Гарри Гаррисон - The Jupiter Plague

The wire cutter clicked loudly in the night and they eased the cut sections back.

“That’s enough — let’s go,” Burke said when the wire had been cut up to three feet above the ground.

They crawled under, one at a time, passing the packs through the gap before them. Then they were skirting the base of the towering black ship, picking their way over the broken ground and, as they came around the bulge of a gigantic fin, they saw in the light of the distant hangars the still-open outer door of the air lock.

“Ladder!” the general hissed, and Haber stood it up beneath the door and switched it on. The two small motors, with their power packs, were built into the bottom of the legs; they whined softly and the ladder extended until the top touched just below the lock. Sam had shouldered the heavy-duty batteries and converter unit that powered the laser that Yasumura carried and, while the others steadied the ladder, he followed the engineer to the air lock.

“Plug this in,” Yasumura whispered, and handed the end of the cable to Sam. The laser was a milk-bottle-sized tube with a flaring, bell-shaped mouth that automatically spaced the output lens at the correct distance from the work while it shielded the operator’s eyes from the fierce light. He put the open end against the large sheet of half-inch steel that had been welded over the lock and switched on the power. It hummed loudly, too loudly in the quiet night, and when he moved it along slowly a black line appeared in the steel: there was the acrid smell of burned metal.

The laser cut steadily and surely, marking a yard-wide circle in the covering plate. Yasumura didn’t complete the circle; when it was almost finished he made an adjustment on the laser, then did the last few inches at the bottom. This time the intense beam of monochromatic light did not cut the steel, heating it instead to a cherry red. He turned off the laser and pushed his shoulder against the plate. The ladder swayed and Sam reached up and braced the engineer’s legs. Yasumura tried again and slowly the heated hinge bent and the disk of metal leaned inward; he climbed higher and put more weight on it until it was bent almost parallel with the inside floor. He stepped carefully over the still-hot edge and vanished inside.

“Up we go,” General Burke said, and Haber started slowly up the ladder under the weight of the heavy pack of equipment.

“If you please, sir,” Sergeant Bennett said, “I think I can do more good right here on the ground. If any police come by, I might be able to keep them quiet — the doctor gave me his hypodermic. You need all the time you can get.”

Burke hesitated only a fraction of a second. “You’re right, Bennett. Rear guard and take care of yourself, no foolish chances.”

“Yes, sir.” He saluted and moved off toward the opening in the wire.

When the general climbed through the hole in the covering plate he had to brush aside the heavy folds of blackout cloth that the others were fixing across it, and once he was inside the edges were sealed and the battle lamp turned on. They blinked in the sudden light and Yasumura hurried over to the control panel, rubbing his hands together happily. The airlock controls were dead, just as they had been when Sam first tried them, so the engineer began at once to remove the covering panel.

“Is this the phone you used?” the general asked.

“It’s the one,” Sam said, and began running through the numbers. They were connected to compartment after compartment, all empty just as before.

“No signs of anyone, or any kind of disturbance,” Burke said, scratching at his blackened jaw. “Try the control room again. Nothing there either. This is a puzzler, Sam.”

There was a muffled clang and they turned to see that Yasumura and Haber had lowered the heavy plate to the floor, exposing the interior of the junction box. The engineer probed with a circuit tester, then probed again. He shorted two terminals with the jaws of a pliers and the frown deepened on his forehead.

“That’s strange,” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be any power through this box at all. I can’t understand it. Maybe Rand rigged some kind of device inside the ship to break all the current past the inner door once he had opened the outer one. A timing device of some kind, perhaps.”

“You mean that you can’t open the door?” Burke snapped.

“I didn’t say that, it’s just difficult…”

“What about the power pack from the laser, will that give you enough current for what you need?”

“Of course! I’m eight kinds of idiot for forgetting that. It’s more than we need, in fact I’ll have to cut down the—”

His voice broke into a mumble as he opened the power pack and changed connections quickly, then ran two wires from it to the open junction box on the wall.

“Here goes!” he said as he closed a relay with an insulated screwdriver.

Nothing happened.

General Burke’s voice crackled like sheet lightning. “Well — can you open it or can’t you?”

“It should be opened now — but it’s not, something has been disconnected inside the ship.”

“Then forget the electricity; isn’t there any other way through that door — or maybe the wall?”

“You have to understand the construction of this ship, General. Since this air lock was designed to be opened to the Jovian atmosphere, it is just as strong as the rest of the hull. The inner lock is thick as a bank-vault door and twice as tough.”

“Are you trying to tell me that — after all we have done to get here — that you can’t get us into the bloody ship?”

From somewhere outside there came the sudden hammer of a machine gun and the clang of bullets on the hull. Even as they were turning, a light was focused on the opening they had cut in the metal, a beam strong enough to show through the thick weave of the blackout cloth.

The light was on for only a fraction of a second, then vanished as there was a burst of firing from beneath the ship.

“That tears it,” Burke said. “They know we’re here and our time is cut to nothing. Bennett won’t be able to hold them off very long. Get us into the ship, Yasumura…”

Another light came on and at the same instant a line of holes stitched itself across the cloth and death screamed and ricocheted around the compartment as half-inch, armor-piercing slugs clanged off the impenetrable metal of the walls. It lasted less than a second, then there was more firing outside and the light was gone. Darkness enveloped the lock as the battle lamp shattered, and in the sudden silence that followed there was a single, choked-off moan.

A tiny cone of light sprang out from Yasumura’s penlight, sweeping across Lieutenant Haber lying sprawled out on the floor with blood soaking out through the leg of his coveralls. Sam cut the cloth away quickly and began to dress the wound with his first-aid pack.

“Is there anyone else hurt?” he said.

“I’m fine,” the general snapped. “Yasumura— what about you?”

“There is no trouble — listen, we could close the outer port, would that help?”

“Keep us from being shot to death,” Burke grunted, “and buy us some time — now you’re beginning to think.”

“The outer door isn’t a problem,” the engineer mumbled around the light he clutched in his teeth as he swiftly changed the connections in the junction box. “The motor for it is here as are the wires, so—”

A relay sparked as he closed it and there was the loud-pitched whine of an electric motor in the wall.

“It should be closing—” His words were cut off as another burst of firing tore the cloth covering from the opening and a shaft of burning light poured in. This time there was no answering fire from below and the light remained on. They dropped to the floor and saw the massive door outside swinging slowly toward them. More shots boomed out, a continuous fire, but it was aimed at the closing door not at the open lock. Bullets roared against the metal, screaming away in vibrating ricochets and still the door kept moving, coming on until it hit the steel plate over the opening. The plate bent, tore and the motor whined louder in the wall, then suddenly stopped. The plate had buckled and jammed leaving an opening just a few inches wide.