right, all right, don’t get touchy—or is it your liver again? Anyway, I rang to tell you that I think we’re on to something, and if I’m any judge, it’s worth a fortune several times over.”
“Well, your judgment has been pretty accurate all the time I’ve known you, so I don’t see any reason why it should fail now. What is it?”
“I don’t even trust the private wire to tell you that. Enough for me to say that it’s worth your while to be over here in my office this evening at eight sharp. You’ll get the surprise of your life!”
“Well, I—” J.K. hesitated, then he seemed to make up his mind. “All right, Drew, I’ll be there. I’m afraid the wife will play hell. I was going to take her out.”
“Eight it is,” Drew said briefly, and put the phone back on its cradle. He waited a second or two and then dialed another number. This time the high, acrimonious voice of Marvin de Brock floated to him. De Brock, head of Independent Atomics, had no time for anybody outside of himself. He was only civil with Emerson Drew because he had to be. Drew was the mastermind—finance.
“Eight o’clock, eh?” de Brock repeated querulously, when Drew had uttered practically the same words as to Darnhome.
“You choose a damned awkward time, don’t you?”
“If you can’t take time out to put yourself in line with more money, you’re more self-centered than I thought,” Drew snapped. “Of course, I can always get—”
“No, no,” de Brock interrupted. “I’ll be there.’
“Good!”
Drew put the telephone down and rubbed his hands gently together.
CHAPTER TWO
Jaline Quinton was waiting for her father when he came into the entrance lounge of the Grand Hotel. She saw him enter through the revolving doors, got to her feet hurriedly, and went across to him.
“Well, dad, how did it go?” She spoke in her native tongue.
“Oh, hello, Jal.…” Her father smiled at her, did not resist as she led him across to the wicker chairs under the dried palms where she had been seated. “I didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”
“Nothing else for it,” the girl answered, sighing. “The post was filled. Don’t seem to be many people who want an interpreter these days. You’d think that with a knowledge of seven languages, I’d get a good deal further than this.”
Her serious blue eyes regarded him for a moment. She was a good-looking girl of obviously Teutonic descent. Blonde hair was piled in coils and waves on top of her head and about her ears. She was slender-shouldered, elfin-limbed, with features which had the pink and white delicacy begotten of her cardiac trouble.
“And you?” she asked. “How did you get on?”
“I think Mr. Drew will be able to do something for me—”
“Then—then you don’t know? You showed him the blueprint, didn’t you?”
“Of course—but I had to leave it with him for examination. His research department has to go through it.”
Jaline considered him in troubled silence for a moment.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, setting the briefcase down on the chair beside him. “That I shouldn’t have done that. I had to, Jal: there was no other way. No scientist could decide the value of my invention by a mere glance. I’m going back tomorrow morning for the answer. I have a receipt, so there’s nothing whatever to worry about.”
“If ever there was a man with no business acumen and a frightening trust of his fellow men, it’s you, dad,” the girl sighed. “You built that watch-making firm of yours up into a concern worth a fortune, and then you let it go for a paltry fifty thousand pounds, English value. Now you have an invention that is again worth millions, and you actually leave the blueprint in the hands of a man about whom you know nothing, trusting solely to a receipt. Do you realize what you’ve done?”
Quinton smiled and patted the girl’s hand. “I have copies of the print, my dear. Everything will be all right, don’t you worry. Drew is too well-known as a financier to try any shady tricks. Wouldn’t pay him.”
“I wonder…,” Jaline reflected. “I don’t trust financiers—not the big ones anyway—no more than you trust banks. Remember how you had your cheque for fifty thousand changed into notes when you got to England, and now have it stored away in your trunk upstairs? Well, you’re afraid of banks, just as I am of financiers.… Y’know, dad, what I really wish is—” The girl’s voice trailed off and she shrugged. “What’s the use of my talking?”
“What? What do you really wish?”
“That we could go back to Switzerland, retire on the fifty thousand, and forget everything. England and London are not the places for us, dad. I’m unhappy. That’s why I’m trying to liven things up by looking for a post of some kind.”
Her father looked at her steadily. “We can’t go back to our own country, Jal—and you know it. We’ve got to remember what the specialists said.”
“About my heart, you mean? That only softer air could prolong my life? That’s all medical talk and I don’t believe one half of it. Let’s go back, the moment we have Drew’s answer!”
Quinton shook his head slowly.
“No, my dear, I wouldn’t take the risk, not with your heart in its present state. If we went back and the air braced you so much as to—to kill you, just think how I’d feel!”
Jaline shrugged. “All right, then, we’ll just have to carry on in London—or out in the northeast country somewhere. Perhaps we’d better discuss it tomorrow when we’ve heard what Drew has to say.”
“That,” her father agreed quietly, “would probably be the best.”
* * * *
At eight o’clock that evening the shades were tightly drawn over the windows in Emerson Drew’s immense office, and the concealed lighting glowed on the furniture and roughcast walls in shadowless brilliance.
He sat at the desk, square and complacent, contemplating the finished model of the Quinton bomb. On his right was the pale-faced, lean-cheeked Metals tycoon J.K. Darnhome, his cold gray eyes studying the bomb’s smooth, tapering outlines.
Marvin de Brock, acid-faced, black-haired, fiftyish, had his elbows on the desk and his chin cradled in his hands. His expression was one of profound absorption.
“And you are sure,” Drew asked Bruce Valant, the scientist, slowly, “that everything is perfect? That Quinton really knows what he is up to?”
“Beyond a doubt,” the scientist agreed, standing on the opposite side of the desk. “Suppose I demonstrate the thing for you, then you’ll get the right idea.…”
Drew nodded, waved a hand, and sat back in his chair. Valant picked up the bomb and took it across to a sheet of two-inch-thick steel that he had brought in. The steel formed
