"Except that the turtle won't be able to do anything about its memories," the girl continued as if she had not heard him. "It will have flippers and a beak but what it will need will be hands. It won't have them until it grows them itself. A turtle with the memories that it was once a man, knowing that if it had hands, it could rebuild human culture!" A bemused expression appeared on her face. "I wonder how the race mind will solve that problem." Again she seemed to muse. "It would be worse to be crabs. Or would it?"
"Shut up!" Zen snarled. "We're not turtles yet. Or crabs. And we're not back on the mud flats."
"But we're on the edge of them," the girl insisted. "One more teeter and we will go totter."
Zen turned to West. "What the hell has happened to Nedra?"
"Nothing," the craggy man answered. "She has some degree of clairvoyance and it is coming to consciousness. Unfortunately, she has not yet had time to develop her talents in that direction."
"Maybe the turtle wouldn't want to rebuild human culture," the girl interrupted. "Maybe it wouldn't want to go back down that blind alley again. Perhaps it would decide to go into another channel, to develop into something totally different. In that case, it might not need hands."
Zen deliberately ignored her. He turned to West. "A bomb will be going off," he said.
"That is what I've been trying to talk to you about," the craggy man answered. "This is another reason why we came back for you—so we could talk to you about that bomb."
"To me?" Zen said startled.
"Yes, to you."
"Why?"
"Because you are a colonel of intelligence and have experience in such matters. Also because you are something that none of us are—a fighting man."
"I—I don't understand you," Zen answered.
"I can get you there. But once there, my knowledge fails. I, to my regret, know nothing of fighting." West spread his hands in a helpless gesture.
"Get me where?" Zen asked.
"To Asia. To the underground cavern where they are getting ready to launch that bomb," West explained. The tone of his voice said this was easy. The hard part came in knowing what to do, and being able to do it, after they were there.
"To Asia?" Zen parroted the words. He had the dazed impression that this whole scene was unreal, that the snoring Asians on the floor, Cal huddled by the wall, and the new people crowding into the room, would shortly all vanish in puffs of green smoke. "How in the hell will you get us to Asia?"
"How did we get out of this gallery?" West responded. "How did we vanish? How did the men in the reports you read get into the planes that were about to crash? Who landed Colonel Grant's space satellite? Who steered it? Who provided the power to energize the motion? Who—"
"Did you know I knew about Grant?"
"It was obvious that you must know."
"And you can get me to Asia?"
"You and as many others as you choose to take with you!"
Walking over to the sleeping lieutenant, he picked up the man's rifle, then turned to the group.
"Who will go with me to Asia?" he asked.
The group stepped forward as one man.
A knot formed in Kurt Zen's throat at the sight and he gulped to force it down. He knew how much this decision meant to them. They had been trained in the ways of peace, they were searching for the road to the future. Fighting meant turning backward on the path that led to growth, it was the last thing they wanted to do. Yet do it they would, if it was necessary. In an instant they were scrambling for weapons from the sleeping Asians, then they were trying to salute and tell him their names and say they would follow him at the same time.
One man saluted well. "Red-Dog Jimmie Thurman," he said. Pride was in the man's voice.
Zen caught the man's arm. "Red-Dog Jimmie Thurman? But I know you."
"Maybe you do, suh." Thurman spoke with the soft drawl of the old south.
"One of the new people appeared in your plane and saved your life!" Zen burst out.
"Yes, suh. That's right, suh."
"But you deserted!"
"Put it another way, suh, let's say I joined the right side."
"How did you find this place?"
"I just kept thinking and kept trying. Eventually we found each other. The psychos tried to make me believe I was nuts. But I knew better. I knew what had happened. And I knew there had to be a reason for it. I kept hunting until I found that reason. The big part of the battle, where I had an advantage over most everybody else, was that I knew from experience that something was going on. Knowing this much, all I had to do was keep looking." The man's voice drawled the explanation. His eyes smiled. "At your service, suh."
"Do you know that going with me may mean death?"
"What's death, suh?" Red-Dog Jimmie Thurman grinned. "I died over the North Pole, suh."
"Spike Larson," another man said.
"You were in a sub," Zen challenged. A glow was coming up inside of him like nothing he had ever experienced before. He was getting fighting men to stand beside him.
"Yes," Larson answered. "And I will consider it a privilege to stand beside you."
Like soldiers, they passed in review before him, the fat boy, the tall, lean, brown-skinned youths. Somehow he thought there ought to be another one. He looked around for him. Grant was talking to West.
Grant was the man whose face had looked out of thin air in the middle of the room.
Seeing that Zen was staring at him, he left off his talk with the craggy man and came over and saluted.
"How was it up in that satellite?" Zen asked.
"Lonely, as hell, colonel," Grant answered.
"Do you want to go with me to Asia?"
"There's no place on Earth I'd rather go. And, the way things stand now I don't have much choice. If they get that bomb into the air—" He left the sentence unfinished.
Then Nedra was standing in front of Zen. At the sight of her, it seemed to him that the world stood still. He shook his head.
"Why?" she challenged.
"Because I love you," he answered.
"Then that is the real reason why you should take me with you," she answered.
"I don't follow," he said.
"If you fail, there will be no tomorrow," she answered. To her, the statement had no answer. "Besides, I am a nurse," she continued. "If there are wounded, I can help with them."
"But—"
"The fact that you love me does not enter into this situation. It is a thing apart. It is a very wonderful thing," she added hastily, the star light shining in her eyes. "And I wish we could bring it to fruit the ways it used to be. But those days are gone. And I am going to Asia with you."
Watching, West smiled. Zen spread his hands in a gesture of defeat. He turned to the craggy man. "This sleep thing: I don't know how you do it and don't much care, but you obviously have a portable generator of some kind that you used to put the lieutenant out in the ghost town."
"Yes," West agreed.
"I'd like to borrow the unit," Zen said.
"Gladly, colonel. I wish we had other weapons."
"We'll make do with what we have," Zen answered.
XIV
"Zero minus one hour," the loudspeaker droned, in a Chinese dialect.
In a deep cavern in the hinterlands of Asia, men responded to the command coming over the speaker system. Already driven to the point of exhaustion, they were working harder than they had ever worked before. The moment of victory, for which all true Asians had lived, was near at hand. The launching of this bomb would make the Asian Union master of the world. Orders had come through to launch this bomb immediately.
"Zero minus forty-five minutes," the speaker said. The drone had gone from the voice of the officer watching the time. A rising excitement appeared in the tones as if he, too, had caught the scent of fear rising in the vast underground depot.
So much was left to be done. The atomic warhead was already in place, waiting for the day of launching, otherwise the task would
have been impossible. The driving engines were complete, but had to be fueled. The steering equipment was almost ready, only the installation of the left gyroscope was necessary. This was at hand waiting to be installed. Five technicians constantly got in each other's way as they tried to slip the delicate instrument into place.
"Zero minus thirty minutes!"
The gyroscope was eased into place and tested. It was found to be in perfect working order.
In the course plotting room, the final calculations were being made. Wind direction and velocity aloft had been noted across half the planet. This had some importance on the launching and landing end but had no significance when the bomb itself was out of the atmosphere.
The target had been figured and refigured. Actually, the target was anywhere on the continent of North America. If this bomb struck anywhere in the Mississippi valley, the whole watershed below the striking point would be scoured clean of all life. Water carrying radiation downstream would account for that.
"Zero minus fifteen minutes!"
On the outside of the mountain, in a special observatory constructed for this precise purpose, radar scopes for tracking the rocket were ready. Instruments in the laboratory there were for the purpose of changing the course of the super bomb, if it veered too far from its destination. The technicians there were on their toes. They had no guards to encourage them but they needed none. They knew what would happen if this bomb failed to land and the fault was traced to their door.
What would happen when the bomb landed?
Hell would happen!
Probably the crust of the Earth would open up in a hole miles in depth. Meteor Crater, in Arizona, would be the work of a child compared to the result of this explosion. What had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be nothing in comparison.
The possibility existed that the molten magma of the core of the planet would gush forth. No one knew for sure whether or not this would happen. If it did take place, the result might be the sudden appearance of a lake of over-flowing lava.
The shock waves from the bomb would probably be strong enough to pull down every skyscraper that still remained standing in America.
The effect on the watershed where the bomb landed would be almost complete catastrophe. If it struck on any of the rivers or streams flowing into the Mississippi, the water supply of all cities downstream to New Orleans would be contaminated.
Nobody knew what the effect of the fall-out from this bomb would be. High air currents might carry radioactive particles for thousands of miles from the explosion point, where they would fall as a gentle but very deadly rain upon the Earth below.
"Zero minus ten minutes!"
The high, thin note of a violin appeared in the vast underground cavern. Amid the scurrying of feet, the shouts of the foremen bossing the work gangs, and the occasional cracking of the rifles of the guard, the sound was unheard by the ears. But deeper centers heard it.
The first man to go was a fat engineer. Sighing, he stumbled and fell. When he did not rise a guard approached him. As the guard determined that the man was snoring, he lifted his rifle.
The engineer died without awakening.
Another shot rang out as another man went to sleep, then continued on to join his fathers.
The technician busy filling the fuel tanks of the rocket was the third man to go. He managed to finish closing the filler cap and to lay down his flexible line before the urge to sleep overcame him.
By this time the guards knew that something was wrong.
Silence came over the cavern. In the stillness, the note of the violin flickering up and down the scale could be heard. Men looked at each other in growing apprehension. Looking, some of them lay down and went to sleep.
"Sleep gas!" an officer bawled. "Shoot all foreigners on sight!"
The officer suspected that some spy had slipped into the underground cavern and had released gas there. His command was intended to enable his men to find and eliminate this alien. As such, from a military standpoint, it was a good command. It had this deficiency: when his men did not find any aliens, but their own people continued going to sleep on them, they began imagining foreigners. The guards began to shoot their own technicians and engineers.
As panic swept through the cavern, guards began to shoot other guards. Soon the people in this huge underground chamber were tearing and destroying each other. And one other thing: they were also going to sleep.
The panic grew to hurricane proportions.
When Kurt Zen appeared inside the cavern the whole vast place was as still as a tomb. Smoke from the rifles hung in the air, the cavern stank of death and fear. But the bomb still rested in its launching cradle.
Zen took one long look at that bomb. He felt his sigh of relief clear down to the ends of his toes. At the sight, the last remnant of pain vanished from his toes and fingers. Not that the damage done by the matches did not still exist. It did. But in the surge of elation that swept through him, he completely forgot the pain.
"We just got here in time," a man said, appearing beside him. It was Spike Larson who had spoken. Awe on his face, Larson glanced around the cavern. "They started killing each other. They must have gone nuts."
"I don't blame them," Zen said. "I damned near did, on the way here."
"That trip through nothing is sure a stinker, isn't it," Larson answered, grinning and shaking his head.
Zen agreed with him whole-heartedly. After tuning his body to an instrument in the cavern, hidden so well that Cuso's men had not had time to find it, West had punched a button. The machine had vanished. West had vanished. A horrible moment had come when it had seemed that his feet were standing on nothing more substantial than air. What he had felt under his feet had, in fact, been far less substantial than air, which had body. It had been even less solid than space. It had been nothing.
Swishing, colonel Grant came into existence on the other side of Zen. Grant looked fussed, but he gripped the rifle he had taken from one of Cuso's men with determination.
"Just between you and me, I'd rather fly a space satellite to Mars any day in preference to facing this jump."
"I know what you mean," Zen said.
As he spoke, another figure came into existence to his left. Nedra! She came spinning into reality with a smile on her face. Zen wasted a moment wondering what kind of cast-iron nerves this girl had.
"It looks as if all we have to do is to tie them up," Spike Larson said. "This is almost too good to be true."
"It is too good to be true," Zen said. Turmoil was—somewhere. He did not know where but it seemed to him that a vast uneasiness had suddenly come into existence. It had to do, somehow, with the future, with a something that was about to happen.
"Halt!" Grant's voice rang out.
Zen swung his gaze around just in time to see an Asian lift himself to his feet near a control board that stood beside the rocket.
"He's walking in his sleep," Larson exclaimed.
"Zero minus one minute," the loudspeaker announced.
"Where in the hell is that man on the speaker?" Grant demanded. "The sleep frequency didn't get to him!"
"No time to be concerned about him now," Zen said. The turmoil that existed somewhere had increased in intensity. Somehow it was concerned with the solitary Asian who was reeling in circles like a drunken man trying to make up his mind.
"Shall I shoot him, colonel?" Grant demanded.
Zen hesitated. He knew that West's deepest wish was to avoid violence if that was possible.
The split second's delay was fatal. Grant's shot rang out—much too late.
Reeling on his feet, the man reached the control panel, and pulled the single switch there. A heavy thud came from the rocket as a ram drove home inside the heavy metal hull.
"Get back!" Zen screamed.
He caught Nedra and pulled her backward. Beside him, he knew that Grant and Larson were also reeling backward. Inside the rocket a steady rumble of sound was building up. Low in frequen
cy but heavy in volume it seemed to shake the foundations of the Earth itself. Inside the vessel heavy heat charges were building up. Smoke and flame spurted backward as the first warming charge let go.
For all Zen knew this section was to have been cleared before the firing of the first rocket. He did not know whether provision had been made for the elimination of flame and smoke but he knew that heat and smoke hit him as he pulled Nedra away.
Then the main charges let go.
Rising like some devil spurting upward from the depths of hell itself, the launching cradle carrying the rocket lurched upward. The stone floor shook underfoot, the mountain shook. Unless this rocket could be stopped, the whole planet would shake. Earth would twitch her skin like an elephant stung by a giant wasp.
With a thundering roar the rocket shook itself loose from its cradle and hurled into the sky under its own power.
"West," Zen shouted.
"Yes, Kurt." The craggy man's reply was as prompt as it would have been if he had stayed in the same room. Actually he was in the American center.
"We've lost," Zen said.
"I know," West replied. A sadness as deep as the ocean of space was in his voice.
"Pull these people back to you."
"Of course."
"Me last." The last lingering roars of sound were still pounding down the bore of the launching cradle.
"Why do you want to be last?"
"Duty," Zen said. "Get that miracle device of yours into operation, pronto."
"Sure. I'm starting now."
"Hey, guys, you're going home!" Zen yelled at the people with him.
"What good is it to go home?" Spike Larson asked.
"There won't be any home within an hour," Grant added. "Or however long that rocket will take to land. Why go back to what isn't there?"
"That's where we will start the task of rebuilding," Zen said.
"Rebuild what with what?" Larson demanded.
"There will be something left," Zen said firmly. "You are already underground. You will stay that way. Keep the good fight going, for years. Raise some kids to keep it going after you are gone." He felt very firm and sure about what he was saying.
"You're full of hot air," Red-Dog Jimmie Thurman said.
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