The Peace Machine

CHAPTER 17

“Move away from the machine,” said the man with the pistol. His long face was gray, priestly with implicit purpose.

“Gladly.” Vicky was dead, Hutchman knew, but he was strangely unmoved. Sensation was returning to his numbed arm, and now he could feel blood streaming over his fingers. “But are you sure you want me to move away from it?”

“Don’t play games. Stand clear!”

Hutchman smiled again, feeling his lips crack. “All right, but have you noticed where my finger is?”

“I can put a bullet through your solar plexus before you can move your finger,” the big man assured him earnestly. “Then you won’t be able to press that button.”

“Perhaps you can.” Hutchman shrugged. The only effect Vicky’s death had had so far was to make his mind feel cold. His thought processes had a cryogenic rapidity. “But you are missing my point. Look really closely at my finger, and you’ll see…”

“He’s already pressed it!” The man who had broken Vicky’s neck spoke for the first time. “Let’s get out of here. They’ll be here any second.”

“Hold on.” The bigger man appeared suspicious of Hutchman’s calmness, and personally affronted by it. He aimed the pistol squarely at Hutchman’s stomach. “What happens if I call your bluff — with a bullet?”

“You’ll be doing your masters a disservice.” Hutchman almost laughed — the man was trying to scare him with a gun, not knowing that with Vicky dead there was no longer any meaning to words like fear, hatred, or love.

“You see, I’m a weak man, and when I was building this machine I had to make allowances for my own character defects. I anticipated that a scene like this one might occur — so I designed the trigger circuits so that they will function when I take my finger off this button.”

The big man stared in bafflement, a muscle twitching at the corner of his mouth. “I could wreck the machine.”

Hutchman coughed so painfully that he half-expected to feel blood in his throat. “In three seconds? That’s all it will take for the output radiation to get to the moon and back — besides to do that you’d have to force me to hold the button down. And I assure you I’ll release it if you take one step into this room.”

“Give it up,” the other man said anxiously to his companion. “Come on, for God’s sake! I think I hear somebody…”

There was the sound of the front door of the house being thrown open and shuddering against the wall. The bigger man turned away from Hutchman, raising his pistol. Hutchman’s flow of sense impressions was blasted and disrupted for an indeterminate time by the sound of machine guns being fired in a confined space. The two men disappeared from his view in a cloud of smoke, dust, and whirling flakes of plaster — then there was silence. A few seconds later he glimpsed khaki uniforms on the landing, and two soldiers in battle kit came into the room. Without speaking they took up positions on each side of the doorway and covered Hutchman with weapons which were still belching acrid smoke.

He sat without moving as the room gradually filled with other men, most of them in civilian clothes. They stared reverently at Hutchman, their eyes taking in every detail of his appearance and of the machine he was touching, but nobody spoke. Out in the street a siren wailed briefly and died away in a disappointed moan. Hutchman watched the strangers, dreamily aware that the situation had its ludicrous aspects, but his arm was throbbing hotly now and he had to concentrate hard to keep from fainting. He looked down at his watch. The time was three minutes before noon.

Close enough, he thought. Three minutes won’t make any difference. But… The trouble was that he could not let go and take his rest just yet. He had specified a noon deadline, and at least one invariant point had to remain — otherwise nothing he had done could retain its meaning.

A stocky, gray-haired man entered the room, and somebody closed the door behind him. The latest arrival was expensively tailored and the conservative cut of his clothes contrasted strangely with his hard, swarthy face, which could have belonged to a Mexican bandit. Hutchman identified him and nodded tiredly in welcome.

“Do you know me, Hutchman?” he said, without preamble. “I’m Sir Morton Baptiste, Her Majesty’s Minister of Defence.”

“I know you.”

“Good. Then you understand I have the authority to have you executed right now, this instant, if you don’t move away from that machine.”

Hutchman looked down at his watch. Two minutes. “There’s no need to have me killed, Minister. I’ll move away from it now if you want.”

“Then do so.”

“Don’t you want to know, first, why the two men who got here before you didn’t kill me?”

“I…” Baptiste looked at Hutchman’s finger on the button, and his brown eyes died. “You mean—?”

“Yes.” Hutchman was impressed with the speed at which Baptiste’s mind had assessed the situation. “It’s a dead man’s hand device. It will work when I take my finger off the button.”

“The power supplies,” Baptiste snapped, glancing around the room. One of the men who had come in with him shook his head slightly.

“Self-contained,” Hutchman said. “About the only thing which could stop me now is if another country can drop a nuclear bomb on Hastings within the next ninety seconds.”

The nameless man who had shaken his head in answer to Baptiste’s previous question about the power supplies came forward and whispered something in the Minister’s ear. Baptiste nodded and made a signal which prompted someone to open the door.

“If you have just received some scientific advice about shifting the machine’s position, say with machine-gun fire, don’t try to follow it,” Hutchman said. “It’s good advice — shifting the machine would cause the output ray to miss the moon — but if anybody tries to leave the room or to get out of the line of fire, I take my finger off the button.”

He checked the time again. One minute.

Baptiste approached him. “Is there any point in appealing to your loyalty?”

“Loyalty to what?”

“To your…” Baptiste hesitated. “You didn’t give us enough time, you know. At this moment your own countrymen are working on nuclear warheads, trying to dismantle them in time. And if you activate that machine…”

“Tough,” Hutchman commented. Vicky is already dead.

“You fool!” Baptiste struck Hutchman across the mouth. “You’re an academic, Hutchman. A theoretician perched on an ivory tower. Don’t you see you’re achieving precisely nothing? Don’t you see—?”

“It’s too late,” Hutchman said, raising his hand in absolution. “I’ve done it.”