“Begging your pardon, sir,” the stocky Cadet insisted, “but aren’t you ducking the issue? What if some of Ballinger’s warships still refuse?”
Captain Strayer sighed, looked at Frank, and finally said, “No, Cadet. I ought to beg your pardon. I guess I have been evasive. Not because I wanted to hold anything back from you, but because I didn’t want to admit the possibility even to myself. Maybe it is too much to expect; maybe there’s no chance whatever that all Ballinger’s ships will come over.”
“If they don’t, what happens, sir?”
Captain Strayer said somberly, “We can only hope enough of them do, because there won’t be a weapon aboard the ‘Nobel.’ Any ships still under Ballinger’s command after your mutiny will have to be blasted out of space, as much as we’d hate to do it.”
Frank said, “Including any ships on which the mutiny was unsuccessful?”
Strayer nodded. “Yes, Captain. I’m afraid so.” Frank wouldn’t meet Andy’s glance. The implication was obvious, and they could do nothing about it. If the mutiny failed aboard any ship on which an agent provocateur had been planted, the penalty for failure might unavoidably be death.
“If you’ll all step into the ready-room,” Frank said, “you’ll find copies of your cover stories. I want you to memorize them and then destroy them. Whatever you do, you must know every detail by heart before Freya Olafson’s brother flies you down to Stavanger.”
Frank and Andy entered the ready-room first. Just as the operations bunker brought back memories of Luna, the ready-room did, too. There were the stiff, uncomfortable chairs, the big coffee urn, the large bare table, the bright overhead lights, and the rolled-up screen and star charts on the front wall.
“Will you all please gather around the table?” Frank began … and then Andy saw his brother’s eyes grow wide.
“They’re gone!” Frank cried in dismay. “I left them right here on the table. The cover stories are gone.”
Even before the impact of his words had been driven home, Frank sprinted toward the door. Andy ran after him and up the stairs that led to ground level. A semicircular wall of concrete blocked off the top of the stairs, for the operations bunker and ready-room had to be protected from radiation.
“I left the door locked,” Frank called over his shoulder.
He didn’t have to say the rest of it. The lock had been smashed.
When Andy followed Frank around the wall of concrete, he could see the looming skeletal structure of the “Nobel’s” launching gantry.
A man was leaning against one of its stanchions, rubbing the back of his head. Andy recognized him as an ex-Senior Class Cadet named Williams. Near
him on the ground where it had fallen was an atomic rifle.
“What happened?” Frank said. “Are you all right?”
Senior Cadet Williams groaned. “Now I am. I … a few minutes ago I guess it was … I heard a sound behind me. I started to turn. Something slammed into the back of my head. I … I’m sorry, Captain. That’s all I remember.”
“You didn’t see who it was?”
Williams hadn’t seen.
Andy said one word, “Gault.”
And then he was running again, this time with Frank behind him.
Sprinting along the quarters hallway twenty running strides ahead of Frank, Andy expected Gault’s door to be locked. When he reached it, he twisted the knob and lunged.
The door wasn’t locked. It burst open, and Andy’s momentum carried him into the small room. He lurched across it to the single window.
Behind him the door slammed shut. When he whirled he saw an opened travel case, partially packed, on the bed. Gault was standing in a halfcrouch near the door. The little ex-smuggler seemed quite calm. He was even smiling.
Frank pounded on the door. “Open up in there!”
The door was now locked, but the sound of Frank’s voice diverted Gault’s attention. Andy sprang at him.
Gault fumbled at his belt and drew an atomic pistol. Its charge was minute, Andy knew, but more than enough to kill. He grabbed Gault’s arm, and they grappled for the weapon. The door rattled and then shook as Frank drove his shoulder against it.
Though small, Gault had a wiry strength. He couldn’t bring the pistol to bear, but Andy couldn’t wrench it from his grasp either. They staggered, locked together, across the room. Gault got his hand free and raised it high over his head.
Andy ducked, not quickly enough.
The heavy butt of the atomic pistol slammed into the side of his head. He was aware of his knees hitting the floor and of Gault’s receding footsteps. He turned and as his vision blurred saw Gault going through the window.
He was on hands and knees when Frank forced open the door. Mutely Andy raised one hand to point at the window.
Seconds later, he heard Frank’s voice, “He’s gone.”
Then Andy lost consciousness.
Chapter 12 Mexico Again
THE same reasons that had prompted Captain Strayer to select northern Norway as the location of Project Nobel were now working in Harry Gault’s favor.
Earth’s population stood at more than five billion, and even during the exciting decades of interstellar exploration the final frontiers on Earth were being pushed back.
What once had been the uncharted Mato Grosso jungle in Brazil was now cultivated farmland that helped feed South America’s billion inhabitants.
Two million square miles of what had been the Sahara desert were irrigated by sea water piped over the Atlas Mountains after its salt content had been removed, and even the fabled, remote city of Timbuktu was a thriving center of commerce.
The Gobi desert was a prairie which fed the plumpest cattle on Earth; hundreds of huge farms sprawled across what once had been the basin of the Congo River; for the first time in its history the yearly flood of the great Nile was fully controlled and exploited so that Egypt had become a vast grainery.
Only the high northern latitudes, because their growing season was too short and their soil too poor, hadn’t changed in hundreds of years. In Norway, the expanse of tundra country from the Arctic Circle north to Hammerfest and North Cape still supplied barely enough forage for the nomadic Lapps and their reindeer herds, and civilized settlements were few and widely scattered. Originally, the Project Nobel base had been an experimental rocket base for the Scandinavian countries. It was surrounded by thousands of square miles of bleak tundra covered by many feet of snow all but a few months of the year. Dotted with lakes and bare hills and threaded with scores of raging rivers that carried the melted snows to the sea, it remained much as it had been for thousands of years.
If you were a fugitive its river gorges and clumps of trees, stunted by frost and wind, offered numerous hiding places. Even with the eternal summer sunlight you could elude your pursuers; there were so many places to hide.
Captain Strayer learned this the hard way after Harry Gault’s escape from the base. Search parties set out on foot; helicopters went aloft; a nearby encampment of Lapps was recruited to assist the searchers.
None of them so much as found Harry Gault’s trail, let alone the man himself.
Meanwhile, Andy, his head bandaged and still painful and tender, sat with his brother in Captain Strayer’s office. Strayer was saying:
“It’s no use. We’ll never find him now if we haven’t already. I’m calling the ’copters in.”
“Then what?” Frank asked.
Captain Strayer shrugged. “Making his escape from the base is one thing, but reporting to Ballinger is another. According to Ruy Alvarez, none of Ballinger’s secret spaceports maintains radio contact with the outside world, Frank. They don’t dare to; it could lead to their discovery. So if Gault reports to Ballinger, it will have to be in person.”
“If he does report to Ballinger, what happens to our twelve volunteers? We can’t just let them walk into a trap.”
Captain Strayer shook his head and asked a question of his own. “What happens to Project
Nobel if we don’t go ahead with our plans?”
“We’d never get off the ground. If we did, the Monitors would shoot us out of space unless we used Ballinger’s fleet for cover. But even if we did, unless we can gain control of his fleet what the ‘Nobel’ does won’t matter.”
“Then it looks like you’ve answered your own question, Frank.”
“But we can’t just. …”
“I’ve contacted Stavanger and Tromso and Oslo. Most of the ramjet personnel are ex-spacemen, don’t forget. Harry Gault won’t leave Norway if they can help it. If we’re just given a couple of days, what he does after that won’t matter.”
Still, Frank was adamant. “Unless we know for sure that Gault’s been stopped, can we let a dozen boys like Andy walk right into a trap?”
Before Captain Strayer could answer that question, Andy did. “We have to go ahead with it, Frank,” he said. “Earth’s whole future hangs on what we do. I don’t have to tell you that. That’s why you had me shadowing Gault. But he never stepped out of line … till now.”
Frank sighed, and grumbled, and hoped for a miracle. But none of the returning ‘copters reported any sign of Harry Gault.
Captain Strayer was right about most of the ramjet personnel at Norway’s three big intercontinental airports; almost to a man they were ex-spacemen.
One of them, though, like Harry Gault himself, was an ex-smuggler who had lost his license before the Edict. His name was Daniel Shea. He had known Gault in the old days and had had his papers lifted at the same hearing that had written an end to Gault’s legal career as a spaceman. Now Shea piloted a ramjet on the Tromso-Los Angeles over-the-pole run.
Harry Gault was aware of this. Even before leaving Mexico he knew he’d probably have to flee Norway as a fugitive. As soon as he left the “Nobel” and its great gantry behind him, he set out for Tromso.
About midway between Narvik to the south and Hammerfest to the north, Tromso was the only town of any size north of the Arctic Circle in Norway. Thanks to its location, it was an ideal spot for the Los Angeles-Norway transpolar run.
It was situated less than three hundred miles from Hammerfest and barely two hundred miles from the Project Nobel base, but those two hundred miles were the longest of Harry Gault’s life. He would never forget the droning whine of the hovering jet-copters, the quick plunge into a copse of stunted evergreens, the wading of shallow but turbulent rivers, the icy fear he felt when, every now and then, he found himself exposed on the bare tundra with nowhere to hide.
He struck out due west from the base on foot, hoping to reach the coast. There, among the inlets and fjords that gave Norway one of the longest coastlines in the world, he knew he could board one of the coastal hovercraft that plied back and forth between Hammerfest and Tromso.
The idea was a good one, but it almost was his undoing. He reached the coastal hovercraft station in six hours, hungry, exhausted, the exposed skin of his hands and face swollen by countless mosquito bites. He watched the saucer-shaped hovercraft glide in. He began to walk out on the pier.
Then, at the far end of the pier, he recognized an ex-spaceman from Project Nobel. Not only were they seeking him in the air and on the ground, but they had covered the hovercraft, too.
Harry Gault turned around, forced himself to walk slowly, and left the pier.
Half an hour later, he was aboard a small fishing boat, a mile and a half downstream on the small fjord on which the hovercraft station was located. He had paid the owner to intercept the hovercraft for him in deep water.
When the saucer-shaped vessel appeared, skimming over the surface, they hailed it. Gault was taken aboard and paid his fare. He saw no familiar face and relaxed for the first time since leaving the base.
Less than twelve hours after leaving Project Nobel, he skimmed into Tromso harbor aboard the hovercraft. Three and a half hours for the ramjet journey to Los Angeles, less than an hour from Los Angeles to Mexico City, where a private ’copter could take him to the secret spaceport, he told himself, and he could still give Captain Ballinger the list of agents provocateur a full day before any of them arrived in Mexico or at any of the other bases.
He knew the airport at Tromso would be unsafe. He had to contact Daniel Shea directly, but he had to stay in hiding, too, for he knew the Nobel spacemen were searching for him. Waiting in a dark comer of the rotunda, he sent a porter to the ready-room to inquire about Shea.
The porter was back in a few minutes. “Not half an hour ago,” he said, and as he spoke Harry Gault’s optimism vanished, “Captain Shea took off in a ramjet.”
“Bound for Los Angeles?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Do you know how long he lays over there?”
The porter shook his head.
Harry Gault realized he was in for a long wait.
Ollie Olafson smiled fondly at his sister Freya and Frank Marlow who stood in arm near him.
“They will be packed in like sardines, yes?” He gestured at the small jet-copter on the field behind him. “But it was the biggest I could get, and I think we can squeeze in twelve for the flight to Stavanger.” Andy and the others climbed the stairs out of the operations bunker. They had been given a final briefing by Captain Strayer. Now he followed them to the waiting ’copter and said, “You all know that what we on the ‘Nobel’ can hope to achieve is in your hands. All our preparations will have been for nothing if you can’t prevent Ballinger’s bombing of the Star Brain. Perhaps all our preparations will have been for nothing if a Ballinger ship fires a single rocket at the fleet protecting Canopus. Because while the Monitor Satellites are not manned, the Confederacy ships at Canopus are. What happens on Earth and to Earthmen in the next hundred years or more will be determined by what you can do aboard Ballinger’s ships. I only wish I were going with you.”
“You know what I wish, sir?” one of the volunteers said with a shaky smile. “I wish we were sure Harry Gault hadn’t left Norway.” They all laughed nervously.
“As far as we can tell,” Frank said, “he hasn’t.” He left Freya’s side and walked among the volunteers, shaking their hands. “But if he has, or if he manages somehow to get word to Ballinger, they’ll be planning a hot reception for you. If that happens, 1 want the solemn promise of every one of you boys that you’ll surrender without a fight. Reed Ballinger is ruthless, remember that. And you’d be completely at his mercy.”
As they boarded the ‘copter, Captain Strayer reminded them, “From Stavanger you’ll each make ordinary ramjet connections with the Ballinger base you originally fled. The rest is up to you.”
Andy was the last to board. He stared across the field at the “Nobel” and its gantry. Next time he saw the ship, he knew, it would be in deep space. If he ever saw it again.
“Almost forgot to tell you,” Frank called at the last moment. “There’s an ex-Cadet in Mexico who’s been feeding valuable information to Ruy Alvarez. He’ll be on your side from the very beginning. Name of Charlie Sands.”
“I know Charlie,” Andy said, surprised. “We served on Luna together.”
The ’copter’s rotors started with a roar. Frank had to shout to make himself heard. “Well, boy, the next time we get together will be on Canopus.”
“Right,” Andy said. “On Canopus.” But he wondered whether he’d ever see his brother again.
Freya and Frank stood back. Frank waved his arm in a single brief parting salute.
“Fasten the door, please,” Ollie Olafson called from the controls.
Andy was about to, but just then he saw a small figure rushing breathlessly across the field. It was the Austrian archaeologist, Dr. Seys.
“Marlow!” he shouted. “I see out of you again they wish to make a spaceman.”
Andy nodded as, panting, Dr. Seys reached the jet-copter.
“I only wish to say that if ever it is your desire to become an archaeologist, 1 would consider it my good fortune to have you as a student in Vienna.”
Andy tha
nked him.
“On he Acropolis you did a splendid job, my young friend. On your mission 1 wish you all good fortune.” Again Andy thanked him and shut the door. The Acropolis was a model of plaster, he thought, and he had been working under Dr. Seys’s instructions. To do it he’d needed patience and a steady hand and an interest in his work. He’d had all three. There never had been any doubt about the outcome. The mission they were about to embark on couldn’t be more different. When each of the volunteers arrived at his destination, he’d be all alone in a hostile camp. He’d have no instructions of a skilled expert to guide him. He’d need courage but prudence too.
As well as all the luck in the world.
Was it worth the risk? As the jet-copter rose, shuddering and whining, Andy knew that it was. No risk was too grave, no peril too great, if it gave Earthmen a chance in space again.
“You could have knocked me over with a hummingbird’s feather,” Daniel Shea said enthusiastically. “I came in the door and I just gave one squint and I told myself, ‘If that isn’t my old friend Harry Gault then I’m not Daniel Shea.’ What brings you to Norway?” “As a matter of fact,” Gault said, “I want out.”
“Of Norway, you mean?” said Shea. “Don’t tell me you’re in trouble again!”
“I’ll tell you. I’m in trouble again. When do you fly back to North America?”
“Not until day after tomorrow. Give a guy a break, will you? I just returned from a round trip.”
“The day after tomorrow will be too late for me,” Gault said slowly. “What about tonight?”
“Impossible, old friend,” Shea said. His enthusiasm had begun to cool.
“I could pay you.”
“Impossible.”
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