Authors: Eric Ambler
‘Some people feel the same way about seatbelts in cars – that they can sometimes turn out to be dangerous, I mean. If there’s anything worth seeing in there I’ll tell you about it.’
The museum was a large square room with stone walls, two casement windows, a heavy wooden door and a tiled floor. There was a kerosene lantern hanging from the ceiling. It didn’t look as if it had been cleaned or lighted recently, but there was kerosene in it still. It gave the room a faint smell of times past. The exhibits were mostly in two glass cases. Others, too large or heavy for the cases, stood against one of the windowless walls.
I looked in the glass cases first, where every object had a yellowing label beside it and a description written in sepia ink. One case contained nothing but skeletons that had been found in the mine. These were mostly of small mammals – cats, dogs and rodents of various sizes – but there were one or two birds and an incomplete human skeleton as well. I tried hard to read the label on that one but the writing combined with the German defeated me. The other case housed the artefacts. They too had been recovered from the mine workings and were, not surprisingly, nearly all miners’ hand tools without their wooden helves. There were picks,
shovels, hammers and wedges all arranged in what I soon gathered was chronological order. Dr Petrucher had assigned the picks, for instance,
circa
dates covering three centuries. At first I could not see how it had been done. The picks, apart from small differences in sizes and the way some of them curved, all seemed identical. The differences could have been accounted for simply by saying that not all of them had been forged by the same toolmaker. Then I noticed that beside each date card was a coin. In another part of the case there was a whole collection of old coins. Dr Petrucher’s system of dating had been based on sound archaeological thinking. If you find an object, such as a coin, which can be dated with reasonable confidence, then it is
probable
in most circumstances that other objects found with it will be of the same period. I approached the rest of the exhibits more respectfully. Against the wall I found parts of an old windlass, a small iron sled and an ox-hide bucket. The German word for ox is
Ochse
. That’s how I knew it was ox-hide.
The most interesting exhibit, however, was Dr Petrucher’s attempt to make a map of the mine. It hung high up on the end wall and I had to stand on a chair to see it properly. It looked like a cross-section drawing of a huge sponge. The Doctor had been something of a sketch-artist too, and around the outer edges of the sponge he had done drawings of how he had thought those old miners must have looked when they were at work. In the lower galleries, it seemed, they had generally worked lying prone in minute tunnels or on their sides hacking away beneath the limestone overhangs. The only standing room in the sponge was in the higher galleries where the winching-up of the baskets filled with ore had been done or at the foot of the ventilation shafts sunk from the hillside above. There was also a drawing of a drainage pump consisting of a lot of scoops or dippers mounted on a long revolving chain the bottom loop of which stayed under water in a deep sump. And Dr Petrucher had tried to figure out the
size of the workings, though the difficulty of making estimates that would be any better than rough guesses had clearly bothered him. However, his medical training had taught him how to make guesswork sound good. He admitted that it was guesswork but made the admission in Latin.
Magnitudo quod cogitari potest
, he had written coyly in a delicate little scroll above his estimates. Translated from the Latin, they were:
Greatest measurable depth
— 280 metres,
Greatest width
— 400 metres,
Volume of air within when unflooded
— 8 million cubic metres,
Volume of air within at maximum (1904) flooding
— 2 million cubic metres.
‘And what do you make of it all, Mr Halliday?’ Zander asked.
I had left the big door open to give myself more light, but even so he had come in very quietly. His hands were in the scrubbed-up position, which I now recognized as an indicator of fast thinking in process, and the eyes were smiling up at me. The thing that startled me was that he was wearing a shirt with a tie and a beautifully cut grey mohair suit.
‘What do I make of this mine? It looks to me like a sponge,’ I said.
‘Think of it as a lung, Mr Halliday, and all will become clear.’
I climbed down from the chair. ‘Simone has put you in the picture? You agree with what’s been planned?’
‘I think you have done very well indeed, Mr Halliday, and worked very hard for us. I said we had enlisted you. You see now? I was right. The idea of using the Austrian television people as a kind of escort was very cute.’
‘Cute you say? You mean you don’t think it’ll work.’
‘Up to a point, I think it may work quite well.’ The quality of the simper made it less patronizing than it sounded.
‘If it works to the point of getting us as far as the Italian frontier in one piece, I’d say that it had worked amazingly well.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said absently.
‘Perhaps what?’ I was getting annoyed.
‘Perhaps they are not planning to make the kill in Austria. In their place I would not try it, I think. For them a clean getaway is most important.’
‘Then we don’t really need an escort? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No, no, Mr Halliday. The escort will be most useful. It will tell them that we believe we need one and that we think we understand their intentions. We shall be taking up what they will see as a natural defensive position. Don’t worry. You have no reason to reproach yourself.’
‘I wasn’t reproaching myself.’
‘Good, good.’ Further discussion of plans for dealing with a Rasmuk hit-team would have bored him. He changed the subject with a flutter of hands. ‘Right now, what is important for your interview with His Highness is that you understand the special significance for him of this mine.’
‘Significance as a fall-out shelter you mean.’
‘Significance as a nuclear fall-out shelter, certainly. But also its value as a defence against biochemical warfare substances.’
‘I only asked because the other day, Mr Zander, you were selling the place as a clinic like Oberzeiring.’
He brushed that away with the edge of a hand as I had seen him brush away other awkward or unwanted trains of thought.
‘That was the other day,’ he said. ‘Now you must have the facts. First, consider the site. Austria is now neutral and most unlikely to suffer a direct attack. All dangers to her in the final World War will come from the devastation of her neighbours. The prevailing winds in this part are westerly, so here, on the eastern slopes of the hills, fall-out of all kinds is likely to be received in smaller amounts. Now, for the mine itself. You were looking at old Petrucher’s ideas about its size. What had occurred to you? Why were you interested?’
‘I was thinking that if there hadn’t been a fairly high silver
content in the ore, nobody in the Middle Ages would have bothered to scratch it all out. Their smelting processes must have been pretty wasteful.’
‘But there was a lot of silver there and they
did
dig the ore out and there had been much more there to take than Dr Petrucher even thought. The workings, now that they have been pumped dry at the deepest part, have about forty percent more air in them than Petrucher’s calculations indicated. I told you to think of it as a lung, Mr Halliday.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘Very well. When the final World War breaks out and the two sides have begun to use nuclear and biochemical weapons on the grand scale, how will you try to meet the threat?’
‘By getting drunk, I’d say.’
‘I am being serious, Mr Halliday. Would you perhaps seal yourself in protective clothing and then, when the filters in the face mask ceased to work, try to hold your breath?’
‘Who’s joking now? I guess a cold water diving suit with plenty of air bottles would help, if you didn’t mind giving up eating and drinking.’
‘And for as long as your supply of fresh air bottles lasts, yes that would help. How long shall we give you? A week?’
‘Thanks. But it’s not enough, is it?’
‘No. Six months at least you would need before harmless and easily breathable air once more became available. This mine here would give you and twenty of your friends or servants an ample supply of safe, easily breathable and uncontaminated air for a minimum period of eight months.’
‘How does it do that?’ I pointed at the sponge on the wall. ‘What comes in through the ventilation shafts? Contaminated air? No, because you’d shut them off presumably. What about the pumps? What keeps them running? Emergency generators? Where does the air and gas to keep them running for eight months come from? How about breakdowns? Do you have spares?’
But he was flapping his hands at me. ‘Please, please, I am asking you to think of it as a lung. With the pumps below now keeping all the workings empty of water, the mine has drawn the equivalent of a deep breath, a breath consisting of nearly twelve million cubic metres of pure air. Now, the great emergency arrives. It could be tomorrow. The electricity fails. The pumps stop. Slowly, very slowly, the deep parts of the mine will begin to flood again and, as they slowly flood, the water will start pushing air out of the mine up through the ventilation shafts. They will have non-return air valves and filters on them, of course, as a precaution, but with the mine gradually flooding the flow of air will always be steadily
out
. The whole mine will be like a lung breathing out, but, because of its great size, taking eight months to do so. Even if mains electricity is restored quickly, the pumps will remain silent. They will be silent so that the pure underground water from the deep springs can continue to flow in, displacing the fresh, clean air and forcing it into the upper galleries for men to breathe.’
‘Whose idea was this? The Ruler’s?’
The simper became bland. ‘The Ruler has a most ingenious mind, as you seem to have realized rather quickly, but in the areas of science and technology it works only superficially. He bought the mine as a simpler kind of refuge from germs and chemicals that might attack his princely virility. He proposed to do much as you suggested a moment ago. Shut the ventilation shafts and rely on his stores of food, bottled water and aphrodisiacs to see him through. These more interesting developments were suggested by the mining engineer I first found to advise him.’
‘The one who’s been shooting off his mouth to the media?’
‘No. He left because he disliked the uses to which his work was to be put. He believed that story about a clinic. When he found it wasn’t true, he resigned. But he made no scandal. The man who followed him was different. You must not think that there was anything very remarkable or original
about this engineering idea. It is only making gravity work for you. Think of a dry dock. First, you pump out the water so that you may repair your ship. Then, when you want the ship to float again, you stop the pumps, open the valves and let water return. The Ruler, though, had difficulty sometimes in understanding this. A moment came when this second engineer treated His Highness with insufficient respect. He was fired. He bears a grudge.’
‘What did he do? Tell The Ruler he was stupid?’
‘He said, and in the hearing of others, that His Highness knew less than nothing about hydraulic engineering. Very foolish. What satisfaction can there be in stating the obvious simply because of a loss of temper. In fact, His Highness had been trying to understand why others could not do with other old mines what he was doing with this one.’
‘Don’t tell me he was beginning to think of civil defence for all.’
‘No, he was thinking that there might be profit of some kind in selling the idea to his brother Rulers. In fact, very few old mines could be used in this way. When they cease to be maintained, most of them soon collapse. It happens that a few of the old, limestone workings in this area are more like natural caves.’
‘Is there any chance of my having a quick look down below before the Dutch unit gets here? If it’s at all possible I’d like to shoot the interview below ground.’
‘That may be possible, but there’s no chance of your going to look now.’ The blandness had gone. ‘His Highness is being very careful today. To reach the mine entrance you would have to go through the room in which he confers with the architect. You would meet and that would be wrong. He will meet you when I bring you in for an audience, accompanied in the background by the Nato representatives, before his chosen witnesses, the Chief Secretary and the Financial Counsellor. You understand?’
‘Sure. Nothing’s been pre-arranged. It’s all a big surprise.’
‘Yes, Mr Halliday.’ He gave me a hard look. ‘And we do or say nothing to contradict that impression. He is all-wise and all-knowing and we treat him with the respect he considers due to him.’
‘Ignoring the fact, for the time being, that he’s an all-time murderous son-of-a-bitch. I see.’
‘No you
don’t
see, Mr Halliday.’ The eyes glittered into mine. ‘We don’t ignore it. We
forget
it. That way I may improve a little my family’s chances, and mine, of staying alive. As long as he thinks we are still innocents we have a small chance. We could still, perhaps, surprise them. But only if we seem innocent. Innocence, remember, is respectful. Your disapproval, your detestation of treacherous behaviour is unimportant and, at present, inconvenient. You will forget it please.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I hope your Nato friends are not going to be late.’
‘They won’t be late for another quarter of an hour, Mr Zander. Let’s not start biting our nails just yet. You ask me to forget something. Right. But don’t you forget, please, that I have an interview to do later. And it’s going to have to be a much more serious job than the quick, easy question-and-answer session that we talked about back in Stresa. I have to get The Ruler talking and I don’t want to hear too much about hydraulic engineering. I want to show the kind of man he’d like you to think he is, and then let you catch a glimpse of the real Mr Slyboots underneath.’