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

releasing will be detectable anywhere on the planet by now. The government has a ship like the Lester Dawes in commission; if this keeps on, she’ll be coming out for a look.”

“Then we’ll have help,” Captain Poole said.

“We need government help like we need the polka-dot fever,” Rodney Maxwell said. “If they get in it, they’ll claim the spaceport themselves, and we’ll have fought a battle for nothing.”

Well, that was it, then. The spaceport was essential to the Maxwell Plan. He’d gotten seven men killed⁠—eight, if the recon-car that was taking Abe Samuels to the hospital in Litchfield didn’t make it in time⁠—and it was up to him to see that they hadn’t died for nothing. He spread the photo-map and the spaceport plans on the chart table.

“Look at this,” he said.

Klem Zareff looked at it. He didn’t like it any better than Conn had. He studied the plan for a moment, chewing his cigar.

“You know, it’s possible they don’t know that thing exists,” he said, without too much conviction. “You’ll be betting the lives of at least twenty men; fewer than that couldn’t accomplish anything.”

“I’ll be putting mine on the table along with them,” Conn said. “I’ll lead them in.”

He was wishing he hadn’t had to say that. He did, though. It was the only thing he could say.

“You better pick the men to go with me, Colonel,” he continued. “You know them better than I do. We’ll need working equipment, too; I have no idea what we may have to take out of the way, inside.”

“I won’t call for volunteers,” Zareff said. “I’ll pick Home Guards; they did their volunteering when they joined.”

“Let me pick one man, Colonel,” Anse Dawes said. “I’ll pick me.”

X

They sent a snooper in first; it picked up faint radiation leakage from inactive power units of overhead lights, and nothing else. The tunnel stretched ahead of it, empty, and dark beyond its infrared vision. After it had gone a mile without triggering anything, the jeep followed, Anse Dawes piloting and Conn at the snooper controls watching what it transmitted back. The two lorries followed, loaded with men and equipment, and another jeep brought up the rear. They had cut screen-and-radio communication with the outside; they weren’t even using inter-vehicle communication.

At length, the snooper emerged into a big cavern, swinging slowly to scan it. The walls and ceiling were rough and irregular; it was natural instead of excavated. Only the floor had been leveled smooth. There were a lot of things in it, machinery and vehicles, all battered and in poor condition, dusty and cobwebbed: the spaceport junkheap. A passage, still large enough for one of the gunboats, led deeper into the mountain toward the crater. They sent the snooper in and, after a while, followed.

They came to other rectangular, excavated caverns. On the plans, they were marked as storerooms. Cases and crates, indeterminate shrouded objects; some had never been disturbed, but here and there they found evidence of recent investigation.

Beyond was another passage, almost as wide as the Mall in Litchfield; even the Lester Dawes could have negotiated it. According to the plans, it ran straight out to the ship docks and the open crater beyond. Anse turned the jeep into a side passage, and Conn recalled the snooper and sent it ahead. On the plan, it led to another natural cavern, half its width shown as level with the entrance. The other half was a pit, marked as sixty feet deep; above this and just under the ceiling, several passages branched out in different directions.

The snooper reported visible light ahead; fluoroelectric light from one of the upper passages, and firelight from the pit. The air-analyzer reported woodsmoke and a faint odor of burning oil. He sent the snooper ahead, tilting it to look down into the pit.

A small fire was burning in the center; around it, in a circle, some hundred and fifty people, including a few women and children, sat, squatted or reclined. A low hum of voices came out of the soundbox.

“Who the blazes are they?” Anse whispered. “I can’t see any way they could have gotten down there.”

They were in rags, and they weren’t armed; there wasn’t so much as a knife or a pistol among them. Conn motioned the lorries and the other jeep forward.

“Prisoners,” he said. “I think they were hauled down here on a scow, shoved off, and left when the fighting started. Cover me,” he told the men in the lorries. “I’m going down and talk to them.”

Somebody below must have heard something. As Anse took the jeep over and started floating it down, the circle around the fire began moving, the women and children being pushed to the rear and the men gathering up clubs and other chance weapons. By the time the jeep grounded, the men in the pit were standing defensively in front of the women and children.

They were all dirty and ragged; the men were unshaven. There was a tall man with a grizzled beard, in greasy coveralls; another man with a black beard and an old Space Navy uniform, his head bandaged with a dirty and blood-caked rag; another in the same uniform, wearing a cap on which the Terran Federation insignia had been replaced by the emblem of Transcontinent & Overseas Shiplines and the words Chief Engineer. And beside the tall man with the gray beard, was a girl in baggy trousers and a torn smock. Like the others, she was dirty, but in spite of the rags and filth, Conn saw that she was beautiful. Black hair, dark eyes, an impudently tilted nose.

They all looked at him in hostility that gradually changed to perplexity and then hope.

“Who are you?” the tall man with the gray beard asked. “You’re none of this gang here.”

“Litchfield Exploration & Salvage; I’m Conn Maxwell.”

That meant nothing; none of them had been near a news-screen lately.

“What’s going on topside?” the man with the bandaged head and the four stripes