Spartan Planet - A. Bertram Chandler [54]
"We have always suspected the Latterhaveneers of a warped sense of humor."
"I wonder what the mob is doing?" asked somebody anxiously.
"We're safe enough here," said, Heraklion curtly.
Are we? thought Brasidus, suddenly apprehensive. Are we? It seemed to him that the floor under his bare soles had become uncomfortably warm. He shifted his stance. Yes, the floor was heating up. He looked down, saw a crack in the polished surface. Surely it had not been there before. And, if it had been, there had not been a thin wisp of smoke trickling from it.
He was about to tell Heraklion when a device on Peggy Lazenby's wrist—it looked like a watch but obviously was not—buzzed sharply. She raised her forearm to her face. "Doctor Lazenby here."
"Captain here. What the hell are you doing? Where are you?"
"Quite safe, John. I'm holed up in the crèche, in the birth-machine room."
"The crèche is an inferno. Admiral Ajax requested my aid to evacuate the children and to restore order in the city. We're on the way now."
The floor tilted, slightly but sharply. One of the vats shattered loudly and the piping dependent from it swung, clattering and tinkling, against the vessels in the tier below, breaking them. The smell of smoke was suddenly very strong.
"Is there only one way out of this place?" demanded Peggy sharply.
"No. There's a hatch in the roof. Through the records room." Heraklion told her.
"Then that's the way that we have to go to escape from this alleged H-bombproof shelter of yours." Into her wrist transceiver she said, "You'll have to pick us off the roof, John. And while you're about it, you can send a squad of Marines down to save the firm's books. No, I'm not joking."
Luckily the hatch was clear, and luckily the ladder was readily available. Through the little room they passed—the women, the surviving nurses and doctors, then, last of all, Heraklion, Peggy and Brasidus. Brasidus had almost to pull her away from the shelves of microfilmed records, and from the glass case in which was displayed the big, flat book on the cover of which, in tarnished gold, were the words, Log of Interstellar Colonization Ship DORIC. First Captain Deems Harris.
They were on the roof then—the tilting, shuddering roof, swept by scorching eddies and black, billowing smoke. The night sky above them was alive with the noise of engines, and from below sounded, ever louder and more frightening, the roar of the fire. Cautiously Heraklion made his way down the listing surface to the low parapet. Brasidus followed him. The two men cautiously peered over, flinching back when a sudden gust of flame seared their faces, crisping their hair and eyebrows.
Grimes had sent down a landing party. Disciplined, uniformed men and women were handling chemical fire extinguishers, others, in a chain, were passing the children out of the blazing building. And still others had set up weapons to protect the rescuers; the rattle of heavy automatic fire was loud and insistent above the other noises.
Peggy Lazenby had joined the two men. "Intervention," she murmured. "Armed intervention. Poor John. He'll be in the soup over this. But what else could he do? He couldn't let those babies burn to death . . ."
"As we shall do," stated Heraklion grimly, "unless your captain does something about it, and fast." As he spoke the roof tilted another few degrees.
But the peculiar, irregular throbbing of the inertial drive was louder now, was deafening. Directly overhead, the glare of the fire reflected from the burnished metal of her hull, Seeker dropped through the vortex of smoke and sparks. Lower she sagged, and lower, until men and women cried out in fear and ran in panic to escape from the inexorably descending pads of her vaned landing gear. Lower she sagged, and lower