"There's nothing left but to go out and pull its teeth," said Lindsay.
"Nothing we know can detonate the thing."
Harris smiled knowingly. "Naturally," he said. "Their point in life is
to immobilize Terra. They must not go off until they are ready. They're
willing to wait. They found out we could detonate them and then return
to work in a couple of hours with radiation shields. So they now get a
fuse that cannot be extracted and cannot be detonated until they want
it to. Give 'em one chance to prove one effective, and all Terra will
be immobilized by them, and they'll drop everywhere. Also, maintaining
the force fields takes a lot of valuable power. And if we shut off the
fields, it might go up and then we'd lose the whole place."
"How I wish we could take pictures."
"Photographs?" asked Grant, smiling. "I saw one of them once. A family
heirloom. Too bad, of course. But what do you expect when the whole
world is living in a sort of bath of neutrons, and silver itself
becomes slightly radioactive? After all, photography used to use a
silver compound of some sort if my physical history is right."
"Silver bromide," said Lindsay slowly. "Look, Harris," he said, his
interest showing where his mind was really working, "go out there
and make a few sketches. Then come back without touching the thing.
Understand?"
"Right."
* * * * *
"I am approaching the thing," he said from the field of action again.
"I'm about two hundred feet from it. Working now with the projection
box, sketching on the ground glass. This is a fairly standard model of
robomb, of course. They load 'em with anything they think useful after
making them at another plant, just as we do. The fuse--too bad they
can't bury it inside. But it must be set, or at least available to the
makers. If they should improve on it, it would be serious business to
de-load these things to get to a buried fuse. Yep, there he is, right
up on top as usual. Fuse-making has reached a fine art, fellows. Think
of a gadget made to work at will or by preset, and still capable of
taking the landing wallop they get. Well, they used to make fuses to
stand twenty thousand times gravity for use in artillery. But this ...
well, Ralph, I've about got it sketched. Looks standard. Except for a
couple of Martian ideographs on it. Jenna, what's a sort of sidewise
Omicron; three concentric, squashed circles; and a tick-tack-toe mark?"
"Martian for Mark Six Hundred Fifty, Modification Zero," answered the
girl.
"Some language when you can cram that into three characters."
"Well, I'm through. Ralph, so far as I'm concerned, this drawing will
serve no purpose. Use that one of the standard model and have Jenna
make the right classification marks across the fuse top. That's a
better drawing anyway. I'm going on out and defu--"
The flash blinded, even through the almost-black glasses. It was warm,
through the leaded glass windows. The eventual roar and the grinding
hailstorm of sand and stone and sintered glass tore at the ship. The
counters rattled madly and fell behind the driving mechanism with
a grinding rattle. A rocketing mushroom of smoke drove toward the
stratosphere, cooling down to mere incandescence as it went.
Miles away a production official watched the meters on his servo panel.
They were stable. The buildings held. With the lighter radioactinic
shields, work could be resumed in twenty-four hours. He started to make
plans, calling his men happily. The bomb was no longer a menace, and
the mills could get back to work.
* * * * *
"Harris," said Garrard solemnly. "So shall it be! Well, may he rest,
now. Hatred such as his--an obsession against an inanimate object. I--"
"Shut up," said Lacy quietly. "You're babbling."
"Well," said Grant in his hard voice, "we can detonate 'em if we can't
defuse 'em. Only it's hard on the personnel!"
Lacy looked up and spoke quietly, though his face was bitter. "Jack
Grant, you have all the sensitivity and feelings of a pig!"
"Why ... you--"
Lindsay leaped forward, hoping to get between them. Jenna went forward
instinctively, putting up a small hand. Garrard looked at them
reflectively, half aware of the incident and half convinced that if
they were to fight, they would regardless of any act of man.
It was the strident ringing of the telephone that stopped them in their
tracks; staying Grant's fist in midswing.
Jenna breathed out in a husky sound.
"Who was that at Gary?" asked General Haynes.
"We lost Harris."
"Same as before?"
Lindsay nodded glumly, forgetting that Haynes couldn't see him. Then he
added: "Didn't even get close."
"What in thunder have they got?" asked Haynes. It was an hypothetical
question, the general did not expect an answer. He added, after a
moment of thought: "You've tried everything?"
"Not everything. So far as I've been able to tell, the things will sit
there until we go after 'em. They'll foul up production areas until we
go after 'em, and then when we're all gone--what then?"
"Lindsay! Take hold, man. You're ... you're letting it get you."