For some reason, although the fact was obvious, it was difficult for me to grasp its being an artificial limb. It looked genuine. But there were the cogs and fine silver wires and pulleys inside. The delicate snaps and clips on the shoulder.
King Asazian was reaching up with his head to press the button, the alarm button.
I was on him again, forcing his body away from the alarm button, then stabbing for his heart. I felt the metallic clang run like a shock up my arm and into my brain.
I heard an odd desperate cry escape from, me like the sound of a child in its sleep. I was suddenly frightened. I was more than that. I was nauseated and filled with a growing terror. I stabbed again and again. Then I realized that the knife blade had snapped, broken clean at the hilt.
There were those shining metallic scratches showing through King Asazian’s flesh-like exterior. But the scratches revealed some kind of thin but impenetrable metal alloy. I could not have known then, of course, that his rib cage had been removed to make way for countless operations, and had been replaced by metal plates. I didn’t try to reason it out either at that time. I had seized him by the throat and was trying to choke King Asazian.
Soon I drew back, trembling. If he had any recognizable neck at all, it was invulnerable behind its metal cast.
My hands were wet and I could feel sweat running down under my shirt. My time was running out. I stood there trying to control myself, trying to think clearly. I had been in difficult situations before. There’s always a way out if you think calmly, keep your head.
I could brain him. But there was nothing to club him with. I started toward the table. But I was afraid to use it. The alarm box fastened to it might sound off if I used the table for a bludgeon. There was nothing else, absolutely nothing else in the room that I could use to brain him with, except his arm. And somehow I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up off the floor.
The window. It was open. A three-floor drop would surely finish him. I pushed the window higher and unlocked the screen, turned, but I couldn’t touch his torso. I tried several times to scoop him up, but a revulsion seized me so powerfully that I couldn’t get my hands within a foot of his hideous hairless shiny torso.
I grabbed his leg and started to drag him from the bed.
I stumbled back and ran into the wall — the leg in my hand. I dropped it. It clanged hollowly and slid across the polished floor toward the door. It seemed that I could still hear the sharp twanging, as if a number of taut piano wires had snapped.
I tried to force myself back toward the bed. The idea of failure was no more agreeable now than it had ever been. But I found it impossible to move toward my intended victim. It was as though I were rooted in terror in one of those immobile nightmares. And all the time I watched his eye fixed on me, angry, condemning and deadly. That was it. It was a deadly arrogant and assured eye. And all the time I saw his body twisting slowly, his other arm coming over toward the button.
I simply could not touch him again. His other arm, his other leg, his entire body — if I grabbed them, I had no idea what would happen. And I had no desire to find out. I wasn’t the first to fail to eliminate King Asazian, and I probably wouldn’t be the last.
Then he laughed. Softly at first. Then louder and louder. It became a throbbing thunderous sound pounding around the room. It grew even louder. I think I screamed, but I couldn’t hear myself.
I reached the door and started to open it. But his voice had aroused the entire hospital. I could hear voices shouting outside, and footsteps coming down the hall.
“Run, Murderer!” he began shouting at me. “Run, run, murderer! Murderer, murderer, run!”
He was still bellowing and laughing as I got through the window and clung to the sill. But I also heard shouts coming around the hospital and toward the darkness immediately below me. As I clung there, his voice blared louder until it reverberated and cracked like the voice coming from a faulty public address system.
As I dropped, the sound followed me. It filled the hospital and the night. Laughter. “Run, murderer!” Laughter. “Run, run, Murderer!”
But I couldn’t run even if I had felt a really intense urge to run. The fall had broken my leg among other things, and in any case, I was the center of attention of several uniformed cops.
I still hear him laughing and telling me to run. I hear him at unexpected and terribly disturbing moments. Sometimes in my cell. Sometimes while I’m out in the recreation yard. But more often in the middle of the night.
It isn’t a sound that I can tolerate very much longer. It is likely that I have heard it quite too long already. You see, it wasn’t a human, nor a purely mechanical sound. Either would, of course, have been perfectly tolerable. It was something like the hollow, atonal, imitation of the human voices that electronic engineers can now create out of sound waves and record on tape. Sound waves that were never titillated initially by any human vocal cords. Listen to such an icy mockery of a human voice; then imagine that only a slight trace of a genuine human voice is somehow imprisoned there.
It was not an alarm button. When he pressed that button, King Asazian switched on his newly installed electronic voice box. Full volume of course. They heard it throughout the hospital and people found — it quite audible a block away. Naturally, I had no chance at all.
I’ve considered the implications. King Asazian is still alive and only partly human. Or perhaps there is a point where a renovated, rebuilt human is no longer really human at all. I have no idea either, how long he will continue to present to the public what appears to be something alive.
What is he, the indestructible ruler of tomorrow? I know this — that he is the product of international specialists and scientific ingenuity of the highest order. And against such frightening international wonders, against such a thing as King Asazian, there is no longer any hope for effective action by such as I — the lone entrepreneur.
Ruby Martinson’s Poisoned Pen
by Henry Slesar
As has been well established, the pen is mightier than the sword. Naturally, only a quill pen is as mighty as all that. For though you can tickle someone into submission with such a pen; what, for example, could you accomplish with a ball point pen?
For years, I lived in mortal terror of G-Men because of my cousin, Ruby Martinson. The three most horrifying letters in my alphabet were F.B.I. and I couldn’t see a picture of J. Edgar Hoover without wondering if it saw me. And the worst part was, the whole trauma was the result of the wildest crime that Ruby Martinson, World’s Greatest Unsuccessful Criminal, ever perpetrated.
By this time, of course, I was getting used to Ruby’s inability to make Crime pay. Even though Ruby was an accountant, he never seemed to get out of the red in all the capers we pulled together. Fortunately, he was making good money ($65 a week) for his age (23) so I never worried about his finances. But I was five years younger, a great deal poorer, and in contrast to Ruby’s iron nerves, mine were made of chicken fat.
On the evening that it started, I was poorer than usual. I had just been fired from my fourth job in the garment district, merely because I had pushed a hand truck into an open manhole on 33rd and 7th Avenue, sending half a dozen Max Teitelbaum originals into the sewer system of New York. So when I met Ruby at Hector’s Cafeteria on Broadway, I was forced to ask him for coffee-and-cruller money. Ruby, who was normally pretty tight-fisted, handed me the coins without a murmur.