Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  "All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was," Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this morning blew it to hell and gone.

  "And I've got to find out how it happened."

  Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little doctor.

  "Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"

  "We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here now," the doctor snapped.

  * * * * *

  Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one time.

  A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.

  She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned expression.

  "He did make an atom bomb," she cried.

  Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.

  At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff room of the hospital administration building.

  Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with every beat.

  "It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."

  At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists, strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered weariness.

  "Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at Funston's work?"

  The therapist nodded unhappily.

  "And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."

  "I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.

  There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.

  "That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."

  Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.

  "Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second, anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?

  "They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"

  At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of the runway with propellers turning.

  Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into the night skies.

  The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and military men huddled around a small wooden table.

  There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary Miss Abercrombie.

  "Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same kind of clay he used before?"

  "I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."

  Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.

  She smiled at Funston.

  "Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the one you made for me yesterday."

  A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top atomic scientists watched in fascination.

  His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in front of him.

  Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense silence.

  "Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She looked at the men and nodded her head.

  The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him from the shack.

  There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere and cameras clicking.

  For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay and photographed it from every angle.

  Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of stony-faced military policemen.

  "I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the scientific teams trooped into the bunker.

  Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.

  A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.

  * * * * *

  Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon. Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.

  In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in a neatly-tied bundle.

  In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.

  "I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."

  The general paused.

  "Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.

  In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panoram
a of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.

  In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar, the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space on a tail of flame.

  * * *

  Contents

  CODE THREE

  by Rick Raphael

  The cars on high-speed highways must follow each other like sheep. And they need shepherds. The highway police cruiser of tomorrow however must be massively different-- as different as the highways themselves!

  The late afternoon sun hid behind gray banks of snow clouds and a cold wind whipped loose leaves across the drill field in front of the Philadelphia Barracks of the North American Continental Thruway Patrol. There was the feel of snow in the air but the thermometer hovered just at the freezing mark and the clouds could turn either into icy rain or snow.

  Patrol Sergeant Ben Martin stepped out of the door of the barracks and shivered as a blast of wind hit him. He pulled up the zipper on his loose blue uniform coveralls and paused to gauge the storm clouds building up to the west.

  The broad planes of his sunburned face turned into the driving cold wind for a moment and then he looked back down at the weather report secured to the top of a stack of papers on his clipboard.

  Behind him, the door of the barracks was shouldered open by his junior partner, Patrol Trooper Clay Ferguson. The young, tall Canadian officer's arms were loaded with paper sacks and his patrol work helmet dangled by its strap from the crook of his arm.

  Clay turned and moved from the doorway into the wind. A sudden gust swept around the corner of the building and a small sack perched atop one of the larger bags in his arms blew to the ground and began tumbling towards the drill field.

  "Ben," he yelled, "grab the bag."

  The sergeant lunged as the sack bounced by and made the retrieve. He walked back to Ferguson and eyed the load of bags in the blond-haired officer's arms.

  "Just what is all this?" he inquired.

  "Groceries," the youngster grinned. "Or to be more exact, little gourmet items for our moments of gracious living."

  Ferguson turned into the walk leading to the motor pool and Martin swung into step beside him. "Want me to carry some of that junk?"

  "Junk," Clay cried indignantly. "You keep your grimy paws off these delicacies, peasant. You'll get yours in due time and perhaps it will help Kelly and me to make a more polished product of you instead of the clodlike cop you are today."

  Martin chuckled. This patrol would mark the start of the second year that he, Clay Ferguson and Medical-Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot had been teamed together. After twenty-two patrols, cooped up in a semiarmored vehicle with a man for ten days at a time, you got to know him pretty well. And you either liked him or you hated his guts.

  As senior officer, Martin had the right to reject or keep his partner after their first eleven-month duty tour. Martin had elected to retain the lanky Canadian. As soon as they had pulled into New York Barracks at the end of their last patrol, he had made his decisions. After eleven months and twenty-two patrols on the Continental Thruways, each team had a thirty-day furlough coming.

  Martin and Ferguson had headed for the city the minute they put their signatures on the last of the stack of reports needed at the end of a tour. Then, for five days and nights, they tied one on. MSO Kelly Lightfoot had made a beeline for a Columbia Medical School seminar on tissue regeneration. On the sixth day, Clay staggered out of bed, swigged down a handful of antireaction pills, showered, shaved and dressed and then waved good-by. Twenty minutes later he was aboard a jet, heading for his parents' home in Edmonton, Alberta. Martin soloed around the city for another week, then rented a car and raced up to his sister's home in Burlington, Vermont, to play Uncle Bountiful to Carol's three kids and to lap up as much as possible of his sister's real cooking.

  While the troopers and their med officer relaxed, a service crew moved their car down to the Philadelphia motor pool for a full overhaul and refitting for the next torturous eleven-month-tour of duty.

  The two patrol troopers had reported into the Philadelphia Barracks five days ago--Martin several pounds heavier courtesy of his sister's cooking; Ferguson several pounds lighter courtesy of three assorted, starry-eyed, uniform-struck Alberta maidens.

  They turned into the gate of the motor pool and nodded to the sentry at the gate. To their left, the vast shop buildings echoed to the sound of body-banging equipment and roaring jet engines. The darkening sky made the brilliant lights of the shop seem even brighter and the hulls of a dozen patrol cars cast deep shadows around the work crews.

  The troopers turned into the dispatcher's office and Clay carefully placed the bags on a table beside the counter. Martin peered into one of the bags. "Seriously, kid, what do you have in that grab bag?"

  "Oh, just a few essentials," Clay replied "Pate de foie gras, sharp cheese, a smidgen of cooking wine, a handful of spices. You know, stuff like that. Like I said--essentials."

  "Essentials," Martin snorted, "you give your brains to one of those Alberta chicks of yours for a souvenir?"

  "Look, Ben," Ferguson said earnestly, "I suffered for eleven months in that tin mausoleum on tracks because of what you fondly like to think is edible food. You've got as much culinary imagination as Beulah. I take that back. Even Beulah turns out some better smells when she's riding on high jet than you'll ever get out of her galley in the next one hundred years. This tour, I intend to eat like a human being once again. And I'll teach you how to boil water without burning it."

  "Why you ungrateful young--" Martin yelped.

  * * * * *

  The patrol dispatcher, who had been listening with amused tolerance, leaned across the counter.

  "If Oscar Waldorf is through with his culinary lecture, gentlemen," he said, "perhaps you two could be persuaded to take a little pleasure ride. It's a lovely night for a drive and it's just twenty-six hundred miles to the next service station. If you two aren't cooking anything at the moment, I know that NorCon would simply adore having the services of two such distinguished Continental Commandos."

  Ferguson flushed and Martin scowled at the dispatcher. "Very funny, clown. I'll recommend you for trooper status one of these days."

  "Not me," the dispatcher protested. "I'm a married man. You'll never get me out on the road in one of those blood-and-gut factories."

  "So quit sounding off to us heroes," Martin said, "and give us the clearances."

  The dispatcher opened a loose-leaf reference book on the counter and then punched the first of a series of buttons on a panel. Behind him, the wall lighted with a map of the eastern United States to the Mississippi River. Ferguson and Martin had pencils out and poised over their clipboards.

  The dispatcher glanced at the order board across the room where patrol car numbers and team names were displayed on an illuminated board. "Car 56--Martin-Ferguson-Lightfoot," glowed with an amber light. In the column to the right was the number "26-W." The dispatcher punched another button. A broad belt of multi-colored lines representing the eastern segment of North American Thruway 26 flashed onto the map in a band extending from Philadelphia to St. Louis. The thruway went on to Los Angeles in its western segment, not shown on the map. Ten bands of color--each five separated by a narrow clear strip, detailed the thruway. Martin and Ferguson were concerned with the northern five bands; NAT 26-westbound. Other unlighted lines radiated out in tangential spokes to the north and south along the length of the multi-colored belt of NAT 26.

  This was just one small segment of the Continental Thruway system that spanned North America from coast to coast and crisscrossed north and south under the Three Nation Road Compact from the southern tip of Mexico into Canada and Alaska.

  Each arterial cut a five-mile-wide path across the continent and from one end to the other, the only structures along the roadways were the turretlike NorCon Patrol check and relay stations--looming up at one-hund
red-mile intervals like the fire control islands of earlier-day aircraft carriers.

  Car 56 with Trooper Sergeant Ben Martin, Trooper Clay Ferguson and Medical-Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot, would take their first ten-day patrol on NAT 26-west. Barring major disaster, they would eat, sleep and work the entire time from their car; out of sight of any but distant cities until they had reached Los Angeles at the end of the patrol. Then a five-day resupply and briefing period and back onto another thruway.

  During the coming patrol they would cross ten state lines as if they didn't exist. And as far as thruway traffic control and authority was concerned, state and national boundaries actually didn't exist. With the growth of the old interstate highway system and the Alcan Highway it became increasingly evident that variation in motor vehicle laws from state to state and country to country were creating impossible situations for any uniform safety control.

  * * * * *

  With the establishment of the Continental Thruway System two decades later, came the birth of the supra-cop--The North American Thruway Patrol, known as NorCon. Within the five-mile bands of the thruways--all federally-owned land by each of the three nations--the blue-coveralled "Continental Commandos" of NorCon were the sole law enforcement agency and authority. Violators of thruway law were cited into NorCon district traffic courts located in the nearest city to each access port along every thruway.

  There was no challenge to the authority of NorCon. Public demand for faster and more powerful vehicles had forced the automotive industry to put more and more power under the touch of the ever-growing millions of drivers crowding the continent's roads. Piston drive gave way to turbojet; turbojet was boosted by a modification of ram jet and air-cushion drive was added. In the last two years, the first of the nuclear reaction mass engines had hit the roads. Even as the hot Ferraris and Jags of the mid-'60s would have been suicide vehicles on the T-model roads of the '20s so would today's vehicles be on the interstates of the '60s. But building roads capable of handling three hundred to four hundred miles an hour speeds was beyond the financial and engineering capabilities of individual states and nations. Thus grew the continental thruways with their four speed lanes in each direction, each a half-mile wide separated east and west and north and south by a half-mile-wide landscaped divider. Under the Three Nation Compact, the thruways now wove a net across the entire North American continent.