“All right.” He pocketed his pistol. “I’m rear guard. Go ahead, gents. Lead the way.”

They went quickly along the corridor and down companionways, Clyde close behind the stewards and Archie lagging behind Clyde, breathing hard and thinking to himself, I could be dining with my wife instead of herding this motley crew into the bowels of an ocean liner.

Both the swindler and his guard were fast asleep under blankets. Neither stirred when Archie, Lynds, and the stewards crowded into the baggage room. Archie smelled something sharp and acrid that he hadn’t noticed on his last visit. Clyde smelled it, too. He stopped abruptly in front of the row of wooden crates from which the smell emanated.

“I smell tar,” said Archie.

“Could be the wine went bad,” said a steward and laughed, “Why don’t we sample some, see if it’s all right?”

Clyde did not laugh, Archie noticed. The young man wet his lips and looked around nervously.

“What’s the matter, Clyde?”

“Uhhmm.”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Do you smell something sharp?” Clyde asked.

“Yes, I just said that. So do they. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Clyde answered, slowly, though Archie bet that he did. He laid a tentative hand on one of the crates, bent over it, and sniffed the wood. When he straightened up, Archie thought that he looked terrified.

“Mr. Abbott, we’d better open all the doors and hatches in this baggage room. Immediately—all you men! Open everything. Now!”

The stewards looked about, uncomprehending.

Archie said, “What is going on, Clyde?”

“Unless I’m mistaken,” said Clyde, “these crates contain raw celluloid film stock. Movie film. The tar smell indicates that it’s old and decomposing.”

“So what?”

“It breaks down chemically into a volatile nitrate gas. It will explode.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m a scientist! I experiment all the time with celluloid film. It’s manufactured by dissolving nitrocellulose in camphor and alcohol.”

“Guncotton,” said Archie, as the penny finally dropped. “Highly flammable.”

“The gas generated by the breakdown will do more than burn. First it will explode. Then the film will burn. We have to vent the gas before something detonates it.”

“Open everything!” Archie ordered the stewards. “Do it now. Open every door.”

They ran to obey.

Clyde Lynds looked up at a ten-by-ten square opening in the ceiling. “The cargo hatch!”

“What are you doing?” said Archie.

Lynds scrambled onto a crate, reached up, and pulled himself onto the bottom rungs of a ladder that rose into the darkness overhead. “The cargo hatch,” he called down. “If I can open it, the shaft will suck the gas out like a chimney.”