Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (13 page)

Sally came out, smiled at her father's secretary, and led Joe down to
the entrance.

"I have the car," she said cheerfully, "and there'll be a lunch basket
waiting for us at the house. I agreed that the lake was too cold for
swimming, though. It is. Snow water feeds it. But it's nice to look at."

They went out the door, and the workers on the Platform were just
beginning to pile into the waiting fleet of busses. But the black car
was waiting, too. Joe opened the door and Sally handed him the key. She
regarded the men swarming on the busses.

"There'll be bulletins all over Bootstrap," she observed, "saying that
Braun tried to dust-bomb the Shed. They'll say that he may have carried
the cobalt about with him, and so he may have burned other people—in a
restaurant, a movie theater, anywhere—while he was carrying the dust
and dying without knowing it. So everybody's supposed to report to the
hospital for a check-up for radiation burns. Some people may really have
them. But Dad thinks that since you weren't burned, Braun didn't carry
it around. If anyone is burned, it'll be the person who brought the
cobalt here to give him. And—well—he'll turn up because everybody
does, and because he's burned he'll be asked plenty of questions."

Joe stepped on the starter. Then he pressed the accelerator and the car
sped forward.

They stopped at the house in the officers'-quarters area on the other
side of the Shed. Sally picked up the lunch basket that her father's
housekeeper had packed on telephoned instructions. They drove away.

Red Canyon was eighty miles from the Shed, and the only way to get there
was through Bootstrap, because the only highway away from the Shed led
to that small, synthetic town. It was irritating, though they had no
schedule, to find that the long line of busses was ahead of them on that
twenty-mile stretch. The busses ran nose to tail and filled the road for
a half-mile or more. It was not possible to pass so long a string of
close-packed vehicles. There was just enough traffic in the opposite
direction to make that impracticable.

They had to trail the line of busses as far as Bootstrap and crawl
through the crowded streets. Once beyond the town they came to a
security stop. Here Sally's pass was good. Then they went rolling on and
on through an empty, arid, sun-baked terrain toward the hills to the
west. It looked remarkably lonely. Joe thought for the first time about
gas. He looked carefully at the fuel gauge. Sally shook her head.

"Don't worry. Plenty of gas. Security takes care of that. When I said
where we were going and that I wanted the car, Dad had everything
checked. If I live through this, I'll bet I stay a fanatic about
cautiousness all my life!"

Joe said distastefully: "I suppose it gets everybody. Mike—the midget,
you know—called me back just now to suggest that the people who tried
to spoil the gyros might try to harm the four of us to hinder their
repair!"

"It's not just foolishness," Sally admitted. "The strain is pretty bad,
especially when you know things. You've noticed that Dad's getting gray.
That's strain. And Miss Ross is about as tense. Things leak out in the
most remarkable way—and Dad can't find out how. Once there was a case
of sabotage and he could have sworn that nobody had the information that
permitted it but himself and Miss Ross. She had hysterics. She insisted
that she wanted to be locked up somewhere so she couldn't be suspected
of telling anybody anything. She'd resign tomorrow if she could. It's
ghastly." Then she hesitated and smiled faintly: "In fact, so Dad
wouldn't worry about me this afternoon—"

He took his eyes off the road to glance at her.

"What?"

"I promised we wouldn't go swimming and—" Then she said awkwardly:
"There are two pistols in the glove compartment. Dad knows you. So I
promised you'd put one in your pocket up at the lake."

Joe drew a deep breath. She opened the glove compartment and handed him
a pistol. He looked at it: .38, hammerless. A good safe weapon. He
slipped it in his coat pocket. But he frowned.

"I was looking forward to—not worrying for a while," he said wryly.
"But now I'll have to remember to keep looking over my shoulder all the
time!"

"Maybe," said Sally, "you can look over my shoulder and I'll look over
yours, and we can glance at each other occasionally."

She laughed, and he managed to smile. But the trace of a frown remained
on his forehead.

Joe drove and drove and drove. Once they came to a very small town. It
may have contained a hundred people. There were gas pumps and a
restaurant and two or three general stores, which were certainly too
many for the permanent residents. But there were cow ponies hitched
before the stores, and automobiles were also in view. The ground here
was slightly rolling. The mountains had grown to good-sized ramparts
against the sky. Joe drove carefully down the single street, turning out
widely once to dodge a dog sleeping placidly in an area normally
reserved for traffic.

Finally they came to the foothills, and then the road curved and
recurved as it wound among them. And two hours from Bootstrap they
reached Red Canyon. They first saw the dam from downstream. It was a
monstrous structure of masonry, alone in the mountains. From its top a
plume of falling water jetted out.

"The dam's for irrigation," said Sally professionally, "and the Shed
gets all its power from here. One of Dad's nightmares is that somebody
may blow up this dam and leave Bootstrap and the Shed without power."

Joe said nothing. He drove on up the trail as it climbed the canyon wall
in hairpin slants. It was ticklish driving. But then, quite suddenly,
they reached the top of the canyon wall and the top of the dam and the
level of the lake at once. Here there was a sheet of water that reached
back among the barren hillsides for miles and miles. It twisted out of
sight. There were small waves on its surface, and grass at its edge.
There were young trees. The powerhouse was a small squat structure in
the middle of the dam. Not a person was visible anywhere.

"Here we are," said Sally, when Joe stopped the car.

He got out and went around to open the door for her. But she was already
stepping out with the lunch basket in her hand when he arrived. He
reached for it, and she held on, and they moved companionably away from
the car carrying the basket between them.

"There's a nice place," said Sally, pointing.

A small ridge of rock stretched out into the lake, and rose, and spread,
and formed what was almost a miniature island some fifty feet across.
There were some young trees on it. Sally and Joe climbed down the slope
and out the rocky isthmus that connected it with the shore.

Sally let down the lunch box on a stone and laughed for no reason at all
as the wind blew her hair. It was a cool wind from over the water. And
Joe realized with a shock of surprise that the air felt different and
smelled different when it blew over open water like this. Up to now he
hadn't thought of the dryness of the air in Bootstrap and the Shed.

The lunch basket was tilted a little. Joe picked it up and settled it
more solidly. Then he said: "Hungry?"

There was literally nothing on his mind at the moment but the luxurious,
satisfied feeling of being off somewhere with grass and a lake and
Sally, and a good part of the afternoon to throw away. It felt good. So
he lifted the lid of the lunch basket.

There was a revolver there. It was the other one from the glove
compartment of the car. Sally hadn't left it behind. Joe regarded it and
said ironically: "Happy, carefree youth—that's us! Which are the ham
sandwiches, Sally?"

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!"