Complete Short Fiction, page 184
“We’re not requesting. As you know perfectly well. You will do any programming necessary, without regard to what is running now, and if necessary we will use station rock. I would have said you’d chip it for us, but I admit there’s a difference between the merely illegal and the impossible. Why do they keep a wreck like you on duty out here?”
Hoerwitz flushed. He was used to this attitude from the young and healthy, but more accustomed to having it masked by some show of courtesy.
“It’s the only place I can live,” he said shortly. “My heart, muscles, and bones can’t take normal gravity. Most people can’t take free-fall—or rather, they don’t like the consequences of the medication needed to take It indefinitely. That makes no difference to me. I don’t care about muscle, and I had my family half a century ago. This job is good for me, and I’m good for it. For that reason, I don’t choose to ruin it. I don’t intend to do any reprogramming for you, and I’d be willing to bet you can’t do it yourself.”
Smith’s gun reappeared, and its owner looked at it thoughtfully. The old man nodded toward it and went on, “That’s an argument, I admit. I don’t want to die, but if you kill me it certainly won’t get you further.” Mac found that he wasn’t as brave as his words sounded; there was an odd and uncomfortable feeling in his stomach as he looked at the weapon. He must have covered it well, however, because after a moment of thought the intruder put the gun away again.
“You’re quite right,” he said. “I have no intention of killing you, because I do need your help. We’ll have to use another method. Mr. Jones, please carry out our first stage of planned persuasion?”
II
Fifteen minutes later Hoerwitz was reprogramming the converters as well as he could with an unusable left hand.
Smith, who had courteously introduced himself during the procedure, had gone to the trouble of making sure his victim was right-handed before allowing Jones to start work. It would, as he said, be a pity to slow the station manager down too much. The right hand could wait.
“How about my toes?” Hoerwitz had asked sarcastically, not yet fully convinced that the affair was serious.
“It seems to have been proved that feet have fewer nerves and don’t feel pain as intensely,” replied Smith. “Of course, the toes will still be there if we need them. Mr. Jones, start with the left hand.”
Mac had decided almost at once that the visitors were sincere, but Jones had insisted on finishing his job in workmanlike style. Smith had supported him.
“It would be a pity for you to get the idea that we weren’t prepared to finish anything we started,” he pointed out.
As he floated in front of the monitor panels readjusting potentiometers and flow-control relays, Hoerwitz thought furiously. He wasn’t much worried about his guests actually getting away with their stolen fuel; what he was now doing to the controls must be showing on repeaters in Elkhart, Papeete, and Bombay already. The station was, after all, part of a company supposed to be doing profitable business, and the fact that fusion power plants were still forbidden on Earth didn’t mean that the company wasn’t keeping close track of its products. There’d be radioed questions in the next few minutes, and when they weren’t answered satisfactorily there’d be arrangements to send a ship. Of course, the company would wait two or three days and make a perigee rendezvous, but if the indicators bothered the directors sufficiently they might ask a police launch to investigate sooner. On the whole, it was unlikely that anything would happen until shortly after perigee; but something would happen to prevent the thieves’ escape.
The trouble seemed to be that that something wouldn’t do Mac himself any good. Up to now, genuine criminals who were willing to use actual violence had been strictly reading material for him; but he had done plenty of reading. He had a vivid mental picture of the situation. The belief that they would kill him before leaving was not so much insight as it was reflex.
They might not even wait until the job was done. The new program was set up for the converters, and he would not be essential unless something went seriously astray. It never did, but he hoped the thieves were the sort of people who worried about things going wrong.
He found his stomach reacting again when Smith approached him after the converters had been restarted. The gun was, not in sight, but Mac knew it was there. For that matter, it wasn’t necessary; any of the visitors could break his neck with one hand. However, Smith didn’t seem to have violence on his mind at the moment. In fact, his speech was encouraging. He would hardly have bothered to give warnings about Hoerwitz’s behavior unless he planned to keep the manager around for a while.
“A few points you should understand, Mr. Hoerwitz,” the boss-thief explained. “You must be supposing that the change in converter program will attract, or has already attracted, notice at home. You are wrong. A mysterious ailment has affected the monitor computers at the central plant. Signals are coming in quite normally from the space factories, but they are not being analyzed. The engineers are quite frantic about it. They hope to get matters straightened out in a few days, but in the meantime no one is going to worry more about one space factory than another unless some such thing as a distress message is received.
“I know you wouldn’t be foolish enough to attempt to send such a message, since you still have nine fingers available for Mr. Jones’ attention, but to remove temptation Mr. Robinson has disabled your station’s radio transmitters. To make really sure, he is now taking care of those in the spacesuits. We realize that a suit radio could hardly be received, except by the wildest luck, at Earth’s present distance; but that distance shrinks to only about a thousand miles at perigee, as I recall.
“If you do wish to go outside, by all means indulge the impulse. I might enjoy a walk with you myself. Our ship is a former police supply boat, heavily armored and solidly locked. One of us has the only key—I wouldn’t dream of telling you which one. Even if you forced your way aboard, which seems possible, its transmitter channels are not standard. They would be received by my friends, not yours. You could not take the ship away, supposing you are enough of a pilot to try it, because it is parked beside your waste radiators, and the exhaust would wreck them—”
“You landed beside the radiators?” For the first time, Mac was really alarmed.
“Oh, no. We know better than that. We landed by your airlock and carried the ship around to the radiators. It weighs only about five hundred pounds here. I fear you couldn’t carry it away again by yourself, and it’s on rough enough ground so I don’t think rolling would be practical.
“So, Mr. Hoerwitz, you may as well relax. We’ll appreciate your attending to your normal business so that our order is ready as soon as possible, but if you prefer to go out for a walk occasionally we don’t really mind. I suppose even you could jump off into space, since I understand that escape velocity here is only about a foot a second, and we’d be sorry to lose you that way; but it’s entirely up to you. You are perfectly free in all matters which don’t interfere with our order. Personally, if I were you I’d go back to quarters and enjoy that really excellent sheet library.”
Hoerwitz had gone, but hadn’t really been able to concentrate on The Tempest. Some of Caliban’s remarks had caught his attention because they expressed his own feelings quite well, and he caught himself once or twice wishing for a handy Ariel. However, he was much too old to spend much mental effort on wishing, and the only spirits available at the station were material mechanisms of very restricted versatility. Worse, he was probably not completely free to command them, unless Smith and Company were unbelievably incompetent.
Of course, if something appeared to be going wrong, they would have to trust him to fix it; maybe something could be worked up from that side.
But what could be done, anyway? Just what did he have? The plant turned over vast quantities of energy, but it certainly wasn’t a magic wand. It had the complex gear of a hydrogen fusion unit, and a modest tonnage of hydrogen-deuterium slush; while it would require deliberate bypassing of a host of safety devices to do it, it would be quite possible to blow the asteroid into a cloud of plasma. This had certain disadvantages besides the likelihood of blinding the unfortunates on Earth who happened to be looking toward the station at the key moment. For one thing, it didn’t really deal satisfactorily with Smith and his friend. It merely promised to dispose of them, and the way Mac’s finger felt at the moment that wasn’t quite bad enough. What else did he have?
There were a score of converters, each designed to take matter and transform it, using the energy of the fuser, into isotopes which could be used on Earth legally and more or less safely as power sources. At the moment, all were working on the Class IV mixtures—the fast-yield substances usable for spacecraft fuel, industrial blasting, and weaponry, which Smith had demanded. Whether he and his friends planned to use the stuff themselves for bank robbery or political subversion, or merely feed the black market, Hoerwitz neither knew or greatly cared. A minute charge of any Class IV product, assuming that he would get hold of it, could certainly get him into the thieves’ ship, no matter how well she were armored. Whether the ship would be worth getting into after such treatment was debatable. A production controller is one thing and a nuclear-explosives expert quite another. Hoerwitz happened to be the first. Trying to abstract explosives under the eyes of Smith, Jones and Associates seemed not only dangerous but probably useless.
There were the radiators, the most conspicuous part of the plant from outside. They were four gigantic structures, each some five hundred feet across and nearly as high. The outer walls were cylindrical and contained high-powered refrigeration circuits; their inner surfaces carried free-election fields which rendered them nearly perfect reflectors. Inside the cylinders, out of contact with their walls, were the radiators themselves—huge cores of high-conductivity alloy, running at a temperature which would have evaporated them into space in minutes if they had not been held together by fields similar to those which restrained the fusion units. The whole structure was designed to get rid of waste energy, of course.
Any serious absorption by the planetoid of the flood being radiated from those units would have started a sequence of troubles of which the warming of the fusion-fuel slush would have been a minor preliminary. Secondarily, the units were arranged to shine away from Earth; their location on the asteroid and the latter’s rotation had been arranged with this in view. It was not a perfect success in one way, since the extremely eccentric orbit in which the asteroid had been placed to facilitate freight-handling work produced a longitude libration of over a hundred degrees each way; but Earth had agreed to put up with this. The periodic flashes of light from the space factories were rather scenic in their way, and most of the astronomers had moved to the Moon or to orbiting observatories anyway.
But those radiators did throw away an awful lot of energy. One should be able to do something with it in a situation like this; something really useful. But what?
III
It was really a pity that the library contained no Fu Manchu or Bulldog Drummond. Hoerwitz needed ideas. Since it looked as though he would have to furnish his own, he selected a sheet for background material, slipped it into the scanner, and drifted toward the cobwebby hammock in the center of the lounge while Flavius berated the holiday-making citizens of Rome on the screen. It was reasonably appropriate, the manager drowsed; there was certainly an Ides of March coming. He wished his finger would stop hurting. The script and background music flowed along a track that his awareness had followed a hundred times before . . .
The frantic disclaimers of China the Poet awakened him. He had drifted and been held against the hammock by the current from the air circulator. The feeble gravity which gave the visiting ship a weight of five hundred pounds at the surface was of course absent in the living quarters at the center of the asteroid. Almost automatically he pushed himself back to the console and shut off the sheet-scanner at the end of the third act. Obviously this wasn’t helping him to think. He’d better check the convertor monitors just to wake himself up and then get some exercise.
Robinson was in the tunnel outside the lounge and without saying a word followed Mac along the passage. The fellow was certainly not very much at home in zero gravity; his coordination as he passed himself from handhold to handhold was worse than sloppy. If this were equally true of the others, it might be a help.
As things turned out, it was.
Smith and Jones were in the control room, drifting idly away from the walls. Another good sign. Either they, too, were unused to free-fall or had completely dismissed Hoerwitz from their minds as a menace. Neither of them could have gotten into action for quite a few seconds, since neither had a pushoff point within reach—not even each other.
They said nothing as the manager and his satellite entered, but watched the former as he aimed and pushed off from a point beside the door and drifted along the indicator panels, taking in their readings as he went. Somewhat to his regret, though not to his surprise since no alarms had sounded, Mac found everything going as programmed. He reached the far end of the room and reversed his drift, aiming for the door. The new course took him within reach of Robinson, and that individual at a nod from Smith seized the old man’s arm as he went by.
This was a slight mistake. The result was a two-body system spinning with a period of about five seconds and traveling toward the door at about a quarter of Hoerwitz’s former speed. The manager took advantage of the other’s confusion to choose the time and style of his breakaway from the system. He came to a halt, spin gone, four or five yards from the meeting point. Robinson, who had been made a free gift of their joint angular momentum, brought up with his head in painful contact with the edge of the doorway. Mac couldn’t pretend to be sorry; Jones concealed a grin rather unsuccessfully, and Smith showed no sign of caring either way. His order to stop Hoerwitz for a conversation had been obeyed; the details didn’t bother him.
“How long is our fuel going to take?” he asked.
“Another fifty to fifty-five hours, barring offtrack developments,” replied the manager. “I gave you an estimate at the beginning, and there’s no reason to change it so far. I trust these instruments, unless you or one of your friends have been playing with circuits. I know you jimmied the radio, but if your man knew what he was about that shouldn’t have bothered this board.”
“That’s all I wanted to know. Do what you want until it’s time to check your instruments again.”
“It’s night by my clocks. I’m sleeping for a few hours, now that I’ve had my daily workout. I see you know where my quarters are—what were you searching for, guns or radios? You brought the only weapons this place has ever seen yourselves, and a radio able to reach Earth is a little too large to hide in a photo album.”
“Spacesuit radios are pretty small.”
“But they’re in spacesuits.”
“All right. We just like to be sure. Wouldn’t you be happier to know that we weren’t worrying about you?” Hoerwitz left without trying to answer that. Smith looked after him for a few seconds, and then beckoned to Brown.
“Don’t interfere with his routine, but keep an eye on the old fellow. I’m not so sure we really convinced him, after all. I’d much rather keep him around to do the work, but the job is much too important to take chances.” Brown nodded, and followed Hoerwitz back to the latter’s quarters. Then he took up his station outside, glanced at his watch, helped himself to a set of the pills needed to keep human metabolism in balance under zero-G, and relaxed. The “night” wore on.
Hoerwitz had been perfectly sincere about his intention of sleeping. He had developed the habit of spending much of his time in that state during his years at the station. His age may have been partly responsible, but the life itself was hardly one to keep a man alert. Few people could be found to accept the lonely and boring jobs in the off-Earth factories—so few that many of them had to be run entirely by computer and remote control. Hoerwitz happened to be one of the sort who could spend all his time quite happily with abstract entertainment—books, plays, music or poetry. He could reread a book, or see the same play over and over again, with full enjoyment, just as many people can get pleasure out of hearing the same music repeatedly. Few jobs on Earth would have permitted him to spend so much time amusing himself; the arrangement was ideal both for him and his employers. Still, he slept a lot.
He therefore woke up refreshed, if not exactly vigorous, some nine hours after Brown had taken up his guard station. He was not only refreshed but enthusiastic. He had a plan. It was not a very complicated one, but it might keep him alive.
It had two parts. One was to convince Smith that the intruders could not load their loot without Mac’s help. This should be simple enough, since it was pretty certainly true. Shifting twelve million pounds of mass by muscle power, even in zero-G, is impractical for four men in any reasonable time. The alternative was the station’s loading equipment, and it was unlikely that anyone but Hoerwitz would be expert in its use. If the thieves were convinced of that, at least they’d keep him alive until the last minute.
The second part of the plan was to arrange for himself a refuge or hiding place good enough to discourage the four from spending the time necessary to get him. This assumed that they had assigned high priority to getting away as soon as possible after loading the stolen fuel, which seemed reasonable. Details here, however, required more thinking. It might be better to trust to concealment; on the other hand, there was something to be said for a place whose location was known to the enemy but which obviously couldn’t be penetrated without a lot of time and effort.
On the whole, the latter choice would make him feel safer, but offhand he couldn’t think of a really impregnable spot. There were very few doors of any kind in the station, and even fewer of these could be locked. Air-breaks were solid, but not made to resist intelligent attack. None of the few locks in the place was any better in that respect, if one assumed that the thieves were of professional caliber.
