The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein Page B

of which the tumblebugs were capable—not quite eighteen miles per hour. Gaines followed them.
    He swerved to avoid Harvey’s body, glancing involuntarily down as he did so. The face was an ugly jaundiced yellow under the sodium arc, but it was set in a death mask of rugged beauty in which the strong fibre of the dead man’s character was evident. Seeing this, Gaines did not regret so much his order to shoot, but the deep sense of loss of personal honor lay more heavily on him than before.
    They passed several technicians during the next few minutes, but had no occasion to shoot. Gaines was beginning to feel somewhat hopeful of a reasonably bloodless victory, when he noticed a change in the pervading throb of machinery which penetrated even through the heavy anti-noise pads of his helmet. He lifted an ear pad in time to hear the end of a rumbling diminuendo as the rotors and rollers slowed to rest.
    The road was stopped.
    He shouted, “Halt your men!” to the Cadet Captain. His words echoed hollowly in the unreal silence.
    The top of the reconnaissance car swung up as he turned and hurried to it. “Chief!” the cadet within called out, “relay station calling you.”
    The girl in the visor screen gave way to Davidson as soon as she recognized Gaines’ face. “Chief,” Davidson said at once, “Van Kleeck’s calling you.”
    “Who stopped the road?”
    “He did.”
    “Any other major change in the situation?”
    “No—the road was practically empty when he stopped it.”
    “Good. Give me Van Kleeck.”
    The chief conspirator’s face was livid with uncurbed anger when he identified Gaines. He burst into speech.
    “So! You thought I was fooling, eh? What do you think now, Mister Chief Engineer Gaines?”
    Gaines fought down an impulse to tell him exactly what he thought, particularly about Van Kleeck. Everything about the short man’s manner affected him like a squeaking slate pencil.
    But he could not afford the luxury of speaking his mind. He strove to get just the proper tone into his voice which would soothe the other man’s vanity. “I’ve got to admit that you’ve won this trick, Van—the roadway is stopped—but don’t think I didn’t take you seriously. I’ve watched your work too long to underrate you. I know you mean what you say.”
    Van Kleeck was pleased by the tribute, but tried not to show it. “Then why don’t you get smart, and give up?” he demanded belligerently. “You can’t win.”
    “Maybe not, Van, but you know I’ve got to try. Besides,” he went on, “why can’t I win? You said yourself that I could call on the whole United States Army.”
    Van Kleeck grinned triumphantly. “You see that?” He held up a pear-shaped electric push button, attached to a long cord. “If I push that, it will blow a path right straight across the ways—blow it to Kingdom Come. And just for good measure I’ll take an ax, and wreck this control station before I leave.”
    Gaines wished wholeheartedly that he knew more about psychiatry.
    Well—he’d just have to do his best, and trust to horse sense to give him the right answers. “That’s pretty drastic, Van, but I don’t see how we can give up.”
    “No? You’d better have another think. If you force me to blow up the road, how about all the people that will be blown up along with it?”
    Gaines thought furiously. He did not doubt that Van Kleeck would carry out his threat; his very phraseology, the childish petulance of “If you force me to do this—” betrayed the dangerous irrationality of his mental processes. And such an explosion anywhere in the thickly populated Sacramento Sector would be likely to wreck one, or more, apartment houses, and would be certain to kill shopkeepers on the included segment of strip twenty, as well as chance bystanders. Van was absolutely right; he dare not risk the lives of bystanders who were not aware of the issue and had not consented to the hazard—even if the road never rolled