into a corridor but, best of all, some metal rungs were set into the wall. Peregrine switched off the flashlight, swung his legs over the edge and, hanging onto the top rung, eased the cover back over the trap. Then he climbed down and moving with the utmost caution, crept along the passage to a door at the end. Again he waited with every sense alert for danger but the place was silent. He opened the door and by the light shining through a slit window found himself at the head of a curved turret staircase.
Keeping close to the outer wall, he went down until he came to another door. Still silence. He opened it a fraction and saw a long corridor at the end of which a light was shining on a landing. Peregrine closed the door and went on down. If Glodstone was imprisoned anywhere it would be in an underground cell. Perhaps the Countess would be there too. Anyway it was the first place to look. Peregrine reached the ground floor and, ignoring the door into the courtyard, followed the steps down below ground. Here everything was pitch-dark and after taking the precaution of waiting and listening again, he switched on his torch. The base of the turret had brought him to the junction of two tunnels. One led off to his right under the east wing while the other disappeared into the distance below the main body of the Chateau. Peregrine chose the latter and was halfway along it when through an open doorway on one side be heard the murmur of voices. That they didn't come from the room itself was obvious. It was rather that people in the room above could be heard down there. He flashed his torch briefly and saw that the place had once been a kitchen.
An old black iron range stood in the chimney breast and in the middle of the room a large wooden table stood covered with dust. Beyond it was a large stone sink and a window and a door which led out into a sunken area. To one side of the sink, a chain hung down over the walled lip of what seemed to be a well. A wooden lid covered it now. Peregrine crossed the room, lifted the lid and shone the torch down and very faintly saw, far below, its reflected light. It might come in handy for a hiding place in an emergency but in the meantime he was more interested in the voices. The sound of them came, he realized, from what looked like a small lift-shaft set into the wall at the far end of the kitchen. Peregrine switched off his torch and stuck his head through the opening. Two men in the room above were engaged in heated argument.
'You're not reading me, Hans,' said an American, 'You're taking a non-power-oriented standpoint. Now what I'm saying is that from the proven experimental evidence of the past there is no alternative to Realpolitik or Machtpolitik if you like...'
'I don't like,' said a man with a foreign accent, 'and I should know. I was there at the Battle of the Kursk. You think I liked that?'
'Sure, sure. I guess not. But what happened there was the breakdown of Machtpolitik powerwise.'
'You can say that again,' said the German. 'You know how many Tigers we lost?'
'Jesus, I'm not talking logistically. You had a pre-War situation which was unbalanced.'
'We had a man who was unbalanced too. That's what you fail to take into account. The human psyche. All you can see is the material, the non-personalistic and dehumanized product of an economically dependent species. But never psychical impulses which transcend the material.'
'That is not true. I admit the interdependency of the individual and the socio-economic environment but the basis remains the same, the person is the process.'
The German laughed. 'You know, when I hear you talk that way I am reminded of our Soviet colleague. The individual is free by virtue of the very collectivity which makes him unfree. With you the collective imposes a freedom on the individual which he does not want. In the Soviet case there is the stasis of state capitalism and in the American the chaos of the free-market economy, and in both the individual is tied with the halter of militaristic power monopolies over which he has no control. And that you rationalize as Realpolitik?'
'And without it you wouldn't be sitting here, Heinie,' said the American savagely.
'Professor Botwyk,' said the German, 'I would remind you that we neither of us would be
