A sharp pain cut through his arm.
'Ah,' he said. 'I'm checking out. I'm losing it. Go on, get out of here, I can't hold it, my hand is dead.'
'Just a second, darling?'
'It's failing. It's failing,' he screamed for he tried to find his will to compress his aching fingers, but he'd been on this drill for so long, it seemed his whole life, and there was no strength left.
'Please, Connie, please, run.'
'Just a second, darling. I almost have it. Now if only there was something I could guide into that hole.'
She looked about.
There wasn't time.
'Oh, Connie,' said Sam. 'Please.'
'Stop being noble. It's annoying.' She reached into the box. 'Maybe if?'
It was gone. It was over. He had failed.
'Connie, I love you.' 'Of course you do, darling,' Connie said, and his fingers at last failed, and the cord slipped and the pin worked its last tiny bit free and the striker was released, its captured tension in its coiled spring allowed to thrust forward toward freedom, and with a powerful snap it drove ahead.
Sam closed his eyes, knowing it didn't matter, for in the next tenth of a second he and Connie would simply cease to exist in their form and instead be rendered?well, he had seen enough deaths by high explosive.
But it didn't go off.
'Jesus!' he said, flexing his fingers to restore the circulation as he fell to his knees.
He looked at Connie. Her face was gray, her eyes blank, her lips tense, fine beads of sweat upon her brow.
Then he realized what she had inserted into the hole to keep the striker from the primer.
It was her finger.
He raced around the table, took up the scissors and began to cut the box away, until at last he had the destructive device free. He could see it now: her smallest thinnest finger, inserted into the crudely enlarged safety- pin hole in the pipe like pull-fire gizmo.
'Okay,' he said, 'I'm going to gently unscrew the device from the ' well.'
'Sam, you say the sweetest things.'
Holding the mortar shell by its warhead against his hip, and with the other hand securing the device, he began the slow process of unwinding the shell from its trigger. It fought him at first, and then he started when some moist warmth clotted up against his fingers and he realized it was her blood. But he unsteadily cranked a tenth of a turn by a tenth of a turn until after what seemed hours the shell itself separated from the firing device. As he set the shell down, something fell to the ground, like a quarter. He saw that it was an artillery shell primer, the necessary ingredient in assuring the explosion.
'Hold your hand up now to stop the bleeding.'
Connie lifted her hand, its finger wedged cruelly in the opening of the pull-fire tube. More blood poured down, matting redly in the fiber of her gray sweater. He held her tightly, unsure what to do next. He wasn't clear if he could just pull it off, or possibly that would maim her finger all the more. He thought maybe he should get her to the faucet and run cold water, but the two of them were on the floor, and she was nestled against him, and it was as close as she'd ever be to him, and he was strangely happy.
'Oh, God,' he said, 'you are so brave. Jesus Christ, you are so brave.
Oh, Connie, leave him, and I'll leave Sally and?' 'Oh, stop it,' she said. 'That would just make a big mess. If you want to be helpful, why don't you find my purse and get me a cigarette and then make me a nice drink.'
Then she noticed they were no longer alone.
'Sam, there's a man from Mars over there.'
Indeed, the Martian lumbered over to them. He was some sort of giant robot, stiffly encumbered in armor, his body a bulk of pure iron, his face an iron mask with a tiny viewing hole. He wore immense mittens of steel braid.
'Say, what part of Mars are you from?' Connie asked.
The Martian shucked off his huge mittens and removed his mask and revealed himself to be merely 'Sergeant Rutledge, U. S. Army, ma'am,' and in seconds everybody else was in there, including police officers, the heroic Harry Debaugh, a medical technician and two more partially disrobed bomb guys, pulling a huge metal box on wheels behind them.
'Look at all these party crashers,' said Connie.
But Sam was thinking: damn, damn, damn, another second and I could have kissed her. earl looked at the telegram and wished it hadn't come. It sat, as yet unopened, on the table on the porch. It actually had arrived yesterday, and Earl could not bring himself to open it. It could only be from Sam.
Sam had promised him he'd tell him man-to-man if he'd decided against the plan. Maybe Sam couldn't come, so Sam had sent a telegram.
Earl imagined it said, At midnight, unless I hear from you, I will inform state police. Regards.
Sam, really, was not a man of war. Sam was a civilian. He thought like a civilian, he reacted like a civilian, he had a civilian's fears and doubts. Earl was a soldier. Earl killed people. That was a difference in the way the two minds worked that Earl could not bridge.
He should never have told Sam. He should never have come back.!' He should have done it on his own.
Earl sat on the porch of the farmhouse in Florida. He could see the empty barn, the rolling fields, and the long dirt road and in the distance the forest cut with palmetto plants, and above it all a blaze of sun.
There was nothing to do but wait; the boys would begin to show up tomorrow or the next day, and dark of the moon was but four days off.
To make himself useful, he was working with the.38–44 high i velocity cartridges, taking each one from its nest of fifty, and with an awl drilling a hole in the center of the semiwadcutter bullet, so that the bullet would rupture when it went through flesh, on the principle of the dumdum bullet. Illegal to do so in battle, but battle was a different phenomenon. This was a holy war, where the odds would be seven against Thebes. So it was allowed.
Earl worked steadily, trying to keep his mind clear, trying not to worry. He went over his own private operational plan, trying mentally to take it apart, to see it afresh, to figure on the unintended consequence. He knew that the confidence that he had thought of everything was the true sign of danger.
Then he saw the car.
It was a long way off. It pulled up the road, yanking a screen of dust behind it. Under the newspaper next to him on the table was a Colt357
Trooper, loaded with the dumdums. Earl could get at it fast, but hoped he didn't have to.
But soon enough it was recognizable, and Earl put aside his thoughts of the gun. It was the Cadillac limousine that Mr. Trugood seemed to travel the country in.
Earl sat back, still dumdumming cartridges, until the car arrived, and a fellow popped out obsequiously to spring the door for the august Mr.
Trugood.
Earl stood and beheld. The man was resplendent in cream linen, with a blue shirt and a yellow tie and a nice straw Panama, with a yellow band to match the tie.
'Hello, sir,' said Earl, rising.
'Mr. Earl. You don't seem happy to see me.'
'Come on up and get yourself out of that heat.'
The man came up, following Earl into the squalid living room. He looked about with distaste.
'It's certainly not elegant, is it? Well, that's what sixty dollars a month rents these days.'
'These boys won't even notice. They'll be too busy buzzing among themselves about cartridges and gun actions.'
'Earl, you're still not happy that I'm here.'
'Sir, I don't want no one down here to see you and identify you. If this thing goes wrong, I want to be the only man with the whole picture. I don't want it coming back at you.'
'Yes, and you also don't want a rich fellow in a fancy car suddenly getting all the natives excited in this backwash, wouldn't that be equally true?'
