Read Online The Origin of Evil by Ellery Queen - Free Book Online Page B

Bourbon? Scotch?’ Without waiting for a reply Macgowan bent double and slithered into his house. Various liquid sounds followed.
    â€˜Laurel, why don’t they put the poor kid away?’ whispered Ellery.
    â€˜You have to have grounds.’
    â€˜What do you call this?’ cried Ellery. ‘Sanity?’
    â€˜Don’t blame you, Mr. Queen,’ said the big fellow amiably, appearing with two chilled glasses. ‘Appearances are against me. But that’s because you people live in a world of fantasy.’ He thrust a long arm into the house and it came out with another glass.
    â€˜Fantasy. We.’ Ellery gulped a third of the contents of his glass. ‘You, of course, live in a world of reality?’
    â€˜Do we have to?’ asked Laurel wearily. ‘If he gets started on this, Ellery, we’ll be here till sundown. That note —’
    â€˜I’m the only realist I know,’ said the giant, lying down at the edge of his porch and kicking his powerful legs in space. ‘Because, look. What are you people doing? Living in the same old houses, reading the same old newspapers, going to the same old movies or looking at the same old television, walking on the same old sidewalks, riding in the same old new cars. That’s a dream world, don’t you realize it? What price business-as-usual? What price, well sky-writing, Jacques Fath, Double-Crostics, murder? Do you get my point?’
    â€˜Can’t say it’s entirely clear, Mac,’ said Ellery, swallowing the second third. He realized for the first time that his glass contained bourbon, which he loathed. However.
    â€˜We are living,’ said young Mr. Macgowan, ‘in the crisis of the disease commonly called human history. You mess around with your piddling murders while mankind is being set up for the biggest homicide since the Flood. The atom bomb is already fuddy-duddy. Now it’s hydrogen bombs, guaranteed to make the nuclear chain reaction — or whatever the hell it is — look like a Fourth of July firecracker. Stuff that can poison all the drinking-water on a continent. Nerve gases that paralyze and kill. Germs there’s no protection against. And only God knows what else. They won’t use it? My friend, those words constitute the epitaph of Man. Somebody’ll pull the cork in a place like Yugoslavia or Iran or Korea and, whoosh! that’ll be that.
    â€˜It’s all going to go,’ said Macgowan, waving his glass at the invisible world below. ‘Cities uninhabitable. Crop soil poisoned for a hundred years. Domestic animals going wild. Insects multiplying. Balance of nature upset. Ruins and plagues and millions of square miles radioactive and maybe most of the earth’s atmosphere. The roads crack, the lines sag, the machines rust, the libraries mildew, the buzzards fatten, and the forest primeval creeps over Hollywood and Vine, which maybe isn’t such a bad idea. But there you’ll have it. Thirty thousand years of primate development knocked over like a sleeping duck. Civilization atomized and annihilated. Yes, there’ll be some survivors — I’m going to be one of them. But what are we going to have to do? Why, go back where we came from, brother — to the trees. That’s logic, isn’t it? So here I am. All ready for it.’
    â€˜Now let’s have the note,’ said Laurel.
    â€˜In a moment.’ Ellery polished off the last third, shuddering. ‘Very logical, Mac, except for one or two items.’
    â€˜Such as?’ said Crowe Macgowan courteously. ‘Here, let me give you a refill.’
    â€˜No, thanks, not just now. Why, such as these.’ Ellery pointed to a network of cables winging from some hidden spot to the roof of Macgowan’s tree house. ‘For a chap who’s written off thirty thousand years of primate development you don’t seem to mind tapping the main powerline for such things