I laughed shortly. "I think I've been in the business as long as you, Wegmann. I know, all right."
"It is the only way," he said. "You understand. There is nothing personal."
"Sure," I said. "I'd do it myself, if the orders were to break clean and leave no witnesses."
"I am glad you understand."
Beside me, Gail stirred slightly, listening to this. A little intake of breath said she was about to speak, to ask a question, then she sighed and was still again. The truck jolted to an abrupt halt and somebody flung open the rear. Next there was the business of untying our feet and getting us unloaded, but I didn't pay too much attention to the details. Even if there was a break, I wasn't ready to take advantage of it yet. Besides, I was looking at the contraption they had installed in the church steeple.
Maybe it was a funny place to find a church, high on the side of the mountain, but that country is full of deserted mining camps and old ghost towns, and while many of the early settlers were pretty rough hombres, many were religious folk, too. Often the church was the best-built structure in the community-the last to fall down after the population moved elsewhere.
I'd guessed we were up on the Sierra Blanca somewhere, but we weren't quite as high as I'd thought. It had seemed, riding in back all trussed up, that we'd done enough climbing to be well above timber line, but there were still heavy stands of pine around us. The little forgotten town was wedged into a fold in the mountainside which opened to the west. There were some board shacks still standing, weathered silvery gray. A couple of stone huts remained almost intact, sturdily built of irregular pieces of local rock laid up carefully, Indian fashion, with mud mortar or no mortar at all. Roofless shells and stumps of walls, half buried in the snow, showed where other houses had been. Up the hillside, above the pines, was at least one mine shaft; there were probably others.
The squat little church was of stone, and parts of it had fallen into rubble, but sections of the roof remained, and most of the bell tower. Up there, camouflaged from air observation by the remnants of the wooden belfry, was the gadget. Actually, it was a kind of parabolic antenna which I associated with radar. You see similar rigs around most military installations, turning nervously, listening like great headless ears.
To be perfectly honest, I can't guarantee such rigs are concerned with radar; that's just what somebody told me once. Electronics isn't my field at all, any more than atomics. I won't even guarantee that this dingus was parabolical. It could have been hyperbolical or spherical, but it's my impression that the electronics boys have more fun with parabolas, for mathematical reasons we won't go in here.
Anyway, it was a bowl-shaped contrivance of rods and wires several feet in diameter. It was aimed in a general westerly direction-out towards the great open valley below-and it was searching busily, swiveling back and forth and up and down in an intricate pattern. There was a man up in the belfry with it. I didn't envy him his job. For one thing, it must have been cold, just sitting there, and for another, that old stonework hadn't been designed to support a lot of heavy, vibrating machinery.
Wegmann was standing beside me. "Well, Mr. Helm?" he said. "What do you think?"
I asked, "What does it do, catch flies and small birds?"
"Not small birds, Mr. Helm," he said. "Not small birds-large ones."
XXIII
High in the old church, a hundred and fifty yards across the little gulch from where we had stopped at the edge of the pines, the radar-like gizmo continued to trace out its complex search pattern, looking more alive and intelligent and energetic than the few half-frozen people in the place. From one of the old stone huts came the incongruous putt-putt noises of an internal combustion engine, probably a diesel or gasoline generator. I stamped my feet to bring back circulation, wishing I could perform a similar favor for my hands, which were still tied behind me.
"What does he mean?" Gail asked, speaking for the first time since we'd left Ruidoso. "What is it? What is that thing, Matt?"
"You heard him. It's the Wegmann Electronic Bird-Catcher, Mark I."
Wegmann shook his head, unsmiling. "You are mistaken, Mr. Helm; I am no scientist. The original device was invented, I believe, by a gentleman named Hallenbeck, Dr. Rudolf Hallenbeck, a German physicist who was concerned with missile development for Hitler and sought refuge in the Soviet Union after World War II."
"Sought refuge," I said. "That's a nice way of putting it."
He shrugged. "You got von Braun. We got Hallenbek. Far from being Mark I, this is, I believe, the eleventh model produced, but only the fourth we have received here. Considering the difficulties of smuggling the machinery into the country and assembling it in a suitably desolate location, it can be understood that only the most promising versions reach us. The others failed to pass the preliminary tests on the Siberian missile ranges and were therefore not issued to us for field trials."
"I see," I said. "Field trials."
"An interesting concept, don't you think? What better way to test your equipment against the probable enemy's? We have been very careful. Down there, they still believe their chronic troubles to be due to stray radio transmissions of an innocent nature. They will know otherwise, of course, when they find what is left of the machine. We will not have time to dismantle and remove it, so we will have to destroy it. But we will not be here when they come."
Dr. Naldi, standing nearby, was regarding Wegmann with a puzzled air. "I don't understand," he said. "You speak of chronic troubles. I thought-"
"You thought this was the first machine of its kind, brought here with great difficulty and expense just to serve your purpose?" Wegmann laughed. "Well, perhaps we did give you some such impression, Doctor. After all, you were looking for a miracle, were you not? You had am pealed in vain to your government and the stubborn Dr. Rennenkamp to stop this dangerous test. You were willing to go to any extremes and accept help from anybody, in the name of humanity. Well, we supplied the help. Why should we make it look easy?"
"I see," Naldi said slowly. "I see."
"The only real miracle," said Wegmann, "is that we have come this close to success with no more assistance than we've got from you. You and Gunther botched your share of the operation miserably; not only that, but yesterday when you were about to be arrested, you came running to me for help instead of staying as far away from me as possible. You drew attention my way. So did Gunther, when he ran into trouble this side of the border. It is a real miracle that, between you, everything wasn't ruined. I suppose one can't expect absolute efficiency from non-professional personnel, but I did expect the two of you to make at least some attempt to follow the simple instructions you were given."
It was a real reaming-out, such as Naldi himself might have given a careless technician in his employ, and the scientist's face turned darkly red. His eyes grew narrow and angry behind his glasses.
"Really, Mr. Wegmann, what gives you the right to…?" Naldi checked himself, and sighed. "Well, perhaps there is some justice in what you say. This kind of melodrama is not in my line. Only desperate necessity forces me to assist in it. For the sake of mankind, Mr. Wegmann, that test must be stopped-or at least delayed until-"
"It will be stopped," Wegmann said.
"As for the films, I do not think it is fair to accuse me of complete failure. They must be here, somewhere."