Possible Impossible – Children of Chaos

So okay, so maybe a guy who lost his private investigator’s license over a little thing like libel isn’t the best guy to stumble over a thing like the Kids. So maybe the same guy—who had to start selling brushes door-to-door to keep on eating—ain’t the best guy to save the world. So the hell what? So somebody had to do it, and it just happened I knew Niles Pfizer from when I was a private eye, and he called me when he found her body. So don’t beef; you still breathe regular, and you don’t have bombs sending your house into the sky—with you in it.

So don’t beef. I had a right to beef; it was dirty, all the way through; but you, you’ve got no reason to beef at all; absolutely none.

The beefing started for me at five in the morning, one day about three months ago. I was pounding my ear and hand-measuring Sophia’s bosom for publicity releases, when the damned phone went off like a shotgun in my head. I cursed the Italian Board of Commerce for disturbing me, and then realized it wasn’t a brace of Sicilian partisans shooting at me, but just the phone. I disentangled myself from the sweaty sheets, un-muggied my mouth, and flopped around till my hand encountered the phone.

“Mggg?” I asked.

“Lunch? Is that you, Ray?”

“Szm-mggg,” I conceded, and started to drift back to the sunny climes and heaving hills.

“Ray! Goddamit, Ray, answer me. Is that you? Niles Pfizer on this end, Lunch. God damn you, wake up!”

Bang! That was the secret phrase. Down came the duck and handed me a five-hundred-dollar bill for saying the common everyday secret phrase, and I snapped awake. “Yeah, yeah, Niles. It’s me. What the hell you doing calling me at this hour. By the way—” I interrupted myself angrily, “—what hour is it?”

“Never mind the kidding around, Ray. I got trouble. I’m not fooling…I walked in here and, oh Jesus, Ray, you should see her, she’s, oh Christ!” He went off in a fit of deep breathing, as though he had his first shoved into his mouth, and in the silence I said:

“What the blazes is happening over there, Niles? You flipped your snapper tonight?”

He came back real strong, and tight, as though he were speaking for clarity, and said slowly, “Ray, I need your help. I need it now. Can you come over here right now?”

I reached up a bit and clicked on the bed lamp. The portable clock by the phone read 5:17 and I screwed one of my baby-blue eyes to the darkness outside the window. “What the hell, Niles! Are you kidding or something? If this is another one of your stupid Bohemian practical jokes…”

His tone was so drippy with scared I knew he wasn’t kidding. Niles as a glamour photographer was one of the best in New York, even though he was a snob and had always had a bit too much money and momma’s apron string for his own good; he was addicted to practical jokery, but this just didn’t sound right. There was a keen edge of hysteria in his voice. “Ray—”

Just that one damned desperate word, and I knew I’d lost sleep for that night.

“Okay, Niles. Sit tight. I’ll be right over, whatever it is.”

Silence for a second, then, softly, gratefully, “Thanks a million, Ray. It’s pretty bad over here. I’m—”

I cut him off. “I’ll be on my way in ten. Have a pot of coffee on. At least at this hour I won’t have to apologize for freeloading.” I hung up on him, and got out of bed.

That was the beginning of the beef, but far from the end.

 

Niles Pfizer lived in one of those classy apartments above the shops on Sullivan Street in the Village. It was the sort of place that had a good north light, a long flight of stairs, and about ten thousand dollars’ worth of modern furniture and imitation-Klee designs on the walls. I always took my time walking that flight from the street, because Niles had thoughtfully hung about half a hundred glossies in frames, of his most famous glamour shots. I had to admit it, Niles had one helluvan eye for the roundity and the pointedy. This time I took the stairs two at a time.

As I hit the last flight, turning sharp around the bannister, I stopped. The light was out in the hall. That wasn’t like Niles. He hated darkness—always said his livelihood and life depended on light—and would never have let a bulb burn out in that hall.

Then I heard the sounds of a scuffle above me, and a second later a sort of nasty pffft! I took that last flight at a dead run. It was darker than the inside of a boot, and I came up snout-first against the closed door of the apartment. But it wasn’t really closed, just shut nearly all the way, and I kept right on going. I slammed into the middle of the room, and by the moonlight pouring down through the skylight saw four figures tussling around. I recognized one of them at once; it was the long-nosed, nearly bald profile of Pfizer. The other three were shorter, and they were doing something unhappy to the photographer.

Where Niles’s belly should have been, there was a pulsing blue glow—and through the glow I could see the darkness of the room. They had blown a hole clean through him.

He was still standing somehow, and the three were more surprised than frightened, it seemed to me. I spent only a moment allowing myself to see, and took a dive for the ones nearest me. I came down hard on one of them, and locked both my hands together. I put my clasped hands hard against his left temple, and heard a dull thunk as I belted him. He staggered off sidewise, clutching his head, and moved away just in time for me to belt the second one in the mouth.

The sonofabitch had buck teeth!

I thought for a minute I’d broken every finger on my right hand. I had to backhand the slob with my left, and he tumbled over his own legs hitting the deck.

The third one was busily clubbing Niles in the skull, and for a second he didn’t quite realize he was being visited. I had just enough time to pick up a wrought-iron candlestick holder from the table beside the door, and swing it with all my might. Man, did he squish! It caught him dead-eye in the nose, and he bleated as though I’d ripped it off. He followed his buddy.

The first one was still standing…I hadn’t really cold-cocked him…and I didn’t know it till the bastard slammed me with a sledgehammer. It must have been a sledgehammer, because I heard the clang. I spun around—half of my own volition, half because the blow had sent me that way—and put two fingers in his Adam’s apple. He went gluggity and took a header. He hit the deck and swam the length of the carpet glugging. I picked him out through the dusk and the moonlight and the fuzz in my head, and took a two-step toward him. The one was a step, the two was a kick. It caught him right in the neck and he just collapsed like a bride’s first cake.

For a moment I stood there, swaying, while the gray lining of my skull pulsed in and out. Then I saw the blue glow that was the middle of Niles Pfizer sink to the floor. I staggered to the wall, and hit the light switch. The joint was crawling with bodies.

In a heap nearest me, the three slobs were still stoned. In the middle foreground, Niles Pfizer was lying on his side, clutching his wounded middle, and breathing heavily. His face was a dead white, and in the light, the blue glow was gone. But the hole wasn’t.

He was dying.

In the background was still another body. She was all hunched over on the model’s stand, stark naked, and without much of her head left. Whatever had done anything as ugly as that to a head as pretty as hers had been, had done it not by blasting, but by melting. The bone showed through starkly, and it wasn’t shattered, but run-together and soft looking, as though she had been made of glass, and they had played an oxyacetylene torch on her.

Hell, she had been dead for some time.

“R-Ray…” I heard Niles gasp, and dragged my eyes off the nude body on the stand. He was staring up at me out of pain-clogged eyes, and I could I see he was heading out but quick. I went over to him, my head still throbbing, and bent over. He tried to raise up, and succeeded in getting onto one elbow. I helped him a little, cradling his head on my lap.

He looked up and tried a grin. It didn’t show through the pain. “Th-they must have been watching from outside…” he said slowly. Each word was a torment. “Af-ter I-I called you…they came in. They d-didn’t even s-say any, anything. Th-they l-looked around, and searched m-me, and then I tried t-to get away, Ray. They shot me with a-a—something, and it burns, Ray. It burns so bad. You’ll never know how it burns in me, Ray.” His face twisted in a hideous grimace, and for an instant I thought he was bailing out on me. I bent lower, as his eyelids closed, but he kept right on talking. I’d never credited the guy with so much gut.

“H-her n-n-name was Martita Delgado,” he said, gasping, but going on doggedly as if he was keeping Death away by talking. “I was going t-to do some late-night stuff, w-with the city as a b-b-backdrop…up on th-the roof. She g-got here a little bit before me, and let her-herself in. M-most of m-my models have their own keys—” he gave me that devilish grin the girls thought was so sexy, even with all that pain in him, and I had to grin back or regret it the rest of my life. The guy was going to get it all out before he conked, and I was going to stick with him till the end.

“W-when I g-got here, she was d-d-dead, and I l-looked th-through her stuff. She had a card in her purse, R-R-R…” he couldn’t get my name out. I nodded to show I understood. “It’s underneath the canvas over th-there—” he pointed to a stack of artist’s canvases leaning against the far wall. “Th-they must have come back for it, or for something, and they f-found me h-h-here.

“I d-don’t know what they w-wanted, Ray. But they didn’t get it…they d-dinnnt guhhhh…”

He trailed off and was gone as silently as the shadows.

I let his head slip down, and avoided looking at the hole where his gut had been. How he had lived long enough to give me such a detailed history I’ll never to this day know, but it had been compulsive. He had willed himself to tell me everything he knew, as though he’d known I’d need it.

Damn him…he had made me a party to it all, just by that speech. Just by giving it all, pouring it all out, he had made me an integral part of this tragedy. Now I was in it, because of all he had said and I was the only one who knew it, and because I held his head in my lap, and because of a hundred other things.

I sat there on my knees, and cursed myself and him for dying, and the whole world for making me a stinking moralist, and putting me into something I didn’t want.

Ever since I’d lost my ticket, I’d sworn to myself I’d stay away from trouble. Now here it was eating at my leg, and making me jump into the cauldron. I wanted out, but there was no way out.

I had to follow through, or know I’d be damned if I didn’t.

I let his body slip off my lap, onto the floor, and started to get up. I had never been the closest friends with Niles Pfizer, but now we were brothers and I had to—not avenge his death; hell, that was corny and just not true—find out what was behind all this. Who had done it, and why. I had to, just because I had to! He’d stuck me with it, right through to the end.

I stood up, and heard the three hoods moving around behind me, on the floor. I turned to them, and they were all awake, and groggy, and looking at one another. They didn’t say a word, and how they communicated I don’t know, but each of them touched a thumb hard to the depression behind their left ears, and, well, I don’t believe it myself, so why the hell should you—they turned to dust.

Just like that. No by-your-leave. No farewells or shuffle-off-to-Buffalos, they just were three tidy heaps of dust on the floor. Pouff! Gone!

I stared at the dust for a minute, and thought I was losing my mind completely. What the blazes was this? What the hell was happening? Was this a long, detailed nightmare?

Wakened out of a dead sleep, hauled down to a Bohemian photographer’s studio, attacked by three thugs, seen a friend have a big glowing blue hole blown in him, seen a nude model with another hole in her head, and now the three hoods had collapsed into dust—why, Jeezus on ice skates, I must be dreaming!

I didn’t pinch myself, I methodically walked over to the edge of the table and banged my crazy bone down on it. It hurt like hell, and I knew I was awake.

Pfizer was dead, Martita Delgado was dead, and the hoods were dust at my feet. Poof, like that.

Before I knew what I was doing, and before I could draw my senses around me to get me the hell out of there, I was at the canvases, and puttering around till I found the little square of pasteboard, stuck in the back of a canvas. It was hardly visible.

I took it out, and read the name and address someone—I assumed it had been Martita Delgado—had written in ink. It said Freidl, 6682 Riverside Drive, gr 2-7390. I turned the card over.

In neat block print it said:

CHILDREN OF CHAOS

Sins of our fathers, our heritage.

And underneath that was a line with the word Advocate under it. Martita Delgado had signed the card. I had the impression if she had had enough ball-point blood to use, she would have signed the thing in blood.

It was fairly evident what had happened. But not why. Martita Delgado had come to Pfizer’s studio for the night work, and had been followed. She had been murdered, and the assassins had left. Then, as an afterthought, they had forgotten to take the card with them. They had come back, but by then, Niles had called me, and had secreted the card. (It just had the look of strangeness and importance about it, so I could see why he would assume—as I had assumed—that it was what they had been after.) They had attacked Niles, and finally shot him with whatever it took to make that melty blue hole in a man, when he would not give them the card. Then I had showed. They had realized I had seen their faces, and so—

I banged my elbow again when I thought of it…

They had turned to dust.

I tucked the card into my shirt pocket, and turned off the lights. I closed the door behind me, leaving the works—with my prints rubbed off the canvases, the doorknob, and the light switch—for the cops to try and unravel.

If they could.

It was a long wait till the bars opened.

A long, chilly wait. But I had company.

The card.

And fear.

 

A straight rye that early in the morning was pure uncommon crap. It tasted like someone was painting my throat passages with napalm. I downed two, and gave the whole thing up as a bad bit. Finally, I piled back into the De Soto and tooled uptown to my pad. The bed was cold, but I got undressed and climbed into it again. I refused to think about the completely horrible and mad things that had happened to me in the space of a few hours.

I hit the sack and began slapping sixty. Ten minutes after my inflamed eyelids had closed and the battering-ram rattle the thug-dusts had left in my head had eased away, the phone rang again.

I ignored it the first eight rings, and pulled the covers over. The ninth ring did it. I sat up, and lit a cigarette. The phone rang ten and eleven. I took a long drag on the cigarette. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. I finished the weed. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one. I ground it out. The phone stopped, no thirty-six. I laid back down, and went to sleep.

I wasn’t disturbed till almost ten o’clock.

Oh happy damned day!

But this time it was the Furies banging on my door. They had stuck a toothpick in the door buzzer, or had a thumb of particularly wondrous pushing power. Plus kicking. Plus banging. Plus yelling, like: “Open up! This is the police!”

So I calmly frantically wildly fast hopped out of the sack, and hit for the front door. I took off the chain and pulled the door open.

At ten in the morning, the face of Goldie Harper, Lieutenant of Homicide, Manhattan West, was nothing to see.

“Man, are you ugly,” I said, and turned away.

Goldie came in, slammed the door behind me, and made directly for the kitchen. “What the hell is it this time, fuzz?” I snapped. “If it’s business, you mooch no coffee from me.”

“It’s business,” he snapped right back, “and I’ll take the coffee anyhow. Unless you want to risk an ‘assaulting an officer’ charge.” I sneered at him with my tongue, got myself all wet, and said to hell with it to myself. He made good coffee anyhow.

I splashed some cold water over my face and the back of my neck, reamed out my Sahara mouth with a dry toothbrush, and went back into the kitchen, barefooted, suddenly afraid Goldie was going to say something about Niles Pfizer.

“What do you know about Niles Pfizer,” he started off. 

It did just nicely to settle my stomach. Like hell.

He was measuring out the coffee for the top of the brewer, and all I could see was that wide, stooped back. His eyes would have told moreGoldie’s always did—but he had them purposely averted. I did not know how much he had. Was he fishing, or did he know for certain?

“Niles Pfizer?” I asked. Surprisingly, my voice was steady and the words came effortlessly. “Why do you ask?”

Goldie clapped the lid on the coffee pot, turned up the gas, and put the bag of coffee back in the ice box. Then he looked at me over his shoulder and grunted.

“Uh-uh.”

I looked back innocently. “Uh-uh what?”

“Uh-uh the bull. We know you were there. Probably between five-forty-five and seven o’clock this morning. And by the way—when you get a chance, take a look at that Adonis profile of yours; if I’d doubted you were anywhere this morning, that pan would tell me you were.

“What’d they hit you with? A Mack truck?”

I abruptly felt the pain in my face, where I’d been slugged by one of the thugs who was now dust. I could imagine what I looked like, but could not imagine how I’d avoided feeling the rawness before.

“I haven’t any idea what the hell you’re talking about, Goldie. And if you don’t stop playing twenty questions with me, and tell me what the hell you want at this ungodly hour, I’ll be forced to—”

“Crap!” he snorted, and turned away. He slid down into a kitchen chair, and thumbed his snapbrim back on his rugged old face. Goldie Harper was one of the veterans, one of the gas-house boys; he knew all there was to know about copping, and who was to be nabbed. He didn’t fool easily.

“Okay,” I conceded, sitting down beside him, “you tell me how you knew I’d been up there, and I’ll give what I know. Fair exchange and all like that.”

He screwed his thick lips into a grimace of annoyance. “If I didn’t know you was a goy,” he growled, “I’d swear you was a yid. Always horse-trading.”

I grinned engagingly at his big ugly puss.

“Simple, jerk,” he snapped, “you left your prints all over that marble bust.”

I didn’t answer for a minute. How could I? I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “What marble bust?”

He looked at me as though he was ashamed I’d asked such a question. “Come on, come on, the bust on the model’s stand. The one of the woman.”

I hesitated again. Something was bad wrong. I remembered that apartment with all the nightmare clarity of an unusually sharp vision. There had been nothing on that model’s stand but the blue-holed body of Martita Delgado, quite nude and quite cold. No bust at all.

I had to fake it.

“Oh, yeah, the—uh—that bust. I forgot for a minute I’d even touched it.”

“What killed Pfizer?” he asked. Coldly.

Game time was over.

I gave him a trumped-up yarn about Pfizer being drunk and lonely and asking me to come over, and me going over, and finding him dead, and going out to get drunk by myself. “I couldn’t afford any trouble, having lost my license, Goldie,” I finished up. “I knew you’d find him eventually anyhow without my help.” Then I asked, tangentially, “How did you uncover him so fast?”

He got up to rescue the coffee that was about to boil over, and brought it back to the table. I got up and took down a pair of cups, some sugar and cream, as he was speaking. “A cleaning woman comes in every morning, very early, to straighten up the mess from the night before. It seems your Pfizer was a ladies’ man if ever there lived one. Today the old lady came in and saw him there. You know what killed him?”

The question took me off-guard. I stammered, and he filled in the gap. “No? Well, we don’t either. So rest easy.”

Since he didn’t seem to think I was guilty of anything—at least, that was certainly the way he was acting—I decided to go along with him. For some reason I had no intention of telling him about that card, or the two strange things that had occurred up in Niles Pfizer’s apartment: the thugs turning to dust, and the  blue glow of the hole drilled through the photographer. But it was obvious he had discovered the body after someone had removed Miss Martita Delgado and her ventilated torso, and substituted a marble bust loaded with my fingerprints.

After all the weirdies I had been tossed since last night, I didn’t even stop to wonder how they had gotten my prints on the bust. They had done it as easily as they had turned to dust, and that seemed to be that. But—

“I didn’t examine him too closely, Goldie, but that wound in his stomach looked pretty odd.”

Harper fitted his wide, blocky hands around the coffee cup, till the fingertips interlaced, and looked up over the lip of the cup at me. His eyes were readable as hell. He didn’t suspect me, but he wanted to know what I knew. Not a chance of that, Goldie, I thought. I had to take care of most of this thing myself…because of the way Niles had died because he had told me about it before he’d conked. And besides, if one man had been brutally murdered just for being near the scene of those thugs’ operations, what might they do to Goldie if he started making things hot for them, as I knew he would if I told him what I knew.

Then I wondered for an instant what they’d do to me?

“Odd? Yeah, I suppose you could call a hole that goes clean through skin and bone and cartilage neat as pinking shears, and leaves the edges of the wound glassy, odd. I suppose you could. If you was an ass.

“But you aren’t an ass, Ray. You’re an ex-shamus, and that makes a difference. You aren’t used to hitting a deal like this without noticing more than you’ve told me.”

“You think I killed him, Goldie?”

He stared at me levelly, and for a minute I thought he’d answer in the affirmative, just to be a bastard. But after a bit he shook his head. “No. I’ll accept your story about the call and such. But I know damned well you’re holding out on me. And if you are, Ray, I can make it hot for you.”

I shrugged. “Look, Goldie, they took away my ticket because I said the wrong things in print about a city hall bigwig, which are still true—”

He cut in, “—which are still libelous till proved otherwise.”

“Okay, okay, till proved otherwise. But just the same, I’m without status, just a private solitary citizen, and you can’t touch me.”

“Take the law into your own hands and I’ll touch you so hard you’ll think the battleship Missouri hit you.”

“Don’t let’s get melodramatic, Goldie,” I chuckled. “Pfizer was an acquaintance, not a buddy. I went to a couple of his crazy parties and I drank a few beers with him once when he wanted some work done. That was all. We were on first name terms, but I won’t put myself in a position to develop a big hole in the tummy like his, just in the sainted name of Niles Pfizer’s ghost.”

Harper pushed away from the table, and got up. “Okay. The department’ll want a statement from you later, so don’t develop any illnesses that need faraway climates to cure. We really haven’t got anything, but since we know you were there at any rate, you’re still suspect number one. Not a very impressive number one, true, but the only one we’ve got.” He walked toward the living room. I followed him.

As he opened the door to leave, I asked, “Goldie, what do you know about a Martita Delgado. Modelled for Pfizer once in a while.”

“Modeled last night, maybe?”

“I asked a simple question. Don’t start weaving skeins.”

“Never heard of her. Anything to check?”

I nodded. “Yeah, maybe. Maybe you ought to find out where she is. Might help—you and me.”

He pursed his thick lips, nodded, and left.

I sat down to think. I was having trouble sorting the real from the fantastic. The affairs of the night before had been compounded, and had involved me all the more, by the apparent disappearance of Martita Delgado, and the in-place-of-her appearance of a marble bust—loaded with sticky prints of one Raymond Francis Lunch, ex-private eye. Me.

So someone had had to hit the apartment after I left, and before Goldie and his hup-squad arrived. That meant I was probably seen leaving—strictly assumption, but I was willing to let it ride as real stuff—and most likely was under surveillance now.

I went to the window and looked out through a corner of the bamboo blinds. The street was full of people as per usual, and no way of telling if any of them were watching my pad.

I saw one character who was a dead-ringer for Abe Lincoln, standing by the mail box, reading the pick-up time card, and he was taking a long time, but there was no way to peg him as an observer. Oh, what the hell, I was just getting edgy…

He straightened up and looked me dead in the eye.

I let the blind slip back, and found a trickle of sweat was coursing its way to my spine’s end. This was no peanuts deal, whatever was behind it. An outfit that used a weapon like the blue-glowholer, and could turn its men into tidy puffs of dust—and who had more than four men in the organization to begin with—was nothing to toy with.

But there didn’t seem to be anything I could do right then. I was being watched, and I didn’t know where to start working, in any event. I went in to get dressed; the card was in my inside jacket pocket. I took it out and looked at it again.

Freidl, 6682 Riverside Drive, gr 2-7390.

I didn’t read the block print on the other side. I already knew what it said, and there was a certain creepy feeling I got every time I thought of the Children of Chaos, whoever or whatever the hell they were. And that tagline about the sins of their fathers being their heritage, made my flesh shimmy. I was almost afraid to shrug into a jacket, and open the bottom drawer of my bedroom dresser. Afraid, because in that drawer, wrapped in a sealed plastic gun-bag, I had my .32 police special, and I knew if I ripped off the top of that bag, I’d take the revolver, and if I took the revolver, I’d sure as hell go out to find these Children of Chaos, and get them to tell me why and how they’d killed Niles Pfizer and the model. And why they’d tried to frame me.

I wasn’t mad, just curious. In a sort of unhealthy, detached way. But I was scared, too—and how.

I ripped off the top of the plastic gun-bag.

 

It was easy shaking Abe Lincoln.

All I had to do was go out the kitchen window, onto the fire escape, and down it till I reached the level of a hall window in the building facing on the next street, its rear to the rear of my building. I paid token respect to my tail by surveying the alley between buildings, before I slid up the window and crawled through. Nothing.

I hoisted through and walked down the stairs to the street. It was empty of observers, being one block away, and I hailed a cab from the corner. I gave the cabbie the address, and settled back, willing myself to a non-thinking state, as the hack pulled out into traffic and moved on.

I had the cabbie circle the block twice, when I got up to 6682 Riverside Drive. I took a close look at the building. It was one of those architectural non-entities built in the Thirties, when no one was quite certain what was chic and what was gauche. Big and only slightly jujy-fruited with scrollwork and knobs on the ledges, it looked gray and clean and solid, as though it had recently been steam-blasted.

Finally, after the cabbie asked me where the hell I thought I was, on a merry-go-round or something, I got out and paid him. I snapped my fingers when I remembered I hadn’t checked into the office of the door-to-door brush company I worked for, and made a mental note to call in to tell them I’d be sick for a week or so. Just playing it safe in the eventuality I didn’t get killed myself, and might need a job when I got back to the real world.

I went into the lobby of the building, and stepped past the doorman as though I knew what I was doing, and where I was going. But he had me out-foxed. There were buzzers for each apartment, all right, but the name-plates were empty. I’d have to ask the doorman, or take potluck, ringing half a hundred doorbells till I found the right one.

“Freidl?” I asked him, because he was still staring at me with open curiosity. I did not say Mr. or Miss or Mrs. Freidl, because I hadn’t the faintest idea which it might be.

“Can I help you, sir?”

I gawked. The way he said it, I knew for a certainty he was Freidl. It was just that way of answering. And I couldn’t stop myself as I asked him: “You’re Freidl?”

“That’s right, sir.” His tones were becoming more curious, more intrigued. Who was this guy, and what did he want? “May I help you?”

I didn’t know what the hell to say to him, and half turned away to look for a quick reply elsewhere. Then I noticed the outside phone hung beside the nameplates and buzzers. The phone anyone who would want to reach Freidl during working hours would have to use. It was gr 2-6800. For a split-instant it didn’t register, then it did all at once. gramercy 2-7390 was the number of the Freidl I was after. So that meant that either this doorman lived in the building himself, which was a coincidence I wouldn’t even consider, or there was yet another Freidl at this address.

Covering quickly, I said, “Did a Mr. Brown leave a package for me here. I spoke to him this morning, and he said he would leave it with you. My name is Furman. Do you have a package for me? A manila envelope with—”

He cut me off. “Mr. Brown is away for the week, sir. Are you certain you have the right apartment building?” I had taken a stab at the name Brown, figuring there had to be at least one Brown out of fifty apartments.

“Certainly this is the right place. I knew your name, didn’t I?” He was a big man, all shoulders and chest and hard gray eyes.

“Yes, sir,” he answered enigmatically, “you did know my name.”

“Well, then?”

“No, sir, Mr. Brown left no package with me. I’ll ring him up if you choose!”

“No, that’s all right,” I backed out of it gracefully. “He must have left before he remembered the package. Well, never mind. Thanks, anyhow.” I walked out of there, feeling the doorman’s eyes boring two tiny holes in my back.

Once outside, I went around the block, making sure he wasn’t trailing me, and found the basement entrance to the building. I went down the stairs, and was in luck. The gate that led through into the rear courtyard and the basement, was open. I saw bits of coal in the court, and figured the coal truck had been here recently, which was why the gate was still open.

I went through, and walked across to the basement door. It, too, stood open and I walked through.

It was dim in the basement, and I found myself in a hallway. Several doors opened on either side, and printed across them were furnace room, custodian, laundry room, and trash room. I tried each door, except the custodian’s, and they were all open, revealing inside just what the title outside had indicated. I tried the custodian’s door. It swung open as I touched the knob. For a second I hesitated, then remembered how the janitor in my own building was constantly out repairing things, and when he thought he would be gone for a short time only, left his own door unlocked. To be certain, I rang the bell. No one answered.

I went inside and closed the door behind me. A quick search of the place revealed what I’d been hoping to find. A duplicate of the buzzer-board in the lobby. Except this one was the tenant’s contact with the janitor, and the name plates had not been removed.

I scanned the board quickly. There it was. 6f. The name was the same, Freidl. After an ear-pressed second against the outer door, I opened up and looked out warily. The way was clear. I stepped out and closed the janitor’s door behind me. The elevator stood across the hallway. I pressed the button and a minute later was riding up to the sixth floor. There are more ways to skin a cat than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio—

6f was one of six staring doors. Staring, for each door had a peephole of one-way glass in it. I stopped and gnawed on my lower lip a while. There were several things I’d not bothered to consider, particularly about the Gargantua named Freidl in the front lobby. It was too damned much coincidence that his name would be the same as that of the person I sought. So there were three possible explanations that rang true. Three possible answers.

One, that he lived upstairs here, either alone or with others of the Children. In that case, the man downstairs was a plant, a front, a guard, and he knew I was after something. That automatically made him a member of the Children of Chaos.

Two, that he had been warned someone might be around looking for this Freidl, and had assumed the name to all strangers asking. The same held true for two as it did for one, in that case, that he was a member of the Children of Chaos.

Third, this was a trap.

I found the last difficult to believe, for no one had known I was coming here. Whoever had gone back to get that card from the body of Martita Delgado, had more than likely not known what she had scribbled on the back of it. They had been after the card itself, for nothing else had been touched in the apartment, but I was stumped to know how they could tell the name Freidl was written on the reverse side, and consequently that I would be coming here in search.

Then I remembered the marble bust with my prints on it, and I realized that someone else had seen my face, and had undoubtedly sent a description of me to anyone who had need for such an outline. So if Big Boy downstairs was one of the Kids—I was mentally referring to the Children of Chaos in that way already—he knew who I was before I opened my yap. Which made number three very, very valid.

He would know I’d get suspicious, and try to get into the building to find the real Freidl. At that point the coincidence of the three unlocked doors struck me between the shoulder blades.

I’ve been selling brushes in apartment buildings for nearly a year, since I lost my license, and I’d yet to see three doors so uncommonly unlocked. What I had thought were logical reasons for their unlockedness—the coal truck, the janitor being off repairing—suddenly seemed pallid. Hell, yes, this was a trap.

I wanted to leave right then.

But I knew I’d have to find some answers pretty chop-chop, or give the whole thing up as a failure on my part. The dying face of Niles Pfizer was behind my eyes, though, and it wouldn’t let me give up. I knew I was a diamond-encrusted ass, but I rang the bell.

I heard the little plate on the other side of the peephole slip up with a soft metallic sound, and knew an eye was glued to the glass, watching me. I’d know in a second if I’d been trapped or outfoxed, or if I’d stumbled on the first link in the chain that would finally wind up by telling me who the Children of Chaos were.

The door opened a sliver on its chain, and a quarter of a head peered around at me.

“Yes?” the quarter asked peremptorily.

“Uh, Freidl?” I asked.

“Do you have an appointment for a reading?” the quarter asked.

Hell, I reasoned. If that was the only way the door would get open, then, “Yes, certainly, I have an appointment.”

The chain rattled, the door shut, the chain rattled some more and was slipped off, then the door opened fully. Until then I had half-assumed Freidl was a man. I was wrong.

Freidl was about the sexiest hunk of wench I’d ever ogled. She was a redhead, but not flashy. Auburn with little highlights of bronze and brown in the red. I couldn’t tell what her eyes held, but they were gleaming and honest-looking, her brow was straight and unfurrowed, and she had the cutest little upturned nose I’d ever seen. Her body I couldn’t say much about, because she was swathed from neck to feet in a long, shapeless gown completely covered with half moons, stars, abstract astrology symbols, and little portentous signs of the zodiac. I’d hit a star-gazer’s joint.

Once inside, and the door locked and chained, my blood started singing in my veins. The song was “Let’s Get Away From It All!”

The apartment was decorated the same fashion as her dress. The living room was suffused with a dull rosy glow, from concealed lights that cast heavy shadows across the low ceiling. The blinds were drawn, and appeared to have been drawn since before I was born. An ornate inlaid tile table sat squarely in the center of the living room, squarely in the center of a hand-woven rug with a curious mushroom-shaped design on it. Around the table were four chairs. The room was three-deep in knickknacks, all of them either of astrological origin, or of Oriental tone.

There were a few crazy things there, too.

A Buddha with its head smashed and a lily in its placid lap dominated one far corner.

A huge vase that rose nearly to the ceiling was filled with what appeared to be mucky, swamp water.

A brace of dueling pistols with ramrods stopping up their barrels hung on one wall, while beneath them, a bared pair of dirks glistened brightly, as though their blades had been rubbed with crimson.

Freidl preceded me into the room, all of which I observed in the space of a few seconds. It was not the sort of room to escape attention.

She moved two of the chairs away from the table, went to a cupboard-like highboy against the far wall, and took out an elaborate, gold-trimmed crystal ball. She sat down with it before her, and nodded me to the seat across.

I sat down and watched her from cautious eyes. She really was a remarkably attractive woman. I would have placed her age at something between twenty-nine and thirty-two. I still could not discern the outlines of what I assumed to be a particularly lush figure, beneath the baggy folds of the seer’s gown.

“You have come to me for a reading by whose recommendation?” she asked warily. “I see no record of your appointment in my files.”

I didn’t quite know what to answer, because since I’d come in, she hadn’t consulted any files. Was she getting that hokum from the crystal, or had she merely figured out I was an impostor…? I thought of Freidl no. 1 downstairs. It didn’t really matter what his reasons had been for telling me he was Freidl. If he was or if he wasn’t, it was a cinch now that he was connected here in some way.

He’d have to be. No one could forget they had someone like this living on the sixth floor.

“Well, I’m, uh, I came to you through a friend,” I said heartily, stalling. 

“What friend?” she asked, inexorably.

“Uh, well, you may know him under a different name…you see, he’s quite well known in the business world, and though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with coming to an astrologer, he might find it prudent to give you another name.”

“What is his name?” she asked again, undeterred.

I dreamed it up fast. “Charles Bowen?” I’m afraid I had a querulous twitch on the end of it, but she shook her head anyway.

“No such man ever came to me for guidance.”

I fished in my side pocket and came up with a fin. I laid it out on the table and said, “Well, in any case, I need a reading most desperately, and I’m willing to pay for—”

She snorted and shoved the fiver back with one finger. She looked at it as though it were Confederate. I assumed she got a lot more than that for a reading.

“I will read you free of charge, Mr. Lunch.”

Her smile was deadly, and my face must have whitened out, at mention of my name. She smiled sphinx-like again, and leaned over the crystal.

Her voice deepened beautifully, and she began to intone as though from a vault: “I see a great deal of unhappiness for you, Mr. Lunch. Much, much unhappiness. I see a dead man, and a dead woman, and a marble bust which many in uniform cluck over. I see you fleeing, and I see the mushroom-shaped sign that invisibly rests on your forehead…”

I fingered my forehead unknowingly, somehow caught up in her rhetoric. She was scaring the pants off me, and I think she knew it. But I still had to listen. The mushroom-shaped bit for instance was a new factor. Perhaps there was a factor of explanation for the deaths of Niles and the Delgado girl in what she was about to say.

“I see a group planning, striving, fighting silently to bring life and light to the world. I see a group who have been terribly wronged. A group whose father’s sins are their heritage—”

Bingo! She was still talking, telling about this group that was secretly planning to do some crazy thing or other when everybody else was asleep or had their backs turned or somesuch, but I wasn’t really listening. She had spouted the same phrase I’d read on that card, as if by rote.

“What do you know about Martita Delgado?” I interrupted.

Her face came up, and the expression was not what I was expecting. If I’d expected her to be startled, she was far from it. That strange grin skimmed across her sensuous lips, and she spat one word, “Karlo!”

I saw a reflection in the crystal, and started to turn just as Big Boy, Freidl no.1, came at me with one of his white gloves full of coins. I tried to slip sidewise in the chair to escape the blow I could almost feel, but she had had it planned out so goddam neat.

The chair had arms. The chair was right up next to the table.

I started to rise, and he hit me across the left cheekbone. The pain paralyzed me all the way down my left side, and I thought sure my face had been split open. I got to my feet somehow, and he hit me again, right behind the ear whammo! I fell forward and started to slip to the floor…

I reached out with numbed fingers and my hand tangled in the billowing flow of Freidl’s gown.

I don’t know what happened after I hit the floor, because I was cold-decked properly, but this I do remember: I heard cloth ripping as I fell past her, and as I slammed into the floor I turned over and got a look at her.

The gown had come away down the front, completely, and I saw what her body looked like. 

Beautiful. Neatly and voluptuously proportioned…

…and completely covered by a fine down of light blue feathers…

I was out like a light.

 

Man, the hammock was rocking too hard! I was hanging head-down, my arms dangling and swinging loosely, a pressure across the small of my back and something hard in my stomach. My legs were bent down and held against a flat hard surface, and I rocked to and fro. I came awake slowly, with pain pain pain, brother, and realized I’d been tossed unceremoniously over someone’s broad shoulder.

I tried to twist my head, and caught a bit of a view. A doorman’s uniform. I was over Karlo’s shoulder, the big ape’s fanny. What could I do? I was weak as a three-day-old martini, and my head felt as though someone had played Beat the Cluck with it. I wished most fervently to go hippity-hop back to my miserable existence as a brush salesman. Being bitten by dogs, getting doors slammed on my foot, having housewives slap me, and husbands snarl at me, was nothing compared to fooling with these Children of Chaos.

These kids wanted to kill me!

I hung there, head-down, feeling the blood trip-hammering in my temples, and closed my eyes.

We were going down a long flight of stairs. Very long. Much longer than the flights between floors of Freidl’s building. In fact, now that I took a deep whiff, it smelled like the crypt, and damp, and musty.

We kept going down, him walking, me swinging limp and helpless.

Finally I figured I’d had enough. I didn’t know what was happening, or where he was intending to take me, but I had a good hunch that the reason I’d been slugged and not killed was that somewhere in my cute curly head I had some info they wanted. Perhaps they suspected I’d talked to Goldie Harper—I was certain now I’d been under surveillance by the Kids since I’d left Pfizer’s place—and were going to brainwash me into telling them what I’d said.

Nuff was nuff. I’d had the course. Framed, beaten, slugged unconscious, this was all of it. I arched my back and kicked out with my legs. I’m not a small man, and I caught that slob right in the crotch. He screamed so loud I thought I was going to be deafened by the echoes that hit up at us from down below. He stumbled against the side of the stairs, and my aching head hit a slippery-wet wall. He stumbled again, down a few stair-levels, and I was able to toss myself off his shoulder, in front of him.

I hauled back, thinking one solid punch would settle his hasenpfeffer, and let it slide out to tag him alongside the jaw.

I must have broken every finger on my left hand. I had heard about glass jaws, iron jaws, and granite jaws. But this guy’s kisser was composed of solid 100% molybdenum steel, coated with impregnable, unshatterable, solid diamond. My arm got news of the pain first, and in a second my entire body was quivering, literally quivering with it. He just stumbled about screeching and clutching himself, while I pressed my lips together trying not to join him in the scream-fest.

Kicking had seemed to do best, so as soon as I got back a little of my control, I kicked him again, as hard as I could. Again in the same spot. This time he just fell backward, and disappeared from sight.

I heard a scream descending, and then he hit. With a bam. I abruptly realized the stair had had a wall on only one side, and the other was open to a great darkness that fell away below the winding staircase. Like in an old haunted castle, I thought to myself crazily.

Then I started down the stairs at my own pace, full of pain and my gorge rapidly becoming buoyant. More than once I was forced to stop and lean against that cool, slippery wall, my hand to my forehead, the steps whirling beneath me like a hungry vortex. But I kept on down, and it was a long way to go.

The bottom came suddenly, and I looked around for Karlo’s body. I found some of it after a while. But one thing about it scared hell out of me. His body was totally gone. Pulped and in slimy runners across the wall and stone flagging of the floor. But his head lay there staring sightlessly at the ebony vastness overhead, completely undamaged. I don’t mean it was attached and unbruised. I mean it was as though his body had been soft and vulnerable, and the head had been constructed from steel, and just set atop the flab body.

For it was cut cleanly at the base of the neck. No broken skin, no open wound, no smashed bone and ripped tissue. Just broken, as a brittle candy bar would be broken.

And staring up at nothing, with dead eyes.

I stooped and touched the head. It was cold as a steel wall in an Eskimo’s summer home. Frozen and dead, Karlo was more terrifying than when alive.

These Children of Chaos were not only deadly, they were freaks.

And that was what started the idea buzzing in my head. That, and the phrase they had used about sins of the fathers. I put it out of my thoughts, and struck out ahead. I hadn’t the faintest idea how long I’d been unconscious, or where I was now. Logic told me I must be near Freidl’s building, and a bit of assumption reassured me that I was far underground. Ergo almost, I was under Freidl’s building. Way beneath.

I wished to hell right then that I’d brought along a flashlight. I patted myself down to see if I’d brought my cigarette lighter, but if I had, it was lost when I’d been thrown over Karlo’s shoulder and joggled down those stairs. The only thing I had on me was the .32 Police Special, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure why they hadn’t taken it off me when I’d been cold. Perhaps because they wanted me out of the way fast. Who knows? At any rate, I had the revolver, and took it out now, holding it tightly, ahead of me, as if it would remove any obstacles in the deepening darkness. Light had filtered down from somewhere above—not much light, but enough to grope my way—but as I passed out of the filtering less-dark, I found myself wandering down a stone corridor, completely dark and stifling.

I remembered something then, and opened my jacket. I felt for the hidden flap inside the right tail of my jacket, and felt the rigid card still safely hidden there. I closed up my jacket again, because it was chilly in that corridor, and kept walking.

A lot of nothing was down there. For a while.

I was walking, and the gun was out ahead of me, when abruptly, the muzzle went clank and hit something solid. I felt ahead of me, and it was a stone wall, just like the sides of the corridor had been. This wall covered the mouth of the tunnel. I felt along it, and there were no openings, no protuberances, nothing. I was cold against it, and finally gave it a healthy shove. Nothing. It wouldn’t budge. Solid as a Krupa paradiddle.

I settled back against the wall, with my badly aching arm held away, and my gun tipped toward the floor. I was stumped. It was a good two miles back along the corridor and up those stairs. And whatever entrance was at the top of those stairs was more than likely locked, as this wall was a lock. I was starting to feel real sorry for myself, when I heard a growing whine, right behind me. I put my ear to the cool wall, and it wasn’t so cool. It was warm in fact.

The whine was behind it.

That started me running back the way I had come. I trotted back a few dozen yards, and lay flat on the stone flagging.

The whine increased till it was good and loud, and then the rock wall slid up into the ceiling. Just like that. Light spilled out from behind it, and I saw three people standing inside, in a small room. A room? No, not quite. It was an elevator of sorts. There were controls, and as they stepped off the slightly raised platform, they turned to the left wall. Two of them were men, and third was a horsey-looking woman of perhaps forty-five. She walked oddly, with a sort of surging, willowing movement, as though her legs were made of licorice sticks soft from the sun. One of the men wore a dark felt hat, pulled so low over his face I could not see his eyes, and he wore heavy gloves, though the day was warm, and they did not match in any way what he had on. The second man was as plain and typical as any pedestrian on the street.

The pedestrian tapped the left-side wall in three places which I noted, and at the third tap a section of wall slid back, showering another band of light that crossed the one from the elevator. As they all three filed in, I rose silently and moved along the wall opposite, hugging it and methodically watching for signs of activity from the hole in the wall.

I started violently as the wall slid back into place, and was sent back into darkness as the elevator disappeared simultaneously. The light was cut off when the stone wall slid down into place, and I had to feel for the section of left-side wall without aid of light.

Finally, I found it, and ran my hand over the surface. There were three indentations where it had been tapped, and I repeated the procedure I had seen the pedestrian undergo, in the same exact way. The wall slid back for me. I stood in the light, and for an instant shivered, thinking I might be clearly limned, for anyone inside to see. But the light was overhead, and the hundreds or so people assembled in the huge mirror-walled auditorium, all had their backs to me. They were seated in modern chairs, in rows, staring up at a platform upon which stood an even more modernistic podium.

Behind the podium stood Freidl, her pastel-blue feather-hide rustling in a breeze from somewhere. It was not as chilly in the auditorium, and I saw that many of the people had their jackets off, or their coats open. 

None of them were normal.

I realized abruptly that the idea I’d had churning within me, coupled with their slogan—sins of our fathers, our heritage—had been correct. Everyone there was malformed in some way. Even those who seemed completely natural, gave off a feeling of strangeness. They seemed alien, and yet I knew they were human beings.

There was a man with a small head growing from his neck, just under the chin of his natural head. He was conversing softly with the midget head.

A woman in the last row had loosened her dress, and a long, spiky tail lay curled behind her chair, on the floor. Every now and then it twitched spastically.

I saw a one-eyed man. One eye in the center of his forehead. He was sitting on the far left and his three-quarter profile was sufficient to label him a cyclops. I took note that he was one of the three who had just entered; that was the reason he wore his hat so far down over his face—to cover his strange eye.

One woman, far up front, was listening to a beanpole man beside her. His neck was of giraffe-proportions, and he leaned and bent to speak to her. A high-pitched, almost birdlike whistle emanated from her, and she rose straight up from her seat, by beating atrophied wings instead of arms. She settled heavily, the mirth dying from her face, and the stunted wings flapped slowly to her sides. I looked away from them, they were all hideous.

Sins of the fathers—

Mutants.

These, indeed, were the Children of Chaos. The offspring of radiation, of holocaust, of eternity gone berserk. I was torn between two feelings: pity for them in their infirmity, and revulsion at the sight of them. I remembered Karlo and his jelly body, his steel head; I remembered the three thugs, who had turned to dust; I looked up at Freidl, magnificent in her softly blue wrapper of feathers.

And I wondered how Martita Delgado, who had been absolutely normal, had gotten in with them.

I slipped behind a pillar that shored up the mirrored ceiling, and strained to catch snatches of conversation from down front. Finally, Freidl banged a gavel, and looking like some sort of bizarre club-woman calling attention, began the meeting. The Children of Chaos were called to order.

“Have we a report from the Agitation Group?” she asked, as an opener. A tall man with arms like ropes stood up, his hairy hawser-appendages swaying freely, and smiled at her.

He must have smiled—she smiled back. She was indeed quite beautiful.

“We have, through one of our membership in Congress, introduced an alarm bill, dealing with fallout. It is sure to be defeated, but the national weeklies and the press will unquestionably pick it up, and the publicity will be widespread. In addition, we have begun a series of riots in Calcutta, Bombay, New Delhi, and seven other large Indian cities. Grain riots. We have taken the precautions of contaminating select doles of this grain, to foment even more unrest.”

He handed up a manila folder with a sheaf of notes in it. “A complete report,” he explained. He sat down, the tentacle arms swinging lithely. 

“Good,” she spoke to herself, and lay the folder down on the podium. 

A woman with hair like a patchwork quilt rose. Her unruly mop of orange, green, blue, pink, and red fluttered about her head like Angel’s Hair. She started to speak, but Freidl cut her off.

“We’ll have the report of your Assassination Group later, Sylvia, but right now we have something much more important at hand.” 

She clapped her hands, and two white-jacketed men—as abnormal as the others, with their humped backs and spined heads partially concealed by the jackets—came onto the platform from an alcove to the right. Bearing between them a tall panel of levers and knife-switches, they staggered slightly making the stairs.

They set the panel down, and immediately set to work untangling the leads and thick bales of wires that ran from the rear of the panel to attachments and sockets at the far right, near the edge of the alcove. In a few moments they had completed their work, and left by the same route they had come.

Freidl looked at the panel for a long series of moments, then walked back to the podium. She stared down at her audience of malformed admirers, and began speaking lowly, with stark intensity, and a sense of importance—as though history was in her speech, as though history were about to be made.

“None of you here need be told that this is a day for which we have worked and suffered, for many years. None of you need be told this, yet many of you have shown alarm at the publicity and pressure that has come about due to the—ah—removal of Member Delgado.” 

A heavy-throated rumble stirred through the auditorium at that, and Freidl raised one downy-feathered arm to still the murmur.

“Any one of you knows the secrecy with which we have had to restrict ourselves. No one of us had it any easier than anyone else. The world that gave us birth would destroy us in a moment if they knew we existed. So we have had to hide ourselves.

“Member Delgado was a traitor! She was prepared to turn us over to the authorities, in exchange for leniency for herself.” Then as almost an aside, with revulsion stinging in her words, she added, “But then, she was hardly one of us at all. Seven toes to a foot hardly qualified her to become a member of the Children of Chaos.”

I stood there digging all this stuff, and thinking My God what a fantastic thing has been going on right under all our noses. How these strange people had been born—was it all as a result of the a-bomb explosions, or was this some after-effect of radiation poisoning; was there a fallout factor working in the air we knew nothing about? I listened to it all, and the .32 Police Special grew warm and sticky in my hand. What a den of hell this place was!

“There was no need to use the Polarizer on her! She was still one of us, a Member!” a tiny, thimble-sized man astride a no-eared woman’s shoulder bellowed in a voice far too large for his size. “It has frightened Members everywhere. Why, I’ve had cables from Ankara and Buenos Aires that are—”

Freidl cut him off peremptorily, with a mash of her palm on the podium. “Good! Excellent! Fear, that is more of what we need. We need more fear in each of us, for with that fear in us, when the time comes, we will more easily be able to convey that fear to the Normals!” She spat the last word out as though it were a chunk of ripe persimmon. I stared at her face, all the way across the auditorium. Man, she was a fanatic if there ever breathed one. She was hell-bent on something or other, and with the minutes, I was getting a better idea of what it was.

Without half trying I knew damned well I was a Normal.

And Miss Freidl did not in any way, shape, or form dig Normals. 

I had to be Normal. I only had one head and ten toes—properly arranged.

“Our organization is dedicated to the overthrow of Man,” she intoned, as though the words were engraved in fire on the inside of her skull. “From ashes and rubble of this world we will rebuild in our own time and our own way. But this Normal world must die, or we will never be free; free from hiding and free from covering ourselves so that we, too, seem to be Normals.”

I thought about that for a second. What a kid with guts that Martita Delgado would have had to have been. To pose for photographs, with the seven-toe deformity she sported. I was betting no one would ever find a photo of her in her bare feet, though.

“Our campaign has suffered during the past ten years,” she went on doggedly, “for though we have had the benefits of more advanced scientific thinking—the effects struck their inventors first, in many cases—we have had to hide and wait and plan in secret. 

“But all that is past. Tonight we are at the point of no return. Future historians will speak of this night…the night of no return. For Man, and for his Children…”

“But Martita was—” the tiny man bellowed anew.

“Martita Delgado was a traitor! She deserved to die! And anyone harboring her sentiments will feel the heat of the Polarizer,” she swung her arm out, and it pointed directly toward the furthest alcove in my sight. I edged out just slightly, and took a look. There were three hawk-nosed men back there—and I mean they had noses would have made a real winged hawk blush—and they were holding weapons with bell-muzzles and coils on them that made the damned things look dangerous. I assumed correctly that these were the Polarizers, and that they were the weapons that had eaten a glowing blue hole through Martita Delgado’s pretty head, and Niles Pfizer’s belly. What the three thugs had done with the one they had used—the thugs who had turned to dust—I did not know, unless they could turn other things to dust, as easily as themselves. But though they were kamikaze troops of the Children’s army, those dust-thugs, I could see no reason why they wouldn’t dust me, instead of themselves. So something else must have happened to the Polarizer they had had with them.

There were a lot of little scrappy pieces to this thing that didn’t fit, that were left hanging. Perhaps I’d never know the answers to them, because this was a helluva big picture I was trying to see, and there were things that had happened that might never come to light.

But I knew I had to hear what she was saying, and snapped my attention back to the podium.

“So a few of you knew her! So you wish to put the petty affections and attachments of your Normal guises above your true purposes! Well, after tonight, none of you will worry about the Martita Delgados in our midst. You will stamp them out as ruthlessly as you will kill all Normals.

“Tonight the Children of Chaos rule the world!”

She stepped back to the panel, and her hand went to one knife-switch painted a blood-red. Her feathered fingers rested on the switch, and her eyes glowed with the most ungodly light I’ve ever seen.

Man, my blood started backing up. 

“This switch controls the first of our Polarizer bombs. Few of you have known of this project. So secret was it, that only the men who conceived it, and the few of us in the top echelons of the Children of Chaos were aware of its existence. Over a thousand bombs have been laid during the past year and a half. In every major city, army emplacement, strategic railhead, air center, and vital position in the world, a Polarizer bomb rests, waiting merely for this…!”

Her hand tightened on the switch, and as though the flesh and steel were one, she slammed it home. I heard a sizzle, and a rumble, and then the very earth beneath and above and around us shivered and trembled.

Then through the ground I heard the most terrible squeal of earthly agony imaginable.

I wasn’t there, I was below ground, but I’ve seen News of the Day newsreels of it, and to say it was horrible would be the mass understatement of the century. That bombsite was ripped loose from the Earth. The bomb had been planted far downtown in New York City, in the one spot that could cripple America most effectively.

When she pulled that switch, the miles-wide area of the financial section of Manhattan went sky-high. It rose up as though on a pillar, with everything staying together for an instant, as that column of earth rose straight up. The city shimmered and wallowed in panic as the financial district went up up up, and then exploded. The buildings split at the seams, and the bricks and steel parted. The entire section went ka-bloom, and people and metal and glass and God everything that was, went every which way. It rained down over New York for the better part of fifteen minutes; rained down into the two-mile deep crater the explosion had caused.

I knew none of that at the time, for I was still intent on the sounds around me and the hellfire look in Freidl’s eyes. But later I saw it, and knew that my emotions as it had happened were accurate. It was a ghastly debacle. Thousands died without a chance. The buildings were miles in the air when they exploded, and anyone living through the explosion itself, would have fallen too far and hit too damned hard to get up and walk away.

No one came out of it alive.

I saw Freidl move her hand to still another knife-switch, and so help me Hannah, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was racing down one of the aisles toward her, with that puny revolver stuck straight out in front of me, and I let loose with three shots.

One two three…

And all three missed her cleanly.

One hit the panel, and went right through. A second spanged off the wall behind her flattening out and clinking away on the floor. The third one I didn’t even see go awry.

I got her with the fourth one.

I hit the platform and went right up over it on all fours. I came almost erect, and fired from the hip. The bullet took her right in the forehead, and spun her around counter-clockwise. She started spilling blood and clutched at her beloved panel, and fell over, carrying it with her.

Then I felt a sizzle go over my right shoulder, and from the corner of my eye I saw the blue blotching bolt of one of those Polarizers as it fired dead-away at me. I dove for the desk, rolled, and came up running again. I snapped off a shot fast, and there was only one guy more surprised than me where it went:

That was the hawk-nosed guy it hit.

He caught the slug high up in the neck—hell, I’d aimed for the belly—and fell back against his two buddies. They were a wild tangle of arms, legs, and bird-beaks for a few seconds, and that gave me just the time to do a Red Grange and land in the middle of them. The hit boy was still thrashing about, making life miserable for the other two, and one of them inadvertently pressed the stud or trigger or whateverthehell the Polarizer had, and another blue flash went up through the mirrored ceiling.

Glass splintered down among the already panicky audience, and they started to bolt. That only made things the more frantic. Jolly-O! I came up out of the puddle of mutants with one of the Polarizers, and turned it on them.

What a glassy mess. It took two bursts. Clean through, and ruined the floor of the alcove, to boot.

With the sideboys out of the way, I turned back to the main auditorium, and swivelled the Polarizer on the rest of them. It was a long, tube-like weapon, with a button at the rear, easy to press, while I held the pistol-grip stock and the bracing rod up front. Somehow, I didn’t have the heart to shoot down those poor winged, double-headed, scaley, twittering monstrosities—even though I knew what they had just done to part of my town, and what they intended to do to my entire race.

I couldn’t shoot them; I felt sorry for the poor ugly bastards. I fired over their heads. It would have been easier if I’d just shot into their midst; not so many would have died.

Because I hit one of the pillars supporting that mirror roof, and the middle of the pillar just went poof! and was gone. The ceiling started to crack, and the cracks ran across the glass, and a second later there were about a million and a half deadly sharp slivers of glass falling. Needles and spears and stalagmites that fell—and pierced—and killed. I was back in the alcove, safe, and watched it all with a sort of growing horror. It was like watching a bunch of trained animals, or freaks, running around on a treadmill, while their squirrel cage burned around them.

This is the end of the Kids, I thought, half-horrified, half-sorry about it all. It seemed a tragic end.

I was almost right.

I backed up, to avoid any of the glass, for by this time the entire ceiling was going, the other two pillars not strong enough to bear the full weight of that ceiling; I backed into the alcove, and backed again, till I found something hard and tight pressed into the tiny of my back.

“Drop that weapon, Mr. Lunch,” a calm, unflurried female voice said. I reached around ever so slow, man, till I felt what was in the small of my back. I dropped the Polarizer.

“You can do a ninety-degree turn,” the voice said, and I played Do-As-I-Say so neatly she could have had no argument. I was facing a door. “Open it,” she said. I opened it.

It was another one of those elevators.

“In.” I got in. She followed right behind, and that little hollow circle that was the muzzle of a .45 stayed right with me. The elevator was dim inside, and she stayed right behind, so I didn’t get a good look at her, but she said, “Press the top button.” There were twenty-two or three buttons on the string, and I jabbed the topmost one. The elevator hit for the ceiling and went on through.

We rode in silence for a time, then she said ironically, “Pure, dumb blind luck, Mr. Lunch. You realize that’s all you’ve had, of course.”

“Of course,” I agreed. Damned if you’d catch me disagreeing with that .45 so handy.

“You happened to find us the night of our largest New York meeting in quite a while. Quite a while, Mr. Lunch. And your blundering ox stupidity has set us back quite a little bit.”

“A bit,” I agreed, and she jammed the .45 into my small vertebræ, so I decided mocking sarcasm was not in style.

The elevator came to a stop. “Open the door,” she instructed me, and like Trilby I obeyed. We were inside a clothes closet. She herded me before her, and we passed through the sweetest-smelling batch of women’s clothes you can imagine, and came out into a lighted bedroom. I looked around and it was a perfectly modern, normal woman’s room. A big double bed, a bureau, a bookcase, a portable tv on a stand, and a dressing table with perfumes on the stand, and a big mirror above it on the wall. A big mirror—

I saw her in the mirror—

I also saw me see her, and saw my face go stark, sheet white. I didn’t give a damn right then, about the .45 or anything. I was sure I was going insane. I had to look. I spun around and came face to face with the last person in the world I’d thought I’d see.

Martita Delgado.

Alive, very beautiful, and holding a steady, unwavering .45 at my head. I struggled with insanity, and just barely threw it two out of three.

“Y-you!” I blurted, originally.

The smile that crossed her lovely face might have put a Mona Lisa to shame, had she not been tinging it with hatred and something even deadlier.

“Lively for a corpse, aren’t I?” she inquired.

I found my tongue was balled up like a little Persian kitten at the back of my throat. It purred gently, then went to sleep. “Oh, stop being so melodramatic, Mr. Lunch,” she said, and laid the .45 down on the night table beside the bed. She sat down on the edge of the big double bed, and her skirt tightened across her thighs so neatly, for a split-second I almost forgot she was a member of the Children of Chaos…and that she was dead.

“I saw the left half of your head blown away and the edges of the wound turned to glass,” I said haltingly. She smiled up at me with her best cover-girl enchanter. I eyed the pistol.

“It isn’t loaded,” she said. “You can pick it up and try it if you choose. It never was loaded. But I had to get you away from there before you did any more damage. And I didn’t want you getting yourself killed.”

“They’d have burned you down in another few minutes, as soon as the clods got their bearings and realized they were in no real danger.” She was still smiling. She had the damnedest pretty cleft in her chin.

“You know I’m going to expose the lot of you, if I ever get the hell out of here alive,” I said hard. I was bluffing; I was certain she wouldn’t turn me loose. Was there another gun trained on me? She could not have been fool enough to bring me up here alone without protection.

She seemed to know what I was thinking. She threw one lovely hand out, and then fluffed her rich auburn hair with it. “Look around. We’re quite alone,” she taunted me. “I wanted to deal with you…in private, Mr. Lunch. May I call you Ray?”

“You may call me Mr. Lunch,” I snapped back, “and I sure as hell will look around.”

I looked; she was telling the truth. We were all alone. I could have throttled her right then and there, and had done with it. But did I want to? According to the now-dead bird-girl, Freidl, Martita Delgado had been trying to break up this worldwide cult.

“Do you feel like telling me this bit from the beginning?” I asked, nasty despite myself.

“Can’t you grasp it by yourself?”

“Not the fine, shaded points,” I replied. She settled back on the bed. Her breasts thrust up against the sheer material of the blouse she wore. I had to remember she had seven toes to each foot; it was the only thing I could think of about her that didn’t appeal.

“We all came out of the blasts,” she said.

“Not Hiroshima alone, surely?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, not just Hiroshima, though you’d be surprised how large the Far East membership of the Children of Chaos is. No, there have been many other blasts, and much change, though few people know about it. It’s been going on for almost ten years. Not just in births, but actually in metabolic changes in each of us. Somehow, we began to band together, and then one day we realized we had to get rid of the Normals, before they got rid of us.”

“Just like that,” I snorted.

“Just,” she snorted back. Her eyes flashed determination.

“During the past ten years we have caused many conflicts. The Israeli-Arab war, the Hungarian Uprising, the Argentinian overthrow of Perón. The—”

“The Korean War?” I burst through. She nodded, smugly. I wanted to strangle her right then. I’d lost a whole barracks-full of buddies on Bloody Ridge and the Chosin Reservoir.

“We have caused them, and more. Assassinations, deaths that seemed to be natural, economic crises, we have been bringing the Normal world to the brink of tension and conflict. We were almost ready to strike our final blows tonight. But that meddling little fool Freidl and her glory-hogging!” her voice dripped with malice.

“I have been at the head of the Children for over eight years, and doing quite nicely, thank you, without any of the mutants actually knowing who ran the organization. I was the mind behind the Polarizer bomb plan. Through many of the scientists who were themselves contaminated and—ah—persuaded to help us—Einstein is with us still, you know, he never really died—we set up the bomb system.

“Then Freidl decided she and her group of thugs were going to turn me out, and take over the new world themselves.”

She paused, and stretched again. My mouth went dry.

“She trailed me that night to Pfizer’s place, and her thugs used the Polarizer on me…”

“I saw you dead…”

“You saw me unregenerated. They killed a section of me. Are you familiar with the attributes of the starfish, Ray?”

“Yeah. And I said you could call me Lunch.”

“Yes, certainly, Ray. You know how the starfish can re-grow sections of itself that have been damaged. Well that happens to be my particular mutation. The toes are false; I merely used them to insure the others thinking I was like them, and yet not letting them know I was immortal, in essence. I was lying there, starting to regenerate, when Pfizer came in. I heard him calling you, but was still unable to move. Then they came back, to get my card, which Niles had already removed.

“I watched the whole thing. The scuffle between the thugs and Pfizer, their killing of him, your heroic entrance,” she said the last humorously, and I could see how it might have seemed so, “and their turning to ashes. We call that breed Dusties for obvious reasons.

“Then, when you left, with the card, I lay there till I had grown back, and took off after you. Do you recall what bars you hit when you left Pfizer’s apartment?”

I couldn’t, and shook my head.

“That’s because you didn’t hit any. You were in your own apartment, under a form of auto-hypnosis, while I placed your prints across a marble bust I’d brought with me from Niles’s apartment. Then I left you and replaced the bust where I had been.”

“I certainly didn’t expect you to go into action so soon. I was counting on them putting you in jail—at least till we had destroyed most of the world with the Polarizers. I’ve been looking for you for ten years, Ray.”

I was going to ask her what she meant, but she passed over that one very quickly, and went on, “But the police let you roam free, and you went right to that little ass Freidl. She saw in you a threat, the fool, and tried to kill you. I, of course, was unable to interfere, and was thrilled when you showed up at the meeting. What was to have been my triumph, Freidl usurped, and she got what she deserved.

“Now all that is finished, and her faction is dispersed. Those of her group who have not been taken care of already by my own followers, will soon be dispensed with.”

So there was trouble within the Kids themselves. That made me happy.

“Now we can go on together. Now that I’ve found you, and you know what the future holds in store for us, we can be the King and Queen of the new world…”

She would have kept on like that, but I stopped her sharply with, “What the hell are you gibbering about?”

“Haven’t you guessed?” she asked. “Don’t you know what I’ve been trying to tell you? Why do you think I haven’t had you killed? Why do you think I saved your life downstairs?”

I was stumped and told her so.

“You and I are the same,” she cried. “The same. We are both regenerative immortals. Husband and wife in kind.”

I boggled. She was insane. “What are you talking about?”

She looked up at me with the sexiest expression I’ve ever seen on a woman, and launched into it. I was stunned, and just listened to it all without saying a word.

“Why do you think you lost your license? I couldn’t have you in a line of work where you might be too badly hurt, or dismembered to regenerate, or where your power would be noticed by others. I trumped up that libel suit, and had your ticket removed. With you as a brush salesman, you were safe, and were held in abeyance till the day of my rulership came to be. You would still have known nothing of the Children of Chaos, had it not been coincidence that I posed for Pfizer and that Freidl picked the night I was to model for him to attempt her assassination.”

“Are you trying to tell me I’m immortal?”

“That’s right, Ray. That’s right, my darling. Together we can rule the world. The new world that will be ours!”

“A world of monsters and sick minds?” I asked nastily.

Her eyes flashed again, and she said, “It will be a new world. A brave and a fine one. No war, no killing, no hatred—”

“And you’re going to found this new world on the ashes of the old, with all the wars and killings and hatred you so despise? Is that it?”

“Ray, don’t be like that,” she pleaded, and I could see a loneliness swimming in her deep green eyes. I looked at her, and thought it might not be such a bad new world at that.

Then I thought of Pfizer and the way Martita had looked on that stand in his apartment, all dead and blown away, and Freidl, and the rest of the Kids. It made me so sick, I wanted to die, but she was reaching up toward me.

She wanted me then, and she was offering not only her immortal self, but the world with it.

I bent toward her, and my arms started around her neck, to embrace her, but they had a life of their own, and the hands struck her windpipe, and the thumbs pressed, and her eyes bugged out, and her mouth opened, and the scream was cut off, and her tongue bulged till her face grew gray with loss of air, and then…in a moment that strung out till eternity, she was dead.

I looked down at her for a moment, and then stumbled out of the room. I could see through a window in the apartment that I was in another section of Freidl’s apartment building. A phone swam into sight, and I dialed Manhattan Homicide West. They couldn’t get to Goldie Harper right away, but I held on and they rang him up in his prowl car, and after a little bit I told him everything.

Everything but that I was immortal, too.

Oh, I didn’t doubt that for a second. She had told me the truth right to the end, with that loneliness of hers—the loneliness only an immortal woman could know—showing; and I told Goldie where to find the Kids. I knew that now the people had been informed of what was happening, there would be a terrible witch hunt, and the deaths of many innocents—those who merely had large birthmarks, or were slightly deformed—but it would even out in the long run. The human race would be saved, and the Kids would be destroyed.

Homo sapiens would triumph over this new species.

But was it right? Did man deserve to survive over man with his new talents and his new attributes? I didn’t know, but it wasn’t my problem. My problem came when I had hung up.

Because I went back to look at her and she was gone. She had regenerated—as I should have known she would—and she was gone.

So that meant the Children of Chaos were not dead…merely chased into hiding, in the beautiful form of Martita Delgado. Now there was only me to go out and find her, wherever she might be, and bring her back, or destroy her. For she was a cancer, a sickness, a bad spot that had to be cut out. I was the one who had to find her and do it, wherever she might be.

I left the apartment, to begin searching, and only when I had reached the street, did I realize something:

If you—the Normals—are going to be witch-hunting the Kids, you will be hunting me, too. For I am as much one of them in kind, as Martita was. I’m immortal, and nothing can kill me. You will be searching for me, when you are searching for the two-headed man who runs things in Anchorage, or the split-tongued child who is head of the Bolivian Assassination Group, or the fat woman who roams with the circus as a disguise for her activities as the head of the French Children of Chaos movement.

You will be searching for me, too, even as I search for Martita.

And though I don’t want the Kids to go on, though I don’t want man to be stamped out, still I don’t want to die either, and if you come too close, I’ll have to fight back.

I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.