Fear is the Key
Page 16
‘Why must you, Miss Ruthven?’
‘There are some questions a gentleman never asks,’ she said icily.
That floored him. He didn’t know what she meant, the same as I wouldn’t have known what she meant, and the net result was to leave him stranded. Every eye in the room was on the two of them, except mine: mine were on Kennedy’s and his were on mine. I was near the door now, with my back turned to the company. It had been easy to slip out the piece of paper from under my collar and now I held it against my chest so that he could see Judge Mollison’s name on it. His expression didn’t alter and it would have taken a micrometer to measure his nod. But he was with me. Everything was fine – but for the chance that Royale might get me with a snapshot before I cleared the doorway.
And it was Royale who broke the tension in the room, giving Vyland an easy out. ‘I’d like some fresh air, Mr Vyland. I could go along with them for the ride.’
I went out through that doorway the way a torpedo leaves its tube. Kennedy had his arm outstretched and I caught it: we crashed heavily to the floor and went rolling along the passageway together. Inside the first two seconds I had the letter stuck deep inside his tunic and we were still threshing about and belabouring each other on the shoulders and back and everywhere it didn’t hurt very much when we heard the unmistakable flat click of a safety catch.
‘Break it up, you two.’
We broke it up and I got to my feet under the steady menace of Royale’s gun. Larry, too, was hopping around in the background, waving a revolver in his hand: had I been Vyland I wouldn’t even have let him have a catapult in his hand.
‘That was a good job of work, Kennedy,’ Vyland was saying warmly. ‘I won’t forget it.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Kennedy said woodenly. ‘I don’t like killers.’
‘Neither do I, my boy, neither do I,’ Vyland said approvingly. He only employed them himself because he wanted to rehabilitate them. ‘Very well, Miss Ruthven. Mr Royale will go along. But be as quick as you can.’
She swept by without a word to him or a glance at me. Her head was high. I still thought she was wonderful.
EIGHT
I hadn’t enjoyed the helicopter trip out to the oil rig.
Planes I’m used to, I’ve flown my own, I once even owned a piece in a small charter airline, but helicopters are not for me. Not even in fine weather, and the weather that morning was indescribable. We swayed and rocked and plummeted and soared up again as if some drunk had us on the end of a giant yo-yo, and nine-tenths of the time we couldn’t see where we were going because the wipers couldn’t cope with the deluge of water that lashed against the windscreen: but Petersen was a fine pilot and we made it. We touched down on the landing-deck of the X 13 shortly after ten o’clock in the morning.
It took six men to hold the machine even reasonably steady while the general, Vyland, Larry and I shinned down the extension ladder. Petersen gunned his motor and took off just as the last of us reached the deck, and was lost in a blinding flurry of rain inside ten seconds. I wondered if I would ever see him again.
Out there on the exposed deck the wind was far stronger and much gustier than it had been on land and it was all that we could do to keep our balance on the slippery metal underfoot. Not that there was much chance of me falling, at least not backwards, not with Larry’s cannon jabbing into the small of my back all the time. He was wearing the big-collared, big-lapelled, belted, epauletted and leather-buttoned coat that Hollywood had taught him was the correct rig of the day for this kind of weather, and he had the gun inside one of the deep pockets. I felt nervous. Larry didn’t like me and would have counted a hole in his fine coat as a small price to pay for the privilege of pulling that trigger. I’d got right under Larry’s skin like a burr under a saddle, and I meant to stay there. I rarely spoke to him, but when I did I never failed to refer to him as ‘hophead’ or ‘junky’ and to hope that his supplies of snow were coming along all right. On the way down to the helicopter that morning I’d inquired solicitously whether or not he’d remembered to pack his grip, and when he’d asked suspiciously what the unprintable I meant by that I explained that I was concerned that he might have forgotten to pack his syringe. It took Vyland and the general all the strength of their combined efforts to pull him off me. There is nothing more dangerous and unpredictable than a drug addict, just as there is nothing more pitiable: but there was no pity in my heart then, Larry was the weakest link in the chain and I meant to keep sawing away at him until something snapped.
We staggered along against the wind till we came to a raised hatch-cover entrance which gave to a wide companionway leading to the deck below. A group of men awaited us here, and I had my collar turned up, hat-brim turned down and a handkerchief in my hand busy wiping the rain off my face, but I needn’t have bothered: Joe Curran, the roustabout foreman I’d talked to ten hours previously, was not there. I tried to imagine what would have happened had he been there, or had he asked the general whether C. C. Farnborough, his private confidential secretary, had found the missing brief-case; but I gave it up, the strain on the imagination was too great. I’d probably just have borrowed Larry’s gun and shot myself.
Two men came forward to meet us. General Ruthven did the honours: ‘Martin Jerrold, our field foreman, Tom Harrison, our petroleum engineer. Gentlemen, this is John Smith, a specialist engineer flown out from England to help Mr Vyland in his research.’ John Smith, I gathered, was the inspired choice of name for myself.
Both men made perfunctory noises of greeting. Larry prodded me in the back so I said I was delighted too, but they obviously had no interest at all in me. Both men looked worried and uneasy, and both men were doing their best to conceal the fact. But the general didn’t miss it.
‘Something bothering you, Harrison?’ Out here on the rig it was obviously the policy for Vyland to keep very much in the background.
‘Very much so, sir.’ Harrison, a crew-cut youngster with heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, looked to me as if he should still be in college, but he must have been good to hold down the responsible job he did. He produced a small chart, spread it out and pointed with a carpenter’s pencil. ‘This chart’s good, General Ruthven. It couldn’t be better, and Pride and Honeywell are the best geological team in the business. But we’re already twelve hundred feet overdue. We should have hit oil at least five hundred feet back. But there’s not even a smell of gas yet. I can’t even begin to explain it, sir.’
I could have explained it, but it was hardly the time.
‘Those things happen, my boy,’ the general said easily. I had to admire the old coot; I was beginning to have more than a fair idea of the almost inhuman strain he was labouring under, but the control, the self-possession were admirable. ‘We’re lucky if we make it two out of five. And no geologist would claim to be 100 per cent accurate, or even within shouting distance of it. Give it another thousand. The responsibility’s mine.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Harrison looked relieved, but there was still a certain uneasiness about him and the general was quick to get on to it.
‘Still something worrying you, Harrison?’
‘No, sir, of course not.’ He was too quick, too emphatic, he wasn’t half the actor the old boy was. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘Hmm.’ The general considered him thoughtfully, then looked at Jerrold. ‘Something on your mind, too?’
‘The weather, sir.’
‘Of course.’ The general nodded understandingly. ‘Latest reports are that Hurricane Diane is going to hit Marble Springs fair and square. And that means the X 13. You don’t have to ask me, Jerrold. You know that. You’re the captain of this ship, I’m only a passenger. I don’t like losing ten thousand dollars a day, but you must suspend drilling the moment you think it’s right to.’
‘It’s not that, sir,’ Jerrold said unhappily. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘That experimental leg you’re working on, sir – shouldn’t it be lowered to give maximum stability?’
‘Vyland?’ The general had turned to the man by his side and raised a questioning eyebrow.
‘I’ll accept full responsibility, General Ruthven.’ He spoke in the quiet, precise, confident tones that a top-flight engineer might have employed, although it would have surprised me if he knew a nut from a bolt. But he could use reason, too, for he added: ‘This storm is going to hit from the west and the maximum strain is going to be on the other, the landward, side. The effect on this side will merely be to lift it.’ He made a deprecating gesture. ‘It does seem rather pointless, doesn’t it, to lower an additional leg just when the other legs on that same side will have far less strain than normal to carry? Besides, General, we are now so near the perfection of this technique which is going to revolutionize underwater drilling that it would be a crime to set it back, maybe several months, by lowering the leg and perhaps destroying all our delicate equipment.’
So that was the line. It was well done, I had to admit: the dedicated enthusiasm in his voice was so exactly right, without being in any way overdone.
‘That’s good enough for me,’ Jerrold said. He turned back to the general. ‘Coming across to your quarters, sir?’
‘Later. To eat, but don’t wait lunch for us. Order it for my stateroom, will you? Mr Smith here is keen to get to work right away.’ Like hell I was.
We left them and made our way down a broad passage. Deep inside the platform here the sound of the wind and the rising waves crashing and breaking against the pillars was completely inaudible. Perhaps some faint murmur of sound might have been heard if the air in that brightly-lit steel passage hadn’t been filled with the hum of powerful generators: we appeared to be passing by some diesel engine room.
At the far end of the passage we turned left and walked almost to its far cul-de-sac limits before stopping outside a door on the right-hand side. On this door, printed in large white letters, was the legend: ‘Drilling Research Project’ followed, in letters scarcely less large, by the words: ‘Private. Most Secret. Positively No Admittance’.
Vyland rapped on the door in a long code knock – I made a mental note of it: four shorts, two long, four shorts – waited till there came three long knocks from the inside, then knocked again, four times in rapid succession. Ten seconds later we had all passed through the door and it was double locked and bolted behind us. It made all the signs about ‘Private’ and ‘No Admittance’ seem rather superfluous.
Steel floor, steel bulkheads, steel ceiling, it was a black cheerless box of a room. At least, three sides of it formed a box – the bulkhead we’d just passed through, the blank bulkhead on the left and the one to the right, with a high grilled door in its centre. The fourth side was convex, bulging out into the room in an almost perfect semicircle, with a butterfly-clamped hatchway in its middle: the trunking, I felt certain, of the big steel pillar reaching down to the floor of the sea. On either side of the hatchway hung large drums with neatly coiled rubber tubes armoured in flexible steel. Below each drum, and bolted to the floor, was a large motor: the one on the right was, I knew, an air compressor – that’s what I’d heard when I’d been out there during the night – and the one on the left probably a forced-suction water pump. As for the furnishings of the room, even the Spartans would have found it rugged: a deal table, two benches and a metal wall-rack.
There were two men in the room – the one who had opened the door and another sitting at the table, dead cigar in his mouth and a pack of greasy cards spread out on the table in front of him – and both cast in the same mould. It wasn’t the fact that they were both shirt-sleeved and had leather holsters strapped across their chests and high up on their left sides that gave them close similarity, not even their evenly-matched height and weight and broad bulky shoulders. The sameness lay in their faces, hard expressionless faces with cold, still, watchful eyes. I’d seen men out of the same mould before, the top-notch professionals of the strong-arm underworld, all that Larry would have given his life to be and could never hope to be. They were so exactly the type of men I would have expected Vyland to employ that the presence of Larry was all the more mysterious indeed.
Vyland grunted a greeting and that was all the time he wasted in the next ten minutes. He walked across to the wall-rack, reached down a long roll of canvas-backed paper that was wrapped round a wooden stick, unrolled it flat on the table and weighted the ends to keep them from curling up again. It was a large and highly complicated diagram, sixty inches long by about thirty in depth. He stood back and looked at me.
‘Ever seen that before, Talbot?’
I bent over the table. The diagram represented a peculiar object shaped halfway between a cylinder and a cigar, about four times as long as its average width. It was flat on top, flat along the middle third of the bottom, then tapering slightly upwards towards either end. At least eighty per cent of it appeared to be given up to some kind of storage tanks – I could see the fuel lines leading to the tanks from a raised bridge-like structure superimposed on the top side. This same bridge housed the beginnings of a vertical cylindrical chamber which ran clear through the body of the machine, passed out through the bottom, angled sharply left and entered an oval-shaped chamber suspended beneath the body of the cigar. On either side of this oval chamber and attached to the underside of the cigar were large rectangular containers. To the left, towards the narrower and more tapering end, were what appeared to be searchlights and long slender remote-control grabs housed in spring clips along the side.
I took a good long look at all of this, then straightened. ‘Sorry.’ I shook my head. ‘Never seen it in my life.’
I needn’t have bothered straightening for next moment I was lying on the deck: maybe five seconds later I had pushed myself to my knees and was shaking my head from side to side in an attempt to clear it. I looked up, groaned with the pain just behind my ear, and tried to focus my eyes. I focused one of them, at any rate, for I made out Vyland standing above me, his pistol held by the barrel.
‘I kind of thought you might say that, Talbot.’ A nice quiet controlled voice, we were sitting at the vicar’s afternoon tea-table and he was asking me to pass along the muffins. ‘Your memory, Talbot. Perhaps you would like to jog it again a little, eh?’
‘Is all this really necessary?’ General Ruthven sounded distressed. He looked distressed. ‘Surely, Vyland, we –’
‘Shut up!’ Vyland snapped. We were no longer calling on the vicar. He turned to me as I climbed to my feet. ‘Well?’
‘What’s the good of beating me over the head?’ I said savagely. ‘How will that make me remember something I never –?’
This time I saw it coming, got the palm of my hand up to the side of my head and was riding the blow, going fast away from it, when it connected. I staggered and hit the bulkhead. It was nearly all show and to complete the effect I slid down to the deck. Nobody said anything. Vyland and his two hoodlums were looking at me with a detached interest, the general was white and he had his lower lip caught in his teeth; Larry’s face was a mask of unholy glee.
‘Remember anything now?’
I called him an unprintable name and rose shakily to my feet.
‘Very well.’ Vyland shrugged. ‘I think Larry here would like to persuade you.’
‘Can I? Can I really?’ The eagerness on Larry’s face was revolting, frightening. ‘Want that I make him talk?’
Vyland smiled and nodded. ‘Remember he’s got to work for us when you’re finished.’
‘I’ll remember.’ This was Larry’s big moment. To be
in the centre of the stage, to get his own back for my sneers and gibes, above all to indulge a sadistic streak wide as a barn door – this was going to be one of the high spots of his existence. He advanced towards me, big gun wavering slightly, wetting his lips continuously and giggling in a high and horrible falsetto. ‘The inside of the right thigh, high up. He’ll scream like – like a pig going under the knife. Then the left. And he’ll still be able to work.’ The eyes were wide and staring and mad, and for the first time in my life I was confronted by a human being drooling at the mouth.
Vyland was a good psychologist; he knew I would be ten times more scared of Larry’s viciousness, his neurotic instability, than of any coldly calculated brutality he or his two thugs would have brought to bear. I was scared all right. Besides, I’d put up a good enough front, it would have been expected of me, but there was no point in overdoing it.
‘It’s a development of the early French bathyscaphes,’ I said rapidly. ‘This model is a combined British and French naval project, designed to reach only about twenty per cent of the depths of its predecessors – it’s good for about 2,500 feet – but it’s faster, more manoeuvrable and it’s equipped for actual underwater salvage which its predecessors weren’t.’
Nobody ever hated anyone more than Larry hated me at that moment. He was a little boy, I was a promised toy, the most wonderful he had ever seen, and he was being robbed of it just as it came within his grasp. He could have wept with rage and frustration and the sheer bitterness of his disappointment. He was still prancing in front of me and waving the gun around.
‘He’s lying!’ His voice was shrill, almost a scream. ‘He’s just trying –’
‘He’s not lying,’ Vyland interrupted coldly. No triumph, no satisfaction in his voice, the end had been achieved and the past was done with. ‘Put that gun away.’
‘But I tell you––’ Larry broke off in an exclamation of pain as one of the two big silent men caught his wrist and forced the gun down till it was pointing at the floor.