Collected Short Fiction, page 524
The hot spot from the testing flash was not too hot. He didn’t misjudge distance or velocity too badly. He kept the spinning seetee mass from collision with his body or any terrene part of the bull, and maneuvered it into the seetee bin ahead of the lead shield and the bedplates that joined the unlike parts of the machine. Triumphantly, he looked at the scales . . . Nearly two tons of mass—only eight more to go.
He glanced at the pale green glow of the instruments. Thirteen-two, Mandate time. He still had six hours. He got his bearings from the familiar stars, careful not to blind himself with the small hot disk of the sun, and swung the bull back toward the vanishing wink of the marker.
“Nick Jenkins!”
His lean frame stiffened in the bulky armor. The faint susurration of the air jet hadn’t changed, but suddenly it seemed to speak to him with the gentle drawl of Captain Rob McGee.
“Get me, Nick?” he thought McGee was whispering. “Then don’t wait to load the bull. Come on back—ready for trouble!”
“Trouble?”
For one startled instant, Jenkins thought McGee had really spoken. A loyal friend and assistant of old Jim Drake, that squat little asterite ferried supplies to Freedonia from Pallasport and Obania. Jenkins first thought his rusty tug must be near, his voice coming on a photophone beam.
But the helmet amplifier, Jenkins recalled, was turned of?—he had got tired of hearing the recorded drone of the Freedonia beacon. Grinning at himself, he leaned to watch the scope again. He started whistling in the helmet, tunelessly, to drown the hissing of the jet.
“Get me?” He thought he heard the urgent drawl of Rob McGee again, and his mind could see the square, plain-featured face of the odd little spaceman, the squinted eyes dark and frightened. “Come back, Nick!”
Jenkins blinked, and whistled louder. He had ridden the bull too far, perhaps, and worked too long beside the slumbering fury of the drift. Perhaps he ought to ask for leave. He didn’t like to take advantage of his kinship to Martin Brand, but seetee demanded sane men to work it.
“This is real, Nick,” the jet insisted. “Listen to me.”
Jenkins listened, uncomfortably. He had heard his fellow engineers say that Rob McGee was—different. The short little spaceman’s parents had both survived a disaster in the drift, so the rumors went, their germ-plasm altered by the radiations. Their child, so the story went, was not quite human.
McGee, men whispered, was a mutant—nature’s first groping effort, possibly, to shape a new human type to fit the new environment of space. Jenkins had come with him to Freedonia on the rusty Good-by Jane, and knew he had an uncanny grasp of time and distance and velocity.
“We need you, Nick!” The drawl in the jet seemed somehow heavy, choked, slow. “For something’s wrong. I tried to get away to space, to call a warning to Mr. Brand, but now I’m blacking out.”
“Huh?” Jenkins sat tense in the cramping stiffness of his armor, and he couldn’t stop his gasping whisper. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t quite know.” The faint words seemed laborious, and very slow. “I can feel some things that other men can’t—a Martian psychologist once told me that I’ve a different kind of psi capacity. But there are limits—”
Jenkins was listening desperately now, but that vocal quality seemed to vanish from the hissing of the jet, as if the brain of Rob McGee were slipping into darkness. For a time there was only the fluttering sigh of the regulator valve. Then, with no change in the sound, it seemed to speak again.
“. . . hard to see what hasn’t happened.” McGee seemed to gasp. “And I’m already blacking out. Can’t reach you long. But I get the feel of danger—the feel of a seetee blast, that none of us can stop. The feel of treason . . . in a man . . . we trusted—”
The ebbing voice was gone.
“No!” Jenkins whispered hoarsely. “Which one of us would betray Freedonia?”
But the jet was merely sighing now, a tiny thread of sound spun through the silent infinity of space. The troubled face of little Rob McGee had vanished from his mind, and he saw two faint pips flash across the scope as he turned the bull. More metal—but the frantic urgency of that queer warning still gripped him.
Cold with alarm, his armored hands swung the bull toward where Freedonia should be. One dim atom, ten thousand kilometers away, the tiny asteroid was lost in the dust of stars. He snapped on the amplifier and swung the photophone mirror, searching for the beacon.
“Freedonia beam!” His searching reflector caught the modulated beam, and the recorded signal made a hollow roaring in his helmet. “HSM T-89-AH-44.”
Startled by that sudden blast of sound, Jenkins moved his hand to turn off the amplifier. For that harsh boom had drowned the quiet whisper of the jet, and it shattered his conviction that McGee-had really called him. He was a spatial engineer, not a parapsychologist; he had always doubted the rumors of McGee’s odd gifts.
“Time to ask for leave,” he muttered wearily, before he remembered not to talk to himself. Old Jim Drake would understand, for other men had gone rock happy. Even Jean Lazarene, the brilliant, emotionless Earthman in charge of the special shop, had broken months ago and come back undisgraced.
“My turn next,” he thought. “When the jets starts telling such tales as that!”
His hand was on the switch. “HSM T-89-AK-44!” the signal roared reassuringly. “Freed—” The signal stopped.
“Huh!” He caught his breath—for he hadn’t turned the switch. Puzzled, he swung the mirror to search again. Nothing. He turned up the amplifier until the whisper of stray starlight became throbbing thunder in the helmet. Nothing, still.
“So the beacon’s off?” he muttered huskily. “So there is trouble—and somebody has turned it off, to keep me from getting back to help!” He swallowed at the sudden dry feeling in his throat. “Who is the traitor, Captain McGee?”
But the amplifier merely rumbled with the voiceless crash of starlight. He snapped it off impatiently. At first the dead silence of space seemed absolute, and then his straining ears caught the breathing of the jet.
“Captain McGee!” he gasped frantically. “Can you talk—?”
But the hissing jet had no more words.
Cold panic clutched his throat, for he needed that beacon. McGee, he knew, was oddly at home in space. The rumors said he had an extrasensory perception for time and mass and distance and motion. But Jenkins was no mutant, evolved for space. He had to rely on his awkward instruments and his feeble physical senses, and the frown of implacable infinity frightened and confused him now.
The diamond stars withdrew from him, remotely cold. The friendly constellations shattered into alien strangeness. The cruel blue eye of the diminished sun stared blindly from the wrong position. Dead ahead of the bull, where Freedonia should have been, another Drake blinker flashed its deadly warning.
No, the marker had to be the same. He counted seconds, desperately, as the colored points burned, to reassure himself. Four, three, and five. He fought his panic, and found the guiding pattern of the constellations. He put the sun back where it should be, and turned the bull away from the deadly heart of the seetee swarm.
Freedonia was too far for the scope to show it, too faint for his eyes to pick it up. He thought it ought to be somewhere north, and he drove the bull that way, thrusting on the wheel to turn all the silent power of the pile into the paragravity drive units behind them. Searching the frozen glitter of the far star clouds, he envied the rumored extrasensory perceptions of little Rob McGee.
Earth-born, Jenkins was no mutant spaceman. His body and his senses were designed for a kindlier world, but he was still a spatial engineer. He tried to keep his head. He used his clumsy instruments, and made his feeble senses serve.
He drove the bull toward Polaris, searching Ursa Minor, hopefully watching the scope. Ghostly pips shone and vanished—for Freedonia was circled with a million deadly moonlets; Drake had manipulated its paragravity field to capture clouds of seetee meteors for a reserve of metal and fuel and a barrier to intruders.
When his rough dead reckoning told him Freedonia should be within a few thousand kilometers, he deliberately slowed the bull. No, panic screamed. Try that faint spark—or that! But those stars, sanity whispered, beckoning him to death.
He swung the bull in a wide slow circle, searching. He had to find Freedonia, because he had no supplies or charts or instruments or even power enough for a long spatial voyage. He had to find it soon, because McGee’s appeal had left him little time for blundering. At last he saw one pale point that crept across the rest, but that brought him small elation.
That moving speck might be Freedonia, a thousand kilometers away. More likely it was a lethal fragment of the drift, perilously near. His dull senses couldn’t tell him, but he presently found it in the scope, with a secondary pip on the distance scale at eight hundred kilometers.
It had to be Freedonia; he could have hailed it, then, with his own photophone beam—if he had dared show a light. But he had no weapon. Not even a magazine of seetee pellets for the testing gun. Surprise would be his only advantage.
He pushed the bull to full acceleration for three hundred kilometers, then to full deceleration. At two hundred kilometers he occulted Polaris with the rock, to start picking his way through the triple shell of satellite mines that Drake had placed for an inner defense.
Freedonia was swelling at last, when he came inside the mines, to a jagged black cube of fractured iron, rolling slowly against the blacker void. The “twin beacon lights on their spidery towers at the two poles were still extinct, and he saw no movement anywhere.
He found McGee’s old tug, Good-by Jane, standing like an upended ingot of rusty steel on the narrow spaceport. It showed no signals. Nothing moved about the white-painted warehouses beyond it. He looked anxiously for the green light that always burned above the living-tunnel cut in a black iron cliff, but even that was dark. Panic took hold of him.
He didn’t try to land on the field, for the bull was not designed for that. He lifted it to another dark face of the angular planetoid, and dropped it beside a slender steel tower that crowned a high iron point. Carefully, he nosed it down into an iron-lipped fissure. The slightest error, here, could graze terrene iron with the seetee ore bin, disastrously. The breath of Jenkins stopped, but he kept, his lean hands steady on the wheel.
He slipped the bull at last into its fitted berth above the seetee ore chutes, and secured it with the paragravity anchor. He quenched the pile, and fumbled with numb fingers to unlock the clamps that held his armor to the seat. Stiffly, he clambered off the machine.
He tried to flex his weary body, and seized a heavy wrench from the tool box on the machine, the handiest weapon he could see. Clutching that in one clumsy glove, he reached with the other for the controls at his waist. He drove the dirigible armor down a dim corridor into the contraterrene machine shop, in search of the unknown enemy.
IV.
The shop was a cavernous gallery, cut into the iron mass of Freedonia. A glare of cold light from high fixtures fell upon an endless row of massive dark machines. Before the machines was a tall barrier of steel mesh, hung with red-lettered luminous warning signs:
Keep Off!
SEETEE!
Jenkins dropped his paragravity: driven armor to the walk outside the railing. He clutched his clumsy club, peering into the shadowy vastness beyond. He tried to listen, with an Earthman’s reflex, and the eerie silence almost frightened him.
For the shop was running.
Beyond that dark barrier, an endless floor of untouchable contraterrene iron rested on a dim forest of wide-flanged bedplates. At the end of the shop, below the ore bins beneath the chute where he had berthed the seetee bull, untouchable ingots of seetee iron came glowing from a huge automatic induction furnace which was also untouchable.
Untouchable hammers shaped those ingots—striking in a dead silence that gave them a curious illusion of unreality. Untouchable lathes sliced off untouchable turnings. Untouchable machines finished untouchable machinings and placed them upon a crawling assembly line.
The assembled devices, however, which an automatic crane lifted from the end of the_ assembly line, were not wholly untouchable. They were new bedplates, shaped like immense inverted mushrooms.
Cased with terrene iron, the circular crowns could be anchored to terrene foundations. Interlocked within them were terrene plates and seetee counter-plates, unlike surfaces with invisible clearances held apart by surface fields of permanent negative paragravity. The upright seetee stalks, untouchable, could support more contraterrene machines.
Jenkins gasped with relief, to discover the shop still running normally. Nobody was in sight from where he stood, but these machines were designed to run with little attention. He tried to grin at his haunting unease.
“Just rock happy, like Lazarene was,” he muttered wearily. “Probably nothing really wrong. Maybe that beacon just burned out, and everybody‘s too busy setting up the machines in Lazarene’s special shop to notice the trouble. Guess I just imagined McGee’s voice in the jet. S’pose I had better ask Drake for a few months off—”
His breath caught. He was watching the automatic crane carrying the newest bedplate from the assembly line to its cradle on a waiting rail car. The car, he saw, was already loaded with twelve new bedplates—with no room for another.
Breathless, he waited for somebody to start the tiny electric locomotive and spot another car. But nobody did. He waited, shivering, for the crane and the whole assembly line to stop—for the relays in the automatic control board were set to stop everything when a car was loaded, until the crew had placed another car and pressed a signal button.
But some relay must have stuck.
Nightmarish horror fell upon Jenkins, when he saw what was happening. The crane was lowering that last bedplate toward the loaded car. The terrene crown of it would touch the seetee stalk of the one beneath—and the first slight reaction, warping unlike plates into contact, would be a fuse to detonate all Freedonia.
For a long heartbeat he stood rooted, numbed with terror. Why didn’t somebody see that cataclysm in the making, and pull the safety switch? Where was everybody, anyhow? Why didn’t—He swallowed hard, and moved.
He snapped on his helmet photophone, tilting his head to turn the dim red monochromatic beam toward the control station high at the end of that long iron gallery, almost above that automatic crane and its lethal burden. Young Rick Drake, he knew, should be on duty now.
“Rick!” he shouted hoarsely. “Stop that crane!”
He could see the pink flicker of the modulated beam on the dark iron wall behind the high platform, but no light answered him. The crane didn’t stop.
“Wake up, Rick!” he gasped. “What’s wrong?”
But he wasn’t waiting for Rick Drake’s answer. His taut fingers gripped the studs to drive his dirigible suit down the long gallery and lift him to the railed platform. Drake’s huge body was slumped against the long control board, held half upright by the stiffness of his armor—but Jenkins had no time for Drake.
For the crane was moving fast.
Jenkins snatched the red-lit emergency switch, yanked hard. And he was still alive. For a breathless, shuddering second, that was all he knew. Then he saw that the shop was stopping.
The silent hammers ceased their eerie rise and fall. The untouchable tools were still, and the assembly line ceased moving. The automatic crane halted with its lethal burden, suspending cataclysm.
Trembling with his own reaction, Jenkins turned anxiously to Rick Drake. That tall young engineer sagged lifelessly, supported only by the unyielding fabric. His red-haired head lolled inside the bubble of the helmet, skin pale, mouth yawning, sightless eyes dilated.
Jenkins touched him, and that toppled his heavy body off the little stool. Jenkins caught him, and laid him on the railed platform. He lifted Drake’s helmet to touch his own, shouting hoarsely:
“Rick, what happened to you?”
The body sagged loosely, as if still warm. He thought the white lips moved a little, thought he heard a sighing breath. But the lips didn’t speak, or the blank eyes focus.
What had happened to Freedonia?
He laid the unconscious man back on the platform, and straightened to face that monstrous problem. Why was the beacon dark? Why the whole rock so apparently deserted? What had struck Rick Drake down?
Shivering, Jenkins glanced at the bedplate beneath him, hanging from that automatic crane. Was that neardisaster freakish accident—or deliberate sabotage?
A quick examination of the maze of cables and relays beneath the control panels showed no cut wires. Stepping off the platform into emptiness, he checked his fall with the thrust unit behind his shoulders, and drove silently down a dark connecting tunnel into the generator room.
That room was another vast cavern hidden beneath the iron crags, and the unfinished machine inside it was the urgent goal of all the effort on the rock. Jenkins landed the small ship of his armor on another railed platform, high beside the reaction chamber. He peered around that gloomy chasm with puzzled, frightened eyes.
The reaction chamber beneath him was made in two huge hemispheres, held together and apart by scores of disk-shaped bedplates. The lower half was terrene steel, cadmium-shielded. Steel railings guarded the bright, harmless-seeming metal of the upper dome, and red signs warned that it was untouchable seetee. Other barriers, higher, surrounded the untouchable milling machines and separators and conveyors and metering injectors.
For one instant, as Jenkins came to rest on the control station, his mind could see the generator finished and running. Those bright machines were operating silently, and the injection fields forced a measured stream of refined contraterrene dust into the reaction chamber.
Touchable terrene machines, clustered around the terrene section of the chamber beneath him, were grinding and refining the terrene fuel. A terrene injector jetted terrene dust to meet the seetee jet and cancel its unlike atoms into intolerable radiation.
