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6

 

. . . . Frazier was looking at me with the kind of look you give a dog that's been run over. Gatley was standing behind him and Smith and Jacobs and a couple of men from the maintenance shop.

"Follow your orders, damn you!" I was yelling, and the blood was thudding in my temples like nine-pound sledges. "I told you to wall it off, and by God I meant I wanted it walled off! I never want sunlight to shine in there again!"

"We all know how you feel, Steve," Frazier was saying. "But there's no use—"

Hobart pushed up beside him and his fat face came open and said, "Look here, Dravek, we have fifty thousand dollars invested in this project—"

I swung on him and somebody tried for my arms from behind and I broke his leg and then they were all backed against the wall in a bunch but Frazier, who was always the only one with the guts to face me. There was blood on his mouth. A mechanic named Brownie was on the floor, groaning.

"He's gone crazy!" Hobart was yelling, and Frazier was looking me in the eye and saying, "All right, Steve, if that's what you want. . . ."  

* * *

"Do you know what it means?" It seemed like a long time had passed, but Jess was still standing beside me with the light in his hand and I was holding the box. I tossed it on the floor and the clatter was muffled in the dust.

"Yeah," I said. "I know." I went back out into the outer room. The egg-crate ceiling was a dark tapestry of sooty spider webs and the walls that had been a soft tan were blackish-green, but I knew the way now. On the far side, a door was set in an alcove beside a rusty pipe pushing up from the rotted casing of a water cooler. It squeaked and opened and Jess' light showed us another room, full of dust and age and piles of shapeless debris where chairs and tables had been.

"Waiting room," I said. "Receptionist's desk over there." I went past the jumble of rusted-out metal and along a hall where dust came up in clouds, through a pair of doors that fell off their hinges when I kicked them and down steps to a pair of rusted steel doors that were standing open.

I looked at the doors, feeling the kind of feeling that Petrie must have had when he read the inscription over King Tut's tomb. My pulse was slamming, slow and heavy, a funeral march. I didn't want to see what was on the other side. I took a deep breath and Jess came down beside me and put the light inside. It made long shadows in a wide, high room, with piping and fallen scaffolding along one wall and a half-completed framework of steel plating looming up in the background like a wrecked tanker. There was lots of dust here, too, and a faint rotten smell in the air.

Jess' light fingered the wall ahead, flicked up along the side of the big tank, showed up piping and condensers and power transformers rafter-mounted up under the black ceiling.

"What was it all for?" Jess asked. "What sort of work did you do here?"

"We were a food packaging and processing outfit. The big tank was part of a new process we developed."

"Why wasn't it completed?"

"I don't remember."

Jess played the light around some more, and held it on the floor. Footprints in the dust led toward the far wall. They skirted a coil of heavy cable with cracked insulation, went on into shadows. My face felt clammy and the palms of my hands were numb. There was something waiting for me up ahead and the fear of it was like cold lead in my stomach. I stepped off, following the trail, and Jess came behind, lighting the way.

* * *

On the other side of the big unfinished tank there was a deep bay with a railed gallery. I went up the companionway, along past open-sided cubicles with stainless steel tubs, still bright under the dust. The stink was stronger here. The footprints turned in at the last bay. I ducked under the low hood, and stopped that way, bent over, looking through a framed opening that had been made by tearing out a wall. The light made complicated shadows across a room full of machinery. Cables and tubes and pipes led from the apparatus to a ten-foot tank like an iron lung. A hatch at one end of the tank was standing open. I could see something inside; something that took hold of my guts like a giant bird's claw and squeezed. I reached and swung the door back and the thing inside glided out on a white porcelain slab and I was looking down at a man's face, dry and brown as carved wood, with shaggy, dry hair, sandy brown, and a glint of teeth showing at the edge of the withered lips.

* * *

The body was nothing but purplish-brown leather stretched over bones. There were a couple of dozen tiny wounds visible on the skin.

"This is a life-support tank," Jess said. "It's been sabotaged. See the broken wires?"

"This is just a kid," I said. "Not more than sixteen years old. The hair's long, but there's no sign of a beard."

"He appears to have desiccated perfectly in the sterile atmosphere."

"The guy that sent us here didn't do it just to show us this," I said. "There's got to be more. Give me a hand."

I took hold of the right arm; it felt as hard and dry as last year's corn husks, and about as heavy. There was nothing under the cadaver except a blackish stain on the porcelain.

Jess played the light inside the tank, showed up a tangle of conduits and wires. The body was on its back, one leg drawn up a little, the arms at the sides, the fists closed. One fist looked a little different than the other. I bent over and looked.

"He's got something in his hand," I said. I broke off one of the fingers getting it out. It was a metal tube three inches long, half an inch in diameter. There was a screw cap at one end. I twisted it off and pulled out tightly rolled papers.

I unrolled them and a couple of faded newspaper clippings slid out into my hand. I smoothed the top one out and read it:

 

Police today continued their investigation into the mystery surrounding the discovery of an unidentified body in a midtown hotel late yesterday. Although the apparent cause of death was suicide from a small-caliber gas gun, a small wound in the roof of the mouth indicated possible foul play. The victim, apparently in his late thirties, was dressed in the uniform of a major in the UN Constabulary. UN Headquarters has so far declined to comment. (IP)

 

The next one was a bigger spread, two long columns in small, crabbed type that had a familiar look to it. The headline read: MAN GUNNED IN DAYLIGHT MURDER. The story under it told me that just before press time a gray Monojag had pulled up to the Waldorf and a man in the back seat had poked a 6mm Bren gun out the window and fired a full clip into a man in a brown overcoat coming out the revolving door. An employee of the hotel had been slightly injured in the knee by a ricochet. Examination of the body failed to produce any indication of the identity of the murdered man. The Monojag had driven off and made good its escape. Police were following up several clues and expected to make an arrest at any moment.

I handed the clip to Jess and another one dropped. I picked it up and was looking at a picture of myself.

It wasn't a bad likeness, except that it showed a little more hair than seemed just right, and there was a small scar high on the right cheekbone that didn't look familiar. And there was something wrong with the expression. But the part that hit my nervous system like a fire hose full of ice water was the caption:

 

* * *

 

The lines below read:

 

Civil Peace Under-Commissioner Arkwright announced today that record search has so far failed to identify the visaless body discovered late yesterday in Mid-city Tube Central.

The corpse, which had been ignored for several hours by Tube patrons who assumed the man was sleeping, is thought to be that of a criminal sought by Peace authorities for violation of the Life Act. See story page 115.

 

"What is it?" I said. "A gag, or a fake, or a little slip in the editorial department?"

Jess was reading the clip. He didn't answer. I looked at the picture some more. It was me, all right; and something about it bothered me. . . . 

"This is no fake," I said. "The guy in the picture was dead when they took it, all right."

Jess glanced at the photo. "Why do you say that?"

"You prop the body up, get the eyelids open, and set the lights to give you a little reflection off the eyeball, tuck the tongue back inside and run a comb through the hair. It looks OK—unless you know what to look for. The Chinese used to use the trick to keep the Red Cross happy about the prisoners."

"Horrible. Still, since he was dead when they found him, I suppose it's understandable."

"Maybe I'm a little slow. Back where I come from, a fellow doesn't often get a look at his own obituary."

Jess gave me his pained look. "You talk as if you imagined that was a picture of yourself."

"Imagine, hell! I know a picture of me when I see it."

"The coincidence in appearance is rather striking—"

"Ha!"

"The clips could refer to relatives of yours. Perhaps it's a vendetta—a rather fantastic vendetta, I confess—"

"It's a swell theory," I cut him off. "Except that I don't know anything about a feud, and I never had a twin."

"You had a grandfather."

"Make that a little plainer."

"Take another look at the date on the clip," he said. "It's over sixty years old."

* * *

My face felt like something chipped out of ice, but I pushed it into a grin.

"That clears that up. I'm not a fresh corpse on a slab down at the city morgue; I'm a nice settled cadaver who's been pushing up daisies the bigger half of a century."

Jess nodded as if that meant something. Maybe it did. I was still hanging in the air feeling for the floor with my toes. There was another paper back of the clips. Jess put the light on it while I unrolled it. It was covered with typing. I smoothed it out on the side of the tank and read it:

 

Number Three gave me most of it. The major almost had it, but he slipped somewhere and they took him. He had the best chance of any of us. Less time had gone by and the organization he was up against wasn't as solid yet, and his taping was better. He spent ten years getting ready, but they nailed him. Three had a tough time, but he picked up his cues and carried it a little farther, and from what he found out gave me the tip that brought me here. But none of it would have happened except for Frazier. He was the only man that could have handled the Plan. He knew what he was doing when he picked him for the job.
 

What I'm going to try may not work, and if it doesn't, I'll wind up like the major and this poor kid here who never even had a name. But it's what I have to do. Maybe I'm wasting my time writing long chatty letters to a guy that doesn't exist, never will exist. But I'm banking on it that I'm not the last. OK, you read the note Number Three left, and came here, just like I did. The box was empty when I found it, too, but his tip to try the sealed wing was there. The paint I put back over it won't last more than ten years, and that ought to be long enough—unless he finds you first. But that's where he outfoxed himself.
 

Maybe the old devil knew himself better than he thought he did. The story about making the setup torture proof was a little far-fetched. He couldn't afford to let himself know. Maybe he even saw this coming some day. But if he did, why—[word scratched out].
 

To hell with that. Let's keep this short. I've got plenty of time, my trail's covered and cold, maybe he thinks I'm dead. I tried hard enough to make him think so. Five years I've laid doggo now. But now it's time to move. Can't stall forever. Because I found it.
 

It's a place you know—but maybe you don't. The systems are getting old. There are gaps in my briefing. Number Three said there might be. He had it all, right up to the beginning of the Plan. I remember the trial, and the start of the project, but it all seems a little academic, like a story you've heard too many times. Or it did. Now that I've seen what I have, it eats at me. I haven't had eighty years to forget, like he has. But now I'm ready to make my try. Maybe he'll be ready for me, and I'll wash up on a beach a thousand miles from there. But I've got to try it now, before I get any rustier. Maybe I've already waited too long, but I had to wait, give myself every break there was—because if I fail, there may not be a Number Five.
 

Funny how I can't stick to the point. I guess I want to talk to somebody; but there's nobody a man can trust. ETORP's stranglehold is getting tighter every day. Now they have private cops with little black lapel badges crawling every street in the city, and there's a lot of talk about some kind of legalized euthanasia, with ETORP running it on a contract deal. Some organization. Maybe I ought to feel proud; maybe I do, in a way. But I'll break it, or get killed. I hope I make it. I've got to make it. It may be the last chance. Just on the off chance something goes wrong, I'm leaving this for you. If anybody else finds this it's got to be him, and what good is a code with him? You'll know what to do with it. And if you don't, you've forgotten too much—or never got it—
 

It's too complicated for me. Things moved fast after my day. We would have called it magic, and maybe it is. Black magic. Bad magic. But part of it's a fairy tale. I make a lousy prince, but I have to try.
 

Funny, when you read this, you'll know I didn't make it; but here it is: MUSKY LAKE. Third, fifth, fourth. 247.
 

Cute, huh?
 

Now it's up to you. I'm going to put this in a place that will remind you what he's turned into, what he did to this poor kid, and left him here for us to find. I'll give it to him to pass to you.
 

Good luck.

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Framed