Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 Read Online Free

his speech. "The single greatest catastrophe now would be for the
news to leak to the general public. The man in the street would dissolve into
chaos if he knew what confronted him. He couldn't face the idea of the earth
smashed to atoms. It would be too much for him. We can't afford to
underestimate his susceptibility to panic, his capacity for running amok and
tearing his hair whenever it would pay him in dividends not to."
                   St. Ives stroked his chin, staring at the
debris on his plate. He bent forward, and in a low voice he said, "I'm
certain that science will save us this time, gentlemen, if it doesn't kill us
first. The thing will be close, though, and if the public gets wind of the
threat from this comet, great damage will come of it." He smiled into the
befuddled faces of his three companions. Kraken wiped a dribble of egg from the
edge of his mouth. Jack pursed his lips.
                   "I'll need to know about
Hargreaves," continued St. Ives, "and you'll want to know what I'm
blathering about. But this isn't the place. Let's adjourn to the street, shall
we?" And with that the men arose, Kraken tossing off the last of his
coffee. Then, seeing that Jack was leaving half a cup, he drank Jack's off too
and mumbled something about waste and starvation as he followed the rest of
them toward the hotel door.
     
                   DR. IGNACIO NARBONDO grinned over his tea. He
watched the back of Hargreaves's head as it nodded above a great sheet of paper
covered with lines, numbers, and notations. Why oxygen allowed itself to flow
in and out of Hargreaves's lungs Narbondo couldn't at cdl say; the man seemed
to be animated by a living hatred, an indiscriminate loathing for the most
innocent things. He gladly built bombs for idiotic anarchist deviltry, not out
of any particular regard for causes, but simply to create mayhem, to blow
things to bits. If he could have built a device sufficiently large to
obliterate the Dover cliffs and the sun rising beyond them, there would have been no
satisfying him until it was done. He loathed tea. He loathed eggs. He loathed
brandy. He loathed the daylight, and he loathed the nighttime. He loathed the
very art of constructing infernal devices.
                   Narbondo looked round him at the barren room,
the lumpy pallet on the ground where Hargreaves allowed himself a few hours'
miserable sleep, as often as not to lurch awake at night, a shriek half uttered
in his throat, as if he had peered into a mirror and seen the face of a beetle
staring back. Narbondo whistled merrily all of a sudden, watching Hargreaves
stiffen, loathing the melody that had broken in upon the discordant mumblings
of his brain.
                   Hargreaves turned, his bearded face set in a
rictus of twisted rage, his dark eyes blank as eclipsed moons. He breathed
heavily. Narbondo waited with raised eyebrows, as if surprised at the man's
reaction. "Damn a man that whistles," said Hargreaves slowly, running
the back of his hand across his mouth. He looked at his hand, expecting to fmd
heaven knew what, and turned slowly back to his bench top. Narbondo grinned and
poured himself another cup of tea. All in all it was a glorious day. Hargreaves
had agreed to help him destroy the earth without so much as a second thought. He had agreed with uncharacteristic relish, as if it
was the first really useful task he had undertaken in years. Why he didn't just
slit his own throat and be done with life for good and all was one of the great
mysteries.
                   He wouldn't have been half so agreeable if he
knew that Narbondo had no intention of destroying anything, that his motivation
was greed—greed and revenge. His threat to cast the earth forcibly into the
path of the approaching comet wouldn't be taken lightly. There were those in
the Royal Academy who knew he could do it, who supposed, no
doubt, that he might quite likely do it. They were