Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/43

Rh. The pistol was a captured German job, a ten-shot Luger issued to our Medical Department men as sidearms for patrol work. It operated like a miniature machine gun and with the trigger held back spewed its whole load in a stream of shots. Whether he was naturally a marksman or whether fear lent accuracy to his hand, or if it were an accident I don't know. I do know that his shots all seemed to take effect; I saw the crawling lizard-thing pause in its downward course, hang clinging to the wall a moment, as if it clutched the wet, cold, slippery bricks with a spasmoticspasmodic [sic] grasp, then suddenly go limp and hurtle to the half-hard lush that lay upon the courtyard tiles, quiver reflexively a moment, then lie still.

"You fool, you damned, fat-headed, superstitious fool!" Weinberg fairly shrieked at the sentry. "I'll have you up before a general court for this—oh, hell, what's the use?"

He was crying as he raced across the quadrangle with me at his heels. The tears were streaming down his cheeks, mingling with the drizzling rain that blew into his face. "Help me with her, Pat," he begged as he fell to his knees beside the still body. "Help me carry her inside. Maybe it's not to late—"

I bent to help him, then, despite myself, drew back. Clothed in outing flannel pajamas, drenched with blood that spurted from at least ten wounds, and obviously dead, Fedocia Watrous lay, a huddled, mangled, bullet-riddled corpse, before us on the rain-diluted snow.

liquor that the pharmacist broke out at Weinberg's order was far from palatable, but it was "Whiskey, U.S.P.," which meant it was one hundred proof—fifty percent grain alcohol—and that was what we needed right then.

"I was afraid of this," he told me as he gulped a second potion down. "She'd been delirous all day, and I asked that they have a nurse with her every minute. I s'pose the girl had left to get her tray, or something, though, and that was when it happened. The moment she was free from surveillance she went for the window—"

"What in heaven's name are you driving at, Al?" I broke in. "What's Fedocia's being in delirium got to do with—"

"Sorry," he apologized. "I hadn't told you what it was I suspected.

"Remember the other night at your quarters I told you I thought medical opinion and theories were due for overhauling?

"Yes, but—"

"Never mind the buts, old man. Ever since we found that Jerry secret agent throttled in our railway coach I'd puzzled over his bruises. The evidence all pointed to a great ape's having throttled him, but that was palpably absurd. I'd found Fedocia's putt and shoe unfastened, but that could have had have no bearing on the case—I thought. Then the other night you told me what Ten Eyck had said before he died—Fedocia's mother had been frightened into madness by a gorilla just before she had her baby; Fedocia never showed her feet to anyone; seemed sensitive about them; you saw her almost faint when young Ten joked about her ability to feed herself with her feet remember?

"Yes, of course; but—"

"Hold hard, feller; let me finish. Nearly everybody's heard—and most laymen believe stories—of pre-natal influence; if a mother's frightened by an an animal her baby's likely to be marked with some characteristic of the beast. A mother terrified by a vicious dog, for instance, may give birth to a dog-faced child; or one who's been chased by a bull may bear a child with vestiges of horn upon its head—"

"What are you building up to?" I demanded. "Those old wives' tales of prenatal influence have been discredited a century and more. Davenport in his Heredity