The Heckler

Teddy Carella sat on a bench in the corridor and watched the rain pattern oozing along the floor. She did not want the shifting, magnified globules of water to reach her husband’s room. In her fantasy, the projected image of the darting raindrops was the image of death itself, stealthily crawling across the floor, stopping at the very edge of the window’s shadow, just short of the door to Steve’s room. She could visualize the drops spreading farther and farther across the corridor, devouring the floor, battering at the door, knocking it down, and then sliding across the room to envelop the bed, to engulf her husband in gelatinlike death, to smother him in shadow.

She shuddered the thought aside.

THERE WAS A TINY BIRDagainst a white sky. The bird hung motionless. There was no wind, no sound, only the bird hanging against a white sky, emptiness.

And suddenly there was the rushing sound of a great wind gathering somewhere far in the distance, far across the sky, across the huge, deserted, barren plain, gathering in volume, and suddenly the dust swarmed across the barren plain, dust lifting into the sky, and the noise of the wind grew and grew and the bird hanging motionless was swept farther upward and began to drop like a stone, falling, falling, as the wind darkened the sky, rushing, the wind heaving into the sky, overwhelming the sky until it turned to gray and then seemed to invert itself, involuting, turning to a deep black while the roar of the wind carried the bird down, down, descending yellow beak, black devouring eyes.

He stood alone on the plain, his hair whipped by the wind, his clothing flapping wildly about his body, and he raised his fists impotently to the angry descending bird, and he screamed into the wind, screamed into the wind, and his words came back into his face and he felt the beak of the bird knifing into his shoulder with fire, felt the talons ripping, tearing, felt flame lashing his body, and still he screamed into the towering rush of the black wind against his frail body, his impotent fists, screaming, screaming.

“What’s he saying?” Lieutenant Byrnes asked.

“I don’t know,” Hernandez answered.

“Listen. He’s trying to say something.”

“Ubba,” Carella said. He twisted his head on the pillow. “Ubba,” he mumbled.

“It’s nothing,” Hernandez said. “He’s delirious.”

“Ubba,” Carella said. “Ubba cruxtion.”

“He’s trying to say something,” Byrnes insisted.

“Ubba crusha,” Carella said.

And then he screamed wordlessly.

THE TWO MEN,Chuck and Pop, had started work at twelve noon. They had synchronized their watches when leaving the store, and had made plans to meet at the ferry slip at four-oh-five. A revised estimate of the time it would take to accomplish their jobs had caused them to realize they could never catch the two-fifteen boat. So, the four-oh-five it was. And, if either one of them did not appear at that time, the other was to proceed to Majesta without him.

Their jobs, actually, were not too difficult—but they were time-consuming. Each of them carried a large suitcase, and each of the suitcases carried a total of twelve bombs. Six of the bombs were explosive; six were incendiary. Pop had made all of the bombs, and he was rather proud of his handiwork. It had been a long time since he’d practiced his craft, and he was pleased to note that he hadn’t lost his touch. His bombs were really quite simple and could be expected to wreak quite a bit of havoc. Naturally, neither he nor Chuck wanted to be anywhere around when the bombs went off, and so each of the bombs carried a time fuse. The explosive bombs made use of simple alarm clocks and batteries and a system of wiring set to detonate several sticks of dynamite. The incendiary bombs were slightly more complicated and for those Pop had to rig a chemical time fuse.

The deaf man had specified that he wanted the explosions and the fires to start sometime between 4 and 4:30P.M . He wanted both explosionsand fires to be violent, and he wanted Pop to make sure the fires would not be extinguished before 5:45P.M . Pop had set each of the exploding machines for 4:15. The incendiary bombs were another thing again; a chemical time fuse could not be set with the same accuracy as an alarm clock unless a great deal of experimentation were done beforehand.

Pop had done a great deal of experimentation.

He knew that concentrated sulfuric acid when dropped into a mixture of potassium chlorate and powdered sugar would immediately start a raging fire. For the purposes of his time fuse, he needed something which would keep the sulfuric acid away from the mixture until such time as the fire was desired. This was no small task. He began experimenting with cork. And he discovered through a series of long tests, that cork would char when exposed to the acid, and that it would take four hours for the acid to eat through .025 inches of cork or, in other words, a slice of cork which was one fortieth of an inch thick.

Pop prepared his bombs.