Episode One: Atoms for Peace: The discovery of a half-man/half-lizard corpse draws former OSS agent Gwen Montgomery from retirement to investigate a series of missing persons.
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Atoms for Peace
April 17, 1954
Until the moment she saw the corpse under the streetlight, Gwendolyn Montgomery had been walking home lost in thought.
Thinking it was such a shame that the blocks of Greenwich Village apartment buildings destroyed in the invasion would be replaced with luxury hotels, but that even so, she preferred New York to Atlanta.
Thinking it was ridiculous that her new lover had insisted on her leaving before dawn so that none of the neighbors would know they'd had sex.
Then she turned onto her street, saw the body face down in a pool of light and a puddle of blood, and all other thoughts vanished. Reflex propelled her into the shadowed doorway of the nearest brownstone, where she drew her derringer out of her purse and wished she had her Colt.
Clutching the gun in her gloved hands, she scanned the street. No sign of anyone else, no sounds except a milk truck a block away. She glanced at the body again; the lab coat and trousers suggested a man, and despite the blood, he might be alive.
Gwen ran as swiftly as she could in the confining girdle under her dress, saw the savage wound stabbing through his clothes and his torso, but knelt in the blood and put her hand to his neck just the same. No pulse…but what's that I feel? His skin was hard and cold, almost like armor; puzzled, she rolled him over.
“Dear lord!” She'd seen corpses before, but not like this.
His face, with its tidy Van Dyke beard and moustache, might have been dignified once; with almost half the skin covered with scales, a lidless eye and a forked tongue half out of the dead mouth, dignity had fled. The scales ran down the neck and his hand was scaly too, with tiny claws on his fingertips.
A man from outer space? A spy for another invasion? Impossible; there were spacemen who looked human, but surely no planet would produce something half-man, half-lizard.
Gwen started rifling through his pockets, then reminded herself World War II and her OSS service were long over. Grimacing at the feel of blood soaking through her nylons, she strode to the nearest phone booth.
When the police cars screeched to a stop, Gwen stood studying the body through the smoke of her cigarette. Some early risers stood further away, soaking up the details that would fuel the day's gossip.
A couple of uniforms jumped out of the first car, shooing the gawkers back, then she heard a familiar voice emerging from the second car. “Gwen? Gwen Montgomery?”
“Nate?” He was balding now, his burly body flabbier, but it was he. “Nate Strawn as I live and breathe. What are you doing here?”
“Told you on VE Day I was gonna follow in Pop's footsteps.” Taking the cigar from his mouth, he started to kiss her cheek, then he got a good look at the corpse and stopped cold. “Jesus. I know dispatch said—but—but—who the hell is this?”
“I've been cudgeling my brains since I saw him, but I can't imagine his face without—well, that!”
“A spaceman!” Emerging from Nate's car, a young detective in a cheap suit and hat, quivering with excitement, raced around the other cops and over to the body. An older man smoking a bulldog pipe ambled after him. “Come on, Nate, he's got to be with a kisser like that!”
“It's a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts,” Gwen said, earning a stare from the younger man. “Sherlock Holmes.”
“You know this broa—lady, Nate?” Gwen could hear the man's tone change as his gaze ran over her dark curls, her full lips, the pencil dress that showed off her figure. She raised an eyebrow, but let him look. Smiling, he adjusted his skinny tie, raised his hat to show crew-cut red hair and held out his hand. “Detective Louis Steele, ma'am. Homicide.”
“Gwendolyn Montgomery.” She shook his hand as Nate uneasily frisked the body, coming up with a wallet and a small notebook. “Anything?”
“Business card says Randall Keller, M.D.” Nate grunted. “Lives the next building over.
“Okay Lou, get statements from everyone here, anyone who leaves the building, we'll go in and knock on doors in a few minutes.” Nate turned to the older man. “Doc, see if you can learn anything—”
“Thank you, detective, I so appreciate it when people tell me my job.”
“I meant about whether he's human.” Nate turned and pointed at the four flatfeet. “Spread out, see if you find a knife or anything else; Cobb, call HQ, find out if Dr. Keller's name rings any bells.”
“So, Miss Montgomery?” Steele pulled out his notebook, “Is that a Southern accent I—”
“The others first, Romeo.” Nate pointed at the gawkers. “Gwen, what's the story?”
She gave him a statement, crisp and concise. “My apologies for turning over the body, but when I felt those scales—”
“About that—” Nate turned back toward the coroner. “Anything?”
“Judging from the bruises and broken ribs, he had a nasty blow before he bled out—tentatively, I'd say thrown from a car. Might get more definite back in the morgue.”
“And his skin?” Gwen ground the butt of her Lucky Strike underfoot.
“Well, there you have me. He appears human, but—”
“He reminds me—a little—of those Life photos of the kaijin after the war,” Nate said. “You remember them, right?”
“The Hiroshima survivors?” The doctor rolled his eyes. “Did an a-bomb fall on Greenwich and nobody told me? AEC testing has proven that's the only way radiation causes mutation.”
“I've read Jessica Gannett's reports,” Gwen said, “but what about the New America project? Stalin thought dumping plutonium in our water—”
“Stalin was hardly a scientific expert, was he?” The doctor knocked out his pipe and immediately began refilling it. “It would have taken half a pound of plutonium per person to cause any mutational effect—and I doubt Keller was fool enough to eat even an ounce. Detective, please take your girlfriend off for a cup of coffee and leave me to my work.”
“She ain't my girl, and I've got an apartment building full of tenants to grill.” Nate flung away his cigar and headed over there. “Don't go far, Gwen, I may have more questions.”
She watched him head off, vaguely disappointed. She wasn't a cop. It was no longer her business.
Yet when she stared down at Keller's corpse, she thought how dreadfully bored she'd been feeling lately.
Gwen was in the middle of reading Dos Passos when she heard the knock on her door. “Miss Montgomery? Are you in?”
“Just a moment.” She opened the door and found two men in cheap dark suits and fedoras. “Are you gentlemen—” She couldn’t say why, but something set a warning bell wringing in her head; she let her Southern accent thicken. “—policemen? Did Detective Strawn send you?”
“Do we look like the kind of mugs in that station?” The right-hand guy smiled, but the words came out with a sneer as he tipped his hat. “Mike Nelson, Atomic Energy Commission. My partner, Harry Thorn.”
“And what would the AEC want with little ol' me? Lose a bomb or something?”
“Bombs are military, ma'am,” Thorn said, without a trace of humor. “The Atomic Energy Commission researches the safe, peaceful uses of atomic energy to build a better world.”
Good lord, I think he's memorized their slogans. “I really don't know anything about nuclear physics, I'm sorry.”
“We understand you found the body,” Nelson said. “We'd like to come in and let you tell us about it.”
“Why, I don't think my mama would approve of letting you in, but I'd be pleased to answer your questions. So, was Mr. Strawn right? Dr. Keller was radioactive?”
“AEC nuclear research is conducted with complete laboratory security,” Thorn said. “Even if radiation poses some undiscovered risk, our staff are safe.”
“But a lot of people don't realize that, honey,” Nelson's tone had turned patronizing, which meant he'd bought the act. “There are crackpots out there who think atomic power is going to turn everyone into kaijin; if you started gossiping at the hair salon about Keller, they'd try to get people stirred up, and you wouldn't want that, would you?”
“Why, no, of course not. But—what did happen to him?”
“Chemical burns,” Thorn said. “You overreacted and mistakenly blamed his burned skin on some strange mutation.”
“I suppose that's possible. It was very dark, and nothing that exciting has ever happened to me before!
Don't worry,” she lied, “I won't breathe a word.”
“Modern art, jeez.” Scotch and soda in hand, Nate stared blankly at the Pollock print hanging over Gwen's bookshelves. “So, living here…your trust fund go belly up?”
“I like the Village.” She placed a glass ashtray on top of the hi-fi before Nate could forget and drop ash on her carpet. “Back home, my father and his friends have a hundred reasons why the invasion proved we need to keep segregation in place; here, I'm surrounded by artists, intellectuals, writers, burning to find some deeper meaning in the Martian attack, in the new world we've found ourselves in.”
“What about that CIA job?”
“A waste of time. If you knew how much money and how many lives Dulles has squandered trying to shatter the Iron Curtain—” Gwen shook her head. “But I didn't call you up to chat.” She described her meeting with the two agents.
“Thorn stopped by the station, too,” Nate said. “Had a long talk with the captain about how terrible it would be if 'groundless allegations' about mutation got into the public record.”
“Groundless? Chemical burns can't give someone a snake's tongue.”
“But all the inquest's gonna focus on is the stabbing. And Lou and me are to keep our traps shut about the scales.”
“Has Keller's apartment been searched?”
“Nelson sealed it off until someone higher-up can make sure there's no classified documents lying around. So he says.” Nate shook his head. “Dr. Keller was a good guy, Gwen. Ran a free clinic in Spanish Harlem. He shouldn't be—”
“Any guards besides the two officers at the front door?”
“Two outside Keller's apartment door.” He smiled. “You still got the equipment to break in?”
“Mama was right about one thing, Nate. Never throw away anything you might possibly need again.”
Entering through the unlocked window, Gwen drew the curtains behind her and crossed the room silently, in sneakers, then laid dark velvet along the base of the door, enough to conceal any light in the room from the cops she heard outside.
She turned on her pencil flashlight. Then she almost dropped it.
Half the one-room apartment had been converted into a laboratory. She saw Bunsen burners, centrifuges, electronic gadgets she didn't recognize, three test tubes with a residue of crystals and a cage full of dead green lizards. The carpet was burned and stained.
Why would he be experimenting here? AEC facilities are the best in the country. Then she shook her head. Search now, theorize later. It's no different from searching Strucker's retreat or the embassy in Oslo.
A swift, thorough inspection found no notebooks or journals and the three file drawers were empty. She moved to the living-room area: 12-inch television/hi-fi in a walnut console, a couple of TV Guides, an ashtray filled with matches and pipe dottle, a bookshelf crammed with chemical and nuclear technical works, plus a dog-eared copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. Gwen checked behind the books, found nothing, and moved to the Murphy bed, tucked up in the wall.
Remembering a certain night in Gdansk, she pulled the bed down as quietly as possible, felt around, but found nothing. Then she glanced at the small letter desk next to it. I couldn't possibly be that lucky.
She opened the desk, saw blotting paper, an inkbottle, envelopes and stamps—and buried under them, a journal. She flipped through a couple of pages and smiled.
Apparently I could.
She tucked one lizard into her pocket, took one test tube and turned off the flashlight. She plucked the black cloth from the door, then groped her way back to the window.
(continued on page 2)