The Hungry World Affair Read online

  THE HUNGRY WORLD AFFAIR

  By Robert Hart Davis

  Napoleon Solo looked at the one man who had an outside chance to save them. “THRUSH has hurled its last challenge. We win---or the world as we know it dies. We---and all decent mankind. All but THRUSH!”

  PROLOGUE

  The big heavy black limousine snarled along the narrow and dangerous cobblestone road that wound through the hills above Athens.

  The day was beautiful. The sun shone with a mellow warmth that it seems to reserve only for Greece. In the far distances the thin-masted fishing boats were like toys pushing across the sparkling water of the Aegean. As the road wound back upon itself, the ruins of the Acropolis slid into view. On the broad plateau, the ancient Acropolis still seemed to dominate the modern city sprinkled below with its motorcars, trams, and television antennae. The time-eaten fluted columns, temples and stadia were reminders that today’s civilization was but a flowering from roots laid in antiquity.

  But the ruins of the Acropolis held no interest, philosophical or otherwise, for the four men in the hurtling limousine. The man beside the driver rode with his mouth a gash, his shoulders straining forward as if to add to the dizzying speed.

  His voice ripped into the air-conditioned, soundproofed, silent interior of the car: “Hurry, you fool! That swine of a defector might have contacted U.N.C.L.E. hours ago. Quit making like a Sunday driver---or we’ll walk into a swarm of enemy agents when we reach Doulou’s place!”

  Eyes hard and knuckles white on the wheel, the driver depressed the accelerator another fraction of an inch. The speedometer needle crept a few kilometers higher. The whine of the engine began to insinuate even into the interior of the luxurious, specially-built THRUSH vehicle.

  A grove of stunted olive trees flashed past. Beyond, a curve loomed emptily, without a rail to guard the sheer hundred foot drop down a face of stone.

  With a touch worthy of the Grand Prix, the driver came into the curve low, balancing the combined forces of gravity, centrifugal force, and traction. The car swept up and out. The rim of the road yawned. Emptiness sucked at the black juggernaut.

  But the driver was coaxing the wheel, touching the accelerator. The car seemed to flatten and stretch out, staying with the road as a surfboard controlled by an expert masters a murderous wave.

  And then, just as it cleared the curve, the car squatted, tires screaming and smoking.

  Up ahead, a gnarled goatherd was prodding his flock across the narrow road toward the meadows in the vales above.

  As the car slewed to a rocking, dust-billowing stop, the man beside the driver touched a button. The window slid down, opening so quickly it seemed to have vanished. The THRUSH agent thrust his head out.

  “Clear the way, old man! Get those filthy vermin off the road!”

  Bouncing on bandy legs, the goatherd was busy soothing those of his charges which had been startled by the sudden appearance of the car.

  The THRUSH agent spat an oath, deflected a button which flipped the bulletproof car door open, and hurled himself out.

  He was a big fellow, with a square, swarthy face, a bull neck, and crinkled black hair. Ethnically, he might have been native to the area.

  But the man’s clothing was like nothing the goatherd had ever seen before. From ankles to neck and wrists, the THRUSH man’s ox-like physique was swathed in a tight-fitting garment that gave the appearance of having been knitted from dull silver.

  The suit was a new THRUSH issue, already given the vernacular dubbing of “hot togs” by agents of the supra-government. With the agent protected by an insulating inner liner, the suit conducted and amplified energy from its own mini-powerpack. If turned to full amplitude, the suit transformed its wearer into a weapon no less deadly than a naked high tension coil.

  As the goatherd stared, the THRUSH man surged into the midst of the flock, lancets of sunlight bouncing off him.

  The silvery man flipped a tab on his right shoulder, activating the suit with the barest minimum power. Each time he brushed against a goat, blue sparks crackled. The animals twitched, bleated, charged pell-mell from the road, rushing blindly from the crackle of lightning in their midst.

  Cloven hooves clawed up the shallow cliffs, hurtled past the monstrous black car, dashed themselves over the precipice.

  With a shriek, the goatherd led the rout. He clawed his way up the face of shade, dashed full tilt into the hemlock that grew on the hillside beyond. The blow knocked him to the ground, where he lay with his hands covering his face.

  With the milling roadblock instantly removed, the THRUSH agent leaped back into the black limousine as it pulled abreast of him.

  With a relishing smile for the havoc he’d wrought, the agent settled into the seat as the limousine roared ahead.

  “These hot togs are really most effective. Turned to full power, they’d make any character who touched you think he’d sat down in the electric chair---not that he’d have time to think!”

  The man in the far corner of the rear seat stirred for the first time. “You sound as if you had doubts.”

  “Doubts?” A note of caution came into the THRUSH man’s voice.

  “That anything devised by THRUSH would be perfect.”

  The agent stared hard through the windshield at the uncoiling road ahead. “I have no doubts whatever, my commander. I was merely so excited by the possibilities of the new hot togs that I was eager to try them out. If I’d turned the power a little higher, I could have fried those goats on the spot.”

  “It is your job to wear and use the suit, not to test it.” The voice from the back seat was cold with the suggestion that the small question mark had just been dropped into the agent’s record.

  The man in the front seat worried his knuckles together. “I did not mean---“

  “I know what you meant. It was not wise of you to say it. But time is important and you did clear the road in the quickest manner possible. We’ll leave it there for now.”

  The man in the back seat leaned forward out of the shadows. Unlike his companions, he was not dressed in hot togs. He wore neat slacks and a dark turtle-neck sweater.

  He was young, compactly and wirily built, and as he peered from the window, sunlight struck his face. It was, in a manner of speaking, the echo of a face all too familiar to many THRUSH agents. A young, square-jawed face with a wide forehead and a cleft in the chin. A face capped by light hair cut with careless bangs.

  At a quick and superficial glance, the face might have passed for that of Illya Kuryakin. But anyone who knew the topflight U.N.C.L.E. agent intimately would have detected a stranger. Illya’s face did not have this merciless aura. His eyes did not hold this fire of cruelty and half-mad lust for power.

  Dion Gould raised a slender hand to flick the bangs from his rounded forehead. The fires leaped higher in his eyes.

  “The private roadway to the villa is just ahead. I see no sign of activity. We have beaten U.N.C.L.E. here. Soon we will have beaten them all the way.”

  TWO

  Up the sunny, pleasant, verdant hillside beyond the villa to which the THRUSH mastermind had referred, Dr. Marko Doulou restlessly prowled one of his greenhouses. He was a short, rotund, pink man with chin whiskers and a bald head that peeled continuously, like onionskin, from over-exposure to sunlight.

  All about Dr. Doulou, in troughs of soil of every color and composition, were strands of wheat from all the major varieties.

  Dogging the doctor’s heels was his assistant, a young bespectacled man clothed in a white lab smock that matched Doulou’s.

  The assistant stood with clipboard cradled in his left forearm, pencil poised in his right hand.

  But the master scientist did not brea
k his moody silence. In the further end of the long greenhouse was a glass case that measured, at its base, about six by twelve feet. Its top was slightly higher than the roly-poly doctor’s head.

  Doulou came to rest on his stocky legs before the case. A sigh formed heavily on his lips.

  In contrast to the stands of healthy wheat throughout the greenhouse, the grain inside the glass case was pitiably stunted and barren.

  Doulou slid a glass panel open, reached inside the case, and plucked a withered stalk. It snapped brittily between his fingers, turned to dust. He shook the powdery remains from his fingers, closed the case with a slow movement of disappointment.

  Then, as he turned to his assistant, Dr. Doulou’s inability to accept defeat asserted itself. His shoulders squared beneath the white smock. His lips tipped up at the corners, and the barest twinkle returned to his eyes.

  “At least we know how not to make healthy grain!”

  The assistant nodded, letting the clipboard hang at his side.

  Fingering his lower lip in thought, Doulou paced the narrow aisles between the greenhouse tanks. Now and then he paused to peer at a stand of wheat, to finger the grain.

  “So much stalk and useless chaff to get an edible kernel of grain,” he mused. His gaze strayed to the glass case, where the most important experiment of his long and distinguished scientific career had backfired.

  His eyes were eloquent. He was thinking of the spectre of hunger as the world’s population explosion reached new heights each day; of the critical need to increase the yield of arable land; of his scientific and humanitarian dream that had turned to withered stalk and dust inside the glass case.

  “Exactly in reverse, eh, Theodosius?” he murmured to his assistant. “We set out to treble, even quadruple the yield of every single stalk of food grain that shall grow on our planet---to fill the granaries of the earth!”

  He passed his hand over his eyes. “We discovered the Doulou Particle. It destroyed the grain. But it shall not destroy our hope!”

  Doulou began to beat his fist in his palm as he paced back and forth like a caged pink bear. “Where did we make our mistake? In our calculations relating to the chromosomatic patterns? Or does there lurk within the Doulou Particle yet another, unknown to us at present, subatomic particle that can---“

  A sharp humming sound interrupted Doulou. His head jerked. “We have visitors.” A frown creased his brow as he started from the greenhouse. “Perhaps it is that man from U.N.C.L.E., Theodosius, to stifle us with all the trappings of security measures!”

  He flung up his hands as he entered the spacious Grecian villa. “How can they expect me to work with a counter spy hanging over my shoulder?”

  Doulou crossed a solarium, where a marble nymph splashed water into an indoor fountain. Columns supported the glass-dome roof high overhead. Potted tropical foliage flung a riot of color against the far wall.

  Doulou mounted a short, wide stairway to a vaulted entrance hall. He was met there by a manservant.

  “A Mr. Kuryakin has arrived, sir,” the butler said. “I’ve shown him to the library, as you instructed.”

  “Yes. Hmmmm. U.N.C.L.E. just now advised us by radiogram to expect their man. Must say they got him here with miraculous speed.”

  Moving with amazing agility on his stumpy legs as he talked, Dr. Doulou had crossed to the library, opened the door.

  Filled with diffused indirect lighting, the room was a quiet sanctuary---dark walnut-paneled walls, floor-to-ceiling draperies, massive walnut and leather furnishings, and thousands of volumes on every subject showing their spines in the book shelves.

  Close behind Doulou, Theodosius shut the massive door, turned, and bumped into the doctor.

  “Going to a costume ball?” he said with wry humor, his glance taking in the dull silver knitting worn by two of the men before him.

  The third man, young, fair-haired, clothed more conventionally, stepped forward. “I’m Illya Kuryakin, Dr. Doulou. You knew I was coming, of course?”

  “Yes. Well,” the little doctor grumped, “did you have to bring these fellows along in their fancy tights?

  “My assistants,” the young man said.

  The newcomers drifted forward to ring in the scientist. He looked at the eyes of the man who had announced himself as Kuryakin. Unaccountably, a tiny alarm bell tinkled in the back of his mind. He didn’t like to be encircled. He had the sensation that they were a human noose, drawing tight about him.

  Doulou’s tongue touched his lips. “May I see your credentials, Mr. Kuryakin?”

  “Of course.” The young man smiled. But he made no move to show a pocket folio of identification. Instead, he lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck, his eyes hard on Doulou.

  “Dr. Marko Doulou, famed agronomist. Scientific specialist in grains. Discoverer of the Doulou Particle. Primary research indicated that radiation of seed with the Doulou Particle would affect the chromosomatic structure and multiply the yield of edible grains, rice, wheat, barley, oats.

  “Instead, you made one of those minute miscalculations somewhere that in science so often have totally unexpected results. In actual experiment, the Doulou Particle had exactly the opposite of the desired result. Grain radiated with the Doulou Particle yields a husk holding a kernel that is little more than dust.”

  Doulou took a step back. His throat had become dry. The eyes about him were coldly ferocious, not the eyes of friends.

  He took a breath to steady himself. He knew Illya Kuryakin by sight. Although they had never met formally, he had once attended a scientific conclave where the legendary U.N.C.L.E. agent had been present as an observer.

  This young man looked like Kuryakin. But Doulou had the dread certainty that it wasn’t. No. The eyes, they were different. At the scientific meeting, with Kuryakin some distance away on the opposite side of the large banquet table, Doulou has discreetly studied the young international agent.

  The doctor’s motive had been simple curiosity. He’d been intrigued by the thought of a life so danger-filled and fast paced, so different from his own cloistered, sedentary existence. He fully intended to seek out the interesting young man for an informal chat, but the agenda had been too crowded with meetings.

  “Who are you?” Doulou’s whisper was husky.

  “Illya Kuryakin.” The man said with a mocking smile.

  “No. You resemble him---enough so that I could walk into your trap. But you are not he!”

  The young man’s face settled into its own aspect of ferocity, of chilling arrogance that surpassed mere egomania.

  “As you say, doctor, the resemblance has achieved its purpose. Now be wise. Permit us to complete our business and go.”

  Doulou took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. His eyes darted. He was ringed in. If only Theodosius would dash for the door, raise the alarm---

  “Business?” he said. His voice was a croak. He was a stranger to violence or the threat of it. And the threat was a fog graying this once-secure room. But in the quagmire of his fright, Dr. Marko Doulou made a discovery about himself. There was some hitherto unknown steel in his guts. He didn’t like the idea of these men walking in and pushing him around.

  “Theodosius,” he said thickly, “go and tell the butler to bring my heart medicine.”

  Doulou’s heart was as sound as flint. Both he and Theodosius knew it.

  Mentally, the doctor prayed that his assistant would be able to employ the ruse to get out of the room.

  Theodosius made no move. Instead, he added his laughter to that which burst suddenly from the three intruders.

  Doulou looked at the surrounding faces, his eye blanking with consternation.

  The agent who’d posed as Kuryakin choked back his glee, wiped his eyes, and looked past the doctor at Theodosius.

  “Do you have the formula for the Doulou Particle?”

  “Of course,” the assistant said. Theodosius slipped a thin sheaf of folded papers from beneath his smock. He started to hand
the papers to the bogus Kuryakin, and Doulou experienced the urge to mayhem for the first time in his long, quiet life.

  “Theodosius!” Doulou was trembling hard from the effort to hold himself in check. “You---One of them? Who are they? Why do you betray the trust---?”

  Theodosius looked different, as if a mask had been lifted from his face. “I am tired of being a shadow, a nothing, a two-bit lackey at your beck and call. When they contacted me, I welcomed the opportunity. THRUSH will rule the world---and I shall rule a scientific complex that will make your efforts look like the futile bumbling of a Middle-Ages alchemist!”

  “You fool!” Doulou said hoarsely. “Don’t you know they’re merely using you as long as it suits their needs?”

  Doulou instantly saw the deepening of contempt in his assistant’s face. His words had no effect. Instead, secretly envying and hating his superior for a long time, Theodosius enjoyed hearing the despair in Doulou’s voice.

  “With this, you have given us the world.” Theodosius shook the formula almost in Doulou’s face. “So who is the fool?”

  Doulou blindly hurled himself at his traitorous assistant. The unexpected collision brought a grunt of surprise from Theodosius. Off-balance, he tripped. Doulou fell with him in a thrashing tangle.

  Theodosius was much younger, stronger, more agile. But Doulou was half crazy from a heartbreaking sense of betrayal. He felt the jolt of Theodosius fist in his face as the assistant writhed free. As the younger man swung a second blow, Doulou grabbed his wrist, clawed for the throat with his other hand.

  Distantly, the doctor heard the phony Kuryakin giving orders: “Careful! Stand back. Let Theodosius handle him. But watch for intruders---with the hot togs ready!”

  Theodosius had scrambled to his feet, drawing back a foot to aim a vicious kick at Doulou’s head. Halfway to his knees, the doctor glimpsed the blow as it came. He jerked his head aside. The foot struck his shoulder, slamming him backward.

  Doulou saw Theodosius’s contorted face towering far above him. Again, the assistant raised his foot, this time intending to smash it down as if upon an insect.

  As the gleaming black shoe descended, Doulou grabbed, twisted. With a squeal of surprise and pain, Theodosius twisted, fell. Strength waning, Doulou clawed his way to the writhing form. He reached, grabbed his assistant’s smock, tried to drag him down as Theodosius struggled to his feet.