Chapter XIII

1

I wasted a lot of time wondering how much Wilton really knew. And, in the end, I decided that it couldn’t be very much. Otherwise, he would have pounced. Not that I was alone in wondering. There seemed to be an unconscionable amount of speculation going on up at the Institute.

Alone among us, it was our great Dr. Smith who showed brave by publishing his conclusions.

“Looked at dispassionately,” he said with irritating slowness, “it might appear that some person or persons”—here he stared hard at Kimbell and Swanton while he was speaking—“had an interest in preventing, or at least delaying, any positive outcome of the experiments. Now that the work is over, the accidents have ceased entirely, and the law of averages can apply again. That is a characteristic of all sabotage.”

“Thank God for that,” Bansted said devoutly, before either Kimbell or Swanton could get their little forked tongues into the forward position. But a split second later Kimbell cut in like a radio comedian.

“So it was sabotage, was it?” he asked. “Have you told the Sunday Express about it?”

“Sabotage, or rather the fear of it,” observed Swanton, taking the cue up perfectly, “only occurs during a decline. Any society that is expanding never gives a thought to it. But once the whole bloody thing starts crumbling then the word begins to crop up. Look at the papers. Ammunition train blows up—sabotage. Naval turbine breaks down—sabotage. You never even hear the word ‘strike’ nowadays; it’s industrial sabotage every time.”

By now Kimbell was talking again.

“As for these accidents having stopped,” he asked, “isn’t it a bit early to speak? How about your theory, if something happened to-morrow? Gremlins do sometimes return, you know.”

And to-morrow was precisely when the next accident did occur. One of us, Gillett’s own girl-friend Una, very nearly went up to heaven in gauge oo pieces.

I don’t expect laymen to know what an anaerobic jar is. But if you’re working on the anaerobes you have to simulate their normal living conditions, and exclude the oxygen. To do this you take a large glass jar, seal it hermetically and begin pumping the air out. Then when most of it has gone you add a little hydrogen to taste.

So far, it’s mere nursery stuff. But just to make sure that all the oxygen has really gone and that you’re giving the anaerobes a sporting chance, you begin heating the mixture. This brings on condensation and leaves room for more hydrogen. By the time you’re through, it’s a thoroughly hydrogen-happy little jar that you have with you. But the heating bit can be tricky. There is an element of palladium black right inside the jar to lay on the heat. Naturally the little capsule is all wired off, like the Davy safety lamp that miners use. That’s because hydrogen when mixed with even the remains of oxygen and brought into contact with a naked flame makes one big Brock’s benefit. And it’s easy enough to monkey about with the element to make it lethal.

It was the demure one who was working the jar. And the two of us were the only people who were in the lab. at the time. Young Mellon, who had just located a new ash-blonde in the St. Austell area, had slipped off rather early to reconnoitre, and Gillett had taken Bansted out to gloat over a pregnant guinea-pig. I was aware somewhere at the back of my mind of the hum of an electric motor which told me that the demure one was using the vacuum pump on the anaerobic jar, and I heard the faint clink of metal on metal as she fitted the spanner into the hydrogen cylinder. Nothing on earth could have been more normal so far.

But it didn’t stop that way for long. The demure one bent down for a second to pick up a pencil or something that she had dropped, and at the same instant the jar exploded. There was a bright white flash like a pocket atom-bomb, a bang like Judgment Day, and no more anaerobic jar.

And no more demure one—that was my first thought. I made my way as quickly as I could across the litter of busted plates and smashed-up bottles, and found her. She was lying in a heap on the floor right up against the side of the opposite bench. There was blood on her forehead where one of the little slivers of glass had cut it, and her legs were twitching. She might have been dead or she might not. I couldn’t say.

I bent down to pick her up. And, while I was still holding her, Gillett came bursting in.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I told him. “It’s just the way friend Kimbell said it would be.”

“Is she all right?”

I nodded.

“You’d better have her,” I said.

And, with that, I passed her over from my arms into his. Then I paused. Gillett was so pale that I thought for a moment that he was going to faint, too.

2

Then something happened that made the whole thing seem odder still. What’s more, the oddity came from quite the most unexpected quarter. It came from Hilda. And when she asked me if I would go for a walk with her on the moor, I knew that there was really something up.

She was an uncompromisingly open-air kind of girl, and she walked rather faster than I did. If I had attempted even to hold her hand I should have had to start running just to make sure that I didn’t have to let go of her again. Then, about a mile from the Institute, Hilda got to the point.

“I want you to do something for me,” she said.

“Agreed,” I told her.

“I want you to help me to get Una away from here.”

That stumped me. If she had asked me to persuade Bansted to shave off his moustache I felt that I should have had about the same chances of success.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because I can’t,” Hilda replied, with the astonishing substitute for logic that women have been using for years, and usually get away with.

“But, still, why me?” I asked her. “I’ve hardly spoken to the girl.”

“Because you’re about the only person here that I trust,” she told me.

That really meant something, coming from her.

“Could be,” I answered. “But I still don’t see how to set about it. I’m not the kidnapping kind.”

“Don’t be silly.” she said.

I wished that Hilda hadn’t got quite that governess sort of note in her voice. It didn’t go with her eyelashes. But it went with everything else apparently.

“Listen to me,” she went on. “I want you to talk to Gillett and say that after what Una has been through you feel that she should go away somewhere. And I want you to be tactful about it. If he thinks that you’re trying to get her away from here for good of course he’ll oppose it. Make it sound only like a few days. That’s all I want you to do.”

“And then?”

“I’ll do everything else there is to do.”

“Meaning what?”

Hilda’s mouth tightened.

“Meaning that when she’s gone she’s never coming back again,” she said. “Never.”

“So,” I answered non-committally.

Perhaps too non-committally. Because it didn’t seem to satisfy her. She suddenly thrust her hand out and laid it on my arm. I was surprised to find how strong her grip was.

“It’s your job to get Una away from here,” she said fiercely. “Just that. Afterwards, it’s my business.”

When I got back to the Institute it was already after six o’clock. I went straight along to the bar to drink things over. If Hilda had been the first girl to tell me that I was the only living male whom she could trust, I might have been bowled right out by it. But members of the other sex had been telling me that kind of thing for as long as I could remember. I think that it must be something to do with my appearance —the hacked-out ruggedness and the crowning disfigurement of the scar. There is an ineradicable Puritan belief among the English that the ugly must necessarily be good.

And I was still suspicious. Gillett was so easily the Institute’s best-looker that I could understand any girl, even Hilda, wanting to get him back again all for her own. The only thing was that I didn’t see why I should help.

I still had other plans for Hilda.