Authors -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Older women -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had
received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while
sleeping or lounging in the barracks.
Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that
led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low
rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds.
Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those
bunks some thirty men lay sleeping.
The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood
there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk
toward that window.
"Look here," he said.
Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull
metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central
part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as
I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work.
All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red
rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to
concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork
served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens
slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men.
I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run.
Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator:
"Turn it on!"
The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel.
I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor
was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the
controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice.
* * * * *
Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be
getting sick of this blamed moon."
It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers,
never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues
and facts to a logical conclusion.
"Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's
something screwy here."
Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip
through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw
another car approaching.
It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her
prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said:
"We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to
my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin."
He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped
across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind.
Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me.
"Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! _That was one
of those damned cockatoo images._ We've got to catch him."
The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us
following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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