The Green Wound Contract by Philip Atlee

Author:Philip Atlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

All God’s “chillun” are reputed to have shoes, and some of them even claim golden slippers, but there never had been a pair like mine before. I put them on three days later at eight o’clock in the morning, in Baton Rouge, and they were the most costly footgear in history. And that was strange, because they were only scuffed, ordinary-looking loafers.

When they were snug, I took the cigarette-case-size remote unit out of my jacket pocket and said, “Okay, I’m checking out.” Then I carried my bag down to the motel office, paid my bill, and drove toward New Orleans in the rented Olds. It was a beautiful day, blue sky and arching castles of cumulus clouds. When I was beyond the city limits and picking up speed, I dropped the remote unit on the seat beside me.

“Can you read me?” I asked, in a normal speaking voice.

“Like a ton of bricks,” said the monitor voice. “That desk clerk has adenoids.”

“A Cajun would hate you. How was the signal?”

“Listen to it yourself,” said the monitor, and his carrier wave snapped off. Another one came on, with a strong beacon signal. It hummed for a minute, faded out, and another came on. Slightly lower in frequency, but still strong. Then another, stronger than ever.

“One and three are loud and clear,” I said. “Middle one was a little fuzzy, must have been New Orleans.”

“It was,” said the monitor. “Cut off your air conditioning.”

I switched it off, and the signal came in 5 and 5. “That did it,” I said.

“Right. Check us again in twenty miles,” said the monitor, and snapped off abruptly.

“Right and out.” I turned off the remote unit and switched the air conditioning back on, with a glance at the speedometer. The highway unreeled before me, and I went over my mental check list again. Because I was a walking transmitter, with two tiny units engineered into the heels of my shoes.

For the past two days, I had been briefed by the electronic team of ten men Carl Wiley had flown down. The shoes had been tested repeatedly, against almost every kind of interference, and had checked out. I had given the mobile monitoring stations a positive signal, with a range of nearly Five hundred miles, while strolling around the main generators of the Baton Rouge power system. The active life of the little cadmium batteries in the loafers was nine or ten days.

Right now, as I cruised along the sunny highway, I was being picked up from a truck Five miles ahead of me, a stationary receiver in downtown New Orleans, and a moving car in Algiers, across the river.

During my years with the agency, I had worn several of these devices while on magic assignments. Sometimes they worked, and twice they got me in trouble, but that was before the problems of space communication had forced such tremendous strides in miniaturization. Since I had actually seen the technicians at work, I was sure these devices would work, but that might not be enough.

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