Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (10 page)

Joe blinked.

"If your friend Braun is caught," said the Major, "he will be punished.
Severely. Officially. But privately, someone will—ah—mention this tip
and say 'thanks.' And he'll be told that he will be released from prison
just as soon as he thinks it's safe. And he will be. That's all."

He turned to his papers. Joe went out. On the way to meet the pilot
who'd check on his tip, he thought things over. He began to feel a sort
of formless but very definite pride. He wasn't quite sure what he was
proud of, but it had something to do with being part of a country toward
which men of wholly different upbringing could feel deep loyalty. If a
man who was threatened unless he turned traitor, a man who might not
even be a citizen, arranged to be caught and punished for an apparent
crime against a country rather than commit it—that wasn't bad. There
can be a lot of things wrong with a nation, but if somebody from another
one entirely can come to feel that kind of loyalty toward it—well—it's
not too bad a country to belong to.

Joe had a security guard with him this time, instead of Sally, as he
went across the vast, arc-lit interior of the Shed and past the
shimmering growing monster that was the Platform. He went all the way to
the great swinging doors that let in materials trucks. And there were
guards there, and they checked each driver very carefully before they
admitted his truck. But somehow it wasn't irritating. It wasn't scornful
suspicion. There'd be snide and snappy characters in the Security force,
of course, swaggering and throwing their weight about. But even they
were guarding something that men—some men—were willing to throw away
their lives for.

Joe and his guard reached one of the huge entrances as a ten-wheeler
truck came in with a load of shining metal plates. Joe's escort went
through the opening with him and they waited outside. The sun had barely
risen. It looked huge but very far away, and Joe suddenly realized why
just this spot had been chosen for the building of the Platform.

The ground was flat. All the way to the eastern horizon there wasn't
even a minor hillock rising above the plain. It was bare, arid,
sun-scorched desert. It was featureless save for sage and mesquite and
tall thin stalks of yucca. But it was flat. It could be a runway. It was
a perfect place for the Platform to start from. The Platform shouldn't
touch ground at all, after it was out of the Shed, but at least it
wouldn't run into any obstacles on its way toward the horizon.

A light plane came careening around the great curved outer surface of
the Shed. It landed and taxied up to the door. It swung smartly around
and its side door opened. A bandaged hand waved at Joe. He climbed in.
The pilot of this light, flimsy plane was the co-pilot of the transport
of yesterday. He was the man Joe had helped to dump cargo.

Joe climbed in and settled himself. The small motor pop-popped
valiantly, the plane rushed forward over hard-packed desert earth, and
went swaying up into the air.

The co-pilot—pilot now—shouted cheerfully above the din: "Hiya. You
couldn't sleep either? Burns hurt?"

Joe shook his head.

"Bothered," he shouted in reply. Then he added, "Do I do something to
help, or am I along just for the ride?"

"First we take a look," the pilot called over the motor racket. "Two
kilometers due north of the Shed, eh?"

"That's right."

"We'll see what's there," the pilot told him.

The small plane went up and up. At five hundred feet—nearly level with
the roof of the Shed—it swung away and began to make seemingly erratic
dartings out over the spotty desert land, and then back. Actually, it
was a search pattern. Joe looked down from his side of the small
cockpit. This was a very small plane indeed, and in consequence its
motor made much more noise inside its cabin than much more powerful
engines in bigger ships.

"Those burns I got," shouted the pilot, staring down, "kept me awake. So
I got up and was just walking around when the call came for somebody to
drive one of these things. I took over."

Back and forth, and back and forth. From five hundred feet in the early
morning the desert had a curious appearance. The plane was low enough
for each smallest natural feature to be visible, and it was early enough
for every shrub or hummock to cast a long, slender shadow. The ground
looked streaked, but all the streaks ran the same way, and all were
shadows.

Joe shouted: "What's that?"

The plane banked at a steep angle and ran back. It banked again. The
pilot stared carefully. He reached forward and pushed a button. There
was a tiny impact underfoot. Another steep banking turn, and Joe saw a
puff of smoke in the air.

The pilot shouted: "It's a man. He looks dead."

He swung directly over the small prone object and there was a second
puff of smoke.

"They've got range finders on us from the Shed," he called across the
two-foot space separating him from Joe. "This marks the spot. Now we'll
see if there's anything to the hot part of that tip."

He reached over behind his seat and brought out a stubby pole like a
fishpole with a very large reel. There was also a headset, and something
very much like a large aluminum fish on the end of the line.

"You know Geiger counters?" called the pilot. "Stick on these headphones
and listen!"

Joe slipped on the headset. The pilot threw a switch and Joe heard
clickings. They had no pattern and no fixed frequency. They were
clickings at strictly random intervals, but there was an average
frequency, at that.

"Let the counter out the window," called the pilot, "and listen. Tell me
if the noise goes up."

Joe obeyed. The aluminum fish dangled. The line slanted astern from the
wind. It made a curve between the pole and the aluminum plummet, which
was hollow in the direction of the plane's motion. The pilot squinted
down and began to swing in a wide circle around the spot where an
apparently dead man had been sighted, and above which puffs of smoke now
floated.

Three-quarters of the way around, the random clickings suddenly became a
roar.

Joe said: "Hey!"

The pilot swung the plane about and flew back. He pointed to the button
he'd pushed.

"Poke that when you hear it again."

The clickings.... They roared. Joe pushed the button. He felt the tiny
impact.

"Once more," said the pilot.

He swung in nearer where the dead man lay. Joe had a sickening idea of
who the dead man might be. A sudden rush of noise in the headphones and
he pushed the button again.

"Reel in now!" shouted the pilot. "Our job's done."

Joe reeled in as the plane winged steadily back toward the Shed. There
were puffs of smoke floating in the air behind. They had been ranged on
at the instant they appeared. Somebody back at the Shed knew that
something that needed to be investigated was at a certain spot, and the
two later puffs of smoke had said that radioactivity was notable in the
air along the line the two puffs made. Not much more information would
be needed. The meaning of Braun's warning that his tip was "hot" was
definite. It was "hot" in the sense that it dealt with radioactivity!

The plane dipped down and landed by the great doors again. It taxied up
and the pilot killed the motor.

"We've been using Geigers for months," he said pleasedly, "and never got
a sign before. This is one time we were set for something."

"What?" asked Joe. But he knew.

"Atomic dust is one good guess," the pilot told him. "It was talked of
as a possible weapon away back in the Smyth Report. Nobody's ever tried
it. We thought it might be tried against the Platform. If somebody
managed to spread some really hot radioactive dust around the Shed, all
three shifts might get fatally burned before it was noticed.
They'd
think so, anyhow! But the guy who was supposed to dump it opened up the
can for a look. And it killed him."

He climbed out of the plane and went to the doorway. He took a telephone
from a guard and talked crisply into it. He hung up.

"Somebody coming for you," he said amiably. "Wait here. Be seeing you."

He went out, the motor kicked over and caught, and the tiny plane raced
away. Seconds later it was aloft and winging southward.

Joe waited. Presently a door opened and something came clanking out. It
was a tractor with surprisingly heavy armor. There were men in it, also
wearing armor of a peculiar sort, which they were still adjusting. The
tractor towed a half-track platform on which there were a crane and a
very considerable lead-coated bin with a top. It went briskly off into
the distance toward the north.

Joe was amazed, but comprehending. The vehicle and the men were armored
against radioactivity. They would approach the dead man from upwind, and
they would scoop up his body and put it in the lead-lined bin, and with
it all deadly radioactive material near him. This was the equipment that
must have been used to handle the dud atom bomb some months back. It had
been ready for that. It was ready for this emergency. Somebody had tried
to think of every imaginable situation that could arise in connection
with the Platform.

But in a moment a guard came for Joe and took him to where the Chief and
Haney and Mike waited by the still incompletely-pulled-away crates. They
had some new ideas about the job on hand that were better than the
original ones in some details. All four of them set to work to make a
careful survey of damage—of parts that would have to be replaced and of
those that needed to be repaired. The discoveries they made would have
appalled Joe earlier. Now he merely made notes of parts necessary to be
replaced by new ones that could be had within the repair time for
rebalancing the rotors.

"This is sure a mess," said Haney mournfully, as they worked. "It's two
days just getting things cleaned up!"

The Chief eyed the rotors. There were two of them, great four-foot disks
with extraordinary short and stubby shafts that were brought to
beautifully polished conical ends to fit in the bearings. The bearings
were hollowed to fit the shaft ends, but they were intricately scored to
form oil channels. In operation, a very special silicone oil would be
pumped into the bearings under high pressure. Distributed by the
channels, the oil would form a film that by its pressure would hold the
cone end of the bearing away from actual contact with the metal. The
rotors, in fact, would be floated in oil just as the high-speed
centrifuge the Chief had mentioned had floated on compressed air. But
they had to be perfectly balanced, because any imbalance would make the
shaft pierce the oil film and touch the metal of the bearing—and when a
shaft is turning at 40,000 r.p.m. it is not good for it to touch
anything. Shaft and bearing would burn white-hot in fractions of a
second and there would be several devils to pay.

"We've got to spin it in a lathe," said the Chief profoundly, "to hold
the chucks. The chucks have got to be these same bearings, because
nothing else will stand the speed. And we got to cut out the bed plate
of any lathe we find. Hm. We got to do our spinning with the shaft lined
up with the earth's axis, too."

Mike nodded wisely, and Joe knew he'd pointed that out. It was true
enough. A high-speed gyro could only be run for minutes in one single
direction if its mount were fixed. If a precisely mounted gyro had its
shaft pointed at the sun, for example, while it ran, its axis would try
to follow the sun. It would try not to turn with the earth, and it would
wreck itself. They had to use the cone bearings, but in order to protect
the fine channellings for oil they'd have to use cone-shaped shims at
the beginning while running at low speed. The cone ends of the shaft
would need new machining to line them up. The bearings had to be fixed,
yet flexible. The—

They had used many paper napkins the night before, merely envisioning
these details. New problems turned up as the apparatus itself was being
uncovered and cleaned.

They worked for hours, clearing away soot and charred material. Joe's
list of small parts to be replaced from the home plant was as long as
his arm. The motors, of course, had to be scrapped and new ones
substituted. Considering their speed—the field strength at operating
rate was almost imperceptible—they had to be built new, which would
mean round-the-clock work at Kenmore.

A messenger came for Joe. The security office wanted him. Major Holt's
gloomy secretary did not even glance up as he entered. Major Holt
himself looked tired.

"There was a man out there," he said curtly. "I think it is your friend
Braun. I'll get you to look and identify."

Joe had suspected as much. He waited.

"He'd opened a container of cobalt powder. It was in a beryllium case.
There was half a pound of it. It killed him."

"Radioactive cobalt," said Joe.

"Definitely," said the Major grimly. "Half a pound of it gives off the
radiation of an eighth of a ton of pure radium. One can guess that he
had been instructed to get up as high as he could in the Shed and dump
the powder into the air. It would diffuse—scatter as it sifted down. It
would have contaminated the whole Shed past all use for years—let alone
killing everybody in it."

Joe swallowed.

"He was burned, then."

"He had the equivalent of two hundred and fifty pounds of radium within
inches of his body," the Major said unbendingly, "and naturally it was
not healthy. For that matter, the container itself was not adequate
protection for him. Once he'd carried it in his pocket for a very few
minutes, he was a dead man, even though he was not conscious of the
fact."

Joe knew what was wanted of him.

"You want me to look at him," he said.

The Major nodded.

"Yes. Afterward, get a radiation check on yourself. It is hardly likely
that he was—ah—carrying the stuff with him last night, in Bootstrap.
But if he was—ah—you may need some precautionary treatment—you and
the men who were with you."