The men came on. Their manner was elaborately casual. Joe stepped up
into view.
"No visitors!" he called. "We don't want company!"
One of the men held his hand to his ear, as if not understanding. They
came on. They made no threatening gestures.
Then Joe took his hand out of his pocket, the pistol Sally'd given him
gripped tightly.
"I mean that!" he said harshly. "Stand back!"
One of the three spoke sharply. On that instant three snub-nosed pistols
appeared. Bullets whined as the men hurtled forward. The purpose was not
so much murder at this moment as the demoralizing effect of bullets
flying overhead while the three assassins got close enough to do their
bloody job with precision.
A stone whizzed by Joe--Haney had thrown it--and the small target rifle
in Mike's hands coughed twice. Joe held his fire. He had only six
bullets and three targets to hit. With a familiar revolver he'd have
started shooting now, but thirty yards is a long range with a strange
pistol at a moving target.
One of the three killers stumbled and crashed to the ground. A second
seemed suddenly to be grinning widely on one side of his face. A .22
bullet had slashed his cheek. The third ran head on into a rock thrown
by Haney. It knocked the breath out of him and his pistol fell from his
hand.
Joe fired deliberately at the widely grinning man and saw him spin
around. Mike's target rifle spat again and the man Joe had hit wheeled
and ran heavily, making incoherent yells. The one who'd tumbled
scrambled to his feet and fled, hopping crazily, favoring one leg.
Deserted, the third man turned and ran too, still doubled over and still
gasping.
Mike's voice crackled. He was in a towering rage because of the way the
target rifle shot. It threw high and to the right. The shooting gallery
paid off in cigarettes for high scores--so the guns didn't shoot
straight.
Until this moment Joe had been relatively calm, because he had something
to do. But just then he heard Sally say "Oh!" in a queer voice. He
whirled. Unknown to him, she had not been waiting under cover, but
standing with her pistol out and ready. And her face was very white, and
she was plucking at her hair. A strand came away in her fingers. A
bullet had clipped it just above her shoulder.
Then Joe went sick ... weak ... trembling, and he disgraced himself by
half-hysterically grabbing Sally and demanding to know if she was hurt,
and raging at her for exposing herself to fire, while his throat tried
to close and shut off his breath from horror.
There came loud pop-pop-popping noises. With the peculiar reverberation
of sound over water, two motorcycles started from the powerhouse along
the crest of the dam. They streaked for the shore carrying five men, one
of whom was the Chief, with a red-checked tablecloth about his middle,
brandishing a fire axe in default of other weapons.
The danger was over.
But the assassins couldn't be followed immediately. They still had at
least two pistols. Eight men and a girl, counting Mike, with an armament
of only two pistols, a .22 rifle, two shotguns and a fire axe were not a
properly equipped posse to hunt down killers. Also by now it was close
to sunset.
So the victors did the sensible thing. Joe and Sally and Haney and the
Chief--his clothes retrieved--plus Mike headed back for Bootstrap. Joe
and Sally rode in the Major's black car, and the other three in the
jalopy they'd rented for the afternoon. On the way into the canyon below
the dam, they stopped at the parked car their would-be assassins had
come in. They removed its distributor and fan belt. The other men
returned to the powerhouse with their shotguns and the fire axe, and
telephoned to Bootstrap. The three gunmen who had planned murder became
fugitives, with no means of transportation but their legs. They had a
good many thousand square miles of territory to hide in, but it wasn't
likely that they had food or any competence to find it in the wilds. Two
were certainly hurt. With dogs and planes and organization, it should be
possible to catch them handily, come morning.
So Joe and Sally drove back to Bootstrap with the other car following
closely through all the miles that had to be covered in the dark.
Halfway back, they met a grim search party in cars, heading for the dam
to begin their man hunt in the morning. After that, Joe felt better. But
his teeth still tended to chatter every time he thought of Sally's
startled, scared expression as she pulled away a lock of her hair that
had been severed by a bullet.
When they got back to the Shed, Major Holt looked tired and old. Sally
explained breathlessly that her danger was her own fault. Joe'd thought
she was safely under cover....
"It was my fault," said the Major detachedly. "I let you go away from
the Shed. I do not blame Joe at all."
But he did not look kindly. Joe wet his lips, ready to agree that any
disgrace he might be subjected to was justified, since he had caused
Sally to be shot at.
"I blame myself a great deal, sir," he said grimly. "But I can promise
I'll never take Sally away from safety again. Not until the Platform's
up and there's no more reason for her to be in danger."
The Major said remotely: "I shall have to arrange for more than that. I
shall put you in touch with your father by telephone. You will explain
to him, in detail, exactly how the repair of your apparatus is planned.
I understand that the gyros can be duplicated more quickly by the method
you have worked out?"
Joe said: "Yes, sir. The balancing of the gyros can, which was the
longest single job. But anything can be made quicker the second time.
The patterns for the castings are all made, and the bugs worked out of
the production process."
"You will explain that to your father," said the Major heavily. "Your
father's plant will begin to duplicate these--ah--pilot gyros at once.
Meanwhile your--ah--work crew will start to repair the one that is
here."
"Yes, sir."
"And," said the Major, "I am sending you to the pushpot airfield. I
intend to scatter the targets the saboteurs might aim at. You are one of
them. Your crew is another. From time to time you will confer with them
and verify their work. If any of them should be--disposed of, you will
be able to instruct others."
"It's really the other way about, sir," objected Joe. "The Chief and
Haney are pretty good, and Mike's got brains----"
The Major moved impatiently.
"I am looking at this from a security standpoint," he said. "I am trying
to make it plainly useless to attack the gyros again. Duplicates will be
in production at your father's plant. There will be three men repairing
the smashed ones. There will be another man in another place--and this
will be you--who can instruct new workmen in the repair procedure if
anything should happen. Thus there will have to be three separate
successful coups if the pilot gyros are not to be ready when the
Platform needs them. Saboteurs might try one. Possibly two. But I think
they will look for another weak spot to attack."
Joe did not like the idea of being moved away. He wanted to be on the
job repairing the device that was primarily his responsibility. Besides,
he had a feeling about Sally. If she were in danger, he wanted to be on
hand.
"About Sally, sir----"
"Sally," said the Major tiredly, "is going to have to restrict herself
to the point where she'll feel that jail would be preferable. But she
will see the need for it. She will be guarded a good deal more carefully
than before--and you may not know it, but she has been guarded rather
well."
Joe saw Sally smiling ruefully at him. What the Major had said was
unpleasant, but he was right. This was one of those arrangements that
nobody likes, an irritating, uncomfortable, disappointing necessity. But
such necessities are a part of every actual achievement. The difference
between things that get done and things that don't get done is often
merely the difference between patience and impatience with tedious
details. This arrangement would mean that Joe couldn't see Sally very
often. It would mean that the Chief and Haney and Mike would do the
actual work of getting the gyros ready. It would take all the glamour
out of Joe's contribution. These deprivations shouldn't be necessary.
But they were.
"All right, sir," said Joe gloomily. "When do I go over to the field?"
"Right away," said the Major. "Tonight." Then he added detachedly:
"Officially, the excuse for your presence there will be that you have
been useful in uncovering sabotage methods. You have. After all, through
you a number of planes that would have been blown up have now had their
booby traps removed. I know you do not claim credit for the fact, but it
is an excuse for keeping you where I want you to be for another reason
entirely. So it will be assumed that you are at the pushpot field for
counter-sabotage inspection."
The Major nodded dismissal with an indefinable air of irony, and Joe
went unhappily out of his office. He telephoned his father at length.
His father did not share Joe's disappointment at being removed to a
place of safety. He undertook to begin the castings for an entire new
set of pilot gyros at once.
A little later Sally came out of her father's office.
"I'm sorry, Joe!"
He grinned unhappily.
"So am I. I don't feel very heroic, but if this is what has to be done
to get the Platform out of the Shed and on the way up--it's what has to
be done. I suppose I can phone you?"
"You can," said Sally. "And you'd better!"
They had talked a long time that afternoon, very satisfyingly and
without any cares at all. Neither could have remembered much of what had
been said. It probably was not earth-shaking in importance. But now
there seemed to be a very great deal of other similar conversation
urgently needing to be gone through.
"I'll call you!" said Joe.
Then somebody approached to take him to the pushpot airfield. They
separated very formally under the eyes of the impersonal security
officer who would drive Joe to his destination.
It was a tedious journey through the darkness. This particular security
officer was not companionable. He was one of those conscientious people
who think that if they keep their mouths shut it will make up for their
inability to keep their eyes open. Socially he treated Joe as if he were
a highly suspect person. It could be guessed that he treated everybody
that way.
Joe went to sleep in the car.
He was only half-awake when he arrived, and he didn't bother to rouse
himself completely when he was shown to a cubbyhole in the officers'
barracks. He went to bed, making a half-conscious note to buy himself
some clothes--especially fresh linen--in the morning.
Then he knew nothing until he was awaked in the early morning by what
sounded exactly like the crack of doom.
9
It was not, however, the crack of doom. When Joe stared out the window
by the head of his cot, he saw gray-red dawn breaking over the landing
field. There were low, featureless structures silhouetted against the
sunrise. As the crimson light grew brighter, Joe realized that the
angular shapes were hangars. Improbable crane poles loomed above them.
One was in motion, handling something he could not make out, but the
noise that had awakened him was less, now. It seemed to circle overhead,
and it had an angry, droning, buzzing quality that was not natural in
any motor he had ever heard before.
Joe shivered, standing at the window. It was cold and dank in the dawn
light at this altitude, but he wanted to know what that completely
unbelievable roar had been. A crane beam by the hangars tilted down,
slowly, and then lifted as if released of a great weight. The light was
growing slowly brighter. Joe saw something on the ground. Rather, it was
not quite on the ground. It rested on something on the ground.
Suddenly that unholy uproar began again. Something moved. It ran heavily
out from the masking dark of the hangars. It picked up speed. It
acquired a reasonable velocity--forty or fifty miles an hour. As it
scuttled over the dimly lighted field, it made a din like all the boiler
factories in the world and all the backfiring motors in creation trying
to drown each other's noise out--and all of them being very successful.
It was a pushpot. Joe recognized it with incredulity. It was one of
those utterly ungainly creations that were built around one half of the
sidewall of the Shed. In shape, its upper part was like the top half of
a loaf of bread. In motion, here, it rested on some sort of wheeled
vehicle, and it was reared up like an indignant caterpillar, and a
blue-white flame squirted out of its tail, with coy and frolicsome
flirtings from side to side.
The pushpot lifted from the vehicle on which it rode, and the vehicle
put on speed and got away from under it with frantic agility. The
vehicle swerved to one side, and Joe stared with amazed eyes at the
pushpot, some twenty feet aloft. It had a flat underside, and a topside
that still looked to him like the rounded top half of a loaf of baker's
bread. It hung in the air at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and
it howled like a panic-stricken dragon--Joe was getting his metaphors
mixed by this time--and it swung and wobbled and slowly gained altitude,
and then suddenly it seemed to get the knack of what it was supposed to
do. It started to circle around, and then it began abruptly to climb
skyward. Until it began to climb it looked heavy and clumsy and wholly
unimpressive. But when it climbed, it really moved!
Joe found his head out the window, craning up to look at it. Its
unearthly din took on the indignant quality of an irritated beehive. But
it climbed! It went up without grace but with astonishing speed. And it
was huge, but it became lost in the red-flecked dawn sky while Joe still
gaped.
Joe flung on his clothes. He went out the door through resonant empty
corridors, hunting for somebody to tell him something. He blundered into
a mess hall. There were many tables, but the chairs around them were
pushed back as if used and then left behind by people in a hurry to be
somewhere else. There were exactly two people still visible over in a
corner.
Another din like the wailing of a baby volcano with a toothache. It
began, and moved, and went through the series of changes that ended in a
climbing, droning hum. Another. Another. The launching of pushpots for
their morning flight was evidently getting well under way.
Joe hesitated in the nearly empty mess hall. Then he recognized the two
seated figures. They were the pilot and co-pilot, respectively, of the
fateful plane that had brought him to Bootstrap.
He went over to their table. The pilot nodded matter-of-factly. The
co-pilot grinned. Both still wore bandages on their hands, which would
account for their remaining here.
"Fancy seeing you!" said the co-pilot cheerfully. "Welcome to the Hotel
de Gink! But don't tell me you're going to fly a pushpot!"
"I hadn't figured on it," admitted Joe. "Are you?"
"Perish forbid," said the co-pilot amiably. "I tried it once, for the
devil of it. Those things fly with the grace of a lady elephant on ice
skates! Did you, by any chance, notice that they haven't got any wings?
And did you notice where their control surfaces were?"
Joe shook his head. He saw the remnants of ham and eggs and coffee. He
was hungry.
There was the uproar to be expected of a basso-profundo banshee in pain.
Another pushpot was taking off.
"How do I get breakfast?" he asked.
The co-pilot pointed to a chair. He rapped sharply on a drinking glass.
A door opened, he pointed at Joe, and the door closed.
"Breakfast coming up," said the co-pilot. "Look! I know you're Joe
Kenmore. I'm Brick Talley and this is Captain--no less than
Captain!--Thomas J. Walton. Impressed?"
"Very much," said Joe. He sat down. "What about the control surfaces on
pushpots?"
"They're in the jet blast!" said the co-pilot, now identified as Brick
Talley. "Like the V Two rockets when the Germans made 'em. Vanes in the
exhaust blast, no kidding! Landing, and skidding in on their tails like
they do, they haven't speed enough to give wing flaps a grip on the air,
even if they had wings to put wing flaps on. Those dinkuses are things
to have bad dreams about!"
Again, a door opened and a man in uniform with an apron in front came
marching in with a tray. There was tomato juice and ham and eggs and
coffee. He served Joe briskly and marched out again.
"That's Hotel de Gink service," said Talley. "No wasted motion, no
sloppy civilities. He was about to eat that himself, he gave it to you,
and now he'll cook himself a double portion of everything. What are you
doing here, anyhow?"
Joe shrugged. It occurred to him that it would neither be wise nor
creditable to say that he'd been sent here to split up a target at which
saboteurs might shoot.
"I guess I'm attached for rations," he observed. "There'll be orders
along about me presently, I suppose. Then I'll know what it's all
about."
He fell to on his breakfast. The thunderous noises of the pushpots
taking off made the mess hall quiver. Joe said between mouthfuls: "Funny
way for anything to take off, riding on--it looked like a truck."
"It is a truck," said Talley. "A high-speed truck. Fifty of them
specially made to serve as undercarriages so pushpot pilots can
practice. The pushpots are really only expected to work once, you know."
Joe nodded.
"They aren't to take off," Talley explained. "Not in theory. They hang
on to the Platform and heave. They go up with it, pushing. When they get
it as high as they can, they'll shoot their jatos, let go, and come
bumbling back home. So they have to practice getting back home and
landing. For practicing it doesn't matter how they get aloft. When they
get down, a big straddle truck on caterpillar treads picks them up--they
land in the doggonedest places, sometimes!--and brings 'em back. Then a
crane heaves them up on a high-speed truck and they do it all over
again."
Joe considered while he ate. It made sense. The function of the pushpots
was to serve as the first booster stage of a multiple-stage rocket.
Together, they would lift the Platform off the ground and get it as high
as their jet motors would take it traveling east at the topmost speed
they could manage. Then they'd fire their jatos simultaneously, and in
doing that they'd be acting as the second booster stage of a
multiple-stage rocket. Then their work would be done, and their only
remaining purpose would be to get their pilots back to the ground alive,
while the Platform on its own third stage shot out to space.
"So," said Talley, "since their pilots need to practice landings, the
trucks get them off the ground. They go up to fifty thousand feet, just
to give their oxygen tanks a chance to conk out on them; then they barge
around up there a while. The advanced trainees shoot off a jato at top
speed. It's gauged to build them up to the speed they'll give the
Platform. And then if they come out of that and get back down to ground
safely, they uncross their fingers. A merry life those guys lead! When a
man's made ten complete flights he retires. One flight a week thereafter
to keep in practice only, until the big day for the Platform's take-off.
Those guys sweat!"
"Is it that bad?"
The pilot grunted. The co-pilot--Talley--spread out his hands.
"It is that bad! Every so often one of them comes down untidily. There's
something the matter with the motors. They've got a little too much
power, maybe. Sometimes--occasionally--they explode."
"Jet motors?" asked Joe. "Explode? That's news!"
"A strictly special feature," said Talley drily. "Exclusive with
pushpots for the Platform. They run 'em and run 'em and run 'em, on
test. Nothing happens. But occasionally one blows up in flight. Once it
happened warming up. That was a mess! The field's been losing two pilots
a week. Lately more."
"It doesn't sound exactly reasonable," said Joe slowly. He put a last
forkful in his mouth.
"It's also inconvenient," said Talley, "for the pilots."
The pilot--Walton--opened his mouth.
"It'd be sabotage," he said curtly, "if there was any way to do it. Four
pilots killed this week."
He lapsed into silence again.
Joe considered. He frowned.
A pushpot, outside the building, hysterically bellowed its way across
the runway and its noise changed and it was aloft. It went spiraling up
and up. Joe stirred his coffee.
There were thin shoutings outside. A screaming, whistling noise! A
crash! Something metallic shrieked and died. Then silence.
Talley, the co-pilot, looked sick. Then he said: "Correction. It's been
five pushpots exploded and five pilots killed this week. It's getting a
little bit serious." He looked sharply at Joe. "Better drink your coffee
before you go look. You won't want to, afterward."
He was right.
Joe saw the crashed pushpot half an hour later. He found that his
ostensible assignment to the airfield for the investigation of sabotage
was quaintly taken at face value there. A young lieutenant solemnly
escorted him to the spot where the pushpot had landed, only ten feet
from a hangar wall. The impact had carried parts of the pushpot five
feet into the soil, and the splash effect had caved in the hangar
wall-footing. There'd been a fire, which had been put out.
The ungainly flying thing was twisted and torn. Entrails of steel tubing
were revealed. The plastic cockpit cover was shattered. There were only
grisly stains where the pilot had been.
The motor had exploded. The jet motor. And jet motors do not explode.
But this one had. It had burst from within, and the turbine vanes of the
compressor section were revealed, twisted intolerably where the barrel
of the motor was ripped away. The jagged edges of the tear testified to
the violence of the internal explosion.
Joe looked wise and felt ill. The young lieutenant very politely looked
away as Joe's face showed how he felt. But of course there were the
orders that said he was a sabotage expert. And Joe felt angrily that he
was sailing under false colors. He didn't know anything about sabotage.
He believed that he was probably the least qualified of anybody that
security had ever empowered to look into methods of destruction.
Yet, in a sense, that very fact was an advantage. A man may be set to
work to contrive methods of sabotage. Another man may be trained to
counter him. The training of the second man is essentially a study of
how the first man's mind works. Then it can be guessed what this
saboteur will think and do. But such a trained security man will often
be badly handicapped if he comes upon the sabotage methods of a second
man--an entirely different saboteur who thinks in a new fashion. The
security man may be hampered in dealing with the second man's sabotage
just because he knows too much about the thinking of the first.
Joe went off and scowled at a wall, while the young lieutenant waited
hopefully nearby.
He was in a false position. But he could see that there was something
odd here. There was a sort of pattern in the way the other sabotage
incidents had been planned. It was hard to pick out, but it was there.
Joe thought of the trick of booby-trapping a plane during its major
overhaul, and then arming the traps at a later date.... A private plane
had been fitted to deliver proximity rockets in mid-air when the
transport ship flew past. There was the explosion of the cargo parcel
which was supposed to contain requisition forms and stationery. And the
attempt to smash the entire Platform by getting an atomic bomb into a
plane and having a saboteur shoot the crew and then deliver the bomb at
the Shed in an officially harmless aircraft....
The common element in all those sabotage tricks was actually clear
enough, but Joe wasn't used to thinking in such terms. He did know,
though, that there was a pattern in those devices which did not exist in
the blowing up of jet motors from inside.
He scowled and scowled, racking his brains, while the young lieutenant
watched respectfully, waiting for Joe to have an inspiration. Had Joe
known it, the lieutenant was deeply impressed by his attempt at
concentration on the problem it had not been Major Holt's intention for
Joe to consider. When Joe temporarily gave up, the young lieutenant
eagerly showed him over the whole field and all its workings.
In mid-morning another pushpot fell screaming from the skies. That made
six pushpots and six pilots for this week--two today. The things had no
wings. They had no gliding angle. Pointed up, they could climb
unbelievably. While their engines functioned, they could be controlled
after a fashion. But they were not aircraft in any ordinary meaning of
the word. They were engines with fuel tanks and controls in their
exhaust blast. When their engines failed, they were so much junk falling
out of the sky.
Joe happened to see the second crash, and he didn't go to noon mess at
all. He hadn't any appetite. Instead, he gloomily let himself be packed
full of irrelevant information by the young lieutenant who considered
that since Joe had been sent by security to look into sabotage, he must
be given every possible opportunity to evaluate--that would be the word
the young lieutenant would use--the situation.
But all the time that Joe followed him about, his mind fumbled with a
hunch. The idea was that there was a pattern of thinking in sabotage,
and if you could solve it, you could outguess the saboteur. But the
trouble was to figure out the similarity he felt existed in--say--a
private plane shooting rockets and overhaul mechanics planting booby
traps and faked shippers getting bombs on planes--and come to think of
it, there was Braun....
Braun was the key! Braun had been an honest man, with an honest loyalty
to the United States which had given him refuge. But he had been
blackmailed into accepting a container of atomic death to be released in
the Shed. Radioactive cobalt did not belong in the Shed. That was the
key to the pattern of sabotage. Braun was not to use any natural thing
that belonged in the Shed. He was to be only the means by which
something extraneous and deadly was to have been introduced.
That was it! Somebody was devising ingenious ways to get well-known
destructive devices into places where they did not belong, but where
they would be effective. Rockets. Bombs. Even radioactive cobalt dust.
All were perfectly well-known means of destruction. The minds that
planned those tricks said, in effect: "These things will destroy. How
can we get them to where they will destroy something?" It was a strict
pattern.
But the pushpot sabotage--and Joe was sure it was nothing else--was not
that sort of thing. Making motors explode.... Motors don't explode. One
couldn't put bombs in them. There wasn't room. The explosions Joe had
seen looked as if they'd centered in the fire basket--technically the
combustion area--behind the compressor and before the drive vanes. A jet
motor whirled. Its front vanes compressed air, and a flame burned
furiously in the compressed air, which swelled enormously and poured out
past other vanes that took power from it to drive the compressor. The
excess of blast poured out astern in a blue-white flame, driving the
ship.
But one couldn't put a bomb in a fire basket. The temperature would melt
anything but the refractory alloys of which a jet motor has to be built.
A bomb placed there would explode the instant a motor was started. It
couldn't resist until the pushpot took off. It couldn't....
This was a different kind of sabotage. There was a different mind at
work.
In the afternoon Joe watched the landings, while the young lieutenant
followed him patiently about. A pushpot landing was quite unlike the
landing of any other air-borne thing. It came flying down with
incredible clumsiness, making an uproar out of all proportion to its
landing speed. Pushpots came in with their tail ends low, crudely and
cruelly clumsy in their handling. They had no wings or fins. They had to
be balanced by their jet blasts. They had to be steered the same way.
When a jet motor conked out there was no control. The pushpot fell.
He carefully watched one landing now. It came down low, and swung in
toward the field, and seemed to reach its stern down tentatively to
slide on the earth, and the flame of its exhaust scorched the field, and
it hesitated, pointing up at an ever steeper angle--and it touched and
its nose tilted forward--and leaped up as the jet roared more loudly,
and then touched again....
The goal was for pushpots to touch ground finally with the whole weight
of the flying monstrosity supported by the vertical thrust of the jet,
and while it was moving forward at the lowest possible rate of speed.
When that goal was achieved, they flopped solidly flat, slid a few feet
on their metal bellies, and lay still. Some hit hard and tried to dig
into the earth with their blunt noses. Joe finally saw one touch with no
forward speed at all. It seemed to try to settle down vertically, as a
rocket takes off. That one fell over backward and wallowed with its
belly plates in the air before it rolled over on its side and rocked
there.
The last of a flight touched down and flopped, and the memory of the
wreckage had been overlaid by these other sights and Joe could think of
his next meal without aversion. When it was evening-mess time he went
doggedly back to the mess hall. There was a sort of itchy feeling in his
mind. He knew something he didn't know he knew. There was something in
his memory that he couldn't recall.
Talley and Walton were again at mess. Joe went to their table. Talley
looked at him inquiringly.
"Yes, I saw both crashes," said Joe gloomily, "and I didn't want any
lunch. It was sabotage, though. Only it was different in kind--it was
different in principle--from the other tricks. But I can't figure out
what it is!"
"Mmmmmm," said Talley, amiably. "You'd learn something if you could talk
to the Resistance fighters and saboteurs in Europe. The Poles were
wonderful at it! They had one chap who could get at the tank cars that
took aviation gasoline from the refinery to the various Nazi airfields.
He used to dump some chemical compound--just a tiny bit--into each
carload of gas. It looked all right, smelled all right, and worked all
right. But at odd moments Hitler's planes would crash. The valves would
stick and the engine'd conk out."
Joe stared at him. And it was just as simple as that. He saw.
"The Nazis lost a lot of planes that way," said Talley. "Those that
didn't crash from stuck valves in flight--they had to have their valves
reground. Lost flying time. Wonderful! And when the Nazis did uncover
the trick, they had to re-refine every drop of aviation gas they had!"