Temple’s last call was on the electrical wholesaler who had furnished the equipment and materials. A list of what had been bought might give him a clue to the nature of the mysterious activity going on inside the camp.
The wholesaler was affable enough until Temple asked about the purchases. Then his face went blank. He stared with empty eyes and muttered vaguely, “They bought a lot of stuff. I don’t remember what all it was.”
“You must have records, invoices, purchase orders,” Temple persisted. “Was most of it big, heavy equipment, or delicate instruments?”
“I…can’t seem to remember. Somebody—that blond girl—took all the records to check. I must get them back sometime.”
Temple gave up and left, the bitter taste of defeat in his mouth. There was no doubt that, somehow, the dealer had been thoroughly brain-conditioned, all knowledge of his transactions with the Meteoritics Team erased from his mind.
The sun was setting when he got his car and drove out to the Solle place. In that flat, treeless country there was no place of concealment. Below the last rise he pulled off onto the prairie a hundred feet or so from the lane and hoped that it would be unnoticed in the deepening gloom.
He climbed to the crest and looked down upon the camp. The floodlights were blazing and the whole place seethed with the same frenzied activity. The tower was now capped by a domed roof and most of the smaller buildings seemed to be finished on the outside. Somewhere heavy machinery snorted and rumbled and hammers thudded. From open doors came the purple glare and fitful spat of arc welders. Stilwell’s powerful binoculars brought the scene closer but added no details of significance.
They did show him that Lee had made good her threat. Across the road in front of the gate stretched a barricade of steel teeth, sharp-pointed and slanting outward from a serrated bed into which they could fold to let a car pass. A new rough-board structure stood a few yards outside the gate. This was simply a roof and back wall covering a long bench. It resembled the shelters often erected at bus stops, but its purpose here baffled him.
When full darkness had fallen, Temple moved down as close to the fence as he could without being caught in the backwash of lights. From this close range, the activity inside seemed even more frenetic and less comprehensible. He was suddenly struck by the absence of human voices, the bawling of orders and requests, the noisy banter that usually emanated from a work crew. Here, it was like watching voiceless robots dashing about. The discovery brought an eerie prickle to the back of his neck.
Moving warily away from the gate he found himself looking through the mesh fence into the original meteoritics camp, tiny and almost lost in a remote corner of the vast complex. No one moved outside but there were lights shining from the windows of the huts and the larger laboratory. The sight brought a lump to his throat.
Then he saw the nine meteorites, lying on a platform beside the laboratory. Through the glasses he could make out the odd, pitchlike surface, but it had a dull, dusty look. Suddenly he knew with almost clairvoyant certainty that those mysterious visitors from space had lain there, untouched and forgotten, since the night they were dragged from their pits. The feeling only intensified the dark mystery and spurred his determination to get beyond that lethal barricade that guarded it.
He moved on, his hopes rising as he saw no signs of guards anywhere along the fence. Apparently they were depending upon high tension current alone for their security, and there were always ways to thwart man-made electricity. He studied the fence, his mind racing.
The steel posts of the fence were set into heavy insulators. An intruder touching the fence would become the conductor that carried the charge from the steel mesh to the ground. With thick rubber boots and the kind of insulating gloves worn by high-line crews he should be safe. It might even be possible to lean a heavily-insulated ladder against the fence without danger.
He stood there, visualizing the equipment he would need for the attempt when Fate in the form of a Kansas jack-rabbit intervened to save him from a fatal blunder. The rabbit, as large as a small dog, came bounding out of the night, perhaps chased by a hungry coyote or irresistibly drawn by the lights. It flashed by Temple in great six-foot leaps, sprang again and rammed headlong into the fence.
The gray body was a full three feet above the ground when it struck the mesh, but there was a blinding flash of sparks, a loud crackle and the stench of burned hair and flesh. Instantly, warning bells set up an ear-splitting clangor, and a signal light above that section of fence began to flash. A dozen guards with shotguns burst into sight, racing toward the indicated spot. Temple faded back into the night and ran.
He was still shaking when he reached his car. But for the rabbit, he would have gone ahead with a suicidal plan. Instead of being grounded to the earth, both poles of the current were in the mesh itself. However well insulated he might be from the soil, a touch would still be fatal and, judging by the arc, the potential was high enough to smash through insulating gloves. Furthermore, he had no doubt that simply touching the fence would set off the alarm bells and light.
The electrocution of the rabbit filled him with a sick horror. It emphasized more sharply than any other incident, the terrible change in Lee and the other team members. Instead of a jackrabbit, it could have easily been some person, innocently curious, who touched the fence. The callous indifference to human lives exemplified in that steel-mesh death trap was almost beyond comprehension.
He spent most of the night pacing the floor of his room, driving his numbed brain to find an answer to the dark mystery. In a corner the television kept up a low yammering. He listened with part of his mind on the slim chance that somewhere in the news there might be a clue. The Crimson Plague was spreading in the same crazy hit-and-miss pattern, flaunting puny medical barriers as arrogantly as it flaunted the laws of contagion. Its toll had reached past a thousand and was rising more swiftly.
About dawn he fell into a troubled sleep, only to be awakened almost immediately by a tumult from the street. From the window he saw the familiar Culwain trucks unloading a horde of workmen, mainly carpenters, judging by the tools they carried.
By the time he could throw on his clothes and get downstairs, the trucks were gone and most of the men dispersing to their homes. A number, however, were turning into an all-night restaurant down the street and he ran toward it, driven by new hope.
A half-hour later he stumbled out again, haggard and despondent. The carpenters had followed blueprints to build the flimsy structures that might, for all they knew or cared, have been hencoops. They were fed well, paid extravagantly and hustled back and forth from bunkhouses to job sites with no time to sightsee. Electricians, plumbers and steelworkers had followed the same pattern. No one explained or answered questions. They were all driven hard but paid well. Beyond that, they knew nothing of what was going on or what purpose their labor fulfilled.
He spent most of the day running down discharged workmen and getting the same answers. Only a handful, chiefly master electricians and welders, turned sullen and evasive under questioning. Temple finally gave up, convinced that they were more confused than hostile, simply because they could not remember what they had worked on. He was positive that like the employment agent and the electrical supplier, any significant memories of their activity within the camp had been erased from their minds.
He paced the streets, his steps timed to the rhythm of a refrain that beat against his frozen brain. Get inside the camp! Get inside the camp! The demand was an obsession that drove and ruled him. He ate little, slept less, grew steadily more gaunt and haggard. What was Lee doing in there, or what were they doing to her? Was there any hope that a spark of feeling for him still lingered in her heart? Had her true personality been ruthlessly destroyed or did it still lie imprisoned, waiting for him to break the chains that bound it?
Get inside the camp, his whole being cried. Get inside and find out. The answers are all in there.
They were days of anguish for Curtis Temple.
He made and abandoned a hundred wild and reckless plans. He spent long hours lying on the hill, watching the camp through the glasses. Several times he saw Lee and the others rushing from one building to another on mysterious errands. Most of the activity now seemed to be centered in the great central tower.
There were still several hundred workmen inside, mainly metalworkers. Machines and human muscle were busy rushing sheet steel and beams into the tower from the dwindling piles outside.
He quickly discovered the purpose of the covered bench outside. Massive trailer trucks were bringing in loads of cable and pipe and sheet metal now, along with what seemed to be enormous pieces of machinery swathed in concealing tarpaulins. At the gate, the truck driver got down and waited in the shelter while someone from inside drove his truck through to the unloading point, then returned it empty.
Each time, before passing the gate, a team of armed guards searched every inch of truck and load. The thoroughness of their inspection discouraged Temple from attempting to slip in as a stowaway. He had a grim feeling that discovery would be highly unpleasant, if not fatal. Twice he had been seen and shot at by the guards, with an accuracy that was unnerving.
He spent most of the nights battering his bloody head against the apparently impregnable barrier of the fence. He hurled chains and lengths of pipe against the fence, hoping to short-circuit and blow out the system. Each time the alarm brought guards who cut out that section of fence for the moments needed to remove the object.
He nursed an idea of bringing his car around over the prairie and using it to smash down some remote section of the fence. That hope died when, prowling in search of the best spot, he discovered a line of sharpened stakes just far enough out from the fence to block such an attempt.
The next night he brought a shovel with the hope of tunneling under the fence. Before he had taken out a half-dozen shovelfuls, he felt the sharp tingling in his hands and feet and remembered the gate guard’s warning of high tension leakage into the earth. If he could feel it on a wooden shovel handle many yards away, the potential directly under the fence would be enough to paralyze if not kill him. Again he gave up in despair.
Day and night he continued fruitless efforts to reach Lee or any of the others by telephone. The gravel-voiced Mrs. Solle always answered and cut him off. He tried every subterfuge he could think of but she displayed an uncanny skill in seeing through them all.
The thirteenth day after his frustrating talk with Lee Mason he saw a fresh burst of activity seize the camp. All day he lay on the ridge, watching bundles being carried into the tower in frantic haste. When nightfall brought no letup in the rush, he stayed at his post, watching through the glasses.
At last he saw the work crews being marched out and away to a building he had guessed were living quarters. When they were all inside, the floodlight suddenly blinked out, leaving the entire camp lit only by dim street lamps. He tensed with a feeling that events of vast importance were impending.
The light-gathering power of the glasses gave him a fairly good view despite the gloom. For some time nothing seemed to be happening. Then, as he swept the skyline of the camp, his breath caught sharply.
At the top of the tower the great dome was moving, splitting apart across the center. As he gaped, the two halves folded out and down, leaving the entire top open to the sky. In the space thus exposed he could make out the shadowy shape of a bluntly rounded nose protruding above the tower wall.
He scrambled to his feet, spurred by a stab of unreasoning terror, not for himself but for Lee and those others inside. An incoherent yell burst from his lips, although the conscious part of his mind was still numb to the realization of what he was seeing.
Then he became aware of a rumbling mutter, so low on the tonal scale that he felt it as vibration rather than heard it as sound. Under his feet the ground quivered. The mutter climbed to a full-throated bellow and the violent rocking of the earth dislodged rocks from the slope of the ridge. At the top of the tower a faint glow of light illuminated the protruding nose. Then light and sound rose together to furious crescendo.
His eardrums ached to sound and pressure. A blinding white light blossomed, turning the night into day. Then, through the brilliance, a dark and gleaming cylinder belched from the open maw of the tower and crept up with accelerating fury.
Temple stood frozen, transfixed. Once, with a group of invited scientists, he had watched a rocket launching at Cape Canaveral. This was like that, and yet different.
The great vehicle itself was similar but there was no cloud of vapor, no boiling backlash of flame. Instead, there was only a slim column of dazzling white stretching from the cylinder down into the tower, as if the rocket were being pushed up by a piston of molten metal rigidly confined within a cylinder of glass.
Instinctively he pressed a stud on the edge of his wrist watch. His eyes never left the rocket, mounting with incredible speed, dragging the white tail up with it into the sky.
Abruptly the tail vanished. For another second or two the rocket was a pinpoint spark moving among the stars. Then there was a soundless flash and the spark was gone.
Seconds later something that felt like a wave of high tension electric current swept over him. His flesh crawled with a feeling of being brushed by invisible feathers. Then the sensation was gone and he could feel the hairs of his skin flatten.
A rocket had gone up from an impossible launching pad within that tower. It had climbed, then vanished in a wisp of light. Had it blown itself up through a malfunction? Were there passengers aboard?
He waited for the sound of a blast to reach his ears but no sound came. When he was sure none would come, he whirled and raced toward his parked car with the blood pounding in his ears and a terrible anguish clawing at his nerves.
CHAPTER 8
Inside The Camp
Curtis Temple was an experienced and dedicated meteor-watcher. He had trained his eyes and muscles to the superb co-ordination essential to capturing every possible secret during the instant a flashing meteor was visible. It had become second nature for his subconscious to chart the fragmentary course of a vanishing spark across the pattern of stars and pure reflex for his finger to clock its speed on the special timer built into his wrist watch.
Heedless of spying eyes, he snapped on the dome light of the car and hunched under it with pad and pencil. His fingers flew through a maze of intricate calculations. Timing the spark across familiar asterisms, whose apparent diameter he knew, gave a fair approximation of the rocket’s speed away from Earth. His knowledge of star positions behind it gave its angle of flight. A condensed pocket Ephemeris he always carried supplied the final figures.
He sat back, sucking in a deep, incredulous breath. A stop watch, a dying spark and mathematics had supplied one major answer to the mystery that had driven him frantic for two weeks. But in supplying it, new and more incredible mysteries had been revealed.
Unless his hurried calculations were far in error, a rocket had blasted off from the meteor camp at a trajectory and speed that would take it directly into the orbit of the moon. And the nine black meteorites whose arrival had set off this weird carnival of horror had apparently been launched from the moon.
It was clear now that the major activity of the meteor camp had been the construction of that rocket and its unorthodox launching pad within the tower. Skilled workmen had fabricated the vehicle itself inside the tower, only to have the memory of their incredible feat somehow erased.
The propulsion method was obviously far in advance of any being used on current space agency projects. Suddenly Temple remembered the identities of some of the scientists who had rushed to the camp after it was set up. Rayfield was a top authority on atomics, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. Lanelle was the inventor of a new oxyllium explosive that showed promise of refinement into a rocket fuel. Mullane was an acknowledged world authority on selenography, the geography of the moon.
But why? Why? The question clawed at him. Why had such
an accomplishment been kept secret and private? Had the meteorites revealed the presence on the moon of some treasure hoard so vast that lust for it had turned human beings into heartless machines?
A new thought brought pallor to his cheeks. Was the Crimson Plague behind the mystery? Had the little group foreseen the ultimate destruction of all mankind by the hideous disease and fled to some new world, leaving the old one to its doom? In the same breath he discarded the idea.
He had glimpsed enough of the ship to estimate its size. It could never, he was certain, transport twelve persons, even if a literal miracle had been performed in the matter of fuel and air supply. He was familiar enough with the problems of astrogation to feel certain it could not have carried more than two, or at most three, passengers.
Then that meant the others were still there in the camp, and in their hands still lay the key to the whole mystery. Suddenly the way into the camp burst upon him. It had been in front of him the whole time but only now, with his mind sharpened by the events of the past hour, did he see it.
He reached into the back seat and his hands closed on the chilled metal of a rifle barrel. A week before, after being shot at by the guards, he had stormed into town and bought a .30-30 with the crazy idea of shooting his way in. He had since cooled off but the rifle had lain where he dropped it in the back. Now he thanked his stars for that mad impulse. Tonight it would get him into the camp, but not in the manner he had first planned.
With the rifle beside him he started the car and headed up over the prairie swell, away from the road. He drove without his lights, guided by the faint radiance of the stars and trusting to luck not to hit a rock or pothole.
He halted at last, broadside to the fence and nearly half a mile east of the gate. He leaned the rifle against the fender, got the jack out of the trunk and walked toward the fence. The floodlights had not been turned back on and tonight they were essential to his plan.
The Gods Hate Kansas Page 5