Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“They know we don’t have any big weapons,” Read said. “They know we have only gas grenades and small arms.”

He looked nervously from side to side. They couldn’t bring the copter in with that thing squatting out there.

A few feet away, sprawled behind a barricade of tables, lay a man in advanced shock. His deadly white skin shone like ivory. They wouldn’t even look like that. One nuclear shell from that gun and they’d be vaporized. Or perhaps the tank had sonic projectors; then the skin would peel off their bones. Or they might be burned, or cut up by shrapnel, or gassed with some new mist their masks couldn’t filter.

Read shut his eyes. All around him he heard heavy breathing, mumbled comments, curses. Clothes rustled as men moved restlessly.

But already the voice of Sergeant Rashid resounded in the murky room.

“We’ve got to knock that thing out before the copter comes. Otherwise, he can’t land. I have six Molotov cocktails here. Who wants to go hunting with me?”

For two years Read had served under Sergeant Rashid. To him, the sergeant was everything a UN inspector should be. Rashid’s devotion to peace had no limits.

Read’s psych tests said pride alone drove him on. That was good enough for the UN; they only rejected men whose loyalties might conflict with their duties. But an assault on the tank required something more than a hunger for self-respect.

Read had seen the inspector who covered their getaway. He had watched their escort charge three-to-one odds. He had seen another inspector stay behind at Miaka Station. And here, in this building, lay battered men and dead men.

All UN inspectors. All part of his life.

And he was part of their life. Their blood, their sacrifice, and pain, had become a part of him.

“I’ll take a cocktail, Sarge.”

“Is that Read?”

“Who else did you expect?”

“Nobody. Anybody else?”

“I’ll go,” the Frenchman said. “Three should be enough. Give us a good smoke screen.”

Rashid snapped orders. He put the German inspector in charge of Umluana. Read, the Frenchman and himself, he stationed at thirty-foot intervals along the floor.

“Remember,” Rashid said. “We have to knock out that gun.”

Read had given away his machine gun. He held a gas-filled bottle in each hand. His automatic nestled in its shoulder holster.

Rashid whistled.

Dozens of smoke grenades tumbled through the air. Thick mist engulfed the tank. Read stood up and ran forward. He crouched but didn’t zigzag. Speed counted most here.

Gunfire shook the hill. The Belderkans couldn’t see them but they knew what was going on and they fired systematically into the smoke.

Bullets ploughed the ground beside him. He raised his head and found the dim silhouette of the tank. He tried not to think about bullets ploughing through his flesh.

A bullet slammed into his hip. He fell on his back, screaming. “Sarge. Sarge.”

“I’m hit, too,” Rashid said. “Don’t stop if you can move.”

Listen to him. What’s he got, a sprained ankle?

But he didn’t feel any pain. He closed his eyes and threw himself onto his stomach. And nearly fainted from pain. He screamed and quivered. The pain stopped. He stretched out his hands, gripping the wine bottles, and inched forward. Pain stabbed him from stomach to knee.

“I can’t move, Sarge.”

“Read, you’ve got to. I think you’re the only—”

“What?”

Guns clattered. Bullets cracked.

“Sergeant Rashid! Answer me.”

He heard nothing but the lonely passage of the bullets in the mist.

“I’m a UN man,” he mumbled. “You people up there know what a UN man is? You know what happens when you meet one?”

When he reached the tank, he had another bullet in his right arm. But they didn’t know he was coming and when you get within ten feet of a tank, the men inside can’t see you.

He just had to stand up and drop the bottle down the gun barrel. That was all—with a broken hip and a wounded right arm.

He knew they would see him when he stood up but he didn’t think about that. He didn’t think about Sergeant Rashid, about the complicated politics of Africa, about crowded market streets. He had to kill the tank. That was all he thought about. He had decided something in the world was more important than himself, but he didn’t know it or realize the psychologists would be surprised to see him do this. He had made many decisions in the last few minutes. He had ceased to think about them or anything else.

With his cigarette lighter, he lit the rag stuffed in the end of the bottle.

Biting his tongue, he pulled himself up the front of the tank. His long arm stretched for the muzzle of the gun. He tossed the bottle down the dark throat.

As he fell, the machine-gun bullets hit him in the chest, then in the neck. He didn’t feel them. He had fainted the moment he felt the bottle leave his hand.

The copter landed ten minutes later. Umluana left in a shower of bullets. A Russian private, the ranking man alive in the station, surrendered the survivors to the Belderkans.

His mother hung the Global Medal above the television set.

“He must have been brave,” she said. “We had a fine son.”

“He was our only son,” her husband said. “What did he volunteer for? Couldn’t somebody else have done it?”

His wife started to cry. Awkwardly, he embraced her. He wondered what his son had wanted that he couldn’t get at home.

That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!

Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the shoulder. “You’re doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you have finished.”

The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.

Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the other patients working at the long tables in the hospital’s arts and crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites, lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers’ prospects for the pennant.

Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere complex of buildings that housed the main wards.

The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word of advice here, and a suggestion there.

She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.

“And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?” Miss Abercrombie asked.

The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to draw away from the woman.

“We mustn’t be antisocial, Mr. Funston,” Miss Abercrombie said lightly, but firmly. “You’ve been coming along famously and you must remember to answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very complicated.” She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.

Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.

Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.

“Atom bomb.”