The COMPLEAT Collected Short SFF Stories

by Sterling E. Lanier

  Why in hell, for the fiftieth time thought Hardwick as he drove, take a top man who is working a fifteen-hour day away from his job at the Pentagon and shove him out in the boondocks? Security Chief of Project Inside Straight, whatever that was! Super Q Clearance! No written orders! Unscheduled personal interview for assignment with the Secretary of Defense! Interview consisting of route information to Point Nowhere in Southern New Jersey, period. End of interview. Get on your civvies and go, man. He had gone.

  The pine shadows were now darkening the narrow country road ahead. Hardwick spared a glance at his watch. Six-thirty. He braked as the road straggled lazily into a small clearing and a meaningless crossroads. A small wooden shack in front of which leaned a rusting gas pump, grayish hose in tatters, stood at one side of the road. Three broken windows leered over a sagging porch railing.

  As Hardwick looked around, his eye caught a flicker of movement and a glint of metal at the left window, gone as soon as registered. His hands tightened on the Chevy's wheel, but his gaze swept calmly on. Mentally, he considered the memorized travel plan and came to a decision.

  THE SMALL black car, an inconspicuous, two-year-old electro-compact, took the road opening to the left, away from the shack, and Hardwick drove on, his mind racing. His whole life from combat in Asia to the present had alerted him to be wary of observation, and for the last ten miles he was aware that he had been steadily watched. The few farm houses, the dark scrubby pines and green thickets, the empty roadside stands, the occasional battered trucks—all, he knew, had contained sleepless eyes. Whatever Project Inside Straight was, someone wanted the word sealed in.

  Again he recalled the precise tone of Secretary of Defense Madden when outlining his route. Hardwick's hands again tightened on the wheel. Now, he felt a certainty that any deviation from the route he had been ordered to follow would meet with unpleasant results, results he would have no time to question!

  The road at this point ceased to be even second-class and was no longer tar but plain dirt and sand. What kind of installation could this be? Hardwick cursed softly as he switched on the car's lights. He had seen no signs on the road of any vehicular traffic at all, and the road itself was in appalling shape. How did supplies and personnel get in or out? He steered around a large pothole, his right fender scraping into a tangle of blueberry bushes as he did so. It was suddenly almost full dark outside, and the last katydids of the season had started a chirping audible even over the crunch of sand under the wheels and the faint hum of the battery-driven engine.

  SUDDENLY, the road ceased. Before him, as he braked sharply, the lights shone on black, oily water. The road had ended at a tiny, forgotten landing on a broad creek winding through the Barrens. A rickety dock stood forlornly at road's end, thrusting out ten feet into the stream, but that was all.

  Hardwick switched off the engine and sat for exactly five seconds in the utter silence that followed, keeping time by staring at the sweep hand on his wristwatch, glowing in the darkness of the front seat. At the fifth second he opened the window wide and began to whistle a tune. It was Melancholy Baby. After precisely fifteen seconds, he stopped whistling and sat very still. Not a sound broke the silence outside, save the faint eddying noise of the water lapping around the piers of the little dock.

  Then an eyebeam from a pencil flash hit him square in the face. Although he had heard no whisper of movement, he saw that someone was now standing next to his window.

  "General Hardwick?" came a pleasant soft voice.

  Feeling slightly ridiculous, he answered, "Aces over Eights."

  "The Dead Man's Hand," said the voice approvingly. With that, a spray with an unfamiliar, sweet, pungent odor lanced in the window and settled over Hardwick's face in a cloud. He barely had time to wonder what was going on when the powerful anaesthetic knocked him out for the count. The trip was over as far as any volition on his part was concerned.

  Chapter Three

  HE AWOKE suddenly and sat up in bed, memory returning with a rush. He saw that he was wearing comfortable pajamas. Looking around the small room, he noted first a uniform of his own rank with all of his correct decorations hanging on a hanger from a wall hook. Under it on the floor lay shoes and socks, both O.D., and a single-starred cap straddled the hook.

  He realized that he felt fine and got out of bed and stretched, still eyeing his surroundings. The drably-painted room was windowless but the air seemed fresh. All around him he was conscious of the pulse of machines. Could this be a power plant of some kind? One of the two visible doors opened on inspection into a tiny shower-bathroom; the other, he guessed a hall door, was locked. What seemed to be all of his personal possessions lay neatly on top of a bureau near his uniform. Curious, he opened the bureau drawers and found a complete supply of O.D. underwear, shirts, handkerchiefs and such, all in his size. He seemed to be booked in for quite a stay.

  At this point a bell pealed gently high on one wall, and a voice came from a hidden speaker apparently concealed in the central light fixture on the ceiling.

  "Please shave and dress, General. You will have visitors in exactly fifteen minutes." There was a pause. "Repeat," said the voice, "Fifteen minutes." There was an audible click.

  He stood with his hands behind him exactly fifteen minutes later, full-uniformed, and saw the locked door open. Outwardly calm but extremely annoyed within, he watched two people come in and close the door.

  IN FRONT was a woman, which surprised him, although his face stayed expressionless. Women do not normally achieve high rank in maximum Security operations. She was about five-seven, with brown hair and eyes, quite good-looking without being a raging beauty. Her eyes were sharp and very intelligent. Hardwick guessed her age at about thirty-four and was surprised later on to find she was four years younger. She was wearing a well-cut brown suit and no jewelery.

  The gray-haired man who stood quietly in back of her also surprised him, but for different reasons, and his impatient anger stopped mounting right there and then.

  He had not seen Thomas B. Allen for over two years, but the mustached C.I.A. senior field agent, who somewhat resembled a caricature of Dr. Watson, was a man whom he respected anywhere or at any time. If Tom Allen was in this strange affair, he had better keep quiet and see what happened.

  The woman looked at him for a moment and then came forward, hand outstretched and a smile on her face.

  "General, you look like a man who needs an apology. I have nothing to apologize for and neither does Mr. Allen, but we apologize anyway. I'm Dr. Joanne Butler, the Technical Director of Inside Straight, and Mr. Allen, whom you already know, is the Security Director. Between us, we've been running things here. You're our new boss."

  Mechanically, Hardwick shook hands with the woman, then with Allen, while trying to grasp this last sentence. His face must have relaxed and revealed some emotion, because Dr. Butler laughed, a sound Hardwick absently noted as low and pleasant.

  "I'm not going to stay," she said. "Mr. Allen will fill you in, and later we can go further into the job. I'll simply say that all three of us are here at the direct—and in my case personal—request of the President. We're not playing around for the fun of it."

  "I never thought we were," said Hardwick, flushing slightly.

  "I know," she said. "But I wanted to make it plainer still. This is the biggest thing you've ever touched, General. Nothing and nobody must stand in its way. Too much has already been sacri ... has been done, by everyone, for this to fail. Do you understand me?"

  PUZZLED at the sudden break in her otherwise calm voice, Hardwick merely nodded. She had been about to say "sacrificed" and had changed her mind, of that he was certain.

  "Good," she said, her efficient manner apparently restored. "I'll see you later then when Tom brings you along. Bear with us until you know the whole story. You have an even tougher job than ours coming up."

  After the door closed behind her, the silent Allen seated himself in the room's one chair and pulled out a horrible-loo
king old pipe which he lit while surveying Hardwick from opaque gray eyes. He waved a hand at the bed, and Hardwick sat down on its edge while his mind went racing back into what he knew about Allen. Allen was the man who, as a young agent, had broken the Mossadegh government of Iran almost single-handed and then gone on from strength to strength, until nowadays he practically wrote his own orders. His brown suit and scuffed shoes, plus the gray, bristly mustache made him look like an out-of-tenure, absent-minded professor at some Eastern college, but Hardwick knew better. Very few people did. He therefore waited, with as much patience as he could muster.

  His pipe going, Allen finally leaned back and spoke.

  "You're looking well, General, but pale. The pressure getting pretty heavy back at the ranch?"

  "I don't imagine that you're cut off from news here, Mr. Allen," he answered. "The roof is falling in all over, in every way."

  "Call me Tom," said Allen, looking shrewdly at him through a cloud of blue smoke. "And I'll call you Al."

  "All right, Tom," said Hardwick. "We'll be pals, even chums, in no time. Now what in hell is this weird business all about?"

  "What do you remember reading or hearing about the Houston General Hospital disaster?" Allen asked suddenly, still watching him very carefully.

  Hardwick thought for a second. This was obviously not a time for idle questions.

  "Yes, I remember it fairly well. Some volatile poisonous gas or something got into the central air ducts, and the whole place went blooie in seconds when it was ignited. The place was deliberately set on fire to destroy any traces of what was there, as I recall. Lot of people killed by the gas first. So what? It just happened earlier this year, didn't it? I was in England at the time."

  "THAT WAS eight months ago," said Allen almost to himself. He sucked noisily on his pipe and exhaled a cloud of awful-smelling blue smoke before continuing. His voice had suddenly become precise and metallic.

  "Because of that disaster, you were sent here under highest security orders to familiarize yourself with and take command of the installation in which you now find yourself. You were trailed from Washington out into the country, watched every yard of the way and then knocked out and dumped into a helicopter, which probably transferred you to one or two others on route. The only thing I can tell you is that you are nowhere at all, probably not by a thousand miles, near to where you last thought you were. This installation is so secret that probably not more than ten people in the world know its exact location. That includes me. I came here the same way you did. I think it's in the continental limits of the U.S., guess it may be underground, but I'm not sure of that either. It could even be underwater. Still interested?"

  "Go on," said Hardwick, keeping his face impassive.

  "Okay. You are going to have to familiarize yourself in detail with this whole place. There are over a thousand personnel here, mostly men, all working as maintenance and security. They were all—except one—kidnapped and convinced later, as I was, that this was a job that had to be done. A whole lot of the place is simply nothing but machines and more machines. You can always hear them. Half the people here are technicians, the other half guards. Half the technicians are concealed guards and half the guards are reserve technicians, held in case of emergency. Any questions yet, or do I go on?"

  "Dr. Butler is the non-kidnappee, I suppose?" Hardwick asked thoughtfully.

  "Pretty smart. Yes, she's the one. A Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. She and the President, or maybe the Secretary of Defense, grabbed the others, I suppose. No, don't laugh. When you see what we're guarding and why and understand your part in it, maybe you'll believe anything. This place kind of gets to you."

  Hardwick thought that if a place could get to Thomas Allen, on whose head the Soviets had once put a no-questions-asked price of one hundred thousand dollars, it ought to be worth looking at.

  ALLEN regretfully knocked out his ash on a saucer from the night table and stuffed the pipe back in his pocket.

  "No smoking outside your room, the dining areas and lounges," he said.

  "I don't smoke," said Hardwick. "Do you really believe that this place could be underwater?"

  "Wait until you see it," said Allen glumly. "It might even be on the Moon. Let's go take a look."

  Hardwick glanced at his watch. It said eight o'clock. "Do I get any breakfast?" he asked.

  "You get anything you want, except Out," answered Allen. "You're the new boss, subject only to Dr. Butler and the Science staff in pure technology. I'll walk you over to the cafeteria and show you what there is to be seen on the way.

  "Oh, yes," he added, reaching into a pocket, "here's your new badge. Pin it on at all times outside this room. This is a very trigger-happy place."

  "What's everyone so afraid of?" asked Hardwick, pinning on the large blue-metal badge. It bore inset a recent picture of himself that he didn't remember seeing before, a lot of mysterious numbers and the words Director of Security.

  "Killing everyone in the country and maybe the world, I imagine," said Allen flatly and opened the door. "After you."

  They emerged into a narrow corridor, well lit by a continuous fluorescent panel in the ceiling. The sound of machinery was louder now, a continuous, muffled vibrato in the back-ground, not loud enough to interfere with speech, but rather like traffic noises heard from a lofty New York apartment

  Down the corridor they were following, Hardwick saw a figure standing. As they approached, a tall lounging man in blue coveralls with a badge on them marked Security straightened up and waved casually. He was a light-skinned Negro.

  "Jim, this is General Hardwick, our new boss. I'm showing him around. He goes anywhere, any time. Al, meet Jim Tableman. I don't know all the troops, but Jim was one of the first to arrive."

  "Glad to see you, General," said Tableman and shook hands. Hardwick noticed that the left hand stayed in his coverall pocket.

  "Got a gun?" he asked casually.

  Like lightning, a .357 magnum snub nose emerged from the pocket, then vanished again, all in one fluid motion.

  "Not bad for an M.A. in Biochemistry, is it?" said Allen pleasantly.

  "Does he just stand here all day or all watch?" asked Hardwick, turning to Allen. He was getting a bit irritated again by all the apparent mystery.

  "Show him what else you're here for, Jim," said Allen. "Stand still, Al, and don't move. My authority, demonstration purposes, Jim."

  Chapter Four

  HARDWICK saw Tableman's hand flick out to an area of wall which appeared to the eye no different from any other. As Tableman touched it, a steel panel slid out from the equally unmarked ceiling and dropped to the floor with a muffled thud. The corridor ahead of them was now totally sealed off by what appeared to be an air-tight, bullet-proof barrier. The whole thing had taken less than a half-second.

  Tableman waited and at a nod from Allen touched the wall again. The steel shutter slid up as fast and as silently as it had come down and the empty corridor stretched before them once more.

  "Thanks, Jim. Come on, Al. We can talk as we walk, and you want breakfast."

  "How many Jims are there?" asked Hardwick as they strolled along. The corridor was always gently curved to the left, and Hardwick guessed that they were in a vast dome-shaped or circular structure of some kind, with many levels, both up and down.

  Allen grinned. "Do you mean guards, biochemists or barrier watchmen?"

  "Barrier watchmen, I guess."

  "One hundred and seven. Each one knows his own wall section trigger, and none of them knows any of the others, except me and eventually you."

  "You've memorized all those sections, all those hidden buttons?" asked Hardwick incredulously.

  "No great trick for a good foreign duty agent, my boy. I'll teach you the method. You've been at a desk too long."

  They passed other coveralled men and even one woman as they walked along. Despite his previous disclaimer, Allen seemed to know all of them by name. Occasional doors broke the smoothness of the c
orridor on both sides. Through one of them which was open, Hardwick glimpsed a lofty room almost filled to the ceiling with what looked like vast, throbbing turbines. It reminded him of a ship's engine room he had once looked at.

  "Air re-conditioning boosters," said Allen. "The place is filled with them. Well, here we are at the restaurant."

  HE LED the way through a glass-panelled double door, and Hardwick found himself in a large, pleasant cafeteria. People of both sexes, all sporting identity badges on their coveralls, sat about in groups or alone. Some read while they ate; others talked, and a few were writing in pads or on sheets of paper.

  "Looks like the dining room of the Rand Corporation," remarked Hardwick as they chose a vacant table and sat down.

  "The Rand Corporation couldn't get the three top cooks off the atom sub fleet," was the answer. "Two others worked for the Waldorf. Order anything you like. They've damn near got it."

  A pretty waitress, also in coveralls and badge, took their order and left. A few people looked at Hardwick and away, he noticed, and then spoke to one another. A steady hum of eating noises, crockery and conversation provided a background. The place could have been duplicated, save for clothes, at any number of science establishments he had visited at one time or another.

  Hardwick asked few questions when the food arrived. He had ordered breakfast without thinking very hard, but the food was excellent, the eggs and bacon being exactly as he had specified. Over his second cup of very good coffee he again began to question Allen, who had been equally silent while eating.

  "What next, Tom?"

  "You get to see Dr. Butler—that is, after seeing the reason why we're here at all. That can be done on the way to her office. You'll understand a lot better what's going on if you see that first."