Inventions -- Fiction; Police -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
Leo Baxter was only three paces into the stale air of the unused
library when he screamed, clasping his hands to his chest and dropped.
A peculiar grating, plucking sound came faintly before he thudded to
the carpet.
I stopped hard in my tracks and wiped the sweat from my face while Leo
Baxter twitched almost at my feet, his heart shredded and bubbling its
last in his perforated chest.
_The paper clips. The ones I had propelled into nothingness weeks ago._
Hat in hand I advanced slowly, waving it before me chest high. Then
it caught suddenly, grated for a split second and passed on in its
arc. Now there were several tiny holes in it. I backed away a foot and
brought my hat down slowly on the same lethal spot of air. Chest-high
it caught and hung suspended.
Leaving it there as a marker I took off my suitcoat, held it before me
and inched forward toward the desk. Something plucked at the dangling
garment, and a chill froze my spine. Had I been walking forward
normally, the tiny speck of metal that barely caught the glint of light
from the window, would have pierced my skin at just about the site of
my appendix. I circled the spot continuing to feel forward with my
coat. That was the paper clip Baxter had fired to demonstrate to me
that first day.
At the phone I called headquarters and told the chief what to do.
"You're so right," he told me, his voice slurring strangely. "Only
you're a little late. The order went out to confiscate the i-Guns. They
think the damned toys might have something to do with the accidents.
And I bought one of the first ones for my little Jerry!" His voice
sounded hollow.
So they were figuring it out! The next question was, how to extract the
deadly particles from the other dimension, or how to keep them from
bleeding back slowly into ours.
I moved cautiously through the old house fanning every inch of air
ahead of me with a phone book. When I got to Calvin Baxter's workshop
I was especially careful, but I needn't have been. The only metal
particles stuck into the thin air seemed to be over his work-bench
where he had been experimenting with his device. All but one.
It was right where I expected to find it--better than six feet in the
air, just forehead high for a man tall as Calvin Baxter. He had fired
his proto-type of the i-Gun just once into the middle of the room.
How long ago? Eight--ten weeks ago?
It seemed impossible that all this horror had occurred in such a short
time.
But there it was, stuck in space, protruding about a hundredth of an
inch from nowhere into clear visibility. So little was showing that I
couldn't be sure, but it looked like the tip of an ordinary little nail
or wood-screw.
This was my "murder-weapon", the cause of Calvin Baxter's accident.
He'd run into it, jerked his head back, and the speck had come out the
same hole it went in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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