The lieutenant had taken off his hat, showing himself to be much
younger and blonder than he had first appeared to Dundon. He sat
watching both men without any particular expression.
"Well, we'd better get on with it," Dundon said, and reached out a
hand toward the colonel, without looking at him. "Do you have the
lieutenant's records?"
The colonel reached quickly into his inside coat pocket, drew out a
long folded envelope which he laid in Dundon's hand. The small man
hefted it, looked briefly inside.
"Hell," he said curtly. "Got to save time. If we have to brief him and
get ready I can't go through all this. What's the story?"
Before the colonel could say anything Dundon looked at the lieutenant
with a wide, amiable, thoroughly unexpected smile. "Don't mind us son,
no time for manners. Have a cigar."
The lieutenant politely refused. The colonel took off his coat and
began to dry himself out, talking as he moved.
"Well, as far as I can recall, here's the poop. His name is Augustus
Webster Hilton, Second Lieutenant, RA, out of Fort Benning. He's six
foot six and a half, weighs two hundred and forty some odd pounds. Age:
25. Nickname: Web. AGCT score of 145."
Dundon's eyes lifted.
"He's got a head on him," the colonel agreed. "Army record superior to
excellent. Present assignment instructing in orbits and trajectory
at Base Training. Qualities of Organization, Leadership very high.
Excellent officer material."
A slight fleeting frown crossed Dundon's face.
"Defects," the colonel said coolly. "Several minor, no major. Minor
include a tendency to irk his superiors by failure to consult, by
failure to keep his opinions to himself. Nothing unusual for the age,
of course. Other defects are his size"--the lieutenant sat without
moving through all of this--"and his blood type. He's got some rare
kind of thing for which plasma is almost never available. That keeps
him from front line duty."
The colonel stopped, began slowly to light a cigarette.
Dundon looked at him oddly.
"Nothing else?"
The colonel shook his head.
Dundon was suddenly flushed. "Wait a minute, son," he said to the
lieutenant, and then he took the colonel by the arm and led him briskly
into a corner.
"What the hell is this?" he hissed angrily, lowly, into the colonel's
ear. "This boy looks like one hell of a good officer, what--"
The colonel held his finger to his lips, gestured cautiously.
"I couldn't tell you in front of him, chief."
"Couldn't tell me what? Listen, I'm not goin' to kill a young kid
like--"
"It's Security. The major defect is Security."
Dundon quieted.
"What did he do?"
"Nothing he did. Chief, you won't like this. But it makes a big
difference. You know the way Security is. They checked this boy all
the way back to the cradle, found out things about him he doesn't know
himself. His history checked all right, no trouble anywhere, except for
his father. According to the records, he doesn't have any."
Dundon cocked an eyebrow. The lieutenant, unhearing, sat without
looking at them.
"His mother claims to have married a man named Bruce Hilton in Chicago
in 1930. There's no record of the marriage. Also, none of her friends
ever met him. She went away from her home town--Evanston--and stayed
for a year and came back with a baby, a wedding ring, and a very sad
tale of a husband who died. There's no record of the death of any Bruce
Hilton. She made up the name obviously. Her maiden name Finnerty."
Dundon stared. "So what the hell--" he began, but the colonel cut him
off.
"So nobody knows. Just the boy's mother and Security. But Security has
a special tab for cases like this. They figure like this: suppose the
kid gets into a sensitive job, or gets to rank pretty high, and someone
finds out about his, well, lack of parentage. You can't figure it. It
could mean blackmail, it could mean security risk, or it could mean
rumors among officers' wives, and a lot of nonsense like that. I know
it doesn't sound like a thing you should hang a guy on, but, well, you
know Security. They never take a chance. This kid will get to be a
captain, maybe a major, maybe even an L.C. But he has no future in the
army."
Dundon was looking down studiously at his shoes.
"So that's what you wanted," the colonel pursued, "somebody competent,
but expendable. Right?"
Dundon looked up, his gray eyes filled with disgust. And then he
realized that the colonel could not help it, did not like this either,
and he patted him on the arm.
"Hell of a reason to kill a kid," he said softly, and turned back to
the lieutenant, the man to be killed, who was sitting calmly in his
chair and wondering when the brass was going to get to the point.
Dundon came back and sat down, and now with great kindness, told the
lieutenant the story.
And so it was that Web Hilton went out into space, and saw the
uncovered stars, and met the naked man, and became the first man in
history to die more than once.
* * * * *
"You know of course," said Dundon, "that the satellite has been
completed and is in orbit. The first crew went up on 9 September.
Construction was finished on 20 September and the full crew was aboard
within twelve hours. The whole thing went off without a hitch. There
wasn't one thing we hadn't anticipated. We sent the green light to the
president and sat back to wait for the Russians to find out what was
'up.'" He grinned momentarily at his joke.
"The station was in orbit for a week," he went on, "and we were
in constant radio contact. Furthermore, we had it under radar and
telescopic observation, either one or the other or both, twenty-four
hours a day, from points all over the Earth. Some of that I guess you
know. The purpose is mainly to supplement the station's own radar. We
don't want anything going near that station without our knowing about
it real quick."
"And we know damn well," he said more slowly, his puzzlement beginning
to show in his voice, "that nothing went near that station."
Web still waited, not following at all. Dundon sat on the edge of his
desk, beginning to fidget now as he talked. His stubby fingers were
running continually through his thin gray hair, and tightening his tie,
and tugging at his buttons, and toying with the desk top. He had been
under a great strain for a long time and it was obvious.
"On 28 September," he said evenly, "--now get this--on 28 September, in
the middle of the afternoon, we lost radio contact with the station.
It cut off in the middle of a weather observation, just like that.
There were no background sounds at all, no noise or confusion. Just
silence. We waited, figuring of course that they had blown a tube, or
something, but we didn't hear a thing. After a few minutes we began to
get worried. They didn't come in on the emergency radio either.
"Radar reported the satellite was still in the regular orbit. Nothing
looked wrong, but we couldn't contact her. After a couple of hours
we began to get panicky. We figured a small meteor had hit her. A
big one would have knocked her out of orbit, but a small one might
have penetrated through and knocked out both radios without altering
trajectory to any noticeable extent. We figured that that must have
been it, because by this time five hours had passed and we hadn't heard
a word.
"So then we managed to get Visual, as soon as it got dark and the
satellite orbited to position. We had a prearranged system of light
signaling to be used in case both radios failed. In the telescopes we
could even see the reflectors sitting right out on the hub, completed
untouched. But we waited all night and we never got a thing.
"Now dammit, it couldn't have been a meteor!" Dundon began to pace back
and forth and both Web and the colonel followed him, absorbed.
"The station is shaped like a doughnut, with solid bulkheads all
around. How could one meteor go all around the damn thing, kill
everybody in it, knock out two separate radios, and still not disturb
the orbit. It would take a swarm, obviously, even if you forget about
the orbit, but there would have to be holes. And we had a close up view
of that station, as close as the house across the street, and there
wasn't a hole to be seen.
"Well, that night we sent up a rocket. Nothing big enough to show
on radar had approached the station, or left it, so the only other
solution was sabotage. One or more of the men we sent up had to be
enemy agents, and they were obviously in control of the station. We had
to make damn sure we got them out real quick. If necessary, we were set
to blow up the station. And then it got worse."
Dundon stopped, came over and sat down on the desk in front of Web,
looking straight at him, watching his reaction. Web was frozen in his
chair.
"The rocket," said Dundon slowly, "never came back. It's still up
there, floating along a few yards from the station. We can see it
clearly. Too clearly, damn it. And the interesting part is this: nobody
got out of the rocket. Nobody went into the satellite. The rocket went
up and maneuvered itself into orbit alongside the satellite, and there
it sits. We haven't been able to contact _it_ by radio either."