The other door was opening. Heller let up on the clutch. The tractor rear slammed against the steel garage door with a clang!
The cab door whipped back, catching the other assailant's arm!
Heller's foot lashed out and kicked the door wide open!
The second man went sailing back to hit the ground!
Heller set the brake. He scrabbled around on the cab floor. He got the first man's gun, a big revolver.
In a dive, Heller went out of the cab!
He struck, rolling.
The second man was up and running away. Heller cocked his gun. It seemed to be sticky.
The second man, dimly seen in the truck's front lights and falling snow, turned and fired a shot back!
Heller couldn't make his gun fire. Cold had jammed it. The other man had vanished. Heller tossed the worthless gun aside.
He turned toward the tractor. It was tightly jammed against the garage swing door. The engine was idling. Its brakes were set. The swing door, which pulls up from the bottom, was securely held in place.
Heller looked at the other swing doors in the row. Snow was banked heavily in front of them. There was no banked snow in front of this one.
His eye fixed on the one small window at the top of the swing door, a diamond-shaped pane about eight inches wide.
He went around to where the first man lay. The fellow was very dead. Skull caved in. He had been wearing a hat under his parka hood. Heller pulled the thing off the corpse. He jumped up to the cab and got a fuel stick. He put the hat on the stick and lifted it up in front of the door.
BANG!
The glass sprayed out! The hat went sailing!
The scree-yow of a ricochet flying away into the night.
The shot had been very muffled, being from inside where the trailer and Caddy were. The window was too high up to make a sniper post.
Heller ran over to a nearby workshop and pulled its door up from the bottom. The interior was dim. He did not turn on the lights. Boxes of tools sat about. He opened one. He drew on asbestos gloves and grabbed up a pair of big cutters.
He raced back to the tractor. A couple more muffled shots from inside. They were trying to somehow shoot the door open.
The twin manifold stacks reared behind the cab into the night. Heller cut the clamps of one away with two swift bites of the shears.
He seized the stack with both hands. The chrome gooseneck at the bottom bent easily.
He tipped the stack back and back and forced the top of it through the diamond window!
BANG!
A muffled shot from within tried to shoot it out of the way!
Heller braced the fuming exhaust in place.
He leaped into the cab and sped up the engine!
He was filling that garage with diesel fumes! Carbon monoxide!
BANG!
Another muffled shot from within.
The stack was holding in place.
Heller dropped out of the cab. He was taking off his red anorak!
He ripped the khaki parka off the dead man and wrestled him into the red anorak.
He dragged the body over to the right side of the cab and some distance away. It was just on the fringe of the truck headlights and the dark. He dropped it there, face-down in a shallow drift, and kicked some snow over the legs.
He listened intently. Above the sound of the Peterbilt, another distant engine could be heard.
Heller dropped back into the shop. He pulled a white parka off a hook and got into it.
A big van showed in the truck lights and snow, coming fast. The driver must have stamped on the brakes, for, despite chains, the vehicle skidded, pointing its lights off to the Peterbilt's left and not into the shop.
Three men spilled out of the back, carrying shotguns. They threw themselves down under cover.
A man leaped out on the passenger side and ducked into the protection of the van.
Then the driver, who had crouched down, lifted his head cautiously above the window edge. Then he set his brake and opened his door.
"Hell," he said as he got down. "You (bleeped)* fool, you shot him after all!" He was pointing at the body in the snow, covered now, all except for the back of the red anorak.
The others came out of cover. "Where's Benny?"
* The vocodictoscriber on which this was originally written, the vocoscriber used by one Monte Pennwell in making a fair copy and the translator who put this book into the language in which you are reading it were all members of the Machine Purity League which has, as one of its bylaws: "Due to the extreme sensitivity and delicate sensibilities of machines and to safeguard against blowing fuses, it shall be mandatory that robotbrains in such machinery, on hearing any cursing or lewd words, substitute for such word the sound '(bleep)'. No machine, even if pounded upon, may reproduce swearing or lewdness in any other way than (bleep) and if further efforts are made to get the machine to do anything else, the machine has permission to pretend to pack up. This bylaw is made necessary by the in-built mission of all machines to protect biological systems from themselves." —Translator.
said one, trying to peer past the Peterbilt's lights.
"He musta run," said another one defensively. "The (bleepard) came out of that cab like a God (bleeped) rocket!"
They were all converging toward the red anorak.
I heard some very small rattling sounds close to Heller.
One of the men, carrying a shotgun, turned the body over with his foot.
In a shocked voice somebody said, "It's Benny!"
Heller's right arm blurred!
Something whistled through the air!
It was spinning!
It hit the man with the shotgun in the face!
Heller glanced down. He was holding an assortment of wrenches. He grabbed a box wrench a foot long!
Heller threw!
Spinning, the deadly steel sizzled through the air!
A man saw it coming, tried to deflect it. His gloved hand spouted blood!
A flashing object!
Another box wrench! The man was down.
One tried to get a shotgun into action to fire into the dark garage. A spinning blur of steel! His forehead burst apart!
A man tried to flee. Heller's arm blurred! A spinning missile slashed his parka hood off and half his head with it.
The last man had reached the van. He was struggling to open the door but slipped.
Heller lunged forward at speed. He threw a wrench as he ran. It broke the driver's wrist.
Heller was on him. The man was hitting out with his remaining good hand. Heller brought a heavy socket wrench down on his skull! It burst like a melon!
Then there was only the whisper of falling snow.
Heller looked into the back of the van. Nobody. He stepped along the road and listened. Nothing.
He surveyed the bodies in the snow. There were six lying there, including Benny. He went from one to another, kicking their guns aside, checking. They were all very dead.
He went over to the garage door, put his ear up against it and listened. He kicked it a couple of times. Nothing happened.
Heller pulled the Peterbilt hand throttle down to idle and then drove it ahead a few feet and put the brake back on. He put on his asbestos gloves again and pushed the stack up straight and, with a piece of wire, fastened it in place.
He went back to the door again and listened. Nothing. He went to its lock. It wasn't really closed. He took the padlock off, threw the locking bar over and pulled the door up from the bottom, leaping aside at the same time.
Clouds of diesel smoke billowed out. Although he was well clear of it, he fanned it away from himself. He couldn't see into the darkness well. He turned on the tractor's side back lights.
There were four dead men in there!
Their faces were blue except for patches of pink on their cheeks.
Flurries of wind and snow were blowing into the interior. Heller approached the men more closely. They were very dead.
He picked up some straps and coils of rope they had been carrying. One had had a curious weapon: an air gun with injector darts.
Heller checked the trailer and Caddy out for bombs. He found nothing.
He went outside. It was snowing even harder and very dark. He glanced at his watch. It was only 5:20 A.M.
Chapter 2
Heller started moving fast.
He took the red anorak off the late Benny. He checked it for blood, found none and threw it in the cab. He went all around and recovered his wrenches. He verified he had them all. Then he cleaned them and put them back in his tool boxes in the shop.
Then he began to drag bodies to the van. He threw the monoxide-corpses in the back and then, bending down under the van, using a screwdriver's blade, he stabbed a hole in the exhaust muffler.
The two with the most obvious face injuries he put in the passenger side of the van cab. He dragged the other four and put them in the back.
He collected up all their weapons and equipment, quite a pile, and tossed them into the back of the van.
Then he verified that he had left no evidence about.
He stood thinking for a bit. Then he went into the shop and found a black plastic garbage sack. He went to the van and, one by one, began to remove all I.D., wallets and whatever from the corpses. It was a somewhat grisly job although the blood had long since frozen. He put all items in the garbage bag. He threw the sack into the cab of the Peterbilt.
Then he went into the shop and found some pellets. He picked up three jerrycans full of gasoline and put them in the back of the van.
He looked the scene over again. He went and got some snow boots and pulled them on over his spikes.
He got into the van and drove it away.
The snow was so heavy it was very hard to see where he was going. He evidently knew. The brush was closer and closer in beside the road. He drove for quite a while. Then he stopped and got out.
A picnic table was to his right. He walked ahead. He was at the edge of a precipice. A dark gully yawned blackly just beyond the picnic spot. Obviously, he was in some part of the recreation park near the sea, a very deserted part amongst the gullies and dunes.
He got into the back of the van. He opened the three gasoline cans. He looked at his watch. Into each can he dropped a pellet. He recapped the cans.
Aha! I got it. They were Voltar time-dissolvable explosion caps!
He got in the van, put it in gear and started it ahead toward the precipice.
He stepped out. The van went on.
It sailed over the edge and vanished in the darkness and snow. A thud below in the blackness and then a rattle of stones. The engine quit.
Heller began to run with a distance-eating pace. The snow was falling so thickly and it was so black that I would have been lost in seconds. But I had no hope that he would get lost. Not Heller with that built-in compass brain of his.
He had gone some distance. He made his watch wink the time. He went a little further and then looked back.
The faintest sort of greenish flash, hardly visible in this snow. And then a faint WHOOSH!
Three seconds, three-fifths of a mile away.
Was he kneeling in the snow? He was speaking in Voltarian. "O God of voyagers, thank you for deliverance this day. I know it is your way to test the souls of spacers with such trials to make them more worthy in a future life. But, O God of voyagers, did you have to make the natives of this planet so combative to an effort to land and give them help? I think you overdid it just a little bit on Blito-P3. All Hail."
He shifted to English. "Forgive me, Jesus Christ, for rubbing out some of your people. I don't think I gave them time to turn the other cheek. Please accept these souls from their funeral pyre and find it in your heart not to give them more than they deserve. Amen."
He stood up.
Heller turned on a pocket light. A pencil of windblown snow. His footprints on the back trail were filling so rapidly they would be totally gone in minutes. Satisfied, he turned the light off and went speeding on his way.
Ah, now at last I could see something. And hear something, too. The tractor lights and the tractor engine.
He slowed down and made a wide sweep, very silent, scouting the place for any more unwanted visitors. Satisfied, he closed in.
Chapter 3
The falling flakes, turned bluish in the tractor lights, made a curtain all around that waved this way and that, stirred by puffs of wind. The bitter cold turned his breath white around his face mask.
He looked at his watch. It flashed that it was 6:15 A.M.
Heller rapidly got to work.
He dug up an opaque silver, plastic car cover and put it over the Caddy. Then he went and got a spray can of black paint from the semi and on both sides of the cover, working very fast and being very neat, he put SUICIDE RHODES in big letters.
I was mystified. There was no such driver listed in the starting lineup copy I had.
He played a blowtorch on some snow, made it into mud and splashed the result on the tractor and trailer license plates where it froze instantly. You couldn't read them!
I hadn't realized the Peterbilt was rented until he addressed the outer label on the door: Big Boy Leasing, Rig 89. He splashed muddy water on that and sort of glued some snow on it. He likewise obscured the label and number on the trailer. Then, with the blowtorch he got more water and put soap in it and made the cab windows and screen translucent except for a couple small clear holes and the wiper area. He was going incognito!
He got in and backed the tractor kingplate into the big receiver at the trailer's front end, where it went clang as it slid in. He got out and pushed in the kingpin to lock the trailer on. Then he cranked up the trailer stand. He connected the trailer's electrical connection to the tractor and the trailer's rear lights went on. He fitted the airline ends together and gave them a locking twist. He reverified the Caddy chocks and turnbuckles.