Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

from Terrell himself. Alder was a refugee who came over here with his parents in 1940, and settled in England. He was then fifteen years old, and already something of an infant prodigy, musically and mathematically. I believe they often go together. His father was a physicist, and after a probationary period he was allowed to work here. He proved valuable, and before the end of the war all three of them were naturalised. The boy had studied physics, too, but soon began to distinguish himself in his own special fields, as composer and performer, and in the world of pure mathematics. Perhaps he was even a genius. After the war he did quite a lot of experimental flying, and originated some minor improvements in aircraft, ending up in this Institute, where he was associated with a number of important modifications in aircraft and car design. Also, it seems, he sometimes had differences with the government and his superiors. He objected to the exclusively military use of innovations which he seems to have considered could be beneficial in civil life. And he didn’t like techniques of his evolving to be kept under wraps, when he believed they could be adapted to help with necessary processes in underdeveloped countries. He seems to have been a difficult colleague of individual views, insubordinate, unwilling to conform against his judgment. And he must have been really brilliant, because according to a
Guardian
article I found, about the time he vanished he was definitely in the running for the directorship of this Institute, and at his age that was fantastic.” The young man raised his direct and daunting eyes, and looked the present Director full in the face. “Can you confirm that, sir?”
    “I can and I do.” Phelps committed himself without hesitation. “The man was brilliant. He was a computer that thought and reasoned. No programming, no minding, no servicing necessary. We spend millions trying to construct an Alder, and then wear out bright young men feeding it. When we get a genuine one as a free gift from heaven we usually fail to recognise him. But difficult he certainly was. Go on, finish your exposition.”
    “Finally, after both his parents were dead, Alder wished and offered to resign from here. I don’t know exactly why, I suppose he was disturbed by a feeling of alienation from the aims of this place, and maybe he felt out of sympathy with policy in general. Anyhow, he was obviously valuable, and he was persuaded to think it over while he took some leave that was due him. I take it the authorities here hoped he would change his mind and stay on. He went off into Savoy alone. And he never came back.
    “When he failed to return on time, there were rumours and an alarm, and Terrell was sent to France to follow up his tracks, until they ended without further trace in Dauphiné. It was automatically assumed that he’d departed behind the Iron Curtain, but no more was ever heard of him from any quarter. He
could
have come to grief somewhere in the mountains, being alone there. But the obvious inference was that he’d turned traitor. And Terrell was the man who followed up his case, and compiled a very damning dossier out of all those small unorthodoxies in Alder’s professional life and attitudes. I’d say that that dossier made it impossible for him ever to come back—supposing, of course, that he’d wanted to change his mind.”
    “Happily we have no reason to suppose anything of the kind,” said the Director tartly. “You don’t seem to have wasted your time, Mr. Welland. You find all this relevant?”
    “I think it becomes very relevant, sir, when you remember that Charles Alder was born Karol Alda, of a Czech father and a Slovak mother. Especially when you add to that the fact that the mother’s birth was registered at Liptovsky Mikulás, not twenty miles from Zbojská Dolina.”
    “Let me understand you clearly. You are suggesting, I take it, that Alder may be there in those parts now—that he