Wash entered the cabin next to hers. She heard its door slam and a little shuffling, then silence fell. Now she was seized with the urge to talk to him, to find out what had passed between him and the Great Ram, and do her utmost to persuade him to make a further attempt later in the night to sabotage the rocket. But she knew she must control her impatience. To leave her cabin while the Great Ram was still about might prove fatal.
It was as well that she waited. She was lying on her back with her eyes closed. There came a faint sound and she knew that someone had opened the door of her cabin. A sixth sense told her that it was the Great Ram and warned her to keep perfectly still. She felt certain that he had looked in to make sure that she was there and asleep. Now, she thanked her stars that she had obeyed Wash and returned to her cabin instead of remaining among the fuel drums. If her cabin had been empty and she had been found near the rocket, she knew that she would never have been able to stand up to the Great Ram's questioning.
He took a step forward into the cabin. Her heart contracted with a spasm of fear. She was the useless member of the party and he had good cause to hate her. Perhaps he had not just come to see if she was asleep, but had decided that the time had come to rid himself of her. She was still holding the bread knife. Instinctively her grasp tightened on its handle. Had he touched her she would have flung back the blanket and lunged blindly at him. But after a moment he stepped back, murmured a few sentences of what sounded like gibberish, and closed the door.
Sweating from every pore she continued to lie there, still not quite certain that he had left her. It seemed an age before she could summon up the courage to turn her head a little sideways and steal a swift glance from beneath still lowered eyelids. She let her breath go in a great sigh. Except for herself, the faint blue light showed the cabin to be empty.
Once more she resigned herself to wait with patience, until it could be reasonably assumed that the coast was clear. Every few minutes she looked at her wrist watch. Its hands seemed to move with incredible slowness, but minute by minute an hour crept by. Getting out of the bunk, she put on her skirt and cautiously opened the door. No sound came to her and momentarily her hopes soared again. By playing on Wash's resentment at having been tricked by the Great Ram and doing her utmost to strengthen the feeling she had instilled into him that, as a Satanist, he had backed the wrong horse, she might yet induce him to make another attempt to sabotage the rocket and, this time, perhaps they would succeed.
Next moment her hopes fell to zero. The door stood open but she could not pass through the doorway. The Great Ram had erected an invisible barrier there that held her a prisoner more surely than any locks and bolts. Strive as she would, just as had been the case at the Cedars, she could not put a foot over the threshold.
* * * * *
Only the hands of Mary's watch told her that she had got through the night. Lying fully dressed on her bunk, through parts of it she had dozed; but she had the impression that she had not dropped off, even for a few moments, and certainly her brain had never ceased to revolve round and round the coming day and the terrible fate that it might usher in for millions of helpless people.
On finding that she could not leave her cabin, she had thought of trying to knock Wash up so that he would leave his and come round to her. But the partition that separated the two cabins was made of thick timber. With the handle of the breadknife she had rapped a tattoo on it, but without result. An hour had elapsed since the Great Ram had left them, and from experience she knew how soundly Wash slept. It was evident that he had already fallen into one of his heavy slumbers, and that to rouse him would need violent hammering. The noise that would make would, she felt sure, bring the Great Ram on the scene, and that she dared not risk.
The fact that he had erected an occult barrier to prevent her from leaving her cabin she took to be a clear indication that Wash had not altogether got away with his bluff about his concern regarding the alignment of the rocket. In some way the Great Ram's suspicions had been aroused and, she guessed, they took the form of suspecting the truth - that she was endeavouring to turn Wash against him, and influencing him to interfere in some way with the rocket's proper functioning.
Wretchedly she had flung herself on her bunk, and endeavoured alternately to devise a means of wrecking the Great Ram's plans when morning came, or giving in to her tired mind and, sloughing off all responsibility, get to sleep. She had succeeded in neither.
Soon after seven o'clock she heard the clatter of pans in the galley, but the Chinese cook did not come to call her as on the previous day. She got up, tidied herself as well as she could and again tried to leave her cabin, but found that the invisible barrier still held her back. Half an hour later she caught sounds of Wash stirring in the cabin next door. Shortly afterwards it was swiftly conveyed to her that he was trapped too. She could hear him shouting:
'What goes on here! Master! Exalted One! I'd bust right through this had any lesser Mage corralled me in. But why put me behind the bars? Come on now! Let me outa here. Let me out, I say!'
To his shouts there came no reply. In vain Mary tried to attract his attention by calling to him, but his angry bellows drowned her cries. Nearly a quarter of an hour elapsed before he seemed to resign himself to having been made a prisoner, and fell silent. She seized the opportunity to beat a loud tattoo on the board wall that divided their cabins. After a few minutes he responded with heavy thumps. The planks in the partition were thick, but there were thin chinks between them. By enunciating clearly in a low voice that was not much above a whisper, each could hear what the other said.
Both, by similar occult spells, had been made prisoners in their cabins. Wash said of the previous night that the Great Ram had not appeared to suspect him of a double cross. When he had suggested that the rocket was completely out of alignment if the intention was for it to fall on Saanen, the Great Ram had replied that he had changed his mind and decided to send it in the opposite direction, so that it should fall in the more sparsely populated Bernese Oberland in the neighbourhood of the little town of Ilanz.
That was all very well but, while Saanen lay to the west, Ilanz lay to the north-east, not many degrees off a direct course to Moscow; and, having seen the route and calculations in the Great Ram's office for the rocket's flight, Wash had not been taken in by this plausible excuse for its reorientation.
He added that both their lives now hung on the Great Ram's having planned that he should be flown out of Switzerland once he had launched his rocket. Where to, remained a matter for anything but happy speculation. Certainly not to Moscow, which by the time an aircraft could reach it would be under heavy atomic attack from the Western Allies; and equally not to any city in Europe, as they would be going up in smoke under hits - or be rendered untenable by near-misses - from Russia's atomic bombardment. Their destination, Wash and Mary unhappily agreed while hoarsely whispering through the chinks between the boards, was probably India or China, and neither had the least desire to go permanently to either.
No one summoned them to breakfast, so they sat on in their respective cabins, occasionally encouraging one another with a sentence or two spoken through the partition. Then, at a little before nine o'clock, the door of Mary's cabin swung open and, with a sudden renewal of her terror, she saw the Great Ram standing looking at her.
'So you thought you could outwit me by seducing from his allegiance that great oaf next door?' he said in his high, sneering voice. 'You miserable little fool. Know now what you have done. With yesterday my use for him ended. I had intended first thing this morning to let him go off in his aeroplane and take you with him. The two of you have found out my real intentions, but I had meant to give him a good reason for not going to Moscow; and there would have been ample time for you to be well out over the Mediterranean before I gave Europe over to havoc. Instead I mean to rescind the postponement of your sentence that I agreed to give him. For the last few hours of your life you may also savour the thought that, through you, th
is lover of your choice is now condemned by me to the hideous death I intend to inflict on you both soon after midday.'
Mary could take little consolation from the thought that Wash was not the 'lover of her choice', so her heart would not be wrung by the knowledge that she had brought about his death. As for herself, she was not afraid to die, but only of the threatened pain. But a quick death, however hideous, might, she thought, be preferable to being carried off into the unknown by Wash, then abandoned by him to suffer disfigurement and a lingering death from the curse that the Great Ram had earlier decreed for her. She dared not raise her eyes to his and continued to sit on the edge of her bunk as he went on.
'Your insolence in believing for one moment that you could interfere with my plans fills me with amazement. That a creature like you, even aided by that backwoods magician you have besotted with your sex, should pit your puny wits against mine is a supreme impertinence.' Suddenly he gave an eerie cackle of high-pitched laughter, and added, 'How little you can understand the power that I wield. I, the Great Ram, have nothing to fear. No, not even when an army is sent against me. Come, I lift the barrier that bars your door. Follow me, and I will show you how I deal with my enemies.'
As he turned away Mary stood up. Whether she would or not she felt a compulsion to leave her cabin and walk down the tunnel after him. He led her out to the rock platform at which the cable railway ended. Pointing across the valley to a group of tiny figures making their way up through the snow towards a low saddle in the opposite range, he said:
'There go Mirkoss, my cook, and the other Chinese I have had working for me here. You see, I have a care for those who serve me faithfully, even if they are no more than slaves. You and that lovelorn fool, Twisting Snake, would also be on your way out of danger now had you not had the impudence to challenge me.'
Mary found her tongue at last, and murmured, 'But why should they have been in danger if they had remained here? When . . . when your rocket lands on Moscow the Russians will fire back at the American cities and those of the N.A.T.O. countries. They won't waste rockets on Switzerland.'
Again he gave his cynical high-pitched laugh. 'Of course, and I too shall be safe among these mountains; but not in this cave. I have a twin brother: a weak fool with whom I long since quarrelled; yet there remains a strong psychic link between us. A clever Englishman named Verney has used him to overlook me. So they are aware of my intentions, and by one means and another have discovered my retreat.'
At this admission, coupled with Verney's name, Mary's heart gave a bound. Perhaps the spool from the tape recorder that she had thrust on Barney had reached the Colonel and contributed to the hunt that must have started for the missing war-head soon after Wash had flown off with it. If the spool had reached Verney, Ratnadatta, Abaddon, Honorius and the rest of that murderous crew would by now have been arrested. So she would have succeeded in avenging poor Teddy after all. But had she? Within a few hours of the Great Ram launching his rocket London would be laid in ruins. Innocent and guilty alike would perish by the hundreds of thousands. The Satanists of Cremorne would have become cinders long before they could be brought to trial.
She knew that she and Wash would be given no further chance to sabotage the rocket. Now, she could only pray that some fault in its mechanism, some act of God, or even some overweening vanity on the part of the Great Ram himself, would delay the launching. The knowledge that Verney was on his way, and Barney too, perhaps, threw her into a fresh form of agony - for she felt that the strain of waiting and wondering if they would arrive on the scene in time to save the situation must soon prove unendurable.
Hardly had she thought of that before she was relieved from having to face it. Exclaiming 'Here they come! Here they come! I knew they could not be far off,' the Great Ram pointed down into the valley.
At the same moment the distant sound of motor engines was wafted up to her and she saw what seemed from that height a column of toy vehicles emerge from round the shoulder of the mountain. Cars, motor cycles, jeeps and tanks skidded and bumped along the uneven track until thirty or forty of them were visible. When the leading cars reached the engine-house they pulled up with a jerk. A score of figures tumbled out of them and ran towards the building.
The Great Ram gave a sinister chuckle. 'Now, little fool, you shall see how I deal with forces far stronger than yourself when they are brought against me.'
Instantly her joy at knowing friends to be so near was changed to awful apprehension, for it seemed clear that he had already planned to use some form of his evil power for their destruction. Yet he uttered no curse and made no gesture.
Suddenly there came a bright flash, a tongue of flame leapt skywards, and a moment later the roar of the explosion followed to echo and echo back and forth across the valley. Where the engine house had stood there was now a dense cloud of smoke and from it came up thinly the cries of the injured and the dying.
In Mary horror temporarily drove out fear. Swinging round she faced the Great Ram and screamed at him, 'You fiend! You fiend! May Heaven blast you for this murder!'
At that moment, had she had the bread knife with her she would have tried to kill him; but he had come for her so unexpectedly that she had had to leave it hidden under the blanket of her bunk. His only reaction was a scornful laugh, followed by a glance that instantly quelled her and forced her to lower her gaze.
'Come now,' he said abruptly. 'I have work to do, and you shall see me do it. Since you have shown yourself to be one of those who follow the pathetic slave religion started by the imposter Christ, it pleases me that you should hear me announce the death knell of Christianity. If He had the power to preserve it, He obviously would, but He has not; and I intend to show those among His followers who may survive how ill-placed their faith in this self-styled "Saviour of the World" has been. Go in now. You know the wireless cabin. Wait for me there while I watch for a little longer the consternation of those puny creatures down in the valley.'
She knew she must obey him, yet she still had a kick left in her and as she turned to re-enter the cave she burst out, 'You've wrecked the railway, but you've only killed a few of them. And it's certain that with those tanks there are mountain troops. They'll climb up here. For every one you kill they'll call up a dozen reinforcements. You've left it too late to escape. They are bound to get you.'
He tossed his head with the old arrogant gesture. 'Little fool, your persistent blindness to my power becomes almost amusing. Mirkoss and the Chinese I had to send away, otherwise they would have been trapped. But I, the Great Ram, am not as other men. When I will I can call down the cloud to hide the entrances to this cave and halt the climbers, unless they are prepared to risk death with every step they take. The cloud, though, will form no barrier to my sight, and I have long since learned to levitate myself; so I can pass over crevasses that no guide would attempt to cross. I am also impervious to cold; so I shall go upward and make my way unchallenged over the range into another valley where I have already made preparations for my reception.'
To that she could make no reply. It was clear that he had thought of everything. Stumbling a little, she made her way to the wireless cabin and threw herself into a chair there.
The thought that now obsessed her was that Barney might have been with Colonel Verney in the engine-house when it had blown up. She was past tears, but her very heart-strings were wrung with the visual image of her gay, laughter-loving Barney as a broken, twisted body being carried on a stretcher from that still-smoking ruin down in the valley. Her belief that he despised her made no difference to her love for him. And since she had realized, from what Wash had told her, that he must be one of Colonel Verney's young men, although she could not begin to account for such a strange metamorphosis, her love for him, instead of being only an unreasoning passion, had been sanctified by respect and admiration.
For what seemed a long time she sat crouched, wringing her hands, in the wireless cabin. It drifted through her mind that, by ripping at t
he wires and bending the terminals, she might put the set out of action. But a moment's thought told her that whether he made his proposed broadcast to the world or not did not matter in the least, as that had no bearing on his ability to launch the rocket.
At last he joined her. Waving her from the chair, he sat down in it and began to fiddle with the apparatus. She stood in the doorway, no longer feeling a compulsion to remain with him, but too mentally exhausted to make the effort necessary to break away.
He spent a good ten minutes tuning in to the wave length he required, then began to speak in what she imagined to be Russian. That he should have wished her to remain to hear him she now guessed to be due to his inordinate vanity's demanding the presence of an audience, however humble or unable to appreciate what he was saying, to witness this epoch-making declaration he was making to the world.
Actually he was telling the Russians that their leaders had betrayed the masses by abandoning the Marxist faith of equality achieved through violence, and had become money-grubbing bourgeois intellectuals. He announced the imminent destruction of the régime - although he made no mention of his rocket or the way in which he meant to bring that about - and told the Russians that those who survived the purge he meant to initiate would be given a new chance to be a law unto themselves and enjoy to the utmost all the pleasures this world had to offer. He then went on to talk of himself and the part that, under Satan, lie would play in the New Order that was to emerge from the Old.
Although Mary could not understand one word he said, she felt sure that from his arrogant, ranting tone - which reminded her vaguely of the broadcasts she had heard when a child, made by Hitler - anyone who was listening to him would take him for a madman. That he was mad she now had no doubt, but that did not make him any the less dangerous.
Abruptly he ceased his tirade and again spent some minutes tuning in to a wave length that he evidently considered the best on which to convey his message to the United States and Britain.
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