New Lensman Part 5

Larry told Pamela to stand guard again and he tried the visiphone. Hanovich's secretary told him that Hanovich was on his way with a squad of men.

Five minutes later the elevator doors again opened. This time it was Hanovich and a group of security men with drawn guns and gas masks. 'We've blocked all the elevator exits!' Hanovich announced gleefully when he saw Lt. McQueen. 'If they're in the Sanctuary, we've got them trapped there!'

'Any idea on how to get them out?' Larry asked.

Hanovich hesitated for a long time. 'Ah, well, ah ...' he said, trying to think of something. The visiphone buzzed, saving him further embarra.s.sment. Larry answered. It was Hanovich's secretary and she wanted him.

'Right after you left, the surveillance team captain called and reported that all of the suspects have gone to the Hospital,' she said. 'I'll switch you over to Inspector Burbee.'

'Where are they now?' Hanovich asked, as the Inspector's face appeared on the plate.

'They took an elevator down to the Sanctuary,' Inspector Burbee answered. 'A big spy-ray block has been put up down there and we can't see what they're doing.'

'When did they leave for the Hospital?'

'About 10 minutes ago. I tried to call you when I had determined where they were all headed but you'd just left.'

'Were there any new people in the group that went down into the Sanctuary?' Larry interrupted.

'Yes, one.'

'Who?'

'Mr. Johnstone, Director of Copernicus Control.'

Larry heard a little gasp from behind him and turned to find Pamela looking very pale and frightened.

'Oh, no,' she said, and then was crying on his shoulder. Behind him Larry heard the conversation continue.

'What kind of weapons do they have down there?'

'No idea. By the time we realized that they were headed toward The Sanctuary, they had their spy- ray block up. They didn't take much with them but there's no telling what they've already got down there.' There was a long pause while Inspector Burbee turned and was conferring with someone else.

Then he continued. 'You can't go down there now. They've released the foam that was to seal off the Sanctuary from the Dome after the evacuation. The elevator shafts are filling up with it.'

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Hanovich swore. 'I'll call the Mayor and find out who can remove it.'

A moment later he explained the situation to Mayor Love. Mayor Love said he would have someone call back in a few minutes.

Rog Philips called back. In typical political fashion, the Mayor had appointed him Acting Director of Facilities, and then dumped the problem on him.

Hanovich again explained the situation.

Rog thought a moment and then said, 'The V-2 gas is the first problem. The atmospheric contamination detectors closed off the ventilation system on your floor in time to limit the spread of the gas, but they've also closed every air-tight door in the area. Evacuate everyone from that floor. V-2 is soluble in water, so don't worry about the spread of the stuff out of the elevators. The air conditioning equipment on the other floors of the hospital will take care of the little bit you carry in the elevator cage. Just don't let anyone stand close to the cage door when it opens. The top floor there is the quarantine ward, so when you get everyone out, we'll blow the atmosphere out the vents to the surface. Then we'll go after the elevator shafts. When we melt the foam out of the shafts, the fumes can be released through the sixth floor, too.'

'How can we evacuate if the shafts are blocked with foam?'

'I doubt if there's any foam up here,' Rog answered. 'In the first place it shouldn't come up this high, and in the second place, at least one elevator should be on one of the lower floors of the hospital.'

'How long before a shaft is clear down to the Sanctuary?'

'At least a day. It depends on whether the solvent and equipment to remove the foam is available or whether we have to bring it in from Tellus.'

'We've got to get down to the Sanctuary as soon as possible. This job has top priority!' Hanovich said.

'Yeh,' Rog said, obviously unimpressed, and cleared his plate.

Hanovich was clearly taken aback by the curt dismissal. It was with a visible effort that he turned to Larry and touched him on the shoulder. 'You better take her home. Nothing's going to happen here for a while.'

'I'll drop into your office later,' Larry said. 'You might try to trace these.' Larry handed him the guns he and Pamela had used and the magnetic identification card he had found on the head gunman.

Then they left.

CHAPTER SIX.

A 'CLUB' WORTH JOINING.

Rog was as pleased as a hungry cat with a piece of chicken. The people in the Facilities Division had responded to him as though they had been let out of a dark prison cell. With any kind of luck, even that pompous a.s.s Hanovich might be impressed with their efforts, although that would be expecting a lot.

Equipment which could remove the foam had been found and transported to the hospital. At the hospital everyone from workmen to engineers helped install it. Rog just stood back out of the way and watched as the walls and floor of an elevator cage were stripped bare.

A refrigerated cooling panel, pulled out of the degreaser in the weld shop was installed. It came complete with drip trays, pumps, hoses and long nozzles for spraying surfaces. When everything was installed, five men in vacuum suits got into the elevator and closed the doors.

A hole was cut in the door, a pipe welded in place and drums of solvent pumped through the pipe into the shaft. Inside the shaft a vacuum-suited handler connected a long coil of hose to the pipe. Other men sprayed solvent from the hose on the foamed plastic below.

The reaction between the plastic and the solvent produced a gas and heat. Uncombined solvent evaporated, condensed on the cooling panel and dripped into pans which led to a pump. The repressurized solvent was sprayed on the walls and used to make certain the elevator tracks were clear. The elevator dropped slowly, paying out hose behind it as the shaft was cleared.

Up on the sixth floor of the hospital, the elevator doors were open and the excess ga.s.ses were drawn out to the surface of the moon.

The five men in the elevator were volunteers. Volunteers to do a dirty, dangerous, unrewarding job. A mistake, a mis-step, and death or serious injury waited for them. Down they went. Spraying away the foam. Tacking the hose to the elevator shaft wall.

They dropped slowly toward, but never reached, the hot, blackened, sticky ma.s.s beneath them. Just workmen? No! Heroes! They were risking their lives for the safety of those above. And if later someone else got the glory ... they would probably smile knowingly at each other and shrug. They were doing a job that someone had to do. Heroes don't always get their names in newspapers or 2324

books and few are ever even recognized.

By the time the local supply of solvent had run out, more had been brought in from Tellus.

It was the next morning when Larry arrived, back in the Patrol's silver and black uniform, at Hanovich's office. After greetings were exchanged, Larry asked, 'Did you trace the guns?'

'Yes,' Hanovich answered. 'They belong to a collector. They weren't missed because he was in the hospital when they were stolen.'

'Any possibility that the collector's a plant to provide the guns?'

'None. He's been a lifelong resident.'

'Did the spy-ray teams you a.s.signed to watch the suspects from Fauth find anything special?'

'No, but here's a list of their possessions. Those marked were left behind in their quarters,'

Hanovich said, giving Larry a small sheaf of paper.

'There's nothing suspicious or even very unusual in the list,' Hanovich continued. 'The things they used were apparently obtained out of our Facilities Stores. Here's a list of the items they got there.' Hanovich gave Larry a second small pad listing several hundred items.

'The items marked, we've found. Their quarters have been searched. All the stuff they left behind had been moved to storage.'

'Any idea if they were in contact with anyone outside?'

'No, we hadn't the chance to watch them long enough for that.'

'Hmmmm. I'd like to go through these lists.'

Hanovich shrugged, and directed Larry toward a chair. 'Gum drops?' Larry said, a few minutes later. 'Pa.s.senger overweight charges are 42 credits a pound and she brings in a pound of gum drops? Have your Laboratory technicians gone through the stuff left behind?'

'Ahh,' Hanovich hesitated. The question was unexpected and a simple 'no' might indicate incompetence on his part. 'I don't believe they are finished yet.'

Lt. McQueen looked at Hanovich speculatively for a long moment. 'I'd like to see the report when they ... ah ... finish.'

From Larry's face and tone Hanovich realized that he knew the reason that the inspection was not complete was that it hadn't been started yet.

'Who took over Johnstone's job at Copernicus Control?' Larry asked, changing the subject.

'The a.s.sistant Director, Jay Harness,' Hanovich answered.

'How long 'til the elevator shaft is clear?'

'They estimate that it'll be about ...' he checked the clock, 'three more hours until they get to the top level of the Sanctuary'

'I'll be back to check with you before then,' Larry said, and left. On the way out Hanovich's secretary gave Larry a message that the Mayor wanted to see him when he left Hanovich's office.

A few minutes later Lt. Larry McQueen was in the Mayor" office.

'Good afternoon, Larry,' Mayor Love smiled broadly. 'How was your vacation in the Sanctuary?'

'Wearing!' came the rejoinder. Then Larry smiled back broadly. 'It had its moments, though.'

'I'm glad you came through it in one piece,' Ron said. 'I'm also glad you brought back Pamela.

She's quite a girl. We would have missed her.'

'Thank you for sending your daughter over to stay with her, when I called. She's worried about her father, and being alone last night would have been rather grim for her. Any idea what else is going on?'

'I. don't know. That's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about,' Ron said. 'I've reviewed the tape I made of the Board of Directors meeting three times now. Why did Griffin react so much to your mentioning Icarus? What are they doing on Icarus?'

'Icarus has been a personal interest with me for quite a few years,' Larry said, smiling. 'if you don't mind, I'll give you my usual one minute lecture on the subject.'

Mayor Love nodded and Larry continued.

'Icarus was one of the first asteroids to be shown to have originated from a major meteoritic collision with Tellus. Some earlier objects, probably a set of asteroids from an even earlier collision, struck Tellus. A portion of the resultant cataclysm was expelled back into s.p.a.ce as Icarus. It has been theorized that the kinetic energy of the collision was so great that it caused the American and Eurasian land ma.s.ses to separate. That's still theory, of course.'

'There were a number of reasons for one to suspect that. Icarus is a fragment of a Tellus-asteroid collision. The most obvious is the synchronous...o...b..t with Tellus. They approach each other every 19 years. The point where Icarus crosses the plane of the ecliptic is so close to Tellus as to be statistically highly improbable. The inclination of Tellus to its...o...b..t is 23.4. The inclination of Icarus' orbit to the ecliptic is 23.0, less than 1/2 of difference. Since an impact was 2425

postulated, one would expect numerous smaller particles to be thrown off and be in nearly the same orbit. These particles form the Arietid meteor stream. Several other facts were used to establish the date of impact, among them the differential orbital precession and the axial precession. The date coincided with the start of an Ice Age.'

'The same astronomer who established that Icarus was the result of an impact, made a further name for himself by rediscovering the asteroids Apollo, which was part of the Eta-aquarid meteor stream, and Hermes, which was part of the Perseid meteor stream. His theory predicted that anything of that size coming close to Tellus would be a.s.sociated with a meteor stream.'

'On the Fifth Triplanetary-Solar Expedition we installed some bolts in the surface of Icarus, adjusted the rotation and used it as a heat shield on our trip around the sun,' Larry said.

'You were on that expedition?' Mayor Love asked.

'Yes. They needed some volunteers. I wasn't too much help ... it's a long story. We left some instruments behind; other than that, there's been nothing on Icarus until now. It gets too close to the sun for a permanent manned station to be built there. That's probably what makes it so attractive to these pirates.' Larry shrugged. 'The word "pirate" doesn't exactly fit into my present concept of the circ.u.mstances here. They were apparently using it as a communication link.

Last year Icarus was so close to Tellus it could have been detected with relative ease. Someone apparently locked directional equipment onto it. The orbit has been very well defined. Once Icarus is located it can be accurately tracked indefinitely after it is out of sight. Using a very narrow beam, the transmitter couldn't be found unless you were directly in line with it and the receiver.

An alien s.p.a.cecraft visited Icarus once a month. That suggested the moon, Luna, because it rotates about Tellus about once a month. The time of month led me to Copernicus. The coincidence was too close to be anything else.'

'So you think Icarus is just a convenient relay point?'

'Yes,' Larry answered. 'We are maintaining a watch on it but it's currently too close to the sun.

There haven't been any further visitors since the last ones were intercepted, so frankly I think we can forget Icarus.'

'Griffin also reacted to the discussions of pirates and sabotage.'

'That figures. How did Johnstone react?'

'Not at all, except just before he asked you about their sources of information he acted like someone who had just remembered something or suspected something.'

'Based on his reactions, would you have believed that he was one of the pirates?'

'No. Quite the contrary,' Mayor Love answered. 'I get the impression that he suspected that you might have traced the information the aliens got on the Solar System through to Copernicus Control.'