Staring at those lights ahead he was visioning something else. Above Branford’s roof tops he seemed to glimpse a hovering, sphinxlike presence — the bony-jawed spectre of Death itself with scythe uplifted as a threat and portent of evil to come.
The highway so far had been unnaturally deserted. The man had passed no other cars either going to or coming from Branford. But, as he neared the city limits, an air of grim activity became apparent.
Khaki-clad figures stood in tense groups. Powerful buff-colored autos and police motorcycles lined the road. A harsh voice shouting an abrupt command slowed the approaching roadster.
“Halt! What’s your business, stranger?”
The man behind the roadster’s wheel stared into the alert eyes of a state trooper who stood challengingly, rifle held ready, bayonet fixed.
The stranger fished in a pocket, drew out a paper and presented it to the trooper. It bore the name Doctor Julius Smith, U. S. Public Health Service. The trooper glanced at it sharply, nodded and stepped back.
The car leaped forward with a whine of gears, crossed a bridge, and entered the city proper.
Lights in houses showed plainly now, but the streets themselves were as deserted as the highway had been. Here and there a shadowy figure moved, walking quickly from one door to another, as though fearful of some dread danger. Here and there a head showed behind a closed window, peering out furtively at the roadster speeding down an avenue toward the square.
The state trooper who had admitted the man didn’t know that his credentials were faked. The city itself had no inkling of the identity of this night-riding stranger. The few who stared as he passed penetrated no farther than the surface of his inconspicuous features, little dreaming that those features formed a marvelously clever disguise.
IF they had been told the name this stranger went by in the high Government circles where his activities were followed, they would still have been in the dark. For the man at the wheel was a hidden hunter of criminals, one who inspired terror and wonder along the black alleys of the underworld. A man who had been suspected and hounded by the police themselves on many occasions when his daring methods had brought him into conflict with the law. A man, finally, who was an eternally baffling enigma to the law and the lawless alike — the man called “Secret Agent ‘X.’”
Tonight the citizens of Branford had something far more startling to occupy them than mere curiosity as to the business and identity of a strange man in a roadster. An epidemic of encephalitis, that mysterious form of sleeping sickness more vicious than its African cousin, was raging.
The sinister malady had broken out three weeks before. It had spread from one or two people to dozens and scores of others. A quarantine of martial strictness had been drawn around the city and its suburbs in a frantic effort to check it.
To break through that quarantine line from the inside meant certain arrest and the risk of being shot. All persons entering Branford were questioned and checked with an eagle eye. Once having gone in, they must not get away again. For the sleeping sickness, making of its victims veritable living dead, carried horror with it that was like the crawling touch of icy fingers.
The disease had come upon the city under the most extraordinary circumstances. Nine gorillas had escaped from the experimental department of Drexel Institute in the heart of Branford, where scientists had been using the great apes as living laboratories. The gorillas had been inoculated with encephalitis virus in an attempt to find the cause and cure for this most enigmatic of modern diseases, the germ of which even the finest collodion filters could not isolate.
Then fate had stepped in with a horrible jest. The gorillas had broken loose. Efforts to control a deadly disease had resulted in the worst epidemic of sleeping sickness the country had ever known.
Always a rare malady, there were no more than several hundred cases now. But an aura of horror advanced before the spread of the disease like a ghastly herald of doom. For, in the first period of encephalitis, its victim passes through a stage of facial rigidity in which the features are devoid of all expression — the stage known as the Parkinsonian Mask. Then comes the terrible listless coma from which there is often no awakening.
Secret Agent “X” was aware of all this. Uneasy questions forced themselves upon his mind. What would happen if the malady spread beyond the limits of Branford? What if it reached the teeming, near-by millions of New York? What if it sent octopuslike fingers from there to other great centers of population — Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, Los Angeles?
The answer came with horrible certainty. Once out of control, the disease would spread as rapidly as the licking flames of a prairie fire. Congested areas would be the focal points of infection. A hundred cases would become a thousand in a week. A thousand would grow to a hundred thousand in a month.
The United States would be visited by a plague as ravaging as those of the Middle Ages, when the mournful bells of the corpse gatherer’s wagons tolled through the midnight streets of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Worse, the victims of this disease would be living corpses, waiting for the relief of slow death, medical science itself baffled and helpless.
But there was more even than this. The whisper of a hideous suspicion had brought Agent “X” through the quarantine lines to risk death itself. An intimation of something as terrible as the spread of the malady had caused him to wire his intentions to a high official in Washington known in the secret files as “K9.”
For behind the spread of the sleeping sickness Agent “X” had traced the dim outline of a crime pattern almost too startling to be believed.
THE newspapers had stated simply that escaped gorillas had started the epidemic. But Agent “X,” reading and rereading the published facts, had felt uneasy questions growing in his mind. Why was it that the great apes were seen solely at night? Why had only one of them actually been shot? And why was it that Branford’s richest citizens had first been afflicted with the disease?
These items pieced together had nourished the dark suspicion in Agent “X’s” mind. These were the indecipherable riddles that had brought him to Branford in search of answers.
Fear lay like a pall around him in the quiet, deserted streets. He drove his car slowly, eyes glowingly alert. As he approached the city’s main square, a weird illumination whitened the sky ahead.
The shimmering, questing beams of dozens of searchlights mounted on emergency fire and police trucks filled the air. They were probing through the vegetation of the square, playing over tree trunks and branches, reaching along the faces of buildings. Behind the searchlights, grim-eyed men held rifles ready. The hunt for the escaped gorillas was on, as it had been for many nights past.
Explanations of the apes’ mysterious disappearance had been put forward. Some said they had fled to the sewers for hiding. Others said they had found refuge in some deserted building. Still others claimed some madman had given the great beasts harborage.
Yet, wherever they stayed in daylight, they were still appearing unexpectedly at night. And those who met them and were scratched or bitten came down with the dread disease. Not only this; mosquitoes, it was now claimed, inoculated with virus from biting human hosts, were also spreading the malady. Thus the threat grew hourly worse. And it was into this living hell that Agent “X” had voluntarily come.
Here in Branford, following his policy of helping men and women to live in peace and happiness, he was prepared to face what might be the greatest crime riddle of his career. Disguised as Julius Smith of the U. S. Public Health Service he hoped to unearth hitherto unknown facts.
A police car stopped him at the edge of the square. His credentials were looked at again. Then he was allowed to proceed. There were three immediate courses open to him. He could go to the office of Doctor Traub, Branford’s commissioner of health, and present his papers. From Traub he would learn all the latest details. He could go to Drexel Institute and learn the circumstances surrounding the gorillas’ escape. Or he could take part in the search for the gorillas themselves in these first hours of darkness when the apes appeared to be most active. In hiding apparently during the day, it was just after nightfall that they went abroad in quest of food.