12
The incoming shift had a messy clean-up job to do. It was accomplishedonly because security men abruptly took over the work of gang bosses,and all ordinary labor on the Platform was put aside until normaloperations were again possible. Even that would not have been feasiblebut for the walkie-talkies the security men wore. As the situation wassorted out, it was explained to them, and they relayed the news for thesatisfaction of the curiosity of those who worked under them. Nowork--no explanation. It produced immediate and satisfactoryco-operation all around.
There had been four separate and independent attempts to wreck thePlatform at the same time. One was, of course, the plan of thosesympathetic characters who had volunteered to help Mike and his gang winthe status of spacemen by firing the Platform's rockets. There were notmany of them, and they had lost heavily. They'd had thermite bombs todestroy the Platform's vitals. Ultimately the survivors talked freely,if morosely, and that was that.
There had been a particularly ungifted attempt to cause panic in theincoming shift in the rooms where its members were screened beforeadmission to work. Somebody had tried to establish complete confusionthere by firing revolver shots in the crowd, expecting the workers tobreak through to the floor and assigned gentlemen with slabs ofexplosive to get to the Platform with them. The gentlemen with theexplosives had run into Major Holt's security reserve, and they gotnowhere. The creators of panic with revolver shots were finally rescuedfrom their shift-mates and more or less scraped up from thescreening-room floor--they were in very bad shape--and carted off to bepatched up for questioning. The members of this group had beenimpractical idealists, and besides, some of them had lost their nerve,as was evidenced by the discovery of abandoned explosives and detonatorsin the locker room and men's room of the Shed.
The most dangerous attempt was, of course, that perfectly planned andco-ordinated assault which had been merely carried out at its originaltime, without either being hastened or delayed by Mike's activities.That plan had been beautifully contrived, and it would certainly havebeen successful but for the machine-gun bullets from the gallery and thefight Joe's followers put up underneath the Platform.
The exact instant when the whole Shed would be most nearly empty hadbeen fixed upon, and three separate units had worked in perfect timing.There'd been the man in the stalled truck. He'd delayed his exit fromthe Shed to the precise fraction of a second to get the doors open atthe perfect instant. The explosive-laden trucks had raced in at theexact second when they were most certain to get underneath the Platformand detonate their cargoes. There'd been a perfect diversion planned forthat, too. Smoke bombs and explosions in the outgoing screening roomshad created real panic, and but for Joe's order for his group'swalkie-talkies to be turned off would have drawn every security man onduty to that spot.
Mike's trick, then, had brought some saboteurs into the open, but hadmerely happened to coincide with the most dangerous and well-organizedcoup of all. However, it was due to his trick that the Platform was notnow a wreck.
There was also another break that was sheer coincidence. It was adiscovery that could not possibly have turned up save in a situation ofpure chaos artificially induced. Joe had had to react in a personal andvengeful way to the manner in which his especial antagonist had foughthim. One expects a man to fight fair by instinct, and to turn tofouls--if he does--in desperation only. But Joe's personal opponenthadn't tried a single fair trick. It was as if he'd never heard of afist blow, but only of murder and mayhem. Joe felt an individual enmitytoward him.
Joe didn't consider himself the most urgent of the injured, when doctorsand nurses took up the work of patching, but Sally was there to help,and she went deathly pale when she saw his bloodstained throat. Shedragged him quickly to a doctor. And the doctor looked at Joe anddropped everything else.
But it wasn't too serious. The antiseptics hurt, and the stitching wasunpleasant, but Joe was more worried by the knowledge that Sally wasstanding there and suffering for him. When he got up from the emergencyoperating table, the doctor nodded grimly to him.
"That was close!" said the doctor. "Whoever chewed you was working foryour jugular vein, and he was halfway through the wall when he stopped.A fraction of an inch more, and he'd have had you!"
"Thanks," said Joe. His neck felt clumsy with bandages, and when hetried to turn his head the stitches hurt.
Sally's hand trembled in his when she led him away.
"I didn't think I'd ever dislike anybody so much," said Joe angrily, "asI did that man while he was chewing my throat. We were trying to killeach other, of course, but--confound it, people don't bite!"
"Did you--kill him?" asked Sally in a shaky voice. "Not that I'll mind!I would have hated the thought ordinarily, but----"
Joe halted. There was a row of stretchers--not too long, at that--in theemergency-hospital space. He looked down at the unconscious man who'dfought him.
"There he is!" he said irritably. "I banged him pretty hard. I don'tlike to hate anybody, but the way he fought----"
Sally's teeth chattered suddenly. She called to one of the security menstanding guard by the stretchers.
"I--think my--father is going to want to talk to him," she saidunsteadily. "Don't--let him be taken away to the hospital until Dadknows, please."
She started away, her face dead-white and her hand stone-cold.
"What's the matter?" demanded Joe.
"S-sabotage," said Sally in an indescribable tone that had a suggestionof heartbreak.
She went into her father's office alone. She came out again with him,and her father looked completely stricken. Miss Ross, his secretary, waswith him, too. Her face was like a mask of marble. She had always been aplain woman, a gloomy one, a morbid one. But at the new and horriblelook on her face Joe turned his eyes away.
Then Sally was crying beside him, and he put his arm clumsily around herand let her sob on his shoulder, completely puzzled.
He didn't find out until later what the trouble was. The man who'd triedso earnestly to kill him was Miss Ross's fiance. She had met this manduring a vacation, as a government secretary, and he was a refugee withan exotic charm that would have fascinated a much more personable andbeautiful woman than Miss Ross. They had a whirlwind romance. Heconfided to her his terror of emissaries from his native country whomight kill him. And of course she was more fascinated still. When heasked her to marry him she accepted his proposal. Then, just two weeksbefore her assignment to the Space Platform project, he vanished. MissRoss was desperate and lovesick.
One day her telephone rang and his anguished voice told her he'd beenabducted, and if she told the police he would be tortured to death. Hebegged her not to do anything to cause him more torment than was alreadyhis.
She'd been trying to keep him alive ever since. Once, when she couldn'tbring herself to carry out an order she'd been given--with threats oftorment to him if she failed--she'd received a human finger in the mail,and a scrawled and blood-stained note which cried out of unspeakabletorment and begged her not to doom him to more.
So Miss Ross, who was Major Holt's secretary and one of his most trustedassistants, had been giving information to one group of saboteurs allthe while. She was the most dangerous security leak in the wholePlatform project.
But her fiance wasn't a captive. He was the head of that group ofsaboteurs. He'd made love to her and proposed to her merely to prepareher to supply the information he wanted. He needed only to write asufficiently agonized note, or gasp tormented pleas on a telephone, toget what he wanted.
Incidentally, he still had all his fingers when Joe knocked him cold.
Sally had recognized him as the subject of a snapshot she'd once seenMiss Ross crying over. Miss Ross had hidden it hastily and told her itwas someone she had once loved, now dead. And this inadvertentdisclosure that Miss Ross was the security leak the Major had never hada clue to could only have come about through such confusion as Mike hadinstigated and Haney and the Chief and Joe had organized. But Joelearned
those facts only later.
At the moment, there was still the Platform to be gotten aloft. Andthere was plenty of work to do. There were two small rips in theplating, caused by fragments of the exploded truck. There were somebullet holes. The Platform could resist small meteorites at forty-fivemiles a second, but a high-velocity small-arm projectile could punctureit. Those scars of battle had to be welded shut. The rest of thescaffolding had to come down and the rest of the rocket tubes had to beaffixed. And there was cleaning up to be done.
These things occupied the shift that came on at the time of the multiplesabotage assaults. At first the work was ragged. But the policy ofturning the Security men into news broadcasters worked well. After all,the Platform was a construction job and the men who worked on it werenot softies. Most of them had seen men killed before. Before the shiftwas half over, a definite work rhythm was evident. Men had begun to takean even greater pride in the thing they had built, because it had beenassailed and not destroyed. And the job was almost over.
Sally went back to her father's quarters, to try to sleep. Joe stayed inthe Shed. His throat was painful enough so that he didn't want to go tobed until he was genuinely tired, and he was thoroughly wrought up.
Mike the midget had gone peacefully to sleep again, curled up in acorner of the outgoing screening room. His fellow midgets talkedsatisfiedly among themselves. Presently, to show their superiority tomere pitched battles, two of them brought out a miniature pack of cardsand started a card game while they waited for a bus to take them back toBootstrap.
The Chief's Indian associates loafed comfortably while waiting for thesame busses. Later they would put in for overtime--and get it. Haneymourned that he had been remote from the scene of action, and was merelyresponsible for the presence and placing and firing of the machine gunsthat had certainly kept the Platform from being blown up from below.
It seemed that nothing else would happen to bother anybody. But therewas one thing more.
That thing happened just two hours before it was time for the shift tochange once again, and when normal work was back in progress in theShed. Everything seemed fully organized and serene. Everything in theShed had settled down, and nothing had happened outside.
There was ample exterior protection, of course, but the outside-guardsystem hadn't had anything to do for a very long time. Men at radarscreens were bored and sleepy from sheer inactivity and silence. Pilotsin jet planes two miles and five miles and eight miles high had longsince grown weary of the splendid view below them. After all, one canget very used to late, slanting moonlight on cloud masses farunderneath, and bright and hostile-seeming stars overhead.
So the thing was well timed.
A Canadian station noticed the pip on its radar screen first. The radarobserver was puzzled by it. It could have been a meteor, and theCanadian observer at first thought it was. But it wasn't going quitefast enough, and it lasted too long. It was traveling six hundredseventy-two miles an hour, and it was headed due south at sixty thousandfeet. The speed could have been within reason--provided it didn't stayconstant. But it did. There was something traveling south at elevenmiles a minute or better. A mile in five-plus seconds. It didn't slow.It didn't drop.
The Canadian radarman debated painfully. He stopped his companion fromthe reading of a magazine article about chinchilla breeding in the home.He showed him the pip, still headed south and almost at the limit ofthis radar instrument's range. They discussed the thing dubiously. Theydecided to report it.
They had a little trouble getting the call through. The nightlong-distance operators were sleepy. Because of the difficulty of makingthe call, the radarmen became obstinate and insisted on putting itthrough. They reported to Ottawa that some object flying at sixtythousand feet and six hundred seventy-two miles an hour was crossingCanada headed for the United States.
There was a further time loss. Somebody in authority had to be awakened,and somebody had to decide that a further report was justified. Then thetrick had to be accomplished, and a sleepy man in a bathrobe andslippers listened and said sleepily, "Oh, of course you'll tell theAmericans. It's only neighborly!" and padded back to his bed to go tosleep again. Then he waked up suddenly and began to sweat. He'd realizedthat this might be the beginning of atomic war. So he set phone bells tojangling furiously all over Canada, and jet planes began to boom in thedarkness.
But there was only one object in the sky. Over the Dakotas it wenthigher. It went to seventy thousand feet, and then eighty. How this wasmanaged is not completely known, because there are still some details ofthat flight that have never been completely explained. But certainlyjatos flared briefly at some point, and the object reached ninetythousand feet where a jet motor would certainly be useless. And then,almost certainly, rockets flared once more and well south of the Dakotasit started down in a trajectory like that of an artillery shell, butwith considerably higher speed than most artillery shells achieve.
It was at about this time that the siren in the Shed began its choppy,hiccoughing series of warm-up notes. The news from Canada arrived, as amatter of fact, some thirty seconds after the outer-perimeter radarscreen around the Platform gave its warning. Then there was nohesitation or delay at all. Men were already tumbling out of bed atthree airfields, buckling helmets and hoping their oxygen tanks wouldfunction properly. Then the radars atop the Shed itself picked up themoving speck. And small blue-white flames began to rise from the groundand go streaking away in the darkness in astonishing numbers.
The covers of the guns at the top of the Shed slid aside. Miles away,jet planes shot skyward, and newly wakened pilots looked at theirnight-fighting instruments and swore unbelievingly at the speed theywere told the plunging object was making. The jet pilots gave theirmotors everything they could take, but it didn't look good.
The planes of the jet umbrella over the Shed stopped cruising andsprinted. And they were the only ones likely to get in front of theobject in time.
Inside the Shed, the siren howled dismally and all the Security men weresnapping: "Radar alarm! All out! Radar alarm! All out!"
And men were moving fast, too. Some came down from the Platform onhoists, dropping with reckless speed to the floor level. Some didn'twait for a turn at that. They slid down one upright, swung around thecrosspiece on the level below, and slid down another vertical pipe. Fora minute or more it looked as if the scaffolds oozed black dropletswhich slid down its pipes. But the drops were men. The floor becamespeckled and spotted with dots running for its exits.
The siren ceased its wailing and its noise went down and down in pitchuntil it was a baritone moan that dropped to bass and ceased. Then therewas no sound but the men moving to get out of the Shed. There weretrucks, too. Those that had been loading with dismantled scaffoldingroared for the doors to get out and away. Some men jumped on board asthey passed. The exit doors swung up to let them go.
But it was very quiet in the Shed, at that. There was no noise but a fewfleeing trucks, and the murmur which was the voices of the Security menhurrying the work crew out. There was less to hear than went onordinarily. And it was a long distance across the floor of the Shed.
Joe stood with his fists clenched absurdly. This could only be an airattack. An air attack could only mean an atom-bomb attack. And if therewas an atom bomb dropped on the Shed, there'd be no use getting outside.It wouldn't be merely a fission bomb. It would be a hell bomb--a bombwhich used the kind of bomb that shattered Hiroshima only as a primerfor the real explosive. Nobody could hope to get beyond the radius ofits destruction before it hit!
Joe heard himself raging. He'd thought of Sally. She'd be in the rangeof annihilation, too. And Joe knew such fury and hatred--because ofSally--that he forgot everything else.
He didn't run. He couldn't escape. He couldn't fight back. But becausehe hated, he had to do something to defy.
He found himself moving toward the Platform, his jaws clenched. It waspure, blind, instinctive defiance.
He was not the only one to have that reac
tion. Men running toward thesidewall exits began to get out of breath from their running. Theyslowed. Presently they stopped. They scowled and raged, like Joe. Someof them looked with burning eyes up at the roof of the Shed, thoughtheir thoughts went on beyond it. The security guards repeated, "Radaralarm! All out! Radar alarm! All out!"
Someone snarled, "Nuts to that!"
Joe saw a man walking in the same direction as himself. He was walkingdeliberately back to the Platform. Somebody else was headed back too....
Very peculiarly, almost all the men on the floor had ceased to run. Theybegan to gather in little groups. They knew flight was useless. Theytalked briefly. Profanely. Here and there men started disgustedly backtoward the Platform. Their lips moved in expressions of furious scorn.Their scorn was of themselves.
There was a gathering of men about the base of the framework that stillpartly veiled the Platform. They tended to face outward, angrily, and toclench their fists.
Then somebody started an engine. A man began to climb furiously back towhere he had been at work. Quite unreasonably, other men followed him.
Hammers began defiantly and enragedly to sound.
The work crew in the Shed went defiantly and furiously back to work. Aclamor was set up that was almost the normal working noise. It was theonly possible way in which those men could express the raging contemptthey felt for those who would destroy the thing they worked on.
But there were some other men who could do more. There were three levelsof jet planes above the Shed, and they could dive. The highest one gotfirst to the line along which the missile from an unknown place wasplunging toward the Shed. That plane steadied on a collision course andlet go its wing load of rockets. It peeled off and got out of the way.Seconds later the others from the jet umbrella were arriving. A tinyspray of proximity-fused rockets blazed furiously toward the invisiblething from the heights.
Other planes and yet others came hurtling to the line their radarsbriskly computed for them. There were more rockets....
The black-painted thing with more than the speed of an artillery shellplunged into a miniature hail of rockets. They flamed viciously. Half adozen--a dozen--explosions that were pure futility.
Then there was an explosion that was not. Nobody saw it, because itspuny detonation was instantly wiped out in a blaze of such incredibleincandescence that the aluminum paint on jet planes still miles away wasscorched and blistered instantly. The light of that flare was seen forhundreds of miles. The sound--later on--was heard farther still. And thedesert vegetation miles below the hell bomb showed signs of searing whenthe morning came.
But the thing from the north was vaporized, utterly, some forty-fivemiles from its target. The damage it did was negligible.
The work on the preparation for the Platform's take-off went on. Whenthe all-clear signal sounded inside the Shed, nobody paid any attention.They were too busy.