The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Lester Del Rey

  It all rested on Jorgenson, then. And Jorgenson must be somewhere under that semimolten hell that could drive through the tank armor and send men back into the Infirmary with bones broken from their own muscular anarchy!

  Ferrel’s face must have shown his thoughts, judging by Jenkins’ startled expression. “Jorgenson’s still in there somewhere,” he said quickly.

  “Jorgenson! But he’s the man who—Good Lord!”

  “Exactly. You’ll stay here and take care of the jerk cases that may come in. Brown, I’ll want you out there again. Bring everything portable we have, in case we can’t move him in fast enough; get one of the trucks and fit it out; and be out with it about twice as fast as you can! I’m grabbing the litter now.” He accepted the emergency kit Brown thrust into his hands, dumped a caffeine tablet into his mouth without bothering to wash it down, then was out toward the litter. “No. 4, and hurry!”

  Palmer was just jumping off a scooter as they cut around No. 3 and in front of the rough fence of rope strung out quite a distance beyond 4. He glanced at Doc, nodded, and dived in through the men grouped around, yelling orders to right and left as he went, and was back at Ferrel’s side by the time the litter had stopped.

  “O.K., Ferrel, go over there and get into armor as quickly as possible. We’re going in there with the tanks, whether we can or not, and be damned to the quenching for the moment. Briggs, get those things out there, clean out a roadway as best you can, throw in the big crane again, and we’ll need all the men in armor we can get—give them steel rods and get them to probing in there for anything solid and big or small enough to be a man—five minutes at a stretch; they should be to stand that. I’ll be back pronto!”

  Doc noted the confused mixture of tanks and machines of all descriptions clustered around the walls—or what was left of them—of the converter housing, and saw them yanking out everything along one side leaving an opening where the main housing gate had stood, now ripped out to expose a crane boom rooting out the worst obstructions, Obviously they’d been busy at some kind of attempt at quenching the action, but his knowledge of atomics was too little even to guess at what it was. The equipment set up was being pushed aside by tanks without dismantling, and men were running up into the roped-in section, some already armored, others dragging on part of their armor as they went. With the help of one of the atomjacks, he climbed into a suit himself, wondering what he could do in such a casing if anything needed doing.

  Palmer had a suit on before him, though, and was waiting beside one of the tanks, squat and heavily armored, its front equipped with both a shovel and a grapple swinging from movable beams. “In here, Doc.” Ferrel followed him into the housing of the machine and Palmer grabbed the controls as he pulled on a short-wave headset and began shouting orders through it toward the other tanks that were moving in on their heavy treads. The dull drone of the motor picked up, and the tank began lumbering forward under the manager’s direction.

  “Haven’t run one of these since that show-off at a picnic seven years ago,” he complained, as he kicked at the controls and straightened out a developing list to left. “Though I used to be pretty handy when I was plain engineer. Damned static around here almost chokes off the radio, but I guess enough gets through. By the best guess I can make, Jorgenson should have been near the main control panel when it started, and have headed for the south chamber. Half the distance, you figure?”

  “Possibly, probably slightly less.”

  “Yeah! And then the stuff may have tossed him around. But we’ll have to try to get there.” He barked into the radio again. “Briggs, get those men in suits as close as you can and have them fish with their rods about thirty feet to the left of the pillar that’s still up—can they get closer?”

  The answer was blurred and pieces missing, but the general idea went across. Palmer frowned. “O.K., if they can’t make it, they can’t; draw them back out of the reach of the stuff and hold them ready to go in…No, call for volunteers! I’m offering a thousand dollars a minute to every man that gets a stick in there, double to his family if the stuff gets him, and ten times that—fifty thousand—if he locates Jorgenson!… Look out, you blamed fool!” The last was to one of the men who’d started forward, toward the place, jumping from one piece of broken building to grab at a pillar and swing off in his suit toward something that looked like a standing position; it toppled, but he managed a leap that carried him to another lump, steadied himself, and began probing through the mess. “Oof! You with the crane—stick it in where you can grab any of the men that pass out, if it’ll reach—good! Doc, I know as well as you that the men have no business in there, even five minutes; but I’ll send in a hundred more if it’ll find Jorgenson!”

  * * * *

  Doc said nothing—he knew there’d probably be a hundred or more fools willing to try, and he knew the need of them. The tanks couldn’t work their way close enough for any careful investigation of the mixed mass of radioactives, machinery, building debris, and destruction, aside from which they were much too slow in such delicate probing; only men equipped with the long steel poles could do that. As he watched, some of the activity of the magma suddenly caused an eruption, and one of the men tossed up his pole and doubled back into a half circle before falling. The crane operator shoved the big boom over and made a grab, missed, brought it down again, and came out with the heaving body held by one arm, to run it back along its track and twist it outward beyond Doc’s vision.

  Even through the tank and the suit, heat was pouring in, and there was a faint itching in those parts where the armor was thinnest that indicated the start of a burn—though not as yet dangerous. He had no desire to think what was happening to the men who were trying to worm into the heart of it in nothing but armor; nor did he care to watch what was happening to them. Palmer was trying to inch the machine ahead, but the stuff underneath made any progress difficult. Twice something spat against the tank, but did not penetrate.

  “Five minutes are up,” he told Palmer. “They’d all better go directly to Dr. Brown, who should be out with the truck now for immediate treatment.”

  Palmer nodded and relayed the instructions. “Pick up all you can with the crane and carry them back! Send in a new bunch, Briggs, and credit them with their bonus in advance. Damn it, Doc, this can go on all day; it’ll take an hour to pry around through this mess right here, and then he’s probably somewhere else. The stuff seems to be getting worse in this neighborhood, too, from what accounts I’ve had before. Wonder if that steel plate could be pushed down?”

  He threw in the clutch engaging the motor to the treads and managed to twist through toward it. There was a slight slipping of the lugs, then the tractors caught, and the nose of the tank thrust forward; almost without effort, the fragment of housing toppled from its leaning position and slid forward. The tank growled, fumbled, and slowly climbed up onto it and ran forward another twenty feet to its end; the support settled slowly, but something underneath checked it, and they were still again. Palmer worked the grapple forward, nosing a big piece of masonry out of the way, and two men reached out with the ends of their poles to begin probing, futilely. Another change of men came out, then another.

  Briggs’ voice crackled erratically through the speaker again, “Palmer, I got a fool here who wants to go out on the end of your beam, if you can swing around so the crane can lift him out to it.”

  “Start him coming!” Again he began jerking the levers, and the tank bucked and heaved, backed and turned, ran forward, and repeated it all, while the plate that was holding them flopped up and down on its precarious balance.

  Doc held his breath and began praying to himself; his admiration for the men who’d go out in that stuff was increasing by leaps and bounds, along with his respect for Palmer’s ability.

  The crane boom bobbed toward them, and the scoop came running out, but wouldn’t quite reach; their own tank was relatively light and mo
bile compared to the bigger machine, but Palmer already had that pushed out to the limit, and hanging over the edge of the plate. It still lacked three feet of reaching.

  “Damn!” Palmer slapped open the door of the tank, jumped forward on the tread, and looked down briefly before coming back inside. “No chance to get closer! Wheeoo! Those men earn their money.”

  But the crane operator had his own tricks, and was bobbing the boom of his machine up and down slowly with a motion that set the scoop swinging like a huge pendulum, bringing it gradually closer to the grapple beam. The man had an arm out, and finally caught the beam, swinging out instantly from the scoop that drew backward behind him. He hung suspended for a second, pitching his body around to a better position, then somehow wiggled up onto the end and braced himself with his legs. Doc let his breath out and Palmer inched the tank around to a forward position again. Now the pole of the atomjack could cover the wide territory before them, and he began using it rapidly.

  “Win or lose, that man gets a triple bonus,” Palmer muttered. “Uh!”

  * * * *

  The pole had located something, and was feeling around to determine size; the man glanced at them and pointed frantically. Doc jumped forward to the windows as Palmer ran down the grapple and began pushing it down into the semi-molten stuff under the pole; there was resistance there, but finally the prong of the grapple broke under and struck on something that refused to come up. The manager’s hands moved the controls gently, making it tug from side to side; reluctantly, it gave and moved forward toward them, coming upward until they could make out the general shape. It was definitely no Tomlin suit!

  “Lead hopper box! Damn—Wait, Jorgenson wasn’t anybody’s fool; when he saw he couldn’t make the safety, he might…maybe—Palmer slapped the grapple down again, against the closed lid of the chest, but the hook was too large. Then the man clinging there caught the idea and slid down to the hopper chest, his armored hands grabbing at the lid. He managed to lift a corner of it until the grapple could catch and lift it the rest of the way, and his hands started down to jerk upward again.

  The manager watched his motions, then flipped the box over with the grapple, and pulled it closer to the tank body; magma was running out, but there was a gleam of something else inside.

  “Start praying, Doc!” Palmer worked it to the side of the tank and was out through the door again, letting the merciless heat and radiation stream in.

  But Ferrel wasn’t bothering with that now; he followed, reaching down into the chest to help the other two lift out the body of a huge man in a Five-shield Tomlin! Somehow, they wangled the six-hundred-odd pounds out and up on the treads, then into the housing, barely big enough for all of them. The atomjack pulled himself inside, shut the door, and flopped forward on his face, out cold.

  “Never mind him—check Jorgenson!” Palmer’s voice was heavy with the reaction from the hunt, but he turned the tank and sent it outward at top speed, regardless of risk. Contrarily, it bucked through the mass more readily than it had crawled in through the cleared section.

  Ferrel unscrewed the front plate of the armor on Jorgenson as rapidly as he could, though he knew already that the man was still miraculously alive—corpses don’t jerk with force enough to move a four-hundred-pound suit appreciably. A side glance, as they drew beyond the wreck of the converter housing, showed the men already beginning to set up equipment to quell the atomic reaction again, but the armor front plate came loose at last, and he dropped his eyes back without in details, to cut out a section of clothing and make the needed injections; curare first, then neo-heroin, and curare again, though he did not dare inject the quantity that seemed necessary. There was nothing more he could do until they could get the man out of his armor. He turned to the atomjack, who was already sitting up, propped against the driving seat’s back.

  “ ’Snothing much, Doc,” the fellow managed. “No jerks, just burn and that damned heat! Jorgenson?”

  “Alive at least,” Palmer answered, with some relief. The tank stopped, and Ferrel could see Brown running forward from beside a truck. “Get that suit off you, get yourself treated for the burn, then go up to the office where the check will be ready for you!”

  “Fifty-thousand check?” The doubt in the voice registered over the weakness.

  “Fifty thousand plus triple your minute time, and cheap; maybe we’ll toss in a medal or a bottle of Scotch, too. Here, you fellows give a hand.”

  Farrel had the suit ripped off with Brown’s assistance, and paused only long enough for one grateful breath of clean, cool air before leading the way toward the truck. As he neared it, Jenkins popped out, directing a group of men to move two loaded stretchers onto the litter, and nodding jerkily at Ferrel. “With the truck all equipped, we decided to move out here and take care of the damage as it came up—Sue and I rushed them through enough to do until we can find more time, so we could give full attention to Jorgenson. He’s still living!”

  “By a miracle. Stay out here, Brown, until you’ve finished with the men from inside, then we’ll try to find some rest for you.”

  The three huskies carrying Jorgenson placed the body on the table set up, and began ripping off the bulky armor as the truck got under way. Fresh gloves came out of a small sterilizer, and the two doctors fell to work at once, treating the badly burned flesh and trying to locate and remove the worst of the radioactive matter.

  “No use.” Doc stepped back and shook his head. “It’s all over him, probably clear into his bones in places. We’d have to put him through a filter to get it all out!”

  Palmer was looking down at the raw mass of flesh, with all the layman’s sickness at such a sight. “Can you fix him up, Ferrel?”

  “We can try, that’s all. Only explanation I can give for his being alive at all is that the hopper box must have been pretty well above the stuff until a short time ago—very short—and this stuff didn’t work in until it sank. He’s practically dehydrated now, apparently, but he couldn’t have perspired enough to keep from dying of heat if he’d been under all that for even an hour—insulation or no insulation.” There was admiration in Doc’s eyes as he looked down at the immense figure of the man. “And he’s tough; if he weren’t, he’d have killed himself by exhaustion, even confined inside that suit and box, after the jerks set in. He’s close to having done so, anyway. Until we can find some way of getting that stuff out of him, we don’t dare risk getting rid of the curare’s effect—that’s a time-consuming job, in itself. Better give him another water and sugar intravenous, Jenkins. Then, if we do fix him up, Palmer, I’d say it’s a fifty-fifty chance whether or not all this hasn’t driven him stark crazy.”

  The truck had stopped, and the men lifted the stretcher off and carried it inside as Jenkins finished the injection. He went ahead of them, but Doc stopped outside to take Palmer’s cigarette for a long drag, and let them go ahead.

  “Cheerful!” The manager lighted another from the butt, his shoulders sagging. “I’ve been trying to think of one man who might possibly be of some help to us, Doc, and there isn’t such a person—anywhere. I’m sure now, after being in there, that Hoke couldn’t do it. Kellar, if he were still alive, could probably pull the answer out of a hat after three looks—he had an instinct and genius for it; the best man the business ever had, even if his tricks did threaten to steal our work out from under us and give him the lead. But—well, now there’s Jorgenson—either he gets in shape, or else!”

  Jenkins’ frantic yell reached them suddenly. “Doc! Jorgenson’s dead! He’s stopped breathing entirely!”

  Doc jerked forward into a full run, a white-faced Palmer at his heels.

  IV

  Dodd was working artificial respiration and Jenkins had the oxygen mask in his hands, adjusting it over Jorgenson’s face, before Ferrel reached the table. He made a grab for the pulse that had been fluttering weakly enough before, felt it flicker feebly on
ce, pause for about three times normal period, lift feebly again, and then stop completely. “Adrenalin!”

  “Already shot it into his heart, Doc! Cardiacine, too!” The boy’s voice was bordering on hysteria, but Palmer was obviously closer to it than Jenkins.

  “Doc, you gotta—”

  “Get the hell out of here!” Ferrel’s hands suddenly had a life of their own as he grabbed frantically for instruments, ripped bandages off the man’s chest, and began working against time, when time had all the advantages. It wasn’t surgery—hardly good butchery; the bones that he cut through so ruthlessly with savage strokes of an instrument could never heal smoothly after being so mangled. But he couldn’t worry about minor details now.

  He tossed back the flap of flesh and ribs that he’d hacked out. “Stop the bleeding, Jenkins!” Then his hands plunged into the chest cavity, somehow finding room around Dodd’s and Jenkins’, and were suddenly incredible gentle as they located the heart itself and began working on it, the skilled, exact massage of a man who knew every function of the vital organ. Pressure here, there, relax, pressure again; take it easy, don’t rush things! It would do no good to try to set it going as feverishly as his emotions demanded. Pure oxygen was feeding into the lungs, and the heart could safely do less work. Hold it steady, one beat a second, sixty a minute.

  It had been perhaps half a minute from the time the heart stopped before his massage was circulating blood again; too little time to worry about damage to the brain, the first part to be permanently affected by stoppage of the circulation. Now, if the heart could start again by itself within any reasonable time, death would be cheated again. How long? He had no idea. They’d taught him ten minutes when he was studying medicine, then there’d been a case of twenty minutes once, and while he was interning it had been pushed up to a record of slightly over an hour, which still stood; but that was an exceptional case. Jorgenson, praise be, was a normally healthy and vigorous specimen, and his system had been in first-class condition, but with the torture of those long hours, the radioactive, narcotic and curare all fighting against him, still one more miracle was needed to keep his life going.