Fantastic Vignettes by Jerry

Author:Jerry [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

The Sacrifice

June Lurie

YOU CAN never in a thousand years, guess where the heroes come from. That arrant coward there, or that blustering fool—each, under the proper circumstances may show that subtle chemical heroism. Such is the way of the gods . . .

We technicians at Rocket Base Number Three, will never forget that morning when it happened. It happened with such dazzling speed too, that it is somewhat of a blur, even now. But the salient elements are there.

The Sovs threw a war-headed rocket at the base. Auto-radar picked it up. I know that, because I was in Controls when they caught it. I can even remember the startled voice of Blane as he looked at the photo-strip on the scopes, first casually, then with unbelieving astonishment. “They’ve got us!” lie yelled out, “we’re pipped two seconds ago!”

And automatically we waited for the blast hoping that the atomic bomb-carrying rocket would possibly be deflected or would explode at such a distance point as to leave us comparatively unharmed. I looked out the window as did a hundred pairs of eyes.

We caught the blinding glare of an exhaust—coming horizontally it seemed—and then the crazy unpredictable rocket skittered to a weird crashing stop. Its eighty foot length smashed and broken, it lay like some wounded monster. Why didn’t it go off? Who knows? Something must have happened to its delicate automatic controls, for it simply lay there, an atomic bomb in its nose, waiting, waiting . . .

Command recognized the situation and over the speakers came the order to abandon the base—and how it must have wrenched Holder’s heart to realize that a hundred and fifty million dollars worth of rocket defense was about to be shot to hell.

Then our astonished eyes saw a figure walking across the field toward the bomb. Fenner said in a stupid voice: “It’s Coring!” And sure enough it was.

Coring was just a kid, a fair mechanic, but shy and retiring, and mortally afraid of the service. He’d been drafted and stuck here because in private life he’d been a good instrument man. But everyone knew how afraid he was. In fact it was a standing joke his cowardice was. “Coring?—he’s afraid of his own shadow,” they would say. “We’ve put him on radar—he wouldn’t go near a bomb.”

And now this kid walks across five hundred feet of flat field toward a monstrous atomic bomb. He didn’t hurry and in his right hand was a standard bag of tools.

Well, the upshot of it all, was that he disarmed the thing! That’s what I said; he disarmed the bomb, working cool as a cucumber on something he must have been mortally afraid of. He finished the job and Armaments took over, but not before Coring had gotten some nasty radiation burns.

You can’t tell where the heroes come from, I said, and I still say it. Coring is still a mechanic—he didn’t go for the hero stuff—but men look at him under a different light. “There’s the man who saved Base Three,” they’ll say.

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