Read Ebook: Down Went McGinty by Holden Fox B Eberle Joseph Illustrator

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Ebook has 198 lines and 9988 words, and 4 pages

Loftus' young, impatient voice snapped me out of my back tracking.

"--couldn't have known, of course," he was saying, answering Haliburton. "Neither McGinty nor anybody else. And that--that sort of narrows things down, doesn't it?" He threw a nervous look at Haliburton and Knight and at me, compressed his lips in a straight little line, and fumbled self-consciously for a cigarette.

"That's just as ridiculous," Haliburton said. "If any one of the four of us was attempting to outwit the other three, the planting of McGinty's talisman would be a little stupid, wouldn't it?"

I tried to stop walking back and forth; I tried to think about McGinty instead of wondering who I was sorest at, Kolomar or the Comrades. Patrick Michael McGinty, maintenance technician third class, as simple and straightforward as they come. He'd play that beat-up accordion for the sixty of us to make us smile and think about home, while he listened to the music by himself and thought his own thoughts.

Either that, on his own time, or good naturedly griping on the job about what slow pokes all scientists were, especially the Comrades, who with all their big muscles still hadn't got a workable Moon-landing ship together. Our side could build one, McGinty would tell you--"Sure, an' it's a bunch o' misers we are, or we'd be a-wadin' the canals o' Mars by now," he'd tell you, and sometimes made you half believe it.

McGinty was just a tech-third, but he was an honest-to-God Spaceman, maybe even more than the rest of us. "The further out y'go, the more th' edge y'got--an' leave all the other dir-rty business behind besides!"

He'd play that accordion of his and just look out a port hole at the stars while he did it. And when he did you could sort of link up that science degree disappointment, that scolding of the scientists for their "slowness," that business about the misers and the canals of Mars, and the watching out the port hole as he played.

A brawny, rough-and-ready spaceman, yes.

A spy and a thief of top-secret documents, no.

No, and good luck piece be damned.

I looked hard at my three execs.

"Kolomar gave me twenty-four hours," I said. "Whatever we do, we've got to do it without spilling the beans around ears that aren't supposed to hear. You know how scuttlebut races through a crew. Kolomar on one side of us--" I saw Knight wince, "--and the Comrades on the other. Mr. X in between."

"If we put the arm on McGinty," Knight said in that soft voice of his, his beefy face unnaturally white, "Kolomar won't give him a chance. Be sending an innocent man into God-knows-what just to stall for our own skins. And when Kolomar found out it wasn't McGinty, he'd keep right on going, right on to the end of Space itself."

Whatever Knight might've said next never got out. The top-urgent signal on my video panel blinked like crazy. If they'd got through my sergeant and the orders I'd given him, they must want me for real, so I answered.

It was Control. The face on the video belonged to the captain in charge. The voice on the audio echoed the all-hell look on the face.

The voice said one of our Moon-orbit rigs--an L-8, incapable of course of a landing but rigged up out of thin aluminum structural beams with a couple of small rocket motors, fuel tanks, and personal space for strictly observational work--had just blasted clear of our own orbit and was headed Moonwards.

"So what the hell, captain--"

My three execs just sat where they were for maybe a full second, mute, their faces immobilized into unintelligent expressions. It seemed that it took me an hour to snap out of it, yet I was moving before they were ... toward my Earth-communications panel.

Then the three of them were up and starting for the door.

"Hold it!" I hollered, and pointed at the miniature Earth-scanner in the bulkhead above my desk. It was only about a quarter the size of the one in Meteorology, but it still gave me a full view of Earth, silently rolling there in its black frame of Space. They caught on. There was still about ten minutes left of the sixty minutes we had over our own part of the world. Ten minutes more, and we would have been on the other half of our two-hour trip around, and unable to contact home for over an hour.

I fumbled the switch open that put me straight through on a tight, direct 3-E band to the Pentagon. I was talking to Kolomar within less than two minutes.

He didn't move a muscle while I told him what had happened. But he made the grimmest picture my Earth-video had ever framed.

"You'll effect pursuit at once, Kenton. Take what armament your maintenance can fabricate. If he is simply attempting escape, he'll find there's not far he can go. Since he is an inexperienced pilot, you should be able to overhaul him with little difficulty. However, the more logical probability is that he's defecting to them. He undoubtedly has the microstats in his possession, and will rendezvous with one of their own orbit craft. It will be your responsibility to destroy him before that rendezvous can be completed."

"But sir, there's no way of being sure--"

"Destroy him."

My protest was completely lost to a cut contact and a dead screen.

I muttered something and began a half-hearted attempt to contact McGinty. Between signals I scrawled a fast note and handed it to Knight. It told him to order an L-8 ready with an extra rocket unit bolted onto its stern someplace. For the extra power, he'd need a set of transition coordinates for a modified orbit, but that would be up to his department.

The note said for Haliburton to take care of having maintenance rig up a couple of hydrazine torpedoes of some kind. Hell, we weren't even allowed pistols up here, and Kolomar had just said "destroy him." More official double-talk. But, sometimes a maintenance crew was good for something a little better than keeping the rust off door knobs. It was a pretty old rule-of-thumb in Space--if you haven't got it, make it.

And right now, the responsibility for those stats was mine. All mine.

I kept Loftus with me, and kept trying to raise McGinty. The chances were he wouldn't answer, of course. But there was nothing else to do until Haliburton and Knight buzzed me that they had everything ready.

"Guess you'd better forget it," Loftus said.

I nodded, tried a final signal pattern, and then quit trying.

I looked into Loftus' young face. It wasn't hard to read.

"Go ahead and say it," I told him.

He looked up, and his mouth twisted into a cynical smile.

"We all fall for happy accordion music and an Irish brogue. All fall for a guy because he appeals to what there is inside people like us that says some guys you can always trust. Maybe, Ken, we deserve to be second-raters."

"Maybe," I said. Only I was thinking about men like Kolomar. About right and wrong, success and failure, always in terms of physical size, physical strength. Whomp me and I'll whomp you back harder. Twenty-first century civilization--still the spoiled brats of a half century ago. "Maybe we do," I said, and wondered if we always would.

"What was it McGinty was always saying?" Loftus asked quietly. "Something about--'the further out y'go, the more th' edge y'got--an' leave all the other dir-rty business behind besides.'"

"Your brogue smells, kid. But that's about the way it went."

"Somehow, I never thought he meant it, this way. Thought he had something else in mind. The way he always looked out the port when he played. At the stars."

"I know, I know," I snapped. "Can it, can it."

Loftus shut up, but I knew what he meant, had known it before he said it, because I'd felt that way about McGinty for a long time, myself. McGinty played accordion music because it was something a little better than the canned stuff we could get on our radios. He had tried for that science degree because he'd wanted to make himself a little better, if he could. He griped about how "slow" the scientists were, griped about the "misers" we had in our politics. Just as a reaction against a state of affairs that he thought might be made a little better. It had always seemed to me that in McGinty's simple philosophy, if you could just get started making things a little better here and there, pretty soon, a lot of things would be a lot better everywhere. Not second-rate.

I drummed my fingers on the communications panel, watching Loftus and waiting for either Knight or Haliburton to buzz me that things were set. I started to get up and that was when my video signal started its nervous blinking. In a single movement I had it switched on. It framed McGinty's big red face.

He was drunk, and his blue eyes were blazing the way they always blazed, drunk or sober.

"Y'been a'callin' me, Colonel? Well here I am! Lookin' fer these, I'll bet!" He waved a huge gauntleted paw in front of the screen. It clutched the thin plastisheen envelope that contained the microstats.

Loftus was out of his chair in an instant, crowding the video next to me and triggering a desk recorder into action at the same time.

"Look, you crazy fool," I bellowed. "I'm not going to ask you what or why, McGinty, not now. But we're coming out after you, and you'd better be turned around and headed back this way by the time we've started."

"Yi, yi, Colonel! Kolomar's a-burnin' is 'e? Ha!" McGinty's red beard bristled, and brick-red hair straggled down into snapping eyes. "He's a slow-poke like a-a-ll the rest of 'em! Only I've got me a deal, Kenny me b'y!"

"McGinty, for God's sake! Kolomar'll hunt you to the end of Time!"

"Will 'e, now!"

"There's nothing he won't do or can't get done to see you in the death chamber, McGinty. No matter where you go or whom you meet--"

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