by J F Bone
Bruce waved to the pilot, and the pilot nodded. Servos whined, and clamshell doors opened in the fuselage near the tail to reveal stacks of cardboard cartons. Bruce carried them to the side of the field. He lifted a steel plate set flush with the ground, touched a button and began, one by one to place the boxes on a moving conveyor belt. When he had finished, he pulled a heavy hose out of the recess and dragged it over to the plane, where he coupled it into a quick-connect near the tail and attached a ground wire. Fuel began to gush from the plane into the hose, as he waved again to the pilot and walked the hundred feet from the plane to the low concrete building capped with a radar mast and antennae which rose above the topmost level of the island. He pressed his right thumb against a small glass plate set in the steel door at the side of the building and waited. Ten seconds passed until the door slid sideways with ponderous slowness and framed a slim redhead in Airforce blue with major’s oak leaves on his shoulders.
“Hi Sucker,” the redhead said, “back for another tour?”
Bruce shook his head, “No, Al, I’m at the Beach Club.”
“Well—I’m glad to see you. It gets lonely out here. I’ll think of you the next two weeks while you’re sweating it out. They’ve got a beauty for you; six birds from Kennedy and one major tracking mission on a polar orbital. You ought to be real busy.”
“Nice,” Bruce said without enthusiasm. Al Vaughan had all the luck. He never got the rough ones.
Six birds were enough for anyone without adding an orbital to the mess. Bruce sighed inaudibly. It would be nice to have a couple of the birds about, but that might be hard on Scotty Jacobs, and Bruce didn’t want that, Scotty—the third man on the team—already had enough trouble with a pregnant wife. If Alice Jacobs knew what her husband did those two weeks of every six when he was away on “business,” she’d stop complaining and have a miscarriage instead.
Bruce looked at his dapper counterpart, “there’s about five hundred pounds of supplies on the conveyor. You might help me unload.” Vaughan shook his head. “Not on your life,” he said, “that’s your job. I have a blonde in Miami that has first priority.”
“You’re a lazy bum,” Bruce said without heat.
“You’ll thank me later,” Vaughan said, “it’ll give you something to do. Time hangs heavy here.”
“I’ve never noticed, but maybe you’re right. Anyway have a good time stateside—and don’t forget to disconnect our fuel hose before you take off.”
“I want to get home alive,” Vaughan said, “so don’t worry. I’ll check everything. Good-by pal—the place is yours.”
Bruce pushed past Vaughan into the building, and as Vaughan went outside, the steel portal closed and would remain that way until Scotty Jacobs took over in two weeks.
He stripped, placed his clothing in the sanitizer, stepped into the decontamination chamber and looked through its glass walls into the control room beyond.
As usual, it was antiseptically clean.
The Big Board was working, and as Bruce showered, he watched the electronic brain of the station check out the VTOL as it lifted from the pad and sped northwestward to the carrier waiting below the horizon.
A bank of red lights bloomed on the board as a beam of electrons stabbed the departing plane and was reflected into the tracking dish. The board chittered, beeped and squeaked as computers analyzed the flight and fed data to the missile programmers. The Big Board hurled a preemptory challenge at the plane, and the VTOL answered with the proper IFF signal. The lights blinked off, the noises died and the Big Board returned to stand-by. You don’t shoot friends who have the right answers.
Watching the electronic interplay between plane and station, Bruce had an old familiar thought that if it weren’t for emergencies, this station could dispense entirely with men. He dried himself and slipped into the blue, lint-free coveralls and slippers that were standard dress for anyone in the station. The place was spotlessly clean. It had to be. The delicate instruments and circuitry, although sealed, could still be adversely affected by particulate matter, and so extreme efforts were made to keep all foreign matter out.
Bruce went from decon through the interlook to his glassed-in living quarters, sealed off in one corner of the station. He opened a hatch in the wall and began to unload boxes from the conveyor belt, open them, vacuum their contents and place them neatly in the appropriate section of the storage lockers that lined one wall. Since there was everything from food to spare parts, the uncrating and sorting took time.
He was in the middle of a box of electronic parts when a buzzer sounded. Bruce looked at his watch. Time for the 1600-hour service check. He put the carton aside, went through the interlock into the Board Room and began to check the instruments that filled it, looking with experienced eyes for any evidence of malfunction.
There was none, except for the vertical radar, and that had been acting peculiarly ever since the station had been re-equipped last year. When the radar first began showing that peculiar shimmering pattern on its disk a few hours after it had been installed, it had triggered a major flap at Kennedy. Literally dozens of top brains had come to Friday Island. Checks were made, instruments were tom down and rebuilt. New circuits were installed. Three space missions were fired into the outer regions above Friday Island. The radar picked them up perfectly, but it still transmitted that peculiar cloudy shimmer. It was something that neither Bruce nor any of the others could explain, and it was bothersome. The official decision that the phenomenon resulted from an interaction with the mineral core of the island was unsatisfying, but acceptable for lack of a better theory. It just went to prove that all the quirks of radar had not yet been solved He shrugged and ran through the test procedures. Except for the shimmer, the set checked out A-OK.
Bruce went from instrument to instrument as precisely competent as the machines he served. The Job was lonely work. For a fortnight, he ran the station checking the instruments and collecting visual data on birds fired from Cape Kennedy six thousand miles to the northwest. For another fortnight at Kennedy, he reviewed reports and data with the brains and performance evaluation teams. Then for a third two weeks, he was free to do as he pleased as long as he remained within range of the CIA men assigned to guard him.
He was an important man. The Job made him a national resource that had to be guarded carefully and protected—not from harm—but from enemies who could use his specialized knowledge. The feeling of importance had once been good, but lately it had become annoying. He was never alone; not even on the island. He was watched, monitored and checked twenty-four hours a day. In his body were implanted homing devices by which he could be located even if he were unconscious. There was a hollow tooth in his jaw which—if bitten a certain way—would poison him quickly and beyond hope of antidote. Except at the station, he always went armed. He was an excellent shot and knew most of the dirty tricks of hand-to-hand combat His instructors were proud of him.
For a young and patriotic man the position and its prerequisites offered enough satisfaction to ensure dedicated performance, but Bruce had been on The Job for five years and was older and more cynical than he had been at twenty-five. The diversions that were his for the asking during his free two weeks were no longer diverting. He didn’t care to drink and had a built-in block against getting drunk, which meant that his virtually unlimited and unaudited expense account was useful only to provide a means of living so dangerously that the attrition rate among his CIA shadowers was inordinately high. In some quarters it was felt that if he broke his damn neck, it would be a good thing. Knowing this gave him a great deal of amusement, for Bruce was not by nature a kindly man, and he derived a good deal of pleasure out of watching others squirm.
Yet his small meannesses were understood and excused by his superiors. After all, for two weeks out of every six he was in the center of a missile impact area, and for the remaining four, he was either being brain picked at the Cape or a potential target for ultimate interrogation by Ivan and his friends.
Nevertheless, Bruce still thought he was living an easy life. He liked the clean results of precision machinery and sophisticated devices. And he enjoyed the knowledge of his real importance that ultimately came to those on The Job. For men were needed on Friday Island. They can do things which machines cannot. They can judge, discriminate, bypass routine, be intuitive, and originate concepts. Machines cannot; they can only react. Therefore he and his co-workers were needed. They gave the human touch that made the station a vital part of the nation’s defense program. But to put more than one man on the Island at a time was simply borrowing trouble.
More than one were not needed—not even for security. Friday Island was fantastically secure. The best minds in the nation had helped construct the Island’s defenses. The place was as close to impregnability as human skill and technology could make it, and it was constantly being strengthened as new devices became available.
Its electronic senses reached out for several hundred miles in all directions from sea level to straight up, and as one came nearer the island, the precision and delicacy of the sensors increased. For defensive armaments the island had a weapons complex that ranged from conventional mines to highly sophisticated, self-arming, antipersonnel missiles that could tell friend from stranger and behave accordingly. And backing this were elements of the Fourth Fleet. It would take a major effort to seize the station, and no country on Earth would be fool enough to try it.
But just in case any enemy was lucky enough to take the station, the walls and instruments were rigged with explosives which could be detonated as a last resort. In a way, living on Friday Island was analogous to living on a powder keg; but if one could ignore this unpleasant fact, it was not a bad life. The work was not too demanding, and the morale office had outdone itself to provide outlets for the inevitable leisure time.
About the only thing that disturbed Bruce was the ghostly patterns on the vertical radar. They drew him back time and again. They were annoying—more so because they were inexplicable. Precision instruments, in Bruce’s book, should behave predictably and not like prima donnas.
“It’s just possible that Ivan has a satellite out there looking down my neck,” he muttered to himself as he often did while working on The Job. “He’d have to be about 18,000 miles out, and at that range this radar couldn’t unravel anything.” He shrugged. “But, what good would an observer be out there? This whole island wouldn’t be any bigger than a pimple on a peach pit, and equipment to see accurately that far hasn’t been built and won’t be for another twenty years. Anyway, it’s a crazy thought. We’ve sent probes and found nothing, but I sure wish I could get over the idea that there’s something out there watching us.” He shrugged and grinned self-consciously, glad that there was no one around to hear him.
The first few days on The Job were always tough, and the nights were worse. The abrupt time change, the changes from winter to summer, from companionship to loneliness (incidentally, how about that blonde in Miami Beach? Was she really lonely or was she a CIA plant? Maybe she was the same one Al Vaughan was chasing. Now that’d be one for the books. Still, it might not be so farfetched as it seemed. The CIA had some pretty slick tricks and some pretty slick blondes in its bag.), from excitement to routine (that weekend in Vegas was a real blast, and that drag race out on the flats had been a gasser.), from heedlessness to duty (there is nothing like a four a.m. champagne party to get the blood circulating—and that lonely blonde—ah me!), all conspired to keep Bruce from sleeping. There were too many memories to lay upon a quiet pillow.
As a result he was awake when the Big Board bloomed red in the IFF sector. There were the usual chirpings and chitterings as the anciliary equipment came to life. Bruce looked interested. Nothing had come this close this late at night for as long as he could remember. Probably a UFO—some poor devil upstairs in a plane that was miles off course. If he passed the island within the 25-mile zone, the defense missiles would shoot him down. He ought to be warned.
Bruce reached for the microphone and opened the set to commercial channel. “Warning!” he said. “This is Friday Island Station. Prohibited area.” He looked at the radar screens to get the UFO’s direction. The horizontal screens were dead, but in the center of the vertical and enlarging visibly as he watched was a white circular patch centered like the bull’s-eye of a target.
And as he watched, the Big Board went dead. That thing upstairs had sent the proper IFF signal, but signal notwithstanding it was no friend.
His hands leaped toward the controls. His fingers hit the countermand key, the emergency control key and the action key in one smooth flow of motion. A klaxon sounded, and the lids of the silos slid back to reveal the needle noses of four Sprint missiles. “Range two hundred thousand,” the mechanical voice announced. “Firing time 10 seconds.” Bruce pressed the firing key and the emergency alarm to alert Cape Kennedy, and as he did the lights went out, and every mechanism within the station stopped.
The silence was a shocking thing.
He had never realized how much noise there was on The Job until it was cut off. The subliminal beepings and chirping of the computers, the snapping noises of hot metal, the soft hiss of air through the ducts, the faint whir of pumps on the heat exchangers, the hum of heating elements, the click of relays, the rush of fluid in the pipes and hydraulic lines, the faint whine of servo motors and the deeper hum of the generators, all were silent. The lack of noise grated on his nerves.
The supposedly impregnable station had a soft spot in its defenses. Cut off its power supply, and it was helpless. He felt his way through the darkness into his quarters and took his pistol from the top drawer of his dresser. His fingers curled comfortably around its handgrip, as his lips quirked with mild amusement. Any outfit sophisticated enough to put the island out of action would certainly have the answer to so elemental a weapon as a gun.
But would they have the answer to the other defenses? Every other minute an IFF signal flashed out from the station to Kennedy, and every alternate minute a signal came from Kennedy to the station. Interruption of two successive signals would ring an alarm stateside, and an operator would try to contact the island. No contact and three more missed signals would cause a missile to be fired, and fifteen minutes later Friday Island would vanish from the face of the Earth.
The Station jarred sickeningly on its foundations, and Bruce was suddenly plastered immovably against the floor, pinned down like an insect on a board. Gravity?—Acceleration? And Bruce knew that there was also a solution to the thermonuclear explosion—get the station out of the way—fast! But how far could they go in the eighteen-odd minutes that would elapse between the time the missile was fired and the time it hit the target? Judging from the acceleration—real far. Maybe even out of this world.
It was dark, quiet and very cold. And with each passing minute it became colder. Bruce couldn’t move. He lay flattened against the floor, his heart pumping slowly and laboriously, forcing his heavy blood through half-collapsed vessels. It was almost impossible to breathe and nearly impossible to think. A gray curtain hung over his vision. He gasped and tried to roll over. He couldn’t. And the gray curtain became thicker and enveloped him entirely.
He awoke with the nightmare feeling of floating. But it was no nightmare. He was floating. He was naked in a decontamination booth, floating in a drizzling spray of something acrid and astringent. It smelled vaguely of sulfur and made him want to cough.
Sulfur?—brimstone?—Hell? He ruled out that possibility. He didn’t believe in Hell.
II
The spray stopped. A sphincterlike door dilated in one wall (ceiling?—floor?), and something came through it. It wasn’t human even though it walked on two legs, had a reasonably human hairless head, binocular vision and hands with opposable thumbs. Humans don’t have four arms or eyes with oval pupils like a goat. But otherwise it didn’t differ much. It was about four feet tall, and it looked intelligent. It was clothed in a tunic belted loosely at the wais
t. The belt supported something that looked like a pistol. A bright red box hung over its midsection from a strap around its neck. At it walked toward Bruce, it began to make noises.
“Whistle burble grunt chitter whistle CHEEP grunt?” it said.
And the red box in uninflected, accentless English said “Now you are clean, we can talk. Are you hurt?”
“No.” Bruce said. It wasn’t hard to see what was wrong with this picture. He was floating weightless in free fall. The alien was standing on its feet and walking. It had an unfair advantage.
“That is good. It is our policy not to be unkind to inferior races unless it is necessary.”
“Inferior?” Bruce asked on a rising note.
“Obviously. Your technology is of a low order. You have a little civilization and many cultures. Your planet is the standard barbarian type we find this far out on the galactic rim.”
“All right, have it your way,” Bruce said, “so what do you want of us?”
“Information at the moment. You have nothing else we want. We wish to investigate. Later we shall determine how you can be made useful to our plans in the future.”
“Do you mean what I think you do?”
“It depends on what you think. Be patient, and I shall explain,” the alien said. It waved one of its left hands at the open doorway. “We shall study your machines. Then we shall study you. The data will be added to data we have already acquired from long-range surveys, and we shall have a fair guess of your maximum capability. Later we shall obtain other specimens of your race and study them to find out what methods can be efficiently used to make you cooperate with us. You have certain mechanical skills that might be useful. You could have metals or other things that we might use. Time will tell.”
“If you have some crazy idea of conquering us, you won’t get away with it,” Bruce said. “If you think you can, you just don’t understand the human race.”
