and Chameleon had no trouble locating th monitors for the two scanners in the map room. They hooked a tiny alligator clamp attached to a thin wire on the ‘video out’ lug of each of the monitor boxes and plugged in the transmitters, which were three by five inches, and an inch thick. The wires connecting the clips to the transmitters were long enough to permit O’Hara to slide the boxes out of sight under the monitors.
Then O’Hara noticed another interesting monitor. It was for the scanner in Garvey’s office. O’Hara hooked it up, too.
‘Okay, let’s check the game room once and get out of here. And let’s hope they’re picking up something outside.’
In the news van, the Magician slowly twisted the small fine-tuning knob on one of the monitors. Suddenly the picture popped in. He was looking at the room Okari had described. The map was easily thirty feet high and twenty feet long. Recessed in it were a dozen diod screens. The camera was moving and the Magician watched ii pan across the room and back. He tuned the other two. One of them was a stationary shot of an office. A small man with a waxed moustache was talking on the phone. The Magician recognized him from O’Hara’s description. It had to be General Garvey.
‘We got it, Lizzie. You’re not gonna believe this. We got two different angles on the map.’
‘Can you see Midas?’
‘Yeah — but the camera’s still mowing. O’Hara’s got to get in there now and freeze it.’
He tuned the sets as sharply as possible. The camera swept to the centre of the room and then started back.
There it was. There were four screens on the Midas location. Two exterior and two interior.
‘Incredible!’ said the Magician.
‘Do we have sound?’
Voices murmured in the map room.
‘Yeah. And a million-dollar picture on all three—’
He stopped in mid-sentence. He was listening to Garvey.
‘Quill. Nine twenty-five, April 8_ 730-037-370. Red urgent. We have not heard from you for twenty-four hours. It is important you make contact immediately.’ He hung up.
‘Well, I’ll be damned. We just got a bonus,’ the Magician said.
‘What?’
‘We got Quill, on film. And guess who it is?’
‘Hooker?’
‘Garvey.’
‘How do we get to the cameras?’ O’Hara asked. ‘Aren’t they pretty high up?’
‘There is a ladder with wheels iii the map room. There will be four men there, five at the most, and they won’t pay any attention — they’ll be too busy. It is from this panel that all the machines on Midas are controlled.’
‘We just walk right in, that it?’ O’Hara said.
Chameleon nodded. They entered the big room. O’Hara was stunned at the size. Then, on two of the diod screens, he saw Midas for the first time.
The exteriors were both eerie. Gray soundless pictures under the sea. One was the dish, a saucer under water with its superstructure hanging down toward the bottom of the ocean.
The other was even more bizarre. A long line of rusted ships, settled deep in the sand, wavered before the camera. Powerful underwater searchlights peered through the murky water, etching the forms and shapes. One of the screens showed a close-up of the pumping station, the heart of the entire system.
There it was, the evidence they needed, in living colour.
Four men were at work at the enormous console. One of them glanced back over his shoulder as they entered the room, then turned back to whatever he was doing. Chameleon rolled the eighteen-foot ladder in place under the cameras. Since there was no way for him to check the parameters of the two cameras, he wanted to make sure one of them was aimed at the crucial part of the map, the TV close-up f the pumping station. And there was no way for them to know for sure whether the transistors were working. At this point ‘they were playing it by ear.
O’Hara went up the ladder. There was a small switch at the bottom of the camera which stopped it from scanning and froze it in place. Once O’Hara stopped the camera it would be only a matter of time until somebody in the security office noticed and came to check. They needed to get out fast once he threw the switch.
He was reaching for the switch when the door opened and Garvey came in. He was directly below O’Hara, who quickly looked away and started fiddling with the camera. Chameleon, too, turned his back to the jaunty little man.
‘Everything okay?’ Garvey asked as he passed them.
Chameleon nodded. ‘Just cleaning the lenses,’ he said.
But Garvey was much more interested in the console. ‘What’s it look like?’
‘We’re about ready to bring in Number Seventeen,’ one of the operators said.
‘Better get the general. You know bow he loves to watch these new wells come in.’
‘Not much to see,’ the man at the console answered. ‘Just the on-line lights going and the digital counter clocking off the gallons.’
‘Ours not to reason why,’ Garvey sighed. He picked up a phone and pressed a number and waited. ‘General,
