H. Piper - The Greatest Works of H. Beam Piper - 35 Titles in One Edition

At eleven, Rodney Maxwell went aboard the Lester Dawes to use the radio and telescreen equipment. By then, two time zones west in Storisende, the Claims Office was opening; he filed preliminary claim to an underground installation with at least two entrances in uninhabited country, and claimed a ten-mile radius around it. By that time, the gang working on top had uncovered a vitrified slab over the hundred-foot circle of the vertical shaft and were cracking it with explosives. According to the scanners, it was full of loose rubble for a hundred feet down. Below that, the microrays hit something impenetrable.

Toward midafternoon, the tunnel in the canyon was cleared. It had been vitrified solid; the scanners reported that it was plugged for ten feet. A contragravity tank let down in front of it, with a solenoid jackhammer mounted where the gun should have been, and began pounding, running a hole in for a blast shot. There were more explosions topside; when Conn took a jeep up to observe progress there, he found the vitrified rock blown completely off the vertical shaft, exposing the rubble that had been dumped into it. The gang on the mesa-top had discovered something else; a grid of auro-copper bussbars buried four feet underground. Ten to one, radio and telescreen signals would be transmitted to that from below, and then probably picked up and rebroadcast from a relay station on one or another of the high buttes in the neighborhood. Time enough to look for that later. He returned to the canyon, where the lateral tunnel was now almost completely open.

When it was clear, they sent a snooper in first. It was a robot, looking slightly like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by three feet at the thickest. It transmitted a view of the tunnel as it went slowly in; the air, it found, was breathable, and there were no harmful radiations or other dangers. According to the plans, there should be a big room at the other end, slightly curved, a hundred feet wide by a hundred on either side of the tunnel entrance. The robot entered this, and in its headlight they could see reconnaissance-cars, and contragravity tanks with 90-mm guns. It swerved slightly to the left, and then the screen stopped receiving, the telemetered instruments went dead and the robot's signal stopped.

"Tom," Rodney Maxwell said, "you keep the crowd back. Klem, stay with the screens; I'll transmit to you. I'm going in to see what's wrong."

He started to give Conn an argument when he wanted to accompany him.

"No," Conn said. "I'm going along. What do you think I went to Terra to study robotics for?"

His father snapped on the screen and pickup of the jeep that was standing nearby. "You getting it, Klem?" he asked. "Okay, Conn. Let's go."

Half a mile ahead, at the other end of the tunnel, they could see a flicker of light that grew brighter as they advanced. The snooper still had its light on and was moving about. Once they caught a momentary signal from it. As Rodney Maxwell piloted the jeep, Conn kept talking to Klem Zareff, outside. Then they were at the end of the tunnel and entering the room ahead; it was full of vehicles, like the one on the bottom level at Tenth Army HQ. As soon as they were inside, Klem Zareff's voice in the radio stopped, as though the set had been shot out.

"Klem! What's wrong? We aren't getting you," his father was saying.

The snooper was drifting aimlessly about, avoiding the parked vehicles. Conn used the manual control to set it down and deactivate it, then got out and went to examine it.

"Take the jeep over to the tunnel entrance," he told his father. "Move out into the tunnel a few feet; relay from me to Klem."

The jeep moved over. A moment later his father cried, "He's getting me; I'm getting him. What's the matter with the radio in here? The snooper's all right, isn't it?"

It was. Conn reactivated it and put it up above the tops of the vehicles.

"Sure. We just can't transmit out."

"But only half a mile of rock; that set's good for more than that. It'll transmit clear through Snagtooth."

"It won't transmit through collapsium."

His father swore disgustedly, repeating it to Zareff outside. Conn could hear the old soldier, in the radio, make a similar remark. They should have all expected that, in the first place. If the Third Force High Command was expecting to sit out a nuclear bombardment in this place, they'd armor it against anything.

"Bring the gang in; it's safe as far as we've gotten," his father said. "We'll just have to string wires out."

Conn used his flashlight and found the power unit for the room lights; all the overhead lights were wired to one unit, if wired were the word for gold-leaf circuits cemented to the walls and covered with insulating paint. For the heavy stuff, like the ventilator fans, they'd have to find the central power plant. He looked around the big room, poking into some of the closets that lined it. Radiation-proof clothing. Tools. Arms and ammunition. First-aid kits. Emergency rations. All the vehicles were plated in shimmering collapsium.

The crowd started coming in: the work-gangs selected for the first exploration work, most of them old hands of Rodney Maxwell's; the engineers they had recruited; Mohammed Matsui—he had a gang of his own, the same one he had been using in tearing down the converter at Tenth Army; the stockholders and officials; the press. And everybody else Tom Brangwyn's police hadn't been able to keep out.

The power plant was at the extreme bottom; Matsui began looking it over at once. Above it they found the service facilities—air-and-water plant; pumps for the artesian well; sewage disposal. Then repair ships, and a laboratory, and laundries and kitchens above that.

"Where do you suppose it is?" Kurt Fawzi was asking. "Up at the very top, I suppose. Let's go up and work down; I can't wait till we've found it."

Like a kid on Christmas Eve, Conn thought. And there was no Santa Claus, and Christmas had been abolished.

The place was built in concentric circles, level above level. Combat equipment nearest the tunnel exit and nearest the vertical shaft, and ambulances and decontamination units and equipment for relief and rebuilding next. Storerooms, mile on circular mile of them. Not the hasty packrat cramming he'd seen at Tenth Army; everything had been brought in in order, carefully piled or racked, and then left. More stores for the next three levels up; then living quarters. Enlisted men's and women's quarters, no signs of occupancy. Enlisted kitchens and mess halls, untouched.

Most of the officers' quarters were similarly unused, but here and there some had been occupied. A sloppily made bed. A used cake of soap in the bathroom. An empty bottle in a closet. Officers' commissary stores had been used from and replaced; the officers' mess hall and kitchen had been in constant use, and the officers' club had a comfortably scuffed and lived-in look. There had been a few people there all the time of the War.

"Men and women, all officers or civilians," Klem Zareff said. "Didn't even have enlisted men to cook for them. And we haven't found a scrap of paper with writing on it, or an inch of recorded sound-tape or audiovisual film. Remember those big wire baskets, down at the mass-energy converters? Before they left, they disintegrated every scrap of writing or recording. This is where Merlin is; they were the people who worked with it."

And above, offices. General Staff. War Planning, with an incredibly complex star-map of the theater of war. Judge Advocate General. Inspector General. Service of Supply. They were full of computers, each one firing the hopes of people like Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and Judge Ledue, but they were only special-purpose machines, the sort to be found in any big business office. The Storisende Stock Exchange probably had much bigger ones.