His eyes switched to Mike. "You're taking her up, Mike? You're flying her again." He studied Mike, and nodded slowly, as if making up his mind. "And you're not coming back. You're going to destroy her. I thought
of that, too. Mike—Mike, don't. Let me. I'm just a has-been, Mike—but I want to feel her in my hands once. After that, it won't matter. ..."
Mike shook his head. "It's my trip, and I'm older than you are, tonight. You're off bounds, Enright. If you're caught in here now, you'll be up for another security check. Better get back. Maybe you're right, and I'm going to destroy her. But it won't do for you to be found with me, if I do. You've got your boys to worry about, and I don't have anyone. Go on, scram!"
Enright licked his lips, and shook his head. "My boys! Yes, yes of course, Mike. Of course. But let me stay here a little longer, while you get her out."
"Okay," Mike told him. The man must be getting senile, he thought. But he'd forgotten one vital thing, and Enright could watch the plane while he went for it. "Stay, then. But you'd better go as soon as I get back. Only a minute."
He swung out to the entrance, and into the main hangar again. There was a flask of hydro-fluoric acid around somewhere, and that had already been proved capable of dissolving the trick metals and the trickier insulation, though they resisted even such a violent acid for a surprising length of time. He finally found it, and went back.
Enright was gone, and the little light bulb was out. Mike stumbled through the darkness, banging his shins on something that shouldn't have been there. He cursed, and decided vaguely that something should be done about men who left things in the middle where nothing was supposed to be. Then he grinned bitterly as he realized he wouldn't be around to do anything about it.
He found the steps to the control cabin of the Enigma, and went up them, and into the cabin. He reached for the door, just as a sudden loud noise shook the air of the laboratory. Probably the guards were trying to get back. He settled under the pseudo-transformer hastily, stuck his arms through the straps, and sent power into the wheels, to go moving out where take-off was possible.
It was only as the ship was lifting savagely that he realized the laboratory floor had been bare before. Something had come out of nowhere! Maybe the control-panel had finally come back—and his father! For a second, he started to settle back. But it was pointless. The corpse of Bruce Dane could do him no good, and he might have no chance to finish this business, if he were interrupted now. The Danes had saddled the world with the worst Trojan horse it had ever known. Now their debt had to be paid, as far as it could be paid.
He shook his mind almost free of thoughts, and went tearing upwards in the Enigma, crowding on full power. The ship almost flew itself, and he found the hatch that led down into its belly, throwing it open with one foot. He pulled the bottle of acid out, staring at its waxy surface. He uncorked it and waited.
When the great capacitor that lay there blew up, it wouldn't do to have the Enigma too low!
The needle went up, indicating twenty miles of height, and he pushed it on, until it crowded the pin at twenty-five, and the jets began to lose apparent power. There he leveled off, set her into a tight circle, and gently dropped the bottle of acid down into the inside, where it would begin eating through the tough metal and tougher insulation, to short-circuit unimaginable power. His foot snapped the hatch back, before any of the fumes could get into the cabin.
For a second longer, he let the plane circle, before he reached for the controls, to head her out towards the ocean.
"Hands up, Mike!"
The voice broke on the words, with the fear riding thickly on them. And Mike's hands shot up as he turned to see Enright crawling out from the rear, his stark white face dirty and strained. The man was shaking, and the gun wavering as it pointed at Mike—the one thing a man who has seen guns in action will always fear.
"You damned fool," Mike said, trying to keep his voice level. "Do you realize you're sentencing yourself to death?"
"They won't catch me." Enright had pulled himself up now, bracing himself to withstand the strain of pressure created by the turning of the ship, now much slower and looser than before, but still too much for comfort outside the field of the pseudo-transformer. Mike realized suddenly that the man had probably been blacked out and had seen none of his work with the acid.
"They won't catch me," Enright said again. "And this time, they'll be satisfied. They'll have to be satisfied. My boys are prisoners of Pan-Asia, Mike Dane! They have been for three years."
Horror and disgust hit at Mike as he stared at the half-hysterical man. "You!"
"Me." Enright settled into the other seat, and pulled the control stick over to his side, kicking it around on its frame without letting the gun drop from its aim at Mike. "Call me a spy, Mike. Go ahead. You can't say anything I haven't said. When I sent them the athodyd plans —and the robot schematics—when I promised them this. But they're winning, anyhow! It doesn't make any difference. It just ends the war sooner, so less get killed. And my boys won't be tortured. I got an ear once, a single ear!"
"So you want to turn the world over to such people," Mike said, and now he was glad that the acid was eating away down there. "You—and Molly!"
Enright looked at him with an unchanged, taut stare. "Molly? No, I couldn't find what she was doing. They wanted that, too—they wanted it pretty badly. But this will satisfy them. It has to satisfy them. They'll free my boys, and the war will be over. Because they think they can crack the secret there. But you're going back, Mike. I don't want you like my boys!"
He reached forward, to press a control on the panel, and then stopped. "You should have a parachute. I—" He gulped, and his finger was shaking on the trigger. Then he caught himself. "But it's better than torture, Mike. And I can't shoot you. Damn it, I can't!"
The finger hit the panel, as if he'd spent hours studying it in the handbook or in their checks of the real thing.
The Enigma stopped with a violent braking from her jets that threatened to buckle her back on herself. The airspeed indicator jerked to a stop against the zero pin. And suddenly, the seat under Mike seemed to explode outwards through a panel that snapped open and shut behind him. He'd been ejected into the air, twenty miles above the Earth without a parachute.
Now the Enigma flashed into motion again, and Mike jerked the oxygen mask up against his face. His body ached and burned inside itself at the change in pressure, even through the heavy webbing of the high-altitude suit that could only partially equalize things. Instinctively, he pulled up the zippers that sealed it, and it flooded with oxygen, ending the attack of bends before they could reach a full start. The pressure held his arms and legs out rigidly, but the feeling now was one of lightness and almost peace as he went into free fall toward the ground below.
The Enigma had turned and was heading westward at full speed, a little erratically, as Enright probably fumbled while learning to handle it. But it was soon lost to sight. Mike wondered how far he would get before the acid did its work—perhaps he'd reach his goal, though that seemed doubtful. But he had no way of knowing.
Surprisingly, he was falling straight toward the little field. The air began to thicken, slowing his fall and setting up a shriek in his ears, while the suit became warm. Then it settled back. There was almost no wind, though he was surprised to find that it was raining gently here. It was too bad that he'd probably smash into the private little field. A man should keep his dying quiet, not make a mess of it where others would see. . . .
The ground touched his feet! The long fall was over! And he felt nothing; no shock, no sudden impact, and no instant death he had expected.
The purpose of the pseudo-transformer was plain now. Anti-inertial Some field that had no effect on gravity or acceleration up to the normal limit, but stubbornly refused to admit that mass had inertia or momentum beyond that normal. No wonder they hadn't detected an energy, output.
It was hissing above him, probably hot. The cover on it had been removed and ne
ver replaced, and the rain was sizzling softly against it. He shucked it off, along with his heavy suit, and began kicking a hole into the damp earth to bury it, where even that trace of the Enigma would be gone, until its normal iron core could rust away in the ground.
It was sizzling worse as he threw the last wet earth over it, but he paid no attention to that. Finished, he started back toward the ruined laboratory, his mind dulled, and without any purpose.
Then he head a faint voice, and jerked erect, almost letting his prosthetic leg double under him.
"Mike! Somebody! Hey!"
It was his father's voice.
Mike opened his mouth to answer. But there was no time. From the place where he had buried the gadget, there was a sudden eruption of steam as the wetness found some vital spot. Then the whole field seemed to explode. Mike caught a brief second of the glare, before something hit him with a giant's hand, and he was suddenly unconscious.
Mike had vague memories of apparent clarity, and of the face of his father and that of Molly over him. But when he finally came out of the last of the drugs and the delirium, ten days had gone by, and only Custer was beside him. He sat up, or tried to, but the other man shook his head.
"You're all right, Mike. You had a concussion that was a honey, and you lost a leg—but it was the prosthetic, not your good one, so I guess that won't matter. Here." Custer threw a small box on the bed, close to Mike's weak fingers.
"Dad?" Mike asked, and was surprised at how rusty his voice felt.
"So you heard him?" Custer grinned, though there was a strange shadow on his eyes. "He came back, unharmed—with no memory of any time elapsing, but he was stuck under a section of the control panel. A good diing we had the place cleared this time. He thinks nothing happened, except that the time-dredge exploded. We took him to the hospital with you, and managed to convince him that the shock had messed up his memory. He'll never know about the Enigma."
It was probably quite possible, Mike realized. There had been no more than fifty men who knew the whole story, and none of them would talk.
"Better open the box, Mike," Custer suggested, and then bent down to do it for him. There was a medal there, and two gold stars pinned to the velvet back.
"For what?" he wanted to know. "For stealing the Enigma and losing it. Or don't they know about that?"
"They know—between your raving and the black-light camera and pickup we had in the laboratory to keep tabs on the Enigma, we have the whole story." Custer reached into his pocket and brought out a heavily folded newspaper clipping.
Mike caught the headline, and gasped, skimming down through the story. Poor Enrightl He'd apparently reached his goal safely, and the Enigma must have been transferred directly to the long sought secret production plant of Pan-Asia. But they'd probably tortured him and the two boys, after the results. It seemed that half of the Gobi desert had erupted. The Enigma had finally blown —and it must have touched off a whole collection of hydrogen bombs with it. Pan-Asia now had exactly no secret production works, and no inhabitants for a hundred miles around.
"But that isn't why the stars," Custer said. "Those are for the real reason we're finally winning the war. Project Swipe is paying off. They took that idea of yours seriously."
"What idea?"
"Spraying. We've been running planes over Pan-Asian territory with the metal glue, and spraying from our top altitude. It's heavy enough to settle in the size drops we use. Next day, we go over with the polymerizer, and the stuff freezes. There probably isn't a machine in the whole European conquered territory that will work. And before they can get the secret, they'll be begging for
peace in any terms. We're getting feelers already. Incidentally, your father thinks the can of glue was all that was left from his swipe after the machine exploded, but he seems to be satisfied to let time alone. One success is enough, I guess. He's got a couple of stars, too, now. If you get married—and it's about time—and Molly gets the rating she deserves, you're going to be quite a family!"
"Molly!"
"Molly," Custer said. "She found what you'd left in her apartment, Mike. That's why she wanted me here when you woke up—so you wouldn't get too excited when you saw her. It wasn't a piece from the Enigma, Mike. It's out in normal top secret now, and the Dane company even has part of a contract on it. Mike, Molly's found how to develop magnetic current!"
Mike looked up at the ceiling, feeling the same shadow creep into his eyes that lay in Custer's, Molly had come back to her place in his mind, bringing warmth and content with her. But something else was there—a realization of the road they were headed down. Today the impossible magnetic current. Tomorrow, counter-inertia. Someday, capacitors that had no limit. It was the opening wedge to a tomorrow where science played god while man went on in the same old pattern of hate and death. And the future wasn't so far, after all.
Custer looked down at Mike with understanding, and dropped a hand onto Mike's shoulder. "Get well soon, boy. We're going to need you. I'll send Bruce and Molly in, in a minute or two."
Mike watched him go. From beyond the door, he heard the warm voice of Molly and the deeper warmth of his father's speech. In a minute, they'd be here, and he'd forget all the other for a while. But not for long. With the future that was coming, there was no time to waste.
Maybe they couldn't eliminate war. But as least they could be ready for it. That, apparently, was all the future could teach them, but it would be enough.
Unto Him That Hath Page 4