Joe didn’t listen. He looked down at the sprawling small town with white-painted barracks and a business section and an obvious, carefully designed recreation area that nobody would ever use. The plane was making a great half-circle. The motor noise dimmed as Joe became absorbed in his anticipation of seeing the Space Platform and having a hand in its building.
The co-pilot said sharply: “Hold everything!”
Joe jerked his head around. The co-pilot had his hand on the wheel release. His face was tense.
“It don’t feel right,” he said very, very quietly. “Maybe I’m crazy, but there was that sandy-haired guy who put his hand up in the wheel well back at that last field. And this don’t feel right!”
The plane swept on. The airfield passed below it. The co-pilot very cautiously let go of the wheel release, which when pulled should let the wheels fall down from their wells to lock themselves in landing position. He moved from his seat. His lips were pinched and tight. He scrabbled at a metal plate in the flooring. He lifted it and looked down. A moment later he had a flashlight. Joe saw the edge of a mirror. There were two mirrors down there, in fact. One could look through both of them into the wheel well.
The co-pilot made quite sure. He stood up, leaving the plate off the opening in the floor.
“There’s something down in the wheel well,” he said in a brittle tone. “It looks to me like a grenade. There’s a string tied to it. At a guess, that sandy-haired guy set it up like that saboteur sergeant down in Brazil. Only—it rolled a little. And this one goes off when the wheels go down. I think, too, if we belly-land——Better go around again, huh?”
The pilot nodded. “First,” he said evenly, “we get word down to the ground about the sandy-haired guy, so they’ll get him regardless.”
He picked up the microphone hanging above and behind him and began to speak coldly into it. The transport plane started to swing in wide, sweeping circles over the desert beyond the airport while the pilot explained that there was a grenade in the nose wheel well, set to explode if the wheel were let down or, undoubtedly, if the ship came in to a belly landing.