So the drilling crew did know there was something going on in that pillar I’d investigated the previous night. When I came to think of it, although it wasn’t inevitable that they should know, it was advisable. So much easier to give the crew a specious explanation for the activities taking place there than to cordon off a section and raise suspicion and unwanted and possibly dangerous speculation. I wondered what sort of yarn had been spun to them. I was to find that out right away.
“Vyland?” The general had turned to the man by his side and raised a questioning eyebrow.
“I’ll accept full responsibility, General Ruthven.” He spoke in the quiet, precise, confident tones that a top-flight engineer might have employed, although it would have surprised me if he knew a nut from a bolt. But he could use reason, too, for he added: “This storm is going to hit from the west and the maximum strain is going to be on the other the landward side. The effect on this side will merely be to lift it.” He made a deprecating gesture. “It does seem rather pointless, doesn’t it, to lower an additional leg just when the other legs on that same side will have far less strain than normal to carry? Besides, General, we are now so near the perfection of this technique which is going to revolutionise underwater drilling that it would be a crime to set it back, maybe several months, by lowering the leg and perhaps destroying all our delicate equipment.”
So that was the line. It was well done, I had to admit: the dedicated enthusiasm in his voice was so exactly right, without being in any way overdone.
“That’s good enough for me,” Jerrold said. He turned back to the general. “Coming across to your quarters, sir?”
“Later. To eat, but don’t wait lunch for us. Order it for my stateroom, will you? Mr. Smith here is keen to get to work right away.” Like hell I was.
We left them and made our way down a broad passage. Deep inside the platform here the sound of the wind and the rising waves crashing and breaking against the pillars was completely inaudible. Perhaps some faint murmur of sound might have been heard if the air in that brightly-lit steel passage hadn’t been filled with the hum of powerful generators: we appeared to be passing by some diesel engine room.
At the far end of the passage we turned left and walked almost to its far cul-de-sac limits before stopping outside a door on the right-hand side. On this door, printed in large white letters, was the legend: “Drilling Research Project” followed, in letters scarcely less large, by the words: “Private. Most Secret. Positively No Admittance “.
Vyland rapped on the door in a long code knock — I made a mental note of it: four shorts, two long, four shorts — waited till there carne three long knocks from the inside, then knocked again, four times in rapid succession. Ten seconds later we ‘had all passed through the door and it was double locked and bolted behind us. It made all the signs about
“Private “and “No Admittance “seem rather superfluous.
Steel floor, steel bulkheads, steel ceiling, it was a black cheerless box of a room. At least, three sides of it formed a box — the bulkhead we’d just passed through, the blank bulkhead on the left and the one to the right, with a high grilled door in its centre. The fourth side was convex, bulging out into the room in an almost perfect semi-circle, with a butterfly-clamped hatchway in its middle: the trunking, I felt certain, of the big steel pillar reaching down to the floor of the sea. On either side of the hatchway hung large drums with neatly coiled rubber tubes armoured in flexible steel. Below each dram, and bolted to the floor, was a large motor: the one on the right was, I knew, an air compressor- — that’s what I’d heard when I’d been out there during the night — and the one on the left probably a forced-suction water pump. As for the furnishings of the room, even the Spartans would have found it rugged: a deal table, two benches and a metal wall-rack.
There were two men in the room — the one who had opened the door and another sitting at the table, dead cigar in his mouth and a pack of greasy cards spread out on the table in front of him — and both cast in the same mould. It wasn’t the fact that they were both shirt-sleeved and had leather holsters strapped across their chests and high up on their left sides that gave them the close similarity, not even their evenly-matched height and weight and broad bulky shoulders. The sameness lay in their faces, hard expressionless faces with cold, still, watchful eyes. I’d seen men out of the same mould before, the top-notch professionals of the strong-arm underworld, all that Larry would have given his life to be and could never hope to be. They were so exactly the type of men I would have expected Vyland to employ that the presence of Larry was all the more mysterious indeed.
Vyland grunted a greeting and that was all the time he wasted in the next ten minutes. He walked across to the wall-rack, reached down a long roll of canvas-backed paper that was wrapped round a wooden stick, unrolled it flat on the table and weighted the ends to keep them from curling up again. It was a large and highly complicated diagram, sixty inches long by about thirty in depth. He stood back and looked at me.
“Ever seen that before, Talbot?”
I bent over the table. The diagram represented a peculiar object shaped half-way between a cylinder and a cigar, about four times as long as its average width. It was flat on top, flat along the middle third of the bottom, then tapering slightly upwards towards either end. At least eighty per cent of it appeared to be given up to some kind of storage tanks — I could see the fuel lines leading to the tanks from a raised bridge-like structure superimposed on the top side. This same bridge housed the beginnings of a vertical cylindrical chamber which ran clear through the body of the machine, passed out through the bottom, angled sharply left and entered an oval-shaped chamber suspended beneath the body of the cigar. On either side of this oval chamber and attached to (he underside of the cigar were large rectangular containers. To the left, towards the narrower and more tapering end, were what appeared to be searchlights and long slender remote-control grabs housed in spring clips along the side.
I took a good long look at all of this, then straightened. “Sorry.” I shook my head. “Never seen it in my life.”
I needn’t have bothered straightening for next moment I was lying on the deck: maybe five seconds later I had pushed myself to my knees and was shaking my head from side to side in an attempt to clear it. I looked up, groaned with the pain just behind my ear, and tried to focus my eyes. I focused one of them, at any rate, for I made out Vyland standing above me, his pistol held by the barrel.
“I kind of thought you might say that, Talbot.” A nice quiet controlled voice, we were sitting at the vicar’s afternoon tea-table and he was asking me to pass along the muffins. “Your memory, Talbot. Perhaps you would like to jog it again a little, eh?”
“Is all this really necessary?” General Ruthven sounded distressed. He looked distressed. “Surely, Vyland, we—–”
“Shut up!” Vyland snapped. We were no longer calling on the vicar. He turned to me as I climbed to my feet. “Well?”
“What’s the good of beating me over the head?” I said savagely. “How will that make me remember something I never——? ”
This time I saw it coming, got the palm of my hand up to the side of my head and was riding the blow, going fast away from it, when it connected. I staggered and hit the bulkhead. It was nearly all show and to complete the effect I slid down to the deck. Nobody said anything. Vyland and his two hoodlums were looking at me with a detached interest, the general was white and he had his lower lip caught in his teeth; Larry’s face was a mask of unholy glee.
“Remember anything now?”
I called him an unprintable name and rose shakily to my feet.
“Very well.” Vyland shrugged. “I think Larry here would like to persuade you.”
“Can I? Can I really?” The eagerness on Larry’s face was revolting, frightening. “Want that, I make him talk?”
Vyland smiled and nodded. “Remember he’s got to work for us when you’re finished.”