“Colonel! The ship is not one of ours. It is closing!”
“Couches!” Riedel ordered. He stood, pressing as he did the switch that turned Stone’s bench into an enveloping cushion. “Raise your legs and lie down, Senator. The television will show you what occurs, and we will release you as soon as possible.”
The hull curve, a smooth violet as Riedel strode to his station, suddenly blazed white in a meter-long knife edge. The impervium alloy held, but Dora’s evasive action in response to the laser thrust hurled the slender officer to the deck. He gripped a chart table, then let skewed acceleration fling him in the direction he wanted to go. He was safely within his couch before the third zigzag snatched at him.
“Riedel,” he announced, “taking command.” His fingers caressed switches they knew by touch. The enemy craft was an eddy in the frozen blue swirls of Earth’s magnetic fields pictured on the detector screen. Riedel set the television cameras to track the detector anomally, though he would not need the picture. By the time Dora had been retrofitted with television, he was used to being guided to battle by the detector alone. And even with their surge weapon ineffective, there would still be a battle with Riedel at the controls. He knew his Dora.
The other craft was within two kilometers now. It fingered Dora’s hull with another short burst, probably unaware that its target was more refractory than earlier victims. The Nazi commander’s face was a grinning death’s head within his couch as he cut forward thrust and flipped Dora to spin like a coin toward the icecap twenty kilometers below. The blue eddy danced around the center of the detector screen and the TV began to flash images of a black disk seeming to approach at a thousand angles. Fluid-filled membranes clamped down on every surface of Riedel’s body, but still the maddening spin worked on his ear canals and the colloid of his brain itself.
The eddy was almost in the center of the detector. Riedel’s fingers acted more through instinct than by conscious calculation. On the television, the spinning edge of the black vessel froze and expanded. There was a terrible, rending crash as Dora’s impervium edge buzz sawed into the unknown material of her enemy’s hull. A sheet of white fire enveloped both craft as the chrome-van alloy proved tougher than what it impacted. Objects vomited from the spiraling gash in the hostile craft. One of them tumbled almost against Dora, now motionless as her enemy fell away from her. The thing was momentarily alive and quite visible on the television screens. It was about nine feet tall, with four limbs that looked like ropes knotted over a thin framework. Its mouth was working and its eyes glittered fear of death through each of their facets.
“You butchers,” a voice rasped through Riedel’s earphones. His anger awakened him to the fact that he still had Dora to pilot, and the anger faded when he realized it was the American who had spoken and not one of his crewmen. “It wasn’t enough to fight the whole rest of the world. You Nazis had to start an interstellar war.”
There was an air leak between compartments F-87 and F-88; a bulkhead had crumpled but the outer skin, though indented, was not seriously torn. Riedel touched switches. As his acceleration couch withdrew into itself, Dora plunged down as smoothly as an elevator and swiftly enough that her passengers neared the weightlessness of free fall.
“Murderers! Criminals!”
Riedel ripped out the jack of his headset. In two steps he had snapped the outside latch on Stone’s couch, effectively silencing and isolating the senator. “Lieutenant Wittvogel,” he ordered, “raise the base. Secrecy is no longer necessary.”
“No reply, sir,” the tall communications officer called across the room. “Not even to the emergency signal.”
“We’re within fifty kilometers,” Riedel said, but he spoke under his breath. “Keep trying,” he ordered.
With an atmosphere to scatter it, sunlight and its reflection from the ice below blazed through the windows. The computer installed three years earlier—a massive thing, not a sophisticated “black box”; but Dora was not a volume-starved turbojet—was guiding them back at 3,000 kph and there was no need for Riedel to stare tensely into the rippling whiteness they skimmed. Beside him stood Sgt. Mueller, as silent as a bored sentry. He had been out of his couch before his commander. When Stone had been locked in, Mueller’s responsibility had ended and he had relaxed with a grin. Even so, it was his ease rather than Riedel’s stark anticipation that caught the first sight of the base.
“Sir, there’s something ahead there that glows!”
Riedel took instant manual control, cutting speed and raising Dora to a kilometer’s altitude. They circled the glow, banked inward for observation rather than flight necessity. A hole had been blasted in the ice, four kilometers across and of a depth obscured by the boiling lake that snarled at its rim.
“The Fuehrer,” Sgt. Mueller whispered. He jackknifed and vomited across the deck plates. Lt. Wittvogel had hurled away his microphone and, like several of his fellow crewmen, was openly weeping. Riedel himself was the least visibly affected, but as he unlatched Stone’s prison he muttered, “I wonder if we taught them about the Bomb, too. They were such bad fighters, no instinct for it at all…”
Riedel was back at the controls, following at full speed and a kilometer’s altitude the brown rim of beach against gray-green water, when Stone touched his shoulder. “You’re done now, aren’t you?” the American said softly.
“‘He could have escaped. He could be at the Moon base now—perhaps they had only one bomb. He—” Riedel’s throat choked him into sudden silence.
“He?” Stone echoed. His face went as white and cold as the ice below. “I fought three years for a chance to kill—that one. If these others have done that, they have my thanks. Whatever else they intend.”
On the horizon was a small freighter static in the shadow of shear, snow-browed cliffs. Inshore of it were a huddle of Quonset huts set in a splotch of snow dirtied by human habitation. “I swore an oath to your wife,” Riedel forced out through tight lips, “and I would prefer to keep it. But if you say another word, Senator, you will go out at a thousand meters.”
The landing legs squealed while Riedel’s practiced fingers brought the disk to a hover over the Quonsets. “Wohlman,” the colonel ordered abruptly, and his executive officer took the controls with a nod.
“What will you do now?” Stone asked as he stepped to the elevator in anticipation of a command.
“The Moon base will need us,” Riedel said, his black and silver chest separated from the American’s by an invisible wall of grief.
“If it’s still there. They would have hit it first, wouldn’t they?”
The cage ground to a halt in the observation gondola. The four men there were tense, hands close to their sidearms. “Inform your people, Senator,” Riedel said. He riffled a worn, mimeographed book, then handed it to Stone. “Our maintenance manual. Perhaps your experts can construct their down disks from it. I have nothing better to offer you here.”
Men in furs were running out of the huts. A blast of dry, chill air hammered the compartment as the hatch opened and the stairway extended. “These are Argentineans. At this time of year you should have no trouble getting a swift return to your country.”
“But what are you going to do?” Stone insisted, the rubberized treads warm under his feet though the wind was a knife across the rest of his body.
Riedel’s eyes, colder than the ice, thrust the American down the gangway. “Do?” he repeated. “We are SS, Senator. We will continue to fight.”
Dora was rising again even before the stairs had fully retracted. A dozen startled Argentineans clustered around Stone, their parka fringes blending indistinguishably with their bushy facial hair. Around them all a huge disk had been etched in the powdered snow by the radiant metal above it.