The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens (28 page)

VII.

As the airliner banked with the ponderous aerial dignity of a condor, the great bay of Guanabara came into view through the window at which Gordon Graham sat. Although he had been to Sao Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro before, Graham never failed to get a thrill out of the approach to the world’s most beautiful metropolis.

Below and in front of them the bay spread out like an immense fan, with clusters of islands in the foreground and behind them the scalloped line of sub-bays. Then the city, running along the edge of the scallop and trailing off into the valleys extending up into the mountains like the teeth of a comb. As the ’plane dropped lower the Corcovado and other peaks thrust themselves up against the skyline.

Even Reinhold Sklar, whom Graham would have thought to be about as aesthetically sensitive as one of Teófilo March’s turtles, said: “Boy, ain’t that somethink!”

Now the white line of the beach could be made out, and back of it the sharp diagonals of the avenidas with their rows of shining skyscrapers. Before them the vast airport thrust out into the bay like a welcoming hand. As they sank towards it, the map effect flattened out of sight. Graham found he was confronted by a solid wall of buildings, throwing back the pinkish-white light of the rising sun, and below them the green of the seashore parkways, along which he could see the movement of thousands of shiny dots: automobiles. In another traffic lane, to their left, convertibles were buzzing in to the airport to leave their rotors, like queen ants shedding their wings, while their owners drove them to work.

The landing ’chute blossomed behind them and they drew up to the ramp. As they walked down the companionway and into the reception building they met a tall, broad-shouldered, bushy-haired, smiling young man with a rather Oriental look. After a moment of uncertainty, Graham recognized Varnipaz bad-Savarun, still in his Earthly disguise.

Shaking hands, Varnipaz asked: “Have you eaten yet?”

“No,” said Sklar. They went into the restaurant and ordered.

“Well,” said Sklar, “what have you found out, pal?”

Varnipaz said: “I reported to headquarters as you ordered me. Then I tried to follow the logical course. If the gang used a cult for a cover in North America, it seemed to me that it might use a similar organization in South America. Therefore I have been going around the city attending the meetings of all the queer little societies and cults—the Cosmotheists, the Brazilo-Israelites, the Hindu Center of Absolute Truth, the Society for the Abolition of Coffee, and so on.” He shook his head. “You Earthmen may call us Krishnans backward, but you have some of the most irrational . . . Well, anyway, I have membership lists of several of them.” He brought out a thick mass of papers. “I thought that if you could compare the membership of these with the list of engineers and technicians employed on the Gamanovia Project, you might find something.”

“I apologize to you,” said Sklar, leafing through the papers.

“For what?”

“For sayink you’d never make a W.F. constable. Your name ought to be Sherlock bad-Holmes. Any time you want to sign up for the candidate school . . . Here, Graham, you know who’s who on the project.”

“I don’t know all of ’em,” said Graham, “but I’ll glance through these anyway.” He too began running down the lists, and presently exclaimed: “Homer Benson! Why, old Homer’s the second man to Souza; I know him w-well. That is, if this is the same Benson.”

“It probably is,” said Sklar. “There wouldn’t be many men with a name like that in Rio. What list is that?”

Graham looked at the heading. “Soci—How do you pronounce it?”

Sklar looked:
“Sociedade Homagem ao Cortereal.
Society for Homage to Cortereal. Who’s he?”

Varnipaz said: “João Vaz Corte-Real, an explorer who some people here think discovered the Americas before Columbus. They take it very seriously, though why anybody cares, when as I understand some Norwegian found the continents long before either, I fail to comprehend.”

Sklar asked Graham: “Any more project pipple on that list?”

Graham sat in silence, running down the list. When almost at the end he said: “I think I recognize two here: Vieira and Wen.”

“Who are they?”

“Gaspar Vieira is one of the local people, a chemist, and Wen Pandjao is a Chinese mathematician. I met ’em both when I was down last year. I don’t really know them, though.”

Sklar drummed with his fingers on the tabletop. “Come on, you two. I should go through the local poliss, but we ain’t got the time.”

They piled into a taxi. Sklar directed the driver to the Gamanovia Building, on the Praia do Flamengo out towards Botafogo Bay. As they rolled he told Graham: “Kip lookink through those lists. There might be others.”

One of Rio’s notorious traffic jams held them up for half an hour, enabling Graham to complete his scrutiny. He said: “I d-don’t see any more, but that doesn’t prove anything. We need the complete list of employees from Gamanovia’s Personnel Department, to check against all of these.”

“Hokus dokus,” said Sklar. “Here we are.”

###

They piled out, gave their names at the registration desk, and a few minutes later were in Souza’s office. Meanwhile Souza’s private secretary and six other girls were going over the lists in the adjoining room.

While waiting, Souza and his visitors engaged in small talk. Graham had great difficulty in following this, for while Sklar’s Portuguese was fast and fluent if badly pronounced, and that of Varnipaz was, like his English, painfully correct and formal, Graham could only read the language and speak it a little. When somebody rattled a string of nasal vowels at him he was helpless.

Presently Souza’s secretary came back with the pile of papers. “Senhor Paulo,” she said, “we found the name of Senhor Gjessing on the list for Mechanosophical Society.”

“What?” said Sklar.

Varnipaz explained: “Those are the ones who worship the Machine. You should go to one of their services. An altar with a machine on it, all wheels and levers and colored lights. As far as I could see it does nothing but go round and round while they kneel and pray to it, but somehow it works them into a state of ecstasy. You Earthmen . . .”

“Is that all?” said Sklar.

“That is all,” said the secretary.

“Good. That little metapolygraph in my suitcase has attachments for only four people. Senhor Paulo, will you get Senhores Benson, Gjessing, Vieira, and Wen?”

While these employees were being summoned, Sklar employed himself with setting up his metapolygraph. He asked Souza: “You don’t mind if I put the box on your desk?”

“So-no.”

“Obrigado.
I hope this will crack the case, because nothing short of deep hypnosis can beat this little machine.”

One by one the experts appeared. Benign old Benson doddered in, and after him the hulking Wen with his perpetual grin. Then fat little Vieira, and lastly a bald man with a handlebar mustache whom Graham did not know.

Souza introduced each one as he arrived: “These are Mr. Sklar, Mr. Graham, and Mr. Muller” (for that was Varnipaz’s alias). When the last man appeared, he introduced him as “Dr. Gjessing,” pronouncing it “zhessing” as if it had been Portuguese.

The owner of the name promptly corrected his boss by murmuring “yessing.”

Wen’s perpetual grin widened. “Roald always wants us to pronounce him as in Norwegian,” he said. “Now me, I have given up trying to make people pronounce my name. It is really ‘wun’ but they all insist on saying ‘wen.’ ”

“Then why do you spell it ‘wen’?” asked Vieira.

“Because in Chinese, the ‘eh’ sound is always ‘uh’ except when it follows or precedes an ‘ee’ sound . . .”

Sklar cleared his throat in a marked manner and broke in: “Now, gentlemen, we’ll discuss the science of fanatics later. With your permission I am going to attach this metapolygraph to you and ask you some questions about an urgent matter. You understand that you don’t have to answer, or even put on the attachments. But as loyal employees of the World Federation I’m sure you want to cooperate, don’t you?” The last words held the faintest hint of menace.

There being no objections, Sklar fastened the leads of the machine to the four men’s head, wrists, and ankles. Then he sat behind Souza’s desk and began asking questions.

“Do any of you know anything about a group, headed by extra-terrestrials, that wants to interfere with the Project?”

Graham, craning his neck a little, could see that the needles on the four dials remained steady as the men answered
“Não”
in turn.

“Have you ever been in contact with such a group?”

“Não.”

“Do you know of
any
secret group opposed to the Gamanovia Project?”

“Não.”

“Have you heard of any plan for firing the maggots ahead of time?”

“Não.”

Still no telltale movement of the needles. After half an hour Sklar gave up and removed the attachments.

“Wrong track,” he said. “Looks as if the next person we’d have to interview would be Teófilo March, the turtle man. Would he be on Ascension Island now?”

“Oh,” said Souza, “you will not be dealing with Senhor March.”

“Why not? Is he dead?”

“No, he has sold out. An
Americano do Norte
named Aurelio bought the Rock, and March’s contract along with it. I believe March keeps his turtle farm, as the cable employees keep their farms on Green Mountain, but . . .”

Sklar’s sharp glance crossed that of Graham, in whose mind a sudden light shone. “Hey!” said Graham. “This is the man they t-t-t- . . .”

“Try again,” said Sklar.

“T-t-t . . .”

“Whistle it.”

“The man the gang was talking about. You remember they said they’d heard from ‘One’? They meant Dr. W-wen, of course, since that’s how he pronounces . . .”

“Stop him!” yelled Sklar, reaching for his holster.

They might as well have tried to stop a rhinoceros. The big Chinese straight-armed Gjessing out of the way and plunged through the door, slamming it behind him. As they rushed for it they heard his feet pounding along the corridor, and they got it open just in time to see him disappearing around a corner.

“He seems to be headed for the control room,” said Souza.

Graham, the youngest man present, outran the others. He knew where the control room was from his previous visits. They tore along the corridor, around a couple of bends, and up a single flight of stairs.

The control door was both closed and locked when they got to it.

“Who’s got a key?” snapped Sklar.

Souza arrived late, puffing like an asthmatic porpoise, and produced a key. It worked the lock, but the door, when they tried to open it, moved only a centimeter or two. Inside they could hear furniture being dragged across the room and placed against the door.

Then came a loud clank. Souza cried:
“Mãe do Deus,
he’s throwing the maggot switches!”

Sklar said: “Gordon, you and Gjessing are the biggest. You push.”

Graham and Gjessing threw their shoulders against the door, which moved a few centimeters more. Inside, another switch went
clank.

“Again,” grunted Gjessing, and under the impact the door opened a little wider.

“Duck,” said Sklar, thrusting his pistol through the crack. Graham, rubbing his battered shoulder, got out of the way.

There was an earsplitting report and the sound of a falling body.

When they finally got the door open, Wen lay in a pool of blood in front of the panel on which were mounted the two hundred-odd firing switches. Three of these had been thrown, their handles projecting down instead of up.

Sklar said: “Will it do any good to push those handles up again?”

“No,” said Souza. “The reaction is irreversible, and once it is started the heat of the pile destroys the control equipment. It will keep firing until after a few days the heat finally destroys the automatic feed mechanism too.”

Sklar, not listening to the latter part, was bending over Wen, who seemed to by trying to say something. Graham, listening carefully, heard: “It was not my fault—I was to throw all the switches ahead of time . . .”

“That’s why your metapolygraph didn’t work,” said Graham to Sklar. “You said a deep hypnosis would beat it. Well, the Osirian pseudo-hypnosis has a similar—”

“Sh!” said Sklar, still listening. “Where are they now?”

Wen murmured: “On Ascension. March’s buildings. Stop them . . .
Duei bu chi, ching . . . Wo bu yau shï . . . Wei-shien . . .”
The voice trailed off to nothing.

“Dead,” said Sklar; then to Souza: “What effect will those switches have?”

Souza and the other engineers had been comparing the numbers on the switches with those on the huge chart on the opposite wall, which showed the locations of all the Gamanovian maggots buried deep in the substratum below the South Atlantic Ocean. Other people, attracted by the shot and the commotion, were crowding in the corridor outside. Vieira kept them out.

Benson said: “Offhand I’d say it would cause the bottom to drop east of Ascension.”

“How much?” asked Sklar.

Graham shrugged. “As Doc Benson says, we’ll have to c-calculate. Fifteen meters, maybe.”

“And what will that do?”

“Cause a tsunami, I should think.”

“What’s a tsunami?”

“Earthquake wave.” Graham and Varnipaz suddenly looked at one another in mutual understanding. “Betty—”

“Well,” said Souza with a shrug, “if these people are on Ascension, let us warn the people of the neighbonng coasts and then wait until the wave has passed. If it drowns them, so much the better, though after all Green Mountain rises to 900 meters and no tsunami could submerge that. What is that English saying about being blown up with one’s own bomb?”

“Hoist with his own petar,” said Graham.

Sklar shook his head. “In the first place we’d have to warn the cable employees of Georgetown, who are not to blame for this. Second, the gang has a hostage with them, a friend of my two deputies here. And for what they’ve done for me, I’ve got to help save her. When will this wave come along?” He looked from face to face.

A Rio city policeman appeared, pushing his way through the crowd outside.