Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (9 page)

Haney growled.

"That was a fool business," he said angrily. "That ain't any place to
fight, up on the job! You know it!"

"Yeah," said Braun in the same odd voice. "You wanna finish it now?"

Haney said formidably: "I'm not dodgin' any fight. I didn't dodge it
then. I'm not dodgin' it now. You picked it. It was crazy! But if you
got over the craziness—"

Braun smiled a remarkably peculiar smile. "I'm still crazy. We finish,
huh?"

Haney pushed back his chair and stood up grimly. "Okay, we finish it!
You coulda killed me. I coulda killed you too, with that fall ready for
either of us."

"Sure! Too bad nobody got killed," said Braun.

"You fellas wait," said Haney angrily to Joe and the rest. "There's a
storeroom out back. Sid'll let us use it."

But the Chief pushed back his chair.

"Uh-uh," he said, shaking his head. "We're watchin' this."

Haney spoke with elaborate courtesy: "You mind, Braun? Want to get some
friends of yours, too?"

"I got no friends," said Braun. "Let's go."

The Chief went authoritatively to the owner of Sid's Steak Joint. He
paid the bill, talking. The owner of the place negligently jerked his
thumb toward the rear. This was not an unparalleled request—for the use
of a storeroom so that two men could batter each other undisturbed.
Bootstrap was a law-abiding town, because to get fired from work on the
Platform was to lose a place in the most important job in history. So it
was inevitable that the settlement of quarrels in private should become
commonplace.

The Chief leading, they filed through the kitchen and out of doors. The
storeroom lay beyond. The Chief went in and switched on the light. He
looked about and was satisfied. It was almost empty, save for stacked
cartons in one corner. Braun was already taking off his coat.

"You want rounds and stuff?" demanded the Chief.

"I want fight," said Braun thickly.

"Okay, then," snapped the Chief. "No kickin' or gougin'. A man's down,
he has a chance to get up. That's all the rules. Right?"

Haney, stripping off his coat in turn, grunted an assent. He handed his
coat to Joe. He faced his antagonist.

It was a curious atmosphere for a fight. There were merely the plank
walls of the storeroom with a single dangling light in the middle and an
unswept floor beneath. The Chief stood in the doorway, scowling. This
didn't feel right. There was not enough hatred in evidence to justify
it. There was doggedness and resolution enough, but Braun was deathly
white and if his face was contorted—and it was—it was not with the
lust to batter and injure and maim. It was something else.

The two men faced each other. And then the stocky, swarthy Braun swung
at Haney. The blow had sting in it but nothing more. It almost looked as
if Braun were trying to work himself up to the fight he'd insisted on
finishing. Haney countered with a roundhouse blow that glanced off
Braun's cheek. And then they bore in at each other, slugging without
science or skill.

Joe watched. Braun launched a blow that hurt, but Haney sent him reeling
back. He came in doggedly again, and swung and swung, but he had no idea
of boxing. His only idea was to slug. He did slug. Haney had been
peevish rather than angry. Now he began to glower. He began to take the
fight to Braun.

He knocked Braun down. Braun staggered up and rushed. A wildly flailing
fist landed on Haney's ear. He doubled Braun up with a wallop to the
midsection. Braun came back, fists swinging.

Haney closed one eye for him. He came back. Haney shook him from head to
foot with a chest blow. He came back. Haney split his lip and loosened a
tooth. He came back.

The Chief said sourly: "This ain't a fight. Quit it, Haney! He don't
know how!"

Haney tried to draw away, but Braun swarmed on him, striking fiercely
until Haney had to floor him again. He dragged himself up and rushed at
Haney—and was knocked down again. Haney stood over him, panting
furiously.

"Quit it, y'fool! What's the matter with you?"

Braun started to get up again. The Chief interfered and held him, while
Haney glared.

"He ain't going to fight any more, Braun," pronounced the Chief firmly.
"You ain't got a chance. This fight's over. You had enough."

Braun was bloody and horribly battered, but he panted: "He's got
enough?"

"Are you out o' your head?" demanded the Chief. "He ain't got a mark on
him!"

"I ain't—got enough," panted Braun, "till he's got—enough!"

His breath was coming in soblike gasps, the result of body blows. It
hadn't been a fight but a beating, administered by Haney. But Braun
struggled to get up.

Mike the midget said brittlely: "You got enough, Haney. You're
satisfied. Tell him so."

"Sure I'm satisfied," snorted Haney. "I don't want to hit him any more.
I got enough of that!"

Braun panted: "Okay! Okay!"

The Chief let him get to his feet. He went groggily to his coat. He
tried to put himself into it. Mike caught Joe's eye and nodded
meaningfully. Joe helped Braun into the coat. There was silence, save
for Braun's heavy, labored breathing.

He moved unsteadily toward the door. Then he stopped.

"Haney," he said effortfully, "I don't say I'm sorry for fighting you
today. I fight first. But now I say I am sorry. You are good guy, Haney.
I was crazy. I—got reason."

He stumbled out of the door and was gone. The four who were left behind
stared at each other.

"What's the matter with him?" demanded Haney blankly.

"He's nuts," said the Chief. "If he was gonna apologize—"

Mike shook his head.

"He wouldn't apologize," he said brittlely, "because he thought you
might think he was scared. But when he'd proved he wasn't scared of a
beating—then he could say he was sorry." He paused. "I've seen guys I
liked a lot less than him."

Haney put on his coat, frowning.

"I don't get it," he rumbled. "Next time I see him—"

"You won't," snapped Mike. "None of us will. I'll bet on it."

But he was wrong. The others went out of the storeroom and back into
Sid's Steak Joint, and the Chief politely thanked the proprietor for the
loan of his storeroom for a private fight. Then they went out into the
neon-lighted business street of Bootstrap.

"What do we do now?" asked Joe.

"Where you sleeping?" asked the Chief hospitably. "I can get you a room
at my place."

"I'm staying out at the Shed," Joe told him awkwardly. "My family's
known Major Holt a long time. I'm staying at his house behind the Shed."

Haney raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

"Better get out there then," said the Chief. "It's midnight, and they
might want to lock up. There's your bus."

A lighted bus was waiting by the curb. Its doors were open, but it was
empty of passengers. Single busses ran out to the Shed now and then, but
they ran in fleets at shift-change time. Joe went over and climbed
aboard the bus.

"We'll turn up early," said the Chief. "This won't be a shift job. We'll
look things over and lay out what we want and then get to work, eh?"

"Right," said Joe. "And thanks."

"We'll be there with our hair in braids," said Mike, in his cracked
voice. "Now a glass of beer and so to bed. 'Night."

Haney waved his hand. The three of them marched off, the two huge
figures of Haney and the Chief, with Mike trotting truculently between
them, hardly taller than their knees. They were curiously colorful with
all the many-tinted neon signs upon them. They turned into a diner.

Joe sat in the bus, alone. The driver was off somewhere. The sounds of
Bootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling of
bicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and a
record-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noise
of festivity.

There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe's window. He started and
looked out. Braun—battered, and bleeding from the corner of his
mouth—motioned urgently for him to come to the door of the bus. Joe
went.

Braun stared up at him in a new fashion. Now he was neither dogged nor
fierce nor desperate to look at. Despite the beating he'd taken, he
seemed completely and somehow frighteningly tranquil. He looked like
somebody who has come to the end of torment and is past any feeling but
that of relief from suffering.

"You—" said Braun. "That girl you were with today. Her pop is Major
Holt, eh?"

Joe frowned, and reservedly said that he was.

"You tell her pop," said Braun detachedly, "this is hot tip. Hot tip.
Look two kilometers north of Shed tomorrow. He find something bad. Hot!
You tell him. Two kilometers."

"Y-yes," said Joe, his frown increasing. "But look here—"

"Be sure say hot," repeated Braun.

Rather incredibly, he smiled. Then he turned and walked quickly away.

Joe went back to his seat in the empty bus, and sat there and waited for
it to start, and tried to figure out what the message meant. Since it
was for Major Holt, it had something to do with security. And security
meant defense against sabotage. And "hot" might mean merely
significant
, or—in these days—it might mean
something else
. In
fact, it might mean something to make your hair stand on end when
thought of in connection with the Space Platform.

Joe waited for the bus to take off. He became convinced that Braun's use
of the word "hot" did not mean merely "significant." The other meaning
was what he had in mind.

Joe's teeth tried to chatter.

He didn't let them.

Major Holt wasn't to be found when Joe got out to the Shed. And he
wasn't in the house in the officers'-quarters area behind it. There was
only the housekeeper, who yawned pointedly as she let Joe in. Sally was
presumably long since asleep. And Joe didn't know any way to get hold of
the Major. He assured himself that Braun was a good guy—if he weren't
he wouldn't have insisted on taking a licking before he apologized—and
he hadn't said there was any hurry. Tomorrow, he'd said. So Joe uneasily
let himself be led to a room with a cot, and he was asleep in what
seemed seconds. But just the same he was badly worried.

In fact, next morning Joe woke at a practically unearthly hour with
Braun's message pounding on his brain. He was downstairs waiting when
the housekeeper appeared. She looked startled.

"Major Holt?" he asked.

But the Major was gone. He must have done with no more than three or
four hours' sleep. There was an empty coffee cup whose contents he'd
gulped down before going back to the security office.

Joe trudged to the barbed-wire enclosure around the officers'-quarters
area and explained to the sentry where he wanted to go. A sleepy driver
whisked him around the half-mile circle to the security building and he
found his way to Major Holt's office.

The plain and gloomy secretary was already on the job, too. She led him
in to face Major Holt. He blinked at the sight of Joe.

"Hm.... I have some news," he observed. "We back-tracked the parcel that
exploded when it was dumped from the plane."

Joe had almost forgotten it. Too many other things had happened since.

"We've got two very likely prisoners out of that affair," said the
Major. "They may talk. Also, an emergency inspection of other transport
planes has turned up three other grenades tucked away in front-wheel
wells. Ah—CO2 bottles have turned out to have something explosive in
them. A very nice bit of work, that! The sandy-haired man who fueled
your plane—ah—disappeared. That is bad!"

Joe said politely: "That's fine, sir."

"All in all, you've been the occasion of our forestalling a good deal of
sabotage," said the Major. "Bad for you, of course.... Did you find the
men you were looking for?"

"I've found them, but—."

"I'll have them transferred to work under your direction," said the
Major briskly. "Their names?"

Joe gave the names. The Major wrote them down.

"Very good. I'm busy now—"

"I've a tip for you," said Joe. "I think it should be checked right
away. I don't feel too good about it."

The Major waited impatiently. And Joe explained, very carefully, about
the fight on the Platform the day before, Braun's insistence on
finishing the fight in Bootstrap, and then the tip he'd given Joe after
everything was over. He repeated the message exactly, word for word.

The Major, to do him justice, did not interrupt. He listened with an
expression that varied between grimness and weariness. When Joe ended he
picked up a telephone. He talked briefly. Joe felt a reluctant sort of
approval. Major Holt was not a man one could ever feel very close to,
and the work he was in charge of was not likely to make him popular, but
he did think straight—and fast. He didn't think "hot" meant
"significant," either. When he'd hung up the phone he said curtly: "When
will your work crew get here?"

"Early—but not yet," said Joe. "Not for some time yet."

"Go with the pilot," said the Major. "You'd recognize what Braun meant
as soon as anybody. See what you see."

Joe stood up.

"You—think the tip is straight?"

"This isn't the first time," said Major Holt detachedly, "that a man has
been blackmailed into trying sabotage. If he's got a family somewhere
abroad, and they're threatened with death or torture unless he does
such-and-such here, he's in a bad fix. It's happened. Of course he can't
tell me! He's watched. But he sometimes finds an out."

Joe was puzzled. His face showed it.

"He can try to do the sabotage," said the Major precisely, "or he can
arrange to be caught trying to do it. If he's caught—he tried; and the
blackmail threat is no threat at all so long as he keeps his mouth shut.
Which he does. And—ah—you would be surprised how often a man who
wasn't born in the United States would rather go to prison for sabotage
than commit it—here."