Jakob Van Meer was a doughty little officer with a fat slack face, sleepy eyes and enough raw courage for a dozen men.
He whistled softly as he saw the size of the hole. Even in the autumn sunlight it looked ominous.
He deposited his radio truck a good six miles away after he saw the hole, and made very certain that each broadcast word was being inscribed on the metal tape. If this was a new weapon, Jakob Van Meer would give future disposal experts plenty to go on, when he himself went up in bits at the heart of a mighty blast.
One trustworthy man stayed on the brink with the special winch equipment. Before Van Meer went down the hole, he listened to the verbal account of Corporal Denty, then put what seemed to be a gigantic stethoscope flat against the ground and bent over to listen.
He frowned. “Damn! I can hear something down there. But there’s no regularity to it. Just some miscellaneous thumping. Well, go ahead; lower away.”
Colonel Rudley Wing, a lean and sallow man, felt a thickness in his throat as he read the report which was, in effect, the obituary of Jakob Van Meer. He shut his jaw hard and walked down the dimly-lighted corridor to the offices of General Argo. Argo saw him at once, had him sit down and held a match for his cigarette.
Wing’s voice sounded odd in his own ears as he said, “That oversized rocket, sir. One of my... No. My best officer investigated. He got halfway down when it all went wrong.”
“Exploded?”
“No. This is pretty odd. The man on the brink went off his nut. Then a man posted three hundred yards back felt panic and extreme exhaustion. He said he was being forced somehow to desert his post and run like hell. Even the men six miles back felt very depressed. After a time, the feeling of depression lifted. They went cautiously back to the hole. The one who had gone mad was dead. So was Van Meer when they hauled him up. His face was contorted. The examining doctor said there was serious damage to the inner ear. He also said that the cause of death was the generation of internal heat in the bodies of the two men. You know the answer to that one, sir.”
“Hypersonics!” the general gasped, his face white.
“Yes, but more effective than anything we’ve heard of before. Panic within hundreds of yards. Black depression six miles away.”
Argo picked up a pencil and tapped the point gently against the steel surface of his desk. “The projectile was what generated this hypersonic wave?”
“There’s no other answer.”
“Then that must be its purpose. I can’t see how we can rightly anticipate a dual function there.”
“What are your orders, sir?”
“Take one of Joe Branford’s engineer units and seal the hole up for good.”
Wing was relieved not to be asked to send another man. He knew that he would go himself rather than send another of his officers. And he did not relish the thought of hypersonic death.
Two hours after dusk the explosives blasted and hundreds of tons of crumbled rock and dirt filled the vast cavity. All civilians living within five miles of the edge of the hole were ordered to evacuate the area, and military roads were diverted to alternate routes.
Chapter Two
The Wall
Alice Powell sat on the edge of the hard cot in her cubicle a quarter-mile underground. The circulation fan high in the corner made a soft droning.
The lid of her foot locker was open, and through tear-dimmed eyes she stared at the smiling picture of Martin Rhode, taped to the inside of the lid. It had been taken the day he enlisted, the day after the bombs had wiped out ten major cities. So long ago. Countless thousands of years ago.
She was a tall girl, her dusky blonde hair pulled tightly back, her uniform crisp and white. But her face was puffy with tears.
She held her own wrist so tightly that the nails bit into the skin, and yet there was no pain which could equal the pain of her great loss.
“There will, of course, be a posthumous decoration,” Colonel Wing had said gently.
What good is that? When those strong brown hands are sealed in the eternal darkness far below the shattered earth.
She heard the distant determined whine of one of the ward buzzers. She sighed, stood up, brushed a wisp of hair back with the back of her hand. It was bed four again. The double amputation. With swift and gentle fingers she injected the morphine.
The lieutenant of engineers saluted crisply and Colonel Wing smiled tiredly, said, “How did it go?”
There was a taught look about the young man’s mouth. “What’s down in that hole, sir?”
“We don’t exactly know. Some sort of device that generates supersonic waves, we believe. Why?”
“Well, sir, we sealed it. Did a good job, too. When we were I’d say about five hundred yards away, I looked back and saw dirt and rock go up like a fountain. I didn’t hear any second explosion. It looked as though the dirt went up about two thousand feet. We went like hell to get out of there, but even so, a hunk of rock as big as my fist came down through the hood and disabled us. The driver said he could make temporary repairs. Two of my men and I went back and took a look. The hole was as clean as a whistle. The diameter at the brink was so much bigger that we couldn’t seal it again. Not enough stuff with us. So I thought I’d better report, sir. Do you want me to try again?”
Wing looked at him for long moments, then stood up. “Come along. I want the general to hear this.”
General Argo listened, asked a few questions, then said angrily, “That affair is taking too much of my time.” He opened a switch on the interphone, said, “Benny? I’ve got a special job for one of your boys. Pick a good one, one that can drop a lump of sugar into a cup of tea from eighty thousand. Low level work. I want a four-thousand-pound D.A. dropped into some mysterious damn hole we’ve got in the rear area. Have your boy get the dope from Colonel Wing. Thanks, Benny.”
The runway started in the heart of a mountain. Johnny Roak had the ship airborne by the time he hit daylight. The jets lifted the ship in an almost vertical climb as Johnny whistled between his teeth. It was one of the hit-and-run bombers, capable of a top speed of eleven hundred, and a minimum speed of forty, once the huge flaps were at full. As the tight cockpit began to heat up, Johnny increased the refrigeration. Directly under him, concealed by the bomb-bay doors, was the egg he was to drop. In the map panel sandwiched between dials, the three-dimensional map, synchronized for ground speed and direction, moved smoothly.
He saw that he was nearing his target and decided to take a practice run at it, then make a 180° and come hack. When he was ten miles away he looked at the landscape and frowned. The autumn grass and leaves had an odd look. Almost as though they had been scorched. The hole seemed to be well inside this scorched area, possibly at the middle of it. He saw that very soon he would begin to pass over the scorched area.
He began once more to whistle. It was a nice day.
Colonel Benjamin Cord wheeled on the young captain and said, “Let me know when you begin to need my permission to spit, or wash your face. Send another plane.”
Three hours later Colonel Cord flung open the door of the general’s office without knocking. Argo was on the verge of reminding Cord of the common courtesies when he saw the expression on Cord’s face.
“What on earth is the matter, Benny?” he asked.
“That — that damnable hole! It’s cost me three planes and three good men.”
Argo’s eyes widened. “How?”
“The first ship blew up in midair. So did the second ship, and at just about the same place. The third time I sent two, one trailing the other at a mile. The third ship gave a running verbal account. Apparently that hole you talk about is the center of a parched area. The following chip reported that as the third ship reached the edge of the parched area, it blew up. Just like that!” Cord snapped his fingers. “Nobody had a chance.”