Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [89]
‘He knows all that,’ said Mr Robinson, speaking unexpectedly. ‘No need to go over a lot of things again. He’s a man who knows everything.’
He said:
‘Do you remember Admiral Blunt?’
Again the head bowed. Something like a smile showed on the twisted lips.
‘Admiral Blunt remembers some scientific work you had done on a certain project–I think project is what you call these things? Project Benvo.’
They saw the alert look which came into the eyes.
‘Project Benvo,’ said Miss Neumann. ‘You are going back quite a long time, Mr Robinson, to recall that.’
‘It was your project, wasn’t it?’ said Mr Robinson.
‘Yes, it was his project.’ Miss Neumann now spoke more easily for him, as a matter of course.
‘We cannot use nuclear weapons, we cannot use explosives or gas or chemistry, but your project, Project Benvo, we could use.’
There was silence and nobody spoke. And then again the queer distorted sounds came from Professor Shoreham’s lips.
‘He says, of course,’ said Miss Neumann, ‘Benvo could be used successfully in the circumstances in which we find ourselves–’
The man in the chair had turned to her and was saying something to her.
‘He wants me to explain it to you,’ said Miss Neumann. ‘Project B, later called Project Benvo, was something that he worked upon for many years but which at last he laid aside for reasons of his own.’
‘Because he had failed to make his project materialize?’
‘No, he had not failed,’ said Lisa Neumann. ‘We had not failed. I worked with him on this project. He laid it aside for certain reasons, but he did not fail. He succeeded. He was on the right track, he developed it, he tested it in various laboratory experiments, and it worked.’ She turned to Professor Shoreham again, made a few gestures with her hand, touching her lips, ear, mouth in a strange kind of code signal.
‘I am asking if he wants me to explain just what Benvo does.’
‘We do want you to explain.’
‘And he wants to know how you learnt about it.’
‘We learnt about it,’ said Colonel Munro, ‘through an old friend of yours, Professor Shoreham. Not Admiral Blunt, he could not remember very much, but the other person to whom you had once spoken about it, Lady Matilda Cleckheaton.’
Again Miss Neumann turned to him and watched his lips. She smiled faintly.
‘He says he thought Matilda was dead years ago.’
‘She is very much alive. It is she who wanted us to know about this discovery of Professor Shoreham’s.’
‘Professor Shoreham will tell you the main points of what you want to know, though he has to warn you that this knowledge will be quite useless to you. Papers, formulae, accounts and proofs of this discovery were all destroyed. But since the only way to satisfy your questions is for you to learn the main outline of Project Benvo, I can tell you fairly clearly of what it consists. You know the uses and purpose of tear gas as used by the police in controlling riot crowds; violent demonstrations and so on. It induces a fit of weeping, painful tears and sinus inflammation.’
‘And this is something of the same kind?’
‘No, it is not in the least of the same kind but it can have the same purpose. It came into the heads of scientists that one can change not only men’s principal reactions and feeling, but also mental characteristics. You can change a man’s character. The qualities of an aphrodisiac are well known. They lead to a condition of sexual desire, there are various drugs or gases or glandular operations–any of these things can lead to a change in your mental vigour, increased energy as by alterations to the thyroid gland, and Professor Shoreham wishes to tell you that there is a certain process–he will not tell you now whether it is glandular, or a gas that can be manufactured, but there is something that can change a man in his outlook on life–his reaction to people and to life generally. He may be in a state of homicidal fury, he may be pathologically violent, and yet, by the influence of Project Benvo, he turns into something, or rather someone, quite different. He becomes–there is only one word for it, I believe,