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They were driving out Queens Boulevard toward the colony, and Alan said, "Why did you leave, Brave? Where'd you go?"
The great Indian spun the wheel for a curve. "Just back to the wall."
"Why?"
"Lights were too bright for my eyes."
Alan stared at him. "You could out-gaze the sun, you pokerfaced liar, and you know it. Why did you leave?"
Brave glanced over at him. "Caliph, I hate to go on sounding like a spae-wife, or the Witch of Endor. But never in all my life have I had such a succession of ominous bodings. You'll think I'm turning raven in my old age—"
"No, damn it, Brave, I know you can smell danger a mile or a month away. Go ahead."
"Quoth the raven, then. I didn't feel happy about standing there. Before we started, it seemed like a good quiet joke. But when we were there and the lights came on, and the cameras started, I suddenly had to step back out of sight. I
had
to, Alan. A couple of my ghostly ancestors took me by the scruff and hauled me right away from there."
"That would have made a nice tableau on TV."
Brave chuckled deep in his chest. "Running Lizard and Pony Sees-the-Sky saving John Kiwanawatiwa from the white man's magic ... I laugh, viceroy, but I swear it felt like that. The old desert-spawned blood—the blood that doesn't tame down—boiled up under those lights and cameras. It pulled the civilized flesh and bones away from them. It whispered that things were wrong, wrong for an Indian and wrong for his friend." He stepped on the gas viciously and the MG spurted forward onto the Union Turnpike like a turpentined hound. "Alan, I almost yanked you up and walked off with you under my arm. I didn't like you sitting there in the bath of electrical magic."
"Why didn't you do it?" asked Alan curiously.
"Oh, hell, boss man. It's one thing to have these primeval urges, and another to forget all your technical training and scientific knowledge so completely that you'll follow the impulse. Do you bust a window every time you'd like to?"
"Hmm." Alan was ill at ease. It seemed to him for a moment that there was something to Brave's instinct, and that he should have been snatched from those lights. Then he said, "I think it's merely that someone had a shot at me the other day, and you've fretted over that till you're seeing assassins behind every chair."
"Maybe. Maybe." Brave rocketed the little car along the dark highway, across the miles to home, and all the while the tomtoms beat in his blood and he knew that he should be afraid, that he should be coldly and sanely afraid of some black hazard soon to come.
Don Mariner walked into their laboratory the following afternoon. He was one of the top engineers on Project Star, a youngish-middle-aged man running to flab and ever-thinning hair. Ordinarily good-humored, today he had a long face and a crease between his eyes. Without a word he spread a sheaf of blueprints and photostats out on a lab table. Alan and Brave bent over them. Don's stubby finger traced the outline of a flying disk, then stabbed at the fuel storage tanks and several other sections of the interior.
"Look at this, you two. I've had it under my nose for three months and it never struck me till today. Just look at it. See anything wrong?"
After a moment Alan said, "The fuel tanks are too big."
"My God! You ought to be the engineer instead of me. I ought to hire out for a potato peeler. Three months it took me to see it."
"What's the point of it?" asked Brave. "If the disks are going to use hornethylene, they won't need a tenth—not a hundredth that much storage space, even if they want to circle the earth a dozen times without landing."
"Here's another thing," said Don Mariner. "This closet for space suits. Why? The stratosphere is the highest they're supposed to go, and there's no need for space suits there. You want a space suit to crawl around the outside of Albertus, but not to wear in a disk. If there's trouble outside the shell you will simply land. Now look at these instruments." He showed them another chart. "Are these instruments for earth travel?"
"I don't know. Are they?"
"They are not. And also they're not the instruments Carey designed for the disks last year. They're a new set entirely, and some of 'em I don't understand myself, but I'll tell you this: they're not for earth travel. They're what you'd want in a space rocket." He looked up, his gray eyes bleak. "I faced Carey with 'em, and he swears they're his old design; and Carey doesn't lie in the ordinary course of events. But they're not, and I know it."
"What's the point?" asked Alan. The question was almost rhetorical; he knew the answer.
"The point is, these disks we're building are supposed to be purely and simply a faster means of traveling around Terra than any we have now. But the man in the street, that faceless brainless little cipher, believes they're for conquering the stars. And by Judas, he's right! We're building interplanetary disks—
and we're not supposed to know it
!"
The three men stared at one another.
"Who's keeping it from us?"
"And why?"
"There are plenty of rocket projects—so what if someone wants to try a space disk instead? Why would he tell all his scientists and technicians a pack of lies? There's no need for secrecy, for God's sake!"
"But—my gosh," protested Alan, "no one man could keep a thing like this from all the rest of us. There must be ten or twenty who know. And details like these, the fuel tanks and instruments, they can't be hidden from anybody!"
"So where does it lead us?"
"Up a narrow, dank, and ill-smelling blind alley," said Brave.
"Not so bl—"
There was a detonation outside the lab; a harsh, clangorous thunderclap of a sound, like the bursting of a bomb full of wash tubs and anchor chains. The three men were dashing for the door before the reverberations had died away.
A disk had crashed on the airfield. Brave and Alan and Don piled into a jeep and raced down toward it.
"I didn't know they had any ready for use," Alan shouted.
"Oh, yes. They haven't advertised it much, though. And this must be the first test flight. I didn't know it was coming off today."
"You'd think we'd all have been invited to the takeoff. Big impressive show, faithful workers get afternoon off, and all that."
"Hell," said Don, "if they're keeping the purpose of the things from us, for no good reason that I can see, they might want to keep the test flight secret too."
"How can they keep it secret? It obviously had to take off in plain sight, and they couldn't shoo everyone indoors. No, I guess they just didn't give a damn about us. Underlings, unimportant servants, that's us," said Alan bitterly, with a flash prevision of the terrible idea that would soon be obsessing him.
They pulled up beside the wreckage of the disk. There was no danger of explosion, due to the peculiar properties of hornethylene. The giant platter, with its raised top like a hot-dish cover and its bubble of clear crystal beneath, lay crumpled and bent, one-third of its whole edge accordioned in upon itself. Even as they came up the crystal bubble inched open; not smoothly, as it should have done, but like a damp-swollen door creaks away from its frame under heavy pressure. The pilot thrust his legs out and dropped to the ground. Alan and a dozen others ran to him.
"Hi," said he. "Guess I pulped this job up right."
"Good Lord, man, are you okay?"
"Not a nick. I just had time to see the ground coming up at me and bingo, I was sitting there with my eyes popping. Anybody got a drink?" He was cut to the pattern of all airmen since the days of monoplanes: tall, narrow of hip and wide of shoulder, lean always-tanned face, a wry grin on the mouth and horizon-hunger in the eyes.
Somebody gave him a flask. "Were you alone?" asked Alan.
"Sure. They can't risk two guys in these things yet. We don't know what they'll do. This one'll take some going over with a microscope and tweezers; it's full of bugs. Someone jockey me to the main offices?"
The crowd dispersed slowly; but Brave, putting an urgent hand on Alan's arm—it enfolded his biceps and the fingertips met the thumb, for Brave's hands were as outsize as the rest of him—held him there. "Wait a minute, risaldar. I want to check something."
"Another instinct, Brave?"
"Plain horse sense. And I want to check it before the big boys clamp a top secret sign on this wreck."
He reached up and gripped the edge of the crystal bubble. It resisted him. He set his muscles and tugged with all his incredible strength. The crushed metal hinges complained and shrieked and parted, and the great bulbous sheet of plastiquartz fell to the ground, narrowly missing him as he dodged back.
"I'll boost you up, and you can give me a hand."
Inside the disk, they crouched and went through the tunnel into the control room. This comprised the entire central portion of the disk; suspended within the shell, like a small kernel in a large nut, it was held comparatively steady as the outer husk rocked and rolled and flipped in its characteristic skipped-rock flight. Alan did not understand the principle of this near-motionless suspension of the control room within an erratically weaving hull, although Don Mariner had tried to explain it to him in patient two-syllable words. It involved a knowledge of the newest developments in gyroscopics, which the young fuel expert did not comprehend. Brave had a fairly good idea of the basic laws involved, but wisely had never tried to beat it into his friend's head. Alan on fuel, on chemistry, on philosophy, was superb; Alan on dynamics or any other branch of mechanics was deplorable.
They looked around the room. Nearly all the equipment was still in its place, for the clamps that held it during the astonishing speeds the disk could maintain in flight had held it still in the shattering instant of the crash. But the entire control board, the panels of instruments and the wide mirrors that gave the pilot a view of the earth and air from every angle, had all been shoved back and broken when the saucer had struck its nose edge into the ground.
Brave walked over to the pilot's seat and stood silently surveying the mess. At last he said, "Alan."
"Yes?"
"Look here."
Alan looked, and started as though he had been stabbed with a hypodermic needle. "God ..." he said.
The control board had buckled back against the pilot's chair; something beyond it, some ponderously heavy piece of machinery in the space between central room and shell, had knifed through wall and board as sharp and deadly as the blade of a guillotine. The metal had sliced the center of the pilot's seat to within six inches of the back.
No man could have sat there at the moment of the crash, as the pilot averred he had done.
He would never have lived. He would have been cut in two....
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