The Vault

The Vault by Murray Leinster

I

The window slid up easily — too easily — and Mike waited a long time, listening, before he made a move. The whole huge pile of the factory was still. There were no lights anywhere, except that dim one by the gate through the stockade. Lying quite still in the darkness, Mike waited. There was no sound, no ringing of alarm bells, no bustle of activity anywhere. The manufacturing plant of the Whitney Jewelry & Watch Company remained as it had been before, a vast, still pile of brick, with empty-eyed windows staring blankly at the night.

And yet... That window had opened very easily. Mike meditated, his little eyes gleaming in the darkness. Then he saw a tiny flicker of light in the distance. The window he had opened was at the end of a long corridor, and he saw the watchman walking unhurriedly away from him. The watchman’s legs threw monstrous shadows from the lantern he carried, Mike could not see his face, but he could see the uniform and note the absolute leisure and confidence with which the man was moving. He paused, as Mike watched, and inserted his key in a watchman’s clock. He turned it, registering his presence and vigilance on a strip of paper within the mechanism. Then, casually, he went on his way. In a few moments he turned a corner and was lost to sight.

Mike grinned to himself in the obscurity. With monkey-like agility he 30 scrambled through the open window, making no sound. Once within the walls of the factory he waited another long minute for a noise. Distant and hollow, he heard the watchman’s footfalls, unhurried, methodical, as he made his round.

Then, softly, Mike lowered the window. He wore rubber-soled shoes. His eyes were those of a cat, and his ears were attuned to the slightest warning of danger, but he heard no faintest sound — not even his own footfalls — save the distant, regular steps of the watchman. The watchman wore creaky shoes.

Like some night-flying moth the intruder slipped through the corridors of the untenanted factory. All about him there were smells. Oil — that would be the delicate lathes where precious metals were worked. Once he smelled fresh paint. And there was that curious odor of freshly mopped floors. The scrub-women had come after the closing of the factory and done their work. Then he smelled faded flowers. Someone had brought them and put them in a glass of water, and they had been left.

Mike paid little or no attention to smells. The place he sought was on the second floor, in the rear — the colossal vault where all the precious things in which the factory dealt were gathered for safety during the night. He made his way there, silently. Every little while he stopped to listen for the unvarying footfalls of the watchman. They went on, unsuspicious and confident.

Through an arduous and twice interrupted apprenticeship in his chosen trade — interruptions spent perforce behind stone walls — Mike had had drilled into him just two things. One was the fatality of haste. The other was the necessity for scientific, painstaking attention to detail. Therefore, Mike let his flashlight slip over the huge surface of the vault door with barely a pause. He knew the watchman would look in on it as he went downstairs. Primarily, he was looking for a place to hide during that moment.

There was a door in the room which contained the vault, but Mike was not certain but that the watchman would return through it. He swept his light around the room — keeping it low, lest it flash out through a window — and regretfully decided against remaining. He went out again, swiftly and silently, looking for a hiding-place.

He found it in a washroom, and listened from there while the watchman retraced his steps, coming downstairs again, going to the vault and throwing the glow from his lantern against it, then clumping oft heavily to the lower part of the factory.

Mike emerged from hiding. He inspected the vault room with greater care. He would have to work in snatches, between visits from the watchman, and he did not want to have to tap the man on the head. There are a great many systems of burglar protection, and one very popular one signals the nearest police station when a watchman fails to ring his time clock at the appointed intervals. Mike did not desire the intrusion of the police, but he wanted a nearby niche to hide in.

The watchman’s footsteps died away. Mike waited to be sure, then opened the door he had noted. To be exact, he did not quite open it. He merely turned the knob, and a heavy weight leaning against it thrust it the rest of the way open caromed clumsily against him, and fell with a curiously cushioned crash to the floor.

Mike’s hair stood on end. In the fractional part of a split second he knew what had struck him, and he bounced into the air to alight noiselessly a full five feet away, ready for anything. But the thing lay still upon the floor, breathing.

Slowly and cautiously Mike sent a momentary dart of light at it. What he saw at once reassured him and frightened him, because it was the last thing he could possibly have expected. It was a man — which he had known — but it was a man with his hands and feet bound together with leather straps, and so entwined with ropes that he could not even writhe. There was a gag in the figure’s mouth, and its eyes were staring wildly about.

Mike was still for perhaps two seconds, while his brain raced. Then he sent a tiny pencil-beam at the vault door. It was closed, solidly. No one had been before him. But there was a man bound hand and foot...

The light played upon him again. He was a young man, dressed as if he were a clerk or a bookkeeper in the factory. His eyes blinked and stared imploringly at Mike. There was some message, some terrible message, that he struggled to convey, but the gag prevented him. Mike watched him for an instant in mounting uneasiness and suspicion. That window had slipped up too easily...

Suddenly there was a tiny creaking, as of a board stepped upon. Mike heard it, catalogued it and had dismissed his obvious refuge in an instant. Someone was coming, softly, toward the spot. Perhaps the watchman, alarmed by the crash. He would certainly find the bound man, but it might be that he would waste precious time releasing him.

Tensely Mike swept the walls again. He could not go out the main door. He would run into the watchman. The one door he had noted was that of a closet. There was another, close beside the back of the vault.

Dense blackness fell. A shadow but little deeper than the darkness about him, Mike flitted across the room. He vanished, utterly without sound.

Then a faint scratching sound. The bound man was struggling to release himself, struggling with a terrible desperation and a horrifying futility. Mike, crouched down in a tiny book-closet, heard it. He was keyed up to an incredible pitch, every nerve quivering like a tightly strung wire. Mike was no longer intent upon robbery. One of the first rules of your old-time safe-cracker is to go through with a job only when everything is right. Mike was as suspicious of the unexpected as any wild animal. Just now his only desire was to get away — peacefully, if possible, but to get away.

He lay still. The scent of books and dust came to his nostrils, but he did not dare make a light to see. He smelled, too, that curious, rubbery smell of new electric insulation. There were wires in the closet somewhere, newly placed. Mike lay still.

Then he felt, rather than heard, someone enter the vault-room. There was a door between him and the newcomer, but he knew the instant that the other man entered. There was a moment of silence. Mike saw an infinitely faint glow through the keyhole. Someone was using a flash.

II

Frozen in utter stillness, Mike listened for the watchman’s exclamation of astonishment at sight of the bound man on the floor. Instead, he heard only a faint murmur. Then he caught words, faintly amused.

“Just got out, Jack, eh? I heard you fall. Out of luck, though. The watchman was in the other building. I saw him go in. He didn’t hear you.”