Or the World Will Die

VIII

We started very early the next morning, and I pushed the Buick as hard as I dared, roaring down the long straight roads which bisected the swamps, catching occasional glimpses of cows up to their bellies in mud, ripping halfheartedly at the swamp grass. The funereal Spanish moss hung heavily from the trees. We passed stretches where the rotted stumps of dead trees stuck up out of the stagnant black water for mile after mile, like a setting for a horror movie. Ragged whites and thick black women sat near the roadside, fishing in the slow currents beyond the shoulder of the road.

Gradually the landscape changed as we came out of the swamps, into the flat lush fields of Texas, and in late afternoon, facing into the sun, we saw the shining misted towers of Houston.

We drove through Houston just before the evening rush and pushed on to San Antonio, finding a tourist court, a grubby one, on Route 87, a half mile north of the city limits. We ate and went back to the court. It was an unreasonably hot night, far too hot to expect to sleep.

Some jaded white benches had been placed out under the trees. Alice and I sat and smoked, watching the cars whine by on the highway, listening to the night sounds, the nasal voice of an alleged cowhand, braying from a nearby juke box about ‘Little Miss Gingham of Eagle Pass’. It had been many years since I had been in the big, casual, lusty state of Texas — and the half-forgotten atmosphere was recreated with nostalgic exactitude. The big lean men with their work-darkened faces, and the sand colored, wide brimmed hats. The soft masculine voices, slow and easy and deep. The pathetic little sandy women, their colorless faces grained and eroded and parched, trotting drably along, keeping up with the long free strides of their men.

After a long period of silence I said, “Karl should be in Kerrville by now.”

“With the answer, maybe.”

“Maybe. Karl is thorough.”

She half turned toward me and the light touched one side of her face. “Have you got one of your patterns yet, Tony?”

“Just the ghost of one, Alice. Here’s what we know. That the opposition is careful, thorough, and experienced. Not amateur. That indicates that the man in charge is an old hand. If he was as capable during the war, he would have been picked up afterward. Thus, he is either one of the men operating in this country who were never suspected, which is possible. Or he was on our side during the war and has pulled a switch. There is the third possibility that he was on the other side, operating in his own country and escaped before he could be picked up. There are a few of those, you know. We’re still looking for Tromp in Holland, de Turenne and Guizot in France, Torricelli in Italy and Schweinfurth in Germany. All good men.”

“Did you ever run into any of them?”

“Tromp and Schweinfurth. Schweinfurth was the one who picked me up in Berlin and made the mistake of trying to take me to his headquarters during an Allied raid. A bomb fragment smashed his shoulder and I got away. I heard later that he recovered. I had Tromp pointed out to me in Amsterdam as the one who had selected the victims for three reprisals. He left Amsterdam the next day, and we never found him.”

“Where did they go?”

I shrugged. “Spain. Argentina. The foreign settlements in Brazil. Maybe they went underground in their own countries. Assumed new identities. Faked papers. Not too difficult to do. Maybe they got to this country. We have fewer restrictions on the movement of citizens than any other country in the world. Look. We’ve come here from New York. At least I have. You from Washington. At no time have we been stopped and our papers examined. At no time have we had to answer questions. We are free to come and go as we wish. That is part of our freedom, and also part of our weakness. Understand, I wouldn’t have it otherwise, but it complicates our internal counter-espionage machinery. Think of the number of disgruntled husbands who leave their wives each year and are never picked up. We live in the most loosely knit society in the world today. The most free and also the most vulnerable. That’s why it makes me feel ill when I think of the way we protect ourselves — with class-conscious Civil Service bureaucrats, struggling to rise from a CAF-10 to a CAF-11 by requisitioning four more clerks to sort the bureau mail, with embassy underlings who would cringe from anything as unethical as snooping into the affairs of the foreign country in which they are stationed, with the intelligence branches of the services which concern themselves more with correcting their order of battle reports of the last war than with accumulating new data on who is going to attack us, when, where and with what excuse.”

“You sound a little bitter, Tony.”

“I am, I guess. Bill Donovan had the right idea when he wanted to perpetuate the Office of Strategic Services as our central intelligence agency, but there is a natural American aversion to a Gestapo of any sort, and, bless their hearts, there’s always the General Accounting Office. The OSS couldn’t operate without greasing the palms of minor officials in foreign countries, and those minor officials wouldn’t give receipts, and without receipts, OSS couldn’t be reimbursed. Hell, if the OSS were in proper operation, instead of dead, we wouldn’t need the Lessault Device to detect work in atomic fission in some unknown country. We’d have the data, and know who was behind it. Remember the old chestnut about eternal vigilance being the price of freedom. Baby, we live between wars in a fool’s paradise, with the freedom, but not the vigilance. Every war so far has given us time to roll up our sleeves and make mountains of shiny weapons and train our men to use them. In our next war we will be faced with the startling problem of trying to turn out weapons in the vast flat expanses of vitrified rock that used to be our factories. Twenty good sized rockets with atomic warheads and we are out of the war. Just twenty rockets. Think of it. Wake up tomorrow and find that Washington, Los Angeles, Detroit, Nashville, St. Louis, Omaha, Seattle, Memphis, Denver, Chicago, Boston, New York and all the rest of the big ones are just names for the history books. The remaining population would be down to about sixty millions who would lack the unifying force of government, and the information net of radio.

“We thought we had that possibility licked with the Agreement of 1948, but now we are back on the wooden horse, grabbing for the brass ring that isn’t there. We are the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, and, at the moment, the most vulnerable. We are envied by the rest of the world, and the hatred, born of envy, hasn’t been very well concealed. Maybe our opposition has delayed the Lessault Device long enough. Maybe they’re ready now. Maybe the morning sun on the other side of the world is shining on the polished snouts of twenty huge rockets while the technicians install the final radio direction devices in the control rooms. You know, I saw one of the German A4’s take off from a launching site. Very dramatic. There is a billowing blast of flame under the tail of the rocket, and then, as the propulsion force overcomes the inertia, it lifts very slowly off the ground, very majestically. Then, gathering speed, it roars up into the blue sky, slowly turning toward the horizon, leaving a trail of white mist as it passes through a layer of cold air at thirty thousand feet.

“Just imagine that those rockets are launched from some place in Europe at eleven o’clock tomorrow. At high noon they will smash our cities and our people and by dusk we will be a dead nation — English a dying language...”

“Shut up, Tony,” she said hoarsely.

“Perfectly normal response, Alice. The wholes idea is too frightening, so we can’t let ourselves think about it. If it happens, I hope that I am at the focal point of one of the explosions. The guillotine, the electric chair, a bullet through the heart, they must all give you a fantastic split second of realization that you are dying. Not so with our chum, the merry little atom. At one moment you are looking in a shop window or talking to a pretty girl. At the next moment you and the shop window or the pretty girl are gone as completely as though you never existed...”

“Shut up!”

“Thrown into the heart of the sun. A blowtorch turned suddenly on a house fly. A cricket on the nose of an exploding shell...”

She jumped up suddenly and walked into the cabin. The screen door slammed behind her. The traffic still purred along Route 87, the juke box sang to me, a girl laughed in the darkness. All was well with the world... until tomorrow, or next week, or until the next tick of the clock.

We left San Antonio at nine and we were in Kerrville by ten. It was almost the peak of the tourist season, with the cafes crowded with the dudes from Houston and San Antonio who had come up to the Hill Country to escape the muggy heat of the valley. Brown girls walked along the sidewalks in slacks and halters, and hundreds of shining convertibles were parked diagonally along the curbs of the wide main street. The sun slammed down against the soft asphalt and the air was clear and dry, giving me a feeling of optimism quite unjustified by the circumstances.

All of the tourist courts on the way into town had signs saying, No Vacancy, and I realized we might have a bit of trouble. However, shortly after noon, on Route 27 beyond Kerrville, we found a pleasant semicircle of cabins made of brown rock on the bank of the Guadeloupe River. We obtained a two room cabin for one hundred and fifty dollars rent for one month in advance. I parked the car in such a manner that our plates couldn’t be seen from the road.

While Alice took over one room and unpacked her things, I drove down to the Post Office and asked for my mail. There was one letter for Mr. Smithson, and I took it out to the car before opening it.

“I’m in Taylor Court, just south of Kerrville. Cabin 9.” It was dated the day before. I bought groceries and went back to the cabin. Alice was sitting on the front steps, wearing slacks, her trim midriff bare to the sun.

“What have you got in the bag, Doc?” she asked.

“Groceries for you, dear. I hope you can cook.”

“I resign. I quit. I can cook like mad, but it isn’t in the contract.”

“No cooking, chum, and no telling you where your love life is staying. In fact, I won’t even take you along. Seriously, I think it’s best if we stick close to the cabin.”

She grinned. “Sure, Tony.” I carried the bag in and she sorted out the groceries. “Dependable man,” she said, “Butter, eggs, salt, pepper, bread, sugar, coffee, tea, frozen vegetables, steak, pickles, and cigarettes.”

“Are there enough tools here to cook with?”

“I guess so.”

Lunch was ready in less than an hour, and we carried the stuff out to a picnic table behind the cabin, close to the river, under the shade of the live oaks. It was a small oasis of peace in the midst of danger.

After lunch was over, I said. “This is nice, isn’t it? I’ve been pretending that we’re the Mr. and Mrs. Smithson on the register and that we’re here on vacation.”

She looked at me quickly, her smile rueful. “Get off that line of thought, Tony. I don’t want to have trouble with you.”

“You won’t. I’m anaesthetized against you now.”

“How flattering!”

“And what have you been pretending?”

“Same thing, except that somehow Mr. Smithson turned out to be Karl. Do you mind?”

“Desperately.” We both laughed and carried the empty plates back into the cabin, where I told her that helping her with the dishes would be an unwarranted invasion of her rights as a housewife and besides I wouldn’t want to get Karl off to a bad start if, as and when he ever saw the light.

She sang in the small kitchen, clattering the few dishes loudly, while I sat out in the shade and listened to the muted grumble of the river.

Light shone around the edges of the closed Venetian blinds on Karl’s cabin. Alice stood behind me as I tapped on the door, using the distinctive knock that was known only to the three of us.

He opened the door quickly and we went in. His wide homely face was split by a big grin of welcome and he shook hands warmly. He latched the door. His cabin was small, but clean, with three chairs around a wide table in the middle of the room. We sat down and I said, “Make it short the first time and then I’ll ask questions.”

His smile faded. “I’ll make it short and I won’t have answers to the questions. Chicago had a very warm day on the seventeenth of April. Dr. Charles Brinker lived in a plush downtown apartment on Jackson Boulevard. His small lab was in the apartment. A woman came in and cooked his breakfast and lunch for him. He ate his dinners out. On the seventeenth, because the day was so nice, he had the woman fix his lunch out on a small stone porch that opened off the living room of the apartment. This stone porch looked over the boulevard. She left him to eat alone. She thought he had finished and returned to the lab. She went out onto the porch. He was on the floor. A twenty-two caliber, long rifle bullet had gone in a fraction of an inch under the left eye and ranged down through his skull, diagonally, ending up close to the skin on the right side of his neck. The shot was fired from a window. They couldn’t find out which window. Several hundred bear on the little porch, and are within a two hundred yard range. If the slug had gone through his head and struck the porch, the police could have triangulated it and found out just about which window it must have been fired from. But the slug stayed in his head. His head could have been in almost any position at the time the slug hit him, thus making any window with range a good possibility. The police made a very thorough search of the entire neighborhood and were unable to find anyone who had heard a shot, seen a man with a rifle, or even noticed Dr. Brinker eating his lunch on the porch. His personal affairs were in order, and there is no evidence that he had been threatened or was at all aware that any attempt on his life was probable. He had a reputation for integrity and patriotism.”

“They searched for evidence of a miss, the mark of a slug somewhere near him?”

“Yes. They even put a scaffold on the outside of the building and searched inch by inch above and below the porch.”

“The woman heard nothing?”

“Nothing at all. I talked to her at her home in Cicero. She is dumb, honest, earnest and without information.”

“What’s the current status with the police?”

“They’ve dwindled down to the point where only two men are now permanently assigned to the case, and one of them will soon be taken off. The remaining one will be a Detective-sergeant Wills, an adequate man who is very stubborn. He has been working on the slug itself, and the laboratories have discovered the make through a metallurgical analysis of the lead. When the slug went through bone, almost all rifling marks were removed from it. With what marks are left, he has narrowed the make of rifle down to either a Remington or a Savage, not over six years old. He’s working on local sales of those weapons during the last six years. If the weapon was brought in from out of town, he’s working his way into a blind alley — and he knows it. But, as I said, he’s a stubborn man.”

We stared at each other and Karl shrugged, saying, “It’s as close to a perfect murder as you’d want to find, Tony. How did things work out in New Orleans?”

I told him the whole story. When I was through, he got up and paced back and forth, frowning, his square fists jammed deeply into his pockets. Alice watched him and I saw in her eyes, what she wasn’t able to make him understand.

Karl whirled on me and said, “Then it’s got to be here! We’ve got to find it through Lessault!”

“Either that or move to the Canadian wilds and forget the whole thing.”

He sat down again. “Tony. I went over the maps before I left Washington. Here’s the dope on the Queen Ranch.” He got a piece of paper and a pencil and sketched a crude rectangle. “Here’s the area. Pretty wild. The southeast corner is the town of Junction, southwest is Sonora, northwest is San Angelo and northeast is Eden. That area covers roughly thirty-six hundred square miles. Down here between Sonora and Junction is a little dirt road that goes up to Camp Allison. At Camp Allison another road cuts east for nine miles. The last two miles is on Queen Ranch property. The Project Area is just beyond the ranch buildings, about twenty acres fenced in with the double fence I told you about. Some of the labs are as much as four hundred feet underground, under solid rock as is the living quarters of the technicians. A few camouflaged buildings are on the surface. Lessault lives underground. There are thirty guards, on duty eight hours and off sixteen, so that there are ten on at any one time. The sensitive fence is hooked up to the guard house, one of the above ground buildings. The Area was set up as a permanent place for the Lessault Device once it is completed. I don’t understand the technology of it, but the theory has something to do with scanning the entire earth’s surface once every twenty-four hours with micro-waves which, on bouncing back to the sending set, record certain alteration if they have struck any intensely radioactive area, such as would exist during the manufacture of atomic bombs. Apparently Lessault arranged a demonstration of the device on a small scale before he destroyed it and his notes. The only thing known about his process is that it will require a large power source and four sending towers two hundred yards apart. Work has been going on the power source and the towers in spite of his refusal to carry on.

“Lessault is given complete freedom of action, except that he is accompanied by armed guards wherever he goes. Government psychiatrists have been working on him without success, using everything from hypnosis to scopalamine.”

“Can we get in to see him?” I asked.

Karl frowned. “Maybe, but I think the odds are bad. Some of the men working as guards have seen me in the Washington office. They use both fingerprints and retinagraphs for identification of visitors. If I was coming from Washington, the office would have sent word ahead. If I try to get in, they’ll check by radio with the Washington office and find out that I’m on leave. It’s not a good gamble for either Alice or myself, and definitely impossible for you, even if you could get by that second fence somehow. At night infra-red beams and photoelectric eyes are spotted all over the place. You walk into one of the invisible beams and it’ll shine a dozen floodlights right at the area where you cut the beam.”

“Does Lessault ever leave the place?”

“He has freedom of movement. I heard someone say down in the Washington office that he has the use of a government car and chauffeur, and that he is a movie addict, particularly fond of the new three dimensional movies. I’d assume that he comes to Kerrville frequently. Kerrville is the natural shopping center for the Area.”

“And there’s only one road in from the Area?” I asked.

“Only one.”

“And you know Lessault by sight?”

“From photographs. He looks like an anemic Satan. Eyebrows go up at the outside ends, lean hooked nose, black hair, thin mouth and a sort of bitter, sardonic expression. Quite lean and, from all reports, remarkably rude. His English is good.”

“And the missing daughter?”

“Irene? A very interesting dish,” Alice said. “As lean as her pop, and as dark, a languid type, with a Parisian reputation as quiet as a scream in the dark. Self centered, rude, acquisitive and sensual. Altogether charming.”

Karl grinned and said, “Meeow!”

“Don’t meeow me, Karl Zetwicz. You find her and she’ll tear off some of that precious self possession of yours. You too, Tony.”

“Sounds like the kidnappers had their hands full, unless they had the sense to knock her quietly on the head,” I said.

“If we can prove they did, we ought to be able to motivate Lessault to get back to work,” Karl said soberly.

“So we plan a way to intercept Lessault?” Alice said.

“To intercept him and talk to him. This is the last race on the card, children,” I said, “and this time we’ve got to play the winner across the board.”

We made plans and deferred decision on any of them until the next day when we could get a look at the area between Junction and Kerrville.