the danger evaporates right before your eyes. All at once the tractor
_was_ veering again, but far enough to the left to make me feel certain
that I wouldn't be flattened to a pancake if I stayed where I was.
But you can feel certain about something like that and go right on
remembering what big tractors have done at various times in the past to
men unfortunate enough to be caught off guard when there's a killer in
the driver's seat.
The vehicle came to a jolting, grinding halt a few yards to the left of
me, and the driver swung himself out of the glass-shielded front seat,
descended lightly to the ground, and was grabbing me by the arm and
helping me to rise before I could get a really good look at him.
He'd descended from the tractor lightly because he was that kind of
a man--just about the most fragile-looking guy I'd ever seen. He was
lean to the point of emaciation, with gaunt cheeks and sparse white
hair that was fluffed out like thistledown by the wind that was blowing
across the square.
He had deepset brown eyes, very sharp and piercing and they were
glowing now with a kind of feverish brightness, as if his agitation
matched my own or had reached a peak that was just a trifle higher.
There was nothing surprising about that, if he knew exactly what had
happened and it was as bad as I feared it might be.
Despite his frailness, he had the features of a strong-willed man, the
chin and mouth firm, the nose pinched a little at the nostrils, as if
stubbornness in adversity had become an ingrained habit with him. I had
the feeling I'd seen that face before, but I couldn't remember where or
under what circumstances.
I was certainly seeing it now under the most nerve-shattering of all
circumstances and would not be likely to forget it a second time.
"How are you, all right?" he asked, his eyes searching my face as if
he was far from sure I knew myself and the way I looked would tell
him more than just a guess on my part. "That explosion was miles from
here," he went on breathlessly, "but it lifted the tractor right off
the ground, treads and all, for a second. I had the craziest kind
of floating sensation until it settled down and kept right on in
this direction. I increased the speed, because I sort of felt that a
fast-moving machine would have a better chance of not overturning."
I stared at him half-dazedly, feeling like a pawn on a chessboard that
had tilted just far enough to make me wonder if it might not still be
precariously poised and go crashing at any moment. And since I couldn't
see the players I didn't know what the rules of that particular game
were or how far they had been abrogated.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
His solicitude amazed me, because if what he'd just said was true--and
I had no reason to doubt it--he should have been more shaken up than
I was and he seemed to have something on his mind that was making him
stare straight past me toward the Big Grayness.
I was staring in the opposite direction. "I'm all right," I assured
him. "Just feel ... a little dizzy." I gestured toward the tractors on
the far side of the square. "What's over there? Did the explosion come
from there?"
He shook his head. "No. I told you it was miles from here, in the
direction of the spaceport. That's the Endicott Administration
Building, fuel conveyor sections and two-thirds of the distributing
units. The tractors are all owned by Endicott. I backed this one out
from between them and had just about gotten it turned around when the
blast hit me."
"I know," I said. "I saw you. I wondered why only one tractor--"
That was as far as I got, because what hit me then was more jolting
than any blast could have been, and it wasn't even physical. Just one
word he'd let drop with a delayed-action fuse attached to it made me
snap my head back and look at him in desperation. He had no way of
knowing what was in my mind, but you don't think of that when you want
someone to do you a favor that's of life-and-death importance to you.
I wanted him to withdraw that one word, to pretend at least that he
hadn't said it. It didn't have to be true, he could have been just
guessing.
The word was "spaceport." It couldn't matter that much to him, surely.
It wasn't his wife but mine who was at the spaceport, and if he was
wrong about where the explosion had taken place it would cost him
nothing to be merciful and admit that he was far from sure about it.
But before I could hope to get such an admission out of him he sounded
a knell to the granting of favors by saying: "Wendel technicians are
activating Endicott fuel cylinders in different sections of the Colony.
They're trying to turn the Colonists against Endicott by committing
mass murder. The cylinders will only destroy an area of a few square
miles, because they're not in the multiple-megaton, nuclear warhead
category. We never thought they'd be turned into bombs."
Then came the knell. "We were warned about this, by a Colonist who's on
his way to the spaceport with one of the cylinders. Or he may be there
already. He just spoke to us briefly on the tele-communicator. That
explosion came from the direction of the spaceport, but it may not be
the one we were warned about. They may be trying to dismantle another
cylinder at the spaceport right now. They won't succeed, because only
an Endicott technician would know how to go about it."
"Do you know?"
He nodded. "Yes ... I can dismantle it. I can get to the spaceport in
about fifteen minutes, if I drive between the aerators and turn right
just before I get to the hospital. The clear-away from that point on
will take me through a section of the Colony and then straight out
across the desert to the spaceport. The Colonist who talked with us
made a serious mistake, but it wasn't his fault. He had no way of
knowing that it takes a fuel cylinder at least forty-five minutes
to build up to critical mass after it's been activated. In some
cases--fifty or fifty-five minutes."
He paused an instant, then went on quickly. "He should have brought it
here. We could have dismantled it in time. But he was afraid it would
kill several thousand people if it went off anywhere near his home,
or in this section of the Colony. He also over-estimated the area
that would be demolished by the blast. When he talked to us he was
two-thirds of the way to the spaceport and if we'd told him to turn
back then and bring the cylinder here the risks would have been too
great. We had to let him go on. I said they can't dismantle it at the
spaceport. But there's a slim chance they can ... because there may
be an Endicott man there or someone who knows enough about Endicott
cylinders to make a hit-or-miss try. With luck, he may just possibly
succeed. But I doubt it."
"You doubt it? Good God--"
"I doubt it very much. That's why it's so important for me to get there
as fast as I can. It's my responsibility--and I refuse to share it with
anyone. There are times when a man must face death alone."
"Who are you?" I asked.
"A man with much to answer for, the opposite of a good man. I'm Kenneth
H. Hillard, President of the Endicott Combine."
It stunned me for a moment, because it was as big a bombshell as Nurse
Cherubin had exploded back at the hospital when she'd nodded toward a
slumped caricature of a man and told me exactly who I'd been banging
around.
But it didn't stun me for long, because even the showdown miracle of
two Mr. Big's taking matters into their own hands when all of the chips
were down--Hillard was also a giant despite his frailness and a better
man than Wendel could ever hope to be--even the wonder and strangeness
of it was of less concern to me at that moment than the danger that
Joan was in.
I told him then. "I'm going with you," I said. "I've every right. If
I'm cutting in on your yen to face death alone ... that's just too bad.
I'm going with you, or you don't go at all. I pack quite a wallop, and
you may as well know it. Wendel does."
"Your wife. I see...."
"I hope to Christ you do--"
"Get in!" he said sharply. "I may need you. I'm not a well man. My
heart--"
We climbed in and he tugged at the brakes, releasing them and the big
vehicle lumbered into motion.
It was already pointed in the right direction, and in less than half
a minute--the second time within fifteen minutes for me--we were deep
in the Big Grayness, with the walls of the aerators looming up on both
sides of us.
Up above all of the sunlight had dwindled to the vanishing point and
the gigantic artificial cavern was lighted now along its entire length
by cold light lamps embedded in the walls at fifty-foot intervals. The
solid, three-dimensional world outside our minds, whatever segment of
reality we happen to be passing through, never looks quite the same
to any two individuals. It is always, in a sense, a special creation,
colored and altered by the human imagination.
To me the cold light lamps were chillingly like enormous eyes, keeping
us under constant scrutiny. The scrutiny of giants, standing motionless
in shadows, with just their luminous eye-sockets visible. It was as
if any moment, promoted by some wild whim, the giant forms might take
a violent dislike to us, might raise mace-like metal fists and smash
the tractor, very much as a robot giant had smashed a Wendel agent in
space, with a fiendishly mechanical rancor.
But to the frail man at my side the aerator walls may have been
chilling in a quite different way, if he was giving the Big Grayness
any thought at all.
Apparently he wasn't, because when his voice rose above the rumble of
the treads he didn't once mention the aerators or the pale blue light
that was glimmering on the hood of the tractor.
"It's the beginning of the end--either one way or the other," he
shouted. "Either Wendel will be destroyed by the Colonists themselves
for committing mass murder, or we'll go down under a juggernaut that
can't be stopped. Sometimes you can't smash absolute evil, when it's
backed up by absolute power."
I raised my voice as high as he'd done, because I wanted to be sure
he'd hear me. "It will always be stopped in the end, I think--if
you have enough moral courage. That's a dynamic in itself, the most
formidable of all weapons. All history confirms it."
"I wish I could believe that!" he shouted back. "But I'm not so sure.
And you have to fight with reasonably clean hands. Endicott is almost
as guilty as Wendel, except that it would rather be destroyed than
resort to mass murder."
"That's two-thirds of the right," I shouted back. "That's where the
biggest dividing line comes. Every tyranny in human history that has
resorted to mass murder has gone down into everlasting night and
darkness and very quickly. The few that survived to die a natural death
drew back at that point. The great, utterly ruthless destroyers always
perish."
We both fell silent then, because there are times when the whole of
the future and everything that human anger and courage can do to
safeguard the future and keep it from destruction seems less important
than coming to grips with an immediate, life-and-death emergency. When
you do that you're going all out to safeguard the future as well, but
you don't think of it in that way. Just getting to the spaceport in
time--Oh, God, yes, in time to be at least a little ahead of time, so
that Hillard would have steady nerves and could dismantle the cylinder
with cautious precision, with no zero-count demoralization to make his
fingers stray from the right wires--just getting there and finishing
the job before the spaceport could become a translucent cone of fire
was a million times as important to me, right at that moment, as the
Wendel-Endicott war.
A million times as important, Ralphie boy. Don't be ashamed of feeling
that way. If the spaceport blows up, and there's no Joan any more, and
the universe comes to an end for you, you've no sure guarantee that the
actors who will step into your shoes and occupy the center of the stage
will make any better job of it than you've been doing. So it will be a
loss, however you slice it, because the death of two lovers is always
a loss. You fight better when you've been given that best of all head
starts.
18
We stayed silent until the tractor had rumbled past eight or ten of the
breaks in the Big Grayness. They were shrouded in dusk-light now, with
no kids playing in the front yards of the housing area pre-fabs. Then,
just as we were turning into the clear-away that branched off from the
one I'd taken on leaving the hospital, Hillard shouted: "We've got to
get over to the left! There's an ambulance right up ahead!"
I heard the siren before I saw it, a banshee-like wail cutting through
the twilight, unnerving in its shrillness. It took a moment or two for
its winking red headlights to come sweeping toward us and if Hillard
had seen them before that it had to mean he had exceptionally sharp
eyesight.
It careened past without slowing, almost grazing the hood of the
tractor. I thought for an instant, when the banshee wail became shrill
again, that it was still coming from the same ambulance. Then I saw
four more furiously blinking headlights coming out of the dusk ahead of
us, and another ambulance swept past, as swiftly as the first had done,
but missing us by a wider margin.
A third followed it at a distance of less than a hundred feet, its
siren at such full blast that it no longer sounded like a banshee wail.
You can be gripped by a dread that's practically breath-stopping and
still manage to shout, if your only other choice is to die inwardly.
It may have been more of a groan than a shout. My voice sounded ragged
and it almost broke. "Could those ambulances be coming from the
spaceport? Do you think--"
He cut me off. I probably couldn't have gone on anyway.
"They could never have gotten out there and back so fast!" he shouted.
"We'll be passing through a section of the Colony in about two more
minutes. It's closer to the hospital, so it's just possible they've
picked up a few victims at the fringe of the blast area who didn't have
our luck."
"The fallout area must be pretty wide!" I shouted back. "Wherever the
explosion took place--"
He cut me off again. "No fallout--or very little. What there is is gone
within four or five minutes. Safe to go in after that, for the residue
wouldn't mutate a fruitfly. Colonists don't know that ... closely
guarded Endicott trade secret. Reason we let the Colonists store them.
A fuel cylinder can be converted into a nuclear bomb, all right, but
it will be the cleanest midget bomb ever built. Take fifteen or twenty
of them to blow up even a third of the Colony. But that doesn't mean
that one couldn't blow up the spaceport, or seriously injure hundreds
of people throughout the fringe area. The ground tremor alone could
do that. I told you what it did to this tractor. Has the force of a
small earthquake, except that the tremors are three times as erratic.
They can just shake you up a little, or break every bone in your body.
Depends on where you happen to be standing. It follows a zigzagging
pattern, so it can pass right by you."
All that didn't come in one shout, but I'm recording it that way
because I didn't interrupt him, and though he must have stopped once
or twice to take a deep breath, and keep a sharp lookout for another
ambulance I wasn't aware of any break in what he was saying. He was
trying his best to make it crystal clear, if only to calm me down a
little.
Some of it was reassuring, but not what he'd said about the spaceport.
A clean bomb with little or no fallout can leave you just as dead if
you're unfortunate enough to be blown up by it.
You see things sometimes you can't bring yourself to talk about, even
to close friends when the horror has receded a little and you know it
can't come back in a physical way to torment you.
So I'm going to draw the veil over most of what we saw when we passed
through about five square miles of the Colony, before the clear-away
broadened out to twice its previous width and we headed out across the
desert toward the spaceport.
We couldn't be sure, even then, just where the explosion had taken
place, because it was only the fringe area we passed through. It hadn't
been laid waste by the blast and there were only five or six demolished
buildings. If the big square which stretched between the Endicott plant
and the aerators had been a built-up section instead of a square the
property damage might have been just as great and would not have seemed
ruinous.
But there was one other difference. The Endicott square had been
unpopulated, with just one tractor moving out from the long line of
tractors on the far side. The five miles of Colony we passed through
had been the opposite of unpopulated. Its streets and squares and
playgrounds and vehicle-parking areas had been thronged with people.
They were still thronged with people but some of them were lying prone,
and others were leaning dazedly against the walls of buildings which
had remained for the most part undamaged and still others, who no
longer seemed to be in a state of shock, were bending over the slumped
bodies of the grievously injured and the dying, doing their best to
console them and ease their pain.
I'm drawing the veil on the rest of it--the blood and the
screaming--because it was pretty awful, and what possible purpose would
be served if I described it? How could it benefit anyone? It would
serve as a reminder of how cruel life can be at times, how uncertain
and terrible. We know that, don't we? So ... to hell with it ... I say
that in a very reverent way, with awe and respect, and not profanely.
But it's best to consign it where it belongs, to hell, and not let it
paralyze all action and make you give up when there are still sunsets,
and the laughter of children, and the happiness of lovers, and ten
thousand other things that are worth fighting to preserve.
It took us less than eight minutes to arrive at the spaceport, dusty
from head to foot, with sand choking our lungs and gasping a little
from oxygen shortage, because when there's a stiff wind blowing over
the desert the aerators don't function at peak efficiency.
I didn't know there was anything wrong until the tractor began to
zigzag a little, about three hundred feet from the massive, steel-mesh
gates of the spaceport.
He had strength enough left to tug at the brakes and bring the tractor
to a grinding halt before he slumped against me, with a strangled sob
that chilled me to the core of my being. It chilled me and stunned me
and frightened me, because I'd never thought that anything like that
could happen.
He was frail, all right, and had the look of a man whose health had
been steadily failing ... no doubt partly brought about by the battle
he'd been waging with Wendel. And he'd mentioned something about
heart-trouble--
The trouble was, I hadn't taken all that too seriously, because you
never think that someone who has displayed extraordinary energy and
firmness of will is going to collapse right when you need him most.
I swung about and looked at him, and his pallor gave me an even worse
jolt than the way he'd moaned and sagged heavily against me.
He gripped my arm and tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come. His
lips moved soundlessly for a moment and then--they stopped moving. His
body stopped moving too. All at once, as if a clock had stopped ticking
inside of him, and Time had stopped ticking for him forever just
because his life and the clock were bound up together, intricate parts
of the same mechanism, and if the clock stopped there was no way his
life could be prolonged.
I knew he was dead before I reached out and touched him. I could tell
by the dull, unseeing glaze which had over-spread his pupils and the
terrible stillness which had come upon him. A stillness and a rigidity
that made it impossible for me to doubt what the alarm bells were
telling me as well. They had started ringing again, but this time it
wasn't so much an alarm they were sounding as a dirge.
It was impossible for me to doubt, but I still had to make sure, as
he would have wanted me to do, by feeling for a heartbeat that wasn't
there and satisfying myself in other ways. It was an obligation I
couldn't evade and had no intention of evading.
It took me less than a minute and a half--a time limit I kept firmly in
mind--to fulfill that obligation. Then I descended from the tractor and
headed for the steel-mesh gates of the spaceport on the run.
19
"Ralph!" she cried, running to meet me as I walked into the big,
steel-walled enclosure where Commander Littlefield and eight or ten or
possibly twelve men in gray skyport-technician uniforms were working
over a long metal cylinder that Death had started working on well ahead
of them. He was the expert and they were just amateurs doing the best
they could to beat the time limit he had set for them. With a grim
chuckle, no doubt, because, as I said once before, Death is a weird-o.
Joan's arms went around my shoulders and she crushed herself against
me, and kissed me hard on the mouth. Then she let go of me and moved
quickly to one side, so that Commander Littlefield could talk to me
without interference or a moment's delay. She seemed to know without
waiting for me to say a word how important that was.
One look at Littlefield's white face told me all I really wanted to
know. But I decided that if he could fill in the details for me in
half a minute I could risk setting another time-limit in my mind and
clocking him second by second by second as he talked.
"A nurse at the hospital got word to us you'd be doing your best to get
back here, Ralph," he said. "The Wendel police have orders to blast you
down on sight, but now that you're here I can protect you--or you can
protect yourself. I've got your papers and insignia. Right now that's
not so urgent as what's happening inside this Endicott fuel cylinder.
It's been triggered to build up to critical mass by a Wendel agent. A
Colonist brought it here and we've been trying to dismantle it. But we
don't know just how to go about it and we don't dare experiment. We've
taken a few _small_ risks, naturally. We've had to. But we're getting
nowhere, and what looks like a small risk could turn out to be a big
one. We don't even know how much time we've got!"
He spoke almost calmly, without raising his voice, but there was
nothing calm about the way he looked. The time limit I'd set to clock
him by had run out and now it was my turn. I was going to have to ask
him to do something that might seem only a little less terrible to him
than being blown apart by a nuclear explosion.
But it would have to be done--and fast.
I clocked myself as I talked, allowing myself about forty seconds.
"Those cylinders build up to critical mass when they've been tampered
with and triggered to explode in about forty-five minutes," I said.
"Don't ask me how I know, because I haven't time to explain. I _do_
know--you can take my word for it. I knew the cylinder was here, and I
was hoping you'd find a way--"
I caught myself up. "Never mind that now. Just listen. I don't know
how long it took the Colonist to bring it here or how long you've been
working over it. But it hasn't exploded yet. _So there's still a chance
we can get it out into space before it blows up!_"
He looked at me as if he thought I'd gone suddenly quite mad. I
finished what I had to say fast, because I knew it would take eight or
ten more minutes for him to recover from his first shock, and issue
orders, and have the cylinder carried on board his big sky ship--his
pride and glory--and for the sky ship to rise from its launching pad
and be blown apart in space.
He'd have to get all of the crewmen off as well and set the robot
controls and if there were any passengers still on board--I refused to
let myself think about that.
"It may be too late," I went on. "We may all be as good as dead right
now. But we've got to try. Do you understand? You've got to get that
cylinder on the sky ship, set the controls and send it out into space.
_It must be done at once. Every second counts._"
He recovered from the shock faster than I'd dared to hope. The grin
that hovered for the barest instant on his lips startled me until I
realized it was a very special kind of grin--the kind of grin only
a man who is about to part with something that means just about as
much to him as his own life would be capable of ... if he had a
non-eradicable streak of wry humor deep in his nature as well.