He reached in and delicately put a loop around the small, fingerlike gearshift lever. He backed away, letting out the cord. He wasn't satisfied. He took off his necktie and used it to lengthen the cord. The FBI man said, "Wait!" in a vexed tone, and added his own necktie. The cord made of two torn-up handkerchiefs and two neckties grew pleasantly long. Hackett pulled. It grew taut.
The gear lever moved. There was a snapping sound. The FBI man tried to throw Hackett to the ground and drop with him. They were both nearly flat in the dust when the car exploded. It made a crater in the dry earth.
Hackett and the FBI man were in that peculiar area of shelter sometimes found around the edge of a crater made by an explosion.
The FBI man had a not very serious cut on his leg from an unidentifiable scrap of flying metal. Hackett had a cut finger. He sucked at it and had the flow of blood practically stopped when squealing state police cars came to a halt around the place where his car had been.
6
The FBI man pulled rank on them and got Hackett back to the buildings under the grandstand from which the work on the garbage pit was being directed. The police hadn't been told what was going on in the cradle from which the ship had lifted. The FBI didn't tell them now. Eventually, though, the FBI agent-in-charge said very confidentially that a crackpot had made a bomb intended to blow sky high some of the dignitaries attending the Greks' departure. The bomb had been seized, and Hackett was to have carried it to a proper bomb-disposal site, but it had detonated from the vibration of his car. It was desirable that nobody know how careless a would-be assassin had been in making a bomb for political use.
The police were partly mollified, But there was resentment later when they checked that story with the crater and the completely fragmented car, and realized that if Hackett and the FBI man had been in it when the bomb went off, they'd have been scattered all over the landscape.
In the garbage pit headquarters the discussion following the exit of the local police was grim. Someone from the State Department took charge. It was self-evident that no Grek or Aldarian could have placed the explosive in Hackett's car. On this day, of all days, a member of either race moving about outside his ship would instantly have been mobbed by his admirers.
Actually, it was the discoveries made in the garbage pit which had kept Lucy and Hackett from going away in their car like anybody else. They'd have been blown to atoms when they essayed to start. But the bomb was more than a narrow escape for Hackett. Humans had placed it, and someone had stayed nearby to make sure the bomb wasn't wasted on a mere car thief or someone of that sort.
"I don't think that matters," said Hackett. "They tried to kill us and failed. It doesn't much matter who they were. We should get that object given to Doctor Thale. We should get it examined and find out what it is, what it does; why the Aldarian didn't want it found on him; why it apparently made the Greks torture and kill a number of Aldarians. The connection isn't certain, but it's possible. I'd say likely."
The State Department man said heatedly that some humans were apparently ready to commit murders by arrangement with the Greks.
"If things are really tied together as they seem to be," Hackett pointed out. "The Greks didn't know they wanted to kill Doctor Thale and me until they got the Aldarian back to the ship. Then they found out something. But they didn't know the names of the people they wanted killed until the police gave them the names from the accident report. So—what humans did they talk to between that time and the lift-off ?"
The agent-in-charge nodded. "Good idea. We'll check it." He spoke to one of his subordinates, giving him instructions. "What kind of explosive was it?"
Hackett grew impatient. The man who'd been with him discussed the explosive. He hadn't recognized the smell. It was a new kind of explosive to him.
"The Greks may have supplied it," said the FBI agent-in-charge. "No handy amount of TNT would have pulverized the car the way I'm told it was."
Hackett became more impatient. The important thing was not who had tried to kill him on behalf of the Greks, but why the Greks wanted him killed. The small, watch-sized object. . . .
Clark intervened. He explained that the object should be X-rayed with the smallest X-ray source possible, so there would be sharp shadows of the internal works on the X-ray film. It should be X-rayed from every possible angle, so it could be reconstructed if anything happened to the object itself. Then it could be opened; not before. This was standard practice when a mysterious artifact showed up in a dig. It should be a valid precaution now.
The FBI approved. Then Hackett mentioned the terrestrial vegetation samples that had been found. Arctic tundra grass. Dwarf willows. Kidney ferns. All cold-climate plants. The Greks must have some sort of flying device which didn't reflect radar beams. They'd been exploring.
"And if they were especially interested in arctic areas," said Hackett, "that would account for lack of observations by Johnson detectors. There's practically nobody up under the north pole scanning the sky for objects warmer than the air."
The FBI man who had been sent to check what humans had talked to the Greks between such-and-such times came back. There'd been ambassadors and prime ministers. . . . But at a late hour the Greks asked to talk to one particular ambassador. The farewell party was on its last legs when they requested his presence. But they'd talked to him earlier. Why again? Hackett said drily that it was after the broadcasts had failed to turn up either himself or Lucy.
"You mean," demanded the State Department man, "that they expected you to come forward, and when you didn't they figured you'd found out something undesirable and that they'd have to kill you?"
"There weren't many people who didn't know us by name," Hackett pointed out, "and who didn't know that we were wanted by the Greks. So if we didn't appear, it would look to the Greks as if we knew too much. We didn't, but it would look that way."
The State Department man said savagely, "As if we didn't have enough troubles, without the Greks having human partners in whatever they plan!"
Somebody said, "But what do they plan?"
"We don't know," snapped the State Department man, "but we know we don't want them to carry out their plan!"
The ranking FBI man said, "The ambassador who talked last to the Greks is still here. At last reports he was still chatting with the Ghanian prime minister. I think we can work this out, if Mr. Hackett will take a certain amount of risk."
Hackett nodded. It seemed to him that nothing was being done. There was too much talk. As a physicist he naturally considered that the important thing was to make an immediate, concentrated, all-out attempt to learn as much as possible of what the Greks hadn't wanted humans to know. They'd dismissed him because he said that their teaching in advanced physics seemed nonsense. It probably was, because they didn't want humans to understand such things as broadcast-power receivers—already supplying a lot of power, and due to supply much more—or space-ship drives, or in fact anything at all of Grek manufacture. But Hackett wanted to work in his own field, and fast! A breakthrough there—
"Of course I'll do anything possible, but I can't see that it matters who tried to kill me! The important thing is to get to work on Lucy's gadget and every other one available, to make a pinhole in our ignorance so we can get ready to do something practical We're wasting time."
Of all times since time began, this was not the one to waste in indignation over the treason of a fellow human —or so it seemed to Hackett. He made an irritated gesture. The FBI man said confidently, "I'll fix this!"