The Radiant Shell | Page 7

biggest difficulty is in getting them out of the country," the spare, elderly man was saying. "But we have solved that. Solved it simply. I myself shall bear them, sewn in my clothes, to our native land. The American authorities could search, on some pretext, any other of our number who tried to smuggle them out. But me they dare not lay a finger on. That would be an overt act."
Thorn's thoughts whirled desperately on. Wait till later and follow whoever left the room with the plans? But he hated to let them get out of his sight.
And at this point he became suddenly aware that the man named Kori was gazing fixedly at him.
Thorn was between the section of the table where Kori sat, and the angular buffet-end. Kori could not possibly see anything but the shining mahogany, thought Thorn. And yet the man's eyes were narrowing to ominous slits as he started in his direction.
* * * * *
Thorn held his breath. Was the shielding film changing in structure? Were the repolarized atoms slowly losing their straight-line arrangement, allowing light rays to penetrate through to his body instead of diverting them to form a pocket of invisibility around him? The film had never acted like that before--but never before had Thorn applied it to living flesh with its disintegrating heat and moisture.
"Excellency," said Kori at last, a hard edge to his voice, "look thou at that buffet. No, no--the end nearest my chair."
"Well?" said the elderly man. "I see nothing."
Thorn breathed a sigh of relief. But the relief was to be of short duration.
"Come to my place, if thou wilt, and see from here," said Kori.
The leader got up and came to Kori's place. Kori pointed straight at Thorn.
"There--seest thou anything out of the ordinary?"
"I see nothing," said the leader, after a moment. "Thine eyes, Kori, are not good."
"They are the eyes of a hawk," said Kori stubbornly. "And they see this--the vertical line of the end of that buffet does not continue straightly up and down. At its middle, the line is broken, then continues up--a fraction of an inch to the side! Like an object seen under water, distorted by the sun-rays that strike the surface!"
Thorn fairly jumped away from the buffet and stood against bare wall. Fool! Of course the light refraction would not be perfect! Why hadn't he thought of that--thought to stand clear of revealing vertical lines!
"There, it is gone," said Kori, blinking. "But something, Excellency, made that distortion of line. And something made Soyo's wolfhound act as it did! Something--"
"Art thou attempting to say a spy listens unseen in this room?" demanded the gray-mustachioed Arvanian.
"Something is odd--that is all I say."
* * * * *
All eyes were ranging along the wall against which Thorn leaned his back. All eyes finally turned to Kori. "It is nonsense." "I see nothing whatever." "Kori has drunk of champagne in place of tea!" were some of the exclamations.
And then occurred the thing that, in Thorn's perilous position, was like the self-signing of his own death warrant.
He sneezed.
That agony of helplessness, as a man's nose wrinkles and twitches and--in spite of the most desperate attempts at repression--the betraying sound forces its way out! How many men have lost their lives because of that insistent soft nasal explosion which can be smothered, but not entirely hushed!
Thorn had felt the sneeze coming on for seconds. He had fought it frantically, with life itself at stake. But he could not hold it back. In his naked body, beginning to burn with fever from the long-clogged pores and insulated not at all by the film from the coolness of the room, the seeds of that soft explosion had been planted--and they would bear fruit!
So he had sneezed!
Instantly there was chaos. Men looked at each other, and back at the blank wall from which had come the painfully muffled sound. Then all sprang to their feet.
"Champagne, is it!" Kori exulted savagely. "Did I not say my eyes were those of a hawk?"
"Double guard all doors!" roared the Arvanian leader, to the guards outside. "Someone is in the house! And you in here," he went on in a lower tone, "see that this unseen one dies!"
Soyo and several other men whipped out automatics and pointed them at the wall. Thorn dropped to the floor. But with his quick action came Kori's voice.
"No, no! The sword, gentlemen. It is not so noisy, and covers a wider sweep."
Thorn shivered. Far rather would he have had bullets as his lot than cold steel. The prospect of being hacked to pieces, of gradually emerging from invisibility as a lump of gashed and bleeding flesh, turned him faint.
* * * * *
The Arvanians split up into orderly formation. Two went to guard the door to the butler's pantry,