But with the ferry, the airship aimed some kind of ray, a beam of energy, I don't know,' she said, exasperated, 'and it blew up the Barclay!' She was pleading for an answer. 'We don't have anything even remotely like that!'
'We know what it was, Gale,' Henshaw said quietly, bringing surprise to the group. Henshaw turned to Treadwell.
'This is your ball game, Tom. Sorry.'
Treadwell nodded. 'The only energy in that beam, that socalled raygun apparatus as some of the press are already describing it,' he said, 'was ordinary light. Oh, it was boosted to a rather extraordinary intensity, but that was all. Strictly for effect.'
Gale was taken aback. She looked to Indy, but he was paying close attention to every word Treadwell was saying.
'We had sufficient observation of the event today,' the Englishman explained.
'The Barclay was torn up by a huge amount of explosives that had been placed in the engine compartment. It was rigged to be set off by a discreet radio signal.
Today was their big show, so to speak. They picked a time with good visibility, so that what happened would be seen by a great many people. They turned on their beam—consider it an extraordinarily powerful searchlight— and focused as tightly as possible, and when that light attracted enough attention, they transmitted their radio signal to detonate the explosive charges.'
He leaned back in his seat. 'A ghastly sort of demonstration, I admit, but that is all it was. Forgive me for being seemingly uncaring. I'm not. But my job is to discover just what happened. What I've told you is what happened. Oh, we'll have confirmation. We immediately sent an aircraft—we've kept several ready to go at a moment's notice—into the smoke from the blast, and I'm quite sure when we do a particulate study, spectrographic and all that, that we'll find quite ordinary remnants of common explosives. Now,' he pulled himself upright in his seat, 'do let me go on.'
He looked to Indy. 'This charade has worked very well, Indy.'
Gale couldn't help a bitter interruption. 'Charade?'
'Let me,' Indy told Treadwell. 'I don't want even a hint of mistaken credit here.' He turned to Gale and Pencroft.
'You see, for a great deal of what's been going on, I was way over my head.
I'm not a pilot, but,' he smiled thinly,
'you already know that, Gale. Everything I've done has been calculated to mislead this group we're after. The more we could get them to concentrate on us—you, me, Cromwell, and Foulois, and for a while, Tarkiz—the more they were led to believe I was the kingpin in all this. Figuring out what was going on, confirming that this idea of alien spacecraft was so much baloney—'
'Rubbish, all right,' muttered Pencroft.
'Exactly like the artifacts. The cube and the pyramids,' Indy stressed.
'Actually, we had a bunch of them to be used if we needed them, but the trap worked right from the beginning. In fact, the cube with those South African diamonds had nothing to do with this group flying the zeppelin and those discs, because we didn't even know about them at the time. But Treadwell has also worked with the De Beers outfit and others, just like I have. That, in fact, is how we first got together.'
Treadwell nodded affirmation and picked up Indy's thread of explanation. 'So we also made certain that the people we were after, even if we could not yet identify them, would know of the existence of one Professor Henry Jones and his great skills in deciphering cuneiform inscriptions. That meant they must go after Indy, and, in doing so, might well reveal themselves to us. At first, of course, they would want him alive and cooperative. But once they found out we'd slipped them the old Mickey and were playing a bit on the dirty side, why, then they were sure to try to eliminate our good friend, here.'
'You all seemed very fast and easy with his life!' Gale said angrily.
'That was my choice, Gale,' Indy emphasized. 'Nobody went into this wearing a blindfold. Besides,' he grinned,
'I had you along to protect me, right?'
'The point, Miss Parker,' Treadwell followed hastily, 'is that Indy's cooperation was really our only quick way to get this crowd to show some cracks in their anonymity.'
'Ah,' Pencroft said pleasantly, more and more pleased with what he judged to be his own role in the affair. 'That's one of the reasons behind our arranging that trimotor machine. On the record, you see, the university, as well as our museum, accepted the cost for that aircraft. It, too, was bait. You can hardly hide a corrugated clanker like that when it traverses the Atlantic! Pack of fools, too, I say. That's what I told them when they laid bare their schemes.'
'But it has worked,' Treadwell offered.
'Then why haven't we figured out those golden discs!' Gale countered.
'Oh, but we have, miss, we have,' Treadwell assured her. 'Most of that is attributed, by the by, to Colonel Henshaw. He is a very close and old friend of mine.
And our government, I should add. We've worked together for years.'
'Do you mean to tell me,' Gale said with her eyes wide, 'you know what those discs are?' She glanced at Indy. His sudden sly smile was infuriating to her.
'Oh, we really had some ideas. Right from the beginning, I mean,' said Henshaw. 'We have some pretty sharp boys in our technical intelligence programs.
Research and development stuff. I was doing that back in the war. I worked with a Frenchman, some fellow named Coanda—um, Henri Coanda—who had developed a rocket gun for aerial combat. A couple of things we'd talked about buzzed around in the back of my head for a while after I heard about the discs. It just took me longer than it should to start putting two and two together. Well, sometimes even the experts miss the obvious, or memories leak away, like mine seemed to do. Then our group, a bunch of us, seemed to come up with the same conclusion at the same time.
As if we'd all been thunked on our skulls simultaneously.'
