It had a pressure switch on the back. It was off. Idly, I punched at it. Maybe putting the pillow on it or the gathering weight of the pillow had pushed it.
Movement caught my eye. The viewer was sitting over there. It lit up.
The full import of this took several seconds to sink in. And then a freezing horror began to chill my bones.
THE COUNTESS KRAK WAS WITHIN RANGE OF ME!
For days she had not been observed!
She might this very moment be picking the lock of the front door to come in and kill me!
Something worse than terror gripped my throat.
I raced to the front door and looked. No. She wasn’t there.
I sped back to the garden and looked around.
No. She wasn’t there.
I wrung my hands in extreme agitation.
WHERE WAS THE COUNTESS KRAK?
PART FIFTY-ONE
Chapter 6
Shocks of that character are very hard on one. They shorten the life span. And in this case, I felt with certainty I might only have seconds to live.
It was Teenie’s fault for distracting me. It was Adora’s fault as well. Were they in league with the Countess Krak? Was the Countess Krak paying them to keep my attention elsewhere while she sneaked up to do me in?
I made myself stand very still in the middle of the floor. Aloud, I said, “Steady. Be calm. Your heart is still beating. There is hope yet. Steady. Be calm.”
THE VIEWER!
If I looked at the viewer I could tell where she was.
Half expecting to see my own face in it, I stared at the screen.
A shabby building was on the viewer. Then she turned. She was looking at cars going by. She must be standing on a corner. Rush-hour traffic was heavy. People were going home.
Another view of the shabby building. The ground floor had a porno store. The second floor had a massage parlor. The third floor had the offices of the National Association of Mental Stealth. She looked back at the traffic.
My wits began to work. Didn’t I know that building?
Krak turned and looked at it again. This time her eyes went to the fourth floor. Yes!
THE LAW OFFICES OF DINGALING, CHASE & AMBO!
The Countess had it under surveillance!
There was a movement at the door which led to the upper floors.
Three girls came out. Did I know them? They looked familiar! One of them had an enormous belly. Maizie Spread!
The other two were Toots Switch and Dolores Pubiano de Cópula, the alleged Mrs. Wisters! Their pictures had been in the papers often enough for me to be absolutely positive. They were giggling and talking amongst themselves. They walked along up the street.
The Countess Krak, obscured by the rush-hour traffic from these poor, unsuspecting, innocent young ladies, BEGAN TO FOLLOW THEM!
I knew at once what was going to happen. The Countess Krak was going to rush up to them and stamp them into the pavement. I was watching a murder about to happen.
Oh, thank Gods, I had been in time after all. I grabbed the phone. I rang Dingaling, Chase & Ambo.
“Did you get the injunction order and the commitment papers on that female fiend?” I screamed into the phone.
“Oh, yes, certainly. The process server is right here this minute! This is Dingaling. Are you Smith? This sounds like hysteria!”
“It is hysteria! That demon is following your three clients! Get her served! Get her committed fast! LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOW!”
“Instantly!” said Dingaling.
I rang off.
I clutched the viewer with both hands.
Oh, thank Gods, I had not been too late after all.
The Countess was following the three girls. She was not twenty feet behind them. You could even hear their giggles and laughter above the traffic roar.
The dark Dolores seemed to be in particularly high spirits. She said something especially gay and then gave Maizie Spread a hard punch in the swollen abdomen. Toots Switch laughed uproariously, like a train whistle.
Oh, the poor dears. All too soon would their gay and innocent laughter be stilled! Come on, process server!
THERE HE WAS!
The shabby man in the shabby coat, his shabby hat hiding his alert eyes. He knew the Countess. He had seen her personally in the condo. He was walking right abreast of her. I expected him to whip around and present his paper.
He was looking back. Maybe he was waiting for the police to assist or the Bellevue wagon to arrive.
He must be very cunning. A process server would have to be. He was now a yard ahead of the Countess.
He turned!
He went racing back down the street, looking at everyone he passed.
The process server raced by the Countess Krak again. He raced by the girls.
He turned and came speeding back. He passed the Countess.
With a shock, I realized that she seemed to be invisible to him. He hardly glanced at her. What crazy magic was this?
The girls walked three blocks.
They turned to some steps and walked down into a restaurant and bar, still laughing loudly.
The Countess Krak remained on the street. She walked over to the curb. She looked up and down.
Then she turned and walked into the restaurant.
The three girls had taken a table over to the side. Toots Switch was calling out, “Where’s the (bleeping) proprietor of this crummy joint?”
“Bartender!” yelled Maizie Spread. “Move your (bleep) and bring three shots of rye over here!”
The Countess Krak walked straight over to them. “Flowers? Flowers?” she was saying in a quavery voice I did not recall ever having heard before.
She reached down into a bucket she was carrying and picked up three corsages of violets. She leaned over the table and, one, two, three, pinned them on the coats of the girls.
The process server brushed the Countess aside and leaned toward the three girls. “Have you seen a huge woman? A fiend?”
They laughed at him, the poor innocent dears. “You flipped your wig, Shover?” said Dolores. Oh, Gods, what courage in the face of death!
“You!” said the process server, whirling around to the Countess. “You see any foul fiend in here?”
The Countess put a red carnation in the buttonhole of his overcoat. “That will be one dollar, please,” she said.
The poor man. He looked so frustrated. He ripped the flower out of his buttonhole. He threw it on the floor. He stamped on it with violence. “I’ve missed!” he shrieked. He rushed away, looking everywhere.
The Countess reached over and picked up the purse of Toots Switch. She had it open. “That’s five dollars for your corsage,” she said.
Toots let out a screech. She snatched the purse back. “Get away from us, you old bag!” she yelled.
The Countess picked up Maizie’s purse and opened it and fished inside. “That’s five dollars for yours,” she said.
“Well, (bleep) you!” howled Maizie, and grabbed her purse back.
Dolores was more alert. She had her purse up in the air, removing it from reach. The Countess reached right across. She grabbed it and opened it.
A gruff voice sounded. “What’s this row?”
Krak turned. It was the proprietor. She said, “They won’t pay me for the flowers they bought.”
The proprietor snarled, “Get out of here, you old (bleep)!” And he grabbed at the purse to recover it.
The purse spun on its strap.
It collided with the top of the proprietor’s head.
He went down like a building had fallen on him.
The Countess Krak walked out.
A guy on the street stopped. He said, “I’ll take one of those, mother.” And he bought a bunch of carnations from her for five bucks!
With a shock, I realized that the Countess, with all her stage experience, had disguised herself as a flower seller! No wonder the process server couldn’t recognize her! They were common as soot along
that avenue! They stood along the street or on corners and sold them to drivers.
Oh, I could handle that!
I reached for the phone to make the call that would get her picked up and sent to Bellevue.
But wait. What was the Countess doing? She had stepped into an alley. There was a rear entrance light dimly above her.
She was reading three cards! Oh, (bleep) her, she had taken something from each purse!
ADDRESSES!
She had the addresses of those poor, defenseless innocents.
All three were the same! The girls lived together!
It was an apartment way up in the Bronx, miles and miles from where I was.
Oh, Gods, this was HORRIBLE!
I grabbed the phone.
“Chase here.”
“The woman you’re trying to get served and committed is disguised as a flower seller!” I screamed. “She’s plotting to slaughter your three clients with smashing brass heels! ACT! ACT! ACT!”
“Do you know anything else, Smith?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Why wouldn’t they listen?
“I mean,” said Chase, “do you know where the murders will be done?”
“YES! YES! YES! In their apartment! She has the address!”
“But that’s impossible. Not even the press knows about it. And that’s pretty extreme security for us when we have been letting reporters sleep with them to get good stories. I think you must have . . .”
“My information is correct! I have undercover men on it. Informers! GET THE POLICE!”
“No, no!” said Chase. “Business like ours is far too touchy to cut the police in on it. We don’t do it that way. We have a tough security company we use. Real man-killers. We’ll put them around the apartment at once with orders to shoot on sight and at long range. We’ll also go through the formality of serving the commitment paper if the person is only wounded. Have no fears, Smith. We do these things well and legally, always. Anyone who tries to reach them won’t have a chance. Thank you for your timely warning.”
I rang off. I was much relieved.
Thank Gods, Dingaling, Chase & Ambo and I were on the job.
The trap was laid.
The Countess Krak didn’t stand a chance.
About the Author
L. Ron Hubbard’s remarkable writing career spanned more than half-a-century of intense literary achievement and creative influence.
And though he was first and foremost a writer, his life experiences and travels in all corners of the globe were wide and diverse. His insatiable curiosity and personal belief that one should live life as a professional led to a lifetime of extraordinary accomplishment. He was also an explorer, ethnologist, mariner and pilot, filmmaker and photographer, philosopher and educator, composer and musician.
Growing up in the still-rugged frontier country of Montana, he broke his first bronc and became the blood brother of a Blackfeet Indian medicine man by age six. In 1927, when he was 16, he traveled to a still remote Asia. The following year, to further satisfy his thirst for adventure and augment his growing knowledge of other cultures, he left school and returned to the Orient. On this trip, he worked as a supercargo and helmsman aboard a coastal trader which plied the seas between Japan and Java. He came to know old Shanghai, Beijing and the Western Hills at a time when few Westerners could enter China. He traveled more than a quarter of a million miles by sea and land while still a teenager and before the advent of commercial aviation as we know it.
He returned to the United States in the autumn of 1929 to complete his formal education. He entered George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he studied engineering and took one of the earliest courses in atomic and molecular physics. In addition to his studies, he was the president of the Engineering Society and Flying Club, and wrote articles, stories and plays for the university newspaper. During the same period he also barnstormed across the American mid-West and was a national correspondent and photographer for the Sportsman Pilot magazine, the most distinguished aviation publication of its day.
Returning to his classroom of the world in 1932, he led two separate expeditions, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition; sailing on one of the last of America’s four-masted commercial ships, and the second, a mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico. His exploits earned him membership in the renowned Explorers Club and he subsequently carried their coveted flag on two more voyages of exploration and discovery. As a master mariner licensed to operate ships in any ocean, his lifelong love of the sea was reflected in the many ships he captained and the skill of the crews he trained. He also served with distinction as a U.S. naval officer during the Second World War.
All of this—and much more—found its way, into his writing and gave his stories a compelling sense of authenticity that has appealed to readers throughout the world. It started in 1934 with the publication of “The Green God” in Thrilling Adventure magazine, a story about an American naval intelligence officer caught up in the mystery and intrigues of pre-communist China. With his extensive knowledge of the world and its people and his ability to write in any style and genre, he rapidly achieved prominence as a writer of action adventure, western, mystery and suspense. Such was the respect of his fellow writers that he was only 25 when elected president of the New York Chapter of the American Fiction Guild.
In addition to his career as a leading writer of fiction, he worked as a successful screenwriter in Hollywood where he wrote the original story and script for Columbia’s 1937 hit serial, “The Secret of Treasure Island.” His work on numerous films for Columbia, Universal and other major studios involved writing, providing story lines and serving as a script consultant.
In 1938, he was approached by the venerable New York publishing house of Street and Smith, the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction. Wanting to capitalize on the proven reader appeal of the
L. Ron Hubbard byline to capture more readers for this emerging genre, they essentially offered to buy all the science fiction he wrote. When he protested that he did not write about machines and machinery but that he wrote about people, they told him that was exactly what was wanted. The rest is history.
The impact and influence that his novels and stories had on the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror virtually amounted to the changing of a genre. It is the compelling human element that he originally brought to this new genre that remains today the basis of its growing international popularity.
L. Ron Hubbard consistently enabled readers to peer into the minds and emotions of characters in a way that sharply heightened the reading experience without slowing the pace of the story, a level of writing rarely achieved.
Among the most celebrated examples of this are three stories he published in a single, phenomenally creative year (1940)—Final Blackout and its grimly possible future world of unremitting war and ultimate courage which Robert Heinlein called “as perfect a piece of science fiction as has ever been written”; the ingenious fantasy-adventure, Typewriter in the Sky described by Clive Cussler as “written in the great style adventure should be written in”; and the prototype novel of clutching psychological suspense and horror in the midst of ordinary, everyday life, Fear, studied by writers from Stephen King to Ray Bradbury.
It was Mr. Hubbard’s trendsetting work in the speculative fiction field from 1938 to 1950, particularly, that not only helped to expand the scope and imaginative boundaries of science fiction and fantasy but indelibly established him as one of the founders of what continues to be regarded as the genre’s Golden Age.
Widely honored—recipient of Italy’s Tetradramma D’Oro Award and a special Gutenberg Award, among other significant literary honors—Battlefield Earth has sold more than 6,000,000 copies in 23 languages and is the biggest single-volume science fiction novel in the history of the genre at 1050 pages. It was ranked number three out of the 100 best English language novels of the twentieth century in the Random House Modern Library Reader’s Poll.
The Missio
n Earth dekalogy has been equally acclaimed, winning the Cosmos 2000 Award from French readers and the coveted Nova-Science Fiction Award from Italy’s National Committee for Science Fiction and Fantasy. The dekalogy has sold more than seven million copies in 6 languages, and each of its 10 volumes became New York Times and international bestsellers as they were released.
The first of L. Ron Hubbard’s original screenplays Ai! Pedrito! When Intelligence Goes Wrong, novelized by author Kevin J. Anderson, was released in 1998 and immediately appeared as a New York Times bestseller. This was followed in 1999 with the publication of A Very Strange Trip, an original L. Ron Hubbard story of time-traveling adventure, novelized by Dave Wolverton, that also became a New York Times bestseller directly following its release.