Free The Day After Judgement by James Blish Page B

thoroughly
     frightened. Hence, despite the possession of ID cards countersigned by General McKnight, they were subjected to over an hour
     of questioning, finger-printing, photographing of retinal blood-vessel patterns, frisking and fluoroscopy for hidden weapons
     or explosives, telephone calls into the interior and finally a closed-circuit television confrontation with McKnight himself
     before they were even allowedinto the waiting room.
    As if in partial compensation, the trip itself was rapid transit indeed. The line itself was a gravity-vacumm tube, bored
     in an exactly straight line under the curvature of the Earth, and kept as completely exhausted of air as out-gassing from
     its steel cladding would permit. The vacuum in the tube was in fact almost as hard as the atmosphere of the Moon, From the
     waiting room, Baines and Jack Ginsberg were passed through two airlocks into a seamlessly welded windowless metal capsule
     which was sealed behind them. Here their guards strapped them in securely, for their own protection, for the initial kick
     of compressed air behind the capsule, abetted by rings of electromagnets, gave it an acceleration of more than five miles
     per hour per second. Though this is not much more than they might have been subjected to in an electric streetcar of about
     1940, it is a considerable jerk if you cannot see outside and have nothing to hold on to. Thereafter, the capsule was simply
     allowed to fall to the mathematical midpoint of its right of way, gaining speed at about twenty-eight feet per second; since
     the rest of the journey was uphill, the capsule was slowed in proportion by gravity, friction and the compression of the almost
     non-existent gases in the tube still ahead of it, which without any extra braking whatsoever brought it to a stop at the SAC
     terminus of the line so precisely that only a love pat from a fifteen horsepower engine was needed to line up its airlock
     with that of the station.
    ‘When you’re riding a thing like this, it makes it hard to believe that there’s any such thing as a devil, doesn’t it?’ Jack
     Ginsberg said. He had had a long, luxurious shower aboard the plane, and that, plus getting away from the demon-haunted ruins
     in Positano, and the subsequent finding in Zurich that money still worked, had brightened him perceptibly.
    ‘Maybe,’ Baines said. ‘A large part of the mystic tradition says that the possession and use of secular knowledge – or even the
     desire fork – is in itself evil, according to Ware. But here we are.’
    But in the smooth-running, even temperatured caverns of the SAC, Baines himself felt rather reassured. There was no Goatgrinning over his shoulder yet. McKnight was an old friend; he was pleased to see Buelg again, and honoured to meet Šatvje;
     and down here, at least, everything seemed to be under control. It was also helpful to find that both McKnight and his advisers
     not only already knew the real situation, but had very nearly accepted it. Only Buelg had remained a little sceptical at the
     beginning, and had seemed quite taken aback to find Baines, of all people, providing independent testimony to the same effect
     as had the computer. When the new facts Baines had brought had been fed into the machine, and the machine had produced in
     response a whole new batch of conclusions entirely consistent with the original hypothesis, Buelg seemed convinced, although
     it was plain that he still did not like it. Well, who did?
    At long last they were comfortably settled in McKnights office, with three tumblers of Jack Daniel’s (Jack Ginsberg did not
     drink, and neither did Šatvje) and no one to interrupt them but an occasional runner from Chief Hay. Though the runner was
     a coolly pretty blonde girl, and the USAF’s women’s auxiliary had apparently adopted the miniskirt, Ginsberg did not seem
     to notice. Perhaps he was still in shock from his recent run-in with the succubus. To Baines’s eyes, the