Rick Brant 8 The Caves of Fear

by John Blaine

  Staying on the shore path, he walked slowly toward the back of the island and presently came out at the tidal flats. The tide was out, leaving the rocks exposed. He sat down at the edge of the low bluff above the flats and stared into the patches of water.

  It was a hard job, trying to recall every detail of his friendship with the little Hindu boy, but he tried. It had started in Bombay when Rick and Scotty were on their way to Tibet with Weiss and Zircon to set up the radar relay station for message transmission via the moon. When their equipment was stolen, it was Chahda who took the lead in finding it again. They had been amused by the beggar boy who had educated himself with an old copy of The World Almanac. His ability to quote anything from the “Alm-in-ack,” as he called it, in English that was sometimes pretty funny, was really astonishing. Then, at the Lost City, he had more than proved his courage and loyalty, and the Spindrifters had sponsored his visit to America as a reward.

  For a while Chahda had attended school in America, then he had gone to the Pacific with the Spindrift expedition to Kwangara Island. After salvaging the remains of an ancient temple from one hundred fathoms of water-not to mention the treasure that was found- the Spindrifters had returned home. But Chahda had elected to remain in Hawaii with Professor Warren of the Pacific Ethnographic Society. Later, he had gone with the Warren scientific expedition to the South Seas, and Barby, Rick, and Scotty had joined the party u? New Caledonia. After completing part of the expedition’s work, the trawler Tarpon had returned to New Caledonia where the young people had solved the mystery of The Phantom Shark. When the three Spindrifters returned home, Chahda had taken air passage to Bombay to see his family.

  “I can’t remember all we talked about,” Rick muttered to himself. “We talked about everything and anything. Except codes. I can’t remember that we ever talked about codes.”

  He got up, noticing that the crew of builders were in their barge, returning to the mainland for the night. They were trucking materials to a point on the shore near Spindrift, using an old wood road, then taking the stuff the rest of the way by barge.

  It was getting on to dinnertime. He took the woods path back, passing by the new cottages. They were nearing completion, the outsides already finished. Beyond the cottages was the farm run by the Huggins family. Mr. Huggins was just herding the island’s milk cows into the barn for milking.

  Rick kicked at a near-by tree. “Either I’m dumb or it isn’t as simple as we think it ought to be,” he said aloud, then went on into the house.

  Scotty and Barby had done no better. They gathered at the family table with long faces and Barby placed the disturbing cable in the middle of the table as a centerpiece.

  “If we look at it long enough, maybe we’ll get inspiration,” she said.

  Professor Julius Weiss, the only one of the three staff scientists who was at home at the moment, picked up the cable and examined it.

  “A cipher, eh?” He adjusted his glasses. “It certainly looks complicated.”

  “Any ideas?” Rick asked hopefully.

  The little mathematician shook his head. “No, Rick. I could give you the cube root of the square of the sum of the numbers, or anything like that, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t even know how to start breaking the code.” He added, “John probably could. He had some experience with codes while in the Navy, I believe.”

  John was Professor John Gordon. He was on an extended trip to New Mexico, serving as a consultant to the Navy’s guided missiles projects. The third scientist, Professor Hobart Zircon, was giving a five-week series of lectures in nuclear physics at Yale.

  “I’m afraid Professor Gordon is too far away to help us on this,” Rick said.

  Mrs. Brant came in, bringing a heavily laden dish of fresh corn on the cob. Behind her trotted a shaggy little dog.

  Rick snapped his fingers. “Here, Diz.”

  Dismal ran over and barked at his young master, then he rolled over on his back and played dead, his only trick. Rick grinned. “Did you bring him along as an adviser, Mom? I’ll bet he’d be as good at solving this as any of us.”

  Mrs. Brant smiled. “From what your father told me, I think he might at that. But why all the long faces? I think it’s exciting getting a code message from Chahda. Why, this is the first time we’ve had a code problem on the island since the moon rocket.”

  Mrs. Brant couldn’t have caused a more sudden reaction had she tossed a lighted firecracker into the middle of the roast.

  Barby knocked over her water glass.

  Scotty gasped, “Great grasshoppers! A book code!”

  .Rick strangled on a sip of milk, and when he could get his breath again, he ran around the table to his mother, kissed her soundly and lifted her hand high in token of victory. “The new champ,” he proclaimed. “Mom you’re a genius!”

  “But, Rick, I didn’t say anything except . . .”

  “You said just enough, dear,” Hartson Brant replied. “We all had the answer right in that second, because you gave us a clue. Do you remember the code our former friend used when he was sending messages off the island?”

  The “former friend” Hartson Brant referred to was a member of the staff who had turned renegade and helped Manfred Wessel’s gang in their efforts to build a moon rocket, using the Spindrift design, in order to win the Stoneridge Grant of two million dollars. The traitor scientist had used code messages to keep the gang informed of new developments on Spindrift while he had used the cloak of false friendship to slow up the building of the Spindrift rocket.

  “He used a double code,” Rick explained. “Part of it was a regular cipher, but the first step was a book code.”

  “I do remember!” Mrs. Brant exclaimed. “He used a copy of that book Hartson’s friend wrote. What was it? Psychiatry Simplified. The code was numbers that gave the page of the book, and the position of the word on the page, and unless you found the book, as Rick and Scotty did, you couldn’t break the code!”

  Barby jumped up in her excitement. “And I know what book Chahda was using!”

  The rest of the group spoke as one. “The World Almanac!”

  Scotty ran for the library, Rick on his heels.

  “We told him about that code,” Scotty said. “Now I remember when, too. It was right after we got back from India, when we were showing him around the lab.”

  “I remember, too,” Rick agreed. “We were telling him how the gang used my plane, with me flying it, to smuggle their coded messages, and he asked us about it because he had never heard of codes beforel”

  They reached the shelf that held the Almanac and stopped short. Because of the year-to-year news summaries in the famous annual, Hartson Brant had kept each edition as a reference source. There were over a dozen of them on the shelf.

  “They’re all different,” Rick said. “The pages change each year. Which one did he use?”

  Scotty’s forehead furrowed. “Which one did he memorize? It was an old one, but I can’t remember the date.”

  “Got it,” Rick said. “Remember the letter L? The twelfth letter of the alphabet. It must be the 1912 editon.”

  Scotty surveyed the shelf. “Which we don’t have,” he said.

  Rick groaned. “No!”

  Hartson Brant called from the dining room. “Haven’t you solved that cipher yet?”

  The boys walked dejectedly back to join the others. Rick explained that the right volume was missing. The Spindrift files just didn’t go back that far.

  “Sit down and eat your dinner,” Hartson Brant said. He sliced roast for them, his eyes thoughtful. “Something’s wrong with your reasoning,” he said, as he filled Rick’s plate. “Would Chahda have a 1912 edition with him in Singapore? I doubt it. More likely he’d have a more recent one.”

  “But the letter L has to mean something,” Barby protested.

  “What could it mean but twelve?” Rick asked, and the answer struck him before the words were out. He shouted, “I know! It could mean fifty L is the Roman numeral fi
fty.”

  Barby clapped her hands. Scotty reached over and pounded Rick on the back.

  “That’s it,” Hartson Brant said approvingly. “I’ll make a wager on it. Chahda used the 1950 edition.”

  Rick pushed back his chair, but the scientist’s voice stopped him.

  “Let’s rest on our laurels, Rick. Finish dinner first, then we’ll all retire to the library and work it out.”

  Because they were burning with impatience, the three younger members of the Spindrift family did not enjoy the meal, but they made a pretense of eating. Then, an eternity later, Hartson Brant took the last sip of his coffee and grinned at Rick. “Shall we get to it?”

  “Shall we!” Barby led the way, holding the cable high.

  The first part was easy. Since most pages in the Almanac had three numbers, they assumed that the first three numbers in each code group referred to the page. Similarly, they assumed that the second two numbers referred to the line. That left two numbers for the position of the word on the line.

  With nervous fingers Rick turned to Page 521 of the 1950 edition and counted down 30 lines. He hesitated over the subtitles, then decided to count them too. At the proper line, he looked up at Scotty and Barby who were watching over his shoulder.

  “But there are two columns.”

  “Don’t worry about the columns,” Scotty advised. “I don’t think Chahda would pay any attention to the columns, because it would mean extra numbers in each group. Count right across and don’t pay any attention to the dividing line.”

  Rick did so. “It doesn’t come out right,” he complained. “The number is 39, but there are only 17 words on the whole line.”

  Barby sighed. “Maybe we’re wrong all the way around.”

  “I don’t think so,” Hartson Brant said. He was sitting in a comfortable chair, smoking an after-dinner pipe. “The logic of the thing appeals to me. Do you suppose Chahda would know about nulls?”

  “What’s a null?” Scotty asked.

  “In cryptography it’s a number, or letter, thrown in for the sake of appearance, or to confuse.”

  “Chahda might know,” Rick said. “That brown head of his is crammed full of more odd chunks of information than you could imagine. But if there’s a null in this, which figure is it?”

  “Try it both ways,” Barby urged. “Here, I’ll do it.” She counted across the line. “The third word is ‘seventeen.’ “ She wrote it down. “The ninth word is ‘come.’”

  “Could be either,” Scotty mused. “But ‘come’ sounds more likely. Let’s try the next group.”

  That was 6231581. Rick turned to Page 623 and counted down 15 lines, including the title. However, he didn’t count the page heading. The heading was on the same line as the page number. Both were above a line drawn across the top of the page, and it seemed sensible to start below the line.

  “There aren’t 81 words on the lines,” he said. “So that means another null, maybe. The first word is ‘both’ and the eighth word is ‘may.’”

  Barby wrote them down. “It all makes sense,” she pointed out. “It could be, ‘Seventeen may,’ or ‘come both.’”

  “Keep going,” Scotty urged. “Try another one.”

  The third group gave them a choice of “Cheyenne,” which seemed unlikely, or “bad.”

  “He couldn’t be talking about Cheyenne,” Rick said. “The word must be ‘bad.’ That means the first figure of the pair is the null, because it’s the second figure that stands for ‘bad.’”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Scotty agreed. “Keep plugging.”

  So far, the probable words were: Come both bad.

  Page 276 in the fourth group turned out to be a table of atomic weights. Line 86 was the element tantalum.

  If the first figure of the last pair was assumed to be a null, the word was the symbol for tantalum: “Ta.”

  Rick stared at it. “Something’s wrong. This doesn’t make sense.”

  Barby asked impatiently, “How do we know?”

  Rick yielded and moved to the next group. It gave the word “rubles.” “That’s Russian money,” he said.

  The trio looked at it in bewilderment, then Scotty suddenly let out a yell of laughter. “I’ve got it! Can’t you see? ‘Ta’ and ‘rubles’ go together! ‘Tarubles.’ Troubles!”

  Then they were all howling with joy. Leave it to Chahda to dream up something like that, Rick thought. So far, the message made sense. Come both, bad troubles.

  He turned the pages and counted feverishly. The sixth group gave “am,” the seventh “in.”

  The eighth group gave the message an ominous tone.

  Come both. Bad troubles. Am in danger.

  The scientists and Mrs. Brant were looking over Rick’s shoulder now, too.

  The ninth group stopped them for a moment because the pair of figures standing for the word was 14. If the figure 1 was a null, the word was “the.” But there were more than 14 words in the line, and the 14th was “my.”

  Rick looked at the faces around him. “I think it’s ‘my’ because he must have had a reason for using nulls. If I were making up the code, I’d use them because sometimes there are enough words in a line so you need two figures and sometimes not. But you always have to put down two figures so the groups will be even.”

  “Good thinking,” Rick’s father complimented him. “Go ahead on that basis. But hurry up. The suspense is awful,”

  There was a chorus of agreements.

  The next word was “boss.”

  “He was working, then,” Scotty guessed. “That must be it, if he has a boss.”

  Rick hurried to the next group. It produced “Carl.” Page 439, the 96th hue, gave “Bradley.” Then the boss’s name was Carl Bradley.

  Hartson Brant gave a muffled exclamation. Scotty turned quickly. “Do you know that name, Dad?”

  “Yes. But let’s get the rest of the message. Quickly, Rick.”

  The words appeared in rapid succession, with a pause now and then to solve a new difficulty. Once, the lines across the columns were not even and a ruler had to be laid across to find the word. Again, a null appeared as the first number in the page group. Chahda had used it because the page was 51 and he needed a third figure to round out the group. That was easy to spot because the group read 951 and the book had only 912 pages.

  In the last series of groups Rick came across another double word like “tarubles.” This time, “be” and “ware” combined to make “beware.” Then, the very last word stopped them for a moment. It was “umbra.”

  “What’s that?” Scotty asked.

  “The shadow cast by the moon during an eclipse of the sun,” Julius Weiss answered. “Or part of it, rather. There are two shadows. The umbra and the penumbra.”

  Barby ran for a dictionary and leafed through the pages quickly. “I have it,” she said. “Listen. It’s from the Latin for ‘shadow,’ and it means ‘a shade or shadow.’”

  “Shadow it is,” Rick said, and wrote it down. Then, slowly, he read the full message to the serious group around him.

  COME BOTH. BAD TROUBLES. AM IN DANGER. MY BOSS, CARL BRADLEY, DISAPPEARED. GOVERNMENT WILL ASK SCIENTIFIC FATHER DO SPECIAL WORK. MUST TAKE. GET JOBS, MEET ME HONG KONG GOLDEN MOUSE. WATCH CHINESE WITH GLASS EYE, HE DANGEROUS. AND BEWARE LONG SHADOW.

  CHAPTER III

  Heavy Water

  Hartson Brant walked swiftly to the telephone and picked it up.

  “What’s the matter, Dad?” Rick asked quickly. The scientist had a strange look on his face.

  “Give me the telegraph office,” Hartson Brant said. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “I’ll tell you in a moment. I want to get a wire off immediately.” He spoke into the phone again. “Western Union? This is Spindrift, Brant speaking. I want to send a straight telegram. Yes. To Steven Ames.”

  Risk gasped. Steve Ames was the young intelligence officer of JANIG, the secret Army-Navy group charged with protecting the security of American government secrets. The
Spindrift group of scientists had worked with Steve in solving The Whispering Box Mystery.

  Scotty’s fingers bit into Rick’s arm.

  Hartson Brant gave the address. “Here’s the message. ‘Have reconsidered your request basis of new information just received here. Urge you come or phone at once.’ That’s it. Sign it ‘Brant, Spindrift.’ Yes. Charge to this number.”

  He waited until the telegraph office had read back the message, then hung up and turned to the waiting group.

  “Three days ago I had a phone call from Steve Ames. He asked if I could undertake a special job for the government that would require me to go overseas at once for an indefinite time. I was forced to decline because obviously I can’t leave now with these staff changes about to take place.”

  The scientist knocked the ashes out of his pipe, his face thoughtful.

  “Steve wouldn’t take no for an answer. He insisted that the job was of the utmost importance, and he added that it concerned an old college chum of mine.” He paused. “His name is Carl Bradley.”

  Back’s eyes met Scotty’s.

  “He said it was an urgent job, but that he would give me a few days to think it over, to see if I couldn’t rearrange my affairs in some way. I assured him it was no use, that I couldn’t possibly leave, but he said to take until Saturday to consider it. That’s tomorrow.”

  Rick whistled. “Some timing.”

  “It’s a lot more than mere coincidence,” Hartson Brant said. “But I don’t know any more about it than what I’ve told you.”

  “Who is Carl Bradley?” Weiss asked.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him, Julius. He has a considerable reputation as an ethnologist. He and Paul Warren and I were in school together. We lost track of him for a while, then he wrote from China. He had spent several years inland, living with the Chinese, as one of them. He produced some immensely valuable studies. Those, and his rather remarkable ability to speak and act like a Chinese earned him the nickname of ‘Chinese Bradley.’ He had lived most of his life since school in one part of Asia or another. But I’m sure I can’t guess what his connection is with this special job of Steve’s, or how he happened to become Chahda’s boss.”