Dragon's Island Read online

  The Stucture of The Genes

  “Life is a steam. Fluid protoplasm, the eternal stuff of men and dinosaurs and trilobites, it has flowed down the evolving generations of a billion years, its channels always set by the chance pressures of mutation and environment. Always until now-but not forevermore. For now at last life has found its own secret springs, in the structure of the genes. Man may now become his own maker. He can remove the fatal flaws in his own imperfect species, before the stream of life flows on to leave him stranded on the banks of time with the dinosaurs andtrilobites—if he will only accept and use the new science of genetic engineering.”

  —Charles Kendrew

  DRAGON’S ISLAND

  by

  JACK WILLIAMSON

  A Science Fiction Adventure

  A TOWER BOOK

  DRAGON’S ISLAND

  Copyright © 1951 by Jack Williamson

  Published by special arrangement with

  Simon and Schuster, Inc., New York

  A TOWER BOOK

  Published by

  Tower Publications, Inc.

  185 Madison Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in U.SA.

  Contents: -

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  One

  The city snarled. Its sudden hostility was a bitter taste and a biting scent of menace, and a livid glow of danger over everything he saw, and cold peril crawling up the back of his neck. Though his ears heard no warning^ alarm crashed inside his brain.

  Dane Belfast met that shocking impact when he opened the door of his New York hotel room, at seven that March morning. The unexpected force of it took his breath and drove him backward. He retreated into the doorway, groping dazedly to discover what had hit him.

  The maroon-carpeted corridor lay empty. He listened, thinking there must have been some shot or scream, but he could hear nothing more alarming than the muted mutter of traffic on Madison Avenue, twenty floors below. He sniffed to test the air for smoke, but he found no actual odor more disturbing than the faint, stale human scents of tobacco and perfume.

  His straining senses found no threat of anything, and he tried at first to ignore what he had felt. He was a scientist, a research geneticist. He had found mysteries enough in the working of the genes and chromosomes, whereby like gives birth to like. He had no time for the inexplicable.

  He caught his breath and carefully brushed a fleck of lint from the overcoat folded on his arm and started resolutely out again toward the elevator. You didn’t need to be a professional biologist to know that danger by itself has no taste or feel or warning glow, and he tried for a moment to believe that he had been stricken with, a sudden synesthesia —that abnormality of perception in which sounds are seen in color and colors tasted.

  But he wasn’t ill. He had never been, not even with a cold. Even after the crushing strain of these last months, he felt too hard and fit to be yielding to any fevered imaginings. He was only twenty-five, still clothed in the indestructible vigor of youth. Everything had been all right, until the moment when he opened the door.

  He hastily explored the day before, but he could recall no disturbing incident—certainly no taste or scent or feel of peril. Bad weather had delayed his plane, so that he arrived too late to call on the man he had come to see. He had gone out alone to eat and see the lights of Times Square. He watched a fight on the television set in a bar, while he drank three beers, and then returned to his hotel. New York had not been snarling then.

  He was trying now to swallow that acrid taste of evil, but it clung to his tongue. He blinked against that colorless glare, but still it washed the corridor with a dreary enmity. And danger halted him again, before he could close the door of his room. An invisible yet strangely actual barrier, it delayed him for a few uneasy seconds—long enough to hear the telephone ringing.

  He hurried back inside to answer.

  “Dane?” The voice was a young woman’s, low-pitched and pleasant. “Dr. Dane Belfast?”

  She sounded as if she thought she knew him, but he hadn’t been East since the time long ago when he and his mother came along with his father to a medical convention. He had no friends in New York; no girl friends, certainly.

  “I’m Nan Sanderson,” she was saying, but he couldn’t remember ever meeting anybody named Sanderson. “Of the Sanderson Service. We’re on Fortieth, just a few blocks from your hotel. Would you come over to our office this morning, say at eleven?”

  “Huh?” He felt sure he had never heard of the Sanderson Service, and he wondered for a moment how the firm had got his name. He had not announced his coming even to Messenger, the financier he meant to see. “What are you selling?”

  “Nothing,” she answered quietly. “Unless you’d call it life insurance. Because you’re in danger, Dr. Belfast. And we can probably save your life.”

  Her voice had a ring of conviction, and her words opened the room to the dark illumination he had met outside. Now that danger-sense was no longer a possible illusion. It was suddenly something real, that he had to accept and explain.

  “Danger?” he whispered blankly. “What enemies have I?”

  “Enough 1” Her hushed voice had a hurried urgency. “Deadly enemies, working cleverly in secret, desperate enough to poison your food or shoot you in the back or stab you while you sleep.”

  Five minutes ago, he might have laughed at that. Now, however, he could feel the frosty breath of peril seeping around the closed door, and taste the venom of hate lingering on his tongue.

  “That sounds pretty drastic.” He couldn’t help shivering. “Who would want to murder me?”

  “One man who might is John Gellian.”

  He repeated that name. Its sound was strange, and he tried again to deny the possibility of danger. He had injured nobody. His research goals had been unselfish. He had nothing anyone could want desperately enough to kill him for it.

  He reached absently to touch his flat pocketbook. Most of his savings had gone to meet unpaid bills at the bankrupt laboratory, after his father died and Messenger’s donations were cut off. The five twenties he had left were not a tempting bait for robbery.

  “I can’t talk long,” the girl was saying. She gave him an address on Fortieth. “Will you be here at eleven?”

  “But I can’t be in any real trouble,” he insisted. “Unless —” He caught uneasily. “Is it because of my research?”

  Like his father, he had been looking for a way to reach and change the genes, to reshape the traits of inheritance they carried. That secret of creation might have been enough to surround him with greedy enemies—but he had failed to find it.

  Tantalizing keys to all the mysterious wonder and power of life, the genes were too small to touch and turn with any process they had tried. Their repeated failures must have worn out Messenger’s faith in the project, and Dane knew they had finally killed his father. He had been ready to give up, himself, before he found the old letters in his father’s desk.

  Letters from Charles Kendrew—written in the
1930’s by that pioneer geneticist, about his daring plans for the great new science he called genetic engineering. Letters from Messenger, dated many years later, promising funds to carry on Kendrew’s unfinished work.

  Those letters were in Dane’s scuffed brief case now. They had brought him to New York. They contained exciting evidence that a workable process for creating useful genetic mutations had already been discovered, probably by Kendrew himself, and that Messenger had made a fortune from it;

  That circumstantial evidence was what he meant to talk to the financier about. He expected an explosive interview. Any process for making directed mutations could be more important to mankind than the methods of setting off atomic fission. If Messenger had anything to hide, the letters might become a dangerous possession after he had been confronted with them.

  But Messenger hadn’t seen them yet. Neither had anybody else. Whatever his motives, he had given nearly two million dollars in all to the laboratory. That entitled him, Dane felt, to the benefit of a considerable doubt. The evidence was too uncertain to establish any crime, and he still hoped that the financier could explain it innocently.

  All Dane wanted was another chance to realize Kendrew’s magnificent dream. If Messenger was already exploiting come crude mutation process, as the letters suggested, he wanted to learn it, perfect it, and see it applied as Kendrew had intended—to benefit mankind and not a corporation.

  Dane was not, however, an enemy of property. He regretted his own shortage of funds as merely a temporary handicap. He was quite willing to let Messenger’s company make an incidental profit on all the creations of genetic engineering, and he had been reasonably confident of fair treatment—until he opened his door and met that dark blaze of danger.

  Now he wasn’t sure of anything.

  “I’ve been doing some genetics research,” he explained to the girl on the telephone. “It might have been important, but it didn’t pan out. If anybody thinks I discovered anything worth stealing—”

  “No, Dane, it isn’t that,” she broke in quickly. “But your predicament is truly desperate. Look out for Gellian. And we’ll be expecting you at eleven.”

  “Wait!” he whispered. “Can’t you tell me—”

  She had hung up. He replaced his own receiver and reached absently for his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his clammy palms. He had failed to learn anything about the Sanderson Service, but he knew he would be there at eleven, hoping to escape the cold pall of danger around him.

  Her warning had convinced him that his disquieting sensations were due to some real cause outside himself, but it seemed to him now, as he turned from the telephone, that they were already fading. He realized uncomfortably that the net result of that glare and reek and taste of harm had been to keep him here long enough to receive her call.

  Until he had more data, however, the nature of that danger-sense seemed likely to remain mysterious. He gulped a glass of water to ease the dryness in his throat, and then unlocked his brief case, suddenly afraid the contents would be gone, with all his clues to that secret science.

  He found them safe—the time-yellowed letters in the neat hand printing of Charles Kendrew, and the notes from Messenger typed on the expensive letterheads of Cadmus Corporation, and the penciled drafts or the carbon copies of a few of his father’s replies.

  He locked the case gratefully, and took it with him when he started out again. He met no shock of new alarm, and that pitiless bloom of danger had dimmed to a haunting memory by the time he reached the lobby.

  Almost himself again, he ate ham and eggs in the hotel coffee shop, although that danger-sense had left a bitter aftertaste that dulled his appetite. He went back to the lobby, and called the office number on Messenger’s letterhead from a public telephone booth.

  Mr. Messenger wasn’t in, a sleek voice purred. Mr. Messenger seldom came in before three in the afternoon, and he was usually in conference after three. Mr. Messenger’s schedule didn’t permit appointments, but Dane could leave his name. He left his name, and said he would be waiting to see Mr. Messenger at three.

  It was still nearly two hours before he would be expected at the Sanderson Service. Hoping to find some illuminating fact about that firm or Messenger’s company or even about somebody named John Gellian, he bought an armful of newspapers at the stand in the lobby and started back to read them in the dubious sanctuary of his room.

  “Excuse me—aren’t you Dr. Belfast?”

  The inquiry was softly spoken behind him, as he left the newsstand. Somehow, it awoke a momentary echo of that disconcerting danger-sense. He spun apprehensively, and saw a sullen flicker of dark hostility that picked out and identified the tall man hurrying after him.

  “I’m Belfast,” he admitted huskily. “I suppose you are John Gellian?”

  “Of the Gellian Agency.” The stranger gave him a stern little smile. “May I have a moment of your time?”

  Two

  Dane had stepped back defensively, but that flash of danger made visible had already faded. John Gellian was left with a look of harassed good will. With an uneasy nod, Dane followed him away from the newsstand, toward an unoccupied corner of the lobby.

  Dane studied the stranger sharply, and failed to find the implacable enemy that Nan Sanderson’s call and his own shock of danger had led him to expect. John Gellian was a rawboned, dark-skinned man of about thirty-five, vigorous and muscular but slightly stooped, as if from overwork. Something about him was puzzling.

  There was a veiled desperation beneath the gravely courteous restraint of his manner. His nervous movements and his worried frown seemed to reveal some cruel inner conflict, of ruthless purpose fighting crushing handicaps. He looked grimly determined, yet thoroughly afraid.

  Perhaps he was ill. Waiting anxiously to find out what he wanted, Dane had time to see the haggard brightness of his eyes and the bad color of his skin and the lines of pain cut deep around his mouth. He was fighting some grave sickness, Dane decided, and haunted with a consuming fear of death.

  They reached a group of chairs in an empty corner, away from the newsstand and the desk and the busy elevators, but Gellian made no move to sit. He swung abruptly to face Dane, his hollowed eyes unexpectedly sharp.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to know me.” His voice was still oddly soft. “Do you mind saying how you knew my name?”

  Dane smiled warily. “I might ask the same question.”

  “We’re a private detective agency.” Gellian smiled disarmingly. “We have been investigating you, with a view to offering you a place on our staff. When our operatives reported that you were in town, I decided to talk it over with you.”

  Somewhat astonished, Dane shook his head. He had riddles enough of his own to solve: the strange disappearance of Charles Kendrew; the peculiar prosperity of Messenger’s company; the nature of the Sanderson Service and the source of that baffling danger-sense.

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong man,” he said. “I’m not a criminologist.”

  “What we need is an expert geneticist,” Gellian answered quietly. “Our reports seem to show that you have just the sort of background we require. I understand that you are free, since the Kendrew Memorial Laboratory went out of existence, and we’re able to pay whatever you want.”

  “Thanks,” Dane said. “Thanks, but really I’m not interested.”

  “You will be,” Gellian promised softly. “When you know what we’re doing. Because we aren’t the usual sort of agency. We don’t run down missing husbands or people who fail to pay their bills. We’re fighting a war—”

  A sudden vehemence had lifted Gellian’s voice, but he checked himself sharply to glance around the lobby as if afraid of being overheard.

  “The job will interest you.” His voice sank cautiously. “But before I tell you any more about it, I’d like to know something about your work at the Kendrew laboratory.” “I’m not looking for a job,” Dane insisted. “But there’s no secret about our research there. In fact,
our results have all been published. We were studying mutations—the sudden changes in the genes that give the offspring new traits, not inherited from either parent.”

  Gellian nodded impatiently. “But what was the purpose of your work?”

  “When my father set up the laboratory, he was hoping to find a method of directing mutation—a process for creating new varieties and species at will, without waiting on the random process of natural variation the way plant and animal breeders have always done. We spent twelve years and two million dollars on the project, and finally gave it up.” “I know, I know.” Gellian shrugged nervously. “Our people on the West Coast reported your failure.” His hollowed eyes narrowed keenly. “What they didn’t report is where you got the two million.”

  “My father’s secret.” Dane felt his fingers tighten on the handle of the brief case, as he thought of the letters from Messenger inside. “The gifts were anonymous,” he went on quickly, hoping Gellian hadn’t noticed his reaction. “We promised not to reveal their source.”

  “Perhaps that doesn’t matter.” Restlessly, the gaunt man looked around the lobby again. “Or perhaps you’ll decide to tell me later. Anyhow, here’s a more important question.” His anxious eyes came back to Dane. “Why was your laboratory named for Charles Kendrew?”

  Dane thought he felt the chill of danger creeping back into the lobby, and thought he saw the dark flicker of it on Gellian’s haggard face again. It made him shiver a little, but he could see no harm in the question. He answered soberly: “Kendrew was an old friend of my father’s. A gifted geneticist, born before his time. Forty years ago, he began trying what we just failed to do. But a family tragedy broke up his life. He abandoned his work and dropped out of sight, back in 1939, years before I was born. My father was hoping to carry on from where he quit—”