The Mad Scientist Affair - Philifrent John T (электронная книга txt) 📗

This was the third time she had invited Trilli to confess his true colors, and Kuryakin grinned at the Italian’s reluctance to commit himself until he had something definite to go on.

“My dear young lady, always this talk about Thrush! I would prefer not to speak thus. First I wish to meet Dr. O’Rourke and discuss his new process. First I must know if it is any good. Then I talk business. But I do not buy a pig in a bag, you understand? This is not so unreasonable as all this wild talk about Thrush. I never heard of that before.”

“Ah now, I’ll believe that when I see it snowing straight up!”

Her voice dwindled and Kuryakin squinted to see that they were now going through the motions of teeing up for the next hole. The Conway Club course lay like three sides of a box around the hill. The first nine holes took you three-quarters of the way around, and the last nine brought you back again. It was a design that suited him very well, and if there were a small germ of curiosity in his mind as to why the greens had not been laid out to go completely around the hill, he refused to let it bother him. He reached out to adjust the staff fractionally, and caught fragments of talk, mostly hers, all about Uncle Mike. He had been a hell-raiser in his young days, had heard bits and pieces about Thrush, had put them together to make a shrewd guess at the whole. He had told his niece all about it, and now she was telling Trilli.

Listening, Kuryakin had to admit that she had most of her facts right. He was intrigued by the incongruity of it. Here against the green tranquility of this quiet flower-strewn landscape, with its pastoral beauty and purple distances, she spoke of a sinister world-wide organization, a nation without a home, a band of ruthless people whose only loyalty was to the Ultimate Computer, whose aim was to master the world. Using any technique that would work, no matter how evil, Thrush took over a city, a council, an industry, or some vital service, and used it as its pawn. She knew it all, and related it in cheerful detail, as if thoroughly approving. She even knew about the Supreme Council of Thrush.

She went to some pains to make this clear.

“I know Uncle Mike,” she declared. “I know him better than anybody does. He won’t sell his discovery, not to the big business you pretend to represent, not even to Thrush, which you do represent!”

Trilli snorted. “It is become ridiculous. You insist I am Thrush, and then you say not even to Thrush will he sell! What, then, does Dr. O’Rourke want?”

“He will contribute his genius in return for a full membership on the Supreme Council,” she said with flat conviction. “You’ll remember, he’s King Mike in these parts, and he’s not one to give up power easily.”

Kuryakin chuckled to himself. Trilli was in a spot now. Although he had status within Thrush he was very far from being that important. He was just a hireling, a field man. The Italian recovered his voice with an effort.

“You really think I am in a position to offer this?”

“Not you!” She was cheerful. “But you can take the message back. And you can now meet Uncle Mike, seeing you’ve at least admitted you are Thrush!”

Kuryakin lost his grin swiftly as he felt an urgent tingle from that sixth sense any agent must have if he is to survive long. Squinting urgently over his shoulder, he saw two men halfway up the right-hand slope of the hillside, one peering at him through binoculars. One glance was enough to identify Schichi and Foden, enough to force immediate decisions. There was no sense in standing his ground and hoping to play innocent with those two. Kuryakin moved with deliberate speed. Rapid touches folded the dish and microphone into compactness and into the shoulder-pack. A wriggle got him into his jacket and the pack on his back.

A quick glance as he yanked the staff out of the turf showed his estimate to be accurate. Schichi and Foden were moving now, coming towards him fast. They were hailing the two players over there, alerting them. A discreet withdrawal seemed best.

Kuryakin went up the hill swiftly, calculating the odds. If he could get over the crest, down the other side, and into the wilderness of bush and scrub, he could lose them easily. They might shoot. He didn’t think they would, but there was an uncomfortable itch between his shoulder-blades as he scrambled up the slope as fast as he could go.

He lost his footing for a gasping moment and tripped, going down on one knee by a wiry bush. In that same second the air where his head would have been was ripped by the violent passage of something that hurled on to smack into the grassy bank a yard ahead. Kuryakin marked it, noting the absence of any sound of a shot. His left hand dug out the projectile as he rushed past and scrambled on up. His fingers told him what it was even before he managed to snatch a glance at it. A golfball. Judging by the way in which it had gouged into the ground, it had come from a powerful catapult or something similar. That would be Foden. Ingenious fellow, Foden. Kuryakin’s habitually serious expression hardened as he appreciated the thinking. A man shot dead is an awkwardness, something to invite curiosity, but who would think it anything more than a sad accident that a man should be struck and killed with a golf ball, here right beside a golf course?

Panting, he tossed the ball away and went on. The hilltop was close now. At his back he heard shouts. Halting at the crest, he weighed the prospect swiftly and shrugged off his pack. The way down was steep, but thick with heather. He dropped the pack between his feet, stood across it, gripped the straps, and gave a strangled groan as something hit him a hammer-blow in the small of his back. Foden again, a damned good shot. Grinding his teeth against the kidney-ache, he squatted on his pack and shoved off, and down, toboganning over the springy heather at a furiously jolting rate. It wasn’t the smoothest ride in the world, but it was easily ten times as fast as anyone might follow on foot. Using his staff like an oar, and his heels desperately, he snatched a backward glance and saw all four of them appear on the crest up there. He hit a bump and flew a short distance, landing with a bone-jarring jolt. Another snatched glance back. No sign of pursuit yet. He was going to make it.

The bottom came rapidly nearer. He steered valiantly, bouncing and bumping, seeking ahead for the best place to halt, trying to evade the bigger hummocks. Ahead he saw a shallow gully, and aimed for it. Beyond that was a very smooth and inviting open green space. Thrusting savagely, he shot towards it, his knees up, his whole body braced for the jar of stopping. There came one of those moments when time seems to stop and hold its breath. He saw the edge ahead, that he was going to shoot out and drop like a ski-jumper, that the drop would be about ten or twelve feet onto that smooth green. But there was something ominously suspicious about that smoothness, greenness, softness. With one last breathless bump he was in mid-air and falling. And, with a supreme effort of will to overcome his natural instinct to drop feet first and cushion his impact, he twisted and writhed, turned in mid-air and spreadeagled himself to fall flat on his back. Flat—with a great slap and splurge—into slimy green ooze!

A bog. Had he been wrong in his snap judgment, had it been turf, the shock would have broken his back. Inside he was knocked breathless but otherwise unhurt. He lay still for a long moment. Some freak of accoustics brought him, faintly, the voices from up there.

Trilli snapped, “If you are very quick and go around, you will—”

“There’s no need of that,” Bridget O’Rourke interrupted calmly. “Whoever he is, he won’t trouble us again. Never a one has come back up out of Kevin’s Hole that I ever heard of!” There came a moment of mumbling and then her voice again, still cheery. “Try it for yourself, and see. Slap one of your golf balls down on that green there, and see what happens to it!”