Short fiction complete, p.34
Short Fiction Complete, page 34
“I deny that!” L’Heuroux spluttered.
He didn’t even know better than to interrupt a man who was haggling. Candido ignored the interruption. “You’ve been getting just about as much as you’re paying for,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want a clear deed to that chunk of land. I want to own what’s left after I’ve stopped it.”
Trask looked like he’d been asked for an option on Brooklyn Bridge. “Is that all?”
“Any objections?” Candido asked.
“Oh no,” Trask said quickly. “Yes—I’m sure it can be arranged. No trouble at all.” He was so eager to make the deal he didn’t think to ask what Candido wanted the property for. He was no businessman, Candido thought.
“Shake,” Candido said, and stuck out his hand.
Three days later, they were ready. There was a steel mill and fabricating plant in Denver—not an especially big one, but big enough for the job. Mention that it was to fight the whirlwind was all the plant manager needed to schedule the work right away, and as soon as machinery and men were cleared of other jobs they went to work.
Candido went east to Kansas. He was gone only thirty-six hours. It was a routine job, and the fire snuffed at the first blast. He got back to Denver in time to catch four hours sleep before the steel company phoned. The rig he’d ordered was ready.
He inspected the product and pronounced himself satisfied. It was fast, good work. He shook the plant manager’s hand. This was a man who knew how to do business. The new equipment was loaded and trucked north to Boulder. They worked all night, and at ten in the morning the tank was ready to go.
It looked only a little like a tank now. More closely, it resembled a beetle with a domelike shell steeply canted on its back, and paired grasshopper legs projecting their knees forward at about the angle flags are carried on parade. The tank itself was small under all that. He just hoped the wind wouldn’t be too strong against it. He’d have to hold tail to the wind all the way in. He hoped the Diesel would have power enough to drive the rig when they got there.
“Might as well start,” he told Storch. He nodded to L’Heuroux. “Come along. You’ll see the way to do it.”
Proudly, L’Heuroux declined. Candido and Storch were alone in the tank when it left Boulder, groaning under its load. It was hard going. The wind drummed on the carapace, and though its round surface was like a shield to the wind, it was like a sail also, forcing the tank headlong forward. He’d had to plan out the way they’d go, studying large scale topographic maps until his eyes burned. He had to know that nowhere ahead was there too steep a slope, too sharp a declivity, nor any obstacle the tank couldn’t clear—for once he began to move with this load, he was committed and could not turn aside. To let the wind get its teeth around the edge of the carapace would be disaster. The tank would be thrown like a tumbleweed, wrecked, and they’d be helpless in that hurricane wind.
The rain-sodden earth bogged under the treads, but the wind kept the tank moving. Candido kept an eye on the pennon he’d fixed to the tank’s prow, showing him the bearing of the wind. He kept the pennon whipping straight ahead. He had a quadrangle map taped to the panel in front of him. The route he’d planned was traced on it boldly. He watched for landmarks. The wind sang like a chorus in rage. The tank rocked and lurched and jolted. Blasts of wind shook it like a bone being gnawed.
The land was slopes and dells, and irrigation canals carved along the winding shoulders of low hills. Most of the canals were hardly more than ditches, easily crossed. One was a deep, slow river, full to its banks and flowing over. The bridge was where the map showed it, and wonder of wonders it held the tank’s weight. He’d checked as much as he could, but the tank was a lot heavier than anything the bridge was built for. Until he was over, he hadn’t been sure.
He’d started from Boulder almost straight east. The wind curved north and he turned with it. The tank crossed the southernmost extreme of Gunbarrel Hill and descended again to the plain beyond. Wire fences that had stood to the wind went down under the tank’s weight. A cornfield, cut to stubs by the wind, streamed dust like the smoke of a brushfire. Wrecked foundations of barns and homes lay like open graves near the roads, now and then giving up another fragment to the tearing wind. The tank turned north and then westward, and passed north of Gunbarrel Hill, and turned south again. The spiral was tighter now. Swinging east again, the tank mounted the Hill’s slope. The wind was like a powerful fist putting steady, driving pressure at the tank’s rear. He should have given the tank some kind of an upward projecting spine, Candido thought, like a sailboat’s jib, to help hold the thing butt to the wind. Too late to do it now. The tank crossed a small watercourse—dry now—bumping on the rocks and creaking with internal stresses.
They came to the crest. He could see the congruency’s sphere off to his left, but he couldn’t turn toward it. Keeping the wind behind him, he circled it widely. Then again, more closely. The foundation of the laboratory building was the final obstacle. For this and all its hazards there could be no evasion. The only way to go was straight in. The best he could do was possibly to sidle past the most forbidding obstructions. Candido studied the path ahead, trying to estimate the best possible path for the tank’s treads. Bent stubs of steel bar gleaned rubbish from the wind like fangs raking flesh; they could as easily slash the tank’s treads—break them. It was hard to make the brakes hold. He could hardly slow the tank’s ponderous, headlong drive.
A thump and a lurch, and the tank mounted onto the platform. A crunch and a long, slowing grind as the tank straddled a pier and crumbled it under its belly. Candido felt something break. He wondered if it was part of the tank or the pier. The tank barged onward, bumping and lurching, and he had to work on the brakes to keep the tank square to the wind. Suddenly he felt something else give.
But the tank was in the dead zone now, under the sphere. The wind’s seethe was like sawteeth, snarling, but now it was without force. Candido realized he hadn’t put on his breather mask, and his ears felt plugged by the low pressure. With numb, fumbling, trembling fingers he got his mask on. He breathed deeply, only now aware how badly he needed it. His blood seemed to vibrate and burn.
He signaled to Storch, and the younger man unlocked and opened the turret-top hatch. Leaning far back. Candido could look up through the opening and see the sphere overhead, whirling like a model of the planet Jupiter. He shifted the tank back and forth, hitching it around until, finally, he was satisfied. The tank had to be in just the right position. Everything had to be just right. When he was satisfied, he put a hand on Storch’s shoulder. He nodded.
“Ready,” he said. The mask changed the word to a mumble, but Storch understood. The younger man checked the handling rig—modified again for this job—as carefully as if it were a supersonic aircraft. Only when he was satisfied did he put it in gear, to take power from the engine. Candido swung his periscope around to watch.
The hoodlike carapace separated into two hemispheres, like a beetle putting back it’s wing covers to fly. Fingertipheld between paired booms, the turned bowl upward and extended like ladles, one to each side, as the booms straightened out from their original hairpin bend. With a hard snap, the booms locked straight and the hemispheres—until now swinging free—locked level. Rigid, Candido thought, and let himself breathe again.
Storch shifted to another gear. Slowly, for the hemispheres were heavy and the gears had been rigged to account for that, the booms hinged upward. Candido revved the Diesel. It changed the speed of the hemispheres’ rising hardly at all. Minutes—it seemed like days—passed. Candido thought grimly of the joke about you’ll never get it off the ground, and all he could hear was the Diesel’s growl and the cry of the wind and the creak of metal joints under strain. The wind touched the lips of the hemispheres. The tank vibrated. Something buzzed resonantly.
Candido cracked the throttle full open. The engine erupted. The hemispheres lifted like the wings of a startled bird, and suddenly the wind caught them and swung them upward in arcs on the ends of their booms. The clang as they met overhead was like the gong of doom. It burned the ears like dentist’s drills.
Abruptly, wind battered the tank. Thunder drummed. Candido’s ears popped with a sudden jump of pressure. The thunder boomed on and on, as if they were sealed in a room with giants pounding on the walls. He could feel the impact of the sound on his body. It was like being shaken like a child’s rag doll. Slowly, by degrees, the thunder melted away.
Candido took off his breather mask. Not needed now. The air was full of dust. It smelled musty. Through the open hatchway, he could see the steel globe enclosing the space where the congruency had been—where it might still be, for that matter, inside that steel container. He breathed deeply. Not until now had he been sure the two hemispheres would meet and fit together without smashing each other, or without one or the other overshooting and passing into the congruency. But the engineers who’d worked on the thing had designed well. Neither had happened.
He climbed out of the tank. The wind still blew, but now it was only a gentle, warm wind. In all directions, storm clouds grayed the sky. As he stood there on the tank’s superstructure, it began to rain. He got back inside. He closed the hatch against the torrent.
“We stopped it, Ken,” he said. He opened the lunch pail he’d packed and handed a sandwich to Storch, took one himself, and poured himself a cup of coffee from the thermos. “The wind’s still blowing out there,” he said. “We’ll have to stay here a while.”
The jeep came, at last, in the last dim vestige of twilight. Its headlamps glistened on the wet concrete of the foundation, but the rain had stopped, finally, more than an hour ago.
By that time, Candido had been able to look the tank over. The treads had lost a total of seven shoes. Several more were badly torn. In two places, the linkage of the left tread was partly broken. A few more yards and likely the tank would have been immobilized. He felt numb and tight-skinned, thinking about that.
The congruency was still there, inside the steel shell. The hemispheres hadn’t sealed perfectly, and a trickle of air was leaking in through the crack. Trask and L’Heuroux climbed out of the jeep and approached. Candido leaned against the tank and let them come. They picked their way across the hazards of the wrecked foundation with a flashlight, even so stumbling from time to time. When they got there, at first they said nothing. Trask beamed the flashlight upward and played it over the steel globe’s surface.
“I checked,” Candido said. “No fractures. It’ll hold, at least till we make a tighter one.”
“Of course you realize,” L’Heuroux said, “the congruency is still there, inside. This doesn’t solve the problem.”
“Doesn’t it?” Candido asked. “Gentle breeze, we’ve got now.” Actually, it was blowing a stiff twenty miles an hour, but the point was made. “When I’ve got a boat that leaks, I plug the hole.”
The flashlight beam fixed on something that protruded from the globe’s underside. It was a short length of pipe, with a valve wheel beside it. “What’s that?” Trask asked.
“Just what it looks like,” Candido said. “A storage tank’s no good without an outlet.”
“Outlet? Storage? I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I’m starting a new business,” Candido said. “That’s why I wanted this chunk of land. I’m going to sell vacuums—the emptiest vacuums anywhere in the world. How much do you think they’ll pay for a gallon of real nothing—no impurities?”
Another thought came. He smiled. Maybe he’d lay a pipeline—maybe all the way to the east coast. Plenty of people would pay for a vacuum you get just from turning a faucet, and he had an unlimited supply. Should be a real good business.
1968
Hawk Among the Sparrows
Throw an ultra-modern, nuclear-missile-armed supersonic fighter back through time against WWI planes—and what chance would the wood-and-cloth planes of that era have?!
The map-position scope on the left side of Pika-Don’s instrument panel showed where he was, but it didn’t show airfields. Right now, Howard Farman needed an airfield. He glanced again at the fuel gauge. Not a chance of making it to Frankfurt, or even into West Germany. Far below, white clouds like a featureless ocean sprawled all the way to the horizon.
Those clouds shouldn’t have been there. Less than four hours ago, before he lifted off the Eagle, he’d studied a set of weather satellite photos freshly televised down from orbit. Southern France had been almost clear—only a dotting of cottonboll tufts. It shouldn’t have been possible for solid overcast to build up so fast. For the dozenth time, he flipped through the meteorological data on his clipboard. No, nothing that could have created such a change.
That made two things he hadn’t been able to figure out. The other was even stranger. He’d lifted from the Eagle’s deck at midmorning. The French bomb test he’d been snooping had blinded him for a while—how long he didn’t know—and Pika-Don was thrown out of control. The deadman circuit had cut in; control was re-established. When his sight came back—and it couldn’t have been terribly long—the sun had been halfway down in the west.
It wasn’t possible. Pika-Don didn’t carry enough fuel to stay up that long.
Just the same, she’d stayed up, and she still had almost half her load. When he couldn’t find the Eagle near Gibraltar, he’d thought there was enough to take him to the American airbase at Frankfurt. (And where could the Eagle have gone? What could have happened to her radar beacon? Could the French blast have smashed Pika-Don’s reception equipment? Everything else seemed to work all right. But he’d made an eyeball search, too. Aircraft tenders didn’t just vanish.)
On the map scope, the Rhone valley crawled slowly southward under the north-moving central piplight that marked Pika-Don’s inertially computed position. It matched perfectly the radar-scanned terrain displayed on the airspace viewscope on the right-hand side of the instrument panel. Frankfurt was still beyond the horizon, more than four hundred miles off. Pika-Don didn’t have fuel to cover half that distance.
Well, he wouldn’t find an airfield by staying up here, above that carpet of cloud. He eased the throttles back and put Pika-Don’s nose down. She’d burn fuel a lot faster down close to the deck, but at mach 1.5 he could search a lot of ground before the tanks went dry.
Not that he absolutely had to find an airfield. Pika-Don could put down almost anywhere if she had to. But an airfield would make it a lot simpler to get a new load of fuel, and it would make less complicated the problems that would come from putting down in a technically still friendly nation.
It was a long way down. He watched the radar-echo altimeter reel downward like a clock thrown into panicked reverse; watched the skin temperature gauge edge up, level out, edge up again as Pika-Don descended into thicker air. For the first eighty thousand feet, visibility was perfect, but at twelve thousand feet Pika-Don went into the clouds; it was like being swallowed by gray night. Uneasily, Farman watched the radar horizon; these clouds might go down all the way to the ground, and at mach 1.5 there wouldn’t be anything left but a smear if Pika-Don hit. She was too sweet an airplane for that. Besides, he was inside.
He broke out into clear air a little under four thousand feet. A small city lay off to his right. He turned toward it. Beaufort, the map scope said. There’d be some sort of airfield near it. He pulled the throttles back as far as he dared—just enough to maintain airspeed. The machmeter slipped back to 1.25.
He passed north of the town, scanning the land. No sign of a field. He circled southward, careful to keep his bearing away from the town’s center. There’d be trouble enough about his coming down in France—aerial trespass by a nuclear-armed warplane, to start with—without half the townspeople screaming about smashed windows, cracked plaster, and roosters that stopped laying eggs. The ambassador in Paris was going to earn his paycheck this week.
Still no airfield. He went around again, farther out. Dozens of villages flashed past below. He tore his flight plan, orders, and weather data off their clipboard—crammed the papers into the disposal funnel; wouldn’t do to have nosy Frenchmen pawing that stuff, not at all. He substituted the other flight plan—the one they’d given him just in case he had to put down in French or French-friendly territory.
He was starting his third circuit and the fuel gauge was leaning against the red mark when he saw the field. It wasn’t much of a place—just a grassy postage stamp with a few old planes in front of three ramshackle sheds and a windsock flopping clumsily over the middle one. He put around, aimed for it, and converted to vertical thrust. Airspeed dropped quickly—there was a momentary surge of wing-surface heating—and then he was hovering only a few miles from the field. He used the deflectors to cover the distance, losing altitude as he went. He jockeyed to a position near the hangars, faced Pika-Don into the wind, and let her down.
The engines died—starved of fuel—before he could cut them off.
It took a while to disconnect all the umbilici that linked him into Pika-Don’s control and environment systems. Some of the connections were hard to reach. It took a while longer to raise the canopy, climb over the side, and drop to the ground. Two soldiers were waiting for him. They had rifles.
The bigger one—the one with the bushy moustache—spoke dangerously. Farman didn’t know French, but their gestures with rifle muzzles were a universal language. He raised his hands. “I’m an American,” he said. “I ran out of fuel.” He hoped they weren’t disciples of the late le grand Charles. They looked nasty enough.
The two exchanged glances. “Americaine?” the smaller one asked. He was clean-shaved. His eyes had a deep, hollow look. He didn’t sound at all displeased.
Farman nodded vigorously. “Yes. American.” He pointed to the fifty-one-star flag on his coverall sleeve. Their faces broke into delighted smiles and they put down their weapons. The small one—he made Farman think of a terrier, and his rifle was absurdly big for him—pointed to a shack beyond the hangars. “Come.”
