by Jerry
“Meaning?”
“Well, it won’t hurt to tell you, I guess. We’re going out to Eldon’s Island. I have orders from the Director to man the Orestes installations there.”
“Orestes?”
“Ground-to-air missiles. Looks like somebody’s expecting unfriendly visitors from the air tonight.”
Huber followed Wortman onto the darkened deck. The man gave low orders in the dark and Huber waited.
Finally he said, “Vic, what’s going on? What blew up out there tonight?”
“Search me. Looked like a bomb.”
“Who’d try to bomb Universal City?”
“Well, it’s been tried before. Why do you think they built this anti-aircraft installation we’re going to man?”
“But that was centuries ago.”
“I know. It sounds ridiculous that anyone would want to destroy the city. One thing, though, you forget . . .”
“Yes?”
“The ones who dropped those bombs two centuries ago are probably still alive.”
HE LEFT Huber by the cabin door and walked to the bow. Huber stood waiting silently. All at once he felt as if he were being pushed into something without his consent.
The thing was too unreal, too coincidental. The series of events affecting him personally: the final confirmation of his future death, the attempt to jump out of the window, the girl, the explosion to the west, the failure of the ’copter, and Wortman’s too convenient arrival and too pat explanation.
All seemingly disconnected events. Yet . . . He shivered in the coolness of the river breezes. There seemed to be no logical connection. Yet there was too much happening. He’d better watch his step with Wortman, he decided. The man was obviously a neurotic. How else explain his morbid interest in the hunts, his organizing a hunt club himself?
Huber moved forward as the cruiser slackened its speed. Their direction changed slightly, and then the motors stilled. He saw the spotlight outlining a ragged fringe of trees and a half-decayed dock. One of the men jumped onto the dock and secured a mooring line.
Then Wortman was on the dock, giving quick orders. Huber steadied himself by the bow and jumped across.
“Look,” he told Wortman, “I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Later, Ken.”
“Now.”
“Later. There’s a ’copter due to pick me up in another ten minutes. I’ve got to get this operation going.”
Huber watched the men move out. There were gleams of individual lights in the darkness. He saw the dim shapes of some type of concrete construction, and heard the sound of metal sliding on metal. Someone shouted an order, and muffled motors whirred. Dim shapes of steel rose slowly to be silhouetted against the glow of the horizon and the lower silhouettes of the trees.
The Orestes, he thought. Still operable after all these years? Someone had been preparing for tonight.
He heard the distant beat of ’copter vanes. As he listened they came closer, and a bright beam of light lanced the night sky. Moments later the heavy craft lowered itself onto the bank before the dock.
Wortman came running. As he passed Huber, he said, “Come on.”
A man was descending from the aircraft. As he stepped into the light, Huber recognized Dykeman’s assistant, Besser.
“Who the hell told you to come out here?” the thin man rasped. For a moment Huber thought he was being addressed.
“The Director ’vised me,” Wortman snapped. “Told me to contact you and hitch a ride.”
Besser swore softly. “All right, get in.”
“Come on, Ken,” Wortman called.
“Who’s that?” Besser demanded.
“Ken Huber.”
“That’s out. I don’t have any orders on him.”
“I do.”
“Dykeman is senior in charge until the Director takes over. He specifically said no personnel but those from city administration.”
“I told you. Director’s orders.”
Besser swore again.
“All right. Get in and make it quick.”
Huber followed Wortman into the ’copter and took one of the rear seats. Besser settled into the pilot’s seat and flipped the manual switch. The blades bit air.
“What’s the deal?” Huber demanded. “Where are we going?”
“Out where that thing blew up,” Wortman said.
“Thing?”
“He doesn’t know,” Besser yelled angrily above the motors.
“What thing?” Huber insisted. “A bomb?”
“You may as well know, since you’ll see it anyway,” Besser yelled. “It wasn’t a bomb. It was a spaceship.”
Huber gaped. The thin man laughed bitterly.
“Don’t look at me as if I’ve gone off my rocker. It’s a spaceship, all right.” His voice was shrill above the noise of their flight. “A spaceship, by damn—complete with crew.”
CHAPTER V
“THE FIRST ONE crashed and blew up,” Besser yelled above the vibration of the rotor. “The blast caught the second and threw it out of control.”
Etched in the blaze of light below, Huber could see the clumsy shapes of at least a dozen twin-rotor disaster craft, their oversize fuel tanks bulging like twin tankers on the stem of a reed, drawn into a tight landing pattern. The shock wave from the explosion had stripped the area of the scrub oak and pine that normally blanketed the plain west of the city. At the extreme boundaries of the circle of disaster, he could see occasional pines still rooted, but they were twisted and ragged looking, and leaned at sharp angles from the center of the bare circle.
He counted fourteen twin search beams on the periphery of the area. Their bright arcs had been directed parallel to the ground. The whole area had a coarse granular appearance as though some monstrous rake had churned the earth in concentric circles from the epicenter. There was an area of nearly a hundred yards in diameter in the center of the blast that glistened like the surface of a frozen lake.
“That must be where the fireball touched the ground,” Wortman said excitedly.
Besser pointed to the east. “And that’s where the second one came in. It must have hit a half mile outside the circle and then torn a path through the trees.”
“Just like a stone skipping across a pond,” Huber yelled.
“Damned hard pond,” Wortman laughed, “and a damned big stone.”
The wreckage of the second ship had strewn itself across the open area under the lights in a long narrow path. The ship had broken into three distinct sections, and Huber saw what he guessed must be the tail section by the battered rocket tubes.
Besser had switched to manual again and was guiding the ship into a landing near the glazed area.
“What about radiation?” Wortman asked.
“An android crew checked first thing. Not a milliroentgen above normal background. Nothing in the cloud either.”
“Whoever heard of a blast that size without a neutron flux?” Huber demanded.
“Big medicine,” Wortman said in an awed voice.
As they alighted, a mud-spattered mechanical centipede came churning across the soft ground from the forward section, dust and clods of dirt spurting from under its many splayed wheels. A conventional gyro-balanced beetle, Huber saw, could not possibly have navigated the uneven terrain. The vehicle ground to a stop near them with a muffled whine of transmissions, and Dykeman, who shared the front seat with an android driver, leaned out. “Besser,” he yelled, “who’s that with you?”
“Ken Huber and Vic Wortman.”
“Damn it, I told you not to bring any outsiders.”
“Director sent me in, Dyke,” Wortman said, moving toward the vehicle. “Told me to pick up Ken and bring him along.”
That’s an outright lie, Huber thought. It confirmed his doubts about Wortman. Something was radically wrong here.
“What’s the situation look like?” Besser asked.
“Don’t know. I was just heading for the forward section when you lande
d. I decided to come back and see who it was.”
“Well, let’s go, then,” Wortman said.
“That area’s off limits to you both,” Dykeman said, staring at them. “And don’t tell me you have any other authorization. I’m the final judge in questions of possible radiation.”
“But Besser said—” Huber began.
“Never mind what Besser said. You both stay here. That’s an order.”
Before either could reply, Besser had mounted to the rear seat and Dykeman said, “Take off.”
“Bring me a picture of your little green men,” Wortman said sardonically. Dykeman ignored him, but Besser turned to Wortman, his sunken eyes burning in the sallow face.
“You’d make a joke out of your mother’s funeral,” he said.
The centipede started with a jolt and raced back toward the forward section.
“Look, there’s something I want to know,” Huber said.
“Know how to run a ’pede?” Wortman demanded.
“Yes, but—”
“I saw one parked on the far side of the landing area as we came in. What say we take a look at that rear section?”
Huber followed him at a trot.
“Dykeman said to stay here,” he panted.
“The hell with what Dyke says,” Wortman snapped, climbing over the wheels of the parked vehicle and into the passenger seat.
Huber mounted beside him and started the motor. The thing snarled softly as his foot engaged the transmission and he threw the vehicle forward.
“What’s Dykeman doing here?” he demanded as he swerved to avoid a massive piece of torn metal.
“Officially in charge of field operations. Only a few of the regular complement are on hand on Carnival night. Rest have left for the week end.”
“What about the radiation?”
“Don’t be silly. Think he’d go in unless it were safe?”
AS THEY approached the rear section with its massive rocket tubes, the metal fragments became more profuse, and Huber needed all of his attention to avoid them. The initial impact of the ship had stripped all the airfoils from the craft; and connecting girders and the metal outer skin had crumbled from the frame with each glancing impact to spread huge pieces of debris over the path of the ship.
He hadn’t realized just how large the motor section was until they drew up beside it and he looked up to see the gouged and scarred wall curve upward above them and out over their vehicle. A gaping hole in the side, apparently the result of torchwork by one of the android disaster crew, was close enough for them to reach from the centipede. Huber crawled through and leaned out to help Wortman, who came up puffing and blowing. He was carrying a hand lantern.
Huber took the light from him and led the way forward. The section seemed to be divided into the short passage into which they had gained entry and two much larger chambers, braced and buttressed against the thrust of the motors, through which branching catwalks led.
Huber paused to eye several of the levers, attached to a complex of pipes resembling a hydraulic system.
“One thing sure,” he said, “our little green men have only four fingers, if you can call them that.”
“How so?” demanded Wortman.
“By the various controls. They’re designed to be grasped by three fingers and an opposable thumb. About human height too, I’d say, though what they look like Dykeman will tell us.”
He began to inspect the massive tanks that filled the first compartment. After a long while, he said, “These damned things can’t be all reaction mass. Where’s the fuel?”
He kneeled and opened a petcock on the massive pipe leading from one of the tanks. Clear liquid gushed out. He checked the flow with a tug and smelled the liquid. Finally he tasted it.
“Here,” he offered Wortman.
Wortman tasted a drop.
“Salt!”
“That’s right. Weak saline.”
“But what about fuel?”
“I’ve got a crazy idea, there. Notice there’s ho shielding worth the name anywhere in this section.”
He started through to the second chamber. “I want to check below,” Huber said, lowering himself slowly on a ladder.
It was fifteen minutes before he re-joined Wortman. “Find anything?” he asked.
“Looks like my crazy idea was right. Our aliens know how to handle a controlled sodium fusion reaction.”
“Now, look,” Wortman protested. “Even I know enough about nuclear physics to know that is impossible.”
“Take my word for it,” Huber said. “Our little green men can do the impossible. And they don’t get any hard radiation from the reaction. They dissolve the fuel right in the reaction mass, salt in water, and get heat and a few stray betas that even the thinnest sheet of tinfoil would stop.”
“What about the motor itself. Can we duplicate it?”
“I think so. The secret seems to be in a little gadget in the rear of the assembly that sends a stream of alphas from a hunk of polonium into the reaction mass and then generates some sort of harmonic field around the chamber. It looks simple, but I’ll be damned if I see how they shake up a few sodium atoms and a couple of alpha particles and get energy out of it.”
“Any idea how much thrust?”
“How much do you think this hulk weighs?”
“Well . . .”
Huber stamped on the deck. It rang hollowly.
“Plain ordinary steel,” he said. “Those motors have enough thrust to raise and maneuver a five-hundred-yard long vessel of solid steel.”
“If we can unravel those motors,” Wortman said, “it means we’ve got space flight dumped right into our lap.”
“There’s more.”
Huber raised the lantern and hooked it on a ragged piece of metal that curled from one wall. The metal wall plates were warped and buckled as though the major impact of striking had been concentrated at this point. The far end of the spacious compartment was filled with a bewildering mass of complex helices and gleaming silver bus bars a foot thick. Dropping away on either side of the catwalk that ran through the center of the compartment was a complex instrument panel with what were obviously acceleration couches positioned at several spots on its face. The whole thing now leaned crazily, its surface scored as though with a giant file.
“That’s not the motor,” Wortman whispered.
“No. It looks something like those electro-gravitic generators Chang in Lima was playing with fifty years ago when he developed the induction field. If there’s one competent physicist on the continent, you’d better get him out here. This thing is beyond me.”
“What is it?”
Huber paused in indecision.
“You should ask what is it, and”—he pointed at the acceleration couches before the great board—“where are the technicians who ran it? This thing needs a lot of controlling.”
“All right, give,” Wortman demanded.
Huber gestured silently, took the lantern, and led him along the catwalk toward the deep well that housed the control board. He directed his light into the depths of the spaceship.
“Looks like something’s been burned down there.”
“That’s right,” Huber said. “Something—don’t ask me what—literally burned down the crew. Something piled them, unconscious or dead, down there and deliberately tried to reduce them to ashes.”
“Who—”
“As for your other question,” Huber said, feeling suddenly as if he were going to strangle on the words, “I think this damned thing is an interstellar drive.”
CHAPTER VI
THE CENTIPEDE returned them to the landing area just as Dykeman arrived from the forward stage. The chubby medic climbed from his vehicle and strode purposefully toward them as they dismounted.
“I thought I told you to stay here,” he said.
“We figured there’d be no danger,” Wortman said.
“That motor section could be hot as blazes,” the medic said with a worrie
d frown.
“Well, it’s too late to worry now.” Huber said. “Find anything in the forward section?”
“Nothing,” Dykeman said, shaking his head. “Not a sign of anyone or anything. Controls pretty badly smashed up, but not a blood spot or anything that would pass for one.
Huber told him what they had found.
“That doesn’t sound reasonable,” Dykeman said.
“Where’s Besser?” Wortman demanded.
“Throwing up a picket line around the area. We brought in a detachment of androids and armed them.”
“What are you afraid of?” Huber wanted to know.
“Did it ever occur to you,” Dykeman said, “that our hypothetical aliens didn’t intend to give us a present of this ship? That they might not want us out there where they come from? That they might try to get in and destroy this wreck?”
“From the ground?”
“Either way,” the medic said, “we’ve got to be prepared until we can get someone in here who understands this thing.”
Huber was about to say something about the drives he’d seen when Dykeman looked up and said:
“It’s about time.”
Brilliant landing lights suddenly flicked on overhead and Huber looked up to see a ’copter lowering toward them.
“Look,” Wortman said, “I’m going out with Besser. Maybe I can help.”
“Better stay here,” Dykeman said. “That’s the Director’s ship.”
“I’ll be back,” Wortman said. Before the medic could answer, Wortman had climbed up beside Dykeman’s driver and the centipede was rocketing away toward the forward section.
“Damned flighty idiot,” Dykeman said; and Huber wondered if Dykeman had yet seen Wortman’s name on the list of hunt clubs he’d given him.
The ’copter settled heavily and the door flew open even before the blades ceased revolving.
A tall man with broad shoulders and a thick corded neck leaped down. In the light from the spots, Huber saw that his hair was tinged with gray. He wondered how old he must be. Very few of the present generation showed any sign of aging.
Dykeman started forward as the man turned to lend assistance to someone behind him. As they stepped into the light, Huber moved forward. With a start, he recognized the second figure.
