Ice Station Zebra

12

It would be an understatement to say that I had the attention of the company. Maybe had I been a two-headed visitor from outer space, or had been about to announce the result of a multimillion-pound sweepstake in which they held the only tickets, or was holding straws for them to pick to decide who should go before the firing squad — maybe then they might have given me an even more exclusive degree of concentration. But I doubt it. It wouldn't have been possible.

"If you'll bear with me," I began, "first of all, I'd like to give you a little lecture in camera optics, and don't ask me what the hell that has to do with murder: it's got everything to do with it, as you'll find out soon enough.

"Film emulsion and lens quality being equal, the clarity of detail in any photograph depends upon the focal length of the lens — that is, the distance between the lens and the film. As recently as fifteen years ago the maximum focal length of any camera outside an observatory was about fifty inches. Those were used in reconnaissance planes in the later stages of the second world war. A small suitcase lying on the ground would show up on a photograph taken from a height of ten miles, which was pretty good for those days.

"But the U. S. Army and Air Force wanted bigger and better aerial cameras, and the only way this could be done was by increasing the focal length of the lens. There was obviously a superficial limit to this length, because the Americans wanted this camera to fit into a plane — or an orbiting satellite — and if you wanted a camera with a focal length of, say, two hundred and fifty inches, it was obviously going to be quite impossible to install a twenty-foot camera pointing vertically downward in a plane or small satellite. But scientists came up with a new type of camera, using the folded-lens principle, where the light, instead of coming down a long, straight barrel, is bounced around a series of angled mirrored corners, which permits the focal length to be increased greatly without having to enlarge the camera itself. By 1950 they'd developed a hundred-inch focal-length lens. It was quite an improvement on the old world war two cameras, which could barely pick up a suitcase at ten miles. This one could pick up a cigarette pack at ten miles. Then, ten years later, came what they called the Perkin-Elmer Roti satellite missile tracker, with a focal length of five hundred inches — equivalent to a barrel-type camera forty feet long. This one could pick up a cube of sugar at ten miles."

I looked inquiringly around the audience for signs of inattention. There were no signs of inattention. No lecturer ever had a keener audience than I had there.

"Three years later," I went on, "another American firm had developed this missile tracker into a fantastic camera that could be mounted in even a small-size satellite. Three years round-the-clock work to create this camera, but they thought it worth it. We don't know the focal length, it's never been revealed: we do know that, given the right 'atmospheric conditions, a white saucer on dark surface will show up clearly from three hundred miles up in space. This on a relatively tiny negative capable of almost infinite enlargement, for the scientists have also come up with a completely new film emulsion, still super-secret and a hundred times as sensitive as the finest films available on the commercial market today.

"This was to be fitted to the two-ton satellite the Americans called 'Samos III' — 'Samos' for 'Satellite and Missile Observation System.' It never was. This, the only camera of its kind in the world, vanished, hijacked in broad daylight, and, as we later learned, dismantled, flown from New York to Havana by a Polish jet-liner which had cleared for Miami and so avoided customs inspection.

"Four months ago this camera was launched in a Soviet satellite on a polar orbit, crossing the U.S. Middle West seven times a day. Those satellites can stay up indefinitely, but in just three days, with perfect weather conditions, the Soviets had all the pictures they ever wanted — pictures of every American missile-launching base west of the Mississippi. Every time this camera took a picture of a small section of the United States, another, smaller camera in the satellite, pointing vertically upward, took a fix on the stars. Then it was only a matter of checking map coordinates and they could have a Soviet intercontinental ballistics missile ranged in on every launching pad in America. But first they had to have the pictures.

"Radio transmission is no good, there's far too much quality and detail lost in the process — and you must remember that this was a relatively, tiny negative in the first place. So they had to have the actual films. There are two ways of doing this: bring the satellite back to earth, or have it eject a capsule with the films. The Americans, with their Discoverer tests, have perfected the art of using planes to snatch falling capsules from the sky. The Russians haven't, although we do know they have a technique for ejecting capsules should a satellite run amuck. So they had to bring the satellite down. They planned to bring it down some two hundred miles east of the Caspian. But something went wrong. Precisely what, we don't know, but our experts say that it could only have been due to the fact that the retro rockets on one side of the capsule failed to fire when given the radio signal to do so. You are beginning to understand, gentlemen?"

"We are beginning to understand indeed." It was Jeremy who spoke, his voice very soft. "The satellite took up a different orbit."

"That's what happened. The rockets firing on one side didn't slow her up any that mattered: they just knocked her far off course. A new and wobbly orbit that passed through Alaska, south over the Pacific, across Grahamland in Antarctica and directly south of South America, up over Africa and western Europe, then around the North Pole in a shallow curve, maybe two hundred miles distant from it at the nearest point.

"Now, the only way the Russians could get the films was by ejecting the capsule, for with retro rockets firing on one side only, they knew that even if they did manage to slow up the satellite sufficiently for it to leave orbit, they had no idea where it would go. But the damnably awkward part of it from the Russians' viewpoint was that nowhere in its orbit of the earth did the satellite pass over the Soviet Union or any sphere of Communist influence whatsoever. Worse, ninety per cent of its travel was travel over open sea, and if they brought it down there they would never see their films again as the capsule is so heavily coated with aluminum and Pyroceram to withstand the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere that it was much heavier than water. And, as I said, they had never developed the American know-how of snatching falling capsules out of the air — and you will appreciate that they couldn't very well ask the Americans to do the job for them.

"So they decided to bring it down in the only safe place open to them — either the polar ice cap in the north, or the Antarctic in the south. You will remember, Captain, that I told you I had just returned from the Antarctic. The Russians have a couple of geophysical stations there, and, up until a few days ago, we thought that there was a fifty-fifty chance that the capsule might be brought down there. But we were wrong. Their nearest station in the Antarctic was three hundred miles from the path of orbit — and no field parties were stirring from home."

"So they decided to bring it down in the vicinity of Drift Ice Station Zebra?" Jolly asked quietly. It was a sign of his perturbation that he didn't even call me "old boy."

"Drift Ice Station Zebra wasn't even in existence at the time the satellite' went haywire, although all preparations were complete. We had arranged for Canada to lend us a St. Lawrence ice breaker to set up the station, but the Russians, in a burst of friendly goodwill and international cooperation, offered us the atomic-powered «Lenin», the finest ice breaker in the world. They wanted to make good and sure that Zebra was set up in good time. It was. The eastwest drift of the ice cap was unusually slow this year, and almost eight weeks elapsed after the setting-up of the station until it was directly beneath the 'flight trajectory of the satellite."

"You «knew» what the Russians had in mind?" Hansen asked.

"We knew. But the Russians had no idea whatsoever that we were on to them. They had no idea that one of the pieces of equipment which was landed at Zebra was a satellite monitor which would tell Major Halliwell when the satellite received the radio signal to eject the capsule." I looked slowly around the Zebra survivors. "I'll wager none of you knew that. But Major Halliwell did — and the three other men who slept in his hut where this machine was located.

"What we did not know was the identity of the member of Zebra's company who had been suborned by the Russians. We were certain someone «must» have been, but we had no idea who it was. Every one of you had first-class security clearances. But someone was suborned — and that someone, when he arrived back in Britain, would have been a wealthy man for the rest of his life. In addition to leaving what was in effect an enemy agent planted in Zebra, the Soviets also left a portable monitor — an electronic device for tuning-in on a particular radio signal which would be activated inside the capsule at the moment of its ejection from the satellite. A capsule can be so accurately ejected three hundred miles up that it will land within a mile of its target, but the ice cap is pretty rough territory and dark most of the time, so this monitor would enable our friend to locate the capsule, which would keep on emitting its signal for at least, I suppose, twenty-four hours after landing. Our friend took the monitor and went out looking for the capsule. He found it, released it from its drogue, and brought it back to the station. You are still with me, gentlemen? Especially one particular gentleman?"

"I think we are all with you, Dr. Carpenter," Commander Swanson said softly. "Every last one of us."

"Fine. Well, unfortunately, Major Halliwell and his three companions also knew that the satellite had ejected its capsule — don't forget that they were monitoring this satellite twenty-four hours a day. They knew that someone was going to go looking for it pretty soon, but who that someone would be they had no idea. Anyway, Major Halliwall posted one of his men to keep watch. It was a wild night, bitterly cold, with a gale blowing an ice.storm before it, but he kept a pretty good watch all the same. He either bumped into our friend returning with the capsule or, more probably, saw a light in a cabin, investigated, found our friend stripping the film from the capsule, and, instead of going quietly away and reporting to Major Halliwell, he went in and challenged this man. If that was the way of it, it was a bad mistake, the last he ever made. He got a knife between the ribs." I gazed at all the Zebra survivors in turn. "I wonder which one of you did it? Whoever it was, he wasn't very expert. He broke off the blade inside the chest. I found it there." I was looking at Swanson, and he didn't bat an eyelid. He knew I hadn't found the blade there; he had found the haft in the gas tank. But there was time enough to tell them that.

"When the man he had posted didn't turn up, Major Halliwell got worried, it must have been something like that. I don't know and it doesn't matter. Our friend with the broken knife was on the alert now, he knew someone was on to him — it must have come as a pretty severe shock — he'd thought himself completely unsuspected — and when the second man the major sent turned up, he was ready for him. He had to kill him, for the first man was lying dead in his cabin. Apart from his broken knife, he also had a gun. He used it.

"Both those men had come from Halliwell's cabin. The killer knew that Halliwell must have sent them and that he and the other man still in the major's cabin would be around in double-quick time if the second watcher didn't report back immediately. He decided not to wait for that: he'd burned his bridges, anyway. He took his gun, went into Major Halliwell's cabin, and shot him and the other man as they lay on their beds. I know that because the bullets in their heads entered low from the front and emerged high at the back — the angle the bullets would naturally take if the killer was standing at the foot of their beds and fired at them as they were lying down. I suppose this is as good a time as any to say that my name is not really Carpenter. It's Halliwell. Major Halliwell was my elder brother."

"Good God!" Dr. Jolly whispered. "Good God above!"

"One thing the, killer knew it was essential to do right away — to conceal the traces of his crime. There was only one way: burn the bodies out of all recognition. So he dragged a couple of drums of oil out of the fuel store, poured them against the walls of Major Halliwell's hut — he'd already pulled in there the first two men he'd killed — and set fire to it. For good measure, he also set fire to the fuel store. A thorough type, my friends, a man who never did anything by halves."

The men seated around the wardroom table were dazed and shocked, uncomprehending and incredulous. But they were incredulous only because the enormity of the whole thing was beyond them. But not beyond them all.

"I'm a man with a curious turn of mind," I went on. "I wondered why sick, burned, exhausted men had wasted their time and their little strength in shifting the dead men into the lab. Because someone had suggested that it might be a good thing to do, the decent thing to do. The real reason, of course, was to discourage anyone from going there. I looked under the floorboards and what did I find? Forty Nife cells in first-class condition, stores of food, a radio-sonde balloon, a hydrogen cylinder for inflating the balloon. I had expected to find the Nife cells. Kinnaird here has told us that there were a good many reserves,' but Nife cells won't be destroyed in a fire. Buckled and bent a bit, but not destroyed. I hadn't expected to find the other items of equipment, but they made everything clear.

"The killer had had bad luck on two counts — being found out and with the weather. The weather really put the crimp on all his plans. The idea was that when conditions were favorable he'd send the films up into the sky attached to a radio-sonde balloon which could be swept up by a Russian plane. Snatching a falling capsule out of the sky is very tricky indeed: snaring a stationary balloon is dead easy. The relatively unused Nife cells our friend used for keeping in radio touch with his friends to let them know when the weather had cleared and when he was going to send the balloon up. There is no privacy on the air waves, so he used a special code. When he no longer had any need for it, he destroyed the code by the only safe method of destruction in the Arctic — fire. I found scores of pieces of charred paper imbedded in the walls of one, of the huts where the wind had carried them from the met office after our friend had thrown the ashes away.

"The killer also made sure that only those few worn-out Nife cells were used to send the S.O.S.'s and to contact the «Dolphin». By losing contact with us so frequently, and by sending such a blurred transmission, he tried to delay our arrival here so as to give the weather a chance to clear up and let him fly off his balloon. Incidentally, you may have heard the radio reports — it was in all the British newspapers — that Russian as well as American and British planes scoured this area immediately after the fire. The British and Americans were looking for Zebra: the Russians were looking for a radio-sonde balloon. So was the ice breaker «Dvina» when it tried to smash its way through here a few days ago. But there have been no more Russian planes: our friend radioed his friends to say that there was no hope of the weather clearing, that the «Dolphin» had arrived, and that they would have to take the films back with them on the submarine."

"One moment, Dr. Carpenter," Swanson interrupted in a careful sort of voice. "Are you saying that those films are aboard this ship now?"

"I'll be very much surprised if they aren't, Commander. The other attempt to delay us, of course, was by making a direct attack on the «Dolphin» itself. When it became known that the «Dolphin» was to make an attempt to reach Zebra, orders went through to Scotland to cripple the ship. Red Clydeside is no more Red than any other maritime center in Britain, but you'll find Communists in practically every shipyard in the country — and, more often than not, their mates don't know who they are. There was no intention, of course, of causing any fatal accident — and, as far as whoever was responsible for leaving the tube doors open was concerned, there was no reason why there should be. International espionage in peacetime shuns violence — which is why our friend here is going to be very unpopular with his masters. Like Britain or America, they'll adopt any legitimate or illegitimate tactic to gain their espionage end — but they stop short of murder, just as we do. Murder was no part of the Soviet plan."

"Who is it, Dr. Carpenter?" Jeremy said very quietly. "For God's sake, who is it? There's nine of us here and — do you «know» who it is?"

"I know. And only six, not nine, can be under suspicion. The ones who kept radio watches after the disaster. Captain Folsom and the two Harringtons here were completely unmobilized. We have the word of all of you for that. So that, Jeremy, just leaves yourself, Kinnaird, Dr. Jolly, Hassard, Naseby and Hewson. Murder for gain and high treason. There's only one answer for that. The trial will be over the day it begins: three weeks later it will all be over. You're a very clever man, my friend. You're more than that: you're brilliant. But I'm afraid it's the end of the road for you, Dr. Jolly."

They didn't get it. For long seconds they didn't get it. They were too shocked, too stunned. They'd heard my words, all right, but the meaning hadn't registered immediately. But it was beginning to register now, for, like marionettes under the guidance of a master puppeteer, they all slowly turned their heads and stared at Jolly. Jolly himself rose slowly to his feet and took two paces toward me, his eyes wide, his face shocked, his mouth working.

"Me?" His voice was low and hoarse and unbelieving. "«Me?» Are you — are you mad, Dr. Carpenter? In the name of' God, man — "

I hit him. I don't know why I hit him — a crimson haze seemed to blur my vision — and Jolly was staggering back to crash on the deck, holding both hands to smashed lips and nose, before I could realize what I had done. I think if I had had a knife or a gun in my hand then, I would have killed him. I would have killed him the way I would have killed a fer-de-lance, a black-widow spider or any other such dark and evil and deadly thing, without thought of compunction or mercy. Gradually the haze cleared from my eyes. No one had stirred. No one had stirred an inch. Jolly pushed himself painfully to his knees and then his feet and collapsed heavily in his seat by the table. He was holding a bloodsoaked handkerchief to his face. There was utter silence in the room.

"My brother, Jolly," I said. "My brother and all the dead men on Zebra. Do you know what I hope?" I said. "I hope that something goes wrong with the hangman's rope and that you take a long, long time to die."

He took the handkerchief from his mouth.

"You're a crazy man," he whispered between smashed and already puffing lips. "You don't know what you're saying."

"The jury at the Old Bailey will be the best judge of that. I've been on to you now, Jolly, for almost exactly sixty hours."

"What did you say?" Swanson demanded. "You've known for sixty hours!"

"I knew I'd have to face your wrath sometime or other, Commander," I said. Unaccountably, I was beginning to feel very tired, weary, and heart-sick of the whole business. "But if you had known who he was, you'd have locked him up right away. You said so in so many words. I wanted to see where the trail led to in Britain, who his associates and contacts would be. I had splendid visions of smashing a whole spy ring. But I'm afraid the trail is cold. It ends right here. Please hear me out.

"Tell me, did no one think it strange that when Jolly came staggering out of his hut when it caught fire he should have collapsed and remained that way? Jolly claimed that he had been asphyxiated. Well, he wasn't asphyxiated inside the hut, because he managed to come out under his own steam. Then he collapsed. Curious. Fresh air invariably revives people. But not Jolly. He's a special breed. He wanted to make it clear to everyone that he had nothing to do with the fire. Just to drive home the point, he has repeatedly emphasized that he is not a man of action. If he isn't, then I've never met one."

"You can hardly call that proof of guilt," Swanson interrupted.

"I'm not adducing evidence," I said wearily. "I'm merely introducing pointers. Pointer number 2. You, Naseby, felt pretty bad about your failure to wake up your two friends, Flanders and Bryce. You could have shaken them for an hour and not woken them up. Jolly here used either ether or chloroform to lay them out. This was after he had killed Major Halliwell and the three others, but before he started getting busy with matches. He realized that if he burned the place down, there might be a long, long wait before rescue came, and he was going to make damned certain that he wasn't going to go hungry. If the rest of you had died from starvation, well, that was just your bad luck. But Flanders and Bryce lay between him and the food. Didn't it strike you as very strange, Naseby, that your shouting and shaking had no effect? The only reason could be that they had been drugged — and only one man had access to drugs. Also, you said that both Hewson and yourself felt pretty groggy. No wonder. It was a pretty small hut, and the chloroform or ether fumes had reached and affected you and Hewson. Normally, you'd have smelled it on waking up, but the stink of burning diesel obliterates every other smell. Again, I know this is not proof of any kind.

"Third pointer. I asked Captain Folsom this morning who had given the orders for the dead men to be put in the lab. He said he had. But, he remembered, it was Jolly's suggestion to him. Something learnedly medical about helping the morale of the survivors by putting the charred corpses out of sight.

"Fourth pointer. Jolly said that «how» the fire started was unimportant. A crude attempt to side-track me. Jolly knew as well as I did that it was all-important. I suppose, by the way, Jolly, that you deliberately jammed all the fire extinguishers you could before you started the fire. About that fire, Commander. Remember you were a bit suspicious of Hewson because he said the fuel drums hadn't started exploding until he was on his way to the main bunkhouse? He was telling the truth. There were no fewer than four drums in the fuel stores that didn't explode. The ones Jolly used to pour against the huts to start the fire. How am I doing, Dr. Jolly?"

"It's all a nightmare," he said very quietly. "It's a nightmare. Before God, I know nothing of any of this."

"Pointer number five. For some reason that is unclear to me, Jolly wanted to delay the «Dolphin» on its return trip. He could best do this, he decided, if Bolton and Brownell, the two' very sick men still left out on the station, were judged too sick to be transferred to the «Dolphin». The snag was that there were two other doctors around who might say that they «were» fit to be transferred. So he tried, with a fair measure of success, to eliminate us.

"First Benson. Didn't it strike you as strange, Commander, that the request for the survivors to be allowed to attend the funeral of Grant and Lieutenant Mills should have come from Naseby in the first place, then Kinnaird? Jolly, as the senior man of the party, with Captain Folsom temporarily unfit, was the obvious man to make the approach, but he didn't want to go calling too much attention to himself. Doubtless by dropping hints, he engineered it so that someone else should do it for him. Now, Jolly had noticed how glasssmooth and slippery the ice-banked sides of the sail were and he made a point of seeing that Benson went up the rope immediately ahead of him. You must remember it was almost pitch dark — just light enough for Jolly to make out the vague outline of Benson's head from the wash of light from the bridge as it cleared the top of the sail. A swift outward tug on the rope and Benson overbalanced. It seemed that he had fallen on top of Jolly. But only seemed. The loud, sharp crack I heard a fraction of a second after Benson's body struck was not caused by his head hitting the ice — it was caused by Jolly here trying to kick his head off. Did you hurt your toes much, Jolly?"

"You're mad," he said mechanically. "This is utter nonsense. Even if it wasn't nonsense, you couldn't prove a word of it."

"We'll see. Jolly claimed that Benson fell on top of him. He even flung himself on the ice and cracked his head to give some verisimilitude to his story. Our friend never misses any of the angles. I felt the slight bump on his head. But he wasn't laid out. He was faking. He recovered just that little bit too quickly and easily when he got back to the sick bay. And it was then that he made his first mistake, the mistake that put me on to him — and should have put me on guard for an attack against myself. You were there, Commander."

"I've missed everything else," Swanson said bitterly. "Do you want me to spoil a hundred per cent record?"

"When Jolly came to, he saw Benson lying there. All he could see of him was a blanket and a big gauze pack covering the back of his head. As far as Jolly was concerned, it could have been anybody — it had been pitch dark when the accident occurred. But what did he say? I remember his exact words. He said: 'Of course, of course. Yes, that's it. He fell on top of me, didn't he?' «He never thought to ask who it was» — the natural, the inevitable question in the circumstances. But Jolly didn't have to ask. He knew."

"He knew." Swanson stared at Jolly with cold, bleak eyes, and there was no doubt in his mind now about Jolly. "You're right, Dr. Carpenter. He knew."

"And then he had a go at me. Can't prove a thing, of course. But he was there when I asked you where the medical store was, and he no doubt nipped down smartly behind Henry and myself and loosened the latch on the hatch cover. But he didn't achieve quite the same high degree of success this time. Even so, when we went out to the station next morning, he still tried to stop Brownell and Bolton from being transferred back to the ship by saying Bolton was too ill. But you overruled him."

"I was right about Bolton," Jolly said. He seemed strangely quiet now. "Bolton died."

"He died," I agreed. "He died because you murdered him, and for Bolton alone I can make certain you hang. For a reason I still don't know, Jolly was still determined to stop this ship. Delay it, anyway. I think he wanted only an hour or two's delay. So he proposed to start a small fire, nothing much, just enough to cause a small scare and have the reactor shut down temporarily. As the site of his fire.he chose the machinery space — the one place in the ship where he could casually let something drop and where it would lie hidden, for hours if need be, among the maze of pipes down there. In the sick bay he concocted some type of delayed-action chemical fuse that would give off plenty of smoke but very little flame — there are a dozen combinations of acids and chemicals that can bring this about, and our friend will be a highly trained expert well versed in all of them. Now, all Jolly wanted was an excuse to pass through the engine room when it would be nice and quiet and virtually deserted. In the middle of the night. He fixed this, too. He can fix anything. He's a very, very clever man indeed, is our friend here:,he's also an utterly ruthless fiend.

"Late in the evening of the night before the fire, the good healer here made a round of his patients. I went with him. One of the men he treated was Bolton, in the nucleonics lab — and, of course, to get to the nucleonics lab you have to pass through the engine room. There was an enlisted man watching over the patients, and Jolly left special word that he was to be called at any hour if Bolton became any worse. He was called. I checked with the engine-room staff after the fire. The engineer officer on watch and two others were in the maneuvering room, but an engineman carrying out a routine lubrication job saw him passing through the engine room about 1:30 a.m. in answer to a call from the man watching over the patients. He took the opportunity to drop his little chemical fuse as he was passing by the machinery space. What he didn't know was that his little toy lodged on or near the oil-saturated lagging on the housing of the starboard turbo generator, and that when it went off, it would generate sufficient heat to set the sheathing on fire."

Swanson looked at Jolly, bleakly and for a long time, then turned to me and shook his head. "I can't buy that, Dr. Carpenter. This phone call because a patient just happens to turn sick. Jolly is not the man to leave «anything» to chance."

"He isn't," I agreed. "He didn't. Up in the refrigerator in the sick bay I have an exhibit for the Old Bailey. A sheet of aluminum foil liberally covered with Jolly's fingerprints. Smeared on this foil is the remains of a salve. That foil was what Jolly had bandaged on Bolton's burned forearm that night, just after he had given him pain-killing shots — Bolton was suffering very badly. But before Jolly put the salve on the foil he spread on something else first, a layer of sodium chloride — common or garden household salt. Jolly knew that the drugs he had given Bolton would keep him under for three or four hours: he also knew that by the time Bolton had regained consciousness, his body heat would have thinned the salve and brought the salt into contact with the raw flesh on the forearm. He knew that Bolton, when he came out from the effects of the drugs, would come out screaming in agony. Can you imagine what it must have been like? The whole forearm a mass of raw flesh — and covered with salt? When he died soon after, he died from shock. Our good healer here — a lovable little lad, isn't he?

"Well, that's Jolly. Incidentally, you can discount most of the gallant doctor's heroism during the fire — although he was understandably as anxious as any of us that we survive. The first time he went into the engine room it was too damned hot and uncomfortable for his liking, so he just lay down on the floor and let someone carry him for'ard to where the fresh air was. Later — "

"He had his mask off," Hansen objected.

"He took it off. «You» can hold your breath for ten or fifteen seconds — don't you think Jolly can, too? Later on, when he was performing his heroics in the engine room, it was because conditions there were better, conditions outside worse — and because by -going into the engine room he was entitled to a closed-circuit breathing set. Jolly got more clean air last night than any of us. He doesn't mind if he causes someone to die screaming his head off in agony — but he himself isn't going to suffer the slightest degree of hardship. Not if he can help it. Isn't that so, Jolly?"

He didn't answer.

"Where are the films, Jolly?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said in a quiet, toneless voice. "Before God, my hands are clean."

"How about your fingerprints on that foil with the salt on it?"

"Any doctor can make a mistake."

"My God! Mistake! Where are they, Jolly — the films?"

"For God's sake, leave me alone," he said tiredly.

"Have it your own way." I looked at Swanson. "Got some nice secure place where you can lock this character up?"

"I certainly have," Swanson said grimly. "I'll conduct him there in person."

"No one's conducting anyone anywhere," Kinnaird said. He was looking at me, and I didn't care very much for the way he was looking at me. I didn't care very much either for, what he held in his hand: a very nasty-looking Mauser. It was cradled in his fist as if it had grown there, and it was pointing straight between my eybs.