Pulp Fiction | The Finger in the Sky Affair by Peter Leslie (16 page)

As Kuryakin set off after her, he realized that the display must now be over. The red floodlights were out, the smoke was blowing away, and from outside the walls of the town a swelling murmur of applause from thousands of sightseers posted along the terraced vineyards and orange groves grew and grew. There was another sound, too, he realized as he ran down the slope towards the gate—nearer and more urgent: the sound of many voices calling, laughing, shouting in a confused babble just beyond the ancient walls.

A moment later, he burst out from the vaulted tunnel into a scene of extraordinary gaiety. A Proven�al fair filled the small
place
outside the gate usually reserved for the parking of cars and games of
pétanque
. Booths, kiosks and sideshows jammed the spaces between the buttresses of the old rampart, sprawled across the open space under the plane trees and spilled over into the narrow roadway between La Résidence and La Colombe d'Or, St. Paul's world famous hotels. Around and between them seethed a vast throng of people hurling coconuts, buying tickets, pitching quoits, munching cotton candy and ice cream, and packing the counters of shooting galleries in flickering torchlight.

But of Helga Grossbreitner there was no sign.

Illya clattered to a halt at the edge of the crowd, scanning the myriad faces with an exasperated frown. Trying to locate a blonde in black trousers and a white shirt among such a press of holidaymakers was hopeless.

He was about to plunge into the maelstrom when there was a shout above and behind him. Solo and Sherry Rogers were climbing down a stone stairway from the top of the rampart. They presented an arresting sight: the Chief Enforcement Officer of U.N.C.L.E. was soot-streaked and dishevelled, his collar torn and his jacket split; and the girl looked almost comically ill-dressed in a skirt and blouse several sizes too large for her.

"Where is she?" Solo panted as they came up to Kuryakin. "Not among that bunch, I hope."

The Russian nodded unhappily. "She kept me at bay with an automatic," he said. "And by the time I'd made a detour to outflank her, she was just that little bit too far ahead...You made out all right at the house?"

"Yes. It was a bit of a struggle, but we made it. I got Sherry and Celeste out first and then went back for the doorkeeper you slugged. The two plug-uglies we put to sleep had already come to and escaped."

"And Larsen?"

Solo looked at the ground. "Pity about him," he said soberly. "But he was at least a quadruple murderer. By the time I'd tied up Celeste and the doorkeeper, called up Station M to ask for the S�reté boys to come and pick them up, and borrowed some of Celeste's clothes for Sherry, the top two stories were a wall of fire..."

He looked back at the battlements. Above the irregular line of roofs, the sky flickered orange in imitation of the display which had so recently finished. Faintly above the hubbub of the crowd, they heard from the far side of the village the hee-haw bray of a fire engine.

"Never mind," Illya said. "I suppose we had better plunge in among all this and try to find her. We'd better split up..."

Slowly, they forged in among the chattering, laughing crowd, swollen to saturation point now by an ever-growing stream of sightseers flooding down the narrow approach road from the terraces surrounding the town. They were jostled, pushed, shouldered aside, jammed inextricably in phalanxes of people between the booths as the strident cries of barkers and the good-natured banter of tourists in a dozen languages swelled and crashed around them. At one point, when Illya had stopped by a sideshow where people bought a handful of numbered tickets rolled into tubes in the hope of winning a raffle prize, Sheridan Rogers approached him and plucked at his sleeve.

"Illya," she said nervously. "I have to explain—I'm so sorry. That dreadful evening in Haut-des-Cagnes...I'm so ashamed...I was drugged, you see. And then they...they hypnotized me to...to behave like that. Oh, it was awful..."

The Russian looked down at the girl's white, strained face. "That's all right, Sherry," he said uncomfortably. "Forget it, please. I should have realized they were trying either to frighten us off you, or to make us think
you
were the weak link in the T.C.A. chain..."

"Now roll up, ladies and gentlemen!" a huge woman with hoop earrings was bawling in front of the booth. "Five tickets for one franc. Any ticket with a five or a nine at the end of a number wins a prize. Roll up, roll up and try your luck!"

"Did they harm you—back there in the house?" Illya asked.

"No. They just kept me tied to that table and gave me an injection every few hours. They were going to...they wanted to..." she broke off and began to cry.

"
Every
ticket ending in a five or a nine wins a prize—There! See: the little girl has won the giant teddy bear!"

A child with pigtails handed over a winning ticket and staggered away hugging the huge toy, her eyes wide in disbelief, as Kuryakin put his arm around Sherry's shoulders. They moved on through the fair, anxiously scanning the faces in the light of the flares.

"Break the bottles with the metal
boules
, ladies and gentlemen! Three broken bottles doubles your money. Six shots a franc..."

"Coconuts, fine coconuts. Knock off the ones you like..."

"Try your aim with the six-shot repeaters! Five bulls wins a prize—come on, now: only one franc fifty for half a dozen shots..."

They stopped by the shooting gallery as Solo forced his way through a knot of German tourists arguing over a quoit-throwing prize and came towards them. "It's no good," he shouted over the din. "There's not a chance in hell of locating her among this crowd. We'll have to —"

Suddenly, Sherry Rogers screamed, pointing frantically over his shoulder.

Among the cardboard targets and ping-pong balls balancing on jets of water, Helga had appeared behind the counter at the far end of the booth. The long-nosed automatic in her hand was pointing straight at Solo.

Illya exploded into action. Hurling Solo aside as the gun spat flame, he snatched a target rifle from a blue-chinned Proven�al youth who had just loaded it and snapped three quick shots at the girl from THRUSH. Helga disappeared through the curtain at the back of the gallery.

"Missed!" Kuryakin called in exasperation. "These fairground guns all have bent barrels! Come on—she went this way..."

Through the crowd now scattering with astonishment and fear, they pushed their way towards the back of the booth. Helga's shot had passed over Solo's shoulder and severed the cord tethering a mountain of gas-filled balloons, and these, suddenly released, were now bobbing and swaying in bright blobs of color over the heads of the throng.

"Come on," Illya yelled. "This way. Over here!"

They fought their way through the jam of bodies, dodged around a blaring hurdy-gurdy and ran over the counter of a coconut game booth. Solo caught one of the hurled wooden balls one-handedly as he leaped across and lobbed it politely back to the astonished thrower.

Helga was only a few yards away. As they sprinted towards her, she pulled to the ground a pyramid of canned food outside a food stall and sent them skating on the rolling tins.

As Solo picked himself up, a heavy blow on the shoulder knocked him down again. The girl was behind a pile of metal
boules
, hurling the steel spheres viciously in their direction.

"Keep down, Sherry," he called. "You could get hurt. Illya! Pick 'em up and throw them back!"

They gathered up the heavy balls and began to hurl them back, flushing Helga out from behind the pile and forcing her to retreat among the other booths. Stubbornly, she fought a rearguard action back through the fair towards the ramparts, fending them off with coconuts, cheap crockery, woolly animals—anything she could lay her hands on that could be thrown. And as they went, the crowd parted before them in amazement and then closed in again behind as though nothing had happened.

But finally the girl was clear of the last stall and running strongly towards the gate. "After her," Solo shouted. "She's heading for the ramparts, again. How many shots has she left in that gun, Illya?"

"She's used six now," the Russian panted. "Another couple and—if the gun's the model I think it is—she'll have to put in a fresh clip."

They piled through the archway and labored up the cobbled slope in pursuit, the watchers on the battlements gazing at them in astonishment as they ran past.

Once they left the narrow main street and swerved onto the wider roadway circling the top of the ramparts, it became suddenly quiet and dark. The torchlight and the noise of the fair were behind them. There was an acrid smell of used gunpowder lingering among the remains of the firework set-pieces fixed to the walls.

Helga's white shirt was a blur in the darkness charting the progress of her pounding feet. Once she stopped, turned, and fired quickly twice in succession—but the bullets whined harmlessly over their heads.

Solo glanced at Illya, who nodded and increased his pace. "She can hardly reload while she's running," he gasped. "Let's close up and see if we can corner her."

They dashed on. And then, rounding a curve in the road, came suddenly to a halt. The walls of the town bulged abruptly here into two turret-like belvederes. As they stood in the nearer of these, Helga Grossbreitner faced them across the gap from behind the parapet of the further one.

"All right, Solo," she called, her body a lighter patch against the dark. "This is as far as you go. I'm out of range of your sleep dart toy—and this is another gun in my hand, in case you're making foolish plans based on my having to reload. You and your friends stay right there."

"Put it down, Helga," Solo called back quietly. "There's three of us and you don't have a chance. The whole place will be swarming with S�reté and Deuxi�me Bureau men at any moment."

"Don't give me that, lover boy. Don't kid yourself you're good enough to take on THRUSH and win!...I'm going over this wall. There will be a car waiting for me on the La Colle road. And tomorrow I'll be making my report to the Council. Your life won't be worth a nickel..."

"Why don't you shout now?"

The girl hesitated, a stray beam of light from somewhere glinting on the barrel of the gun in her hand. "I...have my reasons," she said. "Besides I'm not an executioner: we have special people for that...Now I'm going over. And I warn you: any heads looking over the battlements after me will be silhouetted. I won't hesitate to fire then."

"Helga..."

"I mean it, lover boy. Just watch out after tomorrow, that's all."

Dimly, they saw her climb to the parapet. And then suddenly, in what seemed a flash of blinding brilliance, all the lights of the town came on at once. Windows, doorways, balconies and streets sprang into instant relief against the night as some municipal official somewhere threw a master switch.

Taken utterly by surprise, Helga gasped, looked upwards into the pitiless glare of a street light immediately over the belvedere, and lost her footing on the crumbling stone.

For an eternal moment, they saw her poised over the abyss. Then, with a strangled cry, she disappeared backwards over the wall.

A long time later, it seemed, there were two dreadful thuds followed by the sound of something heavy crashing among branches.

And after that there was silence.

"But, Illya, I don't understand how they did it. How exactly did the laser thing work?"

Kuryakin smiled fondly at Sherry Rogers. The network of fine creases wrinkling her nose when she grinned fascinated him. "It is extremely interesting, Sherry," he said earnestly. "You know what laser really stands for?"

"Indeed I don't."

"It stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation...l-a-s-e-r."

"Great. So how did they shoot down planes with it?"

"Well, you know how ordinary light, ordinary white light, is made of energy of many different wavelengths? And all these different-sized waves bounce about in all directions?"

"As a matter of fact I did know that."

"Good. Then you'll realize at once why a laser is so powerful, when I tell you it emits only
coherent
light."

"I'm sorry, I..."

Kuryakin laughed aloud. "Coherent light is light in which all the wavelengths are exactly the same—and not only that: the individual light rays, all of the same wavelength or color, all march as it were in step, trough to trough and crest to crest. Somebody once compared this kind of light and ordinary light as being like a platoon of well-drilled soldiers in comparison with a disorderly mob."

"Yes, yes, Illya. But —"

"When light waves march in step like this, such frequency-coherent light can perform astonishing feats. This is because the way a laser
makes
the light causes the rays to come out parallel, instead of radiating from a point, as they do with conventional light sources. And since the energy of the rays is not dissipated by the beam spreading out, there's a very intense concentration of energy within a very small area. Thus lasers can cut holes in metal, weld things together —"

"Illya. How can a beam of light cut holes in metal?"

"Because light's a form of energy—and as I told you, lasers concentrate it within a tiny space, because of the way they're made."

"All right," Sherry Rogers said resignedly, lighting another cigarette and stirring her coffee with an indulgent smile. "How
are
they made then?"

They were sitting at a table beneath a striped umbrella on the airport terrace, waiting for the Air France Boeing which was to take Solo back to New York to report to Waverly. Since Sherry had been given forty-eight hours leave—and since Kuryakin was still owed the leave which had been interrupted when the assignment began—he had decided to stay in Nice with her for the remainder of his time off.

"Originally," the Russian continued remorselessly, "lasers were made by putting a rod-shaped crystal of synthetic ruby inside a xenon flashtube—the kind of thing they use for an electronic camera flash. When the ruby is irradiated by the flash, the light raises the energy of one of the components of the synthetic stone...kind of supercharges it...until, by a molecular process you would hardly understand, it burst out of one end of the tube in the form of the laser beam I have described."