Chapter XIV

It was grand to see my half-dozen sub rosa crusaders gathered together again, sitting expectantly on sofas and chairs in Alec's room, watching me with friendship and love. What a tonic those comradely faces were! I drank a silent, sentimental toast to them, and began my yarn.

First I told them of Arold Smiff, the cheap, crooked, gin-soaked little man, who had taken his last bath in 1922; the man who could see the usurpers as well as I could. That roused them to gleeful vociferance, which I squashed with a bark. "Quiet, will you! I'm half starved--haven't had a bite since breakfast. I want to get this done, so I can go and eat a good dinner.

"You know that when I left you I could see just one dismal possibility--a long campaign of slaughter, slaughter, slaughter. But when I met Arold, a plan grew up in my mind--"

"Like a lovely flower in a swamp," murmured Geoff. "Sorry. Pray continue."

"The whole plan," I growled, "is about nine-tenths sheer bluff; but I think it may work. Here it is: first, I travel around the country and collect a hundred names; the names of usurpers whose human shells have had more or less spectacular careers. Not those born to the purple, but those who've come up like rockets, self-made men who've climbed to posts of importance in politics, the law, and elsewhere. I've seen a number of big shots of that sort who are nothing really but robots moved by slimy misshapen blobs ... and I've deduced (pardon the Holmesian expression) that the important members of their loathsome breed are probably those who rise to take over important positions in this world. That allows 'em to protect and to advance their secret cause."

"How?"

"By passing certain laws, and--well, here's an example. One of them commits some crime, perhaps inadvertently. _They_ don't want him to get chucked into prison, where he'd be no use to them in furthering the birth rate. So a were-policeman, to coin a name, will let him escape; or a were-judge will set him free. Get the poisonous subtlety of it? They work themselves into posts where they can help each other to the top of their bent. Even on the lower levels, they're often bartenders and hotel-keepers, who can pass quick word of developments, and so forth. It's as if a lot of Nazis had become lawyers and judges and M.P.s here during the late fracas, and from their exalted seats had protected whole battalions of lesser spies when they ran afoul of the cops."

"I see," said the Colonel. "That's logic."

* * * * *

"So it stands to reason that, if I want to put a great big crimp in their plans, I have to chop a slice off the top of their organization, rather than out of the bottom. I slew a score of 'em while I was the Manchester Slasher, but those were common low folk whom I can't see as especially important to the general plan of the usurpers. They got very peeved about me, but it was nothing to the way they'd have acted had I murdered twenty judicial were-people, or twenty husks of Members of Parliament. My score of twenty lower-case aliens might have been accidental, but twenty upper-crusters wouldn't be. And a hundred will make them sit up and scream like hell.

"You can't hire decent men to commit pointless assassinations, so of course I was handicapped until I met Arold Smiff. In fact, I never even thought of _hiring_ killers, until that night when I found that he could see 'em too. Then the dawn flashed up. You _can_ pay professional rogues to commit murders, and no questions asked. So I deputized Arold to go out and collect a hundred scoundrels for me: the most reliable riffraff available, men who would, as he says, do in their old mothers for a chew of tobacco. He's to pay them ten pounds apiece in advance, with a promise of ten more when the business is done. Then, on a certain night, and within a period of a few hours, they're to strike all over England--and slay these usurpers I'll have collected in my little black book. I understand that the underworld looks with disfavor on a gentleman who collects a fee from a brother crook and then doesn't deliver the goods, so I believe that most of these cutthroats will keep faith and comply with his instructions."

"How do you know this Smith won't do a bunk with your money?" asked Doctor Baringer cynically. "After all, a common thief--"

"Not common," said I loyally. "He was Manny Jarman's right-hand man."

"Who in blazes is, or was, Manny Jarman?"

"Haven't the foggiest, John ... anyhow, Arold's been promised a lot of cash if he comes through; he's enthralled with the scheme, for after all he's been seeing these pink and crimson cacodemons since the early '40s; lastly, and maybe most important, he knows I'm the Manchester Slasher, and in his heart of hearts he's scared white of me. I felt no qualms at all about giving him eleven hundred quid."

Alec whistled. "What a wad!"

"Nearly all I had with me. It's a lucky thing some of us are loaded with the ready, for this affair will cost like sin.

"Then, after our pogrom, I call one of _their_ bigwigs and tell him to meet me somewhere, with as many of his pals as he wants to bring. I say to 'em, 'Gents, you've just seen a sample of my power. I've reached out and obliterated a hundred of you, and they weren't any small potatoes either, but some o' your finest. You realize I didn't snag 'em all by myself; you're no village idiots. Those killings were done by a hundred chaps who can _see_ you. We struck at you all over England. In a few days, another hundred of you get it--and some of you here now are on that list. Couple days later, a hundred and fifty. Then two hundred. And we'll go on knocking you over regularly, working from the top down, till there aren't any of your breed left here, and damned good riddance to filthy bad rubbish, too.'

* * * * *

"Then I make my point. 'The nub of the thing is this: we want you to go home. Pick up your kilts and vamoose. Beat it. This world isn't your world, and by heavens you'd better leave it while the leaving is good. Otherwise you're sunk. You can murder me now,' I tell 'em generously, 'but there's plenty more where I came from. We've perfected a system of warping our vision, and every day there are more of us who can see you in all your ugliness. You can't beat us, because we're the best underground organization that ever existed; and last night's massacre proves it. Till now you had no idea we even existed. Did you?' And they have to admit they didn't, because we don't."

"How's that again, Will?"

"Never mind. Anyway, then they think it over, and if we're in luck, they decide the hell with it, and go home."

"Leaving thousands of suddenly dead bodies, and incredible misery and sorrow among the friends of their puppets," said Geoff. "Oh, I'm with you. That's our whole objective, to rid ourselves of them. But it just hit me: what a lot of tears will be shed because we stepped into this matter."

"Shall we turn back now?"

"Don't drivel. Only ... great merciful powers!" He drank from his glass, his hand shaking. "What will we wreak!"

"Do you think it'll work, Will?" asked Marion quietly.

"It's the biggest bluff of all time, darling. But it must work!" I paused. "There's one big factor. I've hinted at it--here it is. We've always taken it for granted that when the human body dies, the usurper simply goes back to his own world and begins again by getting himself born into a new husk here. Jerry Wolfe figured that out originally, and we've accepted his theory as gospel. But I submit that it needn't be true. I don't know why I ever thought it was. How do we know what happens to the monster when its hull of human flesh dies? How do we know that it's only the puppet which perishes? Echo answers: _we don't know_. Maybe the aliens are so bound to their false humans in this dimension that when the bodies die, the aliens must die too. What's so impossible about that? After all, I've told you that _they_ haven't any powers here except those of the bodies they inhabit. God knows what they can do in their own never-never land--but here, they're little better than so many natural-born people. And if they're that restricted, that much identified with these puppets, maybe even their death is mutual."

* * * * *

I cleared my throat and took a drink of Scotch. "What happened when I killed my first ogre? I went to a pub with Geoff and watched. Pretty soon all the beasts sittin' there started to flap their arms at one another and turn different colors, and then a lot of them got up and left. Aha, yes, I said to myself, the gorgon who got his has gone around behind the dimension-screen telling his chums about it. But I was arguing from a false premise. I was basing my ideas on what I believed to be a fact--yet that fact hadn't been proven at all, and probably couldn't be proven this side of the silver land!"

"Nor disproven," put in Alec.

"But I can show you more to disprove it than you can dig up to prove it! What happens when I assassinate an alien? His human vehicle croaks, while he himself swells up, turns a vivid horrid hue, and goes pop. I submit that that looks more like the death of the alien itself than a simple relegation to another region.

"But I think _they_ can leave this world voluntarily, in which case they go on living in their own. Lord knows how long a life expectancy they've got, over there. Maybe their time is different from ours, so that the life of a man occupies no more than a fraction of a day in the silver land; the theft of a body and the puppeteering of it from womb to tomb may be no more than an hour's vicious pastime for an alien."

"I've been thinking of that," said Geoff slowly. "I see this whole business as a kind of fierce joke on their part, the slow and sly winning of a world from its unseeing inhabitants. So perhaps they'll leave us if their lives are endangered--perhaps the joke may not be worth dying for."

"All this," interrupted John Baringer testily, "is off the track, and really no more than so much anthropomorphism. How can a man finally and definitely state _what_ are the purposes of a pack of inhuman beings? Go on, Will."

"Well, to prove my new theory, Arold and I went out to a pub this morning. We chose a frightful creature that was doing some solitary drinking, and Arold, who's a whizzer of a lad at such matters, slipped some slow poison into his liquor.

"We watched him die, in the throes of agony, which was taken by all the other denizens of the pub for simple indigestion or appendicitis. It took him twelve minutes to die on the floor. I timed him.

* * * * *

"The first three minutes he just writhed and changed colors and shot off angry sparks. He didn't know he was dying. I refer to the real entity, not the human part. Obviously he could feel the pain--they must be able to, otherwise they'd give themselves away by not making the human body jump when it's stuck with a pin, or sits on a hot stove, or whatnot--you can see that. Well, after those three minutes, he seemed to wake up to the fact that this was it. Immediately he started to leave this dimension. It was the damndest sight I ever laid eye on. It was like a man trying to haul himself out of quick-sand or heavy muck. The beast wrenched upward, and jerked back, and did what in any normal being would be called shrugging his shoulders, for all the world as if he was mired in something and wanted to get out. He had an awful time of it. Took him seven minutes and fifteen seconds. But at last he made it.

"He oozed back and away from that twisting body on the floor. He stood there, weaving and trembling, and I'll bet he was sweating, too, if _they_ do any such prosaic thing as sweat. He was entirely divorced from the husk--which lived, mind you, for more than a minute after he'd left it. But as soon as he'd stepped away, he began to fade, and within three or four seconds he had vanished. At any rate, from my sight, and Arold's."

I signaled to Alec to fill my glass. "That's why I think they die when I murder them: because of the time it took that critter to get loose from his puppet. He was scared. I could feel it, just as I can feel their ordinary waves of hatred and abominable passions. I could sense the terror that filled that usurping bastard when he knew his husk was dying. He was purely scared to hell! Why? Why, unless he knew he'd die in both worlds if he couldn't rid himself of the shell before it perished?"

I sighed. I was tired of this whole rotten business, and light-headed from the liquor on my empty stomach. I said, "It was what I'd wanted to discover, why we poisoned the thing. I'd recalled that every alien death I'd seen, every one Jerry Wolfe saw, had been sudden and quick. I'd realized that there were no data on slow deaths. I had to have some. I got it. And I say, it's two to one _they_ die when the human part dies, unless they have plenty of time to get away from it. That's the reason I think they'll leave us voluntarily, in a terrific hurry, when they think there's a whole crew of seers after 'em. They don't like death any more than we do. Death's a queer, an uncanny thing. Nothing that I know in nature likes to die."

"But how did the aliens in those pubs of yours learn so quickly about the killings, if the one who was killed--I mean the one--" Marion frowned angrily--"if the one who'd been relegated didn't go around behind the scenes and tell them?"

"Oh, dear girl!" shouted Geoff. "Messengers! Errand boys! The pony express of the silver land!"

"That's it," said I. "That's what we never thought of. There must be plenty of _them_ who don't have human bodies at all, and move freely in their own dimension. What's to keep them from spreading the word to their comrades when one dies?"

"Will, you've hit it," the Colonel said. "They die here. It's probable, it's the best news yet, and if it's true, the bluff will work."

"And now that I've lectured you for an hour," I said, reaching for Marion's hand, "let's go out to the best restaurant within walking distance, and have us a monstrous dinner. I could eat the proverbial horse."

"There's a place within two blocks where they give you a delightful Percheron steak," said Alec. "Let's travel."