Collected Short Fiction, page 556
“That’s what you always say, but you never do, and I think that’s the trouble with your stomach.” Urgency began to mar the rich perfection of her voice. “Clay, I want you to stay and eat with me this morning. I want to talk to you.”
“There’s nothing really wrong with my stomach,” he told her, “and the office is already calling. If it’s money for anything, you don’t have to ask—”
“It isn’t money.” An impatient firmness thinned her face. “Not even our lost felicity.
And the office can wait, this once. Come on and eat your eggs, while we talk.”
He followed her slowly to the table in the kitchen, shrinking from any emotional scene. He felt deeply sorry for her, but he had already told her all he could about the project, and he couldn’t neglect his imperative duty there.
“Been cleaning?” He looked around at the gleaming white enamel of the kitchen equipment, hoping to divert her. “I still think we ought to hire a maid, if you insist on working.”
“I’ve too much time already.” Dismissing that, she sat down across from him, still erect with purpose. “Clay, I want you not to work this morning.”
“Why not?”
“I want you to drive in with me to Salt City.”
He put down his fork, waiting inquiringly.
“I’m getting so uneasy about you, darling.” Trouble was a shadow under her fresh makeup. “I want you to go back to see Dr. Pitcher. I called his office when I found you at home this morning, looking so tired and thin and bad. He can examine you at eleven.”
“But I told you the office is calling.” He attacked his eggs and toast, as if to prove his health. “I wish you wouldn’t worry,” he urged her. “Because I already know what Pitcher would say.”
“Please, Clay!”
“He’d tell me just what he did last year.” Forester tried to appear mildly reasonable. “He’d strip me and thump me and listen to my heart and X-ray my ulcers, and then he’d have to admit that all I need is a holiday.”
“He says you must rest.” Emotion was shattering the round perfection of her diction. “He wants you to stay at the hospital for at least a week, while he tests you for food allergies and works out a diet for you.”
“You know I can’t take time for that.” He couldn’t say why, because everything about the project was still top secret. “I simply can’t leave the job—”
“Who’ll do it when you’re dead?” She half rose, in her agitation, and sat back tautly. “Clay, you’re actually killing yourself. Dr. Pitcher says you’ll break down unless you stop. Please call the office and tell them that we are going.”
“I wish we could. To take a long vacation, and finish our honeymoon.” He reached to touch her cold hand, quivering on the table, and he saw her sudden tears. “I’m awful sorry, Ruth,” he said softly, “that things turned out this way.”
“Then you’ll go?” Her pleased voice turned practical. “Let’s see, we’ve about half an hour to pack—”
“No!” He tried to soften his vehemence. “Later, maybe.”
“That’s what you always say.” Her tightening voice lost its round modulation. “Clay, I hate Starmont! Why can’t we just forget it, and go away—and not come back?”
“I sometimes wish we could.” He caught her hand again. “But it’s much too late for that, because I’ve started something I can’t stop—”
A hurried three-minute walk, which he felt to be beneficial exercise, brought him to the gleaming steel mesh of the inner fence around the squat, ugly dome of the new concrete building on the north rim of the flat mountain top, which was now his fortress and his prison.
Spiritless as a convict returning from parole, Forester signed his name in the pass book at the gate and let the guard pin on his numbered badge. Armstrong inspected him through a wicket at the steel door of the low fortress beyond, let him in, and locked the door again behind him.
“Glad to see you, Chief.” The technician’s voice was grave. “Something has us worried.”
“That little girl?”
“Don’t know anything about her.” Armstrong shrugged. “But there’s a peak on the search drums we thought you ought to see.”
Curiously relieved to hear no more of that vanishing urchin, Forester followed him beyond the offices to the huge oval room beneath the heavy concrete dome, where his assistant, Dodge, was watching the search equipment of Project Lookout.
“See that, Chief?” Armstrong pointed at one sharp peak, just slightly higher than many others, in the jagged line a recording pen drew on a slowly turning drum. “Another neutrino burst. The plotted co-ordinates place it somewhere in Sector Vermilion. Think it’s strong enough to be significant?”
Forester frowned at that uneven line. The nominal purpose of Project Lookout was to detect the neutrino bursts from any tests of atomic or rhodomagnetic weapons, on the hostile planets or near in space. Tiny rectangular spider webs of red-glowing wire revolved ceaselessly in the enormous search tubes towering beneath the center of the dome, sweeping space; and the black cased directional trackers along the walls were clucking softly to each detected neutrino that triggered their relays, plotting its path.
“Well, Chief?”
“We had better report it,” Forester decided.
He dictated a brief bulletin for Armstrong to encode and put on the teleprinter for the Defense Authority.
“I’m going down to work in the lower project,” he added. “Call me if anything——”
He hurried back to his own silent office, and through it into the innocent-seeming cloakroom beyond. Locking the door behind him, he lifted a mirror to punch a hidden button. The cloakroom dropped, a disguised elevator.
FOR Project Lookout, however vital the watch it kept, was also a blind for something more important.
Project Thunderbolt had sprung from the supernova’s explosion. It was the chief cause of Forester’s breaking health, and the reason he had no time to go with Ruth to Dr. Pitcher. It was a weapon—of the last, most desperate resort. Only eight other men shared with him the killing burden of its secret. Six were the youthful technicians, Armstrong and Dodge and the rest, physically hard and mentally keen, picked and trained for their appalling duty. The other two were the defense minister and the world president.
And Frank Ironsmith?
Forester frowned, going down in the elevator, puzzled and disturbed when he thought of Ironsmith’s call about that urchin at the gate. Because Ironsmith’s job was in the computing section; he had no legitimate knowledge of the project.
If that indolent clerk had ever drawn any unwise conclusions from the problems brought for him to solve, however, he had kept them to himself. Exploring his past, in their routine loyalty check, the Security Police had found no cause for suspicion, and Forester could see no reason to mistrust him now.
Something tightened Forester’s stomach muscles with a faint apprehension, now, as he hurried out of the elevator and along the narrow tunnel to the vault. Snapping on the lights, he peered alertly about the launching station for anything wrong.
The launching tube ran up through the search building, disguised as a ventilator shaft, the gleaming breech mechanism open now and ready. His searching eyes moved to the missiles racked beneath it. They were just as he had left them, and a sense of their supreme deadliness lessened his unease. Turning to the machine shop beside the station, he paused before the newly assembled weapon on a bench there, whose final delicate adjustments had kept him so late last night.
Stroking the cold sleekness of the dural case, he couldn’t help feeling a creative pride in this thing he had made. Slim and tapered and beautiful with precision machining, it was smaller than any of the old atomic weapons, but heavy with an entirely different order of destruction. Its war head, smaller than his skinny fist, was designed to shatter a planet. Its rhodomagnetic drive could far exceed the speed of light, and the relay grid of the auto-pilot invested it with a ruthless mechanical intelligence.
Forester picked up his jewelers’ loupe and bent to open the inspection plate above the pilot again, afraid he had somehow failed to set the safety keys to prevent any detonation before the functioning of the drive had released them. Such a failure could turn Starmont into a small supernova; the fear of it ate at him constantly.
“Please, mister!”
The child spoke to him timidly as he turned from the missile. She was coming out of the narrow passage from the elevator, walking on bare silent feet. One grimy paw was deep in the pocket of her yellow dress, and she was trembling as if to some desperate resolution, her voice dry with fright.
“Please—are you Dr. Forester?”
V
FORESTER started to an incredulous alarm. His jewelers’ lens fell and clattered with a shocking sound on the steel floor.
“How did you get in?”
He believed himself a mild and kindly man. His mirror showed the perpetual frown that worry had etched into his thin features, but he was still a wistful, harmless-seeming gnome of a man, slight and stooped and brown. He felt a flicker of hurt astonishment at the child’s voiceless fear of him, before shocked dismay made him rasp again:
“Who let you down here?”
His voice went up, too shrill. For security and peace had been swept out of his life, by the very being of Project Thunderbolt.
“Nobody—” She stammered and trembled and gulped. Big tears started down her pinched cheeks, and she dropped a handful of yellow-flowered weeds to wipe them away with a grimy fist. “Please don’t be mad, mister,” she whispered. “Nobody let me in.”
Sensitive to pollens, Forester sneezed to the rank odor of the blooms. Shrinking back from him, as if that had been a threatening gesture, the child began to cry.
“Mr. W-White said you wouldn’t l-like me, mister,” she sobbed faintly. “But he said you’d have to l-listen to us, if I came to see you here.”
He tried to soften the rasping anger in his voice. “But how did you get past the guards?”
“Mr. White sent me.” Shyly, she offered him a thin gray card. “With this.”
Sneezing again, Forester kicked away the weeds, and took the finger-smudged card. His breath went out as he read the brief message on it, boldly inked:
Clay Forester:
Sharing your concern for the people of these endangered planets, toe can trade distressing and vital information for the aid we need from you. If you want to know how Jane Carter reached you, come done to the old Dragonrock Light, or bring Frank Ironsmith—we trust nobody else.
Mark White, Philosopher
Hearing the child’s bare feet pattering on the steel floor, he looked up in time to see her running back down the tunnel to the elevator. He darted after her, shouting at her to wait, but the door closed in his face and a green arrow lit to show that the disguised cage was going up.
Shaken with dismay, Forester ran back to his desk in the shop to telephone the upper project. Armstrong had seen no intruders, certainly no small girl in a yellow dress, but he promised to meet the rising elevator and hold anybody in it. Forester waited an agonized three minutes, and started nervously when the telephone rang again. Armstrong’s voice seemed oddly constrained.
“Well, Chief, we unlocked the door and searched the elevator.”
“Did you catch her?”
“No, Chief,” Armstrong said slowly. “There wasn’t anybody in it.”
The grotesque impossibility of her coming and going left Forester shuddering. Restraining himself from starting up the escape ladder beyond the emergency door, he kept his numb forefinger on the elevator button. The cage came back at last, and he went up to join the two technicians.
“Have you caught her yet?”
Staring oddly, Armstrong shook his head. “Sir, there has been no outsider here.”
The man’s voice was too courteous, too flatly formal, his level gaze too penetrating. Forester felt a sudden sickness. Sneezing again, from his allergy to those weeds the child had dropped, he said flatly: “Somebody brought that elevator up.”
“Sir, nobody went down.” Armstrong kept on staring. “And nobody came up.”
“But she was—down there,” Forester 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 huskily, “Look Armstrong. I’m sane—yet.”
“I hope you are, sir.” But the man’s bleak eyes were unconvinced. “We’ve searched the place and phoned the guard detachments,” he reported stiffly. “There is nobody inside except the staff. Nobody but you has been admitted through our gate today.” He glanced behind him uneasily. “The only odd thing is that call from Mr. Ironsmith.”
“He called me, too”—Forester tried to keep his voice from trembling—“about the child at the gate, but that doesn’t explain how she got inside.”
“Ironsmith said she had some message—”
“She did.” Forester displayed the gray card, soiled from Jane Carter’s fingers. The two men studied it silently, and he saw the hard suspicion fade from Armstrong’s eyes.
“Sorry, sir!”
“Can’t blame you.” Feebly, Forester answered his apologetic grin. “Now we can get at the problem.”
They all went down again, to search the vault, but they found no intruder there. The great safe was still intact, plastered with unbroken seals. The long missiles lay safe in the racks. But Forester gathered up the weeds the child had dropped, frowning at them dazedly.
“This math expert,” Armstrong said. “How does he come in?”
“We’ll find out.”
Picking up the desk telephone, Forester told Ironsmith to meet him at the inside gate, right now. They hurried silently back to the upper project, and out to the gate. Two guards waited for each of them to sign the pass book and surrender his badge, and finally let them outside to meet Ironsmith, who was already waiting for them, leaning on his rusty bicycle and calmly chewing gum. Forester asked him harshly:
“What about this little girl?”
“Who?” Ironsmith’s easy grin had faded when he saw their tight faces, and now his gray eyes widened. “Did Jane Carter come back again?”
Narrowly watching that open, boyish face, Forester realized suddenly how many secrets he had carried to the computing section. He still couldn’t quite believe that Ironsmith was a Triplanet agent, but a sudden sick panic tightened his voice.
“All right?” he rasped. “Who is Jane Carter?”
“I never saw her before—” Seeing the drooping weeds in Forester’s hand, Ironsmith started slightly. “Did she leave those?” he whispered. “I saw her picking them, just outside the main gate, when I was riding down to meet her.”
Searching his pink, bewildered face, Forester handed him the gray card. He read it silently, and shook his sandy head. In a flat, accusing voice, Forester said:
“What I want to know is why you called me about her.”
“Just because I couldn’t understand how she went away,” Ironsmith answered innocently. Handing back the gray card, he added quietly, “I’ll go with you to Dragonrock Light.”
“No, Chief!” Armstrong protested instantly. “Let the Security Police look for this mysterious Mr. White. Our job is here, and not playing cloak-and-dagger games with Triplanet spies.” A sudden apprehension shook his voice. “Sir, you wouldn’t think of really going?”
Forester was a man of science. Priding himself on the clear logic of his mind, he felt only scorn for intuition and mistrust for impulse. His own reckless words astonished him now, for he said quietly, “I’m going.”
The car was ready when he recalled his date for lunch with Ruth, and telephoned her hastily to say he wouldn’t have time to eat. He tried to sound casual, and the project had parted them countless times before, but she must have heard the anxious tension in his voice.
“Clay!” she broke in sharply. “What’s the trouble now?”
“Nothing, darling,” he lied uneasily. “Nothing at all.”
THE round stone tower of the old Dragonrock Light stood dim in the fog, half a mile from the road, on a cragged granite islet still joined to the mainland by the ruin of a storm-shattered causeway. Forester parked the car, as near as he could drive, and nodded at Ironsmith to follow him.
“Set up your rocket launcher in that ditch,” he told Armstrong. “Fire without warning at any boat or plane that starts to leave—even if you think we’re aboard. If we aren’t back in exactly one hour, I want you to blow that tower off the rock. Any contrary order will be sent under duress, and you will ignore it.”
“Okay, Chief,” Armstrong agreed reluctantly, and looked at his watch. Dodge was already unfolding the tripod mount. Forester gave those two able men a smile of confidence, and then peered mistrustfully at Ironsmith, who was unconcernedly folding a fresh stick of gum into his mouth and tossing away the empty wrapper. Annoyed at his calm, Forester told him curtly to come along.
Grinning, pleasantly, Ironsmith started scrambling briskly ahead over the wet, storm-tilted stones of the old causeway, which made an uncomfortable footpath. Forester followed, shivering to the raw bite of the mist-laden wind, and suddenly regretful of his impulsive decision. If this were really a trap, it occurred to him, the Triplanet agents had probably come ashore from a space raider lying underwater off the old lighthouse, and with the fog for a veil they might have him and the secret of. the project safe on board long before that hour was up.
“Hello, Dr. Forester!”
The child’s. voice came to meet them through the mist, thin and high as some plaintive bird-call above the sigh of the Wind and the murmur of the sea, and then he saw her standing above them at the base of the crumbling tower, tiny and alone. The wind whipped her thin yellow dress, and her skinny knees were blue and shaking with the cold.
VI
FORESTER climbed to meet her, breathless and uneasy.
“Please be careful,” she called anxiously. “The rocks are so slick and wet.” The gusty wind blew her tiny voice away, and then she was saying, “—waiting to see you. Mr. White said you’d have to come.”
