Chapter 7

I DON’T KNOW what I expected to happen, but whatever it was I didn’t expect her to throw her arms round my neck and burst into tears. ‘Is it never going to end?’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, Peter, tell me what to do.’

I was conscious of the fragrance of her hair, no scent that I could identify, but a warm fragrance that seemed to mingle the sun and the sea and the hibiscus flowering in the bush. I disengaged myself as well as I could, surprised to find her hands quite cold, in sharp contrast with the sun in her hair. ‘It might help if you told me a bit more of the truth,’ I said.

It was late afternoon, but it was still the tropics, and in spite of the tropics she shivered slightly. She said nothing, and I went on rather brutally, ‘I think you know a good deal about the dead man in the cave. Is he your former husband?’

‘Charles? If only it were!’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Whose side are you on?’

‘I didn’t know there were sides to be on. I appear to be a fugitive from the Nuevan Army, and I think it quite likely that they’re after you and Edward Caval as well. Since we’ve escaped together, you can take it that I’m with you for the moment. I can’t say any more, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Poor Peter. And you only came to Nueva to sell guns!’ She paused for a minute. ‘Or did you come only to sell guns? There’s something very odd about you. Why are you so close to the Prime Minister?’

‘I’m not at all close to the Prime Minister. His Government invited me to Nueva as a technical representative of the British Government to discuss the re-equipment of the Nuevan Army. It’s purely official business, and naturally I’ve discussed it with Mr Li Cook.’

‘Suppose we both tell each other the truth. You don’t believe me, and I don’t wholly believe you.’

I got up. She stayed sitting, or rather huddled, on the rock, looking pathetically waif-like. ‘My dear Ruth, I didn’t say I don’t believe you, but only that I don’t think you have told me the whole truth,’ I said. ‘There was no reason for you to tell me about your marriage, and the telephone call to your apartment about earthquakes. Your affairs are nothing to do with me, but if you do want to discuss them you shouldn’t go out of your way to mislead me. You said, for instance, that you thought the voice on the telephone was your ex-husband’s, somewhat disguised. But if you are divorced, and had not seen your husband since you left him, how on earth did he know about your trip to Nueva? And I think you did recognise the voice, and knew quite well that it was not your husband’s.’

I didn’t answer, and she went on, ‘All right, I suppose I haven’t been quite fair. But I’ve been so worried I don’t know what to do. And I don’t know who to trust, except poor old Mr Caval. I think I trust him. If I trust you, are you going to let me down, and hurt me, and perhaps Mr Caval as well?’

‘I don’t go about trying to hurt people. A few minutes ago you asked me to help you. I’m perfectly ready to help you if I can, but I can’t help if I don’t know what the trouble is.’

She seemed to take a decision. ‘Well, I’m going to trust you. But you must sit down. I can’t talk looking up at you.’

I returned to the rock beside her. She didn’t look at me, but at her hands in her lap, squeezed together tightly. ‘Everything I told you about my marriage is true, except that I didn’t tell you more than the hundredth part of the hell I went through. I told you about Charles’s infidelities – I didn’t tell you about his twisted politics and totally unscrupulous attitude to life. I think I did tell you that as a physicist he is very able – I suppose that’s why the university kept him on, in spite of various scandals. Or partly that, and partly that they were afraid of the political trouble he’d cause on the campus if they tried to sack him. Ostensibly Charles is ultra-Left, a Neo-Maoist-Dynamist, or something; in fact he’s as amoral politically as in every other way, and about as utterly selfish as a human being can get. He felt it strengthened his hand to have an ultra-Left following, but that’s all.

‘I met his father a couple of times – very like Charles, except that he doesn’t have Charles’s scientific ability. They both have one obsession – to get their hands on Edward Caval’s land. Charles used to talk about it quite openly – in his view they had a natural right to it because of the old grant from Charles II. Even before I really knew much about him I thought it a bit odd for an ultra-Left socialist to want to benefit from a Royalist grant of three centuries ago. When I did know more about him I was just sickened.

‘It’s true that I’ve never met Charles after I walked out, but it’s not true that I didn’t know of some of the things he was up to. That’s because of Phil Grover – the research student I told you about, whose work Charles pinched. I told you that the boy came to me about it. I couldn’t do anything for him, except tell him to report the facts to the Dean of Studies, which he didn’t do, but I think it helped him a bit just to talk to me. Anyway, this boy was working on seismological theory, and about a year after I’d left Charles he wrote to me to ask if I could help him with the mathematics of some ideas he had. Well, it wasn’t my business, but I felt that he’d been shabbily treated by Charles, and if I could do something for him it seemed to make it better, somehow. And I can’t help being interested in any real mathematical problem. So I said he could come to see me. Do you know anything about seismology?’

‘Well, I just wondered – that was one of the things I wondered about concerning you. I can’t give a seismological lecture now – I’m not a seismologist myself, anyhow, only a mathematician. But basically, it’s like this. The earth’s crust is built up of a series of rock platforms, of different ages and structure, resting on one another like a child’s building blocks. They’ve been there a long time, the rock masses and counter-balancing pressures are enormous, and normally they’re in a state of equilibrium.

‘Now it can happen that sometimes one rock platform begins to slide over another – it may be that the angle is too steep for stability, or there may be some natural lubricant present, like graphite, or it may be that some upheaval far down in the earth has altered the pressure system, there’s an almost infinite number of possible causes for a rock slide. But the effect of a rock slide is a tremor on the surface of the earth, and if the slide goes on, an earthquake. Phil Grover was working on a theory trying to identify the conditions making for instability in the rock structure under any given area, and to use them to promote an earthquake where it wouldn’t matter, or in a place from which people could be evacuated. You see, a rock slide has got to stop somewhere, and if you can make it happen when you want it to instead of waiting for an earthquake, you can let off the pressures under more or less controlled conditions, and allow the area concerned to regain stability.

‘Actually to do any of this you’ve got to have two things – engineering technique capable of moving the masses concerned where and when you want to, and a mathematical technique capable of determining where and when to apply the engineering. Phil, who is essentially an engineering-physicist, reckoned that he’d gone a long way towards solving the engineering problems, but he was stuck over the maths. I needn’t tell you that it’s a most formidable mathematical problem, and although it may be possible to solve it theoretically, I think now that the practical application of any possible solution is at best extremely limited. But I’m getting ahead too fast. I was interested in Phil’s problem at the time, a bit flattered, I suppose, that he’d come to me, and I spent months trying to work out a way of calculating all the things he wanted. That black notebook has some of my calculations. The dead man in the cave is Phil.’

She spoke in a matter-of-fact way as if she were lecturing to a class. She had been so intent on trying to explain things, and I’d been so intent in listening to her, that both of us forgot the time. It was now quite dark. I took her hands, still cold, in mine, and kissed her lightly on the top of her head. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You need have no fear of my not believing you now, and you need have no doubt about my being on your side. There’s a great deal more that you must tell me, and there’s a great deal of work to be done, as quickly as we can do it. But we can’t stay here. Poor old Caval will be sick with worry, and we must get back to the schooner.’

She obeyed like a child, without saying anything, and like a child kept her hand in mine as we walked back to the beach. It was rough going in the dark, but it wasn’t far, and as soon as we were out of the shadow of the trees the combination of slight moon and starlight was enough to indicate the outline of the dinghy on the beach. A faint light from the schooner’s portholes showed where she lay, and I enjoyed the physical relief of rowing out to her. Caval met us at the gangway. ‘Thank God you’ve come,’ he said. ‘I was wondering whether I ought to try to swim ashore to look for you. And I’ve caught some fish, and made a really decent supper.’

‘We owe you a lot of explanation, and I think you owe us a bit of explanation, too,’ I said. ‘But it can wait. We all need that supper of yours, and as far as I’m concerned I need some of your rum. Ruth, too, could do with a good stiff drink.’

I ought to have paid more attention to Caval’s cooking. It was enterprising of him to fish for our supper, and I’m sure it was an admirable meal, but I have to admit that I have absolutely no recollection of what we ate. There was far too much sorting out to do. I was beginning to get a glimmering of the really nasty work that was going on in Nueva, and angry at being used, or so it seemed to me, as an expendable pawn in it. But I was not angry with either Ruth or old Caval.

‘Have you told Mr Caval that you recognised the dead man in the cave?’ I asked Ruth as soon as the rum was poured out.

‘I suppose that is why you were both so ready to come with me when I turned up out of the night.’

‘Only partly so,’ Caval said. ‘We felt a considerable responsibility for you.’ He was oddly impressive, the authority of a lifetime, indeed of generations of Cavals, making him a kind of natural chairman of our small meeting.

Ruth answered. ‘He knows what I’ve told you, and he knows a bit more that I haven’t yet had time to tell you. It would make things clearer if I went on where we left off on the island.’

‘Well, I told you that I tried to work out mathematical solutions for Phil’s problems. I was so interested in the maths that I didn’t think of anything else for quite some time. When I did, I got more and more puzzled. Why had Phil come to me? He had a research job at a great university, he had access to a first-class team of mathematicians, served by high-grade computers and all the rest of it. Why come to me?

‘Most of our dealings were by letter, but he used to visit me from time to time, to come up with new problems, or to ask about something I’d sent him that he hadn’t quite understood. When I began wondering what it was all about, I asked him point blank why he wasn’t using the university’s research staff. I didn’t like his answer. He said, “But you know I’m still working with Charles”.

‘I didn’t know, and honestly, it hadn’t even occurred to me. It didn’t seem possible that a man who’d had some of his own work stolen by Charles should have gone on working with him. I asked him why, and he wouldn’t tell me, except to say that I must know how able Charles was in his own line. Well, I knew that Charles’s line wasn’t seismology. It was nuclear physics, and although it could obviously be related to earth structures, Charles had never, so far as I knew, taken any particular interest in earthquakes. I was on quite good terms with Phil, and I tried to question him without his really knowing it. I didn’t get very far, except to feel that Charles had some hold over him which he wasn’t prepared to tell me about. And to realise that whatever Charles was up to it wasn’t any good.

‘Then I did a lot of hard thinking for myself, and I realised that the possibility of being able to cause earthquakes, even over a limited area, had a number of military implications, and that some governments might be ready to pay out a great deal of money for the process. I thought of going to our own U.S. Government about it, but I didn’t know anyone to go to, and then I thought of something else: if Charles was going to sell out to some foreign government he might find himself in a tricky position. And he had a lot of notes in my handwriting, and letters to Phil with my name on – I’d never thought of being secretive about anything. If there was trouble over selling secrets to a foreign power, or misusing the facilities of an American university in the interests of a foreign power, all he had to do was to disappear and leave Phil and me to carry the can.

‘I got more and more frightened. I told Phil I’d done all I could and that I didn’t have time for any more, I moved to a new job, got a new address, and although one or two more letters from Phil were forwarded to me, I didn’t reply to them.

‘I told you that I’d had a letter from Mr Caval inviting me to Nueva. That was true, but I didn’t tell you that I’d written to him first. You see, I didn’t know who to go to for advice. My own parents are dead, I’d spent so much time working for my D.Phil. and working to keep myself while I studied, that I didn’t have any close friends. I suppose that was one of the reasons why I fell for Charles. From what he’d told me of the Cavals I knew that there was a senior member of the family who didn’t seem a bit like Charles or his father, and since this was in a sense a Caval matter, I wrote to Edward Caval and asked if he could give me advice on a matter concerning the family.’

‘I thought she wanted money,’ Caval said. ‘I told you that I’d had a lot of inquiries made about Charles, in the course of which I learned about his marriage to Ruth, his treatment of her, and their divorce. It seemed to me that she’d been treated shamefully, and if she needed some financial help I was prepared to give it. So I replied inviting her to Nueva, and paying her fare. I tell you this now, because it was what I thought then. Since meeting Ruth I can but offer her the most abject apology.’

‘There wasn’t any telephone call. I made it up for your benefit. I didn’t know who you were, or what you were doing in Nueva. I wanted to test your reaction to the prediction of earthquakes, and I had to have some reason for thinking about it.’

I was a little pleased. At least my feeling that there was something wrong about that telephone call was right.

I suppose we finished supper. I have a vague recollection of Caval’s bringing us some coffee, and a sharp recollection of his saying, ‘That’s why I wrote to Sir Edmund Pusey.’

‘I couldn’t tell him much, and over the past year or so I’ve not been absolutely sure of the integrity of my mail. But I was deeply worried by Ruth’s story – whatever it was, it was far more than a matter for Nueva, and it might concern the whole balance of military power in the world. So I wrote a chatty, personal letter, saying that I was reading the Bible more as I grew old and was particularly impressed by I Corinthians 10, verses 11 and 12.* I trusted him to read between my lines, look up Corinthians 10 and respond. He did. He sent you.’

I ignored this. How like Sir Edmund, I thought bitterly, to send me out to Nueva without telling me anything about Caval! Then I thought that I wasn’t being quite fair – Pusey had no idea why Caval had written to him, he knew that I should meet Caval, and, in his customary way, he had left me a free hand to act as circumstances might suggest. Instead of suggesting anything they’d forced a lot of action that none of us could have foreseen. What mattered now was to decide what to do next.

‘When you wrote to Pusey,’ I said, ‘you knew Ruth’s story, but did you have any idea that any of Charles’s lot would be coming to Nueva?’

‘No. And I didn’t think on those lines until after the earthquake at Chacarima – some time after the earthquake, in fact, for when you and Ruth went back to Fort James I had no idea that it wasn’t a perfectly natural earthquake. Now I’m quite sure that it wasn’t – I think it was some sort of experiment, with the double purpose of trying to get rid of me. And what you found in the caves strongly suggests that whatever is going on is directed from there. But why was the young man killed?’

‘I think I know why he was killed,’ Ruth said. ‘At least, the notebook that you found suggests a possible reason. You see, there’s an error in those figures. I didn’t realise it when I gave them to Phil, but I discovered it later and told him about it. Whatever crooked work Phil was mixed up in he was a scientist first, and he would have told people about the error. That wouldn’t have suited Charles – if he was out to sell an artificial earthquake process, he wouldn’t want anyone to know that it was incomplete and might not work at all. Charles probably reckoned that he had nothing to fear from me, and that Phil was the only person who knew about the mistake.’

‘If the Chacarima earthquake was artificially produced it couldn’t have been a very serious mistake,’ I said. ‘If that was an artificial earthquake, then the process does work.’

‘No, it’s not like that.’ Ruth shook her head impatiently – it was hard to explain rarefied mathematics to people whose maths more or less ended with the multiplication table. ‘It’s not a mistake in the ordinary sense, it’s more a fallacy in mathematical logic. I can’t go into it all now, but roughly it means that a process which may work over a relatively short distance, won’t have the same effect if the distance is extended. It also means that the process may have a kind of reciprocal effect – it may work backwards, as it were. Oh, I can’t explain.’ She put her head in her hands.

‘Don’t worry about it now – obviously it matters tremendously in any real assessment of the process, but to anyone trying to bluff the sale of the process it doesn’t matter at all,’ I said. ‘Do you know what sort of machinery is needed for the engineering side of the process?’

‘I don’t. Phil never explained in any detail, and in a way I wasn’t greatly interested, because I was concerned solely with the maths. It required the generation and transmission of a special sort of radio wave along the plane between rock surfaces to a point mathematically determined beforehand – that’s where the maths came in – at which the magnetic forces in the wave would bring about a kind of nuclear explosion. I don’t know enough about nuclear physics to understand the ins and outs of the explosion – I do know that it wasn’t any ordinary sort of atomic explosion, but in some way a limited one, designed to make one rock mass slide on another and so produce an earthquake. I don’t know how well the radio explosion would work. I do know that the maths wouldn’t work at all reliably.’

‘Something worked at Chacarima. So they’d need a generator and a fair amount of radio equipment. We don’t know how much, but we can assume that it would be fairly heavy.’ I turned to Caval. ‘How difficult would it be to install heavy equipment somewhere in the caves?’ I asked.

‘By sea, not all that difficult – there’s deep water a long way into the hillside. The chief problem would be to unload it, but there’s no reason why a crane or gantry shouldn’t be set up to deal with it. I know of one place where it could be done quite easily. Instead of going ashore where you did you carry on by boat for about another half-mile, and you come to a wide cavern with a firm rock floor. That light we saw from Naurataka was almost certainly a ship going to the inlet – there could have been several previous ships which I wouldn’t have known about, because you can’t see them from Chacarima House.’

‘It seems to me that we ought to go back to investigate. We don’t know what’s going on in the caves, but we do know that something is going on, and the killing of the young physicist suggests that it is something pretty urgent. And the extraordinary business in arresting me has further implications – that nothing must come out about murder in the caves until some deal or other has been completed. There isn’t time to get in touch with London or Washington, and on what we know at present I don’t see what either the British or the U.S. Government could do. We must find out more. With luck I should be able to get in and out of the caves without being arrested. But we must keep control of the schooner. Is there anywhere we can lie up with a reasonable chance of not being seen for twenty-four hours or so?’

Caval considered ‘There’s the bay on the other side of the headland forming one shore of the Chacarima Inlet,’ he said. ‘No one goes there much, and the bay itself extends almost into the bush. From there, we can get into the caves by climbing the headland – I say “we” because you couldn’t possibly find the way on your own. But I know those caves from boyhood – they’re a honeycomb of passages, and I think I can get to the place where machinery is most probably installed without going near the inlet. We can but try, anyway.’

I did a hurried calculation. ‘We must go into the bay when it’s dark, which means some time during tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘I think we can just about make it, but it means starting now, and doing without our comfortable night at anchor.’

Tired as they were, both Ruth and the old man were marvellous. I needed them both at the ancient winch to get up the anchor, but mercifully it had bitten in clean sand, and wasn’t snagged on some coral head. We had to go about to clear the entrance, but there was plenty of room in the lagoon, and once we were away from the half-reef that sheltered our anchorage there was a clean wind to take us out to sea. We had come about NNW from Nueva, and the way back was more or less SSE, a fine point of sailing for the generally NE trade wind. As before, the wind seemed to have fallen off a bit at night, and I wished I could set the big squaresail. But I didn’t want to tackle it in the dark, and reckoned that if I got it up at dawn we’d have ample power to make the run back to Nueva in time to get there in the small hours of the following morning. As soon as I’d settled the Grand Duchess on her course, I persuaded Ruth and Caval to turn in. Ruth demurred at first, saying that I’d had a heavy day with all the water-ferrying, and that she would take the night watch. But I was too worked up for sleep and thought I’d do better to get some rest next day. In the end we compromised. I said I’d carry on until two a.m. and then call Ruth to take the watch until dawn. I wanted to be up at dawn anyway, to get the squaresail set.

Alone at the wheel, I tried to make sense of all that I’d learned. Poor Ruth, she hadn’t had much of a life. I could understand her falling for Charles. Presumably he had his share of the undoubted Caval charm, his Nuevan background adding a romantic touch to his real ability as a scientist. Ruth, on her first holiday for years, exhausted by struggling for her D.Phil., must have thought she was the happiest woman in the world, with a distinguished husband and a fine academic life awaiting her. What a vile awakening! It seemed to me that she had acted with determined courage, accepting that her only course was to draw a firm line across the ledger of her life and open a new page. Why had she then got mixed up with Phil Grover? Conceivably he had been attracted to her, but she hadn’t talked as if she were at all attached to him. She had been shocked to find him dead, but she didn’t appear to have suffered any great emotional shock – rather, she had assessed his death in a cool, analytical way as part of the problem of her ex-husband’s scheming. Perhaps she had told the simple truth when she said that she felt that she could make up a little for Charles’s treatment of the boy.

What was Charles up to, and why had Phil Grover gone to Nueva? Was Charles there too? It seemed quite likely. Was there anything in the artificial earthquake process? It sounded like science fiction – but so would the idea of putting men on the moon a few years ago. Chacarima House had certainly been destroyed by some sort of earthquake, and by all accounts it was a distinctly unusual earthquake, extremely limited in area, and with none of the accompanying physical features that Nuevan earthquakes are supposed to have. One could dismiss the Carib story as bush myth – but the Caribs had been living with earthquakes for a long time, and their folklore, based on generations of acute observation, might well have something in it. The Carib man had said that whatever destroyed Chacarima House had emanated from the Chacarima caves. He put it down to the river’s anger, but that was a natural relation of cause and effect in primitive thinking. Had the Caribs seen ships going to the caves and wondered what was going on? I wished that there was time to go into their forest territory. They trusted Caval, and perhaps they would talk to him. But there wasn’t time. If we were to uncover the secret of the caves, we’d have to do it ourselves.

Suppose it was possible to set up equipment at Point A and cause an earthquake at Point B – the Chacarima caves would seem an ideal site for an earthquake control centre. I thought again of the map of the North Atlantic, and of the strategic value of the Chacarima Inlet – uninterrupted sea reaching to the populous eastern shores of the United States, and to much of western Europe. I didn’t know anything about the seismology of the Atlantic seabed, but it might be easier to send those diabolical radio waves along the structures of an ocean floor than under some landmass. I shivered as the thought came to me. If the process worked, or even if people could be made to think it worked, whoever controlled the process and the Chacarima caves could hold a large part of the world to ransom.

But who was involved? Was the Nuevan Government going it alone? It seemed unlikely, for though Nuevan control of the caves might threaten other people with destruction, the island had scarcely the resources to exploit a threat to the rest of the world. But Nueva in partnership with some Great Power – that would be a very different matter.

How far had negotiations – if there were any negotiations – gone? The killing of Phil Grover suggested that they were not yet finalised, that his knowledge of a fallacy in the process could upset things. That assumed, of course, that Ruth was right, and that Grover had been killed because he knew too much about the process. He might have been killed for some quite unrelated reason, personal jealousy, a quarrel over a woman – there were a myriad possibilities. But assuming that the rest of our speculation was on the right lines, Ruth’s idea made sense. Anybody wanting to use or to develop the process would not have killed Grover – his work was far too valuable. If he knew that the process was incomplete, and nothing like as reliable as it might be made out to be, then anyone trying to sell the process had a powerful motive for his murder.

What could I hope to do by going back to Nueva? Find out what was happening in the caves? With luck, I could do that perhaps. But what then? The Nuevan Government was apparently after me, and if I were seen in Nueva God alone knew what would happen to me. I might be able to get away in the schooner with knowledge that might be vital to my own Government and its allies, but whether the Grand Duchess could escape a naval search was another matter. The main point in our favour was that unless we were seen nobody could know that we were anywhere near Nueva; and at sea the good old Duchess, for all her grand name, was humble and inconspicuous enough. But it was taking an appalling risk – and it was risk to Caval and Ruth as well as to me. Had I any right to expose them to such risk? Ought I not to change course now and make for the U.S. Virgin Islands where they would be safe?

This disturbing thought was interrupted by Ruth herself. ‘It’s well after two o’clock and you never called me,’ she said. ‘If you are really on my side you have got to keep your promises.’

‘What’s worrying me is whether I have any right to take you and Edward Caval back to Nueva. I have only to change course and you can soon be safe in U.S. territory.’

‘Is it any of your business? There may be very great danger – and in any case we may not be able to achieve anything.’

‘Peter, you need to get some sleep. Give me the wheel. I’ve already seen the compass, and I’m going to stay on this course.’

* Now these things happened unto them by way of example, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages are come. Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.