“Had to block in the oceans and rivers, didn’t we?” said Sleepy, with a wink at Barteber. “Have a drink, kid?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Well, there’s no harm in that, but I always say that a good engineer is a lot better a quart later. Why, you ought to hear some of the things I’ve planned when I had two quarts! One time I figured out a scheme to build a bridge from Mars to Jupiter and I would have done it too, only the sun kept getting in the way. You see, it would have radized the metal and nobody could have crossed.
“And then there was the asteroid assembly project,” he continued. “I did that on a bottle and a half. You ball up all the asteroids of some busted planet and they catch fission and you’ve got a sun close to cold planets which revolve around the original sun and lights the—”
“I’m sure it is impractical,” said Tommer.
“Mister Kaltenborn, if Mister Sleepy says it will work,” said Barteber, “it will work. I seen him take—”
But Tommer had left in disgust.
About one o’clock, Sleepy called the men together and made them take loose tools and equipment into the twelve sledged huts. Then he ordered the men themselves into the huts. At three, he and the atomic electrician took a lonely stand on the “deck” of the construction hut.
Sleepy pulled out a bottle. “Here’s how.”
“How,” said the electrician with a grin.
Sleepy put his boot on a plunger and pressed.
Suddenly the upper atmosphere of Planet Six began to glow in pulsing sheets. The glow spread and brightened until it blotted the daylight. A beating concussion was faintly felt on the ground and Sleepy braced himself against the outer wall. He gravely presented the bottle again.
Suddenly the upper atmosphere of Planet Six began to glow in pulsing sheets.
“Here’s how,” he said.
The electrician grinned. “How,” he said.
They wiped their mouths by scrubbing them into their fur collars. The electrician shoved down on the second plunger.
There was a growing roar and the ground began to shake harder and harder until the mountains reeled and danced under the pounding of the upper flashes.
Suddenly the rain came. It was torrential. A man without a helmet would have drowned in a moment. The great drops battered at the rocks and rebounded until the entire surface everywhere was a racing glaze of water, water which mirrored the upper flashes. In a few minutes the valley where the cats had worked so long was so full that all was covered from sight. In half an hour the sledges themselves had become boats and were floating.
The water was shocked and beaten by the repeated earthquakes, and the ranges of mountains, invisible through the downpour, suddenly displayed themselves by their gigantic flashes. They were exploding into volcanoes.
The twenty-thousand-foot tower, anchored by force rays, shook under the onslaught, bending and quivering but standing just the same.
Sleepy pushed the bottle inside his helmet trap, said “Here’s how,” and drank once more, handing it to the electrician.
“How!”
And the third plunger went down.
It was time to duck. The sledges were bobbing already. Shortly something else would hit them. Wind. The blow began to scream in earnest about seven, and it kept up ceaselessly for the next three days.
The sledges were protected by the volcanoes to some extent, but they were battered, nevertheless, by a hundred-mile-an-hour storm. What the speed of wind must have been five miles up, no one could calculate. What batterings the hills and mountains took was not subject to mere computation.
Like a million banshees cut loose all at the same time, the hurricane roared on and on. Now and again mountains belched. Again and again new chain reactions went off in the upper atmosphere. And the water rose and rose and the waves surged and beat.
Sleepy played no poker. The visograph was out of operation for the moment. He lay in his bunk and read an erudite treatise called “Shady Ladies” and sipped his whiskey thoughtfully. Whatever Tommer might be thinking about all this was no concern of one Sleepy McGee.
About nine o’clock the morning of the tenth day, Barteber shoved a cup of hot coffee into Sleepy’s sleeping hand and said, “The rain’s stopped.”
That woke Sleepy. He went to the leaded glass port where somebody had written the names and addresses of a half a dozen faraway girls and wiped off the chalk smears. Indeed, the rain had stopped. But the hurricane wind continued.
Sleepy drank his coffee and let the gale blow itself out. At three that afternoon the waters were calm and settling and he stood on the deck of his sledge and waved to men coming out on theirs. All twelve had weathered the elements, being undentable and self-contained, but two had dragged their moorings and were about a mile farther on.
Lifting his helmet gingerly, Sleepy took a sniff at the air. It was good and he removed his helmet. Jetabo’s bluish haze was not so blue now, being filtered through a mist, and the aspect of this planet was something to gratify Sleepy’s heart.
The water was draining away in huge rivers. The wind, having eroded mightily against every protrusion, had provided enough silt to color the streams brown. There would be bottom land and soil.
The following morning, Sleepy went off in a scout ship they had dredged up and took a look at the planet. He flew at ninety thousand feet, with tracers taking down all necessary data of coastlines, prominent rivers and mountains.
The geology had changed enormously, due to some thirty pounds of plutonium, a crude explosive, injected into this planet’s core. The rarefied atmosphere had broken down the component parts of methane and ammonia into something which could be breathed everywhere on the planet. There were enough seas to provide air saturation and guarantee rainfall, and enough deposits of eroded soil to make crops possible.
When he returned just after dark, he had a map of the planet as it now existed and he could send, by latitude and longitude, four other planes to scatter tons of various seeds.
When he had sent them he found Tommer recovering from a bad case of seasickness. Tommer was sitting by the galley stove being consoled by Barteber and trying to get warm.
Sleepy was about to add his condolences when a sputter of jets told of a landing spacecraft and visitors.
Doyle was in complete helmet and ammonia suit, as were the rest, and they were astonished to find a window open. Nervously, Doyle made a motion to close it, saw that Sleepy, Barteber and Tommer wore no helmets and gingerly removed his own.
“I got action,” said Doyle. “I brought your vice-president in charge of construction and he has seen fit—”
“Hello, Bainsly,” said Sleepy.
“Hello, Sleepy. What’s up?”
“You’re in time to inspect,” said Sleepy. “But have a drink.” He poured several tumblers full. “She’s got a proper atmosphere, with plenty of water in the right places. She’s got soil and the boys are out scattering seeds to hold it where it is, and I guess that is about that. We’re nine days ahead of deadline so that’s a nine million bonus.”
Doyle didn’t drink. “That’s impossible! When I left here twenty-one days ago, nothing had been done. You worked for four months—”
“You mean we studied potentials for four months,” said Sleepy.
“You could have done this in half the time!” Doyle raged. “I demand to know why you fooled around with those cats!”
“Come,” said Sleepy, and moved his languid length out to the deck.
He took the others over to the hut which had been sealed on Doyle’s departure and had the seal struck off.
“Witnesses will state that this has not been opened since you last entered it, Doyle. . . . Come in, gentlemen.”
Sleepy then began to tear up the flooring with a crowbar and shortly there were r
evealed cat-track pins, detonators and all manner of necessary small equipment.
“The cats were bait, Doyle,” said Sleepy. “Bainsly here can tell you all about such things. You wanted to slow us down and you thought you did. You would have gotten an entire planet remake for nothing, and transportation for your colonists as well, if this sabotage had succeeded. But you didn’t kill any men, and so I don’t think my company will make a charge. You’ll have to talk it over with Bainsly, of course, but unless you’ve got nine million cash here and now, Planetary Engineering Construction Co., Inc., will be putting up one planet for auction. And that’s profitable enough, Doyle.”
The inspection party had left early in the afternoon, taking the hope of Colonial Enterprises with them. Barteber was getting dinner and singing about a “gal who wouldn’t say her prayers,” and Tommer sat listening to the sad, sad fate of that creature.
Tommer’s gaze shifted to the visograph and the stud poker game with Mart Lonegan.
Mart was winning today and his debt was down to eighteen thousand dollars.
“Mr. McGee,” Tommer said at last, “do you think it would take me very long to learn stud poker?”
“Why no, Tommer. Not at all. In fact, I’d be willing to teach you myself.”
The Obsolete Weapon
The Obsolete Weapon
RATS squeaked, vermin scuttled, drunks stank and the noisome dark oppressed. The American Military Prison in Rome was exceedingly unkind to the senses.
Now that the Tedeschi had fled northward, American arms sought to integrate a conquest and a people.
In the dankest, foulest cell that G-2 could provide, a brace of allegedly choice criminals kept diffident company.
“Anguis in herba!” howled one from the caldron of his troubled slumber. This, and the other Latin gibberish he had screamed, did not soothe his companion, who now finally protested.
Danny West was some minutes pulling himself from the muddy maelstrom of his nightmares, but at last he scrubbed his eyes with horny knuckles and blinked nervously at his companion.
“You were dreaming,” said his cellmate.
“If that was a dream,” said Danny West, “then this cell is Allah’s number one Paradise!”
“You’re an American, aren’t you?” queried his cellmate with polite interest.
“Sure, from Teague County, Texas!”
“Then why the Latin?”
Danny West scuttled backward two feet and watched from there, gaping suspiciously.
“What Latin?” he said.
“You just called somebody ‘a snake in the grass.’”
Danny hedged. “Well, he was . . . well . . . er— Forget it!”
“Don’t get me wrong,” said his cellmate. “You’ve got me curious, that’s all. What are you, an American soldier, doing with a mouth full of Latin?”
“I was associate professor of ancient languages before they snatched me into this cockeyed mess,” said Danny West. He was plainly hoping to change the subject. “Lay it to aqua vitae.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say so. From what I could pick up—”
Danny West looked dangerous.
“Shut up!” he said. “Shut up! Leave me alone!”
There was quiet then, the cellmate having retired offendedly to the farthest corner, where he sat brooding for more than half an hour.
The feeling that he had given offense wore upon Danny. The screaming urge within him to communicate drove him further. At last he crossed the cell and sat down on the blanket alongside his cellmate.
“Have a cigarette,” he said by way of apology.
The cellmate took one, looked at it for some time as though doubtful what one must do with such an article. At last he permitted it to be lighted, and drew on it carefully.
“I guess I’d better tell you,” said Danny West, the flashboards tearing away from the top of his conversational dam. “I’ve got to tell somebody! Or I’ll begin to think I’m crazy myself.”
His cellmate put a lazy guard on his interest. “By all means,” he said. “Fire away.”
Well—said Danny West—about twenty-four hours ago I was fighting for my life harder than anybody at any training camp ever dreamed of. And the kind of fighting I was doing wasn’t included in any training manuals either.
I haven’t fought the Germans yet, but when it comes to that, after what I’ve been through I’ll take my chances.
You know how it was yesterday afternoon, just about like it is now, the air hot and thick and a storm coming on. Our outfit had been coming forward for two days without any rest and all yesterday we walked in dust behind tanks for what seemed like fifteen million years.
I was tired. Everybody was tired. But when we got into the city it seemed everybody from the commanding general down had some lousy fatigue duty for us to do. There wasn’t any outfit in the army except Company B of the Nineteenth.
Me, after I put about eighteen billets in shape for other guys to sleep in, I finally got routed out by that stinking captain of ours and told that I had been detailed to reinforce the local MP company. He said there were going to be a lot of riots and that two squads were to go and stand duty for any emergency that came up. We were flying squads.
It had been getting hotter and hotter. Some big clouds slid in over Rome, and finally opened up with enough artillery to end the war.
Our captain marched us down to the Colosseum and then left us standing there in the rain, while he went off to some soft bunk someplace.
The sergeant watched him go and the rest of us tried to find a dry spot under the stones. Then the sergeant said, “I got to make a routine patrol,” and he disappeared.
Then one of the corporals said, “I got to make a routine patrol, too,” and he disappeared. And the first thing I knew there wasn’t anybody left there but me.
Pretty soon this stinking captain of ours came back and in the course of that time I was sound asleep—rain, mud and all. He gave me a swift kick in the side and says, “On your feet! Attention! What do you mean by sleeping on duty? Where are the others?”
So I says, “They’re out making routine patrols, Captain.”
“I’ll routine patrol them,” he says and stamps off, probably to find some place a lot drier than it was outside the Colosseum.
I walked up and down for a few minutes but there wasn’t anything doing. The population of Rome just wasn’t thinking about rioting. It was either kissing the boots of the conquering army, or shacking up, or drowning its sorrows in vino.
They had given us riot guns, a couple of bandoliers of ammunition apiece, and three tear gas grenades per man. Then they took away our own weapons, the only ones we knew how to use, as being too heavy for street fighting.
The gun I was carrying must have been made for the Franco-Prussian War. I sat down and looked at it a little while and tried to figure out how the thing worked. I had nothing better to do and you never know in the middle of a war when you’re going to need your weapons.
I had to make up my own manual about the thing as I went along, but later on I was sure glad that I’d taken the trouble. The old baby was an automatic shotgun weighing about fifteen pounds, with an eight-gauge barrel that would have fitted better on a howitzer. It was fully automatic and its ammunition would have broken the springs on a lorry.
I got tired when I was sure the captain wasn’t coming back and began to look for a dry hole under the stones. The lightning kept cracking down like the end of the world. The rain had stopped falling in drops and had joined hands to make close formation. You had to have gills to breathe in that weather.
So I found this hole, and I crawled in. About two seconds later a lightning bolt hit the top of the Colosseum and showered enough mortar down to rebuild a village. That’s all I know.
Immediately afterwards I
was awakened by the roaring of wild beasts. It was as though a circus tent had caught on fire and the menagerie was fighting its way out. It was a symphony of racket that made the ground shake under me. From the bass roars of the lions to the yelps of the dogs, the voice of every animal could be picked out of that din. Cutting through it, weaving circles around it, slicing it up and tramping it down were the trumpetings of at least a hundred wild elephants.
I was lying in straw and the sun was bright through bars. The straw stank, the animals stank, and I was scared. Plainly, somebody had done me dirt.
The walls about me were of wood, except on one side where a grating barred my way. There was no exit that I could find, and my speculations ran the limit from military prison to a new war machine of the Tedeschi.
It was morning, but I had not slept. I was still soaked with the rain, which a moment before I knew had been falling.
I didn’t really begin to shake, though, until a hideous crescendo of human screams began to shake the building. There was enough agony in those screams to load a freight train.
My explorations grew swift and I discovered presently that I was not in a cell but in a sort of hallway, one end of which was blocked by the iron grate, the other end by a large wooden door. On the other side of the latter I could hear a swelling, murmuring sound, like a crowd at a football game.
I still had my riot gun, three gas grenades, and, I hoped, my wits. I was about to shoot the lock off the wooden door when a small black dwarf came wriggling up to the iron bars and peered through. He looked, gaped, and quickly ran away.
I yelled for him to come back, and so he did, with a man whose dress had unmistakably not been seen on earth for the last two thousand years.
He was a big man. With one hand he carried a bucket full of live coals and in the other hand he had a long glowing poker. His face was brutal, like a gorilla’s.
“Listen, fellows,” I said, “how about letting me out of here?”
They stared at each other and began a long argument which was punctuated by jabs toward the little man by the big man’s hot poker.