"You've left out the real reason you got busy and worked out the beam, Neal. They couldn't get a crew for a dust boat since the first one went out like a nova halfway to Earth."
"Can't say as I blame them. The slightest amount of residual air in the hold—a leak from crew quarters—and the dust explodes. But I'd better send Bruce the flight elements. She's due to come sliding down the beam at Port New York in three hours and thirty-five minutes."
He tripped the visor into action; set it on the New York length.
The screen remained blank.
"That's funny! Bruce must've stepped out a moment. But the automatic reflex should have buzzed back."
He waited a minute; tried it again.
Still the screen showed no signs of life.
Neal said "Damn!" Little puckers appeared in his forehead.
"Maybe his screen's blown," suggested Shep.
"He's got an auxiliary, on an independent circuit. And he knows I was due to transmit."
Shep's dark face began to look white. "Gosh, Neal! Suppose they've started."
Neal swung on him fast. "Who's started?" There was an edge to his voice.
Shep gulped. "One of the other unions."
"You're crazy!" Neal made it harsh, explosive, to hide his own unease.
"Maybe, but it makes sense. This is a swell time to start what back in the Second World War they called a 'blitzkrieg.' In another month we go into double production, thanks to the Shipman process. Then it would be too late. Now they've got the jump on us. Their own cargo comes through, and ours gets bypassed in space. The opportunity would never come up again."
Neal got up. His tall, lean body, flat-muscled, lithe like that of a dancer, overtopped Shep by a head. "If it isn't the Moon madness that's got you, you don't know the half of it."
He stopped abruptly, tried New York feverishly again and again.
The screen did not even flicker.
Then he set the length for Washington, where the Council of Experts sat. His mouth, was a hard, tight gash, and his eyes burned like neon bulbs.
So intent was he on the controls, so intent was Shep Low on Neal, that neither one heard the stealthy opening of the exit slide behind them. Five men moved soundlessly into the room, their feet padded with noiseless arbo sheaths.
Neal half turned from the still-blank screen. "Look, Shep!" he started. "While I'm raising Washington, you go get Gautry and tell him—" Then he saw the men, and he jerked upward with a cry of warning, his right hand streaking to the belt where his thermo unit hung.
Fast as he was, the men were faster. Two sprang for him, short dural clubs upraised. Two others sprang for the startled assistant, The fifth flung for the screen control, sent his club crashing over the tangle of cables and thin-walled tubes. The face of the Washington operator was humming into life when a blast of shorted wires and tubes sent crisping flares over the entire outfit.
Neal tugged desperately at his thermo unit and started a second shout for help. Then two clubs slammed simultaneously down on his skull. Moon and stars and galaxies whirled dizzyingly around. As he went toppling he heard as from a great distance the smothered outcry of Shep Low: then everything slid away from him.
The five men paid no further attention to the slumped victims. They worked efficiently and fast. No words were uttered. Their alien eyes and olive-stained faces were impassive. Their lank, black hair was plastered greasily over sloping foreheads. Silently on their arbo sheaths they padded around the chamber, methodically smashing every instrument, every panel, every auxiliary set that might take over in an emergency. The dural clubs, specially alloyed, made small, squishing sounds as they thudded into the apparatus.
The whole thing look but a few seconds. The leader's pale eyes flicked over the holocaust; then he lifted his hand and twisted his wrist in a peculiar gesture. It was a salute!
As silent as they had come, the five men slid out of the place they had wrecked. Like shadows, they hugged the tumbled rocks to one of the emergency locks. Still without a word, they slipped inside, where a small, dull-gray scooter waited. They tumbled in, slid the port into place, and went out of the automatic lock like a gray ghost. Quietly the electro-powered scooter vanished toward the east, its gray sheath merging with the pumice-gray surface of the Moon.
Behind them lay the unwitting Moon station, cut off from all outside communication or warning for at least a day of intensive repairs, The leader's olive-tinted face permitted itself a flitting grin. A day? All that was required was a mere three hours and a half of silence!
Everett Gautry splashed the sweat off his broad-beamed forehead with a weary gesture. The lean, pumice-smudged man leaning against the wall of central quarters looked down at his gnarled hands and spat thoughtfully. He was Joe Banks, the mining foreman.
"Another load gone, Mr. Gautry," he said, "and I wish to Saturn it'd be the last. My men are getting pretty leery 'bout that there dust. Ever' time they shove a dipper into that old vent they jump like it's already exploded."
"She's a hell hole, all right," Gautry agreed, "but we got our orders. 'Get it out,' they tell me, and I get it out according. Ain't much chance o' trouble down there in the vents, though. Been lying there for millions of years, vacuum-sealed, so to speak."
Joe Banks spat again. "Lucky there ain't any atmosphere on the Moon, or else—"
"The scientists back home worried around with that for a while. Claim the discovery of the Tycho dust solved what was puzzling them ever since they turned an eye on the Moon."
"How do you mean?"
"About, the Moon's surface looking like an old-fashioned battlefield," Gautry explained, "and the total absence of air an' water. They figure long ago there must've been both. But the dust was gradually forming underground, under pressure, from some chemicals that we been fortunate back on Earth in not having. Some pockets close to the surface got exposed. A moonquake, mebbe; a big meteor; or mebbe just plain erosion. The contact with oxygen set off the dust. The whole surface of the Moon went off in one grand smack. Everything went—atmosphere, seas, soil, mebbe a whole race o' people. Where the pockets were there was extra-deep explosions—that's your craters now, like Tycho here."
Joe shivered, looked apprehensively down the deep vent almost at their feet. It ran for miles into the bowels of the dead Moon, and was capped with vacuum locks to keep the artificial air within the dome from seeping down into the workings. "I suppose the stuff we're mining lay too deep for the big blow tuh get at it."
"That's the way they figure it," nodded Gantry. He yawned, flexed his powerful arms. "Might's well go in an' chin with Cass an' Low for a while. We all deserve a rest."
"Me, too," agreed Joe. "'Sides, I wanna hear what's goin' on back on Earth." He grinned shamefacedly. "There oughta be a message for me."
Gautry chuckled and poked him in the ribs. "Nancy, eh?"
"Yeah! I tol' her the company don't like so many personal messages, but she says either she talks tuh me ever' other day or she's a-comin' out here tuh see what's what. Claims she got a sneakin' suspicion there's some yaller-haired gals up here on th' Moon."
The boss grinned. "I wish tuh Mike there was, Joe. Me, I'm a single man, and this here life gets kinda hard. You're lucky, fella. But come on."
They threaded their way over the porous surface toward the control chamber.
"'S funny!" Gautry remarked. "Everything's quiet's the Moon itself in there. Usually those two babies come boilin' out when the cargo ship blasts off. Like tuh raise hell when there's a chance."
Joe Banks nodded. "'Specially Neal Cass. Bet he could fight his weight in meteors. Good guy, though."
"They don't come any better." Gautry stepped in through the open slide door. Banks was right on his tail.
"Hello, you two space eaters!" greeted Gautry; then went suddenly quiet. Banks made a little choking sound.
The control room was a shambles of twisted wires and smoldering tubes. It looked as though some Moon giant had torn through it in a murde
rous rage. And on the floor, limp, unstirring, lay the two control men!
Ev Gautry was a big man, but he moved now with the celerity of a cat. He shoved clear across the chamber in a single move, ripped open the emergency medical kit, tumbled out supplies—water, bandages, hypos already filled with powerful stimulants.
"See if they're alive, Joe," he said hoarsely. He did not recognize his own voice.
Banks knelt swiftly. There was a huge lump in his throat that almost suffocated him. He put his ear to Neal's chest; then he did the same with Shep Low.
"They're alive!" he yelped joyfully. "Gawd, Mr. Gautry, they must be made o' dural! Lookit them there lumps on their skulls."
But the boss shoved him aside and began to swab and paint the wounds. He injected the hypos expertly into the big arteries of the arm. There was an almost instantaneous reaction. Color flowed into their faces, breathing grew stertorous, then subsided into regularity. Neal opened his eyes first.
"Wh-what—" he gasped.
"Take it easy, old chap," Gautry advised. "Look, Shep's comin' around."
But Neal's bleary eyes took in the wreckage of his pet instruments, and he jerked off the restraining hand and came wabbling to his feet.
"Those men," he gasped. "Did you get them?"
"Whoa!" said Gautry. "What men?"
"The five who attacked us and wrecked the works."
Joe Banks shook his head. "Never seen hide nor hair o' anyone."
Shep painfully struggled up. His face was pale and the blood streamed still from the cut on his forehead. "They got away clean," he groaned.
Gautry's eyes narrowed. "What's this all about?"
Neal explained swiftly. "They looked like one of the tribes of the Northeast Asiatic Union," he ended. "You know the type—dark-olive faces; curious, slitted eyes, and damp black hair plastered down."
Gautry swore. "Their station's the other side o' the Moon. Damn their filthy hides! I'll break out every gun and scooter we have and blast them to hell and gone off the Moon!"
"But why should they 'a' done it?" asked Joe.
Neal started to shake his head, then suddenly galvanized into life. Alarm flooded his bruised face. "Migosh!" he exploded. "Shep was right."
Shep held his head. "I wish to hell I wasn't," he moaned.
The boss felt a quivering premonition. "Stop talking riddles, you two!" he snapped.
But Neal disregarded him. Frantically his eyes sought the time signal. It was broken.
"Quick!" he shouted. "What time is it?"
Joe stared down at his wrist. "Eleven—fifty-six."
"We were out then about fifteen minutes." Neal's voice was flat, emotionless. "In three hours and twenty minutes the Thunderbolt will crash headlong into Port New York."
"You're crazy!" yelled Gautry. "That slap on the head knocked you dizzy. Just because our plant is wrecked don't mean New York can't hold her on the beam and set 'er down easy."
"He's not crazy!" Shep shouted almost, hysterically. "He's talking God's truth. Just before they jumped us we were trying to raise Bruce Hopper at New York. He's out; and his station's out, same as us. It was a deliberate set-up, I tell you. Both ends of the beam were smashed."
Shep's voice stopped abruptly, and for a long moment only the deep breathing of the four men could be heard. In each man's mind flashed the same panoramic vision. Of a great cargo boat hurtling crewless through space. Of a control beam that was haywire. Of frantic ground crews at Port New York trying desperately to rig up emergency controls and knowing that it could not possibly be done in time. Of twenty million people cramming all roads, all available crafts in panic terror to evacuate a hundred miles square and knowing that millions of them would not make it. Of hope against hope that somehow the ship would swerve and go careening safely out into space. Of blasphemy and imprecations and prayers all intermingled as every telescope trained on the approaching disaster. Of the moment of contact!
Here, every one of the four in that smashed control room felt his heart held in a vise and all blood squeezed from his veins. They knew what would happen. They knew exactly the terrific energies imprisoned in the Tycho dust that required only contact with air for a short space of time to explode.
Cautious experimentation had blasted miles of desert sky-high with a single shell load. Here there was a thousand tons! The imagination reeled and rocked. Half the eastern coast would detonate out of existence. No similar holocaust had taken place in all Earth's history since the time when the glaciers marched inexorably down from the pole.
"We've got to stop it!" Neal's voice was hard, brittle as he broke the terrible silence.
"But how?" Gautry spread his hands helplessly. For the first time in his hard-bitten career he did not know what to do.
"There isn't a chance," wailed Shep. "The Northeast Union knew what was what. Damn their hides! They must have thousands of fighting detonators crammed to the brim with their own Moon dust waiting for the Thunderbolt to crash." He shook his fist up at the pale-green disk of the Earth. "They'll come in slamming and blasting to mop up our union, to bring the terrified remnants under the tyranny. Damn 'em!"
Joe Banks swayed. The gray pumice smudges made black streaks on the sudden pallor beneath. "Nancy!" he whispered. "Nancy! She's in New York!"
"Shut up, all of you!" snapped Neal. "Let me think."
They fell silent. Only their feverish eyes followed his jerky, abrupt pacings around the control chamber. He seemed like a caged lion. His eyes blazed, his brow was a corrugated board, and his mouth was tight with furious thought.
"If anyone can think of a way, it's Neal," Shep said huskily.
Gautry shook his head despairingly. "Correct. But there ain't any way."
Neal came to a swift halt. "It's a million-to-one shot, but it's the only chance."
Joe Banks looked up like a man reprieved from death, "Wh-what is?"
"No time for details, Joe," said Neal. His voice crackled. "Every second counts. Get the Flying Meteor fueled at once. She's the fastest boat we've got. And put the following equipment on board. Hurry, Gantry, if you've ever hurried in your life."
Gautry was the boss of Moon Station 2X, but like all good men he knew when to take orders as well as when to issue them. This was an occasion for taking orders. He didn't have the slightest idea what Neal Cass had in mind; but he knew Neal, and that was enough for him.
"Right, Neal. You'll have 'er r'aring to go in five minutes flat. C'mon, Joe, we got lots to do, an' pronto."
Moon Station 2X within five seconds was a seething, ordered inferno of shouted orders and toiling, sweating men. The little speedster was trundled into its lock, rocket fuel jetting into its tanks from flexible hoses even as it moved. Grim mechanics swarmed over its surface, spied through its innards, tightening, tuning, making sure every rocket valve, every jet was functioning like a precision watch. Equipment poured into it in endless stream.
In four minutes and ten seconds Gautry shouted: "She's ready to blast, Neal. I don't know what you're up to, but we're all praying."
Neal lay in his cushioned rebound straps at the controls. Shep, darkly haggard, lay in his own supports. The ports slid noiselessly into place.
"Hold tight, Shep! I'm giving her maximum acceleration."
Neal shifted the lever all the way over. There was a rushing, roaring sound; a huge jerk out into space that thrust them back against the straps like bouncing marionettes. A crushing weight slammed against their limbs. A wall of blackness overcame them.
It was only seconds, but it seemed like eternities. Then they fought out of their daze. The crushing load lifted.
Shep said: "Whah ... hah! That's the fastest take-off I've ever been in."
Neal's eyes focused on his sights. "Had to, Shep. Every split second counts. We've got to catch up with the Thunderbolt before she gets too close to Earth."
"Hm-m-m! The Thunderbolt's bowling along pretty fast. About thirty miles a second."
"Thirty-two and a half, to be exact. A
nd she's got a head start on us of a whole hour."
Shep groaned. "Sounds pretty hopeless. We're geared to about forty, and you know what they say about stern chases."
Neal's jaw hardened. "I'm not going to run the usual way."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, building up acceleration to maximum speed for which the ship is planned, and then letting her coast. I'm going to keep on accelerating."
Shep sat up quickly, "Wh-what?" he gasped.
"Only chance to catch up," Neal explained. "If I can push her up to sixty and keep accelerating her against the Moon's gravity to keep her at that, we may overhaul the Thunderbolt in about an hour and three quarters. Don't forget, the Thunderbolt's practically hit the Earth's sphere of gravity by now. Instead of fighting the Moon pull, as we are now, she's accelerating without rockets."
Shep cleared his head with a vigorous shake. "We'll start every strut and every seam," he protested. "You know these speedsters can't stand constant acceleration like that."
"She'll have to," Neal declared grimly. "Otherwise we might as well write 'finis' to home and country and two hundred million swell human beings."
Shep digested that. "O.K.!" he said finally. "Give her the gun. We don't matter in this worth a cent. Only—"
"Only what?"
"If I only knew what you had up your sleeve to stop the Thunderbolt, Neal."
Neal turned around to his assistant. "I've only a glimmering yet," he said. "I'm trying to work it out while we're traveling. That's why I had Gantry shove in every type of apparatus I could think of."
The Moon was already only a huge silver disk beneath them, and shrinking visibly with the passing minutes. Neal held the Flying Meteor grimly at constant acceleration. Their limbs were heavy and their blood pumped sluggishly. Their bodies seemed to weigh tons. The gravity pull within the ship was of the order of two Earth gravities.
When The Future Dies Page 30