"That would be reasonable under other circumstances. There's a time for
things to be discovered. They shouldn't be accomplished too soon. But
the time for the ship out there is right now!" Burke said.
Pam raised her eyebrows. "Yes?"
"Those signals have to be checked up on," explained Burke. "It's
necessary now. But it could have been bad if our particular enterprise
had started, say, two years ago. Just think what would have happened
if atomic fission had been worked out in peacetime ten years before
World War Two! Scientific discoveries were published then as a matter
of course. Everybody'd have known how to make atom bombs. Hitler would
have had them, and so would Mussolini. How many of us would be alive?"
Sandy interrupted, "The reporter wants to do a feature story on what
Burke Development is making. I said you were working on a bomb shelter
for quantity production. He asked if the rocket you shot off through
the construction-shed wall was part of it. I said there'd been no
rocket fired. He didn't believe me."
"Who would?" asked Holmes.
"Hmmmmm," said Burke. "Tell him to come look at what we're doing. The
ship can pass for a bomb shelter. The wall-garden units make sense.
I'm going to dig a big hole in the morning to test the drive-shaft in.
It'll look like I intend to bury everything. A bomb shelter should be
buried."
"You mean you'll let him inside?" demanded Sandy.
"Sure!" said Burke. "All inventors are expected to be idiots. A lot of
them are. He'll think I'm making an impossibly expensive bomb shelter,
much too costly for a private family to buy. It will be typical of the
inventive mind as reporters think of it. Anyhow, everybody's always
willing to believe other people fools. That'll do the trick!"
Pam said blandly, "Sandy and I live in a boardinghouse, Joe. You don't
ask about such things, but an awfully nice man moved in a couple of
days ago--right after that shaft got away and went flying thirty miles
all by itself. The nice man has been trying to get acquainted."
Holmes growled, and looked both startled and angry when he realized it.
Pam added cheerfully, "Most evenings I've been busy, but I think I'll
let him take me to the movies. Just so I can make us all out to be
idiots," she added.
"I'll make the hole big enough to be convincing," said Burke. "Sandy,
you make inquiries for a rigger to lift and move the bomb shelter into
its hole when it's ready. If we seem about to bury it, nobody should
suspect us of ambitions they won't like."
"Why the hole, really?" asked Sandy.
"To put the shaft in," said Burke. "I've got to get it under control or
it won't be anything more than a bomb shelter."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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