Part 8

“Hold!” Hanover shouted, in his excitement springing to his feet and waving his arms. “Swat--and I accept your word, Starkington, crude though it is, but expressive. Swat--and I warn you, Starkington--swat as much as the tiniest pigment cell of the diaphanous gauze of a new-hatched mosquito’s wing, and the totality of the universe is jarred from its central suns to the stars beyond the stars. Do not forget there is a cosmic righteousness in that pigment cell and in the last atom of the billion atoms that go to compose that pigment cell, and in every one of the countless myriads of corpuscles that go to compose one of those billion atoms.”

“Listen, gentlemen,” Grunya said. “What are you here for? I do not mean in the universe, but here in this house. I accept all that Mr. Hanover has so eloquently said of the pigment cell of the mosquito’s wing. It is evidently not right to--to swat a mosquito. Then, how in the name of sanity can you reconcile your presence here, bent as you are on a red-handed murder, with the ethics you have just expounded?”

An uproar of reconciliation arose from every mouth.

“Hey! Shut up!” Hall bellowed at them, then turned to the girl and commanded peremptorily, “Grunya, stop it. You’re getting touched. In five minutes you’ll be as bad as they are. A truce to argument, you fellows. Cut it out. Forget it. Let’s get down to business. Where is the Chief, Miss Constantine’s father? You say he told you to come here. Why have you come here? To kill him?”

Hanover wiped his forehead, collapsed from his passion of thought, and nodded.

“That is our reasoned intention,” he said calmly. “Of course, the presence of Miss Constantine is embarrassing. I fear we shall have to ask her to withdraw.”

“You are a brute, sir,” she gravely assured the mild-mannered scholar. “I shall remain right here. And you won’t kill my father. I tell you, you won’t.”

“Why isn’t the Chief here, then?” Hall inquired.

“Because it is not yet time. He telephoned to us, talked with us himself, and he said he would meet us here in this room at ten o’clock. It is almost ten now.”

“Maybe he won’t come,” Hall suggested.

“He gave his word,” was the simple but quite convincing answer.

Hall looked at his watch. It marked a few seconds before ten. And ere those seconds had ticked off, the door opened and Dragomiloff, blond and colorless, clad in a gray traveling suit, stepped in, passing a glance over the assemblage from silken eyes of the palest blue.

“Greetings, dear friends and brothers,” he said in his monotonously even voice. “I see you are all here, with the exception of Haas. Where is Haas?”

The assassins who could not lie stared at one another in awkward confusion.

“Where is Haas?” Dragomiloff repeated.

“We--ah--we don’t know exactly, that is it, exactly,” Harkins began haltingly.

“Well, I do, and exactly,” Dragomiloff chopped him short. “I watched you arrive from the upstairs window. I recognized all of you. Haas also arrived. He is now lying in the shrubbery inside the gate on the right-hand side of the walk, and exactly four feet and four inches from the lower hinge of the gate. I measured it the other day. Do you think that was what I intended?”

“We did not care to anticipate your intentions, dear Chief,” Hanover spoke up benignly, but with logical emphasis. “We debated your invitation and your instructions carefully, and it was our unanimous conclusion that we committed no breach of word or faith in assigning Haas to his position outside. Do you remember your instructions?”

“Perfectly,” Dragomiloff assented. “Wait till I go over them to myself.” For a half-minute of silence he reviewed his instructions, then his face thawed into almost a beam of satisfaction. “You are correct,” he announced. “You have committed no breach of right conduct. And now, dear comrades, all our plans are destroyed by this intrusion of my daughter and of the man who is your Temporary Secretary and who I hope some day will be my son-in-law.”

“What was the aim of your plan?” Starkington asked quickly.

“To destroy you,” Dragomiloff laughed. “And the aim of your plan was?”

“To destroy you,” Starkington admitted. “And destroy you we will. We regret Miss Constantine’s presence, as we likewise do Mr. Hall’s presence. They came uninvited. They can, of course, withdraw.”

“I won’t!” Grunya cried out. “You cold-blooded, inhuman, mathematical monsters! This is my father, and I may be abysmal mire, or anything else you please, but I will not withdraw, and you shall not harm him.”

“You must meet me halfway in this,” Dragomiloff urged. “Let us consider this once that we have failed on both sides. Let me propose a truce.”

“Very well,” Starkington conceded. “A truce for five minutes, during which time no overt act may be attempted and no one may leave the room. We should like to confer together over there by the piano. Is it agreed?”

“Yes, certainly. But first you will please notice where I am standing. My hand is resting against this particular book in this bookcase. I shall not move until you have decided on what course you intend to pursue.”

The assassins drew to the far end of the room and began talking in whispers.

“Come,” Grunya whispered to her father. “You have but to step through the door and escape.”

Dragomiloff smiled forgivingly. “You do not understand,” he said with gentleness.

She clenched her hands passionately, crying, “You are as insane as they.”

“But Grunya, love,” he pleaded, “is it not a beautiful insanity--if you prefer the misnomer? Here thought rules and right rules. It would seem to me the highest rationality and control. What distinguishes man from the lower animals is control. Witness this scene. There stand seven men intent on killing me. Here I stand intent on killing them. Yet, by the miracle of the spoken word we agree to a truce. We trust. It is a beautiful example of high moral inhibition.”

“Every hermit, on top of a pillar or living with the snakes in a cliff cave, has been a beautiful example of such inhibition,” she came back impatiently. “The inhibitions practiced in the asylums are often very remarkable.”

But Dragomiloff refused to be drawn, and smiled and joked until the assassins returned. As before, Starkington was the spokesman.

“We have decided,” he said, “that it is our duty to kill you, dear Chief. There is still a minute to run. When it is gone we shall proceed to our work. Also, in that interval, we again request our two unbidden guests to withdraw.”

Grunya shook her head positively. “I am armed,” she threatened, drawing a small automatic pistol and displaying her inexperience by not pressing down the safety catch.

“It’s too bad,” Starkington apologized. “But we shall have to go on with our work just the same.”

“If nothing unforeseen prevents?” Dragomiloff suggested.

Starkington glanced at his comrades, who nodded, then said, “Certainly, unless nothing unforeseen--”

“And here is the unforeseen,” Dragomiloff interrupted quietly. “You see my hands, my dear Starkington. They bear no weapons. Forbear a minute. You see the book against which my left hand rests. Behind that book, at the back of the case, is a push-button. One firm thrust in of the book presses the button. The room is a magazine of dynamite. Need I explain more? Draw aside that rug on which you are standing--that’s right. Now carefully lift up that loose board. See the sticks lying side by side. They’re all connected.”

“Most interesting,” Hanover murmured, peering down at the dynamite through his spectacles. “Death so simply achieved! A violent chemical reaction, I believe. Some day, when I can spare the time, I shall make a study of explosives.”

And in that moment, Hall and Grunya realized that the philosopher-assassins were truly not afraid of death. As they claimed for themselves, they were not burdened by the flesh. Love of life did not yearn through their mental processes. All they knew was the love of thought.

“We did not guess this,” Gray assured Dragomiloff. “But we apprehended what we did not guess. That is why we stationed Haas outside. You could escape us, but not him.”

“Which reminds me, comrades,” Dragomiloff said. “I ran another wire to the spot in the grounds where Haas is now lurking. Let us hope he does not blunder upon my button I concealed there, else we’ll all go up along with our theories. Suppose one of you goes and brings him in to join us. And while we’re about it, let us agree to another truce. Under the present circumstances, your hands are tied.”

“Seven lives for one,” said Harkins. “Mathematically it is repulsive.”

“It is poor economics,” Breen agreed.

“And suppose,” Dragomiloff continued, “we make the truce till one o’clock and you all come and have supper with me.”

“If Haas agrees,” Alsworthy said. “I am going to get him now.”

Haas agreed and, like any party of friends, they left the house together and caught an electric car for uptown.

_Chapter XIII_

In a private room at the Poodle Dog, the eight assassins and Dragomiloff, Hall, and Grunya sat at table. And a merry, almost convivial supper it was, despite the fact that Harkins and Hanover were vegetarians, that Lucoville eschewed all cooked food and munched bovinely at a great plate of lettuce, raw turnips, and carrots, and that Alsworthy began, kept up, and finished with nuts, raisins, and bananas. On the other hand, Breen, who looked a dyspeptic, orgied with a thick, raw steak and shuddered at the suggestion of wine. Dragomiloff and Haas drank thin native claret, while Hall, Gray, and Grunya shared a pint of light Rhine wine. Starkington, however, began with two Martini cocktails, and ever and again, throughout the meal, buried his face in a huge stein of Würzburger.

The talk was outspoken, though the feeling displayed was comradely and affectionate.

“We’d have got you,” Starkington told Dragomiloff, “if it hadn’t been for the inopportune arrival of your daughter.”

“My dear Starkington,” Dragomiloff retorted. “It was she who saved you. I’d have bagged the seven of you.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Breen joined in. “As I understand, the wire led to the bushes where Haas was hiding.”

“His being there was an accident, a mere accident,” Dragomiloff answered lightly enough, yet unable to conceal that he was somewhat crestfallen.

“Since when has the fortuitous been discarded from the factors of evolution?” Hanover began learnedly.

“You’d never have touched it off, Chief,” Haas was saying at the same time that Lucoville was demanding of Hanover, “Since when was the fortuitous ever classed as a factor?”

“Possibly your disagreement is merely of definition,” Hall said pacifically. “That asparagus is tinned, Hanover. Did you know that?”

Hanover forgot the argument, and sat back aghast. “And I never eat tinned stuff of any sort! Are you sure, Hall? Are you sure?”

“Ask the waiter. He’ll tell you the same.”

“It’s all right, dear Haas,” Dragomiloff was saying. “The next time I’ll surely touch it off, and you won’t be in the way. You’ll be at the other end of the wire.”

“Oh, I cannot understand, I cannot understand,” Grunya cried. “It seems a joke. It can’t be real. Here you are, all good friends, eating and drinking together and affectionately telling how you intend killing one another.” She turned to Hall. “Wake me up, Winter. This is a dream.”

“I wish it were.”

She turned to Dragomiloff. “Oh, Uncle Sergius, wake me up!”

“You are awake, Grunya, love.”

“Then if I’m awake,” she went on, firmly, almost angrily, “it is you who are the somnambulists. Wake up! Oh, wake up! I wish an earthquake would come, anything, if it would only rouse you. Father, you can do it. Withdraw that order for your death which you yourself gave.”

“But don’t you see, he can’t,” Starkington told her across the corner of the table.

Dragomiloff, at the other end of the table, shook his head. “You would not have me break my word, Grunya?”

“I’m not afraid to break--anything!” Hall interrupted. “The order started with me. I withdraw it. Return my fifty thousand, or spend it on charity. I don’t care. The point is, I don’t want Dragomiloff killed.”

“You forget yourself,” Haas reminded him. “You are merely a client of the Bureau. And when you engaged the service of the Bureau, you agreed to certain things. The Bureau likewise agreed to certain things. You may wish to break your agreement, but it has passed beyond you. The affair is in the hands of the Bureau, and the Bureau does not break its agreements. It never has broken them and it never will. If there be not absolute faith in the given word, if the given word be not as unbreakable as the tie-ribs of earth, then there is no hope in life, and creation crashes to chaos because of its intrinsic falsity. We deny this falsity. We prove it by our acts that clinch the finality of the given word. Am I right, comrades?”

Approval was unanimous, and Dragomiloff, half rising from his chair, reached across and grasped the hand of Haas. For once Dragomiloff’s undeviating, monotonous voice was touched with the emphasis of feeling as he proclaimed proudly:

“The hope of the world! The higher race! The top of evolution! The right-rulers and king-thinkers! The realization of all dreams and aspirings; the slime crawled upward to the light; the touch and the promise of Godhead come true!”

Hanover left his seat and threw his arms about the Chief in an ecstasy of intellectual admiration and fellowship. Grunya and Hall looked at each other despairingly.

“King-thinkers,” he murmured helplessly.

“The asylums are filled with king-thinkers,” was her angry comment.

“Logic!” he sneered.

“I, too, shall write a book,” she added. “It shall be entitled _The Logic of Lunacy, or, Why Thinkers Go Mad_.”

“Never has our logic been better vindicated,” Starkington said to her, as the jubilation of the king-thinkers eased down.

“You do violence with your logic,” Grunya flung back. “I will prove it to you--”

“By logic?” Gray interpolated quickly and raised a general laugh, in which Grunya could not help but join.

Hall lifted his hand solemnly for a hearing.

“We have yet to debate how many angels can dance on the point of a needle.”

“Shame on you!” Lucoville cried. “That is antediluvian. We are scholars, not scholastics--”

“And you can prove it,” Grunya stabbed across, “as easily as you can the angels and the needle and everything else.”

“If ever I get out of this mix-up with you fellows,” Hall declared, “I shall forswear logic. Never again!”

“A confession of intellectual fatigue,” Lucoville argued.

“Only he does not mean it,” Harkins put in. “He can’t help being logical. It is his heritage--the heritage of man. It distinguishes man from the lesser--”

“Hold!” Hanover broke in. “You forget that the universe is founded on logic. Without logic the universe could not be. In every fibre of it logic resides. There is logic in the molecule, in the atom, in the electron. I have a monograph, here in my pocket, which I shall read to you. I have called it ‘Electronic Logic.’ It--”

“Here is the waiter,” Hall interrupted wickedly. “He says of course that the asparagus was tinned.”

Hanover ceased fumbling in his pocket in order to vent a tirade against the waiter and the management of the Poodle Dog.

“That was not logical,” Hall smiled, when the waiter had left the room.

“And why not, pray?” Hanover asked, with a touch of asperity.

“Because it is not the season for fresh asparagus.”

Ere Hanover could recover from this, Breen began on him.

“You said earlier this evening, Hanover, that you were interested in explosives. Let me show you the quintessence of universal logic--the irrefragable logic of the elements, the logic of chemistry, the logic of mechanics, and the logic of time, all indissolubly welded together into one of the prettiest devices ever mortal mind conceived. So thoroughly do I agree with you, that I shall now show you the unreasoned logic of the stuff of the universe.”

“Why unreasoned?” Hanover queried faintly, shuddering at the uneaten asparagus. “Do you think the electron incapable of reason?”

“I don’t know. I never saw an electron. But for the sake of the argument, let us suppose it does reason. Anyway, as you’ll agree, it’s the keenest logic, the absolutest and most unswervable logic you’ve ever seen. Look at that.” Breen had gone to where his overcoat hung on the wall and drawn out a flat oblong package. This, when unwrapped, resembled a folding pocket camera of medium size. He held it up with eyes sparkling with admiration. “By George, Hanover!” he exclaimed. “I think you are right. Look at it!--The eloquent-voiced, the subduer of jarring tongues and warring creeds, the ultimate arbiter. It enunciates the final word. When it speaks, kings and emperors, grafters and falsifiers, the Scribes and Pharisees and all wrong-thinkers remain silent--forever remain silent.”

“Let it speak,” Haas grinned. “Maybe it will silence Hanover.”

The laughter died away as they saw Breen, the object poised in his hand, visibly thinking. And in the silence they saw him achieve his concept of action.

“Very well,” he said. “It shall speak.” He drew from his vest pocket an ordinary-looking, gun-metal watch. “It is an alarm watch,” he went on, “seventeen-jeweled movement, Swiss-Elgin works. Let me see. It is now midnight. Our truce”--he bowed to Dragomiloff--“expires at one o’clock. See, I set it for precisely one minute after one.” He pointed to an opening in the camera-like object. “Behold this slot. It is specially devised to receive this watch--mark me, I say, specially devised. I insert the watch, thus. Did you hear that metallic click? That is the automatic locking device. No power can now remove that watch. I cannot. The decree has gone forth. It cannot be recalled. All this is of my devising save for the voice itself. The voice is the voice of Nakatodaka, the great Japanese who died last year.”

“A phonograph record,” Hanover complained. “I thought you said something about explosives.”

“The voice of Nakatodaka is an explosive,” Breen expounded. “Nakatodaka, if you will remember, was killed in his laboratory by his own voice.”

“Formose!” Haas said, nodding his head. “I remember now.”

“So do I,” Hall told Grunya. “Nakatodaka was a great chemist.”

“But I understand the secret died with him,” Starkington said.

“So the world understood,” was Breen’s reply. “But the formula was found by the Japanese government and stolen from the War Office by a revolutionist.” His voice swelled with pride. “This is the first Formose ever manufactured on American soil. I manufactured it.”

“Heavens!” Grunya cried. “And when it goes off it will blow us all up!”

Breen nodded with intense gratification.

“If you remain it will,” he said. “The people in this neighborhood will think it an earthquake or another anarchist outrage.”

“Stop it!” she commanded.

“I can’t. That’s the beauty of it. As I told Hanover, it is the logic of chemistry, the logic of mechanics, and the logic of time, all indissolubly welded together. There is no power in the universe that can now break that weld. Any attempt would merely precipitate the explosion.”

Grunya caught Hall’s hand as she stared at him in her helplessness, but Hanover, fluttering and hovering about the infernal machine, peering at it delightedly through his spectacles, was off in another ecstasy.

“Wonderful! Wonderful! Breen, I congratulate you. We shall now be able to settle the affairs of nations and put the world on a higher, nobler basis. Hebrew is a diversion. This is an efficiency. I shall certainly devote myself to the study of explosives ... Lucoville, you are refuted. There _is_ morality in the elements, and reason, and logic.”

“You forget, my dear Hanover,” Lucoville replied, “that behind this mechanism and chemistry and abstraction of time is the mind of man, devising, controlling, utilizing--”

But he was interrupted by Hall, who had shoved his chair back and sprung to his feet.

“You lunatics! You sit there like a lot of clams! Don’t you realize that that damned thing is going to go off?”

“Not until one after one,” Hanover mildly assured him. “Besides, Breen has not yet told us his intentions.”

“The mind of man behind and informing unconscious matter and blind force,” Lucoville gibed.

Starkington leaned across to Hall and said in an undertone, “Transport this scene to a stage setting with a Wall Street audience! There’d be a panic.”

But Hall shook the interruption aside.

“Look here, Breen, just what is your intention? I, for one, and Miss Constantine, are going to get out, now, at once.”

“There is plenty of time,” replied the custodian of Nakatodaka’s voice. “I’ll tell you my intention. The truce expires at one. I am between our dear Chief and the door. He can’t go though the walls. I guard the door. The rest of you may depart. But I remain here with him. The blow is sped. Nothing can stop it. One minute after the truce is up the last commission accepted by the Bureau will have been accomplished. Pardon me, dear Chief, one moment. I have told you that even I cannot stop the process now at work in that mechanism. But I can expedite it. You see my thumb, lightly resting in this depression? It just barely brushes a button. One press of the thumb, and the machine immediately explodes. Now, as an honorable and logical man and comrade, you can see that any attempt of yours to get out of this door will blow all of us up, your daughter and the Temporary Secretary as well. Therefore you will remain in your seat. Hanover, the formula is safe. I shall remain here and die with the Chief at one minute after one. You will find the formula in the top drawer of the filing cabinet in my bedroom.”

“Do something!” Grunya entreated Hall. “You must do something.”

Hall, who had sat down, again stood up, moving the wineglass to one side as he rested one hand on the table.

“Gentlemen.” He spoke in a quiet voice, but one which immediately gained him the respectful attention of the others. “Until now, despite my abhorrence of killing, I have felt bound to respect the ideals that directed your actions. Now, however, I must question your motives.”

He turned to Breen, who was watching him carefully.

“Tell me,” Hall pursued, “do you feel that you, personally, merit extinction? If you give your life in order to assassinate your Chief, you are violating the tenet that any death at your hand is one warranted by the crimes of the victim. Of what crimes are you so guilty as to make this sentence--which you have passed upon yourself--a just one?”

Breen smiled at this adroit argument. The others listened politely.

“But you see,” the bacteriologist explained happily, “we in the Assassination Bureau recognize the possibility of our own death in the execution of our assignments. It is a normal risk of our business.”

“Accidental death, yes, as a result of the unexpected,” was Hall’s quiet reply. “Here, however, we are speaking of a planned death, and that of an innocent person--yourself. This is in violation of your own principles.”

There was a moment’s thoughtful silence.

“He’s quite right, Breen, you know,” Gray finally offered. He had been listening to the verbal duel with puckered forehead. “I’m afraid that your solution is scarcely acceptable.”

“Still,” Lucoville contributed, “consider this: Breen, by arranging an innocent’s death, might be warranting his own death for dereliction of principle.”

“A priori,” Haas snapped impatiently. “Specious. You are arguing in circles. Until he dies, he is not guilty; if he is not guilty, he does not warrant death.”

“Mad!” Grunya whispered. “They are all mad!”