“Well, then, be as careful as you can.”
“We’ll do that, Chief,” Cleveland put in. “We think as much of us as anybody else does – maybe more – and we aren’t committing suicide if we can help it. And remember about everybody staying inside when we take off – it’s barely possible that we’ll take up a lot of room. Goodbye!”
“Goodbye, fellows!”
The massive insulating doors were shut, the metal side of the mountain opened, and huge, squat caterpillar tractors came roaring and clanking into the room. Chains and cables were made fast and, nighty steel rails groaning under the load, the space- ship upon her rolling ways was dragged out of the Hill and far out upon the level floor of the valley before the tractors cast off and returned to the fortress.
“Everybody is under cover,” Samms informed Rodebush. The Chief was staring intently into his plate, upon which was revealed the control room of the untried super- ship. He heard Rodebush speak to Cleveland; heard the observer’s brief reply; saw the navigator push the switch – button – then the communicator plate went blank. Not the ordinary blankness of a cut-off, but a peculiarly disquieting fading out into darkness.
And where the great space-ship had rested there was for an instant nothing. Exactly nothing – a vacuum. Vessel, falsework, rollers, trucks, the enormous steel I-beams of the tracks, even the deep-set concrete piers and foundations and a vast hemisphere of the solid ground; all disappeared utterly and instantaneously. But almost as suddenly as it had been formed the vacuum was filled by a cyclonic rush of air. There was a detonation as of a hundred vicious thunderclaps made one, and through the howling, shrieking blasts of wind there rained down upon valley, plain, and metaled mountain a veritable avalanche of debris; bent, twisted, and broken rails and beams, splintered timbers, masses of concrete, and thousands of cubic yards of soil and rock. For the atomic-powered “Rodebush-Cleveland” neutralizers were more powerful by far, and had a vastly greater radius of action, than the calculations of their designers had shown; and for a moment everything within a hundred yards or so of the Boise behaved as though it were an integral part of the vessel. Then, left behind immediately by the super-ship’s almost infinite velocity, all this material had again become subject to all of Nature’s everyday laws and had crashed back to the ground.
“Could you hold your beam, Randolph?” Samms’ voice cut sharply through the daze of stupefaction which held spellbound most of the denizens of the Hill. But all were not so held – no conceivable emergency could take the attention of the chief ultra-wave operator from his instruments.
“No, sir,” Radio Center shot back. “It faded out and I couldn’t recover it. I put everything I’ve got behind a tracer on that beam, but haven’t been able to lift a single needle off the pin.”
“And no wreckage of the vessel itself,” Samms went on, half audibly. “Either they have succeeded far beyond their wildest hopes or else . . . more probably . . .” He fell silent and switched off the plate. Were his two friends, those intrepid scientists, alive and triumphant, or had they gone to lengthen the list of victims of that man-killing space-ship? Reason told him that they were gone. They must be gone, or else the ultra- beams – energies of such unthinkable velocity of propagation that man’s most sensitive instruments had never been able even to estimate it – would have held the ship’s transmitter in spite of any velocity attainable by matter under any conceivable conditions. The ship must have been disintegrated as soon as Rodebush released his forces. And yet, had not the physicist dimly foreseen the possibility of such an actual velocity – or had he? However, individuals could come and go, but the Service went on.
Samms squared his shoulders unconsciously; and slowly, grimly, made his way back to his private office.
“Mr. Fairchild would like to have a moment as soon as possible, sir,” his secretary informed him even before he sat down. “Senator Morgan has been here all day, you know, and he insists on seeing you personally.”
“Oh, that kind, eh? All right, I’ll see him. Get Fairchild, please . . . Dick? Can you talk, or is he there listening?”
“No, he’s heckling Saunders at the moment. He’s been here long enough. Can you take a minute and throw him out?”
“Of course, if you say so, but why not throw the hooks into him yourself, as usual?”
“He wants to lay down the law to you, personally. He’s a Big Shot, you know, and his group is kicking up quite a row, so it might be better to have it come straight from the top. Besides, you’ve got a unique knack – when you throw a harpoon, the harpoonee doesn’t forget it.”
“All right. He’s the uplifter and leveler-off. Down with Triplanetary, up with National Sovereignty. We’re power-mad dictators – iron-heel-on-the-necks-of-the- people, and so on. But what’s he like, personally? Thick-skinned, of course – got a brain?”
“Rhinoceros. He’s got a brain, but it’s definitely weaseloid. Bear down – sink it in full length, and then twist it.”
“O.K. You’ve got a harpoon, of course?”
“Three of ‘em!” Fairchild, Head of Triplanetary’s Public Relations, grinned with relish. “Boss Jim Towne owns him in fee simple. The number of his hot lock box is N469T414. His subbest sub-rosa girl-friend is Fi-Chi le Bay . . , yes, everything that the name implies. She got a super-deluxe fur coat – Martian tekkyl, no less – out of that Mackenzie River power deal. Triple play, you might say – Clander to Morgan to le Bay.”
“Nice. Bring him in.”
“Senator Morgan, Mr. Samms,” Fairchild made the introduction and the two men sized each other up in lightning glances. Samms saw a big man, florid, somewhat inclined toward corpulence, with the surface geniality – and the shrewd calculating eyes of the successful politician. The senator saw a tall, hard-trained man in his forties; a lean, keen, smooth-shaven face; a shock of red-bronze-auburn hair a couple of weeks overdue for a cutting; a pair of gold-flecked tawny eyes too penetrant for comfort.
“I trust, Senator, that Fairchild has taken care of you satisfactorily?”
“With one or two exceptions, yes.” Since Samms did not ask what the exceptions could be, Morgan was forced to continue. “I am here, as you know, in my official capacity as Chairman of the Pernicious Activities Committee of the North American Senate. It has been observed for years that the published reports of your organization have left much unsaid. It is common knowledge that high-handed outrages have been perpetrated; if not by your men themselves, in such circumstances that your agents could not have been ignorant of them. Therefore it has been decided to make a first- hand and comprehensive investigation, in which matter your Mr. Fairchild has not been at all cooperative.”
“Who decided to make this investigation?”
“Why, the North American Senate, of course, through its Pernicious Activities . .
.”
“I thought so.” Samms interrupted. “Don’t you know, Senator, that the Hill is not a part of the North American Continent? That the Triplanetary Service is responsible only to the Triplanetary Council?”
“Quibbling, sir, and outmoded! This, sir, is a democracy!” the Senator began to orate. “All that will be changed very shortly, and if you are as smart as you are believed to be, I need only say that you and those of your staff who cooperate . . .”
“You need say nothing at all.” Samms’ voice cut. “It has not been changed yet.
The Government of North America rules its continent, as do the other Continental Governments. The combined Continental Governments of the Three Planets form the Triplanetary Council, which is a non-political body, the members of which hold office for life and which is the supreme authority in any matter, small or large, affecting more than one Continental Government. The Council has two principal operating agencies; the Triplanetary Patrol, which enforces its decisions, rules, and regulations, and the Triplanetary Service, which performs such other tasks as the Council directs. We have no interest in the purely internal affairs of North America. Have you any information to the contrary?”
“More quibbling!” the Senator thundered. “This is not the first time in history that a ruthless dictatorship has operated in the disguise of a democracy. Sir, I demand full access to your files, so that I can spread before the North American Senate the full facts of the various matters which I mentioned to Fairchild – one of which was the affair of the Pelarion. In a democracy, sir, facts should not be hidden; the people must and shall be kept completely informed upon any matter which affects their welfare or their political lives!”
“Is that so? If I should ask, then, for the purpose of keeping the Triplanetary Council, and through it your constituents, fully informed as to the political situation in North America, you would undoubtedly give me the key to safe-deposit box N469T414?