by Paul Kenyon
* * *
Paul said: "I've got a witness."
He looked around at the others sitting at the folding camp table, his fine-etched black face alive with excitement. They were eating an unappetizing-looking supper of bully beef and canned sardines and overcooked eggs obtained locally. They were all beginning to regret having elected Fiona cook.
Skytop lifted his big head, a forkful of beef halfway to his mouth. "You mean somebody survived that massacre, baby?"
Paul shook his head impatiently. "Nobody survived. Everybody got turned to jelly, like the man said. My man saw it from a mile away. From a high point."
"Who was it, Paul?" Eric said. His handsome Viking face was lined with gritty stone and brick dust from the day's dig. He was pleased with himself; that morning he'd found a Babylonian cylinder seal that dated the mound he was excavating at about 3000 B.C. Any lingering doubts that Sheik Hamad might have about their cover story would vanish when he showed it to him.
"One of the laborers. Fellow named Najam. A tribesman. Not from the local village. He's lonely. I've been buddying up to him."
"Hey, I didn't know your Arab-talk was that fluent!" Skytop said.
Paul flashed a smile. "Dates from my Mosque period," he said. "All us cats were learning that there Muslim jive."
Wharton raised an eyebrow. "And learning explosives."
"They both turned out handy, didn't they, Dan-io?"
Wharton nodded soberly. "They did at that. What did your friend Najum see?"
"People running around like bugs. Like they were scared out of their wits and didn't know what they were doing. Animals too. Then they all dropped. All at the same time. Only wasn't nothing to scare them. And wasn't nothing to make them drop."
"But they did, didn't they, love?" Fiona said. She was coming to the table with dessert, a concoction of canned peaches, dates and camel's milk curds. She set the bowl down. Skytop looked at it and took a hasty swig of warm beer.
"They did at that."
Eric pushed the gold-rimmed spectacles farther up his nose. "So whatever it was can operate from a distance. And has a target area of less than a mile."
"Right. Otherwise Najum'd be a jelly-baby."
"What else did this Najum see?"
"He must have seen the CIA man. At least he saw a honcho in a black nightgown ride in on a camel. Few minutes later, him and the camel, they both stampeded. Then they dropped, too."
"And?"
"There was some kind of a spotter plane. A jet. With Ghazali markings."
They all looked at one another. "Paydirt, children," Wharton said.
"There's more," Paul said.
"Go ahead, Paul," Eric said.
"A military convoy rolls into the village a little later. With medics. They poke around a while. Then they all push off."
"An experiment," Fiona said. "Somebody was trying something out." She dug into the mess of peaches, dates and curds with gusto. Skytop looked away.
"That's what it looks like," Eric agreed.
"A Ghazali experiment," Fiona said. She suddenly put down a spoonful of dessert. "The Baroness is right in the middle of it. And so are we." She shivered. "I don't like it. It has bad vibes."
Paul shook his head. "Death always has bad vibes."
Wharton had got up from the table and was pacing restlessly. His forehead was furrowed with thought. He went over to the window and pulled the muslin curtain aside. It was still daylight. He stared morosely out at the desert.
"Dan…" Skytop began.
Wharton raised a hand. "There's someone out there. Hurt, it looks like."
He was out the door immediately. The others followed him.
There was a man limping across the field of broken shards. He looked as if he were having a hard time of it. He was wearing the tattered remnants of an olive uniform.
Wharton reached him just as he collapsed, catching him in his big arms. He and Skytop hefted the man between them and began carrying him toward the hut.
"What're those wounds on his arms?" Paul said. "They look like claw marks."
The man groaned and stirred. Eric said, "What happened to you? What's your name?"
The man opened cracked lips. He was a young, handsome Arab with the fine aristocratic features of a desert warrior.
"Amar…" he croaked. "She caught the birds…"
And then he lapsed into unconsciousness again.
Something was dragging on the ground. Eric leaned over to pick it up. It was an empty canteen, dangling by a strap from Amar's shoulder.
Eric turned the canteen over in his hands. "Recognize the case?" he said slowly. "Leather from Mark Cross. It belongs to the Baroness."
11
"Terrible tragedy," Le Sourd said, buttering a croissant and dipping it in honey. "The Emir is quite upset. He's spending the day in prayer."
The Baroness sipped her coffee. "Sheik Zakar was a special friend of his, I gather. Have you any idea who might have been responsible?"
They were sitting in the small breakfast room in Le Sourd's wing of the palace. It was a cool, comfortable chamber with tile walls and tall sunny windows and rich Moroccan rugs piled on the floor. He'd sent a servant with a note inviting her to share his petit déjeuner with him.
She was wearing a billowy blue peignoir, open over a white crepe morning gown that was gathered, Grecian-style, under the breasts. In the sunlight streaming from the windows the faintest shadow of her nipples was visible through the sheer fabric. Le Sourd contemplated each in turn before replying.
"Perhaps," he said. "One of the prisoners got clean away. A local terrorist leader who calls himself Amar el Shakush. Amar the Hammer. There's some evidence that he may have had friends waiting for him out in the desert. They could have ambushed Sheik Zakar and his men." He shrugged. "In any case, the bodies were half eaten by hyenas. So it's hard to be certain."
"How awful."
"Odd thing, though. One of the hyenas had been shot. By the Sheik's hunting rifle. He or his men wouldn't have done that. They were his pets."
"Maybe one of the terrorists…"
"But then he'd have kept the rifle, wouldn't he? Another odd thing. We found a rifle belonging to one of Zakar's tribesmen near the remains of a terrorist. Amar's companion. Strange that he ambushed a man with his own gun."
"Impossible, Octave darling. So it couldn't have happened that way."
His handsome, sensitive face was unreadable. "Impossible, as you say. And one more odd happening. One of the camels came home with a bundle of dead falcons tied to its saddle. Somebody had netted them. Peculiar kind of net. A very fine plastic thread that I couldn't identify."
"How awful for the Emir. He loved those birds, didn't he?"
There was a hint of mockery in Le Sourd's eyes. "More than he loved Zakar. One of the birds was the Emir's favorite — a white hawk named Hakim. The Emir is inconsolable. He's proclaimed a national day of mourning."
"The poor man."
Le Sourd became busy mopping up honey with his croissant. He finished off his coffee and said, "So that means I have the day off. I'm at your disposal."
"Marvelous, darling! Perhaps you can show me your ultrasonic invention for oil prospecting. I'd love to know how you can see through solid rock."
"Ah, yes. I promised you, didn't I?"
"But Octave, how in the world did a musician like you decide to become a scientist?"
He laughed. "It came naturally." He stood up and walked around the table to pull out her chair. "Why don't you go back to your suite and get dressed. I'll tell you while I'm showing you around."
"Put your arm in there," Le Sourd said.
She looked at the fluid-filled stainless-steel tank dubiously. "Is it safe?"
"Quite safe. You won't feel a thing."
They were standing in a large room whose lacy extravaganza had been converted into a laboratory. Wires trailed in confusion from consoles and breadboarded equipment. There was a row of computer cabinets pushed against the wall,
looking incongruous amidst the carved marble and painted tiles.
She dipped her arm into the tank past the elbow, glad that she'd worn a sleeveless sundress. Le Sourd fiddled with dials. There was a soft humming sound.
"Is it happening?" she said.
"It's happening. See, there's no sensation, as I told you. That's because the pulses of ultrasonic sound passing through your flesh are too weak to notice. If it weren't for this computer reconstructing all those billions of pulses into a recognizable picture, the whole concept would be impossible. Now watch this."
He fit up something that looked like a large color television screen. It was plugged into one of the computer consoles.
"It's like an X-ray!" she said. "Only in color."
There were the bones of her arm on the screen, sharp and clear, surrounded by a fainter glow of pink flesh.
"Better than an X-ray. We can look at the soft tissues, too."
He twisted another dial. A pulsing network of veins and arteries stood out on the screen. You could still see the bone and muscle, but the circulatory system glowed brighter.
"Let's increase the magnification," Le Sourd went on.
Now the video screen zoomed toward the throbbing red vines that were Penelope's conduits of life-blood. She could see the tiniest capillaries now, thick as rope.
He was still twisting dials. The capillaries faded. There was a new network there now, a complicated tangle of grayish twine.
"And that's your nervous system. If you stuck your head into the tank, we could look inside your brain."
She could feel something now: the faintest tingle inside her arm.
"Octave, darling," she said. "You said that the ultrasonic pulses were too weak for me to notice. What would happen if you turned up the power?"
"Your arm would turn to jelly," he said.
She jerked her arm, dripping, out of the tank. He handed her a towel to wipe it off.
"I did think I felt something then," she said.
"I had to turn the volume up slightly to get at the nerve tissues. Very fine structures. Nothing you need worry about, though."
"Did you mean it about my arm turning to jelly?"
"If the intensity were great enough. It would rupture all the cells — break down the tissue. They use ultrasonics to homogenize milk, you know. And manufacture photographic emulsions."
She shuddered. "I don't fancy having a homogenized arm."
Le Sourd laughed. "Then I can't persuade you to climb into that tank so we can have a look inside that lovely body of yours?"
"Not on your life. I'd ruin my dress. But, darling, why would I have to lie in a tub of water? Can't you simply pass your… your sound vibrations… through me while I'm standing here?"
He narrowed his eyes. "Fluid's a better conductor of sound waves than air. And solids are even better. That's why I've been so successful in prospecting for oil for the Emir."
She put on her best kittenish voice. "Octave, you're holding something back."
He looked at her shrewdly. "All right," he said. "It won't matter soon. The world's going to find out shortly. Come with me."
He took her to a stout oak door and unlocked it with an iron key. He switched on fluorescent lights, and an enormous cavern of a hall sprang into view. Once it had been some kind of public chamber, but now it was a gleaming laboratory, rilled with workbenches and the towering shapes of large-scale equipment.
"My staff has the day off to mourn the Emir's falcons," Le Sourd said, "but I think I can operate some of the equipment for you."
"The Emir is financing all this?"
He gave her a mocking look. "He believes in scientific research."
"For the sake of oil prospecting?"
"For the sake of Allah."
He walked over to a swivel-mounted chromium tube that reminded her for all the world of a whaling ship's harpoon gun. Instead of a spearhead sticking out of the barrel, there was a petal-like arrangement of ceramics and some metal alloy. Le Sourd threw a switch, and indicator lights began to flicker on a console.
"Until 1972," he said, "physicists thought there had to be an upper limit to the number of sound vibrations that can be produced in a second. The number was thought to be somewhere around a billion waves per second."
He threw another switch, and a low hum filled the room.
"But now we know there isn't any upper limit," he went on. "With the new developments in cryogenics that have come along in the last few years, we know how to generate ultrasonic waves at trillions of vibrations per second."
A peculiar thing was happening inside Penelope's body. It was a shivery feeling that she couldn't quite place. But it made her feel edgy.
Le Sourd was twisting knobs, warming up his equipment. "The breakthrough came in 1972 at Bell Laboratories," he said. "A pair of scientists were able to generate a narrow beam of ultrasound at several trillion cycles through solids. A supercool solid, in fact. Frozen helium."
The shivery feeling grew stronger. Despite herself, Penelope felt her teeth begin to chatter. It was almost as if she were afraid. There was nothing she was afraid of, but the physical symptoms of fear were there. Le Sourd gave her a sharp look, then reached with both hands into his shirt pockets and adjusted the controls of the devices that looked like hearing aids.
"Go on, darling," she said, mastering self-control.
"A peculiar thing happens to sound at frequencies as high as that," Le Sourd said. "The energy gathers itself into little bundles. The sound turns into something that can be described as both waves and particles. The way you can describe light as both waves and particles."
She gritted her teeth. She could feel herself breathing faster, feel droplets of perspiration on her forehead.
Le Sourd was smiling now, with his perfect pearly teeth. "Light particles are called photons. So particles of sound have been named phonons. Watch."
A heavy steel plate lowered itself from the ceiling. It looked like a section of battleship armor. It was a couple of inches thick. It was about thirty feet across the room, in line with Le Sourd's chromium harpoon.
Le Sourd's face had gone pale now, too. With the smile still in place, he looked like an ivory carving of a flayed head. A sob escaped him, and he reached in his pockets for the hearing aids again.
"Now," he said, "when you take a beam of coherent light and fire it, you have something called a laser. A laser beam's energy is stupendous. It can drill a hole through steel — even something as hard as diamond."
With a sob, he pointed his cannon at the section of armor plate.
"This is what happens when you focus a beam of coherent sound!"
There was no sound that she could hear. There was nothing, except for a neat round hole that suddenly appeared in the center of that two-inch steel plate.
Penelope heard herself scream. She was suddenly in Le Sourd's arms, clinging to him, sobbing with an emotion she couldn't explain.
There was a strange acrid smell in the room, like ionized air.
Le Sourd was stroking her hair, making meaningless soothing sounds. "There, there," he said. "It's all over."
She was catching her breath now. She disentangled herself from Le Sourd's arms.
"What happened?" she said.
"Ultrasound leakage. It causes panic. I'm sorry, but there's no way to shield it with one hundred percent efficiency. I'm still working on it."
She looked at that sinister round hole in the steel and said, "What's the Emir going to do with your beam? Drill for oil?"
"Perhaps, when I learn to focus the beam more narrowly. There's still a spreading effect at a distance of a few miles."
She looked into Le Sourd's clear violet eyes. "Then what's it good for, darling?" she said.
He stared back without blinking. "We're studying the biological effects," he said.
* * *
"The Emir won't be joining us for dinner," Le Sourd said. "He's fasting today in memory of Hakim."
Penelope tucked her han
d under his arm. "Does that mean we can have wine with dinner, darling?" she said.
He laughed. "I wouldn't dare. The servants report everything. But you can have a martini. You established the principle last night."
The dining room in Le Sourd's suite was smaller and more intimate than the Emir's immense hall, and there were a table and chairs instead of cushions and a low platform. Candlelight flickered warmly, and there was the soft enveloping sound of Debussy from hidden loudspeakers.
She sat down in the chair he held out for her, a splendid nocturnal vision with her swept-back black hair and the white flesh of shoulders, arms and bosom, and the midnight-blue gown molding her body. No one could have guessed that the stretch fabric of that low scoop neckline was salted with millions of near-microscopic semiconductor chips that turned the gown itself into a computer, or that the string of magnificent pearls contained an FM unit broadcasting her computer-encoded dinner conversation to Sumo, back in her suite.
He was going to get it all on tape, the way he'd got Le Sourd's laboratory demonstration that morning on tape. It was a good thing she hadn't got into that tank of water, he'd said with a grin. It would have shorted out all his circuits.
"Very fetching gown," Le Sourd said, staring at her neckline.
"Thank you, Octave darling."
"Electrifying, in fact. Ah, here's your martini now." The young boy who was serving set the stemmed glass in front of her ceremoniously, managing to look a little shocked. The martini was cold and frosty, but there was an olive in it instead of a lemon peel. She fished it out by the toothpick and borrowed a lemon wedge from her oyster dish. Le Sourd passed her a sharp little paring knife without comment, and she fixed herself a twist.
"You'll have to forgive my servants," he said. "They haven't mastered the nuances."
The olive had felt like plastic, and she'd have bet that the toothpick was an antenna. Crude! There had been no electronics in her suite — just the ultrasonic scanner that Sumo had detected. She wondered why Le Sourd hadn't bugged his own quarters with ultrasound. It was part of the mystery she'd have to solve.