Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (20 page)

Joe said: "Sally, see if you can get your father to come here and talk.
Haney's right. Not in his office. Right here."

Sally got up and went inside the house. She came back with an uneasy
expression on her face.

"He's coming. But I couldn't very well tell him what was wanted,
and—I'm not sure he's going to be in a mood to listen."

When the Major arrived he was definitely not in a mood to listen. He was
a harried man, and he was keyed up to the limit by the multiplied strain
due to the imminence of the Platform's take-off. He came back to his
house from a grim conference on exactly the subject of how to make
preparations against any possible sabotage incidents—and ran into a
proposal to stimulate them! He practically exploded. Even if provocation
should be given to saboteurs to lure them into showing their hands, this
was no time for it! And if it were, it would be security business. It
should not be meddled in by amateurs!

Joe said grimly: "I don't mean to be disrespectful, sir, but there's a
point you've missed. It isn't thinkable that you'll be able to prevent
something from being tried at a time the saboteurs pick. They've got
just so much time left, and they'll use it! But Mike's plan would offer
them a diversion under cover of which they could pull their own stuff!
And besides that, you know your office leaks! You couldn't set up a
trick like this through security methods. And for a third fact, this is
the one sort of thing no saboteur would expect from your security
organization! We caught the saboteurs at the pushpot field by guessing
at a new sort of thinking for sabotage. Here's a chance to catch the
saboteurs who'll work their heads off in the next twenty-four hours or
so, by using a new sort of thinking for security!"

Major Holt was not an easy man to get along with at any time, and this
was the worst of all times to differ with him. But he did think
straight. He stared furiously at Joe, growing crimson with anger at
being argued with. But after he had stared a full minute, the angry
flush went slowly away. Then he nodded abruptly.

"There you have a point," he said curtly. "I don't like it. But it is a
point. It would be completely the reverse of anything my antagonists
could possibly expect. So I accept the suggestion. Now—let us make the
arrangements."

He settled down for a quick, comprehensive, detailed plan. In careful
consultation with Haney, Joe worked it out. The all-important point was
that the Major's part was to be done in completely unorthodox fashion.
He would take measures to mesh his actions with those of Mike, the
Chief, Haney, and Joe. Each action the Major took and each order he gave
he would attend to personally. His actions would be restricted to the
last five minutes or less before shift-change time. His orders would be
given individually to individuals, and under no circumstances would he
transmit any order through anybody else. In every instance, his order
would be devised to mean nothing intelligible to its recipient until the
time came for obedience.

It was not an easy scheme for the Major to bind himself to. It ran
counter to every principle of military thinking save one, which was that
it was a good idea to outguess the enemy. At the end he said detachedly:
"This is distinctly irregular. It is as irregular as anything could
possibly be! But that is why I have agreed to it. It will be at
least—unexpected—coming from me!"

Then he smiled without mirth and nodded to Joe and to Haney, and went
striding away down the concrete walk to where his car waited.

Haney left a moment later to carry the list of arrangements to the Chief
and to Mike. And Joe went into the Shed to do his part.

There was little difference in the appearance of the Shed by night. In
the daytime there were long rows of windows in the roof, which let in a
vague, dusky, inadequate twilight. At night those windows were
shuttered. This meant that the shadows were a little sharper and the
contrasts of light and shade a trifle more abrupt. All other changes
that Joe could see were the normal ones due to the taking down of
scaffolding and the fastening up of rocket tubes. It was clear that the
shape of the Platform proper would be obscure when all its rocket tubes
were fast in place.

Joe went to look at the last pushpots, and they were ready to be taken
over to their own field for their flight test before use. There were
extras, anyhow, beyond the number needed to lift the Platform. He found
himself considering the obvious fact that after the Platform was aloft,
they would be used to launch the ferry rockets, too.

Then he moved toward the center of the Shed. A whole level of
scaffolding came apart and its separate elements were bundled together
as he watched. Slings lowered the bundles down to waiting trucks which
would carry them elsewhere. There were mixing trucks still pouring out
their white paste for the lining of the rocket tubes, and their product
went up and vanished into the gaping mouths of the giant wire-wound
pipes.

Presently Joe went into the maze of piers under the Space Platform
itself. He came to the temporary stairs he had reason to remember. He
nodded to the two guards there.

"I want to take another look at that gadget we installed," he said.

One of the guards said good-naturedly: "Major Holt said to pass you any
time."

He ascended and went along the curious corridor—it had handgrips on the
walls so a man could pull himself along it when there was no weight—and
went to the engine room. He heard voices. They were speaking a
completely unintelligible language. He tensed.

Then the Chief grinned at him amiably. He was in the engine room and
with him were no fewer than eight men of his own coppery complexion.

"Here's some friends of mine," he explained, and Joe shook hands with
black-haired, dark-skinned men who were named Charley Spotted Dog and
Sam Fatbelly and Luther Red Cow and other exotic things. The Chief said
exuberantly, "Major Holt told the guards to let me pass in some Indian
friends, so I took my gang on a guided tour of the Platform. None of 'em
had ever been inside before. And—"

"I heard you talking Indian," said Joe.

"You're gonna hear some more," said the Chief. "We're the first war
party of my tribe in longer'n my grandpa woulda thought respectable!"

Joe found it difficult to restrain a smile. The Chief took him off to
one side.

"Fella," he said kindly, "it bothers you, this business, because it
ain't organized. That's what this world needs, Joe. Everything figured
out by slide rules an' such—it's civilized, but it ain't human! What
everybody oughta be is a connoisseur of chaos, like me. Quit worryin'
an' get outside and pick up that security guy the Major was gonna send
to meet you!"

He gave Joe an amiable shove and rejoined his fellow Mohawks, each of
whom, Joe noticed suddenly, had somewhere on his person a twelve-inch
Stillson wrench or a reasonable facsimile to serve as a substitute
tomahawk. They grinned at him as he departed.

At the bottom of the flight of narrow wooden steps there was a third
security man. He greeted Joe.

"Major Holt told me to pick you up," he observed.

Joe walked to one side with him. Major Holt had promised to send a
first-class man to meet Joe at this place, with orders to take
instructions from Joe. Joe said curtly: "You're to snag as many Security
men as you can, place them more or less out of sight under the Platform
here, and tell them to turn off their walkie-talkies and wait. No matter
what happens, they're to wait right here until they're needed, right
here!"

He looked harassedly around him. The Security man nodded and moved
casually away. This was close timing. Something made Joe look up. He saw
the catwalk gallery nearly overhead. The expected guard was there.
Haney, though, was with him. There was nothing else in sight. Not yet.
But Haney was on the job. Joe saw a Security man step out of sight in
the scaffolding. He saw his own assigned security man speak to another,
who wandered casually toward the Platform's base.

Minutes passed. Only Joe could have noticed, because he was watching for
it. There were eight or nine Security men posted within call. They had
their walkie-talkies turned off and would be subject only to his orders
if an emergency arose.

Gongs began to ring all around the edge of the Shed. They set up a
horrendous clanging. This was not an alarm, but simply the notice of
change-of-shift time.

There was a marked change in the noises overhead. A crane pulled back.
Hammerings dwindled and stopped. There were the sounds of pipes,
combined to form the scaffolds, being taken apart for removal. A
sling-load of pipe touched the floor and stayed there. The crane's
internal-combustion motor stopped. Its operator stepped down to the
floor and headed for the exit. Hoists descended and men moved across the
floor. Other men scrambled down ladders. The floor became dotted with
figures moving toward the doors through which men went out to get on the
busses for Bootstrap.

Nothing happened. More long minutes passed. The shift brought out by the
busses was going through the check-over process in the incoming screen
room. Joe knew that Major Holt had, within the past five minutes,
gathered together a tight-knit bunch of armed security men to be
available for anything that might turn up. The men doing the normal
shift-change screening were shorthanded in consequence.

The floor next to the exits became crowded, but the central area of the
floor was cleared. One truck was stalled at the swing-up truck doors.
Its driver ground the starter insistently.

Suddenly there was a high-pitched yell away up on the Platform. Then
there was a shot. Its echoes rang horribly in the resonant interior of
the Shed. Joe's own special security man hurried to him, his face tense.

"What about that?"

"Hold everything," said Joe grimly. "That's taken care of."

It was. That was Mike's gang—miniature humans popping out of hiding to
offer battle with missiles carefully prepared beforehand against their
alleged associates in sabotage. One of the associates had drawn a gun
and fired. But Mike's gang had help. Out of small air locks devised to
make the Platform's skin accessible to its crew on every side—provided
they wore space suits—dark-skinned men appeared.

The security man's walkie-talkie under his shoulder made a buzzing
sound. He reached for it.

"Forget it!" snapped Joe. "That's not for you! You've got your orders!
Stay here!"

There was a sudden growling uproar where men were crowding to get out of
the Shed. Thick, billowing smoke appeared. There was a crashing
explosion. The men eddied and milled crazily.

The motor of the stalled truck caught. It moved toward the door, which
opened, swinging up and high. Two trucks came roaring in. They raced for
the Platform. And as they raced inside, their camouflaged loads
clattered off and men showed instead. The guards by the doorway began to
shoot.

"That's what we've got to stop!" snapped Joe.

He began to run, his pistol out. There was suddenly a small
army—gathered by his orders—which materialized in the dim space under
the Platform. It raced to guard against this evidently well-planned
invasion.

The harsh, tearing rattle of a machine gun sounded from somewhere high
up. Joe knew what it was. Mike's whole scheme had been intended to force
all sabotage efforts to take place at a single instant. Part of the
preparation was authority for Haney to drag in two machine guns from an
outer watching-post and mount them to cover the interior of the Shed
when the general attack began.

Those machine guns were shooting at the trucks. Splinters sprang up from
the wood-block floor. Then, abruptly, one of the trucks vanished in a
monstrous, actinic flash of blue-white flame and a roar so horrible that
it was not sound but pure concussion. The other truck keeled over and
crashed from the blast, but did not explode. Men jumped from it. There
must have been screamed orders, but Joe could hear nothing at all. He
only saw men waving their arms, and others seized things from the
toppled load and rushed toward him, and he began to shoot as he ran to
meet them.

Now, belatedly, the sirens of the Shed screamed their alarm, and choppy
yappings set up as the siren wails rose in pitch. Over by the exit
pistols cracked. Something fell with a ghastly crash not ten feet from
where Joe ran. It was a man's body, toppled from somewhere high up on
the structure that was the most important man-made thing in all the
world. A barbaric war whoop sounded among the echoes of other tumult.

A Security man shot, and one of the running figures toppled and slid,
his burden—which must certainly be a bomb—rolling ridiculously. There
had been two trucks that plunged through the swing-up door. They had
raced for the spaces under the Platform at the exact time when the floor
would be clear, because all work had stopped. Under the Platform, the
trucks were to have been detonated. At the very least, they would have
rent and torn it horribly. They might have broken its back. And surely
one truck should have made it. But there should not have been machine
guns ready trained to shoot. Now the load of desperate men from the
overturned survivor scurried for the Platform with parts of its cargo.
If they could fight their way inside the Platform, they could blast its
hull open, or demolish its controls or shatter its air pumps and its
gyros and turn its air tanks into sieves. Anything that could be damaged
would delay the take-off and so expose the Platform to further and
perhaps more successful attack.

There were more pistol shots. A group of men fought their way out of the
incoming screening rooms and raced for the center of the Shed. (Later,
it would be found they had slabs of explosive inside their garments, and
detonation caps to set them off.) Somewhere another door opened, and
Security men came out with flickering pistols, Major Holt leading them.
He had started out to fight off the truck-borne attack, but he was bound
to be too late. Joe's followers were trying to take care of that. The
scuttling men from the incoming rooms were Major Holt's first prey. They
were shot as they ran.