Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [59]
‘The heads of the Services are here,’ said Sir George Packham. ‘We are very anxious to have your opinion as to what can be done.’
‘Oh,’ said Professor Eckstein, ‘done? Yes, yes, done?’
There was a silence.
‘The world is fast passing into a state of anarchy,’ said Sir George.
‘Seems so, doesn’t it? At least, from what I read in the paper. Not that I trust to that. Really, the things journalists think up. Never any accuracy in their statements.’
‘I understand you’ve made some most important discoveries lately, Professor,’ said Cedric Lazenby encouragingly.
‘Ah yes, so we have. So we have.’ Professor Eckstein cheered up a little. ‘Got a lot of very nasty chemical warfare fixed up. If we ever wanted it. Germ warfare, you know, biological stuff, gas laid on through normal gas outlets, air pollution and poisoning of water supplies. Yes, if you wanted it, I suppose we could kill half the population of England given about three days to do it in.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘That what you want?’
‘No, no indeed. Oh dear, of course not.’ Mr Lazenby looked horrified.
‘Well, that’s what I mean, you know. It’s not a question of not having enough lethal weapons. We’ve got too much. Everything we’ve got is too lethal. The difficulty would be in keeping anybody alive, even ourselves. Eh? All the people at the top, you know. Well–us, for instance.’ He gave a wheezy, happy little chuckle.
‘But that isn’t what we want,’ Mr Lazenby insisted.
‘It’s not a question of what you want, it’s a question of what we’ve got. Everything we’ve got is terrifically lethal. If you want everybody under thirty wiped off the map, I expect you could do it. Mind you, you’d have to take a lot of the older ones as well. It’s difficult to segregate one lot from the other, you know. Personally, I should be against that. We’ve got some very good young Research fellows. Bloody-minded, but clever.’
‘What’s gone wrong with the world?’ asked Kenwood suddenly.
‘That’s the point,’ said Professor Eckstein. ‘We don’t know. We don’t know up at our place in spite of all we do know about this, that and the other. We know a bit more about the moon nowadays, we know a lot about biology, we can transplant hearts and livers; brains, too, soon, I expect, though I don’t know how that’ll work out. But we don’t know who is doing this. Somebody is, you know. It’s a sort of high-powered background stuff. Oh yes, we’ve got it cropping up in different ways. You know, crime rings, drug rings, all that sort of thing. A high-powered lot, directed by a few good, shrewd brains behind the scenes. We’ve had it going on in this country or that country, occasionally on a European scale. But it’s going a bit further now, other side of the globe–Southern Hemisphere. Down to the Antarctic Circle before we’ve finished, I expect.’ He appeared to be pleased with his diagnosis.
‘People of ill-will–’
‘Well, you could put it like that. Ill-will for ill-will’s sake or ill-will for the sake of money or power. Difficult, you know, to get at the point of it all. The poor dogs-bodies themselves don’t know. They want violence and they like violence. They don’t like the world, they don’t like our materialistic attitude. They don’t like a lot of our nasty ways of making money, they don’t like a lot of the fiddles we do. They don’t like seeing poverty. They want a better world. Well, you could make a better world, perhaps, if you thought about it long enough. But the trouble is, if you insist on taking away something first, you’ve got to put something back in its place. Nature