Chapter 6

Major Holt wasn’t to be found when Joe got out to the Shed. And he wasn’t in the house in the officers’-quarters area behind it. There was only the housekeeper, who yawned pointedly as she let Joe in. Sally was presumably long since asleep. And Joe didn’t know any way to get hold of the Major. He assured himself that Braun was a good guy--if he weren’t he wouldn’t have insisted on taking a licking before he apologized--and he hadn’t said there was any hurry. Tomorrow, he’d said. So Joe uneasily let himself be led to a room with a cot, and he was asleep in what seemed seconds. But just the same he was badly worried.

In fact, next morning Joe woke at a practically unearthly hour with Braun’s message pounding on his brain. He was downstairs waiting when the housekeeper appeared. She looked startled.

“Major Holt?” he asked.

But the Major was gone. He must have done with no more than three or four hours’ sleep. There was an empty coffee cup whose contents he’d gulped down before going back to the security office.

Joe trudged to the barbed-wire enclosure around the officers’-quarters area and explained to the sentry where he wanted to go. A sleepy driver whisked him around the half-mile circle to the security building and he found his way to Major Holt’s office.

The plain and gloomy secretary was already on the job, too. She led him in to face Major Holt. He blinked at the sight of Joe.

“Hm ... I have some news,” he observed. “We back-tracked the parcel that exploded when it was dumped from the plane.”

Joe had almost forgotten it. Too many other things had happened since.

“We’ve got two very likely prisoners out of that affair,” said the Major. “They may talk. Also, an emergency inspection of other transport planes has turned up three other grenades tucked away in front-wheel wells. Ah--CO_2 bottles have turned out to have something explosive in them. A very nice bit of work, that! The sandy-haired man who fueled your plane--ah--disappeared. That is bad!”

Joe said politely: “That’s fine, sir.”

“All in all, you’ve been the occasion of our forestalling a good deal of sabotage,” said the Major. “Bad for you, of course ... Did you find the men you were looking for?”

“I’ve found them, but--.”

“I’ll have them transferred to work under your direction,” said the Major briskly. “Their names?”

Joe gave the names. The Major wrote them down.

“Very good. I’m busy now--”

“I’ve a tip for you,” said Joe. “I think it should be checked right away. I don’t feel too good about it.”

The Major waited impatiently. And Joe explained, very carefully, about the fight on the Platform the day before, Braun’s insistence on finishing the fight in Bootstrap, and then the tip he’d given Joe after everything was over. He repeated the message exactly, word for word.

The Major, to do him justice, did not interrupt. He listened with an expression that varied between grimness and weariness. When Joe ended he picked up a telephone. He talked briefly. Joe felt a reluctant sort of approval. Major Holt was not a man one could ever feel very close to, and the work he was in charge of was not likely to make him popular, but he did think straight--and fast. He didn’t think “hot” meant “significant,” either. When he’d hung up the phone he said curtly: “When will your work crew get here?”

“Early--but not yet,” said Joe. “Not for some time yet.”

“Go with the pilot,” said the Major. “You’d recognize what Braun meant as soon as anybody. See what you see.”

Joe stood up.

“You--think the tip is straight?”

“This isn’t the first time,” said Major Holt detachedly, “that a man has been blackmailed into trying sabotage. If he’s got a family somewhere abroad, and they’re threatened with death or torture unless he does such-and-such here, he’s in a bad fix. It’s happened. Of course he can’t tell me! He’s watched. But he sometimes finds an out.”

Joe was puzzled. His face showed it.

“He can try to do the sabotage,” said the Major precisely, “or he can arrange to be caught trying to do it. If he’s caught--he tried; and the blackmail threat is no threat at all so long as he keeps his mouth shut. Which he does. And--ah--you would be surprised how often a man who wasn’t born in the United States would rather go to prison for sabotage than commit it--here.”

Joe blinked.

“If your friend Braun is caught,” said the Major, “he will be punished. Severely. Officially. But privately, someone will--ah--mention this tip and say ‘thanks.’ And he’ll be told that he will be released from prison just as soon as he thinks it’s safe. And he will be. That’s all.”

He turned to his papers. Joe went out. On the way to meet the pilot who’d check on his tip, he thought things over. He began to feel a sort of formless but very definite pride. He wasn’t quite sure what he was proud of, but it had something to do with being part of a country toward which men of wholly different upbringing could feel deep loyalty. If a man who was threatened unless he turned traitor, a man who might not even be a citizen, arranged to be caught and punished for an apparent crime against a country rather than commit it--that wasn’t bad. There can be a lot of things wrong with a nation, but if somebody from another one entirely can come to feel that kind of loyalty toward it--well--it’s not too bad a country to belong to.

Joe had a security guard with him this time, instead of Sally, as he went across the vast, arc-lit interior of the Shed and past the shimmering growing monster that was the Platform. He went all the way to the great swinging doors that let in materials trucks. And there were guards there, and they checked each driver very carefully before they admitted his truck. But somehow it wasn’t irritating. It wasn’t scornful suspicion. There’d be snide and snappy characters in the Security force, of course, swaggering and throwing their weight about. But even they were guarding something that men--some men--were willing to throw away their lives for.

Joe and his guard reached one of the huge entrances as a ten-wheeler truck came in with a load of shining metal plates. Joe’s escort went through the opening with him and they waited outside. The sun had barely risen. It looked huge but very far away, and Joe suddenly realized why just this spot had been chosen for the building of the Platform.

The ground was flat. All the way to the eastern horizon there wasn’t even a minor hillock rising above the plain. It was bare, arid, sun-scorched desert. It was featureless save for sage and mesquite and tall thin stalks of yucca. But it was flat. It could be a runway. It was a perfect place for the Platform to start from. The Platform shouldn’t touch ground at all, after it was out of the Shed, but at least it wouldn’t run into any obstacles on its way toward the horizon.

A light plane came careening around the great curved outer surface of the Shed. It landed and taxied up to the door. It swung smartly around and its side door opened. A bandaged hand waved at Joe. He climbed in. The pilot of this light, flimsy plane was the co-pilot of the transport of yesterday. He was the man Joe had helped to dump cargo.

Joe climbed in and settled himself. The small motor pop-popped valiantly, the plane rushed forward over hard-packed desert earth, and went swaying up into the air.

The co-pilot--pilot now--shouted cheerfully above the din: “Hiya. You couldn’t sleep either? Burns hurt?”

Joe shook his head.

“Bothered,” he shouted in reply. Then he added, “Do I do something to help, or am I along just for the ride?”

“First we take a look,” the pilot called over the motor racket. “Two kilometers due north of the Shed, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“We’ll see what’s there,” the pilot told him.

The small plane went up and up. At five hundred feet--nearly level with the roof of the Shed--it swung away and began to make seemingly erratic dartings out over the spotty desert land, and then back. Actually, it was a search pattern. Joe looked down from his side of the small cockpit. This was a very small plane indeed, and in consequence its motor made much more noise inside its cabin than much more powerful engines in bigger ships.

“Those burns I got,” shouted the pilot, staring down, “kept me awake. So I got up and was just walking around when the call came for somebody to drive one of these things. I took over.”

Back and forth, and back and forth. From five hundred feet in the early morning the desert had a curious appearance. The plane was low enough for each smallest natural feature to be visible, and it was early enough for every shrub or hummock to cast a long, slender shadow. The ground looked streaked, but all the streaks ran the same way, and all were shadows.

Joe shouted: “What’s that?”

The plane banked at a steep angle and ran back. It banked again. The pilot stared carefully. He reached forward and pushed a button. There was a tiny impact underfoot. Another steep banking turn, and Joe saw a puff of smoke in the air.

The pilot shouted: “It’s a man. He looks dead.”

He swung directly over the small prone object and there was a second puff of smoke.

“They’ve got range finders on us from the Shed,” he called across the two-foot space separating him from Joe. “This marks the spot. Now we’ll see if there’s anything to the hot part of that tip.”

He reached over behind his seat and brought out a stubby pole like a fishpole with a very large reel. There was also a headset, and something very much like a large aluminum fish on the end of the line.

“You know Geiger counters?” called the pilot. “Stick on these headphones and listen!”

Joe slipped on the headset. The pilot threw a switch and Joe heard clickings. They had no pattern and no fixed frequency. They were clickings at strictly random intervals, but there was an average frequency, at that.

“Let the counter out the window,” called the pilot, “and listen. Tell me if the noise goes up.”

Joe obeyed. The aluminum fish dangled. The line slanted astern from the wind. It made a curve between the pole and the aluminum plummet, which was hollow in the direction of the plane’s motion. The pilot squinted down and began to swing in a wide circle around the spot where an apparently dead man had been sighted, and above which puffs of smoke now floated.

Three-quarters of the way around, the random clickings suddenly became a roar.

Joe said: “Hey!”

The pilot swung the plane about and flew back. He pointed to the button he’d pushed.

“Poke that when you hear it again.”

The clickings ... They roared. Joe pushed the button. He felt the tiny impact.

“Once more,” said the pilot.

He swung in nearer where the dead man lay. Joe had a sickening idea of who the dead man might be. A sudden rush of noise in the headphones and he pushed the button again.

“Reel in now!” shouted the pilot. “Our job’s done.”

Joe reeled in as the plane winged steadily back toward the Shed. There were puffs of smoke floating in the air behind. They had been ranged on at the instant they appeared. Somebody back at the Shed knew that something that needed to be investigated was at a certain spot, and the two later puffs of smoke had said that radioactivity was notable in the air along the line the two puffs made. Not much more information would be needed. The meaning of Braun’s warning that his tip was “hot” was definite. It was “hot” in the sense that it dealt with radioactivity!

The plane dipped down and landed by the great doors again. It taxied up and the pilot killed the motor.

“We’ve been using Geigers for months,” he said pleasedly, “and never got a sign before. This is one time we were set for something.”

“What?” asked Joe. But he knew.

“Atomic dust is one good guess,” the pilot told him. “It was talked of as a possible weapon away back in the Smyth Report. Nobody’s ever tried it. We thought it might be tried against the Platform. If somebody managed to spread some really hot radioactive dust around the Shed, all three shifts might get fatally burned before it was noticed. They’d think so, anyhow! But the guy who was supposed to dump it opened up the can for a look. And it killed him.”

He climbed out of the plane and went to the doorway. He took a telephone from a guard and talked crisply into it. He hung up.

“Somebody coming for you,” he said amiably. “Wait here. Be seeing you.”

He went out, the motor kicked over and caught, and the tiny plane raced away. Seconds later it was aloft and winging southward.

Joe waited. Presently a door opened and something came clanking out. It was a tractor with surprisingly heavy armor. There were men in it, also wearing armor of a peculiar sort, which they were still adjusting. The tractor towed a half-track platform on which there were a crane and a very considerable lead-coated bin with a top. It went briskly off into the distance toward the north.

Joe was amazed, but comprehending. The vehicle and the men were armored against radioactivity. They would approach the dead man from upwind, and they would scoop up his body and put it in the lead-lined bin, and with it all deadly radioactive material near him. This was the equipment that must have been used to handle the dud atom bomb some months back. It had been ready for that. It was ready for this emergency. Somebody had tried to think of every imaginable situation that could arise in connection with the Platform.

But in a moment a guard came for Joe and took him to where the Chief and Haney and Mike waited by the still incompletely-pulled-away crates. They had some new ideas about the job on hand that were better than the original ones in some details. All four of them set to work to make a careful survey of damage--of parts that would have to be replaced and of those that needed to be repaired. The discoveries they made would have appalled Joe earlier. Now he merely made notes of parts necessary to be replaced by new ones that could be had within the repair time for rebalancing the rotors.