Part 27 (1/2)

These things occupied the s.h.i.+ft that came on at the time of the multiple sabotage a.s.saults. At first the work was ragged. But the policy of turning the Security men into news broadcasters worked well. After all, the Platform was a construction job and the men who worked on it were not softies. Most of them had seen men killed before. Before the s.h.i.+ft was half over, a definite work rhythm was evident. Men had begun to take an even greater pride in the thing they had built, because it had been a.s.sailed and not destroyed. And the job was almost over.

Sally went back to her father's quarters, to try to sleep. Joe stayed in the Shed. His throat was painful enough so that he didn't want to go to bed until he was genuinely tired, and he was thoroughly wrought up.

Mike the midget had gone peacefully to sleep again, curled up in a corner of the outgoing screening room. His fellow midgets talked satisfiedly among themselves. Presently, to show their superiority to mere pitched battles, two of them brought out a miniature pack of cards and started a card game while they waited for a bus to take them back to Bootstrap.

The Chief's Indian a.s.sociates loafed comfortably while waiting for the same busses. Later they would put in for overtime--and get it. Haney mourned that he had been remote from the scene of action, and was merely responsible for the presence and placing and firing of the machine guns that had certainly kept the Platform from being blown up from below.

It seemed that nothing else would happen to bother anybody. But there was one thing more.

That thing happened just two hours before it was time for the s.h.i.+ft to change once again, and when normal work was back in progress in the Shed. Everything seemed fully organized and serene. Everything in the Shed had settled down, and nothing had happened outside.

There was ample exterior protection, of course, but the outside-guard system hadn't had anything to do for a very long time. Men at radar screens were bored and sleepy from sheer inactivity and silence. Pilots in jet planes two miles and five miles and eight miles high had long since grown weary of the splendid view below them. After all, one can get very used to late, slanting moonlight on cloud ma.s.ses far underneath, and bright and hostile-seeming stars overhead.

So the thing was well timed.

A Canadian station noticed the pip on its radar screen first. The radar observer was puzzled by it. It could have been a meteor, and the Canadian observer at first thought it was. But it wasn't going quite fast enough, and it lasted too long. It was traveling six hundred seventy-two miles an hour, and it was headed due south at sixty thousand feet. The speed could have been within reason--provided it didn't stay constant. But it did. There was something traveling south at eleven miles a minute or better. A mile in five-plus seconds. It didn't slow.

It didn't drop.

The Canadian radarman debated painfully. He stopped his companion from the reading of a magazine article about chinchilla breeding in the home.

He showed him the pip, still headed south and almost at the limit of this radar instrument's range. They discussed the thing dubiously. They decided to report it.

They had a little trouble getting the call through. The night long-distance operators were sleepy. Because of the difficulty of making the call, the radarmen became obstinate and insisted on putting it through. They reported to Ottawa that some object flying at sixty thousand feet and six hundred seventy-two miles an hour was crossing Canada headed for the United States.

There was a further time loss. Somebody in authority had to be awakened, and somebody had to decide that a further report was justified. Then the trick had to be accomplished, and a sleepy man in a bathrobe and slippers listened and said sleepily, ”Oh, of course you'll tell the Americans. It's only neighborly!” and padded back to his bed to go to sleep again. Then he waked up suddenly and began to sweat. He'd realized that this might be the beginning of atomic war. So he set phone bells to jangling furiously all over Canada, and jet planes began to boom in the darkness.

But there was only one object in the sky. Over the Dakotas it went higher. It went to seventy thousand feet, and then eighty. How this was managed is not completely known, because there are still some details of that flight that have never been completely explained. But certainly jatos flared briefly at some point, and the object reached ninety thousand feet where a jet motor would certainly be useless. And then, almost certainly, rockets flared once more and well south of the Dakotas it started down in a trajectory like that of an artillery sh.e.l.l, but with considerably higher speed than most artillery sh.e.l.ls achieve.

It was at about this time that the siren in the Shed began its choppy, hiccoughing series of warm-up notes. The news from Canada arrived, as a matter of fact, some thirty seconds after the outer-perimeter radar screen around the Platform gave its warning. Then there was no hesitation or delay at all. Men were already tumbling out of bed at three airfields, buckling helmets and hoping their oxygen tanks would function properly. Then the radars atop the Shed itself picked up the moving speck. And small blue-white flames began to rise from the ground and go streaking away in the darkness in astonis.h.i.+ng numbers.

The covers of the guns at the top of the Shed slid aside. Miles away, jet planes shot skyward, and newly wakened pilots looked at their night-fighting instruments and swore unbelievingly at the speed they were told the plunging object was making. The jet pilots gave their motors everything they could take, but it didn't look good.

The planes of the jet umbrella over the Shed stopped cruising and sprinted. And they were the only ones likely to get in front of the object in time.

Inside the Shed, the siren howled dismally and all the Security men were snapping: ”Radar alarm! All out! Radar alarm! All out!”

And men were moving fast, too. Some came down from the Platform on hoists, dropping with reckless speed to the floor level. Some didn't wait for a turn at that. They slid down one upright, swung around the crosspiece on the level below, and slid down another vertical pipe. For a minute or more it looked as if the scaffolds oozed black droplets which slid down its pipes. But the drops were men. The floor became speckled and spotted with dots running for its exits.

The siren ceased its wailing and its noise went down and down in pitch until it was a baritone moan that dropped to ba.s.s and ceased. Then there was no sound but the men moving to get out of the Shed. There were trucks, too. Those that had been loading with dismantled scaffolding roared for the doors to get out and away. Some men jumped on board as they pa.s.sed. The exit doors swung up to let them go.

But it was very quiet in the Shed, at that. There was no noise but a few fleeing trucks, and the murmur which was the voices of the Security men hurrying the work crew out. There was less to hear than went on ordinarily. And it was a long distance across the floor of the Shed.

Joe stood with his fists clenched absurdly. This could only be an air attack. An air attack could only mean an atom-bomb attack. And if there was an atom bomb dropped on the Shed, there'd be no use getting outside.

It wouldn't be merely a fission bomb. It would be a h.e.l.l bomb--a bomb which used the kind of bomb that shattered Hiros.h.i.+ma only as a primer for the real explosive. n.o.body could hope to get beyond the radius of its destruction before it hit!

Joe heard himself raging. He'd thought of Sally. She'd be in the range of annihilation, too. And Joe knew such fury and hatred--because of Sally--that he forgot everything else.

He didn't run. He couldn't escape. He couldn't fight back. But because he hated, he had to do something to defy.

He found himself moving toward the Platform, his jaws clenched. It was pure, blind, instinctive defiance.