CHAPTER I
Mysterious Happenings
N one of the ravines which transverse the southern portion of the Carpathians in their steep descent to the Wallachian plain—between the romantic deeply-cut valley of the Oitu River and the pass of Predeal, over which the express trains thunder on the way from Czernowitz to Bucharest—lies the lonely monastery of Valeni.
A bad, almost untraveled road branches off from the highway above the village of Suicii and winds between darkly-wooded crags in its easy ascent to the old walls of the monastery. Long forgotten and a prey to the moss and vines, the monastery clings to the mountainside, a reminder of times long past when the orthodox Carpathian monasteries changed into stubborn castles and stout defenses against encroaching Islam, and the spiritual lords were no less practiced in weapons than the bailiffs and dukes of Swabian fortresses.
* * *
It is now more than a year and a half since the inhabitants of Suicii were surprised by an unexpected visit. The strangers arrived with a line of trucks, no one knowing whence they came or what they wanted. Then wagons came almost daily from the Oitu valley, laden with tools and building material, chests, furniture, and mysterious machinery.
Curiously, yet shyly, the villagers watched, as gradually a little colony grew in the valley of Valeni—as electricity and radio made their appearance. But none of the strangers understood Roumanian or Hungarian, and so the purpose of the new colony remained a riddle. Even the magistrate in Calimanesti knew only that the people were from Little Russia and were workers of the oil magnate Romano Vacarescu, to whom the forests about Suicii belonged, and that they were to build some dwelling houses near the monastery of Valeni.
At length the excited minds were eased; people became accustomed to the increase in population, and continued to till the cornfields and to drink the inevitable plum brandy. But one day curiosity was newly aroused by the story of a shepherd who came from Magura Cozia.
On the open plateau between Cozia and the damp valley of the upper Arges River strange buildings were being erected. Heavy concrete pillars, surrounding a circular open space, rose high in the air. Within was being built a peculiar structure, about which nobody could form a clear idea. Some claimed that it was the dome of a fortified tower, others asserted that a mighty memorial monument was being erected there, and extremely clever persons could tell (from some certain source or other) about an airport which promised Suicii greater economic importance.
But as the construction proceeded, the entire plateau was surrounded with a high fence and the entrances were carefully guarded. Thus the imaginations of the natives had free run, and soon the most impossible stories about the mysterious structure were current.
There was also great activity within the ancient walls of Valeni. Heavy hammer strokes thundered from the subterranean cells, machines hummed day and night, and thick clouds of smoke poured from the newly erected chimney. In the abandoned monastery yard rose heaps of coal; oil tanks and steel cylinders stood in long rows by the walls; and thick bundles of electric wire ran from the monastery, some across to the plateau and others to the dwellings of the workers.
At night, when the Roumanian mountaineers were sleeping in their sheepskins on the wooden porches of their mud huts, a bright illumination shone from the old walls and cast trembling reflections on the black mountain side.
A Meeting in the Monastery
AN impressive automobile sped through the winding valley of the Oitu. The narrow Toot of the valley, between the closely crowding Carpathians, gives barely room enough for the road, the river, and the single track railway which runs obliquely through the mountains from Hermanstadt to Slatina. Fairly often, in fact, the highway crosses the rails and traverses the Oitu River on shaky bridges. Coming from Ramnicul Valcea (“Garmisch,” as the people of Bucharest term it), the car took the sharp curves before Calimanesti at undiminished speed, climbed with a rattle the ridges of Berislavesti, and crossed Suicii in its mad course. The natives humbly knelt: they recognized the green car of the man who owned the oil wells of Ploesti and countless square kilometers of Carpathian forest.
By speculation on a grand scale the insignificant little Roumanian had in a few decades amassed a fortune reckoned among the greatest in the country. Oil and wood had been his motto: oil for export, bringing him good foreign money, and wood for the wide treeless plains of Wallachia.
The car stopped squarely before the monastery.
“Where is Mr. Suchinow?” the passenger demanded of the young man who promptly opened the door of the car. He spoke French, the language of an aristocrat of Bucharest.
“Monsieur Suchinow is waiting for you down at the office.”
“Too bad! Call for me again in an hour and a half,” he ordered the chauffeur, and then he descended into the dark cells of the monastery.
In the narrow corridor leading to the office, a slender man came to meet the visitor.
“You are punctual. Monsieur Vacarescu. How was the trip across the mountains?”
“No circumlocutions, if you please, Monsieur Suchinow! I do not enjoy idle conversation when it is a matter of business.”
The reproved man remained silent. He knew the peculiarities of the fat little financier and yielded to them.
The two men entered the office, a comfortably furnished room, the thick walls of which muffled the noise of the workshops; the incessant hum of the high frequency generators operating close by -was noticeable only because of a slight trembling of the walls and furniture.
“How far along are you?” asked Vacarescu, curtly, sinking back into a chair with a sigh.
“Finished!” replied Suchinow, still more curtly. On his face, which was strangely dotted with green spots, lurked the shadow of a contemptuous smile.
“Finished except for...?”
“Except for nothing!”
“Do you really mean that the rocket can now be released at any moment?”
“Tomorrow evening at nine twenty-five sharp (Central European time) it must be released, unless I want to loaf around thirteen days more until the next quadrature of the moon.”
The fat financier seemed to have had his breath taken away. His surprisingly narrow hooked nose, which seemed entirely out of place on his fat broad face, trembled as though threatening to fall off.
“And I? And our company?” he snorted.
“Yes, you must certainly hasten, if the Transylvania Company is not to get ahead of you at the last moment!” remarked the slender man pleasantly.
“You have a nerve!” exploded Vacarescu angrily.
“No idle conversation, if you please, Monsieur Vacarescu! It is a question of businesss. We can be finished in a few minutes. The contracts are ready. Have you deposited the money?”
“I am going to protect myself. First, this matter of the Budapest account does not suit me. If the rocket does not return, I lose my money for nothing. Now tell me, who is to steer the thing?”
“Skoryna—you know very well.”
“Do you really expect me to settle a fortune on this untried lad with the peaches and cream complexion?”
“Sir,” replied Suchinow sharply, “you must certainly entrust all these arrangements to me, whether for good or ill.”
“For my money I can probably demand some guarantee, too!” said the irritated Vacarescu.
“Does not Skoryna guarantee matters with his life? What further guarantee do you wish?”
“Bah! a valuable life for twenty thousand English pounds!” jested the financier maliciously.
A shadow crossed the green-spotted face of the Russian.
“Can one balance a human life with money. Monsieur Vacarescu? Even the life of an—an engineer like Skoryna? I beg of you to regard the discussion of this point as closed.”
“At least, your preparations have remained secret?”
“Certainly, so far as is humanly possible. Of course the press notices and the information for the
Lick and Babelsberg observatories are already prepared. The radio announcements are to be sent out immediately after the signing of the papers.”
After a short pause Suchinow suddenly asked:
“Why do you set such store by absolute secrecy?” He looked slyly up at the man opposite.
“I should not like to have this German—what is his name, anyway?—”
“August Korf.”
“Right! I do not want this Korf to take a hand in our game. I trust he knows nothing about it.”
“How should he? After all, what harm would it do? He has not yet finished his first experiments, and he could hardly make up my head start. By the time he can think of competing with us, we shall long since have set the world in an uproar and your foundation will be established solidly. Do you doubt that?”
Vacarescu thoughtfully twirled his watch-chain.
“I cannot help thinking that this Swabian will somehow upset our calculations.”
The inventor grew pale. Anxiously he examined the expression of the financier, and he nervously drummed on the arm of his chair.
“How so?” he asked with forced indifference.
“Do not underestimate this rival! You know that he invented the rocket at about the same time as yourself; he knows the dynamic cartridge; and lately he has been asserting that he can attain twice as high a repulsion-speed by using liquid explosives. Some day this man will come into the open with some startling revelations, and then you and I are in the soup.”
At these words, offering no interpretation but the speculator’s anxiety about his investment of capital, the tension in Suchinow’s face was released.
“I see perfectly well. Monsieur Vacarescu,” he said calmly, “that you have so little confidence in me and my—In Skoryna, that it is doubtless best for us to break our relation and for the Transsylvania Company...”
”For Heaven’s sake!” interrupted Varcarescu, almost screaming at him. “You shall have your deposit ! But the Lord help you, if we fail!”
With a smile bordering on pity Suchinow lifted the telephone receiver.
“Connect Monsieur Vacarescu with the Bucharest Bank of Roumania—yes, the president himself—very well, then call up here.”
Then he opened the door of a little cabinet built in the wall, took out some papers, and spread them over the table.
“Here, Monsieur Vacarescu, is the transfer of license, here is my appointment as general director of the Transcosmos Stock Company, here is the sealed envelope with Skoryna’s will of the twenty thousand pounds, due from the Budapest account in the case of his death, likewise the statement of your message to the Bank of Roumania (which you yourself will telephone in a few minutes)—and here is ink!”