Killdozer! (19 page)

The dozer blatted protestingly and began to crab sideways, pivoting on the end of the blade. Tom jumped out of the way, ran around behind the machine, which was almost parallel with the wall now, and stood in the clear, one hand raised ready to signal, his eyes on the straining blade. And then everything happened at once.

With a toothy snap the block started and came free, pivoting outward from its square end, bringing with it its neighbor. The block above them dropped, and the whole mound seemed to settle. And
something
whooshed out of the black hole where the rocks had been. Something like a fog, but not a fog that could be seen, something huge that could not be measured. With it came a gust of that cold which was not cold, and the smell of ozone, and the prickling crackle of a mighty static discharge.

Tom was fifty feet from the wall before he knew he had moved. He stopped and saw the Seven suddenly buck like a wild stallion, once, and Rivera turning over twice in the air. Tom shouted some meaningless syllable and tore over to the boy, where he sprawled in the rough grass, lifted him in his arms, and ran. Only then did he realize that he was running from the machine.

It was like a mad thing. Its moldboard rose and fell. It curved away from the mound, howling governor gone wild, controls flailing. The blade dug repeatedly into the earth, gouging it up in great dips through which the tractor plunged, clanking and bellowing furiously. It raced away in a great irregular arc, turned and came snorting back to the mound, where it beat at the buried wall, slewed and scraped and roared.

Tom reached the edge of the plateau sobbing for breath, and kneeling, laid the boy gently down on the grass.

“Goony, boy … hey—”

The long silken eyelashes fluttered, lifted. Something wrenched in Tom as he saw the eyes, rolled right back so that only the whites showed. Rivera drew a long quivering breath which caught suddenly. He coughed twice, threw his head from side to side so violently that Tom took it between his hands and steadied it.

“Ay … Maria madre … que me pasado
, Tom—w’at has happen to me?”

“Fell off the Seven, stupid. You … how you feel?”

Rivera scrabbled at the ground, got his elbows half under him, then sank back weakly. “Feel O.K. Headache like hell. W-w’at happen to my feets?”

“Feet? They hurt?”

“No hurt—” The young face went gray, the lips tightened with effort. “No nothin’, Tom.”

“You can’t move ’em?”

Rivera shook his head, still trying. Tom stood up. “You take it easy. I’ll go get Kelly. Be right back.”

He walked very quickly and when Rivera called to him he did not turn around. Tom had seen a man with a broken back before.

At the edge of the little plateau Tom stopped, listening. In the
deepening twilight he could see the bulldozer standing by the mound. The motor was running; she had not stalled herself. But what stopped Tom was that she wasn’t idling, but revving up and down as if an impatient hand were on the throttle—
hroom hrooom
, running up and up far faster than even a broken governor should permit, then coasting down to near silence, broken by the explosive punctuation of sharp and irregular firing. Then it would run up and up again, almost screaming, sustaining a r.p.m. that threatened every moving part, shaking the great machine like some deadly ague.

Tom walked swiftly toward the Seven, a puzzled and grim frown on his weather-beaten face. Governors break down occasionally, and once in a while you will have a motor tear itself to pieces, revving up out of control. But it will either do that or it will rev down and quit. If an operator is fool enough to leave his machine with the master clutch engaged, the machine will take off and run the way the Seven had—but it will not turn unless the blade corner catches in something unresisting, and then the chances are very strong that it will stall. But in any case, it was past reason for any machine to act this way, revving up and down, running, turning, lifting and dropping the blade.

The motor slowed as he approached, and at last settled down into something like a steady and regular idle. Tom had the sudden crazy impression that it was watching him. He shrugged off the feeling, walked up and laid a hand on the fender.

The Seven reacted like a wild stallion. The big Diesel roared, and Tom distinctly saw the master clutch lever snap back over center. He leaped clear, expecting the machine to jolt forward, but apparently it was in a reverse gear, for it shot backwards, one track locked, and the near end of the blade swung in a swift vicious arc, breezing a bare fraction of an inch past his hip as he danced back out of the way.

And as if it had bounced off a wall, the tractor had shifted and was bearing down on him, the twelve-foot blade rising, the two big headlights looming over him on their bow-legged supports, looking like the protruding eyes of some mighty toad. Tom had no choice but to leap straight up and grasp the top of the blade in his two hands,
leaning back hard to brace his feet against the curved moldboard. The blade dropped and sank into the soft topsoil, digging a deep little swale in the ground. The earth loading on the moldboard rose and churned around Tom’s legs; he stepped wildly, keeping them clear of the rolling drag of it. Up came the blade then, leaving a four-foot pile at the edge of the pit; down and up the tractor raced as the tracks went into it; up and up as they climbed the pile of dirt. A quick balance and overbalance as the machine lurched up and over like a motorcycle taking a jump off a ramp, and then a spine-shaking crash as fourteen tons of metal smashed blade-first into the ground.

Part of the leather from Tom’s tough palms stayed with the blade as he was flung off. He went head over heels backwards, but had his feet gathered and sprang as they touched the ground; for he knew that no machine could bury its blade like that and get out easily. He leaped to the top of the blade, got one hand on the radiator cap, vaulted. Perversely, the cap broke from its hinge and came away in his hand, in that split instant when only that hand rested on anything. Off balance, he landed on his shoulder with his legs flailing the air, his body sliding off the hood’s smooth shoulder toward the track now churning the earth beneath. He made a wild grab at the air intake pipe, barely had it in his fingers when the dozer freed itself and shot backwards up and over the hump. Again that breathless fight pivoting over the top, and the clanking crash as the machine landed, this time almost flat on its tracks.

The jolt tore Tom’s hand away, and as he slid back over the hood the crook of his elbow caught the exhaust stack, the dull red metal biting into his flesh. He grunted and clamped the arm around it. His momentum carried him around it, and his feet crashed into the steering clutch levers. Hooking one with his instep, he doubled his legs and whipped himself back, scrabbling at the smooth warm metal, crawling frantically backward until he finally fell heavily into the seat.

“Now,” he gritted through the red wall of pain, “you’re gonna git operated.” And he kicked out the master clutch.

The motor wailed, with the load taken off so suddenly. Tom grasped the throttle, his thumb down on the ratchet release, and he shoved the lever forward to shut off the fuel.

It wouldn’t shut off; it went down to a slow idle, but it wouldn’t shut off.

“There’s one thing you can’t do without,” he muttered, “compression.”

He stood up and leaned around the dash, reaching for the compression-release lever. As he came up out of the seat, the engine revved up again. He turned to the throttle, which had snapped back into the “open” position. As his hand touched it the master clutch lever snapped in and the howling machine lurched forward with a jerk that snapped his head on his shoulders and threw him heavily back into the seat. He snatched at the hydraulic blade control and threw it to “float” position; and then as the falling moldboard touched the ground, into “power down.” The cutting edge bit into the ground and the engine began to labor. Holding the blade control, he pushed the throttle forward with his other hand. One of the steering clutch levers whipped back and struck him agonizingly on the kneecap. He involuntarily let go of the blade control and the moldboard began to rise. The engine began to turn faster and he realized that it was not responding to the throttle. Cursing, he leaped to his feet; the suddenly flailing steering clutch levers struck him three times in the groin before he could get between them.

Blind with pain, Tom clung gasping to the dash. The oil-pressure gauge fell off the dash to his right, with a tinkling of broken glass, and from its broken quarter-inch line scalding oil drenched him. The shock of it snapped back his wavering consciousness. Ignoring the blows of the left steering clutch and the master clutch which had started the same mad punching, he bent over the left end of the dash and grasped the compression lever. The tractor rushed forward and spun sickeningly, and Tom knew he was thrown. But as he felt himself leave the decking his hand punched the compression lever down. The great valves at the cylinder heads opened and locked open; atomized fuel and superheated air chattered out, and as Tom’s head and shoulders struck the ground the great wild machine rolled to a stop, stood silently except for the grumble of water boiling in the cooling system.

Minutes later Tom raised his head and groaned. He rolled over and sat up, his chin on his knees, washed by wave after wave of pain.
As they gradually subsided, he crawled to the machine and pulled himself to his feet, hand over hand on the track. And groggily he began to cripple the tractor, at least for the night.

He opened the cock under the fuel tank, left the warm yellow fluid gushing out on the ground. He opened the drain on the reservoir by the injection pump. He found a piece of wire in the crank box and with it tied down the compression release lever. He crawled up on the machine, wrenched the hood and ball jar off the air intake precleaner, pulled off his shirt and stuffed it down the pipe. He pushed the throttle all the way forward and locked it with the locking pin. And he shut off the fuel on the main line from the tank to the pump.

Then he climbed heavily to the ground and slogged back to the edge of the plateau where he had left Rivera.

They didn’t know Tom was hurt until an hour and a half later—there had been too much to do—rigging a stretcher for the Puerto Rican, building him a shelter, an engine crate with an Army pup tent for a roof. They brought out the first-aid-kit and the medical books and did what they could—tied and splinted and dosed with an opiate. Tom was a mass of bruises, and his right arm, where it had hooked the exhaust stack, was a flayed mass. They fixed him up then, old Peebles handling the sulfa powder and bandages like a trained nurse. And only then was there talk.

“I’ve seen a man thrown off a pan,” said Dennis, as they sat around the coffee urn munching C rations. “Sittin’ up on the arm rest on a cat, looking backwards. Cat hit a rock and bucked. Threw him off on the track. Stretched him out ten feet long.” He in-whistled some coffee to dilute the mouthful of food he had been talking around, and masticated noisily. “Man’s a fool to set up there on the side of his butt even on a pan. Can’t see why th’ goony was doin’ it on a dozer.”

“He wasn’t,” said Tom.

Kelly rubbed his pointed jaw. “He set flat on th’ seat an’ was th’owed?”

“That’s right.”

After an unbelieving silence Dennis said, “What was he doin’—drivin’ over sixty?”

Tom looked around the circle of faces lit up by the over-artificial brilliance of a pressure lantern, and wondered what the reaction would be if he told it all just as it was. He had to say something, and it didn’t look as if it could be the truth.

“He was workin’,” he said finally. “Bucking stone out of the wall of an old building up on the mesa there. One turned loose an’ as it did the governor must’ve gone haywire. She bucked like a loco hoss and run off.”

“Run off?”

Tom opened his mouth and closed it again, and just nodded.

Dennis said, “Well, reckon that’s what happens when you put a mechanic to operatin’.”

“That had nothin’ to do with it,” Tom snapped.

Peebles spoke up quickly. “Tom—what about the Seven? Broke up any?”

“Some,” said Tom. “Better look at the steering clutches. An’ she was hot.”

“Head’s cracked,” said Harris, a burly young man with shoulders like a buffalo and a famous thirst.

“How do you know?”

“Saw it when Al and me went up with the stretcher to get the kid while you all were building the shelter. Hot water runnin’ down the side of the block.”

“You mean you walked all the way out to the mound to look at that tractor while the kid was lyin’ there? I told you where he was!”

“Out to the mound!” Al Knowles’ pop eyes teetered out of their sockets. “We found that cat stalled twenty feet away from where the kid was!”

“What!”

“That’s right, Tom,” said Harris. “What’s eatin’ you? Where’d you leave it?”

“I told you … by the mound … the ol’ building we cut into.”

“Leave the startin’ motor runnin’?”

“Starting motor?” Tom’s mind caught the picture of the small, two-cylinder gasoline engine bolted to the side of the big Diesel’s crankcase, coupled through the Bendix gear and clutch to the flywheel
of the Diesel to crank it. He remembered his last glance at the still machine, silent but for the sound of water boiling. “Hell no!”

Al and Harris exchanged a glance. “I guess you were sort of slap-happy at the time, Tom,” Harris said, not unkindly. “When we were halfway up the hill we heard it, and you know you can’t mistake that racket. Sounded like it was under a load.”

Tom beat softly at his temples with his clenched fists. “I left that machine dead,” he said quietly. “I got compression off her and tied down the lever. I even stuffed my shirt in the intake. I drained the tank. But—I didn’t touch the starting motor.”

Peebles wanted to know why he had gone to all that trouble. Tom just looked vaguely at him and shook his head. “I shoulda pulled the wires. I never thought about the starting motor,” he whispered. Then, “Harris—you say you found the starting motor running when you got to the top?”