Chapter 19

“Ralph!” she cried, running to meet me as I walked into the big, steel-walled enclosure where Commander Littlefield and eight or ten or possibly twelve men in gray skyport-technician uniforms were working over a long metal cylinder that Death had started working on well ahead of them. He was the expert and they were just amateurs doing the best they could to beat the time limit he had set for them. With a grim chuckle, no doubt, because, as I said once before, Death is a weird-o.

Joan’s arms went around my shoulders and she crushed herself against me, and kissed me hard on the mouth. Then she let go of me and moved quickly to one side, so that Commander Littlefield could talk to me without interference or a moment’s delay. She seemed to know without waiting for me to say a word how important that was.

One look at Littlefield’s white face told me all I really wanted to know. But I decided that if he could fill in the details for me in half a minute I could risk setting another time-limit in my mind and clocking him second by second by second as he talked.

“A nurse at the hospital got word to us you’d be doing your best to get back here, Ralph,” he said. “The Wendel police have orders to blast you down on sight, but now that you’re here I can protect you--or you can protect yourself. I’ve got your papers and insignia. Right now that’s not so urgent as what’s happening inside this Endicott fuel cylinder. It’s been triggered to build up to critical mass by a Wendel agent. A Colonist brought it here and we’ve been trying to dismantle it. But we don’t know just how to go about it and we don’t dare experiment. We’ve taken a few small risks, naturally. We’ve had to. But we’re getting nowhere, and what looks like a small risk could turn out to be a big one. We don’t even know how much time we’ve got!”

He spoke almost calmly, without raising his voice, but there was nothing calm about the way he looked. The time limit I’d set to clock him by had run out and now it was my turn. I was going to have to ask him to do something that might seem only a little less terrible to him than being blown apart by a nuclear explosion.

But it would have to be done--and fast.

I clocked myself as I talked, allowing myself about forty seconds. “Those cylinders build up to critical mass when they’ve been tampered with and triggered to explode in about forty-five minutes,” I said. “Don’t ask me how I know, because I haven’t time to explain. I do know--you can take my word for it. I knew the cylinder was here, and I was hoping you’d find a way--”

I caught myself up. “Never mind that now. Just listen. I don’t know how long it took the Colonist to bring it here or how long you’ve been working over it. But it hasn’t exploded yet. So there’s still a chance we can get it out into space before it blows up!“

He looked at me as if he thought I’d gone suddenly quite mad. I finished what I had to say fast, because I knew it would take eight or ten more minutes for him to recover from his first shock, and issue orders, and have the cylinder carried on board his big sky ship--his pride and glory--and for the sky ship to rise from its launching pad and be blown apart in space.

He’d have to get all of the crewmen off as well and set the robot controls and if there were any passengers still on board--I refused to let myself think about that.

“It may be too late,” I went on. “We may all be as good as dead right now. But we’ve got to try. Do you understand? You’ve got to get that cylinder on the sky ship, set the controls and send it out into space. It must be done at once. Every second counts.“

He recovered from the shock faster than I’d dared to hope. The grin that hovered for the barest instant on his lips startled me until I realized it was a very special kind of grin--the kind of grin only a man who is about to part with something that means just about as much to him as his own life would be capable of ... if he had a non-eradicable streak of wry humor deep in his nature as well.

“Ralph, I’ve always looked upon people who put property above human life as just about the lowest worms that crawl. But for a minute--God pity me--I almost felt that way. It’s just that--it’s fifty billion dollars worth of big, tremendous sky ship and that cylinder is so small--”

“It won’t seem small if it blows up and takes the spaceport with it,” I said. “It won’t seem small at all.”

“I know, Ralph. I said once I was old enough to be your father and I still think I am. But if you put me across your knee and gave me the drubbing a dumb six-year old would rate I’d have no right to complain. I should have thought of it myself.”

“We don’t always think of things that stand out like sore thumbs when we’re under tremendous stress,” I said. “Don’t blame yourself for being human, Commander.”

“I hope it won’t take me much longer than that to finish the job, Ralph,” he said. “I’ll do my best. There are only three crewmen on board and all of the passengers have been cleared.”

He swung about without another word and went striding out of the enclosure.

I would have followed him if Joan hadn’t picked that moment to come back into my arms. It held me up for a minute or two.

The incandescent burst of flame that makes a big sky ship’s ascent into space seem for an instant almost cataclysmic, as if the sky itself had been ripped apart in some terrible and incomprehensible way, came exactly eight minutes, thirty-two seconds later.

I timed it myself, not mentally this time but with a watch in my hand. I stood with Joan at my side a hundred feet from the launching pad, watching the cylinder disappear into the sky. It was the cylinder and not the big rocket itself that I seemed to see as I stared upward, as if the sky ship had turned to glass and the deadly thing it was carrying out into space was beginning to stir and vibrate in a quite ghastly way, with its contours enlarged to sky-spanning dimensions under the glass.