The Ladder in the Sky (9 page)

XVI

When Snutch arrived he was looking harassed. He had come up through the shops and spoken to one or two of the foremen on the floor, and his first remarks to Rureth were brusque.

“What’s going on?” he demanded. “You have three men pulled out of the inspection team, and that’s no joke at this of all times. There’s a big demand for magnesium at home right now and they want an eight-ship load for the master that’s coming in next week, and the stuff is piling up in the loading bay stores!”

Rureth told him, crisply and with emphasis, while Hego, Dorsek and one of the other workers stood by in the background with tolerant expressions. Kazan listened passively. He wished Rureth hadn’t put that question about devils to him.

His eyes hurt, and there was a blur in the middle of his field of vision which had replaced the long-lasting afterimage.

When Rureth had finished, Snutch turned to Kazan, scowling. He said, “Is that true? Did he try to kill you with his welder?”

“I can’t say what was in his mind,” Kazan said wearily. “I know he said he didn’t want me under the same roof.”

“Hego?” Snutch said, tinning.

“He’s sold to a devil,” Hego said. “He’s bad. You can feel he’s bad, just by being close to him. If you want work to go on in this shop, you’ll get rid of him.”

“Devils!” Snutch said. “Comet-gas! I’m not going to pay you the compliment of taking that garbage seriously! Rureth, put ’em back on the floor. There’s work to be done.”

“Not Hego,” Rureth said.

There was a frozen silence. Snutch’s face went red. He said, at last, “Are you presuming to question what I say?”

“Where Hego is concerned, yes,” Rureth snapped. “I saw him attack Kazan with a welder. He came within an inch of murder. Men I’ll work with. Wild animals I will not. Hego belongs in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, undergoing massive personality repair. I won’t have him under my responsibility one day longer. The rest is up to you. But I tell you this! If he does kill somebody, I’ll see to it that you’re paid for disregarding my warning.”

“You two, get back to work,” Snutch said in a low voice, pointing at Dorsek and his companion. They obeyed; the moment the door had closed behind them, he went on, “I’ll go along with you this far, Rureth; I’ll get a doctor’s report on Hego. If it confirms what you say, all right. Otherwise I’ll break you. Two can make threats, and I’m better able to see them fulfilled—clear?”

Rureth returned his gaze steadily, but said nothing.

“As for you, Kazan!” Snutch barked, rounding on him. “I feel just about as sick of you as Rureth says he is of Hego! You can’t be in here two minutes without trouble brewing and men are being dragged off the production line!”

Kazan also said nothing. It was sheer self-defense that was driving Snutch to try and shift the blame for Rureth outfacing him. You couldn’t do anything about that.

Snutch stormed to the communicator on Rureth’s desk and made the promised call to the hospital. The threat of psychiatric examination seemed to have cowed Hego for the moment; he raised no objection when Snutch ordered him to report to the doctor.

“Think you can keep things under control now, Rureth?” Snutch demanded sarcastically.

“With Hego out of the way, no problems,” Rureth answered.

“Glad to hear it,” Snutch retorted. “If you’d been on top of your job, you’d have known this was likely to happen and you’d have taken some action in advance.” He jerked his head in Kazan’s direction. “He’s all yours—make the best of him. I remember it was you who first told me was supposed to be an all-around genius. Let’s see you get matching results.”

He marched out. After a long pause, Kazan stirred on his chair.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a source of continual headaches and it isn’t only Snutch who gets them.”

“Him!” Rureth said violently. “He’s scared of you, for the love of life, and for no saner reason than Hego is! I wish I could figure out what goes on inside his head.”

He dropped into his chair and studied Kazan across his desk.

“Not that you’ve made an auspicious start in this place,” he went on. “Snutch is damned right. I should have known what Hego’s reaction was apt to be, crazy or not.” An idea seemed to strike him. “And speaking of crazy!” he said. “What was that you were saying as you got up on the gallery, about you believing in devils? Or was my hearing playing me tricks?”

Kazan shrugged and forced a smile. Rureth didn’t press him, being glad to let the matter slip. He said when he had waited for, and not had, a reply, “But what the hell I’m to do with you, I just don’t know. I was going to give you the straight training course, condensed to fit you. But that means you go to work on manual jobs first. The wyrds know what would happen if I set you alongside Dorsek, for example—and it’d be still worse if you ever tried to give him orders.”

The communicator signaled on his desk. He answered it, listened for a moment, and said crisply, “On my way!”

He got to his feet. “Trouble everywhere today!” he said. “Now there’s a hitch in hull-plate supply. There’s a die broken on number four press. Well, I guess that solves one problem, though. That’s where you go to work.”

It had never been like this, Kazan thought. He felt as if he had been beaten steadily from head to foot all day with clubs; the sheer nervous tension had exhausted him and dulled his mind.

It would be good if he could stop. It would be good to find peace.

With the clangor of the shift-end bell in his ears, he walked moodily out of the shipping complex in a direction opposite from that of most of the other workers, who were headed for the point at which the helibuses waited to return them to the dwelling area. It was more than two miles across reddish dusty ground if you went on foot, but Kazan thought he would rather walk. Half an hour’s silent reflection would be a comfort.

Instead of following the ordinary route, therefore, he went out past the exterior of the loading bays and for a short distance along the edge of the spaceport. There wasn’t much to the port; only a cluster of half a dozen ship cradles and the rails on which the ore tubs slid after loading to wait their turn to be fired into space, and a group of reddish, low-built blockhouses with narrow-beam antennae on their roofs, which sufficed for the control staff. The concrete of the field was dusty too. The spitting rain of this morning had ended by noon, and a steady wind had dried up behind it.

Often there were two or sometimes as many as four ore tubs lined up, when the shipping complex somehow got slightly ahead of schedule—perhaps if an exceptionally pure vein of ore was struck and refinery time was reduced. This evening there was only one, the ship which had been completed and inspected this morning.

Ugly things, Kazan thought. Nothing but a roughly finished ovoid, made of stamped plates over coarse strong ribs, and full of dust. There was nothing about them not dictated by absolute necessity; they were simply a means of getting a bulk of metal out of Vashti’s atmosphere. You could hardly even call them ships, because the only thing that made them more than inert metal lumps was the power unit which socketed home in a tunnel down the long axis of the ellipsoid, and that was strictly detachable; before the master ship collected its cargo and departed that power unit would be removed and returned by itself to crash in the desert a few miles away. Then it would serve to hoist another lump of metal into space.

Like insects, a small group of the control staff swarmed over the ore tub on its rails. There was clearly going to be a firing shortly. It occurred to Kazan that he had picked a bad time to walk in the open—a firing was noisy, and there was always a good deal of stray energy owing to the virtually pure metal structure of the ore tubs, which sometimes caused lightning although they usually sprayed the hull with water from fog-nozzles to carry away the greater part of the charge as the power unit warmed up.

Yes; they were moving away from the hull now, and the monopole motor on which the ship rode was driving it forward into the nearest ship’s cradle. Kazan cursed. He had been looking forward to a slow stroll home, and time to think. Now, if he wanted to live, he would have to start running, or risk yet more dislike from the control staff this time. They would have to hold back the firing till he was off the field.

He was not absolutely certain, he found, that he did want to live. But if he stayed here, they would send out transport and carry him away.

He compromised by walking fast. By the time the wail of the firing siren reached him, he knew he was well past the danger zone. Another five minutes, and he would be in the dwelling area. He paused and turned to watch the ore tub go up.

A sudden demand for magnesium, Snutch had said. This would be a light lift, then, taking only a few minutes, compared to one containing the more usual heavier metals.

Faintly he could hear the complaints of the cradle’s plungers as they pushed the blunt nose of the ore tub up towards the correct angle of ascent; the thrust from the power unit on the centerline was strictly longitudinal. There were no minor adjustments after firing, when the trajectory became purely ballistic.

A second blast from the siren. Twilight was closing in, but when they turned on the water-fog it could be clearly seen how the spray veiled the cradle and the hull resting on it. A few random sparks struck, but Kazan was too far away for them to be dazzling.

Just as well, he thought. His retinas had had enough punishment for one day.

There followed the usual pause while they scanned the area over which the ore tub would travel, making sure there were no obstructions such as unscheduled helibuses, and more sparks struck through the water-fog. And the final, prolonged siren howl announced the actual firing.

Afterwards Kazan could remember what happened in his mind during the next half-minute or so. But at the time he was consciously aware only of external things.

First, the awkward, wobbling rise of the ore tub from the cradle. The moment it came clear of the water-fog it was alive with ungrounded energies, and some of them converted into visible frequencies, making the hull glow faintly blue.

Then the noise, of course, like a lunatic drummer hammering his instrument as though trying to drive the sticks through the heads. It was always like that when an ore tub took off. There were a dozen resonances in the best of them, and this was not one of the best.

Then the calamity.

Something seemed to give at the nose of the hull. A brilliant, white-hot glare appeared. The acceleration of the whole which had previously been steady seemed to be divided—part of the glowing object at the nose, and a much smaller part to the remainder. The hull twisted. By now it was a thousand feet up. The twist became a spin. The forces acting on the hull seemed to go insane, and drove it sidewise and still, for a short distance, upwards. But the sidewise component mattered.

It was arcing towards Kazan, towards the dwelling area where the workers from the outlying areas were now returning for the night; the power unit had broken through the nose; there was a continuous spark between the power unit and the hull hot enough to have fired the powdered cargo.

Like a firework built by a lunatic giant, the ore tub nosed down on the settlement of six thousand people, showering burning liquid magnesium over an area of ten square miles, a fountain of dazzling death.

It was then that Kazan knew two things: first, that it was his fault, for he had interrupted Hego as he was about to close a flaw in that same hull which was breaking apart above him, and second, that he did not really want to die.

A chunk of solid white magnesium oxide struck the concrete a yard from him and splashed; it was still fiercely hot, and specks stung his exposed hands and face. As though the momentary pain had been a trigger, Kazan remembered how to solidify air.

And the ore tub, and the thousands of tons of incandescent magnesium pouring from its riven sides, fell on a hard invisible nothing a hundred feet above the settlement and roofed it over with a sky of fire.

He had been slow. He had not stopped it all from falling in the dwelling area—only most of it. There were screams. There were fires starting in the leisure hall and on some of the dwelling blocks. But at least when it exploded it would—

It exploded, and the world went black around him.

XVII

It was nightmare made flesh from that moment on. For
a
long time the sea of fire overhead glared down so brilliantly eyes could barely be kept open; those who fought to rescue victims trapped in the leisure hall and the worst hit of the apartment blocks had to improvise antiglare filters from loose-mesh cloth, or use one eye only and squint narrowly between two fingers, keeping the other eye closed.

The heat was terrible. It was as though the whole sky had suddenly been filled with suns.

Wherever the incandescent magnesium had fallen, there was appalling destruction. Some of the first spurts from the ore tub as it broke apart had created liquid drops of the metal fully twenty pounds in weight, and wherever they fell on steel girders—mostly on the roof of the leisure hall—they melted them through. The girders bowed, caved, broke, spilling the roof on the ground below.

Aside from the leisure hall, the buildings worst affected were food storage warehouses set a short distance back from the dwelling area, and the shipping complex. A veritable river of liquid magnesium poured off the incredible barrier in the air and flooded over the loading bay where yet more magnesium was in store. There were explosions which sent gouts of white death soaring for miles across the countryside.

After the heat, as after a nuclear explosion, the rain that had been poised ready to fall in the air came gushing down.

A crust of white insoluble magnesium oxide formed over the settlement and darkness followed, almost less bearable than the hideous glare which had gone before. Most of the power was out, and people had to work in the ruins by hand-lights. There was effectively no disease among the workers on Vashti—the land was sterile for many miles around—and the resources of the medical staff were only designed to cope with the occasional injury and with the known allergies which sometimes resulted from contact with native vegetation.

Where fats remained in the food warehouses they were pillaged to provide emergency burn dressings; the deaths were amazingly few, but the casualties numbered more than half the total population, from sprains and scratches to third-degree burns and broken limbs.

Through an inferno of collapsing walls and moaning victims Kazan walked like an unseeing ghost. He kept thinking of the fear which was to him a certainty—that when Hego turned aside from his work, he had left unrepaired a flaw in the hull of the ore tub, and no one had remembered the fact in the confusion following his attack on Kazan.

True enough. “He’s bad. You can feel he’s bad just by being close to him.” True enough. This happens; without intention, simply by Kazan being Kazan.

Was this the purpose of the devil that possessed him? A devil was said to hail from a place of torment; this was a place of torment now. He was too dazed to wonder why—if pain and destruction were intended—he had suddenly regained the power to make air solid, and so saved the settlement from total obliteration.

All he could think of was that this happened because he was here.

He came to what he recognized as his own apartment block; a small fire burned at one end, allowed to remain alight so that rescue workers could see to carry casualties to the emergency hospital set up in front of the building, but carefully watched by grim-faced men with hoses ready to damp it down when there was no more need for it. Squatting or lying hopeless on blankets were more than a hundred injured people, some with terrible burns. He walked between them, scarcely seeing.

“Kazan!” a shrill voice called to him. “Kazan!”

He turned slowly, and saw Clary rising from beside one of the casualties, a roll of bandage in her hand. She was dusty from head to foot and her shirt was ripped jaggedly from the left shoulder down, but she moved smoothly as she hurried towards him. He did not move when she flung her arms around him.

“Kazan, you’re safe!” she sobbed. “I was afraid—!”

“Of course I’m safe,” Kazan said in a gravelly voice. “It was my doing. What do you expect?”

“What did you say?” Disbelieving, she drew back from him. A pace or two distant two men who had paused to rest and wipe their faces after carrying a casualty to join the rest exchanged glances and moved closer. Clary read menace in their faces and tried to pull Kazan away, but he was like a wooden dummy.

“What happened?” the nearer of the men said. “I still don’t know what happened.”

“Did you see it?” his companion demanded of Kazan.

“I saw it,” Kazan said. “The ore tub. The power unit broke loose. It spilled its cargo of magnesium over the settlement.”

“Everyone knows that by now!” Clary said, still trying to make Kazan move away.

“Yeah!” the first speaker said. “What held it up? That’s what I want to know!” He gestured at the opaque roof closing in the settlement. “It’s up there! Hot as blazes-like the sun falling down!”

“Don’t worry what caused it—just be glad!” his companion contradicted. “Aren’t things bad enough? Look at these poor devils half-roasted on the ground here! Look at the buildings! Look at the whole place. It’s a shambles!”

Another man, husky, dirty, moving tiredly, helped a limping woman to a place on the roadway where a doctor was at work, and turned to go. He caught sight of Kazan and the two men interrogating him, and came suddenly alert. He strode over.

“Kazan!” he said. “I’d hoped something fell on you! We could spare you well enough, but I’ll lay you aren’t even scratched!”

Dorsek, Kazan realized dully. He said, “I—I don’t know. I guess I’m okay. But by the wyrds I wish something had fallen on me.”

“Do you now?” Dorsek said softly. “I wonder why that is.”

And in the same moment came Clary’s despairing cry, “Kazan! Don’t listen to him—he’s suffering from shock!”

“You keep quiet!” Dorsek snapped, round on her. “I want to hear this. Go on, Kazan—bring it up!”

“Hego,” Kazan said thickly. “The seam he was going to plug when I came this morning. He didn’t do it, and nobody realized.”

Dorsek’s face twisted into an ugly mask of rage. He said, “Why, you miserable sniveling insect! Aren’t you satisfied yet with what you’ve done to Hego? You aren’t going to get away with this! You aren’t going to unload the blame that easily! It happened because you’re here, and we knew it was going to happen and we tried to stop it. If you’d kept your contagious nose out of that inspection shop then from what you just said it would never have happened and—”

“Stop him!” Clary shrieked, and the two puzzled men standing by made to grab Dorsek as he lunged forward, but they were too slow. Kazan made no attempt to avoid the blow. The fist took him full in the face, and he toppled and slid to the ground, the last sound in his ears being the voice of Clary crying his name.

Eyes red-rimmed, Snutch looked around the assembled remnants of his senior staff. Some of them were wearing surgical dressings, and all of them were dirty and weary. The only light came from a hand lamp on the table in the middle of the room, which gave each of them a vast shadow like a carrion-eating bird poised with folded wings on the wall behind.

“What in the name of the wyrds
is
it?” he said.

They all knew what he meant, and exchanged worried glances. For lack of the chief scientist—unconscious for the past several hours—Rureth spoke up.

“A force field, I guess,” he said. “I know force fields are supposed to be impossible. But that’s one. There’s an invisible dome over the settlement. We mapped it.” He took a rolled paper from his front pocket and threw it down on the table; several people craned to stare at the circular red line inscribed on the outline of the settlement.

“Far as we can tell, there isn’t anything there but air,” Rureth went on, bowing his head to rub his eyes and then shaking back his thin fringe of hair. “It’s fairly elastic, but if you hit it with a heavy hammer it transmits force instead of absorbing it. It’s coated on the outside with a layer of magnesium oxide which in places is feet in thickness. I’ve got a couple of dozen men working on the thin areas. We’ve managed to crack loose a few sheets of the crust and we won’t have to worry about ventilation because air diffuses through the field. Or whatever you like to call it.”

“What shape is it?” Snutch demanded.

“Roughly spherical, but since it’s elastic there’s a dip in the middle where the remains of the ore tub are lying. We figure there’s about three to six hundred tons poised up there. If whatever’s sustaining the field gives out, it’ll come crashing down on our heads. Has anyone any theories about it?”

He looked dispiritedly along the table as though expecting no reply. His expectation was fulfilled. He went on, “I guess to be on the safe side we’d better evacuate the spot directly under the wreck of the ore tub. But if the field collapses we’re going to be buried under chunks of magnesium oxide anyway, so I don’t think the odds are good.”

“Anybody left outside?” Snutch said.

“The control staff at the landing field,” someone said. “I hear they’re all right.”

“Any chance of our getting out?”

“Right now, I’d say none whatsoever.”

“And nothing can get in,” Snutch muttered. “And until the master ship comes to collect the ore tubs, no way of getting a signal out because we haven’t the power to reach Marduk with surviving equipment, and even at maximum drive it’ll take weeks to get supplies here and they’ll have to be—Rureth! How about a tunnel?”

“We thought of that,” Rureth said. “But the trouble’s this. The whole area where the force field meets the ground is concreted, except for a small stretch where it’s been so hammered by the impact of the ore tub that it’s practically fused together. Inside the field, where we can get to, there isn’t enough equipment to break through concrete and make a tunnel. I signaled the landing control staff to see if they could find some equipment out by the mines themselves, but there’s been subsidence and a lot of the underground machinery is buried. When the ore tub hit, it must have been equivalent to a small earthquake. Shook all the tunnels down.”

Snutch’s hands were shaking where they lay on the table.

He noticed them and clasped them hastily together. With much effort he said, “Casualties—oh, what’s the
use?
We’re done for.”

All eyes switched to him. Someone said, “While there’s life—”

Snutch thumped the table and leaped to his feet. He said hysterically, “Hope? Where’s the hope? When’s somebody going to show me hope? All you do is drone on about disaster and how we’re imprisoned and—”

Inconspicuously Rureth exchanged glances with the chief of the medical staff, on whom Snutch had been about to call for his casualty report. The doctor nodded; he made some motion or other beneath the table, and suddenly clapped his hand against Snutch’s thigh.

The manager’s eyes rolled upwards and he began to sag at the knees. Rising unhurriedly, the doctor helped him to fall back accurately into his chair.

“Shock,” he said to the others. “He’ll be out for about three minutes. I gave him a palm-injector load of antitension specifics. I’d pass them round, but my supplies are short.”

“All supplies are short,” someone said pessimistically.

“Yes,” the doctor said thoughtfully. He looked at Rureth. “By the way, some of your men aren’t helping any. Last night, we had enough casualties from the main disaster without having to waste material on men beating each other up.”

“My men?” Rureth said.

“Yes. The one who started it seemed to have been unstabled by shock, and claimed that the guy he was beating up was responsible for the crash. Dorsek was the name. The other was a youngster.” He snapped his fingers. “Someone did tell me who he was; he couldn’t talk for himself. He had a concussion and his face was badly bruised.”

“Kazan?” Rureth said.

“That’s right. Young fellow. Fair-haired.”

“Dorsek’s fault, then,” Rureth said after a pause. He debated with himself: should he inquire how Kazan was, do anything about him? He found he hadn’t got the spare energy. He said, “Dorsek has a case of the same thing as that moron Hego I sent over to you yesterday. What did you make of him?”

The doctor shrugged. “I didn’t get very far. Ran some tests. But when the disaster hit, I figured a strong man was going to be useful in rescue work. So I turned him loose. I guess we can pick the threads up later. After all, he can’t run away.”