'Do it yourself,' Jolly snarled. No 'old boy,' no 'old top.' The bonhomie was gone, and gone forever.
Rawlings looked at Swanson and said woodenly, 'Permission to hit Dr. Jolly over the head with this little old gun, sir?'
'Permission granted,' Swanson said grimly. But no further persuasion was necessary. Jolly cursed and started ripping the cover off the bandage.
For almost a minute there was silence in the room while we watched Jolly carry out a rough, ready and far from gentle repair job on Kinnaird's hand. Then Swanson said slowly: 'I still don't understand how the hell Jolly got rid of the film.'
'It was easy. Ten minutes' thinking and you'd get it. They waited until we had cleared the ice cap, then they took the films, shoved them in a waterproof bag, attached a yellow dye marker to the bag, then pumped it out through the garbage-disposal unit in the galley. Remember, they'd been on a tour of the ship and seen it — although the suggestion was probably radioed them by a naval expert. I had Rawlings posted on watch in the early hours of this morning, and he saw Kinnaird go into the galley about half-past four. Maybe he just wanted a ham sandwich, I don't know. But Rawlings says he had the bag and marker with him when he sneaked in and empty hands when he came out. The bag would float to the surface and the marker stain thousands of square yards of water. The naval ship up top would have worked out our shortest route from Zebra to Scotland and would be within a few miles of our point of exit from the ice pack. It could probably have located it without the helicopter but the chopper made it dead certain.
'Incidentally, I was being rather less than accurate when I said I didn't know the reason for Jolly's attempts to delay us. I knew all along. He'd been told that the ship couldn't reach our exit point until such and such a time and that it was vital to delay us until then. Jolly even had the effrontery to check with me what time we would be emerging from the ice pack.'
Jolly looked up from Kinnaird's hand and his face was twisted in a mask of malevolence.
'You win, Carpenter. So you win. All along the line. But you lost out in the only thing that really mattered. They got the films — the films showing the location, as you said, of nearly every missile base in America. And that was all that mattered. Ten million pounds couldn't buy that information. But we got it.' He bared his teeth in a savage smile. 'We may have lost out, Carpenter, but we're professionals. We did our job.'
'They got the films, all right,' I acknowledged. 'And I'd give a year's salary to see the faces of the men who develop them. Listen carefully, Jolly. Your main reason in trying to cripple Benson and myself was not so much that you could have the say-so on Bolton's health and so delay us: your main reason, your overriding reason, was that you wanted to be the only doctor on the ship so that it could be only you who would carry out the X-ray on Zabrinski's ankle and remove the plaster cast. Literally, everything hinged on that: basically, nothing else mattered. That was why you took such a desperate chance in crippling me when you heard me say I intended to X-ray Zabrinski's ankle the following morning. That was the one move you made that lacked the hallmark of class — of a professional — but, then, I think you were close to panic. You were lucky.
'Anyway, you removed the plaster cast two mornings ago and also the films that you had hidden there in oilskin paper when you applied the plaster to Zabrinski's leg the first night we arrived in Zebra. A perfect hiding place. You could always, of course, have wrapped them in bandages covering survivors' burns, but that would be too risky. The cast was brilliant.
'Unfortunately for you and your friends, I had removed the original plaster during the previous night, extracted the films from the oiled paper, and replaced them with others. That, incidentally, is the second piece of evidence I have on you. There are two perfect sets of prints on the leaders of the satellite films: yours and Kinnaird's. Along with the saltcovered aluminum foil and the confession freely made in front of witnesses, that guarantees you both the eight o'clock walk to the gallows. The gallows and failure, Jolly. You weren't even a professional. Your friends will never see those films.'
Mouthing soundless words through smashed lips, his face masked in madness, and completely oblivious to the two guns, Jolly flung himself at me. He had taken two steps and two only when Rawlings' gun caught him, not lightly, on the side of the head. He crashed to the floor as if the Brooklyn bridge had fallen in on top of him. Rawlings surveyed him dispassionately.
'Never did a day's work that gave me profounder satisfaction,' he said conversationally. 'Except, perhaps, those pictures I took with Dr. Benson's camera to give Dr. Carpenter here some negatives to shove inside that oiled paper.'
'Pictures of what?' Swanson asked curiously.
Rawlings grinned happily. 'All those pin-ups in Doc Benson's sick bay. Yogi Bear, Donald Duck, Pluto, Popeye, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — you name it, I got it. The works. Each a guaranteed work of art — and in glorious technicolor.' He smiled a beatific smile. 'Like Doc Carpenter here, I'd give a year's pay to see their faces when they get around to developing those negatives.'
