A Cunning Criminal of the Future Meets His Nemesis in a Battle of Scientific Wits!

The Nth Degree

By Mort Weisinger
Author of "Price of Peace," "The Impossible Dimension," etc.

DARIUS WAXMAN, president of Solar Spaceways, was on the verge of apoplexy. His fat round face, seamy as an ancient tree, was the color of port. His scalp, under the few grey hairs plastered upon it, was the same shade. His shirt clung in soaked patches to his tubby old body. He went lax in his chair and smiled nervously. His lips curled back from his yellow teeth and his shrewd old eyes bored at his captor.

"Listen, Ainsworth," he said confidently, "you won't get away with this. This is nineteen-eighty, If you called me here to your laboratory to dispose of me, forget it. You can't kill me! Lots of people know you've got it in for me and when they find my body they'll know whom to nail. Then it will be execution for you—in the Ray Chambers. Why, I'll wager that right now every autorobot policeman on sublevels A to L is looking for me with his aura-o-scope. You'd better unlock these handcuffs!"

Arthur Ainsworth, the brilliant biochemist, pushed back his chair, stood up and smashed one fist against his duraluminum-topped desk. He walked over to Waxman and jabbed his thick shoulder with two fingers.

"See here," he said irritably, "when I get finished with you nothing will remain of your body but some thin syrup in a test tube. The Federal Crime' Bureau may not be able to pin that new crime on you, but at least I'll have the satisfaction of seeing the two hundred and forty pounds of your intolerable anatomy changed into plain elemental protoplasm."

Waxman's heavy-jowled countenance turned to a pasty white.

"Change me to protoplasm—what do you mean?" he asked hoarsely.

"Exactly what I said," rasped young Ainsworth. "There won't be any corpus delicti—understand? No one in the world will be able to prove that I disposed of you. The whole Crime Chemist Board themselves won't be able to show you even existed."

Ainsworth clenched his fists until the palms showed white from the nails. His lips compressed into thin, merciless lines.

"Waxman—you're the greatest menace to society in the Federated States of America. Just because you alone know how to manufacture cosmicontrol—the only fuel capable of driving rockets through space—doesn't mean you own the universe. The government knows plenty about you—how your men slaughtered twenty-three Martians and threw the bodies into a canal—so that you could have the handful of radium they thought you'd buy from them.

"And we know that the reason your spaceliner, The Comet, cracked up near Ceres was because you'd refused to install the anti-meteor screens. But now you've gone too far. You've kidnapped the two oldest directors of the Science League—Rudolf, of Electrodynamics, and Carter, of Astronautics. They're my friends and colleagues.

"The Federal Crime Bureau couldn't get you to tell where they are but, by heaven, I'm going to find out what you've done with them—if I have to destroy you! I'm going to give you the worst third degree a human being has ever had."

WAXMAN squirmed in his chair like a cornered rabbit. He wet his thick lips with his tongue. He was almost incoherent from nervousness. "What are you going to do—throw me into a bath of sulphuric acid?"

Arthur Ainsworth laughed mirthlessly.

"Remember your endrocrinology? I'm going to play around with your abdominal-aortic paraganglion gland. This gland has a sebaceous secretion, as you know. I've discovered that this secretion can be hypertrophied by an long exposure to cosmic rays. This immediately results in a reverse procedure of evolution. I've perfected a means of directing and concentrating the cosmic rays on-this gland: All organisms underwent a complete metamorphosis when so exposed—they went through the recapitulative stages of evolution—backward.

"Do you know what that means, Waxman? I'm going to focus my ray on that gland of yours—I've discovered a way to accelerate the reaction —and in a day or two you'll have gone down the entire scale of evolution—down until you're base protoplasm."

Sweat was running off Darius Waxman's face in miniature torrents. He could see by the look of grim purposefulness in Ainsworth's eyes that the fellow meant business. As best he could with the obstacle of handcuffs, he drew out a large handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He was white to the lips.

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"You're a big fool, Ainsworth," he said finally. "What will you gain by disposing of me that way? You'll never get me to admit kidnapping your friends. Let me go and I'll give you half a million dollars."

Ainsworth walked over to a small, white cabinet in a corner of the laboratory. He spoke seriously, and his words had the cold ring of finality.

"You'd better tell me everything now, Waxman. I don't think you'll be able to talk when morphogenetic transformations have changed you to Pithecanthropus Erectus. Your last chance, Waxman—I'm deadly earnest."

The prisoner relaxed back in his chair. "Go ahead," he flamed. "You may be one of the world's greatest bio-chemists but I don't believe you can de-evolutionize me. I dare you to try it!"

Ainsworth raised his head and displayed a moist sponge he had been fingering.

"Incidentally, Waxman," he said coolly, "the process is quite painful to the victim in the early stages. So I'll give you a dose of an anesthetic when we start off."

With a swift, practised movement, Ainsworth brought the drugged sponge hard against the criminal's face. For some brief moments the man's head jerked spasmodically, then slumped down against his chest, pale and passive, when stupefying fumes had done their work.

Darius Waxman came out of his drugged stupor feeling that his experience of a few hours before had been nothing but a bad dream. He stretched himself, yawned twice, and opened his eyes wide. He was still in Ainsworth's laboratory!

Evidently Ainsworth had begun his experiment. In front of him on, a small table he saw a large hand mirror. He reached for it, eagerly, and froze with cold horror when he saw its reflection. His head was like that of an ape's! It was at least six inches larger than in its normal state. His lower jaw protruded forward an inch and a half more than normally; his already fat lips looked like two pendulums and his nose bulged out conspicuously.

Suddenly he caught a view of his feet. His big toes looked like bell-clappers—his feet were enormous, more than a foot long. His hands were at least ten inches long, distended and simianlike.

AROUND him he could see two intricately wired X-ray tubes and other complex instruments focused at him. He realized with a start that the de-evolutionizing process was still going on; he could almost feel his head expanding and his bones shrinking. He sighed audibly; he looked miserable and felt it.

So Ainsworth actually could do what he had boasted! And now he would continue the process, keep that infernal ray trained at him until its diabolic properties lowered him down the path of evolution—down to a single-celled amoeba, down to simple, organic protoplasm itself—nothingness! And what if Ainsworth didn't apply any anesthetic hereafter—could any human being endure the pain Ainsworth had hinted at?

As he stood before the ray, Ainsworth entered the room. He walked over briskly to the machine, almost ignoring Waxman.

"I'm turning on the concentration full strength," he said indifferently. "Do you want to talk while you're still articulate?"

Waxman sucked in a lungful of breath. He was feeling dizzy. "Stop —I'll talk," he starnrrfered. "Carter and Rudolf are exiled on Asteroid two seventy-six in the Zone Belt near Jupiter. I had them taken away because they were stumbling on the secret of cosmicontrol. You never would have got me to talk if it hadn't been for this damn machine!"

Ainsworth rushed over to his desk, snapped on the teledisc and clipped into the ivory microphone:

"Get me IPC—Interplanetary Police Corps? Carter and Rudolf are reported exiled on Asteroid two seventy-six in the Zone Belt near Jupiter. They were kidnaped by—"

As the young scientist worked over the teledisc, twirling levers and rheostats, contacting the Science League and broadcasting the news, he failed to notice Waxman creeping up behind him. The kidnapper grabbed suddenly for Ainsworth's ray-projector, seized it from its holster, and leveled it at the scientist.

Ainsworth whipped about, his right arm dangling, arcing upward toward Waxman's jaw. Waxman was bending back the atom-loader, circled the gun warily around the scientist's head and was about to pull back the trigger when Ainsworth's bailed fist connected.

A split instant later he sidestepped sharply and flung himself at his opponent in flying tackle fashion. Waxman pulled trigger at last and a Coolidge tube in back of Ainsworth disintegrated instantly, falling to the floor in the form of pulverized dust.

A fist smashed into Waxman's face as he again tried to use the ray-projector. He staggered back and then straightened, the gun falling from his hands. Ainsworth stepped in again, fiercely raining effective blow after blow at the anthropoid face.

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"With a sharp grunt of pain Waxman sagged to the floor, unconscious.

"YOU see," Ainsworth was telling the head of the Federal Crime Bureau hours later, "I knew that nothing in the world could ever make Waxman confess. I knew that your men had tried everything on him without getting any results. No third degree could break his iron will. And after a terrific beating—if we gave him one—he had influence enough to throw a lot of the big boys out of their jobs. I was desperate—had to think of something; When I sold Waxman the idea that I intended to destroy him entirely, and began to prove it, he talked. Poor Waxman. For the rest of his life he'll think I was really able to reverse evolution down to its protoplasmic base.

"All I actually did was to inject the base of his pituitary gland with a germ culture that causes acromegaly. Acromegaly is a known pathological condition that causes the head and all its organs to expand abnormally, also the hands and feet. A person under the influence of acromegaly looks like an ape. I ran across the thing while doing a thesis on twentieth century pathology.

"Acromegaliy was even occurent those days. I'd merely discovered a way to speed up its symptoms—and Waxman believed every one of those changes indicated de-evolution!"

The head of the Federal Crime Bureau stood up. "That was a pretty effective third degree, son, even if it was so drastic. But Waxman won't spend much more of his life wondering what it was all about—it's the Ray Chambers for kidnappers!"

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