“Yes. Excuse us, Colonel.”
The little officer rather deliberately ground the butt of his cigarillo under his boot heel. Then he smiled again, touched his visor with his delicate fingers, and turned curtly away.
The Shirts instantly followed.
“Valuable man,” said the Prime Minister. “Gentlemen?”
The Queens turned. A black limousine had come up on silent treads and a footman in livery was stiffly holding the door open. To the front door was attached a gold medallion, showing two linked globes surmounted by a heavy crown.
Like a coat of arms.
The airport was on high ground, and when the car drove through the screen of vegetation the Queens had a panoramic view of half the island.
They realized at once why this island had been selected as the site of a government-in-hiding. It was shaped like a bowl with a mound in the center. The shoreline, which was the edge of the bowl, was composed of steep and heavily wooded cliffs, so that from the sea no evidence of human occupancy or construction in the interior would be visible. The mound in the middle of the bowl, where the airfields lay, was at approximately the same elevation as the wooded cliffs at the shoreline. Between the central airfields and the cliffs on the rim, the ground sloped sharply to a valley. It was in this valley, invisible from the sea, that all the building had been done.
The sight was startling. It was a large island, the valley was great, and as far as the eye could see the valley was packed with buildings. Most of them seemed industrial plants, vast smokeless factories covering many acres; but there were office buildings, too, and to the lower slopes of the hillsides clung colonies of small homes and barracklike structures which, Abel Bendigo explained, housed the workers. The small homes were occupied by minor executives. There was also, he said, a development of more spacious private dwellings on another part of the island; these were for the use of the top executives and the scientific staffs and their families.
“Families?” exclaimed the Inspector. “You mean you’ve got housewives and kids here, too?”
“Of course,” replied the Prime Minister, smiling. “We provide a normal, natural environment for our employees. We have schools, hospitals, recreation halls, athletic fields — everything you’d find in a model community in the States, although on a rather crowded scale. Space is our most serious problem.”
Ellery thought preposterously: Lebensraum.
“But food, clothing, comic books,” said Inspector Queen feebly. “Don’t tell me you produce all that!”
“No, though if we had the room we certainly would. Everything is brought in by our cargo fleets, chiefly airborne.”
“You find planes more practicable than ships?” asked Ellery.
“Well, we have a problem with our harbor facilities. We prefer to keep our shoreline as natural-looking as possible—”
“There’s the harbor now, Ellery!” said the Inspector.
“I’m sorry,” said Bendigo, suddenly austere. He leaned forward to say something to the chauffeur in a low tone. The car, which was speeding along inside the rim of woods, immediately turned off into a side road and plunged down to the valley again. But Ellery had snatched a glimpse, through a break in the vegetation, of a horseshoe-shaped bay very nearly landlocked, across the narrow neck of which rode a warship.
The chauffeur had gone slightly pale. He and the footman sat rigidly.
“We didn’t really see anything, Mr. Bendigo,” said Ellery. “Just a heavy cruiser. One of your naval vessels?”
“My brother’s yacht Bendigo,” murmured the Prime Minister.
Inspector Queen was staring down into the valley with glittering eyes. “Yacht my sacroiliac,” he snapped. “These food and other supplies, Mr. Bendigo. Do you give the stuff away or how do you handle it? What do you pay your people off in?”
“Our banks issue scrip, Inspector, accepted by Company stores as well as by individuals all over the island.”
“And when a man wants to quit, or is fired, does he take his Bendigo scrip with him?” asked Ellery.
“We have very few resignations, Mr. Queen,” said the Prime Minister. “Of course, if an employee should be discharged, his account would be settled in the currency of the country of his origin.”
“I don’t suppose your people find unions necessary?”
“Why, we have unions, Mr. Queen. All sorts of unions.”
“No strikes, however.”
“Strikes?” Bendigo was surprised. “Why should our employees strike? They’re highly paid, well housed, all their creature comforts provided, their children scientifically cared for—”
“Say.” Inspector Queen turned from the window as if the thought had just struck him. “Where do all your working people come from, Mr. Bendigo?”
“We have employment offices everywhere.”
“And recruiting offices?” murmured Ellery.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your soldiers, Mr. Bendigo. They are soldiers, aren’t they?”
“Oh, no. The uniforms are for convenience only. Our security people are not—” Abel Bendigo leaned forward, pointing. “There’s the Home Office.”
He was smiling again, and Ellery knew they would get no more information.
The Home Office looked like a rimless carriage wheel thrown carelessly into a bush. Trees and shrubbery crowded it and its roofs were thickly planted. From the air it was probably invisible.
Eight long wings radiated like spokes from a common center. The spokes, Abel Bendigo explained, housed the general offices, the hub the executive offices. The hub, four stories high, stood one story higher than the spokes, so that the domed top story of the central building predominated.
Not far away, Ellery noticed some mottled towers and pylons and the glitter of glass rising from the heart of a wood. The few elements of the structure that could be seen extended over a wide area, and he asked what it was.
“The Residence,” replied the Prime Minister. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to hurry, gentlemen. We’re far later than I’d intended.”
They followed him, alert to everything.
They entered the Home Office at the juncture of two of the spokes, through a surprisingly small door, and found themselves in a circular lobby of black marble. Corridors radiated from the perimeter in every direction. An armed guard stood at the entrance to each corridor. They could see office doors, endless lines of them, each exactly like the next.
In the center of the lobby rose a circular column of extraordinary thickness. A door was set into it at floor level, and Ellery guessed that it was an elevator shaft. Before the door was a metal booth, behind which stood three men in uniform. The collars of their tunics bore the gold initials PRPD.
Abel Bendigo walked directly to the desk of the booth. To the Queens’ astonishment, he offered his right hand to the central of the three security men. This functionary quickly took an impression of the Prime Minister’s thumb while the man to the right whisked an odd-looking card, like a section of X-ray film set in a cardboard frame, from one of a multiplicity of file drawers before him. This film was placed in a small machine on the desk, and the Prime Minister’s thumbprint was inserted in the bottom of the machine. The central man looked through an eyepiece carefully. The machine apparently superimposed on the fresh thumbprint the transparent control print on file, in such a way that any discrepancy was revealed at a glance. This was confirmed a few moments later when the Queens’ thumbprints were taken and their names recorded.
“Films of your prints will be ready in a short time,” said Bendigo, “and they will go into the control file. No one, not even my brother King, can get into any part of this building without a thumbprint checkup.”