The Old Die Rich Read online

* * * * *

  She straightened up, staring at me for the first time with terror inher eyes.

  "What are you going to do to me?" she whispered.

  "I could kill you as easily as you could have killed me. Kill you andsend your body into some other era. How many dozens of deaths were youresponsible for? The law couldn't convict you of them, but I can. AndI couldn't be convicted, either."

  She put her hand on the wound. Blood seeped through her fingers as shelifted her chin at me.

  "I won't beg for my life, Weldon, if that's what you want. I couldoffer you a partnership, but I'm not really in a position to offer it,am I?"

  She was magnificent, terrifyingly intelligent, brave clear through ...and deadlier than a plague. I had to remember that.

  "Into the cage," I said. "I have some friends in the future who haveplans for you. I won't tell you what they are, of course; you didn'ttell me what I'd go through, did you? Give my friends my fondestregards. If I can manage it, I'll visit them--and you."

  She backed warily into the cage. It would have been pleasant to kissthose wonderful lips good-by. I'd thought about them for a wholemonth, wanting them and loathing them at the same time.

  It would have been like kissing a coral snake. I knew it and Iconcentrated on shutting the gate on her.

  "You'd like to be rich, wouldn't you, Weldon?" she asked through themesh.

  "I can be," I said. "I have the machine. I can send people into thepast or future and make myself a pile of dough. Only I'd give themfood to take along. I wouldn't kill them off to keep the secret tomyself. Anything else on your mind?"

  "You want me," she stated.

  I didn't argue.

  "You could have me."

  "Just long enough to get my throat slit or brains blown out. I don'twant anything that much."

  I rammed the switch closed.

  The mesh cage blurred and she was gone. Her blood was on the floor,but she was gone into the future I had just come from.

  That was when the reaction hit me. I'd escaped starvation and her gun,but I wasn't a hero and the release of tension flipped my stomach overand unhinged my knees.

  Shaking badly, I stumbled through the big, empty house until I found aphone.

  * * * * *

  Lou Pape got there so quickly that I still hadn't gotten over thetremors, in spite of a bottle of brandy I dug out of a credenza, maybebecause the date on the label, 1763, gave me a new case of theshivers.

  I could see the worry on Lou's face vanish when he assured himselfthat I was all right. It came back again, though, when I told him whathad happened. He didn't believe any of it, naturally. I guess Ihadn't really expected him to.

  "If I didn't know you, Mark," he said, shaking his big, dark headunhappily, "I'd send you over to Bellevue for observation. Evenknowing you, maybe that's what I ought to do."

  "All right, let's see if there's any proof," I suggested tiredly."From what I was told, there ought to be plenty."

  We searched the house clear down to the basement, where he stood withhis face slack.

  "Christ!" he breathed. "The annex to the Metropolitan Museum!"

  The basement ran the length and breadth of the house and was twice ashigh as an average room, and the whole glittering place was crammedwith paintings in rich, heavy frames, statuettes, books, manuscripts,goblets and ewers and jewelry made of gold and huge gems, andtapestries in brilliant color ... and everything was as bright andsparkling and new as the day it was made, which was almost true of alot of it.

  "The dame was loaded and she was an art collector, that's all," Lousaid. "You can't sell me that screwy story of yours. She was acollector and she knew where to find things."

  "She certainly did," I agreed.

  "What did you do with her?"

  "I told you. I shot her through the arm before she could shoot me andI sent her into the future."

  He took me by the front of the jacket. "You killed her, Mark. Youwanted all this stuff for yourself, so you knocked her off and got ridof her body somehow."

  "Why don't you go back to acting, where you belong, Lou, and leavesleuthing to people who know how?" I asked, too worn to pull his handsloose. "Would I kill her and call you up to get right over here?Wouldn't I have sneaked these things out first? Or more likely I'dhave sneaked them out, hidden them and nobody--including you--wouldknow I'd ever been here. Come on, use your head."

  "That's easy. You lost your nerve."

  "I'm not even losing my patience."

  * * * * *

  He pushed me away savagely. "If you killed her for this stuff orbecause of that crazy yarn you gave me, I'm a cop and you're nofriend. You're just a plain killer I happened to have known once, andI'll make sure you fry."

  "You always did have a taste for that kind of dialogue. Go ahead andwrap me up in an airtight case, have them throw the book at me, sendme up the river, put me in the hot squat. But you'll have to do theproving, not me."

  He headed for the stairs. "I will. And don't try to make a break orI'll plug you as if I never saw you before."

  He put in a call at the phone upstairs. I didn't give a particulardamn who it was he'd called. I was too relieved that I hadn't killedMay Roberts; destroying anything that beautiful, however evil, wouldhave stayed with me the rest of my life. There was another reason formy relief--if I'd killed her and left the evidence for Lou to find,he'd never help me. No, that's not quite so; he'd probably have triedto get me to plead insanity on the basis of my unbelievableexplanation.

  But most of all, I couldn't get rid of the look on her face when I'dshot her through the arm, the arm that was so wonderful to look at andthat had held a murderous little gun to greet me with.

  She was in the future now. She wouldn't be executed by them; theyregarded crime as an illness, and they'd treat her with theirmarvelously advanced therapy and she'd become a useful, contentedcitizen, living out her existence in an era that had given me morehappiness than I'd ever had.

  I sat and tried to stupefy myself with brandy that should long agohave dried to brick-hardness, while Lou Pape stood at the door withhis hand near his holster and glared at me. He didn't take his eyesoff me until somebody named Prof. Jeremiah Aaronson came in and wasintroduced briefly and flatly to me. Then Lou took him upstairs.

  It was minutes before I realized what they were going to do. I ran upafter them.

  I was just in time to see Aaronson carefully take the housing off thehooded motors, and leap back suddenly from the fury of lightningsparks.

  * * * * *

  The whole machine fused while we watched helplessly--motors, switches,panel and mesh cage. They flashed blindingly and blew apart and meltedtogether in a charred and molten pile.

  "Rigged," Aaronson said in the tone of a bitter curse. "Set to shortif it was tampered with. I wouldn't be surprised if there wereincendiaries placed at strategic spots. Nothing else could have made amess like this."

  He finally glanced down at his hand and saw it was scorched. He hissedwith the realization of pain, blew on the burn, shook it in the air tocool it, and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket by reachingall the way around the rear for it with his left hand.

  Lou looked helplessly at the heap of cooling slag. "Can you make anysense of it, Prof?" he asked.

  "Can you?" Aaronson retorted. "Melt down a microtome or any otherpiece of machinery you're unfamiliar with, and see if you can identifyit when it looks like this."

  He went out, wrapping his hand in the handkerchief.

  Lou kicked glumly at a piece of twisted tubing. "Aaronson is a topphysicist, Mark. I was hoping he'd make enough out of the machineto--ah, hell, I wanted to believe you! I couldn't. I still can't. Nowwe'll have to dig through the house to find her body."

  "You won't find it or the secret of the machine," I answeredmiserably. "I told you they said the secret would be lost. This ishow. Now I'll never be able t
o visit the future again. I'll never seethem or May Roberts. They'll straighten her out, get rid of her hateand vindictiveness, and it won't do me a damned bit of good becausethe machine is gone and she's generations ahead of me."

  He turned to me puzzledly. "You're not afraid to have us dig for herbody, Mark?"

  "Tear the place apart if you want."

  "We'll have to," he said. "I'm calling Homicide."

  "Call in the Marines. Call in anybody you like."

  "You'll have to