Then Veshnir would go his way, enormously richer, above suspicion, with Sangaman shouldering the entire responsibility in his grave.
He veered from the path to the landing field, and went down an even fainter one to the left. He wasn’t going back to the plane for a little while yet. He had another goal in mind.
Not far from the landing field, on the coast, there was a small inlet that made a natural bay. On the shore was a remnant of a dock, where a fisherman had kept his boat till discovering that tides and storms made the bay unusable during too much of the year.
In this little bay, a black hulk rose furtively to the surface. First a periscope, then a conning tower, then a wedge-shaped black hull. Men swarmed out of the hatchway onto the deck of the submarine, and a small boat was swung up and set into the water. The captain of the undersea craft stepped into the boat without a word and was sculled ashore.
CHAPTER XII
The Automatons
The shack was about forty feet square. It was sided with tarpaper, and in the gloom of the forest, was impossible to see for more than a hundred yards. On top of the squat, one-story structure, were tree branches in a perfect camouflage from eyes that might peer down from a plane.
A corner of the building was walled off into a kind of crude office about eight feet square. In this, Veshnir met the submarine captain.
The captain gave Veshnir, without a word, a blue-green slip of paper of the type checks are printed on. But it was twice as large as our ordinary checks. It was a foreign draft on a New York bank, made out to Carl Veshnir, for “crude drugs.”
“This,” said the sub captain, voice hard and humorless and efficient, “is a token payment, only, to guarantee our good faith. The real payment, shortly to follow, will be placed in our name in your bank, and later switched to your account secretly and over a period of months so that its size will rouse no comment. That was your wish, I believe?”
Like the plane pilot, he treated Veshnir as an inferior. But Veshnir didn’t notice that. His hand was greedy as he clutched the draft. His fingers closed like a miser’s clasp on a stack of gold coins. Only this represented many, many golden stacks.
It was a check for one million dollars!
“The radio,” said the captain, “has brought code messages of trouble in your New York. Trouble, I gather, directly resulting from your — work. There has of course been much excitement. Some have been sacrificed, and more will be. I trust you won’t let sentimentality interfere with our plans?”
“What do you mean?” said Veshnir, looking at the check.
“I mean that the most natural thought would be for one to disclose the whole secret of the… er… trouble to police headquarters, in an effort to prevent more deaths. Yet that cannot be, my friend. Publicity, at this point, would ruin our great, historical program beyond repair.”
“There will be no publicity,” said Veshnir.
“You swear that? You promise that… er… sympathy for those unfortunate enough to have come in contact with our weapon won’t move you to tell what you know in an effort to stem the spread?”
“I’m sorry for the people,” said Veshnir. And in some queer way he managed to express real regret in his tone. “But — talk to the police? Try to help? With nineteen more million dollars to be mine in a few days if I keep still? Hardly! It isn’t necessary to swear, with nineteen million to glue my lips shut!”
“It is good,” grunted the sub captain, with a veiled look in his fanatical eyes. “After we have concluded our vast program, it will be all right to help the authorities. By then some thousands may have felt the white death. But after that it will be all right. And your part will never be guessed.”
He bowed like a hinge, in the middle, and walked to the door of the eight-by-eight cubicle.
“May I look around before I go back to my ship?”
“Of course,” said Veshnir.
He showed the captain what the tarpaper building contained. And it was like a look into the deepest inferno.
The tarpaper shack was a temporary factory. In it were about ten workmen, and in it a product was being efficiently, rapidly manufactured and stored twenty-four hours a day. But the characteristics of the workmen, and the nature of the product, differentiated this from all other factories, whatsoever.
There were twelve long benches, in rows in the low shed. At ten of them stood a man each. But they didn’t look like humans. Their appearance made you believe, suddenly, in zombies — or living dead.
Their eyes were dull and seemed almost incapable of sight. Their faces were vacant and pallid, and indicated that the brains behind them were certainly incapable of thought. Their hands moved like the tentacles of automatons; and like automatons they never slackened their movements. Minute after minute they made the same moves, without slackening pace, and almost, it seemed, without looking.
The moves made by them were bizarre in the extreme.
Before each was a long, shallow tray which was half filled with chopped meat. Over the meat was growing, with incredible rapidity, the white mold. Beside each pan was a smaller tray. In these trays were piled little glass capsules about as large as the tip of a man’s thumb.
The robotlike workers were filling these capsules with the mold.
With a small instrument much like a tiny teaspoon, white mold was skimmed from a bit of the chopped meat, and packed in a glass container. Then the little glass capsule was sealed with a drop of collodion. After that it was set aside, to be taken to a rack that covered one whole wall. In that rack was tray after tray of the capsules. Unguessable thousands of them, with the swift-growing white stuff reproducing itself endlessly and fantastically in the meat trays — to be made into still more death pellets incased by glass.
A curious thing was to be noted. The glass capsules freshly packed looked as if they were filled with snow. The capsules that had been packed for several hours or more, seemed, instead of fine snow, to have silver-gray dust in them.
That was because the mold, deprived of food and forced into suspended animation in the capsules, shriveled into dormant spores just waiting to be released again — in the vicinity of meat — or flesh.
“It is good,” said the sub captain, staring with bleak eyes at the thousands of capsules in the rack. “How long has it taken to produce these?”
“Two days,” said Veshnir, face never looking more kindly and benevolent than then.
“Five days more should be sufficient,” the captain said. “By then we should have twice enough for our needs. It is very, very good—”
He stopped abruptly and stared into a corner he had seen for the first time. One of the twelve long tables had hidden it before.
He glared at two men. One was a freckled, homely Scotchman with bleak blue eyes and ears that stuck out from his sandy head like sails. The other was an extremely gangling Negro who managed to look sleepy and disinterested even in such circumstances.
The circumstances being that both the Scot and the Negro were tied so tightly that flesh at arms and ankles bulged. They were lying like sacks on the rough plank floor.
“Who are dose two men?” snapped the submarine captain, in his agitation forgetting some of the precision of his English.
“Two who tried to interfere,” said Veshnir. “Men from your country’s offices in New York captured them. We brought them here.”
“Why?” demanded the captain.
“Eh?” said Veshnir, puzzled. “Well, it wasn’t safe to keep them around New York—”
“Why did you not kill them at once? But no matter. Shoot them now! While I watch. It is very bad to keep living prisoners.”
“Oh,” said Veshnir. “You mean why didn’t we kill them instead of capturing them. Well, it happens I need workers in here. Two of the ones I had died prematurely. As you see, two of my work tables are vacant. So I brought these men to fill them.”