"All right, snoopie, here it is." Sharp lifted a strange implement from his bag and pointed it. "Duck," Penny shouted, "That's it!"
"All right, snoopie, here it is." Sharp lifted a strange implement from his bag and pointed it. "Duck," Penny shouted, "That's it!"
"All right, snoopie, here it is." Sharp lifted a strange implement from his bag and pointed it. "Duck," Penny shouted, "That's it!"
He jerked his bag open. His hand dived into it. It came out of the bag with the strangest looking instrument Rocks had ever seen. Constructed of pale silvery metal, fitted with a series of faceted lenses, it glinted evilly under the lights.
Because of the very nature of the instrument, Sharp handled it clumsily. But there was no mistaking its purpose. He brought it up. Penny screamed.
Rocks stepped forward. His left hand flicked out. All the weight of his body was behind that blow. He drove it straight at Sharp's chin. It would have made Joe Louis bat his expressionless eyes. It would have knocked Sharp's head almost off his shoulders—if it had landed.
That was the trouble. It didn't land. Sharp saw it coming. He ducked down and to one side, fumbling with the instrument he had taken from his bag. The fist skidded across the top of his head. It sent him staggering backward.
"The next time," Rocks gritted. "I won't miss. I'll knock your damned head off, you dirty murderer." He charged.
Sharp brought the instrument up. Pale, scarcely visible flame lanced from it, like a heat wave moving through air. It spurted forward, soundlessly. As it leaped it seemed to absorb, to blot out all sound. There was a sudden heavy silence in the museum basement, the sort of silence that is so real it registers on the ear drums.
Rocks saw the instrument coming up. He kicked himself to one side, in a dancing step. The fringe of lambent flame barely touched him. But that touch sent needles of agony through his body, sucked the life out of him, turned his muscles into lumps of lead, threw him off balance, so that his charge, instead of striking Sharp, barely grazed him. His arms closed around the business manager's body. To keep himself from falling, Rocks clinched.
They wrestled. Sharp could not use the instrument. Rocks was so groggy he could barely hold on. Sharp dug into him with his elbows, kicked viciously at his shins.
If he could only hold on, Rocks thought. The agony was lessening. The groggy shadows were going from his mind. If he could only hold on for another minute.
He was holding on. He was winning. Soft living had made a weakling of Sharp. He would be no match for the rugged, youthful muscles of Rocks Malone, in a fair fight.
Then Sharp struck upward. His fist hit Rocks in the chin. Malone sagged downward. Shaking his head, he grabbed at Sharp again. And missed. And fell to the floor. Before he could move, Sharp had leaped around a table. He had brought the instrument up.
"All right," he husked. "You asked for it, with your snooping. You're going to get it. You and this girl."
Rocks staggered to his feet. He leaned against the edge of the table, panting, fighting for breath and strength. Sharp was across the table from him. He was aiming the instrument.
This time there would be no escaping it. It would point at him and those almost invisible tongues of light would flash out, the deadly silence would smash all sound into nothingness, and millions of microscopic needles would tear through his flesh.
Sharp fumbled for the firing button.
Penny, crouched on the other side of the room, grabbed the handiest object she could find, and threw it. It was the alarm clock. It struck Sharp full in the face, and the alarm, jarred by the impact, went off.
Probably the clang of the alarm bell started Sharp as much as the impact of the clock. Certainly it did not hit him hard enough to harm him. But it did startle him, scare him. He reeled backward.
Rocks cleared the table with a single leap. He went up into the air like a kangaroo and leaped, feet foremost, at Sharp. His feet struck the business manager full in the stomach. Sharp doubled up like a jackknife, and went to the floor. Rocks fell on top of him. He struck viciously with his fists. Sharp cried in pain and Rocks struck harder. The man was down, but he wasn't out. Rocks drew back his fist for the final blow.
It never landed. Down over his shoulder the barrel of a gun flashed. Where it had come from, Rocks did not know. It struck the business manager across the skull.
His head popped like the breaking of a rotten egg. He went limp.
Rocks looked up. Kennedy stood there. He was holding the pistol with which he had struck Sharp, in his hand. He looked to see if he would need to use it again. He saw he wouldn't.
He whirled the gun around on its trigger guard.
"Damn me for a fool," he said. "I could kick myself from here to the Loop and back again. I missed a trick and it cost three hundred people their lives."
"What trick?" Rocks gasped.
"I should have known this gazabo was lying," Kennedy snarled. "I should have known his long cock and bull story about some incredible creature coming out of that box was too fantastic for belief. I should have known he was lying, out damn it, the sight of Morton's body so addled my wits that I was willing to believe the story Sharp told. Oh, he was smooth enough about it. He knew how the weapon he found killed. He knew what it did to Morton's body, and he had to have a fantastic story to account for the way Morton looked. He solved the secret of that box soon after it was brought here. He had a reason for it too. He had been playing the market and he was down on his uppers. If there was a treasure in that box, he wanted first crack at it. He didn't find any treasure in it. Instead he found some kind of a damned weapon in it that came from God alone knows where. When he found Morton had opened the box and was about to catch up with him by weighing the box, he took the obvious out—by killing Morton, using the weapon he had found in the box. He killed McCumber because the old man knew there was something fishy about the box being on the scales. So he killed McCumber—to shut him up."
"But those people in the theater?" Rocks whispered.
Kennedy exploded. "He needed money, needed it bad. I dug this all up in my investigation today. He was trying to sell the weapon he had discovered to the agents of a foreign power. They wanted a demonstration before they would pay off. So he gave them a demonstration. He showed them how efficient a weapon he had for sale—by killing all the people in a theater."
The detective was furiously angry. "And I let myself get taken in by a story of a monster."
Rocks had already picked up the instrument Sharp had found in that box. He was studying it, looking it over. The principle on which it operated, he couldn't begin to guess, but he saw one thing that startled him enormously. He showed it to the detective.
"Great Jehosophat!" Kennedy gasped. "A place for six fingers. Whoever built that damned thing had six fingers."
The Lord of the Silent Death was not an extra-dimensional monster. It was a weapon that killed in utter silence.
The instrument that came out of the box from the tomb of the forgotten Sumerian King is now in Washington, in the secret vaults of the War Department. The experts are studying it, trying to fathom how it works. They have begun to get hints of the principle involved. Only hints, but something to go on. They have discovered that it kills in two ways. The first, and obvious way, is by pointing it directly at its victim. At the theatre he had sprayed the power, full on, across the audience, then across the ensemble on the stage, then as he went out the back had caught all others.
The second way is worse. In Sharp's bag was found a sack of small round objects that look like marbles. All the owner of the weapon needs to do to kill an enemy is to drop one of those bits of glass in the enemy's pocket. Then he can go off several miles and start the weapon. The force it generates is concentrated in the bit of glass, and the silence is instantly generated, the bit of glass being destroyed in the process.
That was the method Sharp used to kill McCumber. As they left the museum, Sharp dropped one of the bits of glass in the pocket of the old archeologist's coat. McCumber had found it, but had attached no significance to it.
The experts hope that the War Department of this country will never need such a weapon. But if it does, it will have it.
But the thing that plagues the experts, that frets the archeologists, that has caused Rocks Malone to tear his hair, is the fact that the weapon was designed to be used by a creature who had six fingers. Not five fingers. Six. And the archeologists are having drizzling fits trying to decide whether there was once a race of six-fingered creatures here on earth, a race that reached tremendous scientific heights, and vanished.
Or was earth once visited by creatures out of space, who left a weapon behind them?
Nobody knows. Possibly nobody will ever know.
But Rocks Malone is preparing to leave for Asia Minor, to dig in the ruins of lost and gone civilizations, searching for another clue to the identity of the lost race.
Penny is going with him.