Collected Short Fiction, page 501
“Let me out,” he told the sergeant suddenly. “A homeless kid, with that crazy notion about seeing Claypool—we can’t just let her run off in the desert. I’m going to bring her in. I’ll be responsible.”
He rode down around the turn, and on for a mile beyond. He didn’t find the child. Presently he came back to the gate, walking to push the cycle up the grade. The sergeant stood scowling down the empty road.
“Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know.” Ironsmith paused in the gate, to mop dusty sweat off his pink worried face. “But she’s gone.”
“I kept watching the road, and I didn’t see her anywhere.” The sergeant scratched his head, and then automatically set his cap back to the proper angle and checked his buttons and his tie. “A funny thing,” he concluded vehemently.
II.
Dr. Webb Claypool was not an easy man to see—not unless you happened to be a general on a confidential mission, or another distinguished scientist armed with proper credentials from the Security Police. For his own discoveries had made Starmont a guarded arsenal.
Before the Crater Supernova blazed out to dim the stars, five years ago, Claypool had been only a renowned astronomer. Then thirty-five, he was a slight, shy, brown-eyed gnome, wistful with his deep thirst for truth, and already secure in the snug little aristocracy of science. The ascending path of his career looked bright ahead, and Ruth had just forsaken her integrators to marry him.
The new star cut short their honeymoon, and changed everything. Very young and very serious about the rites of life, she had planned the honeymoon. They went to the little coast town where she was born, and that evening they had driven out to an abandoned lighthouse and carried their picnic basket down the cliffs to a narrow scrap of beach beneath.
“That’s the old Dragonrock Light.” They sprawled on their blanket in the dusk, her dark head pillowed on his shoulder. Happily, she was introducing him to her fondest childhood recollections. “Grandfather used to keep it, and sometimes I came—”
Then he saw a faint cold light on the cliffs, and turned his head and found the star. It took his breath, with its hard violet splendor. His memory of that moment was always poignant with the cold sting and salt taste of spray from the breakers, and the sharp smoke of damp driftwood smoldering, and Ruth’s perfume—a heavy scent called Sweet Delirium. He always recalled the blue glitter of the star’s thin light, in her first tears.
Because she cried. She was no astronomer—she knew how to set up and check an electronic integrator, but the Crater Supernova was only a point of light to her. She wanted to show Claypool these places that were hallowed by her childhood, and it hurt her that some silly star should interest him more than the depth of her first tender love.
“But look, darling! A man could wait five hundred years for a chance like this—a supernova in our home Galaxy. Think what it means!”
He tried hard to make her see.
“Think of a star—a great atomic engine! For millions and billions of years it runs, pouring out; its measured energy. Sometimes, adjusting its equilibrium, a star flares up with heat enough to melt its planets, and you have an ordinary nova. But a very few stars go somehow—wrong. Stability fails, altogether. The star explodes into billions of times its normal brightness, and completely changes its state. The thing is an unsolved mystery—as fundamental as the failure of the binding force that lets an atom split.”
The red glow of the fire touched warm glints in her hair, but the thin light of the star was cold on her hurt white face, and it made hard blue diamonds of her tears.
“Please, darling!” He gestured eagerly at the violet star, and saw that his arm cast a hard black shadow from it on her wounded face. Its stellar magnitude, he estimated, must already be nearly minus six!
“I’ve been watching this star, and I’m ready for it,” he told her breathlessly. “I’ve had special equipment ready at Starmont for several years—just in case. It can answer questions for me. It might tell us—anything! So, please, dear—”
She yielded then, as gracefully as she could, to his more urgent passion. They left their basket and their blanket forgotten on the beach, and drove hard across the coastal range to reach Starmont before the star had set. She went with him into the whispering gloom of the observatory, and watched with a hurt wonder as he toiled so frantically to set up his special spectrographs and expose his plates while the seeing lasted.
Claypool’s flash of intuition, when it came, was as dazzling as the supernova’s light. It illumined the cause of that stellar engine’s wreck, and revealed a new geometry of the universe, and showed him a new meaning even in the familiar pattern of the periodic table of the elements.
In his first hot fever of perception, he thought had seen even more. Trembling with a breathless weakness, he dropped and smashed the best set of plates, which clearly showed the rhodomagnetic displacement. He broke his pen, covering yellow pages with frantic symbols. Coatless in a chill blue dawn, he ran out of the observatory and roused Ironsmith to check his work.
For one hour of mad illusion he felt in his grasp the ultimate answer to all the riddles of the universe. He stalked the mountain dawn, hatless and impatient, drunk with the supernal wonder of it—until the young mathematician came cycling after him, grinning cheerily, to point out his staggering error.
For all that humiliating blunder, however, he had learned enough to change history and wreck his stomach and slowly blight his marriage.
For the corrected equation still described a new energy-spectrum. He soon discovered that the elements of the rhodium triad were the key to it, as iron and cobalt and nickel had always been to all the familiar wonders of electromagnetism. He sent a few more problems to the computing section, and evolved the terrible technique of total mass-conversion.
That was five years ago.
Ruth had made and postponed many plans for them to finish that interrupted honeymoon, but he had never found the time to go. Now she never talked about it any more. The Crater Supernova was gone long ago, faded to a telescopic puff of exploding nebular debris, but the cold violet light of it had changed his life. Things were different, now, and Dr. Webb Claypool was a hard man to see.
He was protected from casual callers—from murderous Triplanet agents as well as from barefoot waifs—by an inner fence, with a second guarded gate. That fence surrounded a squat, domed fortress, of gray concrete. Searchlights flooded the fence and the building by night, and armed men watched always from four guard towers.
The Security Police discouraged all talk of the activities inside that fence. Six technicians worked there, under Claypool’s direction. They slept in the building, ate in their own mess hall, and went about by watchful twos. If they ever mentioned their duty there, they called it just “the project.”
Those guarded activities composed a two-layer secret. The flat dome on the surface housed Project Lookout. That installation was known to the general staff and the Defense Authority. It was supported by unlimited sums from unaudited discretionary funds, and shipments of expensive equipment which were dropped from accountability.
Nominally, Project Lookout existed to detect any tests of atomic or mass-conversion weapons, on the neighboring planets or at space. Tiny, rectangular spider webs of redly glowing wire revolved ceaselessly and slowly in huge, squat tubes under the dome, sweeping space. The black-cased directional trackers clucked softly to each detected neutrino, plotting its origin.
Project Lookout was really functional. Claypool himself had designed the search tubes—after the computing section had solved problems enough to predict the rhodomagnetic effects of neutrino decay. Every neutrino that passed those glowing grids printed its own record, and every nuclear reaction within the vast range of the tubes betrayed itself with a spray of those most elusive particles.
The whole search project, however, was intended for a blind. The military satellite stations above the atmosphere were better situated to pick up gamma rays from mass-conversion weapons. “The chief function of Project Lookout was merely to hide the deeper secret of Project Thunderbolt.
Project Thunderbolt was a weapon—of the last, most desperate resort. Only nine men shared its dreadful responsibility. Six were the youthful technicians, physically hard and mentally keen, picked and trained for an appalling duty. The other three were the world president, the defense minister, and Claypool himself.
And Ironsmith?
If that cheerfully indolent mathematician drew any unwise conclusions from the problems brought to the computing section, he kept such thoughts to himself. The Security Police had explored his past, in their routine loyalty-check of the Starmont staff, and found no mark against him. He idled through his work, and idled about the mountain on his rusty cycle; and he didn’t seem to matter.
Project Thunderbolt was hidden underground. The cloakroom behind Claypool’s office in the search building was a disguised elevator. The shaft dropped a hundred feet, to a concrete vault in the heart of the mountain. All the blasting and construction had been done by his own technicians, to maintain security. The launching tube ran up through the search building, masked as a ventilator shaft, and the shining missiles racked beneath it in the vault were the deadliest things that men had ever made.
The day that persistent urchin came, Claypool was working in the machine shop beside the launching station in the vault, alone. The six young men of his staff were trained to set and launch the missiles, and the big sealed safe behind him held all the specifications—lest some Triplanet assassin should succeed—but he had dared trust no other with the full details of war head, drive, and pilot.
Sleek with the clean beauty of precision machinings, the tapered thing before him on the bench was smaller than any of the old atomic weapons. But its war head was calculated to shatter the crust of a planet. Its rhodomagnetic drive could exceed the speed of light.
The relay-grid of the pilot-mechanism invested it with a ruthless mechanical intelligence.
“Please, mister!”
The little girl came timidly out of the automatic elevator, behind him, walking on bare silent feet. One grimy paw was deep in the pocket of her yellow dress. The tattered ribbon in her black hair made a scarlet banner of courage, but her voice was dry with apprehension. “Please—are you Dr. Claypool?” He started with incredulous alarm. His jewelers’ lens fell and clattered with a shocking sound on the steel floor, and rolled through a ladder well down into the power plant on the level below. Not even the staff members were allowed to enter this vault, except on duty. Claypool staggered upright, barking sharply:
“Who let you in?”
By nature he had been a mild and kindly man. He was still a wistful, harmless-seeming little gnome, slight and brown and nearly bald, although acid worry had already etched his features sharp and furrowed them with a perpetual frown. He and Ruth had even dreamed of children, once, before Project Thunderbolt became his jealous mistress.
But he caught his little sleep on a cot beside the launcher, now, and taxed his digestion with a diet of coffee and hurried sandwiches and vitamin pills. Even when he could escape for a visit outside the fence, to the pleasant house in the tall evergreens, that dreadful mistress followed him.
For all security and peace were doomed by the very being of Project Thunderbolt. Power demands its price. The master of such a weapon must be steeled to use it instantly, or else to perish by it. Claypool seldom dared to leave the teleprinters which might bring fearful news from the warning net.
Only in that buried vault could he find a sense of desperate safety, shielded with every possible device, ready to strike back at any aggressor with his planet-smashing missiles. Now the child’s frightened voice had demolished that uncertain security.
“Who let you in?” he rapped again.
His voice went up, too shrill. The shock of this incredible intrusion staggered him with consternation. Sensitive to odors, he caught a penetrating rankness, and he saw the handful of loud yellow-flowered weeds which she clutched in one dirty little fist. He must have made some threatening gesture, for the urchin began to cry.
“Nobody—” She stammered and trembled and gulped. Big tears started down her pinched cheeks, and she dropped the weeds to smear them with her fist. The loud reek of the ragged blooms made Claypool faintly ill. “Please don’t be mad, mister,” she whispered, “ ’cause nobody let me in.”
Claypool had seen Triplanet spies, trapped and waiting for the firing squad. He had nightmares, when he thought Project Thunderbolt had been betrayed. But this shivering, big-eyed waif didn’t look as if she had come to kill him, and he tried to soften his angry, unbelieving voice.
“Then how did you get here?”
“Mr. White sent me.” Shyly, she offered him the gray card. “With this.”
Claypool kicked away the nauseating weeds, and sneezed once to their pollen. Trembling with his own alarm, he took the card from the frightened child. It was grimy with her small fingermarks. Blue printing on it ran:
A. WHITE, PHILOSOPHER
Underneath the name, written in bold blue script, was the word over. He looked on the back of the card, and found a brief, disturbing message:
Dear Claypool:
We share your concern for the safety of these endangered planets, and now we need your help. We have distressing and vital information. Come alone to the old Dragonrock Light, or bring Frank Ironsmith—we trust no one else.
A. White
He heard the child’s bare feet pattering on the steel floor, and looked up in time to see her run back down the dim-lit tunnel, and slip into the elevator. He caught his breath and darted after her, shouting at her to wait. But the automatic door closed in his face, and a green arrow lit to show that the elevator was going up.
Shaken with a cold alarm, Claypool ran to the telephone on. the shop desk, and called the two technicians on duty in the search dome above. They assured him that they had seen no intruders, certainly not a small girl in a yellow dress. But they were waiting, with drawn pistols, when the elevator came to the top of the shaft.
The two young men flung up the cloakroom door, rapped out a warning, and rushed into the little cubicle. It was unmistakably empty. There was nowhere to search, though they shook and prodded the garments on the cloakroom hooks. They found no waif in yellow.
They found nobody at all.
III.
Claypool was a man of reason. He was used to dealing calmly with technological marvels, and he preferred to ignore anything which failed to fit the ordered pattern of physics. He felt no particular wonder at the planet-shattering missiles of Project Thunderbolt, because they were part of that pattern.
But little Dawn Hall didn’t fit.
The grotesque impossibility of her visit left him numb and cold. He restrained himself from starting up the escape ladder beyond the emergency door, and kept his shuddering linger on the elevator button. The laggard cage came back at last, and he went up to find the two puzzled technicians, Armstrong and Dodge, waiting for him in the search building.
“Did you catch her?”
Staring oddly, Armstrong shook his head. “Sir, there has been nobody here.”
The man’s voice was too courteous, too flatly formal, his level gaze too penetrating. Claypool felt a sudden sickness—and sneezed again, from his allergy to those ragged yellow weeds the child had brought. He insisted hoarsely: “Somebody brought that elevator up.
“Sir, nobody went down.” Armstrong kept on staring. “Nobody came up.”
“But she was—down there!” Claypool croaked. These men knew the intolerable strain upon him always. Perhaps it wasn’t strange for them to think that he had cracked. But he insisted flatly: “Armstrong, I’m sane—yet.”
“I hope you are, sir.”
The man’s eyes were bleak, unconvinced.
“We’ve searched the place and phoned the guards,” reported Dodge, equally doubtful. “There is nobody inside the fence, except the staff. Nobody at all has been admitted through our gate, today.” He glanced behind him, uneasily. “But there is one funny item, sir.”
“Eh?” Claypool tried to keep his voice from trembling. “What’s that?”
“It may not mean a thing.” Dodge shrugged, in a taut bewilderment. “But Sergeant Stone, on the outside gate, says he did see a small girl he didn’t recognize—he didn’t notice the color of her dress. She asked for you, and then she talked with Ironsmith. Stone says he didn’t let her in, and he doesn’t know where she went. He says she had a card—”
Claypool caught a grateful breath.
“Here it is!” He displayed the gray card, soiled with small fingermarks. The two men studied it silently, and he saw the dark suspicion fade from Armstrong’s eyes.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Can’t blame you.” Feebly, Claypool answered his apologetic grin. “Now we can get to the problem.”
They all went down again, to search the vault, and found no intruder. The great safe was still intact, plastered with unbroken seals. The long missiles lay safe in the racks. But Claypool triumphantly gathered up the yellow weeds the child had dropped, and sneezed again.
“This math expert?” Dodge was scowling. “How does he come in?”
“We’ll find out.”
Claypool picked up the desk telephone, and told Ironsmith to meet him at the inside gate. They hurried silently up, and out. Alert men in the towers watched them silently. Two guards at the gate waited for each of them to whisper his own code word, and finally let them out.
Ironsmith came down to meet them promptly, riding his rusty cycle and contentedly chewing a cud of gum. He grinned at Claypool, saw the tight faces of the men with him, and sobered suddenly. Claypool greeted him with a hard demand:
“What about this little girl?”
“Who?” Ironsmith stepped off the bicycle, and his gray eyes widened. “Did she come back?”
