Fiction Complete, page 38
“Yeah,” scowled Murdock. “Wish I knew how much is the old tech instinct and how much is Whitehead sloppiness.”
“Proves the old saying anyhow—‘expect the worst and you won’t be disappointed.’ ”
“Here comes Mac,” sighed Murdock as the connecting door was kicked open. “Let’s put it up to him.”
They joined MacNichols beside the robot, drowning him in their lamentations while he replaced the voice-box. Once or twice he opened his mouth but was unable to break in.
The well ran dry about the time MacNichols drove the last screw. He scratched his grizzled head and looked at them.
“You mean you hit practically every guess straight on the head?” he asked Murdock. “Whenever you smelled something faulty, you found it?”
“I was right every time!” declared Murdock.
“Hmmm,” murmured MacNichols.
He dropped the test data sheet on Les Dale’s desk and began to toy idly with the latter’s approval stamp.
“Queer vocal system it has,” he mused. “It can make two or three variations, but in effect it always says the same thing.”
“Hah!” exulted Murdock. “Cheap work there, too!”
“I don’t think so,” said MacNichols. “I think it was designed that way.”
He inked the rubber stamp and pressed it down on their section of the data sheet with a firm, unhurried motion. “Hey!” they protested simultaneously.
“Why not?” queried MacNichols. “It serves its purpose. Ask it something and listen to the answer!”
He turned on the vocal switch, so that the robot was now functioning fully.
“What kind of numbskull built you?” demanded Murdock with a sneer.
“Not that kind of question,” interrupted MacNichols patiently. “Something calling for a yes-or-no answer from a—uh—personal attendant.”
Murdock turned to the robot again with exaggerated politeness. “You’re a complete hunk of junk that can’t even stand up, aren’t you?” he inquired.
For the first time, the robot was equipped to answer back. “Yes, sir, Mr. Whitehead!” it agreed emphatically—and promptly fell flat on its face with a jingling crash.
Les scampered nimbly out of the way but Murdock did not quite make it. He swore and hopped about, rubbing a grazed shin.
MacNichols grinned at him. “You and Whitehead!” he chuckled. “You’re never, never wrong, are you?”
“Absolutely right, Mr. Whitehead, sir!” answered a muffled voice from the floor.
Thinking Machine
There are various sorts of analogue computers. The one they had in the Lab was good—but the kind the stranger had in mind was better. And much, much deadlier—
Engineer Oscar Kleweski watched the technicians preparing to blast the world beyond recognition. The shining globe in the pit spun serenely on its axis, causing the white shroud of clouds to split into bands with differing rotational speeds.
“Look, you guys,” repeated Lane from beside his camera battery, “are you sure you quoted me the maximum speed?”
“Don’t worry,” answered Schultz. “There won’t be any pieces shooting back at you. Kleweski wouldn’t let us.”
“You want it all on film, don’t you?”
“It’ll be all right,” said Kleweski, and turned to the tech handling the satellite. “Orbit double-checked?”
Plump Turino lifted dark eyes briefly, curled an assenting lip, and re-examined the controls of his force beams.
“Then let’s tear it down!”
Kleweski retired with his clipboard to a platform at the rear of the observation balcony. The technicians were ranged along a row of control panels before him. Over their heads, he had a good view of the twenty-foot sphere hanging in the center of the experimental pit, which was three hundred feet across and the heart of the orbital space station built around it. The balcony was shielded from the central vacuum by a field of force easier, like gravity, to manipulate out here in space.
Turino laid aside a half-eaten chocolate bar and hunched over his instrument panel. From the right, lit like the planet by artificial sun lamps, glided a four-foot globe. It fell into an orbit about the larger one, circled it three times for Lane’s recording lenses, then edged gradually closer.
“Another one shot,” predicted Schultz. “Took me three days to build up the pseudocontinents on that model.”
“It may not need complete dismantling,” said Kleweski.
“Hope they don’t take apart the core of the big one,” Schultz muttered gloomily. “Working those iron wedges back into place is a job.”
“So is calculating their velocities from the film.”
“There’s the 2.58 the real moon has,” announced Turino.
The smaller globe had moved delicately inward and speeded up in its orbit. Tides in its seas and in the cloudy atmosphere of the planet were now marked. At regular intervals, Turino called off the distance in terms of planet radius. Kleweski took down data without shifting his eyes from the scene.
“Due pretty soon, ain’t she?” asked Schultz, as the moon circled within the 2.44 radii of Roche’s limit. “Oh-oh! Here comes The John!”
Kleweski glanced over his shoulder. Through the extra door at the end of the balcony came Charley Johnson, the office politician of the engineering department.
“What’s that with him?” gasped Schultz.
“Something from around Arcturus,” answered Kleweski. “He came to make Doc Lawton an offer for the lab.”
“No kiddin’ ?” Schultz thought that over. “You have a piece of it like the other engineers. You gonna sell?”
“Got my doubts. Let’s get on with this, and talk later.”
Johnson nodded to Kleweski, and led his squat, squarely built guest to a position of vantage at the end of the balcony. The Arcturan was a head shorter than Kleweski’s six feet, but better than a yard wide. He looked as if put together to stand anything. Four stumpy legs supported a body sheathed in rubbery, walnut-brown skin and sporting four less muscular tentacles about waist-high—if the Arcturan had had a waist. Most of the features on the broad head, save for two wide-set eyes, were concealed by a breathing mask. Kleweski thought he saw a vocal filter slung from the stranger’s harness, indicating that the Arcturan’s range of speaking sounds was unearthly.
“Showing signs,” warned Turino.
“A liquid satellite would be gone before now,” Kleweski told Schultz. He called, “Let’s squeeze out the last millimeter!”
“Out of my hands,” Turino reported after another moment.
The satellite had achieved an improbable proximity to the larger sphere. Lane’s cameras recorded the surface disturbances. A chorus of exclamations arose as the moon began to break up. Most of the pieces curved “down” to the major globe. The white clouds became roiled by tiny flames, and shot out wisps of vapor as larger bits struck the surface.
In the end, three small, irregular moons circled the ruined planet. The clouds had been dispersed or condensed, revealing Schultz’s surface details to be a complete mess.
“And no rings, even!” he complained. “Oughta be rings.”
“Look closer,” said Kleweski. “I think there’s an irregular one forming now. If we keep the setup long enough, it’ll smooth out. It’s just hard to see because most of the stuff fell to the surface this time.”
“Some mess,” remarked Charley Johnson. “The Altair job?”
Kleweski nodded, gathering his papers from a data desk.
“Altair VII, after a planetoid displaced their satellite. When we analyze the film, we can tell them the symptoms of critical approach—atmosphere tides ought to be easiest to spot. I don’t think they’ll have to move yet; but it won’t hurt them to start hunting a place to colonize.”
“Well, if you’re finished, the showdown’s going to get underway in Lawton’s office.”
“I’ll be there,” said Kleweski.
He watched the crew begin to let air into the pit as Johnson left the chamber with the Arcturan.
“Showdown, huh?” commented Schultz. “You guys don’t all want to sell, I guess. But Lawton does?”
“Not much we can do,” admitted Kleweski. “He practically built this place from the pit out, and he owns most of it.”
“What’s he wanna sell for?”
“He wants to build a bigger station. With two or three pits and extra observatories to lease to astronomers.”
He tapped his clipboard moodily against his thigh, and stared at the “planet” Turino was maneuvering with his force beams to the side of the pit.
“It’ll cost plenty,” the engineer added.
“Bet he’s been making plenty,” said Schultz. “Done everythin’ from proving ring formation or predictin’ planet formation for other stars to estimating positions of lost spaceships.”
“True, but he still needs a big chunk of cash. Only—I’m not sure I want to turn my part of this lab over to some promoter from space without knowing it’ll be used for the public good.”
Leaving Schultz to supervise the salvage of materials, he dropped his notes at the cubby called his office and took an elevator to the conference room. Most of the others were already present, waiting for Dr. Lawton, Johnson, and the Arcturan. Kleweski slumped lankily into a chair and stared at a schematic diagram of the station framed on the bulkhead.
Seen from top or bottom, the station resembled a sphere. In effect, it was one, although an equatorial view revealed it to be actually a squat cylinder, with bulging observatory domes above and below. The experimental pit was at the center, shielded, and surrounded by levels of compartments for living, working, and housing the mechanisms used to manipulate the material in the pit. Besides these levels, which were laid out in octagonal bands about the pit with safety doors at the angles, supply levels extended to the skin of the station. Most of these, except for the air-conditioning chambers and elevator shafts, were kept airless. They included two sally-ports, each housing a pair of light rockets, which were reached through air locks from the working levels.
Then the door at the end of the room opened and Dr. Lawton ushered in the prospective purchaser.
“. . . And so that’s the way it went,” Kleweski told Schultz some hours later. “His name is Ouayo, from Arcturus V, and he has enough in one of Terra’s main banks to swing the deal.”
“But you didn’t go along?”
They were sitting on a table in Schultz’s workshop, amid scattered heaps and boxes of materials the technician used to simulate the outer crusts of planet models.
“No,” said Kleweski, “I said I’d rather keep an active interest, since there would be no chance for similar research until Lawton gets the new station built.”
“So?”
“So Lawton finally smoothed things over and got Ouayo to include me in the contract. They decided my services would be vital, anyway, because I know the place inside out and the Arcturan will need somebody to drop down to Luna for supplies and gadgets from time to time.”
“That’s right,” agreed Schultz. “Running the station is no one-man job, for all it’s loaded with automatic gadgets. Well, guess I might as well start packing my stuff, huh?”
“Take your time,” said Kleweski. “You have a whole week.”
Schutz’s eyebrows rose at that. He uttered a low whistle.
“What’s his hurry?”
“I don’t know; he’s a closemouthed lump. But he must have something queer on the fire. Schultz—”
“Yeah?” encouraged the other as the silence lengthened.
Kleweski, who had been staring into emptiness as if at some unpleasant vision, shook himself slightly.
“I was going to say that I’d like to hear from you once in a while, when you have time to send a light-gram.”
“Sure.”
“I mean . . . well—”
“Sure,” repeated Schultz, looking at him keenly. “I’ll expect you to answer them, too.”
“That’s right,” said Kleweski.
The task of moving the personnel from the station took most of the week, but went smoothly enough except for a rush job on models Ouayo insisted on having built.
Kleweski, detailed by Lawton for a trip to Luna to arrange storage for laboratory records of completed and projected experiments, missed most of the furor.
Upon his return at the end of the week, the first person he encountered after reporting to Lawton was photographer Lane.
“Say, you ought to see the pit now!” Lane greeted him.
“What’s the matter?” asked Kleweski.
“They’ve been driving the shop men night an’ day to fill it up with models. How many you think they crammed in there?”
“How many?” demanded Kleweski.
“Sixteen!”
“Huh?”
“That’s right! Four planet-size with three moons apiece.”
“They’re crazy!” exclaimed Kleweski. “They’ll have them rattling around like dice!”
“It was runnin’ pretty good when I saw it. Look up Schultz; I think maybe he has a key to the balcony.”
“Why? Have they got it locked?”
“Orders, from the Arcturan Lump,” Lane nodded. “He must be inventing something secret. Did you see that stuff in an orbit around the station when you came in?”
“Six or eight big drums? They his?”
“Yep,” said Lane. “Won’t load them into the station till we’re gone. I’d almost like to stay to find out what they are, but that Ouayo gives me the creeps.”
Kleweski left him thoughtfully and sought out Schultz. He found him snoring on a bench in his workshop.
“Oh, you’re back?” mumbled the technician, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “What’s new?”
“I hear tell there’s something new in the pit.”
“Oh, that . . . yeah. What a job to do in a week! We worked three shifts on those models. Everything had to be just so, even to using a special solution for the oceans. Ouayo brought that in from his baggage outside.”
“Lane says they have the place locked.”
“Yeah, but I haven’t sealed all the emergency hatches yet. Want to take a look?”
Kleweski nodded. Schultz, yawning, led him out of the model shop into the corridor, past two angles in the octagonal floor plan, and down to the machinery level.
This belt of mechanisms used to. operate the pit and to generate power for the rest of the station was about thirty feet high. A similar level was immediately below, but deck to deck, with the artificial gravity opposite indirection.
“Here’s the hatch across from the control balcony,” said Schultz. “That is, it’s down this ladder.”
He dropped headfirst down the ladderway, like a good swimmer nonchalantly diving from a low float. Halfway through the thickened deck, he grabbed a rung of the ladder and began to climb “down” as he passed the plane of the space station’s equator. Kleweski followed, and found Schultz swinging open a small, thick hatch.
Having removed this like a cork from the neck of a bottle, Schultz led the way through a short tunnel in the pit shielding. He opened a similar cylindrical portal at the other end, and they gazed out into the pit from a niche that was recessed to be outside the field of force that maintained the pit vacuum.
Kleweski exclaimed.
“What a scramble! How did you get them all in?”
Four twenty-foot spheres hung in the artificially lighted void. Around each revolved two smaller ones, proportioned as rather large moons. Several others glided toward each other near the center of the pit.
Kleweski thrust his head forward, studying the glowing models in their orbits. After a moment of silent analysis, the pattern suddenly burst upon him.
The four “planets” were spaced equally around the pit, midway between center and the outer limits. Two moons of each followed orbits in the same general plane. The third satellite in each case moved in an elongated ellipse perpendicular to this plane, each cutting down between its two mates at one end of the journey and at the opposite extreme coming almost to a junction with the other dead moons at the center of the pit.
“What’s he trying to do?” grunted Kleweski. “There never was such a system. At least, the odds against it are fantastic!”
“Designing one of his own,” suggested Schultz sarcastically. “Easy to get around in as a subway. Each planet has two locals, plus one express to all points past the center.”
Kleweski did not laugh. His eyes widened.
“Maybe you’re not kidding,” he muttered. “It’s made to order from a viewpoint of economizing on spaceship fuel.”
He eyed the setup for a few minutes, then thanked Schultz and thoughtfully made his way to his own compartment.
He had still not made up his mind a few days later as he stood shivering in the poorly heated observation dome atop the station’s north pole. He had just turned away from peering through a small telescope at the last receding rocket trail of the ship® carrying away members of the laboratory staff.
Which is now reduced to two, he reflected. Ouayo and me!
He left the dome by the little car that ran through a bulging “great circle” tube on the station’s exterior, and dropped down to the working level and a narrow passage through the supply compartments.
“I suppose Ouayo’s busy getting in his secret equipment,” he muttered. “Stuff like those language records he gave me.”
He wondered why the Arcturan had not yet changed the air of the station to whatever he breathed. Still, he told himself, it was none of his business and Ouayo’s preoccupation with other matters was saving Kleweski the trouble of wearing a breathing mask. He decided to have a look into the pit before making another inspection round of the space station.
He found the entrance to the balcony, and looked in upon a mystifying sight. Ouayo stood blockily before a small television screen, the center of a strange new assembly on one of the data desks. Kleweski’s first feeling was chagrin at having been left out of whatever experiment was underway. Then he noticed one of the mysterious tanks Ouayo had been keeping in an orbit about the station.
