The Shadow Men Read online

  THE SHADOW MEN

  A novel by

  A. E. VAN VOGT

  From Startling Stories January 1950 edition

  Contents:-

  THE SHADOW MEN

  CHAPTER I Therapy—To Be Murdered

  CHAPTER II Escape in Time

  CHAPTER III Planiac Captive

  CHAPTER IV Life with Lela

  CHAPTER V A Woman’s Loud Voice

  CHAPTER VI Carmean

  CHAPTER VII Shadow Man

  CHAPTER VIII Hope’s End

  CHAPTER IX The Moment for Action

  CHAPTER X The Tweener World

  CHAPTER XI Brain-Pattern

  CHAPTER XII Conspiracy

  CHAPTER XIII The Wooing of Ann

  CHAPTER XIV Shadow City

  CHAPTER XV Unexpected Welcome

  CHAPTER XVI Grannis

  CHAPTER XVII The Therapy

  CHAPTER XVIII The Ultimate Reality

  When he allowed Marie Chanette

  to die, Cargill tore open the entire

  fabric of time to come!

  CHAPTER I Therapy—To Be Murdered

  LIEUTENANT MORTON CARGILL A staggered as he came out of the cocktail bar. He stopped and was turning, instinctively seeking support, when a girl emerged from the same bar. She half fell against him.

  They clung to each other, maintaining a precarious balance. She seemed to recover first She mumbled, “ ’Member, you promised to drive me home.”

  “Huh ?” said Cargill. He was about to add, “Why, I've never seen you before.” He didn’t say it because it suddenly struck him that he had never before in his life been so drunk either. And there was a vagueness about the last hour that lent a sort of a plausibility to her words.

  He certainly had intended to find himself a girl before the evening was over.

  Besides, what did it matter anyway?-This was 1943. He was a man who had three days left of his embarkation leave and he couldn’t stop to argue about the extent of his acquaintance.

  “Where’s your car?”

  She led the way, weaving, to a Chevrolet coupé He had to help her unlock the door and she collapsed onto the seat beside the steering wheel, her head hanging limply. Cargill climbed behind the wheel and almost slid to the floor.

  For a moment that pulled him out of his own blur.

  He thought, startled, “I’m not fit to drive a car either. I’d better get a taxi.”

  The impulse faded. He was a man who had three days left of his leave. As of right now the pickup was a fact, whatever its history, and he was just tight enough not to have any qualms. He stepped on the starter.

  * * * * *

  Cargill made the first effort to get out of the car after the crash. The door wouldn’t open. His attempt at movement made him aware of how squeezed in he was. Dazed, he realized that he had escaped death and injury by a miracle.

  He tried to reach across the girl toward the door on her side—and got his second big shock.

  The whole front of the car was staved in.

  Even in the half darkness Cargill realized that the blow had been mortal. In a spasm of comprehension of what this could mean he made a new effort to open his own door. This time it worked. He staggered out and off into the darkness. No one tried to stop him, no one saw him.

  In the morning, pale and sober, he read the newspaper report of the accident:

  GIRL'S BODY FOUND IN WRECK

  Her car smashed beyond repair when it sideswiped a tree, Mrs. Marie Chanette last night bled to death from injuries sustained in the accident. The body was not discovered until early this morning and it is believed the victim might have been saved had she been found sooner and treated.

  Mrs. Chanette, who was separated from her husband recently, is survived by a three year old baby girl and a brother, said to be living in New York. Funeral arrangements await word from relatives.

  There was no mention of a possible escort. A later edition mentioned that she had been seen talking to a soldier, and that paragraph was enlarged upon in the evening paper. By the second morning there was talk of murder in the news columns, and an amazingly accurate description of the soldier was given. The wretched Cargill took alarm, and returned gloomily to his camp.

  He was relieved a week later when his division was sent overseas. It put three years between him and the impulse that had made him scamper off into the darkness, leaving behind him a dying woman. Battle experience hardened him against the reality of death for other people and slowly the awful sense of guilt faded. Completely recovered, he returned to Los Angeles early in 1946. He had been home several months when a note arrived for him in the morning mail:

  Dear Captain Cargill:

  I saw you on the street the other day and I noticed your name was still listed in the phone book. I wonder if you would be so kind as to meet me at the Hotel Gifford tonight (Wednesday) at about 8:30.

  Yours in curiosity,

  Marie Chanette.

  Cargill read the note, puzzled, and for just a moment the name meant nothing to him. Then he remembered. And then—

  “B—but,” he thought, stunned, “she never knew my name."

  It required minutes to shake off the chilling sensation that stole along his spine. At first he decided against turning up but as evening arrived he knew he couldn’t remain away.

  “Yours in curiosity!” What did she mean?

  It was 8:15 when he entered the foyer of the magnificent Gifford and took up a position beside a pillar from which he could watch the main entrance. He waited.

  AT 9:30, he retreated, blushing from his fifth attempt to identify Marie Chanette.

  He hadn’t noticed the man behind the column who was talking to the girl. The girl was smiling sweetly now, the secret smile of a female who has won the double victory of defending her virtue and simultaneously proving that she is still attractive to other men.

  Her gaze turned fleetingly, knowingly and touched Cargill’s eyes, then her attention swung back in a proprietary fashion to the young man. She smiled once more, too sweetly. Then she took her escort’s arm and they moved off through a door above which floated Cargill poured down the first drink a lighted sign that said alluringly, DREAM ROOM.

  The high color faded from Cargill’s cheeks as he took up his position once more. But his determination was beginning to wane. Five women had now repulsed him and that was too strenuous for any one evening.

  A big man moved up beside him. He said softly, “Captain, how about peddling your wares in some other hotel? Your repeated failure is beginning to embarrass the guests. In other words, move on, bud, move on. And fast.”

  House dick—Cargill stared at the other's smooth face with a pale intensity. He was about to slink off when a young woman's voice said clearly, “Have I kept you waiting long, Captain?”

  Cargill swung around in glassy-eyed relief. Then he stopped. His brain roared. He mumbled, “You’re Marie Chanette.”

  She was changed but there was no doubt. It was she. Out of the corner of one eye he saw the house detective move off, baffled. An impulse came to call the man back.

  Even as the thought came he forgot the fellow. For his fascinated brain, there was only the girl.

  “It really is you,” he said. “Marie Chanette!”

  Her name came hard from his tongue as if the words were pebbles that interfered with his speech. He began to realize how changed she was, how different.

  The girl he had picked up three years before had been well dressed but not like this. Now she wore a “hot pink” sari with a fur coat of indeterminable animal lightly held over her shoulders, the most glittering coat Cargill had seen since his return to America.

  Her clothes ceased to matter. “But you’re dead,” he wanted to say. “I r
ead the account of your burial.”

  He didn’t say that. Instead he listened as the girl murmured, “Let’s go into the bar. We can talk about—old times—over a drink." without pausing. Then he looked blur-rily at the girl. And saw that she was watching him with a faint indulgent smile.

  “I wondered,” she said, “what it would be like to come back and have a drink with a murderer. It’s really not very funny, is it?”

  Cargill began to gather his defenses. There was something here he didn't understand, a purpose deeper than appeared on the surface. He had seen suppressed hostility too often not to recognize it instantly. This woman was out to hurt him and he had better watch himself.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said sharply and his voice had a faint snarl in it. “I’m not sure that I even know you.”

  The woman did not answer immediately. She was doing something to her purse. It opened abruptly. She reached in and took out two large photographs. She tossed them across the table without a word.

  It gave Cargill several seconds to focus his unsteady gaze on the prints. His eyes and his mind coordinated finally, and with a gasp he snatched them up.

  Each one showed a man in an officer’s uniform in the act of climbing out of a badly wrecked car. The realism of the scenes almost stopped Cargill’s breath.

  One of the prints showed the girl pinned by the door on her side. Her face was twisted and blood was streaming down over her eyes.

  The second print was a full face of the officer, taken on an upward slant from an almost impossible position behind the girl.

  Both prints showed the officer’s face and both showed him squeezing out of the partly open door on the driver’s side.

  In each case it was his own countenance.

  Cargill let the prints drop from limp fingers and stared at the girl with eyes that narrowed with calculation. “What do you want?” he asked harshly. Then more violently, “Where did you get those pictures?”

  The last question galvanized him into action. He snatched the prints as if defending them from her, as if they were the only evidence against him. With tensed fingers he began to rip them into tiny pieces.

  “You may keep those copies,” said the girl calmly.

  Copies! Cargill shifted his feet and he must have looked up. For a waiter darted forward and he heard himself ordering drinks. And then the whisky was back and he was pouring it down into his burning throat. He thought more sanely that, if she were alive, no charge could be brought against him after all this time.

  He saw that she was fumbling in her purse. She drew forth a glittering cigarette and, putting it in her mouth, took a deep puff, then exhaled a thin cloud of smoke. Without seeming to notice his gaze fastened on the “cigarette” she delved once again into her purse, this time came out with a card the size of a streetcar pass, tossed it across the table at him.

  “You will be wondering,” she said, “what this is all about. There, that explains to some extent. Suppose you look at it.”

  Cargill scarcely heard.

  “That cigarette,” he said. “You didn’t light it.”

  “Cigarette?” She looked puzzled, then she glanced in the direction of his glare. Understanding dawned. She reached once more into her purse, and came out with a second cigarette similar to the one she was smoking. She held it out to him.

  “It works automatically,” she said, “every time you draw on it. Very simple but I’d forgotten they won’t be available for a hundred years yet. Very soothing they are.”

  He needed it. The cigarette seemed to be made from some kind of plastic but the flavor was pure mild tobacco. Cargill drew on it deeply three times.

  Then his nerves steadier, he forgot the uniqueness of such a cigarette and picked up the document she had thrown on the table. A luminous print stared up at him:

  THE INTER-TIME SOCIETY

  FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL ADJUSTMENTS

  recommend

  READJUSTMENT THERAPEUTICS

  for

  Captain Morton Cargill

  June 5, 1946 CRIME: MURDER

  THERAPY TO BE MURDERED

  The sinking sensation that came to Cargill had in it a consciousness of darkness gathering over his mind. He was aware of a boogie woogie record starting to play nearby. He shook himself blurrily. Through a thick mist he gazed at the girl. “This is silly,” he muttered. "You’re kidding me.”

  She shook her head. “It isn’t me. Once I went to them it was out of my control. And as for you the moment you picked up that card you were—”

  Her voice retreated into a remote distance as the shadows swept in over him. There was night.

  CHAPTER II Escape in Time

  THE blackness ended but his vision remained blurred. The obstruction cleared away after he had blinked hard for several seconds. Automatically he looked around him.

  At first, he did not clearly realize that he was no longer in the dream room. There was a tremendous difference but for a moment his mind made a desperate effort to justify a similarity. He tried to think of the cocktail bar as having been stripped of its furniture.

  The illusion collapsed. He saw that he was sitting in a chair at one end of a tastefully furnished living-room. To his left was an open door through which he could see the edge of a bed. The wall directly across from him was a mirror.

  Once more he had to make an adjustment. For as he looked into the “mirror” he saw that there was a girl sitting in what would have been the mirror image of his own chair. It was the girl who resembled Marie Chanette.

  Cargill started to his feet. In two minutes, in a frenzy of uneasy amazement, he explored the apartment. The door he had seen when his vision first cleared led to a bedroom with attached bathroom. The bathroom had a connecting door but it was locked. The living room wall was not a mirror at all but a window.

  Beyond it was a virtual duplicate of the apartment he was in. There were the same living room and the same door leading to another room—Cargill could not see if it was a bedroom but he presumed that it was. On one wall of the living room was a clock which said: “May 6, 6:22 P.M.” It had obviously stopped working a month ago.

  He had been moving with a feverish excitement. Now he retreated warily to a chair and sat there, glaring at the girl. He remembered what she had said in the cocktail bar—remembered the card and its deadly threat.

  He was still thinking about it when the girl climbed to her feet and came over to the glass barrier. She said something or rather her mouth moved as if in speech. Not so much as a whisper of sound came through. Cargill was galvanized. He plunged up from his chair, and yelled, “Where are we?”

  The girl shook her head. Baffled, Cargill explored the wall for a possible means of communication. Then he looked around the room for a telephone. There was none. Not, he reflected presently, in a brief fury of self-anger, that a phone would have done him any good.

  There was such a thing as having a phone number to call. Another thought struck him. Frantically he searched for pencil and paper in the inside breast pocket of his coat. Sighing with relief, he produced the materials. His fingers trembled as he wrote: Where are we?

  He held the paper against the glass. The girl nodded her understanding and went back to get her purse. Cargill could see her writing in a small notebook, then she was back at the glass barrier. She held up the paper. Cargill read, 1 think this is Shadow City.

  That was meaningless. Where's that? Cargill wrote.

  The girl shrugged and answered, Somewhere in the future from both your time and mine.

  That calmed him. He had his first conviction that he was dealing with queer people. His eyes narrowed with calculation. Cautiously he considered the danger to himself of a cult that put forward such nonsense. The girl was forgotten, and he went back slowly and settled down in the chair.

  “They won’t dare harm me,” he told himself.

  Just how it had been worked he couldn’t decide. But apparently the family of Marie Chanette had somehow discovere
d the identity of the man who had been with the girl when she was killed and in the distorted fashion of kinfolk, blamed him completely for the accident.

  He had no sense of guilt, Cargill told himself. And he certainly had no intention of accepting any nonsense from a bunch of neurotic relatives.

  Anger welled up in him, directed now and no longer stimulated by fear and confusion. A dozen plans for counteraction sprang full-grown into his mind. He’d break the glass, smash the door that led from the bathroom, break every stick of furniture in the room.

  These people were going to regret even this tiny action they had taken against him. For the third time, with deliberation now, he climbed to his feet. And he was hefting a chair for his first attack when a man’s voice spoke at him -from the air directly in front of him.

  “Morton Cargill, it is my duty to explain to you why you must be killed.”

  Cargill remained where he was, rigid.

  He unfroze swiftly. Ab his mind started to work again he looked wildly around him, seeking the hidden

  speaker from which the voice had come. He assumed that it had been mechanical. He rejected the momentary illusion that the voice had come from mid-air.

  His gaze raked the ceiling, the floor, the walls, in vain. He was about to explore more thoroughly with his fingers, with his eyes close up, when the voice spoke again, this time almost in his ear.

  “It is necessary,” it said, “to talk to you in advance, because of the effect on your nervous system.”

  The meaning scarcely penetrated. He was fighting a sense of panic. The voice had come from a point only inches away from his ear and yet there was nothing. No matter which way he turned the room was empty. And there was no sign of any mechanical device. Definitely there was nothing that could have produced the illusion of somebody speaking directly into his ear.