Highways in Hiding
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George Oliver Smith >> Highways in Hiding
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I suddenly re-lived the big crack-up.
Willingly now, no longer rejecting the memory, I followed my
recollection as Catherine and I went along that highway at a happy pace.
With care I recalled every detail of Catherine, watching the road
through my mind and eyes, how she'd mentioned the case of the missing
spoke, and how I'd projected back to perceive that which I had not been
conscious of.
Reminding myself that it was past, I went through it again,
deliberately. The fallen limb that blocked the road, my own horror as
the wheels hit it. The struggle to regain control of the careening car.
As a man watching a motion picture, I watched the sky and the earth turn
over and over, and I heard my voice mouthing wordless shouts of fear.
Catherine's cry of pain and fright came, and I listened as my mind
reconstructed it this time without wincing. Then the final crash, the
horrid wave of pain and the sear of the flash-fire. I went through my
own horror and self condemnation, and my concern over Catherine. I
didn't shut if off. I waded through it.
Now I remembered something else.
Something that any normal, sensible mind would reject as an
hallucination. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there had been no time for a
man to rig a block and tackle on a tree above a burning automobile in
time to get the trapped victims out alive. And even more certain it was
that no normal man of fifty would have had enough strength to lift a car
by its front bumper while his son made a rush into the flames.
That tackle had been rigged and burned afterward. But who would reject a
block and tackle in favor of an impossibly strong man? No, with the
tackle in sight, the recollection of a man lifting that overturned
automobile like a weight lifter pressing up a bar bell would be buried
in any mind as a rank hallucination. Then one more item came driving
home hard. So hard that I almost jumped when the idea crossed my mind.
Both Catherine and Dr. Thorndyke had been telepaths.
A telepath close to any member of his underground outfit would divine
their purpose, come to know their organization, and begin to grasp the
fundamentals of their program. Such a person would be dangerous.
On the other hand, an esper such as myself could be turned aside with
bland remarks and a convincing attitude. I knew that I had no way of
telling lie from truth and that made my problem a lot more difficult.
From the facts that I did have, something smelled of overripe seafood.
Government and charities were pouring scads of dough into a joint called
the Medical Research Center. To hear the scholars of medicine tell it,
Mekstrom's Disease was about the last human frailty that hadn't been
licked to a standstill. They boasted that if a victim of practically
anything had enough life left in him to crawl to a telephone and use it,
his life could be saved. They grafted well. I'd heard tales of things
like fingers, and I know they were experimenting on hands, arms and legs
with some success. But when it came to Mekstrom's they were stopped
cold. Therefore the Medical Research Center received a walloping batch
of money for that alone; all the money that used to go to the various
heart, lung, spine and cancer funds. It added up well.
But the Medical Research Center seemed unaware that some group had
solved their basic problem.
From the books I've read I am well aware of one of the fundamental
principles of running an underground: _Keep it underground!_ The Commie
menace in these United States might have won out in the middle of the
century if they'd been able to stay a secret organization. So the
Highways in Hiding could stay underground and be an efficient
organization only until someone smoked them out.
That one was going to be me.
But I needed an aide-de-camp. Especially and specifically I needed a
trained telepath, one who would listen to my tale and not instantly howl
for the nut-hatch attendants. The F.B.I. were all trained investigators
and they used esper-telepath teams all the time. One dug the joint while
the other dug the inhabitant, which covered the situation to a
faretheewell.
It would take time to come up with a possible helper. So I spent the
next hour driving toward Chicago, and by the time I'd crossed the
Ohio-Indiana line and hit Richmond, I had a plan laid out. I placed a
call to New York and within a few minutes I was talking to Nurse Farrow.
I'll not go into detail because there was a lot of mish-mash that is not
particularly interesting and a lot more that covered my tracks since I'd
parted company with her on the steps of the hospital. I did not, of
course, mention my real purpose over the telephone and Miss Farrow could
not read my mind from New York.
The upshot of the deal was that I felt that I needed a nurse for a
while, not that I was ill, but that I felt a bit woozy now and then
because I hadn't learned to slow down. I worked too fast and too long
and my condition was not up to it yet. This Miss Farrow allowed as being
quite possible. I repeated my offer to pay her at the going prices for
registered nurses with a one-month guarantee, paid in advance. That
softened her quite a bit. Then I added that I'd videograph her a check
large enough to cover the works plus a round trip ticket. She should
come out and have a look, and if she weren't satisfied, she could return
without digging into her own pocket. All she'd lose was one day, and it
might be a bit of a vacation if she enjoyed flying in a jetliner at
sixty thousand feet.
The accumulation of offers finally sold her and she agreed to
arrange a leave of absence. She'd meet me in the morning of the
day-after-tomorrow, at Central Airport in Chicago.
I videographed the check and then took off again, confident that I'd be
able to sell her on the idea of being the telepath half of my amateur
investigation team.
Then because I needed some direct information, I turned West and crossed
the line into Indiana, heading toward Marion. So far I had a lot of
well-placed suspicions, but until I was certain, I could do no more than
postulate ideas. I had to know definitely how to identify Mekstrom's
Disease, or at least the infected flesh. I have a fairly good recall;
all I needed now was to have someone point to a Case and say flatly that
this was a case of Mekstrom's Disease. Then I'd know whether what I'd
seen in Ohio was actually one hundred percent Mekstrom.
VI
I walked into the front office with a lot of self-assurance. The Medical
Center was a big, rambling place with a lot of spread-out one- and
two-story buildings that looked so much like "Hospital" that no one in
the world would have mistaken them for anything else. The main building
was by the road, the rest spread out behind as far as I could see;
beyond my esper range even though the whole business was set in one of
the clearest psi areas that I'd even been in.
I was only mildly worried about telepaths. In the first place, the only
thing I had to hide was my conviction about a secret organization and
how part of it functioned. In the second place, the chances were good
that few, if any, telepaths were working there, if the case of Dr.
Thorndyke carried any weight. That there were some telepaths, I did not
doubt, but these would not be among the high-powered help.
So I sailed in and faced the receptionist, who was a good-looking
chemical-type blonde with a pale skin, lovely complexion and figure to
match. She greeted me with a glacial calm and asked my business.
Brazenly I lied. "I'm a freelance writer and I'm looking for material."
"Have you an assignment?" she asked without a trace of interest in the
answer.
"Not this time. I'm strictly freelance. I like it better this way
because I can write whatever I like."
Her glacial air melted a bit at the inference that my writing had not
been in vain. "Where have you been published?" she asked.
I made a fast stab in the dark, aiming in a direction that looked safe.
"Last article was one on the latest archeological findings in Assyria.
Got my source material direct from the Oriental Institute in Chicago."
"Too bad I missed it," she said, looking regretful. I had to grin, I'd
carefully avoided giving the name of the publication and the supposed
date. She went on, "I suppose you would not be happy with the usual
press release?"
"Handouts contain material, all right, but they're so confounded trite
and impersonal. People prefer to read anecdotes about the people rather
than a listing of facts and figures."
She nodded at that. "Just a moment," she said. Then she addressed her
telephone in a voice that I couldn't hear. When she finished, she smiled
in a warmish-type manner as if to indicate that she'd gone all out in my
behalf and that I'd be a heel to forget it. I nodded back and tried to
match the tooth-paste-ad smile. Then the door opened and a man came in
briskly.
He was a tall man, as straight as a ramrod, with a firm jaw and a
close-clipped moustache. He had an air like a thin-man's Captain Bligh.
When he spoke, his voice was as clipped and precise as his moustache; in
fact it was so precise that it seemed almost mechanical.
"I am Dr. Lyon Sprague," he clipped. "What may I do for you?"
"I'm Steve Cornell," I said. "I'm here after source material for a
magazine article about Mekstrom's Disease. I'd prefer not to take my
material from a handout."
"Do you hope to get more?" he demanded.
"I usually do. I've seen your handouts; I could get as much by taking
last year's medical encyclopedia. Far too dry, too uninteresting, too
impersonal."
"Just exactly what do you have in mind?"
I eyed him with speculation. Here was not a man who would take kindly to
imaginative conjecture. So Dr. Lyon Sprague was not the man I'd like to
talk to. With an inward smile, I said, "I have a rather new idea about
Mekstrom's that I'd like to discuss with the right party."
He looked down at me, although our eyes were on the same level. "I doubt
that any layman could possibly come up with an idea that has not been
most thoroughly discussed here among the research staff."
"In cold words you feel that no untrained lunk has a right to have an
idea."
He froze. "I did not say that."
"You implied, at least, that suggestions from outsiders were not
welcome. I begin to understand why the Medical Center has failed to get
anywhere with Mekstrom's in the past twenty years."
"What do you mean?" he snapped.
"Merely that it is the duty of all scientists to listen to every
suggestion and to discard it only after it has been shown wrong."
"Such as--?" he said coldly, with a curl of his eyebrows.
"Well, just for instance, suppose some way were found to keep a victim
alive during the vital period, so that he would end up a complete
Mekstrom Human."
"The idea is utterly fantastic. We have no time for such idle
speculation. There is too much foggy thinking in the world already. Why,
only last week we had a Velikovsky Adherent tell us that Mekstrom's had
been predicted in the Bible. There are still people reporting flying
saucers, you know. We have no time for foolish notions or utter
nonsense."
"May I quote you?"
"Of course not," he snapped stiffly. "I'm merely pointing out that
non-medical persons cannot have the grasp--"
The door opened again and a second man entered. The new arrival had
pleasant blue eyes, a van dyke beard, and a good-natured air of
self-confidence and competence. "May I cut in?" he said to Dr. Sprague.
"Certainly. Mr. Cornell, this is Scholar Phelps, Director of the Center.
Scholar Phelps, this is Mr. Steve Cornell, a gentleman of the press," he
added in a tone of voice that made the identification a sort of nasty
name. "Mr. Cornell has an odd theory about Mekstrom's Disease that he
intends to publish unless we can convince him that it is not possible."
"Odd theory?" asked Scholar Phelps with some interest. "Well, if Mr.
Cornell can come up with something new, I'll be most happy to hear him
out."
Dr. Lyon Sprague decamped with alacrity. Scholar Phelps smiled after
him, then turned to me and said, "Dr. Sprague is a diligent worker,
businesslike and well-informed, but he lacks the imagination and the
sense of humor that makes a man brilliant in research. Unfortunately,
Dr. Sprague cannot abide anything that is not laid out as neat as an
interlocking tile floor. Now, Mr. Cornell, how about this theory of
yours?"
"First," I replied, "I'd like to know how come you turn up in the nick
of time."
He laughed good-naturedly. "We always send Dr. Sprague out to interview
visitors. If the visitor can be turned away easily, all is well and
quiet. Dr. Sprague can do the job with ease. But if the visitor, like
yourself, Mr. Cornell, proposes something that distresses the good Dr.
Sprague and will not be loftily dismissed, Dr. Sprague's blood pressure
goes up. We all keep a bit of esper on his nervous system and when the
fuse begins to blow, we come out and effect a double rescue."
I laughed with him. Apparently the Medical Center staff enjoyed needling
Dr. Sprague. "Scholar Phelps, before I get into my theory, I'd like to
know more about Mekstrom's Disease. I may not be able to use it in my
article, but any background material works well with writers of fact
articles."
"You're quite right. What would you like to know?"
"I've heard, too many times, that no one knows anything at all about
Mekstrom's. This is unbelievable, considering that you folks have been
working on it for some twenty years."
He nodded. "We have some, but it's precious little."
"It seems to me that you could analyze the flesh--"
He smiled. "We have. The state of analytical chemistry is well advanced.
We could, I think, take a dry scraping out of the cauldron used by
MacBeth's witches, and determine whether Shakespeare had reported the
formula correctly. Now, young man, if you think that something is added
to the human flesh to make it Mekstrom's Flesh, you are wrong. Standard
analysis shows that the flesh is composed of exactly the same chemicals
that normal flesh contains, in the same proportion. Nothing is added,
as, for instance, in the case of calcification."
"Then what is the difference?"
"The difference lies in the structure. By X-ray crystallographic method,
we have determined that Mekstrom's Flesh is a micro-crystalline
formation, interlocked tightly." Scholar Phelps looked at me
thoughtfully. "Do you know much about crystallography?"
As a mechanical engineer I did, but as a writer of magazine articles I
felt I should profess some ignorance, so I merely said that I knew a
little about the subject.
"Well, Mr. Cornell, you may know that in the field of solid geometry
there are only five possible regular polyhedrons. Like the laws of
topology that state that no more than four colors need be used to print
a map on a flat surface, or that no more than seven colors are required
to print separate patches on a toroid, the laws of solid geometry prove
that no more than five regular polyhedrons are possible. Now in
crystallography there are only thirty-two possible classes of crystal
lattice construction. Of these only thirty have ever been discovered in
nature. Yet we know how the other two would appear if they did emerge in
natural formation."
I knew it all right but I made scribblings in my notebooks as if the
idea were of interest. Scholar Phelps waited patiently until I'd made
the notation.
"Now, Mr. Cornell, here comes the shock. Mekstrom's Flesh is one of the
other two classes."
This was news to me and I blinked.
Then his face faded into a solemn expression. "Unfortunately," he said
in a low voice, "knowing how a crystal should form does not help us much
in forming one to that class. We have no real control over the
arrangement of atoms in a crystal lattice. We can prevent the crystal
formation, we can control the size of the crystal as it forms. But we
cannot change the crystal into some other class."
"I suppose it's sort of like baking a cake. Once the ingredients are
mixed, the cake can be big or small or shaped to fit the pan, or you can
spoil it complete. But if you mix devil's food, it either comes out
devil's food or nothing."
"An amusing analogy and rather correct. However I prefer the one used
years ago by Dr. Willy Ley, who observed that analysis is fine, but you
can't learn how a locomotive is built by melting it down and analyzing
the mess."
Then he went on again. "To get back to Mekstrom's Disease and what we
know about it. We know that the crawl goes at about a sixty-fourth of an
inch per hour. If, for instance, you turned up here with a trace on your
right middle finger, the entire first joint would be Mekstrom's Flesh in
approximately three days. Within two weeks your entire middle finger
would be solid. Without anesthesia we could take a saw and cut off a bit
for our research."
"No feeling?"
"None whatever. The joints knit together, the arteries become as hard as
steel tubing and the heart cannot function properly--not that the heart
cares about minor conditions such as the arteries in the extremities,
but as the Mekstrom infection crawls up the arm toward the shoulder the
larger arteries become solid and then the heart cannot drive the blood
through them in its accustomed fashion. It gets like an advanced case of
arteriosclerosis. Eventually the infection reaches and immobilizes the
shoulder; this takes about ninety days. By this time, the other
extremities have also become infected and the crawl is coming up all
four limbs."
He looked at me very solemnly at that. "The rest is not pretty. Death
comes shortly after that. I can almost say that he is blessed who
catches Mekstrom's in the left hand for them the infection reaches the
heart before it reaches other parts. Those whose initial infection is in
the toes are particularly cursed, because the infection reaches the
lower parts of the body. I believe you can imagine the result,
elimination is prevented because of the stoppage of peristalsis. Death
comes of autointoxication, which is slow and painful."
I shuddered at the idea. The thought of death has always bothered me.
The idea of looking at a hand and knowing that I was going to die by the
calendar seemed particularly horrible.
Taking the bit between my teeth, I said, "Scholar Phelps, I've been
wondering whether you and your Center have ever considered treating
Mekstrom's by helping it?"
"Helping it?" he asked.
"Sure. Consider what a man might be if he were Mekstrom's all the way
through."
He nodded. "You would have a physical superman," he said. "Steel-strong
muscles driving steel-hard flesh covered by a near impenetrable skin.
Perhaps such a man would be free of all minor pains and ills. Imagine a
normal bacterium trying to bore into flesh as hard as concrete. Mekstrom
Flesh tends to be acid-resistant as well as tough physically. It is not
beyond the imagination to believe that your Mekstrom Superman might live
three times our frail four-score and ten. But--"
Here he paused.
"Not to pull down your house of cards, this idea is not a new one. Some
years ago we invited a brilliant young doctor here to study for his
scholarate. The unfortunate fellow arrived with the first traces of
Mekstrom's in his right middle toe. We placed about a hundred of our
most brilliant researchers under his guidance, and he decided to take
this particular angle of study. He failed; for all his efforts, he did
not stay his death by a single hour. From that time to the present we
have maintained one group on this part of the problem."
It occurred to me at that moment that if I turned up with a trace of
Mekstrom's I'd be seeking out the Highways in Hiding rather than the
Medical Center. That fast thought brought a second: Suppose that Dr.
Thorndyke learned that he had a trace, or rather, the Highways found it
out. What better way to augment their medical staff than to approach the
victim with a proposition: You help us, work with us, and we will save
your life.
That, of course, led to the next idea: That if the Highways in Hiding
had any honest motive, they'd not be hidden in the first place and
they'd have taken their cure to the Medical Center in the second. Well,
I had a bit of something listed against them, so I decided to let my
bombshell drop.
"Scholar Phelps," I said quietly, "one of the reasons I am here is that
I have fairly good evidence that the cure for Mekstrom's Disease does
exist, and that it produces people of ultrahard bodies and superhuman
strength."
He smiled at me with the same tolerant air that father uses on the
offspring who comes up with one of the standard juvenile plans for
perpetual motion.
"What do you consider good evidence?"
"Suppose I claimed to have seen it myself."
"Then I would say that you had misinterpreted your evidence," he replied
calmly. "The flying saucer enthusiasts still insist that the things they
see are piloted by little green men from Venus, even though we have been
there and found Venus to be absolutely uninhabited by anything higher
than slugs, grubs, and little globby animals like Tellurian leeches."
"But--"
"This, too, is an old story," he told me with a whimsical smile. "It
goes with the standard routine about a secret organization that is
intending to take over the Earth. The outline has been popular ever
since Charles Fort. Now--er--just tell me what you saw."
I concocted a tale that was about thirty-three percent true and the rest
partly distorted. It covered my hitting a girl in Ohio with my car, hard
enough to clobber her. But when I stopped to help her, she got up and
ran away unhurt. She hadn't left a trace of blood although the front
fender of the car was badly smashed.
He nodded solemnly. "Such things happen," he said. "The human body is
really quite durable; now and then comes the lucky happenstance when the
fearful accident does no more than raise a slight bruise. I've read the
story of the man whose parachute did not open and who lived to return it
to the factory in person, according to the old joke. But now, Mr.
Cornell, have you ever considered the utter impossibility of running any
sort of secret organization in this world of today. Even before Rhine it
was difficult. You'll be adding to your tale next--some sort of secret
sign, maybe a form of fraternity grip, or perhaps even a world-wide
system of local clubs and hangouts, all aimed at some dire purpose."
I squirmed nervously for a bit. Scholar Phelps was too close to the
truth to make me like it, because he was scoffing. He went right on
making me nervous.
"Now before we get too deep, I only want to ask about the probable
motives of such an organization. You grant them superhuman strength,
perhaps extreme longevity. If they wanted to take over the Earth,
couldn't they do it by a show of force? Or are they mild-mannered
supermen, only quietly interested in overrunning the human race and
waiting out the inevitable decline of normal homo sapiens? You're not
endowing them with extraterrestrial origin, are you?"
I shook my head unhappily.
"Good. That shows some logic, Mr. Cornell. After all, we know now that
while we could live on Mars or Venus with a lot of home-sent aid, we'd
be most uncomfortable there. We could not live a minute on any planet of
our solar system without artificial help."
"I might point out that our hypothetical superman might be able to stand
a lot of rough treatment," I blurted.
"Oh, this I'll grant if your tale held any water at all. But let's
forget this fruitless conjecture and take a look at the utter
impossibility of running such an organization. Even planting all of
their secret hangouts in dead areas and never going into urban centers,
they'd still find some telepath or esper on their trail. Perhaps a team.
Let's go back a step and consider, even without psi training, how long
such an outfit could function. It would run until the first specimen had
an automobile accident on, say Times Square; or until one of them
walked--or ran--out of the fire following a jetliner crash."
He then spared me with a cold eye. "Write it as fiction, Mr. Cornell.
But leave my name out of it. I thought you were after facts."
"I am. But the better fact articles always use a bit of speculation to
liven it up."
"Well," he grunted, "one such fanciful suggestion is the possibility of
such an underground outfit being able to develop a 'cure' while we
cannot. We, who have had the best of brains and money for twenty years."
I nodded, and while I did not agree with Phelps, I knew that to insist
was to insult him to his face, and get myself tossed out.
"You do seem to have quite a set-up here," I said, off-hand.
At this point Phelps offered to show me around the place, and I
accepted. Medical Center was far larger than I had believed at first; it
spread beyond my esper range into the hills beyond the main plant. The
buildings were arranged in a haphazard-looking pattern out in the back
section; I say "looking" because only a psi-trained person can dig a
pattern. The wide-open psi area did not extend for miles. Behind the
main buildings it closed down into the usual mottled pattern and the
medical buildings had been placed in the open areas. Dwellings and
dormitories were in the dark places. A nice set-up.
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