life as just about the lowest worms that crawl. But for a minute--God
pity me--I almost felt that way. It's just that--it's fifty billion
dollars worth of big, tremendous sky ship and that cylinder is so
small--"
"It won't seem small if it blows up and takes the spaceport with it," I
said. "It won't seem small at all."
"I know, Ralph. I said once I was old enough to be your father and I
still think I am. But if you put me across your knee and gave me the
drubbing a dumb six-year old would rate I'd have no right to complain.
I should have thought of it myself."
"We don't always think of things that stand out like sore thumbs when
we're under tremendous stress," I said. "Don't blame yourself for being
human, Commander."
"I hope it won't take me much longer than that to finish the job,
Ralph," he said. "I'll do my best. There are only three crewmen on
board and all of the passengers have been cleared."
He swung about without another word and went striding out of the
enclosure.
I would have followed him if Joan hadn't picked that moment to come
back into my arms. It held me up for a minute or two.
* * * * *
The incandescent burst of flame that makes a big sky ship's ascent into
space seem for an instant almost cataclysmic, as if the sky itself
had been ripped apart in some terrible and incomprehensible way, came
exactly eight minutes, thirty-two seconds later.
I timed it myself, not mentally this time but with a watch in my hand.
I stood with Joan at my side a hundred feet from the launching pad,
watching the cylinder disappear into the sky. It was the cylinder and
not the big rocket itself that I seemed to see as I stared upward,
as if the sky ship had turned to glass and the deadly thing it was
carrying out into space was beginning to stir and vibrate in a quite
ghastly way, with its contours enlarged to sky-spanning dimensions
under the glass.
To my inward vision it was bigger than the ship itself and it was hard
to understand how even a huge sky ship could be carrying anything so
enormous and death-freighted when a short while before it had been
discharging passengers in the bright Martian sunlight who had given
no thought to Death ... only what life had in store for them on a new
world.
My fingers were clenched around the watch and I wasn't even aware that
Commander Littlefield had joined me until he tapped me on the arm.
"We can see and hear it when it happens--all of it, just as if we were
taking it out into space ourselves. Every tele-communicator on the sky
ship is turned on and tuned to big screen wave length. If there was a
crewman on board he could talk to us and we could talk to him."
"Thank God there isn't a living man on board," I breathed.
"Yes," he said, nodding. "Yes, we can be thankful for that. And for
our lives as well. There are four big screens here, but we may as well
watch the one in the port clearance building. It's the largest of the
four--if size makes any difference when about all we'll see when the
cylinder explodes is a blinding flare. We won't see the bulkheads
collapsing, or a robot cyb crumbling, that's for sure. It will happen
too fast."
"What good will it do us to watch at all?" Joan asked. "I'd rather stay
right here. We'll see the flash, won't we?"
"You'll see it, all right," Littlefield said, grimly. "It will look
like an exploding star for about ten seconds. My sky ship--an exploding
star. I never thought it would ever come to that."
He started to turn away, thinking, no doubt, that I'd fallen in with
Joan's idea of passing up a view of it on the screen. But I hadn't at
all and when he started walking toward the port clearance building I
was right at his side. So was Joan, because she was that kind of a
wife. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask him--questions of
the utmost urgency, such as how much progress he'd made in finding out
who had shot the dart at me from high up on the spiral and just what
news he'd received from the hospital, when Nurse Cherubin had informed
him I was trying to get back to the spaceport, that went beyond that
bare statement--I was sure she'd briefed him in detail--and ... well,
a lot of questions. But this hardly seemed the right time to ask him,
because his inner torment was too great.
I could sympathize and understand, because I knew what a hell he was
passing through. Nothing could prevent the destruction of his sky ship,
but he had to see it with his own eyes, no matter how much agony it
caused him.
He didn't have to do any explaining to the Port Clearance men, because
they'd either assumed he'd pick out their screen well in advance of our
arrival or their own curiosity had proved overmastering.
The screen was lighted and the sound tracks whirring when we walked
into the projection room. It was just like walking into the sky ship's
chart room and staring across it at the four robot giants who had
followed both emergency instructions in space and the routine kind and
were doing their best to perform a man's job now. A mechanical best,
which meant, of course, that they had no way of knowing how close they
were to annihilation. They would be blown apart without pain and had
nothing to lose that a man would have valued. But they were not men,
and who can be sure that mechanical brains and the thought processes
which take place in them are not faintly tinged with emotional
coloration?
Probably not ... for it would have been something that laboratory
tests have never succeeded in establishing. A cybernetic brain can
become fatigued, yes--but it is not really a human fatigue. It is on
the metal-fatigue level. But knowing all that, a chill would have gone
through me if the robots had been able to talk to us.
The image on the screen was three-dimensional, and in full color and
the illusion that we were standing right in the sky ship's chart room
was so startling that Joan whispered: "I wish we'd stayed outside. It's
terrifying. Almost as if ... we could be blown up ourselves when the
blast comes."
"No danger of that," I said, squeezing her hand reassuringly. "You'd
better sit down."
There were ten hollow-tubed metal chairs in the room, but all except
one were occupied. I reached out and drew it toward her, but she shook
her head. "No, I'll stand, Ralph. I may want to leave in a minute."
One of the port clearance lads got up and offered Commander Littlefield
his chair, assuming I'd take the one that Joan had refused. But we were
both of one mind about standing. Only Littlefield sat down, as if the
burden of torment which rested upon him had added ten years to his age.
No sound at all came from the screen for a full minute. Then a scream
broke the stillness. It was so totally unexpected, so horrifying, that
two of the port clearance men leapt to their feet, sending their chairs
spinning backwards. Commander Littlefield was on his feet too, but he
hadn't leapt up. He'd arisen jerkily, his hands pressed to his temples,
as if to shut out the sound or keep his head from bursting.
We saw her then. She had come into the chart room and was staring
directly at us, and just knowing she could see us as clearly as we
could see her made her plight seem even more terrible. To me, at least,
because it wasn't hard to imagine what was passing through her mind.
_I'm alone on the ship ... just as I feared. They've sent me out alone
into space. If Commander Littlefield isn't on board ... if he's in that
room watching me with all those other men ... what else can it mean?_
She'd be ten times as sure of it if she'd been inside the port
clearance projection room and knew what it looked like, and I was
almost certain she had, because there was an unmistakable look of
recognition in her eyes, and the Port Clearance building was where they
took passengers for questioning.
20
She looked as she always had, with her hair piled up high on her head
and the full lips drowsily sensuous, and her breasts thrusting firmly
upward against the tight-clinging fabric that ensheathed them just
below the curve of her throat, and the soft whiteness of her upper
bosom.
Only her eyes had changed. Stark terror looked out of them and suddenly
as she stared at us she pressed one hand to her throat and swayed back
against the bulkhead on the right side of the doorway. It brought
her up short. But I was sure that if it hadn't she'd have gone right
on retreating backwards until she either started screaming again or
crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.
She neither screamed again nor fainted, for Commander Littlefield gave
her no time to succumb to utter panic. But if his voice hadn't rung out
as sharply as it did--at the precise moment that it did--the outcome
might have been quite different.
"Why did you return to the ship?" he shouted. "Why did you do such a
reckless thing? Was it because we suspected you? Was it because you
knew we were about to place you under arrest? Answer me! Your life may
depend on it."
"Yes ... I went back," she said. "But only to get ... something I
didn't want you to find. I was pretty sure I'd hidden it where you'd
never think of searching, but when you started suspecting me--"
"I see. A damaging piece of evidence? Something of the sort?"
She nodded. "Yes ... yes ... a paper. It would have proven my guilt."
"You admit your guilt then? We can still save you, but not if you go on
lying, clinging to the story you told us. Every part of that is false."
"No, no!" She almost screamed the words. "Most of what I told you was
true. My brother did work for Wendel and ... I didn't know that he had
died. I just found that out a few hours ago. I came to Mars to help
him, to save him if I could. I was a Wendel agent, but only because I
had no choice. They threatened to kill my brother ... used that as a
weapon to make me spy for them and do--uglier things."
Her voice rose pleadingly. "Bring the ship back. Don't send me out
alone into space. You can't be that cruel--"
"We can't bring the ship back. But we can save you. Just tell the
truth. Wendel knew that the Board was sending someone to Mars to
investigate the combine, a man who couldn't be bribed to shut his eyes
to what he was sure to see here. You had instructions to kill that man
before he could set foot on Mars. Wendel wanted him killed because they
knew the Board was backing him to the hilt and he had been given enough
authority to make him the most dangerous kind of adversary. Wendel also
knew that you were the most resourceful and intelligent agent in their
employ.
"You proved that, to my satisfaction, when you did what no one has
ever done before--outwitted a Mars' rocket security alert system
by concealing yourself in a cybernetic robot. I'm sure it didn't
take Wendel long to discover that you are as intelligent as you are
beautiful--both valuable assets in a secret agent. Priceless assets.
The time is very short. Am I right so far?"
"Yes ... it's all true. Please ... help me!"
"You tried to kill, without success, the man the Board was sending to
Mars to investigate and crack down on both Wendel and Endicott. You
tried to kill him three times."
"No, only once. I'm telling you the truth. I didn't fire that dart.
There were other Wendel agents on board. One tried to blow up the ship.
And there were other Wendel agents in New Chicago, with instructions to
assassinate him if they could."
"I see. But you did try to kill him in New Chicago. Why did you come to
Mars, if you didn't intend to try again?"
"I told you. I didn't lie when I said I came to save my brother, that I
wanted to see Wendel exposed ... forced to face criminal charges. When
I tried to stab him in the New Chicago Underground and failed ... I
realized what Wendel had done to me, what a vicious person I'd become.
I decided I couldn't go on being that kind of person any longer, not
even to save my brother. I took the only other way I could think of
to keep Wendel from killing my brother. I _am_ a resourceful woman, I
_am_ intelligent ... why should I deny it? I might have made the Wendel
Combine think twice about killing him. But now my brother's dead and--"
Her shoulders sagged and a look of torment came into her eyes.
"All right. One thing more. When that Wendel agent surprised you in the
chart room and the man you'd tried to kill saved you ... why were you
so frightened? Why did the agent go into such a rage? You must have
thought he intended to kill you. And if you were both Wendel agents--"
"I wasn't supposed to be on the ship. He knew it, and must have been
pretty sure I'd turned traitor. He knew all about my brother. There
wasn't much he didn't know about me, because he was a very high-placed
agent. He knew I had every reason to hate Wendel. And I think he was
also the kind of man who turns sadistic when he has a woman completely
at his mercy."
She saw me then. I could tell by the way her eyes widened and then
fastened on me, staring straight past Littlefield as if he was no
longer her only accuser.
But she was mistaken if she thought I had any desire to accuse her.
I was furious with Littlefield, sickened by his relentless attack on
her and if I hadn't been stunned for a moment, caught up in a kind
of hypnotic spell by the suddenness of that attack and the startling
candor she'd displayed in replying to it I'd have interfered sooner.
What she'd told him was evidence. It would help me to smash Wendel in
a legal way, which is always the best way, when backed up as it would
have to be by armed, completely lawful authority. All I'd have to do
would be to put what she'd just said into one package and what Wendel
agents had done to an Endicott fuel cylinder in a densely populated
section of the Colony in another and bring the two packages together
and there would take place, on Earth and on Mars, the kind of explosion
that would blow the Wendel Combine into the rubbish bin of history. The
Wendel-Endicott war would be over, and the Colonists would have a new
birth of freedom.
A death-bed confession has the strongest kind of legal validity and
when a woman thinks she has been sent out into space on an unmanned
rocket perhaps to die ... she is not likely to lie about anything.
An unforeseeable accident--a blind fluke of circumstance--had dealt
Littlefield a winning hand and he had taken full advantage of it. He
had done it to help me, God pity him ... for I hated him for it.
Every question he'd asked her and every reply she'd taken a minute or
two to make explicit had cut down her chances of staying on this side
of eternity.
She was looking straight at me.
"Ralph!" she said. "I don't want to die alone in space! What are they
trying to do to me?"
It was as much as I could take.
I grabbed Littlefield by the shoulders and swung him about and
demanded. "You said you could save her. How? Were you lying? If you
were ... I'll kill you."
"Let go of me, Ralph," he said. "A chance like that would never come
again. I had to risk it."
"All right--you've risked it. Now ... can you save her? That's all I
want to know. Nothing else matters."
"Yes ... I think so. If the cylinder doesn't blow up for three or four
more minutes. If she puts on a vacuum suit and goes out into space and
we're able to pick her up tomorrow or the next day--"
"Then for God's sake tell her. You'll have to tell her about the
cylinder, or she won't know how great the danger is. She may take her
time about it."
"All right," he said. "I'll take care of it."
He was talking to her in the big screen when Joan and I walked out of
the port clearance building.
We walked out because, if the explosion had come while he was talking,
just watching it would have killed me. No worse death can come to a
man than the one that can take place inwardly, for it can shrivel and
blacken his soul and leave him a burnt-out shell of a man until he dies
physically. And Joan could sense that, and wanted to get me out of
there as quickly as possible.
The explosion came a full ten minutes later, which meant that even
Hillard hadn't known how variable the critical mass buildup could be in
at least a few of the Endicott cylinders.
We were standing in the open, two hundred feet from the nearest rocket
launching pad, when we saw it--Littlefield's exploding star high up in
the night sky. The brightness lasted less than ten seconds.
21
You can be holding high cards, practically unbeatable, in the final
deal of a poker game and still not be sure of winning. You have to call
your opponent's hand before he gets the idea that just by drawing out
a gun and shooting you dead he can gather up all the chips, and cash
them in by threatening further violence. Assuming, of course, that he's
capable of that kind of violence and is in all respects the opposite of
an honest gambler.
You can be even less sure of winning when it isn't a game of cards
you're on the point of winning, but a duel to the death with a ruthless
power combine and time is running out on you.
I had all the evidence I needed now to smash the Wendel Combine. But it
had to be built up by legal experts, and stripped down as well, until
the documentation had the sinewy, blockbusting persuasiveness of a
champion's punch.
It would have to stir popular fury on Earth on a very wide scale,
be made so convincing that no one could possibly mistake it for a
trumped-up shakedown in another grab for power. And that would take
time--two or three weeks, at least.
And right at the moment Wendel was almost certainly out of the hospital
and back in the Wendel plant, getting ready to close in on the skyport
with his army of goons.
The problem that confronted me can be summarized in just one sentence.
I had to get into my uniform, pin the silver bird into place and
complete just two visits, or Wendel would dig my grave wide and deep.
Not just my own grave, of course--but when you fight to stay alive you
remember all of the things you want to protect and stay alive for.
There are men, I suppose, who are chiefly concerned with survival on a
more primitive plane, but I think I can honestly say I've never been
that kind of man.
My first visit was going to be to one hell of a live man--Joseph
Sherwood. Sherwood had undisputed custody, by authority of the Board,
of every nuclear weapon in the Colony with enough large-scale
destructive potential to make open defiance of that authority an
extremely risky undertaking.
I was now his superior in rank, but I had no intention of making
changes in his command or questioning the wisdom of the decisions he
was more than qualified to make. The measures he had taken to protect
the Colony I regarded as absolutely correct and he knew far more
about nuclear armaments than I did. There were limits to what those
measures could accomplish, because a large-scale thermonuclear weapon
can destroy thousands of innocent victims, and the Wendel Combine knew
precisely how far it could go without bringing down the thunder.
All I had to do was convince Wendel that it had now gone too far and
that the thunder was very close. Basically it would be quite a simple
undertaking. I would simply have to walk into the Wendel plant and talk
to him in a calm way, at the risk of being blown apart.
I was standing before a full-length mirror in a small, windowless room
which the skyport officials had assured me wasn't wired for sound.
It sure had privacy. Not that I'd need it while I was putting on my
uniform, because I'd be wearing it when I emerged and they would all
see the silver bird. And Joan was the only woman in the building ...
which made privacy a little absurd on more than one count.
It was just that--well, when you stand before a mirror and pin that
kind of insignia on a quite ordinary, regulation-fit uniform it does
something to the wearer which changes the way he looks in a quite
startling way.
I guess I just didn't want anyone to see me observing the change
in a mirror and grin, which would have forced me to do something I
just hadn't time for--take a sock at him. I suppose there's a little
garden-variety vanity in me--show me a man who claims he hasn't a trace
of it in his nature and I'll show you a first-class liar--but right at
the moment I wouldn't have been lying if I'd said that nothing could
have been further from my mind than preening myself on the way I looked.
But it was just as well I had privacy, because I had to stand before
the mirror for three full minutes to get accustomed to the change, and
feel relaxed and casual about it.
I'd forgotten to tell Commander Littlefield I'd be needing a tractor,
warmed up and ready to roll, and that the place to find it waiting for
me would be right outside the gate. The one I'd left there with a dead
man sitting in it didn't have quite the trim, speedy look of three or
four I'd noticed standing about the skyport and if he could get me a
lighter one so much the better.
Joan was taking care of it for me. She came back just as I was turning
from the mirror, with the silver bird gleaming on my right shoulder.
She'd seen me wearing it before, of course, so she wasn't startled. But
the tall, stoop-shouldered man with graying temples who had followed
her into the room had enough startlement in his eyes to have made her a
present of half of it and still made the grade in that respect.
He kept staring at the silver bird in tight-lipped silence until I
darted a questioning glance at Joan and he seemed to realize he was
putting a strain on my patience.
"My name's John Lynton," he said, hesitantly. "Commander Littlefield
told me you'll be needing a tractor. I have one, and I'll be glad to
drive you, sir. I brought the Endicott fuel cylinder to the skyport,
so I naturally feel pretty strongly about everything that's happened.
There's just one thing I'd like to see happen to Wendel. But I guess I
don't have to spell it out for you, sir."
I stared at him in amazement. I'd taken it for granted that the
Colonist who had delivered the cylinder was no longer at the skyport,
because no one had pointed him out to me, and I'd been under too much
of a strain to question Littlefield about it.
"Well ... that takes care of one thing that puzzled me," I said. "I
couldn't understand why you'd just deliver the cylinder and clear out.
But people here seem to feel they're privileged to do pretty much as
they please at times. So it didn't puzzle me too much."
"I was in the Administration Building, talking to a sky ship officer,
when you were in the shed, sir," he explained. "But I saw you come into
the projection room--"
"All right," I said. "We haven't time to discuss it and it's not
important anyway. I know how to drive a tractor, but I'm not an expert
at it. If you've got your own tractor you'll know what to do if it
breaks down. That's an advantage I'd be a fool to pass up. But if
you're going with me, you may as well know we'll be in danger the
instant we pass through the gate. The Wendel agents have orders to
blast me down on sight."
I shouldn't have said that, for it made Joan bite down hard on her
underlip and say in a kind of talking-to-herself whisper, "An armed
escort would cut down the danger. Littlefield could--"
I shook my head. "We'd be certain to be stopped then and an open clash
with Wendel agents in the streets of the Colony would wrap it up--but
good. There's no way of packaging it that would please Wendel more."
The instant Lynton realized, just from the way I was looking at Joan,
that I wanted to be alone with her he said: "I'd better check over the
tractor once more. I'll drive it through the gate, draw in to the side
of the clear-away and keep a sharp eye on the incoming traffic--if any.
I'll keep the motor running, sir."
The instant the door closed behind him Joan was in my arms. For the
most part all we did was embrace without saying a word, which is one
way of saying as much as you possibly can in the space of half a minute.
I was a little afraid that Joan would break down and burst into tears,
which would have spoiled everything. I could see the tears trembling
on the fringes of her eyelids, and decided right then and there that
she was one hell of a precious woman. And when you're parting with
something very precious you can break your heart in two if you let
yourself do too much thinking.
So I just kissed her very firmly on the mouth for the tenth time, swung
about and walked out of that small, windowless room without looking
back to see if she was still doing her best to keep the tears from
flowing.
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital I'd seen more of the Colony
than I could have covered on foot in half a day. Jogging through the
streets again with Lynton doing the driving I could have taken in even
more of it in a sight-seeing way. I could have--but I didn't.