Dome Around America Read online

  The skull was gone.

  Trembling with a vague dread, Barry Thane ran back to the blue cottage. Grandfather Barry was sitting in the little den, writing a letter, when he burst in with his abrupt confession that he had crossed the fence to the Ring again.

  “Don’t do it again.” Grampa frowned as sternly as if he had still been an officer in the Guard. “Promise me!”

  “I promise—till I’m in the Guard myself.” Barry was panting, breathless from his run. “But listen, Grampa! That skull I showed you—where I saw that queer eye—it’s gone!”

  “Things change, even Outside.” Grampa pushed aside his writing materials and reached for his pipe, with no sign of excitement. “When you’re my age—”

  “Grampa, something took away that skull!”

  “Perhaps a meteor struck it.” Grampa shrugged. “There are meteor showers Outside—most of them probably from debris the dwarf left in space. With no air to burn them up and no Ring to turn them off, they often strike the ground. I saw several fall, while I was in the Guard.”

  He stopped to light the pipe.

  “That skull was very dry and brittle,” he spoke around the pipestem. “When the meteor hit, it just went to dust.”

  “Maybe,” muttered Barry. “But I didn’t see any dust.”

  He was sixteen, by the time he found the coinage to tell his father that he wanted to drop his business courses and enter the Ring Guard Academy. Patterson Thane was a big man, and anger made him florid. He stamped up and down the long, formal library of the mansion beside Lake Michigan, bellowing at Barry.

  “Don’t act a fool, son! I’ve got your career all mapped out. You’ll be a senior executive in ten years. By the time I’m ready to retire, you can step into control of General Nucleonics. One day, with what I have to give you, you can be the biggest man in America. So you want to join the Ring Guard!” He made an angry snort. “Why, I can give you more for your next birthday than you’d earn in a lifetime in the Guard!”

  “But I don’t want money.” Barry’s voice trembled as he tried to find words to fit the vague but powerful necessities he felt. “I don’t want—what you call success. I want something real.”

  “What’s more real than a million dollars?” roared Patterson Thane. “Except two millions?”

  “A—a safe way out of the Ring.” Haltingly, Barry tried to put his feelings into words. “That would be something real!” Enthusiasm began to fire his voice. “There are plenty of real things Outside. New deposits of uranium and thorium, even, for your own company!”

  Oddly, Patterson Thane grew angrier.

  “Uranium!” he rapped. “If you had a lick of business sense, you’d know better than that!”

  “There were known deposits on the land,” Barry protested. “There must be more, where the sea was—”

  “And they could ruin us! General Nucleonics controls all the known reserves, here inside the Ring. We can set our own prices. The Corporations can’t let the Ring fail, to save a few dollars.”

  “We can’t let the Ring fail at all,” Barry said. “That’s why we must find a way to reach the fissionable elements Outside. They’re there. America needs them. Somebody will find a way.”

  “Maybe you’re talking sense, after all.” Patterson Thane’s hard eyes narrowed shrewdly. “If it has to be done, we’ll do it. Learn what you can at the Ring Academy. Then I’ll arrange for General Nucleonics to finance your search for new reserves Outside, in exchange for full control of all you find. That way our own interest will be protected—”

  “Dad, you don’t understand!” Barry paused, trying to smooth the bitterness out of his voice. “It’s the Ring I care about, and no special interests. Science and progress—”

  “You’re a thundering fool!”

  “Maybe I am,” Barry whispered. “But I want to know what’s at the bottom of those great valleys where the oceans were. I want to know what’s going on Outside.”

  “It’s dead as space!”

  “I’m not so sure,” Barry said. “I believe there’s something out there, watching us. I’m afraid of some danger to the Ring!”

  “Go on to the Academy!” shouted Patterson Thane. “Maybe they can hammer some practical sense into your head. I can’t!”

  He went to Ring City and passed the stiff examinations that qualified him for the Guard. He grew up at the Academy, into a straight, gray-eyed guardsman, but still he clung to his great dream. One day he mentioned it to General Whitehall, who was the head of the Academy and instructor of the advanced classes in the theory of the Ring.

  “Do you think, sir, that we can ever go Outside? Without danger to the Ring, I mean?”

  “I doubt it, Thane.” The general shook his grizzled head. “For all our theories, we know too little about the Ring.”

  “I’ve been wondering, sir, why we know so little. Couldn’t we learn more?”

  “Not without experiment,” the old general rapped. “We can’t experiment with the life of America.”

  “Couldn’t we build another, smaller generator?”

  “Outside, we could.” Whitehall nodded grimly. “But here inside, any experimental generators would disturb the forces that radiate our Ring. You know what Brock did, with the small Ring field used for a screen.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I think we were lucky, even with Brock. As I understand the mechanics of the Ring, any such rupture destroys its stability. There’s danger of the same effect you get when you puncture a soap bubble with a hot needle. If your grandfather hadn’t managed to smash Brock’s screen so quickly—I don’t like to think what might have happened.”

  “We wouldn’t be here,” Thane agreed. “But there ought to be some safe way out.”

  “Perhaps there is,” the general said. “We used to do some theoretical research along those lines, in the Guard laboratory.” He shrugged wearily. “Lately, with the Corporations paring our funds a little deeper every year, we have our hands full to maintain the routine patrols.”

  “I—I’d like to do something about it, sir,” Thane insisted, as vigorously as he dared. “There are minerals outside that America needs. And don’t you think, sir, that we ought to be ready to fight Outside, to defend the Ring?”

  “What could be a better defense than the Ring itself?” the general demanded. “And who’s Outside, to attack the Ring?”

  “There’s something Outside!”

  Whitehall’s keen blue eyes looked interested, and he was an old friend of Grandfather Barry. Thane decided to tell him about that enigmatic eye and the skull that had vanished.

  “My grandfather says a meteor powdered the skull,” he finished. “But there wasn’t any crater, that a meteor might have made.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  “I don’t know what it was,” Barry confessed. “Some sort of small thing, hiding in the skull? Or maybe the lens of a camera, that some larger thing had hidden there? I don’t know. But I’m certain it was something—”

  “Pretty skimpy evidence.”

  “I know it is, sir,” he had to agree. “But still I’d like to know what became of that skull.”

  At graduation, Barry Thane stood first in the little class of only twenty men—in the last economy drive, the entire personnel of the Ring Guard had been cut to less than two hundred. It was many years now since the last would-be explorer had broken through the Ring, in a rocket that crashed Outside, and all the dangers to it had begun to seem remote.

  From the Academy, Thane was ordered to Key West Base. Ten men under Captain Steadman were stationed at the old, sun-washed town on its low coral island. They were responsible for nearly two thousand miles of the Ring, which chopped off the shallow sea a few miles beyond the island.

  Thane was assigned to the north flight. Every other day, in a fight patrol ’copter, he flew fifteen hundred miles along the circular rim of the sea. The months went by. He made a hundred flights. The sheltered sea was always different in its livin
g response to wind and sky, yet never marred with any hint of peril to the Ring. The Outside, for all its passive hostility, never seemed to change—until the morning he saw the rock that moved.

  Usually he took off at dawn, but that morning he had waited two hours while a repairman tinkered with the robot pilot. The sun was already up when he left the base. It burned through the Ring on his right, with too little air to veil its savage fire. His head was soon aching, in spite of his goggles. When he saw the shadow moving, he thought for an instant that his eyes had tricked him.

  But there it was again—a long black blade stabbing out toward him across a vast gray flat of cracked sea-mud, where all the other shadows were retreating. He let the ’copter fly itself, while he searched the long ridge beyond the flat with his binoculars.

  The shadow pointed to the rock: a jagged brown boulder creeping toward him through a shallow pass. It stopped the instant he found it, and stood as still as any sea-worn stone. He studied it, looking for what had made it move.

  A meteor?

  A rockslide?

  He rubbed his aching eyes and looked again, but he saw no trace of any natural cause. The motion he glimpsed had seemed strangely cautious, and he wondered if his unexpected appearance had caused its sudden halt. But what would move a rock so furtively?

  Before he had found any reasonable answer to that, he realized that the sky was turning too black ahead. The maintenance crew had failed to fix that suicidal circuit, and the robot pilot was flying the ’copter into the Ring.

  He snatched for the manual controls, a second too late. The ’copter grazed the Ring and fluttered down toward the lonely sea.

  Stinging blood blinded him, from the cuts where his face had smashed against the fuselage, but at first he felt no pain. He was dazed, and vaguely angry at himself for causing a stupid accident, and still trembling from the shock of the thing he had seen.

  When he could move, he wiped his eyes and snapped on the radio. His lips felt dead, and his salt-sweet blood was hot in his mouth.

  “Patrol Eighteen, calling Key West Base,” he croaked faintly. “Thane calling—”

  “Go ahead, Patrol Eighteen.”

  “There’s something moving Outside,” he gasped. “Something camouflaged to look like a rock. Coming toward the Ring, across that long ridge in Sector 41-B. It stopped when it saw me.” That report was the important thing. He caught his breath and added: “’Copter crippled. Defective robot pilot ran it into the Ring. I’m falling into the sea. Do you hear me, Key West Base? Patrol Eighteen, reporting a moving object Outside—”

  “Forget your moving object.” The humming voice was cold with disbelief. “A rescue ’copter will take off at once.”

  In a rear-vision mirror that the collision had twisted askew, Thane caught a glimpse of his face. He knew it had to be his face, though it looked sickeningly unfamiliar. The cheek and the temple were cut to the bone. Loose red skin was peeled down over one eye. Something had happened to the nose.

  Weakly, he pushed the mirror aside. Looks, he thought, shouldn’t matter too much in the Guard. The important thing was his report, and it had been acknowledged. If die operator wasn’t too skeptical to pass it along—

  He saw the calm blue ocean coming up to meet him, too fast and too steeply. There was nothing that he could do about it. Water exploded against the pontoons. Spray drenched him, burned his face with fiery pain.

  But the ’copter didn’t sink. The rudder still worked, and he tried to hold the nose of the ’copter into the wind. He thought it would float longer that way. He had to keep afloat, because of the unbelief in the operator’s voice. He had to get something done, about that incredible object.

  The waves became battering surges of dark oblivion, but still he fought them. He didn’t let go. He held out until the rescue ’copter hovered over him. He caught the tossed rope and knotted it around him, before he went down into the darkness.

  TWO

  Afterwards, everything was jumbled. The rope was dragging him out of the wreckage. A rock was moving, Outside. Men were carrying him on a stretcher. He tried to tell them about about the rock, but they only jabbed him with a hypodermic needle. He was on a beamway coaster. A nurse moved him gently. Another nurse was talking to him.

  “Breathe,” she kept repeating. “Just relax and breathe.”

  He struggled to tell her about that ominous rock, but he was gagged with bandages. He fought to tear the bandages away, but strong hands held him, and something pushed him down again into the dark.

  He woke slowly at last in a clean hospital room. Its walls were creamy plastoid. Through a broad window, he could see a strip of green park and the crowded drive along the lakeshore beyond. Even before his mother came, he knew that he was back in Chicago Corporation.

  His mother had a perpetual look of suppressed anxiety on her thin, sweet face, and strands of gray in her hair. She, too, had always seemed happier on their vacation trips, away from Patterson Thane, but she had been a faithful and uncomplaining wife.

  “Hello, Mother.” Barrys’ voice was still muffled with the bandages. “What are they doing about that rock?”

  She didn’t know what he meant, but only that he had crashed his ’copter into the Ring. He told her about the moving rock, and made her promise to call General Whitehall, who had recently left the Academy to assume command of the Guard.

  “I’ll call him,” she agreed. “But don’t you think you might have been mistaken—” She saw the urgent shake of his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll call the general.” She stood smiling at him tenderly. “You don’t have to worry over anything. I wanted to be the one to tell you. Your face will be almost the same.”

  He remembered the torn red mask he had glimpsed in the mirror.

  “We called in Dr. Rand,” she said. “The famous plastic surgeon. They wouldn’t let me see your face before the operation, but it must have been—” Something checked her voice. “We had to find pictures, for Dr. Rand to follow.”

  “Flattering ones, I hope!”

  “You aren’t quite the same.” She managed to smile at him. “The nurse let me see your face, when she changed the dressing this morning. Maybe the pictures had been retouched too much. Your mole is gone, and that little scar on your hp—but nobody would notice, except your mother. Dr. Rand is really wonderful.”

  A nurse in the doorway beckoned to his mother.

  “Don’t forget,” he reminded her anxiously. “Call the general right away.”

  Next morning, he was awake when the dressings were changed, and one of the nurses handed him a mirror. Thinking of that red and dreadful mask, he was almost afraid to look. When he did, he gasped with relief. The only scars left were faint white lines, already fading. His face looked somewhat retouched, as his mother had said. But Dr. Rand was wonderful.

  The mirror was still in his hands when another girl in white came in. Another nurse, he thought. But his heart skipped a beat as she walked toward him.

  “Good morning, Thane.”

  Her voice was crisp and throaty. Even in her severe white attire, she had a glowing loveliness. He nodded at her hopefully, but her only response was a sharp look at the mirror in his hand.

  “I’m admiring my new face,” he said. “You should have seen the old one.”

  “I did. I’m Rand.” She ignored his astonished gasp. “Lay your head back, please.”

  Her cool fingers touched his scarred face, so lightly that they caused no pain at all. He caught the faint, pleasant scent of her dark hair. Suddenly he wanted to hear her voice again, wanted to see what a smile would do to her grave beauty.

  “Thanks, doctor, for all you’ve done—”

  “Quiet, please!”

  He lay still while she finished her brief examination and gave the nurses brisk orders about the anaesthetic mist and the dressings for his face. A kind of panic struck him, when she walked out without another word to him.

  After the nurses were gone, he lay staring at the creamy
plastoid wall, trying not to dream of Dr. Rand. If he had followed his father’s road, there might have been a chance for him, but he couldn’t hope that the famous surgeon would give up her career for a cottage at a Ring Guard base.

  He shut his eyes to shut her out. But there she stood again, alive and alert, with that faint frown of concentration on her forehead. He wondered if she ever took the time to smile.

  General Whitehall came to see him, the following afternoon. The new commander of the Guard was slender and very erect, beneath his seventy years. His blue eyes were oddly mild and kindly, in his lean, stem face.

  “Well, Lieutenant!” His voice was always gruff and abrupt. “Your mother called me yesterday. Seems there’s something on your mind.”

  “My report, sir. I wanted to be sure it got attention.”

  The general looked puzzled. “What report.”

  “About how I came to let that ’copter collide with the Ring.” Thane’s voice lifted urgently. “I had seen something moving Outside. Something disguised to look like a boulder, coming over a ridge in Sector 41-B. I happened to be late that morning, and perhaps I took it by surprise. Its motion seemed cautious, and it stopped in an instant—”

  “Don’t worry about it, Thane,” the general said. “Maybe it really was a boulder. Men in the Guard have imagined things before. The Outside can get on your nerves.”

  “It was moving, sir!” A kind of desperation shook his voice. “The position of the sun and the slope of the ridge happened to be just right to make its shadow magnify its motion, or I’d have missed it.”

  The general was smiling tolerantly.

  “If it will ease your mind, I’ll double the north patrol out of Key West,” he said. “Any further reports of anything unusual in Sector 41-B will receive immediate attention.”

  “But still you don’t believe me, sir!”

  “I’ve served nearly fifty years in the Guard.” The general almost forgot to be gruff. “In that time, there have been a number of similar reports, but every mystery has been satisfactorily explained—with no damage to the Ring. In your case, we must keep in mind that you were looking against the blinding Outside sun, and that shadows can be deceptive.”