The Pillars of Salt Affair

One

Illya Kuryakin thought he was dead. He lay in a sea of blackness, deep, impenetrable, and his first conscious thought was. So this is what it’s like. It wasn’t so bad, he decided. Just blackness. Nothing but a sea of blackness.

He smelled food. That was strange, a part of his mind said. You shouldn’t be able to smell food if you were dead. He tried to identify the smell. Chili peppers.

Chili peppers?

He became aware that the blackness was not as deep as it had appeared at first. There seemed to be a light there, far away, almost a feeling of light, like you had when you were sleeping and someone turned on a dim lamp somewhere in the room.

Illya realized his eyes were closed. He tried to open them. The lids seemed stuck together. He concentrated on opening his eyes, and finally one parted into a slit. He was looking at a ceiling. It was rough-hewn, made of what seemed to be wood-braced adobe. He got the eye open all the way then.

He was in a single room, he saw, the walls of dark adobe like the ceiling. The light he had seen came from a small oil lantern on a wooden table at the far end There was a door there, closed. The smell of chili peppers seemed to come from the other side of the door.

He was lying on a straw mattress supported by a rough-wood frame. There was a thin blanket covering him to the waist. He saw that his chest was bare, and that he seemed to be wrapped in some kind of white cloth strips across his stomach and chest.

He tried to sit up then, and a sharp, biting pain stabbed through his right side, ripping a gasp from his throat, and he sank back down again. But the shock of the sudden pain cleared his mind completely, and he was instantly alert.

Illya Kuryakin began to remember, then.

He remembered the hurtling, downward flight of the sedan as it left the mountain road with its blown tire. He remembered his futile efforts to slow it, and the pressure on his arms as he tried t manipulate the wheel. He remembered the jarring impact as the sedan crashed into the rocks on the slope, and then the floating, helpless feeling as they became airborne. He remembered the right door being wrenched open, and Solo being thrown out, and then his own frantic tearing at the door, his body leaving the sedan, spinning into the air.

He remembered rolling himself into a tight ball in midair, and automatic reaction, and then solid collision with the ground, and rolling, over and over, downward, and his desperate clawing at the rocky earth to stop his momentum, and then simultaneous knives of pain in his side and the back of his head. After that there was only blackness.

Illya felt himself sweating. Where was he? How had he gotten here? And what had happened to Napoleon Solo? Maybe.

He heard the door at the far side of the room open. An old man came inside. Illya could see his face, wrinkled, leathery, in the flickering light from the lantern. He looked to be Indian.

The man came across the room cautiously, peering down at Illya. Seeing he was awake, the old man’s lined face broke into a toothless grin. He said something in what Illya supposed was Zapotec dialect.

Illya shook his head slowly, indicating that he did not understand. The man nodded and left the room. But he returned seconds later with a young girl in her late teens. The girl went to stand above Illya. She smiled shyly.

“Can you speak English?” Illya asked her. His voice was thick.

“Yes, a little,” the girl said, pronouncing each word carefully. “I have been to school to learn.”

“Good,” Illya said. “Now tell me, where are we?”

“The house of my father, Juan Corrazon,” the girl said.

“Yes, but where? Teclaxican?”

The girl explained. Teclaxican was many miles to the west.

Illya said, “Are we near the lake?”

“Yes.”

“How did I get here?”

“My father found you near the wreckage of an automobile,” the girl said. “He was gathering firewood in the valley. He brought you here on the burro.”

“When?”

“Tonight, after supper.”

Illya could see through the single window in the room that it was dark outside. There was no sign of a moon. “What time is it?” he asked the girl.

“It is near midnight,” she said. “We have been waiting for you to awaken.”

Midnight. He had been unconscious for more than eight hours. He thought, What about Solo? He said to the girl, “Ask your father if he saw anyone else near the wreckage. Another man.”

The girl spoke rapidly to her father. The old man shook his head emphatically. Illya wet his lips. Solo had been thrown clear he knew that. Suppose he was still up there on the slope, hurt, dying, or... He had to get to Teclaxican.

He tried to raise up again, and the biting pain in his side forced him down. His breath came in short gasps.

The girl stepped forward and put her hand gently on his shoulder. “You must lie still,” she said. “You have broken ribs. I could feel them when I bandaged you.”

“I’ve got to get to Teclaxican,” Illya said through clenched teeth.

“In the morning I will go for the doctor,” the girl said. “Tonight you must rest.”

“You don’t understand,” Illya said. “I have a friend who was in that car with me when it went off the road. He’s still on that slope somewhere. I’ve got to get help.”

Again, Kuryakin tried to rise. The pain brought tears to his eyes. Groaning, he sank back.

The girl spoke to her father again. He shook his head. She seemed to be arguing with him. Finally, the old man gave a reluctant grunt and left the room.

The girl said, “I will take the burro to Teclaxican. I will bring the doctor back here.”

“You’ll go now?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” Illya said. “And bring the policia back with you.”

“Policia?” the girl said, “subjefe Hernandez?”

“If that’s his name,” Illya said. He thought of something. “Where’s my jacket?”

“On the chair,” the girl said.

“Bring it here, will you?”

The girl brought him the jacket. Grimly he searched the pockets. His U.N.C.L.E. communicator was gone, undoubtedly lost on the slope. He threw the jacket down in frustration.

“I will go now,” the girl said.

“Hurry,” Illya Kuryakin said. “As fast as you can.”

Two

Subjefe Hernandez was one of the fattest men Illya Kuryakin had ever seen. He weighed in excess of three hundred pounds, and wore a soiled khaki uniform and a black-visored cap that was too small for his huge head. He was obviously not pleased at having been gotten out of bed in the middle of the night. He scowled down at Illya as the small, hawk-faced doctor probed with gentle fingers at his side. The girl had brought them from Teclaxican, arriving just a few moments before in a vintage station wagon belonging to the subjefe. She had been gone two hours.

“You will tell me again what happened,” the subjefe said.

For the third time, Illya explained about the accident, about how they had been driven off the road by the jeep. The subjefe did not appear to believe him.

“Senor,” he said, “I have had a very difficult day. This afternoon, my wife tells me she is to have another child. Tonight, something strange happens to the water in Teclaxican. And now, you have gotten me out of bed to...”

“What happened to the water?” Illya interrupted. But he already knew the answer.

“It begins to taste of salt,” the subjefe said. “Our fresh mountain water. And then there is no more water. I turn on the faucet... nothing. I do not understand it.”

Illya debated telling about the THRUSH tests, and decided against it. He could trust no one; somebody in Teclaxican had seen he and Solo leave that afternoon, and had sent the jeep after them. But he had to get to the hotel, to the spare communicator in one of the suitcases there. He said once again that his friend was lying somewhere on the slope, a victim of the accident.

“There is nothing we can do tonight, senor,” the subjefe told him. “In the morning, we will send out a search party to look for your friend.”

Illya gritted his teeth and kept quiet. It wasn’t doing him any good, arguing.

The doctor finished his examination, announced that Illya had three cracked ribs and a mild concussion, and proceeded to tape him tightly. Illya thanked the old man and the girl for their help, and then he, the subjefe and the doctor got into the ancient station wagon for the ride back to Teclaxican.

After some argument, Illya Kuryakin convinced the doctor that he was well enough to spend the night unattended at the hotel, promising to stop for further examination in the morning. Alone in his room at last, Illya took the spare U.N.C.L.E. communicator from its hiding place in the false compartment under one of the suitcases and put through a Channel D call to Alexander Waverly in New York.

He was not surprised to find his superior still at headquarters. He explained what had happened in Teclaxican that day, and that he was worried about Solo’s safety. Waverly told him that he would dispatch a team of agents to Teclaxican, and that Illya was to wait until they arrived before returning to the mountain lake. The chief of U.N.C.L.E. operations seemed greatly disturbed, and Illya sensed that not all of that perplexity stemmed from his report. But Waverly did not elaborate, and Illya knew better than to question him.

Late the following morning a distraught Subjefe Hernandez, his authority challenged by the arrival of the team of U.N.C.L.E. agents, led them up the winding road toward the lake. Illya, stiff, his side aching, his vision blurred from lack of sleep, sat grimly beside the subjefe in the lead jeep.

An irate and hungover Diego Santiago y Vasquez was there as well, having insisted that he be allowed to accompany them when he was told what had happened to his battered sedan.

They went first to the lake, along the path near the slide. Illya had wanted to search for Solo... he had not shown up in Teclaxican that night, and no one had seen nor heard from him-but he knew that if THRUSH were still in the area they had to be dealt with first.

But they found nothing at the lake. Illya had half-expected to see a gleaming crystallized floor of salt when they reached it, but there was only blue water, shining under the sun. It seemed THRUSH had pulled out its forces sometime during the night, either because they had finished their testing there or because they had somehow learned or were fearful of U.N.C.L.E.’s impending arrival. At any rate they were gone, and as had been the case at the other test sites, they had left no traces.

The men set about searching the slope where the sedan had hurtled downward the day before. Illya, tramping along the rocky, brush-covered ground, steeled himself for the discovery of Solo’s body.

But they did not find his body. They found nothing, except for a small, bent object one of the men discovered near a group of rocks. Illya knew immediately that it was Solo’s communicator.

He did not know what to think. Was Solo dead? If so, where was his body? Had THRUSH captured him? If so, where had they taken him? And what were they planning to do with him? Illya knew none of the answers. He knew only one thing for certain.

Napoleon Solo had vanished.

Three

Alexander Waverly said, “I can readily understand your concern, Mr. Kuryakin. I must confess I am concerned as well. But THRUSH security is the tightest we have ever encountered. There simply is nothing we have been able to learn about Mr. Solo’s whereabouts.”

Illya said nothing. It had been three days since his return from Mexico, and in those three days every U.N.C.L.E. office, every agent, had been placed on standby alert, every informant and source of information available to U.N.C.L.E. had been exhausted. No one, it seemed, knew or had found out anything concerning Napoleon Solo.

But there was another, even more important, reason for U.N.C.L.E. forces having been alerted and mobilized into readiness. There had been no more THRUSH tests.

Waverly and the other members of Section I knew that this could only mean one thing: THRUSH, apparently satisfied by their experimentation with the salt chemical, were on the verge of whatever major offensive their Council had set forth. And there was nothing U.N.C.L.E. could do except wait.

Their scientists, working feverishly, had learned nothing more from the sample of rock salt. The only new development had come from Section II, and that was the reason Waverly had called Illya to his office.

U.N.C.L.E. was now certain that they knew the name of the man who had developed the salt chemical.

Illya Kuryakin and Mr. Waverly were seated at the circular briefing table now. Illya, his injured side still bandaged heavily, sat uncomfortably on his chair, fidgeting. He had slept very little in the past three days, plagued with worry over Solo’s safety. He had voiced those worries to Mr. Waverly just a moment ago. The waiting had begun to tell on his nerves; he wanted to do something, anything.

The screen on the wall before the briefing table flashed on to reveal a newspaper photograph, taken at a large gathering of some type. In the foreground were a group of three men, one of which had been looking toward the camera when the picture was snapped.

May Heatherly’s voice came to them from Section III, somewhere inside the steel complex of U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. “This picture was taken at the National Scientific Convention in Zurich seven years ago. The man looking at the camera is Dr. Mordecai Sagine.”

Illya studied the man. He was short, squat, with a head that appeared much too large for his body, although that impression was not entirely an accurate one since he had a thick, leonine mane of light-colored hair that grew almost to his shoulders.

He looked, Illya thought, like an anachronistic rock-and-roll singer. The eyes, covered with heavy brows, were stark and penetrating, and his lower lip protruded a good inch below his upper lip. If he had a chin, it was not visible in the photograph. All in all, Illya decided, he had that type of face that frightened little children.

May Heatherly’s voice said, “During the late nineteen fifties, Dr. Sagine received national prominence for his work in chemical analysis, most particularly in the early efforts to convert sea water into drinking water. He had been engaged in private research, with a government grant-in-aid. But in the early sixties he startled the scientific world with his announcement that he had discovered a reverse process, that is to say he had learned the secret of converting fresh water into salt water through the use of a catalytic chemical element.

“Even though he conducted several public experiments to prove his discovery, his colleagues ridiculed it as impractical and valueless. Some even went so far as to term the entire process an elaborate hoax.

“Dr. Sagine disappeared shortly thereafter, and since that time no one has seen nor heard from him. There was some speculation that, angered over the treatment he had received, he had defected, but this was never borne out. The photograph you see here is the only one U.N.C.L.E. has been able to obtain, and as far as we know the only one of Dr. Sagine in existence.”

The photograph disappeared from the screen, and it went dark again. Illya looked at Mr. Waverly. “Sounds like just the type of disillusioned individual THRUSH would entice into its fold.”

“Exactly, Mr. Kuryakin,” Waverly said. “Even though Dr. Sagine’s original chemical process did nothing more than change fresh water to salt water, there has been an interim period of seven years to allow him to finalize it, hence producing crystallized salt from fresh water, and to develop an antidote.”

“But we’re still right where we started,” Illya said. “We may know who he is, but we don’t know where he is, and we don’t know what THRUSH is planning to do with his discovery. We don’t know what the chemical is and we don’t know how to counteract it.”

“We are faced with an extremely difficult situation,” Waverly agreed. “Extremely difficult. But I am afraid the only position we can adopt at present is one of patient watchfulness.”

“All we need is one little clue, something to go on,” Illya said. He slammed his fist on the table in a rare display of anger and frustration.

“We have every department, every man, in constant vigil,” Alexander Waverly said. “We shall uncover some pertinent development, Mr. Kuryakin. You may rest assured of that.”

Illya’s face was tightly set. “It had better be soon,” he said, and added cryptically, “Before it’s too late.”

Four

The break they needed came much sooner than they had anticipated. And it came, not from the combined forces of U.N.C.L.E., but strangely enough from the Managing editor of Travelogue Magazine.

Two hours after Illya Kuryakin had been briefed on Dr. Sagine, a call came through the switchboard at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters for him. He had remained in Waverly’s office, sitting silently in one of the chairs, the tenseness in his body mounting with each passing minute. The jangling of the telephone on Waverly’s desk jerked him upright on the chair, and he leaned forward as his superior answered it.

When Waverly told him the call was for him, Illya jumped from the chair, grabbing the receiver to his ear.

The man on the other end of the wire introduced himself as Robert Pausen, managing editor of Travelogue Magazine. He told Illya that he had just received a telephone call, asking for one of his photographers. The photographer’s name, the caller had said, was Illya Kuryakin.

Illya frowned, not fully understanding at first. Then he remembered that, to insure their cover in Mexico, Travelogue Magazine had been informed of the guise and had agreed to cooperate fully if any queries were received by them. Now, Illya asked the managing editor who the caller had been.

“A woman,” Pausen said. “A Miss Estrellita Valdone.”

Estrellita Valdone? The woman they had met at the hotel in Teclaxican. Illya scowled. What reason could she possibly have for contacting him? Unless- He asked, “Did she say why she had called?”

“No,” Pausen said. “Just that it was urgent she speak with you.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her I would try to locate you.”

“Did she leave a number?”

“Yes,” the managing editor said. He gave it.

Illya wrote it down on a scratch pad, thanked Pausen, and hung up. He stood tugging at his ear thoughtfully, aware that Waverly was looking at him. He explained the nature of the call quickly.

Waverly tapped the dottle from his pipe. “You should call the woman immediately,” he said. “It may be that she has something to tell us about the events in Teclaxican.”

Illya Kuryakin nodded. He picked up the phone, contacted one of the U.N.C.L.E. operators, and gave her the number. He waited, drumming his fingers on the desk top.

When the phone was answered on the other end, Illya recognized the voice as that of Estrellita Valdone. He explained that his editor had contacted him, and that he was returning her call.

Illya stood listening, nodding silently as Estrellita spoke. He scribbled on the scratch pad. A moment later, he hung up the phone and turned to Waverly,

“Well, Mr. Kuryakin?” Waverly said.

“Just what we’ve been waiting for,” Illya said, excitement in his voice. “She wants me to meet her at nine o’clock tonight.”

“Yes!” Waverly said. “And why does she want to meet with you?”

“She says she knows where Napoleon is.”

Five

Napoleon Solo did not know where he was. When he regained consciousness, he was lying on a cot in a small room with no doors and no windows. The walls of the room were painted green, a pale pastel shade of green. There was nothing in the room except the cot.

At first his mind refused to function. Thoughts became separate entities, apart from each other. A single thought would touch his mind, and then fade, to be replaced by another. He tried to concentrate on each thought, fuse it with a second, achieve some continuity. But it was as if he were dreaming, a deep, troubled dream, from which he sought desperately hard to escape, to wake from, and could not.

He was aware, separately, of his surroundings. First the walls. And then the color of the walls. The ceiling. The cot on which he was lying. The fact that the room had no doors or windows. Each of these facts touched his mind, fled, returned again, one by one, intermingling with other facts, other thoughts, but never two in the same sequence.

He fought the silent battle within his mind for an interminable period. There was no time for him; there was only the mental conflict, the intense pressure exerted on every cell in his brain that stretched dangerously taut the fine line between rationality and insanity.

His body was rigid, immobile, on the cot, and he stared at the ceiling above and knew nothing of the silent, waiting eyes hidden behind one-way view-plates in the walls, watching the struggle that went on within him.

Reason returned to his mind with infinite, but inexorable, slowness. Finally he was able to grasp one of the ephemeral thoughts, hold it, and it remained, stark and vivid. The walls were green. It was very odd, the thought said, that the walls should be green. Four green walls.

Where was the door? There should be a door in one of the four green walls.

He felt the fusion of those two images, and then, slowly, there was the related knowledge of the cot on which he lay, and of the fact that his entire body was soaked in hot, flowing perspiration. He was aware, in that moment, of the lessening of pressure on his brain, and he felt his body relax, lose its rigidity. A sense of great relief, like a purge flooded through him, to be followed almost immediately by a heavy drowsiness that seized the lids of his eyes and pulled them closed.

He had won the battle, and now he slept. When he awoke again, there was full clarity.

He was instantly aware of his surroundings, and even though his head pounded with an intenseness he had seldom experienced, he was able to recall everything that had happened before he had been exposed to the nerve gas. He had only vague recollection of its effects on his mind; it was as if he had just wakened from a nightmare.

He lay looking around him. A cell, he thought. That would explain the absence of a door and of windows. Entrance was probably gained through an electronically operated panel in one of the walls. Yes, a cell. But where? Mexico? Or where else?

That didn’t seem likely. THRUSH had been there merely for the purpose of conducting tests. Then — THRUSH’S base of operations. Of course. They had to have a secret, well-hidden complex, one unknown and unsuspected by U.N.C.L.E. a place where the salt chemical could be developed.

But where?

Solo lay motionless on the cot. Why had he been brought here, wherever he was? A wedge, he thought. Yes, that must be it. An added bit of precaution by THRUSH, in case they needed bargaining power for negotiations with U.N.C.L.E. And such negotiations, Solo knew, would only come about if THRUSH gained the upper hand in the battle between the two powerful forces. Consequently, the obvious assumption was that THRUSH was on the verge of launching whatever insidious plot its council had devised.

But what that was, he still had no way of knowing. And locked in this doorless, windowless cell, there was nothing he could do to stop it. Escape seemed impossible. But there had to be a way. And he had to be ready, not lying helpless on the cot. Solo gritted his teeth and swung his legs out and down to the floor, pushing himself into a sitting position with his hands. He sat for a full minute.

He tried to stand. His legs would not support his weight and he fell. His body felt drained, fever-weak, and every fiber of his being ached. Nerve ends like open sores set him trembling.

He spent almost an hour learning to walk again. It was almost as if he were a child, a baby taking his first experimental steps. He managed, with great effort, to stand finally, after falling several times.

Equilibrium returned as slowly as had his ability for rational thought. But, irrevocably, it did return. He took a step on his right foot, swayed, arms flailing, and this time he did not fall. Elation rushed through him. He took another step, with his left foot and fell again. But now the sense of defeat had left him, and he got up immediately.

He walked. He walked from front to back of the green-walled room, from side to side. Some of the weakness had begun to leave him. He flexed his arms, his fingers, working his muscles. He held his hands in front of his eyes and willed them to stop shaking.

He had to keep moving. If he gave in to the raw jangling of his tortured nerves, his mind could still snap. He forced blankness of his brain, continuing to walk. A whirring sound came from behind him. His heart began to pound wildly and he spun around, crouching catlike.

A small, square opening had appeared in the flat surface of the floor near the cot. Solo closed his eyes, clenching his fists, concentrating every ounce of his will on quieting the raging forces in his body. When he felt calm returning, he opened his eyes.

The opening was gone. But on the floor where it had been was a small bowl, wooden, containing some kind of greenish liquid.

Solo went there and bent, looking at the bowl. He was ravenously hungry. He did not know how long he had been without food. He wet his lips and lifted the bowl to his mouth.

Warning lights touched his brain. Drugs, he thought. It might be loaded with drugs. Maybe they think I know something, and they put some kind of narcotic in here, like a truth serum.

Solo flung the bowl from him, across the room, and it hit the concrete floor with a dull thud, spattering the greenish liquid on the green walls.

Solo had lost all track of time. At first, he refused to sleep. He paced the room continually, stopping only to rest for short periods. His nerves had begun to function normally, as had the remainder of his body. But he was afraid to close his eyes, afraid enough of the gas remained in his system to have harmful effects while he slept.

Finally, the fatigue became too great, and he knew it was impossible for him to remain awake. He lay down on the cot, and sleep covered him like a blanket the instant he shut his eyes. When he awoke, the surging pain in his head was gone. He felt stiff, but otherwise the adverse bodily conditions had disappeared completely. He was greatly relieved. The danger point had been passed, now.

There was another bowl of the greenish liquid on the floor, but he ignored it, feeling the pangs of hunger in his stomach. He lay on the cot for a while, thinking about Illya and, bitterly, about the girl named Estrellita Valdone. Then he stood and began pacing. There was still the possibility, he knew, of claustrophobia setting in, and of morose melancholia. He had to keep busy, keep doing something, keep his mind from dwelling on his imprisonment.

He walked. He thought, though for short periods. He exercised his body. He slept, fitfully, for an hour or two. And he fought the growing hunger in his stomach each time a fresh bowl of the greenish liquid came up through the opening in the floor.

He had been in that single room for three days, though he had no idea it had been that long, when the two men came for him. He was sitting on the cot, resting his legs after walking, when a loud whirring sound came from one of the walls on his right. The sound did not frighten him, as had the one that first day. He looked up.

The wall had slid open. Outside was a hallway. Two men stood there, each armed with a sub-machine gun and an Army-type automatic at their belts. They were dressed in brown khaki uniforms and black-billed caps. Solo recognized their attire as that worn by THRUSH guards.

One of the men made a motion with the gun he held in his hands. Solo stood, wetting his lips. They were taking him out of here. Now, he thought, maybe I’ll find out where I am. Maybe I’ll find out what T.H.R.U.S.H...

A sudden thought struck him, What if it were too late? What if THRUSH had already launched their offensive? And what if it had succeeded? What if... He forced the questions out of his mind. He couldn’t afford to think like that. It wasn’t too late. It couldn’t be. There was still time. There had to be.

Solo went out into the hallway. One of the guards prodded him to the left, and they walked in that direction. The guards flanked him. At the end of the hallway was a blank wall that opened to reveal an elevator as they neared.

They moved inside. Machinery buzzed, and the panel slid shut. They began to rise. Napoleon Solo had the odd feeling that he was in U.N.C.L.E. headquarters, ascending to see Mr. Waverly; the electronic panels, the concrete and steel construction, was very similar. There was no doubt about it, Solo thought. This was a major THRUSH fortress.

The elevator stopped abruptly. The panel slid back, and they stepped out. Solo was not prepared for what he saw. It was a laboratory.

Not a laboratory by any normal standards, however, it was huge, the size of an auditorium, high-ceilinged. Banks of equipment, huge caldrons, like wine vats, long rows of benches laden with jars, bottles, test tubes and other chemical paraphernalia covered every available inch of space. Overhead, a maze of intricately spiraling glass tubing linked the vats with each other and with various oddly-shaped machines... each with a series of dials, gauges, and round glass bowls at the base... scattered throughout the room. A colorless liquid bubbled, apparently under great heat, inside the tubing and the glass bowls under the machines. To his right, Napoleon Solo saw a large, straight piece of tubing, much larger than the ones overhead, that led from the largest of the vats to a conveyor belt of sorts. It was circular, revolving slowly.

Three men stood grouped around it, and Solo could see that they were filling five gallon jars through a tap in the tubing. One man operated the tap, and when each jar had been filled with the colorless liquid one of the other men would take it from the revolving belt and put it onto another, short conveyor that disappeared through an opening behind him. The third man replaced the full jars with empty ones.

This was not only a laboratory, Solo realized; it was a manufacturing plant. The colorless liquid, he guessed, was the chemical which was capable of converting fresh water into crystallized salt. But why were they producing such great quantities of it?

One of the guards prodded Solo again, and they began to walk across the room, threading their way through the equipment. They passed men in white laboratory smocks, hunched over the benches, checking gauges, scurrying about in an appearance of general disorder. Like they were pressed for time, Solo thought. Like they were trying to meet a deadline. A chill touched his neck. There was only one reason why they would be moving at such pace.

The room was alive in a cacophony of sound... the liquid bubbling overhead and in the vats, the whirring of machinery, voices raised in an effort to be heard. Solo’s head began to ache again; after the time he had spent in the total silence of the single room, the sudden exposure to such din was almost deafening.

They reached the far end of the room. There was a wide, Plexiglas window there, affording a view into another, much smaller laboratory. It was almost a miniature, scale model of the one in which they stood, replete with everything except the vats, the conveyor belts, and the oddly shaped machines.

Private lab, Solo thought. And inside there had to be the man who was behind all this, the head of the THRUSH project, the developer of the salt chemical. One of the guards opened a door set beside the Plexiglas window, and they stepped inside.

The private lab was soundproofed. As soon as the door was shut, the outside noises ceased. There was only the gentle bubbling of liquid in the spiraling tubing that connected two small glass jars at one end.

A man sat on a high stool before a group of test tubes on the long, single bench that covered the length of the room. He was writing furiously on a piece of yellow paper. He seemed not to have heard them enter. “Dr. Sagine?” one of the guards said.

The man made no response.

“Dr. Sagine?” the guard said, louder this time.

The man looked up irritably. “Yes, yes, what is it? Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“You asked us to bring him down,” the guard said, pushing Napoleon Solo forward with his free hand.

“Well, all right. You’ve brought him,” the man said. “Wait outside.”

“Hadn’t we better...”

“Wait outside, I told you!”

“Yes, sir.”

The two guards left the room.

Solo stood looking at the man on the high stool. He felt a faint revulsion.

The man was the ugliest individual he had ever seen. He was chinless, with a wetly protruding lower lip. He was very short, almost gnome-like, with a huge head and a bushy mop of shoulder length, jaundice-colored hair. His skin was pale, an unhealthy white color, and bushy yellow brows topped bright, gray eyes that reminded Solo of rodent’s.

Sagine was bent over the yellow piece of paper once again. Solo waited. The man finished his writing, swiveled on the stool, and broke the pencil he had been using in half. He threw the two pieces over his shoulder, staring at Solo.

“MR. U.N.C.L.E. agent, is it?” the man said. “Got you, didn’t we? Nerve gas. Breaks most men down. You’re a strong one, you are, but we’ll break you. Watched you in the cell, you know. Watched you the whole time in there. View plates in the walls. Thought you were going to drink the soup. Did you guess it was drugged? Of course you did. You’re a smart man, MR: U.N.C.L.E. agent, but we’ll break you. Oh yes, we’ll break you.”

Solo stared at the man. He was obviously quite mad. The short staccato speech had been clipped off in a reedy, high-pitched voice. If the man spoke that way, then he must think in the same manner, a thousand confused, whirling thoughts spinning in his mind. Solo shuddered involuntarily, remembering how his own thoughts had spun, how close he had come to madness himself.

Yes, this man was mad, all right. But he was also very dangerous. Solo would not make the mistake of underrating him.

He said, “Just who are you?”

“Who am I? Who am I? Dr. Sagine, that’s who. Dr. Mordecai Sagine. The finest chemist in the world. They laughed at me; did you know that? I showed them. Oh, yes, I showed them. They won’t laugh now, you know. I developed the Sagine formula. I did it. Took me ten years.”

Solo tried to extract some logical sense from the man’s diatribe. He had never heard of Dr. Mordecai Sagine, but the man doubtless was the inventor of the chemical. And as such, he would know what THRUSH was planning to do with it. All else was unimportant now.

Solo said, “I must admit, it took a brilliant mind to perfect such a process as you have here.”

“You agree, do you?” Dr. Sagine said. “You’re intelligent, MR. U.N.C.L.E. agent. The rest of them weren’t. Fools, all of them.”

“There must be a great number of uses you can put your discovery to,” Solo said.

“Uses, eh? Only one use, MR. U.N.C.L.E. agent. The ultimate use. My name will be legend, did you know that? I will be immortalized. THRUSH has promised me. Oh, yes. Dr. Mordecai Sagine.”

“What use will your chemical be put to, Dr. Sagine?” Solo asked softly. A crafty look crept into Dr. Sagine’s fevered eyes. “Trying to get information out of me, are you? Well, no matter. Nothing you can do about it. We’ll break you like a stick, Mr. U.N.C.L.E. agent.”

Dr. Sagine hopped down off the stool and walked in a shuffling, crab-like step to where a door stood at the far end of the private lab. Solo followed him. Dr. Sagine opened the door, stepped through, turned to see if Napoleon Solo was behind him, and then went to a desk in the middle of the adjoining room and sat down in a chair behind it, folding his arms across his chest.

“Well?” he said. Solo frowned. “Your office.”

“Look there,” Dr. Sagine said, pointing to what appeared to be a blank wall. Then he pressed a button somewhere beneath the desk. The wall slid back, revealing a Plexiglas window much like the one in the laboratory.

The first thing Solo saw was blue sky. Blue sky, dotted with gently rolling clouds. In the distance, he could see snow-capped mountain peaks. He went to the window quickly, looking out.

Below him, and to the side, he saw sheer walls of granite. This fortress is hollowed out of solid rock, he thought. Near the top of a mountain. Below him was a precipitous drop of what he guessed must be in excess of a thousand feet. A canyon lay down there, and there was the tiny, winding line of a river that flowed through it. To his left, where the walls of granite curved, receding, he could see the edges of a road that had been carved in the mountainside.

“Well?” Dr. Sagine said. “What do you see, MR. U.N.C.L.E. agent?”

Solo said nothing. The snow-capped mountains in the distance reminded him of something. He had seen them before. Where...

“Do you see the river down there?” Dr. Sagine said. “Do you?”

“I see it,” Solo said. He was trying to remember.

“Do you know what river that is?” Dr. Sagine asked him.

Solo got it then. Pike’s Peak. He and Illya had been to Denver once on an assignment, and they had... The river! Of course, there was only one it could be.

“The Colorado River!” Napoleon Solo said.

“Yes, yes, the Colorado,” Dr. Sagine said. “Quite correct.” He laughed maniacally. “Four hours to go. Exactly four hours. Going to put the Sagine formula in that Colorado River down there, you know. Going to turn that river into a frozen bed of rock salt. What do you think of that, MR. U.N.C.L.E. agent?”

Solo spun it round. The Colorado River, the most important river in the Western United States. If it were crystallized, thousands of fertile acres of agricultural land in Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California that depended on water from the Colorado for irrigation would be reduced to barren wasteland. Electrical power derived from the huge dynamos at Hoover Dam would cease. Hundreds of thousands of people would be without drinking water.

“Only the first step, you know,” Dr. Sagine said. “THRUSH wants a major test. After that, the formula goes into every main body of fresh water in the world. Simultaneously. Oh, yes, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, the Nile, The Amazon, the Congo, the Huang. All of them. In the mountains, too. Melting snow. All the fresh water reduced to rock salt. Millions of people at my mercy. I’m the only one who knows the antidote. The only one.”

Spittle flecked Dr. Sagine’s deformed lower lip. Solo stared at him, speechless. “Two days,” Dr. Sagine said, his mad eyes alive with the fever of his affliction. “Two days to immortality! I’ll have my revenge then. Oh, yes, they’ll be sorry they laughed at me. THRUSH will see to that. Going to force the world powers to surrender under their terms. Extinction by thirst and famine if they don’t. Tidal floods, too. I can do that. Just put in too much of the antidote. Food everything. Two days, Mr. U.N.C.L.E. agent. Two days, and THRUSH and I will rule the world!”