The Greatest Sci-Fi Books - Cyril M. Kornbluth Edition. Cyril M. Kornbluth

he shouted. "That doctor told us not to let you——"

      "Never mind that! What the hell's going on?" yelled Novak, towing Nearing to the gate. The two guards were there—husky kids, blinking in the headlights. They'd been having trouble filling the guard roster, Novak knew. Members were dropping away faster every day.

      "Kids from L.A.!" Nearing shouted in his ear. "Came to razz us!"

      A rhythmical chant of "O-pen up!" began to be heard from the cars over the horns.

      Novak bawled at them: "Beat it or we'll fire on you!" He was sure some of them heard it, because they laughed. One improbably blonde boy in a jalopy took it personally and butted his car into the rocket field's strong and expensive peripheral fence. It held under one car's cautious assault, but began to give when another tanker joined the blonde.

      "All right, Eddie!" Novak shouted to the elder of the gate guards. "Take your shotgun and fire over their heads." Eddie nodded dumbly and reached into the sentry box for his gun. He took it out in slow motion and then froze.

      Novak could understand, even if he couldn't sympathize. The glaring headlights, the bellowing horns, the methodical butting of the two mastodans, the numbers of them, and their ferocity. "Here," he said, "gimme the goddam thing." He was too sore to be scared; he didn't have time to fool around. The shotgun boomed twice and the youth of America shrieked and wheeled their cars around and fled.

      He handed back the shotgun and told Eddie: "Don't be scared, son." He went to the phone in the machine shop and found it was working tonight. People had been cutting the ground line lately.

      He got the Stuart home. "Grady? This is Dr. Novak. I want to talk to Mr. Stuart right away and please don't tell me it's late and he's not a well man. I know all that. Do what you can for me, will you?"

      "I'll try, Dr. Novak."

      It was a long, long wait and then the old man's querulous voice said: "God almighty, Novak. You gone crazy? What do you want at this time of night?"

      Novak told him what had happened. "If I'm any judge," he said, "we're going to be knee-deep in process servers, sheriff's deputies, and God-knows-what-else by tomorrow morning because I fired over their heads. I want you to dig me up a real, high-class lawyer and fly him out here tonight."

      After a moment the old man said: "You were quite right to call me. I'll bully somebody into it. How're you doing?"

      "I can't kick. And thanks." He hung up and stood irresolutely for a moment. The night was shot by now—he'd had a good, long rest anyway——

      He headed for the refractories lab and worked on the heat of composition. He cracked it at six a.m. and immediately started to compound the big batch of materials that would fuse into the actual throat-liner parts and steering vane. It was a grateful change of pace after working in grams to get going on big stuff. He had done it by ten-thirty and got some coffee.

      The lawyer had arrived: a hard-boiled, lantern-jawed San Francisco Italian named DiPietro. "Don't worry," he grimly told Novak. "If necessary, I'll lure them on to the property and plug 'em with my own gun for trespassing. Leave it in my hands."

      Novak did, and put in an eighteen-hour stretch on fabricating pieces of the throat liner. Sometime during the day Amy Stuart brought him some boxes and he mumbled politely and put them somewhere.

      With his joints cracking, he shambled across the field, not noticing that his first automatic gesture on stepping out of the shop into the floodlight area was to measure the Prototype with his eye in a kind of salute.

      "How'd it go?" he asked DiPietro.

      "One dozen assorted," said the lawyer. "They didn't know their law and even if they did I could have bluffed them. The prize was a little piece of jail-bait with her daddy and shyster. Your shotgun caused her to miscarry; they were willing to settle out of court for twenty thousand dollars. I told them our bookkeeper will send his bill for five hundred dollars' worth of medical service as soon as he can get around to it."

      "More tomorrow?"

      "I'll stick around. The word's spread by now, but there may be a couple of die-hards."

      Novak said: "Use your judgment. Believe I can do some work on the servos before I hit the sack."

      The lawyer looked at him speculatively, but didn't say anything.

      CHAPTER XVII.

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      A morning came that was like all the other mornings except that there was nothing left to do. Novak wandered disconsolately through the field, poking at this detail or that, and Amy came up to him.

      "Mike, can I talk to you?"

      "Sure," he said, surprised. Was he the kind of guy people asked that kind of question?

      "How are the clothes?"

      "Clothes?"

      "Oh, you didn't even look. Those boxes. I've been shopping for you. I could see you'd never have time for it yourself. You don't mind?"

      There it was again. "Look," he said, "have I been snapping people's heads off?"

      "Yes," she said in a small voice. "You didn't know that, did you? Do you know you have a week-old beard on you?"

      He felt it in wonder.

      "I've never seen anything like it," she said. "The things you've accomplished. Maybe nobody ever saw anything like it. It's finished now, isn't it?"

      "So it is," he said. "I didn't think—just installing the last liner segment and hooking on the vane. Mechanical oper——

      "God, we've done it!" He leaned against one of Proto's delta fins, shaking uncontrollably.

      "Come on, Mike," she said, taking his arm. She led him to his camp cot and he plunged into sleep.

      She was still there when he woke, and brought him coffee and toast. He luxuriated in the little service and then asked abashedly: "Was I pretty bad?"

      "You were obsessed. You were a little more than human for ten days."

      "Holland!" he said suddenly, sitting full up. "Did anybody—"

      "I've notified him. Everything's going according to plan. Except—you won't be on the moon ship."

      "What are you talking about, Amy?"

      She smiled brightly. "The counter-campaign. The battle for the public being waged by those cynical, manipulating, wonderful old bastards, Holland and my father. Didn't you guess what my part in it was? I'm a pretty girl, Mike, and pretty girls can sell anything in America. I'm going to be the pilot—hah! pilot!—of the first moon ship. So gallant, so noble, and such a good figure. I'm going to smile nicely and male America will decide that as long as it can't go to bed with me, the least it can do is cheer me on to the Moon."

      She was crying. "And then I showed I was my father's daughter. The cynical Miss Stuart said we have a fireworks display in the takeoff, we have conflict and heroism, we have glamour, what we need is some nice refined sex. Let's get that dumb engineer Novak to come along. A loving young couple making the first trip to the Moon. Irresistible. Pretty girl, handsome man—you are handsome without that beard, Mike." She was crying too hard to go on. He mechanically patted her shoulder.

      Her sobs abated. "Go on," he said.

      "Nothing to go on about. I told 'em I wouldn't let you go. I love you too much."

      His arm tightened around her. "That's all right," he said. "I love you too much to let you go without me."

      She turned her tear-stained face to him. "You're not going to get noble with me——" she began. And then: "Ouch! Mike, the beard!"

      "I'll shave," he said, getting up and striding to the lab sink.

      "Don't