The Devastators

by Donald Hamilton

  The rest of the place, as far as I’d seen it, had been strictly business, wired for light as necessary, but with the bare rock showing, wet here and there with the usual trickles of underground water. In Madame Ling’s quarters, the rock was concealed behind wallboard and wooden paneling, and there was carpeting on the floor. The furniture wasn’t fancy, but it wasn’t cheap, either. There was indirect lighting. There were, however, no pictures on the wall, no old Ming vases, no art objects or decorations of any kind. Obviously, while Madame Ling intended to be reasonably comfortable, she wasn’t trying to set up a home away from home inside this Scottish rock.

  An efficient-looking mass of electronic equipment was installed in one rear corner. Beside it, a door led into a further room, presumably her sleeping quarters, since there was no bed here. I looked for the switch she had mentioned. It wasn’t hard to find, located above and behind the big wooden desk near the radio stuff—but there were two switches. One had a red handle. The other handle was black.

  Madame Ling saw me looking, and said, “Yes, that is it. Black for the Black Death. Appropriate, don’t you think, Mr. Helm?”

  “And the red one?”

  She hesitated, and shrugged. “That actuates the destruct circuit manually, Mr. Helm. Naturally we do not want your scientists poking and prying among what we leave behind. When we are through with this place, entirely through with it, we will blow it sky-high, using a remote-control device in the same circuit.”

  “Rats and all,” I said, watching her.

  “Yes, of course.” She laughed quickly. “Rats and all, Mr. Helm. Now please come over here and sit down. I have a few questions to ask you.”

  20

  It wasn’t much of a question-and-answer session. At the start, at least, she asked nothing that I couldn’t readily answer. I’m not a Hollywood hero, and I’m not about to get beat up just to prove how tough I am. I’ve never subscribed to the theory that you’ve got to refuse to tell a Communist something just because he—or she—asks.

  If Madame Ling wanted to know what message Walling had conveyed to me through Nancy Glenmore, if I had reported this information to Washington, and if they’d had any luck with it, I saw no reason not to tell her—particularly since she’d probably already got the dope from Vadya, over the phone, the night before. She was just checking us against each other. When she got to the exact purpose of my mission here, the situation got a little tougher. I hadn’t yet decided what was the best way to handle that.

  “I came to find Dr. McRow,” I said, stalling.

  “We know that,” Madame Ling said. “My question concerned what you are supposed to do when you find him.”

  “Didn’t Vadya tell you?”

  “The Russian girl can hardly be considered a reliable source of information, Mr. Helm, either as to her own motives or as to yours…”

  There was a knock at the door. The dark-faced man, stationed against it, glanced at Madame Ling. When she nodded, he turned to open. It occurred to me that he was getting on my nerves a little. I wished she would at least call him by a name, so I could have a handle to think of him by. I wished he would express an opinion on something. After all, I knew he could talk if he wanted to. I’d heard him. Well, maybe he just had nothing to say right now.

  He pulled the door open, and McRow entered, carrying a couple of flasks, a jar of absorbent cotton, a pair of tweezers, and a hypodermic needle, all neatly arranged on a folded white towel on a stainless steel tray.

  “You can put it on the desk, Doctor,” Madame Ling said. “Go right ahead. You might explain to Mr. Helm the nature of the experimental program in which he is participating.”

  McRow didn’t look at me. He used the tweezers to extract a wad of cotton, which he dunked in a liquid that was presumably alcohol.

  “We are trying to determine the efficacy of a serum,” he said, coming over to me and shoving the sleeve up my left arm with his free hand. “I’m about to inject… This man has already received an injection of some kind today, Madame,” he said quickly, looking up. “There’s a puncture, and slight inflammation of the surrounding tissue.”

  “Well, use the other arm,” she said. “It was only an antidote to a drug he’d been given.”

  “It could affect his powers of resistance.”

  She shrugged. “Use him anyway. We have too little data as it is.” She glanced at me. “You understand, Mr. Helm, right now you are being inoculated against the disease. In a few hours you will be infected with the culture. You will then, if our previous experience is a guide, have about sixty per cent chance of surviving.”

  “Sixty point five,” McRow said, “according to our present figures, which however cannot be trusted beyond the first digit, since they represent a sample of only twenty-eight.”

  I made the calculation in my head. “That means that seventeen have lived and eleven have died so far.”

  Madame Ling smiled approvingly. “You are quick with figures. Of course, we are speaking only of those who were inoculated. Of our first control group of twenty—those who were infected without first receiving the serum—none have lived, but Dr. McRow estimates that, with adequate medical attention, five out of one hundred could possibly recover. These are the figures I mentioned to you earlier.”

  Well, people were dying all over the world, one way or another. I wasn’t about to break into tears because a few more had succumbed to a cold-blooded medical experiment; but a small show of indignation seemed advisable.

  “Twenty and twenty-eight is forty-eight,” I said. “Where did you get all these human subjects?”

  I was speaking to the woman, but it was McRow who answered, nastily: “You might say they volunteered. They were nosy-parkers who tried to interfere with my work, like you. I warned them! I warned everybody! I’m not going to spend my whole life working for pennies and having other people make millions from my discoveries!”

  Under other circumstances, he would have sounded ridiculous: a peevish little boy complaining that life was unfair.

  I said, “Forty-eight nosy-parkers is a lot of nosy-parkers. Are you sure Madame Ling didn’t round you up a few strays on the side, people who weren’t doing anything to harm you but just happened to be handy?”

  He didn’t say anything, but jabbed his needle into my right arm harder than seemed necessary. He knew damn well that all of his subjects hadn’t been hostile agents, but he wasn’t admitting it, even to himself.

  His attitude gave me a hint of how to handle him, and I said, “Well, you might as well be getting used to it, I guess. After all, you’re going to murder millions before you’re through, aren’t you?” His head came up angrily. I grinned, and went on smoothly, “Oh, hell, I’m not criticizing, man. I make my living at it myself. As a matter of fact, I came here to kill you.”

  I was glad I had waited until he’d got the hypo out of my arm, because he’d undoubtedly have broken it off, the way he jumped. His reaction told me I was on the right track: this wasn’t a man to be tricky with, this was a man to lean on hard, just like Basil. Madame Ling and her Eastern cohorts, and the silent, dark-faced man were tough enough, but apparently they’d had to make do with some fairly mushy Western help.

  McRow licked his lips. “But I… I thought you were an American agent!”

  “So?”

  “But surely… I mean, we don’t employ assassins, do we?”

  I laughed. “Look who’s calling who names! And who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about? Surely you don’t still consider yourself an American citizen?” I grinned at him. “You, my friend, are a fool. What do you think is going to happen to you? Are you figuring on making a hundred million dollars with this lady’s help, and restoring the old family plantation—well, castle—and settling down to be a wealthy Scottish laird in kilts and sporran?” His eyes wavered, and I knew I’d hit close. As Madame Ling had said, he had his fantasies. I said harshly, “Let me give you some advice, Doc, as one murderer to another. I see our taciturn friend has
put the stuff he got from my pockets right there on the desk. There should be a nice little knife, about four inches in the blade. It’s good and sharp. I don’t see my gun anywhere, so why don’t you just take that knife, Doc, and cut your throat, and save everybody a lot of trouble?”

  He snapped: “Save you a lot of trouble, you mean!”

  “Me,” I said, “or the guys who’ll come after me, if I fail. I figure there’ll be about ten million of them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I said, “Well, I was just using your figures, Doc. You estimate your stuff will kill around ninety-five per cent, isn’t that right? There are about two billion people in the world. After ninety-five per cent of them are dead, there’ll still be around ten million left. And every damn one of them will be looking for Dr. Archibald McRow with a gun in his hand, or a knife, or a stone club, or nothing at all but the bare fingers and the homicidal impulse. You’ll be the most unpopular man on this depopulated planet, amigo.”

  He laughed uneasily. “You’re being ridiculous. Of course, unless we’re forced to, we’re not really going to—”

  “You may not be,” I said, “but she is.”

  I sensed, rather than saw, Madame Ling stir slightly. The nameless man at the door had also moved, as if to step forward and silence me, but she’d signaled him to lay off. She was watching McRow. He glanced at her, and looked back to me.

  “You’re crazy!” he cried. “Madame Ling is merely taking precautions against outside interference—”

  “Sure,” I said. “She’s got this place rigged with more remote control gadgets than a space probe, to hear her tell it. She’s going to be on the ship’s radio thirty-six hours a day, after she leaves here, giving orders and ultimatums and pushing buttons like a church organist doing hot licks from Haydn. I never heard a grown woman talk so much science-fiction nonsense in my life.” I glanced at Madame Ling. “Oh, don’t get me wrong, Madame. I enjoyed every minute of the performance. It was real great.”

  She did not move. She’d thrown aside the mink coat, and she was wearing a figured silk tunic above the narrow pants. She was smiling faintly as if she found me amusing, too amusing to stop, at least not while I was doing good work for her. After all, she’d have to break the news to him pretty soon; and this way she could study his reactions while I did the talking for her.

  McRow licked his lips again. “But… but I don’t understand.”

  I said, “Hell, sonny, there’s no remote-control stuff here. There’s just that black lever on the wall, which she’ll pull just before she goes out the door and down to the boat which will take her out to the much-advertised ship. Since she’s so insistent it’s a ship, it’s probably a plane or submarine, probably the latter. They’ve got a few, I’ve heard, not the latest atomic jobs, but adequate. Good enough to take her—under strict radio silence, of course—to the coast of Europe, where she’ll land a load of your infected rats, and then across the Atlantic where she’ll dump a big consignment on the North American continent, and maybe a small one in South America. And then home to the Orient, to manufacture serum like mad, and try to improve it with the help of one McRow, and inoculate as many of her people as possible—the politically sound people, of course; the others can go to hell—before your hopped-up Black Death works its murderous way around the world, leaving only one country in any kind of shape to take over…”

  I was watching the woman’s delicate, smiling face; and I saw that I was right on the beam. I saw her finger move. I didn’t see the dark-faced man move—I wasn’t looking that way—but I heard him. There was no point in dodging. Where could I go? I just hoped he was good at his work, and he was. The blow put me out instantly, with hardly any pain at all.

  21

  I woke up in a cage, like a rat. I mean, the mesh was bigger and the wire was stronger, but it was a cage just the same. I was lying on a kind of sagging chain-link shelf crimped into one side of it, about eighteen inches off the stone floor. There was no mattress, no blanket, and no other furniture except a unit of basic plumbing, quite primitive, in the back corner. The place stunk of insect spray and strong disinfectant, that was not, however, strong enough to cover up various other odors reminiscent of a public john. I seemed to be wearing a suit of crude white cotton pajamas and nothing else.

  I managed to get this much information without using anything but my eyes and nose. I stirred cautiously, to give anybody hanging around plenty of warning that I intended to wake up. It seemed unlikely that surprise could gain me anything except a crack with a gun-butt, and the back of my neck was quite tender enough already.

  I sat up unmolested, and found that I had the cage or cell to myself. There were others, however, down both sides of the long, narrow hall carved out of the rock. The next cage down the line on this side was empty. There was a woman, judging by the hair, asleep in the one beyond. The hair was gray and frizzy and unfamiliar. Elsewhere, a few faces were turned my way incuriously. I knew none of them.

  I decided that I was in the observation ward, the door of which Madame Ling had pointed out to me, the one with the guard. It looked pretty much like the animal room she’d shown me, except that the cages were larger, the specimens wore a certain amount of rudimentary clothing, and there were no fancy gadgets for opening the doors.

  “Feeling better, old chap?”

  I looked around. In the next cage toward the door—the last one that way—stood Sir Leslie Alastair Crowe-Barham, watching me through the strong wire mesh. He was wearing pajamas, too, and a pair of cheap rubber thong sandals. Looking down, I found a similar pair under my cot. I put my feet into them and stood up; rubbing my aching neck. I felt pretty groggy—not surprising, considering that I’d been rendered unconscious in two different ways within the space of an hour or two.

  “I’ll live,” I said.

  “Fortunate man,” said Les. “To be so certain.”

  I grinned at him weakly. “Well, let’s say I’ll live until somebody decides otherwise. I gather they’re shooting me full of their high-powered culture soon, after which it’s up to Lady Luck. But, hell, sixty-forty is better odds than you often get in this racket, or so I keep trying to tell myself. Besides, I…” I glanced around, “Is it safe to talk?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “There is nothing elaborate about this place. No microphones or closed-circuit television. They just pop their heads in now and then to see if we’re behaving ourselves; and they have a full-scale inspection twice a day to check us for symptoms and drag out the positives—that is, the ones who have developed the disease.”

  I suppose I should have shown a friendly curiosity about the hair-raising adventures he’d undoubtedly been through since we’d parted company in London, but the fact that he was here spoke for itself. The details weren’t important. He didn’t seem to be particularly interested in my harrowing experiences, either.

  “What happens to the so-called positives?” I asked.

  “For a while, I’m told, they were kept in another ward below, but that experiment has been discontinued. Madame Ling apparently decided she didn’t have the time, facilities, or personnel to follow each case to its gruesome conclusion. Now, I understand, the positives are simply disposed of at sea.”

  “Tidy,” I said. “I suppose you’ve checked the locks and studied the guard routine and all that jazz.”

  “Certainly. There is not much else to do here. I have found no tempting weaknesses. I’m told that one man managed to escape some time ago—one of your people—but he got away from the burial squad somehow after being taken out of here as a positive. My considered opinion, old chap, is that without outside help escape from in here is not really feasible.” He moved his shoulders ruefully. “Perhaps I was a little hasty in allowing myself to be captured so easily in London. I’m rather good at escaping, don’t you know? It has been a specialty of mine. I had a notion that if I allowed myself to be brought into this place.” He sighed. “Ah, pride.”

  I said, “Well,
that makes two of us. I had kind of the same notion. However, I had a chance to use a little psychology on McRow while he was sticking me full of his number-one-goop. Give him a few hours to think it over, and he may be open to a proposition when he comes in to give me shot number two. Anyway, it’s a hope. What’s the time now?”

  “I can’t really tell you, old fellow. There are no timepieces in here. However, you were unconscious for over an hour. You had me quite worried.”

  “That long?” The various injections must have combined with the blow to keep me under longer than normal. “Well, that still gives us a while to wait. Of course, if we miss here, we may have a chance on their damn ship or submarine.”

  “That will be too late, I’m afraid,” Les said.

  I glanced at him. “You’ve figured it, too? I don’t think there’s much doubt she’ll turn one batch of infected animals loose when she leaves here, but at least we may be able to keep her from distributing the rest. And this is a pretty deserted stretch of coast, and if we can get the warning out in a reasonable time, your people may still be able to seal off the area and exterminate the lousy little plague-carrying beasts before they get clear away. There are some pretty potent and penetrating war gases nowadays. I guess they’ll work on rats.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly, “but that is not exactly what I meant, old boy. You may have noted that I am standing well away from you, and that I have not offered to shake your hand in greeting, or even as many fingers as we might get through the wire.”

  I looked at him for a moment. His long horse face seemed the same as usual, except for a few days’ growth of beard. I drew a long breath.