“You can indeed.” Manson smiled. “You can indeed. I almost envy you. No, dammit, I do envy you. Anyway, we’ll see what we can do.”
Two minutes later Jack Mulrooney was gone. Manson ordered Miss Cooke to send his file back to Personnel, rang Accounts and instructed them to send Mulrooney a £1000 merit bonus and make sure he got it before the following Monday, and rang the head of Ground Survey.
“What surveys have you got pending in the next few days or just started?” he asked without preamble.
There were three, one of them in a remote stretch of the extreme north of Kenya, close to the Somaliland border, where the midday sun fries the brain like an egg in a pan, the nights freeze the bone marrow like Blackpool rock, and the shifta bandits prowl. It would be a long job, close to a year. The head of Ground Survey had nearly had two resignations trying to get a man to go there for so long.
“Send Mulrooney,” said Sir James and hung up.
He glanced at the clock. It was eleven. He picked up the Personnel report on Dr. Gordon Chalmers, which Endean had left on his desk the previous evening.
Chalmers was a graduate with honors from the London School of Mining, which is probably the best of its kind in the world, even if Witwatersrand liked to dispute that claim. He had taken his degree in geology and later chemistry and gone on to a doctorate in his midtwenties. After five years of fellowship work at the college he had joined Rio Tinto Zinc in its scientific section, and six years earlier ManCon had evidently stolen him from RTZ for a better salary. For the last four years he had been head of the company’s Scientific Department situated on the outskirts of Watford in Hertfordshire, one of the counties abutting London to the north. The ID photograph in the file showed a man in his late thirties glowering at the camera over a bushy ginger beard. He wore a tweed jacket and a purple shirt. The tie was of knitted wool and askew.
At eleven-thirty-five the private phone rang and Sir James Manson heard the regular pips of a public coin box at the other end of the line. A coin clunked into the slot, and Endean’s voice came on the line. He spoke concisely for two minutes from Watford station. When he had finished, Manson grunted his approval.
“That’s useful to know,” he said. “Now get back to London. There’s another job I want you to do. I want a complete rundown on the republic of Zangaro. I want the lot. Yes, Zangaro.” He spelled it out.
“Start back in the days when it was discovered, and work forward. I want the history, geography, lay of the land, economy, crops, mineralogy if any, politics and state of development. Concentrate on the ten years prior to independence, and especially the period since. I want to know everything there is to know about the President, his cabinet, parliament if any, administration, executive, judiciary, and political parties. There are three things that are more important than all else. One is the question of Russian or Chinese involvement and influence, or local Communist influence, on the President. The second is that no one remotely connected with the place is to know any questions are being asked, so don’t go there yourself. And thirdly, under no circumstances are you to announce you come from ManCon. So use a different name. Got it? Good. Well, report back as soon as you can, and not later than twenty days. Draw cash from Accounts on my signature alone, and be discreet. For the record, consider yourself on leave; I’ll let you make it up later.”
Manson hung up and called down to Thorpe to give further instructions. Within three minutes Thorpe came up to the tenth floor and laid the piece of paper his chief wanted on the desk. It was the carbon copy of a letter.
Ten floors down, Dr. Gordon Chalmers stepped out of his taxi at the corner of Moorgate and paid it off. He felt uncomfortable in a dark suit and topcoat, but Peggy had told him they were necessary for an interview and lunch with the Chairman of the Board.
As he walked the last few yards toward the steps and doorway of ManCon House, his eye caught a poster fronting the kiosk of a seller of the Evening News and Evening Standard: THALIDOMIDE PARENTS URGE SETTLEMENT. He curled his lip in a bitter sneer, but he bought both papers.
The stories backed up the headline in greater detail, though they were not long. They recorded that after another marathon round of talks between representatives of the parents of the four-hundred-odd children in Britain who had been born deformed because of the thalidomide drug ten years earlier, and the company that had marketed the drug, a further impasse had been reached. So talks would be resumed “at a later date.”
Gordon Chalmers’ thoughts went back to the house outside Watford that he had left earlier that same morning, to Peggy, his wife, just turned thirty and looking forty, and to Margaret, legless, one-armed Margaret, coming up to nine years, who needed a special pair of legs and a specially built house, which they now lived in at long last, the mortgage on which was costing him a fortune.
“At a later date,” he snapped to no one in particular and stuffed the newspapers into a trash basket. He seldom read the evening papers anyway. He preferred the Guardian, Private Eye, and the left-wing Tribune. After nearly ten years of watching a group of almost unmoneyed parents try to face down the giant distillers for their compensation, Gordon Chalmers harbored bitter thoughts about big-time capitalists. Ten minutes later he was facing one of the biggest.
Sir James Manson could not put Chalmers off his guard as he had Bryant and Mulrooney. The scientist clutched his glass of beer firmly and stared right back. Manson grasped the situation quickly and, when Miss Cooke had handed him his whisky and retired, he came to the point.
“I suppose you can guess what I asked you to come and see me about, Dr. Chalmers.”
“I can guess, Sir James. The report on Crystal Mountain.”
“That’s it. Incidentally, you were quite right to send it to me personally in a sealed envelope. Quite right.”
Chalmers shrugged. He had done it because he realized that all important analysis results had to go direct to the Chairman, according to company policy. It was routine, as soon as he had realized what the samples contained.
“Let me ask you two things, and I need specific answers,” said Sir James. “Are you absolutely certain of these results? There could be no other possible explanation of the tests of the samples?”
Chalmers was neither shocked nor affronted. He knew the work of scientists was seldom accepted by laymen as being far removed from black magic, and that they therefore considered it imprecise. He had long since ceased trying to explain the precision of his craft.
“Absolutely certain. For one thing, there are a variety of tests to establish the presence of platinum, and these samples passed them all with unvarying regularity. For another, I not only did all the known tests on every one of the samples, I did the whole thing twice. Theoretically it is possible someone could have interfered with the alluvial samples, but not with the internal structures of the rocks themselves. The summary of my report is accurate beyond scientific dispute.”
Sir James Manson listened to the lecture with head-bowed respect, and nodded in admiration. “And the second thing is, how many other people in your laboratory know of the results of the analysis of the Crystal Mountain samples?”
“No one,” said Chalmers with finality.
“No one?” echoed Manson. “Come now, surely one of your assistants…”
Chalmers downed a swig of his beer and shook his head. “Sir James, when the samples came in they were crated as usual and put in store. Mulrooney’s accompanying report predicated the presence of tin in unknown quantities. As it was a very minor survey, I put a junior assistant onto it. Being inexperienced, he assumed tin or nothing and di
d the appropriate tests. When they failed to show up positive, he called me over and pointed this out. I offered to show him how, and again the tests were negative. So I gave him a lecture on not being mesmerized by the prospector’s opinion and showed him some more tests. These too were negative. The laboratory closed for the night, but I stayed on late, so I was alone in the place when the first tests came up positive. By midnight I knew the shingle sample from the streambed, of which I was using less than half a pound, contained small quantities of platinum. After that I locked up for the night.
“The next day I took the junior off that assignment and put him on another. Then I went on with it myself. There were six hundred bags of shingle and gravel, and fifteen hundred pounds’ weight of rocks—over three hundred separate rocks taken from different places on the mountain. From Mulrooney’s photographs I could picture the mountain. The disseminated deposit is present in all parts of the formation. As I said in my report.” With a touch of defiance he drained his beer.