The man outside showed a gold badge. "Morgan, FBI. You David
MacHeath?"
"Yes." MacHeath stepped outside and showed the FBI man his
identification.
"We were told to co-operate with you in this Konrad Bern case. He's
managed to slip away from us somehow, but we know he's still in the
area. He can't get past the gate."
MacHeath let his mind expand until it meshed with that of Dr. Konrad
Bern.
"There is a way out," MacHeath snapped. "The acceleration tube."
"What?"
"Come on!" He started sprinting toward the elevators. He explained to
the FBI agent as they went.
"The acceleration tube of the ultracosmotron runs due north of here
for two miles underground. The guard at the other end won't be
expecting anyone to be coming from the inside of the target building.
If Bern plays his cards right, he can get away."
"Can't we phone the target building?" the FBI man asked.
"No. We shut off all the electrical equipment and took down some of
the wires so we could balance the acceleration fields."
"Well, if he's on foot, we could send a car out there. We'd get there
before he does. Uh ... wouldn't we?"
"Maybe. But he'll kill himself if he sees he's trapped." That wasn't
quite true. Bern was ready to fight to the death, and he had a heavy
pistol to back him up. MacHeath didn't want to see anyone killed, and
he didn't want stray bullets flying around the inside of that tube or
in the target room.
MacHeath and the FBI agent piled out of the elevator at the bottom of
the shaft. Dr. Roger Kent was standing at the head of the stairs that
spiraled down to the gun chamber. Dr. Kent knew that Bern had gone
down the stairway, but he didn't know why.
"He's our saboteur," MacHeath said quickly. "I'm going after him. As
soon as I close the door and seal it, you turn on the pumps. Lower the
air pressure in the tube to a pound per square inch below
atmospheric. That'll put a force of about a ton and a quarter against
the doors, and he won't be able to open them."
Dr. Kent still didn't grasp the fact that Bern was a spy.
"Explain to him, Morgan," MacHeath told the Federal agent. He went on
down the spiral staircase, knowing that Kent would understand and act
in plenty of time.
* * * * *
The door to the tube was standing open. MacHeath slipped on a pair of
the sponge-soled shoes, noticing angrily that Bern hadn't bothered to
do so. He went into the tube and closed the door behind him. Then he
started down the blackness of the tube at a fast trot. Ahead of him,
in the utter darkness, he could hear the click of heels as the
leather-shod Bern moved toward the target end of the long tube.
Neither of them had lights. They were unnecessary, for one thing,
since there was only one direction to go and there were no obstacles
in the path. Bern would probably have carried a flashlight if he'd
been able to get his hands on one quickly, but he hadn't, so he went
in darkness. MacHeath didn't want a light; in the darkness, he had the
advantage of knowing where his opponent was.
Every so often, Bern would stop, listening for sounds of pursuit,
since his own footsteps, echoing down the glass-lined cylinder,
drowned out any noise from behind. But MacHeath, running silently on
the toes of his thick-soled shoes, kept in motion, gaining on the
fleeing spy.
A two-mile run is a good stretch of exercise for anyone, but MacHeath
didn't dare slow down. As it was, Konrad Bern was already tugging
frantically at the door that led to the target room by the time
MacHeath reached him. But the faint sighing of the pumps had already
told MacHeath that the air pressure had been dropped. Bern couldn't
possibly get the door open.
MacHeath's lungs wanted to be filled with air; his chest wanted to
heave; he wanted to pant, taking in great gulps of life-giving oxygen.
But he didn't dare. He didn't want Bern to know he was there, so he
strained to keep his breath silent.
He stepped up behind the physicist in the pitch blackness, and judging
carefully, brought his fist down on the nape of the man's neck in a
hard rabbit punch.
Konrad Bern dropped unconscious to the floor of the tube.
Then MacHeath let his chest pump air into his lungs in long, harsh
gasps. Shakily, he lowered himself to the floor beside Bern and
squatted on his haunches, waiting for the hiss of the bleeder valve
that would tell him that the air pressure had been raised to allow
someone to enter the air lock.
It was Morgan, the FBI man, who finally cracked the door. Griffin and
Dr. Kent were with him.
"You all right?" asked Morgan.
"I'm fine," MacHeath said, "but Bern is going to have a sore neck for
a while. I didn't hit him hard enough to break it, but he'll get
plenty of sleep before he wakes up."
More FBI men came in, and they dragged out the unprotesting Bern.
Dr. Kent said: "Well, I'm glad that's over. I'll have to get back and
see what Dr. Nordred is raving about."
"Raving?" asked MacHeath innocently.
"Yes. While I was in the pump room reducing the pressure, he called me
on the interphone. Said he'd been looking all over for me. He and
Luvochek and Bessermann are up in the lab." He frowned. "They claim
that one of the radiolead samples was floating in the air in the lab.
It's settled down now, I gather, but it only weighs a fraction of what
it should, though it's gaining all the time. And that's ridiculous.
It's not at all what Dr. Nordred's theory predicted." Then he clamped
his lips together, thinking perhaps he had talked too much.
"Interesting," said MacHeath blandly. "Very interesting."
* * * * *
Senator Gonzales sat in Brian Taggert's sixth-floor office in the
S.M.M.R. building and looked puzzled. "All right, I grant you that
Bern couldn't have been the saboteur. Then why arrest him?"
Dave MacHeath took a drag from his cigarette before he answered. "We
had to have a patsy--someone to put the blame on. No one really
believed that it was just bad luck, but they'll all accept the idea
that Bern was a saboteur."
"We would have had to arrest him eventually, anyway," said Brian
Taggert.
"Give me a quick run-down," Gonzales said. "I've got to explain this
to the President."
"Did you ever hear of the Pauli Effect?" MacHeath asked.
"Something about the number of electrons that--"
"No," MacHeath said quickly. "That's the Pauli _principle_, better
known as the Exclusion Principle. The Pauli _Effect_ is a different
thing entirely, a psionic effect.
"It used to be said that a theoretical physicist was judged by his
inability to handle research apparatus; the clumsier he was in
research, the better he was with theory. But Wolfgang Pauli was a lot
more than clumsy. Apparatus would break, topple over, go to pieces, or
burn up if Pauli just walked into the room.
"Up to the time he died, in 1958, his colleagues kidded about it,
without really believing there was anything behind it. But it is
recorded that the explosion of some vacuum equipment in a laboratory
at the University of Göttingen was the direct result of the Pauli
Effect. It was definitely established that the explosion occurred at
the precise moment that a train on which Pauli was traveling stopped
for a short time at the Göttingen railway station."