She then got on her jacket. She threw her black sable short cape over her shoulders. She stepped to a mirror and arranged her blond fluffy hair. Then she recovered and drew on her scarlet gloves.
She went over to a window and opened it an inch. It was dusk but the sound of neighborhood children shouting and yelling came from the street.
She wound up the microphone cord very neatly and packed the hypnohelmet in the shopping bag. She looked around to see if she had left anything.
Then she drew out a very tiny object.
I froze.
A BOMB!
Oh, my worst fears were realized.
The Countess Krak looked at the five men. It was like a waxworks where they show famous figures in the middle of a notorious crime. But this crime was not something of the past, exhibited for historical edification, it was here and now! It was about to happen in all its hideous awfulness!
Those poor devils were about to feel the full fury of the remorseless Countess Krak.
Poor Kutzbrain. If only somebody had thought to warn him that she had slaughtered three men for simply making an innocent pass at her! I knew she would never forgive that. She had simply put it off because she had other things to do. Now the world of psychiatry was about to feel the full degradation of one of its leading lights. I wondered if in his final moments he would trace his downfall to the cheery words inviting her to lie down on the couch for a jolly romp? How, in his profession, could he possibly suspect he had been dealing with worse than death itself? Alas, poor Kutzbrain's professional habits-nay, his professional duty to rape women and wives-had not included a subcourse in dealing with a Manco Devil incarnate, like the vicious Countess Krak.
She placed the bomb a bit closer to Kutzbrain than the rest. She looked around one last time. Her gaze lingered on Kutzbrain.
Then she pushed the plunger!
The bomb was set to go on time!
She picked up her shopping bag. She walked to the door. She left it wide open.
She walked sedately down the stairs.
She went out the front door of the apartment and into the dusky street.
She crossed it. A side alley was directly across from the apartment building.
She lurked like a lepertige beside the trail, hidden and waiting to enjoy the death agonies of its prey.
She had a hand in the shopping bag. She checked the position of her thumb. It was resting on the trigger of the dynamo that immobilized the men.
She was watching the apartment window intently as though expecting something to happen. It happened!
A FLASH!
Smoke began to roll out the window slit she had left open.
She pressed the trigger of the dynamo, releasing the men.
INSTANT SCREAMS!
The sounds they were emitting must have been tearing out their throats!
They were deafening even across the street.
The thunder of feet!
More screams of terror!
Police Inspector Grafferty came tearing out of the apartment house.
He leaped into a squad car at the curb. He was frantically trying to find the keys. He was screaming, screaming, screaming the whole while!
Two more police burst out. They were howling with panicked horror.
They sprang into the second squad car. It started up instantly. Its wheels screeched and smoked as it sped a weaving course away.
The third cop had fallen down the stairs. Howling, he finished rolling across the foyer and leaped as though shot from a rocket into the squad car.
Grafferty and the cop wrestled for the wheel, both screaming.
The third cop got the engine started.
With both of them trying to drive and knocking the other aside, the squad car raced away.
Just as it went, Kutzbrain finally got a window open in the apartment. But he didn't jump through the opening. He went through the glass, screaming.
He landed in a privet hedge, screaming.
He got up and ran in a circle, screaming!
"They're after me, they're after me," shrieked Kutzbrain. And only then did I understand what she had used. It was an emotion bomb from the Eyes and Ears of Voltar, and from all the assorted emotions available she had chosen Horror.
But the Countess Krak, that insidious female fiend, was not through with poor Kutzbrain.
I understood now why she had lingered.
She had a little package in her hand. It was a one-time disposable dart gun. She stepped forward. She aimed. The piteous spinning figure of Kutzbrain came in the sight.
She fired!
Kutzbrain was still running in a circle.
Suddenly the pitch of his screams changed.
Leaping up and down, he tore off his jacket.
Still screaming, he suddenly began to run on a course that would take him squarely into a mob of children who had stopped to stare at the pandemonium.
Kutzbrain was tearing off his shirt.
Kutzbrain, still screaming, was tearing off his pants.
"They're after me!" he shrieked, and got rid of his undershirt and shorts!
Then he began to run in earnest.
Krak, that Devil, had shot him with a dart that causes people to get warm and itch so violently that they shed their clothes.
What terrible revenge!
The children, like the tail of a speeding comet, were racing after Kutzbrain shouting, "A streaker! A streaker!" It was a dreadful din. The whole neighborhood was turning out to join the chase.
The Countess Krak tidied up her shopping bag. She fluffed her hair.
Sedately, she strolled off in the direction of the subway. She was thinking, no doubt-the sadistic female monster-that this was a day's work well done. She even bought a Milky Way at the subway stand and munched on it quite happily as she rode triumphantly home.
My state was not one that could be described as victorious.
I couldn't get out of the closet.
I had to call on the radio and beg Raht to phone Miss Pinch and plead with her to move the furniture away so I could open the door.
It was not that Raht had had a sneering tone in his voice on the radio, it was not that Candy and Miss Pinch laughed at me for getting myself locked in the closet "like a naughty boy," it was not that the redecorators had not finished after all and the place was still a screaming mess, and it was not the fleas. It was the smug manner in which the Countess Krak had been eating that Milky Way!
Fury can sometimes open the door as often as it closes it. And fury opened it now.
INSPIRATION!
Miss Simmons was a doctor of psychology as well as education. Her father was a psychologist. She would know very well what hypnotism was!
I would tell her she had been hypnotized and blow the whole implant!
And then we would see who had the last laugh!
What with one thing and then the other and then the first thing again, it took me the better part of the night to write the letter. Written so the calligraphy could not be traced, it said:
Dear Miss Simmons,
I herewith return your glasses so you will know I am a friend.
I have to inform you that a dastardly deed has been perpetrated upon you.
You were hypnotized and lied to by the foulest fiend who ever existed between Hells and Heavens. You were told a pack of lies while in hypnotic trance. DON'T BELIEVE THEM!
The things you were told were utter hog-wash and you should cast them utterly from your mind. You have been absolutely right all along about him.
Just realize that your future and that of this planet depend utterly upon your exposing that (bleepard) for what he is.
Don't let the firm hue of resolution be sickled o'er by the pale cast of hypnotism. ACT. ACT. ACT!
Your true friend,
X
Shortly after sunup, I woke Raht with the radio. I made an appointment to meet him at the Slime-Tripe Building at 8:30 A. M.
When the time came I was there, standing on the wavy terrazzo paving. Raht arrived. (Bleep) him, he had let his mustache grow and it bristled on both sides despite orders. But I had no time to upbraid him. Besides, we might be being watched.