“What was that? Surely not me?”
“No, not you. Though we wanted a suitable candidate for the purpose you are going to fulfil, and you will do admirably. But what we really wanted is aboard this plane. And what is more, my friend, you stole it! At least, that is what the world is going to think.”
I laughed outright. “Don’t be a fool! The British Intelligence know perfectly well I was working for them.” He didn’t bat an eyelid; and for the first time I saw, beneath his unprepossessing exterior, the ruthlessness that lay beneath it. “Dothey?” he asked. “Think back, Mr. Cummings. You have a sick mind. You’ve had an unhappy love affair — with someone, it transpires, who has a key-position in British Intelligence. Beyond that, little is known about you. Furthermore, you are artistically inclined ... and you know how unstable artistic people are,” he added, with commendable irony, considering he had some small claim to the arts himself.
“No, you were working forus, my friend; and at length they’ll find out. Take your flat, for instance. You’d be surprised if you knew what lies concealed, at this very moment, inside your grand piano. And at a suitable moment, when they discover that the Delanez incident was just a lot of spoof, someone will tip them off.”
“It’s a very neat little plan,” I said evenly, striving to keep myself under control.
Fenton blew a series of smoke rings. “Yes, I’m rather pleased with it myself,” he admitted. “And, as the pavement artists proclaim, all my own work! Just think how neatly it all fits in. In the first place I was lucky. The coincidence that you happened to know Alice Redgate; that is why you were chosen, of course. And as she was your only friend in the outside world (at least, the only person with whom you were in contact) you were bound to tell her about your discovery; and if she hadn’t phoned you, you would probably have called her. Of course, we knew nothing about it at the time, but that is what happened, is it not?” He didn’t wait for my comment. “Well, naturally, when they discover that all the bunk about Tottenham Court Road and Gertrude (the other woman knew nothing about this, incidentally — we told her a completely different story) and the dramatic phone call amounts, as you observe, to a rather unlikely movie, you will be Number One Suspect. It was you who voluntarily drew attention to the whole affair in the first place ... obviously part of the plan in the event of the official failing to do so. From then on you led them all a pretty dance while something infinitely more dangerous was being carried out right under their darling noses. And we’ve fixed it so that the person who is likely to have most faith in you — that rather silly little girl you are so keen on — will be the first to suspect the horrible truth. Namely, that you cultivated her as part of the plan. Because she was the person you told about that bogus note, which brought you exactly where we wanted you. They’ll even begin to wonder whether those mysterious attacks of yours were really genuine. Oh, you were a real doll, Mr. Cummings; no one could have been found after a year’s exhaustive search to touch your speed. We really are ever so grateful.”
“And now, I presume, you have some entertainment planned for me?”
“Oh yes, quite adivertissement, as they say in Paris.”
The note of the engines dropped a few tones, and the plane levelled off. We had evidently stopped climbing. The air, I noticed, was much smoother by now — which was just as well; my charming companion’s little speech had done nothing to avert the sickening pain in my head.
“Your usefulness,” he continued, “is only just beginning. As I say, the box of tricks that we have aboard this aircraft was stolen by you. You’ll never guess,” he said archly, “what it is.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Space guns. And we’re on our way to Mars.”
He ignored this; no irony of mine was going to ruin his little scene. “The code name for this particular little job is PERISCOPE. Rather an apt little moniker for it, in my humble opinion.”
“I have never heard of PERISCOPE,” I said.
“That is not surprising, my friend. Very few people have. But it’s a remarkable invention; British science has every reason to be proud of it. If it means anything to you at all, it is a means of getting a radar pattern without using radar ... but perhaps you haven’t a very technical turn of mind.”
“Go on.”
“I would rather you heard it from an expert.” He shouted something to a man I couldn’t see.
Fenton’s companion turned out to be Eric Stutyen, late of Paddington Station. I might have guessed it.
Stutyen looked much larger in the confines of the ship. He was almost friendly now, lacking the overdone banter of his more than slightly effeminate colleague, who now left the field to him. I changed my attitude correspondingly. Here was a man who wasn’t playing games to boost his own ego.
Stutyen raised his voice unnecessarily to combat the sound of the engines. “I apologize for our necessarily crude method of abducting you,” he said, with just a trace of a foreign accent. “Unfortunately there was no other method of doing it. On the whole I try to avoid physical violence.”
“What about the body in the Berlin plane?” I challenged. “The unfortunate understudy of our friend here. Wasn’t that violent enough?”
“My dear fellow,” exclaimed Stutyen disarmingly, “you don’t know the facts. Let me explain. It was Fenton, all right, who stayed in that hotel near the airfield. That was to associate his face and name with the voice on the tape recording we knew you had at R7. Thus, when he disappeared, and a fully-clothed body was found on the plane, plus a few clues, everybody was quite sure that Fenton was the victim.
“But that body was not put aboard in England at all; it was planted there in Berlin. It’s quite easy to get hold of a corpse in the East Sector — you can take your choice in fact — and to smuggle it across the zone barrier. We found one that resembled our friend (now entertaining the pilot, who loathes him!), bashed it about a bit, and, as you in England say, Bob’s your Uncle. This, incidentally, is the one part of the cover plan that we donot want Prescott-Healey to discover; it was arranged so that Fenton can go back when the time comes — suitably disguised, of course. We have other work for him to do there.”
This was getting remarkably interesting. “Now tell me something about PERISCOPE,” I demanded.
“Ah, yes; PERISCOPE. A stunning development — quite stunning. In the event of total war (which nobody wants, of course — we prefer to make our conquests much more economically, both in terms of human life and money) most of the work would have to be done, as everyone knows, by long-range missiles. Paradoxically, in order to get our own way without a war, we have to be the strongest nation in brute force so that we have the maximum bargaining power. After all, no one is going to give ground to a country that is armed with nothing more lethal than pamphlets and radio stations.”
“A well-known principle of power politics.”
“Quite,” he agreed. “So! We must make sure that Britain (still a not inconsiderable power!) and the United States divulge their secrets; as well as to make certain that they don’t get any of ours. And traitors like Fenton (who, of course, are utterly despicable) make the whole thing possible.”
“You are very frank,” I observed.
“I can afford to be! Well, to continue. Although guided missiles, carrying atomic warheads, are pretty reliable for short-and medium-range work, they naturally become less so when travelling greater distances. Annoyingly enough, radar will work in the first instance, when you can almost do without it, and not in the second, when it becomes invaluable.
“What one would like to be able to do, in fact, would be to press a button — say in New York — and watch on a screen the track of a missile over its entire journey to, say, London (an intriguing possibility!) and control it accordingly, should its trajectory not be maintained correctly. Well, as you may know, the frequencies used for normal radar are very high and, unlike other radio signals, cannot be reflected off the ionized layer, which you can think of as a very thin Iron
Curtain that surrounds the entire world at a height of, say, one hundred miles.”
“An unhappy simile, Mr. Stutyen.”
He smiled. “Radar beams,” he continued, “simply penetrate this curtain, shooting right through it into outer space. As you may have heard, it is possible, because of this, to get radar reflections off the moon, and other celestial bodies. But even if the radar transmissions could be reflected back to Earth from the ionized layer, it would be very difficult to use them with any great accuracy, owing to the unevenness of the reflecting agent — which in fact approaches us and then recedes every day — and, if you think it out, the plotting of the consequent impulses would be highly complex.
“Therefore, radar, and in fact radio waves in general, are pretty useless for this purpose.”
The plane gave a slight lurch, and Stutyen braced himself against the packing-cases.
“We must be over the Atlantic by now,” he said, “and it might be a little rough. This aircraft does not fly at very high altitudes unfortunately; but we can’t have everything.”
“TheAtlantic!” I exclaimed. “What are we doing over the Atlantic? I rather assumed we would be flying East.”
“A perfectly natural assumption, Mr. Cummings. But we are in fact on our way to America. Long Island, to be precise. Now, don’t jump to conclusions — the United States is not yet plotting against England! But it so happens that much of the research has been carried out over there; and on board this plane we have only one-half of the equipment. For various technical reasons, which I won’t trouble you with, the work must be completed in the Western Hemisphere before we are able to ship anything to my country. Fenton has his counterparts in the U.S.A., where at this very moment a politically unreliable genius is busy plotting against his own country — a habit, I have already said, which I deplore. However, theywill do it.”
“But how? ...”
He interrupted me. “... Patience is all, Mr. Cummings! Let us finish. It is essential that you should know something about this box of tricks.” He re-arranged his cramped body again. “The Earth,” he continued, “is surrounded by a magnetic field. Which is the cause — to put it inAlice-in-Wonderland language — of the North Pole. By means of a compass you can tell which direction you’re going. This plane is of course guided by such a compass.
“The Earth’s magnetic field varies continuously. Even the magnetic North Pole is shifting a few yards every day — as every navigator knows. But it is changing in more ways than that. Its intensity varies, due to sunspot activity. At certain positions on the Earth’s surface it ‘swirls’ like the waves on the sea, and this can be due either to magnetic storms (caused by the sunspots) or by variations in the electric generator (the molten-iron core of the Earth) which polarizes it. Are you understanding me so far?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Now, as we found in the International Geophysical Year, it is possible to plot these variations, though the methods used were (and are, for there are several months yet to go) somewhat primitive. But in a laboratory that is secreted in one of those innocent and exclusive country houses on Long Island, a method has been found where these variations can be plotted by only three such units placed in different parts of the world. A method, moreover, that is so accurate that all variations can be compensated in such a manner that it can be assumed that there are no such changes at all.
“Thus we have artificially created a situation somewhat akin to a completely still swimming pool, without a ripple on its surface. Drop a pebble in the middle, and concentric waves will spread out from the source of the disturbance.
“The parallel is rather obvious. Instead of a pebble in the flat water we have a magnetic object — the missile — travelling through a stationary magnetic field ... at least the field appears to be stationary because we have compensated any changes that take place within it to give the same effect. The only change in magnetic field, in fact, which we record, is caused by the progress of the missile. It is not difficult to see that its progress can be plotted, and with surprising accuracy.”
The idea made me reel. It sounded like the mad science master’s dream. “But even if it could work,” I said eventually, “there are thousands of aircraft in the air at the same time. How could you identify your particular baby?”
“Because our ‘particular baby’ would carry equipment that caused a special magnetic disturbance of its own. It’s quite easy really; provided you have about thirty million dollars to spend on the sensitive equipment used to pick it up. The British have already taken the trouble to prove to themselves — and, I’m glad to say, to us — that a prototype, admittedly only working over a short range, works very accurately indeed. The distance travelled was only about a mile, and they had to use more than a dozen ‘compensating’ stations — but, of course, it was a very low-altitude device. Long-range rockets travel five hundred miles and more into space on their mission of destruction, and therefore arc immune from most man-made magnetic disturbances.”
The plane droned on, and I suddenly had a vision of the sort of destruction that the device would make possible — if it worked. Rockets would no longer have to be aimed with any great accuracy at their targets; they would not depend on radar apparatus within them, intended to ‘home’ them on a big city that might turn out to be the wrong one; no suicide crew would be required to guide the deadly weapon to its target. Instead, its course could be automatically maintained from a few small huts, scattered over distances of thousands of miles. Push-button warfare would come of age with a vengeance. As in the race for the hydrogen bomb, the stragglers were to be given a helping hand by disloyal members of the winning team ... My next thoughts were anticipated.
“You are now wondering,” he said, “whether you’ve got the nerve to try and wreck this plane, and yourself with it. Let me put you right on that point:
“Even if you succeeded (and you won’t) it wouldn’t stop us, for the damage has already been done from the United States end. We know the principles upon which this ingenious device works. We are simply saving ourselves time by ‘borrowing’ the prototype.
“Next: even though you have a box of matches in your pocket, you cannot set fire to this craft because, in this cabin, there is nothing to catch. (You’d never get those crates alight with a box of matches.)
“Next: the vital control cables for the elevators and rudder are out of your way under the metal flooring; and if you sever the electric cables you see overhead you will merely plunge the cabin into darkness and fuse the landing lights (which we certainly won’t be using when we alight — this is a flying-boat, by the way).
“Lastly, you won’t overpower the crew or myself or even poor Fenton because we are armed and you are not. Altogether, it is pointless for you to try anything; so don’t be an unnecessary martyr to the cause.”
I relaxed. At least I needn’t kill myself for nothing. Stutyen was a very convincing character. Furthermore, he had some extremely convincing arguments.
“One thing I don’t altogether understand,” I said.
“I shall be happy to assist you,” said Stutyen, quite without any sardonic inflection.
“Surely, the moment they know that you’ve pinched — or should I sayI have? — this gadget, they’ll double up security in the States and make it quite impossible to get the stuff out.”
“A natural conclusion, once again, for you to draw, Mr. Cummings. But you see, all the ‘spying work’ — for let us call a spade a spade — has already been done over there.
“Steinhart, the chief of PERISCOPE at the American end, is an honest man. It suits us well that he is; otherwise — American security being what it is (far better than yours, YOU know) — the secrets would be quite out of our reach by now.
“But Steinhart, though loyal to his country, is not the chief inventive brain on the subject — he is more the head of the project. Hugh Palate, who was the nearest thing to a madman who was not actually certified that I know of, was the brai
n-power. He was also the traitor. And like all traitors he was shot. There is a twist to the situation, however: he was shot byus— after he had confided in our experts and helped to build a replica of the apparatus in a laboratory we rigged up for him. Every story has a moral; there must be one in this somewhere. At all events, no connection whatever is suspected between him and our agents; nor did anyone know that he was presenting us with secrets. He simply ... got lost, during a holiday expedition along the Alaska Highway, and nobody ever found him. There was a very flattering obituary notice in theNew York Times; and another highly respectable American newspaper actually printed a tribute paid to him by the Soviet Union, for his share in the I.G.Y. researches.”
“An entirely new form of poetic justice!”
“I thought it might appeal to you,” said Stutyen. “Anyway, they never found him; for the simple reason that he wasn’t there. He was shot in this very airplane and dumped about a hundred miles from the Nantucket light.” He looked at me penetratingly. “I see you are wondering how we fly in and out unobserved. Oh dear! There is so much to explain on these occasions, isn’t there?
“Our house on Long Island is owned by a very wealthy young man who spends most of his valuable time at expensive resorts dotted about the globe. His connections, politically speaking, are impeccable — they range from the Vanderbilts, through the Knickerbockers to the Rockefellers. Consequently, he is most unlikely to be suspected of espionage, and nor are his friends. Gary Brand, the gentleman in question, is of course far too busy indulging in the pursuit of pleasure to take the remotest interest in such matters; I doubt whether he knows quite what a Communist is. He is, therefore, an exceedingly useful person to know.
The Cummings Report Page 8