Books › Blue Book v082 n01 [1945-11], 1945 › scan 3
Scan 3
Blue Book v082 n01 [1945-11], 1945
24 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1The Sorcerer's Daughter
3A strange treasure quest made possible by a wartime invention that failed as a mine-detector but would locate objects buried deeper.
5by H. BEDFORD-JONES
7MURCHISON and I left Genoa with the Baby, as we decided to call it, in our rattling old Fiat. Our pal the Vicomte de Gondy had gone ahead to line up the project and obtain quarters in Alassio, on what used to be Mussolini's Italian Riviera. Now French troops were in possession, and although the war was well over, tourists had not yet begun to clutter up the landscape.
9As yet we knew little about our quest for the Dolls' House and the sorcerer's daughter; Gondy would attend to all that. We had been busy with the Baby.
11Murchison and I had served during the war in radionic laboratories, devising mine detectors that would offset the infernal Kraut ingenuity. Once discharged, we roped in Gondy as our contact man and set forth to make our fortune. Gondy was impulsive, charming, handsome and reliable. Murchison was skinny, often grouchy and apt to be flighty, but a fine technician. With me, Bill Carson, to act as brains and ballast, we got on beautifully.
13The Baby resulted from one of our laboratory failures. It started out as an electronic detector of mines, which it decidedly was not; it was like hunting quail with a Boston bull. So, with our usual Yankee ingenuity, we turned it to detecting other things, and by electronics out of radar, so to speak, we got something good. We had tubes of our own devising, and into the Baby put our best brains, vastly improving it over our original detector. We were, in brief, after buried treasure—and we had proved that we could get it.
15Now, aside from legends, people do not stand on street-corners and holler that they have buried treasure in their back yards. Locating such deposits takes finesse. Gondy had this, and he knew everyone worth knowing on the Continent, spoke half a dozen languages, and was a good scout. He had turned up our present job, about which as yet we knew little.
17"Well, the Baby works, that's sure. Never saw anything sweeter," said Murchison, as I piloted the old Fiat along the endless series of railroad tunnels and crossings that marked the [address hidden] north of Genoa. "She really works, Carson! And they say this Alassio place is the biggest resort on the coast, outside of San Remo, filled with English tourists before the war. Looks like a cushy little job for us and our magnesium Baby."
19"We were lucky to get our hands on that magnesium," I replied. "But don't expect any cushy job extracting gold from Mother Europe, Murch. Especially from Italians. We take our lives in our hands when we try it."
21"Tell me something new," he grunted. "Hi! There's Alassio, I bet."
23SO it was—a glaring, Fascist-perfect resort of boulevards and modernistic houses crowded inside Cape Santa Croce. This entire coast, where the Alps ran down to the sea and left a thin strip of beach between narrow valleys, had been improved out of recognition by Mussolini's regime, but we could glimpse a glorious five-mile stretch of open plage beyond that ran to the next little town, the hills rich with grayish olive groves and pricked out with vineyards.
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