Episode Seven: The Mind That Wanted The World: Science Investigators Gwen Montgomery and Steve Flanagan must figure out whether a rogue scientist has been replaced by an alien carbon copy...or something worse.
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The Mind That Wanted the World
San Francisco, August 28, 1957
“So this is where he died?”
The deep voice rang through the lab like a golden bell. Science Investigator Gwen Montgomery turned from the illegal magnetic device she and Claire White were examining and confronted a handsome, six-two blonde man in a blue suit, green shirt and purple and yellow striped tie.
“Well—good afternoon.” Even his clothes, Gwen saw, couldn’t completely detract from his matinee-idol good looks. “And you would be—?”
“Adam…Newman.” He looked at the two women without any of the interest their curves usually brought them. “I—worked with Doctor Ryan.”
“That’s what he told the guys downstairs,” said Turner, the red-headed homicide cop standing next to Newman. “I figured maybe he could shed some light on that gadget Doc White is analyzing.”
“Gadget.” Newman studied the shattered machine, then glanced across the laboratory to where Dick Randall was chemically testing a mound of broken glass in hopes of understanding Frank Ryan’s unlicensed research. “I remember it. I remember this place.”
“You’re the first person we know of that Ryan let in here.” Gwen picked up a notebook from on top of a nearby retort. “What can you tell us?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk to you. I only came here to—but why should I tell you? I shall go.”
“No, you shan’t.” Turner grabbed the guy by his shoulder. “Why don’t you sit down and answer the nice—”
Turner bounced off the lab wall before Gwen realized Newman had shoved him. Two cops started to draw their guns, then they too went flying through the air. With a hoot of glee Newman leapt ten feet to the top of the emergency generator, then vaulted out the second-floor window in a shower of glass.
Drawing her gun, Gwen reached the window as Newman landed catlike in the parking lot below. She fired as he raced for the gate, saw him stagger, but without slowing down. As he reached the street, a couple of cops ran after him; he bent, hefted a manhole cover and hurled it into the nearer officer, smashing him into the cop behind him.
With a screech of wheels, a motorbike pulled up next to Newman. Newman climbed on behind the burly rider and away they went.
“Holy cow.” Staring out the window, Claire adjusted her cats-eye glasses. “And just when we were wondering what kind of cat would be strong enough to take two hundred pounds of steel and drop it on Ryan’s head.”
“So, Miss St. James.” On the far side of the building, Gwen’s partner Steve Flanagan waited as Ryan’s petite, dark-haired secretary adjusted her frock below her knees. “You said this was urgent—about Dr. Ryan?”
“No, it’s my fiancé, Richard.” She looked surprised at Steve’s error. “Richard Caldwell, of Caldwell Magnetics?”
“I’ve heard the name.”
“I think ... I think he’s been replaced.”
“Replaced?”
“By a spaceman. A carbon copy.” Carol St. James sat stiffly, tensely, as if waiting for him to laugh.
Steve didn’t. “And you think this ceecee was involved in killing your boss?”
“What? Of course not! Richard and Dr. Ryan were friends, that’s how I met him. Richard would never—” She swallowed and closed her eyes.
“I know it must have been rough, finding Ryan’s body in the secret lab.” Steve set a hand lightly on her arm, drew back when she flinched. “Has Caldwell—changed?”
“He’s…” St. James slid her arms tight around herself, pressing her elegant black jacket to her torso. “He’s…aggressive. Towards me.”
“He hits you?” Steve grabbed her by the shoulders, forced her to face him. “If he’s beating you, we’ll help, don’t worry, nobody can—”
“No, Richard would never raise a hand to me!” She broke away from him shaking off the idea. “But he’s become…demanding.” Her face flushed crimson. “Not…patient.”
“Ohhhh.” Steve felt a little like blushing himself. “He’s uh, usually—patient?”
“I’m from a very small town. I guess I was raised to be a…a good girl.” She stared out the window at the almost-repaired Golden Gate Bridge. “I know we’re all supposed to be Kinsey girls these days, but—”
“Being old-fashioned’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Richard says that. He’s always been…understanding. About waiting.” Her body began to tremble. “But the past month he’s…he’s…and then last night…”
She began to cry. She didn’t stop for a long time.
1:30 p.m.
“Caldwell’s brain scan and psychoanalysis last month came up clean, Steve.” Gwen shook her head firmly as she paced past the bloodstains on the laboratory floor, hunting for some clue they’d missed.
“He raped her, Gwen.” Steve’s hands clenched at the thought. “She didn’t come out and say it, but—”
“And why would she tell you? A stranger?”
“She tried telling her mom. Got an earful about what happens when girls give the cow away.” The look on St. James face had made Steve want to slap her mother hard.
“This was her first time, I take it? She wouldn’t be the first virgin to have second thoughts.”
“She was crying. Non-stop.”
“Tears are a woman’s secret weapon.” Gwen scrutinized the pieces of broken machinery Claire had laid out on one table. Ryan’s equipment had been advanced enough that even Claire couldn’t reconstruct it easily. “This could easily be revenge for him forgetting her birthday or some other slight. Rape’s an easy charge to make, hard to prove—much like claims about ceecees.”
“And even if Caldwell were a rapist, that wouldn’t make him a spaceman.”
“We can’t overlook it, though.” Steve folded his arms. “Look what happened at Dr. Cavanaugh’s madhouse.”
“Send a report to Nate and to Meara, that’s protocol. But Caldwell has his LSD test coming up that month, so she’ll probably wait until then to dig any further.” Steve nodded; the first time he’d taken LSD convinced him no alien could conceal its true self while in such an altered state. “Newman’s our immediate concern: He claims he was in this lab, and he appears strong enough to rip open a steel door or a hospital safe, or crush Ryan’s head.”
“Okay—but can he microwave someone to death?”
Despite the seemingly obvious cause of Ryan’s death, Gwen had pushed the coroner to check further. It turned out that what really killed Ryan had been having his organs cooked from the inside out.
That linked his death with the murder of FBI informant Albert Saunders a month earlier. Saunders had been spying on a ring supplying lab equipment to unlicensed scientists; he’d died sitting in a public place, so quickly no-one had noticed until the pork-like smell from his baked body filled the air. The SI labs said a microwave beam was the likeliest cause.
“We don’t know how the microwaves fit in,” Steve said, “or why Newman would break into a state research hospital to steal radium. There’s no radiation in this lab, or anywhere else in the building.”
“I got a theory guys.” Claire sauntered into the lab, clad casually as usual in a black turtleneck and slacks. It wasn’t the accepted dress code for girl scientists, but Steve figured being a genius let Claire get away with stuff like that. “It’s kind of way out, though.”
“And up until now this case has been so mundane,” Gwen said. “Go ahead.”
Claire took a second to fit a cigarette into her gold holder and light up. Steve took the second to watch her. Not that he wasn’t happy being back with Dani, but the brainy blonde certainly was an eyeful.
“I told you I called the archives about Ryan’s early research, right? Harry finally called back. Seems Ryan wrote a couple of papers in the early years about growing androids—synthetic humans—in the lab. Super-strong, super-fast, able to breathe underwater or walk naked through the Arctic.”
“I took a look at Ryan’s research-license history,” Gwen said. “He’s never even applied for anything like that.”
“I’m sure he was savvy enough to know the TSC would never OK creating humans in a test tube. And his papers predicted the technology to do it wouldn’t be developed in this century.”
“But?” Steve glanced at the pieces on the table.
“Normal bodies grow the way they do because our genes somehow tell them, you dig?” Claire ran her hand over a curved piece of metal with jagged wires sticking out. “After going over all Ryan’s technology, I think it could—theoretically—use a magnetic field to shape an artificial body the same way. Which would explain why he had those man-sized chemical retorts in here.”
“A super-strong body?” Gwen asked.
“If you can grow an android at all, adding strength would be a snap. So maybe Adam ‘new man’ was here as Ryan’s experiment. And when he hatched out, he went oedipal on his pop.”
“Ryan’s a biochemist,” Gwen said. “How would he know how to build this?”
“He knew Caldwell,” Steve replied. “Caldwell’s a magnetic expert, right?”
“Expert?” Claire laughed. “The cat who invented the magnetic telescope and the magnetic X-ray, yeah, you could call him that—but why would you point the finger at him?”
“I wasn’t.” Steve remembered Claire had dated Caldwell at one time. “I just think we should run the angle by him.”
“I already called him when I started work on this.” Claire studied the machinery thoughtfully. “I could call him again.”
“You get back to work, we’ll catch up with him,” Gwen said, shooting Steve a You Win look. “It’s unlikely he’d risk his career being involved in a rogue experiment—”
“You could say the same about Ryan,” Steve replied.
“—but perhaps if we drop by his apartment, we’ll learn something.”
6:30 p.m.
“Yes, it’s my new De Kooning,” Caldwell gestured at the blurry mess hanging on his wall, as he headed toward the insistent phone in his study. “This should only take a second.”
As soon as Caldwell closed the study door, Steve headed down the corridor, letting the thick shag carpet muffle his footsteps. He pressed his ear to the door. “…three months? Mackenzie, I told you, I need the neutralizer immediately…brink of a breakthrough…very well, then.”
The phone clicked. Steve headed back to the living room fast, noting as he did that Gwen had been studying something on Caldwell’s mahogany desk. She sat back on the leather couch while Steve pretended to study the books crowding Caldwell’s shelves. Everything outside the painting struck him as tastefully old-fashioned, even the big walnut console holding Caldwell’s hi-fi and one of Future Technologies’ new color televisions.
“I’m sorry about that.” The professor dipped his pipe into a tobacco jar decorated with a UCLA logo. “I spend more time on administrative duties than I do actually working in my laboratory…so, Miss Montgomery, an android?”
“So Dr. White thinks.”
“Frank’s strength was chemistry, he couldn’t have build a—a magnetic womb. I’m not sure I could have.” He took a seat by Gwen on the couch, giving her an unsubtly lecherous smile. “Have you found any link between the device and the crime ring the FBI was investigating? The one we think sabotaged my magnetic robots back in Skink?”
“The FBI doesn’t tell us much,” Gwen replied. “But yes, Dr. Ryan was a customer—since the FBI priority was the men behind the ring, they delayed arresting Ryan to avoid showing their hand. And, of course, the ring also dealt in microwave technology—”
“I still can’t believe they blackmailed Howard Chableau into doing their dirty work,” Caldwell said. “I had complete trust in him.”
As they kept talking, Steve did his best to study Caldwell without being obvious. Early forties. Expensive suit. Crewcut. Physics professor turned hotshot inventor. The way he was giving Gwen the eye, he didn’t come across like a guy who’d wait for the wedding night, but he didn’t seem like a rapist, either. Maybe Gwen’s right. Maybe his fiancée’s just frigid.
But thinking of Carol St. James sobbing, Steve didn’t believe it.
Aug. 29, 1957, 9:45 a.m.
“Sure you can’t make it up, baby?” Steve said into his wrist-radio. “I promise I’ll make time, it won’t be like Yuma. And your buddy Claire is here—”
“We’re stationed here in San Diego until the last of those pterodactyls is gone from the sky. Sorry.”
“Well, be careful, okay? I just found you again four months ago, I ain’t done with you yet.”
“You’d better not be. When I’m back in one piece, we can do dinner to celebrate.”
“You’ll let me buy you dinner?” Steve didn’t understand why she insisted on paying for her own. “That’d be swell.”
“Well see. Take care of yourself.”
“You, too.”
“Newman’s struck again.” Gwen said, hanging up the lab phone she and Claire had been crouched over. “Witnesses say a man smashed through the brick wall of Mackenzie Electronics bare-handed, then walked off with a Mackenzie Neutralizer. Those weigh about five hundred pounds.”
“Wait a second.” Steve wondered why that sounded familiar, then snapped his fingers. “Caldwell’s phone call—he was trying to buy a neutralizer, said he needed it now—”
“That can’t be right.” Claire bit down on her cigarette holder. “Neutralizers are used in radioactive research; they prevent mutation by capturing stray atomic particles. Nothing Richard’s working on would require a neutralizer…You haven’t been asking about him just for kicks, have you?”
“I think I may owe Carol St. James an apology,” Gwen said slowly. Steve looked at her in surprise. “Caldwell hates modern art—”
“Sure does,” Claire said. “He says scientists need reality, not ‘abstract distortions.’”
“—so why does he have a De Kooning on the wall?” Claire looked surprise. “It was odd enough that I took a quick look at his desk. There was a letter from his broker—it seems he’s converting most of his stock portfolio into cash.”
“Common enough these days,” Claire said. “Look how the market crashed after the Invasion.”
“But blue-chip stocks like Eckert-Mauchly and Future Technologies?” Gwen shook her head. “Possible, but—”
“Under the Infiltration Act, we have grounds to have him tested,” Claire said. “His research license requires—”
“If he is a spaceman, he already beat the test once,” Gwen said. “And if he’s just a rogue scientist, it won’t do anything but warn him we’re suspicious.” She pursed her lips. “I’ll call Turner, see if the police have more information about the Mackenzie break-in that might help.
“I’ll call Jo Davies,” Steve said. “She’s been dating that G-Man, Mickey Moon, right? I have a question she can maybe get an answer to.”
Within a half-hour, Turner told Gwen that the Mackenzie bandit hadn’t worked alone. A patrol car parked by the break-in site had been lured away by a couple of bikers—belonging to a club called the Hell’s Angels—flinging garbage on the window shield.
And the night Saunders died at the Vulcan Club in Los Angeles, Jo told Steve, Richard Caldwell had been one of the witnesses the FBI interviewed.
“But if Richard’s involved,” Claire said, lighting a cigarette at a Bunsen burner, “why did the ring supply Chableau with black-market equipment? He could have used the company’s—”
“If Chableau had used company resources, the company would have come under suspicion,” Gwen said. “The ring made Caldwell look clean. No-one went looking.”
“Even if they had, I’ve been to Caldwell Magnetics,” Claire said. “Richard has ten times Ryan’s staff and the lab’s on-the-go 24 hours a day. If he’s conducting rogue research, he’s doing it somewhere else.” She laughed without humor. “If this was a comic-book, Batman would set a trap for the Joker—”
“Maybe we can,” Steve said. “If he’s behind the radium thefts, maybe he doesn’t have enough.” The women looked at him. “What if Caldwell heard that the research hospital had a new shipment of radium in?”
11:30 p.m.
Plainclothes police were watching the hospital entrances.
More officers were waiting discreetly in white-walled rooms close to the radiation laboratory and the safe that supposedly held radium. One of them had a tear gas bomb, all of them had gas masks.
Steve and Gwen were waiting on their own, also masked, in an out of order restroom a little further away, the police department having insisted on “first crack” at Newman. Gwen had decided not to debate jurisdiction.
The sound of bullets told Steve that Adam Newman had arrived.
The screams said the trap hadn’t closed.
Guns drawn, they raced down the hall into a thick cloud of tear gas, Steve saw a half-dozen cops sprawled out on the linoleum, one with his head twisted halfway around. The locked doors to the laboratory had been ripped away; stepping inside, Steve could dimly make out someone in a doctor’s coat ripping the door off the safe. The sound of tearing metal grated through Steve’s bones. “Stand where you are, buddy! Put it down nice and—”
The man half turned and hurled the safe at Steve, who threw himself to the floor. The door embedded itself deep in the wall behind him as Gwen fired. The man snatched a lead receptacle out of the safe, turned and raced straight for her. She leapt aside, still firing; Steve saw the man’s eyes, free of tears, evaluate her for a second, then the man sprinted into the corridor.
“I thought it was a bullet-proof vest,” Gwen said. “I hit his leg, his arm, his chest, nothing stopped him.”
“Was it Newman?” Gwen nodded. “Then it doesn’t matter how tough he is. Caldwell’s the only one we told about the phony radium, and the tracker in the vial will lead us right to his lab.”
Aug. 30, 12:45 a.m.
“That’s it?” Steve stared at the dark, decrepit warehouse, back to the tracking gadget, then back to the warehouse. The only sign of life was a half-dozen bikers standing and smoking by the loading dock.
“It better be,” Gwen said. “If Caldwell opens the vial, he’ll know we’re onto him. Any luck reaching Claire or Nate?”
Steve flicked a finger off his wrist-radio. “Whatever’s in that building, it must be putting out some kind of static. We’ll have to break in alone.”
“Not before we tell someone where it is, Steve.” She pursed her lips. “I’ll drive by for a closer look, then we find the nearest pay phone.” She steered the car around the next turn, past the bikers—one threw a beer can at the window—and around the next side. “See anything?”
“Not a damn thing. Guess we’d better—”
Light flashed from across the street, then something hit the car with the force of a tank. Steve had barely a second to realize the car was no longer on the ground, then it struck a wall. He felt himself bang into the roof, then fell to a floor that was actually the passenger-side window, too stunned and pained to move.
Another flash of light and the driver’s door flew away. A metal hand reached inside, groped and pulled Gwen out.
“Hey, lookie!” A deep male voice bellowed. “The machine’s found a chick for us!”
“Should we search the car, Snake?”
“Let’s take the doll into the boss, then come back out and see if we find anything.” A deep chuckle. “Maybe he’ll let us play with her instead of putting her in his dungeon.”
Too dark—they didn’t see me inside when they drove past… Steve made himself crawl through the windshield, ignoring the glass cutting at his flesh and clothes. Thank god…nothing broken. He made it behind a nearby pile of empty crates before his strength gave out.
Even with Gwen captured, it was as far as he could go.
(continued on page 2)
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Science 7: The Mind That Wanted The World
by Fraser Sherman 1 2