Chapter 8

Nevertheless, the afternoon began splendidly. Joe dunked the bottled soft drinks in the lake to cool. Then he and Sally ate and talked and laughed. Joe, in particular, had more than the usual capacity for enjoyment today. He’d been through twenty-four hours of turmoil but now things began to look better. And there was the arrangement with Sally, which had a solid satisfactoriness about it. Sally was swell! If she’d been homely, Joe would have liked her just the same--to talk to and to be with. But she was pretty--and she was wearing his ring. She’d wrapped some string around the inside of the band to make it fit.

The only trouble was that Joe was occasionally conscious of the heavy weight in his right-hand coat pocket.

But they spent at least an hour in contented, satisfying, meaningless loafing that nobody can describe but that everybody likes to remember afterward. From time to time Joe looked ashore, when the weight in his pocket reminded him of danger.

But he didn’t look often enough. He was pulling the chilled soft-drink bottles out of the lake when he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He whirled, his hand in his pocket...

It was the Chief, with Haney and Mike the midget. They were striding across the rocky small peninsula.

Haney called sharply: “Everything okay?”

“Sure!” said Joe. “Everything’s fine! What’s the matter?”

“Mike had a hunch,” said the Chief. “And--uh--I remembered I worked on the job when this dam was built twelve-fifteen years ago.” He looked about him. “It looked different then.”

Then he caught Joe’s eye and jerked his head almost imperceptibly to one side. Joe caught the signal.

“I’ll see about some more soft drinks,” he said. “Come help me fish up the bottles.”

Sally smiled at the other two. She was already inspecting the lunch basket.

“We still have some sandwiches,” she said hospitably, “and some cake.”

Haney came forward awkwardly. Mike advanced toward her with something of truculence. Joe knew what was in his mind. If Sally treated him like a freak ... But Joe knew with deep satisfaction that she wouldn’t. He went down to the water’s edge.

“What’s up, Chief?” he asked in a low tone.

“Mike hadda hunch,” rumbled the Chief. “Somebody tried to smash the stuff you brought. They did. But we started gettin’ set to mend it. So what would they do? Polish us off. If they were set to atom-dust the whole Shed an’ everybody in it, they wouldn’t stop at four more murders.”

Joe fished for a pop bottle.

“Mike said something like that back at the Shed,” he observed.

“Yeah. But you were the one who figured things out. You’d be first target. Haney and Mike and me--we’d be hard to knock off in a crowd in Bootstrap. But you and her headed off by y’selves. Mike figured you mightn’t be safe. So we checked.”

Joe brought up one bottle and then another.

“We’re all right. Haven’t seen a soul.”

“Don’t mean a soul hasn’t seen you,” growled the Chief. “A car left Bootstrap less than twenty minutes behind you. There were three guys in it. It’s parked down below the dam, outa sight. We saw it. And when we came up, careful, we spotted three guys hidin’ out behind the rocks yonder. They look to me like they’re waiting for somebody to go strolling back from the shoreline, so’s--uh--maybe folks out at the powerhouse can’t see ‘em. That’d be you and her, huh?”

Joe went cold. Not for himself. For Sally.

“There’s nobody else around,” said the Chief. “Who’d they be waiting for but you two? Suppose they got a chance to kill you. They’d take the car keys. They’d drop your two bodies somewheres Gawdknowswhere. There’d be considerable of a hunt for you two. Major Holt would be upset plenty. Security might get loosened up. There might be breaks for guys who wanted to do a little extra sabotage--besides maybe hamperin’ the repairin’ of the pilot gyros. Then they could try for Haney and Mike and me.”

Joe said coldly: “I’ve got a pistol and so has Sally. Shall we take those pistols and go ask those three if they want to start something?”

The Chief snorted.

“Use sense! It’s good you got the pistols, though. I snagged a twenty-two rifle from a shooting gallery. It was all I could get in a hurry. But go huntin’ trouble? Fella, I want to see that Platform go up! I’ll take care of things now. Good layout here. They got to come across the open to get near. Don’t say anything to Sally. But we’ll keep our eyes open.”

Joe nodded. He carried the chilled, dripping bottles back to where Haney solemnly ate a sandwich, sitting crosslegged with his back to the lake and regarding the shore. The Chief dragged a .22 repeating rifle from inside his belt, where it had hung alongside his thigh. He casually strolled over to Mike and dropped the rifle.

“You said you felt like target practice,” he remarked blandly. “Here’s your armament. Any more sandwiches, ma’am?”

Sally smilingly passed him the last. She left the top of the basket open. The pistol that had been there was gone. Then Sally’s eyes met Joe’s and she was aware that his three friends had not come here merely to crash a picnic. But she took it in stride. It was an additional reason for Joe to approve of Sally.

“Me,” said the Chief largely, “I’m goin’ to swim. I haven’t had any more water around me than a shower bath for so long that I crave to soak and splash. I’ll go yonder and dunk myself.”

He wandered off, taking bites from the sandwich as he went. He vanished. Haney leaned back against a sapling, his eyes roving about the shoreline and the rocks and brush behind it.

Mike was talking in his crackling, high-pitched voice.

“But just the same it’s crazy! Fighting sabotage when we little guys could take over in a week and make sabotage just plain foolish! We could do the whole job while the saboteurs weren’t looking!”

Sally said with interest: “Have you got the figures? Were they ever passed on?”

“I spent a month’s pay once,” said Mike sardonically, “hiring a math shark to go over them. He found one mistake. It raised the margin of what we could do!”

Sally answered: “Joe! Listen to this! Mike says he has the real answer to sabotage, and, in a way, to space travel! Listen!”

Joe dropped to the ground.

“Shoot it,” he said.

He was grimly alert, just the same. There were men waiting for them to start back to the car. These saboteurs were armed, and they intended to murder Sally and himself. Joe’s jaws clamped tautly shut at the grim ideas that came into his mind.

But Mike was beginning to speak.

“Forget about the Platform a minute,” he said, standing up to gesticulate, because he was only three and a half feet high. “Just figure on a rocket straight to the moon. With old-style rockets they’d a’ had to have a mass ratio of a hundred and twenty to one. You’d have to burn a hundred and twenty tons of old-style fuel to land one ton on the moon. Now it could be done with sixty, and when the Platform’s up, that figure’ll drop again! Okay! You’re gonna land a man on the moon. He weighs two hundred pounds. He uses up twenty pounds of food and drink and oxygen a day. Give him grub and air for two months--twelve hundred pounds. A cabin seven feet high and ten feet across. Sixteen hundred pounds, counting insulation an’ braces for strength. That makes a pay load of a ton an’ a half, and you’d have to burn a hundred an’ eighty tons of fuel--old-style--to take it to the moon, and another hundred an’ twenty for every ton the rocket ship weighed. You might get a man to the moon with a twelve-hundred-ton rocket--maybe. That’s with the old fuels. He’d get there, an’ he’d live two months, an’ then he’d die for lack of air. With the new fuels you’d need ninety tons of fuel to carry the guy there, and sixty more for every ton the ship weighed itself. Call it six hundred tons for the rocket to carry one man to the moon.”

Sally nodded absorbedly.

“I’ve seen figures like that,” she agreed.

“But take a guy like me!” said Mike the midget bitterly. “I weigh forty-five pounds, not two hundred! I use four pounds of food and air a day. A cabin for me to live in would be four feet high an’ five across. Bein’ smaller, it wouldn’t need so much bracing. You could do it for two hundred pounds. Three hundred for grub and air, fifty for me. Me on the moon supplied for two months would come to five-fifty pounds. Sixteen tons of fuel to get me to the moon direct! To carry the weight of the ship--it’s smaller!--fifty tons maximum!”

“I--see... ,” said Sally, frowning.

He looked at her suspiciously, but there was no mockery in her face.

“It’d take a six-hundred-ton rocket to get a full-sized man to the moon,” he said with sudden flippancy, “but a guy my size could do the same job of stranglin’ in a fifty-ton job. Counting how much easier it’d be to get back, with atmosphere deceleration, I could make a trip, land, take observations, pick up mineral specimens, and get back--all in a sixty-ton rocket. That’s just ten per cent of what it’d cost to take a full-sized man one way!”

He stamped his foot. Then he said coldly: “Haney, sittin’ still you’re a sittin’ duck!”

The comment was just. Joe knew that Sally was on the lakeward side of this small island, and that there were impenetrable rocks between her and the mainland. But Haney sat crosslegged where he could watch the mainland, and he hadn’t moved in a long while. If someone did intend to commit murder from a distance, Haney was offering a chance for a very fine target. He moved.

“Yeah!” said Mike with fine irony, reverting to his topic. “I could show you plenty of figures! There are other guys like me! We’ve got as much brains as full-sized people! If the big brass had figured on us small guys, they coulda made the Platform the size of a four-family house an’ it’d ha’ been up in the sky right now, with guys like me running it. Guys my size could man the ferry rockets bringin’ up fuel for storage, and four of us could take a six-hundred-ton rocket an’ slide out to Mars an’ be back by springtime--next springtime!--with all the facts and the photographs to prove ‘em! By golly--”

Then he made a raging, helpless gesture.

“But that’s just the big picture,” he said bitterly. “Right now, right at this minute, we could make it easy to finish the Platform the way it’s building in the Shed! There are ferry rockets building somewhere else. You know about them?”

Sally said apologetically: “Yes. I know there’ll be smaller rocket ships going up to the Platform. They’ll carry fuel and stores and exchanges for the crew. Yes, I know there are ferry rockets building.”

“Those ferry rockets,” said Mike sardonically, “carry four men, plus two replacements for the crew. They’ll carry air for ten days. But put four of us small guys in a ferry rocket! We’d have air and grub for two months, almost! Pull out the pay load and put in a hydroponic garden and communicators and we’d be a Platform, right then! Send up another ferry rocket to join us, and it could bring guided missiles! The ferry rockets could be finished quicker than the Platform! Send up three ferry rockets with midgets as crews, an’ we could weld ‘em together and have a Space Platform in orbit and working--and what’d be the use of sabotaging the big Platform then? The job would be done! There’d be no sense sabotaging the big Platform because the little one could do anything the big one could! It’d be up there and working! But,” he demanded bitterly, “do you think anybody’ll do anything as sensible as that?”

His small features were twisted in angry rebellion. And he was quite right in all his reasoning. Mankind could have made the journey to the planets in a hurry, and it could have had its Space Platform in the sky much more quickly, if only it could have consented to be represented by people like Mike--who would have represented mankind very valiantly.

Sally said distressedly: “Oh, Mike, it’s all true and I’m so sorry!”

And she meant it. Joe liked Sally especially right then, because she didn’t patronize Mike, or try to reason him out of his heartbreak.

Then Haney said abruptly: “Somebody’s spotted the Chief.”

Joe mentally kicked himself. The Chief had said he was going to swim. Now--but only now--Joe looked to see what he was doing.