Routh fished from his pocket an innocent-seeming twist of wire. As he made his first exploratory thrust at the keyhole he felt the blood course more warmly in his veins. Reason would have told him that only the most slender of advantages was opening before him, and that in this inexplicable establishment he was likely to remain as helpless a puppet on one side of a door as another. But with the sense of power that had again leapt up in him reason had very little to do. The Tables Turned. Routh Hits Back. The theory which he had formed as to the nature of Squire’s racket had stirred in him feelings that were avidly acquisitive and predatory. The treatment to which he had been subjected had filled him with malignity. Now his head was swimming slightly with the sensation of fresh scope given to these emotions. But his hand remained so steady that only a few minutes passed before he was standing, tense and listening, in the long empty corridor.
Close on the right, three steps led to a higher level. Much farther away on the left, several steps made an answering descent. He remembered the appearance of this long annex from the outside – how it dipped down as by several shallow flights to the level of the little lake. So the house lay on his right, while on his left the building ended in the odd covered bridge leading to the ornamental building on the island. Routh took a gulp of air, swung left, and walked rapidly and noiselessly forward.
Most of the doors leading off the corridor were open. But at this in itself he felt no alarm, since he was intuitively certain that at this hour the whole place was empty. Pausing to reconnoitre, he discovered that this long wing was given over to a series of laboratories, for the most part intercommunicating, and the majority being considerably larger than that in which he had been imprisoned. It occurred to him that there was more opportunity in these than in the corridor to lurk or dodge if anyone did, in fact, appear. He therefore made his way forward as much as possible by this route.
What he saw he saw only vaguely, since he was without a basis of technical knowledge to sharpen his observation. In one room the benches were crowded with complex units of glass utensils and rubber tubing and little bright sheets of metal connected by innumerable wires; these, articulated into a skeleton by sundry steel rods and clamps and brackets, had to his view the appearance of grotesque automata designed in mockery of living things. Another room looked like his idea of a telephone exchange. A third was given over to what seemed a huge pin-table – the kind on which valves light up and the score is progressively shouted at you as the meandering balls make and break one electrical circuit after another.
Routh had only such popular analogies upon which to draw. It was the more to the credit of his underlying astuteness, therefore, that a purely intellectual conclusion presently forced itself upon him. At a first blush these large evidences of scientific effort appeared abundantly to confirm him in the persuasion to which he had recently come – namely, that here were the people by whom the five-pound notes are made. But now a sense not only of the scale but of the variousness and elaboration of what lay around him suggested that even this impressive conclusion was inadequate. Or, if Squire indeed made the five-pound notes, he had some deeper and more grandiosely scientific plot or project in hand as well.
Routh’s mind had just halted baffled before this conception when he became aware of voices somewhere ahead of him.
9
‘I tell you he’s no more than a little rat of a deserter living on his wits.’
Routh stopped dead. He recognized the tones of the detestable Squire.
‘Very probably. But it’s dangerous and unnecessary, all the same. This is something far too big to have you acting on these sudden impulses. What do you suppose the Director will say to such a story?’
‘He ought to be damned grateful – and so should you. You know that I’ve brought in capital subjects before this.’
The voices were coming from behind the closed door of what Routh guessed must be one of the last rooms in the building. They were heard the more clearly because this door too had a keyhole. Routh’s ear was pressed to it.
‘And – what’s more – you seem to be in an uncommonly foul temper.’
It was again Squire’s voice. And Squire’s voice had gone sulky. In a flash it came to Routh that Squire was by no means the boss of this mysterious place. He was talking now to somebody with whom he was on no more than equal terms – if even that. And they both had above them somebody called the Director. The word conjured up a vague image of striped trousers, a gold watch-chain, a silk hat.
‘I’m certainly not feeling any too sweet. And in a moment I’ll tell you why.’ It was now the other man who was speaking – and his voice, Routh realized, was far more coldly formidable than Squire’s could ever be. ‘But first let me tell you this. We just can’t afford the risk of people disappearing on our doorstep.’
‘But you’d find him, I tell you, so devilish suitable. A craven little brute capable of moments of real fury. You’ve often said–’
‘Never mind what I’ve often said. If I’ve said anything at all to you, the more fool I’ve been.’ There was sharp anger in the second man’s accent. ‘And now go and turf the fellow out. He hasn’t seen anything, I suppose?’
‘Nothing at all. Or only poor old Deilos. I couldn’t resist having a bit of fun–’
‘I lose all patience with you, Squire. Something extremely serious has happened. And now you come in with this distracting nonsense. What have you done with the fellow?’
‘Locked him up in number eight. Blue with funk. You can have him when you want him.’
‘I don’t want him. But no more do I want him going out and gossiping about what goes on here. Will nothing make you realize what we’re on the verge of? Power such has never been wielded on this earth before. All the gold of the Incas wouldn’t buy a tithe of it. And all that you–’
Routh started so violently that he hit his head on the doorknob and lost the conclusion of the unseen speaker’s sentence. The astounding conclusion towards which his mind had already been unconsciously moving had flashed upon him in an instant. Alchemists don’t make five-pound notes. Alchemists make gold.
All the gold of the Incas… Routh had read about them – a vanished folk in America whose very fish kettles and chamber pots had been wrought out of solid gold. And the alchemists had wanted that sort of wealth. They had messed about, pretty well blindly, with chemicals and crucibles, hoping to make something they called the philosopher’s stone – a substance that would turn to pure gold a million times its own weight of base metal. And now these people, substituting science for magic, were on the verge of doing just that…
Routh again pressed his ear to the keyhole. The missing of a single sentence, he felt, might be fatal to his own power to exploit the terrific possibilities now opening before him.
‘Look here, Squire – you may as well know just how the matter stands. The stuff has gone inert again. I’m completely held up.’
A low whistle conveyed the invisible Squire’s first reaction to this announcement. ‘That’s bad,’ he said – and Routh thought that he heard malice in his former captor’s voice. ‘The Director won’t like it at all.’
‘It’s not in the least out of the way, and the Director understands perfectly. I have command of almost nothing, you know, in a pure form. The position is just as it is with those growth-inhibiting stuffs they play about with. You, Squire, wouldn’t make head nor tail of it in technical terms. But put it like this. Put it that you have a host of human beings, some tiny percentage of which constitutes a superbly efficient military force that you are concerned to cherish. All the rest are tiresome and irrelevant camp-followers who can never be the slightest use to you. And you don’t yourself know which are which.’
A snort from Squire interrupted this exposition. ‘It sounds damned nonsense to me.’
‘It is damned nonsense, Squire. Unfortunately it is Nature’s damned nonsense, not mine. Well, now – every now and then one of the camp followers does something quite idiotic –
stands on his head, say, or turns a somersault. And at that the morale of your unknown army mysteriously collapses and nearly all your work has to be done over again. My particular sort of chemistry has some very grand names, you know. But that is what you might call the low-down on it. And the present upshot of it is that tomorrow I go back to Formula Ten.’
There was a moment’s silence during which it occurred to Routh to substitute an eye for an ear. What immediately became visible through the keyhole was not difficult to interpret. Near at hand a blurred but familiar form represented one of the oddly high and square shoulders of the man Squire. In the background was a green baize door in a wall lined with books. And in the middle distance was part of the polished surface of a table or desk. On this there was nothing to be seen except a pair of hands issuing from the sleeves of a white coat – fine hands, powerful and with long square fingers exquisitely cared for.
‘So you see that I have singularly little use for your tramp, my dear Squire. Formula Ten, I assure you, will occupy me very sufficiently for the next few weeks… By the way, here it is.’
For a moment one of the hands on the desk flicked out of Routh’s field of vision. Then it was back again, immobile as before. But now between the two hands there lay what looked like a single folded sheet of quarto paper. The effect of this appearance was startling. Squire’s shoulder disappeared. Squire’s voice rose in something like a surprised and horrified yelp. The owner of the hands answered this with a low laugh. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Here it is.’
‘But you’ve no business to have it out like that. It’s outrageous! If the Director…’
‘The Director has some very odd ways, I admit. This, I really believe, is the only existing copy of Formula Ten. It is unique – and the basis of the whole effort. How lucky we are to have it! It was got out of Hendrik, I have been told, just before be succumbed to the persuasions that were unfortunately found necessary in his case. Am I right?’
‘I know nothing about it.’ Squire’s voice was suddenly husky.
‘Don’t you? Then how much you must regret not having been present, my dear Squire, on an occasion so much in your line. But – as I say – we were lucky to get what we did. One knows people here and there about the world who would give millions for this, does one not? Or even – come to think of it – a kingdom? No wonder the Director will have it out only under circumstances of the most portentous security. I enter into your horror and dismay, my dear chap. But when I need Formula Ten I fetch it out and mention the fact afterwards.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘That reminds me. No more do I like your friend the tramp. I don’t like his being brought here, and I don’t know that I like his going away from here either. I think he had better be killed at once and the body incinerated. See to it, Squire, will you?’
It is difficult to hear something of this sort said about oneself and not suppose, for some moments at least, that one is simply listening to a rather tasteless joke. Had the full force of the words broken upon Routh at once he would undoubtedly have taken to his heels and run. As it was, he remained, misdoubting and stupefied, during the few seconds in which flight might have availed him. His eye was actually still at the keyhole when that orifice was obscured by what was patently the bulk of Squire advancing to open the door. And Squire, it seemed, was now to be simply his, Routh’s, executioner!
That men so wicked as these could exist was at once incredible and most horribly plausible. And Routh realized that to be found crouching here would be fatal. It was not merely that the secrets he would be presumed to have overheard must absolutely seal his fate. It was also that in such a situation a passive role is fatal; that to turn the tables upon fortune at such a juncture only action will remotely serve… Routh opened the door before him and marched into the room.
Squire fell back with an exclamation. Squire’s companion, seated still at his desk, quite feebly echoed it. Routh had undeniably caught his adversaries off balance. The sense of this enabled him to nod briskly at the seated man and to wave Squire casually back. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
The words came out with nothing of the anxious calculation that had marked his attempt at a similar greeting in the bank that morning. Had he not always known he would carry the big moment when it came? Routh glanced round the room with the easy command of an important person; with the sort of glance that makes enormous leather armchairs propel themselves forward, corks pop, syphons spurt, cigar boxes fly open. ‘Director not here?’ he asked briskly. ‘It’s really with him that I’d better have a word.’
Squire and his companion glanced at each other. At length the seated man spoke. ‘I don’t know you from Adam,’ he said. ‘And apparently you don’t know me. I am the Director.’
Routh again gave an assured glance round him. The room went some way to substantiate this false claim. The furniture was handsome, and all round the walls were the sort of heavily tooled books you see in expensive shop windows in the West End. Over the fireplace was a high-class dirty picture: a lot of naked women lolloping around a pool. Underneath this a bright fire burned in an open grate. Routh walked across to it and warmed his hands. ‘Nice place you have here,’ he said. ‘Plenty of books. Nice picture.’
‘I fear I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance.’ Squire’s companion was a small man with a high domed forehead and almost no hair. His fine hands still lay passively before him. The rest of him was insignificant and even meagre, as if his body had no other function than that of providing a line of communication between that big brain and those long and powerful fingers. He had bleak grey eyes which he now turned from Routh to Squire. ‘Presumably this is the gentleman whom you supposed that you had – um – accommodated in number eight?’
‘Of course it is.’ Squire, who had still by no means recovered his self-possession, stared at his late prisoner with mingled bewilderment and malice. ‘But I can’t think how he managed–’
‘We learn that sort of thing very early in my crowd.’ Routh put both hands in his trouser pockets and chinked the few coins in the one without a hole in it. ‘But you had no idea of that, had you, Squire?’
‘Your crowd?’ The white-coated man spoke sharply, and as he did so swung round upon Squire. ‘Did I understand you to say that your encounter with this fellow was a perfectly casual one?’
Before Squire could reply, Routh laughed harshly. ‘So your poor friend believed,’ he said. ‘Mind you, there’s an excuse for him. The idea of attacking the girl and then hanging round until somebody appeared – well, it wasn’t too bad, was it? Squire was convinced he had me where he wanted me. And so in I came. Not my own notion, I must confess. Quite a junior colleague’s, as it happens.’
On the mantelpiece behind Routh’s head, and just below the dirty picture, a clock was ticking softly. At any moment, he realized, it might begin to affect him as had the clock in the bank that morning; it might begin to pound like a hammer inside his head. And if his nerve went he was done for. For certainly the ice on which he was now skating was paper-thin. That he had fooled Squire from the start was a notion that might now take in Squire himself. But could it conceivably take in this other fellow? Only – Routh saw – if it attracted the other fellow. If this egg-headed scientist disliked Squire enough to be willing to see him in a mug’s role, then any cock-and-bull story having that effect might convince him for a while. The thing to do, then, was to make Squire look a perfect fool.
‘Poor old Squire! Has he told you about my father in the asylum and my mother gone off to New Zealand? It would have made a cat laugh, the way it all took him in. Thought he was getting a waif and stray to keep under his thumb at some of your dirtiest work here. And all the time he was getting us.’
The clock was still behaving normally behind him. Squire was flushed and his shoulders had gone even more unnaturally high and square. The other fellow rose from his desk and walked away from it. ‘Haven’t you,’ he asked, ‘taken on rather a dangerous mission? The coll
eagues you speak of must be uncommonly obliged to you. It’s a pity’ – and with sudden dangerous sweetness the egg-headed man smiled – ‘that they won’t be in a position even to send a wreath.’
Once more Routh contrived a convincing laugh. ‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘it’s your friend Squire here that’s about due for a wreath. If he were with our crowd he’d have been taken for a ride long ago. But as for me – well, naturally I’ve taken my precautions.’
‘It’s damned nonsense.’ Squire had taken a stride forward. ‘The little rat’s bluffing. He’s simply making fools of us.’
‘It may be nonsense. But it’s a sort of nonsense that requires getting to the bottom of.’ Egg-Head turned his eyes slowly on Routh. ‘You have a crowd,’ he said. ‘You have colleagues. You have come here by design. You have taken precautions to ensure your personal safety. If there is any sense in all this, I am quite ready to hear it.’ He turned with a sudden flash of temper upon Squire. ‘And as this whole piece of folly is your responsibility, you had better do so too.’
‘I tell you, it’s all–’
‘Be quiet and hear the fellow out… Now then, what do you mean by your crowd?’
‘I mean a crowd that knows about your crowd. All that science stuff.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the long line of laboratories he had shortly before traversed. ‘We know what it’s about. We know what you’re making. Valuable stuff, I’d call it. We think it needs protection. And that you need protection too.’
‘Expensive protection, no doubt?’
‘You mayn’t like the bill, I agree. But it’s probably very much in your interest to pay up, all the same.’
‘I see.’ The meagre man in the white coat again gave his disturbingly sweet smile. ‘But suppose we are not interested? And suppose we are minded to give these precious colleagues of yours a little practical demonstration that they rather need protection on their own account? If they exist – which is something I am by no means convinced of – we can certainly make you tell us where to find them. We could then return you to them – or return some significant part of you – just as an indication that we are not minded to do business with them. Don’t you agree with me?’
Operation Pax Page 4
