No Traveler Returns Sterling E. Lanier

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.The syndicate had money in it.They sent people to look around.Some didn't come back.The syndicate smelled something badly wrong and got out of the whole thing.They don't much go for new ideas, or mysteries either.But we heard about it.That was one piece." He watched the line of men who were still carrying nameless things up from the great hole and laying them gently on the side, extending' the lines of shapeless objects, all covered in plastic, to yet further on down the road.It was obvious, sickeningly so, that they were no longer finding bodies, but rather fragments."Disappearances were still another thing.All kinds of people, not who were known to have been here, but who could have been here or passing through.The F.B.I, has charts and graphs, and so do we.I began to play with them, and a kind of vague blob appeared.This county and two around it on the east and west." Vardaman left them and went back to the hole where he could supervise.The sound of careful digging still came from the bottom.The men were silent, the enormity of what they were uncovering reducing them to a perspiring quiet, broken only by a muffled curse and the shovel noises audible at close range.Over all, the piercing tremolo of the larks rose on the hot air of the prairie, uncaring and rapturous."The next clue came from the churches, a place I'd never have looked.No minister of any denomination ever asked here to perform marriages or to bury anyone.The churches demolished and used as building sites.No church records newer than twenty years of this town at all.Vardaman found that out while he was investigating.Since the churches, even the Protestant ones, don't liaison much with one another, not one of them noticed that it alone was not the only brand that had left town." A man ran up the ladder on the far side of the hole and ripped off his gas mask.He went off to the side of the road, well away from the hole and vomited.The sounds came clearly to the little group who were listening to Naylor.Nobody reprimanded the man, a state patrolman, or tried to bring him back.He sat down after a while with his head in his hands."We'll all have a few nightmares," mused the captain, half to himself."Let's see, what came next? Well, there was money, lots of it, moving in the wrong ways for this area.This is conservative country.People don't play the stock market here, or have Swiss bank accounts.That was a weak point in their planning, though they tried to be clever.They were awfully damn clever about the cars.With the two legitimate garages to change the bodies and repaint, file off engine-block numbers and so on, those cars just like to vanished.We still have only a very few traced, mostly to Mexico.But the idea of the local banker and the local nail factory owner and the fellows that owned the garages all having Swiss bank accounts, that was bad.Treasury gave us some help there.Then there was the law situation."He spat.A bad cop is anathema to a good one.A cop involved in this sort of thing was unthinkable, awful, a terrible affront to the concept of the law.The law officers involved were people whom Naylor really hated.He went on."Never any crime here, beyond reports, second-hand from the town police and the justice, a chicken stealing and kids being wild.That was another mistake, and it helped eliminate the other places we were watching.Every town has major crimes once in a while, usually an occasional murder, or homicide of some kind, never mind the actual cause.Yet this place never had anything but the piddling stuff, and it was always settled here without trial, or at least nothing beyond the J.P.That was a pointer.I'm a little surprised that they thought they could get away with that, surprised no one had any more psychology than that.""They got away with it for twenty years, from the looks of things," mumbled Morehouse through his handkerchief."Suppose they decided they'd had enough last year and quit? Where would we be then?"They all came alert.The sound of a distant series of shots came faint and far off from over the fields.In a moment, a young lieutenant, masked like all the rest, sprinted over from his command jeep parked up the road.He saluted the colonel, who waved irritably in answer, still holding the cloth to his nose, and choked out the word, "Report.""Two of them tried through the cornfields north of town, sir [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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