Collected Short Fiction, page 525
Pure fury!
That reaction would be more savagely hot than the sun’s atomic fire. No possible material could contain it, but the spatial engineers had forged a chain to bind its ultimate energy. Levin, a century ago, had first attempted to replace the heavy shielding of a ship’s power pile with a paragravity field intense enough to bend the escaping rays and particles into harmless circles. Levin died of radiation burns when his pile blew up, but Dahlberg, twenty years later, found a way to dispose safely of the accumulating energy. He oscillated the special field inside a coil, inducing a secondary magnetic field which converted the savage violence of decaying mesons and trapped photons into useful electricity.
The Levin-Dahlberg field thus had finally subdued the sullen power of atomic fission. It made possible such compact and almost safe atomic power piles as drove the seetee bull. And it could contain and transform the vaster might of seetee.
For a moment Jenkins saw the shining coils of gray-white condulloy already installed inside that vast reaction chamber—the coils had to be made of that precious superconductor, because the river of induced energy from that conversion field would vaporize any common metal.
His mind could see the serpentine gleam of the condulloy cables that would carry that monstrous current to the Brand transmitter already half installed above, in the thin steel tower already built on the highest crag of Freedonia. His engineer’s bold imagination, for that moment, could picture that boundless torrent of energy flowing, building up the power-field that would serve all the needs of all the men who wished to tap it anywhere.
But the moment passed.
The generator and the Brand transmitter were not complete. Eighty tons of condulloy were needed, and that new alloy of rare isotopes was worth two dollars a gram. The cost evidently puzzled the financial genius of Martin Brand himself, for Jenkins knew that old Jim Drake had asked for the metal two months ago.
The moment passed, and Jenkins searched the shadowy cavern before him for any signs of trouble. The railed machines were still. He saw no armor moving, and saw no hint of any sabotage. But Paul Anders, he knew, should be at work here.
He found the studs again, to lift his bulky suit from that high platform and drop it to the terrene iron of the floor. He found Anders there, lying beneath the terrene cup of the reaction chamber. A roll of blueprints lay near his armored hand, the wiring diagram of the Levin-Dahlberg coils.
Jenkins moved the lean Earthman to where the light was better. The long body was as pallidly lifeless as Rick Drake’s had been, the head rolling limply in the helmet, the distended eyes unseeing.
What had struck these two men down?
A glance showed Jenkins that the armor was still intact, as Drake’s had been. Air pressure and humidity and temperature were normal, oxygen and carbon dioxide and helium readings correct. No blood was visible, or any other sign of sudden violence.
Was it radiation illness?
Starting to a bleak recollection of McGee’s telepathic warning of a seetee blast—if that queer experience had really been telepathy—Jenkins bent stiffly to study the tiny geiger on the limp man’s wrist.
The face of it flashed green once, and again, as he peered at it, showing occasional penetrating particles or photons too infrequent to be deadly. The counter needle, measuring the total accumulated exposure, was still on the white section of the scale—far from the orange that meant caution, the red that was danger, and the black that spelled death.
No, this wasn’t seetee shock.
Some epidemic, perhaps?
Jenkins had taken four semesters of spatial medicine, but he could think of no disease which this might be. The living quarters, although somewhat cramped, were antiseptically sanitary. The two men must have been feeling fit when they came to work. They must have been stricken with inexplicable quickness—or else Rick Drake would have stopped the seetee shop.
Poison?
When all the planets were almost at war over the vanishing reserves of uranium and thorium, the contraterrene technology might seem an imperial prize. Jenkins could imagine desperate men—agents from Venus or Mars or the Jovian Soviet or even Interplanet—ready enough to murder twenty men for control of Freedonia.
He bent again to lift the stiff-clad arm of Anders, to peer again into the transparent helmet. There was no hint of rigor mortis. He could feel no pulse through the heavy sleeve, but the flesh seemed warm and elastic. He saw a slow breath-movement.
The man was still alive—but he wouldn’t be, if that automatic crane had finished its last trip. Shivering, Jenkins searched the shadows beneath the bulging reaction chamber. Shapeless danger peered out of the clots of darkness there, retreating as he strode forward. He followed leering peril around that dim, vast room, and upward again, beyond those railed untouchable machines.
The dirigible suit lifted him up out of the generator room, through one of the wide, insulated conduits where a condulloy cable was to run. He found nothing moving about the naked steel girders of the transmitter tower on the summit above, and no other victim.
Anxiously, he started toward the tunnel dwelling.
“Wait!” whispered terror, with the air jet’s voice. “Try Lazarene’s special shop—that’s where the danger is!”
His taut body felt clammy in the armor. Sweat of fear was cold on his face, as he soared northward from the tower to another fractured face of Freedonia. For he had never liked the sallow-faced, metalvoiced engineer from Earth who called himself Jean Lazarene, and he had been appalled when old Jim Drake told him the actual purpose of the special shop.
“Seetee weapons!” he had gasped. “What’s the need of them?”
“Freedonia has become a valuable prize.” Drake’s deep voice was a solemn rumble, and his faded eyes were grave. “Your uncle says there are men who would seize our plant and misuse it for military purposes. He feels that our efforts at secrecy aren’t enough, and he wants us to develop a missile for defense—a light, self-guided missile with a seetee war head.”
“But don’t we have the protection of the Mandate government?” Jenkins ventured a respectful protest. “Besides those clouds of drift—arid the spatial mines!”
Old Drake nodded his roan head, wearily.
“But your uncle says that isn’t enough. He’s afraid of spies. He says the Mandate is a very feeble device, that any planet could upset. He insists that we develop a missile, and he asked me to put you in charge of the project.”
“Huh!” Jenkins caught his breath, and shook his head decisively. “No,” he said, “I’m more interested in the useful phases of seetee. I don’t like the idea of seetee weapons, and I’d rather run the bull. I wish you’d find another man.”
“I don’t want any seetee war,” Drake’s troubled voice assured him. “We’ll develop nothing larger than we need to defend Freedonia.” The old engineer shook his head. “Your uncle will be disappointed.”
But Jenkins still wanted nothing to do with seetee missiles, and he kept his job on the bull. It was the lean Earthman, Lazarene, just back from leave, who was finally put in charge of the special shop.
Now, at the bottom of the jagged chasm that concealed the entrance to that arsenal, Jenkins dropped into darkness. Reluctant to betray himself with the helmet light, he groped his way into the iron-walled gallery—and stumbled over something stiffly yielding.
He staggered-back, shaken. His groping glove found the light switch inside the entrance. He snapped on the lights, stooping apprehensively. His peering eyes swept the whole long shop, and saw no hostile movement. Swallowing hard, he looked down at what his booted feet had struck.
Three men, armored in white.
Jenkins bent awkwardly, to see the pale heads lolling in their helmets. The stout man was Feinberg, the blond man Hanson, the short man Ching. They were all engineers who had been assigned to Lazarene’s crew. Their limp bodies lay in a neat row against the iron wall, as if dragged there.
Jenkins lifted his armor to soar on past than. Shivering, he searched that long iron gallery again. Here were more railed, untouchable machines, all still. He lifted himself to the elevated control station, looking for Lazarene. The railed platform was empty.
Still bewildered, he saw no answer to the silent riddle of the rock—until he turned his flying armor back toward the doorway, and saw the empty spaces where machines had stood and the empty racks, against the dark iron walls, where the finished missiles had been stored.
Empty racks!
The meaning of that caught the back of his neck, and shook him with a breathless weakness. He dropped to look for other clues, and found the discarded loading hooks that men in powered armor had used to lift the crated missiles. He found widespaced parallel scratches, where the flanges of a paragravity conveyor tube had scraped the floor. Finally, in the dark bottom of the iron chasm outside he found a heavy missile, still in its battered aluminum launching tube, where hurried men had dropped it and left it.
Jenkins straightened over that long bright case, staring blankly at the patch of stars visible above the dark iron rim. The stars of splendid Orion—but he saw only unthinkable disaster.
“They can’t”—he gasped unbelievingly—“rob the arsenal . . . whoever they are—”
“But they’ve done it,” his staggered awareness whispered in the air jet. “Very neatly, too. They must have brought a ship here, through the mines and the drift—with some traitor to show them the way. They knocked out the loyal men—somehow. Turned off the beacon, loaded their loot, and. got away!”
“But they mustn’t—” Jenkins muttered.
He stiffened abruptly. Perhaps he could stop them! For he had seen the beacon go off, not three hours ago—and they must have been an hour or longer loading those missiles and machines, even with modern paragravity conveyors. They couldn’t get away fast, through the mines and the drift. Still they might be near.
“At least,” he whispered, “I can try!”
He hurtled out of that narrow pit, soaring around Freedonia to the berth where he had left the seetee bull. That clumsy machine wasn’t designed for a weapon, but it might do. The scope might find the escaping raiders, if they were near enough. The low-powered drive might overtake them, if they were slow enough. The tons of seetee metal in the bedplates and ore bin made a war head big enough to smash any ship—almost, to crack a planet.
Jenkins wasn’t anxious to die as a suicide pilot. Perhaps he could aim the bull like a missile, and then slip off in his armor. But that unknown raider mustn’t get away. Its cargo was the end of the Mandate, the beginning of a new Spatial War, and ruin and oppression and death for all the planets but one.
If his life should be the price—
That unpleasant question didn’t need decision yet, Jenkins told himself hopefully. First he had to find that departing craft, and then overtake it. He dropped past the unfinished transmitter tower, into the dim gallery where the seetee bull was berthed.
The quenched pile warmed while he clapped his armor to the cold metal seat. He gripped the wheel, watching the instruments, waiting for the wavering needles to steady. He tried to quiet his nerves, for the delicate task of backing out the bull.
He caught his breath, and reached to release the anchor—
Freedonia shuddered.
No sound struck him, for there was no air. But the iron rock shivered, and the heavy machine trembled under him. A terrible light flashed against the iron lip of the fissure above him, so bright that it wiped away all color.
Jenkins was blinded for an instant. The trembling of the asteroid ceased, and there was still no sound. In a moment he could see color—and the color he saw was the dreadful color of death. He saw all around him a pale, vanishing glow of blue.
He knew the meaning of that, even before he looked at his geiger.
The alarm of that tiny instrument was purring urgently against his wrist. The face of it was flickering with warning scarlet. He raised his wrist stiffly, to see the counter needle. It crept out of the red sector on the dial, even as he looked.
It crawled into the black.
“You’ve had it, Nick Jenkins,” sighed the air jet beneath his jaw. “You don’t have to go out looking for any chances to barter off your life. Because those raiders got you—whoever they are. Because you’re going to die, Jenkins—of seetee shock!”
V.
He was going to die. Jenkins sat stiffly on the hard seat of the bull, staring at that fact without belief or understanding. It couldn’t really be, he tried to tell himself. The flickering geiger must be lying, for he still felt quite well.
“Don’t try to kid yourself, Nick Jenkins,” the air jet whispered, with his own stunned awareness. “You know too much spatial medicine for that. These geigers are accurate—and that much hard radiation kills you as dead as a bullet through the head.
“It only takes longer to die.”
He shook his head blankly in the helmet, too dazed to realize anything. The geiger stopped vibrating abruptly, as the tiny alarm spring ran down. Mechanically he wound it again with his stiff gloves, and set the needle back to zero.
“That won’t help you, Jenkins,” jeered the jet. “You can’t turn back the radiation sickness in you. The men escaping in that ship have already murdered you—and Freedonia!”
The harsh impact of that loosed furious purpose in the blank void of his despair. He stiffened his shoulders and crouched to check the instruments and reached again to release the anchor. For he wasn’t dead yet.
He slipped the bulky machine out of its berth. He backed it carefully out of the iron-walled fissure. The seetee bin didn’t touch anything terrene, but the reset geiger on his wrist began to purr again as the bull rose into the open. In a moment he saw the cause, and shivered again.
He saw a vast new crater bitten into iron Freedonia, where the seetee shot had struck. The ragged metal ridges and summits around it, riven and twisted from the monstrous fury of the blast, still glowed evilly red. The flattened floor blazed with a white incandescence.
Arid the counter needle, already climbing into the orange sector on the face of the geiger, warned Jenkins that a silent storm of secondary radiations was raging about him. The incalculable energy of that primary blast had formed countless tons of radioactive isotopes in the rock. All Freedonia was poisoned, deadly now.
Instinctively he pushed hard on the wheel, to drive the bull away from that ugly glow of that cancer in the rock.
“What’s your hurry, Jenkins?” mocked the whisper of the jet. “A few more rays can’t kill you any deader.”
He grinned feebly at himself, and tried to swallow the bitter dryness in his throat. Looking back to study that glowing pit again, he decided the seetee shot must have come from the south. He swung the bull toward faint Octans, and bent to watch the scope.
A white pip showed!
An object at four hundred kilometers. It must be the raider—already beyond the triple shell of spatial mines. He centered it in the scope, and thrust the bull to full acceleration. Still the pip on the distance scale crawled farther out.
Five hundred kilometers, and six.
Octans, Jenkins knew, marked the safest passage through the drift beyond the mines. The pilot of the raider was clearly certain of his way. Who could he be?”
Jenkins pondered that, bitterly. One of his twenty-odd fellow engineers had obviously betrayed the great dream of Brand and Drake—but which could be guilty? What manner of man could pretend to share the perilous struggle to tame seetee, and turn traitor to his comrades and their goal?
He couldn’t quite imagine.
The distance pip reached eight hundred kilometers. He knew the chase was hopeless, yet he kept on until the nausea hit him—the first warning effect of that terrible energy which had burned through his body.
Gray illness fell upon him. His body tensed and shuddered. An icy sweat dissolved his strength, and turned his sick body clammy in the armor. The bull seemed to rock and pitch and drop beneath him, until he was utterly lost in the world.
The nausea ebbed at last. His knotted stomach relaxed. He tried to swallow the choking constriction in his throat, and straightened his quivering body weakly. He searched the constellations and found himself again—but the faint spark of the fleeing ship in Octans had vanished from the scope.
Laboriously, he swung the bull back toward the poisoned planetoid. A black depression followed him. The fact of his own sure death was still remote, half unreal. The thing that shocked and sickened him, with a sense of loss more painful than any personal blow, was the murder of the dream that he had helped to build.
For the Brand transmitter was to have been a wondrous new heart for human civilization, pumping out the energy that was ultimately life. All the planets were sick for power; most human ills, he thought, were merely symptoms of that sickness. Contraterrene energy could have cured them.
The new crater glared at him, as he came back to land. The heat of it was cooling swiftly. The cragged rim was already black. Only the pit still glowed, a solitary eye of brooding, scarlet hate.
The alarm of his geiger purred again, for those new isotopes in the rock still glowed with more deadly rays than heat, and they would for months and years. All Freedonia was forbidden, now, radiant with energies too powerful for human bodies to endure.
His fellow engineers; Jenkins knew, must have died with their dream. For the seetee shot had been accurately placed in the center of a rough triangle, between the unfinished generator and the living quarters and the special shop. Nobody, he thought, could have escaped the penetrating radiations.
Yet he tried to hope.
He berthed and anchored the seetee bull again, and unclamped his armor from the seat. The nausea was gone. He felt almost well again, almost hopeful, as the massive suit lifted him over the sinister glow of that new crater and dropped him outside the living tunnel.
The outer valve of the entrance lock yawned open. Old Jim Drake stood just inside the chamber, leaning on the long solenoid of a portable prospecting gun. The set of his helmet and his uplifted arms showed such a frantic purpose that Jenkins called:
