The Power Cube Affair - Phillifent John T. - Страница 23

"About playing rough." Solo brought the talk back to business. "We might be able to drop something for you, at that. The girl who was found in the sea at Hastings, for instance. Her name's Mary Chantry, and she didn't die at Hastings, but on the beach outside John Guard's bungalow. That's how it all started. Then, you may have heard about a teenage riot on the Embankment, night before last. That was us. Somebody tried to have us removed. Again, last night, over Watford way, somebody broke into a villa, smashed the place up, scared the occupier into hysterics, then crashed their car as they drove off. Three drunken seamen. That, also, was us. Same idea."

"You move around, don't you?"

"We try. But we don't know who we're striking at, and that's where you could come in. What do you know about one Absalom Green, for instance?"

"Nothing for you." Carpenter frowned over a couple of swallows. "He is a connoisseur-dealer objet d'art man, specializes in gem stones and small carvings, trinkets, jewelry that kind of thing. Wealthy, owns a yacht, is reputed to skate close to the fringes now and then, but nothing to prove it."

"Suppose I told you the yacht is not his, but belongs to the man he works for?"

"You told me, now I know what I didn't know before. Sorry."

"All right." Solo sighed, made passes at his plate. "What about the Countess of Danby, then?"

"You can have her, Hippies make news. So do love-ins and pot, and any kind of improper sex and/or sadism. Flower people, even. But when a lot of very important and rich society folk get together for a party and have fun, that's no good to us. Lady Herriott's affairs are on the level. No crime. And for charity."

Solo scowled at this insider's view of press ethics. "What about a certain Miss Nanette Perrell, then?"

Carpenter straightened up a fraction, disposed of his current mouthful carefully, then asked, "Just how involved are you with her?"

"What difference does that make?"

"Plenty. I prefer to tell the truth as I know it, but not if it means you are likely to take me outside and beat my brains out. You know?"

"That's all right," Solo grinned. "We are not that kind of involved."

"Both of you? Well, that could be one way—I'll tell you, to us unfortunate sensation sellers Nan Perrell is known as the Deadly Peril, or the Kiss of Death, to taste. She is very rich, completely single, and extremely easy to get, at first glance. The pattern runs like this. She catches lions. The society kind. Men who are good at something and fool enough to brag about it. Swimming, shooting, wrestling, swords or arrows, high diving—you name it, brag about it where she can hear, and she'll flutter those baby blue eyes, kid you on to show off—and then smear you at your own game. She is good. Very, very good. What are you two good at?"

"Listening," Kuryakin murmured. "How long has she been fighting this private war of the sexes?"

"About seven or eight years. My guess is her father wanted a boy and never got over it. Jim Perrell was a mining engineer. Tough, like leather and piano wire. You know"––Carpenter pushed his plate away—"I have a theory about her. Someday she is going to run into the man who can beat her. And that will break her all to pieces. Then, if he cared to pick up the pieces, he would be able to do what he liked with her. End of sermon. Anything else I can do?"

"Yes." Kuryakin inserted himself into the discussion now in a tone that made Solo prick up his ears. "I hear rumors about what could be a silly season story. Something about it crazy Hungarian inventor who discovered a new electronic crystal formula that is supposed to amplify mental powers?"

"Hah!" Carpenter threw back his head in a laugh. "We've all heard it. That's the kind of thing that always creeps out of the woodwork about this time of year. Various versions. Some say it's yttrium iron garnet, others claim it's gallium arsenate."

"Arsenide," Kuryakin corrected. "I've checked on it. Peculiar stuff. In certain circumstances it displays negative resistance—"

"Hey!" Carpenter brought his head down again, and his eyes narrowed intently. "It's not a silly season rumor?"

"It may not be. What have you heard?"

"Basically the inventor is supposed to be one Devos Gorchak—"

"Right," Kuryakin nodded. "I know about him. Thrush has used him a time or two, but they won't hold him down, because he's unreliable. Crazy. Besides being a chemical electronics wizard, he is also a mathematics puzzle fanatic. The story I heard is that he's dead, but you can never believe that, with Thrush in the background."

"What'd he do?" Solo demanded, and Carpenter scowled.

"The story is that he perfected this crystal stuff and discovered that merely by touching a bit of it with a finger it amplified certain mental powers. According to the shape, it tunes in to different powers, like command, suggestion, sex attraction, inspiration, that kind of thing. According to one version, Gorchak took a bit of this stuff in his hand down the village street and he had every woman in the place following him like sheep."

"Just holding it in his hand?" asked Solo.

"That's not so unlikely," said Illya. "Remember, every square inch of the skin has millions of nerve endings, which eventually communicate back to the brain. For amplification, that's enough. What really matters is the pattern, the injected signal."

"You mean this is for real, Illya?"

"Real enough to have headquarters seething like a pot on a fire. The version they have is that Gorchak managed to calculate the precise shapes for various potentials and carved the crystals—they are not gallium arsenide, incidentally, but something very similar, we don't know what—he carved a number of crystals in such a way that they can be fitted together to make a cube. And the man who holds that cube in his hand is master. His power will be fantastic and invincible."

"Hold it a minute!" Solo clung to sanity grimly. "Why didn't Gorchak just keep it for himself?"

"Two reasons, so far as I can find out. One, he knew that he himself was unstable. And this is like drugs, like LSD. It expands, so it will make a sane man brilliant, but an unbalanced man would be destroyed by it. And he seems to have had one of his regular differences with the technological hierarchy in policy. So he scattered his carvings all over the place."

"That's right!" Carpenter nodded excitedly. "It's a kind of chase. All sorts of people are after the pieces."

"But there's one really big snag," Kuryakin pointed out. "Gorchak was crazy. He cut those pieces in such a way that just to hold any one in your hand is enough to knock you for a loop in short order. Like a belt of vodka on an empty stomach. So even if one man could assemble them all, he still has to figure out how to put them together."

"Now I get it," Solo groaned. "Twenty-five pieces I have, and two to go. An insoluble problem, he called it. Three by three by three, to make a cube, and he has them all."

"That's right, Napoleon. And he reckons he knows a way to solve the thing. We don't have much time."

"Look!" Carpenter cleared his throat carefully. "If this really is a story, and you get anything, remember where I live, won't you? What I mean, this is a story!"

"If we live to tell it," Kuryakin promised gravely, "you shall have the exclusive."