harmless trick done with mirrors, you know.”


  Pat’s eyes reflected a struggle with himself. “Bill, if all this is too difficult for you....”

  “Don’t garble the signals now, quarterback.” Bill tried to grin. “I want to get rid of this ... this thing. If B-three can make her point, I got a hunch she’ll go away.”

  “Well, she didn’t pick on a coward.”

  “You just don’t know where the yellow went.” This time Bill managed the grin.

  “Let’s get back to the morning,” Pat suggested. Bill pressed his elbows on the arms of the chair.

  “B-three’s surviving next of kin is her mother, who lives in Harlandale. But I didn’t have a chance to get out of the car. A Genghis Khan character manned the outpost—with a German shepherd, Blitzen, who looked like he wanted my right leg for breakfast. This guerrilla—George Kahler was his name—said I was trespassing and told me to drop out. I didn’t have much of a rebuttal. But I’m sure Mrs. Braxley saw me from the house.”

  “Braxley?” Pat’s voice snapped. “Did you say Braxley?”

  “Sure,” Bill said. “The last occupant of B-three was named Elizabeth Braxley. The morgue record indicated that her father, Dr. Jonathan Fitfield Braxley, is deceased. The mother, Mrs. Carlotta Braxley, is secluded out there in an old place called The Oaks. Looks like she’s handing the whole kaboodle over to the worms.”

  Pat had the look of a man who had stood too close to an explosion. His face was rigid. The Braxley name had swept his thoughts from the present moment.

  “Did you know them?” Bill asked.

  Pat’s eyes focused. After a moment he shook his head. “But I don’t have to refer back to scientific journals to know about them. The facts are the kind that stick in your memory.”

  Pat noticed the way he was gripping the desk’s edge. He quietly folded his hands and rested them on the blotter pad. “Jonathan Braxley was a casualty in the scientific wars. Like Madame Curie, killed in the end by the very radium she’d discovered.”

  Pat watched his fingers curling against each other. “A generation ago Braxley had everything. Youth. Genius. Beautiful young wife. Growing recognition. Unlimited future. He was one of the youngest men in the Manhattan Project during World War Two. As a nuclear physicist he helped develop the first controlled chain reaction in history.”

  Pat seemed to listen a moment to the friendly, ordinary sounds filtering in the office—the distant ringing of a phone, a burst of laughter from students passing beyond the window.

  “Then ... a laboratory accident,” Pat said. “Braxley suffered a walloping dose of high-energy particles. It didn’t get him right away. He lived on for a short time. And then it got him.”

  “Rough,” Bill murmured with feeling.

  “And it gets rougher. It’s beyond me how a sensitive woman like Carlotta Braxley survived it all. Little wonder she’s shut herself up behind a bodyguard.”

  Bill held back his questions, watching Pat mull the story.

  “Elizabeth Braxley was bom shortly after her father’s death,” Pat said. “I recall at least two papers about her that appeared in the parapsychology journal. They suggest the broad picture. It isn’t hard to guess the details.”

  Pat’s head made a vague, pitying movement. “No one can say for sure that she inherited the changes atomic radiation made in her father. Greenleaf does suggest that hereditary factors were altered. He conducted a series of psychic experiments with her at the small, expensive private school where she was then enrolled. The results were astounding. I don’t think Greenleaf quite dared to believe them himself. You can detect doubts between his lines, if you want to dig out his treatise.”

  A reflection of bitterness quirked Pat’s mouth. “Greenleaf never had a chance to doublecheck and assemble all the proofs. Elizabeth Braxley, who had been sort of mistily fragile from childhood, was taken ill, and had to leave school.”

  “She had leukemia,” Bill said. “It was on the morgue record.”

  “The end?” Pat pushed back his chair and stood. “Or an ESP linkup that will end when we get the message?”

  Bill glowered in mock reproach, partly to cover the chill threading through him. “I do love the way you put it, teach.”

  “I know,” Pat said gravely, “but we haven’t a blueprint to lead us to the switch and tell us how to turn off the juice.”

  “On that note,” Bill said with a jocularity he didn’t feel, “Elizabeth Braxley can wait—while I time in the flesh and blood female in my life.”

  As Bill crossed to the door, Pat spoke his name. Bill stopped and looked over his shoulder. Pat was moving around to stand in front of the desk.

  “How about a flight plan prior to any more solo takeoffs?” Pat requested. “I know you can take care of yourself—but it’s bad for my blood pressure.”

  “Sure, Pat, and I’m sorry I wasn’t a little more thoughtful.”

  Bill was certain he'd catch Betty in the cafeteria. Instead, he saw her when he was half a block away. She was a trim figure on the concourse slipping past a small group of strolling students.

  With her quick, tense pace she had covered a couple of hundred yards before Bill caught up with her.

  “Hi,” he said, a bit short of breath as he fell in step beside her. “Training for a broken-field run?”

  His quip fell flat as she jarred to a stop and spun to look at him. The sight of him crumpled the softly oval lines of her face.

  She said, “Bill,” on a slightly strangled note.

  He caught her hand. “Hey, what gives?”

  She glanced away. “I couldn’t eat. The thought of it choked me.”

  “Then we wont eat.”

  She muffled a soft sob. “Bill, why do you have to be so nice?”

  “With you, it’s easy. I don’t have to be. I’m just----"

  “Oh, you know what I mean! It would be a lot easier for me if you were a casual friend, a now and then date.”

  He drew her aside. A wooden bench encircled the bole of a huge old water oak nearby. He touched her shoulders with firm gentleness, forcing her to sit down.

  “Please, Bill.” She was fighting tears. “I’ve got a bomb of a headache. I was on my way to the parking lot. I’m going home for the afternoon.”

  He sat sideways on the edge of the bench so that he was almost facing her. “I guess I should have told you, before everybody found out secondhand from Dr. Connell.” His shoulders rolled in an ironic shrug. “Just goes to show—I thought I was being the big man, protecting everyone.”

  Her moist eyes crept up to his face. “Bill, it really isn’t true—those things Dr. Connell told your father and me?”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  She bit her lip and looked at him miserably. Then her gaze dropped away. “I wish no one had told me. I could have gone on being around you in blissful ignorance,” she whispered. “Looking at you and seeing the nice, normal person I wanted to see. The person I enjoyed so much.”

  “Now, wait a minute.” Bill’s tone was peppered with irritation. “I’m the same person I was this time yesterday.”

  “Yes, I know. I know now.”

  He studied the strained white line of her chin and cheek. “Let’s not let our concern for each other peel our nerves and start us fighting,” he said.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it at all.” “Maybe not,” he agreed.

  She lifted her hand and touched her temple. “But I can’t stop thinking about it!”

  “Then why try?”

  Her eyes flashed up. “You mean I should just accept the idea that you’re the sort of person who ... who sees dead bodies that don’t exist, in strange places?”

  His back muscles flinched.

  She suddenly seemed to catch the way her words had sounded to him. “Oh, Bill, I didn’t mean it to sound that way! It’s just that I’m so puzzled, and frightened, and mixed-up.”

  “I don’t blame you for that.” He hesitated. The question was almost too important to risk asking. “Are you suddenly frightened of me?�
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  She didn’t answer right away. Her eyes pored over his features. With her palm she touched the back of his hand where it lay on his knee. She tested her response to the feeling of contact.

  “No,” she said. “I’m scared . . . down deep inside. For you. Not of you.”

  “Fine,” Bill said. “Let’s take it from there.” “Would you, Bill?” The first hint of hope touched her voice. “Really take it from there?”

  Looking in her eyes, catching the subtle inflections of her tone, he began to realize what she was driving at. “You think I’ve been going about it all wrong, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. I wanted to scream, sitting there in Dr. Connell's office, listening to him talk about psychic forces and evidence suggesting that you weren’t suffering an ordinary hallucination.”

  She paused to see how he was taking it. His tight control on his composure let his face give her no clue. But inside, he was tom with the thought that she was trying to deal with him gently now, trying to reach into a wounded mind. She didn’t buy Connell’s theories. She thought he was sick, period, and right now Bill wondered whether she might very well be right.

  “Bill, parapsychology is such a young science.” She was choosing her words with careful tact. “It might be like the old practice of alchemy.”

  He didn’t point out that alchemy had evolved into the very real science of chemistry. Man today could build molecules and even make artificial elements because the alchemist had searched the darkness of ignorance for a way to turn lead into gold. Their gropings had accumulated the foundation stones of knowledge on which the first chemists had built.

  But he knew that Betty would find no comfort in dark gropings right now. She wanted an answer to come out of what she believed was hard, proven, safe knowledge.

  He hated the sound of the words, but he had to say them: “You think I ought to go to a head-shrinker?”

  “Mental sickness is no disgrace, Bill. They do wonders nowadays.”

  He studied the ground at his feet. A colony of ants was laboring a bread crumb around the obstacle of a dried oak leaf.

  B-three, he thought, the cost of your company may be more than I can pay.