The Mind Master

Beginning a Two-Part Novel

By Arthur J. Burks

A sequel to “Manape the Mighty”

A bullet ploughed through the top of the ape’s head.

---

“Let’s hope the horrible
nightmare is over, dearest,”
whispered Ellen
Estabrook to Lee Bentley
as their liner
came crawling up
through the Narrows
and the
Statue of Liberty
greeted the two
with uplifted torch beyond Staten
Island. New York’s skyline was
beautiful through the mist and
smoke which always seemed to
mask it. It was good to be home
again.
Once more Lee Bentley is caught
up in the marvelous machinations
of the mad genius Barter.

Certainly it was a far cry from
the African jungles
where, for
the space of a
ghastly nightmare,
Ellen had
been a captive of
29
the apes and Bentley himself had
had a horrible adventure. Caleb
Barter, a mad scientist, had drugged
him and exchanged his brain with
that of an ape, and for hours
Bentley had roamed the jungles
hidden in the great hairy body, the
only part of him remaining “Bentley”
being the Bentley brain which
Barter had placed in the ape’s skull-pan.
Bentley would never forget
the horror of that grim awakening,
in which he had found himself
walking on bent knuckles, his voice
the fighting bellow of a giant anthropoid.

Yes, it was a far cry from the
African jungles to populous Manhattan.

As soon as Ellen and Lee considered
themselves recovered from
the shock of the experience they
would be married. They had already
spent two months of absolute rest
in England after their escape from
Africa, but they found it had not
30
been enough. Their story had been
told in the press of the world and
they had been constantly besieged
by the curious, which of course
had not helped them to forget.

“Lee,” whispered Ellen, “I’ll
never feel sure that Caleb
Barter is dead. We should have
gone out that morning when he
forgot to take his whip and we
thought the vengeful apes had slain
him. We should have proved it to
our own satisfaction. It would be an
ironic jest, characteristic of Barter,
to allow us to think him dead.”

“He’s dead all right, dear,” replied
Bentley, his nostrils quivering
with pleasure as he looked
ahead at New York, while the
breeze along the Hudson pushed
his hair back from his forehead.
“He had abused the great anthropoids
for too many years. They
seized their opportunity, don’t mistake
that.”

“Still, he was a genius in his
way, a mad, frightful genius. It
hardly seems possible to me that he
would allow himself to be so easily
trapped. It’s a reflection on his
great mentality, twisted though it
was.”

“Forget it, dear,” replied Bentley,
putting his arm around her shoulders.
“We’ll both try to forget.
After our nerves have returned to
normal we’ll be married. Then nothing
can trouble us.”

The vessel docked and later Lee
and Ellen entered a taxicab near
the pier.

“I’ll take you to your home,
Ellen,” said Bentley. “Then I’ll
look after my own affairs for the
next couple of days, which includes
making peace with my father, then
we’ll go on from here.”

They looked through the windows
of the cab as they rolled into lower
Fifth Avenue and headed uptown.
Newsies were screaming an extra
from the sidewalks.

“Excitement!” said Bentley enthusiastically.
“It’s certainly good
to be home and hear a newsboy’s
unintelligible screaming of an
extra, isn’t it?”

On an impulse he ordered the
cabbie to draw up to the curb and
purchased a newspaper.

“Do you mind if I glance through
the headlines?” Bentley asked
Ellen. “I haven’t looked at an American
paper for ever so long.”

The cab started again and
Bentley folded the paper, falling
easily into the habit of New
Yorkers who are accustomed to
reading on subways where there
isn’t room for elbows, to say nothing
of broad newspapers.

His eyes caught a headline. He
started, frowning, but was instantly
mindful of Ellen. He mustn’t show
any signs that would excite her,
especially when he didn’t yet understand
what had caused his own instant
perturbation.

Had Ellen looked at him she
might have seen merely the calm
face of a man mildly interested in
the news of the day, but she was
looking out at the Fifth Avenue
shops.

Bentley was staring again at the
newspaper story:

“An evil genius signing his
‘manifestoes’ with the strange
cognomen of ‘Mind Master’
gives the authorities of New
York City twelve hours in
which to take precautions. To
prove that he is able to make
good his mad threats he states
that at noon exactly, to-day, he
will cause the death of the chief
executive of a great insurance
company whose offices are in
the Flatiron Building. After
that, at regular stated periods,
warnings to be issued in each
case ten hours in advance, he
will steal the brains of the
31
twenty men whose names are
hereto appended:” (There followed
then a list of names, all
of which were known to
Bentley.)

He understood why the story had
startled him, too. “Mind Master!”
Anything that had to do with the
human brain interested him
mightily now, for he knew to what
grim uses it could be put at the
hands of a master scientist. Around
his own head, safely covered by
his hair unless someone looked
closely, and even then they must
needs know what they sought, was
a thin white line. It marked the
line of Caleb Barter’s operation on
him that terrible night in the African
jungles, when his brain had
been transferred to the skull-pan of
an ape, and the ape’s brain to his
own cranium. Any mention of the
brain, therefore, recalled to him a
very harrowing experience.

It was little wonder that he
shuddered.

Ellen noticed his agitation.

“What is it, dearest?” she asked
softly, placing her hand in the
crook of his arm.

He was about to answer her,
desperately trying to think
of something to say that would not
alarm her, when their taxicab, with
a sudden application of the brakes,
came to a sharp stop. Bentley noticed
that they were at the intersection
of Twenty-second Street
and Fifth Avenue. The lights were
still green, but nevertheless all traffic
was halted.

And for a strange reason.

From the west door of the Flatiron
Building emerged a grim apparition
of a man. His body was
scored by countless bleeding
wounds which looked as though
they had been made by the fingernails
of a giant. The man wore no
article of clothing except his shoes.
Apparently, his clothing had been
ripped from his body by the same
instrument which had turned his
body into a raw, dripping horror.

The man staggered, half-running,
at times all but falling, toward the
traffic officer at the intersection.

As he ran he screamed, horrible,
babbling screams. His lips worked
crazily, his eyes rolled. He was
frightened beyond the comprehension
of ordinary mortals. His
screams began and ended on the
high shrill notes of utter dementia,
and as he ran he pawed the air
with his bleeding hands as though
he fought out on all sides against
invisible demons seeking to drag
him down.

“Oh, my God!” said Ellen. “Even
here!”

What had caused her to speak the
last two words? Did she also have
a premonition of grim disaster? Did
she also feel, deep down inside her,
as Bentley did, that the nightmare
through which they had passed was
not yet ended?

Bentley now sat unmoving, his
eyes unblinking, as he saw the
naked man stagger over to the traffic
officer. The color drained from
his face.

He looked at his watch. It was
exactly noon.

Even without further consideration
Bentley knew that this gruesome
apparition had some direct
connection with the newspaper story
he had just read.

Unobtrusively, trying to
make it seem a preoccupied
action, he folded the newspaper
again and thrust it down at the
end of the seat cushion. But Ellen
was watching him, a haunting fear
gradually coming into her eyes.

She quickly reached past him and
snatched the paper before he realized
her intent. The item he had
read came instantly under her eyes
because of the way he had automatically
32
folded the paper. She
read it with staring eyes.

“So, Lee,” she said, “you think
there’s a connection with––with––well,
with us?”

“Absurd!” he said heartily, too
heartily. “Caleb Barter is dead.”

“But I have never been sure,” insisted
Ellen. “Oh, Lee, let’s get
away from here! Let’s take the first
boat for Bermuda––anywhere to
escape this terrible fear.”

“No!” he retorted harshly. “If
our suspicions are correct, and I
think we’re unwarrantedly keyed up
because of our recent experiences,
the officials of New York may need
my help.”

“Your help? Why?”

“I know more about Caleb Barter
than any other living man, perhaps.”

“Then you do have doubts that
he is dead!”

Bentley shrugged his shoulders.

“Ellen,” he said, “drive on home
without me. I’m going to drop off
and find out all I can. If we’re in
for it in any way it’s just as well
to know it at once.”

“You’ll come right along?”

“Just as soon as I can make it.
And I hope I’ll be able to report our
fears groundless.”

Bentley stepped from the cab.
He ordered the chauffeur to turn
right into Twenty-second Street
and to proceed until Ellen gave him
further directions.

Then Bentley hurried through the
congestion of automobiles toward
the traffic officer who was fighting
with the naked man, trying to subdue
him. Other men were running
to the officer’s assistance, for it
could be seen that he alone was
no match for the lunatic. Bentley,
however, was first to arrive.

“Give me a hand!” gasped the
officer. “I can’t handle ’im without
usin’ my club and I don’t wanna
do that. The poor fella don’t know
what he’s a-doin’.”

Bentley quickly sprang to
the patrolman’s assistance. Between
them they soon reduced the
stranger to a squirming bundle and
dragged him to the sidewalk; another
officer was phoning for an
ambulance. The stricken man was
now mumbling, babbling insanely.
Blood trickled from the corners of
his lips. The sight of one eye had
been destroyed.

Bentley watched him, sprawled
now on the sidewalk, surrounded
by a group of men. The man was
dying, no question about that. The
talons, which had scored him, had
bitten deeply and he was destined
to bleed to death soon even if the
wounds were not otherwise mortal.

Bentley noticed something
clutched tightly in the man’s right
hand––something that sent a chill
through his body despite the heat
of a mid-July noon. The officer, apparently,
had not noticed it.

Soon a clanging bell announced
the arrival of an ambulance, and as
the crowd stepped aside to clear
the way, Bentley bent over the
dying man. The man’s lips were
parted and he was trying with a
mighty effort of will to speak.

Bentley put his ear close to the
bleeding lips through which words
strove to bubble. He heard parts of
two words:

“…ind …aster….”

Bentley suddenly knew what the
man was trying to say. The half-uttered
words could mean only––“Mind
Master.”

Bentley suppressed a shudder and
extended his hands to the closed
right hand of the dying man. Carefully
he removed from between the
fingers three tufts of thick brown
hair, coarse and crude of texture.
There was a rattle in the naked
man’s throat.

Five minutes later the ambulance
intern hastily scribbled in his record
the entry, “Dead on Arrival.”

Bentley, more frightened than he
33
had ever been before, entered a
taxicab as soon as the body had
been removed and the streets
cleared. He stared closely at the
tufts of hair in his hand. Maybe he
had been wrong in taking them before
detectives arrived on the scene,
but he had to know, and he felt
that these hairs proved his mad suspicions.

Caleb Barter was alive!

The hairs came from the shaggy
coat of a giant anthropoid ape or a
gorilla.

How terribly far-fetched it
seemed! It was unbelievable
enough that Bentley had once reposed
in the body of an ape. That
had been in the African wilds. But
the idiocy of the thing now rested
in Bentley’s belief that here, immediately
upon landing, he was
again facing something just as horrible.

But the coincidences were too
clear. The palaver about “brains,”
and “Mind Master”––and those ape
hairs in Bentley’s hands. He wished
he knew all that had led up to that
story he had read in the paper
just prior to the appearance of the
naked man from the west door of
the Flatiron Building. However, the
killing would get front page position
now, due to the importance
of the dead man––Bentley never
doubted it was the man whom, in
the paper, the “Mind Master” had
promised to slay.

Great apes in the heart of New
York City! It sounded silly, preposterous.
Yet, before he had gone
through that dread experience with
the mad Barter, Bentley would have
sworn that brain transplantation
was impossible. Even now he was
not sure that it hadn’t all been
a terrible dream.

Should Bentley go at once to the
police to give them the benefit of
whatever knowledge he might have
of Caleb Barter? He wasn’t sure.
Then he decided that sooner or
later he must come out into the
open. So he caught a cab and went
to police headquarters.

“I wish,” he said, “to talk to someone
about the Mind Master!”

If he had said, “I have just come
from Mars,” he could scarcely have
caused a greater sensation.

But his calm statement got him
an instant audience with a
slender man of thirty-five or so,
whose hair was prematurely gray at
the temples, and whose eyes were
shrewd and far-seeing.

“My name’s Thomas Tyler,” said
the detective. He certainly didn’t
look the conventional detective, but
Bentley knew instantly that he
wasn’t the conventional detective.
“I work on the unusual cases. If
you hadn’t sent in your name I
wouldn’t have seen you, which
means that as soon as you leave
here you are to forget my name and
how I look.”

He motioned Bentley to a seat.
Bentley sat back. Suddenly Thomas
Tyler was around his desk and had
pushed back the hair from Bentley’s
temples. He drew in his breath with
a sharp hiss when he saw the white
line which circled Bentley’s skull.

“It’s not exactly proof,” he said,
as though he and Bentley had been
in the midst of a discussion of
that awful operation Barter had
performed on Bentley, “but I’d take
your word for it.”

“The story, in the main, was
true,” said Bentley.

“I thought so. What made you
come here?”

“I saw that naked man run across
Fifth Avenue from the door of the
Flatiron Building. I saw the officer
subdue him, helped him do it in
fact, and saw the man die. Since
there was no detective there, I took
34
the liberty of removing these from
the fingers of the dead man.”

Bentley gave Tyler the coarse
hair, stained with blood. Tyler
looked at it grimly for a moment
or two.

“Not human hair,” he said, as
though talking to himself. “Not
like any I know of. But … ah,
you know what sort of hair, eh?
That’s what sent you here!”

“It’s the hair of an ape or a
gorilla.”

“How do you know, for sure?”

“Once,” said Bentley grimly, “for
several horrible hours … I was
a giant anthropoid ape.”

Tyler’s chair legs crashed
solidly to the floor.

“I see,” he said. “You think this
thing has some connection with
your own experiences. How long
ago was that?”

“Slightly over two months.”

“You think the same man…?”

“I don’t know. But who could
want, as a newspaper story I just
read says, to steal the brains of
men? What for? It sounds like
Barter. I’ve never heard of anybody
else with such an obsession.
I’m putting two and two together––and
fervently hoping they’ll add
up to seven instead of four. For
if ever in my life I wanted to be
wrong it’s now.”

Tyler pursed his lips. Bentley
saw that his eyes were glinting
with excitement.

“But there’s a possibility you’re
right. Do you know what the Mind
Master’s first manifesto said? It
was published by a tabloid newspaper
as a sort of gag––a strange
crank letter. Here it is.”

Tyler tossed Bentley a newspaper
clipping a week old. Bentley
read quickly:

“The white race is deteriorating
physically at a dangerous
rate. In fifty years, if
nothing is done to prevent it,
the world will be filled with
men whose bodies are so soft as
to be almost worthless. But I
shall take steps to prevent that,
as soon as I am ready. I need a
week. Then I shall begin my
crusade to make the white race
a race of supermen, whom I
alone shall rule. They shall
keep the brains they have,
which shall be transferred to
bodies which I shall furnish.

(Signed) The Mind Master.”

Tyler squinted at Bentley
again.

“You see? Brains are all right,
he says, but the white race needs
new bodies. If he isn’t suggesting
brain substitution, what is he suggesting?
Though I confess I never
thought of your story until your
name was sent in to me a while
ago. For the world thinks of Barter
as having been killed by the
great apes.”

“Yes, I told newspaper reporters
that. I thought it was true. But
this Mind Master must be Barter.
There couldn’t be two persons in
the world with mental quirks so
much alike.”

“Tell me what Barter looks like.
Oh, there are plenty of pictures
extant of the famous Professor
Caleb Barter who disappeared from
the world some years ago, but he’ll
know that, of course, and he won’t
look like the pictures.

“Alteration of his own features
should be easy for a man who
juggles brains.”

“He may have changed his features
since I saw him, too,” said
Bentley. “But I’m sure I’d know
him.”

Tyler’s telephone rang stridently.

He took down the receiver. His
mouth fell slackly open as his eyes
lifted to Bentley’s face. But he
recovered himself and slapped his
hand over the transmitter.
35

“Anybody know you came here?”
asked Tyler.

Bentley shook his head.

“Well,” went on Tyler, “I don’t
know how it happens, but this telephone
message is for you!”

Bentley’s heart seemed to jump
into his throat. One of those
hunches which sometimes were so
valuable to him had struck him, as
though it were a blow between the
eyes. His lips tightened. His face
was pale, but there was a grim light
in his eyes.

He hesitated for a second, the receiver
in his hand, his mouth
against the transmitter.

“Well, Professor Barter?” he said
conversationally.

There came a gasp from
Thomas Tyler. He jumped to
the door and motioned to someone.
A man in uniform came to his side.
Bentley distinctly heard Tyler tell
the man to have this telephone call
traced.

From the receiver came a well-remembered
chuckle.

“So you were expecting me, eh,
Bentley? You never really believed
that one of my genius would fall
such easy prey to the great apes
did you?”

“Of course not, Professor,” said
Bentley soothingly. “It would be
an insult to your vivid mentality.”

“Vivid mentality! Vivid mentality!
Why, Bentley, there isn’t
another brain in the world to compare
with mine. And you of all
people should know it. The whole
world will know it before I’m finished,
for I have made tremendous
strides since you helped me to perform
that crowning achievement in
Africa. By the way, tell your friend
Tyler, who just called the officer
to the door, that it’s useless to
try to trace this call!”

Bentley jumped as though he
had been stung. How had Barter
known what Tyler was doing? How
had he guessed what Tyler had told
the man in uniform? How had Barter
known Bentley was visiting
Tyler? How had he discovered even
that Bentley was back in the
United States? Why, besides, was
he so friendly with Bentley now?

“You speak, Professor,” said
Bentley softly, “as though you
could see right into police headquarters.”

“I can, Bentley! I can!” said
Barter impatiently, as though he
were rebuking a schoolboy for saying
the obvious.

“You’re close by, then?”

“No. I’m a long way––several
miles––from you. But I can see
everything you do. And you needn’t
look at Tyler in such surprise!”

Bentley started. He had
looked at Tyler in a surprised
way and, clever though he was, he
didn’t think that Barter could have
guessed so accurately to the second
the gesture he had made. Barter
chuckled.

“It’s a good jest, isn’t it? But
listen to me, Bentley, I’ve a great
scheme in hand for the amelioration
of mankind. I need your help,
mostly because you were such an
excellent subject in my greatest
successful experiment.”

“Will it be the same sort of experiment
as the other?” Bentley’s
heart was in his mouth as he asked
the question.

“Yes, the same … but there are
improvements I have succeeded in
perfecting since the creation of
Manape. My one mistake when
Manape was created was in that I
allowed myself to lose control of
him––of you! That will not happen
again. Oh, if you’ll help me,
Bentley, that operation will not be
performed on you until you yourself
request it because I shall have
proved to you that it is better for
you. You shall be my assistant and
obey my orders, nothing more.”
36

Lee Bentley drew a deep breath.

“If I prefer not to work with
you again, Professor?”

A chuckle was Barter’s answer.
The chuckle broke off shortly.

“You should not refuse, Bentley,”
said the scientist at last. “For then
I should find it necessary to remove
you. You might stand in my way,
and though you would be but a
puny obstacle, you still would be
an obstacle. For example, consider
Ellen Estabrook, your fiancée. I can
find no use for her … and she
knows as much about me as you do.
Therefore, at my convenience, I
shall remove her.”

“Caleb Barter,” Bentley’s
voice was hoarse with anger
as he dropped his soothing mode of
address toward the man he knew
was insane, “if anything happens to
Miss Estabrook through you I shall
find you no matter how well you
are guarded … and I shall destroy
you bit by bit, as a small boy destroys
a fly. For every least evil
thing that happens to Miss Estabrook,
a hundred times that will
happen to you at my hands.”

“Good!” snapped Barter, no
longer chuckling. “I am happy to
know how much she means to you.
It shows me how easily I may control
you through her. It means war
then, between us? I’m sorry,
Bentley, for I like you. In a way,
you know, you are my creation. But
in a war between us, Bentley, you
haven’t a chance to win.”

Bentley clicked up the receiver.

“Could you trace the call, Tyler?”
he snapped.

Tyler shook his head ruefully.

“We couldn’t locate the right
telephone, but we could tell which
exchange it came through, and the
lines of that exchange cover a huge
section of the city.”

“Can you find out exactly the section
and the address of each phone
on every line?”

“Yes. The exchange is Stuyvesant.”

“That gives me some help. I used
to live in Greenwich Village and
I had a Stuyvesant number. I’m
going after Barter. Say, Tyler, how
do you suppose Barter knew exactly
what was going on in this room?”

Tyler’s face slowly whitened as
his eyes looked fearfully into the
eyes of Lee Bentley. He shook his
head slowly.

Bentley squared his shoulders and
spoke quietly and determinedly.

“Mr. Tyler,” he said, “I am in
a great hurry. May I be conducted
in a police car? Might as well. I’ll
be working with you hand and glove
until Barter is captured.”

Bentley rode behind a shrieking
siren to the home of the Estabrooks
… while from a distance of two
miles Caleb Barter watched every
move and chuckled grimly to himself.

The huge room was absolutely
free of all sounds from anywhere
save within itself. The walls,
the floors, the doors were of chrome
steel. The cages were iron-ribbed
and ponderous.

The long table which ran down
the strange room’s center was covered
with retorts, test tubes, Bunsen
burners––all of the stock-in-trade
of the scientist who spends
most of his time at research work.
The man who bent over the table
was well past middle age. His hair
was snow-white, but his cheeks were
like rosy red apples. He literally
seemed to glow with health. He was
like a strange flame. His hands were
slender, the fingers long and extraordinarily
supple. His lips were
redder even than his cheeks, and
made one, strangely enough, think
of vampires. His eyes were coal-black,
fathomless, piercing.
37

On the bronze wall directly across
the table from the swiftly laboring
man was a porcelain tablet set into
the bronze, and in the midst of the
table were a score of little push-buttons.
Above each was a red
light; and below, a green one.

Several inches below each green
light was a little slot which resembled
a tiny keyhole, something
like the keyhole in the average
handbag. There was a key in each
hole, and from each key hung a
length of gleaming chain which
shone like gold and might have
been gold, or at least, some gold-plated
metal. On the dangling end
of each chain was another key
which might have been the twin of
the key in the hole above.

In the space between the keyholes
and the green lights there
were the letters and figures: A-1,
B-2, C-3, D-4 … and so on up to
T-20.

Plainly it was the beginning of
a complicated classification system
with any number of combinations
possible.

Behind the working man the
row of cages partially hid the
brooding horror of the place. There
were twenty cages––and in each one
was a sulking, red-eyed anthropoid
ape. Plainly the fact that the number
of apes coincided with the number
of push-buttons, and with the
number of keys, to say nothing of
the red lights and the green lights,
was no accident. The apes were sullenly
silent, proof that they feared
the man at the table so much that
they were afraid to move.

At last the white-haired man
stopped and breathed a sigh of satisfaction.
Carefully he placed in the
middle of the table the instrument
which he had been examining. It
looked like a slightly concave aluminum
plate or tympanum, save that
on the apex appeared a tiny ball of
the same metal. Except for the color
and the fact that the thing was
almost flat, it looked like a small
Manchu hat.

“Naka Machi!” said the man suddenly
in a conversational tone of
voice.

The chrome steel door swung
open swiftly and silently and another
man entered. He was about
the same height as the first man,
but he was younger and his eyes
were blacker. His hair was as black
as the wings of a crow. He was a
Japanese dressed in Occidental
garb.

“Naka Machi,” said the white-haired
one again, “I have examined
every bit of the infinitesimal mechanism
in the ball on this tympanum.
It is perfect. You are a genius,
Naka Machi. There is only one
genius greater––Professor Caleb
Barter!”

Naka Machi bowed low, and as he
spoke his breath hissed inwardly
through his teeth after the Japanese
manner of admitting humility––“that
my humble breath may not
blow upon you”––which never
needed really to be sincere.

“I am merely a genius with my
fingers, Professor Barter,” said
Naka Machi in a musical voice.
“The smaller the medium in which
I work the happier I am, Professor;
and in that I am a genius. But the
plan for this so marvelous little
radio-control, as you call it, came
entirely from your head, my master.
I did exactly as the plans bade
me. Will it work?”

Caleb Barter’s red face
went redder still. His eyes
shot flames of anger. His lips
pouched. Almost he seemed on the
point of striking down his Japanese
assistant.

“Will it work?” he repeated.
“Have you not just told me that
you followed my plans exactly?
Have I not just now checked your
every bit of work and pronounced
38
it perfect? Then how can it fail to
work? Have you another one
ready?”

“Yes, my master. Now that I have
perfected two, the work will become
monotonous. If the master
wishes, I can create still another
radio-control, inside the head of
a pin, which I should first render
hollow with that skill which only
Naka Machi possesses?”

Caleb Barter almost smiled.

“It will not be necessary. But it
will be necessary for you to make
eighteen additional radio-controls
of the same size as this one, or say
make twenty-four so that we shall
have some extra ones in case of
accident. These two will be put
into action at once. Naka Machi,
bring me Lecky, completely uniformed
as a smart chauffeur! Have
you laid in a store of clothing, as
I bade you, to fit every conceivable
need of Lecky, Stanley, Morton and
Cleve?”

“Yes, my master.”

“Then bring in Lecky accoutered
as a chauffeur.”

Ten minutes later a young man
entered behind Naka Machi. He
was slender and his chauffeur’s
uniform fitted him like a glove. He
looked like a soldier in it. Indeed
his bearing, his whole stance, spoke
of many years as a soldier––and a
proud one. The fellow was brimful
of health. His cheeks were rosy
with vitality. He looked like a man
with health so abundant he never
found means to tire himself to the
point where he could sleep dreamlessly.

But, nevertheless his arms hung
listlessly at his sides. His eyes
seemed empty of hope, dull and
lifeless, and one looked into those
eyes and shuddered. One tried to
gaze deeply into them and found
oneself baffled. There was no soul
behind them.

“Come here, Lecky,” said Barter
coldly.

Lecky glided effortlessly forward
to stand before Barter.

“You’ve no brains, Lecky,” said
Barter emotionlessly; “no brains
of your own. You have a splendid
body which moves only at the will
of Caleb Barter. I need that body
for my purposes. But a man with
brains is dangerous. That’s why
you haven’t any.”

Barter now took the silvery tympanum
with the ball atop it and set
it on the head of Lecky. On top
of it he placed the chauffeur’s cap,
bringing it down tightly to keep
the tympanum in place.

“If I had it to do again I’d insert
the tympanum under the skull
as part of the operation, Naka
Machi,” said Barter as he worked.
“We’ll do that hereafter. And we
begin work immediately. I’m going
to send Lecky out now to get the
first subject.”

“The first subject, sir?”

“Yes. Manhattan’s richest man.
A man must have brains to become
Manhattan’s richest man, and
I need men with brains. His name
is Harold Hervey. He will be
leaving his office in the Empire
State Building in about half an
hour. I want Lecky to be on hand
to meet him.”

On his own head Barter placed a
second tympanum which Naka
Machi had brought him. Over it he
pulled a rubber cap, like a bathing
cap with a hole cut in the top.

“Now, we’ll try it out, Naka
Machi,” said Barter. “Which one
of these lights is Lecky’s?”

“B-2, my master.”

Barter sat down under the light
marked “B-2” and lifted the key
which dangled from the end of the
golden chain. This key he inserted
in a tiny orifice in the ball atop
his head. Then he turned in his
chair to look at Lecky. Barter’s
face was a mask of concentration
as he gazed intently at the young
man.
39

Lecky stiffened to attention.
His right hand shot to his
cap visor in salute. His lips twisted
into a travesty of a smile. For a
few seconds he went through a
strange series of posturings. He
stood in the attitude of a boxer preparing
to attack. He danced
smartly on his toes. He bent double
and touched the floor with the
palms of his hands. He jumped up
and down with his legs stiff. He
stopped suddenly with his right
hand at rigid salute. But his eyes
were still vacant through every posture.

Barter’s face showed a glow of
satisfaction.

“He did exactly what I willed
him to do! I am his master. He is
my slave––even more abjectly than
you are my slave, Naka Machi!”

“But that would be impossible,
my master,” said Naka Machi, hissing
again through his teeth as he
sucked in his breath. “None could
be more abjectly your slave than
I.”

“Do not say anything is impossible,”
said Barter peevishly, “when
I say otherwise. Anything is possible
to me! Now, we’ll send Lecky
forth. I’ll watch him through the
heliotubes and control his every
move. While I am directing Lecky
you will prepare the table behind
me for the first of our world-revolutionizing
operations.”

“Yes, my master,” said the Japanese
humbly.

“But first, it’s just as well that
Lecky is in a good humor, even
though he is my slave. Where are
the walnuts, Naka Machi?”

The Japanese tendered a large
walnut to Barter. Barter rose and
approached Lecky who still stood
at salute. He stopped a couple of
paces in front of the soldierly man
and held up the walnut as a man
sometimes holds up food to a dog,
bidding him “speak” before he may
be fed.

Then Lecky did a strange
thing.

He began to jump up and down
like a pleased child. His jumping
caused him to lose his balance, but
he recaptured it by pressing the
backs of his hands against the floor.
His hitherto expressionless eyes
lost their dullness. Saliva dribbled
at the corners of his mouth. Barter
tossed him the walnut. Lecky held
it under his right forefinger, against
the heel of his thumb, instead of
between thumb and forefinger, as he
lifted it to his mouth.

Barter chuckled.

“Even the human casement cannot
wholly hide the ape, eh, Naka
Machi?” said Barter.

Naka Machi hissed.

Barter returned to the porcelain
slab banked with the lights and
the keys. He readjusted the keys
and his face became thoughtful
again.

Lecky turned smartly, still nibbling
at his walnut, strode to the
bronze door and let himself out.

Through the heliotube directly
above the key marked “B-2,” Caleb
Barter watched him go, and kept
watching him as he made his way
to the street. Barter looked ahead
of his puppet, noting the cars which
were parked at the curb. He saw
a stately limousine. He grinned.
The chauffeur was not in sight.
Barter looked for him and found
him at a table in a nearby restaurant,
his back to the window.

Barter looked back at his puppet
and his face became serious with
concentration.

Lecky walked blithely along the
street and turned right when he
was opposite the limousine. Without
a moment’s hesitation, he
stepped into the limousine, pressed
the starter, shifted gears, turned
in the middle of the block and
started swiftly uptown.

After Lecky had shifted gears
he drove with his left hand alone.
40
His right was still busy with the
walnut.

Barter now looked like a man in
a trance, so deeply did he concentrate
on his task of guiding his
soulless, ape-brained puppet, Lecky,
through the heavy traffic of Manhattan.

“That list, Tyler,” said Bentley,
after he had somewhat
calmed the fears of Ellen Estabrook
and had returned to the task
of tracing Barter, “is headed by
Harold Hervey, the multi-millionaire.
I know Barter well enough to
know that he’ll go down the list
methodically, taking each person in
turn. We’d best take immediate
precautions to guard the old man’s
home. For Barter, if not entirely
ready to take drastic steps, must
be almost ready, else he couldn’t
issue his manifestoes and take a
chance of some slip-up before he
could get really started.”

“Why do you suppose he named
Hervey on the list?” asked Tyler.

“Because Hervey is a financial
genius. Barter wishes not only to
carry out his plan of creating a
race of supermen, but wishes at
the same time to maintain personal
control of them. And to control
Manhattan, from which he logically
hopes to extend his control to the
whole United States, then to the
whole world, Barter must also control
the money marts. Hervey is
the shrewdest financier in the
world.”

“But won’t we frighten Hervey’s
family if we take steps now?”

“Better to frighten them now
than to be too late entirely. However,
we can place his house under
surveillance without the knowledge
of the family for the time being.
And you’d better send a couple of
men to his office in the Empire
State Building to see that nothing
happens to him on the way home
this evening. I talked to him by
telephone and he pooh-poohed the
whole thing. Hard-headed business
executives have no imagination.”

Bentley and Tyler rode uptown
in the back seat of a speeding police
car driven by one of the best chauffeurs
Bentley had ever ridden behind.
He edged through holes in
the traffic where Bentley could
scarcely see any holes at all. He
estimated the speed of cars which
might have collided with the police
vehicle and slipped through with
inches to spare. In his way the
man was a genius. But Bentley was
yet to see the driving of a master
genius….

Far out in the residential district
the police car came to a
stop. Other police cars arrived at
intervals to disgorge men in plain
clothes who immediately entered
upon their guard duties as unobtrusively
as possible. If Hervey’s
family noticed at all they would
scarcely attach any importance to
the arrival of cars and the discharging
of passengers who seemed
to have nothing to do except dawdle
on the sidewalks.

But all the way uptown a hunch
had ridden Bentley. He had the
feeling that no matter how fast the
police car traveled, no matter how
skilfully the chauffeur inched his
way through the press, they would
be too late to save Hervey. The
feeling became an obsession. Many
times he called through the speaking
tube.

“Faster, driver, for God’s sake,
faster!”

Now near the home of Harold
Hervey, Bentley found himself unable
to walk slowly, with the air
of nonchalance, which the other
police officers wore like a cloak.

“Something’s happened,” said
Bentley, “I’m sure of it. I feel that
41
Barter is so close to me that I
could touch him if I knew in which
direction to extend my fingers.”

Suddenly a speeding car, with
horn bellowing, came crashing up
the street toward the Hervey residence.
It was traveling at great
speed, careening from side to side
like a ship in a storm at sea.

“There comes Hervey’s car,” said
Tyler. “And something has happened
to make him travel like that.
Old man Hervey doesn’t allow his
chauffeur to go faster than twenty
miles an hour.”

Tyler and Bentley were near
by when the car squealed to a
stop before the Hervey residence
and a hatless, disheveled man leaped
out almost before the car stopped
rolling.

“That’s not Hervey,” said Tyler.
“That’s his private secretary. Something’s
up. It’s time we took a hand
in things.”

Tyler and Bentley grasped the
young man by the elbow.

“What’s up?” demanded Tyler.

“It’s Mr. Hervey, sir,” panted the
secretary. “It just happened. He’s
been kidnaped!”

The secretary was a slight man,
but fear had given him strength.
He almost dragged Tyler and Bentley
off their feet as he strode on
up the walk leading to the home of
Hervey.

“You’ll scare his family half to
death!” said Tyler.

“It’ll have to come sometime,
Tyler,” said Bentley. “It might as
well be now. They’ll have to know.
We’ll have to sit inactively from
this moment on. Tyler, there’s nothing
that can be done for Hervey.
Barter has scored. We couldn’t
catch him now to save ourselves
from perdition. But his next step
will involve the Hervey menage.
We’ll have to wait there for his
next move.”

Tyler and Bentley entered the
vast gloomy structure of the old-fashioned
Hervey domicile on the
heels of the frightened secretary.
Mrs. Hervey, a faded woman of
sixty or so, met them at the door.
Her head was held high, her lips
grimly drawn into a straight line.

“So,” she said evenly, “they’ve
got Mr. Hervey. I begged him to
take those threats seriously. He’s
been either killed or kidnaped.”

“Kidnaped,” said Bentley, continuing
brutally because of the
courage he saw in the old woman’s
face. “And that means he’ll be
dead within the hour, if he isn’t
dead already. We’ve got to stay
here for a few hours, to await the
next move of the madman calling
himself the Mind Master, in the
hope that we can trace him when
he makes his next move.”

Mrs. Hervey lifted her head still
higher.

“We’ll place no obstacles in your
path, gentlemen,” she said, “if you
are from the police. The family will
confine itself to the upper floors
of the house.”

Tyler and Bentley took possession
of the living room. Outside
a dozen plain-clothes men were
to patrol the grounds during the
hours of darkness.

Other men were at every adjacent
street corner. A rat could not have
got through unobserved.

Tyler and Bentley took seats at
a table facing the door. The police
car in which they had arrived stood
at the curb, with the chauffeur at
the wheel, the motor humming
softly.

“Timkins,” said Bentley, addressing
the private secretary who stood
in the most distant corner of the
room, his eyes fearfully fixed on
the street door, “how was Mr.
Hervey captured?”

“I was accompanying him to his
car, sir,” replied the young man,
“when a dapper fellow in a chauffeur’s
42
uniform confronted us on the
sidewalk. He stood as stiff and
straight as a soldier. He didn’t say
a word. He just looked at Mr.
Hervey. Mr. Hervey stopped because
the man was blocking the
sidewalk. I looked into the chauffeur’s
eyes. They seemed utterly
dead. I shivered. I’d have sworn
the man had no soul, now that I
look back at it. Suddenly he lashed
out with his fist, striking Mr. Hervey
on the jaw. Mr. Hervey started
to fall. The man caught him under
the arms and tossed him into the
tonneau of a limousine at the curb.
The car was away before I could
summon the police.”

Bentley nodded.

“Which way did the car go?” he
demanded.

“Downtown, at top speed,” replied
Timkins.

Bentley turned to Tyler.

“The Stuyvesant exchange is
downtown,” he said. “Now Timkins
says that the kidnaper’s car went
downtown. And the naked man was
killed in the Flatiron Building,
which is well downtown in its turn.
Tyler, fill all the area covered by
the Stuyvesant exchange with plain-clothes
men. Telephone Headquarters
to see whether a stolen
limousine has been reported from
somewhere in the area. Barter
wouldn’t have cars of his own for
fear they could be traced. He’ll use
stolen cars when he uses cars at all.
And he had his puppet pick up the
limousine close to his hideout.”

Tyler nodded and quickly
spoke into the telephone on
the table at his elbow.

The telephone reminded Bentley
of Ellen Estabrook.

When Tyler had finished issuing
pointed instructions Bentley called
the residence of the Estabrooks in
Astoria, Long Island.

Carl Estabrook answered the
telephone.

“Is Ellen all right?” asked
Bentley. “May I speak to her?”

Carl Estabrook’s answering gasp
came plainly over the wire.

“Are you crazy, Lee?” he asked.
“Not ten minutes ago you telephoned
Ellen and told her to meet
you near the arch in Washington
Square. I asked her if she was sure
the voice was yours, and she
was….”

But Bentley, white-faced, had
already clicked up the receiver.

“Tyler,” he said, “Ellen Estabrook,
my fiancée, is walking into
a trap. It’s Barter again. He’d know
how to imitate my voice well
enough to fool Ellen. It would be
simple enough for a man like him.
He probably had that long conversation
with me at headquarters to
make sure he hadn’t forgotten the
timbre and pitch of my voice … and
to hear how it sounded over the
telephone. Please have plain-clothes
men pick up Ellen in
Washington Square. And that,
Tyler, if you’ll notice, is also downtown.”

Bentley felt that he would go
mad with anxiety as he awaited
some news from the plain-clothes
men Tyler had ordered to look for
Ellen Estabrook.

He had asked Tyler to issue
rather unusual instructions to the
plain-clothes men around the Hervey
residence. They were to make
no attempt to halt anyone who
might approach the house, but were
to permit no one to depart. It was
a weak plan, but knowing the supreme
egotism of Barter, Bentley
felt that the old scientist would deliberately
accept such a challenge.
He wouldn’t mind risking the loss
of a minion.

“He controls his puppets from
his hideout, Tyler,” Bentley
explained, “and won’t hesitate to
send them into danger since it can’t
touch him. And he watches every
43
move they make, too. He’s made
some television adaptation of his
own. I’ll wager, if he so desires, he
can see us sitting here right now,
even perhaps hear what we say.
I can fancy hearing him chuckle,
and Tyler…?”

“Yes?”

“I can see old man Hervey on
an operating table with Barter bending
over him, working fiendishly.
Behind Barter are cages of apes.”

“But how could he transport
apes to his hideout?”

“He could manage to smuggle
anything anywhere. Money paves
the way to any accomplishment,
Tyler. We needn’t concern ourselves
with how he does it, but
with the fact that he must surely
have apes in his hideout.”

There came suddenly an imperious
ringing of the doorbell.

Bentley and Tyler leaped to their
feet, their hands streaking for their
automatics which they had placed
within easy reach on the table. Side
by side they sprang for the door,
and flung it open.

A chill of horror ran through
Bentley.

“Mother of God!” cried Tyler.

“Mr. Hervey!” shrieked Timkins.
The secretary, noting the figure
which toppled so grimly into the
room, fainted. The thud of his body
followed the thud of the old man’s
body to the floor.

In that first moment of overwhelming
terror, all three men
noted that Hervey’s skull-pan was
missing.

“Look after details here, Tyler!”
cried Bentley, quickly recovering
himself. “I’m after whoever brought
the old man home.”

Bentley was racing down the
path for the street, where a man in
chauffeur’s uniform was hurling
himself into a limousine, while bullets
from half a dozen plain-clothes
men, racing to head him off, sang
about his ears. But the stranger
gained the driver’s seat and the
limousine was away like a shot. The
police car was rolling as Bentley
leaped upon the running board,
then eased in beside the driver.

“Don’t stop for anything!” cried
Bentley. “Keep that car in sight!”

The car headed downtown at
breakneck speed.

Bentley would never forget
that nightmarish ride downtown.
It was a dream as terrifying
and ghastly as had been his experience
in the African jungles
when he had been Manape. Added
to the utter fear of the ride was
his fear for the safety of Ellen
Estabrook. Caleb Barter, so far, was
utterly invincible. It seemed he
could not be beaten or outwitted in
any way. But Bentley set his lips
tightly.

Caleb Barter must have some
weak spot in his insane armor, some
way by which he could be reached
and destroyed––and Bentley swore
to himself that it would be he who
would find that weak spot.

The limousine ahead was going
at dangerous speed. The police
chauffeur beside Bentley crouched
low over the wheel as he drove.
His eyes never left the speeding
limousine. People on the sidewalks
stared in astonishment as the two
cars flashed downtown.

The leading car sped on, the
driver obviously expecting ways to
open in the last second before
threatened collision. He passed cars
on the left and the right. There
were times when his wheels were
up on the curb as he went through
lanes between cars and sidewalks.
He was determined to go through.

Only Bentley understood that the
driver ahead was an automaton, a
man whose brain did not know the
meaning of fear. He knew that
44
from his hideout Caleb Barter was
directing the flight of the escaping
car. He could fancy the old man of
the apple-red cheeks, sitting in a
chair in his hideout, his hands in
the air as though they gripped the
wheel of a car, sweat breaking forth
on his cheeks as he guided his
puppet through the press of cars.

But by now in that uncanny way
that sometimes happens the streets
were being cleared as if by magic
before the flight of one whom all observers
must have thought a madman.
Only Bentley knew that the
driver ahead was not a madman.

His own car careened from side
to side. Bentley wondered
what the chauffeur would think if
he knew he was driving a race
against one of Barter’s supermen.
He would perhaps have realized that
no man could possibly follow with
any degree of success. The police
driver had succeeded so far only
because, Bentley guessed, he felt
that where any other man could
drive, so could he.

Only Bentley knew that the
driver up there was not a “man” in
the normal meaning of the word.
He wondered who “he” really was––not
that it mattered greatly, for
the entity required to make “him”
a normal man had perhaps been destroyed,
or had become part of
some giant anthropoid to be used
later in Barter’s ghastly experiments.

“I wonder if Tyler will send out
calls for police cars in other parts
of the city to try and cut off the
runaway,” shouted Bentley above
the shrieking of the motor and the
wailing of the siren. “Are any police
cars equipped with radio?”

“Several,” answered the police
chauffeur. “And they are able to
cut in on various public radio stations,
too. By this time warnings
are being heard on every blaring
radio in Manhattan.”

The two cars sped on. For a brief
space the car ahead took to the
sidewalk. Suddenly a human body
was tossed violently against the
side of a building, and the fleeing
car passed on. As the pursuing car
passed the spot Bentley knew by
the shape of the bundle that the
enemy had killed a woman. At that
speed he must have crushed every
bone in her body. In a matter of
seconds the information would be
telephoned to radio studios and
people would be warned to take to
open doorways when they saw cars
traveling at undue rates of speed.

“I’m a better driver than he is!”
yelled the police chauffeur, out of
the side of his mouth at Bentley.
“I haven’t killed anyone yet.”

The words had scarcely left his
mouth when a blind man, tapping
his way with a cane, came from behind
a building at an intersection
and stepped into the gutter. The
fool, couldn’t he hear the shrieking
of the siren? But perhaps he was
deaf, too.

The police chauffeur turned
sharply to the left and for a
second Bentley held his breath expecting
the careening car to turn
over. If it did it would roll over a
dozen times, and destroy anything
that happened to be in its path. But
with a superhuman manipulation of
the wheel the police chauffeur
righted the car, got it straightened
out again, and was on his way. The
old man had not been touched, but
there was no doubt that he had felt
the wind of the great car’s passing.

The fleeing car was gaining now.

It rode madly down Broadway.
The great pillared intersection
where Broadway cuts through Sixth
Avenue was dead ahead. The fleeing
car continued on, crashing
through, while cars evaded it in
every direction, and into Broadway
beyond. After it went Bentley, all
45
other matters forgotten as he prayed
to the god of speed to guide them
through.

Two cars came out of Thirty-first
Street. Their drivers saw their
danger at the same time. But they
turned different ways, and as Bentley’s
car flashed past them the two
cars seemed welded solidly together.
They were rolling across the
sidewalk toward the huge plate
glass window of a restaurant. Just
as the pursuing car lost them as
they swept past, the two cars went
through that plate glass window.
Bentley, in his mind’s eye, saw the
two dead, mutilated drivers, and
the passengers with them, he saw
the wreckage of the restaurant, the
mangled diners who sat at the
tables nearest the fatal window.

“More marks against Barter,” he
muttered to himself. “How long will
the list be before I’ll be able to
drag him down?”

On and on went the two cars.
People packed the sidewalks,
but they kept close against the
buildings. The streets were almost
deserted now, for that warning had
got ahead. Three other police cars
were careening down the street, too.
Bentley saw them with pleasure.
Other cars would be coming in to
head off the fleeing limousine. This
one puppet of Barter’s, at least,
would be pocketed before he could
find time to leap from his car and
escape.

“Barter’s sweating blood as he
saws with both hands at an imaginary
driver’s wheel,” thought
Bentley. “When will he give up––and
what will his driver do when
Barter relinquishes control?”

For the first time the grim
thought came to him. He knew that
the creature there had the brain of
an ape. What would an ape do if he
suddenly found himself at the wheel
of a car going down Broadway at
eighty miles an hour? He would
chatter, and jump up and down.
The plunging car, with accelerator
full on, would be out of control.

“God Almighty, I never thought
of that!” yelled Bentley. “As soon
as he sees he can’t save his puppet
he’ll let him get out the best way
he can, himself … and that car
will be traveling, uncontrolled, at
eighty miles an hour.”

As though his very statement had
fathered the thought, two police
cars swept into the intersection at
Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue.
The fleeing limousine was turning
right to go down Fifth Avenue.

The police cars were brought to
a halt to effectively stop the further
progress of the speeding limousine.
Three other cars plunged
in to make the box barrage of cars
effective. The fleeing car was
trapped. Barter must know that. If
he did know, it proved that he
could see everything that transpired.
The next few seconds would
show.

Bentley gasped as he put his
hand on the driver’s arm to
have him slow down to prevent a
wholesale pile-up in the busy intersection.
He gasped with horror as
he did so, for the fleeing car was
now going crazy. It zigzagged from
side to side. Now it rode the two
right wheels, now the two left.

And suddenly the driver swung
nimbly out through the left window,
his hands reaching up over
the top, and in a moment he was
on the roof of the careening car.

“I’ve seen apes swing into trees
like that,” Bentley thought.

While the car plunged on, the
creature stood up on the doomed
limousine, and in spite of the fact
that the wind of the car’s passing
must have been terrific, the ghastly
hybrid jumped up and down on the
top like a delighted child viewing
a new toy or riding a shoot-the-chutes.
46

Suddenly the creature’s right leg
went through the top’s fabric. It
struggled to regain its footing as
an ape might struggle to regain
position on a limb in the jungles.

At that moment the fleeing car
crashed mercilessly into the two
nearest police cars ahead. The men
inside had expected the driver to
slow down to avoid a collision. How
could they know what sort of
brain lurked within the driver’s
skull? They couldn’t … and three
policemen paid with their lives for
their lack of knowledge as their
bodies were hurled beneath a mass
of twisted wreckage, crushed out of
human semblance.

The hybrid atop the fatal car
was hurled through the air like
a thunderbolt. His body passed over
the railing of the subway entrance
before the Flatiron Building and
Bentley knew he had crashed to his
death on the steps.

The police car had already come
to a stop, and Bentley was running
toward the subway entrance.

The shapeless bleeding bundle on
the steps no longer even resembled
a man. Fortunately nobody had
been struck by the hurtling body;
and, miraculously enough, Barter’s
pawn was not yet quite dead.

Moans of animal pain came
through his bleeding lips. The eyes
scarcely noticed Bentley, though
there was a slight flicker of fear
in them. Then, in the instant of
death, even that slight expression
passed from them. Bentley saw the
scarline about the skull.

And now Bentley knew that Barter
was missing no slightest move,
that he saw everything….

For the ghastly hybrid on the
steps raised his right hand in meticulous
salute … and died. It
was an ironic, grotesque gesture.

Plain-clothes men gathered
around.

“Take his fingerprints,” said
Bentley quickly. “Then telegraph
the fingerprint section, U. S. Army,
at Washington, for this man’s
identity.”

An ambulance was taking aboard
the three mangled policemen as
Bentley stepped back into his car
for the ride down to Washington
Square to see what dread thing had
happened to Ellen Estabrook.

Ellen Estabrook was almost
in hysterics when Bentley
reached her. She had been immediately
picked up by plain-clothes
men and had thought herself captured
by minions of Barter. She had
been panic-stricken for a moment,
she told Bentley, and it had taken
her some little time to be persuaded
that she was in the hands
of police.

But Bentley’s heart was filled to
overflowing with gratitude that he
had been able to safeguard Ellen
against Barter. He never doubted
it had been Barter who had telephoned
her. And even now he
fancied he could hear Barter’s
chuckle of amusement. Barter was
watching, perhaps even listening.
Bentley felt that the madman was
just biding his time. Barter could
have taken Ellen in this attempt,
but hadn’t tried greatly, knowing
himself invincible, knowing that he
could take her at any moment if
it was necessary. And he might take
her even if it were not necessary,
since he had warned Bentley she
must be removed.

The police car raced back uptown
so that Bentley could inform himself
of any new developments in
the Hervey case. Ellen snuggled
against him gratefully. “You’ll have
to stick close to me,” said Bentley,
“until something happens, or until
the exigencies of service draw me
away from you. Then it will be up
47
to Tom Tyler to look after you.”

“I can look after myself,” she retorted
spiritedly. “I’m over age
and not without brains….”

“Yet you went to Washington
Square,” said Bentley gently.
“Didn’t it even seem strange to you
that I would have selected such a
place as a rendezvous?”

Ellen turned away from him
and her lips trembled. His
gentle thrust had hurt her.

“But I would have sworn it was
your voice, Lee,” she said. “And––I
still think it was!”

“I tell you I didn’t phone you
to meet me in Washington Square!”

“But you told me you had talked
with Barter for a long time on the
headquarters phone, didn’t you? Remember
that you are dealing with
the cleverest and maddest brain we
know of to-day. What if he had
merely talked with you to get a
record of your voice? Suppose a
voice were composed of certain ingredients,
certain sounds. Suppose
those ingredients could somehow be
captured on a sensitized plate of
some kind! Edison would have been
burned as a sorcerer a few centuries
before he invented the wax
record. Twenty years ago who
would have thought of talking pictures … voices
permanently recorded
on celluloid?”

“But the talkie films merely
parrot, over and over again, the
words of actual people. When I
talked with Barter this morning I
certainly said nothing about meeting
you at Washington Square.”

“But the tone, the timber, the
frequency of your voice! Lee, suppose
he had gone a step further
than the talkies and had found a
way to break the voice apart and
put it back together to suit himself…?”

“Good Lord, Ellen! It sounds
crazy … but if you would have
sworn that voice was mine, then
mine it may have been, speaking
words with my voice that I never
spoke personally. But wait until we
find out for sure. We’re just guessing.”

But the idea stuck in his mind
and he believed in it enough to tell
Tyler, upon arriving at the Hervey
residence, to warn every man named
on the list of the Mind Master to
make no appointments over the
telephone, no matter how sure they
were of the voices at the other end
of the wire.

It sounded wild, but was it?

That night Ellen and Bentley
occupied rooms which faced
each other across the hall in a midtown
hotel, and plain-clothes men
were on duty to right and left in
the hall. There were men on the
roof and in the lobby, in the garage,
everywhere skulkers might be expected
to look for coigns of vantage
from which to proceed against
Ellen Estabrook. Bentley knew
quite well that Barter would not
drop his intention against Ellen,
especially since he had failed once
already.

Tyler and Bentley sat in Bentley’s
room drinking black coffee
and discussing their plans for the
next day. The latest paper had contained
another manifesto of the
Mind Master! the second man on
his list was to be taken at ten
o’clock the next day. The man was
president of a great construction
company. His name was Saret
Balisle; he was under thirty, slim
as a professional dancer, and dark
as a gypsy.

“But what does Barter want with
all these big shots?” asked Thomas
Tyler. “Just what is the point of
his stealing their brains and putting
them into the skull-pans of apes,
if that’s what you think he has in
mind?”

“The Barter touch,” said Bentley
grimly. “At first he probably intended
48
to kill just any men and
make the transfer, and then use his
manapes to send against the men
he wished to capture, and through
whom he intended to gain control
of Manhattan. Then he decided,
since he had learned to control his
manapes, by radio I suppose, that it
would be an ironic touch to make
virtual slaves of the “key” men he
had chosen for his crusade.”

“But why the transplantation at
all, even if the man is mad? He
reasons logically. Only his premises
are unthinkable … and he builds
successful ghastly experiments on
top of them….”

“He claims he wishes to build
a race of supermen,” Bentley
answered. “His reason for the
brain transference is therefore
plain. An anthropoid ape has a body
which is several times as hardy,
durable and mighty as that of even
the strongest man, but the ape has
not the brain of a civilized man.
A specialized man, one with a
highly developed brain, generally
has a very weak body. He’s constantly
put to the necessity of
taking exercise to keep from growing
sick. Therefore the ape’s body
and the man’s brain would seem, to
Barter, an ideal combination. That
nature didn’t plan it so troubles
him not at all. He will make a fool
of nature!”

“I wonder if we’ll get him. Nobody
knows how many lives have
been lost already.”

“We’ll get him, Tyler. I’ll bet
anything you want to name that
your men have walked back and
forth across his hideout. I’ll bet
that decent, respectable people live
within mere yards of him and do
not know it. We’ll get to him the
second he makes a mistake of any
kind. Maybe he’ll make his first one
when he tries to get Saret Balisle––Good
Lord, I forgot something.
Tyler, phone again and ask Headquarters
if the coroner found anything
strange about the head of the
men I chased down Fifth Avenue.”

Tyler phoned.

“Yes,” he said, clicking up the
receiver, “he had bits of metal which
looked like aluminum in his scalp;
but the autopsy shows that it came
from outside somewhere.”

“It’s part of Barter’s radio control,”
muttered Bentley, “it must
be! It has to be … and I didn’t
think of looking for it at the time.”

Long before sunrise Bentley
and Tyler repaired to the office
of Saret Balisle, letting themselves
in with keys which had been
furnished them last night. It had
been decided that Balisle would not
try to run away from the threat of
the Mind Master, but would be in
his office as usual. If he ran, and
got out of touch with the police,
Barter would get him anyway and
nobody would be the wiser.

Balisle had grinned and shrugged
his shoulders, but the wanness in
his cheeks showed that he didn’t
take the threats lightly, considering
what it was thought had happened
to Harold Hervey.

“I wonder,” said Tyler as they
walked through the cool of the
morning to the Clinton Building on
lower Fifth Avenue, where Balisle
had his offices, “how Barter keeps
his apes with men’s brains from
trying to break away from him
when he has to divert his mental
control to other channels?”

Bentley hesitated, seeking a logical
answer. It seemed simple
enough when the answer came to
his mind.

“Suppose, Tyler,” he said, “that
you wakened from a nightmare and
looked into a mirror to discover
that you were an anthropoid ape?
That you were incapable of speaking,
of using your hands save in
the clumsiest fashion? When it
came home to you what had happened
49
to you, would you rush right
out into the street, hoping that the
people on the sidewalks would
understand that you were a man
in ape’s clothing?”

“Good Lord! I never thought of
that!”

“You would if you’d ever been
an ape. I know the feeling.”

“Then Barter’s manapes are more
surely prisoners than if they were
sentenced to serve their entire lives
in the deepest solitary cells in
Sing Sing! How horrible––but still,
they yet would have a way of
escape.”

“Yes, simply break out and start
running, knowing that the crowd
would soon take and destroy them.
Right enough––but even when one
knows oneself an ape it isn’t easy to
destroy oneself.”

They entered the offices of
Saret Balisle and looked about
them. It was just an ordinary office.
They looked in clothes closets and
in shadowy corners. They took
every possible precaution in their
survey of the situation. They looked
for hidden instruments of destruction.
They looked for hidden dictaphones.
They were extremely
thorough in their preliminary preparations
for the defense of Saret
Balisle.

At five minutes of ten o’clock
Balisle was at his desk, pale of
face, but grinning confidently.

There were men in uniform in
the hallways, on the roof, in the
windows of rooms across the avenue.
Bentley and Tyler should have
felt sure that not even a mouse
could have broken through the
cordon to reach Saret Balisle. But
Bentley was doubtful.

He went to the window nearest
Balisle and looked out. Sixteen
stories down was Fifth Avenue, patrolled
in this block by a dozen
blue-coats and as many more plain-clothes
men. Saret Balisle seemed
to be impregnable.

But at ten o’clock exactly, a
blood-curdling scream came from
the room adjoining Balisle’s, where
some insurance company had offices.
The scream was followed by
other screams––all the screams of
women….

For just a moment Bentley and
Tyler whirled to stare at the door
giving onto the hall, their hands
tightly gripping their automatics.

“God Almighty!” It came in a
choked scream from the lips of
Saret Balisle, simultaneous with
the falling of a shower of glass in
the room.

Tyler and Bentley whirled
back.

A giant anthropoid ape stood on
the window sill, and the brute’s
left hand held tightly clasped the
ankle of Balisle, holding him as
a child holds a rag doll.

The ape swung Balisle out over
the abyss.

Tyler flung up his automatic.

“Don’t!” shouted Bentley. “If you
shoot he’ll drop Balisle!”

Bentley felt sick and the bottom
seemed to drop out of his stomach
as the anthropoid, still holding
Balisle as lightly as though he
didn’t know he held extra weight
at all, dropped from sight.

Tyler and Bentley leaped to the
window, looked down. The ape had
dropped safely to the ledge of the
window just below. He held on
easily with his right hand while
Bentley and Tyler swayed dizzily.
The anthropoid still held Balisle
by the ankle.

A head looked out of the window
to the right. A frightened woman.

“God!” she choked. “That beast
came out of the clothes closet.
We’ve been wondering why we
couldn’t open it. He must have been
inside, holding it.”
50

A hundred men, all crack shots,
stood helpless on roofs, in windows
across the street, in the street
below, while the anthropoid ape
dropped slowly down the face of
the Clinton Building toward the
street.

How would Barter lead his
minion free of this tangle when, as
was inevitable, the brute reached
ground level?

Bentley and Tyler were to
learn in the next few minutes
how great was the executive ability
of Caleb Barter. He had created a
mighty puzzle, each and every bit
of which must fit together exactly.
Time was important in making the
puzzle complete––and the puzzle
changed with each passing second.
As the anthropoid went slowly
down the face of the Clinton Building,
Bentley was sure that Barter
controlled every move and saw
every slightest thing that transpired.
He knew very well that of
all the great organization which
had been set to prevent the taking
of Saret Balisle, not a man would
now shoot at the ape for fear of
jeopardizing the life of Balisle.

And yet Balisle was being
spirited away to pass through an
experience which would be far
worse than a merciful bullet
through the brain or the heart.
Bentley knew he would be justified
in the eyes of humanity if he
ordered his men to fire upon the
anthropoid, even if he were sure
that Balisle would die. But as long
as there was life there was hope,
too, and he couldn’t bring himself
to give the order.

The ape dropped down the face
of the building as easily as he
would have dropped from limb to
limb of a jungle tree. The sixteen
stories under him did not disconcert
him at all. Bentley had a suspicion
about this particular ape, but
he wouldn’t know for a time yet
whether his suspicion had a basis
in fact. He couldn’t think of a man––especially
an old man like Harold
Hervey––making that hair-raising
descent. Yet … if he were controlled,
mind and soul, by Caleb
Barter the Mind Master…?

“Tyler,” said Bentley tersely.
“The instant the ape reaches the
street I’m going to order your men
to fire. You will shout out to them
now, designating which ones shall
fire. Be sure they are crack marksmen
who will drill the ape without
hitting Balisle––and, by all means,
have them wait so that the ape’s
fall won’t send Balisle crashing to
death.”

“Maybe I’d better tell them to
rush him?”

“Maybe that’s better, but remember
they’re dealing with a giant
anthropoid, in strength at least, and
that somebody is likely to be
fatally injured. In addition the ape
may tear Balisle apart as soon as
men start to close in on him. Barter
will have thought of that, and
all he’ll have to do to make his
puppet perform is to will him to do
it. No, they’ll have to shoot––and
tell them to aim at his head and
heart.”

Tyler leaned out of the window
and shouted to the men
across the street.

“Shoot as soon as the ape reaches
the sidewalk!” he cried. “Be careful
you don’t hit Balisle.”

And from Balisle himself, muffled
and frightened, came a sudden
cry.

“Shoot now! I’d rather fall and
have it over with!”

There was a moment of silence.
Bentley almost gave the order to
fire when the ape was at the
twelfth story, but he held his
tongue by a supreme effort of will.
51

Balisle looked down. It must
have been a terrifying experience
to swing above such a horrible abyss
by one leg, and for a moment
Balisle lost his head. He screamed
and started to grapple with his
grim captor.

“Don’t, Balisle!” shouted Tyler.
“You’ll make him lose his balance.
Hang on as you are and we’ll get
him when he reaches the street.”

“What good will it do?” screamed
Balisle, his voice taking on a high
keening note as the ape dropped
again, this time from the twelfth to
the eleventh floor. “He slipped it
over a hundred men to get me this
far. He’ll find a way to beat you
when he reaches the street, too.”

Bentley had a sinking feeling that
Balisle spoke the truth; but even
so, he could not see how anybody,
even Barter, could walk
through the trap which was being
tightened around the descending
anthropoid.

It made Bentley dizzy to watch
the slow methodical descent of the
anthropoid. He could fancy himself
in Balisle’s position and it made
him sick and faint. He understood
the desperation which caused
Balisle to make yet another attempt
to battle with the ape.

Then the ape did a grim thing.

He paused on the eleventh floor,
and crouching on a window sill,
deliberately snapped Balisle’s head
against the wall of the Clinton
Building! In his time Bentley had
slain rabbits exactly like that.
Balisle hung now as limp as a rag
and blood dripped from his mouth
and nose. But Bentley knew, as his
face went white at the sound of
that sharp, thudding blow that
Balisle had not been killed by it.

Savage oaths burst from the
lips of policemen who saw the
action of the ape.

“He acts like a human being! An
ape wouldn’t have thought of that!”

The words came hysterically
from the lips of a woman who,
frightened though she was, could
not tear herself from the window
to the right of where Bentley and
Tyler leaned out to stare down.

Bentley smiled grimly. What
would she think if he told her
gravely that the creature crawling
down the face of the building was
not quite an ape?

So far the public didn’t know
what the Mind Master schemed.
He’d spoken of stealing brains, but
that had meant nothing to the general
public. Just the maunderings
of a madman, perhaps.

At the third floor the anthropoid
hesitated. He seemed to be gazing
all around, noting the preparations
which were being made to trap him
at the street level.

“An ape wouldn’t do that,” muttered
Bentley. “A man would. The
man in that manape is showing
through––but he won’t be able to
force himself free of Barter’s domination.
If he could he’d probably
throw Balisle down now to keep
him from being … well, treated as
Barter intends to treat him.”

The ape dropped to the second
floor. Silence seemed to hang over
Fifth Avenue. Ugly gun muzzles
protruded from every window across
the street. Scores of rifles were
aimed down from windows in the
Clinton Building, to drill the ape
through from above.

At that instant a limousine
whirled into Fifth Avenue, traveling
fast, and ground to a stop
under the ape.

“What’s this?” cried Bentley.

“That’s Saret Balisle’s car,” said
Tyler. “There’s nobody in it but
his chauffeur. The fool! Does he
think he can take his master away
from the ape singlehanded?”

“That looks like foolhardy loyalty,
but I’m not so sure that it’s
Balisle’s chauffeur at the wheel.
Tyler, send somebody down to
52
wherever it is that Balisle parks his
car.”

But before Tyler could move
to obey, the anthropoid ape
made his surprise move, and did
a thing which no ape would have
thought of doing. He hurled Balisle
toward the limousine. The somersaulting
body struck the roof of
the car, crashed through the fabric,
and dropped into the tonneau.

At the same instant the limousine
leaped to full speed ahead.

A shower of bullets smashed
windows and scored deeply and
menacingly the brick walls all
around the giant anthropoid which
for a second still crouched on the
second-story ledge. The ape whirled
and crashed through the window at
his back.

“Tyler, send half a dozen cars
after that limousine. They simply
have to catch it. But they mustn’t
fire for fear of killing Balisle.
Have the car followed right to Barter’s
hideout. The men in this building
will scatter at once through
the building. We must trap that
ape!”

The whole police organization
was in a turmoil.

Sirens screamed as police cars
flashed after the fleeing limousine
which carried Saret Balisle away.
Doors slammed and windows
crashed as two score policemen
scattered through the building,
armed with riot guns and pistols,
seeking the ape.

Tyler, after barking the staccato
orders which set his men in motion,
turned to Balisle’s secretary.

“Quickly, the number Balisle
calls when he wants his automobile
sent around.”

The girl gave it, and Tyler called
the number.

“Are Mr. Balisle’s car and chauffeur
there?” he asked.

He swore explosively and hung
up the receiver.

“Another killing,” he said. “Balisle’s
car is gone and the garage
people have just found his chauffeur,
almost ripped to pieces, in
another car left at the garage for
storage.

“That means this ape is armed
with metal fingernails, just like the
one that killed the insurance man in
the Flatiron Building. That means
he’ll be doubly dangerous when
caught. The murdered chauffeur
will have to wait for a few moments
while we capture the ape.”

Shouts and shots rang through
the Clinton Building. The ape
was going wild, crashing through
doors and windows as if they
weren’t there. His mad bellowing
sounded terrifying in the extreme,
so deep and rumbling that the air
seemed to tremble with its menace.

But in the end there came a
chorus of triumphant shouts which
told that the giant ape had been
surrounded.

Bentley and Tyler raced in the
direction of the sounds. From all
directions came the sounds of footfalls
as other plain-clothes men
raced to be in at the death. Bentley
held his automatic tightly gripped
in his right hand. He knew exactly
where he was going to aim if the
ape were not dead when he reached
him.

The creature had been cornered
in the areaway between two banks
of elevators and had climbed up the
cage as high as he could go. He was
just out of reach of human hands,
even had there been any men there
with the courage to try to take
him alive. A white foam dripped
from the chattering lips of the
anthropoid. His red-rimmed eyes
flashed fire. Bentley noted the little
metal ball on top of the creature’s
head.

Deliberately he stopped, raised
his automatic, and held it steady
while he pressed the trigger with
53
the extreme care which a sharp-shooter
knows to be necessary …
and a bullet ploughed through the
top of the ape’s head.

The little ball vanished, and the
ape released his grip suddenly. His
chattering died away to an uncertain
murmur, the fire went out of
his eyes, and he fell to the floor.
No bullet had yet actually struck
him, for he had whirled into the
window from the second-story ledge
simultaneously with the barking of
the policemen’s rifles and pistols.
He had escaped there––but here he
was not to escape.

Bentley and Tyler both lifted
their voices to shout warnings to
the policemen, but their voices were
drowned in the savage explosions of
a dozen weapons, in the hands of
men who probably thought the creature
was in the act of charging …
and the ape sprawled on the floor,
his legs and arms quivering.

Half a dozen men rushed forward,
weapons extended.

“Keep back!” yelled Bentley,
rushing in.

He stood over the ape, staring intently
at his glazing eyes.

“Tyler,” snapped Bentley, “have
everybody fall back beyond earshot.”

Tyler issued the orders. Bentley
shouted, “Quickly, quickly!” knowing
he had little time.

Then, with Tyler beside him, he
knelt beside the ape.

“I know you can’t talk, but you
can answer me by nodding or
shaking your head. You are Harold
Hervey, aren’t you?”

The eyes of the ape were hopeless.
Tyler gasped, staring at Bentley
as though for a moment he
thought him crazy. But in the next
instant he doubted his own sanity,
for the ape, slowly and ponderously,
nodded his head.

“I’m going to name a number of
places where I think you might
have been taken,” went on Bentley.
“In each case nod or shake your
head. Is it near Sixth Avenue?”

Slowly the great head moved,
more slowly even than before; but
it nodded.

“Where? Below Twenty-third
Street?”

Again the ponderous, agonizing
nod.

Bentley went on.

“Below Fourteenth Street?”

Again the nod, barely perceptible
this time.

“Below Christopher Street?” asked
Bentley.

This time the head shook from
side to side, ever so slightly.

“Two blocks above Christopher?”

But this question was never destined
to be answered. The giant
anthropoid in whose skull-pan was
the brain of Harold Hervey, entirely
controlled by Caleb Barter,
until Bentley had shot the little
metal ball from his head, had died.

Bentley rose and looked down at
the anthropoid for several seconds.

“Barter will hate to lose this creature,”
he said. “He probably has
just the number of apes he needs––and
Tyler, here’s a hunch: he’ll
need an ape to take the place of
this one! Get me the best surgeon
to be found in Manhattan, and get
him as fast as you can!”

“Good God!” ejaculated Tyler.
“What do you want a surgeon for?
What are you going to do?”

“Barter needs an ape to take the
place of this one. I shall be that
ape!”

The Mind Master

By Arthur J. Burks

Conclusion

“Now, Bentley,” said Barter, “I’ll explain what I intend doing.”

---

It would be difficult to comprehend
the nervous strain under
which Manhattan had been
laboring during the past thirty-six
hours. The story of the kidnaping
of Harold Hervey had not been
given to the newspapers, for an excellent
reason. If Hervey’s financial
enemies knew of his kidnaping and
death they would hammer away at
his stocks until they fell to nothing
and his family, accustomed to fabulous
wealth, would have been reduced
to beggary.

The Mind Master himself, up to a
late hour, had given no word to the
newspapers in his “manifestoes.”
The Hervey family held its breath
fearing that he would––for the newspapers
would have played the story
for all the sensationalism it would
carry. Bentley, when this matter was
called to his attention, wondered.
Barter had kept his own counsel for
a purpose, but what was it? There
was no way of asking him.

The story of the mad race down
Broadway in pursuit of the limousine
which had returned the lifeless body
of Hervey to his residence had been a
sensational one, and the tabloids had
given it their best treatment. The
chauffeur who had crawled out like
a monkey atop his careening car, to
lose his life when catapulted into the
entrance to the Twenty-third Street
subway station: the three policemen
whose lives had been lost because the
chauffeur hadn’t stopped as they had
expected him to, the kidnaping of
Saret Balisle by a great ape hadn’t
yet broken as a story, nor the murder
of Balisle’s chauffeur.

But everybody knew something of
the story of the naked man of the
day before. Many were the speculations
as to what had ripped and torn
his flesh from his body, along with
his clothes. What manner of claws
had it been which had sliced him in
scores of places as though with many
razors?

Men and women walked the streets
apprehensively, and many of them
turned at intervals to look behind
them. No telling what they would do
when the story of Balisle’s kidnaping
by an anthropoid ape and a queer
241
mute chauffeur got abroad. To top it
all the police pursuers lost the
Balisle limousine and Saret Balisle
had taken his place among the lost.

Bentley knew as soon as the
disgruntled and rather frightened
police officers returned to the
Clinton Building with the news that
Balisle had got away from them in
the stolen Balisle car, that already
the ill-fated young man was probably
under the anesthetic which Caleb
Barter used on his victims.

“Tyler, do you know a surgeon
who can do any surgical job short of
brain transplantation?”

“Yeah. There’s a chap has offices in
the Fifth Avenue Building. He’s
probably the very best in the racket.
Maybe it’s because of his name. It’s
Tyler.”

“Some relative of yours?”

“Not much. He’s just my dad––and
one of the world’s finest and cleverest.”

“Will he listen to reason? Can he
perform delicate operations?”

“He’s my dad, Bentley, and he’d
do almost anything I asked him so
long as it was honest … and he
could switch the noses of a mosquito
and a humming bird so skillfully
that the humming bird would go
looking for a sleeping cop and the
mosquito would start building a nest
in a tree.”

“Get him here. No––has he an operating
room where all sound can be
shut out? I’ve got a hunch I’d like
somehow to try and drop a screen
around us as we work. Maybe your
dad would know what to do. You see,
I’m positive that Barter sees everything
we do and if he sees me turning
into an ape he would just chuckle
and pass up the trap.”

“He’s got a lead armored room
where he keeps a bit of radium.”

“That’s it. Talk to him. No, not on
the phone. You’ll have to figure out
some way to do it so that you can be
sure Barter isn’t listening.”

“I’ll manage. I’ll send him a note.”

“Your messenger will be killed on
the way to him.”

“Then I’ll go myself.”

“And Barter will watch everybody
that goes into his office or comes out,
and mark down each person as possibly
being connected with the
police. However, you figure it out.”

When Tyler had gone and the
dead “ape” had been stretched
out in one corner of Balisle’s office,
and covered with something to cloak
its hideousness, Bentley telephoned
Ellen Estabrook.

“Have I been making any appointments
with you this morning?” he
asked her cheerily.

“Please don’t jest when things are
so terrible. Have you seen the latest
papers?”

“No. What do they say?”

“There’s a lot of the story I’m
thinking about. You’d better read it
right away. It’s an extra, anyhow.
The newsies ought to be calling it
around you somewhere––and where
are you, anyway?”

Bentley informed her, and told
her, too, that he would be with her
as soon as he possibly could. Taking
the usual masculine advantage he decided
to tell her now what he
wouldn’t have had the heart to tell
her to her face, that he was planning
a rather desperate stunt to reach Barter,
and would consequently be away
from her for an indefinite period.

“But I’ll see you first?” she said
after a long hesitation. Bentley could
hear her voice tremble, though he
knew she was fighting desperately to
keep him from noting the catch in
her voice.

“Yes, nothing will happen until––well,
not until I’ve seen you again.”

Just as Bentley hung up the receiver
the extra was being cried.
Some two hours had now elapsed
since Balisle had been taken away,
and now the newsboys were shouting
the headlines.
242

“Extra! Extra! All about the big
Wall Street crash! Hervey fortune
entirely swept away!”

Bentley sent an office boy out
for the paper and spread it out
on the desk to digest it as quickly as
possible.

“One million shares of Hervey Incorporated,”
read the black words in
a box on the first page––a story in
mourning, “were dumped on the market
at eleven o’clock this morning.
Four men seem to have been behind
the queer coup. One of them had a
power of attorney from Harold Hervey
himself, and he had the shares to
sell. So many shares were dumped
that the bottom fell out of the stock.
Others holding the Hervey shares,
fearful that they would get nothing
at all, also began to dump, and every
share thus dumped was bought up
quickly by three other men about
whom nobody knew anything, except
that they paid with cash. The
strangest thing about it all was that
the three men who bought Hervey
Incorporated, seemed to be dumb-mutes,
for they didn’t say anything.
They acted through a broker, and
indicated their purchases with their
fingers in the conventional manner
and tendered cards as identification!
They were Harry Stanley, Clarence
Morton, and Willard Cleve––addresses
unknown, history unknown.

“Nothing, in fact, is known about
any of the three or the little white-haired,
apple-cheeked man who sold
so heavily in Hervey Incorporated.
That the three mutes did not buy the
shares sold by the little white-haired
man would seem to indicate that all
four of them worked together … but
it is only a supposition as they were
not seen together and apparently did
not know one another. But the three
mutes constantly ate walnuts. All
four men, who among them knocked
the bottom out of Wall Street, and
wiped away the Hervey fortune,
slipped out in the excitement inspired
by their rapid buying and selling,
and seemed to vanish into thin
air.”

Bentley didn’t know much about
the stock market, but it seemed to
him that Barter had managed a theft
of mighty proportions. With a power
of attorney, which he had wrung
from Hervey after his capture, he
had managed to possess himself of
Hervey’s shares. In themselves they
were worth millions. Even at a fraction
of their price Barter would realize
heavily on them. Selling quickly
he would force the price far down.
Then his puppets––and Bentley had
no doubt that Stanley, Morton and
Cleve were his puppets––bought all
other shares offered by panicky investors
in Hervey Incorporated at a
tiny fraction of their value. Far less,
naturally, than Barter had made by
selling his loot.

The purchased shares Barter could
hold for an increase. Hervey Incorporated
was good and its price would
go up again, and Barter would sell
and gain millions.

That is how Bentley saw it, and
his lips drew into a firmer,
straighter line as, half an hour later,
he explained it all to Ellen.

“It’s desperate, dear,” he whispered
in her ear. “Manhattan’s financial
structure has been shaken to its
foundations. But that isn’t all by any
means. Barter has performed his horrible
operation on two of New York’s
most brilliant men. It was a Barter
gesture to send ‘Harold Hervey’ to
capture Balisle, and the horror of it
staggered me.”

“Lee,” said Ellen, “understand
this: that if I have no word from you
within seventy-two, no, forty-eight
hours after you get started on this
scheme you have in mind, I’m going
to get through to Barter somehow. If
I put an ad in the paper and tell him
where I’m to be found he’ll surely
make another attempt to take me in.
If he’s captured you, or uncovered
243
the trap you’re laying, then I’ll at
least be with you. If he kills you he
kills me. If we can’t live together we
can die together.”

Bentley kissed her fervently, trying
not to think what it would mean
to him now if she were in the hands
of Caleb Barter. Secretly he intended
having Tyler keep her so closely
guarded that she couldn’t possibly do
anything as foolish as she had suggested.

The late evening papers carried
another manifesto of the Mind Master
to the effect that the remaining
eighteen men named on the original
list were to be taken before noon of
the next day.

Oddly enough eighteen kidnapings
were reported from various places in
Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

“So,” thought Bentley, “he’s afraid
to send out normal apes to capture
his eighteen key men. Maybe his control
over them is not perfect. That’s
it. I suppose––he needs human brains
before he can exercise perfect control.
I suppose Stanley, Morton and
Cleve did the kidnapings.”

Late that night Bentley kissed
Ellen good-by, told her to keep
up her courage, and repaired to the
rendezvous arranged for by Thomas
Tyler and his surgeon father. In the
operating room was the cold body of
the anthropoid that had successfully
abducted Saret Balisle.

“Young man,” said Dr. Tyler, “just
what is it you want me to do? I’m not
asking for your reasons. Tommy tells
me you know what you’re doing. I
must say though, I don’t believe that
story of brain transplantation. No
doctor would believe it for a minute.”

Bentley looked at the dead ape.

“You’ll take Tommy’s word for it
that that ape kidnaped Saret Balisle
to-day and took him down the face of
a building, sixteen stories to the
ground?”

“Of course. Tommy wouldn’t
string his father.”

“Well, part of your surgical work
to-night will make it necessary for
you to look at that creature’s brain.
You’ll recognize a human brain in
that ape’s skull. After you’ve made
that discovery, here’s what I want
you to do: I’ll strip to the skin; then
I want you to place the skin of that
ape on me, so that from top to toes I
am an ape. You’ll have to do the job
so perfectly that I’ll be an ape––as
soon as, under your watchful eye
and Tom’s, I have mastered all the
ape mannerisms the three of us can
remember. Can you do it?”

Tyler senior shrugged.

He motioned his son and Bentley
to help him lift the huge ape body to
the operating table, and under the
glaring light above he set to work
with instruments which gleamed like
molten silver, then became a sullen
red….

“Listen, boys,” said Dr. Tyler,
after he had removed the skin
of the ape, and for a few brief seconds
had examined the brain, to
shake his head in astonishment. “I’ve
an idea that may help you. It would
be impossible for you, Bentley, to
play the ape well enough to fool this
mad Mind Master. But a hitherto unknown
type of ape has just been discovered
in Colombia. I read the story
of it in a scientific journal to-day.
The ape is more manlike than any
other known to science. You shall be
that ape, brought in during the night
by a famous returned explorer. There
will be great interest in you now that
the story of Saret Balisle’s kidnaping
has broken. With the attention of
New York upon you, certainly your
presence will interest Caleb Barter.”

Tyler senior rummaged in a pile of
papers on his desk and brought forth
the story he referred to, which also
carried a picture of the Colombian
ape.
244

“It would be impossible for me to
change your shape and add to your
size sufficiently to make you a real
giant anthropoid. You’d have to be
twice as deep through the chest;
you’d have to have bowed legs as big
as small tree trunks; you’d have to
have a sloping forehead. No, it’s impossible,
for I’d have to equip you by
padding to an impossible degree, and
a scientist would only need to touch
you to know you as an imitation ape.
But if you are made up as the Colombian
ape––”

Bentley quickly interrupted.

“The idea is excellent. I was dubious
before about my chances of success,
but as an ape of a new species I
have a far better chance, and my inevitable
human behavior won’t be so
noticeable.”

Dr. Tyler measured Bentley as
carefully as a tailor, proud of
his skill, measures a particular,
wealthy customer.

“You will almost suffocate,” he
said, keeping up a running monologue
as his inspired hands worked with
forceps and scalpels, “but I can make
plenty of air vents in the ape skin
which will allow the pores of your
skin to breathe. If they are hidden
under the hair they will scarcely be
noticed, unless of course Barter sees
what we are doing here and suspects
from the beginning.”

“I can stand the discomfort for as
long as may prove necessary,” said
Bentley grimly, conquering a feeling
of terror as he already saw himself
in the role of an ape, a role previously
played in which he had suffered
the torments of the damned, “and
anything is preferable to the wholesale
carnage which Barter is doing.
In seventy-two hours he has wrecked
the morale of Manhattan. I shall try
to get it back. Tyler, will you make
every effort to guard the other eighteen
men named on the Mind Master’s
original list?”

“Of course,” but Tyler said it
dubiously. Barter had proved it almost
impossible to outwit him. In
their hearts both Bentley and Tyler
knew that Barter would make good
his boast to take the eighteen men he
had named. It seemed a grim price
Manhattan must pay to be finally rid
of Barter’s satanic machinations.

When Bentley, stripped naked,
quietly announced his readiness to
take his place on the operating table,
Tyler senior took a deep breath, like
a diver preparing to plunge into icy
water, and looked questioningly at
Bentley.

“I’m ready, sir,” said Bentley
quietly. “Let’s get on with the task.”

Dr. Tyler set to work with amazing,
uncanny speed. He had never
been more skilful in closing sutures
of the flesh in any of his myriad of
operations. He was a man inspired as
he labored on the task of changing
Lee Bentley from a normal human
being to a Colombian ape.

While the surgeon worked his
son telephoned to the Colombian
explorer whose return from
Latin-America had been mentioned
in the day’s news. He couldn’t explain
anything over the telephone, he
said, but would Doctor Jackson come
at once to the private offices of James
Tyler, surgeon?

Doctor Jackson grumbled, but the
urgency in the voice of Tyler convinced
him that the thing was important.
He promised to be on hand
within an hour. It then lacked a few
minutes of three o’clock in the morning.

Next at Bentley’s suggestion––and
he talked quickly and eagerly to keep
his mind off the ordeal he knew he
was facing––Tyler got the curator of
the Bronx Zoo out of bed and asked
him to wait upon Doctor Tyler immediately.

At four o’clock Doctor Jackson
and the curator entered the room
where Surgeon Tyler had performed
a miracle.
245

Doctor Jackson stepped back in
amazement when he noted the manlike
ape which leaned with arms
folded against one wall of the operating
room. His eyes were big with
amazement.

He studied Bentley for several
minutes, while no one spoke a word.

It was the curator who broke the
strained silence.

“So this is your Colombian ape,”
he said. “I read the news story, but I
understood that the ape you had
found had been killed in the attempt
to capture it.”

Surgeon Tyler spoke easily.

“That news story,” he said, “was
to prevent Doctor Jackson from
being annoyed by visitors eager to
see his find. As a matter of sober fact
Doctor Jackson captured the Colombian
ape alive and is now about to
turn it over to the zoo. Understand
me, Doctor Jackson?”

Still the explorer said nothing.
For a moment longer he stared
at Bentley; then he walked over to
him.

“The hair is different,” he said as
though talking to himself. “The Colombian
ape’s hair is of a slightly
finer texture. But that could be explained
away as I allowed only the
merest bit of information to the reporters
to-day. I can add a supplementary
story in the next newspaper
which will explain that the coarse
fur of the Colombian ape is the only
thing about it which makes it resemble
a giant anthropoid.”

Jackson had walked to Bentley
without fear and ran his fingers
through the hair as he spoke.

“I know it’s a man, and some surgeon
has performed a miracle,” he
said. “Just what is it you wish me to
do?”

“You’ve read the stories relating to
the Mind Master, Doctor?” asked
Bentley suddenly. How strangely his
voice came from the body of an ape!

“I’ve read some of them,” answered
Jackson. “Is this a scheme
whereby you hope to trap the Mind
Master?”

“Yes.”

“Then depend upon me for any
assistance I can render. As a scientist
I understand fully the power for evil
of a mad genius of our class. This
Mind Master should be ruthlessly destroyed.”

“Thank you,” said Bentley, stepping
forward. “You know, perhaps,
how the Colombian ape behaves,
enough that you can coach me how
to walk, how to gesture?”

“Certainly. It will take perhaps an
hour to prepare you to fill your role
creditably.”

Jackson’s face flushed with enthusiasm.
He was launched on a
task which fired his interest. He was
an authority on apes and anything
relating to them inspired him.

“Seat yourself on a chair,” said
Jackson. “The Colombian ape sits
upright like a man.”

Bentley seated himself as Jackson
had bidden him.

“Now spread your legs apart awkwardly,
with the knees straight. The
Colombian ape doesn’t exactly sit on
a chair or a rock or a tree, he leans
against it in a half sitting position.”

Bentley quickly assumed the awkward
strained position suggested by
Jackson.

Jackson stepped up to him and
placed Bentley’s arms, unbent, so
that his fists hung down outside his
wide-apart knees, and cupped his
fingers so that they seemed perpetually
in the act of closing on something.

“You can’t possibly take the proper
position with your toes,” went on
Jackson, “for it’s beyond a man’s
ability to curve his toes as he does
his hands. The Colombian ape’s toes
are prehensile.”

“Can’t you say in your next news
story, Doctor,” suggested Bentley,
“that the Colombian ape, the nearest
246
animal relative of man, seems to be
in an advanced stage of evolution.
Can you not say that the Colombian
ape is by way of losing the use of his
toes?”

“Many scientists know that to be
untrue,” said Jackson, “but perhaps
we can help you through your
scheme before they begin denying
details in the newspapers. Too bad
we can’t send secret suggestions to
all anthropologists that they remain
discreetly silent until the mantle of
horror is lifted from Manhattan. But of
course we can’t, since we’d betray
ourselves. Our only hope, then, is to
work at top speed.”

“I am as eager as anyone to finish
a particularly horrible task,” said
Bentley.

Under Jackson’s instructions
Bentley walked up and down
the room. His shaggy shadow on the
several walls as he turned, marched
and countermarched at Jackson’s
commands, filled Bentley with self-loathing.
He found himself repulsive.
His body perspired freely impregnating
the ape skin with a harsh odor
that was biting and terrible in his
nostrils. It was sickening. He tried
to close his mind to the repulsiveness
of what he was doing.

He walked with a swaying, side-to-side
gait, something like a sailor’s
rolling walk, while his arms swung
free at his sides as though they merely
hung from his body. The Colombian
ape walked like that, Jackson
said.

“How about the intelligence of the
Colombian ape?” asked Bentley.

“We shot the only specimen so far
seen by man before we could discover
any facts bearing on his intelligence,”
said Jackson.

“Then you can safely say that he
possesses intelligence far beyond
that of known apes,” said Bentley
quickly, “somewhere, let us say, between
that of the lowest order of
mankind and civilized man.”

Jackson nodded his held dubiously.

“It seems,” he said unsmilingly,
“that I arrived in the United States
at exactly the right time! You would
have failed signally to convince the
Mind Master in the role of an African
great ape.”

Bentley managed a short laugh.
How horribly it came from the lips
of an ape!

“I’m not overly superstitious,” he
said, “but I regard this as a good
omen. I feel we’re sure to succeed in
what we are planning. I think Barter
will surely wish to experiment with
me if he thinks I am in reality a great
ape from Colombia. He’ll welcome
the chance to examine any ape which
so nearly resembles man. I’m an important
link in his plan to create a
race of supermen. At least that’s how
we must hope that Barter will estimate
the situation when my story is
told in to-morrow’s papers.”

An hour before dawn Doctor
Jackson, weary from his arduous
instruction of the equally exhausted
Bentley, pronounced Lee a
satisfactory “ape.”

“Now here’s where you come in,”
said Bentley tiredly to the curator.
“I’m to be taken now to a cage in the
Bronx. During the rest of to-day you
will quietly instruct your attendants
that their guard to-night at the
zoo must not be too strict. I must be
in position to be stolen by the minions
of the Mind Master.”

Now the full significance of the
desperate expedition upon which
Bentley was embarking came home
to them all. Their faces were white.
Bentley shuddered under his ape
robe. His mind went catapulting back
into the past to the time when he had
been Manape. This was much like it,
save that all of him was now encased
in the accouterments of an ape and
he did not suffer the mental hazards
which had almost driven him insane
when he had been Manape, with the
247
perpetual necessity of keeping close
watch over his own human body
which had held the brain of an ape.

He stiffened. “I’m ready,” he said.

Immediately upon arrival the
curator had been asked to have a
closed car, quickly walled with a
mixture of lead and zinc––which
Bentley and Tyler hoped would
thwart the spying of Caleb Barter––brought
to Tyler’s door.

Three or four zoo attendants entered
with a cage when Bentley
pronounced himself ready. They
stared agape at Bentley and their
faces went white when he strode
toward them upright, like a man.

Bentley would have spoken to reassure
them, but Tyler signaled him
to keep silent. The zoo attendants
might talk and entirely spoil their
scheme.

Two hours later, long before the
first crowds began to arrive at
the Bronx Zoo, Lee Bentley was
driven from his small cage in the car,
into a huge cage at the zoo. From a
dark corner, in which he crouched
as though overcome with fear, he
gazed affrightedly out across what
he could see of Bronx Park.

“When I used to feed the animals
here,” he said to himself, “I never
expected that the time would come
when I myself would be caged––and
one of them.”

The curator had ridden out with
the cage. But, save for making sure
of the fastening on the big cage, he
paid no heed to Bentley. He treated
him, of necessity, as though he were
actually the Colombian ape he pretended
to be. From now on until he
succeeded or failed, Lee Bentley was
an ape from the jungles of Latin-America.

Just before the crowds could reasonably
be expected to begin arriving,
curious to see this strange thing
Doctor Jackson had brought from
Colombia, an attendant arrived with
a freshly painted sign.

“Colombian Great Ape,” it read,
“Presented to Bronx Zoo by Doctor
Claude Jackson.”

It seemed to close entirely behind
Lee Bentley the vast door which separated
the apes from civilization.
Miserably he crouched in his corner
and awaited the coming of the
curious.

A numbing fear began to grow
upon Lee Bentley as the ordeal
of waiting began.

Naturally he could not eat the food
given usually to apes and of course
he could not be seen calmly eating
bacon and eggs with knife and fork.
And because he couldn’t eat he was
assailed by a dreadful hunger, which,
however, he managed to fight down
partially. He smiled inwardly as he
looked ahead and understood that
despite the warnings not to feed the
animals, children of all ages, from
four years to sixty, would surreptitiously
toss peanuts and walnuts into
his cage.

He felt a little hopeful about it.
They would at least allay his hunger.

But no, he could not do that,
either. Nobody had thought to ask
Doctor Jackson how a Colombian
ape manipulated his food. Even a
certain clumsiness in that respect
might start questions which would
cause the public to doubt the authenticity
of Jackson’s find.

Bentley decided to sulk. The ape
he was supposed to be could reasonably
be expected to resent captivity
and would probably go on a hunger
strike. He would do likewise and be
in character if he starved.

He crouched in a far corner as the
first comers began to arrive. They
were fathers and mothers with their
children, and the older people carried,
usually, newspapers under their
arms. Bentley wished with all his
soul that he could see one of the
248
papers close enough to read the headlines.

However, when the crowd was not
too thick, Bentley waddled nearer to
the wire mesh which separated him
from the curious crowd and through
lids which were half closed as
though he slept, he managed to
glimpse a few excerpts from the
paper:

“Police department redoubling
their precautions to prevent Mind
Master from capturing eighteen intended
victims.”

“Hideout of Mind Master still undiscovered.
When will the public be
delivered from the stupidity of the
police?”

“Doctor Jackson returns from Colombia,
bringing a living specimen of
an ape hitherto unknown to civilized
man, but more like him than any ape
hitherto known. Visitors may see the
creature to-day in the Bronx Zoo.”

That was the story which had
brought out the visitors who
were forming, moment by moment, a
bigger crowd before Bentley’s cage.
Bentley managed a glimpse of a
woman’s wrist-watch after what
seemed an age of trying to do so
without his intention becoming plain
to the too bright children who
crowded as close to the cage as attendants
would permit. It was ten
o’clock. It would be at least twelve
more hours before Bentley could
reasonably expect any action on the
part of Barter. Barter would now be
concentrating on his plans to kidnap
the eighteen men he had first named.

Bentley tried to make the time pass
faster by imagining what Barter
would be doing. By now his labors
must be titanic. He must have separate
controls for each of his minions,
and there were many times
when he must control several at one
time, thus making his task akin to
that of a man trying to look two
ways at once, while he rolled a cigarette
with one hand and shined his
shoes with the other. Certainly the
concentration required was enormous.

Yet, no matter how complicated
became his puzzle, Barter was its
master because he was its creator, and
Bentley hadn’t the slightest doubt
that, until someone actually penetrated
Barter’s stronghold, he would
not be stopped.

Bentley knew that at the very first
opportunity he would destroy Caleb
Barter as he would have destroyed a
mad dog or stamped to death a deadly
snake. The life of one man would
rest lightly upon his conscience, if
that man were Caleb Barter.

Perhaps, though, he could learn
many of Barter’s secrets before he
destroyed him. Properly used they
might prove boons to mankind. It
was only the use Barter was putting
them to that threatened to fill the
world with horror and bloodshed.

“Mama, why don’t he eat?”

“Hush,” said a woman, as
though afraid the Colombian ape
would hear and become angry;
“don’t annoy the creature. He looks
fully capable of coming right out at
us.”

But the child who had been admonished
began to juggle a bag of peanuts
which he managed to throw into
the cage. Bentley stooped forward,
sniffing suspiciously at the sack,
while a wave of hunger made him
feel weak and giddy for a moment.
He just realized that he hadn’t eaten
for almost twenty-four hours. His
time had been so filled with action
and excitement that there hadn’t
been opportunity.

“I hope,” he said to himself, in an
effort to drive away thoughts of
food, “that Tyler will take every precaution
to prevent Ellen from doing
something foolish.”

Knowing that he could no longer
communicate with her, could no
longer be absolutely sure that she
was still out of Barter’s clutches, he
249
suffered agonies of fear for her
safety.

“If Barter places a hand on her I’ll
tear his skin from his carcass, bit by
bit!” he said, unconsciously clenching
his fists.

“Oh, look, mama, he’s shuttin’ his
fists as though he wanted to fight
somebody! I’ll bet he could whip
Dempsey, couldn’t he, mama?”

“Perhaps he could, son. Hush now,
and watch him. There’s a good boy!”

It brought Bentley sharply back to
his surroundings and proved to him
that he must not allow his mind to go
wool-gathering if he did not wish to
give himself away. What if, in an access
of anger, he happened to speak
his thoughts aloud? He could imagine
the amazement of the crowd.

The day wore on.

At noon a strange horror
seemed to travel over the Bronx Zoo,
and within a short time every last
visitor had precipitately departed.
Bentley could now safely approach
the wire mesh and look out and
around over a wider radius.

Right under the wire mesh was a
newspaper someone had thrown
away.

By pressing tightly against the
mesh Bentley could see the headlines.

“Mind Master successful on all
counts!”

So that’s what had turned the
crowd to stony silence with very
fear? They had all fled, wondering
who would be next. Bentley had
heard the shouting of the extra on
the distant streets, but it had been so
far away he hadn’t heard the words.
One solitary newspaper had appeared
among the Bronx crowd and the
story it carried under startling
scareheads had passed from brain to
brain as though by magic … and the
crowd had fled.

Bentley stared down at the newspaper
in horror, a horror that was in
no way mitigated by his having fully
expected Barter to succeed. Mutually,
with no words having been spoken
to express the thought, Tyler and
Bentley had conceded to Barter the
eighteen victims he had named.

Nothing could be done to stop him.
His brains were greater than the
combined wisdom of the city of New
York.

What else was in that paper?

Bentley stared at it for an hour,
and finally a vagrant breeze, for
which he had hoped and prayed during
that hour, whipped across the
park and stirred the paper. He read
more headlines.

“Lee Bentley disappears! Believed
kidnaped or slain by Mind Master!”

How had that story got out? Surely
Tyler would have kept that from
the press. Following on the heels of
the Colombian ape story, Barter
would almost surely put two and two
together to arrive at the proper total.

Bentley read on:

“Ellen Estabrook, fiancée of
Lee Bentley, disappears mysteriously
from her hotel room. Guarded by
a score of police, not one has yet
been found who knows anything of
her disappearance or saw her leave.
Nobody seems to have seen anyone
go to her room or leave it. Our police
department must have fallen on evil
days indeed when twenty crack
plain-clothes men cannot keep one
woman under surveillance.”

Something was radically wrong,
but Bentley could not piece the
whole story together, simply because
he had been out of touch for so many
hours that the thread of it had
slipped from his fingers.

Suddenly Bentley noticed that a
solitary man was watching him curiously,
a dawning amazement in his
face. Bentley roused himself and
saw that he was standing against the
mesh, fingers hooked into it above
his head, his weight on his left leg,
his right foot crossed over his left,
his head thoughtfully bowed.
250

To the amazed man yonder the
“Colombian ape” must have looked
remarkably like a condemned man
clutching the bars of his cell, awaiting
the coming of the executioner.

Bentley recovered himself and sat
down on the floor of the cage in the
loose easy manner an ape would have
used.

He forced himself to sit thus until
evening, when the last curious one
vanished from the park and darkness
began to fall.

Then excitement at the approach
of a hoped for denouement began to
rise in his heart like a rushing tide.

Would Barter fall for the ruse? Or
did he already know that the Colombian
ape was Lee Bentley?

In either case, Bentley thought,
the Mind Master would take action
during the first hours of darkness.
Bentley was gambling desperately
on what he knew to be characteristic
of Caleb Barter.

Bentley knew that if Ellen
were in the hands of Caleb Barter
the mad professor would probably
do her no harm, but use her as a
club against Bentley, and through
Bentley, the Manhattan police. He
did not believe that the Mind Master
would consider performing the brain
operation on Ellen. Caleb Barter’s
scheme seemed to consider only men,
and men of substance.

No, Ellen would not be harmed, he
felt, but that made him feel no easier,
knowing that she might be in the
hands of Barter.

How could he know of Naka
Machi, and the refined vengeance of
the Mind Master?

The last visitors had left the park
and comparative quiet settled over
the zoo. Save for the sounds of animals
feeding and the occasional cursing
voices of attendants there were
no sounds. Not since Bentley had
taken his place in the cage had anyone
spoken to him. He had never felt
so lonely and uncertain in his life.

Now there was utter darkness and
silence.

And then before his cage appeared
a tiny spot of light. If Barter’s minions
expected to deal with a powerful
ape they would come prepared to
subdue him by whatever means
seemed necessary. Bentley had no
wish to be injured, and yet he must
make some show of resistance in order
to allay any possible suspicion
that he wished to be stolen.

There was a faint gnawing sound
at the wire outside the cage. Mice
might have made that sound, sharpening
their teeth on the wire. Bentley
decided to feign sleep. Had Barter
come personally to supervise his
capture? That didn’t seem reasonable
as Barter must realize that all
his effectiveness depended upon his
ability to retain control of whatever
organization he might have built up––and
his central control must be his
hideout.

Then he would be sending some of
his puppets to get Bentley.

Would they be apes with man’s
brains? Impossible. Apes could not
travel from place to place without
attracting attention, especially if
they traveled unguarded and went
casually to a given destination as
men would go. So, if his puppets
were not men in the normal meaning,
then they were “apemen.”

The wire came softly down.
Bentley hoped that no attendant
might come blundering around
now to spoil everything. His heart
pounded with excitement.

At last he was going to see Caleb
Barter again at close quarters.

“I shall destroy him,” he told himself.

The shadowy outlines of two men
came through the severed wires.
Bentley still pretended to be asleep.
He wondered if Barter’s televisory
251
equipment included any arrangements
permitting him to see in the
dark, and knew instantly that it did.
How else could these two puppets
have come so unerringly to the
proper cage in Bronx Park?

No, Bentley did not dare allow
himself to be taken easily in the hope
that his actions would pass unnoticed.

But he waited until the ropes began
to fall about him, testing the
strength of his adversaries by mental
measurement. By their uncertain,
hesitating actions he knew that he
dealt only with the forms of men––forms
which were ruled by brains
which had not in themselves intelligence
enough to perform the acts
they were now performing. Ape
brains in the skull-pans of men. The
brains in themselves were only important
because they were living matter
which was being used as a sensory
sounding board by which Caleb Barter,
the Mind Master, transmitted his
commands to the arms and legs and
bodies of his puppets.

Bentley sprang into action. He
growled and snarled at the two men
who were trying to take him. Only
two men? Surely Barter would have
sent more than two men to take a
great ape! He knows I’m not a true
ape, thought Bentley. He’s giving me
a challenge. He knows I wish to get
to his hideout and he is making sure
that I get there.

But Bentley was only guessing.
Calmness descended upon him as he
realized that he was soon to face a
crucial test.

Just now, however, he struck out
at the two men who were striving
to bind him. They were husky chaps,
and one of them packed the wallop
of a real fighter. Neither man said a
word to him, and when his own hands
clawed at them––how would he dare
strike out with his fists?––the men
made queer animal sounds in their
throats. Bentley could well remember
how helpless, hopeless and lost
he had felt when his brain had been
in the skull-pan of Manape.

The brain of an ape could not be a
terribly intelligent instrument in the
first place. What thoughts, if apes
had thoughts at all, coursed through
an ape brain which found itself inside
a human skull?

The answer to that was simple:
only such thoughts as Barter originated
and transmitted through the
mental sounding board. After all, the
material of the human brain and the
ape brain were perhaps very much
alike, and Barter was working on a
sound scientific principle in making
a sounding board of an ape’s brain.

Bentley shuddered through the fur
that covered him. Knowing the sort
of creatures with which he had to
deal––men in all things save their intelligence––made
him tremble with
nausea. Such grim, ghastly hybrids.
But he stopped shuddering when he
recalled that he still dealt with men
after all––at least with one man,
Caleb Barter. When he thought of
these two “apemen” as separate entities
of a human being of many personalities––Caleb
Barter––he was
able to plan some method by which
to deal with them.

So now he fought, seemingly with
the utmost savagery, to keep them
from binding him with ropes. Even
as he fought, however, he fancied he
could hear the grim chuckling of
Caleb Barter. What did Barter know?

Bentley knew that eventually he
would discover the truth.

In struggling against the two
“men” his hands encountered the
knobs on their heads––the tiny metal
balls protruding from the top of the
skull at the point where, in babies,
the head remains soft during babyhood.
He could have broken connection
with Barter for these two by
jerking the controls free. And then
what? He would never get through
to Barter and would release in Bronx
252
Park two men whose strange type of
madness, when they were discovered,
would startle the countryside. Two
men with the savagery of anthropoid
apes! He shuddered as he carefully
refrained from disturbing those balls.

At last Bentley was quite securely
bound, only his lower limbs remaining
free so that he could walk,
though the length of his steps was
strictly limited. His hands were entirely
and securely bound, and the
significance of this fact did not
escape him. Barter knew that he did
not need his hands to aid him in
walking! Of course the newspaper
story released by Doctor Jackson had
reported the Colombian ape as being
able to walk exactly like a man.

But that didn’t prevent Bentley
from nursing the suspicion that Barter
already knew. Even if he did, it
could in no wise alter the determination
of Bentley. His task was to
penetrate the hideout of Barter––and
he was on the way there now.

With little attempt at concealment
the two men led Bentley
to a long black closed car outside the
park. They met no one. The two men
avoided discovery with uncanny ease.
Bentley thrilled with excitement. He
felt he knew approximately where
Barter’s hideout was.

It was useless, to speculate, however;
time would show it to him.

Bentley was tossed into the tonneau
of the car. His two captors,
moving with the precision of men in
a trance, took their places in the
front seat. Bentley struggled for a
time against his bonds. He wanted to
sit up and peer out, to see what way
they took so that he would know
where he was when he reached Barter’s
hideout. But of course, even if
he shook his bonds free he did not
dare rise to a sitting position, for to
control the intricate handling of his
two puppets, Barter’s attention must
have been pretty carefully fixed upon
this car.

So Bentley contented himself with
waiting.

Lying on his back on the floor of
the car he tried to see what he could
through the car windows. He knew
when he was carried under an elevated
system by the crashing roar of
trains over his head. He knew he was
being carried downtown, but he
wasn’t sure that this was the Sixth
Avenue elevated.

How could he find out the road
they were traveling without sitting
up and looking at street signs?

He felt he didn’t dare do that.
He’d be as careful as possible
on the off-chance that Barter really
believed him a Colombian ape, when
the benefit of surprise would be with
Bentley.

The car progressed downtown at a
normal speed. It stopped for red
lights and obeyed all other traffic
regulations. Barter was taking no
chance on losing more of his puppets.

Bentley suddenly gasped with horror
as he remembered something.
Eighteen important men of Manhattan
had been kidnaped that day by
Caleb Barter. Would Bentley be
forced to watch the mad professor
perform the eighteen inevitable operations?

Perspiration poured from every
pore as he visualized the horror he
might be compelled to witness when
he was finally taken into Barter’s
hideout. The ape skin clung to him
as though it were actually his own.
There were even moments when
Bentley feared that it might grow to
him.

But he put the feeling of horror
from him with the thought that if
Ellen were in Barter’s power, Barter
might even be forcing her to anesthetize
for him while he performed his
grisly slaughter.

Bentley’s courage returned and
now it seemed to him that the journey
would never end, so eager was
253
he to discover whether or not Ellen
had eluded the hands of the Mind
Master.

Caleb Barter smiled warmly
at the woman who had come to
him almost as though in answer to a
prayer. He admired her flashing eyes
and the lifted chin which spoke of
pride and courage.

“I had thought of improving the
feminine strain of the race also,” he
told her, but almost as though he
spoke to himself, “but I realized that
it mattered little the stature of the
mothers of the race as long as the
fathers were made virile. But if all
women were like yourself, Miss
Estabrook, the race would not require
the improvement it is now my
duty to bestow upon it.”

Ellen stared directly into the eyes
of the white-haired old man. As she
looked at him she found it hard to
believe that one so gentle from outward
appearances had such a vast,
grim power for evil. In repose his
face was kindly, though there was
something out of character in the
fact that it was so apple rosy. And
his lips were far too red.

“Where,” she said quietly, fearlessly,
“is Lee Bentley?”

Barter raised his eyebrows as he
stared back at her. So far she had not
looked around at this great room into
which he had had her conducted; she
had seemed interested only in her
mission, whatever that might be.

“You mean that delightfully rude
young man?” he asked sardonically.

“You know well enough whom I
mean! Where is he?”

“Then he is not to be found in his
usual haunts?”

“He has disappeared.”

“And you come out seeking Professor
Barter because Bentley his
disappeared! It is almost as though
you had previously arranged with
him to come seeking me if, at a certain
time he failed to return from
some mysterious rendezvous….”

Barter’s face was now a mask
of uncanny shrewdness. In a
few words he had pierced through
Ellen’s secret of why she had deliberately
placed herself in the way of
Barter’s minions in order to be taken,
and now he had used the words of her
own questions to form a weapon
against her. Ellen gasped in terror.

Had she made a hideous mistake?
Had she, by failing to wait for word
from Bentley, ruined all his well laid
plans?

Barter now stood before her, his
eyes almost shooting fire.

“Tell me quickly,” he began, and
for a second she thought he would
put his hands on her, “what sort of
plan is he making to betray me into
the hands of my enemies, who are the
enemies of super-civilization because
they are my enemies?”

“I know of nothing,” said Ellen
stoutly, hoping that she had not,
after all, betrayed the fact that she
knew Bentley had started to work
out an unusual scheme. The details
she didn’t know, for Lee hadn’t told
her. “But I do know, what all the
world knows, that he was helping the
police against you. Naturally, then,
when he vanished I thought of you.
Besides you had already warned him
that you would remove him in your
own good time. He caused you the
loss of two of your puppets and I
thought, naturally enough, that you
would try to remove him to some
place where he could not operate so
successfully against you.”

“That’s all?” queried Barter eagerly.
“You don’t know of some special
scheme that has been worked out to
trap me?”

“I know of no scheme. Now that I
am in your hands, Professor, what do
you intend doing with me?”

Barter stared at Ellen for several
minutes.
254

“I haven’t captured Bentley …
yet,” he said at last, slowly, “but I
shall––no doubt about that. It is inevitable––as
inevitable as Caleb Barter.
I can use him in my labors for
humanity. How I treat him after he
is taken depends somewhat on you.
You may therefore consider yourself
a sort of hostage. I have much medical
work to perform. Have you ever
been a nurse?”

Ellen recoiled in horror.
“You don’t mean you would
ask me to help you perform those
horrible––” She stopped abruptly before
her sudden tendency to hysterics
should make her say things to anger
Barter too far.

“So,” he said quickly, “you think
my brain operations are horrible, eh?
Well, you shall see that they are not
horrible; that Professor Barter, the
greatest scientist the world has ever
produced, is really preparing to prevent
civilization from utterly decaying.”

“And afterward?” asked Ellen. “I
know that eventually you will be
taken and that the people will destroy
you, tear you limb from limb.
But you will never believe that. Tell
me, then, what you plan to do with
me.”

For a brief time he considered the
matter.

“I am an old man,” he said at last,
musingly, “but I am young in spirit
and in body. It would be amusing to
have a mate––but no, no, that would
not do! The destiny of Caleb Barter
is not linked with a woman. You
would simply hold me back. However,
I have often been interested in
miscegenation and its effect on the
race if properly guided. My assistant
Naka Machi, is one of the finest
specimens of his race. Perhaps I
shall arrange for you to mate with
him, under conditions which I shall
dictate, in order to experiment with
your offspring….”

Ellen swayed, her face going dead
white. She hadn’t yet met Naka
Machi, but his name told her enough.
The thought of a Japanese, however,
was far less repellent than the cold,
calm way in which Barter spoke of
using the offspring of such a union.

“I’ll kill myself at the first opportunity,”
said Ellen suddenly.

Barter put his forefinger under
Ellen’s chin in a paternal
fashion. His eyes looked deeply into
hers. She thought of what his fingers
had done in the past … those long
slender fingers. His touch made her
shudder.

But his eyes held her. They seemed
like deep wells. Then they were like
black coals advancing upon her out
of the darkness, growing bigger and
bigger as they came, with little
flames in their centers also growing
as they approached.

“You will submit your will to
mine,” said the soft voice of Caleb
Barter.

His right hand was making swift
snakelike movements back of Ellen’s
head. His voice droned on, but
already it seemed to Ellen to come
from a vast distance.

“Your mind will be concerned only
with the welfare of Caleb Barter,”
droned on the voice. “You will think
only of Caleb Barter; your greatest
desire will be to serve him. There is
nothing you would not do for him.
Let your objective mind sleep until
Caleb Barter wakens it; give your
subjective mind into my keeping.”

Beads of perspiration broke out on
the cheeks of Caleb Barter as he
worked quickly to place the girl entirely
under his skilled hypnosis. At
last she stood like a statue, her wide-open
eyes staring into space, straight
ahead. She did not move. She
scarcely seemed to breathe.

“You will know that my home is
your home, Ellen,” said Barter softly.
“You will feel that you are welcome
here and that you love this place. It
needs the attention of a loving woman;
255
you will give it that attention.
But you will be subservient always
to my will. You will enter upon
your duties.”

Ellen Estabrook sighed softly as
though with relief. Her hands went
up to remove her hat, which she
placed on a chair in a corner of the
hellish laboratory. She removed her
light coat and arranged her hair with
skilled fingers. But even as she moved
around the room of the long table her
eyes stared vacantly into space. She
was as much a puppet of Caleb Barter
as were Stanley, Morton and
Cleve. But, mercifully, she did not
know it.

Barter studied her for several
moments; his eyes squinted. He
was making sure that she was not
duping him with pretense. Satisfied
at last be turned his eyes away from
her. He stepped to the porcelain slab
set in the bronze wall of his laboratory
and looked at the push-buttons
marked “C-3” and “E-5”. The red
lights were on, indicating that the
two puppets controlled by these two
keys were returning toward their
master. The lights had been green
when Barter had begun his conversation
with Ellen Estabrook, indicating
that the two puppets were still
going away. With a tremendous
effort of will he had given them sufficient
mental stimulus to keep them
traveling without his direct will for
the few minutes he would require for
Ellen.

Now, however, he quickly donned
the metal cap and the little ball, and
inserted into the orifice in his cap the
swinging key which connected by
chain with the key which fitted into
the slot under the button marked
“C-3”.

He had returned to his puppets
just in time. “C-3” was Cleve, who
was driving the car sent out to bring
in the Colombian ape. As Barter got
in touch with the car it narrowly
averted a crash with a police car …
and the perspiration broke forth
afresh on the body of Barter as he
resumed control of his puppets.

The second creature, in the front
seat of the car, was Morton, and it
didn’t matter particularly about him
as he was not driving. But Morton
was now becoming all ape. Barter did
not wish to use any more of his mental
energy than was necessary. He
contented himself by sending his
will into Cleve, who began at once to
drive like a master. Whenever Morton,
beside him, showed an inclination
to jump out of the car or otherwise
interfere with Cleve in his
work, Barter had but to express the
thought, and Cleve either pulled him
back to his place beside him, or gave
him a walnut from his pocket.

Barter could as easily have
had them change places, since
he assumed control of either at will,
or could have controlled a score
simultaneously. But that would have
required additional thought stimulus,
and he wished to conserve his
mental energies for the work which
yet faced him.

Once he switched his attention
from the heliotube which controlled
Cleve––and through which, concurrently,
he saw everything that
transpired near Cleve, because his
televisory apparatus and his radio
control were co-workers on almost
identical vibratory waves––to the
area of Manhattan immediately surrounding
his own neighborhood.

“Hmm,” he said to himself, “the
police are getting too close. As soon
as I have completed my labors to-night
I shall destroy some of them
as a warning to others to keep their
distance.”

Morton and Cleve drew up to the
curb while Barter watched carefully
on all sides, through the heliotube,
to make sure that their arrival was
unmarked by the police.

They climbed out quickly and
raced across the sidewalk to the
256
green gate which gave on a gloomy
old court, inside which they were
swallowed by the shadows from all
eyes save those of Caleb Barter.

Five minutes after the strange trio
had entered the “place,” the great
chrome-steel door of Barter’s laboratory
swung open.

“Morton and Cleve, my master,”
announced Naka Machi, bowing low
and sucking in his breath with a hissing
sound.

Barter’s own puppets entered with
the ape between them.

Barter walked fearlessly forward.
He had slipped the key from the orifice
atop his head. Morton and Cleve
now stood listlessly, dumbly, looking
with dead eyes at their master.
Barter tossed them several walnuts
each.

Then he turned his attention to the
ape, rubbing his hands together with
pleasure.

But the ape was behaving strangely.
His eyes were staring past Barter.
His hands sought to lift as though he
would hold them out to someone; but
the ropes prevented him. Barter
turned to look. Ellen Estabrook
stood beyond him, white of face, motionless
as a statue. The ape was
straining toward her.

Caleb Barter chuckled with understanding.

“Good evening, Lee,” he said gently.
“I’ve been expecting you!”

Bentley had been bound carelessly.
Who could expect ape
brains to devise clever bonds, even
when controlled by Caleb Barter?
And now it seemed that Caleb Barter
had known all along; he said he had
been expecting Bentley. No, that
wasn’t it. Barter had seen him yearning
toward Ellen Estabrook, statuesque
and wide-eyed on the other
side of the room. If it hadn’t been
for the presence of Ellen he might
have been accepted as an ape. Now it
made little difference.

But his bonds were not tightly
drawn. He found himself fighting
them fiercely, trying to get his hands
on Caleb Barter. He could see the
scrawny Adam’s apple of the mad
scientist, and his fingers itched to
press themselves into the flesh.

Caleb Barter stood his ground
calmly. “Naka Machi,” he said softly.

Suddenly Bentley felt a dull, paralyzing
blow on his skull. He knew it
had been intended to render him utterly
unconscious. But Naka Machi
hadn’t taken into consideration that
his skull was protected by the hide
of an ape. He remembered, as he
stumbled and fell forward, that the
Japanese were wizards with their
hands. That’s why Naka Machi could
knock him down, render him helpless,
yet leave his brain as clearly active
as before. Perhaps clearer, even,
for now his brain did not act on his
legs and arms, which were helpless.

Bentley felt as he imagined a patient
on the operating table might
feel when not given sufficient anesthetic,
yet given enough to make him
incapable of speech or movement.
Such a patient would hear the soft
discussions of the surgeons, see them
prepare their instruments, yet be unable
to tell them that he wasn’t entirely
unconscious.

Barter stooped over Bentley
and rolled back the lids of his
eyes.

“Good. Naka Machi!” he said. “He
won’t be in any position to do us an
injury. Remain powerless, Lee Bentley,
but retain your knowledge.”

Barter, then, was familiar with the
strange hypnosis which the blow of
Naka Machi’s hand had put upon
Bentley. Barter had taken advantage
of it to add to it a sort of mental
paralysis, so that the condition would
continue.

“You are in my hands, Lee,” he
said in paternal fashion, “but you
257
can do me no harm. Since you were
associated with me in the first of my
great experiments you know much
about me. I have never ceased to hope
that you would one day understand
and appreciate what I am doing for
humanity and be brought to aid me.
Perhaps if I force you to watch my
efforts you will understand them and
sympathize with my ambitions.”

Bentley could say nothing. Barter’s
eyes seemed to leap at him
growing large and glaring, just as
the eyes of caricatured animals leap
at the camera in trick motion pictures.
Physically he was powerless.
Only his brain was active.

“Remove this covering from him,
Naka Machi,” went on Barter. “Remove
his bonds. You are about his
size. Garb him in some of your own
clothing.”

Bentley had the odd feeling that
he didn’t need to turn his head to see
things around him. His head felt
huge, almost to bursting, and his
eyes felt huge, too, so that he could
see in all directions, as though his
eyeballs had been fish-eye lenses.

He studied Naka Machi. A nasty
opponent in a fight, he decided.
He hadn’t figured on any opponent
other than Barter. This man was
almost as great. The skill of his
fingers as he quickly removed the ape
skin from Bentley, using scalpels
taken from Barter’s table, amazed
Bentley with their miraculous dexterity.
He cleaned Bentley’s body
with some solution in a sponge and
clothed him in some of his own clothing
which fitted fairly well.

Then he lifted Bentley from the
floor and stood him against the wall.

Bentley was unbound. He tried to
lift his hands but they refused to
move. His feet, too, seemed anchored
to the floor. His knees were stiff and
straight. He might as well have been
a wooden image for all his ability to
get about.

Now Barter spoke.

“Come here, Lee,” he said.

Bentley was amazed at the kindliness
in Barter’s attitude. He dealt
with Bentley as though he had been
his son. He felt that Barter genuinely
liked him. It was rather amazing.
Barter liked him but would remove
him without compunction if he
thought it necessary.

Bentley found he could move his
feet, or rather they seemed to move
of their own volition, as he crossed
the room to stand before Barter.

“I’m rather proud of what I have
been able to do, Lee,” went on Barter,
“and I am now entirely safe from
the police. I’ve issued another manifesto
telling the public that for each
attempt made against me, one of the
eighteen men captured by me to-day
will die. Manhattan is the abode
of terror. Here, see for yourself.”

He extended to Bentley what
seemed to be a pair of binoculars, but
with the ear-hooks common to ordinary
spectacles. He set them over
Bentley’s eyes and set them in place.

“Now you can survey New York
as you wish.”

Bentley looked for a moment
or two. Sixth Avenue was a
deserted highway, on which red and
green lights blinked off and on in the
usual routine, signaling to drivers
who were non-existent. There were
vistas of deserted streets and avenues.
There were some few living
things––policemen in uniform, standing
in pairs and larger groups, all
concentrated in an area covering no
more than twenty acres, which twenty
acres included the hideout of
Caleb Barter. Bentley knew that the
hideout was under Millegan Place.
He had recognized it coming in. A
secret panel in a brick wall had
opened to show a door where none
was apparent. Then a circular stairway
leading down into darkness to
the room which Barter had gouged
out of the earth and turned into a
laboratory of hell.
258

“See the police?” asked Barter.
“They know now where I am, but
they are helpless because of my
hostages. I shall now begin the operations
I believe to be necessary.
Then I shall issue another manifesto,
telling the public that I am safeguarded
by great apes whose ability
will prove the correctness of my
theory about the possibility of creating
a race of supermen. My manifesto
shall say that my apes must not
be slain. It shall say that for every
ape slain by the police one of my
eighteen hostages will die.”

Bentley would have gasped with
horror, but he could not. Now he saw
Thomas Tyler, his face a white mask
of despair, in the midst of his helpless
men.

“I’ll give you a hand, somehow,
Tommy,” Bentley whispered deep
down inside him.

“Now you shall see what I do,
Lee,” said Caleb Barter. “Naka
Machi, bring the ape skin you took
from my friend. Bentley, you will
follow us.”

Barter removed the strange
glasses from Bentley’s eyes,
blotting out the deserted streets and
avenues of Manhattan. Naka Machi
followed behind Bentley, carrying
the ape skin in which Bentley had
penetrated the stronghold of Caleb
Barter.

The chrome-steel door swung
silently back and the three entered
another room filled with blaring
light. Without being able to look
back Bentley knew that Ellen, white
of face and staring, followed at their
heels.

There was a long white operating
table in this room, and a smaller
chrome-steel door set some four feet
above the floor in one wall.

“Naka Machi, the incineration
tube,” said Barter brusquely.

Naka Machi stepped to the operating
table and dug into one of the
drawers. He brought out a white
tube, closed at one end, about an inch
in diameter, eight inches in length,
and snowy white.

“Concentrated fire, Bentley,” said
Barter. “Watch!”

Barter had Naka Machi cast the
ape skin through the small steel door,
beyond which Bentley could see a
boxlike space large enough to accommodate
two or three grown men,
lying side by side at full length. It
seemed to be indirectly lighted. The
ape skin dropped on the floor of this
compartment. Barter took the “incineration
tube” and directed it on
the skin. Bentley heard the clicking
of a button.

The ape skin charred quickly,
folded up, drew into itself, disappeared––and
a fine gray ash settled
on the floor of the compartment, like
rain from the roof of the ghastly little
space.

“Now you understand that I have
solved the problem of disposing of
the cumbersome useless bodies of my
hostages, Lee,” said Baxter, rubbing
his hands together as though he
washed them.

Bentley’s heart leaped as Naka
Machi placed the incineration tube
on the operating table. It was close
enough that Bentley could have
reached it, had he not been utterly
powerless to move.

“Naka Machi,” said Barter. “Bring
me ape D-4 and Frank Keller, the
diplomat. Ellen, clear the operating
table. Quickly, now! Bentley, stand
against the wall and do not move––but
miss nothing I do.”

Then began a grim series of activities
which combined to form
a nightmare Bentley was never to
forget, even as he prayed within him
that no slightest memory of it would
remain in the brain of Ellen Estabrook.

Naka Machi went back to the room
259
which Bentley had first entered and
returned almost at once with a tall
thin man, immaculately garbed in
gray, wearing a spade beard. His
eyes were flashing fires of anger and
of pride.

He stared at Barter.

“What is all this quackery?” he
demanded. “Who is responsible for
this unspeakable rigmarole?”

“Your words are harsh, Mr. Keller,”
said Barter suavely, “and you
shall learn in good time what I intend.
Had you followed my manifestoes
in the news columns you
would have known what I intend. I
shall create a race of super––”

“You will at once release myself
and the others with me,” interrupted
Keller.

But at that moment Naka Machi
returned, leading a great ape which
seemed as docile as though it had
been drugged. Naka Machi raised his
right hand quickly, so quickly Bentley
could scarce follow the movement,
and with the edge of his palm
struck the tall gray man in back of
the head. Keller’s knees buckled. As
he started to fall Naka Machi stepped
close to him, gathered him in his
arms and bore him to the table.

At Barter’s swift instructions
Ellen Estabrook, all unknowing,
placed a cone indicated by Barter
over the mouth and nose of Keller.
Naka Machi struck the ape as he had
struck the man, but he waited until
he had persuaded the brute to take
his place on the table near Keller’s
head.

The ape sprawled. Naka Machi
quickly twisted both Keller
and the ape around so that their
heads were toward each other, their
feet pointing in opposite directions.

“Is that close enough my master?”
came the soft voice of Naka Machi.

“Quite,” said Barter, whose face
was now a mask of concentration.
“Cleve and Stanley and Morton?”

“They have been locked in their
cages, my master,” said Naka Machi.
“Are you sure this man who came in
the guise of an ape is safe?”

“I shall make sure. But do you remain
close where you can render
him harmless in case I have misjudged
him.”

Naka Machi turned baleful eyes on
Bentley. The latter could see the
hatred in them and for a moment was
at a loss to understand it.

“I shall destroy him before he can
put his hands upon you, my master,”
said Naka Machi.

“I do not wish him destroyed, Naka
Machi,” replied Barter. “That is
enough of the anesthetic, Miss Estabrook.
Naka Machi, my instruments,
quickly.”

Before he proceeded with his
labors Barter stood in front of Bentley
and stared at him for a moment.
Bentley felt the strength flow out of
him under the gaze of this man––a
gaze he could not avoid. Barter
smiled slightly.

“You will eventually join me of
your own free will, Lee,” he said
softly.

“I would rather die a thousand
deaths!” screamed Bentley, but the
sound of his scream echoed and reechoed
through his soul without
coming out so that Barter could hear
it.

Barter’s confidence in his ability
to convert Bentley was assuredly
a mark of his twisted mind,
for he must surely have realized that
Bentley would be the most injured
by his schemes. But he seemed to associate
him with the days of Manape,
when Barter had proved to himself,
to Bentley and Ellen Estabrook, that
the operation he now planned in
wholesale proportions was possible.
Bentley could understand why Barter
regarded him as a friend and colleague,
and his animosity temporary––because
as a subject of his first
great experiment Bentley was a symbol
of Barter’s success.
260

Strange how easy it was to find
logic in the reasoning of madmen,
and to understand that logic!

Barter sprang back to his task.

“Naka Machi,” he said, “take heed
that you serve me well. Do you like
this woman?”

“Yes, my master.”

“If you continue in your loyalty to
me, I shall give her to you.”

Bentley’s mind recoiled with horror.
The shock of this cold statement
was like another blow on the head.
He wanted to leap forward and set
strangling fingers about the neck of
Naka Machi. Ordinarily Naka Machi
could handle him with ease, but now
that Bentley had heard the plan of
Barter, he could have handled the
Japanese with superhuman strength.
But he could not move. He strained
against the bodily lethargy which
held him prisoner. If only he could
move forward and grasp the incineration
tube, he would turn it on Naka
Machi and Barter….

But he could not move, could not
fight off the lethargy which was like
invincible prison walls around him.

He could move the tips of his
fingers, he discovered … but no more
than that. The shock of Barter’s calm
statement had cast off that much of
his semi-hypnotic lethargy. A minute
before he hadn’t been able even to
move his fingers.

Give him time, he told himself,
while inwardly he bled as he
struggled desperately to throw off
the grim hypnosis, and he would yet
manage to save the lives of at least
some of the eighteen, see that Ellen
won free, and destroy this hell-hole
under Millegan Place.

Now incredibly slender instruments
were busy near the heads of
the two on the operating table––the
ape and Keller, the doomed man. As
the knives and scalpels leaped to
their work with startling dexterity
and amazing speed, Bentley strained
again against his horrid invisible
prison. If only he could save this
man Keller from this horror … but
it was useless.

The fingers of Barter worked
swiftly over the skull of the ape,
first. Naka Machi stood on one side
of the long table, Ellen on the other,
near Barter. Bentley studied her face
as the skull of the ape fell open under
the hands of Barter, and he knew
she was unaware of what she was doing.
Bentley had expected a crimson
horror, but nothing of the kind developed.
Could Barter read his
thoughts?

“I am an adept at bloodless surgery,
Bentley,” he said, while his
fingers never ceased their swift
manipulations.

Now Naka Machi held the skull-pan
of the ape, from which he had
removed the reddish substance which
was the ape’s brain. This Naka
Machi had tossed into the aperture
where the ape skin had been destroyed.

The empty skull-pan of the ape
awaited the brain of Keller.

Bentley could feel the sweat burst
forth on him in every pore as he tried
to throw off his awful inertia, to go
to the aid of Keller. If Barter should
see the perspiration on his cheeks….

Bentley thought of Samson in the
midst of his enemies, blind and
beaten, of how he had prayed to be
given strength to pull down the pillars
of the temple….

“Oh God,” said Bentley to himself,
“only this once give me strength to
throw off these chains. Grant that I
do something to save the man from
this horror.”

But he could still move only the
tips of his fingers when Barter
had finally closed the sutures in the
skull-pan of the ape, renewing again
the ape’s skull, with the brain of
Keller inside. Keller was finished. He
had not moved on the table. Even his
chest stood still, stark and lifeless.
Barter had not troubled to restore
261
Keller’s skull-pan. What was the
need?

Naka Machi gathered up the carcass
of Keller and bore it swiftly to
the boxlike hole in the wall of the
ghastly room….

He thrust it in. He stepped back
and caught up the incineration tube
of concentrated fire … and Bentley
saw the body of the murdered man
shrivel up so quickly it seemed as
though it had dissolved before his
eyes. Down from the ceiling of the
hell-hole dropped the fine gray ash,
all that remained––save the imprisoned
brain––of Frank Keller, the
diplomat.

Now Bentley was cognizant of
something else. With Barter’s concentrated
work on Keller, something
of the power went out of him. Ever
so slightly Bentley could feel that
Barter was lacking in strength. Some
of his will, some of the essential
essence of his brain, of his soul, had
been expended in the operation––and
by so much was Bentley enabled to
move. For now he could move two
full fingers on each hand. But how
carefully he kept watch to see that
neither Naka Machi nor Barter
noticed that he was bursting from his
invisible prison.

If he could get that incineration
tube. He’d do the necessary things
first … then direct the ray of it
against the softer portions of the
hideout of Barter. The flame would
eat through. Somewhere it would
finally reach wood; that was inflammable.

There would be smoke, and fire …
and in the end people would come.
Tyler would be watching for a sign,
anyway. Barter had said that the
police knew approximately where he,
Barter, was located.

“Now, Bentley,” said Barter,
“I’ll explain what I intend
doing while I rest a moment before
the next ordeal. The whole world is
against me now because it regards
my experiments as horrible, but if I
prove to the world that I am right,
and that the men of my creation are
supermen, in the end the world will
be on my side. I can force it to obey
me, in time, but I prefer the world to
serve me willingly, because it realizes
that what I do for civilization
should really be done.”

Bentley said nothing, because he
could not speak.

“I’ll send Keller to his office under
my instructions,” said Barter. “Of
course I’ll issue a manifesto, first, so
that the city will know that it is not
a wild ape that has escaped. When
the new Keller, with the strong brain
of Keller and the mighty body of an
ape, appears at his office and proves
to his people that he has been vastly
improved by my experiment….”

Bentley tried to shut his mind to
the horrible picture Barter’s words
drew before his eyes. Barter broke
off short, while Bentley’s mind
seemed to rock with the shock of
Barter’s last statement. He saw a picture
… a great office filled with
many desks occupied by white-faced
men and women … an ornate desk
where a “manape” sat…. It was
ghastly beyond comprehension. It
must never come to pass.

Barter spoke again to Naka Machi.

“Bring me David Fator and ape
S-19.”

“Yes, my master,” replied Naka
Machi.

Again Bentley went through
the horror from beginning to
end. He could now move his toes. If
only he could fall forward, grasp
that incineration tube, turn it on
Barter! With Barter unable to control
him he would regain his senses
in time, he hoped, to stave off the certain
charge of Naka Machi, whose
hatred for himself he now understood
too well.

He hoped, if he were able to accomplish
what he planned, that horror
upon awakening would cause Ellen
262
to faint. While she was out he could
destroy the horror with the cleansing
flame … and tell her she hadn’t
seen it, after all.

Bentley could feel the strength
pour back into him. Barter was becoming
moment by moment more intent
on his labors. He was becoming
careless with Bentley, not because he
underestimated him but because he
was intensely absorbed in his work.

By the time two more men had
gone bodily into the incinerator and
mentally into a pair of apes, the first
ape, carelessly dumped on the floor,
came out from under the effects of
the drug.

“Stand over there in the corner,
Keller,” Barter said to the hybrid
carelessly, “and remember that no
matter how you may wish to escape
you can only do so if I will. Remain
quiet there and consider whether you
will oppose me or obey me. Oppose
me and your only escape is self-destruction.
Obey me and possess the
world!”

Bentley could imagine the horror
and despair of “Keller,” for he himself
had known that horror and despair.

Now he could swing his wrists
slightly. Naka Machi turned once
with a sudden movement and almost
caught him at it, and perspiration
broke out on Bentley’s face again.
Thank God, Ellen realized none of
what she was experiencing.

Two other men gave their lives
at Barter’s hands … yet Bentley
had only regained sufficient possession
of himself to fall forward
on his face if he tried to walk, but
even that was something.

Five men were gone now. Could
he possibly regain muscular control
in time to save the lives of some of
the eighteen? As he watched the five
go into the furnace, one by one, he
began to despair of saving any of the
eighteen, but with each operation
Barter lost mental strength. If he
lost in arithmetical progression as he
had during the last five, Bentley estimated
that he, Bentley, would be
able to move his arms enough to
grasp the incineration tube by the
time Barter had finished his eighth
transplantation.

So, the horror growing until
nausea ate at Bentley’s stomach like
voracious maggots, he watched Barter
destroy three more men and create
godless monsters in their places.
As each manape regained consciousness
Barter told him what he had
told Keller––and Naka Machi took
them out, one by one, and placed
them in their allotted cages.

Naka Machi placed the eighth man
in the furnace, returned the incineration
tube to the table.

“Now, oh God the Father!”
moaned Bentley.

He leaned forward, striving with
all his will to force his hands to go
truly to their target as he fell. He
had little or no control of his legs or
knees. But let him once hold that
tube in his hands….

He fell soundlessly, his hands
clutching for the tube. His fingers
touched it as he crashed to the floor,
and it fell near him. His fingers
fumbled for the tube and now
gripped it tightly.

From under the table, writhing
and twisting, striving to break his
mental bondage, Bentley saw the legs
of Caleb Barter. He snapped the button
on the tube and turned its open
end toward those legs.

“I must not look into his eyes as
he falls,” thought Bentley, “or all is
lost.”

A terrible scream rang
through the operating room.
Barter was falling, crumpling as he
fell, and as his body slid downward
past the table edge, Bentley held the
end of the tube toward it. As the
bodies of the eight had shriveled, so
shriveled the body of Caleb Barter.

Ellen Estabrook screamed horribly,
263
and sprawled on the floor within
a foot or two of Bentley. Nature
had mercifully sent her into momentary
oblivion when the will of
Barter, holding her in thrall, had
snapped to show her the horror of
what she did.

Naka Machi was screaming. Bentley
was Bentley again, crawling
forth from under the table. Naka
Machi met him in a rush and dissolved
before the deadly ray as
though he had never existed. Its effect
must have been a silent explosion,
for a fine gray ash came down
from the ceiling as the residue which
falls when a soaring rocket has exploded
and expended its power. The
gray ash was Naka Machi, forever
rendered harmless to Ellen.

Bentley walked over and stood
looking at the manapes in their
cages. What could be done with
them? There was no hope, no possible
way by which they could resume
their normal lives, for of their human
bodies there remained but heaps of
fine powdery ashes.

Suddenly the manape Keller swept
his great hairy arm out between the
bars and snatched the tube from
Bentley’s hand. With a cry of mortal
anguish Bentley recoiled from the
cage. God! Now all was lost if the
manape clicked on the deadly ray
and swept it over the room.

Before he could formulate a plan
of action, the manape pressed the
fatal button. With a cry Bentley
threw himself across the room to
where Ellen lay unconscious, his
only thought to somehow protect
her from the tube.

But the manape, Keller, swung
the ray upon the other apes
with the human minds, and they dissolved
into ashy nothingness with
bewildering rapidity. The keen mind
of Keller was doing what he knew
must be done for the good of everyone
concerned.

Numbed with horror, Bentley saw
the ray directed on Morton and
Stanley. They fell silently and without
protest….

Keller clicked off the button and
looked over at Bentley. He alone remained
of Barter’s frightful experiment.
He alone remained and it
seemed that he was trying to tell
Bentley something … asking him
to now take the tube and turn it full
on the body which housed his human
brain.

While Bentley hesitated, the manape
bent down and placed the tube
on the floor of the cage, the muzzle
pointing inward. With a clumsy motion
of a long hairy arm he reached
out and snicked on the button, then
placed himself within its deadly
range. Keller vanished and the ray
bit into the wall back of the cage;
began to eat through.

Bentley leaped to his feet and tore
across the floor. He plunged his
trembling hand through the bars of
the cage, switched off the button and
lifted the tube.

There were the remaining normal
apes. They could have been saved for
transportation to the zoo, but horror
was on Bentley and he used the tube
again, and yet again….

And there were the keys. He pulled
them from their slots in the porcelain
slab, in case there should be other
“Stanley-Morton-Cleves” abroad of
whom he knew nothing….

He turned the tube against the red
lights and the green lights.

Then he turned the tube upward
and held it steadily. He watched the
charred hole grow bigger and deeper
in the high ceiling….

When at last he heard the approaching
clang of the fire engine
bells and the screaming triumph of
police sirens, he carefully snicked off
the button of the tube and returned
to lift the form of Ellen in arms that
were strong to hold her.