The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 02 Page 16

  Soon after supper Spawn yawned. "I think I shall go to bed." His glance was inquiring. "What are you going to do?"

  I stood up. "I'll go to bed, too. Markes wants to see me early in the morning. You'll be there, Spawn?"

  "Yes. We will go together."

  It was still no more than eight o'clock in the evening. Spawn followed me to my bedroom, and left me at its door.

  "Sleep well. I will call you in time."

  "Thanks, Spawn."

  I wondered if there were irony in his voice as he said good night. No one could have told.

  * * * * *

  I did not go to bed. I sat listening to the silence of my room and the garden, and Spawn's retreating footsteps. He had said he was sleepy, but nevertheless I presently heard him across the patio. He was apparently in the kitchen, cleaning away our meal, to judge by the rattling of his pans. It was as yet not much after hour eight of the evening. The hours before my tryst with Jetta seemed an interminable time to wait. She might not come, though, I was afraid, until midnight.

  At all events I felt that I had some hours yet. And it occurred to me that the evening was not yet too far advanced for me to call upon Perona. He lived not far from here, I had learned. I wanted to see this beribboned old Minister of Nareda's Internal Affairs.

  I would use as my excuse a desire to discuss further the possibility of smuggler being here in Nareda.

  I put on my hat and a light jacket, verified that my dirk was readily accessible and sealed up my room. Spawn apparently was still in the kitchen. I got out of the house, I felt sure, without him being aware of it.

  * * * * *

  The Nareda streets were quiet. There was a few pedestrians, and none of them paid much attention to me. It was no more than ten minutes walk to Perona's home.

  His house was set back from the road, surrounded by luxurious vegetation. There was a gate in front of the garden, and another, a hundred feet or to along a small alleyway which bordered the ground to my left. I was about to enter the front gate when sight of a figure passing under the garden foliage checked me. It was a man, evidently coming from the house and headed toward the side gate. He went through a shaft of light that slanted from one of the lower windows of the house.

  Perona! I was sure it was he. His slight figure, with a gay, tri-cornered hat. A short tasseled cloak hanging from his shoulders. He was alone; walking fast. He evidently had not seen me. I crouched outside the high front wall, and through its lattice bars I saw him reach the side gate, open it swiftly, pass through, and close it after him. There was something furtive about his manner, for all he was undisguised. I decided to follow him.

  The front street fortunately was deserted at the moment. I waited long enough for him to appear. But he did not; and when I ran to the alley corner--chancing bumping squarely into him--I saw him far down its dim, narrow length where it opened into the back street which bordered his grounds to the rear. He turned to the left and shot a swift glance up the alley, which I anticipated, provided for by drawing back. When I looked again, he was gone.

  * * * * *

  I have had some experience at playing the shadow. But it was not easy here along the almost deserted and fairly bright Nareda streets. Perona was walking swiftly down the slope toward the outskirts of the village where it bordered upon the Nares Sea. For a time I thought he was headed for the landing field, but at a cross-path he turned sharply to the right, away from the field, whose sheen of lights I could now see down the rocky defile ahead of me. There was nothing but broken, precipitous rocky country ahead of him, into which this path he had taken was winding. What could Perona, a Minister, be engaged in, wandering off alone into this black, deserted region?

  It was black indeed, by now. The village was soon far behind us. A storm was in the night air; a wind off the sea; solid black clouds overhead blotted out the moon and stars. The crags and buttes and gullies of this tumbled area loomed barely visible about me. There were times when only my feel of the path under my feet kept me from straying, to fall into a ravine or crevice.

  I prowled perhaps two hundred yards behind Perona. He was using a tiny hand-flash now; it bobbed and winked in the darkness ahead, vanishing sometimes when a curve in the path hid him, or when he plunged down into a gully and up again. I had no search-beam. Nor would I have dared use one: Perona could too obviously have seen that someone was following him.

  There was half a mile of this, I think, though it seemed interminable. I could hear the sea, rising with the wind, pounding against the rocks to my left. Then, a distance ahead, I saw lights moving. Perona's--and others. Three or four of them. Their combined glow made a radiance which illumined the path and rocks. I could see the figures of several men whom Perona had joined. They stood a moment and then moved off. To the right a ragged cliff wall towered the path. The spots of light bobbed toward it. I caught the vague outline of a huge broken opening, like a cave mouth in the cliff. The lights were swallowed by it.

  I crept cautiously forward.

  CHAPTER VI

  Ether-wave Eavesdropping

  I had thought it was a cavern mouth into which the men had disappeared, but it was not. I reached it without any encounter. It loomed above me, a great archway in the cliff--an opening fifty feet high and equally as broad. And behind it was a roofless cave--a sort of irregularly circular bowl, five hundred feet across its broken, bowlder-strewn, caked-ooze floor.

  I crouched in the blackness under the archway. The moon had risen and its light filtered with occasional shafts through the swift-flying black clouds overhead. The scene was brighter. It was dark in the archway, but a glow of moonlight in the bowl beyond showed me its tumbled floor and the precipitous, eroded walls, like a crater-rim, which encircled it.

  The men whom Perona had met were across the bowl near its opposite side. I could see the group of them, five hundred feet from me, by a little moonlight that was on them; also by the sheen from the spots of their hand-lights. Four or five men, and Perona. I thought I distinguished the aged Minister sitting on a rock, and before him a huge giant man's figure striding up and down. Perona seemed talking vehemently: the men were listening; the giant paused occasionally in his pacing to fling a question.

  All this I saw with my first swift glance. My attention was drawn from the men to an object near them. The nose of a flyer showed between two upstanding crags on the floor of the valley. Only its forward horizontal propellers and the tip of its cabin and landing gear were visible, but I could guess that it was a fair-sized ship.

  The men were too far away for me to hear them. Could I get across the floor of the bowl without discovery? It did not seem so. The accursed moonlight became stronger every moment. Then I saw a guard--a dark figure of a man showing just inside the archway, some seventy feet from me. He was leaning against a rock, facing my way. In his hands was a thick-barreled electronic projector.

  I could not advance: that was obvious. The moonlight lay in a clear clean patch beyond the archway. The guard stood at its edge.

  * * * * *

  A minute or two had passed. Perona was still talking vehemently. I was losing it: not a word was audible. Yet I felt that if I could hear Perona now, much that Hanley and I wanted to learn would be made clear to us. My little microphone receiver could be adjusted for audible air vibrations. I crouched and held it cautiously above my head with its face, like a listening ear, turned toward the distant men. My single-vacuum amplification brought up the sound until their voices sounded like whispers murmured in my ear-grids.

  "De Boer, listen to me--"

  Perona's voice. They must have been chance words spoken loudly. It was all I could hear, save tantalizing, unintelligible murmurs.

  So this was De Boer, the bandit! The big fellow pacing before Perona. I wanted infinitely more, now, to hear what was being said.

  I thought of Hanley. There might be a way of handling this.

  I had to murmur very softly. I was hidden in these shadows from the guard's sight, but he
was close enough to hear my normal voice. I chanced it. A wind was sucking through the archway with an audible whine: the guard might not hear me.

  "X. 2. AY."

  The sorter's desk. He came in. I murmured Hanley's rating. "Rush. Danger. Special."

  It went swiftly through. Hanley, thank Heaven, was at his desk.

  * * * * *

  I plugged in my little image finder; held it over my head; turned it slowly. I whispered:

  "Look around, Chief. See where I am? Near Nareda; couple of miles out. Followed Perona; he met these men.

  "The big one is De Boer, the depth bandit. I can't hear what they're saying--but I can send you their voice murmurs."

  "Amplify them all you can. Relay them up," Hanley ordered.

  I caught Perona's murmurs again; I swung them through my tiny transformers and off my transmitter points into the ether.

  "Hear them, Chief?"

  "Yes. I'll try further amplification."

  It was what I had intended. Hanley's greater power might be able to amplify those murmurs into audible strength.

  "I'm getting them, Phil."

  He swung them back to me. Grotesquely distorted, blurred with tube-hum and interference crackle, they roared in my ear-grids so loudly that I saw the nearby guard turn his head as though startled. Listening....

  But evidently he concluded it was nothing.

  I cut down the volume. Hanley switched in.

  "By God. Phil! This--"

  "Off, Chief! Let me hear, too!"

  * * * * *

  He cut away. Those distorted voices! They came from Perona and the bandits to me across this five hundred foot moonlit bowl; from me, thirteen hundred miles up to Hanley's instruments; and back to me once more. But the words, most of them, now were distinguishable.

  Perona's voice: "I tell it to you. De Boer ... and a good chance for you to make the money."

  "But will they pay?"

  "Of course they will pay. Big. A ransom princely."

  "And why, Perona? Why princely? Who is this fellow--so important?"

  "He is with rich business men, I tell to you."

  "A private citizen?"

  "... And a private citizen, of a surety. Fool! Have you come to be a coward, De Boer?"

  "Pah!"

  "Well then I tell you it is a lifetime chance. All of it I have arranged. If he was a government agent, that would be very different, for they are very keen, this administration of the American government, to protect their agents. But their private citizens--it is a scandal! Do you not ever pick the newscasters' reports, De Boer? Has it not been a scandal that this administration does very little for its citizens abroad?"

  "And you want to get rid of this fellow? Why, Perona?"

  "That is not your concern. The ransom is to be all yours. Make away with him--in the depths somewhere. Demand your ransom. Fifty thousand gold-standards! Demand it of me. Of Nareda!"

  "And you will pay it?"

  "I promise it. Nareda will pay it--and Nareda will collect the ransom from the American capitalists. Very easy."

  His voice fell lower. "Between us, you will get the ransom money from Nareda--and then kill your prisoner if you like. Call it an accident; what matter? And dead men are silent men, De Boer. I will see that no real pursuit is made after you."

  * * * * *

  They were talking about me! It was obvious. Questions rushed at me. Perona, planning with this bandit to abduct me. Hold me for ransom. Or kill me! But Perona knew that I was not a private citizen. He was lying to De Boer, to persuade him.

  Why this attack upon me? Was Spawn in on it? Why were they so anxious to get rid of me? Because of Jetta? Or because I was dangerous, prying into their smuggling activities. Or both?

  De Boer: "... Get up with my men through the streets to Spawn's house? You have it fixed?"

  "Yes. Over the route from here as I told you, there are no police to-night. I have ordered them off. In the garden. Dios! You offer so many objections! I tell you all is fixed. In an hour, half an hour; even now, perhaps, the Americano is in the garden. The girl has promised to meet him there. He will be there, fear not. Will you go?"

  "Yes."

  "Hah! That is the De Boer I have always admired!"

  I could see them in the moonlight across the pit. Perona now standing up, the giant figure of the bandit towering over him.

  * * * * *

  Hanley's microscopic voice cut in: "Getting it, Phil? To seize you for ransom!"

  "Yes. I hear it."

  "This girl. Who--?"

  "Wait, Chief. Off--"

  De Boer: "I will do it! Fifty thousand."

  Perona: "An hour now. Spawn will be at his home asleep."

  "And you will go to the mine?"

  "Yes. Now, from here. You seize this fellow Grant, and then attack the mine. Our regular plan, De Boer. This does not change it."

  Attack Spawn's mine! Half a million of treasure was there to-night!

  Perona was chuckling: "You give Spawn's guards the signal. They are all my men--in my pay. They will run away when you appear."

  Hanley cut in again. "By the gods, they're after that treasure! Phil, listen to me! you must...." His voice faded.

  "Chief, I can't hear you!"

  Hanley came again: "... And I will notify Porto Rico. The local patrol will be about ready to leave."

  "Or notify Nareda headquarters," I suggested. "If you can get President Markes, he can send some police to the mine--"

  "And find all Nareda's police bribed by Perona? I'll get Porto Rico. We have an hour or two; the patrol can reach you in an hour."

  The bandits were preparing to leave here. Two or three of them had gone to the flyer. Perona and De Boer were parting.

  "... Well, that is all, De Boer."

  "Right, Señor Perona. I will start shortly."

  "On foot, by the street route to Spawn's--"

  Hanley's hurried voice came back: "I've sent the call to Porto Rico."

  * * * * *

  The guard had moved again. He was no more than forty feet away from me now--standing up gazing directly toward where I was crouching over my tiny instruments in the shadows of the rocky arch. A footstep sounded behind me, on the path outside the arch. Someone approaching!

  A tiny light bobbing!

  Then a voice calling, "Perona! De Boer!"

  The guard took a step forward; stopped, with levelled weapon.

  Then the voice again: it was so loud it went through my opened relay, flashed up to New York, and blew out half a dozen of Hanley's attuned vacuums.

  "Perona!"

  Spawn's voice! He was coming toward me! I lay prone, my little grids switched off. I held my breath.

  Spawn's figure went past within ten feet of me. But he did not see me.

  He met the guard. "Hello, Gutierrez. The damned American--"

  Perona and De Boer came hastening. Spawn joined them in the moonlight just beyond the archway, close enough for me to hear them plainly. Spawn was out of breath, panting from his swift walk. He greeted them with a roar.

  "The American--he is gone!"

  "Dios! Gone where, Spawn?"

  "The hell--how do I know, Perona? He is gone from his room--from the house. Maybe he followed you here? Did he?"

  CHAPTER VII

  Behind the Sealed Door

  There was a moment when I think I might have escaped unseen from that archway. But I was too amazed at Spawn's appearance to think of my own situation. I had believed that Perona was plotting against Spawn, meeting these bandits in this secret place; I had just heard them planning to attack Spawn's mine--to rob it of the treasure doubtless, which I knew was stored there.

  But I realized now it was not a plot against Spawn. He had come here swiftly to join Perona and tell him that I, their intended victim, was missing. He had greeted the bandit guard by name. He seemed, indeed, as well known to these bandits as Perona himself.

  They stood now in a group some thirty feet away from me. I
could hear their excited voices perfectly clearly. My instruments were off; but I recall that as I listened to Spawn I was also aware of the tingle of the electrode-band on my chest--Hanley, vigorously calling me back to find out why I had so summarily disconnected.

  "I took him to his room," Spawn was explaining excitedly. "De duvel, why should I have sealed him in? How could I? He is no child!"

  De Boer laughed caustically. "And so he has walked away from you? I think I am a fool to mix myself with you two."

  Perona retorted, "I have made you rich, De Boer. Think what you like; to-night is the end of our partnership. Only, you do what I have told you to-night."

  "Hah! How can I? Your American has flown his trap."

  This guard--this Gutierrez, as Spawn had called him--was listening with interest. De Boer's several other men were gathered there. I felt myself safe where I was, for the moment at least.

  * * * * *

  I cut Hanley in. "Chief, they're closer! Spawn has come! They've missed me! I'll relay what they're saying, but you step it down; there's too much volume."

  "You're all right, Phil? Thank Heaven for that! Something blew my vacuums."

  "Chief, listen--here they are--"

  Perona: "But he will be back. In the garden now, no doubt, with Jetta."

  De Boer: "Ah--the little Jetta! So she is there, Spawn? Not in years have you spoken of your daughter. A young lady now, I suppose. Is it so?"

  Spawn cursed. "We leave her out of this. You follow the Señor's plan."

  "Come to your house? You think the bird will be there for me to seize?"

  "Yes," Perona put in. "You go there; in an hour. Then to the mine."

  Spawn undoubtedly was in this plot to attack his mine! He said, "At the mine we have arranged everything. Damn this American! But for Perona I would not bother with him."

  "But you will bother," Perona interjected.

  De Boer laughed again. "I would be witless could I not figure this! He is a young man, and so handsome he has frightened you with the little Jetta! Is that it, Perona? Jealous, eh?"

  I had been holding the image finder so that Hanley might see them. Hanley's voice rattled my ear-grid. "Phil! Get away from there! Look! De Boer is searching!"