"A THRUSH submarine, beyond any possibility of doubt," Illya said. "I can just make out the insignia on the conning tower."
All three men remained silent for a full minute after the screen went blank.
Then Waverly said: "There's another telecast I want you to look at, picked up in just as mysterious a way. It's quite brief, as you will see."
Almost instantly the screen grew very bright again, and a completely different kind of landscape came into view. Instead of towering cliffs walls swept by winter gales and a gray expanse of sea there stretched in all directions a level waste of sand, sun-drenched and almost featureless. Far in the distance a few dunes were faintly visible, obscured by a pale violet haze which seemed to hang suspended between the desert and the sky.
In the foreground a tall man wearing tropical shorts and a sun helmet sat on a tripod-shaped metal stool making a sketch with swift strokes on a sheet of paper pinned to a drawing board. He was darkly bearded and sun-bronzed, with hawklike features.
Suddenly he looked up and jumped to his feet with a wild cry, dropping the drawing board and backing away in terror from some thing which the three men in the darkened room could not see at all.
The something wasn't visible on the screen, and could have been a considerable distance from where the abruptly recoiling man had been sitting.
Just as abruptly the telecast flickered out.
"Watch," Waverly said, sharply. "Another picture is coming. It establishes something of great importance—that what you have just seen is a fragment from some kind of documentary record. It must have been intended to be just that, a televised documentary which THRUSH could hardly fail to find of interest."
When the screen lighted up again the drawing board appeared against a featureless gray background, so greatly enlarged that it almost filled the screen. The sketch which the artist had been making when the board had dropped to the sand was unfinished and extremely crude.
It depicted what looked like a dancing giant in a posture of ceremonial rigidity, as if its movements had become so formalized as that of a Balinese temple dancer. In a vague way it did seem either Balinese or Chinese, for the artist had placed upon its head a kind of tower-shaped turban tapering to a point.
An instant before the screen went dark again a cold, metallic voice spoke a few words: "Gobi—7Y887. Object pickup. Object pickup. Object pickup. Transmission channel T 56 H."
In tight-lipped silence Waverly left the projector, walked across the room and clicked on the overhead lights. His voice was emotion charged when he said: "Well, now you've seen both telecasts. John Blakeley has been missing for three weeks. No word from him at all. You recognized him, I'm sure, despite a three weeks' growth of beard."
"Yes, of course," Solo said. "Instantly. He went unshaven close to a month two years ago in the Sahara, when we—"
"He's working alone this time," Waverly said, cutting him short. "And there are parts of the Gobi which are quite different from the Sahara, apparently. That's why we sent him there. Strange lights in the sky, terrified natives and THRUSH in big, capital letters written right across the sky. Invisible to governmental intelligence agencies from here to Singapore perhaps, but not to U.N.C.L.E. We've had too much experience in making that kind of writing visible."
"You filled us in pretty thoroughly about all of that last month," Solo said.
"What I didn't fill you in about, naturally," Waverly said, "was what you've just seen. A clearly established linkage between what happened in Newfoundland and whatever it was that made Blakeley draw that sketch and let it drop to the sand. Both of the telecasts were picked up in the same mysterious way and both apparently are directly related to a kind of eavesdropping that is without precedent in human experience. It is a kind of eavesdropping which could—"
Waverly stopped, rumbled in his pocket for his pipe and got it lighted again before going on. There was a grimly speculative look in his eyes.
"Perhaps we'd better discuss the whole eavesdropping problem for a moment," he said. "Suppose we try to put it into perspective, to relate it to the major problems which U.N.C.L.E. may find itself more and more involved with.
"There are four technological developments which threaten human survival on a worldwide scale. One, the population explosion, depends less on technology in a strict sense than on what medical science has accomplished in overcoming diseases that take a high toll of human life. But we may as well include it.
"Then there's the always present danger of thermonuclear destruction on a global scale and the equally serious threat of chemical and biological warfare on the same scale.
"But the greatest threat of all, perhaps the one most to be feared, is eavesdropping on a global scale. Do you realize what it could mean if there was no privacy left on earth, if everyone was under continuous observation night and day? Civilization would almost certainly come to a complete standstill. No one could even breathe without the certain knowledge that they were being spied upon. Every conversation would be picked up and processed and filed away for future reference. Would anyone care to talk or carry on under such circumstances? The demoralization would be absolute. People would simply give up. Not at first. There would be ruthless tyrants still in the saddle. But eventually the blight would extend even to them."
Waverly puffed slowly on his pipe for a moment, staring at the projector as if he wished, despite what he had just said, that it were an all-seeing eye that could penetrate the walls of every THRUSH cell.
"If THRUSH possessed such a eavesdropping weapon," he went on, "they would not worry too much about how destructive it would ultimately prove. They would think only of how useful it would be to them in achieving world dominance. U.N.C.L.E. would be first in the line of attack. You can be sure of that."
He took another slow puff on his pipe. "That is why I wanted you to look at those telecasts," he said. "The plane will leave tomorrow afternoon at five o'clock. Your first stop will be Tokyo, where you will be briefed as to your exact itinerary. You will be flown to Inner Mongolia and then to the Gobi. The details have not yet been completely worked out. But everything will have been taken care of before you arrive at the Tokyo airport, where you will be met by a most genial gentleman. A pipe smoker, like myself."
THREE
THE WOMAN WHO WAS DRESSED KILL
WHEN SOLO AND Kuryakin emerged from the quiet brownstone they had the disturbing feeling that observant eyes were trained upon them. But they could not have said why, for the street was deserted along its entire length except for a parked limousine near the end of the block. The driver wore a chauffeur's uniform and he had descended from the car a was helping its three remaining occupants to descend to the curb.
The first was a young lady very curiously garbed. She wore a long yellow dress of shimmering silk which descended to her ankles and small golden slippers. Her hair, a lustrous black, was knotted into a double braid and coiled tightly around her head in over-lapping folds. Her skin was of a satiny whiteness, but even from so great a distance they could see that her features were of oriental cast, the eyes almond-shaped, the cheek bones high-arching and prominent. Whether she was beautiful, plain-looking or ugly was hard to determine. But it seemed extremely unlikely that she could be ugly, and the likelihood of her being beautiful Solo put very high.