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'Elizabeth! How can you be so heartless about it!'

'Well, that's what happened You asked'

'But couldn't he save himself?'

'Don't be idiotic It's sheet ice, a et up to sixty ot a prayer'

'But didn't he fly off at one of the bends?'

'Fritz said he went all the way to the botto hut But Fritz says he must have been dead in the first hundred yards or so'

'Oh, here's Franz Franz, can I have scras runny like I always have them'

'Yes, miss And you, miss?' The waiter took the orders and Bond heard his boots creak off across the boards

The sententious girl was being sententious again 'Well, all I can say is it must have been some kind of punishet paid off for doing wrong'

'Don't be ridiculous God would never punish you as severely as that' The conversation followed this new hare off into a maze of infantile arette and sat back, gazing thoughtfully at the sky No, the girl was right God wouldn't mete out such a punishment But Blofeld would Had there been one of those Blofeld s at which, before the full body of men, the crime and the verdict had been announced? Had this Bertil been taken out and dropped on to the bob-run? Or had his coive the sinner the trip or the light push that was probably all that had been needed? More likely The quality of the scream had been of sudden, fully realized terror as the er-nails and boots, and then, as he gathered speed down the polished blue gully, the bunding horror of the truth And what a death! Bond had once gone down the Cresta, from 'Top', to prove to hiainst the blast of air, padded with leather and foam rubber, that had still been sixty seconds of nakd fear Even now he could remember how his limbs had shaken when he rose stiffly from the flimsy little skeleton bob at the end of the run-out And that had been a bare three-quarters of a mile This man, or the flayed reone down head or feet first? Had his body started tu? Had he tried, while consciousness ree of one of the early, scientifically banked bends with the unspiked toe of this boot or that? No After the first few yards, he would already have been going too fast for any rational thought or action God, what a death! A typical Blofeld death, a typical SPECTRE revenge for the supreme crime of disobedience That was the way to keep discipline in the ranks! So, concluded Bond as he cleared the tray away and got down to his books, SPECTRE walks again! But dohat road this time?

At ten e of affabilities, Bond gathered up an armful of books and papers and followed her round the back of the club building and along a narroell-trodden path past a sign that said PRIVAT EINTRITT VERBOTEN

The rest of the building, whose outlines Bond had seen the night before, cauished but powerfully built one-storey affair ranite blocks, with a flat cement roof from which, at the far end, protruded a s radioinstructions on the previous night and which would also serve as the ears and e of the plateau and below the final peak of Piz Gloria, but out of avalanche danger Beneath it the mountain sloped sharply away until it disappeared over a cliff Far below again was the tree line and the Bernina valley leading up to Pontresina, the glint of a railway track and the tiny caterpillar of a long goods train of the Rhätische Bahn, on its way, presumably, over the Bernina Pass into Italy

The door to the building gave the usual pneumatic hiss, and the central corridor was more or less a duplicate of the one at the club, but here there were doors on both sides and no pictures It was dead quiet and there was no hint of ent on behind the doors Bond put the question

'Laboratories,' said Iruely 'All laboratories And of course the lecture-room Then the Count's private quarters He lives with his work, Sair Hilary'

'Good show'

They ca door

'Herein!'

James Bond was tremendously excited as he stepped over the threshold and heard the door sigh shut behind hiinal Blofeld, last year's model - about twenty stone, tall, pale, bland face with black crew-cut, black eyes with the whites showing all round, like Mussolini's, ugly thinpointed hands and feet but he had no idea what alterations had been contrived on the envelope that contained the man

But Monsieur le Coue on the small private veranda and came in out of the sun into the penumbra of the study, his hands outstretched in welcome, was surely not even a distant relative of the man on the files!