Appleby wondered why. Another wild-goose chase, he told himself. The quintessential red herring. The perfect turn round Robin Hood’s barn. Tomorrow he would find himself back in London – always supposing that Batty Tarratt’s poor tortured nerves held out so long – at precisely the point at which he had departed from it.
He paused in his gloomy reflections to take another look at the natural scene. To the east the moors stretched away in unbroken sullen purple to tumble themselves like some unnatural sea against the bastions of the North-West Highlands. And beneath him was a green and racing ocean, tossing itself in spray and spume on jagged rocks, and in one place running far up a golden beach overhung by low cliffs topped with heather. The little boat of St Wulfius, Appleby thought, might with perfect propriety emerge from behind a headland at any moment. For the scene was in all probability utterly unchanged since the ninth century – except that two men were floating through the sky, so securely that they had to keep up boring jokes about their danger, and proposing presently to drop effortlessly upon the remote rock to which the saint could have come only through sheets of foam and past the innumerable submerged fangs of rock that constituted, along with the seethe and suck of small hideous currents, the special hazard of the place.
A dinghy with an outboard motor. Well, Wulfius had certainly had even less than that. But this didn’t make Howard Juniper’s plan, as reported by Lord Ailsworth, any less ridiculous. A glance at the map showed that mere distance made nonsense of it. Jumbo Brown’s helicopter would be more than an hour on the job. No man could seriously have proposed such an exploit. Either Juniper had been romancing to Lord Ailsworth or Lord Ailsworth had been romancing to Appleby. And even suppose that Juniper had in fact had command of some much more powerful craft. It was inconceivable that he could have piloted it, undetected, to one of the most elaborately guarded spots on the surface of the earth. And, if detected, his whereabouts wouldn’t be unknown now. On the contrary, Howard Juniper would probably be in gaol. With luck, he might be on bail, with a number of persons quietly keeping an eye on him.
Appleby glanced at Jumbo Brown. The helicopter had every appearance of looking after itself, but it was nevertheless clear that Jumbo’s whole being was concentrated on it. A happy man, Appleby thought. Like riding. It’s second nature, and you’re not thinking about it, and yet you’re putting everything you have into it all the time. Happy Jumbo, for whom every wild-goose chase is another jaunt with his enchanting bride. He never makes a fool of himself. Nothing ever eludes him, since the elusive doesn’t come his way. And therefore he never scowls.
Appleby scowled. What was eluding him now was any rational occasion for having come here. But perhaps he had never had such occasion. Perhaps he was acting on mere instinct – like Jean Howe’s Lemmings. At least, like the Lemmings, he was going straight out to sea. Scotland had virtually cleared off the horizon; had picked up its trailing purple skirts and moved off east. There was nothing to be seen but sea – sea and a few points of leaping white that must mean rock. Round Ardray, he understood, these would be as thick as the hazards on a pin-table. Wulfius must have threaded his way through them with prayer – with that, and a steady hand on the sheet, a steady hand on the tiller.
The sea had turned from green to blue, and then back not to one green but many; from high in the air it was like a strangely veined marble turned molten and seething. Appleby’s stomach told him the helicopter was bumping up and down, and less definable sensations seemed best accounted for on the supposition that every now and then it was caught into a sudden lateral drift. Bright sunshine, the uneasy angry sea, a vicious veering wind. A queer part of the world, Appleby had been told. Ardray, thrusting out of the Atlantic, was like a centre round about which the vast forces of wind and water perpetually revolved. But not itself a still centre. Nature, here wheeling and cornering in some mysterious race, reached out a hand in passing and shook the place.
And there it was – a fantastically corrugated basalt mass, rising sheer out of ocean. It was very possibly beautiful, and certainly it was surprising and majestic. But Appleby stared at it almost resentfully. Like almost everything in this Juniper affair, there was no sense to it. How did lava come to behave like that – right out here in the middle of the Atlantic? No doubt the geologists had thought up some answer, but to the lay imagination the island was a massive enigma – as a battleship would be, say, stranded in the middle of the Sahara. And why come to such a remote and sterile spot for the purpose of carrying on ballistic research? Appleby hadn’t been given the answer to this puzzle either. He knew only that the place had long been famous as a natural curiosity, and that what was specifically curious about it had proved to be unexpectedly useful. ‘You’ll find out when you get there,’ a very important personage had said to him briskly. ‘Murray will show you whatever you want to see. That goes without saying. But I don’t see that it can have anything to do with this confounded Juniper and his bugs.’
Appleby didn’t see it either. He seemed to see it less and less as the helicopter slowed, hovered, and dropped. Admiral Murray would be waiting for him – having received a signal ordering him so to do. But it didn’t follow that it would be with a beaming smile. The man was a scientist. But was said also to be a peppery old sailor who had fought at Jutland. He mightn’t welcome a jumped-up policeman talking nonsense about birds.
There was the slightest of bumps. The rotors died and Jumbo Brown whipped off his helmet. ‘Space-travel completed,’ he said. ‘If my calculations have been correct, it’s the moon.’
It might well have been the moon, Appleby thought. There was no scrap of vegetation; there was nothing but flat bare wind-whipped rock. Only here and there, he noticed, the surface was broken by what appeared to be small craters – a circumstance which naturally accentuated the lunar suggestion which the place already carried. There were several clumps of low concrete buildings, clinging to the rock like desperate barnacles. And from one of these – it was distinguished from the others by flying an ensign – a small party had just set out, apparently to meet the helicopter. There were some men in uniform and some in what appeared to be the white coats of laboratory workers. Those in uniform held caps jammed on their heads. All were leaning against a howling gale.
The conviction strengthened in Appleby that he was unlikely to be popular on Ardray.
But he turned out to have been quite wrong. This was perhaps because he himself liked the Ardray crowd as soon as Admiral Murray had introduced them to him over a glass of sherry. They were a team with a goal in view. One could imagine them as perched on the edge of the Antarctic continent, organizing for an expedition to the Pole. Only theirs was even more complicated as a co-operative task; they represented a higher percentage of technical accomplishment; and there was – Appleby guessed – an element of danger that lasted longer and was more evenly shared. All this produced a slight effect of the brakes being on so far as the expression of personality was concerned. Everybody was being quiet but not too quiet; one could feel the steady concentration that held these people together day after day and week after week in the pursuit of whatever it was that they had agreed to go after.
As he was led away to lunch in private with the Admiral, Appleby ventured to say something of this impression he had received. Murray looked at him keenly and nodded approval. ‘The long count down,’ he said. ‘If I ever write a book about Ardray – which heaven forfend – I shall call it that. But shall we eat before we tackle business? As I don’t have a visitor every day, perhaps you’ll indulge me so far. We try to keep a few tatters of civilized habit about us. It’s the first thing I tell a new boy when he arrives. Don’t only watch your cap. Watch your pants as well. Otherwise the damned gale will have them off you in no time. And, I’m bound to say, I’ve never had to speak to a chap twice yet. They’re a mixed lot, and I don’t know that I’d choose all of them to go round the world with. But they’re doing me a magnificent job. And we have a very decent chef. Uncommonly rare thi
ng in the services nowadays. I’ve put more intrigue into nobbling him than into getting my three Fellows of Trinity and my elderly OM. Care to try his game pie? It will be better in October. But it’s not bad now.’
Eating game pie, Appleby acquiesced readily enough in half an hour’s desultory talk. It was decent of Murray to receive him in this friendly way. ‘Does everything have to come to you by helicopter?’ he asked, when they had finished their meal.
‘Nearly everything does. We do have a harbour of sorts, but it takes some navigating. Nice when you get into it, though – if you can stand the row.’
‘The row?’
‘Like stage thunder. Whole set-up always reminds me of Covent Garden. If you don’t mind being blown about, we’ll go and have a look.’
They left the Admiral’s hut and were at once standing on the bare windswept rock. ‘No hope of raising your own vegetables,’ Appleby said.
‘Decidedly not. Backside of the world, I call it. How does it go? Ever-threatening storms of Chaos blustering round, and so forth. Great poet, Milton – despite his damned bad politics. Mind a ladder, Appleby?’
Appleby intimated that he didn’t mind a ladder. He had been led past two of the queer craters with which the flat surface of the island was pitted, but he hadn’t been invited to inspect them. Instead, he was guided to the eastern extremity of Ardray, where the sheer cliff which everywhere else constituted its perimeter appeared to break down into a narrow cleft. This itself almost immediately became perpendicular, and appeared to have been adapted to serve as something like the shaft of a lift. There was a steam winch with a naval rating guarding it, and from an iron gantry cables disappeared into near-darkness below. So did a narrow iron ladder, clamped into the rock. The Admiral slung an electric torch on a lanyard round his neck, and went down without a word. Appleby, under the friendly but slightly ironical eye of the rating, followed with amateur circumspection.
The torch was needed only during the middle section of the descent. After that there was daylight again – but of a quality so unusual that Appleby judged the comparison with Covent Garden to be quite in order. The cave into which the cleft dropped seemed at first to be a great pillared hall with a floor of green marble. But the floor was water, and the pillars – red and brown and green and gold – were nature’s handiwork alone; massive basalt formations, fantastically hung with seaweed and lichen. Appleby, finding his feet at length on firm rock, looked round at his leisure. The sea, he saw, was in soft perpetual movement up and down. It must be this that was responsible for the sound – as of a vast creature gently breathing – with which the place was filled.
‘The Hermit’s Chapel,’ the Admiral said. ‘You may have seen the same sort of thing on Staffa. Curious, isn’t it?’
Appleby agreed that it was curious. At the same time, he reflected with a faint impatience that it wasn’t as a tourist that he had come to Ardray. The sights were, as they say, well worth a visit. But they didn’t seem to bring him any nearer to Howard Juniper. ‘The hermit,’ he said, ‘being Wulfius?’
‘Certainly. And perfectly historical, you know. Not a doubt about him. Great man. Sailed these seas as if they were a duck pond. There was a move to call our brainchild the Wulfius. But I wouldn’t have it. Inappropriate. Blasphemous, almost. Or in howling bad taste – which is, of course, worse.’
‘Your brainchild? The project you’re all working on?’
‘Yes, yes. I’ll show it to you presently. Glad to have somebody it can be shown to.’
Appleby was still looking round the cave. ‘But you don’t work down here?’
‘Lord, no. But it’s useful. We can get craft in at low tide. On the less stormy days, that is. At other times it would be uninhabitable. Extraordinary effects from compressed air. They deserve study – or would in a sane world. That produces the terrific row I was speaking of. Sorry you can’t hear it.’
‘This is quite striking enough. By the way, what did you decide to call the brainchild?’
The Admiral chuckled. ‘Come and see one or two of them,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll give you three guesses.’
They went back up the ladder. Appleby was glad to see the end of it. ‘Probably,’ he said, ‘I’d need more than three guesses to get at why you’re all here at all. It can’t be just for privacy. And all the transport must make it enormously expensive.’
‘You’re in the target-area – but actually barking up precisely the wrong tree.’ Murray was now striding across the island. ‘Enormously expensive is just what it’s not. The point about Ardray is that Mother Nature has done a big preliminary job for us, absolutely gratis. Just go carefully, will you? Up to the edge and peer over.’
They had reached one of the craters which had been among Appleby’s first observations on the island. It proved to be a natural shaft of not more than eight yards in diameter. It seemed to Appleby not informative. It was a mere pit of blackness.
‘Not in use, this one,’ Murray said. ‘Drop something.’
Appleby found a loose fragment of rock and dropped it. He listened. ‘Good lord!’ he said.
‘Quite a tidy depth – eh? We’ll go on to the next.’
They walked on about twenty paces. The next shaft had a low fence round it. A number of pipes and wires ran up to its lip and disappeared.
‘Air and so on,’ Murray said. ‘Nobody down there now. But we’ve got one of them there. Just take a look.’
Again Appleby peered down. As he did so, Murray stooped and flicked a switch. The black pit was instantly illuminated. At the bottom it was probably a good working light. But from the bright daylight above it gave only an uncertain view.
‘Well, what do you see?’ Murray was whimsically challenging.
‘Nothing very clearly,’ Appleby said. ‘But at least I think I see the idea. It’s this business of getting off rockets from very deep underground, isn’t it? Absolute invulnerability for the launching of thermonuclear jobs?’
Murray nodded soberly. ‘Just that. And here, on Ardray, a devilishly inscrutable providence, Appleby, has provided us with a dozen or more of these infernal pits ready-made – just by way of encouragement.’
‘Mysterious,’ Appleby said drily.
‘Just that. Fortunately, the real problems are left for us to solve. And they’re enormous, as you can imagine. Doing the sums, and all that, keeps us sane. If we are sane, which I sometimes take leave to doubt. But look again, will you? There’s a little fellow down there now.’
Appleby looked again. ‘Yes, I see. But I don’t know I’d call it all that little.’
Murray chuckled. ‘How would you describe it?’
Appleby shook his head. ‘I really can’t make much of it, in this violently foreshortened aspect. But I’d describe it as a dumpy pear-shaped object, with what look like rather ineffective flippers halfway up.’
‘Capital!’ Admiral Murray was delighted. ‘You’ve caught the essence of it very nicely. And that, you know, is why I’ve christened it as I have. Not that “christen” is perhaps the right word. Another piece of confounded blasphemy, come to think of it.’
Appleby turned and stared at his host. He wasn’t going to need three guesses. ‘Would I be right,’ he asked, ‘in supposing that you’ve named the thing after an earlier visitor to this island?’
‘Absolutely right. Brilliant shot, if I may say so. The Great Auk it is.’
‘Well,’ Appleby said when they had returned to the Admiral’s office, ‘at least I know now how this rumour about Garefowl on Ardray got around. Incidentally, the thing would make quite a good study of how rumours augment themselves as they travel. Have you heard the version about the young man who was working for you here, who believed himself to have seen the birds, and who was later killed in an accident?’
Murray shook his head. ‘That’s a new one to me. But I do know that my modest flight of fancy has caused confusion. If I’d just dubbed the thing the Pink Streak or the Grey Crusader or something like that, no excitement woul
d have been caused. But of course the fellows who know about birds wouldn’t be taken in for a moment. Come to think of it, I wish I’d called it the Golden Eagle.’
Appleby laughed. ‘Wouldn’t you have done better still to call it the Dodo?’
‘In the hope that a little rationality in the world might render it obsolete? But the Great Auk carries that idea too.’ Abruptly, Murray dropped this vein of whimsy. ‘Well, now – what have you come about?’
‘About a fellow who may be described as in another branch of your lethal trade, and who has very awkwardly vanished. His name is Howard Juniper.’
Murray sat up straight ‘Vanished! Howard Juniper? I’m most concerned to hear it. I know him quite well.’
‘The dickens you do!’ Appleby sat up in turn. ‘And do you imagine he knows you work here?’
‘Certainly he does. Why, I had dinner with him the last time I was in London. That’s about two months ago.’
‘Did you talk about birds?’
Murray shook his head emphatically. ‘I’m sure we didn’t. Why should we?’
‘Well, it seems that Juniper was interested in them at one time. Do you know that as a young man he went in for extravagant hoaxes, and so on?’
‘I believe I’ve heard of it. But I shouldn’t suppose him to be much by way of that sort of thing now.’
‘Would it surprise you to learn that, shortly after you last met him, he was meditating a plan to make a secret raid on Ardray?’
‘It would.’ For the first time, Admiral Murray spoke a shade testily. He plainly thought the conversation was veering into nonsense.
Appleby caught the note. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to ask all these idiotic-seeming questions. But, I assure you, it’s not for fun. Do you know Lord Ailsworth?’
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