by Talbot Mundy
Paranoia? Paresis? I began to wonder. Dope seemed improbable, although I was sitting too far away from him to draw confident deductions about that. But he was certainly not the same dynamic monster that he had been, hardly fifteen minutes gone, when he interrupted Baltis’ operation on my forearm. It seemed to me his lower lip had drooped a trifle, and the occasional movement of his left hand near his mouth suggested something wrong with the co-ordination of his faculties. He blazed up suddenly. He seemed to have forgotten the problem, or perhaps to believe he had solved it. Vanity lurked in his smile as he glanced toward Grim.
“You want her?”
“Yes,” said Grim.
“Take. You can have as many ash you want. Kill her if she’s no good.”
“Come here,” said Grim, and Baltis promptly went and sat beside him; but she glanced at Henri Coq, who smiled and tilted both ends of his d’Artagnan moustache.
Dorje lurched off the pile of rugs and cushions. Locomotor ataxia? Apparently not; he walked without any noticeable difficulty with his legs, although he still had the air of disliking to use them. He went out through a narrow door at the back of the platform, but the eight men remained where they were. They lolled and stared at us. One of them sprawled on his stomach on Dorje’s rug-pile and appeared to try to understand the box-like instrument. The others smiled at him. He smiled back, sat up, shrugged his shoulders and resumed his former place.
Grim glanced at me. “You get it?”
“Is it safe to talk English?”
“Yes, when he isn’t here.”
“Cracking,” I said, “that’s obvious. Do you know what it is?”
“He calls it soma. He has probably gone out now to take some. If so, he won’t be back for twenty minutes. He never sleeps. He takes that stuff instead. First it makes him relax. Then it makes him diamond-hard and mentally alert.”
“There’s something physical as well.”
“Sure. That’s why he began to take the stuff. It’s a drug the Atlanteans used.”
“Where is Vasantasena?”
“God knows. He seemed afraid of her. Two men took her somewhere. I hope nothing happened.”
“Stick to the point,” said Jeff. “Tell us all you can before he gets back. I understood your signals to mean ‘Success not quite impossible if we humor him.’ Go on from there. I didn’t get the rest of it.”
“He’s at the end of his tether,” said Grim, “and he knows it. He may decide to kill us, and he may not. He broke down badly on the way here — nerves gone — had the horrors — sees the Asiatic hells when he’s in that condition, but has to control himself to keep his men from guessing what’s wrong. So he talked to me. He found a buried city in the Gobi Desert, where the Atlantean secrets are all preserved in synthetic gold tablets in chests of the same metal — chemical formulae — everything.”
“I could have told you that,” said Baltis.
“But you didn’t.”
“Benjamin mentioned it,” said Jeff. “Go on.”
“He hadn’t brains enough himself to read them, or the patience either, but he had the luck to find a Chinaman who could puzzle it out. He says it’s a kind of key-language, in ideoform, not unlike Chinese. The Chink found several men to help him, and between them they deciphered a lot of it, but there’s oodles more. Dorje began experimenting with the formulae that they translated into modern Chinese, and he soon found he could wreck the whole world, as the Atlanteans did, if he trained himself and taught some people to become receptive to his impulse. That’s about how he phrased it. He decided to rule the world instead of absolutely wrecking it. And, of course, he had heard the legend about the Lord Maitreya’s expected coming, so he began with propaganda about that, and by getting a rep as a great magician.”
“How long has he been doing this?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know. He says he is more than eighty years old. He has kept himself going with chemical formulae found in those gold chests. So has the Chinaman. But the Chinaman also is cracking.”
“Out there in the Gobi?”
“No. No water or supplies out there. His first establishment was in Siberia. Do you remember reading of a cataclysm, said to be caused by an enormous meteor, that wiped out hundreds of square miles — about the time of the Armistice, I think it was — wiped ’em out so absolutely that it was years before anyone knew what had happened? That was his headquarters — his explosion — caused by him because his men rebelled. It was where he was making his thunderbolts. He blew ’em up — or rather, he made a woman do it; he says he was bored with the woman anyhow.”
“He breaks women’s hearts,” said Baltis. “They love the excitement of his wisdom. When that fails them there is nothing left. Who cares to live for nothing? And to turn against him would be to incur misery and torture without any self-esteem. Women die for self-esteem, not love, and Dorje knows that.”
“Go on, Jim,” said Jeff. “He’ll be back in a minute.”
“Dorje’s next move was into Tibet, where he found, and rebuilt an abandoned monastery to the north of Koko Nor. He took advantage of the fact that Tibet is closed territory and that Tibetan monks are naturally secretive and predisposed to so-called psychism and anything of a super-normal nature. The Maitreya legend helped him. He was able to plot, and to do almost anything he chose, under the cloak of religion. He established a college in his monastery and even obtained a sort of charter for it from the Dalai Lama. People flocked to him from all the ends of Asia, and he picked and chose until he had plenty of men — and women, too — to make his thunderbolts and poison-gas. He began to train men — and women — to scatter all over the world and take advantage of Communist — Fascist — almost any kind of propaganda — stir unrest — discontent — preach pessimism. And he had the genius to see that the secret services were his best medium, so he diligently corrupted those, until even the famous Indian secret service is as undependable today as a wet squib. Always harping on the coming of the Lord Maitreya, he encouraged the Indian Nationalists, and the Gandhists, and the Moslems, setting one against the other and them all against the British; and of course, when the ball got rolling it increased of its own momentum.
“He sent agents into China, Mexico, South America — everywhere. The discipline was simple; if they failed, or disobeyed him, they were simply betrayed to the police or to the military. When his agencies grew strong enough they set up secret courts of justice, such as Bertolini’s in Cairo, and inflicted unspeakable tortures in the presence of one another, compelling the latest recruits to do the torturing, so that there was not much risk of their betraying one another after that. And only picked men and women knew anything at all about himself, his purpose or his organization; all the others believe to this hour that they are Communists, or Fascists, or some other kind of savior of mankind.
“His plan was to destroy, in one week, all the modern ammunition in the world. That would leave all modern armies at the mercy of men with bows and arrows — swordsmen — spearmen — cavalry. And there would be no navies — no airplanes left. Asia can easily put ten million men in the field, and Asia believes in the Lord Maitreya. All Dorje had to do was to keep himself out of the limelight and to plant his thunderbolts and flask of poison-gas. The idea, of course, of the gas is to bomb the legislatures of the world. The flasks will go in anybody’s pocket. Two or three flasks, for instance, tossed on to the floor of the House of Congress — two or three more in the White House — two or three dozen, say, in the Treasury and other important administrative buildings — the same thing on the same day in a dozen or more countries — it only needs two or three hundred carefully instructed men — and where is the world’s government?”
“Good riddance to it!” remarked Henri de la Fontaine Coq. “A politician is something to be cr-r-racked like a louse.”
Grim glanced at him. I saw him glance sideways at Baltis, too. Then he went on:
“However, Dorje saw he had no chance to succeed, even with his gas and thunderbo
lts, unless he could contrive a system of communication not connected with the wire or wireless systems or organized civilization. There was plenty about thought transference in the golden library that he found in the Gobi Desert. Apparently the Atlanteans knew almost all there is to know about every form of vibration and what it will do. But there was no understanding it until those ancient books were found, of which Chullunder Ghose told us in Delhi; those reached Dorje through Vasantasena, who has been his agent for a long time. They interpreted into an intelligible script the secret formula; that were engraved on the golden tablets; and after that it was no longer a secret how to direct thought-waves and to send them a limitless distance.
“But the trouble then was, that the receiving and sending instruments — human brains — are just about as delicate and misunderstood as the thought-waves themselves are. So he had to devise an instrument that would act, in a sense, like a mirror and respond — not to the broadcast thought-wave — he says that is impossible, because of confusion — but to the reaction set up in the brain of the recipient. In other words, a man might look at the machine and see the thought to which his brain is responding unknown to himself. That is one of the machines on the platform. He has to use it. He is getting worn out. He can no longer detect the messages his brain receives — or at any rate, not always. I was trained in Tibet, but I can only do it now and then. Chullunder Ghose can do it oftener than I can — Jeff not quite so often. Everybody can do it occasionally. But almost nobody understands it. Some call it playing hunches. Others call it being intuitive. The fact is, that the ether, which permeates all matter and is non-dimensional in any sense that our intelligence can grasp, is nevertheless more solid than any substance that we know of, and more sensitive than any photographic plate. A vibration set up in the ether is instantly spread in all directions. An explosion of dynamite might not affect the ether, because the vibration would be at the wrong rate. But a thought-wave does affect it. That is the principle behind Dorje’s system of communication. He explained it to me in the airship, on the way here.”
Dorje came in, stood in the doorway holding to the posts, stared at us, made me shudder, and went away again. He looked less weary of himself. His eight men stirred with a vaguely felt restlessness. I felt it, too. So, I think, did the others. Grim continued:
“He encountered another difficulty. The machine is only rudimentary — extremely delicate — and doesn’t work well. It appears to depend on something that resembles static. It works best at the highest altitudes, and in a dry atmosphere. The metal on which its functioning depends appears to absorb, not moisture, but the effects of moisture, whatever those are, and to lose a little of its sensitiveness. Dorje still can send — or he says so, but he can’t receive any longer without that instrument.
“Another thing he has discovered is the use of anti-gravity — his name for it. Mathematicians, of course, have understood for centuries that each law has its opposite; but it took Newton to reveal the law of gravity as a practical fact; and Dorje seems to be the first since the Atlanteans to put in practice what his Chinaman discovered from the tablets about antigravity — which is the principle on which his airship works.”
“I don’t believe one word of that,” said Henri de la Fontaine Coq. “Nothing can fly without gravity — not even a what-do-you-call-it — a blimp.”
Grim grinned. “That is how he has preserved his secret. Nobody believed a word of it. His ships have been seen and reported by any number of people. He has two of them. Nobody believed the tales about chlorine gas until it wiped out a division at Ypres. Who believed in the telephone? It has been the same with Dorje’s airship. And if you want rather worse humiliation than Bell got when he talked telephone, try talking anti-gravity to a group of scientists. Discoveries are made by unlearned men. The learned merely recognize them and perfect them after jealousy and incredulity are bankrupt.”
“Stick to your story,” Jeff urged.
“All right. Dorje’s greatest difficulty is his general staff. He calls them his babus. He hates and despises them. They probably hate him, and I’m betting on that.”
“Why did he go to Delhi?” Jeff asked.
“According to his own account, in order to catch me. His theory is, that the best of all lieutenants is a defeated enemy, and he thinks he has defeated me by burning Vasantasena’s house. His agents in Delhi will say I burned it, and he thinks the secret service will believe that.”
“They already do,” said Jeff.
Grim nodded. “He says he has watched me for a long time, and he badly needs a chief of staff. He’s a strange mixture of slyness and naive frankness. He admits quite frankly that his plan has broken down, but he doesn’t admit what I think is the obvious truth, that his staff have turned against him. He appears afraid of them. He speaks of them with the kind of bitter contempt with which Napoleon, on St. Helena, used to speak of some of his ex-generals.”
“It is too simple — too obvious. I got to sleep,” said Henri de la Fontaine Coq. “When I awake, then tell me that you still don’t know the answer — and I will not believe you!”
“Henri — he has genius,” said Baltis.
Henri de la Fontaine Coq composed himself for sleep. He removed his leather jacket and folded it for a pillow.
“Aviators have neither brains nor courage,” said Chullunder Ghose — pointedly, deliberately insolent. “They are like birds that can be caught with seeds or quick-lime. And a French aviator is the stupidest of all. Nobody but a French aviator would have been such a fool as to do what you have done.”
Henri de la Fontaine Coq sat up again and forced himself awake.
“Your flattery is aimed at me?” he asked. He yawned. “I am unworthy of it, I assure you. If I were stupid I should be a banker or a commander-in-chief or a father of fifteen children, and very respectable. But I know luck when I see it.”
“He has genius,” said Baltis.
Grim glanced quickly at Chullunder Ghose, nodded almost imperceptibly and looked away again. The babu resumed the offensive.
“If we wait for him to guide us we shall soon see how easy it is to fly, because our souls will leave our bodies — if an aviator has one!” said Chullunder Ghose. “A man who has been fool enough to fly into forbidden territory, at the behest of an adventuress, is not a savant whose advice this babu would exchange for common sense. He has lost his ‘plane. He has lost his reputation. He has lost his prospects—”
“And he has won the game!” said Henri de la Fontaine Coq. “You animal! You fat toad! There is nothing now to do but to collect the stakes and spend them! It is too simple. We accept all of Dorje’s proposals. We agree to everything. We even invent new staggering concepts for him. And we presently overturn him and avail ourselves of Dorje’s riches. When it suits us, we dictate terms to the world. We become heroes. We are kissed by statesmen. But what we will do afterwards to save ourselves from being destroyed by boredom, I am a fat priest if I know!”
He disposed himself again for sleep, curling up like a dog with his head on the folded leather jacket.
“There is nothing that he does not dare,” said Baltis. “I assure you, Henri is an absolutist.”
“Self am opposite of absolutist,” said Chullunder Ghose. “I bet you pounds Egyptian fifty—”
“Steady!” said Grim through the side of his mouth. “Here comes Dorje.”
CHAPTER 38. “A leader without a plan is more exciting than a ‘plane without a rudder.”
He looked like another being — a different monster, revived by the stuff he had drunk. His Mongolian features seemed to have been sharpened. His eyes glittered. He looked as unsympathetic as flint — as devoid of humor as a turtle. His head now was erect on his neck, and his neck looked almost brittle it was so incapable of bowing to any mood or morals not approved of by the bulging brain. There was a suggestion of the gladiator grown contemptuous of fear from too much use of its effect on others. Even his spidery legs had new strength; they were under him
, instead of seeming afraid of his weight. And when he spoke, although he still could not pronounce the letter “s,” his voice had the jarring gracelessness of power that is beyond passion and not qualified by doubt.
“He smells of ice,” said Baltis in an undertone. “Do you know now why a woman neither loves nor hates him, but obeys?”
“Now I go,” said Dorje. “You come. Kick that shluggard awake, or I will have him vivishected. Shtand up — closhe together — all fache that way.”
I shook Henri de la Fontaine Coq and he struck at me, as if he resented being dragged out of a dream. But he was on his feet in a minute and laughing:
“Lucky for you I missed your nose! One or two women have had to learn not to waken me suddenly. What does that animal wish us to do?”
Dorje gave an order in a strange tongue to one of his men. They all came scrambling off the platform and lined up behind us. They stank of sour milk, rancid butter, yak-dung, sweat and rotten fish. The man behind me breathed on the back of my neck and it felt like being chosen for a python’s dinner.
“Schlaa!” said Dorje — or a word that sounded like it. A man opened the door and led the way, swaggering into the sunlight, turning there, licking his lips and then snotting his nose on the back of his hand. I would have preferred to have been killed by a hyena. Nothing in the whole world is as loathsome as a human being who has forgotten that he is one. For a second or two I think all of us, Baltis included, believed we were about to be killed. My own thought was that Dorje had overheard our conversation and had decided to make short work of us. It was one of life’s abominable moments.