Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Grim did tell. Ten minutes trailed into an hour while he explained, as far as can be done when scientific words have not yet been invented for the purpose. I did not believe him. Neither did McGowan. My mind, while I try to keep it tolerant of other men’s opinions, refuses to take seriously explanations that are not demonstrable by scientific method. For him to say, as he did say, that the Eastern trick consists in emptying the brain of thought in order that it may pick up other thought deliberately broadcast or else latent in the layers of the mass mind, left too much still to be explained. His argument that orators, with nothing in the world to say, can stir men’s minds by stilling thought with trickery of voice and gesture, and then fill them with emotion that induces them to go away and vote in opposition to their better judgment, seemed to me unconvincing.

  But he knew what he wanted to say, and he did his best to say it, in a language that is singularly lacking in appropriate terms.

  “The difficulty is,” he said, “that though we are all being constantly bombarded by a perfect barrage of thoughts from all directions, so that lots of people go mad because they are oversensitive to it, there are very few who are able to train themselves to select the thoughts they wish to think and to reject the others. I believe Dorje’s messages are — to use a stock phrase — thoughts sent on a certain wave-length. Trained brains intercept them.”

  “Is yours trained?” asked McGowan.

  “Partly. I keep thinking of a string of numbers.”

  “So do I,” said Chullunder Ghose.

  “So do I,” said Jeff.

  “Without telling each other, let’s all three write down what we get,” said Grim.

  He, Jeff and Chullunder Ghose wrote on leaves torn from McGowan’s note- book. They passed to me what they had written. I read aloud:

  “4-3-2-9-2-5-9-8-7-1.”

  There were the same figures, in the same order, on each sheet of paper.

  “And Jeff and I are only partially trained,” said Grim.

  “Chullunder Ghose comes by it naturally.”

  “What the devil do the figures mean?” McGowan wondered.

  Grim glanced at the black-clad Chinese butler.

  “They are meant, I think,” he said, “for Bertolini, who could very likely get them but, being blind, could not have looked them up, for instance, in a code-book, if there is one, as I think there must be. Someone loose that fellow’s legs. He has heard our conversation, so we’d better take him with us, or he might talk to the wrong man while our backs are turned. Besides, we need a man who knows to go ahead of us and make sure that the gas has gone out of the tunnel.” He looked straight into the man’s eyes. “If he won’t talk, he shall serve us somehow!”

  CHAPTER 26. “Even Lenin never had the nerve to blow his horn as loud as that!”

  There was no smell or sign of gas in the rock-hewn chamber where we had fought with Bertolini’s gang, but there were five men lying on the floor who had died so instantaneously that their nerves had not had time to make their muscles move and register pain or even a spasmodic struggle. There was a careful autopsy performed on them, and on the dead men in the other cavern, late that evening and not a trace of anything was found that could explain why or how they had died. They were dead; the life was separated from their bodies; that was all that even chemical analysis could answer.

  Nor was there the slightest trace of gas or of any detectable rare element within the tunnel leading downward from the cavern, although later in the day men came and chipped small pieces from the stone and those were crushed and chemically tested. Nobody believed our tale about the gas until a too incredulous laboratory expert opened one of the glass flasks taken from the drawer in the Chinese butler’s room. That expert and his five assistants died so swiftly that the only good they did was to suggest how other unexplained deaths, in many countries, might have happened. There are nine of those flasks remaining for some genius to open, if he dares, and analyse if he can find a way to do it. And there may be others; nobody knows how many gallons of that deadly liquid Dorje sent to different quarters of the globe for the removal of objectionable people. All we do know is that Dorje’s factory is now as lost forever as the secret of the means by which men built the Pyramid, of blocks that weigh eight hundred tons apiece, before even wheels were in regular use or steam and electricity were known. We know no more, comparatively, than the ancients did; their ignorance of what we know was probably not greater than our ignorance of principles they understood. And when a man like Dorje taps a new vein of the infinite resources of the universe, he leaves our ablest scientists as ignorant as cavemen gaping at a radio receiving set.

  Grim was quite sure the Chinaman was Bertolini’s intimate if not his master. He was equally sure, although he had no proof, that Bertolini had a code-book hidden somewhere and that the Chinaman knew where it was. But I don’t think that even Grim with his inductive imagination guessed to what fanatical extremes that Chinaman would go to keep the information from us.

  It was a square hole three feet high, but it formed the opening of a circular descending shaft, thirty or thirty-five feet deep, that had difficult steps cut spiral-wise around it. We had to descend with our bodies pressed close to the wall, while a soldier lay in the square opening overhead and showed the way with an electric torch. The Chinaman seemed used to it. He went down as adroitly as a sailor and reached the bottom several seconds ahead of Grim, who came next and was racing to overtake him.

  But McGowan had brought extra torches and we each had one. At the bottom with our hands free we could use them; so the Chinaman fled down a six-foot tunnel in a glare of white light and he very soon came to a standstill, realizing that he had no chance of hiding from us and that whatever he did we could see him. I believe, too, that he was stiff from being tied; his tendons hurt him. Anyhow, he slowed down, Grim overtook him, and by that time we were hard on Grim’s heels.

  It was partly a natural tunnel, partly hewn; the ancient burrowers had followed a fault in the rock, and wherever they came to pockets they had hewn them into rectangular chambers of all shapes and sizes, so that the passage was irregular and not unlike the Roman catacombs. There were skeletons in some of the chambers, and I paused long enough in the entrance of one large chamber to make sure that several skeletons in there were those of men who died quite recently; the flesh appeared to me to have been removed with acid. In another place there were female skeletons, two of them with long dark hair still clinging to the skulls.

  There was a gap in the floor that we jumped, Grim following the Chinaman and we pursuing Grim. Jeff jumped it like a catapulted hayrick, but Chullunder Ghose seemed as light on his feet as a full balloon, although he came down on the far side awkwardly, slid, and sat down so hard that his belly shook and he dropped his flashlight down the hole. It was switched on, and it fell on something that prevented it from breaking. I turned back to help him. He and I looked down into a cave illuminated by the torch, which lay undamaged on a pile of filthy-looking sacks.

  “Come on,” I said, “we can examine that hole later.”

  “Said the dentist to the man with toothache. Now or never, sahib. You do what you jolly well dam-choose about it!”

  Down he went feet first on to the pile of sacking, ignoring rough steps hewn into the rock wall. I saw him roll off the sacking and vanish. Arguing that Grim was not likely to need me since he had Jeff and McGowan, I followed the babu, landing on the sacking heels first. Dry things cracked under my weight.

  I opened one and a broken skull rolled out of it. The floor was spread a foot deep with the broken bones of human skeletons — not mummies. Nailed to the walls of the cave with iron spikes were parts of other skeletons still held together by dry ligaments that broke and let the bones fall as the babu touched them. Of the hundreds in there, some looked old enough to have been dead for centuries; but I counted ten, on walls and floor, that at the first glance I could swear had marrow in their bones.

  “Look out!” said the babu sudd
enly.

  The Chinaman came sprawling down the hole and landed on hands and knees on the loose mass of ribs and skulls and thigh-bones that concealed the floor. He was up in a second; he rushed me with his head down, clutched my jacket as I dodged him, tore it and then charged Chullunder Ghose. The babu fled.

  “Come on, sahib! I say, come on, dammit!”

  He switched his light out. In another second he was clambering the rough steps.

  “Come on, sahib, for the love of—”

  So I switched my light out too, although I couldn’t see why I should run from a middle-aged Chinaman who was already out of breath as well as stiff from being gagged and tied. I could hear Grim coming, and the others close behind him. My hand touched the babu’s foot. He switched his light on — jumped for the sacking again, taking me with him, and we rolled together off the sacks on to the floor. But he held his torch as if it were a gun and he were fighting. He kept it full on the Chinaman. Grim — Jeff — McGowan crashed on to the sacks. Jeff and the babu spoke together:

  “Doubled on us! Ducked around a Y-shaped passage! Sahib, he has swallowed it! I guessed he did not come down here for nothing! I saw where it came from!”

  I sprang at the Chinaman. So did Grim — Jeff — McGowan. He was gagging. He had swallowed something that stuck in his throat, but he fought like a bear-cat. We held him, and by the light of the babu’s electric torch I tried to force him to disgorge what was choking him. He bit my fingers to the bone. It needed all the strength of Jeff’s two hands to force his jaws apart; and even then, though he was dying of strangulation, he resisted and kept on struggling to swallow something that would not go either way; his will was such that he could overcome the natural instinct to disgorge, even though I used every trick I knew to make him do it.

  I had no instruments. To save the man’s life, if for no other reason, I had to take desperate measures, and whether I killed him or not is something that the Book of Judgment, if there is one, must determine. I got the thing out, and he bled to death. He would have strangled to death, I believe, if I had not done that; and if he had contrived to swallow what I pulled out from his throat he would undoubtedly have died, not quite so quickly but in great pain.

  It was a tube, of such diameter that it was a mystery how he had got it into his throat at all. It was three and a half inches long and made apparently of bronze — at any rate of some copper alloy, very ancient and extremely thin — so thin that at one place where it was broken it had turned up like paper and would certainly have pierced the lining of his stomach, had it ever got that far. It was screwed together in the middle and contained a roll of exceedingly thin, strong paper that had been thumbed and handled so often as to be entirely discolored on the outside. Grim unrolled it, and his fingers trembled.

  It was nearly a yard long, entirely covered on the inside with Tibetan characters, which neither McGowan nor I could read. We held the torches. Grim, Jeff and Chullunder Ghose pored over it, the babu breathing through his nose and almost squealing with excitement.

  “We have him!” he shouted. “We have him!”

  He danced, impiously posturing like Krishna with his flute, whereas he should have danced like Siva. The thighs of a skeleton crashed from the wall to the floor.

  “Symbolic of the end of Dorje! Read it, Jimgrim sahib! Read it! Translate!”

  “What were those numbers?” Grim asked.

  “Four, three, too, nine, two, five, nine, eight, seven, one,” I answered.

  “This,” said Grim, “is all divided into numbered words and sentences. The numbers are not in sequence. There’s a sentence at the bottom, numbered one, that seems to be the signature. It reads ‘I am Dorje the scepter of that which shall be. I am Maitreya. I destroy that I may rebuild. Dorje is my body and Maitreya is my spirit. I am dual and I bring forth the third, which is a new dispensation.’”

  “Hot stuff!” said McGowan. “Even Lenin never had the nerve to blow his horn as loud as that.”

  “But there are lots of number ones,” said Grim, “at least a dozen of ’em. The numbers seem to run from one to nine; and then from one to nine again, and so on. And the words and sentences, except that last one, don’t make sense in the order in which they stand, not even if you read them in the order four, three, two, nine, two, etc.”

  “Omit that last one,” Jeff suggested. “That’s the signature. That leaves nine numbers.”

  “And transpose them!” The babu was dancing again — dancing on skulls and ribs and thigh-bones. “Forty-five from forty-five leaves eight, six, four, one, nine, seven, five, three, two. So we start with the eighth figure. Which would that be?”

  “Three,” Grim answered. “Good — you’re right. It makes sense. Give me a paper and pencil and for God’s sake hold that torch-light steady.” He scribbled. “Wait a minute. There are two twos in the figures we got, and two nines.”

  “All right,” said McGowan, “aren’t there lots of twos and nines on that sheet? Try the first two for the first; the second two down the line for the second; the first nine, and then the second nine — how does it read then?”

  “Give me your notebook.” Using Chullunder Ghose’s broad back for a table, swearing at him irritably when he moved, Grim covered half a dozen pages. “Yes,” he said at last, “we’ve got it. Listen: ‘I find fault. Slay those who moved too soon. Those who escape, betray them to their governments. Continue until I order otherwise to attribute blame for every outbreak and every destruction to whichever social rebels in each country are already most notorious. Continue to excite rebellion against all governments. Double and redouble all precautions concerning shipments of my lightning and my breath of anger (God, what a name for the stuff!) even to the extent if necessary of destroying those who have served their destiny by bringing these to the appointed places. Concentrate on spreading unrest and a feeling of impending cataclysm. Observe greater secrecy. Remember you are only one of many who obey me. My conquest is not hastened by your consulting with one another, which can lead only to confusion. Drink your inspiration from its source, which I am. I am Dorje, the scepter of that which shall be. I am Maitreya. I destroy that I may rebuild. Dorje is my body and Maitreya is my spirit. I am dual and I bring forth the third, which is a new dispensation!”

  “General orders!” said McGowan. “Hot and heavy! Got to hand it to him! How about those figures in the daily paper?”

  “What was the date? The twenty-ninth?” Grim asked. “We can’t read those, then, till we get a Bible.”

  The babu yelped excitedly. “Am three in one! Am most observant babu in the universe; am champion long-distance heavy-weight deductionist from Kanchenjunga to Peru; am humble servant. All three! Just a minute. I saw where Celestial sword-swallower of Dorje’s predigested pilot-book abducted same! I bet you! I bet everybody. Pounds Egyptian fifty! Who bets? Wait a minute?”

  He began to burrow among bones that almost filled the opening of a six-foot cavity in the middle of the end wall, tossing jaws and ribs and thigh-bones to the floor like a terrier enlarging a rat-hole.

  “Torches! Torches! Why does no one bet me?”

  He dragged forth an armful of bones and we flooded the hole in the wall with white light.

  “There you are! I said so! Why should something so important that a Chinese swallows it be hidden here, and not lots of other improbable things? Law of improbability is only mystery that always functions! Is it likely? No. Then seek and ye shall find it! Look, I tell you!”

  One would have thought he had found Dorje himself, so jubilant he was. However, what he found was all we needed at the moment — a big Bible, a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and two volumes of McLaughlin, along with a set of work-sheets done in pencil giving sets of figures evidently meant for insertion in the agony columns of newspapers all over the world. There was even a list of newspapers, including more than fifty in the U.S.A.

  McGowan read off the figures from the Cairene daily paper. Chullunder Ghose transposed them, usi
ng the order 8, 6, 4, 1, 9 ,7, 5, 3, 2; 8 becoming 1, 6 becoming 2, and so on. Grim decoded, turning from page to page of the Bible and jotting down the indicated words. The first number preceding a hyphen were page numbers, the next gave the line on the page, and the next gave the word. The message read:

  “Men of Egypt, laugh if they say these calamities are caused by this or that. Know ye they are the deeds of him ye look for who shall rule all peoples from his high place. Therefore let each of you according to his own ability strive to bring your rulers into despair and contempt. Pay no taxes. Lend not to your rulers. Obey no laws of their making. Cause the wheels to cease turning. Answer no man. And beware ye of rash speech with one another. I am that I am.”

  “That smells a bit of Bertolini — lacks the Nelson touch,” said Grim. “However, now we’re all set.”

  I suggested that such messages were hardly likely to accomplish much in civilized countries, but McGowan snorted:

  “Have you forgotten our war-time propaganda? Was there ever anything less credible than that? And who didn’t believe it? Why, even our own propagandists did!”

  “Sink a few more battleships,” said Jeff.

  “Blow up a few more arsenals,” said Grim.

  Chullunder Ghose almost shouted. He was screeching with excitement:

  “Smash a bottle of that liquid in the House of Commons — in the House of Representatives in Washington — in the French Chamber of Deputies — in the Berlin Reichstag — kill off all the politicians! And no trace of how it happened! Dorje might turn out to be a godsend after all! Am not yet convert to cause of Dorje, but I feel premonitory symptoms! If he would also guarantee to kill wife of this bosom — but that is too much to imagine!”

  “We can stop him now,” said McGowan. “We’ll have his code copied at once, and that roll translated. We’ll distribute copies to every secret service in the world. It should be easy to track down the men who insert the advertisements. They’ll squeal on the others. Then what?”