Bill's grip tightened. "Wait! This garden was guarded. Have you killed those men? Because if you have all bets are off!"
The little Frenchman smiled. "But no, Monsieur. I have no quarrel with your countrymen. There are other missiles for this little toy of mine—hollow needles filled with a certain rare drug like the 'mercy bullets' of your American sportsmen. They will sleep soundly for some hours yet, and have what you call the big hangover when they awaken but that is all. Shall we go now? It is late, and I have much to tell you."
The whole idea looked screwy to me. Even now I'm not sure that it wasn't. But when Bill Porter makes up his mind, it would take Gabriel's trumpet to change it. He was quite capable of plumping one of Dampier's little needles into me and going off with the Frenchman alone.
"I'll get the car," I said. "Let's get out of here before someone stumbles over a corpse and yells for the cops."
We were somewhere in the middle of Maryland before Bill let me slow down. He must have had a talk with Dampier while I was getting the car, for the little Frenchman never peeped until we swung into a narrow dirt road somewhere north of Frederick. He called the next turn, and the next, until I began to suspect that he was running us around in circles. At last we pulled up before a deserted farm-house, set back from the road behind a dilapidated picket fence. Bill nudged me. Silhouetted against the stars were the towers of a high-tension line. Dampier was either stealing or buying power in a big way.
Now a French gentleman's word is supposed to be about as good as Finland's credit, but we were taking no chances. I remembered that wicked little dart with its razor-edged barbs, and I felt pretty sure that Bill hadn't forgotten it either. We lined up, one on each side of him, and marched across the weed-grown lawn to the rickety side porch. There was a Yale lock on the door, and as Dampier swung it open I saw that it was backed with steel armor-plate. Outside the house might look like the poorer section of Bilded Road, but inside it was built like a fortress. Six-inch concrete walls, steel doors, indirect lighting and ventilation—it looked as though Monsieur Pierre Dampier had been expecting to stand a pretty heavy siege.
A winding stair went down through the floor into a basement room that ran under the entire house. Dampier led the way, Bill followed, and I came last. Probably our science editor could have made something of what Dampier had in that buried room. I couldn't. I wouldn't even have known where to begin photographing it, if the Leica hadn't been back on the terrace at the Embassy where I'd dropped it to vault over the rail into Bill's little shambles, and the Graflex somewhere in the back of the car.
To begin with, he was drawing more current than any ten men I'd ever seen, and I've covered some of the atom-busting at M.I.T. and the lightning shop at Pittsfield. It all went into two huge buss-bars, that ran across to a kind of cage of interlacing copper loops, standing in the center of the room. They were hung from jointed supports that rose above an insulated block or platform of bakelite, with most of the bulkier apparatus inside out of sight, but I had a hunch that whatever was going to happen would take place in, at, and around those spidery coils.
One corner of the room was a kind of office with a desk and books, and a couple of ancient chairs. Dampier waved Bill and me into them and began to pace up and down in front of us like an expectant father. The wild glint had come back into his eyes, but I've seen enough of scientists to know that that isn't necessarily fatal. Most scientists are half nuts anyway. Bill and I never agreed on that point.
You see, before Bill became a demon reporter, he was the white hope of American science. That's how I met him, trying to cover something I couldn't understand and didn't much want to. He fixed my story up for me, and chiseled in on the season's juiciest murder scandal in return. I came down with a bad case of busted cranium, as a result of following his hunches a little too far, and he wrote my scoop for me. After that it stuck. I claimed then they should have made him science editor, but old Medford is our owner's nephew or something, and besides he's pretty good. Anyway, Bill wouldn't take a desk job. It seems he'd always wanted to feel the pulse of Life—