[Magazine 1967-­11] - The Volacano Box Affair - Davis Robert Hart - Страница 7

"Would mutual hunger be acceptable?"

"You are a fast thinker!"

They went to the laboratory's cafeteria and took their seats at a table away from other diners. After the main course the U.N.C.L.E. agent excused himself and contacted Waverly, telling him as much as he'd learned and suggesting that all data on Paul Rollins be sifted and the man's current whereabouts be traced if possible. Then Illya returned to the cafeteria for dessert and coffee.

"I want to hear more about Dr. Dacian's experiments," he said. "Did he ever suggest when talking to you, for instance, that his beam might have a potential other than peaceful?"

"Yes, he did. Well, let me put it this way. He said to me once that he shuddered to think of what might happen if the instrument were used by someone who didn't know exactly what he was doing. Then he thought for a moment and said he shuddered even more to think that it might fall into the hands of a wicked person who did know exactly what he was doing."

"How well did you know Dr. Dacian?"

"We were good friends," Frieda said, her face registered no indication that anything more serious might have existed between them. "He was an enormously outgoing and expansive man. He wore his heart on his sleeve and I don't think there was a furtive or dishonest bone in his body. He was patriotic, and he had a strong revulsion to what he called wickedness. In short, Mr. Kuryakin, he was a peaceful man, and it would take overwhelming evidence to make me believe he defected or sold out."

"Calm down," Illya said. "I never suggested anything of the sort. I only want to know if he realized that the peaceful instrument he had created might also be converted into a weapon. And I suppose I want to know to what extent he could resist pressure to disclose his formulas to anyone he suspected of having 'wicked' intentions."

"I believe Edward Dacian would die before revealing them. He was that kind of man."

"Yes, but could he be forced to produce the rigs themselves?"

"I just don't know. I'm told that wicked people use some rather nasty techniques for coercing their fellow men."

Illya smiled. "That is about the mildest statement I have ever heard. You're very charming, Miss Winter."

The girl blushed, and an embarrassed pause ensued. Then she said "I imagine you're interested in a demonstration. Why don't we go behind the laboratory and look at Dr. Dacian's apparatus."

"Fine."

They pushed away from the table and proceeded out the building into a garden in the rear. The sun was strong and warm, and the air was fragrant with perfume from semi-tropical flowers.

Frieda Winter unlocked the door of the compound and they entered. She reached under an almost invisible bubble in the fence and switched off an electric eye guarding the perimeter of the rig. They then strolled up to the scaffolding, and Illya scrambled under the pipes and tubes to get a closer look at the machinery at the center. It was disappointingly simple, the vital mechanisms being sheathed in steel so that only a tubular lens extended from the box's belly. A shaft about a yard in diameter yawned beneath the tube.

A thick pipeline emerged from the ground near the rig, and nearby on a kind of dolly stood a complicated knot of ducts, valves, gauges and the like.

"Water is pumped into the shaft from that pipeline," Frieda explained. "Of course, if the shaft extended from a river bed or ocean floor, we would not need to pump in water at all. But since it would have been too expensive to do that for experimental purposes, we simply tapped the Gulf waters. Come here."

She beckoned to Kuryakin to stand near the mouth of the shaft. He approached it but by the time he was standing by her side the heat from the bowels of the earth was almost intolerable. They backed off.

"Once the shaft is dug by the beam, the water is passed into it under controlled means, and this apparatus here," she said pointing to the dolly, "is sealed over the shaft. It receives the steam and keeps it superheated until it can be converted into mechanical energy. Of course, if this were an electric plant, a number of shafts would be sent down, and they would be considerably wider than this one, you understand.

"And they would be harnessed directly to dynamos instead of linked up from a distance, as we've done here. Nevertheless, as crude as our apparatus is, we've produced electricity more abundantly and cheaply than any other source known to man. And all we do," she smiled, "is add water."

"But if you sent your beam too far—"

"We would have the first active volcano in the continental United States, to state the matter unimaginatively."

They gazed at the apparatus respectfully, then returned to the laboratory.

ACT IV

KEY TO HELL

THE TRUCK PULLED up to the prefabricated hut on the Sperber site, and the driver and two helpers got out of the cab. The driver knocked on the door of the hut and was greeted by a gaunt man with a funereal expression on his face and a strange grey scar running almost from temple to temple.

The driver thrust a set of papers under the bony man's nose, murmuring, "Scaffolding."

While Paul Rollins, alias Rawlings, was examining the bill of lading, the driver and his helpers ambled away and gazed with perplexity at the bleak property. Some scrubby trees grew here and there, and wild grass and sage covered the rocky soil to the edge of the property, which was bounded by a range of hills on the west and a river on the east and south.

Spaced out at intervals of an acre or so were the skeletons of oil rigs, rusty and useless.

The driver pushed his Stetson up on his brow and scratched his balding head.

'What do you think?" be whispered.

"I think they either know there's oil down there, or else they're all crazy as bedbugs," said one helper.

"If there's oil down there," said the other helper, "I'll drink a glass of it before breakfast every day for the rest of my life."

"Maybe they're not drilling for oil?" said the first.

"Of course not," said the driver, "they're drilling for high octane gasoline."

The three men laughed, and then one of the helpers said "Truthfully, now, what kind of rig can they construct with the scaffolding we brung 'em? There ain't enough there to construct any kind of oil rig I've ever seen, and I've seen 'em all."

"Maybe they're expecting another load of scaffolding, or getting it from some other outfit than us," the driver surmised.

"Maybe," his assistants agreed. "But if that's all they're using," the driver went on, "I don't reckon they'll get much deeper than fifty yards."

They chuckled again and ambled back to the hut, where the bony man gave them their signed copies of the papers. They unloaded the pipes, plates, and hardware and departed, smirking.

Rollins assembled his crew and they set about wrecking the pumping rig over the well furthest from the road. After it had been removed, the crew carried the scaffolding to the well and began erecting a low rig resembling a quarter-scale model of an oil-drilling tower. A square space was left in the middle over the oil shaft, a space exactly the dimensions of Edward Dacian's volcano box. When the job was done, Rollins had a. coded message cabled to Singapore.

And from several dozen other places throughout the world, similar cables issued.

TWO

EDWARD DACIAN raised his heavy eyelids and looked at the ceiling of his cell. It was white and sterile, and he silently gave thanks that although he was a prisoner he was not being held in a dank, cold dungeon. The place was white-plastered, air-conditioned, and, though austere, not uncomfortable.