Mars is My Destination, Frank Belknap Long [reading an ebook .TXT] 📗

and look at him in desperation. He had no way of knowing what was in my mind, but you don't think of that when you want someone to do you a favor that's of life-and-death importance to you.

I wanted him to withdraw that one word, to pretend at least that he hadn't said it. It didn't have to be true, he could have been just guessing.

The word was "spaceport." It couldn't matter that much to him, surely. It wasn't his wife but mine who was at the spaceport, and if he was wrong about where the explosion had taken place it would cost him nothing to be merciful and admit that he was far from sure about it.

But before I could hope to get such an admission out of him he sounded a knell to the granting of favors by saying: "Wendel technicians are activating Endicott fuel cylinders in different sections of the Colony. They're trying to turn the Colonists against Endicott by committing mass murder. The cylinders will only destroy an area of a few square miles, because they're not in the multiple-megaton, nuclear warhead category. We never thought they'd be turned into bombs."

Then came the knell. "We were warned about this, by a Colonist who's on his way to the spaceport with one of the cylinders. Or he may be there already. He just spoke to us briefly on the tele-communicator. That explosion came from the direction of the spaceport, but it may not be the one we were warned about. They may be trying to dismantle another cylinder at the spaceport right now. They won't succeed, because only an Endicott technician would know how to go about it."

"Do you know?"

He nodded. "Yes ... I can dismantle it. I can get to the spaceport in about fifteen minutes, if I drive between the aerators and turn right just before I get to the hospital. The clear-away from that point on will take me through a section of the Colony and then straight out across the desert to the spaceport. The Colonist who talked with us made a serious mistake, but it wasn't his fault. He had no way of knowing that it takes a fuel cylinder at least forty-five minutes to build up to critical mass after it's been activated. In some cases—fifty or fifty-five minutes."

He paused an instant, then went on quickly. "He should have brought it here. We could have dismantled it in time. But he was afraid it would kill several thousand people if it went off anywhere near his home, or in this section of the Colony. He also over-estimated the area that would be demolished by the blast. When he talked to us he was two-thirds of the way to the spaceport and if we'd told him to turn back then and bring the cylinder here the risks would have been too great. We had to let him go on. I said they can't dismantle it at the spaceport. But there's a slim chance they can ... because there may be an Endicott man there or someone who knows enough about Endicott cylinders to make a hit-or-miss try. With luck, he may just possibly succeed. But I doubt it."

"You doubt it? Good God—"

"I doubt it very much. That's why it's so important for me to get there as fast as I can. It's my responsibility—and I refuse to share it with anyone. There are times when a man must face death alone."

"Who are you?" I asked.

"A man with much to answer for, the opposite of a good man. I'm Kenneth H. Hillard, President of the Endicott Combine."

It stunned me for a moment, because it was as big a bombshell as Nurse Cherubin had exploded back at the hospital when she'd nodded toward a slumped caricature of a man and told me exactly who I'd been banging around.

But it didn't stun me for long, because even the showdown miracle of two Mr. Big's taking matters into their own hands when all of the chips were down—Hillard was also a giant despite his frailness and a better man than Wendel could ever hope to be—even the wonder and strangeness of it was of less concern to me at that moment than the danger that Joan was in.

I told him then. "I'm going with you," I said. "I've every right. If I'm cutting in on your yen to face death alone ... that's just too bad. I'm going with you, or you don't go at all. I pack quite a wallop, and you may as well know it. Wendel does."

"Your wife. I see...."

"I hope to Christ you do—"

"Get in!" he said sharply. "I may need you. I'm not a well man. My heart—"

We climbed in and he tugged at the brakes, releasing them and the big vehicle lumbered into motion.

It was already pointed in the right direction, and in less than half a minute—the second time within fifteen minutes for me—we were deep in the Big Grayness, with the walls of the aerators looming up on both sides of us.

Up above all of the sunlight had dwindled to the vanishing point and the gigantic artificial cavern was lighted now along its entire length by cold light lamps embedded in the walls at fifty-foot intervals. The solid, three-dimensional world outside our minds, whatever segment of reality we happen to be passing through, never looks quite the same to any two individuals. It is always, in a sense, a special creation, colored and altered by the human imagination.

To me the cold light lamps were chillingly like enormous eyes, keeping us under constant scrutiny. The scrutiny of giants, standing motionless in shadows, with just their luminous eye-sockets visible. It was as if any moment, promoted by some wild whim, the giant forms might take a violent dislike to us, might raise mace-like metal fists and smash the tractor, very much as a robot giant had smashed a Wendel agent in space, with a fiendishly mechanical rancor.

But to the frail man at my side the aerator walls may have been chilling in a quite different way, if he was giving the Big Grayness any thought at all.

Apparently he wasn't, because when his voice rose above the rumble of the treads he didn't once mention the aerators or the pale blue light that was glimmering on the hood of the tractor.

"It's the beginning of the end—either one way or the other," he shouted. "Either Wendel will be destroyed by the Colonists themselves for committing mass murder, or we'll go down under a juggernaut that can't be stopped. Sometimes you can't smash absolute evil, when it's backed up by absolute power."

I raised my voice as high as he'd done, because I wanted to be sure he'd hear me. "It will always be stopped in the end, I think—if you have enough moral courage. That's a dynamic in itself, the most formidable of all weapons. All history confirms it."

"I wish I could believe that!" he shouted back. "But I'm not so sure. And you have to fight with reasonably clean hands. Endicott is almost as guilty as Wendel, except that it would rather be destroyed than resort to mass murder."

"That's two-thirds of the right," I shouted back. "That's where the biggest dividing line comes. Every tyranny in human history that has resorted to mass murder has gone down into everlasting night and darkness and very quickly. The few that survived to die a natural death drew back at that point. The great, utterly ruthless destroyers always perish."

We both fell silent then, because there are times when the whole of the future and everything that human anger and courage can do to safeguard the future and keep it from destruction seems less important than coming to grips with an immediate, life-and-death emergency. When you do that you're going all out to safeguard the future as well, but you don't think of it in that way. Just getting to the spaceport in time—Oh, God, yes, in time to be at least a little ahead of time, so that Hillard would have steady nerves and could dismantle the cylinder with cautious precision, with no zero-count demoralization to make his fingers stray from the right wires—just getting there and finishing the job before the spaceport could become a translucent cone of fire was a million times as important to me, right at that moment, as the Wendel-Endicott war.

A million times as important, Ralphie boy. Don't be ashamed of feeling that way. If the spaceport blows up, and there's no Joan any more, and the universe comes to an end for you, you've no sure guarantee that the actors who will step into your shoes and occupy the center of the stage will make any better job of it than you've been doing. So it will be a loss, however you slice it, because the death of two lovers is always a loss. You fight better when you've been given that best of all head starts.

18

We stayed silent until the tractor had rumbled past eight or ten of the breaks in the Big Grayness. They were shrouded in dusk-light now, with no kids playing in the front yards of the housing area pre-fabs. Then, just as we were turning into the clear-away that branched off from the one I'd taken on leaving the hospital, Hillard shouted: "We've got to get over to the left! There's an ambulance right up ahead!"

I heard the siren before I saw it, a banshee-like wail cutting through the twilight, unnerving in its shrillness. It took a moment or two for its winking red headlights to come sweeping toward us and if Hillard had seen them before that it had to mean he had exceptionally sharp eyesight.

It careened past without slowing, almost grazing the hood of the tractor. I thought for an instant, when the banshee wail became shrill again, that it was still coming from the same ambulance. Then I saw four more furiously blinking headlights coming out of the dusk ahead of us, and another ambulance swept past, as swiftly as the first had done, but missing us by a wider margin.

A third followed it at a distance of less than a hundred feet, its siren at such full blast that it no longer sounded like a banshee wail.

You can be gripped by a dread that's practically breath-stopping and still manage to shout, if your only other choice is to die inwardly.

It may have been more of a groan than a shout. My voice sounded ragged and it almost broke. "Could those ambulances be coming from the spaceport? Do you think—"

He cut me off. I probably couldn't have gone on anyway.

"They could never have gotten out there and back so fast!" he shouted. "We'll be passing through a section of the Colony in about two more minutes. It's closer to the hospital, so it's just possible they've picked up a few victims at the fringe of the blast area who didn't have our luck."

"The fallout area must be pretty wide!" I shouted back. "Wherever the explosion took place—"

He cut me off again. "No fallout—or very little. What there is is gone within four or five minutes. Safe to go in after that, for the residue wouldn't mutate a fruitfly. Colonists don't know that ... closely guarded Endicott trade secret. Reason we let the Colonists store them. A fuel cylinder can be converted into a nuclear bomb, all right, but it will be the cleanest midget bomb ever built. Take fifteen or twenty of them to blow up even a third of the Colony. But that doesn't mean that one couldn't blow up the spaceport, or seriously injure hundreds of people throughout the fringe area. The ground tremor alone could do that. I told you what it did to this tractor. Has the force of a small earthquake, except that the tremors are three times as erratic. They can just shake you up a little, or break every bone in your body. Depends on where you happen to be standing. It follows a zigzagging pattern, so it can pass right by you."

All that didn't come in one shout, but I'm recording it that way because I didn't interrupt him, and though he must have stopped once or twice to take a deep breath, and keep a sharp lookout for another ambulance I wasn't aware of any break in what he was saying. He was trying his best to make it crystal clear, if only to calm me down a little.

Some of it was reassuring, but not what he'd said about the spaceport. A clean bomb with little or no fallout can leave you just as dead if you're unfortunate enough to be blown up by it.

You see things sometimes you can't bring yourself to talk about, even to close friends when the horror has receded a little and you know