Martinson’s drastic piloting got them down to a rough landing, on the wheels, on the road leading to the Otisville station, slightly under a mile away from the mountain. They taxied the rest of the way. The crowd left the mouth of the tunnel to cluster around the airplane the moment it had come to a stop, but a few moments’ questioning convinced McDonough that the Otisvilleans knew very little. Some of them had heard “a turrible noise” in the early morning, and with the first light had discovered the bright metal coating the sides of the tunnel. No, there hadn’t been any smoke. No, nobody heard any sounds in the tunnel. You couldn’t see the other end of it, though; something was blocking it.
“The signal’s red on this side,” McDonough said thought-fully while he helped the adjutant tie the plane down. “You used to run the PBX board for the Erie in Port, didn’t you, Marty? If you were to phone the station master there, maybe we could get him to throw a block on the other end of the tunnel.”
“If there’s wreckage in there, the block will be on automat-ically.”
“Sure. But we’ve got to go in there. I don’t want the Number Six piling in after us.”
Martinson nodded, and went inside the railroad station.
McDonough looked around. There was, as usual, a motorized hand truck parked off the tracks on the other side of the embankment. Many willing hands helped him set it on the right of way, and several huskies got the one-lung engine started for him. Getting his own apparatus out of the plane and onto the truck, however, was a job for which he refused all aid. The stuff was just too delicate, for all its weight, to be allowed in the hands of laymenand never mind that McDonough himself was almost as much of a layman in neurophysiology as they were; he at least knew the coUimat-ing tables and the cookbook.