"Kim!" Her gun drooped as she stared at him. He stood up, his eyes flaming with rage.
"Well, what's wrong with you? You swat flies! You slaughter vicious beasts!" His voice rose to a pitch of hysteria. "You pull noxious weeds and destroy bacteria! How can you defend these creatures? They're animals — dangerous animals. Why should they be left to pollute the earth with their presence?"
Garnet shrank back, her eyes shining with tears. "Oh, Kim — you've gone back to that! I thought you'd given it up. Please say you didn't mean that."
He laughed, harshly and bitterly, with a cold, rasping sound. Garnet stood up and said, "My poor Kim, you'll have to..."
He grabbed her by both arms and tried to throw her off balance into the next room. She struggled and hooked a heel behind his knee, causing him to stumble. He grabbed for the doorframe, and she brought up the big automatic, slapping him across the side of the head with it. He went down like a tree, and folded down the concrete steps.
With a choked sob, she knelt beside him and felt for a pulse. In a moment she stood up, waved the gun at Napoleon and Illya. "Come with me," she said. "We must get away from here before someone else comes. They'd never believe me."
She handed her gun to Napoleon and stared up at him with tear-filled, tortured eyes. "Please trust me. I've made a dreadful mistake, and I have many things I must tell you. But we must get away from here immediately."
Napoleon took the gun gently and handed it to Illya. Then he took Garnet's arm and helped her through the wreckage of the wooden door to the metal one. She found a key, and a moment later they were in the cool evening air of the alley.
Chapter 4: "He Really Could Destroy The World!"
Illya drove. Garnet was shaking too hard to start her car, and now she had dissolved into quiet hysterics in Napoleon's arms in the back seat. He watched her with acute concern mixed with embarrassment as she clung to him and sobbed for several minutes while he patted her shoulder and spoke softly and encouragingly to her.
Finally, when she seemed to have calmed down a bit, he fumbled out his handkerchief for her and he tried to open a conversation. "Ah — my name is Napoleon Solo. Are you Garnet Keldur?"
Her voice shook, but she managed to say, "Yes...I am. And I know who you are. And he's Illya Kuryakin. I saw you in New York." She finished wiping her eyes, and collected herself with a visible effort. "But...how did you find us so fast?"
"Professional secret. Look, do you feel like talking?"
"I...I don't..."
"Can you tell us what happened just now?"
"Well. . ." She cleared her throat. "Kim is my brother. He's got all the brains in the family, but he's...he's sort of disturbed. When we were in college, he developed emotional problems which got him involved with Nihilism. And he studied it until he was convinced it was the only solution to everything. Oh, lots of people feel this way when they discover some new philosophy, but Kim couldn't see anything else from then on.
"Mr. Solo, Kim is convinced the highest goal of knowledge is the destruction of humanity. To him, man is the most vile thing that ever existed on this planet. He used to say things like this, years ago. I — I thought he'd gotten over it and realized that people aren't really so bad after all. He stopped saying awful things like that about three years ago. He got a job for some kind of consulting organization up in San Francisco, and he was away from home a lot.
"Then about a year ago he showed up and told me he'd left his job because he'd discovered something he didn't want his company to take away from him. He said he had a perfect defense against the atomic bomb — and he could even prevent all atomic warfare all over the world with this."
Napoleon caught a glance from Illya in the rear-view mirror. The Russian's eyebrows were arched in an expression of extreme skepticism. Napoleon looked at Garnet doubtfully. "Did he tell you anything about how it worked?"
"Oh, he explained the whole thing to me, and showed me the diagrams. I couldn't follow them, though — I only got as far as tensor analysis in math. My interests were more in humanities. It looked simple enough, though, and Kim is bright enough I'd take his word for it. And of course he showed me the demonstration of the first working model."
The car swerved slightly as the driver reacted. Napoleon decided to save the technical material until they were near a recorder and some technicians. He himself had stopped at integral calculus, and could remember little of that. No point in wasting her information on essentially deaf ears. "What did this have to do with Nihilism?" he asked.
"I thought he was over that," she said, sniffling into the handkerchief as her tears started to flow again. "I thought he'd just be stopping atomic warfare — but he wants to use it to stop all human life on earth! And he can!" Her voice broke. "He's my brother, Mr. Solo. We've got to do something to stop him, before he kills himself — and everybody else!"
* * *
"Now, Garnet, what is this — thing your brother invented, and what does it do?"
"He calls it an Energy Damper. He and a friend of his named Chernik built it together. Kim discovered the theories behind it. I don't know how it works."
Garnet, after a stiff drink, was a good deal calmer. She sat in one of the quiet comfortable rooms deep in U.N.C.L.E.'s Los Angeles office and spoke in an even, controlled voice. The reels of a tape recorder spun slowly, taking continuous note of questions and answers.
"He showed me the first experimental model about three months ago. It had a small field, but it proved his theories and showed them which way to work. He turned on a light bulb in a table lamp, and then turned on the little Energy Damper. The bulb got yellower and dimmer as he turned up the control, until it went out altogether. Then as he turned the control back down, it came back to life again.
"I have no idea how it works. Chernik explained it as a sort of field that inhibits the transformation of energy. When it was on the light bulb, the electrons were still flowing through the wire, but the electrical energy couldn't be transformed into radiant energy — heat and light."
Napoleon looked at an electronics technician who had come up from the labs to listen — he looked back, and shrugged elaborately.
"It's somewhere about three steps beyond Einstein's Unified Field Theory," he whispered, " and I don't understand that!"
"He found there was a quality he called Theta that governed the well, the speed of the transformation affected," Garnet continued. "A very small Theta would damp an atomic explosion. A larger one would also stop an electrical motor or dim a light bulb. Another step up would prevent a chemical explosion, like dynamite, or gasoline in a car engine. A higher one would put out a fire; and a fully open Theta would — theoretically — damp out the biochemical reactions necessary to life." She looked at Napoleon. "I guess it's not theoretical any more."
Napoleon grinned wryly. "No, it isn't. And as far-out as your story sounds, I will now be the last person in the world to doubt it. That thing he turned on me was set at the maximum Theta, I take it?"
"I don't know — it must have been, from your description of how it felt. And it was one of the heavy early models I used to stop your car with in New York."
"What were you doing in New York?"
She sighed. "There's so much to tell you — and it's not coming out in any kind of order. I'm sorry I'm so confused. I'll try to get myself a little better organized for you. Kim was able to convince a lot of people — some of them with money — that he had a machine that could prevent atomic war. And he got money for his experiments. He convinced them that this had to be kept very secret, because there were a lot of powerful governments that would try to stop him and destroy his invention, because they needed the threat of atomic war to keep their people under control. You'd be surprised how many people really believe that! And Kim wanted to build one huge E/D with a non-directional field big enough to blanket the entire earth!