Forty-five minutes later, half deafened by the tumult of falling water which had battered his ears from the other side of the conduit, he thankfully unstraddled the great iron tube, wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans, and stepped onto the balcony which circled the modernistic cube of the power station building.
There appeared to be no personnel guarding it. No lights gleamed through the slits of the shuttered windows or pierced the louvers on the doors. There was no watchman's cubicle beside the main entrance. The place seemed as deserted as the blank surface of the lake above which he had scanned so fruitlessly for so long. The nearest sign of life was the floodlight above the guardhouse, shining palely through the complexities of transformer and pylon from the main gates a quarter of a mile down the valley.
He edged his way around the balcony and found a door on the far side of the building from the gates. Crouching down, he drew from his hip pocket a square metal device about five inches square. He moistened the four rubber suction cups attached to its corners and clamped it firmly to the door above the lock. Then, straining every nerve in concentration, he placed one ear to the box and began with infinite care to oscillate a flat knob set flush with its surface. Presently he gave a satisfied grunt and rose to his feet. The door swung silently inwards at his touch and he vanished into the dark interior.
Something was wrong inside. At first he couldn't place it - then, over the muted, more muffled roar of the water, his trained senses gave him the answer. It was nothing positive; it was an absence that he noticed. There should have been a humming of generators, a whine from the giant turbines, a whiff of ozone in the air. But there wasn't.
Believing now firmly that the power station was totally uninhabited, Illya risked switching on a miniature but powerful flashlight. As soon as the thin beam lanced the dark, he saw why.
For whatever purpose the dam had been constructed, it wasn't that of supplying electricity to Getuliana. For apart from ducts leading the seething water direct from the pipes out to the river which wound down to the gates and the bridge, the vast building was completely empty. There were no turbines, no generators, no insulators, no railed catwalks or gauge-and-dial consoles. Like the metalled but trafficless road leading to it, the place was nothing but a blind, a colossal sham...
Chapter 9
The Message That Had To Get Through
ALTHOUGH THE WALLS were damp to the touch, there seemed to be a current of dry air blowing through the cell.
Napoleon Solo had no idea how long he had been there. There was always a bright light burning and the only means he had of marking the passage of time was the doctor's visit - if indeed he was a doctor. At least he wore a white coat and he was always attended by two women in nurse's uniform. On the other hand, the visits might be sporadic and not regular at all. Certainly it seemed to Solo that there was more time now between the hypodermic injections than there had been before when he had still be strapped to the bed.
The bed was made of iron and enameled black. It was high and narrow, with a thin, hard mattress and no bedclothes, and its legs were cemented into the floor of the cell.
For a long time it had been Solo's world. Although he was not particularly uncomfortable with his wrists and ankles buckled into the leather bracelets at the four corners of the bed and his middle restrained by a broad strap passing under its frame, it nevertheless afforded him only a limited horizon. The walls of the cell were of smooth green cement; the ceiling, with its four powerful bulbs behind armored glass, was stone colored; and what little he could see of the floor looked like slate. The door was a single slab of steel without even a judas-window. And that was all - there was no furniture of any kind, no decoration to break the monotony, only a single small grille through which he imagined the warm, dry air was extracted.
In the circumstances, it was natural that he should take an abnormal interest in the bed. He knew by heart every chip and scratch and imperfection in the shiny surface of its headrail. He could have mapped with his eyes closed the graining of the leather handcuffs attaching his wrists to the frame. He was an authority on the disparate personalities of three flies and a daddy-longlegs in the cell whose existence was dedicated to avoiding the webs spun by a spider which lived in one corner of the grille.
Every now and then the door would swing silently open and in would come the doctor with his crisp, white women. The women varied but the doctor was always the same - a pudding-faced man, rather plump, with staring brown eyes behind thick spectacles.
One of the women would open a case and hand things to the doctor while the other put the heel of her hand under Solo's chin and forced his head back onto the mattress so that he couldn't raise himself. Then the doctor would pinch up a fold of skin from Solo's arm (so far as he could tell, he had been stripped to his underwear and socks) and inject whatever it was he injected. After that, Solo went to sleep.
This routine wasn't invariable, of course: there were different treatments too, involving tubes and clips and something like a dentist's gag. It was to do with food or feeding, Solo thought. Sometimes there was a clip biting into his arm with a tube attached to it, and some times something went into his throat. In either case, it left him rather sore - and in each case he usually went to sleep afterwards just the same.
The man and the two women always worked in complete silence, which Solo found rather unnerving at first, but his throat was always too dry and sore to ask questions or talk himself and he soon got used to it.
And yet there was talking, somewhere. Or there had been. And one of the voices, he could almost have sworn, was his own. Yet he could in no way remember talking, or think of anything to talk about. Perhaps he dreamed while he slept, but he had definite impressions of voices and movement, the words surging and receding like bees on a drowsy summer afternoon. Sometime or other, too, there had been someone shouting. Perhaps it had been him.
It was all very puzzling.
And then, suddenly, one day - one night? one morning? one afternoon? he could not tell - one day the doctor had come in with his two assistants and they had unbuckled the straps and taken them away. He was left alone in the cell, free to get up, sit down, move around, just as he liked.
Solo thought that was very kind. He was so grateful that he made no protest when they came back a little later to give him another injection.
It was funny about the injections. Really he felt quite giddy after them sometimes. Everything seemed to spin around and he could never tell if he really had been to sleep or whether perhaps he had actually just woken up from the time before. Sometimes he thought he had been in the cell for weeks, perhaps months; and sometimes he was convinced he had only been in there a few hours at the most and would soon begin to feel hungry.
On the whole, he was inclined to favor the former theory - mainly because one of the nurses, a pretty one he had noticed on several visits, seemed to have had different hairstyles on different occasions.
He remembered who he was - and what he was supposed to be doing - in a single blinding moment of awareness. The doctor and the nurses were just coming in, the cell door had opened... and there was a second's delay. Somebody outside had called a question to the doctor.