"Where we're going?" Steel's guard laughed quickly. "Buddy, that's something you'll be mighty interested in if Miss Harmon has a mind to tell you about it." And Steel saw the girl walking toward them, wiping a smudge of grease from her cheek. "He wants to know where we're going," the guard grinned as she came up.
She also laughed, a tinkling laugh that Steel hated more because he would have liked it if she hadn't been who and what she was. "Bring him along," she told the guard. "Everything seems to be running smoothly. We'll take a moment off to show him around."
The big fellow gave Steel a shove and followed him and the girl past the generators toward the far end of the room. When they got there, Steel saw there wasn't any wall at the room's end. The room ended abruptly at a two hundred foot drop.
The exit here was only a hole in the wall of a vast cavern, big as a city block. The place had been hollowed out of the earth's ice crust. Its slick green walls glistened brightly under thousands of heat arcs that melted, dried, held back the constantly encroaching cold. On the floor of the cavern, Steel saw what appeared to be a monster space ship, a smooth egg-like thing with a small platform on top. So this was what they planned to escape in! Pile in, melt the ice lid off the cavern, take off! He didn't seethemat first—they were the same color as the frozen floor. Then he caught sight of the restlessly moving creatures around the ship.
The cavern's floor was alive with ice-bears, thousands of them, gigantic males, grizzly females, pink-clawed cubs, a living moat around the precious ship. Not only hadTheBear chained science to her grim purpose. Here were nature's cruelest watchdogs on guard.
"Okay," Steel said at last. "So I'm impressed. Now will you tell me where you plan togoin that ship?"
"Ship?" The girl's smile grew perplexed. "What ship?"
Steel motioned toward the egg-shaped thing below. "That. That's the space ship you plan to get away in, isn't it?"
The girl burst out laughing. Her laughter echoed out across the cavern, tinkling mirth in a place that Hell couldn't have rivaled in Steel's eyes. "Well," she said finally, "you might call it something we plan to escape with. That object is an antigrav projector, Mr. Steel. We'll escape with it all right, but we're going to take the Earth along with us...."
During his career as a detective, Steel had heard doomed convicts call the Devil's curse upon mankind; he'd heard dope-crazed crones in the upper levels shriek the curse of witches upon their neighbors; he'd heard cornered gangsters swear dark vengeance—but he'd never before heard words of such raw horror. And the girl said them as a simple statement of fact—with a laugh.
"We're going to take the Earth along with us...." This could have been just an insane threat. Cornered, the gang was trying to destroy the world in its own suicide. But Steel had seen the gang's ultra science here, he'd seen their banks of electrotubes—they weren't up to anything as simple as destroying the world by suffo-gas. He couldn't miss the real meaning of Lois Harmon's words. Taking the Earth withthemmeantmovingit.
Which was still madness! Still suicide! But they didn't think so. They were right now making frantic preparations.
"You see," the girl continued, "we've been experimenting exclusively with gravitational force—the forces of attraction and repulsion that not only hold the atom together but hold the planets of the Solar System in balance." Her smile taunted Steel. "Dad finally devised an ultra-wave screen that could be projected. This screen surrounds the object toward which it's projected, shields off all the gravitational forces acting upon it and allows us to play upon it only those forces we care to use in moving the object from one place to another. You saw how we encircled you with those ice balls when you first came snooping around. You saw how we snatched a pistol out of your hand. In a few minutes, you'll see how we snatch the Earth out of the Solar System."
In a few minutes.... The girl's face blurred before Steel's eyes. Her words came to him faintly. "But I don't know why I'm telling you all this. You came here, working for Hampton Stahl's filthy money." Then raving fury blinded Steel completely.
He whirled. Ran.
He streaked back into the control room. The first weapon he saw was a wrench. He grabbed it on the run. He sped down the line of electrotubes along the wall, smashing them as fast as he could swing his arm.
Vaguely, he heard the girl's scream behind him. He heard his guard's heavy feet pounding after him. Before him, he saw the horde of workers halt, then swarm toward him. But he kept slashing with his wrench, eyes squinting against the flying glass, smashing his way up the line of tubes toward the main control board. When the wrench was snatched away, he kept tearing at the tubes with his bare hands.
Then he was crushed down by the hundreds of fists and feet that flew at him from every side.
When he was jerked back on his feet, the first thing he saw was Lois Harmon's face. Her face was streaked with tears. Tears of sheer hatred glistened in her green eyes. Her lips parted, trembling, but she couldn't speak. Her tiny fist lashed out, smacking Steel in the face.
She kept pummeling him till somebody pulled her back, fearful apparently that she might hurt her hands on him. Nobody seemed at all concerned whether Steel was hurt or not. Quite on the contrary.
"So you're still after Stahl's reward, huh?" Mike, the ex-boxer, swam toward Steel's blood-filled eyes; he started whipping Steel back and forth across the face with his open hand. A hand as heavy as a sand bag. "When they took me into this crew it was the first decent thing anybody'd ever done for me! They're the first decent folks this damn world's seen in ten thousand years! And you try to stop what they're doing!"
"Give him hell, Mike! The voice came to Steel as from a great distance. But there was something about it.... He recognized it. When Mike's hand paused, he twisted his head around to look at the man who had spoken.
"No!" He tried to blink the blood out of his eyes. The man was Harlan Webb. Harlan Webb, one of those five cops who'd gone after The Bear and never come back! "Harlan!"
"Sure," the man said. "I'm Harlan Webb. We used to be cops together. But we're on different sides now, Steel."
"But I thought The Bear—"
"Sure, that's what we wanted everybody to think about us—Jim, Dick, Bill, the other cops who disappeared, they're up there with Dirk guarding the entrance now. That's what we wanted everybody to think happened to our families when they were brought here too. That's the only way Dr. Harmon could keep what he was doing secret."
"You mean The Bear didn't—"
"Didn't kill them? Is that what you mean!" This was Lois Harmon again. "We didn't killyou, did we—when we certainly should have." She pointed about the room. "There's the vice-president of Uranium, Inc. He's been an engineer with us ever since he 'disappeared'. There's the crew and passengers of that space liner that lost its cargo last night." She shook her head furiously. "Our men have killed only as the last possible resort. That rule has been as important as our secret."
"Hush! Hush!" This was Dr. Harmon, holding up his hands, finally making himself heard. His eyes were grim behind his spectacles. "We haven't time for this now! This man has wrecked our remote control up here but we can still operate from the projector itself." He brushed his shaggy white hair from his eyes. "We must hurry before the police get here."
"But, my long-departed friend, the police aren't coming...."
Every eye turned from Steel to the door leading in from the passage. Steel craned to stare over the shoulders of the men who held him.
That great shadow in the doorway was the bulk of Hampton Stahl.
"I thought I had finished with your interference for good, Dr. Harmon, when I arranged that little laboratory explosion fifteen years ago," Stahl said. "I see now, however, that I'll have to destroy you and your work all over again."
Swiftly, when the shock of his appearance died, the men around Steel surged toward Stahl in one mass. And, just as swiftly, when they came at him, Stahl stepped aside, into the room, and twenty of his guards pushed through the door.
They carried volt rifles. Stahl waved his fat hand.
The guards fired straight into the unarmed group coming at them, mowing them down like insects. When the rifles lowered again, a full hundred charred forms writhed on the floor, then quickly lay still. Mike, Harlan Webb, the rest....
"After they've shown us around," Stahl said when the volt rifle reverberations died, "you can do away with all the rest of them." Then his thick lips twisted into a smile. "Including Mr. Steel there. It will relieve me of an embarrassing contract."
At Stahl's words now, Steel realized he was standing there alone. Most of the men who had surrounded him had left to go for Stahl. Most of these were now lying in black heaps on the floor. The rest stood among the charred bodies, staring helplessly as Stahl's guards advanced across the room, ready for the slightest excuse to use their rifles again. The terrible silence of their advance was broken only when Lois Harmon sobbed, buried her golden head in her father's arms.
Steel stood there alone, realizing just how much alone he was. He'd thrown a wrench into the Harmon gang's plans, for which they'd been in the act of doing away with him. Then his rescuers—whom he'd called here himself—had turned out to be an equal menace, bringing the same fate that they'd saved him from. He'd jumped out of The Bear's frying pan into the shortly forthcoming fire of Stahl's volt rifles....
"When I received your message and learned who The Bear was," the fat man smiled, halting before Steel, "I preferred not to bother the police with what was really a private matter between Dr. Harmon and myself."
"Private matter!" Dr. Harmon's cold eyes were frightening behind his spectacles. One hand soothed his daughter's head but the other was knotted, white-knuckled at his side. "Yes, you always did look upon my experiments as a private matter. You didn't care whether they benefited mankind or not—if they interfered with your vita-lamp profits, you tried to crush them."
"And crush them I shall," Stahl replied easily, turning to the old man. "When we sighted the coordinate location Mr. Steel so kindly sent us, we blasted the whole area immediately. We blasted the entrance to your hideout before your men had time to use any trick weapons you've developed." Which had been the end of Dirk and the men who'd been up there with him, Steel thought. "At this moment," Stahl continued, waving toward the door through which he'd entered, "others of my guards are searing every room in the place. When we leave here there won't be the slightest sign that this place ever existed. The world will continue to think Dr. Harmon died fifteen years ago."
The guards herded the remaining few of Dr. Harmon's men into a corner.
"Now," the fat man told Dr. Harmon, "if you'll kindly lead us on a little tour of your power plant here, you'll have exactly that much longer to live."
The old man hesitated a moment. Then he lifted his white head, took his daughter's hand and moved slowly ahead past the generator houses. One of the guards shoved Steel after them and the procession started down the long room.
"On the way here," Stahl said chattily to the old man and the girl, "we received a telenews report that a freight liner had just discovered something rather startling in the Venusian space sector. Earth scientists are in a dither." He laughed. "The planet Venus seems to have disappeared...."
Steel's eyes widened. He recalled Dr. Harmon's and Dirk's mysterious doings in the video room.
"Perhaps you can explain what happened, Doctor," Stahl said.
"If you wish," the old man answered finally. He walked straight ahead, chin high, voice mechanical and cold. "Venus was in the way of Earth's planned trajectory from the Solar System. We simply moved it—as we've been moving smaller asteroids farther out in space for months. Venus was the last object that had to be cleared from Earth's path to Sun K-16."
"So that's where you planned to take it," Stahl said with some surprise. He laughed. "Who was it that said 'Give me a lever and I'll move the Earth'? So you found it! And I'm quite sure you could have accomplished it without mishap too, Doctor. If you remember, I worked out the preliminary planning with you myself."
"Until you realized what would happen to your vita-lamp monopoly if the Earth had a warm sun again!"
Stahl laughed again, agreeably. Steel however could barely keep his mouth from hanging open. He didn't know what to believe any more. Those blurred white lines behind Venus' picture on the video screen—had they been star trails? A background that Venus was moving past so fast even the video camera's ultra speed couldn't catch it? Was it possible Venushadbeen moved and that the Earth couldhavebeen moved? These men talked about moving planets as if they'd been moving a house on log rollers. Steel was bewildered.
"Well," Stahl said, "now I'll have your formula for the projector and vita-lamps will become only a sideline. I'll move another planet to Sun K-16—Jupiter, perhaps. When I move it to a livable climate its real estate prices will be something unimaginable. I suppose you applied the principle to space ships long ago."
"They were our first experiments," Dr. Harmon told him. "We have a small fleet in stalls near the surface. We found our only problem was keeping their speed down—to keep them from burning by air friction in taking off and landing." For some reason now as they went down the room, Dr. Harmon went into greater detail in explaining whatever questions Stahl put to him. He was fighting for time, Steel decided, hoping thatsomethingwould happen, anything. Steel also decided it was high time he started hoping that too. He was in for the killing now himself.
When explanations had finished they had reached the end of the room and now stopped at the brink of the vast bear-pit.
"And here it is," Dr. Harmon said wearily. "The projector."
The immensity of the place, the terrible creatures staring up at them, the mysterious machine majestically alone down there—all combined to silence even Stahl a moment. His guards crowded forward, exclaiming to each other and staring into the pit. They did not, however, let their curiosity distract the vigilance of their rifles. The guns remained snug against their prisoners' backs.
"And how did you get the manpower to build all this?" the fat man finally turned back to Dr. Harmon.
"They were easy to find," the old man said simply. He seemed to stare through Stahl—perhaps at the years he had put into this work and its miserable failure. "We found followers everywhere—our workers came from the slums of every city on Earth as well as from the highest society. Most of those we were forced to capture also eventually volunteered to work with us. Those who didn't volunteer we kept in very comfortable quarters, knowing that they—and the world—would be free very soon. We even brought poverty-stricken children here. Helping us gave them their only chance for education." Steel remembered his first sight of The Bear in that auditorium crowded with tenement kids. "The Bear idea was only an advertising trick my daughter thought of," Dr. Harmon said. "It awed the common man and terrified—you." His eyes snapped back into focus on Stahl's face.
"And now it's all turned out to my profit," Stahl said. "So suppose we go down and have a look at the projector. You have a way of getting down there, certainly."
Steel found himself also wondering how theycouldget down there. He looked upon it with little surprise however, only one more breath-taking gadget, when Dr. Harmon pressed a button on the nearby wall and a low-railed platform shot up from the top of the machine below. It halted at their feet. Where it had been on the machine below, there was now an open port with a circular stair leading inside, discernible in the distance.
"Very tricky," Stahl said. "But just to make sure this lift doesn't suffer any mishap on the way down, Doctor, I think you better stay up here and operate it while your daughter goes down with me."
Steel's eyes were on the girl's face as she looked at her father. Then she quickly rushed into his arms. The sight made Steel wince. The old man stroked her golden hair and whispered in her ear. Steel started to turn away. Then something flashed, the slightest glint in that icy place where the very walls glinted—he caught a glimpse of what it was, then instantly turned away, afraid somebody else might have seen.
He searched the guards' faces around him and Stahl's face, but they hadn't seen. They hadn't seen Dr. Harmon quickly slip a knife in his daughter's hand.
Steel recognized it for what it was, a thing common in police circles, a tiny knife, small enough to hide in one hand. When a button was pressed on its side a six-inch blade licked out like a watch spring uncoiling.
"The rest of you men stay up here with the good doctor," Stahl said. "Hans, you and Barge come down with me and our lovely guide." The fat man stepped out on the disk-like lift. He caught the girl's arm and jerked her after him.
In the next three seconds, the guards stepped on the lift with them—and Steel remembered the pledge that had brought him here, Floyd lying there dead, the dreary upper levels around that deserted building.
Stahl said, "Okay, let us down, Doctor"—and Steel remembered the confidence that even Dr. Harmon's deadly enemy, Stahl, had had in the Earth-moving venture's safety. Floyd too, working for The Bear, had believed in it enough to die for it. It was the one chance to bring warmth to the Earth again, banish completely such things as the upper levels!
Dr. Harmon pressed the button and the lift started down—and Steel remembered the unwavering courage in Lois Harmon's eyes when her father had slipped her that knife.
In those three seconds, everything that had happened flashed through Steel's mind, and everything thatcouldhappen. In those three seconds he decided what hewantedto happen.
He jumped.
The lift was moving down swiftly. It was going down just a trifle slower than Steel fell. There was little jolt when he landed.
He knocked one of the guards' rifles sailing immediately. The other whirled upon him, rifle raised. But the platform was too small for a rifle. It worked to the guard's disadvantage. Steel grabbed the barrel. A lever. With it, he wrenched the fellow over the side.
He caught a glimpse of Lois Harmon clinging to the hand rail, one hand at her trembling lips, her green eyes huge. Then Stahl's bulk loomed before him and the other guard came in behind him, while from above a volt gun spurted its molten stream past his head.
The guard got his elbow around Steel's neck. Stahl raised both huge hands and brought them down at his face like twin sledge hammers. Steel dropped his weight in the guard's arms, twisted his head, caught Stahl's blow on his shoulder. Then the arm around his neck was blinding him, cutting off his air. A red film swam before his eyes. His ears roared. He felt Stahl's blows numbly against his face. Going down. Going down.
It was more instinct than anything else that made him grip the guard's shirt behind him. It was many a police lesson in roughhouse that doubled Steel forward and arched his back, while he jerked at the guard's shirt with his last strength. He yanked the guard off his feet and flung him up and out over the railing.
When the guard's scream died away, Steel found himself on the floor of the platform, Stahl on top of him, thick fingers grappling for his throat. The platform had stopped falling. It rested at the bottom of the cavern.
"I'll get him! I'll get him!" screamed Lois, leaping toward Stahl, deadly little knife upraised.
"I'll get him! I'll get him!" screamed Lois.
"I'll get him! I'll get him!" screamed Lois.
"I'll get him! I'll get him!" screamed Lois.
Steel fished his legs around and kicked her back against the railing. "No!" he yelled. "Get the projector working!" Dr. Harmon had said:We can still operate from the projector itself....
The girl turned and fled down the circular stairs, to disappear inside the vast machine.
But Stahl found his opening. He got a grip on Steel's right arm, twisted it behind him and then twisted it back like a bending stick. Steel rolled to keep it from breaking. And found himself staring over the platform's edge into a writhing sea of shaggy hair, upturned blazing eyes, dripping jaws—the bears—ten feet below.
Stahl strained at his arm, shoving with his knees, breath heavy in Steel's ear. Steel's right leg slid over the edge.
Although they couldn't shoot for fear of hitting Stahl now, the sound of gunfire continued from above. It was the requiem for those who remained of the Harmon gang, Steel thought wildly—and for Dr. Harmon.
Steel tried to get a grip on the railing post. The fat man scraped his fingers away. He clawed at the platform floor. But he couldn't stop his sliding. He cursed and prayed and tried to cling to the floor by the sheer friction of his body. Stahl was shoving too hard. Steel's body slid over the side, one last arm hooked in the railing.
The fat man struggled up and kicked at the arm. Then, more than the kick on his arm, Steel felt a sickening shudder pulse through his body—through the platform—through the world....
Stahl felt it, too. His foot hesitated in the next kick. His eyes glaring down at Steel suddenly widened.
The moment was all Steel needed. He jerked himself back up on the platform, rolled and struggled to his knees. Then he saw Stahl wasn't even playing any more. The fat man was staring up at the roof of the cavern as if he was having an apoplectic stroke. It was only then that Steel realized the blinding light in his own eyes.
He squinted up at the strange brightness and saw at the distant top of the cavern, like a huge skylight above them, a great white square, blazing with a light that no artificial fluorescence had ever approached. A light Earth had forgotten.
"The sun...."
Stahl's voice was a whisper. Then it sirened into a scream. "Sun K-16! They've done it! They've done it!" His eyes shot back to Steel, like a wild beast's. "But you'll never have it!" he shrieked. His hands shot out at Steel like talons.
This time Steel was prepared. His right fist came up and across Stahl's thick chin. The fat man toppled backward, tottered against the railing, and then went over.
At that moment, Lois Harmon ran up the ladder. Steel caught her and pressed her face against his chest. "Don't look."
But he looked. He saw Stahl ride for an instant on the shaggy white sea below, beat with his hands frenziedly against the mass of animals under him, and then slip down into the mass like a pig slipping into a meat grinder.
His scream was an era dying....
The bright sunlight playing across the shimmering ice waste, the young rivers of melting snow—the telenews cameras ate it up.
The telenews men didn't seem to care whether they had an audience or not. They had the video cameras set up on the sun-drenched Terminal roofs, sending the picture to receiving sets that probably hadn't a single watcher throughout the world. The population of Earth had swarmed to the surfaceen masseand tears of thanksgiving mingled with the melting snow.
"Nobody seems to care that the lower levels have already filled with water," the announcer chattered hysterically into his portable mike. "Nobody seems to carehowthis thing happened. The only thing that matters is that itdidhappen—the greatest thing thateverhappened!"
"And they'll never know how it happened," Lois Harmon said. "Dad would have wanted it that way." She and Steel sat in their plane on the Terminal roof, listening to the announcer, watching the joyful mob that stretched across the ice as far as they could see.
"Yeah," Steel said quietly, "every clue to the old world will be washed away clean. Everything will begin new." And, he thought, Floyd would also have wanted it that way. This was what he'd died for. Even the memory of that upper level chill would soon be gone. He watched a group of mothers holding their sickly white babies up to the warmth, a horde of small boys and girls whose cheeks already glowed with the strength of a new race.
"Everything new ..." the girl repeated. She turned, green eyes meeting Steel's, then dropped her golden head against his shoulder.
Steel grinned as he put his arm around her. "Looks like I'd better hunt another job, too," he said. "I guess I'm a pretty bum detective when the world gets stolen right under my nose."