I spent ten minutes in scribbling down figures on a sheet of paper, fiddling with a slide rule, consulting a wiring diagram and getting nowhere at all. I didn’t conceal the fact that I was getting nowhere at all. I clicked my tongue in impatience, scratched my head with the end of my pencil, compressed my lips and looked with mounting irritation at the walls, the door, the window. But mostly I looked in irritation at Royale. Eventually he got it — he would have been hard pressed not to get it.
“My presence here bothering you, Talbot?”
“What? Well, no, not exactly — I just don’t seem to be getting——”
“Not working out as easily as you thought it would, eh?”
I stared at him in irritable silence. If he wasn’t going to suggest it I would have to, but he saved me the trouble.
“Maybe I’m just as anxious as you to get this thing over. I guess you’re one of those characters who don’t like distraction. And I seem to be distracting you.” He rose easily to his feet, glanced at the paper in front of me, picked up his chair with one hand and made for the door. “I’ll wait outside.”
I said nothing, just nodded briefly. He took the key from the inside of the door, went out into the passage, shut the door and locked it. I got up, crossed to the door on cat feet and waited.
I didn’t have to wait long. Within a minute I heard the sound of feet walking briskly along the passage outside, the sound of somebody saying, “Sorry, Mac “in a pronounced and unmistakably American accent and then, almost in the same instant, the solid, faintly hollow sounding impact of a heavy blow that had me wincing in vicarious suffering. A moment later the key turned in the lock, the door opened and I helped drag a heavy load into the room.
The load was Royale and he was out, cold as a flounder. I hauled him inside while the oil-skinned figure who’d lifted him through the door reversed the key and turned it in the lock. At once he started throwing off sou’wester, coat and leggings, and beneath everything his maroon uniform was as immaculate as ever.
“Not at all bad,” I murmured. “Both the sap and the American accent. You’d have fooled me.”
“It fooled Royale.” Kennedy bent and looked at the already purpling bruise above Royale’s temple. “Maybe I hit him too hard.” He was as deeply concerned as I would have been had I accidentally trodden on a passing tarantula. “He’ll live.”
“Hell live. It must have been a long deferred pleasure for you.” I had shed my own coat and was struggling into the oilskin rig-out as fast as I could. “Everything fixed? Get the stuff in the workshop?”
“Look, Mr. Talbot,” he said reproachfully, “I had three whole hours.”
“Fair enough. And if our friend here shows any sign of coming to?”
“I’ll just kind of lean on him again,” Kennedy said dreamily.
I grinned and left. I’d no idea how long the general could detain Vyland on whatever spurious errand he’d called him away, but I suspected it wouldn’t be very long; Vyland was beginning to become just that little bit anxious about the time factor. Maybe I hadn’t done myself any good by pointing out that the government agents might only be waiting for the weather to moderate before coming out to question the general, but with Vyland pointing Ms gun at me and threatening to kill me I had had to reach out and grasp the biggest straw I could find.
The wind on the open well-deck shrieked and gusted as powerfully as ever, but its direction had changed and I had to fight my way almost directly against it. It came from the north now and I knew then that the centre of the hurricane must have passed somewhere also to the north of us, curving in on Tampa. It looked as if the wind and the seas might begin to moderate within a few hours. But, right then, the wind was as strong as it had ever been and on my way across I had my head and shoulders so far hunched into the wind that I was looking back the way I came. I fancied, in the near darkness, that I saw a figure clawing its way along the life-line behind me, but I paid no attention. People were probably using that line all day long.
The time for circumspection, for the careful reconnoitering of every potential danger in my path, was past. It was all or nothing now. Arrived at the other side I strode down the long corridor where I had whispered to Kennedy earlier in the afternoon, turned right at its end instead of left as we had done before, stopped to orientate myself and headed in the direction of the broad companionway which, Mary had said, led up to the actual drilling deck itself. There were several people wandering around, one of the open doors I passed gave on to a recreation room full of blue smoke and crowded with men: obviously all work on drilling and the upper deck was completely stopped. It didn’t worry the drillers, their ten-day tour of duty was paid from the time they left shore till they set foot on it again, and it didn’t worry me for it was to the working deck I was going and the absence of all traffic that I’d find up there would make my task all the easier.
Rounding another corner I all but cannoned into a couple of people who seemed to be arguing rather vehemently about something or other: Vyland and the general. Vyland was the man who was doing the talking but he broke off to give me a glare as I apologised for bumping him and continued down the passage. I was certain he could not have recognised me, my sou’wester had been pulled right down to my eyes, the high flyaway collar of my oilskin was up to my nose and, best disguise of all, I had dispensed with my limp, but for all that I had the most uncomfortable sensation between the shoulder blades until I had rounded another corner and was lost to their sight. I wasn’t sure whether this obvious argument between the general and Vyland was a good thing or not. If the general had managed to get him deeply interested in some controversial subject of immediate and personal importance to both, then well and good; but if Vyland had been expostulating over what he regarded as some unnecessary delay, things might get very rough indeed. If he got back to the other side of the rig before I did, I didn’t like to think what the consequences would be. So I didn’t think about them. Instead, I broke into a run, regardless of the astonished looks from some passers-by at a complete loss to understand the reason for this violent activity on what was in effect a well-paid holiday, reached the companionway and went up two steps at a time.
Mary, tightly wrapped in a hooded plastic raincoat, was waiting behind the closed doors at the top of the steps. She shrank back and gave a little gasp as I stopped abruptly in front of her and pulled down the collar of my oilskin for a moment to identify myself.
“You!” She stared at me. “You — your bad leg — what’s happened to your limp?”
“Never had one. Local colour. Guaranteed to fool the most suspicious. Kennedy told you what I wanted you for?”
“A — a watchdog. To keep guard.”
“That’s it. I don’t want a bullet or a knife in my back in that radio shack. Sorry it had to be you, but there was no one eke. Where’s the shack?”
“Through the door.” She pointed. “About fifty feet that way.”
“Come on.” I grabbed the door handle, incautiously twisted it open, and if I hadn’t had a strong grip on it I’d have been catapulted head over heels to the foot of the stairs. As it was, the hammerblow blast of that shrieking wind smashed both door and myself back against the bulkhead with a force that drove all the breath out of my lungs in an explosive gasp and would possibly have stunned me if the sou’wester hadn’t cushioned the impact as the back of my head struck painfully against the steel. For a moment I hung there, my head a kaleidoscopic whirl of shooting colour, bent double against the hurricane force of the wind, whooping painfully as I fought to overcome the shock of the blow and me sucking effect of the wind and to draw some breath into my aching lungs: then I straightened up and lurched out through the door, pulling Mary behind me. Twice I tried to heave the door close, but against the sustained pressure of that wind I couldn’t even pull it half-way to. I gave it up. They could, and no doubt very shortly would, send up a platoon from below to heave it shut: I had more urgent things to attend to.