“While this is not a luxury hotel,” Jogajong said, “I believe we can offer adequate hospitality while you are waiting for the submarine to come and collect you. You need not be afraid that the heater will attract infra-red detectors—in that cave there a hot spring sometimes bubbles up and gives off warm gas. The nearest peasant habitation is nearly a kilometre away. I have more than a hundred loyal guards on the approach paths. And, as I imagine you know in view of the way you were brought here, I have many good friends among the common people. Sit down, please. Are you hungry, thirsty, wishing for a cigarette?”
Donald sniffed the air. As though reminded of its duty by Jogajong’s words, a puff of brimstone-scented gas wafted from the cave-mouth and made him think of hell.
But there was something reassuringly confident about the rebel leader’s greeting. It gave him time to review what he had just lived through, and at once the moment of greatest terror—greater even than when Sugaiguntung put on the light inside his house and revealed him at the glass door—claimed his attention.
He said, “What happened to Zulfikar Halal?”
There was a pause. Jogajong only shrugged.
“He told me it would be expensive to buy transport across the Strait!” Donald insisted in a voice tinged with shrillness. “I gave him a thousand talas, and the bleeder didn’t show up!”
“He lied anyway,” Jogajong said without emotion. “We have good communications with your countrymen here, and as soon as we heard what you hoped to do we made arrangements of our own. There were six boats waiting beyond their usual time of sailing tonight, and any of them would have brought you to me—not because they were bribed, but because I asked it of them.”
“You mean I never need have gone to him at all?”
“That’s correct.”
Donald clenched his fists. “Why, that dirty—!”
“Yes, he is a weak link in my chain,” Jogajong nodded. “I prefer always to rely on my own countrymen. But of course your people feel that espionage is a filthy business and it is better to put the dirt on someone else’s hands. I shall make a report; he will not have the chance to deceive anyone else.”
“What will you do?” Fury made Donald eager to hear of torture: slow fires, nails pulled out by the roots.
“A word in the right place will ensure his arrest,” Jogajong murmured. “And the jails of Gongilung are not the next thing to Paradise … Don’t concern yourself. You have done more than enough, and his treachery did not in the upshot mean that your bravery was wasted.”
Donald sighed and relaxed. What the rebel leader said was obviously true. He glanced around the clearing again.
“How long do we have to wait—have they told you?”
“Until the level of activity among the aquabandits has dropped enough to give the submarine a chance of coming through unmolested.”
“Major Delahanty said something about that. How long?”
“I would estimate three to five days,” Jogajong said equably. “If necessary we can mount a certain—ah—distracting event to lure their forces away, but it would be better not to. The disappearance of someone so eminent as Dr. Sugaiguntung is going to give a great deal of trouble to the Solukarta régime anyhow. I hope they are prevented from concealing the truth; the suspicion that he may have left of his own free will could do incalculable good for my cause.”
Donald rubbed his chin. “Hmmm! Are you sure it would be better if the news leaked out?”
“Definitely, sir.”
“Could you get an anonymous message to someone at the Gongilung press club?”
“Easily. I had in fact thought of doing that, but I would need the names of people who would take such information seriously, not write it off as mere rumour.”
“I can give you a name,” Donald said.
“Excellent!” Jogajong hesitated and glanced at the other people in the clearing, silent on their tree-stump stools. “But for this moment you will excuse me—I must complete the staff conference I’m holding. Later we can talk more fully, yes?”
Donald gave a dull nod.
Staff conference? Why not? Things must have been like this in more countries than I could count—Russia, China, Cuba, South Africa … A handful of men and women meeting in a secret lair, and then suddenly coming out and turning as though by magic from fugitives to cabinet ministers! Who should know better than I do how quick and easy such a transformation is?
And to plot Yatakang’s next revolution on the threshold of a volcano seemed perfectly, inexpressibly apposite.
tracking with closeups (25)
THE MAN WITHOUT CONVICTIONS
When Jeff Young read about the trap set for the party of soldiers coming ashore from Boat Camp he put two and two together. The same partisan who had bought the aluminophage from him had asked for monofilament wire of a type which happened to be in store at the metalworking shop. One of the gossip sheets had circulated his way recently, apparently, and drawn his attention to some uses for the stuff based on traps which Maquis used to set in World War II for dispatch-riders on motorcycles, except that in those days they had to use piano-wire and because it was thicker and easier to see its employment was generally confined to twilight.
He was a little sorry about the eleven dead and thirty-one seriously injured soldiers. His preference was for sabotage that did no more than stir people up, like ants whose nest has been kicked—in essence, a sort of joke.
Granted, there had been nothing funny about the episode that left him with one short leg …
The beauty of this wire stranded together out of single, immensely long molecules was, of course, that it cut almost anything as readily as a cheese being sectioned, and its breaking-strain was closer than any other sort of wire to the theoretical maximum. Handling it, naturally, was a problem—one had to wear gloves of monofilament mesh, or tugging on it would slice flesh cleaner than a razor.
Thinking about it, he came up with an entirely new way of putting a rapitrans train out of operation, a means of exploding a town-gas pipe at a distance not exceeding two miles, and the device which later caved in the North Rockies Acceleratube.
context (25)
A FAVOURITE STORY OF CHAD MULLIGAN’S
“This very distinguished philosophy professor came out on the platform in front of this gang of students and took a bit of chalk and scrawled up a proposition in symbolic logic on the board. He turned to the audience and said, ‘Well now, ladies and gentlemen, I think you’ll agree that that’s obvious?’
“Then he looked at it a bit more and started to scratch his head and after a while he said, ‘Excuse me!’ And he disappeared.
“About half an hour later he came back beaming all over his face and said triumphantly, ‘Yes, I was right—it is obvious!’”
continuity (36)
MAKESHIFT
The moment Norman and Chad appeared in the lobby of the GT tower an anonymous staffer dashed over to them and announced that Rex Foster-Stern wanted to see them. A second came up and said that Prosper Rankin had been looking everywhere for Norman, and a third caught sight of him and came to let him know that Hamilcar Waterford was asking where he had got to.
Rankin and Waterford could stew, but Rex was a different matter. Norman said, “Where is he?”
“Down in the Shalmaneser vault.”
“That’s where we’re going.”
“Er…” The staffer was plainly flustered. “Who is the gentleman with you, sir?”
“Chad Mulligan,” Norman said, and brushed the staffer aside.
GT’s image-maintenance was excellent, but Norman could detect the subtle clues that indicated it was breaking down. It meant nothing that there were two parties of visitors in the huge lobby waiting to be escorted on a tour of the building—proof that rumours of the corporation being poised on the edge of catastrophe hadn’t managed to outweigh the impact of the Beninia publicity. It meant nothing that a team from Engrelay Satelserv was bringing in cameras and other equipment on air-trolleys to cover the formal banquet scheduled for this evening. It meant nothing that reporters of all possible skin colours and probably also the Alexandrian five sexes were coming and going with one eye on the current release-sheet and the other on the way ahead.