Space Platform Part 16

Red Canyon was eighty miles from the Shed, and the only way to get there was through Bootstrap, because the only highway away from the Shed led to that small, synthetic town. It was irritating, though they had no schedule, to find that the long line of busses was ahead of them on that twenty-mile stretch. The busses ran nose to tail and filled the road for a half-mile or more. It was not possible to pa.s.s so long a string of close-packed vehicles. There was just enough traffic in the opposite direction to make that impracticable.

They had to trail the line of busses as far as Bootstrap and crawl through the crowded streets. Once beyond the town they came to a security stop. Here Sally's pa.s.s was good. Then they went rolling on and on through an empty, arid, sun-baked terrain toward the hills to the west. It looked remarkably lonely. Joe thought for the first time about gas. He looked carefully at the fuel gauge. Sally shook her head.

"Don't worry. Plenty of gas. Security takes care of that. When I said where we were going and that I wanted the car, Dad had everything checked. If I live through this, I'll bet I stay a fanatic about cautiousness all my life!"

Joe said distastefully: "I suppose it gets everybody. Mike--the midget, you know--called me back just now to suggest that the people who tried to spoil the gyros might try to harm the four of us to hinder their repair!"

"It's not just foolishness," Sally admitted. "The strain is pretty bad, especially when you know things. You've noticed that Dad's getting gray.

That's strain. And Miss Ross is about as tense. Things leak out in the most remarkable way--and Dad can't find out how. Once there was a case of sabotage and he could have sworn that n.o.body had the information that permitted it but himself and Miss Ross. She had hysterics. She insisted that she wanted to be locked up somewhere so she couldn't be suspected of telling anybody anything. She'd resign tomorrow if she could. It's ghastly." Then she hesitated and smiled faintly: "In fact, so Dad wouldn't worry about me this afternoon----"

He took his eyes off the road to glance at her.

"What?"

"I promised we wouldn't go swimming and----" Then she said awkwardly: "There are two pistols in the glove compartment. Dad knows you. So I promised you'd put one in your pocket up at the lake."

Joe drew a deep breath. She opened the glove compartment and handed him a pistol. He looked at it: .38, hammerless. A good safe weapon. He slipped it in his coat pocket. But he frowned.

"I was looking forward to--not worrying for a while," he said wryly.

"But now I'll have to remember to keep looking over my shoulder all the time!"

"Maybe," said Sally, "you can look over my shoulder and I'll look over yours, and we can glance at each other occasionally."

She laughed, and he managed to smile. But the trace of a frown remained on his forehead.

Joe drove and drove and drove. Once they came to a very small town. It may have contained a hundred people. There were gas pumps and a restaurant and two or three general stores, which were certainly too many for the permanent residents. But there were cow ponies. .h.i.tched before the stores, and automobiles were also in view. The ground here was slightly rolling. The mountains had grown to good-sized ramparts against the sky. Joe drove carefully down the single street, turning out widely once to dodge a dog sleeping placidly in an area normally reserved for traffic.

Finally they came to the foothills, and then the road curved and recurved as it wound among them. And two hours from Bootstrap they reached Red Canyon. They first saw the dam from downstream. It was a monstrous structure of masonry, alone in the mountains. From its top a plume of falling water jetted out.

"The dam's for irrigation," said Sally professionally, "and the Shed gets all its power from here. One of Dad's nightmares is that somebody may blow up this dam and leave Bootstrap and the Shed without power."

Joe said nothing. He drove on up the trail as it climbed the canyon wall in hairpin slants. It was ticklish driving. But then, quite suddenly, they reached the top of the canyon wall and the top of the dam and the level of the lake at once. Here there was a sheet of water that reached back among the barren hillsides for miles and miles. It twisted out of sight. There were small waves on its surface, and gra.s.s at its edge.

There were young trees. The powerhouse was a small squat structure in the middle of the dam. Not a person was visible anywhere.

"Here we are," said Sally, when Joe stopped the car.

He got out and went around to open the door for her. But she was already stepping out with the lunch basket in her hand when he arrived. He reached for it, and she held on, and they moved companionably away from the car carrying the basket between them.

"There's a nice place," said Sally, pointing.

A small ridge of rock stretched out into the lake, and rose, and spread, and formed what was almost a miniature island some fifty feet across.

There were some young trees on it. Sally and Joe climbed down the slope and out the rocky isthmus that connected it with the sh.o.r.e.

Sally let down the lunch box on a stone and laughed for no reason at all as the wind blew her hair. It was a cool wind from over the water. And Joe realized with a shock of surprise that the air felt different and smelled different when it blew over open water like this. Up to now he hadn't thought of the dryness of the air in Bootstrap and the Shed.

The lunch basket was tilted a little. Joe picked it up and settled it more solidly. Then he said: "Hungry?"

There was literally nothing on his mind at the moment but the luxurious, satisfied feeling of being off somewhere with gra.s.s and a lake and Sally, and a good part of the afternoon to throw away. It felt good. So he lifted the lid of the lunch basket.

There was a revolver there. It was the other one from the glove compartment of the car. Sally hadn't left it behind. Joe regarded it and said ironically: "Happy, carefree youth--that's us! Which are the ham sandwiches, Sally?"

8

Nevertheless, the afternoon began splendidly. Joe dunked the bottled soft drinks in the lake to cool. Then he and Sally ate and talked and laughed. Joe, in particular, had more than the usual capacity for enjoyment today. He'd been through twenty-four hours of turmoil but now things began to look better. And there was the arrangement with Sally, which had a solid satisfactoriness about it. Sally was swell! If she'd been homely, Joe would have liked her just the same--to talk to and to be with. But she was pretty--and she was wearing his ring. She'd wrapped some string around the inside of the band to make it fit.

The only trouble was that Joe was occasionally conscious of the heavy weight in his right-hand coat pocket.

But they spent at least an hour in contented, satisfying, meaningless loafing that n.o.body can describe but that everybody likes to remember afterward. From time to time Joe looked ash.o.r.e, when the weight in his pocket reminded him of danger.

But he didn't look often enough. He was pulling the chilled soft-drink bottles out of the lake when he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He whirled, his hand in his pocket....

It was the Chief, with Haney and Mike the midget. They were striding across the rocky small peninsula.

Haney called sharply: "Everything okay?"

"Sure!" said Joe. "Everything's fine! What's the matter?"

"Mike had a hunch," said the Chief. "And--uh--I remembered I worked on the job when this dam was built twelve-fifteen years ago." He looked about him. "It looked different then."

Then he caught Joe's eye and jerked his head almost imperceptibly to one side. Joe caught the signal.

"I'll see about some more soft drinks," he said. "Come help me fish up the bottles."

Sally smiled at the other two. She was already inspecting the lunch basket.

"We still have some sandwiches," she said hospitably, "and some cake."

Haney came forward awkwardly. Mike advanced toward her with something of truculence. Joe knew what was in his mind. If Sally treated him like a freak.... But Joe knew with deep satisfaction that she wouldn't. He went down to the water's edge.

"What's up, Chief?" he asked in a low tone.

"Mike hadda hunch," rumbled the Chief. "Somebody tried to smash the stuff you brought. They did. But we started gettin' set to mend it. So what would they do? Polish us off. If they were set to atom-dust the whole Shed an' everybody in it, they wouldn't stop at four more murders."

Joe fished for a pop bottle.

"Mike said something like that back at the Shed," he observed.

"Yeah. But you were the one who figured things out. You'd be first target. Haney and Mike and me--we'd be hard to knock off in a crowd in Bootstrap. But you and her headed off by y'selves. Mike figured you mightn't be safe. So we checked."

Joe brought up one bottle and then another.

"We're all right. Haven't seen a soul."

"Don't mean a soul hasn't seen you," growled the Chief. "A car left Bootstrap less than twenty minutes behind you. There were three guys in it. It's parked down below the dam, outa sight. We saw it. And when we came up, careful, we spotted three guys hidin' out behind the rocks yonder. They look to me like they're waiting for somebody to go strolling back from the sh.o.r.eline, so's--uh--maybe folks out at the powerhouse can't see 'em. That'd be you and her, huh?"