The Vulcan Disaster

“Splendid. Nick — I have the little wireless Leon gave me. I will hide it in the bottom of the picnic basket. I will take it to town and set it up and call Leon. If I were to do it here someone would pick up my carrier frequency, so close by. But tomorrow, with, more than likely, only a substitute in the radio shack...”

“Dandy,” I said. “Okay. And I’ll slip back aboard at the same time and see what I can find out.”

“Nick,” she said, squeezing my arm. “I... I am going to worry about only one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That woman. Alone with you... tonight...”

I bent over and kissed her again, still keeping the shirt clear of her smock. “Not to worry. That’s an order. I’m immune. Now skedaddle.” I patted her on the bottom. Komaroff’s flunkey is due here any minute now.

“Okay. Nick... it will go all right, won’t it?”

“Sure,” I said, nice and confident. I hoped it would, anyhow. “You’ll do okay. If you weren’t all right, Leon wouldn’t have kept you around all this time. He’d have drummed you out of the family.”

“Yes,” she said with a shy smile. “He would, wouldn’t he?”

I followed the silent servant up one flight and into a long hall, paneled in rich hardwoods, with the fittings starting at one end of the hall in polished antique brass and ending at the other in silver — the latter being Russian turn-of-the-century objects, lanterns made for gas operation and converted. Underfoot were Persian carpets; overhead was more paneling.

It was the walls — decked out the way they were, you couldn’t call them bulkheads — that really made the impression. Stuck in precisely fitted niches were a series of matched paintings that looked somehow familiar in style but not in subject matter: I looked at the brass plaques underneath the pictures — a set of depictions in a classically severe style of famous massacres and slaughters — and whistled. If Komaroff were to die intestate I’d have bet Spain would have mortgaged Morocco to buy them — and to build, a special Goya museum to house them. In between the paintings were tapestries equally priceless: one, not noticeably different from its neighbors, gave you what purported to be an eyewitness view of the Battle of Crecy. Another was the Battle of Agincourt, by a man who claimed to have watched it. And, true to the code Komaroff seemed to run by, when we passed a covert guard booth on the way, the man inside it looked out from the filigreed walls of a confessional booth from the days of Torquemada, four hundred years ago.

Komaroff’s man stopped me at the saloon and announced me through an antique speaking tube connected to the starboard door. He heard some reply I couldn’t make out; then he left me alone in the big room.

Here the decor was strictly business. No paintings. No wall hangings. Just weapons.

It seemed, as a matter of fact, to be a kind of museum of weapons — picking out not the various stages of a given gun, but the great breakthrough weapons that, over the course of history, changed warfare. In opposite corners were a Maxim gun and a Gatling, sitting majestically on the decking.

The walls were a beautifully arranged hodgepodge, until you started to get the pattern. Here was a fossilized antelope humerus, marked “Olduvai Gorge” and indexed according to the latest of Dr. Leakey’s datings. There beside it were a stone battle-ax; a Bronze Age Greek short-sword (if I could believe the legend, from the original Schliemann dig at Troy); an iron mace; a suit of armor; a crossbow; an English longbow; a Sharps rifle; a Colt’s Pacemaker...

The other side was more of the same, only specializing in elegant forms. Here were a pair of matched Toledo dueling swords; another pair of Heidelburg Schlaeger; a pair of flawless flintlock dueling pistols; a pair of sai, like the one I’d taken from the assassin in Hong Kong, and a pair of those efficient mock-Bowies Will Lockwood had wielded with such deadly efficiency against three men at a time. So that was the “butterfly knife” Basil Morse had warned me about. And for good reason, I decided.

“Mr. Archer...”

The soft voice behind me startled me out of my reverie. I turned and when I saw who had called my name I said to myself no, baby, no way. You are never going to convince me that this is Alexandra Komarova.

But she didn’t try. The girl in the golden chains said “This way, Mr. Archer.” She averted her eyes. Her head was held down in a slave-like attitude. And the more I thought about it, looking at her, the more I thought that was exactly what she had to be: a slave.

She was dressed in little golden chains, starting from a gold collar around her neck and working down. That collar was connected to tiny chains; these connected to the bound, manacled hands she held so pitiably before her; the manacles connected to the long chains that reached the hobbling bands around her slim ankles.

Other than the chains and manacles, she was totally naked.