All the Colors of Darkness. Lloyd Biggle jr.
trip across the lobby, thus doubling the number that could be accommodated.
Lines still jammed the lobby at midnight, and business was brisk at the ticket windows. Travelers coming down from Pennsylvania Station to watch the show found their way into the ticket lines, and as a result arrived at their destination hours or days before they were expected. The airlines were receiving an avalanche of cancellations. Wall Street was digging itself out from a panic of late selling that plunged transportation stocks to unheard of lows. Universal Trans stock had probably soared to a spectacular level, but no one knew for sure because there were no sales. The harassed Universal Trans stockholders were gloatingly hanging onto it.
To any point in the world where Universal Trans chose to set up a terminal, the traveling time by transmitter was zero; or, to be precise, it was the time a passenger required to stroll through an entrance gate, down a short passageway, and out of an exit gate. Boards of directors of many corporations were in session that Monday night, bleakly contemplating that fact and weighing its significance. The more farsighted of them found its meaning ominous, and set about balancing inventories, closing factories, ordering retoolings, and bellowing frantically at research divisions for new products.
The age of the automobile, the air age, were finished. Demolished. Brushed aside to crumble into ignoble oblivion.
And for the first time in three years the directors of the Universal Transmitting Company went to bed early and slept well.
CHAPTER 4
Jan Darzek’s only full-time employee was a former model named Jean Morris. She was a splendid ornament to his office, which she ran with ruthless competence, and on certain outside assignments her efficiency was deadly. Few people, male or female, could contemplate her superb figure and exquisite features and guess that behind her long lashes both of her large brown eyes were private.
She entered Darzek’s employment because she fell in love with him. She quickly learned that Jan Darzek was no mortal man, but an institution of weirdly developed talents, all directed at securing elusive bits of information and assembling them into comprehensive reports to clients. By that time she had transferred her love to the detective business and begun the intense cultivation of her own talents. They made a spectacularly successful team.
On the day of the Universal Trans opening, Darzek returned from lunch and found her puzzling over a telephone call. “From Berlin,” she said. “Supposedly from Ron Walker.”
“You don’t say.”
“It was a collect call.”
“It would be,” Darzek said with a grin. “If he calls back, don’t accept it.”
“I thought it was a gag. Or was that Ron’s twin brother that was here when I came in this morning?”
“Ron hasn’t got a twin brother, and it was a gag. This morning he was in New York. Now he’s in Berlin. In the meantime he’s been in London, Paris, and Rome. He’s traveling on a newspaper assignment. I met one of his buddies at lunch, and heard all about it.”
“Oh,” she said. “That transmitting business.”
“Right. Ron is doing a world tour by transmitter, sending back local color stuff on how the foreign populations are taking it. Naturally he’d like to give me a long personal report, with me paying the phone bill. If he calls again, tell the operator I just left for Siberia by transmitter.”
Twenty minutes later Darzek had a visitor, a businessman who had failed to control his exuberance on a trip to Paris the previous spring. There were complications.
“Paris?” Darzek said with a smile. “Last week I’d have told you I couldn’t spare the time. This week—I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
The businessman delivered himself of a deep sigh of relief. “Good. I’ll leave the whole thing in your hands. When you get back—will you be back by Friday?”
“I’ll go over tomorrow afternoon,” Darzek said. “I’ll see the young lady, and come right back. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
The businessman’s brows arched in surprise, then relaxed. “Ah. Universal Trans. I’d forgotten.”
“You’ll never forget it again,” Darzek said.
By Tuesday morning the police had decided to capitulate. Three blocks of Eighth Avenue were blocked off. The perspiring populace jammed the street from sidewalk to sidewalk. Universal Trans developed a sudden and thoroughly justified apprehension that the crowd might interfere with business, and opened a side entrance for paying passengers. When Jan Darzek arrived on the scene Tuesday afternoon it took him forty-five minutes to push his way from the Pennsylvania Station to the Universal Trans terminal, and he was restrained from giving up only by the fact that the swelling crowd behind him looked more formidable than the crowd in front.
Finally he reached the terminal, slipped into the side entrance with a feeling of intense relief, and was whisked by escalator to the mezzanine. He paused there for a few minutes to look down on the mob in the lobby below.
Confusion raged about one of the demonstration transmitters. An elderly lady had thrust her umbrella through ahead of her, and then balked at following it. She hauled frantically on the umbrella, two feet of which protruded at the far platform. The umbrella did not yield. The combined eloquence of six guards finally persuaded the lady to push her umbrella the rest of the way through and follow it.
Darzek watched her waddle away, a frown clouding his good-looking face. The temperature was ninety-five, there was no rain in sight, and—why an umbrella? Protection against the sun?
“Down, boy,” he told himself. “Who do you think you are? A detective?”
A moment later a high school girl changed her mind after curiously thrusting one arm into the transmitter. She hung helplessly, her forearm extending from the distant receiver. Her screams rang out shrilly above the din that filled the terminal. A guard finally shoved her through, and she scampered down the steps and darted furtively away. In the fracas the guard also stuck one arm through, and had to move on to the far platform. The crowd hooted.
“Strictly a one-way operation,” Darzek thought. “But one way at a time should be adequate for most travelers.”
The crowd seemed more amused than alarmed at the two mishaps. The lines kept moving, but Darzek noted that people approached the transmitter warily, tensed themselves as if for a plunge into a cold shower, and lurched through with eyes closed and hands held defensively in front of them.
Darzek tucked his briefcase under his arm and moved over to one of the lines at the ticket windows. Directly ahead of him a shapely blonde turned, surveyed Darzek’s sturdy six-foot frame and curly blond hair with analytical detachment, turned away. Darzek decided to ignore her.
In the next line a jovial, plump businessman was talking excitedly with a gaunt, unhappy-looking companion. “Tried it downstairs. Nothing to it. You don’t feel a thing. Like the ads said, it’s just like stepping from one room to another. Darnedest thing I ever saw. One step and there you are, clear across the room.”
The other chomped nervously on a cigar. “Across the room isn’t the same thing as here to Chicago.”
“Just the same. You can go clear to Singapore—if they have a terminal there—and it won’t take any longer than it does to go across the lobby. No more airplane flights for me. They’re safe, of course, but now and then a plane does crack up, and this is absolutely safe. That’s why they give you the insurance. They’re not going to give you fifty thousand dollars’ worth of free insurance if they aren’t certain that nothing can happen.”
“Humph!” the cigar chewer said. “They don’t do that because it’s safe. They do it because this is a new thing, and some people will naturally be afraid of it, and they want everyone to think it’s safe. Just tell me what would happen if that thing blew a fuse with half of you here and half of you in Chicago.”
“Say—I never thought of