by Philip Wylie
Jerry had been glancing at his silent companion.
“You know, Ring, you’ve gone to more trouble and spent more time trying to make a phone call than I ever heard of! Some woman?”
Grove laughed. “You must admit the opportunities have been limited. Service is poor on the Na Pali Coast. The admiral was away, for a poker game or something. There were problems, and I needed your company before I could tell my party about things.”
Jerry slowed for the turn into the park. “Been here?”
“Yes.”
In the past year Grove had covered all the major highways in the state and many of the minor routes. He had familiarized himself with the park road system, which is provided with gates so the crowds driving in to see an eruption can be kept out of danger areas. His trips to Kilauea had been made in quiescent periods. He knew Halemaumau, the legendary home of the Pele, had resumed eruption recently.
As they sped past the Volcano House—a motel set on the rim of Kilauea’s three-mile-wide caldera—he saw the countless steam vents and, beyond, massive smoke from the fire pit. He’d heard it described as “Hell” by people who’d never been in the latter place, as yet. Others rather vulgarly referred to Halemaumau as the drive-in volcano.
Jerry turned off at the Observatory driveway and Grove stared. The vast caldera lay before them, plains of cooled black lava hills, some now forested, smears of sulphur-yellow and ochre, with steam plumes everywhere. But the smoke vented massively by Halemaumau was of diverse tints, illuminated underneath by fires unseen from here—intermittent, reflected orange fires. A man stood outside the building, yanking at something he wore.
Grove hurried up, passing the man’s car, its door left open. The man yelled, “Give me a hand!”
Grove did. The fellow was dressed in heavy clothing, neck to shoes—which had very thick soles. At his side on the lawn was a helmet, like an astronaut’s. He’d been attempting to free a stuck zipper. Grove took over, realizing the suit was an asbestos and fabric coverall. When the zipper yielded, its wearer muttered thanks and shrugged out of the garment. Underneath, he wore shorts—and sweat; nothing else. He dashed to the car for two metal jars with long handles.
“Gas samples.” He smiled. “Much obliged.” He ran.
Grove charged into the building behind him; he was, plainly, one of the vulcanologists—a brow fit for any egghead, nose long, with a reading-spectacle mark, eyes amber—intent, hurried; he had to be grabbed to be halted.
“Palmer?” Grove said. “Where’ll I find Dr. Jake Palmer?”
This amused the haste-prone scholar. “You’ll find him—if that doesn’t mean reach him physically, or talk with Jake—in Halemaumau. Where I’ve just been!” He waggled his jugs. “Got to get these in the lab.” He went.
Grove chased and overtook the man a second time. “I believe Jake has recently installed a private phone. Know where it is? It’s an emergency situation—”
The stranger took that with more aplomb than might be expected, even of scientists who deal with volcanoes. He set down his thermal containers and shook his head. “Emergencies are what happens, around volcanoes! I think Jake did install a line for his own use, a while back. But all the phones here went out not long ago. My lab assistant drove over to tell us.”
Grove’s disappointment was great.
His expression aroused sympathy in the other. “Happens occasionally here. Lady Pele’s a pretty busy goddess now, and telephone lines can be snapped, you know. Charley, my assistant, went off to try Volcano House, and around. A repair crew will come up from Hilo on the double, when word goes through.” He was trying to be decent. “Incidentally—your name is—?”
He asked, was told, and said, “I’ll be damned! The second one!”
Shaking his head, he picked up his samples and trotted toward the lab. Something sure was biting that guy! he thought. Grove had fled back through the hall while his name was being repeated.
Jumping into the car, he explained the new problem to Jerry and added, “Let’s go over where Palmer’s at work. Maybe we can get to him and brief him—while the repair people are on the way. If, when and as.”
They passed the car-dense parking yard on Halemaumau’s rim. From a railed wooden platform nearby, people gazed down at the surging lava pit and across to the cinder cones standing in the heaving lava. These black, steep pinnacles rose from the red-hot lava floor almost to the rim, a hundred feet above their black mouths. And the pit smoke eddied and rolled across a desert of shimmering pumice beyond the overlook and the cars.
They drove past the tourist-crowded grandstand, past the parking area and through the acrid smoke. Clear of that choking stretch, Jerry pulled off on a shoulder glittering with pumice, drifted there like brown snow. Grabbing his case, Grove led the way over a shoveled footpath on naked rocks. They passed large signs warning that all persons who entered the region did so to their own risk and skirted the rim of Halemaumau to a point far from the safe public edge—a point where the heat could be felt, where the massive cinder cones could be heard whoofing as they ejected heavy clots of lava, and burbling as they maintained constant fountains. Lava rose higher than this rim, fell back, and slid in bright rivers down the cones. There it spread and darkened into sludgy scallops with red edges. The black floor of the pit was cracked by a hundred seams which opened and closed, revealing the molten red beneath the changing surface. Waves of dark lava hit the cliff walls of this near-circular abyss and broke into crests and spume of fire. Red lava poured over precipices in falls and ran in rivers, like the issue of a gut-slit blast furnace.
They slowed. A hundred feet beyond, several men labored. They wore the heat-resistant clothing and the helmets like that of the man at the Observatory and they were hoisting or lowering some heavy object at the edge of the volcano. Grove signaled them to wait; they paid no heed. The verge at Grove’s side was split away from a solid edge. Hundreds of tons of rimrock leaned out, balanced, hanging, and liable to drop into the molten pit at any time.
Through that cleft Grove saw the cause of concentration up ahead. A man on a boatswain’s chair was dangling halfway down the vertical wall, a situation demanding the absolute attention of his colleagues. To Grove, the descent was incredible. How could any man bear being lowered closer to the molten, seething floor, and nearer to the gobbets shot from the giant fountains of lava, almost directly under a great slab of split-away rock? In the heat, the noise, the fumes.
They sat down; Grove’s state was apparent; he had to stop.
“They do it all the time,” Jerry shouted, to override the volcano’s din. “Learned more about volcanoes here than from all the others in the world.”
Jerry would have gone on. But Grove was now looking back along the trail with a strange fixity. Three men were approaching on the your-own-risk path. They were some sort of Arabs, Jerry saw, without surprise. People from everywhere thronged Hawaii: Japanese in kimonos and obis, Hindus in dhotis, nothing was unusual.
These wore robes and turbans. Their leader was an outsize fat man with peacock feathers topping his headgear. So why was Ring staring? Just then he turned to Jerry.
“Let’s take cover behind that rock pile at the rim!”
“Why?” Jerry looked at the foreign tourists again and shrugged. But he followed Grove to a heap of slaglike stone that hid them from the trail. “What’s the matter?”
Grove moved to Jerry’s ear to reply. “What the matter is, I’ve made my last mistake.”
“Hey!”
“The wires that were cut. By an earthquake?”
Jerry reacted swiftly and peered around the rocks, at the Arabs. “No!”
Grove was already opening his case. “There’s also the thing that scientist said at the Observatory.”
He had to shout although Jerry was less than a yard away.
The earth quivered in response to tumultuous rhythms of Halemaumau. Cinder cones spouted white-hot fountains and steam hissed in many places below them as if a hundred s
afety valves were trying to reduce the pressure in as many overloaded boilers. Occasional damped explosions accompanied the ejection of molten rock which had choked the throats of the black, immense cones; with each such hoarse but giant cough the impediment was hurled aloft. It separated into brilliant shards and glittering chunks that fell back onto the seething floor below the incendiary steeples.
Grove risked a quick look from the cover of their rock pile. Two Arabs preceded the huge one and now, emerging from flowing clouds of smoke and steam, came two more, wearing turbans but otherwise in Western clothes. He thought he saw the head of still another man pop up from behind a rift on the barren area and at the side of the trail opposite the pit. He wasn’t sure. Dropping back close to Jerry, he explained.
“I was the ‘second’ somebody, that scientist said. It didn’t occur to me that he meant another ‘Grove’ had been asking if a Grove had been seen around here. Probably one who said we were brothers. They got here ahead of us, Jerry. And they’re coming for us now. Five of them.”
Jerry still had his gun. He leaned around the rock heap and fired twice. “Missed!” His word was drowned.
Grove began unpacking his case. To Jerry’s stupefaction, he produced wrapped sandwiches and held one out. “Jenny keeps fresh ones in the refrigerator,” he bellowed, smiling.
The two Arabs in the lead had halted and looked to their right when Jerry next peered from a different spot. He got off two shots and both men crumpled. It made no sense. Then it did. Jerry ducked and gestured. It made no sense, again, to see that Grove was actually eating his sandwich and had set out fruit on a paper napkin. However, Grove did look after another bite.
Jerry had aimed two shots at one person yet both leaders had fallen. Now Grove could see why. A man was running in the open toward the Arabs and as he ran he fired. Both men in the rear were shooting at the runner and so was the huge Arab. The exposed stranger did not manage to stop the three, though one in the rear staggered as the stranger fell and lay still.
Jerry ducked back and looked wildly at Grove, gesturing with his gun. “Solentor?”
Grove nodded. “I’m sorry—”
His face taut, Jerry made his next try. This time, however, he stood up to aim at the waddling Arab. He failed by a split second because he’d wanted to be sure. The Arab’s weapon flickered and Jerry fell back, slowly. Blood poured from his forehead and Grove, seeing, was sure he’d lost his friend.
He gave one more glance at the enemy and saw the rear guard cut down. He heard, as if distantly, a machine gun but he could see no one firing. It broke off in the midst of a next burst. Grove knew what that meant! The gun had jammed; one operated by somebody using a periscope, Grove dimly thought, since nothing human had been visible in the place where the firing stopped.
Solentor, alone, cleared the last wraiths of steam and came steadily toward the rock heap. Grove sat again and resumed eating. He did not try to think of the identity of those who had helped to kill four of the five Arabs. There was no use in speculation and apparently they were only two, one now killed and the other frantically trying to get a jammed weapon working.
In this pandemonium of volcano and this unaccountable exchange of firing, Grove swept every emotion from his mind. He could not let himself look at the body of Jerry. He must not speculate on the completely unexpected help. Waiting for his enemy, Grove set his bitten sandwich aside and picked up a lime. He shook sugar on it from a shaker.
Solentor rounded the rock heap, smiling. He squatted behind it and took in the action of the other man. He was briefly astonished and to a degree that showed on his heavy, outsized face, which now had a darker tint that matched his flowing costume. He held his Lvov Mark Ten on Grove steadily and bellowed, “Just sit where you are.”
Grove nodded. The weapon didn’t appear to faze him. He glanced down as if he was going to suck his lime and decided not, apparently. They looked at each other for a few seconds. Grove’s wide gray eyes were calm. The other’s were wild, which Grove interpreted as a very grand thing to see in this last moment he expected to live.
Solentor shoved the case out of Grove’s reach. “You probably won’t mind being killed,” he said, “considering your success.” Bitterness clenched Solentor’s massive features. “And my failure,” he added.
Behind them, a cinder cone huffed out a clot of lava the size of a locomotive. The overhanging section of cliff split away with an earth-shaking sound that caused Solentor to glance toward the place for an instant.
He did not glance back.
The green, fruitlike object in Grove’s hand was, this time, a plastic imitation, one that was filled with concentrated lime juice, a product sold in most supermarkets. Squeezed lightly, it would squirt a slow and measurable stream. Squeezed hard—its small opening would jet the concentrate like a water pistol.
The highly acid liquid shot into Solentor’s eyes. He jumped away in shock, tripped on his robes, lost his turban and continued moving backward to get his balance or to keep away from Grove; perhaps both.
Grove was on his feet and ready but he saw what was certain. Solentor, blind, howling, backed a step too far. Grove rushed to the rim and saw the massive body plummet, strike the lava, cast it in high waves and sink into a molten sea.
He turned back slowly and went toward Jerry just as Jerry began to try to sit up. Grove covered the short distance and knelt beside him. Jerry rubbed his scalp, looked at his bloodied fingers, leered at Grove, and said unevenly, “He should of aimed lower.”
The wound was deep and bleeding hard. It seemed, to Grove’s touch, prickly—bone-sharp.
Then a voice called thinly. Once more Grove peered around the slag heap but with great caution: one of the men with Solentor might be, like Jerry, hit but conscious.
What he beheld was the most astonishing thing of all that had happened in the past two or three minutes. Beyond the motionless and fallen Oddie and the fake Arabs another man stood—a man in a Panama hat, a lightweight jacket, shirt, tie and tan slacks. The man was looking down at Oddie and he held a peculiar weapon.
Grove tossed his case into Halemaumau, glanced at Jerry and left him for a moment to go to meet Eaper. Axe behaved as if he were greeting a colleague in the next office, at the hall drinking fountain.
Grove couldn’t say anything. But Arthur Xavier Eaper could. The director of the CIA spoke in a sonorous way, looking down at the body of Oddie. “He was one of ours,” said the director. “He was on the team.”
Grove felt slightly and inexplicably faint. Eaper’s weapon distracted him then: it was a machine-pistol with some sort of periscopic device. Trust Axe, he thought crazily, to have a fancy model you can fire without exposing yourself, providing its complexity doesn’t make it jam.
Eaper continued in a manner neither sacred-faked nor mortician-fatuous. “How the devil do you happen to be here, Grove?”
The question removed the traces of faintness. Eaper and Oddie had got on Solentor’s trail, somewhere, somehow, before the Russian reached Volcanos Park, by a small margin, as Grove could see. But Eaper hadn’t any idea of how or why he and Jerry were at the same point!
“The night watchman at Sea Life Park,” Grove said as the director waited, “is a pal.”
“I’ve heard.” Beneath Eaper’s social caste, Jerry.
“We—well, went on a sort of binge. Wound up here. Then those Moslems started shooting at us.”
“I saw it.” Eaper nodded solemnly. “And the big one happened to fall?” He smiled insinuatingly.
“He—ah—tripped.”
Eaper was informative. “That man—and those Oddie gave his life to attack—were fleeing pursuit, hot pursuit—by myself—and my team. I strongly suspect, Grove, when the leader, the large man, tried to force you to share your cover, he was killed deliberately. Your rusty judo was still adequate, since he didn’t expect it, eh, Ring?”
“You could,” Grove admitted, his eyes narrowing slightly, “put it that way.”
“You di
dn’t—ahhh—recognize the man?”
“That sea elephant? Should I? Who is he?”
“Nobody you’d recall, I see.”
Grove cut it out. “My friend is hurt.” He turned, gasped and rushed to the unevenly approaching Jerry. Taking an arm, he murmured, “Say nothing, we’re both drunk, plastered!”
Jerry got it—besides, his stagger was real.
Eaper watched Grove help Jerry along the path. “Drunk as a goat,” Eaper said disgustedly. “You look like the devil too, Grove! When you’re cleaned up and rid of the hangover, get in touch. I’ll be in Honolulu. Number’s in the book. Not the address.”
Eaper smirked at the ingenuity of that and resumed his equally common look of distaste as the pair tottered on, toward a sudden rush of men in neat clothes who shouted with pleasure that was sickening, to see the chief in one piece.
Grove got Jerry back in the car and bandaged the wound with a clean handkerchief and a pad made from Jerry’s already ruined shirt.
“What in hell was all that?”
“I haven’t any idea,” Grove replied; and he started the car.
17
Which?
Grove drove to a hospital in Hilo. The doctors looked at the wound and kept Jerry there for observation. It had been a very near miss, with bone splintering and concussion that might affect him later.
Part of an afternoon remained. He phoned instructions to Jenny and had to listen to some incoherent talk about the big quake near the park. Grove had an idea about it, but the evening papers said little he understood. An eruption of the explosive type had occurred off the Makai Range at noon. Fortunately nobody had been harmed as the pier had been vacated because of some hush-hush scientific work planned for the evening. All vessels were at sea. The Kalan Highway had been closed off immediately afterward, and the park had been evacuated by the Makapuu exits. Reporters, as of now, were not permitted in the area. Offshore waters were similarly forbidden. Oahu’s last eruption had occurred about five thousand years ago, geologists estimated. This one was minor and quite possibly induced by some secret military experiment.