“More cider,” I shouted. “More cider. Pour it on the floor, down the side of the wall, spray it through the air above where that damned ampoule landed. For God’s sake don’t splash any cider on yourselves. Hurry! Hurry!”
“What the hell is all this in aid of?” Hardanger demanded. His normally ruddy face was pale and set and uncomprehending, but for all that he was already carefully tipping a small vat of cider on the floor. “What will this do?”
“It’s hygroscopic,” I said quickly. “The botulinus, I mean. Seeks out water in preference to air every time, it has a hundred times the affinity for hydrogen that it has for nitrogen. You heard the General speak of it this evening.”
“This isn’t water.” Hardanger objected almost wildly. “This is cider.”
“God help us!” I said savagely. “Of course it’s cider. We haven’t got anything else here. I don’t know what the effect, the affinity will be. For the first time in your life, Hardanger, you’d better start praying that an alcohol has a high water content.” I tried to lift another, smaller cask but gasped and dropped it as a sharp spear of agony struck at the right side of my chest. For one terrible second I thought the virus had struck, the next I realised I must have displaced my strapped broken ribs when I hurled that barrel through the air. I wondered vaguely whether a broken rib had pierced the pleura or even a lung, and then forgot about it: in the circumstances, it hardly mattered any more.
How long to live? If some of the botulinus virus had escaped into the atmosphere, how long before the first convulsions? What had Oregon said about the hamster when we’d been talking outside number one lab yesterday? Fifteen seconds, yes, that was it, fifteen seconds for the Satan Bug and about the same for botulinus. For a hamster, fifteen seconds. For a human being? Heaven alone knew, probably thirty seconds at the most. At the very most. I stooped and lifted the portable lamp from the floor.
“Stop pouring,” I said urgently. “Stop it. That’s enough. Stand high: if you want to live, stand high. Don’t let any of that cider touch your shoes, touch any part of you, or you’re dead men.” I swung the lamp round as they scrambled high to avoid the amber tide of cider already flooding rapidly across the stone floor, and as I did I could hear the police engine of the Jaguar starting up. Gregori taking off with Henriques and Mary towards the realisation of his megalomaniac’s dream, secure in the knowledge that he was leaving a charnel house behind.
Thirty seconds were up. At least thirty seconds were up. No one twitching yet, far less in convulsions. More slowly this time, I played the lamp beam over each and every one of us, starting at strained staring faces and moving slowly down the feet. The beam steadied on one of the two constables whose clothes had been taken.
“Take oS your right shoe,” I said sharply. “It’s been splashed. Not with your hand, you bloody idiot! Ease it off with the toe of the other shoe. Superintendent, the left arm of your jacket is wet.” Hardanger stood very still, not even looking at me, as I eased the jacket at the collar and slid it down carefully over arms and hands before dropping it to the floor.
“Are we — are we safe now, sir?” the sergeant asked nervously.
“Safe? I’d rather this damned place was alive with cobras and black widow spiders. No, we’re not safe. Some of this hellish toxin will escape to the atmosphere as soon as the first of those splashes on the wall or floor has dried up — there’s water vapour in the air, too, you know. My guess is that as soon as any of these splashes dry up we’ll all have had it inside a minute.”
“So we get out,” the General said calmly. “Fast. Is that the idea, my boy?”
“Yes, sir.” I glanced quickly round. “Two barrels on either side of the door. Two more in line with them and a bit back. Four men standing on those and swinging the cider-press between them. I can’t do it, something’s wrong with my ribs. That press must weigh three hundred pounds if it weighs an ounce. Think four of you could do it, Superintendent?”
“Think we can do it?” Hardanger growled. “I could do it myself, with one hand, if it meant getting out of this place. Come on, for God’s sake, let’s hurry.”
And hurry they did. Manoeuvring casks into position while having to stand on others was no easy trick, more especially as all the casks were full, but desperation and the fear that borders on overmastering panic gives men ability to perform feats of strength that they can never afterwards understand. En less than twenty seconds all four barrels were in position and, in another twenty, Hardanger, the sergeant and two constables, a pair on each side of the heavy ponderous cider-press, were starting on their back swing.
The door was made of solid oak, with heavy hinges to match and a draw-bar on the outside, but against that solid battering ram propelled by four powerful men with their lives at stake it might as well have been made of plywood: the shattered door was smashed completely off its hinges and the wine-press, released at the last moment, went cartwheeling through the doorway into the darkness beyond. Five seconds later the last of us had followed the cider-press.
“That farmhouse,” Hardanger said urgently. “Come on. They’ve probably got a telephone.”
“Wait!” There was twice the urgency in my voice. “We can’t do that. We don’t know that we’re not carrying the virus on us. We may be bringing death to all that family. Let’s give the rain time to wash off any virus that may be sticking to the outside.”
“Damn it, we can’t afford to wait,” Hardanger said fiercely. “Besides, if the virus didn’t get us- in there it’s a certainty it won’t get us now. General?”
“I’m not sure,” the General said hesitantly. “I rather think you’re right. We’ve no time—–”
He broke off in horror as one of the unclothed constables, the one whose shoe had been splashed by the cider, screamed aloud in agony, the scream deepening to a tearing rasping coughing moan: clutching hands clawed in a maniac frenzy at a suddenly stiffened straightened neck where the tendons stood out whitely like quivering wires: then he toppled and fell heavily to the muddy ground, silent now, the nails of his fingers tried to tear his throat open. His crew-mate, the other uniform-less constable, made some sort of unintelligible sound, moved forward and down to help his friend, then grunted in pain as my arm hooked around his neck.
“Don’t touch him!” I shouted hoarsely. “Touch him and you’ll die too. He must have picked up the toxin when he brushed his shoe with his hand then touched his mouth. Nothing on earth can save him now. Stand back. Keep well clear of him.”
He took twenty seconds to die, the kind of twenty seconds that will stay with a man in his nightmares till he draws his last breath on earth. I had seen many men die, but even those who had died in bullet and shrapnel-torn agony had done so peacefully and quietly compared to this man whose body, in the incredibly convulsive violence of its death throes, twisted and flung itself into the most fantastic and impossible contortions. Twice in the last shocking seconds before death he threw his racked and tortured body clear off the ground and so high in the air that I could have passed a table beneath him. And then, as abruptly and unexpectedly as it had begun, it was all over and he was no more than a strangely small and shapeless bundle of clothes lying face downwards in the muddy earth. My mouth was kiln-dry and full of the taste of salt, the ugly taste of fear.
I can’t say how long we stood there in the heavy cold rain, staring at the dead man. A long time, I think. And then we looked at each other, and each one of us knew what the others were capable of thinking only one thing. Who was next? In the pale wash of light from the lamp I still held in one hand, we all stared at each other, one half of our senses and minds outgoing and screwed up to the highest pitch of intensity and perception to detect the first signs of death in another, the other half turned inwards to detect the first signs in themselves. Then, all at once, I cursed savagely, perhaps at myself, or my cowardice, or at Gregori or at the botulinus virus, I don’t know, turned abruptly and headed for the byre, taking the lamp with me, leaving the others standing there round the dead man in the rain-filled pitchy darkness like darkly-petrified mourners at some age-old heathen midnight rites.