“Toward Red Mountain. I think maybe to the power house. He asked me where it was.”
“What do you think he wants with that?” the sheriff asked of Jordan.
Jordan shrugged and shook his head.
‘Maybe it’s all in the kid’s head,” the sheriff suggested. “These wild teledepth programs they look at give them all kinds of ideas.”
“It isn’t in my head,” Jimmy said violently. “I saw him. He stepped on the ground and stuck his foot into it. I talked to him. And I know something else. He stutters.”
“What?” said the sheriff. “Now I know you’re lying.”
The father started dragging the boy by the arm. “Come on home, Jimmy. You got one more licking coming.”
Jordan, however, was sure the boy was not lying. “Leave him alone,” he said. “He’s right. He did see him.” He took a fast look at the timepiece on his panel board. “I’ll be down in an hour and a half. Wait for me.”
He flicked the switch off, and kicked up the motors. The ship shot southward almost as rapidly as a projectile.
He had topped the Sierras and had just turned into the great central valley of California when, with the impact of a blow, a frightening thought occurred to him.
He flicked the screen on again, and he caught the sheriff sitting behind his desk industriously scratching himself in one armpit.
“Listen,” Jordan said, speaking very fast. “You’ve got to send out a national alarm. You must get every man you can down to the power plant. You’ve got to stop him from getting in.”
The sheriff stopped scratching himself and stared at Jordan.
“What are you so hot up about, young man?”
“Do it, and do it now,” Jordan almost shouted. “He’ll tear the pile apart and let the hafnium go off. It’ll blow half the state off the planet.”
The sheriff was unperturbed. “Mr. Star boy,” he said sarcastically, “any grammar school kid knows that if someone came within a hundred yards of one of those powerhouse piles, he’d burn like a match stick. And besides why would he want to blow himself to pieces?”
“He’s made out of permallium.” Jordan was shouting now.
The sheriff suddenly grew pale. “Get off my screen. I’m calling Sacramento.”
Jordan set the ship for maximum speed, well beyond the safety limit. He kept peering ahead into the dusk, momentarily fearful that the whole countryside would light up in one brilliant flash. In a few minutes he was sweating and trembling with the tension.
Over Walnut Grove, he recognized the series of dams, reservoirs and water-lifts where the Sacramento was raised up out of its bed and turned south. For greater speed, he came close to Earth, flying at emergency height, reserved ordinarily for police, firemen, doctors and ambulances. He set his course by sight following the silver road of the river, losing it for ten or fifteen miles at a time where it passed through subterranean tunnels, picking it up again at the surface, always shooting south as fast as the atmosphere permitted.
At seven thirty, when the sun had finally set, he sighted the lights of Red Mountain, and he cut his speed and swung in to land. There was no trouble picking out the power plant; it was a big dome-shaped building surrounded by a high wall. It was so brilliantly lit up, that it stood out like a beacon, and there were several hundred men milling about before it.
He settled down on the lawn inside the walls, and the sheriff came bustling up, a little more red in the face than usual.
“I’ve been trying to figure for the last hour what the devil I would do to stop him if he decided to come here,” Berkhammer said.
“He’s not here then?”
The sheriff shook his head. “Not a sign of him. We’ve gone over the place three times.”
Jordan settled back in relief, sitting down in the open doorway of his ship. “Good,” he said wearily.
“Good!” the sheriff exploded. “I don’t know whether I’d rather have him show up or not. If this whole business is nothing more than the crazy imagination of some kid who ought to get tanned and a star-cop with milk behind his ears, I’m really in the soup. I’ve sent out an alarm and I’ve got the whole state jumping. There’s a full mechanized battalion of state troops waiting in there.” He pointed toward the power plant. “They’ve got artillery and tanks all around the place.”
Jordan jumped down out of the ship. “Let’s see what you’ve got set up here. In the meantime, stop fretting. I’d rather see you fired than vaporized along with fifty million other people.”
“I guess you’re right there,” Berkhammer conceded, “but I don’t like to have anyone make a fool out of me.”
At Ballarat, an old man, Eddie Yudovich, was the watchman and general caretaker of the electrical generation plant. Actually, his job was a completely unnecessary one, since the plant ran itself. In its very center, buried in a mine of graphite were the tubes of hafnium, from whose nuclear explosions flowed a river of electricity without the need of human thought or direction.
He had worked for the company for a long time and when he became crippled with arthritis, the directors gave him the job so that he might have security in his latter years.
Yudovich, however, was a proud old man, and he never once acknowledged to himself or to anyone else that his work was useless. He guarded and checked the plant as though it were the storehouse of the Terrestrial Treasury. Every hour punctually, he made his rounds through the building.
At approximately seven thirty he was making his usual circuit when he came to the second level. What he discovered justified all the years of punctilious discharge of his duties. He was startled to see a man kneeling on the floor, just above where the main power lines ran. He had torn a hole in the composition floor, and as Yudovich watched, he reached in and pulled out the great cable. Immediately the intruder glowed in the semidarkness with an unearthly blue shine and sparkles crackled off of his face, hands and feet.
Yudovich stood rooted to the floor. He knew very well that no man could touch that cable and live. But as he watched, the intruder handled it with impunity, pulling a length of wire out of his pocket and making some sort of a connection.
It was too much for the old man. Electricity was obviously being stolen. He roared out at the top of his voice, and stumped over to the wall where he threw the alarm switch. Immediately, a hundred arc lights flashed on, lighting the level brighter than the noon sun, and a tremendously loud siren started wailing its warning to the whole countryside.
The intruder jumped up as though he had been stabbed. He dropped the wires, and after a wild look around him, he ran at full speed toward the far exit.
“Hold on there,” Yudovich shouted and tried to give chase, but his swollen, crooked knees almost collapsed with the effort.
His eyes fell on a large wrench lying on a worktable, and he snatched it up and threw it with all his strength. In his youth he had been a ball player with some local fame as a pitcher, and in his later life, he was addicted to playing horseshoes. His aim was, therefore, good, and the wrench sailed through the air striking the runner on the back of the head. Sparks flew and there was a loud metallic clang, the wrench rebounding high in the air. The man that was struck did not even turn his head, but continued his panicky flight and was gone in a second.
When he realized there was no hope of effecting a capture, Yudovich stumped over to see the amount of the damage. A hole had been torn in the floor, but the cable itself was intact.
Something strange caught his attention. Wherever the intruder had put his foot down, there were many radiating cracks in the composition floor, just as though someone had struck a sheet of ice with a sledge hammer.
“I’ll be danged,” he said to himself. “I’ll be danged and double danged.”