Free The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) by Richard S. Prather

these pix the
same?” I asked him.
    “ No, each slightly
different. The book is a series of sixty prints made from
consecutive frames of an eight-millimeter movie film. This film,
made at a medical-research facility for its record of an
experimental procedure, was secretly removed from the facility by a
lab worker friendly to POCUEA. And returned the next day. After we
had made copies.”
    “ Sounds kind of–well,
illegal to me.”
    “ Me, too. Probably a dozen
of us broke two or three hundred laws. Interestingly, the
experiment, the research, was not illegal, but we are.” He smiled
and went on, “As I say, the pictures are all a little different.
Look more closely, Sheldon.”
    I did. And then I could
see that, in this later photo, the chimpanzee’s head was tilted
slightly more forward and down, the eyes were protruding slightly,
and the lips instead of being in the “Whoo!” oval were spread to
the sides, exposing the large teeth. Finally, I noticed that the
metal cylinder was not a foot behind the chimp’s head but was
against the back of its skull.
    And suddenly, with a quick
prickling coolness at the nape of my neck, I understood.
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    I dug a finger into the
pages of the book, opened it near the end. Here, the chimp’s head
was far forward and twisted to one side; the eyes appeared to be
bursting from the brown skull; the lips were pulled so wide it
looked as if the stretched skin of the mouth might tear, as in
photos I’d seen of astronauts straining against several G’s of
acceleration. And there was blood....I closed the book, stared at
Hank.
    He told me, “As I said, a
series of photographs, from movie film, each frame printed
separately on paper, so the pages may be flipped, giving the
illusion of movement, or reality.”
    I nodded. “Sure. When I
was a kid, I had a bunch of little books like this, smaller ones.
Flip books we called them at school, but most were just cartoons,
sex stuff, and if the teachers caught us guys–even a few giggling
girls–with what they told us was mind-destroying pornography, we
were sent home with sealed notes. Punishment for looking at dirty
pictures. At least, they called them dirty.”
    “ Not as dirty as these,
Sheldon. Flip them, look, learn.”
    I held the book with thumb
and finger of my left hand near its spine, riffled the pages with
my other thumb, and for two or three seconds it was a real little
movie, starring a chimp. And now I could see that the cylindrical
thing was a kind of steel hammer, actuated and thrust forward by
the Rube-Goldberg mechanism of shafts and rods and metal elbows and
ball bearings, its power supplied by something outside the camera’s
view; and that the hammer jumped forward and struck the brown
skull, after which the chimp’s head snapped toward the camera and
then jerked slightly back, pulled by the distended and twisted
neck.
    Hank was saying, “This was
an experiment–very expensive, not only because the researchers were
highly paid but because the chimpanzees cost a great deal, they are
so rare now–to measure the effect on a living brain, a brain very
similar to mine, or yours, of concussion produced by a given weight
moving at measurable acceleration. As in automobile accidents, or
falls from high places. The results were never put to any practical
use, a report filled with useless numbers was written, that is all.
It was just–scientific information and we, POCUEA, have a dozen
others, all different, most worse than this. In this particular
scientific experiment the three researchers—laughing and joking
during its progress, by the way—repeated the crushing blow to the
chimpanzee’s skull a total of ten times. What information of any
possible value could the second blow reveal? Much less the fourth,
the fifth. After the first impact the animal—these researchers
themselves named him Jock-Jock—was unconscious. After the second or
third he was unquestionably dead.” Hank was silent for a