by Philip Wylie
Solentor did move, just a little: he lifted the forefinger of his free hand and, of course, noted that nothing dire followed. “The first agendum was to remove you, an automatic decision when I learned how you’d come out here to—live. And die, now. But we did not act at once because of a puzzle.”
“Oh?”
“We have certain, let me call it, access to knowledge of the activities of your constantly retitled Composite Information Agency. Your CIA. Our various sources have told us, over the long periods after you were spotted here, that you were not CIA. What were you, then? At first, I had the impulse to order your removal in any event; old scores paid. But I waited.”
“The plastic surgery,” Grove commented reasonably, or with that seeming, “undid most of the damage you blame me for.”
Solentor’s eyes opened, he rubbed his face, lifted the weapon and then, perhaps realizing that his arm and hand motion gave a final proof of Grove’s vulnerability, he half-lowered the gun. “I could not quite believe that your residence here and your means to conceal it—we looked into you from many angles as soon as I decided to delay your removal—were what they seemed. Very extreme measures, I’d say, just to allow an old man to retire so even his business associates and friends couldn’t write or call. It appeared to me that you were on some mission, and one I determined to know.”
“And what would it be, may I ask?”
Solentor stared as if the other were joking. “You do not really know? It is very possible but I must be sure.” His voice dropped and he spoke half to himself. “You have failed to find out a thing.” He corrected that—causing Grove inward excitement. “You are able to discover almost nothing. And your old friend, the director, Axe, is sniffing at ten thousand trivialities—in wrong places.”
“Did you expect, then”—Grove was mild—“that when you called in your trained devils you could twist out of me a thing I have no knowledge of?”
“Haven’t you? If so, we’d twist, as you say, that fact out of you.” Solentor’s thick lips parted in a smirk. “Your Joint Chiefs of Staff and your Security Council suspect my associates are perfecting some great but unknown—project. But they have no idea what, or where. And there was a time, Grove, when we held you in great admiration, which enraged us. You might still be—admirable. You would long have been dead except that, after Stalin, came Khrushchev, who was not vindictive but soft. I had recovered then. He told me, personally, to abandon our efforts against old enemies who had ceased to be active. Things have changed.
“I daresay,” Grove interrupted, dryly. “K’s softness. And Mao’s wrath.”
Solentor stared oddly. “When you found that fool, that trusting idiot of Eaper’s in that big tank, I began to wonder anew—knowing by then Mr. R. ‘K.’ Grove had a middle name not initialed with a K. I advised my people over here to do some further looking. I found, among many findings, that you had become a smuggler. Of what? I asked myself. That is another thing to be learned tonight.”
“Plants, mostly,” Grove idly responded, “that I didn’t want to declare. I’m making some horticultural experiments. Then I brought in a couple of pets. Which I didn’t wish to wait for, over the four months of quarantine. Both of them, unfortunately, died; poisoned by a pet-hating woman who lives nearby, I think.”
“And other matters you will not mention, easily? Explosives?” Solentor watched the effect—none. “If so, they are not in this place, I’m sure. You are too canny. Twice, also, you have picked up communications—yes?—from odd places.” Grove made a swift note of that. He’d satisfied himself that Oddie’s people knew nothing of the series of spots where messages from two men on the mainland had been left—by a carpenter living in Honolulu whom one of the men knew and trusted completely for the task slated: to deposit those sealed packages where instructed and without curiosity about their contents or their recipient. But Solentor’s agents had seen him retrieve two of the reports, though which two Grove could not imagine. He felt humiliated. He would have to change that pattern, and explain why—always assuming he was to get an opportunity to do that.
Those thoughts were flashes and his response was delayed deliberately. He eyed the gross man who filled and overran the chair opposite and spoke with some amusement. “My mainland business is growing, and pretty big, now. As you certainly must know, industry in America differs in method from the sweatmills of Russia. But here we do a good deal of so-called industrial spying—to make sure the competition is not ahead of us and to learn what it plans.”
Solentor nodded, looked irritably at Grove’s tapping foot and considered ordering it to stop. He decided to hide his irritation, since the slight, insistent slipper-jigging was a barometer of stress that, otherwise, Grove had concealed with great effectiveness. He had magnificent control of his voice and face, Solentor mused, with envy. Grove guessed at those thoughts quite accurately.
“Whatever the United Socialist Slave Republic assumes,” he went on, “whatever your agents have reported about me, as well—showing, of course, their lack of understanding of the subtle aspects of American commercial activities—whatever, I mean, you are trying on here—the thing you said nobody who ought to know about in America does know about, and wherever this gambit is located, if it is not a mere ploy—at least you ought to have sense enough to realize an old bird like me would hardly take it on by himself. So—why this call? You must be losing your old grip. Care for a cigar, by the way?” When the other man shook his head, Grove asked, “Mind if I have one?”
“No.” Solentor saw Grove make the first sign of all-purposeful motion, a slight tensing for, in this case, a mere reach. “We have,” the Siberian grinned, “made a fairly quick check of this room. We did it while you were banging about in the kitchen, getting your supper. While you sang old dance tunes, as my men reported. Americans are musical barbarians.”
“You knew, when you came in, that there were no little tricks ready to hand? Your sort—or Eaper’s?”
Solentor pointed. “Cigars. A lighter. Sugar in a bowl and a lime to suck?” He sounded revolted by that snack. “A cheap novel to read! A favorite chair, where you so often sit and where a third-rate rifleman could shoot you from the water, escaping easily, afterward.”
Grove shook his head. “Nope. Bulletproof glass from that angle. I never entirely forget the drill. And I remember, still, that an old enemy might take a potshot at me.”
“You Americans are insane in every way but your greatest madness is to believe you can hold back the extension of the doctrines of Marx and Mao, of Communism.”
Grove smoked, smiled and said, “Oh, I don’t know. You grabbed Middle Europe, sure. But you haven’t broken its people. You and Mao’s heirs still fail in India, Africa. And Cuba is a tiny bit of Latin America. We’re ahead of you in space, as of our recent achievement on Mars. You can’t fight us, in all-out war. Of course, we ought to have taken Russia apart after the Second War. I recommended it to my superiors then. The main reason I opted out in ’48 was their failure to get my point about defending liberty. Still—we’ve stalemated you, there, and everywhere, for years.”
The summary was of an order often used by his leaders to spur Solentor. He replied, ominously, “The situation at the moment is, as you say, frozen. But deadlock is intolerable to us. A nation of sentimental, vulgar, ignorant, wasteful rich, cowardly empire-stealing, bourgeois people like yours will soon be humbled!”
“Red flag flying over the Capitol, you mean? A Politbureau replacing Congress? That bit? Nuts!”
Solentor turned a faint lavender. “You may have even been honest with me, Grove. ‘Industrial espionage’—what a filthy capitalist thing! So! If you have nothing else to add without pressure, I shall call in my men to be sure there is nothing.”
Grove knew the time for sparring was about at an end. Solentor had his men ready, and he had means to summon them—an act that should not be permitted, if it was avoidable. He knew, too, that Solentor had wanted this private chance to study his former
adversary, which was why there had been any time. He also had profited that way. He speculated on whether or not he should goad Solentor further and decided to try: one of them might, as a result, show his age—call it—more than the other.
“You told me you knew of my smuggling,” he began. Solentor stared, not bothering to respond. “I mentioned the contraband: couple of pets and some—trees, shrubs, plants. I assume your men are under cover—as an extra precaution, even though my fence is high? Hiding under my shrubs and trees?” Grove grinned. “Just as I thought. Too bad!” His head shook slightly.
Solentor murmured an annoyed doubt.
“The planting,” Grove sighed, “is partly of manchineel, some in every clump—and among all my major trees except the coconut palms, which are no good for concealment. You’ve surely heard of manchineel?”
Grove watched the other think that over, with interest. Had he any background in botany? Or had he, on some previous and probably murderous junket—say, to Cuba—learned of the species? Would it be wise to keep on needling the man with that invention?
Grove guessed, from Solentor’s expression, that it wouldn’t hurt. He began to talk like a lecturer and some of what he said was true. “You surely know that the poisons used by Indians of the Amazon are made from gum-tree sap. And that the Caribbean Indians used to throw a tree branch in a stream to kill fish—which then had to be cooked thoroughly to be edible? You may even be familiar with the report of Gordon Bareter, the botanist, who had the bad luck to put a sleeping bag near a manchineel tree—on a night the wind rose? Their resin falls like that of the pepper tree—which merely etches the paint off parked cars. Bareter lived, though he never recovered his sight. And I told you, Borrie, you nitwit, that I had always taken precautions of some sort, knowing certain people, you topping the list, had not been sent long ago to a deserved grave.”
He stopped. Solentor still had Grove pinned. But this dissertation had led him through a series of expressions that were as clear, almost, as speech.
Grove decoded them, first, as a hazy but incomplete recollection of manchineel, or, anyway, of poisonous branches that killed fish; next, a special doubt: Solentor’s province was human nature and how to corrupt, pervert and destroy it, not—the realm of all nature. His doubt, as he then glanced directly at Grove, was like a silent question and answer, that decided Grove would be capable of planting his grounds with lethal trees. The third reflection appeared as movements of eyes toward distance, considering the men on duty outdoors—and then, with eyes nearly shut—the cost to him if he lost them, along with, perhaps, his chance of learning more if he shot Grove, and was left to escape on his own. In his concentrated state he let his .404 slant off target, slightly. A smile spread on the face.
Grove read it and said, “If you move your gun, what’s right beside you, Borrie, will—hey! Hold it! Turn your eyes if you need proof—but for God’s sake, sit still!”
Grove’s tone was so real that Solentor did freeze and merely cut his eyes first toward the fireplace where he saw nothing and then in the opposite direction, where the thing he saw literally paralyzed him, eyes included.
“It won’t do anything unless you move or I stop tapping my foot,” Grove said mildly. “I think.”
Solentor, bloodless, could not even breathe.
“We can talk, because it’s used to that.”
Beyond that cutting of eye Solentor called on no other muscle. He could not. His face became suffused with a crimson-threaded mauve that slowly turned fish-belly white. He did not breathe. It was like watching a speeded-up motion picture of the process of rot. Grove thought a heart attack or stroke might end his life; but the muzhik was tough. At last he drew in a slow, desperate breath. Exhaling with extreme care, he took a second disciplined gasp. His color improved, gradually.
What Solentor had seen and what remained in position at his side was a king cobra, reared to shoulder level, facing him with a darting tongue and spread hood. He tried to communicate with his stunned eyes, to ask mercy, perhaps.
“While your arm’s beyond the cobra’s vision,” Grove finally suggested, “you better lower it and put that Klokvik on the chair, quietly.” He saw resistance. “In time, your arm will tire and you’ll have to lower it. The cobra will then strike. Besides, you are no longer aiming the gun at me”—an untrue but calm remark—“so it would be useless to snap off a shot, even if that’s your idea.”
Solentor actually began to lower the weapon with the perspiring care of a man trying to disarm an unfamiliar bomb. He let go of it, finally. Meanwhile Grove clarified the picture, lecturing, almost:
“My mother, you may know, was an animal trainer. She also had a so-called snake charmer act in the side shows with non-poisonous snakes, usually big but placid pythons. She was interested in the deadly species, though. And a long time ago some man she met who came from what was Cochin-China said cobras could identify people; knew their keepers, in zoos, for instance. One day I was touring the snake house in Washington Zoo and ran into a curator, a famous herpetologist—can’t recall his name at the moment, unfortunately. I asked the man about cobras knowing people. He demonstrated the truth and scared the hell out of me. Cobras let him walk right past—but when I tried—well!” Grove swallowed convulsively and with no false effort. The experience had been memorable.
Solentor decided he had to try something. His position wasn’t bearable. He whispered, “Will you deal?”
Grove smiled faintly. “What can you trade? Let me fill you in a bit more.” He moved a hand toward his humidor, eyes on the big snake—and decided not to move further, or so it seemed to Solentor; though that act was pretense. Grove frowned and went on.
“As long as I keep tapping my foot, you are reasonably safe. This king cobra is among my smuggled pets. Twelve feet long, about, but never measured by me. They’re said to grow twice that long. Cobras are suspicious snakes, as all herpetologists will tell you. This one, I trained to start up from the hothouse through a crawl hole between walls when I began tapping the way I’ve been doing. It means, food will be served. But to get its meal, live rats, usually, it has to cross from behind the draperies that close off the lanai to a point near me. You were on that path, and a stranger, so naturally it stopped to look you over. If I quit tapping it will strike, as it will if it sees you move. When it comes for dinner it knows I’ll stand to get it—but I don’t dare, with a stranger so close to it and considering its basic reactions.” Grove now noted Solentor’s stealthy effort to slide his hand toward the released gun. “Don’t,” he advised.
Sweat had begun to bead the fat face when Solentor got his first breath. It ran in tiny brooks, now; his armpits were soaked; and his clothing became a blotter for spreading stains. Grove would have liked to waste more time. But he was by no means certain how long the cobra would continue to inspect the unknown man. He hadn’t even been entirely sure it would behave as it had; just fairly sure.
“I’ll trade you on one basis.”
Solentor almost nodded, remembered, and murmured, “Which is–?”
“You can talk safely,” Grove reminded, “so long as you don’t move at all. Well, I’ll get you off this hook if you will tell me”—he looked away in thought and seemed not to be watching Solentor at all—“exactly the location and the nature of Project Neptune.”
Solentor gasped, faintly. Then he flinched. Next his eyes screwed up as he waited for the fangs. At that very moment the cobra became bored and lay flat. Solentor peeped in frantic wonder because his sudden flinch had not led to the expected horror.
When he realized that Grove was looking down, he looked. When he saw the great snake, hood no longer distended, crawling lazily toward Grove, Solentor leaped up and rushed toward the lanai where he let loose a hoarse shriek. Grove, meanwhile, sidled out of the leather chair around the arm farthest from the cobra and he also hurriedly left the room, but not in pursuit.
He heard expected sounds while he nervously procured from a closet and then tende
red the cobra’s meal. That done, he put a folding pen around the snake and the revolting dinner scene. He was aware that Solentor had left through a side window of the lanai, not needing to break a pane there. He was conscious that a motor right below the glassed-in porch had chugged briefly. He could identify other sounds, too, and their sequence. Men ran about, muttered and swore in Russian. A motorboat coughed. A dog barked. The boat roared and gathered speed, on a course toward Rabbit Island.
When the cobra’s meal was half ingested Grove jockeyed the reptile and its folding pen into a box. The box went downstairs where he locked the whole business in a closet. He was not a snake admirer. He had not enjoyed training this deadly monster in its limited tricks. But it had saved his life, for one thing. And it had been the means of levering proof of a vital fact out of The Lever himself!
Project Neptune was real.
Grove returned to his living room, flopped in his red chair for minutes, finally lighted a cigar and decided to postpone the cobra’s disposal for a while. Its value had been great; it was now zero.
He felt shaky, still, though a held-out cigar didn’t show a discernible tremor. That, he thought, was something to be grateful for, not proud of. His hand might be steady but his mind was quivering like a plucked fiddle string. And he felt very cold, too. He tried to make apologies for it, speaking aloud: “It was a little tight there, actually.”
Then he chuckled and not quite weakly, either.
At last he went out on the lanai and found what he expected. The windows at its ends were not of bulletproof glass, but ordinary plate, four large panes in each. One such rectangle had been removed from its metal frame, doubtless while he’d made supper though it might have been earlier. Replacing it was a now-dangling slab of rigid plastic that, if shut, would not be noticed save by accident or very close examination. It was removable. On the ground below was a fork lift, used as an elevator to reach the lanai. What he had heard, but failed to “hear” usefully, was the sound of Solentor climbing onto the raised lift. The draft he’d recalled, belatedly, came when the plastic window was opened.