Operation Pax (5 page)

Routh prowled his prison in a fury, convinced that just beyond its walls lay spread the power and the glory – an absolute command of wealth, and hence of all the kingdoms of the earth. Had he encountered Deilos again at this moment, the creature would certainly have taken him for a dangerous beast of prey.

He placed the stool on the bench, and from the shaky perch thus constituted he examined the skylight. Some of the panes opened outwards and upwards for ventilation. But the whole thing was securely barred and meshed. He went round the walls and cupboards, tapping and scratching; nothing appeared to give the slightest hope of escape. The innumerable bottles on the shelves fascinated and alarmed him. His ideas on chemistry were vague. He believed that if he mixed enough of these stuffs together on the floor there would certainly be an explosion that would blow the roof off. But what would be the good of that if he were himself maimed, blinded, perhaps killed? There seemed no resource but the poor one of making a row. That might frighten them so that they would turn him out. And then perhaps he could put some screw on them from safety.

Routh approached the single door of the laboratory, having now in his head no more than this inglorious notion of thumping on it. But as his eyes fell on the keyhole he stopped and stared. The thing was almost incredible. But there could be little doubt that behind that keyhole lay no more than a very common lock indeed.

From his earliest years Routh had been an amateur of keyholes. They constituted perhaps his nearest approach to a disinterested love of knowledge. And it so happened that this interest had broadened itself with the years. A keyhole had become for Routh not merely something to peer through or listen at; it had become something to fiddle with. And this substantial process of sublimation seemed likely to stand him in good stead now. Frequently he had beguiled the tedium of lonely nights in cheap lodgings by teaching himself, on the strength of such professional hints as he had picked up from inebriated cracksmen, to pick the simple locks that such accommodation commonly provided. And with such a lock, strangely enough, he was confronted now. He could confidently look forward to being on the farther side of it within ten minutes.

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.

‘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.