It was a long bare barn-like structure of a place, with the first third of it given over to a kind of communal living venture while beyond that a narrow central passage bisected two rows of eight by eight cubicles, each with its own door, all of them open to the main roof. In the foreground, brown corticene on the floor, a couple of small tables with writing materials, seven or eight rattan and canvas chairs and that was it. No home from home, but good enough for something that would only be left there to rust and flake away when the Navy was finished with it.
Anderson nodded to a chair and I didn’t need any second invitation. He crossed to a small alcove, picked up a phone I hadn’t noticed and cranked a naval-type generator. He listened for a few minutes, then hung it back on its rest.
“Damn thing’s gone dead,” he said irritably. “Always when you need it most. Sorry, Allison, more walking for you. My apologies to Surgeon Lieutenant Brookman. Ask him to bring his kit. Tell him why. And tell the captain we’ll be over as soon as possible.”
Allison left. I looked at Marie, seated across the table from me, and I smiled back. The first impression of Anderson had been a wrong one, if only they were all as efficient as he was. The temptation to relax, to let go and close the eyes, was temptation indeed: but I’d only to think of those still prisoners in the hands of Witherspoon and Hewell and I didn’t feel sleepy any more.
The door of the nearest cubicle on the left opened and a tall skinny youngish man, with prematurely grey hair and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, clad only in a pair of under-shorts, came out into the passage, glasses raised half way up his forehead as he rubbed the sleep out of myopic eyes. He caught sight of Anderson, opened his mouth to speak, caught sight of Marie, dropped his jaw in astonishment, gave a peculiar kind of yelp and hurriedly retreated.
He wasn’t the only one who was astonished, compared to my own reactions he was a selling-plater in the jaw-dropping field. I rose slowly to my feet, propping myself up on the table, Bentall giving his incomparable impression of a man who has seen a ghost. I was still giving the impression when the man appeared a few minutes later, dressing-gown flapping about his lanky ankles, and this time the first person he saw was me. He stopped short, peered at me with his head outthrust at the end of a long thin neck, then walked slowly to where I was standing.
“Johnny Bentall?” He reached out to touch my right shoulder, maybe to make sure I was real. “Johnny Bentall!”
I got my jaw closed far enough to speak.
“No other. Bentall it is. I didn’t exactly look to find you here, Dr. Hargreaves.” The last time I’d seen him had been ‘ over a year previously, when he’d been the chief of hypersonics in the Hepworth Ordnance establishment.
“And the young lady?” Even in moments of stress Hargreaves had always been the most punctilious of men. “Your wife, Bentall?”
“Off and on,” I said. “Marie Hopeman, ex-Mrs. Bentall. I’D explain later. What are you-”
“Your shoulder!” he said sharply. “Your arm. You’ve hurt it”
I refrained from telling him that I knew all about my arm.
“A dog bit me,” I said patiently. It didn’t sound right, somehow. “I’ll tell you all you want, but, first, one or two things. Quickly, please. It’s important. Are you working here, Dr. Hargreaves?”
“Of course I am.” He answered the question as if he considered it mildly half-witted and from his point of view I suppose it was. He would be unlikely to be taking a holiday in a naval camp in the South Pacific.
“Doing what?”
“Doing what?” He paused and peered at me through his pebbles. “I’m not quite sure whether I-”
“Mr. Bentall says he is a Government Intelligence officer,” Anderson put in quietly. “I believe him.”
“Government? Intelligence?” Dr. Hargreaves was in a repetitive mood tonight. He looked at me suspiciously. “You must forgive me if I’m a bit confused, Bentall. What happened to that machine import-export business you inherited from your uncle a year or so ago?”
“Nothing. It never existed. There had to be some cover-up story to account for my departure. I’m betraying official secrets but not really doing any harm in telling you that I was seconded to a Government agency to investigate the leakage of information about the new solid fuels we were working on at the time.”
“Um.” He thought a bit, then made up his mind. “Solid fuel, eh? That’s why we’re out here. Testing the stuff. Very secret and all that, you know.”
“A new type rocket?”
“Precisely.”
“It had to be that. You don’t have to take off to the middle of nowhere to carry out experiments on new stuff unless it’s either explosives or rockets. And Heaven knows we’ve reached the limit in explosives without blowing ourselves into space.”
By this time other cubicle doors had opened and a variety of sleepy men, in a variety of clothes and underclothes, were peering out to see what the matter was. Anderson went and spoke softly to them, knocked on a couple of other doors, then came back and smiled apologetically.
“Might as well have them all here, Mr. Bentall. If your facts are right it’s time they were up anyway: and it’ll save you having to tell the same story over again.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant.” I sat down again and closed grateful fingers over a large glass of whisky that had mysteriously appeared from nowhere. Two or three tentative sips and the room seemed to be floating around me: neither my thoughts nor my eyes were any too keen to be focussed on anything, but after another few sips my vision seemed to clear again and the pain in my arm began to recede. I supposed I was getting lightheaded.
“Well, come on, Bentall,” Hargreaves said impatiently. “We’re waiting.”
I looked up. They were waiting. Seven of them altogether, not counting Anderson-and the late Dr. Fairfield was the missing eighth.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Ill keep it short. But, first, I wonder if any of you gentlemen have any spare clothes. Miss Hopeman here has just recovered from a rather bad chill and fever and I’m afraid-”
This gave me another minute’s grace and time for the glass to be emptied and refilled by Anderson. The competition to supply Marie with clothes was brisk. When she’d given me a grateful and rather tired smile and disappeared into one of the cubicles, I told them the story in two minutes, quickly, concisely, missing out nothing but the fact that I’d heard women singing in the abandoned mine. When I’d finished, one of the scientists, a tall florid-faced old bird who looked like an elderly retired butcher and was, in fact, as I later discovered, the country’s leading expert in inertial and infrared guidance systems, looked at me coldly and snapped:
“Fantastic, absolutely fantastic. Imminent danger of attack. Bah! I don’t believe a word of it.”
“What’s your theory of what happened to Dr. Fairfield?” I asked.
“My theory?” the retired butcher snapped. “We all know how poor old Fairfield met his dreadful end. No theory. We heard from Witherspoon-Fairfield used to visit him regularly, they were great friends-that they’d been out trolling for trevally-”
“And he’d fallen overboard and the sharks got him, I suppose? The more intelligent the mind the more easily it falls for any old rubbish. I’d sooner rely on the babes in the wood than a scientist outside the four walls of his lab.” Dale Carnegie wouldn’t have approved of any part of this. “I can prove it, gentlemen, but only by giving you bad news. Your wives «re being held prisoner in the mine on the other side of the island.”
They looked at me, then at each other, then back at me again.
“Have you gone mad, Bentall?” Hargreaves was staring at me through his pebble glasses, his mouth tight.
“It would be better for you if I had. No doubt you gentlemen imagine your wives are still in Sydney or Melbourne or wherever. No doubt you write to them regularly. No doubt you hear from them regularly. No doubt you keep their letters, or some of them. Or am I wrong, gentlemen?”
No one said I was wrong.
“So, if your wives are all writing from different homes, you would expect, by the law of averages, that most of them would use different paper, different pens, different inks, and that the different postmarks on the envelopes would not all be printed in the same colours. As scientists, you will all have respect for the law of averages. I suggest we compare your letters and envelopes. No one wants to read any private correspondence, just to make a superficial comparison of likenesses and differences. Would you like to cooperate? Or”-I glanced at the red-faced man-“are you scared to learn the truth?”