“Why must you, Miss Ruthven?”
“There are some questions a gentleman never asks,” she said icily.
That floored him. He didn’t ‘know what she meant, the same as I wouldn’t have known what she meant, and the net result was to leave him stranded. Every eye in the room was on the two of them, except mine: mine were on Kennedy’s and his were on mine. I was near the door now, with my back turned to the company. It had been easy to slip out the piece of paper from under my collar and now I held it against my chest so that he could see Judge Mollison’s name on it. His expression didn’t alter and it would have taken a micrometer to measure his nod. But he was with me. Everything was fine — but for the chance that Royale might get me with a snapshot before I cleared the doorway.
And it was Royale who broke the tension in the room, giving Vyland an easy out. “I’d like some fresh air, Mr. Vyland. I could go along with them for the ride.”
I went out through that doorway the way a torpedo leaves its tube. Kennedy had his arm outstretched and I caught it: we crashed heavily to the floor and went rolling along the passageway together. Inside the first two seconds I had the letter stuck deep inside his tunic and we were still threshing about and belabouring each other on the shoulders and back and everywhere it didn’t hurt very much when we heard the unmistakable flat click of a safety catch.
“Break it up, you two.”
We broke it up and I got to my feet under the steady menace of Royale’s gun. Larry, too, was hopping around in the background, waving a revolver in his hand: had I been Vyland I wouldn’t even have let him have a catapult in his hand.
“That was a good job of work, Kennedy,” Vyland was saying warmly. “I won’t forget it.”
“Thank you, sir,” Kennedy said woodenly. “I don’t like killers.”
“Neither do I, my boy, neither do I,” Vyland said approvingly. He only employed them himself because he wanted to rehabilitate them. “Very well, Miss Ruthven. Mr. Royale will go along. But be as quick as you can.”
She swept by without a word to him or a glance at me. Her head was high. I still thought she was wonderful.
CHAPTER VIII
I hadn’t enjoyed the helicopter trip out to the oil-rig.
Planes I’m used to, I’ve flown my own, I once even owned a piece in a small charter airline, but helicopters are not for me. Not even in fine weather, and the weather that morning was indescribable. We swayed and rocked and plummeted and soared up again as if some drunk had us on the end of a giant yo-yo, and nine-tenths of the time we couldn’t see where we were going because the wipers couldn’t cope with the deluge of water that lashed against the windscreen: but Petersen was a fine pilot and we made it. We touched down on the landing-deck of the X 13 shortly after ten o’clock in the morning.
It took six men to hold the machine even reasonably steady while the general, Vyland, Larry and I shinned down the extension ladder. Petersen gunned his motor and took off just as the last of us reached the deck, and was lost in a blinding flurry of rain inside ten seconds. I wondered if I would ever see him again.
Out there on the exposed deck the wind was far stronger and much gustier than it had been on land and it was all that we could do to keep our balance on the slippery metal underfoot. Not that there was much chance of me falling, at least not backwards, not with Larry’s cannon jabbing into the small of my back all the time. He was wearing the big-collared, big-lapelled, belted, epauletted and leather-buttoned coat that Hollywood had taught him was the correct rig of the day for this kind of weather, and he had the gun inside one of the deep pockets. I felt nervous. Larry didn’t like me and would have counted a hole in his fine coat as a small price to pay for the privilege of pulling that trigger. I’d got right under Larry’s skin like a burr under a saddle, and I meant to stay there. I rarely spoke to him, but when I did I never failed to refer to him as “hophead “or “junky “and to hope that his supplies of snow were coming along all right. On the way down to the helicopter that morning I’d inquired solicitously whether or not he’d remembered to pack his grip, and when he’d asked suspiciously what the unprintable, I meant by that. I explained that I was concerned that he might have forgotten to pack his syringe. It took Vyland and the general all the strength of their combined efforts to pull him off me. There is nothing more dangerous and unpredictable than a drug addict, just as there is nothing more pitiable: but there was no pity in my heart then, Larry was the weakest link in the chain and I meant to keep sawing away at him until something snapped.
We staggered along against the wind till we came to a raised hatch-cover entrance which gave to a wide companion-way leading to the deck below. A group of men awaited us here, and I had my collar turned up, hat-brim turned down and a handkerchief in my hand busy wiping the rain off my face, but I needn’t have bothered: Joe Curran, the roustabout foreman I’d talked to ten hours previously, was not there. I tried to imagine what would have happened had he been there, or had he asked the general whether C. C. Farnborough, his private confidential secretary, had found the missing brief-case; but I gave it up, the strain on the imagination was too great. I’d probably just have borrowed Larry’s gun and shot myself.
Two men came forward to meet us. General Ruthven did the honours: “Martin Jerrold, our field foreman, Tom Harrison, our petroleum engineer. Gentlemen, this is John Smith, a specialist engineer flown out from England to help Mr. Vyland in his research.” John Smith, I gathered, was the inspired choice of name for myself.
Both men made perfunctory noises of greeting. Larry prodded me in the back so I said I was delighted too, but they obviously had no interest at all in me. Both men looked worried and uneasy, and both men were doing their best to conceal the fact. But the general didn’t miss it.
“Something bothering you, Harrison?” Out here on the rig it was obviously the policy for Vyland to keep very much in the background.
“Very much so, sir.” Harrison, a crew-cut youngster with heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, looked to me as if he should still be in college, but he must have been good to hold down the responsible job he did. He produced a small chart, spread it out and pointed with a carpenter’s pencil. “This chart’s good, General Ruthven. It couldn’t be better, and Pride and Honeywell are the best geological team in the business. But we’re already twelve hundred feet overdue. We should have hit oil at least five hundred feet back. But there’s not even a smell of gas yet. I can’t even begin to explain it, sir.”
I could have explained it, but it was hardly the time.
“Those things happen, my boy,” the general said easily. I had to admire the old coot; I was beginning to have more than a fair idea of the almost inhuman strain he was labouring under, but the control, the self-possession were admirable. “We’re lucky if we make it two out of five. And no geologist would claim to be 100 per cent accurate, or even within shouting distance of it. Give it another thousand. The responsibility’s mine.”
“Thank you, sir.” Harrison looked relieved, but there was still a certain uneasiness about him and the general was quick to get on to it.
“Still something worrying you, Harrison?”
“No, sir, of course not.” He was too quick, too emphatic, he wasn’t half the actor the old boy was. “Nothing at all.”
“Hmm.” The general considered him thoughtfully, then looked at Jerrold. “Something on your mind, too?”
“The weather, sir.”
“Of course.” The general nodded understandingly. “Latest reports are that Hurricane Diane is going to hit Marble Springs fair and square. And that means the X 13. You don’t have to ask me, Jerrold. You know that. You’re the captain of this ship, I’m only a passenger. I don’t like losing ten thousand dollars a day, but you must suspend drilling the moment you think it’s right to.”
“It’s not that, sir,” Jerrold said unhappily. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That experimental leg you’re working on, sir — shouldn’t it be lowered to give maximum stability?”