A Security man shot, and one of the running figures toppled and slid, his burden--which must certainly be a bomb--rolling ridiculously. There had been two trucks that plunged through the swing-up door. They had raced for the s.p.a.ces under the Platform at the exact time when the floor would be clear, because all work had stopped. Under the Platform, the trucks were to have been detonated. At the very least, they would have rent and torn it horribly. They might have broken its back. And surely one truck should have made it. But there should not have been machine guns ready trained to shoot. Now the load of desperate men from the overturned survivor scurried for the Platform with parts of its cargo.
If they could fight their way inside the Platform, they could blast its hull open, or demolish its controls or shatter its air pumps and its gyros and turn its air tanks into sieves. Anything that could be damaged would delay the take-off and so expose the Platform to further and perhaps more successful attack.
There were more pistol shots. A group of men fought their way out of the incoming screening rooms and raced for the center of the Shed. (Later, it would be found they had slabs of explosive inside their garments, and detonation caps to set them off.) Somewhere another door opened, and Security men came out with flickering pistols, Major Holt leading them.
He had started out to fight off the truck-borne attack, but he was bound to be too late. Joe"s followers were trying to take care of that. The scuttling men from the incoming rooms were Major Holt"s first prey. They were shot as they ran.
Joe stumbled and fell and he heard guns crackling. As he scrambled up he pitched into a running figure that snarled as Joe hit him. And then he was fighting for his life.
This was under the Platform and in the middle of confusion many times confounded. Joe caught a wrist that held a gun. He knew his a.s.sailant had a bomb slung over one shoulder and right now had one hand free for combat. Joe instinctively tried to batter his enemy with his own pistol, instead of pushing the muzzle against the man"s body and pulling the trigger. He struck a flailing blow, and his hand and the weapon struck a metal brace. The blow cut his knuckles and paralyzed his fingers.
Despairingly he felt the pistol slipping from his grasp. Then his a.s.sailant brought up his knee viciously, but it hit Joe"s thigh instead of his groin, and Joe flung his weight furiously forward and they toppled to the ground together.
There was fighting all around him. The machine guns rasped again--there was a burst of tracer-bullet fire. The panicked men by the exit tried to surge out through the swinging doors. But the tracers marked a line they must not cross. They checked. Once a gun flashed so close by Joe"s eyes that it blinded him. And once somebody fell over both himself and his antagonist, who writhed like an eel possessed of desperate strength past belief.
Joe could really know only his private part in the struggle down in the murky tangle of the scaffold base. But there was fighting up on the Platform itself. A savagely grinning Mohawk wrestled furiously with a man on one of the rocket tubes. An incendiary device in the saboteur"s pocket ignited, and it flamed red-hot and he screamed as it burned its way out of his garments. The Mohawk flung the man fiercely clear, to crash horribly on the far-distant floor, and then kicked the incendiary off. It fell after the man and hit and burst, and it was thermite which surrounded itself with a column of acrid smoke from seared wood blocks.
There was fighting by the exit doors. There was an ululating uproar in the incoming screening room, and a war whoop from the top of the Platform. A saboteur tried to crawl into an air-lock entrance, and he got his head and shoulders in, but a copper-skinned Indian held his forehead still and chopped down with the side of his hand on that man"s neck. Underneath the Platform was panting chaos, with pistol shots and hand-to-hand struggles everywhere. The force Joe had gathered fought valiantly, but four invaders got to the foot of the wooden steps, where there were two guards. Then there were only two saboteurs left to scramble desperately up the steps over the dead guards" bodies and head toward the Platform door, but the Chief appeared swinging a twelve-inch Stillson. He let it go, precisely like a skillfully flung tomahawk, and leaped down sixteen steps squarely onto the body of the other man. A gun flashed, but then there was only squirming struggle on the floor.
Mike the midget, inside the Platform, found one bloodied, panting, sobbing man who somehow had gotten inside. And Mike brought down a spanner from a ladder step, and swarmed upon his half-conscious victim, and hit him again, and then stayed on guard until somebody arrived who was big enough to carry the saboteur away.
And all this while, Joe struggled with only one man. It was a horrible struggle, because the man had a bomb and he might manage to set it off or it might go off of itself. It was a ghastly struggle, because the man had the strength and desperation of a maniac--and practiced the tactics.
Joe pounded the hand that held the gun upon the floor, and it hit something and exploded smokily and fell clear. But that made things worse. While struggling to kill Joe with the revolver, his antagonist had had only five fingers with which to gouge out Joe"s eyes or tear away his ears or rend his flesh. But with no pistol he had ten, and he fought like a wild beast. He even breathed like an animal. He began to pant--thick, guttural pantings that had the quality of h.e.l.lish hate. And then there was a surging of bodies--Major Holt"s reserve was arriving very late in the center of the Shed--and then a struggling group trampled all over the pair who squirmed and fought on the ground, and a heavy boot jammed down Joe"s head and he felt teeth sink in his throat.
They dug into his flesh, worrying and tearing....
Joe used his knee in a frenzy of revulsion--used his knee as the other man had tried to use his in the first instant of battle. The man beneath him screamed as an animal would scream, and Joe jerked his bleeding throat free. In hysterical horror he pounded his antagonist"s head on the floor until the man went limp....
And then he heard a grim voice saying: "Quit it or you get your head blown off! Quit it----" And Joe panted: "It"s about time you guys got here! This man came in on that truck. Watch out for that bomb he"s got slung on him...."
12
The incoming shift had a messy clean-up job to do. It was accomplished only because security men abruptly took over the work of gang bosses, and all ordinary labor on the Platform was put aside until normal operations were again possible. Even that would not have been feasible but for the walkie-talkies the security men wore. As the situation was sorted out, it was explained to them, and they relayed the news for the satisfaction of the curiosity of those who worked under them. No work--no explanation. It produced immediate and satisfactory co-operation all around.
There had been four separate and independent attempts to wreck the Platform at the same time. One was, of course, the plan of those sympathetic characters who had volunteered to help Mike and his gang win the status of s.p.a.cemen by firing the Platform"s rockets. There were not many of them, and they had lost heavily. They"d had thermite bombs to destroy the Platform"s vitals. Ultimately the survivors talked freely, if morosely, and that was that.
There had been a particularly ungifted attempt to cause panic in the incoming shift in the rooms where its members were screened before admission to work. Somebody had tried to establish complete confusion there by firing revolver shots in the crowd, expecting the workers to break through to the floor and a.s.signed gentlemen with slabs of explosive to get to the Platform with them. The gentlemen with the explosives had run into Major Holt"s security reserve, and they got nowhere. The creators of panic with revolver shots were finally rescued from their shift-mates and more or less sc.r.a.ped up from the screening-room floor--they were in very bad shape--and carted off to be patched up for questioning. The members of this group had been impractical idealists, and besides, some of them had lost their nerve, as was evidenced by the discovery of abandoned explosives and detonators in the locker room and men"s room of the Shed.
The most dangerous attempt was, of course, that perfectly planned and co-ordinated a.s.sault which had been merely carried out at its original time, without either being hastened or delayed by Mike"s activities.
That plan had been beautifully contrived, and it would certainly have been successful but for the machine-gun bullets from the gallery and the fight Joe"s followers put up underneath the Platform.
The exact instant when the whole Shed would be most nearly empty had been fixed upon, and three separate units had worked in perfect timing.
There"d been the man in the stalled truck. He"d delayed his exit from the Shed to the precise fraction of a second to get the doors open at the perfect instant. The explosive-laden trucks had raced in at the exact second when they were most certain to get underneath the Platform and detonate their cargoes. There"d been a perfect diversion planned for that, too. Smoke bombs and explosions in the outgoing screening rooms had created real panic, and but for Joe"s order for his group"s walkie-talkies to be turned off would have drawn every security man on duty to that spot.
Mike"s trick, then, had brought some saboteurs into the open, but had merely happened to coincide with the most dangerous and well-organized coup of all. However, it was due to his trick that the Platform was not now a wreck.
There was also another break that was sheer coincidence. It was a discovery that could not possibly have turned up save in a situation of pure chaos artificially induced. Joe had had to react in a personal and vengeful way to the manner in which his especial antagonist had fought him. One expects a man to fight fair by instinct, and to turn to fouls--if he does--in desperation only. But Joe"s personal opponent hadn"t tried a single fair trick. It was as if he"d never heard of a fist blow, but only of murder and mayhem. Joe felt an individual enmity toward him.
Joe didn"t consider himself the most urgent of the injured, when doctors and nurses took up the work of patching, but Sally was there to help, and she went deathly pale when she saw his bloodstained throat. She dragged him quickly to a doctor. And the doctor looked at Joe and dropped everything else.
But it wasn"t too serious. The antiseptics hurt, and the st.i.tching was unpleasant, but Joe was more worried by the knowledge that Sally was standing there and suffering for him. When he got up from the emergency operating table, the doctor nodded grimly to him.
"That was close!" said the doctor. "Whoever chewed you was working for your jugular vein, and he was halfway through the wall when he stopped.
A fraction of an inch more, and he"d have had you!"
"Thanks," said Joe. His neck felt clumsy with bandages, and when he tried to turn his head the st.i.tches hurt.
Sally"s hand trembled in his when she led him away.
"I didn"t think I"d ever dislike anybody so much," said Joe angrily, "as I did that man while he was chewing my throat. We were trying to kill each other, of course, but--confound it, people don"t bite!"
"Did you--kill him?" asked Sally in a shaky voice. "Not that I"ll mind!
I would have hated the thought ordinarily, but----"
Joe halted. There was a row of stretchers--not too long, at that--in the emergency-hospital s.p.a.ce. He looked down at the unconscious man who"d fought him.
"There he is!" he said irritably. "I banged him pretty hard. I don"t like to hate anybody, but the way he fought----"
Sally"s teeth chattered suddenly. She called to one of the security men standing guard by the stretchers.
"I--think my--father is going to want to talk to him," she said unsteadily. "Don"t--let him be taken away to the hospital until Dad knows, please."
She started away, her face dead-white and her hand stone-cold.
"What"s the matter?" demanded Joe.
"S-sabotage," said Sally in an indescribable tone that had a suggestion of heartbreak.
She went into her father"s office alone. She came out again with him, and her father looked completely stricken. Miss Ross, his secretary, was with him, too. Her face was like a mask of marble. She had always been a plain woman, a gloomy one, a morbid one. But at the new and horrible look on her face Joe turned his eyes away.
Then Sally was crying beside him, and he put his arm clumsily around her and let her sob on his shoulder, completely puzzled.
He didn"t find out until later what the trouble was. The man who"d tried so earnestly to kill him was Miss Ross"s fiance. She had met this man during a vacation, as a government secretary, and he was a refugee with an exotic charm that would have fascinated a much more personable and beautiful woman than Miss Ross. They had a whirlwind romance. He confided to her his terror of emissaries from his native country who might kill him. And of course she was more fascinated still. When he asked her to marry him she accepted his proposal. Then, just two weeks before her a.s.signment to the s.p.a.ce Platform project, he vanished. Miss Ross was desperate and lovesick.
One day her telephone rang and his anguished voice told her he"d been abducted, and if she told the police he would be tortured to death. He begged her not to do anything to cause him more torment than was already his.
She"d been trying to keep him alive ever since. Once, when she couldn"t bring herself to carry out an order she"d been given--with threats of torment to him if she failed--she"d received a human finger in the mail, and a scrawled and blood-stained note which cried out of unspeakable torment and begged her not to doom him to more.
So Miss Ross, who was Major Holt"s secretary and one of his most trusted a.s.sistants, had been giving information to one group of saboteurs all the while. She was the most dangerous security leak in the whole Platform project.
But her fiance wasn"t a captive. He was the head of that group of saboteurs. He"d made love to her and proposed to her merely to prepare her to supply the information he wanted. He needed only to write a sufficiently agonized note, or gasp tormented pleas on a telephone, to get what he wanted.
Incidentally, he still had all his fingers when Joe knocked him cold.
Sally had recognized him as the subject of a snapshot she"d once seen Miss Ross crying over. Miss Ross had hidden it hastily and told her it was someone she had once loved, now dead. And this inadvertent disclosure that Miss Ross was the security leak the Major had never had a clue to could only have come about through such confusion as Mike had instigated and Haney and the Chief and Joe had organized. But Joe learned those facts only later.
At the moment, there was still the Platform to be gotten aloft. And there was plenty of work to do. There were two small rips in the plating, caused by fragments of the exploded truck. There were some bullet holes. The Platform could resist small meteorites at forty-five miles a second, but a high-velocity small-arm projectile could puncture it. Those scars of battle had to be welded shut. The rest of the scaffolding had to come down and the rest of the rocket tubes had to be affixed. And there was cleaning up to be done.