by David Drake
Then the horizon dipped below the Cub's nose again and Martinson was climbing out of the valley. A lake passed below them, spotted with islands, and with the brown barracks of Camp Cejwin, once a children's summer camp but now full of sleeping soldiers. Martinson continued south, skirting Port Jervis, until McDonough was able to pick up the main line of the Erie Railroad, going northeast toward Otisville and Howells. The mountain through which the Otisville tunnel ran was already visible as a smoky hulk to the far left of the dawn.
McDonough turned on the radio, which responded with a rhythmical sputtering; the Cub's engine was not adequately shielded. In the background, the C.O.’s voice was calling them: “Huguenot to L-4. Huguenot to L-4.”
“L-4 here. We read you, Andy. We're heading toward Otisville. Smooth as glass up here. Nothing to report yet.”
“We read you weak but clear. We're dumping the gas in the Airoknocker crackle ground. We'll follow as fast as possible. No new AF spottings yet. If crackle, call us right away. Over.”
“L-4 to Huguenot. Lost the last sentence, Andy. Cylinder static. Lost the last sentence. Please read it back.”
“All right, Mac. If you see the bomber, crackle right away. Got it? If you see crackle, call us right away. Got it? Over.”
“Got it, Andy. L-4 to Huguenot, over and out.”
“Over and out.”
The railroad embankment below them went around a wide arc and separated deceptively into two. One of the lines had been pulled up years back, but the marks of the long-ago stacked and burned ties still striped the gravel bed, and it would have been impossible for a stranger to tell from the air whether or not there were any rails running over those marks; terrain from the air can be deceptive unless you know what it is supposed to look like, rather than what it does look like. Martinson, however, knew as well as McDonough which of the two rail spurs was the discontinued one, and banked the Cub in a gentle climbing turn toward the mountain.
The rectangular acres wheeled slowly and solemnly below them, brindled with tiny cows as motionless as toys. After a while the deceptive spur line turned sharply east into a woolly green woods and never came out again. The mountain got larger, the morning ground haze rising up its nearer side, as though the whole forest were smoldering sullenly there.
Martinson turned his head and leaned it back to look out of the corner of one eye at the back seat, but McDonough shook his head. There was no chance at all that the crashed bomber could be on this side of that heavy-shouldered mass of rock.
Martinson shrugged and eased the stick back. The plane bored up into the sky, past four thousand feet, past four thousand, five hundred. Lake Hawthorne passed under the Cub's fat little tires, an irregular sapphire set in the pommel of the mountain. The altimeter crept slowly past five thousand feet; Martinson was taking no chances on being caught in the downdraft on the other side of the hill. At six thousand, he edged the throttle back and leveled out, peering back through the plexiglas.
But there was no sign of any wreck on that side of the mountain, either.
Puzzled, McDonough forced up the top cabin flap on the right side, buttoned it into place against the buffeting slip-stream, and thrust his head out into the tearing gale. There was nothing to see on the ground. Straight down, the knife-edge brow of the cliff from which the railroad tracks emerged again drifted slowly away from the Cub's tail; just an inch farther on was the matchbox which was the Otisville siding shack. A sort of shaking of pepper around the matchbox meant people, a small crowd of them—though there was no train due until the Erie's No. 6, which didn't stop at Otisville anyhow.
He thumped Martinson on the shoulder. The adjutant tilted his head back and shouted, “What?”
“Bank right. Something going on around the Otisville station. Go down a bit.”
The adjutant jerked out the carburetor-heat toggle and pulled back the throttle. The plane, idling, went into a long, whistling glide along the railroad right of way.
“Can't go too low here,” he said. “If we get caught in the downdraft, we'll get slammed right into the mountain.”
“I know that. Go on about four miles and make an air line approach back. Then you can climb into the draft. I want to see what's going on down there.”
Martinson shrugged and opened the throttle again. The Cub clawed for altitude, then made a half-turn over Howells for the bogus landing run.
The plane went into normal glide and McDonough craned his neck. In a few moments he was able to see what had happened down below. The mountain from this side was steep and sharp; a wounded bomber couldn't possibly have hoped to clear it. At night, on the other hand, the mouth of the railroad tunnel was marked on all three sides, by the lights of the station on the left, the neon sign of the tavern which stood on the brow of the cliff on Otisville (POP. 3,000—HIGH AND HEALTHY) and on the right by the Erie's own signal standard. Radar would have shown the rest: the long regular path of the embankment leading directly into that cul-de-sac of lights, the beetling mass of contours which was the mountain. All these signs would mean “tunnel” in any language.
And the bomber pilot had taken the longest of all possible chances: to come down gliding along the right of way, in the hope of shooting his fuselage cleanly into that tunnel, leaving behind his wings with their dangerous engines and fuel tanks. It was absolutely insane, but that was what he had done.
And, miracle of miracles, he had made it. McDonough could see the wings now, buttered into two-dimensional profiles over the two pilasters of the tunnel. They had hit with such force that the fuel in them must have been vaporized instantly; at least, there was no sign of a fire. And no sign of a fuselage, either.
The bomber's body was inside the mountain, probably halfway or more down the tunnel's one-mile length. It was inconceivable that there could be anything intelligible left of it; but where one miracle has happened, two are possible.
No wonder the little Otisville station was peppered over with the specks of wondering people.
“L-4 to Huguenot. L-4 to Huguenot. Andy, are you there?”
“We read you, Mac. Go ahead.”
“We've found your bomber. It's in the Otisville tunnel. Over.”
“Crackle to L-4. You've lost your mind.”
“That's where it is, all the same. We're going to try to make a landing. Send us a team as soon as you can. Out.”
“Huguenot to L-4. Don't be a crackle idiot, Mac, you can't land there.”
“Out,” McDonough said. He pounded Martinson's shoulder and gestured urgently downward.
“You want to land?” Martinson said. “Why didn't you say so? We'll never get down on a shallow glide like this.” He cleared the engine with a brief burp on the throttle, pulled the Cub up into a sharp stall, and slid off on one wing. The whole world began to spin giddily.
Martinson was losing altitude. McDonough closed his eyes and hung onto his back teeth.
Martinson's drastic piloting got them down to a rough landing, on the wheels, on the road leading to the Otisville station, slightly under a mile away from the mountain. They taxied the rest of the way. The crowd left the mouth of the tunnel to cluster around the airplane the moment it had come to a stop, but a few moments’ questioning convinced McDonough that the Otisvilleans knew very little. Some of them had heard “a turrible noise” in the early morning, and with the first light had discovered the bright metal coating the sides of the tunnel. No, there hadn't been any smoke. No, nobody heard any sounds in the tunnel. You couldn't see the other end of it, though; something was blocking it.
“The signal's red on this side,” McDonough said thoughtfully while he helped the adjutant tie the plane down. “You used to run the PBX board for the Erie in Port, didn't you, Marty? If you were to phone the station master there, maybe we could get him to throw a block on the other end of the tunnel.”
“If there's wreckage in there, the block will be on automatically.”
“Sure. But we've got to go in there. I don't want the Number S
ix piling in after us.”
Martinson nodded, and went inside the railroad station. McDonough looked around. There was, as usual, a motorized hand truck parked off the tracks on the other side of the embankment. Many willing hands helped him set it on the right of way, and several huskies got the one-lung engine started for him. Getting his own apparatus out of the plane and onto the truck, however, was a job for which he refused all aid. The stuff was just too delicate, for all its weight, to be allowed in the hands of laymen—and never mind that McDonough himself was almost as much of a layman in neurophysiology as they were; he at least knew the collimating tables and the cookbook.
“O.K.,” Martinson said, rejoining them. “Tunnel's blocked at both ends. I talked to Ralph at the dispatcher's; he was steaming—says he's lost four trains already, and another due in from Buffalo in forty-four minutes. We cried a little about it. Do we go now?”
“Right now.”
Martinson drew his automatic and squatted down on the front of the truck. The little car growled and crawled toward the tunnel. The spectators murmured and shook their heads knowingly.
Inside the tunnel it was as dark as always, and cold, with a damp chill which struck through McDonough's flight jacket and dungarees. The air was still, and in addition to its musty smell it had a peculiar metallic stench. Thus far, however, there was none of the smell of fuel or of combustion products which McDonough had expected. He found suddenly that he was trembling again, although he did not really believe that the EEG would be needed.
“Did you notice those wings?” Martinson said suddenly, just loud enough to be heard above the popping of the motor. The echoes distorted his voice almost beyond recognition.
“Notice them? What about them?”
“Too short to be bomber wings. Also, no engines.”
McDonough swore silently. To have failed to notice a detail as gross as that was a sure sign that he was even more frightened than he had thought. “Anything else?”
“Well, I don't think they were aluminum; too tough. Titanium, maybe, or stainless steel. What have we got in here, anyhow? You know the Russkies couldn't get a fighter this far.”
There was no arguing that. There was no answering the question, either—not yet.
McDonough unhooked the torch from his belt. Behind them, the white aperture of the tunnel's mouth looked no bigger than a nickel, and the twin bright lines of the rails looked forty miles long. Ahead, the flashlight revealed nothing but the slimy walls of the tunnel, coated with soot.
And then there was a fugitive bluish gleam. McDonough set the motor back down as far as it would go. The truck crawled painfully through the stifling blackness. The thudding of the engine was painful, as though his own heart were trying to move the heavy platform.
The gleam came closer. Nothing moved around it. It was metal, reflecting the light from his torch. Martinson lit his own and brought it into play.
The truck stopped, and there was absolute silence except for the ticking of water on the floor of the tunnel.
“It's a rocket,” Martinson whispered. His torch roved over the ridiculously inadequate tail empennage facing them. It was badly crumpled. “In fair shape, considering. At the clip he was going, he must have slammed back and forth like an alarm clapper.”
Cautiously they got off the truck and prowled around the gleaming, badly dented spindle. There were clean shears where the wings had been, but the stubs still remained, as though the metal itself had given to the impact before the joints could. That meant welded construction throughout, McDonough remembered vaguely. The vessel rested now roughly in the center of the tunnel, and the railroad tracks had spraddled under its weight. The fuselage bore no identifying marks, except for a red star at the nose; or rather, a red asterisk.
Martinson's torch lingered over the star for a moment, but the adjutant offered no comment. He went around the nose, McDonough trailing.
On the other side of the ship was the death wound; a small, ragged tear in the metal, not far forward of the tail. Some of the raw curls of metal were partially melted. Martinson touched one.
“Flak,” he muttered. “Cut his fuel lines. Lucky he didn't blow up.”
“How do we get in?” McDonough said nervously. “The cabin didn't even crack. And we can't crawl through that hole.”
Martinson thought about it. Then he bent to the lesion in the ship's skin, took a deep breath, and bellowed at the top of his voice:
“Hey in there! Open up!”
It took a long time for the echoes to die away. McDonough was paralyzed with pure fright. Anyone of those distorted, ominous rebounding voices could have been an answer. Finally, however, the silence came back.
“So he's dead,” Martinson said practically. “I'll bet even his footbones are broken, every one of ‘em. Mac, stick your hair net in there and see if you can pick up anything.”
“N-not a chance. I can't get anything unless the electrodes are actually t-touching the skull.”
“Try it anyhow, and then we can get out of here and let the experts take over. I've about made up my mind it's a missile, anyhow. With this little damage, it could still go off.”
McDonough had been repressing that notion since his first sight of the spindle. The attempt to save the fuselage intact, the piloting skill involved, and the obvious cabin windshield all argued against it; but even the bare possibility was somehow twice as terrifying, here under a mountain, as it would have been in the open. With so enormous a mass of rock pressing down on him, and the ravening energies of a sun perhaps waiting to break loose by his side—
No, no; it was a fighter, and the pilot might somehow still be alive. He almost ran to get the electrode net off the truck. He dangled it on its cable inside the flak tear, pulled the goggles over his eyes, and flicked the switch with his thumb.
The Walter goggles made the world inside the tunnel no darker than it actually was, but knowing that he would now be unable to see any gleam of light in the tunnel, should one appear from somewhere—say, in the ultimate glare of hydrogen fusion—increased the pressure of blackness on his brain. Back on the truck the frequency-analyzer began its regular, meaningless peeping, scanning the possible cortical output bands in order of likelihood: First the 0.5 to 3.5 cycles/second band, the delta wave, the last activity of the brain detectable before death; then the four to seven c.p.s. theta channel, the pleasure-scanning waves which went on even during sleep; the alpha rhythm, the visual scanner, at eight to thirteen c.p.s.; the beta rhythms at fourteen to thirty c.p.s. which mirror the tensions of conscious computation, not far below the level of real thought; the gamma band, where—
The goggles lit.
…And still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds….
McDonough snatched the goggles up with a gasp, and stared frantically into the blackness, now swimming with residual images in contrasting colors, melting gradually as the rods and cones in his retina gave up the energy they had absorbed from the scene in the goggles. Curiously, he knew at once where the voice had come from: it had been his mother's reading to him, on Christmas Eve, a story called “A Child's Christmas in Wales.” He had not thought of it in well over two decades, but the scene in the toposcope goggles had called it forth irresistibly.
“What's the matter?” Martinson's voice said. “Get anything? Are you sick?”
“No,” McDonough muttered. “Nothing.”
“Then let's beat it. Do you make a noise like that over nothing every day? My Uncle Crosby did, but then, he had asthma.”
Tentatively, McDonough lowered the goggles again. The scene came back, still in the same impossible colors, and almost completely without motion. Now that he was able to look at it again, however, he saw that the blue animals were not sheep; they were too large, and they had faces rather like those of kittens. Nor were the enormously slow-moving birds actually birds at all, except that they did seem to be flying—in unlikely straight lines, with slow
, mathematically even flappings of unwinglike wings; there was something vegetable about them. The red field was only a dazzling blur, hazing the feet of the blue animals with the huge, innocent kittens’ faces. As for the sky, it hardly seemed to be there at all; it was as white as paper.
“Come on,” Martinson muttered, his voice edged with irritation. “What's the sense of staying in this hole any more? You bucking for pneumonia?”
“There's… something alive in there.”
“Not a chance,” Martinson said. His voice was noticeably more ragged. “You're dreaming. You said yourself you couldn't pick up—”
“I know what I'm doing,” McDonough insisted, watching the scene in the goggles. “There's a live brain in there. Something nobody's ever hit before. It's powerful—no mind in the books ever put out a broadcast like this. It isn't human.”
“All the more reason to call in the AF and quit. We can't get in there anyhow. What do you mean, it isn't human? It's a Red, that's all.”
“No, it isn't,” McDonough said evenly. Now that he thought he knew what they had found, he had stopped trembling. He was still terrified, but it was a different kind of terror: the fright of a man who has at last gotten a clear idea of what it is he is up against. “Human beings just don't broadcast like this. Especially not when they're near dying. And they don't remember huge blue sheep with cats’ heads on them, or red grass, or a white sky. Not even if they come from the USSR. Whoever it is in there comes from some place else.”
“You read too much. What about the star on the nose?”
McDonough drew a deep breath. “What about it?” he said steadily. “It isn't the insignia of the Red Air Force. I saw that it stopped you, too. No air force I ever heard of flies a red asterisk. It isn't a cocarde at all. It's just what it is.”
“An asterisk?” Martinson said angrily.
“No, Marty, I think it's a star. A symbol for a real star. The AF's gone and knocked us down a spaceship.” He pushed the goggles up and carefully withdrew the electrode net from the hole in the battered fuselage.