Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Several times he encountered air breaks—sliding bulkheads actuated by automatic pressure-controlled switches, designed to cut off any section with a bad air leak. His action at each of these was the same; from an outer pocket of his armor he would take a small wedge of steel and skillfully jam the door. It was this action which convinced Mayhew that the agent was not a scientist—he was displaying the skill of an experienced burglar or spy. He was apparently well supplied with the wedges, for in the hour before he found what he was seeking he jammed more than twenty of the air breaks. Mayhew and Floyd did not bother to have them cleared at the time, since no one was in the outer level without a spacesuit.

  Nearly half of the outer level was thus unified when Hart reached a section of corridor bearing valve handles and hose connections instead of doors, and knew there must be liquids behind the walls. There were code indexes stenciled over the valves, which meant nothing to the spy; but he carefully manipulated one of the two handles to let a little fluid into the corridor, and sniffed at it cautiously through the gingerly cracked face plate of his helmet. He was satisfied with the results; the liquid was one of the low-volatility hydrocarbons used with liquid oxygen as a fuel to provide the moderate acceleration demanded by space launched torpedoes. They were cheap, fairly dense, and their low-vapor pressure simplified the storage problem in open-space stations.

  All that Hart really knew about it was that the stuff would burn as long as there was oxygen. Well—he grinned again at the thought—there would be oxygen for a while; until the compressed, blazing combustion gases blew the heat-softened metal of the outer wall into space. After that there would be none, except perhaps in the central core, where the heavy concentration of radioactive matter made it certain there would be no one to breathe it.

  At present, of course, the second level and any other intermediate ones were still sealed; but that could and would be remedied. In any case, the blast of the liberated fuel would probably take care of the relatively flimsy inner walls. He did not at the time realize that these were of magnesium, or he would have felt even more sure of the results.

  He looked along the corridor. As far as the curvature of the outer shell permitted him to see, the valves projected from the wall at intervals of a few yards. Each valve had a small electric pump, designed to force air into the tank behind it to drive the liquid out by pressure, since there was no gravity. Hart did not consider this point at all; a brief test showed him that the liquid did flow when the valve was on, and that was enough for him. Hanging poised beside the first handle, he took an object from still another pocket of his spacesuit, and checked it carefully, finally clipping it to an outside belt where it could easily be reached.

  At the sight of this item of apparatus, Floyd almost suffered a stroke.

  “That’s an incendiary bomb!” he gasped aloud. “We can’t possibly take him in time to stop his setting it off—which he’ll do the instant he sees our men! And he already has free fuel in the corridor!”

  He was perfectly correct; the agent was proceeding from valve to valve in long glides, pausing at each just long enough to turn it full on and to scatter the balloon-like mass of escaping liquid with a sweep of his arm. Gobbets and droplets of the inflammable stuff sailed lazily hither and yon through the air in his wake.

  Mayhew calmly lighted a cigarette, unmindful of the weird appearance of the match flame driven toward his feet by the draft from the ceiling ventilators, and declined to move otherwise. “Decidedly, no physicist,” he murmured. “I suppose that’s just as well—it’s the military information the army likes anyway. They certainly wouldn’t have risked a researcher on this sort of job, so I never really did have a chance to get anything I wanted from him.”

  “But what are we going to do?” Floyd was almost frantic. “There’s enough available energy loose in that corridor now to blast the whole outer shell off—and gallons more coming every second. I know you’ve been here a lot longer than I, but unless you can tell me how you expect to keep him from lighting that stuff up. I’m getting into a suit right now!”

  “If it blows, a suit won’t help you,” pointed out the older man.

  “I know that!” almost screamed Floyd, “but what other chance is there? Why did you let him get so far?”

  “There is still no danger,” Mayhew said flatly, “whether you believe it or not. However, the fuel does cost money, and there’ll be some work recovering it, so I don’t see why he should be allowed to empty all the torpedo tanks. He’s excited enough now, anyway.” He turned languidly to the appropriate microphone and gave the word to the action squad. “Take him now. He seems to be without hand weapons, but don’t count on it. He certainly has at least one incendiary bomb.” As an afterthought, he reached for another switch, and made sure the ventilators in the outer level were not operating; then he relaxed again and gave his attention to the scanner that showed the agent’s activity. Floyd had switched to another pickup that covered a longer section of corridor, and the watchers saw the spacesuited attackers almost as soon as did Hart himself.

  The European reacted to the sight at once—too rapidly, in fact, for the shift in his attention caused him to miss his grasp on the valve handle he sought and flounder helplessly through the air until he reached the next. Once anchored, however, he acted as he had planned, ignoring with commendable self-control the four armored figures converging on him. A sharp twist turned the fuel valve full on, sending a stream of oil mushrooming into the corridor; his left hand flashed to his belt, seized the tiny cylinder he had snapped there, jammed its end hard against the adjacent wall, and tossed the bomb gently back down the corridor. In one way his lack of weightless experience betrayed him; he allowed for a gravity pull that was not there. The bomb, in consequence, struck the “ceiling” a few yards from his hand, and rebounded with a popping noise and a shower of sparks. It drifted on down the corridor toward the floating globules of hydrocarbon, and the glow of the sparks was suddenly replaced by the eye-hurting radiance of thermite.

  Floyd winced at the sight, and expected the attacking men to make futile plunges after the blazing thing; but though all were within reach of walls, not one swerved from his course. Hart made no effort to escape or fight; he watched the course of the drifting bomb with satisfaction, and, like Floyd, expected in the next few seconds to be engulfed in a sea of flame that would remove the most powerful of the Western torpedo stations from his country’s path of conquest. Unlike Floyd, he was calm about it, even when the men seized him firmly and began removing equipment from his pockets. One unclamped and removed the face place of his helmet; and even to that he made no resistance—just watched in triumph as his missile drifted toward the nearest globes of fuel.

  It did not actually strike the first. It did not have to; while the quantity of heat radiated by burning thermite is relatively small, the temperature of the reaction is notoriously high—and the temperature six inches from the bomb was well above the flash point of the rocket fuel, comparatively non-volatile as it was. Floyd saw the flash as its surface ignited, and closed his eyes.

  Mayhew gave him four or five seconds before speaking, judging that that was probably about all the suspense the younger man could stand.

  “All right, ostrich,” he finally said quietly. “I’m not an angel, in case you were wondering. Why not use your eyes, and the brain behind them?”

  Floyd was far too disturbed to take offense at the last remark, but he did cautiously follow Mayhew’s advice about looking. He found difficulty, however, in believing what his eyes and the scanner showed him.

  The group of five men was unchanged, except for the expression on the captive’s now visible face. All were looking down the corridor toward the point where the bomb was still burning; Lang’s crew bore expressions of amusement on their faces, while Hart wore a look of utter disbelief. Floyd, seeing what he saw, shared the expression.

  The bomb had by now passed close to several of the floating spheres. Each had caught fire, as Floyd h
ad seen—for a moment only. Now each was surrounded by a spherical, nearly opaque layer of some grayish substance that looked like a mixture of smoke and kerosene vapor; a layer that could not have been half an inch thick, as Floyd recalled the sizes of the original spheres. None was burning; each had effectively smothered itself out, and the young observer slowly realized just how and why as the bomb at last made a direct hit on a drop of fuel fully a foot in diameter.

  Like the others, the glove flamed momentarily, and went out; but this time the sphere that appeared and grew around it was lighter in color, and continued to grow for several seconds. Then there was a little, sputtering explosion, and a number of fragments of still burning thermite emerged from the surface of the sphere in several directions, traveled a few feet and went out. All activity died down, except in the faces of Hart and Floyd.

  The saboteur was utterly at a loss, and seemed likely to remain that way; but in the watch room Floyd was already kicking himself mentally for his needless worry. Mayhew, watching the expression on his assistant’s face, chuckled quietly.

  “Of course you get it now,” he said at last.

  “I do now, certainly,” replied Floyd. “I should have seen it earlier—I’ve certainly noticed you light enough cigarettes, and watched the behavior of the match flame. Apparently our friend is not yet enlightened, though,” he nodded toward the screen as he spoke.

  He was right; Hart was certainly not enlightened. He belonged to a service in which unpleasant surprises were neither unexpected nor unusual, but he had never in his life been so completely disorganized. The stuff looked like fuel; it smelled like fuel; it had even started to burn—but it refused to carry on with the process. Hart simply relaxed in the grip of the guards, and tried to find something in the situation to serve as an anchor for his whirling thoughts. A spaceman would have understood the situation without thinking, a high school student of reasonable intelligence could probably have worked the matter out in time; but Hart’s education had been that of a spy, in a country which considered general education a waste of time. He simply did not have the background to cope with his present environment.

  That, at least, was the idea Mayhew acquired after a careful questioning of the prisoner. Not much was learned about his intended mission, though there was little doubt about it under the circumstances. The presence of an alien agent aboard any of the free-floating torpedo launchers of the various national governments bore only one interpretation; and since the destruction of one such station would do little good to anyone, Mayhew at once radioed all other launchers to be on the alert for similar intruders—all others, regardless of nationality. Knowledge by Hart’s superiors of his capture might prevent their acting on the assumption that he had succeeded, which would inevitably lead to some highly regrettable incidents. Mayhew’s business was to prevent a war, not win one. Hart had not actually admitted the identity of his superiors, but his accent left the matter in little doubt; and since no action was intended, Mayhew did not need proof.

  There remained, of course, the problem of what to do with Hart. The structure had no ready-made prison, and it was unlikely that the Western government would indulge in the gesture of a special rocket to take the man off. Personal watch would be tedious, but it was unthinkable merely to deprive a man with the training Hart must have received of his equipment, and then assume he would not have to be watched every second.

  The solution, finally suggested by one of the guards, was a small storeroom in the outer shell. It had no locks, but there were welding torches in the machine shops. There was no ventilator either, but an alga tank would take care of that. After consideration, Mayhew decided that this was the best plan, and it was promptly put into effect.

  Hart was thoroughly searched, even his clothing replaced as a precautionary measure. He asked for his cigarettes and lighter, with a half smile. Mayhew supplied the man with some of his own, and marked those of the spy for special investigation. Hart said nothing more after that, and was incarcerated without further ceremony. Mayhew was chuckling once more as the guards disappeared with their charge.

  “I hope he gets more good than I out of that lighter,” he remarked. “It’s a wick-type my kid sent me as a present, and the ventilator draft doesn’t usually keep it going. Maybe our friend will learn something, if he fools with it long enough. He has a pint of lighter fluid to experiment with—the kid had large ideas.”

  “I was a little surprised—I thought for a moment you were giving him a pocket flask,” laughed Floyd. “I suppose that’s why you always use matches—they’re easier to wave than that thing. I guess I save myself a lot of trouble not smoking at all. I suppose you have to put potassium nitrate in your cigarettes to keep ’em going when you’re not pulling on them.” Floyd ducked as he spoke, but Mayhew didn’t throw anything. Hart, of course, was out of hearing by this time, and would not have profited from the remark in any case.

  He probably, in fact, would not have paid much attention. He knew, of course, that the sciences of physics and chemistry are important; but he thought of them in connection with great laboratories and factories. The idea that knowledge of either could be of immediate use to anyone not a chemist or physicist would have been fantastic to him. While his current plans for escape were based largely on chemistry, the connection did not occur to him. The only link between those plans and Mayhew’s words or actions gave the spy some grim amusement; it was the fact that he did not smoke.

  The cell, when he finally reached it, was perfectly satisfactory; there were no peepholes which could serve as shot-holes, no way in which the door could be unsealed quickly—as Mayhew had said, not even a ventilator. Once he was in, Hart would not be interrupted without plenty of notice. Since the place was a storeroom, there was no reason to expect even a scanner, though, he told himself, there was no reason to assume there was none, either. He simply disregarded that possibility, and went to work the moment he heard the torch start to seal his door.

  His first idea did not get far. He spent half an hour trying to make Mayhew’s lighter work, without noticeable success. Each spin of the “flint” brought a satisfactory shower of sparks, and about every fourth or fifth try produced a faint “pop” and a flash of blue fire; but he was completely unable to make a flame last. He closed the cover at last, and for the first time made an honest effort to think. The situation had got beyond the scope of his training.

  He dismissed almost at once the matter of the rocket fuel that had not been ignited by his bomb. Evidently the Westerners stored it with some inhibiting chemical, probably as a precaution more against accident than sabotage. Such a chemical would have to be easily removable, but he had no means of knowing the method, and that line of attack would have to be abandoned.

  But why wouldn’t the lighter fuel burn? The more he thought the matter out, the more Hart felt that Mayhew must have doctored it deliberately, as a gesture of contempt. Such an act he could easily understand; and the thought of it roused again the wolfish hate that was such a prominent part of his personality. He would show that smart Westerner! There was certainly some way!

  Powerful hands, and a fingernail deliberately hardened long since to act as a passable screw-driver blade, had the lighter disassembled in the space of a few minutes. The parts were disappointingly small in number and variety; but Hart considered each at length.

  The fuel, already evaporating as it was, appeared useless—he was no chemist, and had satisfied himself the stuff was incombustible. The case was of magnalium, apparently; and might be useful as a heat source if it could be lighted; its use in a cigarette lighter did not encourage pursuit of that thought. The wick might be combustible, if thoroughly dried. The flint and wheel mechanism was promising—at least one part would be hard enough to cut or wear most metals, and the spring might be decidedly useful.

  Elsewhere in the room there was very little. The light was a gas tube, and, since the chamber had no opening whatever, would probably be most useful as a light. The alga tank,
of course, had a minute motor and pump which forced air through its liquid, and an ingenious valve and trap system which recovered the air even in the present weightless situation; but Hart, considering the small size of the room, decided that any attempt to dismantle his only source of fresh air would have to be very much of a last resort.

  After much thought, and with a grimace of distaste, he took the tiny striker of the lighter and began slowly to abrade a circular area around the latch of the door, using the inside handle for anchorage.

  He did not, of course, have any expectation of final escape; he was not in the least worried about his chances of recovering his spacesuit. He expected only to get out of the cell and complete his mission; and if he succeeded, no possible armor would do him any good.

  As it happened, there was a scanner in his compartment; but Mayhew had long since grown tired of watching the spy try to ignite the lighter fuel, and had turned his attention elsewhere, so that Hart’s actions were unobserved for some time. The door metal was thin and not particularly hard; and he was able without interference and with no worse trouble than severe finger cramp to work out a hole large enough to show him another obstacle—instead of welding the door frame itself, his captors had placed a rectangular steel bar across the portal and fastened it at points well to each side of the frame, out of the prisoner’s reach. Hart stopped scraping as soon as he realized the extent of this barrier, and gave his mind to the new situation.

  He might, conceivably, work a large enough hole through the door to pass his body without actually opening the portal; but his fingers were already stiff and cramped from the use made of the tiny striker, and it was beyond reason to expect that he would be left alone long enough to accomplish any such feat. Presumably they intended to feed him occasionally.