The Saint and the Happy Highwayman s-21 Page 20

  "I don't know yet," answered the Saint soberly.

  The girl Carmen rejoined them as they left the house. Simon found her walking beside him as they strolled through the warm moonlight. He dropped the remains of his cigar and offered his cigarette case; they stopped for a moment while he gave her a light. Neither of them spoke, but her arm slipped through his as they went on.

  The blaze of lights which Sardon switched on in his laboratory wiped the dim silvery gloom out of their eyes in a crash of harsh glaring illumination. In contrast with the tasteful furnishings of the house, the cold white walls and bare tiled floor struck the Saint's sensitive vision with the hygienic and inhuman chill which such places always gave him. But Sardon's laboratory was not like any other place of that kind in which he had ever been.

  Ranged along the walls were rows of big glass-fronted boxes, in which apparently formless heaps of litter and rubble could be dimly made out. His tye was caught by a movement in one of the boxes, and he stepped up to look at it more closely. Almost in the same moment he stopped, and nearly recoiled from it, as he realized that he was looking at the largest ant that he had ever seen. It was fully six inches long; and, magnified in that proportion, he could see every joint in its shiny armour-plated surface and the curious bifurcated claws at the ends of its legs. It stood there with its antennae waving gently, watching him with its bulging beady eyes . . .

  "Tetramorium cespitum," said Dr Sardon, standing beside him. "One of my early experiments. Its natural size is about three tenths of an inch, but it did not respond very well to treatment."

  "I should say it had responded heroically," said the Saint. "You don't mean you can do better than that?"

  Sardon smiled.

  "It was one of my early experiments," he repeated. "I was then merely trying to improve on the work of Ludwig and Ries of Berne, who were breeding giant insects almost comparable with that one, many years ago, with the aid of red light. Subsequently I discovered another principle of growth which they had overlooked, and I also found that an artificial selective cross-breeding between different species not only improved the potential size but also increased the intelligence. For instance, here is one of my later results--a combination of Oecophylla smaragdina and Prenolepsis imparis."

  He went to one of the longer and larger boxes at the end of the room. At first Simon could see nothing but a great mound of twigs and leaves piled high in one corner. There were two or three bones, stripped bare and white, lying on the sandy floor of the box. . . . Then Sardon tapped on the glass, and Simon saw with a sudden thrill of horror that what had been a dark hole in the mound of leaves was no longer black and empty. There was a head peering out of the shadow-- dark bronze-green, iridescent, covered with short sparse bristly hairs. . . .

  "Oecophylla is, of course, one of the more advanced species," Sardon was saying, in his calm precise manner. "It is the only known creature other than man to use a tool. The larvae secrete a substance similar to silk, with which the ants weave leaves together to make their nests, holding the larvae in their jaws and using them as shuttles. I don't yet know whether my hybrid has inherited that instinct."

  "It looks as if it would make a charming pet, anyway," murmured the Saint thoughtfully. "Sort of improved lap dog, isn't it?"

  The faint sly smile stayed fixed on Sardon's thin lips. He took two steps further, to a wide sliding door that took up most of the wall at the end of the laboratory, and looked back at them sidelong.

  "Perhaps you would like to see the future ruler of the world," he said, so very softly that it seemed as if everyone else stopped breathing while he spoke.

  Simon heard the girl beside him catch her breath, and Nordsten said quickly: "Surely we've troubled you enough already----"

  'I should like to see it," said the Saint quietly.

  Sardon's tongue slid once over his lips. He put his hand up and moved a couple of levers on the glittering panels of dials and switches beside the door. It was to the Saint that his gaze returned, with that rapt express sion of strangely cunning and yet childish happiness.

  "You will see it from where you stand. I will ask you to keep perfectly still, so as not to draw attention to yourselves--there is a strain of Dorylina in this one. Dorylina is one of the most intelligent and highly disciplined species, but it is also the most savage. I do not wish it to become angry----"

  His arm stretched out to the handle of the door. He slid it aside in one movement, standing with his back ||

  to it, facing them.

  The girl's cold hand touched the Saint's wrist. Her fingers slipped down over his hand and locked in with his own, clutching them in a sudden convulsive grip. He heard Ivar Nordsten's suppressed gasp as it caught in his throat, and an icy tingle ran up his spine and broke out in a clammy dew on his forehead.

  The rich red light from the chamber beyond the door spilled out like liquid fire, so fierce and vivid that it seemed as if it could only be accompanied by the scorching heat of an open furnace; but it held only a slight appreciable warmth. It beat down from huge crimson arcs ranged along the cornices of the inner room among a maze of shining tubes and twisted wires; there was a great glass ball opposite in which a pale- yellow streak of lightning forked and flickered with a faint humming sound. The light struck scarlet highlights from the-gleaming bars of a great metal cage like a gigantic chicken coop which filled the centre of the room to within a yard of the walls. And within the cage something monstrous and incredible stood motionless, staring at them.

  Simon would see it sometimes, years afterwards, in uneasy dreams. Something immense and frightful, glistening like burnished copper, balanced on angled legs like bars of plated metal. Only for a few seconds he saw it then, and for most of that time he was held fascinated by its eyes, understanding something that he would never have believed before. . . .

  And then suddenly the thing moved, swiftly and horribly and without sound; and Sardon slammed the door shut, blotting out the eye-aching sea of red light and leaving only the austere cold whiteness of the laboratory.

  "They are not all like lap dogs," Sardon said in a kind of whisper.

  Simon took out a handkerchief and passed it across his brow. The last thing about that weird scene that fixed itself consciously in his memory was the girl's fingers relaxing their tense grip on his hand, and Sar-don's eyes, bland and efficient and businesslike again, pinned steadily on them both in a sort of secret sneer. . . .

  "What do you think of our friend?" Ivar Nordsten asked, as they drove home two hours later.

  Simon stretched out a long arm for the lighter at the side of the car.

  "He is a lunatic--but of course you knew that. I'm only wondering whether he is quite harmless."

  "You ought to sympathize with his contempt for the human race."

  The red glow of the Saint's cigarette end brightened so that for an instant the interior of the car was filled with something like a pale reflection of the unearthly crimson luminance which they had seen in Dr Sardon's forcing room.

  "Did you sympathize with his affection for his pets?"

  "Those great ants?" Nordsten shivered involuntarily. "No. That last one--it was the most frightful thing I have ever seen. I suppose it was really alive?"

  "It was alive," said the Saint steadily. "That's why I'm wondering whether Dr Sardon is harmless. I don't know what you were looking at, Ivar, but I'll tell you what made my blood run cold. It wasn't the mere size of the thing--though any common or garden ant would be terrifying enough if you enlarged it to those dimensions. It was worse than that. It was the proof that Sardon was right. That ant was looking at me. Not like any other insect or even animal that I've ever seen, but like an insect with a man's brain might look. That was the most frightening thing to me. It knew!"

  Nordsten stared at him.

  "You mean that you believe what he was saying about it being the future ruler of the world?"

  "By itself, no," answered Simon. "But if it were not by itself----"

&n
bsp; He did not finish the sentence; and they were silent for the rest of the drive. Before they went to bed he asked one more question.

  "Who else knows about these experiments?"

  ''No one, I believe. He told me the other day that he was not prepared to say anything about them until lie could show complete success. As a matter of fact, I lent him some money to go on with his work, and that is the only reason he took me into his confidence. I was surprised when he showed us his laboratory tonight--even I had never seen it before."

  "So he is convinced now that he can show a complete success," said the Saint quietly, and was still subdued and preoccupied the next morning.

  In the afternoon he refused to swim or play tennis. He sat hunched up in a chair on the veranda, scowling into space and smoking innumerable cigarettes, except when he rose to pace restlessly up and down like a big nervous cat.

  "What you are really worried about is the girl," Nordsten teased him.

  "She's pretty enough to worry about," said the Saint shamelessly. "I think I'll go over and ask her for a cocktail."

  Nordsten smiled.

  "If it will make you a human being again, by all means do," he said. "If you don't come back to dinner I shall know that she is appreciating your anxiety. In any case, I shall probably be very late myself. I have to attend a committee meeting at the golf club and that always adjourns to the bar and goes on for hours."

  But the brief tropical twilight had already given way to the dark before Simon made good his threat. He took out Ivar Nordsten's spare Rolls-Royce and drove slowly over the highway until he found the turning that led through the deep cypress groves to the doctor's house. He was prepared to feel foolish; and yet as his headlights circled through the iron gates he touched his hip pocket to reassure himself that if the need arose he might still feel wise.

  The trees arching over the drive formed a ghostly tunnel down which the Rolls chased its own forerush of light. The smooth hiss of the engine accentuated rather than broke the silence, so that the mind even of a hardened and unimaginative man might cling to the comfort of that faint sound in the same way that the mind of a child might cling to the light of a candle as a comfort against the gathering terrors of the night. The Saint's lip curled cynically at the flight of his own thoughts. . . .

  And then, as the car turned a bend in the drive, he saw the girl, and trod fiercely on the brakes.

  The tires shrieked on the macadam and the engine stalled as the big car rocked to a standstill. It flashed through the Saint's mind at that instant, when all sound was abruptly wiped out, that the stillness which he had imagined before was too complete for accident. He felt the skin creep over his back, and had to call on an effort of will to force himself to open the door and get out of the car.

  She lay face downwards, halfway across the drive, in the pool of illumination shed by the glaring headlights. Simon turned her over and raised her head on his arm. Her eyelids twitched as he did so; a kind of moan broke from her lips, and she fought away from him, in a dreadful wildness of panic, for the brief moment before her eyes opened and she recognized him.

  "My dear," he said, "what has been happening?"

  She had gone limp in his arms, the breath jerking pitifully through her lips, but she had not fainted again. And behind him, in that surround of stifling stillness, he heard quite clearly the rustle of something brushing stealthily over the grass beside the drive. He saw her eyes turning over his shoulder, saw the wide horror in them.

  "Look!"

  He spun round, whipping the gun from his pocket, and for more than a second he was paralyzed. For that eternity he saw the thing, deep in the far shadows, dimly illumined by the marginal reflections from the beam of the headlights--something gross and swollen, a dirty grey-white, shaped rather like a great bleached sausage, hideously bloated. Then the darkness swallowed it again, even as his shot smashed the silence into a hundred tiny echoes.

  The girl was struggling to her feet. He snatched at her wrist.

  "This way."

  He got her into the car and slammed the door. Steel and glass closed round them to give an absurd relief, the weak unreasoning comfort to the naked flesh which men under a bombardment find in cowering behind canvas screens. She slumped against his shoulder, sobbing hysterically.

  "Oh, my God. My God!"

  "What was it?" he asked.

  "It's escaped again. I knew it would. He can't handle it----"

  "Has it got loose before?"

  "Yes. Once."

  He tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail, stroked his lighter. His face was a beaten mask of bronze and granite in the red glow as he drew the smoke down into the mainsprings of his leaping nerves.

  "I never dreamed it had come to that," he said. "Even last night, I wouldn't have believed it."

  "He wouldn't have shown you that. Even when he was boasting, he wouldn't have shown you. That was his secret . . . And I've helped him. Oh God," she said. "I can't go on!"

  He gripped her shoulders.

  "Carmen," he said quietly. "You must go away from here."

  "He'd kill me."

  "You must go away."

  The headlamps threw back enough light for him to see her face, tear-streaked and desperate.

  "He's mad," she said. "He must be Those horrible things . . . I'm afraid. I wanted to go away but he wouldn't let me. I can't go on. Something terrible is going to happen. One day I saw it catch a dog . . . Oh, my God, if you hadn't come when you did----"

  "Carmen." He still held her, speaking slowly and deliberately, putting every gift of sanity that he possessed into the level dominance of his voice. "You must not talk like this. You're safe now. Take hold of yourself."

  She nodded.

  "I know. I'm sorry. I'll be all right. But----"

  "Can you drive?"

  "Yes."

  He started the engine and turned the car round. Then he pushed the gear lever into neutral and set the hand brake.

  "Drive this car," he said. "Take it down to the gates and wait for me there. You'll be close to the highway, and there '11 be plenty of other cars passing for company. Even if you do see anything, you needn't be frightened. Treat the car like a tank and run it over. Ivar won't mind--he's got plenty more. And if you hear anything, don't worry. Give me half an hour, and if I'm not back go to Ivar's and talk to him."

  Her mouth opened incredulously.

  "You're not getting out again?"

  "I am. And I'm scared stiff." The ghost of a smile touched his lips, and then she saw that his face was stern and cold. "But I must talk to your uncle."

  He gripped her arm for a moment, kissed her lightly and got out. Without a backward glance he walked quickly away from the car, up the drive towards the house. A flashlight in his left hand lanced the. darkness ahead of him with its powerful beam, and he swung it from left to right as he walked, holding his gun in his right hand. His ears strained into the gloom which his eyes could not penetrate, probing the silence under the soft scuff of his own footsteps for any sound that would give him warning; but he forced himself not to look back. The palms of his hands were moist.

  The house loomed up in front of him. He turned off to one side of the building, following the direction in which he remembered that Dr Sardon's laboratory lay. Almost at once he saw the squares of lighted windows through the trees. A dull clang of sound came to him, followed by a sort of furious thumping. He checked himself; and then as he walked on more quickly some of the lighted windows went black. The door of the laboratory opened as the last light went out, and his torch framed Dr Sardon and the doorway in its yellow circle.

  Sardon was pale and dishevelled, his clothes awry. One of his sleeves was torn, and there was a scratch on his face from which blood ran. He flinched from the light as if it had burned him.

  "Who is that?" he shouted.

  "This is Simon Templar," said the Saint in a commonplace tone. "I just dropped in to say hullo."

  Sardon turned the switch down again and
went back into the laboratory. The Saint followed him.

  "You just dropped in, eh? Of course. Good. Why not? Did you run into Carmen, by any chance?"

  "I nearly ran over her," said the Saint evenly.

  The doctor's wandering glance snapped to his face. Sardon's hands were shaking, and a tiny muscle at the side of his mouth twitched spasmodically.

  "Of course," he said vacantly. "Is she all right?"

  "She is quite safe." Simon had put away his gun before the other saw it. He laid a hand gently on the other's shoulder. "You've had trouble here," he said.

  "She lost her nerve," Sardon retorted furiously. "She ran away. It was the worst thing she could do. They understand, these creatures. They are too much for me to control now. They disobey me. My commands must seem so stupid to their wonderful brains. If it had not been that this one is heavy and waiting for her time----"

  He checked himself.

  "I knew," said the Saint calmly.

  The doctor peered up at him out of the corners of his eyes.

  "You knew?" he repeated cunningly.

  "Yes. I saw it."

  "Just now?"

  Simon nodded.

  "You didn't tell us last night," he said. "But it's what I was afraid of. I have been thinking about it all day."

  "You've been thinking, have you? That's funny." Sardon chuckled shrilly. "Well, you're quite right. I've done it. I've succeeded. I don't have to work any more. They can look after themselves now. That's funny, isn't it?"

  "So it is true. I hoped I was wrong."

  Sardon edged closer to him.

  "You hoped you were wrong? You fool! But I would expect it of you. You are the egotistical human being who believes in his ridiculous conceit that the whole history of the world from its own birth, all the species and races that have come into being and been discarded, everything--everything has existed only to lead up to his own magnificent presence on the earth. Bah! Do you imagine that your miserable little life can stand in the way of the march of evolution? Your day is over! Finished! In there"--his arm stiffened and pointed--"in there you can find the matriarch of the new ruling race of the earth. At any moment she will begin to lay her eggs, thousands upon thousands of them, from which her sons and daughters will breed--as big as she is, with her power and her brains." His voice dropped. "To me it is only wonderful that I should have been Nature's chosen instrument to give them their rightful place a million years before Time would have opened the door to them."