The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  Palmer clutched at Ferrel’s sleeve. “Doc, isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “Try.” He metered out a minute quantity of drug doubtfully, felt Jorgenson’s pulse, and decided on half that amount. “Not much hope, though; that man’s been through hell, and it wasn’t good for him to be forced around in the first place. Carry it too far, and he’ll be delirious if he does talk. Anyway, I suspect it’s partly his speech centers as well as the throat.”

  But Jorgenson began a slight rally almost instantly, trying again, then apparently drawing himself together for a final attempt. When they came, the words spilled out harshly in forced clearness, but without inflection.

  “First . . . variable . . . at . . . twelve . . . water . . . stop.” His eyes, centered on Jenkins, closed, and he relaxed again, this time no longer fighting off the inevitable unconsciousness.

  Hokusai, Palmer and Jenkins were staring back and forth at one another questioningly. The little Japanese shook his head negatively at first, frowned, and repeated it, to be imitated almost exactly by the manager. “Delirious ravings!”

  “The great white hope Jorgenson!” Jenkins’ shoulders dropped and the blood drained from his face, leaving it ghastly with fatigue and despair. “Oh, damn it, Doc stop staring at me! I can’t pull a miracle out of a hat!”

  Doc hadn’t realized that he was staring, but he made no effort to change it. “Maybe not, but you happened to have the most active imagination here, when you stop abusing it to scare yourself. Well, you’re on the spot now, and I’m still giving odds on you. Want to bet, Hoke?”

  It was an utterly stupid thing, and Doc knew it; but somewhere during the long hours together, he’d picked up a queer respect for the boy and a dependence on the nervousness that wasn’t fear but closer akin to the reaction of a rear-running thoroughbred on the home stretch. Hoke was too slow and methodical, and Palmer had been too concerned with outside worries to give anywhere nearly full attention to the single most urgent phase of the problem; that left only Jenkins, hampered by his lack of self-confidence.

  Hoke gave no sign that he caught the meaning of Doc’s heavy wink, but he lifted his eyebrows faintly. “No, I think I am not bet. Dr. Jenkins, I am to be command!”

  Palmer looked briefly at the boy, whose face mirrored in credulous confusion, but he had neither Ferrel’s ignorance of atomic technique nor Hokusai’s fatalism. With a final glance at the unconscious Jorgenson, he started across the room toward the phone. “You men play, if you like. I’m starting evacuation immediately!”

  “Wait!” Jenkins was shaking himself, physically as well as mentally. “Hold it, Palmer! Thanks, Doc. You knocked me out of the rut, and bounced my memory back to something I picked up somewhere; I think it’s the answer! It has to work – nothing else can at this stage of the game!”

  “Give me the Governor, operator.” Palmer had heard, but he went on with the phone call. “This is no time to play crazy hunches until after we get the people out, kid. I’ll admit you’re a darned clever amateur, but you’re no atomicist!”

  “And if we get the men out, it’s too late – there’ll be no one left in here to do the work!” Jenkins’ hand snapped out and jerked the receiver of the plug-in telephone from Palmer’s hand. “Cancel the call, operator; it won’t be necessary. Palmer, you’ve got to listen to me; you can’t clear the whole middle of the continent, and you can’t depend on the explosion to limit itself to less ground. It’s a gamble, but you’re risking fifty million people against a mere hundred thousand. Give me a chance!”

  “I’ll give you exactly one minute to convince me, Jenkins, and it had better be good! Maybe the blowup won’t hit beyond the fifty-mile limit!”

  “Maybe. And I can’t explain in a minute.” The boy scowled tensely. “O.K., you’ve been bellyaching about a man named Kellar being dead. If he were here, would you take a chance on him? Or on a man who’d worked under him on everything he tried?”

  “Absolutely, but you’re not Kellar. And I happen to know he was a lone wolf; didn’t hire outside engineers after Jorgenson had a squabble with him and came here.” Palmer reached for the phone. “It won’t wash, Jenkins.”

  Jenkins’ hand clamped down on the instrument, jerking it out of reach. “I wasn’t outside help, Palmer. When Jorgenson was afraid to run one of the things off and quit, I was twelve; three years later, things got too tight for him to handle alone, but he decided he might as well keep it in the family, so he started me in. I’m Kellar’s stepson!”

  Pieces clicked together in Doc’s head then, and he kicked himself mentally for not having seen the obvious before. “That’s why Jorgenson knew you, then? I thought that was funny. It checks, Palmer.”

  For a split second, the manager hesitated uncertainly. Then he shrugged and gave in. “O.K., I’m a fool to trust you, Jenkins, but it’s too late for anything else, I guess. I never forgot that I was gambling the locality against half the continent. What do you want?”

  “Men – construction men, mostly, and a few volunteers for dirty work. I want all the blowers, exhaust equipment, tubing, booster blowers and everything ripped from the other three converters and connected as close to No. 4 as you can get. Put them up some way so they can be shoved in over the stuff by crane – I don’t care how; the shop men will know better than I do. You’ve got sort of a river running off behind the plant; get everyone within a few miles of it out of there, and connect the blower outlets down to it. Where does it end, anyway – some kind of a swamp, or morass?”

  “About ten miles farther down, yes; we didn’t bother keeping the drainage system going, since the land meant nothing to us, and the swamps made as good a dumping ground as anything else.” When the plant had first used the little river as an outlet for their waste products, there’d been so much trouble that National had been forced to take over all adjacent land and quiet the owners’ fears of the atomic activity in cold cash. Since then, it had gone to weeds and rabbits, mostly. “Everyone within a few miles is out, anyway, except a few fishers or tramps that don’t know we use it. I’ll have militia sent in to scare them out.”

  “Good. Ideal, in fact, since the swamps will hold stuff longer in there where the current’s slow. Now, what about that super-thermite stuff you were producing last year? Any around?”

  “Not in the plant. But we’ve got tons of it at the warehouse, still waiting for the army’s requisition. That’s pretty hot stuff to handle, though. Know much about it?”

  “Enough to know it’s what I want.” Jenkins indicated the copy of the Weekly Ray still lying where he’d dropped it, and Doc remembered skimming through the nontechnical part of the description. It was made up of two superheavy atoms, kept separate. By itself, neither was particularly important or active, but together they reacted with each other atomically to release a tremendous amount of raw heat and comparatively little unwanted radiation. “Goes up around twenty thousand centigrade, doesn’t it? How’s it stored?”

  “In ten-pound bombs that have a fragile partition; it breaks with shock, starting the action. Hoke can explain it – it’s his baby.” Palmer reached for the phone. “Anything else? Then, get out and get busy! The men will be ready for you when you get there! I’ll be out myself as soon as I can put through your orders.”

  Doc watched them go out, to be followed in short order by the manager, and was alone in the infirmary with Jorgenson and his thoughts. They weren’t pleasant; he was both too far outside the inner circle to know what was going on and too much mixed up in it not to know the dangers. Now he could have used some work of any nature to take his mind off useless speculations, but aside from a needless check of the foreman’s condition, there was nothing for him to do.

  He wriggled down in the leather chair, making the mistake of trying to force sleep, while his mind chased out after the sounds that came in from outside. There were the drones of crane and tank motors coming to life, the shouts of hurried orders, and above all, the jarring rhythm of pneumatic hammers on metal
, each sound suggesting some possibility to him without adding to his knowledge. The “Decameron” was boring, the whiskey tasted raw and rancid, and solitaire wasn’t worth the trouble of cheating.

  Finally, he gave up and turned out to the field hospital tent. Jorgenson would be better off out there, under the care of the staff from Mayo’s, and perhaps he could make himself useful. As he passed through the rear entrance, he heard the sound of a number of helicopters coming over with heavy loads, and looked up as they began settling over the edge of the buildings. From somewhere, a group of men came running forward, and disappeared in the direction of the freighters. He wondered whether any of those men would be forced back into the stuff out there to return filled with radioactive; though it didn’t matter so much, now that the isotope could be eliminated without surgery.

  Blake met him at the entrance of the field tent, obviously well satisfied with his duty of bossing and instructing the others. “Scram, Doc. You aren’t necessary here, and you need some rest. Don’t want you added to the casualties. What’s the latest dope from the pow-wow front?”

  “Jorgenson didn’t come through, but the kid had an idea, and they’re out there working on it.” Doc tried to sound more hopeful than he felt. “I was thinking you might as well bring Jorgenson in here; he’s still unconscious, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about. Where’s Brown? She’ll probably want to know what’s up, if she isn’t asleep.”

  “Asleep when the kid isn’t? Uh-huh. Mother complex, has to worry about him.” Blake grinned. “She got a look at him running out with Hoke tagging at his heels, and hiked out after him, so she probably knows everything now. Wish Anne’d chase me that way, just once – Jenkins, the wonder boy! Well, it’s out of my line; I don’t intend to start worrying until they pass out the order. O.K., Doc, I’ll have Jorgenson out here in a couple of minutes, so you grab yourself a cot and get some shut-eye.”

  Doc grunted, looking curiously at the refinements and well-equipped interior of the field tent. “I’ve already prescribed that, Blake, but the patient can’t seem to take it. I think I’ll hunt up Brown, so give me a call over the public speaker if anything turns up.”

  He headed toward the center of action, knowing that he’d been wanting to do it all along, but hadn’t been sure of not being a nuisance. Well, if Brown could look on, there was no reason why he couldn’t. He passed the machine shop, noting the excited flurry of activity going on, and went past No. 2, where other men were busily ripping out long sections of big piping and various other devices. There was a rope fence barring his way, well beyond No. 3, and he followed along the edge, looking for Palmer or Brown.

  She saw him first. “Hi, Dr. Ferrel, over here in the truck. I thought you’d be coming soon. From up here we can get a look over the heads of all these other people, and we won’t be tramped on.” She stuck down a hand to help him up, smiled faintly as he disregarded it and mounted more briskly than his muscles wanted to. He wasn’t so old that a girl had to help him yet.

  “Know what’s going on?” he asked, sinking down onto the plank across the truck body, facing out across the men below toward the converter. There seemed to be a dozen different centers of activity, all crossing each other in complete confusion, and the general pattern was meaningless.

  “No more than you do. I haven’t seen my husband, though Mr. Palmer took time enough to chase me here out of the way.”

  Doc centered his attention on the ’copters, unloading, rising, and coming in with more loads, and he guessed that those boxes must contain the little thermodyne bombs. It was the one thing he could understand, and consequently the least interesting. Other men were assembling the big sections of piping he’d seen before, connecting them up in almost endless order, while some of the tanks hooked on and snaked them off in the direction of the small river that ran off beyond the plant.

  “Those must be the exhaust blowers, I guess,” he told Brown, pointing them out. “Though I don’t know what any of the rest of the stuff hooked on is.”

  “I know – I’ve been inside the plant Bob’s father had.” She lifted an inquiring eyebrow at him, went on as he nodded. “The pipes are for exhaust gases, all right, and those big square things are the motors and fans – they put in one at each five hundred feet or less of piping. The things they’re wrapping around the pipe must be the heaters to keep the gases hot. Are they going to try to suck all that out?”

  Doc didn’t know, though it was the only thing he could see. But he wondered how they’d get around the problem of moving in close enough to do any good. “I heard your husband order some thermodyne bombs, so they’ll probably try to gassify the magma; then they’re pumping it down the river.”

  As he spoke, there was a flurry of motion at one side, and his eyes swung over instantly, to see one of the cranes laboring with a long framework stuck from its front, holding up a section of pipe with a nozzle on the end. It tilted precariously, even though heavy bags were piled everywhere to add weight, but an inch at a time it lifted its load, and began forcing its way forward, carrying the nozzle out in front and rather high.

  Below the main exhaust pipe was another smaller one. As it drew near the outskirts of the danger zone, a small object ejaculated from the little pipe, hit the ground, and was a sudden blazing inferno of glaring blue-white light, far brighter than it seemed, judging by the effect on the eyes. Doc shielded his, just as someone below put something into his hands.

  “Put ’em on. Palmer says the light’s actinic.”

  He heard Brown fussing beside him, then his vision cleared, and he looked back through the goggles again to see a glowing cloud spring up from the magma, spread out near the ground, narrowing down higher up, until it sucked into the nozzle above, and disappeared. Another bomb slid from the tube, and erupted with blazing heat. A sideways glance showed another crane being fitted, and a group of men near it wrapping what might have been oiled rags around the small bombs; probably no tubing fitted them exactly, and they were padding them so pressure could blow them forward and out. Three more dropped from the tube, one at a time, and the fans roared and groaned, pulling the cloud that rose into the pipe and feeding it down toward the river.

  Then the crane inched back out carefully as men uncoupled its piping from the main line, and a second went in to replace it. The heat generated must be too great for the machine to stand steadily without the pipe fusing, Doc decided; though they couldn’t have kept a man inside the heavily armoured cab for any length of time, if the metal had been impervious. Now another crane was ready, and went in from another place; it settled down to a routine of ingoing and outcoming cranes, and men feeding materials in, coupling and uncoupling the pipes and replacing the others who came from the cabs. Doc began to feel like a man at a tennis match, watching the ball without knowing the rules.

  Brown must have had the same idea, for she caught Ferrel’s arm and indicated a little leather case that came from her handbag. “Doc, do you play chess? We might as well fill our time with that as sitting here on edge, just watching. It’s supposed to be good for nerves.”

  He seized on it gratefully, without explaining that he’d been city champion three years running; he’d take it easy, watch her game, handicap himself just enough to make it interesting by the deliberate loss of a rook, bishop or knight, as was needed to even the odds—Suppose they got all the magma out and into the river; how did that solve the problem? It removed it from the plant, but far less than the fifty-mile minimum danger limit.

  “Check,” Brown announced. He castled, and looked up at the half-dozen cranes that were now operating. “Check! Checkmate!”

  He looked back again hastily, then, to see her queen guarding all possible moves, a bishop checking him. Then his eye followed down toward her end. “Umm. Did you know you’ve been in check for the last half-dozen moves? Because I didn’t.”

  She frowned, shook her head, and began setting the men up again. Doc moved out the queen’s pawn, looked out at the worker
’s, and then brought out the king’s bishop, to see her take it with her king’s pawn. He hadn’t watched her move it out, and had counted on her queen’s to block his. Things would require more careful watching on this little portable set. The men were moving steadily and there was a growing clear space, but as they went forward, the violent action of the thermodyne had pitted the ground, carefully as it had been used, and going became more uncertain. Time was slipping by rapidly now.

  “Checkmate!” He found himself in a hole, started to nod; but she caught herself this time. “Sorry, I’ve been playing my king for a queen. Doctor, let’s see if we can play at least one game right.”

  Before it was half finished, it became obvious that they couldn’t. Neither had chess very much on the mind, and the pawns and men did fearful and wonderful things, while the knights were as likely to jump six squares as their normal L. They gave it up, just as one of the cranes lost its precarious balance and toppled forward, dropping the long extended pipe into the bubbling mass below. Tanks were in instantly, hitching on and tugging backward until it came down with a thump as the pipe fused, releasing the extreme forward load. It backed out on its own power, while another went in. The driver, by sheer good luck, hobbled from the cab, waving an armored hand to indicate he was all right. Things settled back to an excited routine again that seemed to go on endlessly, though seconds were dropping off too rapidly, turning into minutes that threatened to be hours far too soon.

  “Uh!” Brown had been staring for some time, but her little feet suddenly came down with a bang and she straightened up, her hand to her mouth. “Doctor, I just thought; it won’t do any good – all this!”

  “Why?” She couldn’t know anything, but he felt the faint hopes he had go downward sharply. His nerves were dulled, but still ready to jump at the slightest warning.