Some people had nightmares about the times they’d almost bought the farm themselves. Kelly saw instead faces distorted by pain or rage or the shock waves of the bullet already splashing flesh to the side. He was as likely to awaken screaming as those who feared their own death; and he was surely as likely to slug his brain with alcohol to blur the memories he knew it could not erase.
But it was the only thing Tom Kelly did that his gut knew he could win at, and he was only really alive during those rare moments that he was winning.
The edge of the spherical hub began to rotate past the open door of the cage. A gray-haired woman in a skirt and bemedaled jacket glanced over her shoulder toward the cage. Kelly squeezed the valve lever in the pistol grip and, as the nozzle began to buck, fired an ignition cartridge with the lever under his left hand.
Recoil from Kelly’s shot, a five-pound stream of napalm, thrust him back against the wall of the elevator cage, but that was of no significance to the effect of the short burst. The veteran had only a momentary glimpse past the uniformed woman before his flame obliterated the scene, but there were at least two dozen figures in the center of the hub. They all wore formal uniforms and were attempting to stand braced in formation, despite the tendency to float in the absence of gravity.
Kelly’s flame devoured them. The effect of his weapon under these conditions was beyond anything he had seen or dreamed of on Earth.
The compressed air tank could send the jet of fuel fifty yards, even with gravity to pull it down. Here it easily splashed the thickened gasoline off the far side of the hub, barely a hundred feet from the weapon. The lowered air pressure, half that of Earth, combined with the high relative oxygen level to turn what would have been a narrow jet of flame into a fireball which exploded across the open area like the flame-front filling the cylinder of a gasoline engine on the power stroke.
The gush of orange blinded Kelly and kicked him back against the wall from which he had begun to recoil from the thrust of the napalm itself. The suit he wore was designed to protect its wearer against the unshielded power of the Sun and insulate him against the cold of objects which had radiated all their heat into the insatiable black maw of vacuum. Its design parameters were sufficient to shield him here against the second of ravenous flame he had released. Blinking and wishing he had flipped down the sunshield over his faceplate before he fired, Kelly thrust himself off the wall of the stationary elevator and into the hub proper.
The great domed room was filled with violent motion. Smoke and occasional beads of napalm still afire swirled in the shock waves rebounding from the curved walls.
The men and women who had shared the room with the fireball cavorted now like gobbets spewed from a Roman candle. Their hair and uniforms blazed, fanned by the screaming, frantic efforts of the victims to extinguish them. Nazis, blinded as their eyeballs bubbled, collided with one another and sailed off across the dome on random courses, pinwheeling slowly.
Slender poles were set every twenty feet or so in the floor and walls of the room to give purchase to those who, like Kelly at present, were drifting without adequate control. The veteran snagged one of the wands in the crook of his left arm. He locked his body against it to kill the spin he had been given by the elevator cage which rotated with the spoke. When he had anchored himself, he was able to survey the room and the possible threats it held.
The bodies, some corpses and some still in the process of dying, which drifted like lazy blowflies over carrion, were no danger to anyone. A touch on the back of Kelly’s leg caused him to twist in panic, cursing the way the helmet limited his peripheral vision. Something smoldering had brushed him, surrounded by a mist of blood from lungs which had hemorrhaged when they sucked in flame.