The Chief let him get to his feet. He went groggily to his coat. He
tried to put himself into it. Mike caught Joe's eye and nodded
meaningfully. Joe helped Braun into the coat. There was silence, save
for Braun's heavy, labored breathing.
He moved unsteadily toward the door. Then he stopped.
"Haney," he said effortfully, "I don't say I'm sorry for fighting you
today. I fight first. But now I say I am sorry. You are good guy, Haney.
I was crazy. I--got reason."
He stumbled out of the door and was gone. The four who were left behind
stared at each other.
"What's the matter with him?" demanded Haney blankly.
"He's nuts," said the Chief. "If he was gonna apologize----"
Mike shook his head.
"He wouldn't apologize," he said brittlely, "because he thought you
might think he was scared. But when he'd proved he wasn't scared of a
beating--then he could say he was sorry." He paused. "I've seen guys I
liked a lot less than him."
Haney put on his coat, frowning.
"I don't get it," he rumbled. "Next time I see him----"
"You won't," snapped Mike. "None of us will. I'll bet on it."
But he was wrong. The others went out of the storeroom and back into
Sid's Steak Joint, and the Chief politely thanked the proprietor for the
loan of his storeroom for a private fight. Then they went out into the
neon-lighted business street of Bootstrap.
"What do we do now?" asked Joe.
"Where you sleeping?" asked the Chief hospitably. "I can get you a room
at my place."
"I'm staying out at the Shed," Joe told him awkwardly. "My family's
known Major Holt a long time. I'm staying at his house behind the Shed."
Haney raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
"Better get out there then," said the Chief. "It's midnight, and they
might want to lock up. There's your bus."
A lighted bus was waiting by the curb. Its doors were open, but it was
empty of passengers. Single busses ran out to the Shed now and then, but
they ran in fleets at shift-change time. Joe went over and climbed
aboard the bus.
"We'll turn up early," said the Chief. "This won't be a shift job. We'll
look things over and lay out what we want and then get to work, eh?"
"Right," said Joe. "And thanks."
"We'll be there with our hair in braids," said Mike, in his cracked
voice. "Now a glass of beer and so to bed. 'Night."
Haney waved his hand. The three of them marched off, the two huge
figures of Haney and the Chief, with Mike trotting truculently between
them, hardly taller than their knees. They were curiously colorful with
all the many-tinted neon signs upon them. They turned into a diner.
Joe sat in the bus, alone. The driver was off somewhere. The sounds of
Bootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling of
bicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and a
record-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noise
of festivity.
There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe's window. He started and
looked out. Braun--battered, and bleeding from the corner of his
mouth--motioned urgently for him to come to the door of the bus. Joe
went.
Braun stared up at him in a new fashion. Now he was neither dogged nor
fierce nor desperate to look at. Despite the beating he'd taken, he
seemed completely and somehow frighteningly tranquil. He looked like
somebody who has come to the end of torment and is past any feeling but
that of relief from suffering.
"You--" said Braun. "That girl you were with today. Her pop is Major
Holt, eh?"
Joe frowned, and reservedly said that he was.
"You tell her pop," said Braun detachedly, "this is hot tip. Hot tip.
Look two kilometers north of Shed tomorrow. He find something bad. Hot!
You tell him. Two kilometers."
"Y-yes," said Joe, his frown increasing. "But look here----"
"Be sure say hot," repeated Braun.
Rather incredibly, he smiled. Then he turned and walked quickly away.
Joe went back to his seat in the empty bus, and sat there and waited for
it to start, and tried to figure out what the message meant. Since it
was for Major Holt, it had something to do with security. And security
meant defense against sabotage. And "hot" might mean merely
_significant_, or--in these days--it might mean _something else_. In
fact, it might mean something to make your hair stand on end when
thought of in connection with the Space Platform.
Joe waited for the bus to take off. He became convinced that Braun's use
of the word "hot" did not mean merely "significant." The other meaning
was what he had in mind.
Joe's teeth tried to chatter.
He didn't let them.
6
Major Holt wasn't to be found when Joe got out to the Shed. And he
wasn't in the house in the officers'-quarters area behind it. There was
only the housekeeper, who yawned pointedly as she let Joe in. Sally was
presumably long since asleep. And Joe didn't know any way to get hold of
the Major. He assured himself that Braun was a good guy--if he weren't
he wouldn't have insisted on taking a licking before he apologized--and
he hadn't said there was any hurry. Tomorrow, he'd said. So Joe uneasily
let himself be led to a room with a cot, and he was asleep in what
seemed seconds. But just the same he was badly worried.
In fact, next morning Joe woke at a practically unearthly hour with
Braun's message pounding on his brain. He was downstairs waiting when
the housekeeper appeared. She looked startled.
"Major Holt?" he asked.
But the Major was gone. He must have done with no more than three or
four hours' sleep. There was an empty coffee cup whose contents he'd
gulped down before going back to the security office.
Joe trudged to the barbed-wire enclosure around the officers'-quarters
area and explained to the sentry where he wanted to go. A sleepy driver
whisked him around the half-mile circle to the security building and he
found his way to Major Holt's office.
The plain and gloomy secretary was already on the job, too. She led him
in to face Major Holt. He blinked at the sight of Joe.
"Hm.... I have some news," he observed. "We back-tracked the parcel that
exploded when it was dumped from the plane."
Joe had almost forgotten it. Too many other things had happened since.
"We've got two very likely prisoners out of that affair," said the
Major. "They may talk. Also, an emergency inspection of other transport
planes has turned up three other grenades tucked away in front-wheel
wells. Ah--CO_2 bottles have turned out to have something explosive in
them. A very nice bit of work, that! The sandy-haired man who fueled
your plane--ah--disappeared. That is bad!"