Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  “But how did he know that he had to start from the Great White Throne?” I asked.

  “I’m certain he knew a great deal about Sanderson. He had surely watched the old man when he was through his country. It is a bit far from here by our European standards, where if you move fifty miles you may be in another nation, country, and culture. But in these huge, undetailed areas, men cover a lot of ground. Why, even in Europe, stone-age man thought little of tramping on his ten toes all the way from the Black Sea out to Ireland—and that meant two sea voyages to boot—and back.

  “When Kerson learned that other people were interested in Sanderson’s dives into the back of beyond, his interest became keen. Did he steal the code from Intil or from Sanderson? From Sanderson, I suspect. Intil would be harder to rob, and once he had Sanderson’s code probably put it away safe until he had your help to decode it. We know he cherished the little stick on which it had to be ‘enscrolled.’ Sanderson would, no doubt—I expect you have come to a similar conclusion—have been the trader’s guest more than once, and the old Scotchman must every now and then have talked a little when he was holding perhaps more than he ought of the liquid ‘Scotch’; small, discreet (as he thought) boasts about his own cunning. No man who is as interested in locking up secrets in clues, as was he, but wants, sooner or later, to share his cleverness with someone—someone, I have generally found, whom he likes to think of as a fool. Many a criminal has been caught simply because the detective was not clever in anything but in his power to look like a sucker.”

  It went through my mind that Mr. Mycroft certainly lacked that gift and, indeed, had the complementary weakness which he had just been pointing out—the need to describe his cleverness. Well, but for that I might easily be left never knowing exactly where I stood in all this tangle.

  “I surmise,” he went on, “that probably Kerson, on one of Sanderson’s ‘look-in’s,’ opened the old man’s lips with the native solvent I’ve just mentioned. Kerson would copy the clue and replace it. Maybe it was coiled up on its stick in the old fellow’s effects.’”

  I interrupted, for here I actually knew more than he. “Yes, Kerson had evidently made a very careful copy and had his own idea of what the clue might be, for when he came to me he thought it might be Ogham, an example of which he had seen in a puzzle book.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Mr. Mycroft, treating me for a moment as a colleague. “That was shrewd of him. If he hadn’t had to extract the clue in a hurry and could have unwrapped all Sanderson’s gear he might have come straight upon the right words.”

  “Perhaps he had tried twisting it round,” I added, “for I noticed that the piece of paper he handed me, if you are right that it was a copy, still had a tendency to curl of itself.”

  “Well, be that as it may, about the Great White Throne the old man in his ‘Scotch’-inspired talk would be likely to begin rambling on in that biblical language which, learned by all Scotch bairns before they can understand a word of it (especially dear to Calvinists is that scene of the irrevocable Last Judgment before the Great White Throne), pours off their tongues when in ‘liquor’ or in delirium. The repetition of that phrase would stick in Kerson’s mind; for Kerson, like most descendants of pioneers, was undoubtedly brought up on the obscurer and less ethical parts of the Old and New Testaments. He’d puzzle away at the old man’s enigmatic hints.

  “Of the code he would still be unable to make anything, until he decided, because he’d heard from me that you were a decoder, to take it to you. I think anyone who knows his Bible in a mechanical way, with all that chapter and verse way of handling it like a set of catch words or charms, might blunder on the clue. When you add to that the fact that any remarks about the Great White Throne would undoubtedly not only have its scriptural connotation to a trader of Fundamentalist stock, but would also, to anyone who knew this district, clearly refer to this desert National Monument—well—” he broke off.

  “I suppose,” I said, “he’d come up here and might learn that there had actually been a mission trail, now long lost, somewhere off the standard trail. But how did he get further?”

  “The trail went at least as far as the natural stone circle, we know,” he said. “From there on he’d be able, I think, to find what he was looking for, if he knew near enough what it was that he wanted.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Again he must have learned from Sanderson, either by word of whiskey-opened mouth or by examining the geological specimens the old man pretty certainly once had on him, that he was not out after gold.”

  “What were they after?”

  “He was seeking, if not for treasure in heaven, for treasure from the heavens. But as that has been the goal of all of us, before I end with that, let me end with you.”

  “You mean how my guess, though I didn’t know of such a mission trail, and the code didn’t mean that, actually put him on such a trail and brought him to his fatal goal and end.”

  “Yes; it sounds strange, but it has actually happened before. It does occur, this strange insight by someone who may actually believe that he is not telling the truth.” (I didn’t like that, but was too anxious to have the thing cleared up even to smart much under the slap.) “The standard case was in the middle of the last century. A sound and noted scholar in Copenhagen announced to a widely interested world of classical studies, that he had found a Latin document, long lost, much desired and of specific information. He said that he had come upon the famous Antonine Itinerary, a book known to us only in quotation fragments but which originally gave the record-map (distances, post-houses, description of the terrain, etc.) of the imperial mails system of the Roman Empire. He published what, he said, were a number of excerpts. But when urged to produce the original manuscript, he demurred. Finally he was charged with having concocted the whole thing, and in disgrace, the keenest of all disgraces for a scholar, he died. A sad story, but not uncommon, alas! Poor Chatterton was a poet and so is remembered, but many who were not did the same thing and met a fate as ill. But this story only begins with the disgrace and death. Archaeological exploration went ahead. The Roman road system was excavated in all parts of Europe. Judge the surprise, the consternation, when time and again as a lost road was uncovered by the spade, its route was found ‘prophesied’ in the dead and discredited Copenhagen scholar’s records. Then these records were actually consulted, and by them it was possible to find where to dig so as to strike long-lost and buried stretches of old Roman imperial highway. Still, even today, no one thinks the poor fellow ever had an actual manuscript of the lost Antonine Itinerary in his hands. No hint of such a find has ever come to anyone’s ears. If he had had that original, he could not have destroyed it, when all that was needed for his triumphant rehabilitation was to have produced it. Besides, some of his references still seem to be false. No, the only explanation is,” he paused, “what happened to you. ‘Free association’—I think that psychological term for this sort of tendentious fishing-and-guessing is best and most just—suddenly gives rise to a true, but even to the mind that gives it, an unknown insight.”

  I must say I was relieved to find that, as it were in spite of myself, I had been accurate, reliable, acute. It seemed as good a point as any at which to leave the awkward interest in myself and my bona fides and to turn to clearing up the rest.

  “By the way,” I ventured, “have you Intil’s moves clear in your mind?”

  “Yes,” he said. “He was the simplest, because the most violent. Violence is always, au fond, simple because it can’t resist in the end those simple reactions, that crude hitting out, which ends in murder. The worst criminal never kills actually, any more than the best chess player takes pieces. He wants to win, not to show off; he wants power, not bloodshed. Intil may, indeed, have actually risked his life. I’m sure now that he trailed Sanderson and when Sanderson found him on his tracks and couldn’t shake him off, they exchanged shots, probably, and Intil hit. He then relieved the corpse of eve
rything, including the clue and the little rod that, when he understood enough, made it possible for him to get the code word perfect. You know how, once he thought he had that clue and that you two must have lit on its meaning also, he tried to be rid of you. It was neat in its way,” he ruminated, “but really it showed the murderer’s characteristic rashness, hurry, hastiness; so in the end he’s so slapdash he actually licks the wrong envelope.”

  These were reflections in which, as I have already said, I could have no relish. I turned Mr. Mycroft’s mind back, therefore, to where a patch of fog still lay over the center of my knowledge of this amazing business.

  “But who or what killed Kerson?” I asked. After all, it was not possible to say that I, or anyone else, as far as I could see, had had any hand in that.

  “What finished him off,” said Mr. Mycroft, “finished our story, too, if I’m not mistaken. Here, at least, you may have my line, why I came out here and why I am returning. Some little while ago some very small specimens of ore were sent to certain people on a certain committee in a certain capital. But though these specimens were minute, they were of the utmost—I might say, incomparable—value. Beside them, gold was literally dross—a degenerate slag, a waste byproduct. You must know of the hunt which is going on at present, absorbing all the energies of all the physicists, wherever they are, whichever side they are on? The search is to get a super-radium, a radioactive substance that is so active that it will set up indefinitely ‘chain-reactions’ in ordinary nonradioactive matter. It would cause ordinary matter to start combusting by atomic action, just as thermite will start noninflammable things burning through its intense molecular action.”

  “Then iron and rock would start smoldering like ignited wood and coal, and the world would be literally on fire?”

  “That’s the dream,” he replied. “But at present, do what they can, the reaction, though it has been started, though the match has been lit leading to the world-mine, it won’t go on. True, some progress has been made, and now the fuse burns for some nine ‘sputters.’ But after that, some safety catch or mechanism of the nature of things, intervenes, and the chain-reaction peters out. That was why there was such a stir, a secret stir but none the less deep for that, in high quarters when these spicules of rock, which I have mentioned, arrived—arrived in their thick lead containers. The account said, I understand, that they were of meteoric origin, and though of, until now, unknown intensity of radiation, that was not their interest. For they were not of nearly sufficient radioactive power to help set going that unlimited reaction-train—that reaction with which any possessor can destroy everyone else—”

  “Himself included?” I questioned.

  No answer came through the dark, but after an instant the voice resumed. “The minute rock splinters came, it was said, from the outer fragments or rind of a meteorite. The thing was not impossible. Ludblad, the Swedish astronomer, has shown that the meteorites which are always raining upon us—as we can see well at this moment (most of them are eroded by our atmosphere into fine dust)—probably come from one or even two fellow planets which rode the sky once on orbits outside Mars. They, he has given some proof for supposing, blew up after they had become mature, and, maybe, after they had given rise to life; for some researchers think that they have actually found bacterial life still lurking in these meteoric fragments. However that may be, meteorites of all sorts of geological make-up have been found: of stone and of the nickel iron which is supposed to be the composition of our own world’s central mass. Traces of nearly all the minerals have been found. Yes, they were mature worlds and they utterly shattered themselves.”

  “How?” I asked, watching at that moment a huge meteorite, an actual spar, I suppose, of those ill-fated worlds, burst into flame above my head.

  “No one knows, of course, but there are two theories: One is that all planets, this one we are sitting on included, tend—it was Joly’s theory, the man who found how to date the rocks by their radioactivity—to get hotter and hotter until the radioactive layer melts the crust and, the pressure released, the liquid or gaseous center of the earth bursts out, rending this husk on which we live to fragments. The other theory is that some mad form of life must have monkeyed with matter’s make-up until—” He left the sentence unfinished and in the black silence the firm earth felt to me only a dark spinning bubble ready at any moment to fly asunder.

  “To leave speculation alone,” the level voice continued, “if these were splinters of rock so highly radioactive—and tests proved that this part of the sender’s claim was accurate—if, further, as the report went on to claim, they were not the most powerful radioactive material to be obtained, but only, as it were, the rind of this strange fruit, this apple of discord, flung by the fates onto earth’s lap—well, then, this world of ours, being what it is today, couldn’t let such a ‘welkin’s welcome’ well alone. Meteorite gifts have always played an important part in man’s civilization. The first iron tools, we now know from chemical analysis, are precisely that form of nickel-iron alloy which nearly all metal meteorites yield; and the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians called the metal, ‘The strong thing—or the adamant—that fell from Heaven.’

  “Incidentally, I suppose you probably understand that the heat generated by a meteorite, by its friction on the air, is so terrific that when it strikes the earth the sand is melted and some of it actually fuses into glass?”

  “I know,” I said, “that there’s a company which tried to dig up a huge buried meteorite in Arizona. But I thought it had gone too deep.”

  “The advices which were received about what I may call Sanderson’s meteorite said that it, on the contrary, had behaved like the great Siberian one of 1908. There the ball itself seems to have burst before it struck the earth and so, instead of a single mass plunging hundreds of feet into the earth, a sort of shrapnel showered down over a wide area and a core probably lighted at the center of the bombarded patch.

  “The problem, however, was to find exactly where this meteorite had come to earth. It was quite likely quite a small one. Our informant, need I say, was chary. He wanted to know whether we were interested, but not to let us in on his secret, except on his own terms. I say ‘we,’” he added, “a little prematurely. For it was only at that point that I myself was actually called in. There’s little more to say; you’ll probably have deduced the rest. Intil was our cautious informant. He wanted to get backing for what he took to be a big excavation, as it might have been. Sanderson, however, had already started excavating—though, of course, Intil did not know this. Intil had simply gained possession of some of the highly radioactive outer-ore which Sanderson had collected, and the clue, which he couldn’t read. He was always rather daring but always in rather too much of a hurry.”

  “And Kerson’s death?” I demanded, for that was the real issue, surely.

  “I think,” Mr. Mycroft said, “that Sanderson had exposed the main core-mass at his last visit. I believe that it must have formed round itself a kind of oxide or skin of far less radioactive material (though still, by our standards, intensely radiant). I believe that Sanderson, whom we know to have been a man of more than usual general knowledge, had the sense, when he had gone as far as that, to wait. The strange treasure was practically inert. Though it would be highly dangerous to handle, it would, unless tampered with, remain like the genie in the bottle. No doubt one day he would have asked for help. Perhaps, for all we know, his clue was not merely a highly embroidered personal mnemonic but he was working out some sort of ‘agony column’ message, whereby he might signal to, contact, and make working terms with a fellow explorer who, when he had tested him out, might be brought to share risks and probably profits.

  “However that may be, Intil, the high-brow hijacker, got first on his trail. When these two were gone, along comes Kerson. All he knows is that there’s a super-valuable ore to be found. He finds the pit, thanks, among other ‘pawns of fate,’ to you. He sees the mass of exposed ‘ore’ lying there at
the bottom. He goes down and starts cracking away at the lump, the top of which is exposed. One doesn’t know how long the released, or ‘unscreened,’ radiation took to kill him. He got as far as where we found his body, crept under the tarpaulin—violent X-ray ‘burns’ are rightly so called, and this must have been a furnace, the like of which no physicist has yet witnessed—and died. Now you see why I took with us the lead-impregnated rubber gauntlets, which men who work with X-rays wear—though against that charge, I doubt if they would have been adequate.”

  “But there wasn’t any stone down that pit. I saw,” I said.

  “Not now,” he answered. “When Kerson cracked the crust, the shell of that dread dragon’s-egg, the core mass radiated itself away. You know they have already made in the laboratory elements higher than the 90 of uranium, the highest known natural element, but they are so unstable that they will not last. This immensely high power must have been equally unstable. The higher the power, the less it endures—a motto not without comfort in these frantic power-days! Though the electroscope which I let down into the pit showed that the whole area was still intensely radioactive”—(I thought of that sinister glow I had been sure I had seen hovering round the lips of the pit)—“still the treasure itself, more deadly than the fabulous Rhine Gold, has ‘melted into air, into thin air.’ Well, I was bound to seek. Better in our hands than in theirs. But I must own, Mr. Silchester, that I am not sorry that Nature has once again intervened, once again withdrawn, on consideration, from us such final powers.”