Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (21 page)

Joe stumbled and fell and he heard guns crackling. As he scrambled up he
pitched into a running figure that snarled as Joe hit him. And then he
was fighting for his life.

This was under the Platform and in the middle of confusion many times
confounded. Joe caught a wrist that held a gun. He knew his assailant
had a bomb slung over one shoulder and right now had one hand free for
combat. Joe instinctively tried to batter his enemy with his own pistol,
instead of pushing the muzzle against the man's body and pulling the
trigger. He struck a flailing blow, and his hand and the weapon struck a
metal brace. The blow cut his knuckles and paralyzed his fingers.
Despairingly he felt the pistol slipping from his grasp. Then his
assailant brought up his knee viciously, but it hit Joe's thigh instead
of his groin, and Joe flung his weight furiously forward and they
toppled to the ground together.

There was fighting all around him. The machine guns rasped again—there
was a burst of tracer-bullet fire. The panicked men by the exit tried to
surge out through the swinging doors. But the tracers marked a line they
must not cross. They checked. Once a gun flashed so close by Joe's eyes
that it blinded him. And once somebody fell over both himself and his
antagonist, who writhed like an eel possessed of desperate strength past
belief.

Joe could really know only his private part in the struggle down in the
murky tangle of the scaffold base. But there was fighting up on the
Platform itself. A savagely grinning Mohawk wrestled furiously with a
man on one of the rocket tubes. An incendiary device in the saboteur's
pocket ignited, and it flamed red-hot and he screamed as it burned its
way out of his garments. The Mohawk flung the man fiercely clear, to
crash horribly on the far-distant floor, and then kicked the incendiary
off. It fell after the man and hit and burst, and it was thermite which
surrounded itself with a column of acrid smoke from seared wood blocks.

There was fighting by the exit doors. There was an ululating uproar in
the incoming screening room, and a war whoop from the top of the
Platform. A saboteur tried to crawl into an air-lock entrance, and he
got his head and shoulders in, but a copper-skinned Indian held his
forehead still and chopped down with the side of his hand on that man's
neck. Underneath the Platform was panting chaos, with pistol shots and
hand-to-hand struggles everywhere. The force Joe had gathered fought
valiantly, but four invaders got to the foot of the wooden steps, where
there were two guards. Then there were only two saboteurs left to
scramble desperately up the steps over the dead guards' bodies and head
toward the Platform door, but the Chief appeared swinging a twelve-inch
Stillson. He let it go, precisely like a skillfully flung tomahawk, and
leaped down sixteen steps squarely onto the body of the other man. A gun
flashed, but then there was only squirming struggle on the floor.

Mike the midget, inside the Platform, found one bloodied, panting,
sobbing man who somehow had gotten inside. And Mike brought down a
spanner from a ladder step, and swarmed upon his half-conscious victim,
and hit him again, and then stayed on guard until somebody arrived who
was big enough to carry the saboteur away.

And all this while, Joe struggled with only one man. It was a horrible
struggle, because the man had a bomb and he might manage to set it off
or it might go off of itself. It was a ghastly struggle, because the man
had the strength and desperation of a maniac—and practiced the tactics.
Joe pounded the hand that held the gun upon the floor, and it hit
something and exploded smokily and fell clear. But that made things
worse. While struggling to kill Joe with the revolver, his antagonist
had had only five fingers with which to gouge out Joe's eyes or tear
away his ears or rend his flesh. But with no pistol he had ten, and he
fought like a wild beast. He even breathed like an animal. He began to
pant—thick, guttural pantings that had the quality of hellish hate. And
then there was a surging of bodies—Major Holt's reserve was arriving
very late in the center of the Shed—and then a struggling group
trampled all over the pair who squirmed and fought on the ground, and a
heavy boot jammed down Joe's head and he felt teeth sink in his throat.
They dug into his flesh, worrying and tearing....

Joe used his knee in a frenzy of revulsion—used his knee as the other
man had tried to use his in the first instant of battle. The man beneath
him screamed as an animal would scream, and Joe jerked his bleeding
throat free. In hysterical horror he pounded his antagonist's head on
the floor until the man went limp....

And then he heard a grim voice saying: "Quit it or you get your head
blown off! Quit it—" And Joe panted: "It's about time you guys got
here! This man came in on that truck. Watch out for that bomb he's got
slung on him...."

The incoming shift had a messy clean-up job to do. It was accomplished
only because security men abruptly took over the work of gang bosses,
and all ordinary labor on the Platform was put aside until normal
operations were again possible. Even that would not have been feasible
but for the walkie-talkies the security men wore. As the situation was
sorted out, it was explained to them, and they relayed the news for the
satisfaction of the curiosity of those who worked under them. No
work—no explanation. It produced immediate and satisfactory
co-operation all around.

There had been four separate and independent attempts to wreck the
Platform at the same time. One was, of course, the plan of those
sympathetic characters who had volunteered to help Mike and his gang win
the status of spacemen by firing the Platform's rockets. There were not
many of them, and they had lost heavily. They'd had thermite bombs to
destroy the Platform's vitals. Ultimately the survivors talked freely,
if morosely, and that was that.

There had been a particularly ungifted attempt to cause panic in the
incoming shift in the rooms where its members were screened before
admission to work. Somebody had tried to establish complete confusion
there by firing revolver shots in the crowd, expecting the workers to
break through to the floor and assigned gentlemen with slabs of
explosive to get to the Platform with them. The gentlemen with the
explosives had run into Major Holt's security reserve, and they got
nowhere. The creators of panic with revolver shots were finally rescued
from their shift-mates and more or less scraped up from the
screening-room floor—they were in very bad shape—and carted off to be
patched up for questioning. The members of this group had been
impractical idealists, and besides, some of them had lost their nerve,
as was evidenced by the discovery of abandoned explosives and detonators
in the locker room and men's room of the Shed.

The most dangerous attempt was, of course, that perfectly planned and
co-ordinated assault which had been merely carried out at its original
time, without either being hastened or delayed by Mike's activities.
That plan had been beautifully contrived, and it would certainly have
been successful but for the machine-gun bullets from the gallery and the
fight Joe's followers put up underneath the Platform.

The exact instant when the whole Shed would be most nearly empty had
been fixed upon, and three separate units had worked in perfect timing.
There'd been the man in the stalled truck. He'd delayed his exit from
the Shed to the precise fraction of a second to get the doors open at
the perfect instant. The explosive-laden trucks had raced in at the
exact second when they were most certain to get underneath the Platform
and detonate their cargoes. There'd been a perfect diversion planned for
that, too. Smoke bombs and explosions in the outgoing screening rooms
had created real panic, and but for Joe's order for his group's
walkie-talkies to be turned off would have drawn every security man on
duty to that spot.

Mike's trick, then, had brought some saboteurs into the open, but had
merely happened to coincide with the most dangerous and well-organized
coup of all. However, it was due to his trick that the Platform was not
now a wreck.

There was also another break that was sheer coincidence. It was a
discovery that could not possibly have turned up save in a situation of
pure chaos artificially induced. Joe had had to react in a personal and
vengeful way to the manner in which his especial antagonist had fought
him. One expects a man to fight fair by instinct, and to turn to
fouls—if he does—in desperation only. But Joe's personal opponent
hadn't tried a single fair trick. It was as if he'd never heard of a
fist blow, but only of murder and mayhem. Joe felt an individual enmity
toward him.

Joe didn't consider himself the most urgent of the injured, when doctors
and nurses took up the work of patching, but Sally was there to help,
and she went deathly pale when she saw his bloodstained throat. She
dragged him quickly to a doctor. And the doctor looked at Joe and
dropped everything else.

But it wasn't too serious. The antiseptics hurt, and the stitching was
unpleasant, but Joe was more worried by the knowledge that Sally was
standing there and suffering for him. When he got up from the emergency
operating table, the doctor nodded grimly to him.

"That was close!" said the doctor. "Whoever chewed you was working for
your jugular vein, and he was halfway through the wall when he stopped.
A fraction of an inch more, and he'd have had you!"

"Thanks," said Joe. His neck felt clumsy with bandages, and when he
tried to turn his head the stitches hurt.

Sally's hand trembled in his when she led him away.

"I didn't think I'd ever dislike anybody so much," said Joe angrily, "as
I did that man while he was chewing my throat. We were trying to kill
each other, of course, but—confound it, people don't bite!"

"Did you—kill him?" asked Sally in a shaky voice. "Not that I'll mind!
I would have hated the thought ordinarily, but—"

Joe halted. There was a row of stretchers—not too long, at that—in the
emergency-hospital space. He looked down at the unconscious man who'd
fought him.

"There he is!" he said irritably. "I banged him pretty hard. I don't
like to hate anybody, but the way he fought—"

Sally's teeth chattered suddenly. She called to one of the security men
standing guard by the stretchers.

"I—think my—father is going to want to talk to him," she said
unsteadily. "Don't—let him be taken away to the hospital until Dad
knows, please."

She started away, her face dead-white and her hand stone-cold.

"What's the matter?" demanded Joe.

"S-sabotage," said Sally in an indescribable tone that had a suggestion
of heartbreak.

She went into her father's office alone. She came out again with him,
and her father looked completely stricken. Miss Ross, his secretary, was
with him, too. Her face was like a mask of marble. She had always been a
plain woman, a gloomy one, a morbid one. But at the new and horrible
look on her face Joe turned his eyes away.

Then Sally was crying beside him, and he put his arm clumsily around her
and let her sob on his shoulder, completely puzzled.

He didn't find out until later what the trouble was. The man who'd tried
so earnestly to kill him was Miss Ross's fiancé. She had met this man
during a vacation, as a government secretary, and he was a refugee with
an exotic charm that would have fascinated a much more personable and
beautiful woman than Miss Ross. They had a whirlwind romance. He
confided to her his terror of emissaries from his native country who
might kill him. And of course she was more fascinated still. When he
asked her to marry him she accepted his proposal. Then, just two weeks
before her assignment to the Space Platform project, he vanished. Miss
Ross was desperate and lovesick.

One day her telephone rang and his anguished voice told her he'd been
abducted, and if she told the police he would be tortured to death. He
begged her not to do anything to cause him more torment than was already
his.

She'd been trying to keep him alive ever since. Once, when she couldn't
bring herself to carry out an order she'd been given—with threats of
torment to him if she failed—she'd received a human finger in the mail,
and a scrawled and blood-stained note which cried out of unspeakable
torment and begged her not to doom him to more.

So Miss Ross, who was Major Holt's secretary and one of his most trusted
assistants, had been giving information to one group of saboteurs all
the while. She was the most dangerous security leak in the whole
Platform project.

But her fiancé wasn't a captive. He was the head of that group of
saboteurs. He'd made love to her and proposed to her merely to prepare
her to supply the information he wanted. He needed only to write a
sufficiently agonized note, or gasp tormented pleas on a telephone, to
get what he wanted.

Incidentally, he still had all his fingers when Joe knocked him cold.

Sally had recognized him as the subject of a snapshot she'd once seen
Miss Ross crying over. Miss Ross had hidden it hastily and told her it
was someone she had once loved, now dead. And this inadvertent
disclosure that Miss Ross was the security leak the Major had never had
a clue to could only have come about through such confusion as Mike had
instigated and Haney and the Chief and Joe had organized. But Joe
learned those facts only later.

At the moment, there was still the Platform to be gotten aloft. And
there was plenty of work to do. There were two small rips in the
plating, caused by fragments of the exploded truck. There were some
bullet holes. The Platform could resist small meteorites at forty-five
miles a second, but a high-velocity small-arm projectile could puncture
it. Those scars of battle had to be welded shut. The rest of the
scaffolding had to come down and the rest of the rocket tubes had to be
affixed. And there was cleaning up to be done.