Prescription for Chaos (56 page)

Overhead, a bright light on a pole passed rapidly over the highway, illuminating a seething brown pile on the handling machine that carried it. The aliens below were struggling out of their suits. One of them jumped over to try to get at the wires that ran out from the machine. An arrow streaked out, and this time Cardan saw where it came from—a slit under a raised cover on the side of the disabled monster tank.

A few moments later, Maclane said, "The bees are in the ship, Chief. And, boy—the aliens are out of it!"

"Any trouble?"

"Not much. I just had to move the queen, and the rest came along. They weren't in a good mood, though, believe me." Maclane was silent a moment, then said, "What a shambles. And these are the people who almost had us whipped a few hours back."

"When it started out," said Cardan, "they could hit us without our striking back. Now the situation is reversed."

"I hope they don't get it reversed again."

"Their time's running out. Whitely's closing in on them. If he does it the way I think he'll do it, he'll draw them off first by hitting them from the south and southeast, then he'll come down on them like a ton of bricks from the north."

"What do we do?"

"Keep them miserable. And somehow we've got to get Donovan out of that giant tank and away from here. He's in there firing out arrows at anyone who tries to get near the grid, and that's fine, except that the gas may get him when Whitely attacks."

"I think I can get a message to him, Chief. He knows Morse, and I can bang and scrape a piece of metal on the tank for dots and dashes."

"Good. Go to it."

A file of cylinders started down the hill, and began to cross the road. Cardan went to work to sabotage them as they passed.

In the east, it was starting to get light.

Maclane had persuaded Donovan to get out, and Donovan had just disappeared around the bend in the steam car, when from the opposite direction Cardan noticed a kind of fog begin to drift across the scene.

Maclane said, "Here it comes, Chief."

The fog began to thicken, rolling across the road and flat land below. Far off in the distance, there was a sudden blaze of light.

Cardan shifted his cigar, and watched intently. The glare, whatever it was, reminded him of thermite. Then he remembered the two cylinders that had been on guard up the road.

Somewhere up the road, twin beams of light reached out through the fog, and rapidly approached, followed by two more sets of lights.

A cylinder rolled across the road, its gun swinging uncertainly around.

A burst of flame sprang out at the cylinder, and it rolled aside and smashed down the embankment.

Through the gray mist moved an old high-wheeled steam car, a man in a gas mask crouched at the wheel, and another in the seat behind him.

Behind this car came two more, and as they pulled to the side, men jumped off two long flat-bed wagons drawn behind the cars. In the mist, the gas-masked figures dropped over the bank and disappeared.

It wasn't much over an hour later when Miss Bowen said, "General Whitely's on the line, Mr. Cardan."

Cardan glanced around the room. All but one of the circuits had been disassembled, the parts put back in storage bins, and the boards burned up.

Whitely's voice jumped out of the phone. "Hello, Bugs. Where are you?"

"Inside the Milford plant."

"I've got aerial photos here, and the industrial section of Milford's knocked flat."

"Then I guess we got into the subbasement just in time. How are things where you are?"

"We're rounding them up, what's left of them. Say, Bugs, they had quite a run of bad luck, you know that?"

"So I gathered from your last message." Cardan studied his cigar and waited.

"We'll be in to dig you out as soon as we get this cleaned up. We're anxious to know what you did it with."

"Did what with?"

"You know what I mean."

"Don't rush too fast getting here," said Cardan. "This place is well-shielded and we've got a good food supply."

"Don't try to dismantle it, Bugs. We can use it, whatever it is. And we'll be there as fast as we can get there."

Cardan said irritatedly, "The viewer we had was upstairs, and upstairs has been blasted to bits. Talk sense, Tarface."

The general said in a low hard voice, "It's going to be like that, is it?"

"Like what?"

"You know what I mean."

"Maybe you'd better spell it out."

"I'll spell it out in private."

Cardan drew on his cigar. "Before you go running off half-cocked after some figment of your imagination, Tarface, you'd better get a good grip on that equipment the aliens were using. There ought to be enough stuff there to make you happy, provided you don't accidentally shut off the field and get blown up with your own nuclear device."

"I've thought of that long since," said the general coldly. "The fact that a man is in uniform doesn't mean that he's a fool."

"I'm sorry, Tarface," said Cardan.

After a brief silence, Whitely said, "It's all right, Bugs. But I don't understand your attitude." There was a pause. "And I don't think I like it."

Cardan's eyes narrowed. "We've known each other a long time, Tarface. But don't ever get the idea you're going to tell me what to do, or I'll tie you in knots and beat your brains into your boots." Cardan sat up, warming to the subject.

A small voice came out of the phone. "I'm sorry Bugs. I got carried away."

Cardan cut off his next sentence. "That's O.K. I know how it is."

"Listen, we'll be in to dig you out as soon as we can."

"Don't take any unnecessary risks. We're all right here."

"O.K. And thanks, for whatever it was."

"You're welcome, for whatever it was."

The general laughed. "So long, Bugs. We'll be seeing you."

"So long. Tarface."

Cardan put the phone back in its cradle.

Maclane handed him the headset of the one remaining circuit. "I thought you might want to take a last look, Chief, before we disassemble it."

Cardan looked at the miserable collection of feline-faced giants, chained together, and being loaded into trucks.

Cardan studied the scene for a moment, then handed back the headset.

Maclane said, as he started to disassemble the circuit. "It's an imperfect world, where you can have a thing like this and not be able to use it freely and openly."

"Imperfect," said Cardan, "but it's still ours. And as long as that's so, some day things may be different."

"I'm not so sure," said Maclane. "I've been thinking about it, and I'm afraid it would cause terrific dislocation."

Cardan nodded. "Sure," he said. "It will cause dislocation. But there's a precedent for that. Remember, they used to clap certain people in prison, excommunicate them for heresy, jeer and make jokes about them. What they were doing caused dislocation, too. Therefore it had to be stopped, or so it seemed."

Maclane scowled. "You mean, witches practicing witchcraft?"

"No," said Cardan. "I mean, scientists practicing science. Think what happened to Galileo."

Maclane said somberly, "New things throw people off balance. They don't like it."

Cardan nodded. "Taking a step forward throws the human body off balance, too. But it's a good sign when the first steps are taken, however hesitantly.

"When someone starts to walk, even with screams of fear and rage, he's growing up."

Alarik Kade had not spent fifty-eight years of his life on The Project without acquiring an instinct for a day that is really going to go sour.

Signs and portents a tyro would scarcely connect up often gave him the first powerful indications. Things like the hungry redjacket drill that droned down the ventilation pipe around 0266 the night before, popped through a rusty spot in the screen, then whined around the room, banging into concrete floor, ceiling, and walls at random till it picked up the heat radiation from Alarik, huddled under a light comforter with the pillow over his head.

The drill hit the comforter, and Alarik sprang out of bed in a rush. The ring of night-glow dots around the lamp base guided him quickly to the lamp, but where was the striker? As Alarik groped around the tabletop, he could hear behind him the
zzt-zzt
and half-hysterical whine as the drill got into the warm covers and stabbed around in all directions for some place to draw blood.

Cursing under his breath, Alarik felt the cold curving surface of a pewter water pitcher, the smooth back of a closed razor, a slim volume containing logarithms to the base eight, a handkerchief, a thick book of well-tested pragmatic formulas and their constants, an ashtray with gold-plated model of an early turbine plane, a glossy brochure telling why he should buy Koggik Steel, a progress report he should have read last night and hadn't, a .50 Special Service Revolver with all four barrels full of rust, a Lawyer Skeel mystery with three shapely girls on the cover, which he shouldn't have read last night but did—but no striker.

The whine of the drill was growing increasingly petulant. At any moment the thing might detect Alarik with its heat-sensitive nose and come for him. What would happen then, he thought, would be that in trying to hit the drill, he would knock the pitcher over and soak the book and papers on the table. With a sense of grim satisfaction in his foresight, Alarik set the pitcher on the floor, close to one of the table's massive cross-braced legs, and then felt of the tabletop again.

A little beyond where the pitcher had been, his three outstretched fingers felt the flaring squeeze-grip of the striker.

Just then, the whine grew suddenly louder. Alarik ducked, banged his head, and the striker clattered to the floor. The drill smacked into the wall behind him. Alarik groped for the striker. The drill took off in a new line and hit him squarely in the back.

The room seemed to take a somersault.

Alarik came to with his face in the concrete and the last dregs of the drill's knock-out poison fogging his mind. His head ached, he could hear a noise in his ears like the roar of a waterfall, and there was a throbbing bump on his back about half the size of his fist.

Dizzily he pulled himself to his feet.

The way things had happened so far assured him he was in for a rough day. Whether it would be a real record-breaker, he told himself, remained to be seen.

He took a step forward, and put his right foot squarely into the water pitcher. His foot slid in smoothly and tightly and in clutching for support he knocked the razor off onto the floor. As he gripped the edge of the table, a muffled banging whine told him a fresh and hungry drill was blundering down the vent pipe.

Keeping a tight grip on his emotions, Alarik lowered himself to the floor and felt for the striker. His hand closed instead around the open blade of the razor. He gingerly shut the razor, slid it out of the way under the table, and heard it hit something with a metallic
clink
.

Alarik groped under the table, found the striker, stood up with his weight resting on his left foot, squeezed the striker once to see the cluttered tabletop by the light of the striker's sparks, managed to get the glass shade off the lamp without breaking anything, turned the knob of the rack-and-pinion mechanism to get the fragile mantle up out of the way, opened the gascock, and squeezed the handle of the striker. The flints scraped across the ridged steel, the gas lit with a
pop
, and Alarik triumphantly put on the chimney and lowered the mantle. The mantle lit up in a dazzling glare that showed a second redjacket drill, as big as Alarik's thumb, pushing in through the ventilator screen.

Alarik sprang forward to kill it, slipped, and landed on the floor. The drill streaked around overhead, Alarik's right arm and leg jerked up in a self-protective reflex, the water pitcher stuck to his right foot emptied itself in his face, and just then the drill detected the promising heat of the lamp. The drill whizzed around in tight circles, shot down the chimney, and whipped the mantle to bits. The room fell dark, and the gas jet settled down to incinerating the drill. A column of greasy smoke rose from the lamp chimney, and a powerful choking odor filled the room.

All this left Alarik Kade, Chairman-Director of the Special Project, half-choked and with one foot in a pitcher, picking the smoldering remains of one drill out of the lamp while still dizzy from the bite of another, and with the muffled hopeful buzz of yet a third standing the hair on end all over his body.

That was how the day started.

And experience told Alarik that with a start like that, it was bound to be a day he would never forget—if he lived through it.

The sunlight, when Alarik came up into it, after finishing out the miserable night, lit up a day that, on its surface, at least, looked good.

For one thing, there was not a cloud in the sky. That meant reasonably good ground observation. He glanced up, and saw, far overhead, the glint of the shiny aluminum gondola of
Sunbird
. The name made him uneasy, reminding him of the hydrogen that had been substituted for helium in the hope of getting a little more precious lift for high-altitude observation. A brief dazzling flash told him that
Sunbird's
signal mirrors were working properly, and that in turn meant that the aggravating difficulties with the seals of the remote arm were taken care of, at least for the present.

Off over the flat bright sand to his right, at the end of the long runway, the big turbine plane was being slowly wheeled around. Judging from the slowness with which it was turned, it already had its load of fuel and water, and being perfectly reliable, no one was worried about it. Slung under its midsection like a babe clinging to its mother was one of his two big headaches.

To his left, like an upright giant dagger with nearly conical blade and an almost cylindrical haft, stood The Beast. This was his other, and much larger, headache. Contradictory emotions of love and hate welled up in Alarik as he looked at it. No one could work on The Project for all this time without feeling a little of both these emotions.