Part 2

"You must be the chemist they were talking about," the old man replied. "I heard them say something about one of the chief chemists at the neutron pile project. As for me, my name is Dr. Alexander Nolan. I came up here in my plane about a month ago to write up some historical research I've been doing during the past five years. Instead, your kidnappers came in and took over. But here I am rambling on about myself as usual. What's your name, young fellow?"

"I'm Roger Lorin," Roger replied. "I'm a chemist all right. I was working at Arctic City on the neutron project, but I still can't figure out why I should be kidnapped. They couldn't get any ransom, and I don't have any information that would be useful to them. I just don't see it."

"Roger Lorin, eh," the historian mused. "I think I see why you were kidnapped. You're more important than you think you are, which is unusual. Most men think that they are more important than they really are. I suppose you've heard about the oil well that was blown up in the Gulf of Mexico and the man who was shot and killed down in Venezuela. Now, if some North American Citizen were to be found dead, possibly tortured for information about the neutron pile, it might be just the spark that sets off the powder keg that's been building up during the past ten years."

"But why should South America do anything like that?" Roger asked nervously. "They have nothing to gain by such actions. We've shared the information on pile developments since the projects were started."

"Oh, but South America is not the power behind this business," Nolan said gently. "I'll admit that the evidence seems to point to South America, but I have reasons to believe that another power is behind this."

"But which one could it be?" asked Roger.

"Indications point to the League of Islam," replied Nolan. "They are clever, but a student of political history can get some insight into their plans if he looks carefully enough. If you're interested, I can give you some background."

"Go ahead," Roger said. "I'd like to find out what's behind this."

"Well," the historian began. "I guess that you could say that this story goes back 4000 years. The hatred between the Jews and the Arabs goes back that far, and it plays an important part in the present situation. Actually the seeds of the present trouble were planted more than a hundred years ago, when the United States helped the Jews set up a republic on land that the Arabs considered theirs. When the republic of Israel was established, many Arabs were driven from their homes. Added to this, American economic aid to Israel didn't help our relations with the Arab world. As a result, the fifties and sixties of the last century were a time of unrest throughout the Middle East.

"A short war between Israel and the Arab States lasted from 1946 to 1949. The Arabs lost out, but border incidents occurred intermittently until 1969. After the United States and Russia were involved in the Two Week Chaos, the Arab League moved against Israel. The Arabs had grown in strength during the preceding twenty years and were able to push the Jews out of Palestine or put them under their control.

"Under agreements made in the United Nations, the United States sent an expeditionary force to the Holy Land. The whole affair was a debacle. America had been weakened by the atom bombing of many of her cities and military establishments. Russia was also out of the running. After the death of Malenkov in 1968, one of the party leaders had tried to bring union by starting a war. After American retaliation with hydrogen and atom bombs, the growing resentment of the Russian people against an undesirable system exploded into open revolt. The Soviet Union became a disorganized crazy-quilt pattern of small, constantly warring states.

"On top of the destruction of atomic war, came the great economic collapse of 1970. The financial structure of the United States and her allies fell apart, and with it the United Nations went down into oblivion. The states of the Arab League could now do much as they pleased without outside interference.

"The Two Week Chaos and the great collapse incapacitated the western powers for nearly thirty years. The Arab States prospered and formed the League of Islam in 1990. The League covered the eastern end of the Mediterranean and the coast of North Africa. During this period, South America had formed the South American Republic and became a world power.

"The North American Union, which was formed in 1997, wished to take up where the United States had left off in the development of Arabian oil. The Arabs, who had developed the fields themselves with help from South America, had no desire for North American intervention. The Americans, who had a long term lease signed in the late fifties, were not willing to give up so easily, and hard feeling developed. The Suez incident of thirty years ago and the American control of the moon and the satellite stations didn't help matters any.

"When the Americans finished the first satellite station in 1984 and landed the first rocket on the moon in 1991, the Arabs became apprehensive and made known their wish to build a spaceport in the Sahara Desert. The North American Union, which had a monopoly on rocket building facilities, refused to allow it, out of fear of the growing strength of the Arabs. I think that that was a serious mistake. The sight of the satellites passing overhead, plus the knowledge that they belong to an unfriendly power doesn't help to create good will. The fact that the moon has an independent government makes it worse. The leaders of Islam know that the Lunar government wouldn't allow nationalism in space. I guess you know how the Lunar citizens feel about the North American monopoly on space travel."

"They don't like it," Roger said. "They feel that they could be more independent if they were receiving supplies from more than one source. Lunar government is nothing more than a form, set up by the North American Union to keep up appearances. The moon isn't self sufficient enough to make its independence more than a form. If the Lunar colonies could trade with more than one nation, they could maintain their independence by the moon's natural defensive position; and control of the satellite stations would help to ease international tensions. There's not much chance of a dictatorship being formed there, because the colonists are too individualistic and are interested in their government. It looks to me like both sides are at fault in this mess."

"That's usually the case," the historian commented. "The Arabs aren't free of blame either. Some of their tactics in the Holy Land weren't exactly calculated to win the good will of the United States, and they have been rather violent in some of their dealings with our citizens."

The conversation was interrupted when one of their captors opened the door a few inches and slid two cans of food concentrate through the crack.

"I see dinner has arrived," Nolan said as he stepped over to the door and picked up the containers. He handed one to Roger, and the two men removed the tops. In a few minutes a coil in the sides of each container heated the contents, and the prisoners ate a warm if uninspiring meal. Plastic spoons fastened to the sides of the cans served as utensils.

After they had finished the food, the two prisoners sat and discussed various topics until late in the evening, when they finally turned in.

Outside, the temperature dropped to sixty degrees below zero. The stars sparkled with a brilliance that was reminiscent of outer space. Once the frosty stillness was broken by the whine of the jets of a cargo plane, hauling a train of ore gliders from the mines on an island farther north. In the front room of the center hut a guard sat, watching a number of television screens which showed the area around the camp bathed in infra red light. In front of the hut lay the convertiplane, a shining, bluish silver dart with its needle nose and swept back wings and tail. Near the cliffs back of the huts, Nolan's small two seater lay with its channel wings folded into the fuselage.

At six, Roger was awakened roughly by one of the guards. He was given a can of concentrates which he ate quickly, his eyes straying now and then to the big machine pistol held by one of his captors. After Roger had eaten, he was ordered out to the plane and strapped into a seat, an armed guard beside him. With screaming jets blowing air over its channel wings, the convertiplane lifted from the snow and, a few minutes later, streaked into the dark sky under the power of its main jets.

Three hours later they descended to the yard of a large house on the outskirts of Denver. The scattered buildings of the city lay on a blinding white blanket of snow that sparkled in the winter sun like minute jewels. Roger was hurried into the house and soon stood in the middle of a spacious living room, his hands held firmly by steel handcuffs. He faced a man with swarthy skin and dark hair, a typical Latin type.

"Señor Lorin," the South American said and motioned toward an easy chair. "Please be seated. Perhaps you are tired after your trip."

"The trip was all right," Roger replied coldly, "though I don't like traveling against my will. I trust that the Arabs are paying you well for this little job."

A momentary look of surprise crossed the man's handsome features, but he smiled quickly and said in an affable voice tinged with surprise. "Arabs? What do they have to do with this? I do not know any Arabs. You do me an injustice to think that I would work for any other country than my own."

Hoping that the results would justify his confidence, Roger replied. "Quit trying to bluff. South Americans have no reason to kidnap me. They'd have absolutely nothing to gain and plenty to lose by such actions. Even if they could fight a long drawn out war with us, they'd lose in the end. Why most of your scientists and engineers receive their graduate schooling up here. I met quite a few of your countrymen during my school days."

"You are an astute man," the South American smiled. "Yes, I am actually working for the League of Islam." He admitted it blandly without apparent conscience or remorse.

"I can't say that I admire a man who'd sell his country, and not only that but the whole western hemisphere down the river. Did they pay you thirty pieces of silver?" Roger asked scornfully.

"The stakes are much higher than that," the traitor replied, without apparently being affected by Roger's scorn. "An empire awaits those who are bold, greater power and riches than any ruler has even known before."

"I thought that we had left that behind with the twentieth century."

"The desire for power is always with us," the traitor, whose name was Manuel Juarez, said. "If I do not get it, someone else will. The struggle never ends."

"Maybe that's true in some parts of the world," Roger said, "but we don't do things that way here."

"Be that as it may," Juarez said with finality. "We won't speak of it again." Abruptly he turned his chair toward a blank wall and pressed a button on the arm of the chair. The whole wall lit up with stereo color, and the room resounded with the hum of a crowd of people.

"Skiing is an interesting sport," Juarez commented. "I enjoy watching the skill with which the skiers perform in these tournaments."

Roger and Juarez watched a symphony of graceful form and movement against a backdrop of snow, blue sky, and tall pines. Both men sat in chairs that moulded automatically to the shape of the body. Radiant heat bathed them in warmth that was a pleasant contrast to the wintry scene in the television wall.

The instrument which showed them the ski tournament so clearly represented a force that had killed an entire industry eighty years earlier. The economic collapse and the development of good color stereo television had resulted in the complete destruction of the movie industry. Although there was still much poor entertainment on the air, any person could usually find entertainment to suit his taste, whether it was for adventure stories or Shakespeare, for popular music or the works of the great composers.

* * * * *

Roger was held in the house for about a week and a half. Although he did not know why he was held for such a long time, he knew that he was being watched with unceasing vigilance. He had no chance to escape. Then suddenly the enforced inactivity was over.

Juarez and two guards entered his room. All three were dressed in outdoor clothing and were armed.

"You will come with us peacefully," Juarez warned. "If you try anything foolish, we will not hesitate to kill you. We have other plans for you, but your death here would serve our purpose."

Roger went. They left the house and prepared to enter a small channel winged plane. The craft had a tear shaped body flanked by two pontoon-like cylinders. Each cylinder contained two small jet engines, one blowing a stream of air forward and the other blowing a stream backward across wing-like plates. The supersonic blasts gave the wings enough lift so that the plane could hover, rise vertically, or move forward or backward with equal ease. Such planes could attain a speed of 450 miles per hour.

At this time, a small patrol plane of the same type was flying slowly through the area. Both of its occupants were thoroughly bored, and one of them began to look around through a pair of light amplifying binoculars. He spotted the abduction scene taking place below. Every detail, including Roger's handcuffs, was crystal clear. The patrolman, his curiosity aroused, switched to ultraviolet sensitivity, but saw none of the code numbers that appeared on the bodies of all police planes. Handcuffs and no police markings meant a check report to police headquarters.

"Patrol 67," the policeman reported into the radio. "There's a prisoner being held in Zone 18. The plane has no police markings. The prisoner is about five feet, eleven inches tall, has light hair, a rather large nose, and is wearing a green jacket over gray coveralls. One of the other men is dark, short, and stocky."

"That sounds like Roger Lorin," came the reply. "He disappeared from Arctic City about a week ago. There's a bulletin out on him. Keep a long distance watch on that plane."

About an hour after they had taken off, the fugitives, who were flying low, disappeared in the mountains and were lost to the police plane's radar.

The sun set, and night settled its cold hand over the mountains. The stars glittered like icy diamonds in the almost black firmament. The moon bathed the world in cold silvery light. The mountains rose like walls against the cold, dark sky.

The plane climbed out of a canyon and flew southwest along the side of a high peak. At treetop level, they flew through a high pass, and entered a valley where a small, ice-covered lake gleamed in the cold moonlight. The plane landed on the glittering ice. Among the pines on the west side of the lake, stood a stately hunting lodge. The outside was faced with logs to give it a rustic look, but the interior was luxuriously furnished.

Two men from the lodge pushed the plane into a hangar on the lake shore, while Roger and his captors climbed a short flight of stairs and entered the building.

"Now we wait," Juarez said disgustedly. "I hope that Gomez gets here soon, so that we can get this business over with and get out of here. I cannot be sure, but I thought I saw someone following us after we took off this morning."

But he didn't get his wish. For the next three days, the men passed the time in various ways. Some went fishing through the ice on the lake, others watched television, still others played cards or pool in the game room.

During this time the police were not idle. They staked out the house in Denver and waited. Their patience was rewarded when, on the second night, a small plane came down out of the dark sky and hovered over the landing area. A man dropped to the ground and headed toward the house, and the plane rose into the night with blue flame dancing from the ends of the wing cylinders, and headed back toward the mountains. A large police plane high above traced the flight of the small ship with infra red detectors and spotted the hideout of the fugitives.

On the third night Miguel Gomez arrived. He was a big, strapping man unusually light complected for a South American. His greetings were loud and boisterous.

"Well, Juarez," he said loudly, "I see that you have our prisoner in good condition. But we can do nothing for awhile. A new plan has been developed. In one week, a rocket carrying high officials from our Republic will take off from the Chicago spaceport. These officials go to inspect the Lunar atomic laboratories. That rocket will crash, and the North Americans will be blamed. There will be evidence of general negligence with hints of sabotage. So! the fun will begin. If that does not work, we will use our friend, Lorin, here to top it off."

That night they listened to a late newscast before going to bed. The situation was tense. The presidents' meeting had been postponed until after the inspection of the moon laboratories by the South American officials. There was talk of a general mobilization and a tightening of discipline at the military stations along the Mexican border and the gulf coast.

* * * * *

Five hundred miles above the Earth, the polar weather station wheeled silently through space. A sphere two hundred feet in diameter, it was girded by a ring deck that was home to forty men and women. The big observation room was the real reason for the space station's existence. Here, the weathermen kept watch over the movements of Earth's atmosphere. The fluffy white clouds that appeared on their screens told a tale of mass air movements that meant stormy or clear weather for the Earth below. An almost blinding white mass of cloud over Canada told of a cold front moving southward to collide with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico and unleash a blizzard over the plains of the Midwest. Tumbling clouds hid a storm that whipped the North Atlantic into a raging fury of white water. Clear areas showed where snow sparked under the winter sun or where soft tropical breezes ruffled the fronds of palm trees.

The station was passing over the Pampas of Argentina on the day side of Earth when the incident occurred. Miriam Andrews, on duty at the time, sat watching the progress of a small rain squall. Suddenly a look of surprise crossed her rather plain features, and she turned the amplifier gain-knob of the light amplifying telescope to higher magnification. On the screen appeared a sprawling airport on which lay scores of large, box-like transport planes. Into the huge, channel winged craft flowed lines of robot controlled armored vehicles. Miriam, who had a keen mind and an interest in international affairs, recognized the dangerous possibilities of these preparations. She did not hesitate to call the station director. That individual was summoned from a deep sleep by the imperative buzzing of the intercom. He switched the instrument on, saw Miriam's excited face, and came fully awake with a feeling of alarm. Excitement on the part of station personnel was apt to mean deadly danger. He interrupted the excited girl. "Repeat that again and slow down." Miriam repeated her story.

"I'll send a message when we get close enough to Chicago to use a tight beam," he said. "There's no use spreading that news all over the western hemisphere." With that he broke the connection and called the radio room to give instructions about the message.

The station swept around the Earth untroubled by the gathering fury below. A rocket, a slender, blue steel, winged cone, blasted away from the station with a brief but brilliant display of its atomic jets. The watches changed, and the weathermen continued to receive data, analyze it, and send it to the coordinating centers on Earth.

Although most of the men on the station heard the news with the detachment of those whose main interest lies in space and on the moon, the North American government was not so calm. It was not long before big formations of box-like transports were headed southward with heavy loads of flying armored equipment, technicians, and troops. Flights of dart like interceptors patrolled the gulf area, ranging the blue skies at supersonic speeds. On the ground, rows of slim antiaircraft missiles stood like candles in a birthday cake. At the first flicker on a radar screen, they would scream skyward to intercept hydrogen and atom armed missiles at the borderline of space. Both powers made good resolutions of nonaggression, but the rest of the world watched the preparations with a skeptical eye. The weapons that could unleash the horrors of nuclear warfare at the flick of a switch stood in frightening array on both sides of the gulf.

Meanwhile, the police prepared to close in on the mountain cabin. Equipped with gas bombs, machine pistols and recoiless rifles, they came struggling through a snow clogged pass and down the mountain sides from hovering planes. Unseen in the darkness, they crept through the woods toward the house. A rifle shot cracked as a guard sighted them with his sniperscope. One of the policemen fell, a bullet in his leg. The lights in the house went out, and gun flashes lanced through the windows. Bullets, hunting their prey like angry wasps, snarled through the darkness.

Roger was locked in an upstairs bedroom with a guard before the door. During the next two hours, the roar of machine pistols and the crack of rifle fire split the mountain stillness and echoed from the hillsides. At the end of that time, the police withdrew to rearrange their strategy.

Juarez sat on the floor near a broken window and cleaned his machine pistol. "I think that it is time to kill Lorin and get out of here," he said, as he placed a fresh clip in the magazine. "It will serve us to good advantage."

"Fool!" Gomez exclaimed. "If they found us with a dead man on our hands, we wouldn't stand a chance. I have used this place enough to know that they have us pinned in. We can use Lorin as a bargaining point. We will arrange to take him with us and drop him by parachute. But--the parachute will not open. A convertiplane, which I have called, will meet us above the clouds and take us away before they can stop us."

"They will not trust our word," Juarez said. "We cannot get away with it."

"Oh, but we can," Gomez said. "The police know that Lorin's death would have regrettable results. Even the fact that he is a citizen of the North American Union would be enough to start trouble, let alone his position as a key research man on the neutron project. They will do anything to see that he remains alive. The scheme will further enrage the North Americans and might perhaps incite them to war."

"I see," replied Juarez. "An excellent plan. Let's contact the police, and see what happens."

* * * * *

Unseen by the guards around the house, four policemen crawled through the snow. Wearing white uniforms, they blended so well with their background that even the sniperscope men didn't see them. Their view was limited by the fact that most of the large lights that had flooded the area with infra red radiation had been shattered by gunfire. Individual beams were insufficient to sweep the whole area.

Carrying thirty-shot rocket launchers and rocket powered gas bombs, they took positions around the house and aimed the slender guns. At a radio signal, streams of red fire shot from the tubes, and the small rockets tore through every window in the house. In a few minutes, the place was saturated with sleep gas. Not a man moved throughout the building. Policemen in gas masks converged on the house.