The King is Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

instantly followed.
    â€˜Valuable man,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘Gentlemen?’
    The Queens turned. A black limousine had come up on silent treads and a footman in livery was stiffly holding the door open. To the front door was attached a gold medallion, showing two linked globes surmounted by a heavy crown.
    Like a coat of arms.
    The airport was on high ground, and when the car drove through the screen of vegetation the Queens had a panoramic view of half the island.
    They realized at once why this island had been selected as the site of a government-in-hiding. It was shaped like a bowl with a mound in the centre. The shoreline, which was the edge of the bowl, was composed of steep and heavily wooded cliffs, so that from the sea no evidence of human occupancy or construction in the interior would be visible. The mound in the middle of the bowl, where the airfields lay, was at approximately the same elevation as the wooded cliffs at the shoreline. Between the central airfields and the cliffs on the rim, the ground sloped sharply to a valley. It was in this valley, invisible from the sea, that all the building had been done.
    The sight was startling. It was a large island, the valley was great, and as far as the eye could see the valley was packed with buildings. Most of them seemed industrial plants, vast smokeless factories covering many acres; but there were office buildings, too, and to the lower slopes of the hillsides clung colonies of small homes and barracklike structures which, Abel Bendigo explained, housed the workers. The small homes were occupied by minor executives. There was also, he said, a development of more spacious private dwellings on another part of the island; these were for the use of the top executives and the scientific staffs and their families.
    â€˜Families?’ exclaimed the Inspector. ‘You mean you’ve got housewives and kids here, too?’
    â€˜Of course,’ replied the Prime Minister, smiling. ‘We provide a normal, natural environment for our employees. We have schools, hospitals, recreation halls, athletic fields — everything you’d find in a model community in the States, although on a rather crowded scale. Space is our most serious problem.’
    Ellery thought preposterously: Lebensraum .
    â€˜But food, clothing, comic books,’ said Inspector Queen feebly. ‘Don’t tell me you produce all that!’
    â€˜No, though if we had the room we certainly would. Everything is brought in by our cargo fleets, chiefly airborne.’
    â€˜You find planes more practicable than ships?’ asked Ellery.
    â€˜Well, we have a problem with our harbour facilities. We prefer to keep our shoreline as natural-looking as possible —’
    â€˜There’s the harbour now, Ellery!’ said the Inspector.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ said Bendigo, suddenly austere. He leaned forward to say something to the chauffeur in a low tone. The car, which was speeding along inside the rim of woods, immediately turned off into a side road and plunged down to the valley again. But Ellery had snatched a glimpse, through a break in the vegetation, of a horseshoe-shaped bay very nearly landlocked, across the narrow neck of which rode a warship.
    The chauffeur had gone slightly pale. He and the footman sat rigidly.
    â€˜We didn’t really see anything, Mr. Bendigo,’ said Ellery. ‘Just a heavy cruiser. One of your naval vessels?’
    â€˜My brother’s yacht Bendigo ,’ murmured the Prime Minister. Inspector Queen was staring down into the valley with glittering eyes. ‘Yacht my sacro-iliac,’ he snapped. ‘These food and other supplies, Mr. Bendigo. Do you give the stuff away or how do you handle it? What do you pay your people off in?’
    â€˜Our banks issue scrip, Inspector, accepted by Company stores as well as by individuals all over the island.’
    â€˜And when a man wants to quit, or is fired, does