Sinister Barrier (22 page)

He saw Sheehan, an operative, shove the muzzle of his gun straight into a slobbering mouth and let her blow. Gobs of noggin, slop and goo flew in all directions as the part-headless victim toppled under his stamping feet. Far behind him, or in front, or in some direction—he didn’t know where—a voice was hollering something about Vitons. He bulled into the horde of dupes, his struggles more maniacal than their own. Then the whole of existence became an inferno of raging fire through which he sank and sank and sank until every sound had ceased.

Chapter 14

EASING THE BANDAGE AROUND HIS HEAD, Graham gazed at the distant pile of Bank of Manhattan, then turned to the others.

“How the devil did we manage to get out of that mess? What happened?”

“Me and my pair had five on our hands in the foyer,” explained Wohl. He fondled a damaged knee, winced. “We heard the shenanigans upstairs come echoing down the levitator shafts as the other six went to your aid. A short time later, two of them came down like bats out of hell, bringing you with them. You’d been conked, and I’ll say you looked lousy!” He favored the knee again, muttered an oath. “Your stretcher-bearers said they’d got out one jump ahead of visiting luminosities.”

“And Hetty?”

“There!” Wohl handed him a pair of field glasses. “She went Mayo’s way.”

“What, flung herself out?” Wohl’s answering nod plunged him into thought.

So the duty imposed upon that poor, warped mind had been a threefold one—she was to end herself with her usefulness.

He was moody as he looked at the tragic bundle on that far sidewalk. In a little while, they’d pick her up and send her to decent repose. Meanwhile, it was fortunate that they’d got out fast and in the nick of time, for once again they were unidentifiable among New York’s slinking, wary millions.

Short of sheer chance, or the aid of a dupe, they were as difficult to pick out as individual bees in a mighty swarm. There was good parallelism in an imaginary revolt of the bees. The same elusiveness would protect from superior mankind the few intellectual insects who were seeking a means of replacing formic acid with Black Widow venom. If it came to that, they were bees—bees whose nervous honey was not for others.

He said to Wohl, “Two brought me down? Only
two?”
His inquiring eyes moved to the four dishevelled operatives standing near, and two of them fidgeted uneasily. “What of the other four—were they killed?”

“A couple of them were.” One of the restless pair waved his hand toward Bank of Manhattan. “Bathurst and Craig stayed behind.”

“Why?”

“Most of the dupes were scattered, wounded or dead, but the Vitons were entering. They were coming in at the top while we were trying to get you out at the bottom. So Bathurst and Craig hung back, and—” His voice trailed off.

“Decoyed them, knowing there could be no escape?” Graham suggested. The other nodded assent.

Two had remained to attract the still invincible but over-eager foe; to run and shriek and shriek and die—or become dupes in their turn. They had raced higher in the building, knowing that they would never reach the top, but knowing that by the time their recoiling minds were seized and analysed, the others would be safely merged in the concealing mass of humanity.

It was a sacrifice made for him. There was no comment Graham could make that would not sound fatuous, and he knew that none was asked or expected. In the tradition of the service, two Intelligence operatives had done their duty as they deemed it—and that was that!

Rubbing his throbbing left arm, he lifted the thin bandage beneath the sleeve. A mere flesh wound.

Wohl said, “Let that be a lesson to you: don’t rush in where angels fear to tread. It buys you nothing but grief.”

“I’m hoping it’s bought us salvation,” Graham retorted. Taking no notice of Wohl’s mystification, he turned to the four operatives.

“You two,” he said, selecting a pair, “beat it out to Yonkers. You won’t be able to get there direct—there’s hard radiation across the route. It may be necessary to take a roundabout road. But you must get there at all costs.”

“We’ll make it, never worry,” assured one.

“Okay. Tell Steve Koenig he’s to try point five centimeters sooner than immediately, and that’s a hot tip. You’d better split and go different ways if you can: it will double your chances of getting through. Remember—point five centimeters. That’s all that Koenig will want to know.” He addressed the other couple. “Marconi’s have established their underground plant at Queens end of the low-level city. They’re fiddling around on their own, without orders from Washington, but they could use the information I’ve got. So rush along and tell Deacon we’ve reason to believe that point five centimeters is the critical wavelength.”

“Yes, Mr. Graham,” answered one.

He spoke to all four. “You’d better say, too, that if either of them gain success they’ll have to move fast if they want to stay in business. They’ll have to protect their own plant with the first installation they produce, and then the stations from which they draw power. Then—and not until then!—they can supply official demands. Tell them it’s absolutely essential that they refuse to be moved by any bureaucratic panic until they’ve protected their own plants and power-stations. D’you understand?”

“Sure, Mr. Graham.” They went out, cautiously, yet fast.

Grimness was in the set of his jaw when he remarked to Wohl, “If we discover a way to turn out suitable weapons, we’re not going to have them destroyed at the source.”

“That’s logical,” agreed Wohl. He cocked a questioning eye. “You’ve found something, Bill?”

“Yes, I got the specific detail for which Hetty’s mind had been directed to seek. Undoubtedly, the luminosities intended to suck her knowledge as she acquired it and take action accordingly.” He ripped a dangling pocket flap from his tattered jacket, scowled at it, flung it away. “If possible, she was to ascertain the location of any experimental group working on or near point five centimeters. Had she been able to identify them, they’d have been smeared around. Probably they’d have smeared other groups simultaneously, just to keep us confused. We’d have had no clew to a potent wavelength—but they’d have put finish to the one they fear.”

“Gosh!” Wohl registered a mixture of glee and admiration. “And that’s what you dived in to get? The Vitons might just as well have told you themselves!”

“They did,” was Graham’s succinct reply. “They informed us by proxy. Very kind of them—damn their guts!” He had a look at his watch. “We’ve to carry on from this point, getting results in a few precious hours. Polarization’s the trouble—we’re dealing with short radio waves, not ordinary light.”

“Never mind,” Wohl comforted. “So far you’ve done fine.”

“Me? You mean
we!”

“I mean you,” Wohl persisted. “You’ve done fine. Every cloud has a silver lining.”

“We’ll have to see that silver darned quick, else it’ll come too—” He stopped, rubbed his pulsing arm, stared at the other. “I seem to remember something about photons changing their double-eights to true spirals when rebounding from polished silver.”

“What of it? I spiral off glass—when it holds beer.”

“Silver might do it,” Graham went on, ignoring him. “The problem’s largely one of refraction versus reflection, but silver might do it. There’s a good chance that so short a wave might spiral if the beam could be bounced off a silver plate—especially if we use a Bergstrom magnetic-field impeller to make the stuff hard and fast by cutting down absorption.”

“You bet!” Wohl’s grin was apologetic. “It ought to work just like you say. I get the whole idea so clearly I could see it with muffled ears in a dungeon next month.”

“The odd chance in a thousand,” murmured Graham. “It will be worth trying if Laurie hasn’t thought up something better.” Ceasing to nurse his injuries, he became suddenly dynamic. “Jump to it, Art—we’re going back to Laurie.”

A hundred highly skilled craftsmen now toiled and sweated inside the great Faraday shed. They had been commandeered from various local radio and scientific instrument works, and every man knew his stuff so well that Laurie and his little band could concentrate unhampered on their own special jobs.

Valuable hours of non-stop work were represented by the compact but complicated apparatus which glistened and shone in the center of the littered floor. Long, slender tubes sparkled in the assembly’s heart: cylindrical screens projected from its turntable framework beneath which were a dozen rubber-tired wheels. From its seat mounted before a small control-board the entire set-up could be moved and rotated electrically like a crane, drawing power from cables which snaked out of its end couplings and ran across the floor toward the generators.

Here, a worker bent over a true-surfaced peralumin disk and silver-plated it by wire-process metallization. While his electric arc sputtered its rain of minute drops, another worker close by plated another disk with granulated silver by-passed into an exoacetylene flame and thus blast-driven into the preheated surface. Any method would do so long as there was someone capable of doing it with optical accuracy.

Another worker was burnishing a heavily plated disk on a confiscated buffing machine, frequently checking results with a micrometer gauge. Behind him, one of Laurie’s experts was completing the assembly of a hemispherical trellis antenna. Two more scientists fussed around a big, cylindrical funnel; one fitting front and rear skeleton-sights to its upper surface, the other making minute adjustments to its complex impeller.

Two hours to go!

Graham came in with an old-fashioned printed paper, rested one foot on the assembly’s turntable while he scanned the front page. Iowa threatened by battle for Omaha. Asian armor enters Luxembourg. Madrid obliterated in atom-blast. Scandinavia’s last stand today. More atomic rockets flay Britain. It was gloom, gloom, gloom all the way. His eyes found the side column just as Laurie came up. French collapse imminent. He shoved the paper into his pocket.

“Bad news?” inquired Laurie.

“Not so good. There’s something else, too. It came from Philly by ham radio. Veitch’s nearly completed apparatus was blown to pieces early this morning.”

“Ah!” Laurie’s bushy brows drew together in a frown. “That suggests he was on the right track. If he was on the right track, then we’re on the wrong one.”

“Not necessarily. Veitch had a dupe in his crowd. We warned him, and he said he’d kid the fellow along. He didn’t want to remove him in case he was replaced by another. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

“The dupe did it?”

“Yes—killing himself in the blast. Honorable harakiri, sort of. A couple of others are wounded.” He looked meditative. “I’d have phoned Veitch before now if it hadn’t been that all his lines are reserved strictly for outgoing traffic. He ought to have been ready long before anyone else, since he had tons of stuff transported from Florida and it needed only reassembling.”

“H’m-m-m! Any other news?”

“Only that Sangster’s been located, I was worried about him. They found him in an underground hospital. He was in William Street when that big section of skyway collapsed. He’ll recover.”

Leaving Laurie, he visited the open space fronting the shed. Here, in the middle of the cleared area, was a ring of giant copper earths, all ready to connect with the multiple condensers of the transmitter’s intricate grounding system.

A parade of blue dots, made tiny by distance, wended its way far to the east, somewhere over Long Island. His eyes gleamed as he watched them. Nice fix they were in, he thought, with chronic disregard for his own greater fix. Like hundreds of worried bee-keepers trying to search thousands of hives containing tens of millions of bees. They could go here, and there, and to dozens of other places, but they couldn’t be everywhere at one and the same time. That was their weak spot.

His gaze returned to the copper earths, and he wondered whether even this efficient system would absorb the terrific shock imposed upon it by a vengeful enemy. He doubted it. A system ten times the size would not be sufficient to cope with the hell’s fury such as had fallen upon Silver City.

The most they could hope for was to destroy one Viton—and let the rest of the world know why Faraday’s had been thrown all over the landscape, let it thus know that there still was hope if the struggle could be maintained a little longer. Yes, the end of only one Viton would be enough.

Behind the transmitter’s intended site was a wide pit, its six-inch wall of sprayed-on, quick-drying cement diving into the depths like a gigantic pipe. There was a slide-pole down its center.

One man was going to operate the transmitter. If he could do it, that man was going to try to save himself from the certain holocaust that success would bring by plunging down the shaft deep, deep into the ebon depths. It was a primitive sanctuary—but the fastest out that could be contrived in the circumstances.

Returning, he asked Laurie, “How long?”

“Fifteen minutes.” Laurie mopped his damp and anxious brow. “We’ll be all set in fifteen minutes. If it works, we’ll have plant ready for ten more assemblies.” He waved a hand to indicate the bustling crowd. “And providing we don’t get slaughtered, we’ll fling them together in a couple of hours.”

“No you won’t.” Graham’s contradiction was flat and authoritative. “You’re going to rush those spares away to a safe distance right now. The whole area is liable to be tossed moonward when those Vitons get the rats, and the spares had better be someplace else during the showdown.” Finding a microphone, he chattered into it rapidly.

Three minutes later, a line of trucks swung before the doors, each picking up its load and lumbering heavily away. Workers departed in silent, ruminative groups, leaving behind a shop cleared of all but the polarized-wave projector shining in the middle of the floor. A quartet of scientists hurried to complete various connections, make a few last-minute adjustments.

He leaned on the turntable, watching them with a cold patience that surprised himself considering that the testing time was so near. After days of nervous strain, he was suddenly as impassive as a stone Buddha—like a man who finally finds himself in the dental chair after a jumpy hour in the waiting-room. His gaze settled on one of the working four, a half-pint individual with a tonsure around his balding head.