The Yellow Fraction by Rex Gordon

Author:Rex Gordon [Gordon, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1969-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Len felt a fierce exultation bum through him. It was there. Something had happened, and someone, somewhere, had not got a clue. Yet it was still, at that stage, something completely vague and undefinable, like people meeting.

“Don’t look like that, Len,” Lucinda said, and they went down, to the dining room.

They could talk there, at the table. It was not intended. The soldiers were to wait on them at table, which was no doubt intended to prevent them from wandering off and losing themselves in kitchens. Someone had decided it was best to keep an eye on them, even there. But when the soldier brought the soup course no one ate, and Salford sat staring at him as long as he stood by them. The soldier backed away, and then they ate. Slowly, it was as though they built an invisible ring around them.

Ed Creet talked into his soup. It was a low voice that would not carry to a soldier, and everyone was watching. “Supposing we aim to do it, how would we get out of here?”

Even Ed Creet knew it, and was talking about possibilities. It was something of a surprise to Len. He had thought of a lot of things, but not actually of getting out. He examined the idea. It was fairly worthless.

Eliza bent her head to the contents of her plate. “They have a sentry in the corridor. There are the building guards, and the walls, and a thousand miles of desert.” She sounded reluctant, as though saying play it on the home ground.

Salford looked down the line of girls. “The sentry looks sex-starved,” he said softly. “All the guards are lost in the desert.”

Len wondered what he wanted.

“The sentry has a spray-gun,” Ropotsky said. .

“Anyone who had a spray-gun here could get two,” Salford said. He looked at a soldier’s belt. The soldier was coming to take the plates.

They did not talk when a soldier was near them. They watched the soldiers waiting on table, steadily.

Ropotsky must have been thinking what Salford meant. When the soldier had gone, he said, “So you take the building.”

Duncan shifted his shoulders indifferently. “We don’t want the building. We would want the gates.”

They viean it, Len thought.

Sorensen tried to stop it “The air strip is three miles away.”

“Len’s room,” Salford said.

“Len s?”

“He has a view of the gate. He can see what time the guard is changed.”

“So?”

“It is midnight. We are waiting there, armed. Then we have a vehicle.”

Salford was a difficult man to stop. They had seen it

“Face it, Des. If we got away in a plane, we would be shot down before we got to Davis City.”

“You think so? There are twelve of us. We have the armament first of the interior guard, then of the new guard coming to relieve them. It is night, and we move fast in the vehicle. We cut communications first. We drive into the airfield firing.”

An image of the rim of the Arcon desert came into Len’s mind, and the thousands of miles of desert to lose a plane in.

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