Haney and Joe said together, "No!" and Joe added: "Mike's not crazy! He
knows better! But it's a good story for somebody who doesn't know Mike."
Haney said in indignation: "I came out here to ask the Major to help us.
The Chief's gettin' a gang together, too. There's some Indians of his
tribe that work here. We can count on them for plenty of rough stuff.
And there's Joe and me. The point is that Mike's stunt makes it certain
that everything busts loose at a time we can know in advance. If the
Major gives us a free hand, and then in the last five minutes takes his
own measures--so they can't leak out ahead of time and tip off the gangs
we want to get--we oughta knock off all the expert saboteurs who know
the weak spots in the Platform. For instance those who know that
thermite in the gyros would mess everything up all over again."
Joe said quietly: "But Major Holt has to be told well in advance about
all this! That's absolute!"
"Yeah," agreed Haney. "But also he has got to keep quiet--not tell
anybody else! There've been too many leaks already about too many
things. You know that!"
Joe said: "Sally, see if you can get your father to come here and talk.
Haney's right. Not in his office. Right here."
Sally got up and went inside the house. She came back with an uneasy
expression on her face.
"He's coming. But I couldn't very well tell him what was wanted,
and--I'm not sure he's going to be in a mood to listen."
When the Major arrived he was definitely not in a mood to listen. He was
a harried man, and he was keyed up to the limit by the multiplied strain
due to the imminence of the Platform's take-off. He came back to his
house from a grim conference on exactly the subject of how to make
preparations against any possible sabotage incidents--and ran into a
proposal to stimulate them! He practically exploded. Even if provocation
should be given to saboteurs to lure them into showing their hands, this
was no time for it! And if it were, it would be security business. It
should not be meddled in by amateurs!
Joe said grimly: "I don't mean to be disrespectful, sir, but there's a
point you've missed. It isn't thinkable that you'll be able to prevent
something from being tried at a time the saboteurs pick. They've got
just so much time left, and they'll use it! But Mike's plan would offer
them a diversion under cover of which they could pull their own stuff!
And besides that, you know your office leaks! You couldn't set up a
trick like this through security methods. And for a third fact, this is
the one sort of thing no saboteur would expect from your security
organization! We caught the saboteurs at the pushpot field by guessing
at a new sort of thinking for sabotage. Here's a chance to catch the
saboteurs who'll work their heads off in the next twenty-four hours or
so, by using a new sort of thinking for security!"
Major Holt was not an easy man to get along with at any time, and this
was the worst of all times to differ with him. But he did think
straight. He stared furiously at Joe, growing crimson with anger at
being argued with. But after he had stared a full minute, the angry
flush went slowly away. Then he nodded abruptly.
"There you have a point," he said curtly. "I don't like it. But it is a
point. It would be completely the reverse of anything my antagonists
could possibly expect. So I accept the suggestion. Now--let us make the
arrangements."
He settled down for a quick, comprehensive, detailed plan. In careful
consultation with Haney, Joe worked it out. The all-important point was
that the Major's part was to be done in completely unorthodox fashion.
He would take measures to mesh his actions with those of Mike, the
Chief, Haney, and Joe. Each action the Major took and each order he gave
he would attend to personally. His actions would be restricted to the
last five minutes or less before shift-change time. His orders would be
given individually to individuals, and under no circumstances would he
transmit any order through anybody else. In every instance, his order
would be devised to mean nothing intelligible to its recipient until the
time came for obedience.
It was not an easy scheme for the Major to bind himself to. It ran
counter to every principle of military thinking save one, which was that
it was a good idea to outguess the enemy. At the end he said detachedly:
"This is distinctly irregular. It is as irregular as anything could
possibly be! But that is why I have agreed to it. It will be at
least--unexpected--coming from me!"
Then he smiled without mirth and nodded to Joe and to Haney, and went
striding away down the concrete walk to where his car waited.
Haney left a moment later to carry the list of arrangements to the Chief
and to Mike. And Joe went into the Shed to do his part.
There was little difference in the appearance of the Shed by night. In
the daytime there were long rows of windows in the roof, which let in a
vague, dusky, inadequate twilight. At night those windows were
shuttered. This meant that the shadows were a little sharper and the
contrasts of light and shade a trifle more abrupt. All other changes
that Joe could see were the normal ones due to the taking down of
scaffolding and the fastening up of rocket tubes. It was clear that the
shape of the Platform proper would be obscure when all its rocket tubes
were fast in place.
Joe went to look at the last pushpots, and they were ready to be taken
over to their own field for their flight test before use. There were
extras, anyhow, beyond the number needed to lift the Platform. He found
himself considering the obvious fact that after the Platform was aloft,
they would be used to launch the ferry rockets, too.
Then he moved toward the center of the Shed. A whole level of
scaffolding came apart and its separate elements were bundled together
as he watched. Slings lowered the bundles down to waiting trucks which
would carry them elsewhere. There were mixing trucks still pouring out
their white paste for the lining of the rocket tubes, and their product
went up and vanished into the gaping mouths of the giant wire-wound
pipes.
Presently Joe went into the maze of piers under the Space Platform
itself. He came to the temporary stairs he had reason to remember. He
nodded to the two guards there.
"I want to take another look at that gadget we installed," he said.
One of the guards said good-naturedly: "Major Holt said to pass you any
time."
He ascended and went along the curious corridor--it had handgrips on the
walls so a man could pull himself along it when there was no weight--and
went to the engine room. He heard voices. They were speaking a
completely unintelligible language. He tensed.
Then the Chief grinned at him amiably. He was in the engine room and
with him were no fewer than eight men of his own coppery complexion.
"Here's some friends of mine," he explained, and Joe shook hands with
black-haired, dark-skinned men who were named Charley Spotted Dog and
Sam Fatbelly and Luther Red Cow and other exotic things. The Chief said
exuberantly, "Major Holt told the guards to let me pass in some Indian
friends, so I took my gang on a guided tour of the Platform. None of 'em
had ever been inside before. And----"
"I heard you talking Indian," said Joe.
"You're gonna hear some more," said the Chief. "We're the first war
party of my tribe in longer'n my grandpa woulda thought respectable!"
Joe found it difficult to restrain a smile. The Chief took him off to
one side.
"Fella," he said kindly, "it bothers you, this business, because it
ain't organized. That's what this world needs, Joe. Everything figured
out by slide rules an' such--it's civilized, but it ain't human! What
everybody oughta be is a connoisseur of chaos, like me. Quit worryin'
an' get outside and pick up that security guy the Major was gonna send
to meet you!"
He gave Joe an amiable shove and rejoined his fellow Mohawks, each of
whom, Joe noticed suddenly, had somewhere on his person a twelve-inch
Stillson wrench or a reasonable facsimile to serve as a substitute
tomahawk. They grinned at him as he departed.
At the bottom of the flight of narrow wooden steps there was a third
security man. He greeted Joe.
"Major Holt told me to pick you up," he observed.
Joe walked to one side with him. Major Holt had promised to send a
first-class man to meet Joe at this place, with orders to take
instructions from Joe. Joe said curtly: "You're to snag as many Security
men as you can, place them more or less out of sight under the Platform
here, and tell them to turn off their walkie-talkies and wait. No matter
what happens, they're to wait right here until they're needed, right
here!"
He looked harassedly around him. The Security man nodded and moved
casually away. This was close timing. Something made Joe look up. He saw
the catwalk gallery nearly overhead. The expected guard was there.
Haney, though, was with him. There was nothing else in sight. Not yet.
But Haney was on the job. Joe saw a Security man step out of sight in
the scaffolding. He saw his own assigned security man speak to another,
who wandered casually toward the Platform's base.
Minutes passed. Only Joe could have noticed, because he was watching for
it. There were eight or nine Security men posted within call. They had
their walkie-talkies turned off and would be subject only to his orders
if an emergency arose.
Gongs began to ring all around the edge of the Shed. They set up a
horrendous clanging. This was not an alarm, but simply the notice of
change-of-shift time.
There was a marked change in the noises overhead. A crane pulled back.
Hammerings dwindled and stopped. There were the sounds of pipes,
combined to form the scaffolds, being taken apart for removal. A
sling-load of pipe touched the floor and stayed there. The crane's
internal-combustion motor stopped. Its operator stepped down to the
floor and headed for the exit. Hoists descended and men moved across the
floor. Other men scrambled down ladders. The floor became dotted with
figures moving toward the doors through which men went out to get on the
busses for Bootstrap.
Nothing happened. More long minutes passed. The shift brought out by the
busses was going through the check-over process in the incoming screen
room. Joe knew that Major Holt had, within the past five minutes,
gathered together a tight-knit bunch of armed security men to be
available for anything that might turn up. The men doing the normal
shift-change screening were shorthanded in consequence.
The floor next to the exits became crowded, but the central area of the
floor was cleared. One truck was stalled at the swing-up truck doors.
Its driver ground the starter insistently.
Suddenly there was a high-pitched yell away up on the Platform. Then
there was a shot. Its echoes rang horribly in the resonant interior of
the Shed. Joe's own special security man hurried to him, his face tense.
"What about that?"
"Hold everything," said Joe grimly. "That's taken care of."
It was. That was Mike's gang--miniature humans popping out of hiding to
offer battle with missiles carefully prepared beforehand against their
alleged associates in sabotage. One of the associates had drawn a gun
and fired. But Mike's gang had help. Out of small air locks devised to
make the Platform's skin accessible to its crew on every side--provided
they wore space suits--dark-skinned men appeared.
The security man's walkie-talkie under his shoulder made a buzzing
sound. He reached for it.
"Forget it!" snapped Joe. "That's not for you! You've got your orders!
Stay here!"
There was a sudden growling uproar where men were crowding to get out of
the Shed. Thick, billowing smoke appeared. There was a crashing
explosion. The men eddied and milled crazily.
The motor of the stalled truck caught. It moved toward the door, which
opened, swinging up and high. Two trucks came roaring in. They raced for
the Platform. And as they raced inside, their camouflaged loads
clattered off and men showed instead. The guards by the doorway began to
shoot.
"That's what we've got to stop!" snapped Joe.
He began to run, his pistol out. There was suddenly a small
army--gathered by his orders--which materialized in the dim space under
the Platform. It raced to guard against this evidently well-planned
invasion.
The harsh, tearing rattle of a machine gun sounded from somewhere high
up. Joe knew what it was. Mike's whole scheme had been intended to force
all sabotage efforts to take place at a single instant. Part of the
preparation was authority for Haney to drag in two machine guns from an
outer watching-post and mount them to cover the interior of the Shed
when the general attack began.
Those machine guns were shooting at the trucks. Splinters sprang up from
the wood-block floor. Then, abruptly, one of the trucks vanished in a
monstrous, actinic flash of blue-white flame and a roar so horrible that
it was not sound but pure concussion. The other truck keeled over and
crashed from the blast, but did not explode. Men jumped from it. There
must have been screamed orders, but Joe could hear nothing at all. He
only saw men waving their arms, and others seized things from the
toppled load and rushed toward him, and he began to shoot as he ran to
meet them.
Now, belatedly, the sirens of the Shed screamed their alarm, and choppy
yappings set up as the siren wails rose in pitch. Over by the exit
pistols cracked. Something fell with a ghastly crash not ten feet from
where Joe ran. It was a man's body, toppled from somewhere high up on
the structure that was the most important man-made thing in all the
world. A barbaric war whoop sounded among the echoes of other tumult.
A Security man shot, and one of the running figures toppled and slid,
his burden--which must certainly be a bomb--rolling ridiculously. There
had been two trucks that plunged through the swing-up door. They had
raced for the spaces under the Platform at the exact time when the floor
would be clear, because all work had stopped. Under the Platform, the
trucks were to have been detonated. At the very least, they would have
rent and torn it horribly. They might have broken its back. And surely
one truck should have made it. But there should not have been machine
guns ready trained to shoot. Now the load of desperate men from the
overturned survivor scurried for the Platform with parts of its cargo.
If they could fight their way inside the Platform, they could blast its
hull open, or demolish its controls or shatter its air pumps and its
gyros and turn its air tanks into sieves. Anything that could be damaged
would delay the take-off and so expose the Platform to further and
perhaps more successful attack.
There were more pistol shots. A group of men fought their way out of the
incoming screening rooms and raced for the center of the Shed. (Later,
it would be found they had slabs of explosive inside their garments, and
detonation caps to set them off.) Somewhere another door opened, and
Security men came out with flickering pistols, Major Holt leading them.
He had started out to fight off the truck-borne attack, but he was bound
to be too late. Joe's followers were trying to take care of that. The
scuttling men from the incoming rooms were Major Holt's first prey. They
were shot as they ran.
Joe stumbled and fell and he heard guns crackling. As he scrambled up he
pitched into a running figure that snarled as Joe hit him. And then he
was fighting for his life.
This was under the Platform and in the middle of confusion many times
confounded. Joe caught a wrist that held a gun. He knew his assailant
had a bomb slung over one shoulder and right now had one hand free for
combat. Joe instinctively tried to batter his enemy with his own pistol,
instead of pushing the muzzle against the man's body and pulling the
trigger. He struck a flailing blow, and his hand and the weapon struck a
metal brace. The blow cut his knuckles and paralyzed his fingers.
Despairingly he felt the pistol slipping from his grasp. Then his
assailant brought up his knee viciously, but it hit Joe's thigh instead
of his groin, and Joe flung his weight furiously forward and they
toppled to the ground together.
There was fighting all around him. The machine guns rasped again--there
was a burst of tracer-bullet fire. The panicked men by the exit tried to
surge out through the swinging doors. But the tracers marked a line they
must not cross. They checked. Once a gun flashed so close by Joe's eyes
that it blinded him. And once somebody fell over both himself and his
antagonist, who writhed like an eel possessed of desperate strength past
belief.
Joe could really know only his private part in the struggle down in the
murky tangle of the scaffold base. But there was fighting up on the
Platform itself. A savagely grinning Mohawk wrestled furiously with a
man on one of the rocket tubes. An incendiary device in the saboteur's
pocket ignited, and it flamed red-hot and he screamed as it burned its
way out of his garments. The Mohawk flung the man fiercely clear, to
crash horribly on the far-distant floor, and then kicked the incendiary
off. It fell after the man and hit and burst, and it was thermite which
surrounded itself with a column of acrid smoke from seared wood blocks.
There was fighting by the exit doors. There was an ululating uproar in
the incoming screening room, and a war whoop from the top of the
Platform. A saboteur tried to crawl into an air-lock entrance, and he
got his head and shoulders in, but a copper-skinned Indian held his
forehead still and chopped down with the side of his hand on that man's
neck. Underneath the Platform was panting chaos, with pistol shots and
hand-to-hand struggles everywhere. The force Joe had gathered fought
valiantly, but four invaders got to the foot of the wooden steps, where
there were two guards. Then there were only two saboteurs left to
scramble desperately up the steps over the dead guards' bodies and head
toward the Platform door, but the Chief appeared swinging a twelve-inch
Stillson. He let it go, precisely like a skillfully flung tomahawk, and
leaped down sixteen steps squarely onto the body of the other man. A gun
flashed, but then there was only squirming struggle on the floor.
Mike the midget, inside the Platform, found one bloodied, panting,
sobbing man who somehow had gotten inside. And Mike brought down a
spanner from a ladder step, and swarmed upon his half-conscious victim,
and hit him again, and then stayed on guard until somebody arrived who
was big enough to carry the saboteur away.
And all this while, Joe struggled with only one man. It was a horrible
struggle, because the man had a bomb and he might manage to set it off
or it might go off of itself. It was a ghastly struggle, because the man
had the strength and desperation of a maniac--and practiced the tactics.
Joe pounded the hand that held the gun upon the floor, and it hit
something and exploded smokily and fell clear. But that made things
worse. While struggling to kill Joe with the revolver, his antagonist
had had only five fingers with which to gouge out Joe's eyes or tear
away his ears or rend his flesh. But with no pistol he had ten, and he
fought like a wild beast. He even breathed like an animal. He began to
pant--thick, guttural pantings that had the quality of hellish hate. And
then there was a surging of bodies--Major Holt's reserve was arriving
very late in the center of the Shed--and then a struggling group
trampled all over the pair who squirmed and fought on the ground, and a
heavy boot jammed down Joe's head and he felt teeth sink in his throat.
They dug into his flesh, worrying and tearing....
Joe used his knee in a frenzy of revulsion--used his knee as the other
man had tried to use his in the first instant of battle. The man beneath
him screamed as an animal would scream, and Joe jerked his bleeding
throat free. In hysterical horror he pounded his antagonist's head on
the floor until the man went limp....
And then he heard a grim voice saying: "Quit it or you get your head
blown off! Quit it----" And Joe panted: "It's about time you guys got
here! This man came in on that truck. Watch out for that bomb he's got
slung on him...."
12
The incoming shift had a messy clean-up job to do. It was accomplished
only because security men abruptly took over the work of gang bosses,
and all ordinary labor on the Platform was put aside until normal
operations were again possible. Even that would not have been feasible
but for the walkie-talkies the security men wore. As the situation was
sorted out, it was explained to them, and they relayed the news for the
satisfaction of the curiosity of those who worked under them. No
work--no explanation. It produced immediate and satisfactory
co-operation all around.
There had been four separate and independent attempts to wreck the
Platform at the same time. One was, of course, the plan of those
sympathetic characters who had volunteered to help Mike and his gang win
the status of spacemen by firing the Platform's rockets. There were not
many of them, and they had lost heavily. They'd had thermite bombs to
destroy the Platform's vitals. Ultimately the survivors talked freely,
if morosely, and that was that.
There had been a particularly ungifted attempt to cause panic in the
incoming shift in the rooms where its members were screened before
admission to work. Somebody had tried to establish complete confusion
there by firing revolver shots in the crowd, expecting the workers to
break through to the floor and assigned gentlemen with slabs of
explosive to get to the Platform with them. The gentlemen with the
explosives had run into Major Holt's security reserve, and they got
nowhere. The creators of panic with revolver shots were finally rescued
from their shift-mates and more or less scraped up from the
screening-room floor--they were in very bad shape--and carted off to be
patched up for questioning. The members of this group had been
impractical idealists, and besides, some of them had lost their nerve,
as was evidenced by the discovery of abandoned explosives and detonators
in the locker room and men's room of the Shed.
The most dangerous attempt was, of course, that perfectly planned and
co-ordinated assault which had been merely carried out at its original
time, without either being hastened or delayed by Mike's activities.
That plan had been beautifully contrived, and it would certainly have
been successful but for the machine-gun bullets from the gallery and the
fight Joe's followers put up underneath the Platform.
The exact instant when the whole Shed would be most nearly empty had
been fixed upon, and three separate units had worked in perfect timing.
There'd been the man in the stalled truck. He'd delayed his exit from
the Shed to the precise fraction of a second to get the doors open at
the perfect instant. The explosive-laden trucks had raced in at the
exact second when they were most certain to get underneath the Platform
and detonate their cargoes. There'd been a perfect diversion planned for
that, too. Smoke bombs and explosions in the outgoing screening rooms
had created real panic, and but for Joe's order for his group's
walkie-talkies to be turned off would have drawn every security man on
duty to that spot.
Mike's trick, then, had brought some saboteurs into the open, but had
merely happened to coincide with the most dangerous and well-organized
coup of all. However, it was due to his trick that the Platform was not
now a wreck.
There was also another break that was sheer coincidence. It was a
discovery that could not possibly have turned up save in a situation of
pure chaos artificially induced. Joe had had to react in a personal and
vengeful way to the manner in which his especial antagonist had fought
him. One expects a man to fight fair by instinct, and to turn to
fouls--if he does--in desperation only. But Joe's personal opponent
hadn't tried a single fair trick. It was as if he'd never heard of a
fist blow, but only of murder and mayhem. Joe felt an individual enmity
toward him.
Joe didn't consider himself the most urgent of the injured, when doctors
and nurses took up the work of patching, but Sally was there to help,
and she went deathly pale when she saw his bloodstained throat. She
dragged him quickly to a doctor. And the doctor looked at Joe and
dropped everything else.
But it wasn't too serious. The antiseptics hurt, and the stitching was
unpleasant, but Joe was more worried by the knowledge that Sally was
standing there and suffering for him. When he got up from the emergency
operating table, the doctor nodded grimly to him.
"That was close!" said the doctor. "Whoever chewed you was working for
your jugular vein, and he was halfway through the wall when he stopped.
A fraction of an inch more, and he'd have had you!"
"Thanks," said Joe. His neck felt clumsy with bandages, and when he
tried to turn his head the stitches hurt.
Sally's hand trembled in his when she led him away.
"I didn't think I'd ever dislike anybody so much," said Joe angrily, "as
I did that man while he was chewing my throat. We were trying to kill
each other, of course, but--confound it, people don't bite!"
"Did you--kill him?" asked Sally in a shaky voice. "Not that I'll mind!
I would have hated the thought ordinarily, but----"
Joe halted. There was a row of stretchers--not too long, at that--in the
emergency-hospital space. He looked down at the unconscious man who'd
fought him.
"There he is!" he said irritably. "I banged him pretty hard. I don't
like to hate anybody, but the way he fought----"
Sally's teeth chattered suddenly. She called to one of the security men
standing guard by the stretchers.
"I--think my--father is going to want to talk to him," she said
unsteadily. "Don't--let him be taken away to the hospital until Dad
knows, please."
She started away, her face dead-white and her hand stone-cold.
"What's the matter?" demanded Joe.
"S-sabotage," said Sally in an indescribable tone that had a suggestion
of heartbreak.
She went into her father's office alone. She came out again with him,
and her father looked completely stricken. Miss Ross, his secretary, was
with him, too. Her face was like a mask of marble. She had always been a
plain woman, a gloomy one, a morbid one. But at the new and horrible
look on her face Joe turned his eyes away.
Then Sally was crying beside him, and he put his arm clumsily around her
and let her sob on his shoulder, completely puzzled.
He didn't find out until later what the trouble was. The man who'd tried
so earnestly to kill him was Miss Ross's fiance. She had met this man
during a vacation, as a government secretary, and he was a refugee with
an exotic charm that would have fascinated a much more personable and
beautiful woman than Miss Ross. They had a whirlwind romance. He
confided to her his terror of emissaries from his native country who
might kill him. And of course she was more fascinated still. When he
asked her to marry him she accepted his proposal. Then, just two weeks
before her assignment to the Space Platform project, he vanished. Miss
Ross was desperate and lovesick.
One day her telephone rang and his anguished voice told her he'd been
abducted, and if she told the police he would be tortured to death. He
begged her not to do anything to cause him more torment than was already
his.
She'd been trying to keep him alive ever since. Once, when she couldn't
bring herself to carry out an order she'd been given--with threats of
torment to him if she failed--she'd received a human finger in the mail,
and a scrawled and blood-stained note which cried out of unspeakable
torment and begged her not to doom him to more.
So Miss Ross, who was Major Holt's secretary and one of his most trusted
assistants, had been giving information to one group of saboteurs all
the while. She was the most dangerous security leak in the whole
Platform project.
But her fiance wasn't a captive. He was the head of that group of
saboteurs. He'd made love to her and proposed to her merely to prepare
her to supply the information he wanted. He needed only to write a
sufficiently agonized note, or gasp tormented pleas on a telephone, to
get what he wanted.
Incidentally, he still had all his fingers when Joe knocked him cold.
Sally had recognized him as the subject of a snapshot she'd once seen
Miss Ross crying over. Miss Ross had hidden it hastily and told her it
was someone she had once loved, now dead. And this inadvertent
disclosure that Miss Ross was the security leak the Major had never had
a clue to could only have come about through such confusion as Mike had
instigated and Haney and the Chief and Joe had organized. But Joe
learned those facts only later.
At the moment, there was still the Platform to be gotten aloft. And
there was plenty of work to do. There were two small rips in the
plating, caused by fragments of the exploded truck. There were some
bullet holes. The Platform could resist small meteorites at forty-five
miles a second, but a high-velocity small-arm projectile could puncture
it. Those scars of battle had to be welded shut. The rest of the
scaffolding had to come down and the rest of the rocket tubes had to be
affixed. And there was cleaning up to be done.
These things occupied the shift that came on at the time of the multiple
sabotage assaults. At first the work was ragged. But the policy of
turning the Security men into news broadcasters worked well. After all,
the Platform was a construction job and the men who worked on it were
not softies. Most of them had seen men killed before. Before the shift
was half over, a definite work rhythm was evident. Men had begun to take
an even greater pride in the thing they had built, because it had been
assailed and not destroyed. And the job was almost over.
Sally went back to her father's quarters, to try to sleep. Joe stayed in
the Shed. His throat was painful enough so that he didn't want to go to
bed until he was genuinely tired, and he was thoroughly wrought up.
Mike the midget had gone peacefully to sleep again, curled up in a
corner of the outgoing screening room. His fellow midgets talked
satisfiedly among themselves. Presently, to show their superiority to
mere pitched battles, two of them brought out a miniature pack of cards
and started a card game while they waited for a bus to take them back to
Bootstrap.
The Chief's Indian associates loafed comfortably while waiting for the
same busses. Later they would put in for overtime--and get it. Haney
mourned that he had been remote from the scene of action, and was merely
responsible for the presence and placing and firing of the machine guns
that had certainly kept the Platform from being blown up from below.
It seemed that nothing else would happen to bother anybody. But there
was one thing more.
That thing happened just two hours before it was time for the shift to
change once again, and when normal work was back in progress in the
Shed. Everything seemed fully organized and serene. Everything in the
Shed had settled down, and nothing had happened outside.
There was ample exterior protection, of course, but the outside-guard
system hadn't had anything to do for a very long time. Men at radar
screens were bored and sleepy from sheer inactivity and silence. Pilots
in jet planes two miles and five miles and eight miles high had long
since grown weary of the splendid view below them. After all, one can
get very used to late, slanting moonlight on cloud masses far
underneath, and bright and hostile-seeming stars overhead.
So the thing was well timed.
A Canadian station noticed the pip on its radar screen first. The radar
observer was puzzled by it. It could have been a meteor, and the
Canadian observer at first thought it was. But it wasn't going quite
fast enough, and it lasted too long. It was traveling six hundred
seventy-two miles an hour, and it was headed due south at sixty thousand
feet. The speed could have been within reason--provided it didn't stay
constant. But it did. There was something traveling south at eleven
miles a minute or better. A mile in five-plus seconds. It didn't slow.
It didn't drop.
The Canadian radarman debated painfully. He stopped his companion from
the reading of a magazine article about chinchilla breeding in the home.
He showed him the pip, still headed south and almost at the limit of
this radar instrument's range. They discussed the thing dubiously. They
decided to report it.
They had a little trouble getting the call through. The night
long-distance operators were sleepy. Because of the difficulty of making
the call, the radarmen became obstinate and insisted on putting it
through. They reported to Ottawa that some object flying at sixty
thousand feet and six hundred seventy-two miles an hour was crossing
Canada headed for the United States.
There was a further time loss. Somebody in authority had to be awakened,
and somebody had to decide that a further report was justified. Then the
trick had to be accomplished, and a sleepy man in a bathrobe and
slippers listened and said sleepily, "Oh, of course you'll tell the
Americans. It's only neighborly!" and padded back to his bed to go to
sleep again. Then he waked up suddenly and began to sweat. He'd realized
that this might be the beginning of atomic war. So he set phone bells to
jangling furiously all over Canada, and jet planes began to boom in the
darkness.
But there was only one object in the sky. Over the Dakotas it went
higher. It went to seventy thousand feet, and then eighty. How this was
managed is not completely known, because there are still some details of
that flight that have never been completely explained. But certainly
jatos flared briefly at some point, and the object reached ninety
thousand feet where a jet motor would certainly be useless. And then,
almost certainly, rockets flared once more and well south of the Dakotas
it started down in a trajectory like that of an artillery shell, but
with considerably higher speed than most artillery shells achieve.
It was at about this time that the siren in the Shed began its choppy,
hiccoughing series of warm-up notes. The news from Canada arrived, as a
matter of fact, some thirty seconds after the outer-perimeter radar
screen around the Platform gave its warning. Then there was no
hesitation or delay at all. Men were already tumbling out of bed at
three airfields, buckling helmets and hoping their oxygen tanks would
function properly. Then the radars atop the Shed itself picked up the
moving speck. And small blue-white flames began to rise from the ground
and go streaking away in the darkness in astonishing numbers.
The covers of the guns at the top of the Shed slid aside. Miles away,
jet planes shot skyward, and newly wakened pilots looked at their
night-fighting instruments and swore unbelievingly at the speed they
were told the plunging object was making. The jet pilots gave their
motors everything they could take, but it didn't look good.
The planes of the jet umbrella over the Shed stopped cruising and
sprinted. And they were the only ones likely to get in front of the
object in time.
Inside the Shed, the siren howled dismally and all the Security men were
snapping: "Radar alarm! All out! Radar alarm! All out!"
And men were moving fast, too. Some came down from the Platform on
hoists, dropping with reckless speed to the floor level. Some didn't
wait for a turn at that. They slid down one upright, swung around the
crosspiece on the level below, and slid down another vertical pipe. For
a minute or more it looked as if the scaffolds oozed black droplets
which slid down its pipes. But the drops were men. The floor became
speckled and spotted with dots running for its exits.
The siren ceased its wailing and its noise went down and down in pitch
until it was a baritone moan that dropped to bass and ceased. Then there
was no sound but the men moving to get out of the Shed. There were
trucks, too. Those that had been loading with dismantled scaffolding
roared for the doors to get out and away. Some men jumped on board as
they passed. The exit doors swung up to let them go.
But it was very quiet in the Shed, at that. There was no noise but a few
fleeing trucks, and the murmur which was the voices of the Security men
hurrying the work crew out. There was less to hear than went on
ordinarily. And it was a long distance across the floor of the Shed.
Joe stood with his fists clenched absurdly. This could only be an air
attack. An air attack could only mean an atom-bomb attack. And if there
was an atom bomb dropped on the Shed, there'd be no use getting outside.
It wouldn't be merely a fission bomb. It would be a hell bomb--a bomb
which used the kind of bomb that shattered Hiroshima only as a primer
for the real explosive. Nobody could hope to get beyond the radius of
its destruction before it hit!
Joe heard himself raging. He'd thought of Sally. She'd be in the range
of annihilation, too. And Joe knew such fury and hatred--because of
Sally--that he forgot everything else.
He didn't run. He couldn't escape. He couldn't fight back. But because
he hated, he had to do something to defy.
He found himself moving toward the Platform, his jaws clenched. It was
pure, blind, instinctive defiance.
He was not the only one to have that reaction. Men running toward the
sidewall exits began to get out of breath from their running. They
slowed. Presently they stopped. They scowled and raged, like Joe. Some
of them looked with burning eyes up at the roof of the Shed, though
their thoughts went on beyond it. The security guards repeated, "Radar
alarm! All out! Radar alarm! All out!"