“Hellstrom must have some price!” Peruge said.
“You think if you up the ante, he may bite?”
“I don’t know for sure. What I’d like to do is send Janvert and probably Myerlie around to the south of Hellstrom’s valley and look for sign of Carlos and Tymiena. I have a hunch they may have approached from the south. Lots of trees that way and you know how cautious Carlos was.”
“You send no one.”
“Chief, if we—”
“No.”
“But if we could put that kind of pressure on Hellstrom we might get him for much less. We could have this thing all sewed up and ready to move before the board gets—well, you know how they can be when they get suspicious.”
“You would teach your grandfather to suck eggs. I said no!”
Peruge began to sense complications. “Then what do you want me to do?”
“Tell me what you saw at Hellstrom’s place.”
“Not much more than I saw yesterday.”
“Be specific.”
“In one sense, it’s ordinary; very ordinary. Almost too ordinary. No laughter, smiles, relaxation; everything very serious and, well, dedicated. That’s the word that kept occurring to me: dedicated. That is not ordinary. They put me in mind of a Chicom farm commune laboring to meet its harvest quota.”
“I don’t think we’re going to find a red in this woodpile,” the Chief said, “but that’s something to keep in mind if we need to cover ourselves with glory. However, the matter is much more serious than you realize.”
“Oh?” Peruge was suddenly alert, intensely concentrated on the voice coming to him over the phone.
“I had a call from upstairs today,” the Chief said. “A special assistant to the Man. They wanted to know if we were the ones poking into Hellstrom’s affairs.”
“Oh-oh!” Peruge nodded. That explained why Hellstrom had appeared so confidently in command of the situation. How did this little bug doctor get that kind of clout?
“What did you do?” Peruge asked.
“I lied,” the Chief said, his voice bland. “I said it must be somebody else because I hadn’t heard about it. However, I promised to check because sometimes my people get a bit overzealous.”
Peruge stared at the wall in silence for a moment. Who was being set up here? He said, “We have Merrivale set up if we need a patsy.”
“That was one of the things I considered.”
One of the things! Peruge thought.
The Chief interrupted his development of that worry, asking, “Now, tell me what they’re doing on that farm.”
“They’re making movies about insects.”
“You told me that yesterday. Is that all?”
“I’m not sure what else they’re doing, but I have some ideas about where they may be doing it. There’s a basement in that barn-studio: wardrobe and some other crap down there, all disgustingly normal in appearance. But there’s a tunnel from the barn to the house. They took me through it and we had lunch in the house. There were some very strange dames to wait on us, too, I tell you. Beautiful dolls, all four of them, but they don’t talk—not even when you speak directly to them.”
“What?”
“They don’t speak. They just serve table and go away. Hellstrom said it’s because they’re perfecting special accents and have been ordered by their voice coach not to say anything unless the coach is there to listen and correct them.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“Does it? It struck me as odd.”
“Were you transmitting to Janvert and the others?”
“No. It was the same as yesterday. They were very nice about it and so-o-o reasonable. Radio for their sound tracks and so on. Would I please not cause problems?”
“I still don’t like you going in there without radio. If something—maybe you’d better replace Janvert with Myerlie or DT as your second.”
“Relax. They as much as told me that I’d be all right if I played it cool.”
“How’d they do that?”
“Hellstrom explained in detail how angry he gets when people cause setbacks in their schedule. I was told to stick close to my guide and not stray.”
“Who was your guide?”
“Some little guy named Saldo, no bigger than Shorty Janvert. Very closemouthed. There was no sign of the dame they threw at me yesterday.”
“Dzule, are you sure you’re not imagining—”
“I’m sure. Look, we’re stymied. I need help. I want the highway patrol, the FBI, and anyone else we can dragoon into it crawling over those hills around Hellstrom’s farm.”
“Dzule! Didn’t you hear me when I told you about my call from upstairs?”
Peruge tried to swallow in a suddenly dry throat. The Chief could be very abrupt and final when his voice took on that calm, reasonable tone of correction. So there was more to that call from upstairs than just reported. The troops were stirred up.
“You cannot ask for help on a project that doesn’t exist,” the Chief said.
Peruge said, “Did you know I’d transmitted a request through Signals for FBI help?”
“I intercepted that and cut it off. That request no longer exists.”
“Is there any way we could get an overflight to inspect that farm?”
“Why?”
“It’s what I was starting to explain. There’s this tunnel from the barn to the house. I’d like to know if there are more such tunnels under that area. Geological Survey has techniques to detect that kind of thing.”
“I don’t think I could ask for that without tipping our hand. I’ll look into it, though. There may be some other way. You’re suggesting they may have laboratories and such under the barn in tunnels?”
“Yes.”
“It’s an idea. I’ve a couple of friends in the oil industry who owe us favors.”
“The board—”
“Dzule!” There was a warning note in that voice. It said, don’t question my intelligence!
“I’m sorry, Chief,” Peruge said. “It’s just that—well, I’m very uneasy about this thing. All afternoon, I kept wanting to get the hell out of there. There’s a stinking animal smell about the place and—it’s a very creepy place. The trouble is, I can’t pin down a single thing to make me uneasy except the blatant facts of Porter and company.”
The Chief’s voice took on a patronizing, fatherly tone. “Dzule, my boy, don’t go inventing trouble. If we can’t get our hands on Hellstrom’s invention and control the metallurgical process, this becomes a very straightforward case. I can discover that some of my overzealous boys have uncovered a hornet’s nest of subversion. To do that, however, we need much more than we already possess.”
“Porter and—”
“They don’t exist. You forget that my signature was on the orders.”
“Ahhh—yes, of course.”
“I can go upstairs and say we have this bit of a file, little more than a memorandum, really, that one of our boys found at the MIT library. I can do that, but only if I’m ready to defend the argument that it involves a private development of a major weapon system.”
“Unless we have more information, they’ll make the same kinds of guesses we did.”
“Precisely!” the Chief said.
“I see. Then you want me to take this to an open negotiation with Hellstrom?”
“Indeed I do. Is there any reason why you think you cannot do that?”
“I can attempt it. I have a date to go back there tomorrow. I led them to believe I’ll have an army of professional help to conduct a search of the area within a day or so, and they—”
“What are your preparations?”
“Janvert and his teams will be using line of sight to follow my movements while I’m outside the buildings. When I get inside, I most likely will be incommunicado. We will, of course, probe for a soft spot—a window or something that could act as a microphone for our laser pickup. However, I don’t believe I should wait for that kind of contact before opening—”