Goodbye California - Alistair [95]
‘Well, well.’ Morro smiled. ‘This time you have not been just superficially obtuse. You are correct, of course. Follow me, gentlemen.’
He led the way to the small booth from which he had telephoned. Its inner wall held yet another steel door. There was no press button to open this: instead, alongside the door was a small brass panel, highly polished, measuring about ten inches by six. Morro placed his flat palm and fingers against it. The door slid smoothly open.
Inside was a tiny room, not more than six feet by six. On the wall opposite the door was a metal table which supported a simple radio transmitter, smaller than an attaché case, with calibrated dials and tuning knobs. On top of the case was a perspex-covered red button. Clamped to one side of the table was an eight-inch cylinder with a diameter about half that. At one end of the cylinder was a cranking handle: at the other end an insulated lead to a socket in one side of the transmitter. There were two other sockets close by that one. From one, a lead reached down to a lead-acid battery on the floor: the third socket was connected to a wall socket.
‘An almost childishly simple device, gentlemen,’ Morro said. ‘A perfectly ordinary radio transmitter, but one serving a most extraordinary purpose. It is programmed with a specific code on a pre-set wave-length. The chances of anyone duplicating both the wave-length and the code are so astronomically remote they can be said to be non-existent. We have, as you see, guarded against any chance of a power failure: we have mains, battery and the hand-cranked generator.’ He touched the perspex-covered red button on top. ‘To operate, one simply unscrews the plastic dome, turns the button through ninety degrees and presses.’ He ushered them out, laid his hand against the brass panel and watched the door slide close. ‘One cannot very well have buttons for this purpose. Some careless person might accidentally lean against them.’
Healey said: ‘Only your handprint can open that door?’
‘You didn’t imagine that plate was simply an elaborate press-button? Well, gentlemen, the recording.’
‘One last thing,’ Burnett said. He nodded towards the row of Aunt Sallies. ‘There are two empty sets of clamps there. Why?’
‘Well, now.’ Morro smiled his empty smile. ‘I thought you might ask me that.’
The four physicists sat round the table in Burnett’s room, contemplating both their brandies and the future with an understandably profound gloom.
‘Well, I said it, didn’t I?’ Burnett said heavily. ‘“Mark my words”, I said. Didn’t I say that?’
No one said whether he’d said it or not. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
‘Even that control room could have been part of a massive hoax.’ Schmidt was grasping at nonexistent straws.
No one said anything to that either, and for the same reason.
‘And to think that we said he wasn’t amoral as a madman should be,’ Burnett said. ‘That if he were really mad he’d set off his atomic bomb in the Wilshire Boulevard.’
No one had anything to say to that either. Burnett rose and said: ‘Back shortly, gentlemen.’
Peggy was still in bed but looked considerably better than she had done on her arrival at the Adlerheim. Her mother sat in an armchair to one side. Burnett had a brandy glass in his