The Dagger Affair - McDaniel David (хороший книги онлайн бесплатно txt) 📗

At length he finished the report, sat up and opened his eyes. "All right?"

Waverly nodded. "Mr. Kuryakin — any additions, corrections or comments?"

Illya thought. "None, sir."

"Now," said Waverly, producing a manila folder from somewhere, "here are copies of your preliminary reports. I'm not fully satisfied with the material contained in them. For instance, what was done in the way of surveillance on the electronics shop in Van Nuys where you were captured the, ah, second time?"

"All the public records on the property have been checked out," Illya said immediately. "Feldman should be forwarding a complete report to you. He had also posted a guard on the building, although it was nearly cleaned out by the time we accomplished this."

Waverly nodded. "Have you checked for any witness to your...arrival in that park?"

The interrogation continued for some time, as Waverly acquainted himself with every detail of the situation and his agents' actions. He made no comments beyond an occasional nod of acknowledgment, and he took no notes. When he had every detail from Napoleon and Illya, he turned to Garnet.

"Now, Miss Keldur, I must confess to some mystification as to the exact nature of this...Energy Damper. I am told you know more about it than anyone except the inventor and the builders."

Garnet repeated her description of the demonstration Kim had given her, and Napoleon recalled as well as he could his own feelings within the maximum Theta field — though the memory gave him a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. He could face death in a fight, with excitement and adrenaline surging through his bloodstream, or the quick death of assassination or explosion, or any of the other deaths he faced regularly in line of duty. But that draining away of existence was a feeling he had no desire to repeat, and a death he would greatly prefer to avoid.

Waverly inquired again into details of the financing of the DAGGER project, interested in how a small group of fanatics could raise cash to the extent this would obviously require.

Garnet was vague. "I have no idea what approaches he used. I know he and Holt would laugh sometimes about the gullibility of people. He was able to convince them it had to be kept very secret, though. So they gave Kim their money through a system of covers I never found out anything about.

"Of course, I guess Kim — and Chernik and Holt, and a couple of others — were the only ones who really planned to get rid of civilization entirely. And I think a lot of them were thinking along the lines of preventing all kinds of chemical explosions — from gunpowder to gasoline engines — and sending the whole world back to the steam age. Or maybe even making fire impossible, so everything would go to a really primitive level — I know one fellow, not by name though, who was sure this would force everyone to go back to nature and be?I think his words were 'closer to God.' But Kim, and Chernik and Holt, are going to?"

Suddenly the room went dark.

The air-conditioner's hum fell to a mutter and went silent. The only illumination in the room was a faint glow from Waverly's pipe and the light of the city reflected back from the sky and through the window.

Garnet broke off with a gasp of surprise. Waverly fumbled for a moment; then a match flared, throwing his face into sharp, ruddy relief. At the same time, Napoleon flipped his cigarette lighter and looked down.

"My watch has stopped," he said matter-of-factly.

Illya said, "Looks as if they've got it working."

Waverly poked absent-mindedly at his intercom and called his secretary's name twice before he realized, and broke off with an embarrassed snort. Napoleon was checking the door, which would not open automatically. He found the manual emergency latch, and the door ground reluctantly open.

Out in the corridor there was confusion. Somebody was saying, "The emergency generators, dammit, where are the emergency generators? They held up for twelve hours in the blackout last week — where are they now?"

The secretary was tapping at the buttons on her telephone by the light of the desk-type cigarette lighter which threw a butane flame four inches high — and was the only light in thirty feet. People were starting to cluster around the desk like moths, asking questions of each other.

"Are all the lights out?" "I think everything's out!" "My flashlight doesn't work." "Hey, Helen, where's the fuse box?" "All right, Manny, what did you do this time?" "I didn't do it — I was in Kansas City at the time and I've got twelve witnesses to prove it."

Waverly cleared his throat loudly and with authority. "Attention, please — attention. This is the result of a highly classified experiment in our technical section. The condition was not wholly unexpected, and should end in a few minutes. Return to your sections, please, and occupy yourselves there with whatever questions most concern you."

By the uncertain light of matches and cigarette lighters, the personnel made their ways back to their various offices while Waverly muttered to himself about the remarkable dependence everything showed on electricity. He told his secretary to lay in a stock of candles on each floor, and was starting to talk about putting voice tubes like those on a ship between key points for emergency communication, when the lights came back on again.

"Very good," said Illya, consulting his spring-wound watch. "Eleven and one half minutes." He looked at Napoleon and added, "If you wish to re-set your watch, the time is exactly 9:35 and...forty seconds. Mark."

"Oh, ye gods," said the secretary suddenly. "We'll have to get every clock in the building re-set. And the time-clocks....And what about the radio reports we've missed? Station Jay's weekly..."

The complaints and worries faded off as Waverly led his small party to the elevator. The four of them stepped in, and he touched the bottom button.

Thirty seconds later the doors slid back and they stepped into the midst of a babble of confusion.

"Shot!" one man was exclaiming. "Seventy-two hours of careful examination shot! What a rotten, rotten time to blow the power!"

"Yeah? Well, this condenser has been annealing for a day and a half, and now I'll have to go back and recast the whole thing. Pete, why didn't you give us a day's warning?"

"Doggone it, I didn't know it was going to work. And besides, the old man gave this thing abso-top priority. Look, you just be glad we were able to figure out how to kill the field! Whatever..." He glanced over his shoulder as he became aware of a figure behind him, and started when he saw "the old man" standing there.

"Mr. Waverly — what is this? I've read the reports on it, and the fairy stories those field agents sent in, but it's just not possible! Look here," he added, beckoning them over to a workbench. "This thing looks like it was put together by random numbers — or a chimpanzee with a soldering iron."

The brown case lay open and empty at the side of the bench. Sitting front and center was an unlikely-looking agglomeration of wires and transistors, capacitors and coils, and a few other things Napoleon could not immediately identify.

"We traced some of the circuitry on this gadget," he said, "but it gives me the fidgets. It's got open ends and dead shorts all through it — and some of the components I can't even analyze, let alone figure out what they are or what they are supposed to do."

"Can you figure anything out of it?" asked Waverly.