CHAPTER VI

An Urgent Message

BALKED, but still determined, he went back to town feeling that everyone was playing into Briggs'

hands, even the girl. He really admired her loyalty to her husband, yet he knew that she was surely afraid of him and could hardly have confidence in him. That must she had plainly shown after the rescue from the vault. Then why was she putting her father's life into the man's keeping? Surely she must know that Briggs would never bring Rothberg back alive to incriminate him.

Puzzled by her actions and the problem of rescue, his brain went around and around in a perpetual circle of defeat. Yet he was by no means ready to give up. He tried to get help from the government, the state, the county, and finally from wealthy citizens.

The world's imagination was aroused as it never had been before. Floyd Collins, penned beneath tons of rock and sand in a Kentucky cave had at one time set its sympathies afire, but Rothberg confined on an inaccessible vessel in plain sight of all, stirred sentiment as never before. There came flooding to the press little sketches of his benefactions and other eulogies from the men he had helped. For the time, the space ship crowded all other items of news to the back pages. Scientists gave their opinion as to the possibility or impossibility of rescue. Thousands of letters and telegrams poured into the city to Briggs, to the Foundation, and to Clifford. Money was offered by popular subscription and private donation. Some of it finally came under Clifford's control, but by that time Briggs was three days ahead of him and Clifford knew that without some miracle he could never beat him. Nevertheless he started furiously to work, hoping the miracle would happen. He secured the services of a munition works and laid out plans in accordance with the study he had given them. He also called to his aid every specialist in the field of rocket construction. His rocket promised to be something exceptionally good. And yet, with all its merit, he learned that Briggs was better equipped and making an equally good or superior rocket and would have it completed sometime the next day, whereas only the skeleton of his own was begun.

He met Marks downtown that afternoon. Marks barely spoke and passed on. Clifford whistled softly and went his way, but it was quite clear he didn't stand so well at the Rothberg place. "Well, he thought,

"it is just as well that I don't. I've no business out there anyway." He caught a bus and rode out to the munition factory intending to spend the night with his workers.

"How's it coming?" he asked the foreman as he entered.

"Pretty fast, Mr. Peterson. We're making real headway. Every man possible is at work and they are putting soul and muscle into every minute of it."

"Drive them, foreman," Clifford commanded, "Rothberg is suffering I am sure. He may be dying and every second counts."

He did not tell the foreman he was running a race with Briggs; but walked down the rows of screaming lathes and whirling wheels.

"By the way," he heard above the roar and din.

He turned. The foreman had followed him.

"What is it?" he shouted.

"Mrs. Briggs called for you on the private phone."

"Mrs. Briggs?" Clifford exclaimed.

"Yes. She seemed pretty much upset when I told her you were not here." Clifford stepped to a phone booth out of the clamor and called her? She answered his ring at once as though she had been waiting for him to call.

"Mr. Peterson," her voice came in a whisper, "Come out her quickly."

"What's wrong," he asked, sensing that she was quite alarmed.

"Don't ask. I can't tell you," she replied still in a whisper, "I believe someone is listening."

"Coming right out," Clifford assured her.

"Don't come to the house," she cautioned, "Meet me by the fountain in the sunken garden." He hung up the receiver and opened the door of the booth, ran down the aisle and out the factory door. Ten minutes later he crawled from the taxi and paid off the driver a block from the Rothberg place. Then he waited until the cab drove away before he hurried up the street and vaulted the low garden wall where the shadows of the maples were deepest. Crystal appeared from a clump of foliage as he reached the fountain. She hardly seemed the same woman he had left working with Briggs over the sketches of the rocket, that night in the laboratory.

"BB's mad," she whispered, "See—he's here in the garden now, waiting for the ship!"

CLIFFORD glanced through the foliage and saw Briggs' tall figure moving restlessly under the dim reflection of a light from the street. He paced up and down the flagstone walk with his face turned toward the western horizon.

"Nothing strange about that," Clifford said depreciatingly. "He's not the only man in the world watching for that ship tonight. Maybe I'm mad also," he tried to laugh reassuringly.

"Listen," she insisted and caught his hand.

Briggs' hoarse voice came rumbling to them. He was quoting a verse, but not as one soothed by the cadence and rhythm of it but rather as a man repeating a fearful curse:

"The moving finger writes; and having writ

Moves on, nor all your Piety nor Wit,

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it."

The starlike ship rose out of the west. Briggs shrank from it as from a blow. He turned his back upon it but looked over his shoulder as though he could not take his eyes away from it.

"God," he rumbled on in that hoarse deep bass, "God, I've got to!" The luminous patch grew larger and larger against the sky.

"What do you make of it?" she asked, "He's been going on like that for two nights now. I can't stand it any longer!"

"Insane," Clifford announced slowly. It was the most charitable thing to say and the easiest way out for her when the truth became known.

"I know it," she whispered, "That is why I must carry on." Briggs came up the path. She shrank into the shadows, but Clifford stood his ground. She plucked at his sleeve.

"Hide please, for my sake," she whispered tensely.

He stood undecided.

"Hide—please," she begged, "It won't do for him to see you here with me." Clifford shrugged his shoulders in acquiesence and disappeared into the leaves. Briggs came down the path and she stepped out to meet him. He stopped and looked down at her, his shadow outlined against a street lamp. The glow of the light put a halo into her yellow hair and etched the cameolike outline of her profile with its radiance.

For a minute Clifford feared for what Briggs might do, for it was plain he was all wrought up and unbalanced. He could see Crystal's eyes widening as Briggs stared into them and despite her plea he was about to step out to let Briggs know she was not alone, when Briggs dropped his gaze to the fountain and said hoarsely:

"God, I love you. That was why I—no, I'll forget that now."

"What do you mean, BB?" she asked excitedly.

He stood beside her as though debating something within himself, then he turned abruptly and said: "No, I don't want to talk to you about it. I want you to think well of me, Crystal." He smoked fretfully and seemed unusually restless as though something weighty was on his mind. After a moment of that kind of tense silence he began to pace back and forth across the cement flanking of the fountain. Then he faced her, turned about again and walked away.

Clifford came from his hiding feeling somewhat ashamed.

"Clifford," she said impulsively, "I feel despicable to say a thing like this about my husband, but I have a duty to my father also. That is why I called and asked you to come here. I don't believe BB intends to make the flight at all. I believe he is afraid."

"What did you want with me?" he asked though he knew very well what was coming. "I don't want him to go. I never did from the very first, but I pretended to trust him so that he would complete the rocket. BB's gruesome, insanely cruel, sometimes, but there is no questioning his ability as an inventor. We needed him to perfect the rocket, thinking his own life would pay for any mistake he made." She laid her hand on his shoulder, "I know it's a good deal like asking your life, but will you go up?"

"Yes," he answered his heart leaping, and added softly, "For him and you."

The Struggle for the Rocket

SHE took her hand from him and drew back as though she was suddenly afraid, and said hurriedly:

"Come at daybreak. I'll let -you in at the back gate. You will be off before he knows it. I will hinder him in some way."

She left him and ran swiftly up the path.

Clifford remained rigidly where she had left him until he saw the light of the porch flash upon her white dress as she opened the front door and entered the house. The door closed quietly behind her. He waited wondering just what to do. He was worried for what might happen with her alone in that house with Briggs, and still he felt he ought to get away from the garden and come back as she had asked. Undecided he waited on, listening for a cry, fearing she might be in peril, hoping that Briggs would come out so that he could feel easier about her.

A distant motor truck growled as it labored up Blackstone hill, a flash of headlights swept this way and that as a belated auto sped along the drive; the low blast of a tugboat moaned as it moved up harbor; fretful broken noises of the city's sleep.

Then there was a sleep stir throughout the city, blatant honking of autos on the still night, greeting again the rising of the earth's newest satellite.

The city quieted again and Clifford sank upon a stone bench. The night was warm, the air calm. He had not slept for three nights and yet he was not at all drowsy. Briggs was on his mind. He knew the man had daring and nerve, then how could Crystal be right about him being afraid? It was a fearful thing to leave the earth which confined all men, and risk the unknown of the cosmos. He half expected to see Briggs come slinking from the house to watch the ship again as it mounted the sky; to hear him repeat again the lines he had turned into a curse; to see him turn his back and look over his shoulder as though the ship was a magnet his eyes could not shake off. And when Briggs did not come, he felt even more uneasy about the girl. It was certain she was afraid and only a sense of loyalty to an unfortunate husband kept her within him. Twice Clifford started to the house, twice he returned, and finally the time came for him to meet her. He circled a private hedge and reached the rear gate. She was there waiting and put a finger to her lips as a signal for silence. Unexpectedly the gate to the rocket yard opened and Briggs stood as glowering as a thunder cloud.

"What are you doing her at this hour?" he growled.

Clifford pushed his bulk through the gate into the rocket yard. "I'm going to use your rocket, Briggs."

"You are going to get out of here or be carried out feet first!" Briggs roared. Clifford glanced around the yard. The rocket angled its long gray nose toward the sky, which was just becoming flushed with the pink of dawn. It was indeed a beautiful machine, stream-lined and fully equipped. There were searchlights, mirrors for observation, crawlers to take her about over the hull of the satellite, oxygen tanks, and every other contrivance imaginable to assure safety and comfort. Of course, first glance did not reveal all that, much of it he discovered a few minutes later. But a glance did reveal that Briggs had made a perfect passenger rocket.

The door of the rocket chamber was ajar, whether Briggs had just left it, or it was open accidentally, he did not know. The switch which would fire the rocket at the next passage of the ship was also open.

`Clifford glanced at his watch. Only three minutes to wait!

He shot a right uppercut into Briggs' jaw and behind that swing he put the hard hitting vim of his hundred and seventy-five pounds. It took Briggs by complete surprise and sent him grabbing at the gravel. Clifford hurdled across the yard and closed the contact switch, then climbed into the rocket chamber and whirled down the levers which closed the door.

He glanced again at his watch as Briggs got to his feet. A full minute before contact. Briggs shook back his disordered hair and looked groggily around. He apparently noticed the closed rocket switch and ran for it, but Crystal threw herself upon him and circled his waist with her arms.

CLIFFORD knew that contact was at hand and tightened down the levers. It was a fifty-fifty chance whether Briggs would make the switch before the ship passed and the rocket was automatically fired. Briggs came on dragging the girl, but badly hampered. Briggs turned on her and struck her in the face. Time was up. Clifford's blood boiled but he couldn't leave then, not even to help the girl. Contact was at hand. He got one more glimpse of Briggs. A short, bullnose pistol was in his hand and though Clifford heard no report inside that tight tube, he did see a whiff of thin blue smoke and noticed the revolver was not aimed at him nor the girl, but at the chronometer which closed the contact, and that was all he saw for he was catapulted upward toward the sky.

"Too late, you fool," Clifford thought as he felt the rocket rising with increasing speed, vaulting him up, up, up, out of the garden, out of the world, leaving the earth shrinking like a dwindling landscape far, far below.

Launched into strange and unknown dangers, he had no thought of them, but was wondering about the two he had left so far below in the rocket yard.

Five minutes passed. He waited anxiously for the banging contact with the steel hull of the satellite. Ten minutes passed and nothing at all, not the slightest noise.

Impossible! What had happened? Had he actually touched the vessel and there been no noise due to vacuum of space? He knew there could be no noise outside the tube for there was no air to carry sound, but inside the air should have carried it to him.

Another minute went by. He looked out the port hole again and again. He could see nothing. Had Briggs overheard his talk with the girl and changed the chronometer to send him out before the ship passed?

Was he lost in the infinite stretches of space?

The observing mirrors were folded back into the niches of the rocket hull to protect them from the burning air on the trip up. He knew that he was then far above the friction of air and he decided to use them to try get a glimpse of the earth. He worked them out and found there was no friction against them at all. He did not even seem to be moving. He felt as though he were suspended in space without motion or direction. He felt as fixed as though he were anchored to the solid earth, and yet he knew he could have hardly lost the furious velocity he had gained.

His mirrors caught the earth, far below. He must have already have travelled around it for a long ways, for the landscape seemed whirling backward dizzily as though he looked down from the window of a speeding plane. Twirling his mirrors about for new angles, he realized that he was caught in an orbit all his own and was one of the two earth beings out in space beyond human help. The great gulf of space spread about him and the tawny world below seemed exotic and bare, swept now and then by a curtain of cloud bank and again caught in the shining splendor of the blazing sun. With a feeling of resignation he turned his mirrors hopelessly. He caught something else in the glass! The space ship! Briggs could not have changed the chronometer after all! Why the sixteenth of a second would account for that quarter of a mile miss. It must have been that shot Briggs gave the chronometer which had done the trick. The bullet must have closed the contact just the fraction before the ship was due, for he was ahead of the ship!

He gazed pop-eyed at the long gray thing, seemingly at rest with its head pointed toward him. It was only a quarter of a mile away, and yet it might as well have been a thousand miles. He wondered if he could devise some way to slow up so that the ship might overtake him, but he knew that in space nothing would offer the least brake to his speed. The mirror caught the blazing sun against a black sky totally devoid of stars. A mystic, unreal sun, a weird uncanny sky, and he was alone with only a thermos bottle of coffee!