He still found it difficult to have any pity for them. They had obviously been willing to accept money to destroy another planet—or they wouldn’t have been working here. They had probably rebelled only when they had discovered how suicidal the attack would be.
.
Cradling the radio against his chest, Brion rose to his feet. He had a better view of the bombs now. There were twelve of them, alike as eggs from the same deadly clutch. Pointed like the bow of a spacer, each one swept smoothly back for its two metres of length, to a sharply chopped-off end. They were obviously incomplete, the war heads of rockets. One had its base turned towards him, and he saw six projecting studs that could be used to attach it to the missing rocket. A circular inspection port was open in the flat base of the bomb.
This was enough. With this description, the Nyjorders would know he couldn’t be lying about finding the bombs. Once they realized this, they couldn’t destroy Dis without first trying to neutralize them.
Brion carefully counted fifty paces before he stopped. He was far enough from the cavern so he couldn’t be heard, and an angle of the cave cut off all light from behind him. With carefully controlled movements he turned on the power, switched the set to transmit, and checked the broadcast frequency. All correct. Then slowly and clearly, he described what he had seen in the cavern behind him. He kept his voice emotionless, recounting facts, leaving out anything that might be considered an opinion.
It was when he finished. He thumbed the switch to receive and waited.
There was only silence.
Slowly, the empty quality of the silence penetrated his numbed mind. There were no crackling atmospherics nor hiss of static, even when he turned the power full on. The mass of rock and earth of the mountain above was acting as a perfect grounding screen, absorbing his signal even at maximum output.
They hadn’t heard him. The Nyjord fleet didn’t know that the cobalt bombs had been discovered before their launching. The attack would go ahead as planned. Even now, the bomb-bay doors were opening; armed H-bombs hung above the planet, held in place only by their shackles. In a few minutes the signal would be given and the shackles would spring open, the bombs drop clear. …
“Killers!” Brion shouted into the microphone. “You wouldn’t listen to reason, you wouldn’t listen to Hys, or me, or to any voice that suggested an alternative to complete destruction. You are going to destroy Dis, and it’s not necessary! There were a lot of ways you could have stopped it. You didn’t do any of them, and now it’s too late. You’ll destroy Dis, and in turn this will destroy Nyjord. Ihjel said that, and now I believe him. You’re just another damned failure in a galaxy full of failures!”
He raised the radio above his head and sent it crashing into the rock floor. Then he was running back to Ulv, trying to run away from the realization that he too had tried and failed. The people on the surface of Dis had less than two minutes left to live.
“They didn’t get my message,” Brion said to Ulv. “The radio won’t work this far underground.”
“Then the bombs will fall?” Ulv asked, looking searchingly at Brion’s face in the dim reflected light from the cavern.
“Unless something happens that we know nothing about, the bombs will fall.”
They said nothing after that—they simply waited. The three technicians in the cavern were also aware of the time. They were calling to each other and trying to talk to the magter. The emotionless, parasite-ridden brains of the magter saw no reason to stop work, and they attempted to beat the men back to their tasks. In spite of the blows, they didn’t go; they only gaped in horror as the clock hands moved remorselessly towards . Even the magter dimly felt some of the significance of the occasion. They stopped too and waited.
The hour hand touched twelve on Brion’s watch, then the minute hand. The second hand closed the gap and for a tenth of a second the three hands were one. Then the second hand moved on.
Brion’s immediate sensation of relief was washed away by the chilling realization that he was deep underground. Sound and seismic waves were slow, and the flare of atomic explosions couldn’t be seen here. If the bombs had been dropped at they wouldn’t know it at once.
A distant rumble filled the air. A moment later the ground heaved under them and the lights in the cavern flickered. Fine dust drifted down from the roof above.
Ulv turned to him, but Brion looked away. He could not face the accusation in the Disan’s eyes.
XVIII
One of the technicians was running and screaming. The magter knocked him down and beat him into silence. Seeing this, the other two men returned to work with shaking hands. Even if all life on the surface of the planet was dead, this would have no effect on the magter. They would go ahead as planned, without emotion or imagination enough to alter their set course.
As the technicians worked, their attitude changed from shocked numbness to anger. Right and wrong were forgotten. They had been killed—the invisible death of radiation must already be penetrating into the caves—but they also had the chance for vengeance. Swiftly they brought
