Read Ebook: Double Trouble by Jacobi Carl Anderson Murphy Illustrator

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Ebook has 147 lines and 8521 words, and 3 pages

I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move.

"Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric."

Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely.

"Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked."

He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing.

Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there.

"There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?"

Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights."

A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch.

"The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings.

"Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said.

Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory."

There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items.

The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp.

Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers.

Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled.

"Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet."

A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase.

"Let's look around," I said.

"C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are."

He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene.

It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them.

"It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone."

"Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?"

"Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much."

The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements.

Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen.

"Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?"

"Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever."

"Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?"

"Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?"

"A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either."

We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room.

Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos.

"There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it."

Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him.

There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form.

A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions.

And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker.

"Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images."

The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?"

"Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied.

Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.

Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.

"Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again."

Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.

"That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?"

On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady.

Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks.

Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds.

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