The World's End Affair

by Robert Hart Davis

  As Solo lurched to his feet, General Weng struggled to pull out a pistol. The gunman was up again too, aiming at Solo from behind. Solo spun and flung his useless gun.

  It smacked the agent's nose. Solo had a split second to find another weapon.

  He saw one, its point embedded in the top of a crude fisherman's bench. Solo's water-slicked hand closed around the haft of the scaling knife. He jerked it loose. The agent fired.

  Solo tried to dodge. The bullet slammed into his left shoulder. But his right hand was already swinging in a killing aim. The serrated edge of the knife grazed the agent's throat like a caress. The man shrieked as blood flowed down over his lapels from the fatal slash in his neck.

  Solo caught the gunman's pistol as it fell from slack fingers. General Weng was breathing in asthmatic panic. His cheeks gleamed with sweat and his eyes with murder. He had gotten his gun out. He chattered lurid obscenities as he fired.

  His bullet took Solo hard in the left thigh. Blood soaked Solo's trousers instantly. His leg throbbed and weakened to the point where he could not stand. He felt the leg collapsing under him as he triggered the shot that caught Weng in the breastbone.

  With an elephantine bay Weng fell over backwards, his shirt red. Solo lay on the slick deck, panting. His whole left pants leg was soggy with blood.

  Weng propped himself on hands and knees. He aimed his pistol at Solo while his eyes wedged down into tiny pain-wracked slits. Solo flopped over on his belly. He braced his right forearm with his left hand to steady his aim. He centered the muzzle on the middle of Weng's forehead.

  Thunder crashed in the sky. Another wave hit the junk's hull and sloshed under the edge of the tarpaulin. Most of the coals in the charcoal brazier were extinguished by the spray. A few still flickered but the interior of the tarpaulin shelter was dim. Random spots of light illuminated Weng's pained face. The adversaries held each other at gunpoint.

  "Standoff, Mr. Solo," Weng wheezed. "Though perhaps I will get the better of it yet."

  Muzzle to muzzle, the men lay on the deck as the storm roared. Solo's lips peeled back from his teeth. "Turn off the switch, General. Turn it off unless you want one more bullet in your fat hide."

  Weng gasped for air. A spasm, of pain shuddered his blubber. "I can kill you while you kill me, Mr. Solo."

  "Very true," Solo panted. The pain in his left leg was maddening. He felt dizzy. "But you aren't really sure whether that bullet in your chest has already put a period after everything, are you? Maybe you want to take a chance. Maybe - you want to find out whether a police surgeon can patch you up. You kill me and I kill you and neither of us finds out. That's the way the hand looks to me, General." Solo bit his lower lip as his leg flamed with heat and hurt. "I said turn off the switch, General."

  At last Weng coughed, "Yes. Yes. The will to live remains. You win."

  With one hand he threw his gun across the shelter. It fell sloshing in water. With his other hand he flicked the switch on the belt. Solo let the muzzle of his own gun drop. He pushed himself up to his feet.

  General Weng struggled and heaved, managing to sit up with his back resting against one of the tarpaulin supports. He lifted the blood-soaked lapel of his suit, felt gingerly beneath it. His paunch heaved slowly. Weng's face became crafty.

  "I still maintain, Mr. Solo, that U.N.C.L.E. personnel are naive. Step around here on my side of the generator box, please. Fine. I trust that you can see the stenciling on the box? Can you also recognize the language?"

  Beneath his feet, Solo could feel the deck heaving less violently. The thunder was less ear-splitting than before. He bent to examine the white stenciling. He stood up again, one hand braced on the generator so that he wouldn't fall.

  "The stencil identifies the generator as the property of one of the governments meeting at the Hotel International. That's exactly according to your plan. But when U.N.C.L.E. turns the generator over to the proper authorities, your little flim-flam will be exposed. I'm afraid all that blood you've lost has weakened your logic, General."

  "Not at all, not - at all." Weng coughed. "You see, Mr. Solo, we return to the subject of naiveté. You believe you have convinced me that I have a remote chance to survive the impact of your bullet. I am more realistic. I am dying. However -"

  With incredible speed Weng's fat yellow hand jerked out from beneath his black-bloody lapel. He cracked a football-shaped plastic capsule with his thumbnail. Sparks and smoke boiled. Weng tossed the capsule onto the deck. Blinding white tongues of flame leaped from it.

  "That thermal device, Mr. Solo, will destroy the junk, water-soaked as she is. It will destroy my corpse along with yours. But the metallurgical materials incorporated into this belt and the generating unit, the tremendous heat will not harm them. The components will be found, their stencils intact. THRUSH will achieve its goal of touching off an armed conflict, even though you and I are not present to witness it."

  Weng cocked his sweat-shining head. "Listen, Mr. Solo. The rain has diminished. It will soon stop altogether. But the storm has just begun."

  Solo snatched up a bucket lying beside the fisherman's bench, filled it with some of the water sloshing over the deck, flung the water on the fire. The white, sparking mass was barely affected. The soaked tarpaulin caught. White fire-tendrils raced upward. Solo dove to fill another bucket.

  A huge hole appeared in the top of the tarpaulin. The smoky-white flames ate their way to the mast and began to climb higher. As Solo flung the second bucket, everything blurred. His left leg was giving out.

  The decking was afire. General Weng's trousers were afire. The fisherman's bench was afire. But the generator remained untouched, unharmed. Solo fell again. This time he couldn't rise. His leg and shoulder wounds combined to make him helpless.

  The white fire boiled around him. Its heat made his skin crawl.

  "Farewell, Mr. Solo," General Weng said through the smoke. His eyelids were nearly closed, life nearly gone from his body. "I would suggest that we exchange greetings—in hell - except for the fact that I - shall not be joining you there. Hell is - reserved for failures. I have – succeeded -" With a vast shudder of his paunch, Weng died.

  Solo lay blinded with pain on the deck. His right pants leg was sending up shoots of smoke. He had to save himself to tell the true story of the storm generator. With almost his last remnant of strength, he took the deadly belt and managed to put it on.

  The junk was burning like matchwood. All around, the white brilliance leaped and crackled. Solo knew it was the windup. "Weng was right. THRUSH would achieve its malevolent ends after all.

  Dazed, he fortunately remembered the THRUSH pistol which he still held in his right hand. He gaped at it a moment. He groaned in pain as he flopped over on his stomach, aimed below the waterline and emptied the pistol into the hull.

  A bit of orange peel floated in through the small hole his clustered shots had opened. Some of the fire fizzled out. Solo began pummeling at the edges of the hole. In a minute he had made an opening the size of his fist. More water poured in.

  The junk began to list. Water rolled over the gunwale. The junk was sinking.

  Solo paddled from beneath the edge of the burned tarpaulin, using one leg and one arm. He managed to reach the mooring line of a nearby sampan. He got the line around his waist so that he would not sink.

  The junk disappeared from view, carrying the storm generator and Weng's corpse to the bottom of the harbor.

  Thus tethered, semi-helpless, yet somehow alive and conscious, it was as though little incidents, usually unnoticed, came into sharper, more vivid focus.

  Solo saw a head emerge from over the taffrail of a crazily bobbing sampan, not twenty feet away. A saffron face, mouth open in surprise, looked solemnly into his, rolled its eyes in abject terror, and disappeared.

  Half delirious, Solo laughed. "Can't blame the silly fellow," he said to the empty waves. "I really am not at my best. Lucky Bernice can't see me now."

  For some reason, the idea
seemed very funny to him. Bernice, who shuddered with distaste if a single lock of her auburn hair got out of place!

  As if to bring him back to the unpleasant present, a large and fragrant bit of offal floated past his face.

  High above him, in the city itself, he could see that a large cornice on the roof of the Continental had torn loose and was hanging and was swinging precariously over the street. One of the new apartment projects was afire. Through the smoke, as though framed in some nightmare, he saw a man, pajama coat flapping in the wind, poise on an upper windowsill and jump, turning slowly end over end as he plummeted down.

  The end of some poor devil. He wondered what the fellow was thinking as he saw his end rushing up to meet him. Probably nothing. For a man to do the Dutch act, forces stronger than conscious thought would have torn his brain away from any semblance of reality, so that fear retreated, and nothing remained but the dreadful certainty of the thing that he must do.

  Someone was groaning softly. With a shrug of distaste, Solo realized that it was he who was making the noise.

  He grinned bleakly up at the storm-tossed sky.

  Waverly had always said that he, Solo, had a bit of madness in him.

  This would make the old devil suck on his pipe and nod, all right.

  Then, so gradually that he was not even aware of it, conscious thought went away, and only half dreams remained. Finally those too went away…

  A harbor patrol boat discovered him bobbing unconscious among the orange peels an hour later.

  Three

  String music filled the candlelit room. The room was intimate, paneled in wine velvet. A rich curtain of the same material isolated. it from the remainder of the restaurant. Across the stubs of the candles which had burned down during the meal, Illya Kuryakin took Mei's hand.

  "It's been a delight to dine with you, my dear." Illya kissed her hand in his best continental manner. "Especially here in Hong Kong, with the city relatively intact, the generator recovered by U.N.C.L.E., and those two antagonistic countries back to the conference table. I must say you look radiant."

  "Only because you have been kind enough to show me so many new and wonderful things these last few days," Mei said.

  A remarkable change had come over the Tibetan girl. She had adopted a Western wardrobe. Her lustrous dark hair was done up in the latest bouffant style. She looked quite sophisticated and gorgeous. Rather maliciously, Illya decided he was glad Napoleon was still confined to the hospital.

  Mei sipped the last of her wine. She glanced at him warmly. "I never believed we would live through it all. You showed such amazing courage."

  "Well," Illya said, "I hate to sound stuffy about it, but it is nice of you to admit that someone else besides my dear friend Na -"

  The curtains whooshed back. Dapperly dressed, Napoleon Solo grinned down at them.

  "Someone mention my name?"

  He walked with a slight limp, hut his arm was out of the cast. He whipped the curtains together behind him and pulled a chair over.

  "That doctor is a gentleman. He didn't want to release me yet. But when I told him I wouldn't miss this party for the world, he listened to reason. Well, here we are, the three of us again. Mei, you're ravishing." He patted her arm.

  The girl's eyes glowed. Illya raised his napkin to hide a dyspeptic expression.

  Solo rubbed his hands together. "What's on the menu? I'm starved. I would have been here sooner -"He reached for the wine bottle "- but it's raining outside. From natural causes, I'm happy to report."

  Solo stopped in the act of pouring. "You know, I completely forgot. Mr. Waverly signaled the hospital to see if I knew where you were. He wants to talk to you right away. I think it'd be better if you stepped outside. Sometimes the communicator does make a lot of noise."

  Jaw rigid, Illya rose. "Very well. But I'll be back."

  "No need to hurry."

  Solo turned to Mei and looked deep into her eyes. She seemed mesmerized.

  "Mei," he said, "listen to a great idea. I have a few weeks' vacation due, the wounds and all, and I was wondering whether we could use that time to get you ready for a beauty contest coming up in the States. I think you'd be sensational as Miss Free Tibet -"

  The curtain rings gave an angry clatter as Illya Kuryakin left. Napoleon Solo kept right on talking.