Гарри Гаррисон - The Jupiter Plague

“Shore about two hundred yards ahead,” Sam reported, bent over the hooded screen of the radar.

“I can’t see a damn thing,” the general muttered. “No, I’m wrong, there it is.” He touched the switch on the microphone. “Cut in your silencers, be ready to turn— now !”

With the silencers engaged, their speed dropped by a third and the copters rumbled away into the darkness. As the two hoverjeeps turned toward the ocean their passage was marked only by the dimpled water that they floated above and the muttering, muted whistle of their fans. Silent jets of air drove them forward, down the Upper Bay and under the briefly glimpsed lights of the Narrows Bridge and into the Lower Bay and the higher waves of the Atlantic. Once they were well away from the shore the silencers were cut out and they tore through the darkness with racing-car speed. The rain was stopping and through patches in the haze they caught glimpses of a row of lights off on their left.

“What’s that?” General Burke asked.

“Coney Island, the street and boardwalk lights along the shore,” Sam said, squinting at the radar.

“Blast! Just when we could use some filthy weather it has to clear up — what’s that I’m coming to ahead?”

“Rockaway Inlet, it leads into Jamaica Bay. Stay on this course, we’re in the middle of the channel and we have to go under the bridge that crosses it.”

There was no traffic on the bridge that they could see and it appeared to float in midair, vanishing out of sight into the mist in both directions: they drifted under it with muted fans. Ahead lay the wilderness of mudbanks, waterways, swamps and waving cattails that made up the heart of Jamaica Bay. They floated over it, ignoring the marked channels as the hover craft crossed water, reed clumps and mud flats with equal facility. Then the bay was behind them and just ahead was the straight line of the filled land and the lights marking the end of the Kennedy Airport runway. With engines throttled back they drifted up the bank.

“The alarms begin right there at the lights, sir,” Haber’s voice whispered in General Burke’s earphone.

“Put down then, we’ll go the rest of the way on foot.” They dropped like silent shadows and the men climbed out and unloaded the equipment. “Sergeant, you’ve had the most experience with the cheaters; we’ll hold here while you put them in.”

Sergeant Bennett shouldered the heavy equipment pack and crawled forward in the mud, the detector rod held out before him. They could see nothing of his advance and Sam held his impatience under control and tried to keep his thoughts off Nita back there in the hospital dying by degrees. He wished that he had put in the cheaters, though he knew that they must have changed in the ten years since he had last handled one. Trying to picture what Bennett was doing would keep his mind off that hospital bed. The swinging prod cutting a regular arc over the ground, then the twitch of the needle on the glowing dial. Knocking out the infrared detectors wasn’t difficult, as long as you didn’t bang them with the insulation hood when you were dropping it over them at the end of the long rod. The ultraviolet alarms were the tricky ones, first making an accurate reading of the output without cutting the beam in order to adjust the cheater lamp. Then the smooth, continuous motion they had practiced so much, moving the tiny UV generator in front of the pickup so that there was no change in the level of received radiation. Once it was in position you could break the original beam to the photocell because the cheater light was shining into it from a few inches away. Nita, Nita. The minutes stretched out and the air cleared, stars broke through above them. At least there was no moon.

A silent figure loomed up before them and Sam’s hand automatically found the butt of his pistol. It was Sergeant Bennett.

“All in position, sir, a pushover, dead easy. If you’ll all walk behind me single file I’ll take you through the gap.”

They went carefully, one behind the other, treading as lightly as they could with the heavy packs and the ladder. The infrared detectors were ignorant of their passage since their body heat was shielded from the pickups by the insulating covers, and though they cut through the invisible beam of ultraviolet light there was no alarm since the cheater fed its own steady UV source guarding photocell.

“That’s the last of them,” Haber said. “There’s nothing now between us and the guards around the ship.”

“No cover either,” General Burke said, “and the rain has stopped. We’ll stay in the grass here and parallel the runway. Keep low and keep quiet.”

With its attendant rows of lights the wide runway stretched away from them, terminating suddenly in the dark bulk of the spaceship that sprawled across it, blocking it. A few lights on the ground near the ship marked the location of the guarded, barbed-wire fence that ringed it, but there were black gaps in between the lights. The general led them toward the nearest patch of darkness, midway between two of the lights, and they crawled the last hundred yards on their stomachs. They dropped into the mud, motionless, when a slowly plodding policeman appeared in the nearest illuminated circle. He cradled a recoilless.75 submachine gun in the crook of his arm. No one moved as the guard squelched by them, a dimly moving form against the night sky. Only when he had passed through the next circle of light did General Burke issue his whispered instructions.

“Bennett — knock out the detectors and as soon as you do we can cut through the wire. Sam and Haber move toward that light and get ready to take out any cops that come this way. Yasumura, lie still and shut up. Let’s go.”

For Stanley Yasumura this was the worst time, just waiting, unable to do anything as the minutes ticked by. The clifflike bulk of the “Pericles” loomed over him and he tried to study it, but there was little to see. The general and the sergeant were working as a team, neutralizing the different alarms. The other two seemed to have vanished in the darkness and all he could do was lie there, plastered with mud and soaked to the skin, and try not to hear the racing thud of his heart. There was a stir of movement at the far side of the nearest light and another policeman appeared, walking steadily toward the spot where Yasumura lay, approaching with measured, heavy steps. It seemed incredible to Yasumura that the man couldn’t see him lying there, or that he hadn’t heard the rustling movements of the two others working their way toward the barbed wire. And where were the ones who were supposed to be on guard?

In unvoiced answer to his question the two figures rose behind the policeman and closed with him in a silent rush. Haber had his arm about the cop’s neck so that the incipient shout became only a muffled gasp, while Sam held his flailing arm, twisting it so that it was palm up and pressing the nozzle of the pressure hypodermic against the bare skin. There was a brief hissing that blasted droplets of the sedative through the skin into the tissue below. For a few seconds there was a soundless struggle as both men held the policeman’s writhing figure so that he could not raise an alarm or reach the trigger of his gun: then he collapsed and they eased him to the ground.

“That’s fine,” General Burke said, appearing out of the darkness. “Lay him over here and take his weapon; we’re ready to go through the wire. Pick up the ladder and the rest of the gear and follow me.”

“The second strand up from the bottom is carrying a charge,” Sergeant Bennett said, pointing to it where it was stapled to the tall wooden pole; the wire fence stretched ten feet above the ground. “I’ve jumped it with an insulated wire so we can get through, but don’t touch the ends.”