“You had better let Eberhardt tie your hands behind you first.”
A man does these things. Even on the march to execution, he obeys. He becomes trapped into a kind of automatism, in which there is only the one hypnotising thought that death waiting at the end of a few seconds is still not yet death.
With the cigarette held between his lips, Simon put his hands together behind his back. He placed them with the edges of his wrists together and his muscles tense. Eberhardt walked around behind him, and he felt the roughness of cords tightening on his skin.
When Eberhardt stepped away again, pulling out the gun which he had temporarily thrust into one overall pocket, Julius went to the door and switched on some more lights. Deeper reaches of the long barren shed with its Martian islands of machinery sprang into sight under the crude glare of more powerful bulbs hung from the roof.
“Since this was your great discovery, I think it deserves to be your last memory,” Julius said.
He crossed to a larger and much more complicated switchboard which had become visible on one of the side walls, and made another connection. The air trembled with a deep and almost musical note that soared quickly and settled into a thin but tangible whine that Simon could feel in the soles of his feet. He recognised it in a moment as the hum of a mighty generator.
“I don’t know how familiar you are with the process of extracting mercury from cinnabar,” Julius said conversationally.
“Not so familiar as I might be,” said the Saint in the same tone. “Do you stick a glass tube in it and put it in an oven so that it climbs out like a thermometer, or do you sit over it with a microscope and pick it out with tweezers?”
“Here we use some improvements on the Almadén method,” said Julius, rather like a pedantic lecturer. “But the process is fundamentally the same. First the ore is crushed with some new machinery designed by Bruechner of Essen. Then it is carried by a conveyor belt to a continuous furnace. As it passes down through the furnace, it is roasted at high temperature.”
He selected a heavy lever and threw it over, and the shed suddenly trembled with a tremendous thumping clatter like a regiment of cavalry trotting over an iron drumhead. A second similar lever added a harsh groaning whirr to the din.