"Zero minus one hour," the loudspeaker droned, in a Chinese dialect.
In a deep cavern in the hinterlands of Asia, men responded to the
command coming over the speaker system. Already driven to the point of
exhaustion, they were working harder than they had ever worked before.
The moment of victory, for which all true Asians had lived, was near at
hand. The launching of this bomb would make the Asian Union master of
the world. Orders had come through to launch this bomb immediately.
"Zero minus forty-five minutes," the speaker said. The drone had gone
from the voice of the officer watching the time. A rising excitement
appeared in the tones as if he, too, had caught the scent of fear
rising in the vast underground depot.
So much was left to be done. The atomic warhead was already in place,
waiting for the day of launching, otherwise the task would have been
impossible. The driving engines were complete, but had to be fueled.
The steering equipment was almost ready, only the installation of the
left gyroscope was necessary. This was at hand waiting to be installed.
Five technicians constantly got in each other's way as they tried to
slip the delicate instrument into place.
"Zero minus thirty minutes!"
The gyroscope was eased into place and tested. It was found to be in
perfect working order.
In the course plotting room, the final calculations were being made.
Wind direction and velocity aloft had been noted across half the
planet. This had some importance on the launching and landing end but
had no significance when the bomb itself was out of the atmosphere.
The target had been figured and refigured. Actually, the target was
anywhere on the continent of North America. If this bomb struck
anywhere in the Mississippi valley, the whole watershed below the
striking point would be scoured clean of all life. Water carrying
radiation downstream would account for that.
"Zero minus fifteen minutes!"
On the outside of the mountain, in a special observatory constructed
for this precise purpose, radar scopes for tracking the rocket were
ready. Instruments in the laboratory there were for the purpose of
changing the course of the super bomb, if it veered too far from its
destination. The technicians there were on their toes. They had no
guards to encourage them but they needed none. They knew what would
happen if this bomb failed to land and the fault was traced to their
door.
What would happen when the bomb landed?
Hell would happen!
Probably the crust of the Earth would open up in a hole miles in depth.
Meteor Crater, in Arizona, would be the work of a child compared to the
result of this explosion. What had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
would be nothing in comparison.
The possibility existed that the molten magma of the core of the planet
would gush forth. No one knew for sure whether or not this would
happen. If it did take place, the result might be the sudden appearance
of a lake of over-flowing lava.
The shock waves from the bomb would probably be strong enough to pull
down every skyscraper that still remained standing in America.
The effect on the watershed where the bomb landed would be almost
complete catastrophe. If it struck on any of the rivers or streams
flowing into the Mississippi, the water supply of all cities downstream
to New Orleans would be contaminated.
Nobody knew what the effect of the fall-out from this bomb would be.
High air currents might carry radioactive particles for thousands of
miles from the explosion point, where they would fall as a gentle but
very deadly rain upon the Earth below.
"_Zero minus ten minutes!_"
The high, thin note of a violin appeared in the vast underground
cavern. Amid the scurrying of feet, the shouts of the foremen bossing
the work gangs, and the occasional cracking of the rifles of the guard,
the sound was unheard by the ears. But deeper centers heard it.
The first man to go was a fat engineer. Sighing, he stumbled and fell.
When he did not rise a guard approached him. As the guard determined
that the man was snoring, he lifted his rifle.
The engineer died without awakening.
Another shot rang out as another man went to sleep, then continued on
to join his fathers.
The technician busy filling the fuel tanks of the rocket was the third
man to go. He managed to finish closing the filler cap and to lay down
his flexible line before the urge to sleep overcame him.
By this time the guards knew that something was wrong.
Silence came over the cavern. In the stillness, the note of the violin
flickering up and down the scale could be heard. Men looked at each
other in growing apprehension. Looking, some of them lay down and went
to sleep.
"Sleep gas!" an officer bawled. "Shoot all foreigners on sight!"
The officer suspected that some spy had slipped into the underground
cavern and had released gas there. His command was intended to enable
his men to find and eliminate this alien. As such, from a military
standpoint, it was a good command. It had this deficiency: when his men
did not find any aliens, but their own people continued going to sleep
on them, they began imagining foreigners. The guards began to shoot
their own technicians and engineers.
As panic swept through the cavern, guards began to shoot other guards.
Soon the people in this huge underground chamber were tearing and
destroying each other. And one other thing: they were also going to
sleep.
The panic grew to hurricane proportions.
When Kurt Zen appeared inside the cavern the whole vast place was as
still as a tomb. Smoke from the rifles hung in the air, the cavern
stank of death and fear. But the bomb still rested in its launching
cradle.
Zen took one long look at that bomb. He felt his sigh of relief clear
down to the ends of his toes. At the sight, the last remnant of pain
vanished from his toes and fingers. Not that the damage done by the
matches did not still exist. It did. But in the surge of elation that
swept through him, he completely forgot the pain.
"We just got here in time," a man said, appearing beside him. It was
Spike Larson who had spoken. Awe on his face, Larson glanced around the
cavern. "They started killing each other. They must have gone nuts."
"I don't blame them," Zen said. "I damned near did, on the way here."
"That trip through nothing is sure a stinker, isn't it," Larson
answered, grinning and shaking his head.
Zen agreed with him whole-heartedly. After tuning his body to an
instrument in the cavern, hidden so well that Cuso's men had not had
time to find it, West had punched a button. The machine had vanished.
West had vanished. A horrible moment had come when it had seemed that
his feet were standing on nothing more substantial than air. What he
had felt under his feet had, in fact, been far less substantial than
air, which had body. It had been even less solid than space. It had
been _nothing_.
Swishing, colonel Grant came into existence on the other side of Zen.
Grant looked fussed, but he gripped the rifle he had taken from one of
Cuso's men with determination.
"Just between you and me, I'd rather fly a space satellite to Mars any
day in preference to facing this jump."
"I know what you mean," Zen said.
As he spoke, another figure came into existence to his left. Nedra!
She came spinning into reality with a smile on her face. Zen wasted a
moment wondering what kind of cast-iron nerves this girl had.
"It looks as if all we have to do is to tie them up," Spike Larson
said. "This is almost too good to be true."
"It is too good to be true," Zen said. Turmoil was--somewhere. He did
not know where but it seemed to him that a vast uneasiness had suddenly
come into existence. It had to do, somehow, with the future, with a
something that was about to happen.
"Halt!" Grant's voice rang out.
Zen swung his gaze around just in time to see an Asian lift himself to
his feet near a control board that stood beside the rocket.
"He's walking in his sleep," Larson exclaimed.
"_Zero minus one minute_," the loudspeaker announced.
"Where in the hell is that man on the speaker?" Grant demanded. "The
sleep frequency didn't get to him!"
"No time to be concerned about him now," Zen said. The turmoil that
existed somewhere had increased in intensity. Somehow it was concerned
with the solitary Asian who was reeling in circles like a drunken man
trying to make up his mind.
"Shall I shoot him, colonel?" Grant demanded.
Zen hesitated. He knew that West's deepest wish was to avoid violence
if that was possible.
The split second's delay was fatal. Grant's shot rang out--much too
late.
Reeling on his feet, the man reached the control panel, and pulled the
single switch there. A heavy thud came from the rocket as a ram drove
home inside the heavy metal hull.
"Get back!" Zen screamed.
He caught Nedra and pulled her backward. Beside him, he knew that Grant
and Larson were also reeling backward. Inside the rocket a steady
rumble of sound was building up. Low in frequency but heavy in volume
it seemed to shake the foundations of the Earth itself. Inside the
vessel heavy heat charges were building up. Smoke and flame spurted
backward as the first warming charge let go.
For all Zen knew this section was to have been cleared before the
firing of the first rocket. He did not know whether provision had been
made for the elimination of flame and smoke but he knew that heat and
smoke hit him as he pulled Nedra away.
Then the main charges let go.
Rising like some devil spurting upward from the depths of hell itself,
the launching cradle carrying the rocket lurched upward. The stone
floor shook underfoot, the mountain shook. Unless this rocket could be
stopped, the whole planet would shake. Earth would twitch her skin like
an elephant stung by a giant wasp.
With a thundering roar the rocket shook itself loose from its cradle
and hurled into the sky under its own power.
"West," Zen shouted.
"Yes, Kurt." The craggy man's reply was as prompt as it would have been
if he had stayed in the same room. Actually he was in the American
center.
"We've lost," Zen said.
"I know," West replied. A sadness as deep as the ocean of space was in
his voice.
"Pull these people back to you."
"Of course."
"Me last." The last lingering roars of sound were still pounding down
the bore of the launching cradle.
"Why do you want to be last?"
"Duty," Zen said. "Get that miracle device of yours into operation,
pronto."
"Sure. I'm starting now."
"Hey, guys, you're going home!" Zen yelled at the people with him.
"What good is it to go home?" Spike Larson asked.
"There won't be any home within an hour," Grant added. "Or however long
that rocket will take to land. Why go back to what isn't there?"
"That's where we will start the task of rebuilding," Zen said.
"Rebuild what with what?" Larson demanded.
"There will be something left," Zen said firmly. "You are already
underground. You will stay that way. Keep the good fight going, for
years. Raise some kids to keep it going after you are gone." He felt
very firm and sure about what he was saying.
"You're full of hot air," Red-Dog Jimmie Thurman said.
"Besides, you are planning something else," Nedra spoke. "You want to
get rid of us so you can--"
"West!" Zen shouted.
"Yes, Kurt."
"Take 'em away!" Zen yelled. "They're trying to rebel on me. Take Nedra
first before she reads my mind."
"I'm working as fast as I can," West answered. "This instrument has to
be tuned to the individual body frequency. Ah--"
"I knew there was something--" Nedra began. And vanished. Zen grinned.
He had the impression that she was calling him names that no lady
should speak as she went away. Time would cure that, if any time was
left. In the chamber an Asian was stirring.
"Zen, old man, what are you up to?" Grant asked.
"Take this one next," Kurt ordered. Grant looked reluctant but resigned
as he disappeared.
Zen was alone in the big chamber. Smoke swirled from the ceiling. One
Asian was already on his feet and a guard was sitting up.
"I've got them all here," West's voice came across vast distances.
"Good."
"Are you ready?"
"Yeah," Zen answered. "But I'm going that way." He pointed toward the
ceiling.
"Kurt!" West's voice was sharp with sudden pain as he caught the
colonel's meaning.
"That way or no way," Zen answered.
"But that's not a passenger rocket."
"The hull will hold enough air to keep me alive for as long as I need
to be there."
"But the rocket is in constantly accelerating flight. It's a moving
target."
"Red-Dog Jimmie Thurman's plane was falling and Colonel Grant's
satellite was moving and Spike Larson's sub was on the bottom of the
Indian Ocean. Don't give me any back talk, Sam. Somebody got into
that plane and that satellite and that submarine. I can get into that
rocket. You're the man who can put me there."
"But I'm not on that target!" West's voice had a wail in it.
"Then get on it!" Kurt Zen sounded like an exceedingly gruff drill
sergeant addressing a new recruit, or like a colonel who had his mind
made up.
"All right. I'll do my best. But something will remain here, Kurt, even
after the explosion. We'll be safe, in a way, here."
"That argument has already been used, by me, to get the others back to
you. You and I know, Sam, that hell won't hold a hat to the American
continent if that whizzer hits."
"All right," West repeated. "Ah! I'm on the rocket as a target."
"Good!" Zen repressed every muscular tremor everywhere in his body.
Somewhere there was jubilation, a sensed but not tangible vibration
that he could not locate. He concentrated on the jubilation.
A layer of smoke floated down from the ceiling like a descending
death-pall. The guard had gotten to his feet. He had picked up his
rifle and was staring around the room seeking either an explanation for
what had happened, or a target. To him, which he got didn't matter. His
eyes came to focus on the lean colonel with the bandaged fingers. That
uniform did not belong here.
The guard raised his rifle.
"Good luck, Kurt," West's voice whispered across the space between two
continents.
As the gun exploded in his face, Kurt Zen felt his body vibrate into
what seemed to be nothing. Again the terror wrenched at his soul. Again
he experienced the mind-compelling agony of this incredible type of
space flight.
This time he did not mind these terrors. Somewhere in his mind was
jubilation. Wondering if it was the forerunner of death, he continued
to concentrate on that.
Dimly, as if from some other space, or some other time, he was aware of
a roar. The rocket swam into existence ten feet away from him. He was
outside it, in airless space.
West had made a miscalculation.
Agony seared every cell in his body. Pain clamped at his throat like
hands trying to choke him to death.
"Oops! I made a mistake," he heard West gasp.
He was moving with the rocket, on a parallel course. West had matched
course and velocity but he had not achieved his exact aiming point.
Error in the instrument? Human mistake? Who knew?
Who cared?
_Click!_
Like a vast ocean of warm, pulsing, sure power, the race mind came into
Kurt Zen. It existed here in space, too! He had never thought of that.
In what little thinking he had had time to do, he had considered it as
a super special sort of field which possessed intelligence but which
was limited to the surface of the planet.
Here in space, it sustained life in him.
He did not know how this was done, this was one of the mysteries which
must be left to the future to solve--if there was a future other than
the mud flats. It felt to him as if a vast tidal current was flowing
into his body.
_Click!_
He was in the rocket!
The smell of overheated oil fouled his nose. As he tried to move, he
bumped his head. He was in a narrow passage. Ahead was a control panel
with automatic devices. He began to crawl in that direction.
Noise was a thundering roar in his ears. His whole body felt as if it
was about to shake to pieces. The passage was narrow. It had never been
intended for humans. Moving upward, Zen found it was too narrow. He got
stuck.
No matter how hard he tried he could not move an inch forward. The
control panel was so close he could spit on it but it could not have
been farther out of his reach if it had been on the other side of the
Moon.
Air was getting short. He twisted and squirmed, fighting like the
devil, but his body was wedged into the narrow passage in such a way
that he could not move.
Something pulled at his arms. Nedra was directly ahead of him. She was
trying to pull him forward along the passage.
"You?" he whispered.
"Who has a better right than I?" she answered. Sweat grimed her face.
Her hair was awry. Fiercely she pulled at him.
The rocket yawed, beginning its turn in space. He forced himself
forward. And came free.
Somehow he found the strength to pull himself up in front of the
control panel. He was running on nervous energy now and he knew it. No
strength was left in his body beyond what he was forcing into it.
"Send it out to space!" he muttered. "Send it out there!" He tried to
wave his arm in an outward gesture and bumped his hand on the steel
hull.
Light came through a circular port. He had a glimpse of the Earth down
below. The planet was very far away. Blue seas and green land, the
planet was also very beautiful.
He fumbled his way over the controls, trying to understand them.
Somewhere stabilizing gyroscopes were running smoothly. He could hear
them. The controls were simple. He decided which way was up, and jammed
home the controls.
Nothing happened.
In the confined quarters his laughter had madness in it.
Nedra stared at him.
"What happened?"
"Nothing. Nothing happened. They're locked in place."
His eyes grew very wide.
"These controls are only for establishing the flight course. Once that
is established and the rocket launched, they automatically lock in
place."
"Then we can't change the course?"
"No."
Her face puckered and she looked like a small girl about to cry.
Another panel to the left caught his attention. It had a red button on
it. He studied the wiring on it.
"By thunder!" the words burst involuntarily from his lips.
"What is it, Kurt?"
"They put a manual control on the warhead. It's got to be that. It
can't be anything else." He pointed to the red button. "Why do you
suppose they did that?"
"Test purposes, probably, to check the firing mechanism before the
warhead was installed. What difference does it make?" Nedra's voice was
listless.
"Maybe we can go to heaven."
"What do you mean?"
He explained very carefully what he meant.
"Explode the rocket here in space?"
"Sure," he said. His tone of voice said this was nothing, that anybody
could do it. West's voice clamored in his mind again. He ignored it.
His hand moved toward the red button.
"There's one thing I want you to know," he said, pausing.
"What is that?"
"I love you," he said.
She came into his arms like a tired, frightened child. "I knew that
the minute I saw you," she said. He held her close to him and she lay
there, seemingly very content. "All right," she said. "I'm ready." Her
lips sought his.
Kissing her, he reached behind her back and punched the red button.
A relay thudded.
Darkness closed in.
* * * * *
Kurt Zen came out of that darkness to find himself staring upward into
the face of Sam West. There was something about that face that was
familiar, something that he should have guessed long before. He tried
to think what it was.
"How'd you get to heaven?" he said.
"The warhead had a delay relay on it," West explained. "It was about
thirty seconds, as near as I can figure it. Anyhow it gave us just
enough time to snatch both of you out of that rocket before she blew."
What he said sounded very important. Under other circumstances, Zen
knew he would have considered it important. But other things seemed
more significant now. "Did she blow?" he asked.
"All of ten minutes ago," West said exultantly. "Do you know what this
means, Kurt? Do you know what it means?"
"Yeah," Zen answered. "I won't have to be an eel." There was still this
other thing that was important. "Say--"
"An eel?" For an instant the craggy man was puzzled. Then he grasped
the meaning. "You're right, Kurt. No eels--for any of us."
"That's good," Zen said. "Nedra--"
"She's right here beside you, still out from exhaustion. But she will
be all right."
"Good," Zen said again. This other fact was still in his mind. As he
tried to think what it was, the answer came to him. He looked up at the
craggy man. "You're not Sam West," he said.
"No?" the craggy man said, the ghost of a smile on his lips. "Then who
am I?"
"You're Jal Jonner. Nobody but Jal Jonner could have done all the
things you have done."
"You're right, Kurt. I'm Jal Jonner. And you're Kurt Zen. And this is
Nedra--" Zen saw the smile on the face of the craggy man. It was a very
good smile, the best he had ever seen. Then it faded away as he sank
into the deep slumber of exhaustion. He did not even feel Jonner place
Nedra's hand in his as he went to sleep.