It takes something like five seconds to kill.

And then, from somewhere behind us, Fenrek said:

“What a nasty business.”

CHAPTER 13

We stood there for a moment, staring at him like idiots.

He rose up out of the rocks and the breaking surf, Fenrek, half lying, half rising, and half falling over himself. There was a great red gash on his forehead, and he was still wearing his nice silk suit but without the shirt. He stumbled and fell flat on his face in the sand, and as I ran forward I saw what had happened to his shirt; it was all torn up and bound around his leg, binding a piece of sea-weathered cedar to one side and a round stick of what looked like Eucalyptus to the other. If it was meant to be a splint, it was a pretty lousy job. I ran to him fast.

But Estrilla was there before me. She flung herself down on top of him on the wet sand, her arms tight around his neck, half strangling him. Astrid came running up, crying now, and between the two of them they helped him to his feet as I stood there and watched. Estrilla was in a mild state of hysteria, and Fenrek put his arms round her and said:

“My darling...it’s all right, it’s all right...”

She couldn’t speak. She was climbing all over him, the hell with a broken leg that had got itself all twisted out of shape again in those comic splints. He seemed surprised at her hysterics, and he said, gently reproving: “You should have known, I don’t die quite so easily.”

He took her face between his hands—a broken wrist there, too, by the looks of it—and kissed her gently on the mouth, balancing himself on Astrid, trying to sort out one frantic female head from another and not succeeding very well; they were both all over him. He kissed her again, and caught my eye over her shoulder and said gruffly:

“Well, you might at least have the decency to look the other way.”

I said: “Not on your life.” It’s not often you get the chance to see a strong man in a moment of weakness. It was a weakness highly colored by an astonishment that was in itself astonishing; for God’s sake, didn’t he know how much she loved him?

I said: “So that was you, yelling back there. Pity. I thought for a moment it might have been a guincho. I’ve never seen one, and I was quite looking forward to the experience. Now lie down, if you can tear yourself away from the distaff for a moment, and I’ll have a crack at fixing that leg a little more tidily.”

Estrilla said quickly: “I’ll do it.” She wiped a hand at her tears, and laughed, and started crying again and hardly knew which side was up. I was astonished at the sudden change in her. But she pushed me aside, and I sat down with Astrid on the sand and watched her.

Fenrek lay down obediently, and she unwrapped all those pieces of torn shirt, and pulled aside the two crude pieces of wood, and I said:

“You’ll never do it alone. He’s a weak old man, but there might be a muscle or two left in his thighs. You’d better let me help you.”

She said: “No, I can manage.”

I looked at Astrid, smiling now so widely that I wondered if she too were going to break out all over in hysterics.

Estrilla put her foot in his crotch, took hold of the ankle with both hands, looked at him in a loving sort of way that can only be described as sickening, and said: “This is going to hurt you very much, would you like some cognac?”

Surprised, he said: “Well, of course I would. Do you have any?”

She shook her head miserably. “No, I don’t...” She pulled hard then, and twisted, quite expertly; I heard the broken bone crunch into place. Fenrek gasped and said: “Oh, you...you... bitch” But he took a deep breath and said: “All right, all right, that was fine.” He shook his head from side to side, his face very white, and then he shuddered and looked at me and tried to grin. He lay back on the sand and stared up at the sky while Estrilla put those foolish bits of wood back into place again. He said, to no one in particular: “There must be a longer piece of wood lying around here somewhere. A walking stick, a crutch...I found one, but it got away from me in the surf.”

I marveled at the strength he must have shown back there, with a broken leg and a busted wrist—the most painful of the breaks—fixing himself up laboriously with torn rag and bits of driftwood. I moved over and took a look at the wrist, a compound fracture with a piece of bone sticking through the flesh, and when Estrilla tried to shove me away again, I said: “That’s not going to be quite so easy.” But between us we got some rag wrapped around it. Not that that was going to help very much.

And while we were working on it, he said: “Is it too much to hope that Loveless is still in there somewhere?”

“Much too much. Loveless is on his way back from Guincho. He went there to send that telegram, remember? And damn his eyes, he took the Jensen. I only hope he doesn’t bash it into a tree.”

He surprised me: “The Jensen’s still at the top of the Bocea. You can see it from back there.”

“Oh? Well, that’s a stroke of luck.”

It wasn’t really. I realized that Loveless was not going to risk driving a car that just might be well-known enough to invite comment. If, as he suspected, the police were out looking for him along the coastal road, one of them might just have decided to pass the time of day with the driver.

I said; “So he’s walking there, it’ll take him a long time. But then, we always realized that he would have plenty of time, didn’t we? Till the dark of the night.”

Fenrek said: “Does he have the toxin with him?”

I fished into my pocket and brought out the little box for him to see. Through all that pain, his eyes were shining. “Good. So it’s just a question of finding one man.” He jerked his head at the shining steel of the container. “How do we destroy that?”

“With heat. What happens when Loveless turns up at Guincho?”

“They don’t touch him, in case he was carrying that toxin’ with him. And the big question—is there any more of it?”

I said: “No more.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. So now it’s up to us.”

I said mildly: “It always was.”

“The men at Guincho have orders to take no risks, to keep him under surveillance and let us know where he is.”

I said: “Some silly bastard is going to take a crack at him, you’ll see. He’ll make a dive for a gun, and that someone will fire, and he’ll be just too late. Because Loveless will have shot him dead before he can even think of pulling the trigger.”

Fenrek shook his head. “No. We told them that he might be carrying that botulin on him, in his pockets. If it had been in a simple glass vial, a shot could have busted it open and given us a real lively epidemic. So there’ll be no shooting.”

“That doesn’t go for him.”

He said gently, looking at the heights of the sandstone cliff: “The chances are that he is up there now, watching us. What’s his weapon?”

“Sawed-off shotgun. A Lames over-under, 12-bore and cut down to a fourteen-inch barrel. Dangerous toy at close quarters, but not much good from up there.”

Estrilla was fitting an improvised sling for Fenrek’s wrist.

He said: “Get rid of that toxin. Now. I want to know it’s gone.”

“All right.”

While they were helping him to a shelter under the lea of the cliff, close in among the rocks where Estrilla had been, out of the wind and the sun, I clambered up to the little shack, or what was left of it, and ripped off a piece of dry cedar and walked back to the rocks with it, shaving it with my pocketknife into tiny slivers, some not so tiny, and then a few sticks of kindling. I set fire to them with my lighter, in a small hollow of rock, fanned them till they were beginning to blaze, then went back for some heavier pieces, which I wrenched out from the foundations, and lugged them back down there.

In fifteen minutes, the hot embers were glowing nicely, turned by a funneled breeze into a blowtorch. I unwound the wire from the little steel box, and said: “Now everybody keeps well away.” I tipped the four glass vials carefully into the middle of the fire, found a long stick and heaped live embers over them, and then got the hell out of there fast. I didn’t know whether they’d pop or not, and if they did, I didn’t want to be too close.

But they didn’t. I took another look in five minutes. The glass had melted already, and I realized that the smart boys who had made these deadly weapons up had taken just that precaution. A fire in the Research Center, otherwise, might have blown loose oddments of toxin all over the landscape. The melted glass had taken on a strange green tinge, and I realized that it had been impregnated with something to absorb enough heat to ensure a rapid melting. Of the powder itself, there was nothing visible at all.

Heat in excess of eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit is about the only thing that will destroy botulinum spores, but to be doubly sure I piled more and more embers up, and threw on more wood; and watching me. Fenrek said (mind reading again!):