The Cosmic Computer, H. Beam Piper [best sci fi novels of all time .TXT] 📗

pointed to the head of the canyon, where a mass of rock had slid down.

“That’s it; you can still see where they put off the shots.”

The canyon was long enough and wide enough for the Lester Dawes to land in it; she could be loaded directly from the tunnel. The manipulators began moving in, wrestling with the larger chunks of rock and dragging or carrying them away. Power shovels began grunting and clanking and rumbling; dust rose in a thick column. Toward midmorning, the troop carriers which served as school buses in Litchfield arrived, loaded with more workmen. A lorry lettered Storisende Herald-Guardian came in, hovered over the canyon, and began transmitting audiovisuals. More news-folk put in an appearance.

The earth and rock at the top of the tunnel entrance fell away, revealing the vitrified stone lintel; everybody cheered and dug harder. More aircars arrived, getting in each other’s and everybody else’s way. Raymond Fitch, Lester Dawes, Lorenzo Menardes and Morgan Gatworth. Dolf Kellton, playing hookey from school. Kurt Fawzi; he landed in the canyon and watched every shovelful of rock lifted, as though trying to help with mental force. Tom Brangwyn, with a score of the Home Guard to reinforce the Company Police. Klem Zareff called in his air cavalry to help control the sightseers. Nobody was making trouble; they were just getting in the way.

At eleven, Rodney Maxwell went aboard the Lester Dawes to use the radio and telescreen equipment. By then, two time zones west in Storisende, the Claims Office was opening; he filed preliminary claim to an underground installation with at least two entrances in uninhabited country, and claimed a ten-mile radius around it. By that time, the gang working on top had uncovered a vitrified slab over the hundred-foot circle of the vertical shaft and were cracking it with explosives. According to the scanners, it was full of loose rubble for a hundred feet down. Below that, the microrays hit something impenetrable.

Toward midafternoon, the tunnel in the canyon was cleared. It had been vitrified solid; the scanners reported that it was plugged for ten feet. A contragravity tank let down in front of it, with a solenoid jackhammer mounted where the gun should have been, and began pounding, running a hole in for a blast shot. There were more explosions topside; when Conn took a jeep up to observe progress there, he found the vitrified rock blown completely off the vertical shaft, exposing the rubble that had been dumped into it. The gang on the mesa-top had discovered something else; a grid of auro-copper bussbars buried four feet underground. Ten to one, radio and telescreen signals would be transmitted to that from below, and then probably picked up and rebroadcast from a relay station on one or another of the high buttes in the neighborhood. Time enough to look for that later. He returned to the canyon, where the lateral tunnel was now almost completely open.

When it was clear, they sent a snooper in first. It was a robot, looking slightly like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by three feet at the thickest. It transmitted a view of the tunnel as it went slowly in; the air, it found, was breathable, and there were no harmful radiations or other dangers. According to the plans, there should be a big room at the other end, slightly curved, a hundred feet wide by a hundred on either side of the tunnel entrance. The robot entered this, and in its headlight they could see reconnaissance-cars, and contragravity tanks with 90 mm guns. It swerved slightly to the left, and then the screen stopped receiving, the telemetered instruments went dead and the robot’s signal stopped.

“Tom,” Rodney Maxwell said, “you keep the crowd back. Klem, stay with the screens; I’ll transmit to you. I’m going in to see what’s wrong.”

He started to give Conn an argument when he wanted to accompany him.

“No,” Conn said. “I’m going along. What do you think I went to Terra to study robotics for?”

His father snapped on the screen and pickup of the jeep that was standing nearby. “You getting it, Klem?” he asked. “Okay, Conn. Let’s go.”

Half a mile ahead, at the other end of the tunnel, they could see a flicker of light that grew brighter as they advanced. The snooper still had its light on and was moving about. Once they caught a momentary signal from it. As Rodney Maxwell piloted the jeep, Conn kept talking to Klem Zareff, outside. Then they were at the end of the tunnel and entering the room ahead; it was full of vehicles, like the one on the bottom level at Tenth Army H.Q. As soon as they were inside, Klem Zareff’s voice in the radio stopped, as though the set had been shot out.

“Klem! What’s wrong? We aren’t getting you,” his father was saying.

The snooper was drifting aimlessly about, avoiding the parked vehicles. Conn used the manual control to set it down and deactivate it, then got out and went to examine it.

“Take the jeep over to the tunnel entrance,” he told his father. “Move out into the tunnel a few feet; relay from me to Klem.”

The jeep moved over. A moment later his father cried, “He’s getting me; I’m getting him. What’s the matter with the radio in here? The snooper’s all right, isn’t it?”

It was. Conn reactivated it and put it up above the tops of the vehicles.

“Sure. We just can’t transmit out.”

“But only half a mile of rock; that set’s good for more than that. It’ll transmit clear through Snagtooth.”

“It won’t transmit through collapsium.”

His father swore disgustedly, repeating it to Zareff outside. Conn could hear the old soldier, in the radio, make a similar remark. They should have all expected that, in the first place. If the Third Force High Command was expecting to sit out a nuclear bombardment in this place, they’d armor it against anything.

“Bring the gang in; it’s safe as far as we’ve gotten,” his father