by Don Thompson
still open.
It was just as though he'd been unconscious no more than a few minutes.But Wayne had a strong feeling that it had been more than that.
Therefore he was only shocked, rather than stunned, when a glance at hiswristwatch indicated six hours and forty minutes had elapsed.
He held his head tightly in both hands to keep it from flying off in alldirections at once, and he tried to think.
He knew it was important to think--fast and straight.
Six hours and forty minutes.
That was too long to be unconscious from a simple blow on the head, andhis head didn't really hurt that bad.
Probably the weapon had still been firing whatever mysterious ammunitionit used when it struck him; and when it bounced off his head it hadturned, and he'd been caught in its blast.
But that didn't matter. That wasn't the important thing.
Six hours and forty minutes he'd been out.
Seven hours!
The Defense Department official he'd spoken to had told him seven hours.
And thank God it wasn't five hours or six, as he'd been urging them tomake it.
Anyway he had only twenty minutes now. Possibly a little more, but justas likely less.
That realization should have spurred him to instantaneous and heroicaction, but instead it paralyzed him for several minutes. He couldn'tthink what to do. He couldn't get his muscles and nerves functioning andcoordinated.
The absence of gravity didn't help. He thrashed about futilely.
But at last, almost by accident, his feet touched a metal support beam,and he pushed himself toward Sheilah. He grabbed her around the waistwith one arm and with his free hand pulled both of them through thedoor.
It seemed a long, long time before he got Sheilah to the reconnaissanceship. By then the twenty minutes were up. His life was going intoovertime.
Sheilah was conscious but still disorganized and limp, struggling weaklyand ineffectually. Wayne fumbled with the door, got it open and shovedher inside.
Then he pulled himself in and closed the door.
They might make it yet. They still had a chance.
He studied the control board, deciding on the proper button to push.
From behind him Sheilah screamed, "The bomb! You've got the bomb andyou're going to--Well, you're not!"
Her body slammed against his shoulders and her arms encircled his neck.Her fingers clawed at his eyes.
Wayne struggled, not to free himself, but only to get one hand loose, toreach the control board. When he did get a hand free, they had floatedtoo far from the controls.
"Stop it, you stupid bitch!" Wayne snarled. "You're going to kill usboth!"
Wayne said, "Listen, there's a guided missile from earth headingstraight for this ship, and it has a hydrogen bomb warhead. It'll gethere any minute now and when it--"
His words were broken off by the tremendous roar and concussion of thehydrogen bomb.
Wayne's last thought before oblivion swallowed him was that theywouldn't have had time to escape, anyway.
But that wasn't the end. Wayne woke up enough to refuse to believe hewas alive, and O'Reilly was somewhere near, telling him:
"Cirissins full of grate your forts. Radio eggulant blan. Thankelnormous. Rid of earth now. Blasted away. Givish _good_ high dragon bump.Yukon gome now."
Wayne groaned. The meaning of O'Reilly's words was trying to get throughto his brain, and he was trying desperately to keep the meaning out.
O'Reilly's voice receded into a thick gray fog. "Keep shib. Shores.Presirent felpings. Gluck."
Metal slammed against metal. Wayne slammed against something hard. Anddarkness closed in once again.
But this time it wasn't so smothering and didn't last nearly so long.
When he opened his eyes his head was clear. He wasn't floating. He waslying on something hard--a floor surface of the Cirissin landing ship.He didn't ache anywhere.
All in all he felt pretty good.
For the first few seconds.
Then he started remembering things, and he wished he hadn't bothered towake up.
Sheilah was standing by the control panel, her back to him. She blockedthe view screen, but Wayne didn't want to see it anyway. He wasn't evencurious.
Sheilah turned, saw him, smiled broadly.
She said, "Gee, mister, I guess you're a hero. I dunno how you done it,but you made 'em go away, and you made 'em turn us loose." Wayne coulddetect no mockery or bitterness in her voice.
"Aw, shut up," he growled.
"You still mad at me cause of what I done? Well, gee, I'm sorry. Ididn't get whatcha were up to. I guess I still don't, but ... Oh, hell,let's don't fight about it. It don't matter now, does it?"
Wayne shook his head wearily. "No," he agreed. "It doesn't matter now."
Sheilah moved away from the control board and came toward him. In herfilmy, transparent costume, she was the quintessence of womanly allure.
Wayne gasped and stared, but not at her.
The view screen had become visible when she'd moved.
It showed earth.
Or a curved, cloud-veiled slice of earth. Intact, serene and growingsteadily larger.
"What the hell! Why, I thought ..." Wayne jumped to his feet, brushedpast Sheilah and peered more closely at the view plate. There was nomistaking it. Earth.
"What's a matter with you, mister?" Sheilah asked.
Wayne felt dizzy. O'Reilly had said, "Earth blasted away," hadn't he?And the H-bomb hadn't destroyed the Cirissin ship. Therefore ... Well,therefore what?
In the first place what O'Reilly had actually said was, "Rid of earthnow. Blasted away." It wasn't quite the same as ...
O'Reilly had never said anything about _destroying_ earth.
Quite a sizeable re-evaluation project was taking place in Wayne's mind.It took several minutes for all the pieces to fall into their properplaces. But once he was willing to realize that the Cirissins had knownwhat they were doing, everything seemed obvious.
"Oh, good Gawd!" he muttered. "What utter idiots!"
"The Cirissins?" Sheilah asked.
"No, I mean us. Me. Good Lord, just because O'Reilly's English wasn'tperfect! What did I expect for only three weeks? Hummm. The atomicstructure of the entire ship must be uniformly charged to ... Damn! Highdragon bump!"
"I don't getcha," Sheilah said. "What's with this high dragon bumpbusiness? I thought they wanted a hydrogen bomb to destroy earth, and Ithought you'd agreed to help 'em, and so I thought ..."
"Oh, never mind," Wayne said. "I know what you thought, and you weren'tany more stupid than I was. We were both wrong.
"Look, the Cirissins must have been stalled--out of gas, sort of.Something had gone wrong with their nuclear drive units. They had someemergency fuel, but they didn't want to use it. Like having a can ofkerosene in the car when the tank runs dry, I suppose. It will work, butit messes up the engine. You understand so far?"
"Sure."
"Okay then. They happened to be close to earth, so they went into anorbit around it and studied it for a while on radio and TV bands, andrealized they might be able to get help without using their emergencyfuel--uranium, incidentally, not kerosene.
"So they grabbed us. Me, I suppose because they'd seen my TV scienceprogram. They must have gotten the idea from some stupid spy show thatscientists have to be seduced into revealing information. That's whythey picked up you."
Sheilah interrupted, "But what did they _want_? I thought ..."
Patiently, Wayne said, "Just what they said. A high dragon bump. A_bump_, not a bomb. A boost, a push. Not to blast away earth, but toblast away _from_ earth. That's all."
END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _If Worlds of Science Fiction_ June 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have bee
n corrected without note.