They were driving out Queens Boulevard toward the colony, and Alan
said, "Why did you leave, Brave? Where'd you go?"
The great Indian spun the wheel for a curve. "Just back to the wall."
"Why?"
"Lights were too bright for my eyes."
Alan stared at him. "You could out-gaze the sun, you pokerfaced liar,
and you know it. Why did you leave?"
Brave glanced over at him. "Caliph, I hate to go on sounding like a
spae-wife, or the Witch of Endor. But never in all my life have I had
such a succession of ominous bodings. You'll think I'm turning raven in
my old age--"
"No, damn it, Brave, I know you can smell danger a mile or a month
away. Go ahead."
"Quoth the raven, then. I didn't feel happy about standing there.
Before we started, it seemed like a good quiet joke. But when we were
there and the lights came on, and the cameras started, I suddenly had
to step back out of sight. I _had_ to, Alan. A couple of my ghostly
ancestors took me by the scruff and hauled me right away from there."
"That would have made a nice tableau on TV."
Brave chuckled deep in his chest. "Running Lizard and Pony Sees-the-Sky
saving John Kiwanawatiwa from the white man's magic ... I laugh,
viceroy, but I swear it felt like that. The old desert-spawned
blood--the blood that doesn't tame down--boiled up under those lights
and cameras. It pulled the civilized flesh and bones away from them.
It whispered that things were wrong, wrong for an Indian and wrong for
his friend." He stepped on the gas viciously and the MG spurted forward
onto the Union Turnpike like a turpentined hound. "Alan, I almost
yanked you up and walked off with you under my arm. I didn't like you
sitting there in the bath of electrical magic."
"Why didn't you do it?" asked Alan curiously.
"Oh, hell, boss man. It's one thing to have these primeval urges, and
another to forget all your technical training and scientific knowledge
so completely that you'll follow the impulse. Do you bust a window
every time you'd like to?"
"Hmm." Alan was ill at ease. It seemed to him for a moment that there
was something to Brave's instinct, and that he should have been
snatched from those lights. Then he said, "I think it's merely that
someone had a shot at me the other day, and you've fretted over that
till you're seeing assassins behind every chair."
"Maybe. Maybe." Brave rocketed the little car along the dark highway,
across the miles to home, and all the while the tomtoms beat in his
blood and he knew that he should be afraid, that he should be coldly
and sanely afraid of some black hazard soon to come.
* * * * *
Don Mariner walked into their laboratory the following afternoon. He
was one of the top engineers on Project Star, a youngish-middle-aged
man running to flab and ever-thinning hair. Ordinarily good-humored,
today he had a long face and a crease between his eyes. Without a word
he spread a sheaf of blueprints and photostats out on a lab table. Alan
and Brave bent over them. Don's stubby finger traced the outline of a
flying disk, then stabbed at the fuel storage tanks and several other
sections of the interior.
"Look at this, you two. I've had it under my nose for three months and
it never struck me till today. Just look at it. See anything wrong?"
After a moment Alan said, "The fuel tanks are too big."
"My God! You ought to be the engineer instead of me. I ought to hire
out for a potato peeler. Three months it took me to see it."
"What's the point of it?" asked Brave. "If the disks are going to
use hornethylene, they won't need a tenth--not a hundredth that much
storage space, even if they want to circle the earth a dozen times
without landing."
"Here's another thing," said Don Mariner. "This closet for space suits.
Why? The stratosphere is the highest they're supposed to go, and
there's no need for space suits there. You want a space suit to crawl
around the outside of Albertus, but not to wear in a disk. If there's
trouble outside the shell you will simply land. Now look at these
instruments." He showed them another chart. "Are these instruments for
earth travel?"
"I don't know. Are they?"
"They are not. And also they're not the instruments Carey designed for
the disks last year. They're a new set entirely, and some of 'em I
don't understand myself, but I'll tell you this: they're not for earth
travel. They're what you'd want in a space rocket." He looked up, his
gray eyes bleak. "I faced Carey with 'em, and he swears they're his old
design; and Carey doesn't lie in the ordinary course of events. But
they're not, and I know it."
"What's the point?" asked Alan. The question was almost rhetorical; he
knew the answer.
"The point is, these disks we're building are supposed to be purely
and simply a faster means of traveling around Terra than any we have
now. But the man in the street, that faceless brainless little cipher,
believes they're for conquering the stars. And by Judas, he's right!
We're building interplanetary disks--_and we're not supposed to know
it_!"
The three men stared at one another.
"Who's keeping it from us?"
"And why?"
"There are plenty of rocket projects--so what if someone wants to
try a space disk instead? Why would he tell all his scientists and
technicians a pack of lies? There's no need for secrecy, for God's
sake!"
"But--my gosh," protested Alan, "no one man could keep a thing like
this from all the rest of us. There must be ten or twenty who know.
And details like these, the fuel tanks and instruments, they can't be
hidden from anybody!"
"So where does it lead us?"
"Up a narrow, dank, and ill-smelling blind alley," said Brave.
"Not so bl--"
* * * * *
There was a detonation outside the lab; a harsh, clangorous thunderclap
of a sound, like the bursting of a bomb full of wash tubs and
anchor chains. The three men were dashing for the door before the
reverberations had died away.
A disk had crashed on the airfield. Brave and Alan and Don piled into a
jeep and raced down toward it.
"I didn't know they had any ready for use," Alan shouted.
"Oh, yes. They haven't advertised it much, though. And this must be
the first test flight. I didn't know it was coming off today."
"You'd think we'd all have been invited to the takeoff. Big impressive
show, faithful workers get afternoon off, and all that."
"Hell," said Don, "if they're keeping the purpose of the things from
us, for no good reason that I can see, they might want to keep the test
flight secret too."
"How can they keep it secret? It obviously had to take off in plain
sight, and they couldn't shoo everyone indoors. No, I guess they just
didn't give a damn about us. Underlings, unimportant servants, that's
us," said Alan bitterly, with a flash prevision of the terrible idea
that would soon be obsessing him.
They pulled up beside the wreckage of the disk. There was no danger of
explosion, due to the peculiar properties of hornethylene. The giant
platter, with its raised top like a hot-dish cover and its bubble of
clear crystal beneath, lay crumpled and bent, one-third of its whole
edge accordioned in upon itself. Even as they came up the crystal
bubble inched open; not smoothly, as it should have done, but like a
damp-swollen door creaks away from its frame under heavy pressure. The
pilot thrust his legs out and dropped to the ground. Alan and a dozen
others ran to him.
"Hi," said he. "Guess I pulped this job up right."
"Good Lord, man, are you okay?"
"Not a nick. I just had time to see the ground coming up at me and
bingo, I was sitting there with my eyes popping. Anybody got a drink?"
He was cut to the pattern of all airmen since the days of monoplanes:
tall, narrow of hip and wide of shoulder, lean always-tanned face, a
wry grin on the mouth and horizon-hunger in the eyes.
Somebody gave him a flask. "Were you alone?" asked Alan.
"Sure. They can't risk two guys in these things yet. We don't know what
they'll do. This one'll take some going over with a microscope and
tweezers; it's full of bugs. Someone jockey me to the main offices?"
The crowd dispersed slowly; but Brave, putting an urgent hand on Alan's
arm--it enfolded his biceps and the fingertips met the thumb, for
Brave's hands were as outsize as the rest of him--held him there. "Wait
a minute, risaldar. I want to check something."
"Another instinct, Brave?"
"Plain horse sense. And I want to check it before the big boys clamp a
top secret sign on this wreck."
He reached up and gripped the edge of the crystal bubble. It resisted
him. He set his muscles and tugged with all his incredible strength.
The crushed metal hinges complained and shrieked and parted, and the
great bulbous sheet of plastiquartz fell to the ground, narrowly
missing him as he dodged back.
"I'll boost you up, and you can give me a hand."
* * * * *
Inside the disk, they crouched and went through the tunnel into the
control room. This comprised the entire central portion of the disk;
suspended within the shell, like a small kernel in a large nut, it
was held comparatively steady as the outer husk rocked and rolled
and flipped in its characteristic skipped-rock flight. Alan did not
understand the principle of this near-motionless suspension of the
control room within an erratically weaving hull, although Don Mariner
had tried to explain it to him in patient two-syllable words. It
involved a knowledge of the newest developments in gyroscopics, which
the young fuel expert did not comprehend. Brave had a fairly good
idea of the basic laws involved, but wisely had never tried to beat
it into his friend's head. Alan on fuel, on chemistry, on philosophy,
was superb; Alan on dynamics or any other branch of mechanics was
deplorable.
They looked around the room. Nearly all the equipment was still in
its place, for the clamps that held it during the astonishing speeds
the disk could maintain in flight had held it still in the shattering
instant of the crash. But the entire control board, the panels of
instruments and the wide mirrors that gave the pilot a view of the
earth and air from every angle, had all been shoved back and broken
when the saucer had struck its nose edge into the ground.
Brave walked over to the pilot's seat and stood silently surveying the
mess. At last he said, "Alan."
"Yes?"
"Look here."
Alan looked, and started as though he had been stabbed with a
hypodermic needle. "God ..." he said.
The control board had buckled back against the pilot's chair; something
beyond it, some ponderously heavy piece of machinery in the space
between central room and shell, had knifed through wall and board as
sharp and deadly as the blade of a guillotine. The metal had sliced the
center of the pilot's seat to within six inches of the back.
No man could have sat there at the moment of the crash, as the pilot
averred he had done.
He would never have lived. He would have been cut in two....