By the light of the bonfires and strategically placed torches the lock and stabilizer sections were fitted, the tanks of Bug air were brought up and positioned inside the framework and the periscopes were set up and aligned. The vanguard of Hutton’s convoy came rumbling and creaking onto the Escape site, off-loaded hurriedly because the fires were making the Battlers restive, and returned to town. While their load of metal plating was being lifted, manhandled into position and hung onto its proper place on the framework, the empty wagons were reloaded with furniture, personal possessions and litters for the injured and driven to the other side of town where they were parked by the roadside. There they waited just as the cats in the bay were waiting—although in their case the furniture and sundry oddments were carried mainly to break up or hide the outlines of the deck cargo of dismantled gliders and similar items too valuable to destroy with the town.
It was like a scene from some surrealist’s Hell, with red-eyed, smoke-blackened demons aswarm over an alien and uncompleteable jigsaw puzzle in three dimensions. But they were completing it—all the pieces had reached the site and smooth metal flesh was growing across the bare bones of the dummy. And so far everything had gone without a hitch.
Something should go wrong, Warren felt, something serious. But nothing did.
Men fell or burned themselves with torches or had heatstroke or had hands or legs crushed during the process of assembly or while unloading wagons. They were taken to the hospital in town and then to the litter wagons. But these were only minor hitches, the ones which had been planned for. Just as was the fact that they were still a little behind schedule.
“The discharge of a C-7 is detachable at line of sight,” Warren said worriedly, and unnecessarily, to Hutton. “We have to light the fires at least an hour before the guardship clears the horizon or they’ll know it isn’t the real thing.”
“Just three more sections to go, sir!” said Hutton, the smoke, excitement and the strain of too much shouting all contributing to the hoarseness of his voice. “They’re at ground level and won’t give much trouble, and we’ll have them in position before the head and smoke get too bad. So you can give the signal now, sir…!”
Hutton’s face and body were so thickly caked with soot, sweat and grime that he had the aspect of a piece of smoke-blackened sculpture, but the excited, shining eyes and the even brighter gleam of teeth were not the expression of a thing of stone. Grinning in return, Warren slipped the lanyard of his whistle over his head and handed it to the Major.
“You give the signal,” he said.
There was a moment of absolute quiet after the high, clear note of the whistle sounded, then the silence was broken by more whistles, shouted orders and sporadic cheering punctuated by the thud of explosions and the angry hiss of fire-paste. At a few widely separate points around the site a red glow showed through the trees and a few sparks drifted into the air, but as yet there was not much to see.
“I want to get a better view of all this,” Warren said briskly, turning to enter the dummy. He paused, patted the smooth metal plating beside him and added, “You’ve done a good job, Major, a very good job. When assembly is complete, leave—there’s nothing more for you to do here. Go help Fielding with the road evacuation; she might want you to pull a wagon or something. And uh, look after her, Major. Give us time to reach the guardship, then … well, what you do after that depends on circumstances, but whatever happens you are going to have an awful lot to do.”
“I understand,” said Hutton in a low voice. His eyes were not shining quite so brightly and his teeth did not show at all. He went on, “If you don’t … I mean, I can’t be sure that I could organize a second escape. The way things are at the moment, sir, I couldn’t promise—”
“And I wouldn’t want you to, Major,” said Warren meaningfully, even though he knew that at present the meaning was lost on Hutton.
“Good luck, sir,” said the Major.
Warren went through the opening in the dummy’s hull, around or under the timber braces and into the mouth of the main ambush tunnel. The compartments opening off it were full of men checking weapons or airtanks or just sitting quietly beside their spacesuits. One of the rooms, the testing compartment, was full of deep and very muddy water and another was festooned with as-yet-unclaimed spacesuits, one of which was his own. At the other end of the tunnel the road was becoming well-lit by the growing number of fires and he made good time to the town and to the harbor. The glider refused to unstuck from the water until its rockets were almost burned out and they made only five hundred feet, but by then there was no dearth of warm updraughts of air to help him.
A very fine man, Major Hutton, Warren thought; the type of personality and mind which should be preserved, no matter what the cost! The thought gave him a little comfort, although it could not make him completely sure that what he was doing was right…
From two thousand feet the scene resembled a tremendous wheel of fire whose hub was the blunt torpedo shape of the dummy and whose spokes radiated in lines of burning trees and vegetation to the Post, to the many farms up the valley and to the town. Around the site the greenery gave off much smoke and burned with a loud frying sound. But most of the spokes radiated toward the town, and here the wooded buildings were dry and roared as they burned and hurled clouds of sparks half a mile into the air.
It looked both spectacular and highly artificial. Satisfied, Warren tapped his pilot’s shoulder and they dived through the smoke and sparks toward a landing in the bay.
They put Warren into his suit then. After the freedom and comfort of a kilt the battledress part alone felt hot and constricting, and when they fitted the wickerwork shield, helmet and air-tanks he felt even worse. As respectfully as possible in the circumstances, they held him head downwards in the muddy pool of water so that they could check the seal between issue battledress and home-made helmet. He was dunked three times before he was able to tell them where the water was coming through.
A wide leather strap laterally encircled his head and served to anchor a large sponge pad to his forehead. A second strap going around the top of his head and under his chin held the first one in place and gave support to yet another strap, a thin one this time, which crossed just under his nose. To this one was attached a thin, hollow cane, and when they took him out of the pool and laid him face down he worked his lips about until the cane was between his teeth and then drank the muddy water. There was about a half a pint of the stuff.
Water inside the helmet during weightless maneuvering could be deadly, and drinking it was the only way of getting rid of it. He was helped to his feet, motioned to crane his neck forward to wipe away the remaining droplets with his forehead pad, then assisted toward the dummy along the tunnel which was now lined with spacesuited figures resting against nearly vertical planks. Their eyes followed him as she passed, caught by the big numeral “1” painted on his wickerwork shield, and under the ludicrous nose-strap and drinking-straw gadgets their teeth showed in a smile. Warren stopped long enough at each one of them to tap out “Good Luck” against their face-pieces, show his own teeth and wag an admonishing finger if any of them started to come to attention.
Kelso and Sloan were already in the dummy, propped in their wooden supports near one of the periscopes, waiting. Warren joined them.
Chapter 18
After having had the fires under observation, during darkness, when they would have been seen to the best advantage and having drawn certain conclusions from these observations, it was expected that the Bugs would send down a probe for a closer look. Instead of a quick dive in and out of the atmosphere, which was the usual procedure when investigating any suspicious occurrences it was expected that curiosity would make them soft-land the probe for a really close look. And it was known that if the vehicle landed it would not have enough fuel left to return to the guardship. Being an extremely valuable piece of equipment, the Bugs would not soft-land it in the first place unless they expected to get it back. The only way they could do that was to bring it back aboard the shuttle, and if they considered landing the shuttle they could not be feeling too suspicious.