Complete Short Fiction, page 185
Of course, much of the factory equipment itself, designed to contain nuclear reactions, would have resisted any imaginable tools. None of this could, however, be regarded as practical for hiding purposes; one might as well get inside a blast furnace or sulfuric-acid chamber.
All in all, it looked as though straight concealment were going to be more practical, and this pretty well demanded the outside of the asteroid.
The tunnels of the station were complex enough to make a fairly good labyrinth, but there was a reasonable basic pattern underlying their arrangement. Hoerwitz knew this pattern so well, quite naturally, that it never occurred to him that his unwelcome guests might have trouble finding him in the maze once he got out of sight. He did think of turning out the lights to complicate their job, but they should have little trouble turning them back on again. Robinson, at least, must know something about electricity. Besides, darkness and weightlessness together were a very bad combination even for someone as used to the latter as Hoerwitz. No, outside would be best.
The asteroid was far from spherical, had a reasonable amount of surface area, and its jagged surface promised all sorts of hiding places. This was especially true in the contrasty lighting of airlessness. Mac could think of a dozen possible spots immediately—his years of residence had not been spent entirely inside. During safe periods he had taken several trips outside (safe periods meant, among other things, the presence of company; taking a lone walk in a spacesuit is about as sensible as taking a lone swim in the Indian Ocean).
More familiarity with the surface would have been nice, but what little he had should at least be greater than the others did. If he were to drop casually some remark which would give the impression that he knew the outside like one of his own Shakespeare sheets, they might not even bother to search once he was out of sight—provided he waited until there was very little time left before they were leaving, and provided he was able to disappear at all. Too many ifs? Maybe.
It was also important that Smith not change his mind about letting Hoerwitz take walks outside. It wouldn’t require careful guarding to prevent such an excursion; five seconds’ work on Mac’s spacesuit would take care of that. It was annoying that so much of the plan depended more on Smith’s attitude than on Hoerwitz’s action, especially since Smith didn’t seem to believe in taking chances. The attitude would be hard to control. The manager would have to seem completely harmless—but he’d better take Hamlet’s advice about overacting.
That was a matter of basic behavior. On the question of useful action, there was another factor to consider. At the present setup rate, the isotopes the thieves wanted would be ready ten or a dozen hours before perigee, which Mac was still taking as the latest time they’d want to stay around. Something really ought to be done to delay the conversion and delivery process, to keep at a minimum the supply of spare moments which could he devoted to looking for missing factory managers. Could he slow down the converters without arousing suspicion? He knew much about the machines, and the others presumably knew very little, but trying to fool them with some piece of fiction would be extremely risky. His left hand gave an extra twinge at the thought.
Of course, some genuine trouble could develop. It hadn’t in all his years at the station, but it could. There was no point waiting for it, and even if it did they’d probably blame him anyway, but—could he, perhaps, arrange for something to happen which would obviously be Jones’ fault? Or Smith’s own? The basic idea was attractive, but details failed to crystallize.
It was certainly high time for action, though if he hoped to accomplish anything such as living, the closer to completion the process came, the less good a slowdown would accomplish. In fact, it was time to stop daydreaming and get to work. Hoerwitz nodded slowly to himself as ideas began to shape up.
IV
He went to the galley and prepared breakfast, noting without surprise that the others had been using his food. It was too bad that he didn’t have anything to dose it with for their benefit. He measured out and consumed his daily supply of null-G medicines, and put the utensils in the washer—one common aspect of his job he had refused to accept. Difficult as such things as ham and eggs are to manage in free-fall, he had insisted on regular food instead of tubes of paste. He worked out techniques of his own for keeping things in the plate. Someday, he had been telling himself for a couple of decades, he would write a book on zero-G cookery.
With the galley chores done, he aimed himself down the corridor toward the control chamber. Brown and Robinson were inside, both looking bored. The latter was drifting within reach of a wall, the manager noticed; perhaps his experience of the day before had taught him something. Hoerwitz hoped not. Brown was near the center of the room and would be useless to his party for quite a few seconds if action were required.
The instruments were disgustingly normal. All twenty converters were simmering along as programmed. Not all were doing just the same things, of course; they had been loaded with different substances originally and had been interrupted in various stages of differing processes when Hoerwitz had been forced to reprogram. One of them had already been processing a Class IV order and was now approaching the climax of its run. It seemed wiser to point this out to the thieves so that they wouldn’t think he was up to anything when he shut this one down, as he would have to do in a few hours. He did so.
“At least you people won’t have to do everything at once,” he remarked.
“What do you mean?” asked Brown.
“When you came, I told you that one of the units was on Four already. You can tell your boss that it should be ready to load in eight hours or so. I’ll show you where the loading conveyors are handled from—or do you want to lug it out by hand? You were bragging about carting five hundred pounds of ship around when you came.”
“Don’t be funny, old fellow,” cut in Robinson. “You might as well have that loading machinery ready. You might even be ready to show a couple of us how to use it. If Smith should decide he doesn’t like your attitude, we might be the only ones able to.”
“All right with me,” replied the manager. He felt reasonably safe as long as Smith himself was not present. It had seemed likely that none of the others would dare do anything drastic to him without direct orders, and Robinson’s remark had strengthened the belief. “The controls are in a dome at the surface. They’re simple enough, like a chess game.”
“What does that crack mean?”
“Just what it sounded like. Any six-year-old can learn the rules of chess in an hour, but that doesn’t make him a good player. I’m sure Mr. Smith won’t need you to remind him of that when you suggest that you ought to do the loading.” The two men glanced at each other, and Robinson shrugged.
“Better show me where the controls are, anyway,” he said. “You better stay here,” he added to Brown. “I’ll be with Hoerwitz, but Smith said this panel was never to be left unwatched. We might not have time to explain if he found us both gone.” The other man nodded. Hoerwitz, keeping his face as expressionless as he could, led the way to the station he had mentioned.
This was about as far from the control chamber as anything could be, since it was at the surface. It lay near the main entrance, a quarter of the way around the asteroid’s equator from the radiators. The converters themselves were scattered at fairly regular intervals just under the surface. The general idea was that if one of them did misbehave it would meet only token resistance outward, and the rest of the plant might have a chance. Access and loading tunnels connecting the converters with the cargo locks and the living quarters were deliberately crooked. All these tricks would of course be futile in a major blowup, but it is possible to have minor accidents even in nuclear engineering.
The dome containing the loading control panels was one of the few places offering a direct view to the outside of the asteroid. It had served as a conning site while the body was being driven in from beyond Mars; it still was sometimes used that way. The thrust pits were still in service, as the present long, narrow orbit was heavily perturbed by the Moon and required occasional correction near apogee. This was not done by Hoerwitz, who could no more have corrected an orbit than he could have built a spaceship. The thrust controls were disconnected except when a ballistics engineer was on hand.
The dome was small, little more than a dozen feet across, and its entire circle was rimmed with conveyor control panels. Hoerwitz, quite unintentionally, had exaggerated their simplicity. This might have gotten him into trouble with anyone but Robinson. Without worrying about this situation, since he failed to recognize it, the manager promptly began explaining.
“First, you want to be careful about these guarded switches on each panel,” he pointed out. “They’re designed to bypass the safeties which normally keep you from putting too hot a load on the conveyors, so that you can dump a converter in an emergency. At the moment, since all the units are hot, you couldn’t operate any part of the conveyor system except by those switches.
“Basically, the whole thing is simple enough. One panel is concerned with each of the twenty separate conveyor systems, and all panels are alike, so—”
“Why didn’t they make just one panel, then, and have a selector to set it on any one of the reactors?” asked Robinson. Hoerwitz sadly revised upward his estimate of the fellow’s brain power, as he answered.
“Often several ships are loading, or several reactors unloading, at one time. It turned out to be simpler and safer to have independent control systems. Also, the system works both ways—customers get credit for mass brought to the station for conversion. We have to take material to the converters as well as away from them, and it’s more efficient to be able to carry on several operations at once. The original idea, as you probably know, was to use the mass of the asteroid itself for conversion; but with laws about controlling rotation so that the radiators would point away from Earth most of the time, and the expense of the original installation, and the changes in orbit and angular momentum and so on, they finally decided it was better to try to keep the mass of the place fairly constant. They did use quite a bit of material from it at first. There are a lot of useless tunnels inside, and quite a few pits outside, left over from lose days.”
Hoerwitz was watching his listener covertly as he spoke, trying to judge how much of this information was being absorbed, but the other’s face was unreadable. He gave up and went on with the lesson.
They were joined after about a quarter of an hour by Smith, but the head thief said little, merely ordering the instruction to continue. The factory manager decided to take no more chances testing his listeners with double-talk; Smith had impressed him as being a different proposition from his followers. The decision to play safe in his presence proved a wise one.
It took another ten minutes for Mac to wind up the lesson.
“You’ll need some practice,” he concluded, “and there’s no way to get it just yet. I was never a schoolteacher, but I understand that your best way of making sure how well you know something is to try to teach it to someone else. I trust Mr. Smith approves of that thought.”
“I do.” Smith’s face didn’t show approval or anything else, but the words were encouraging.
“Give me a lesson right now, Rob. I’d particularly like to know just what this switch does—or did Mr. Hoerwitz forget to mention it?” He indicated the emergency-dump override.
“Oh, no, he showed me that first. We’d better keep clear of it, because it empties that particular converter onto its conveyor and dumps it into space, even though it’s still hot.”
For a moment there might have been a flicker of surprise on Smith’s face.
“And he told you about it? I rather thought he might skip items like that in the hope that one of us might make a mistake he could not be blamed for.” Hoerwitz decided that it would be less suspicious to answer that remark than to let it pass.
“Is there anything that could possibly go wrong that you would not blame me for?” he asked.
“Probably not, at that. I’m glad you realize it, Mr. Hoerwitz. Perhaps I’ll be spared the nuisance of having to leave a man on guard here as well as at the main controls.” He glanced through the dome’s double wall at Earth’s fat crescent, which dominated the sky on one side of the meridian as the Moon did on the other. “Is there any way of shutting off access to this place until we’re ready to use it? Think how much more at ease we’d both feel if there were.”
Hoerwitz shrugged. “No regular door. There are a couple of safety air-breaks in the corridor below; you could get one of them closed easily enough, since there are manual switches for them as well as the pressure and temperature differential sensors, but it would be a lot harder to open. If one of those things does shut, it’s normally because air is being lost or dangerous reactions going on on one side or the other. A good deal of red tape is necessary to convince the machinery that all is well after all.”
“Hmph.” Smith looked thoughtful. “All right, we’ll consider it. Rob, you stay here until I decide. You come with me, old fellow.” Hoerwitz obeyed with mixed feelings.
It was lucky he hadn’t tried to dump the reactors and shut himself off in the dome section, in view of Smith’s perspicacity, but he couldn’t thank his own intelligence or foresight for saving him. The sad fact was that he’d never thought of the trick until he was explaining matters to Robinson. Now it was certainly too late. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, since someone like Robinson could presumably get air doors open again in short order; and there was an even brighter side, now that he thought of it. The last few minutes might well have gone far in convincing Smith that the manager was really reconciled to the situation. One could not be sure of that, naturally, with a person like Smith, but one could hope. Time would no doubt tell—and quite possibly in bad language.
As they floated back down toward the living section—Hoerwitz noted with some regret that Smith was getting better at handling himself in free-fall—the head thief spoke briefly.
“Maybe you’ve learned your lesson. From what’s just happened, I guess we can both hope so. Just the same, I don’t want to see you anywhere near that place where we just left Robinson, except when I tell you myself to go there for my own reasons. Is that clear?”
“It is.”
“Good. I don’t really enjoy persuading people the hard way, but you may have noticed that Mr. Jones does. If you’ve really accepted the fact that I have the bulge on you, though, we won’t have to amuse him.”
“You’ve made everything very clear. Do you want the reactor which was working on Class IV when you came, and which will be ready pretty soon, to be unloaded as soon as it’s done?”
“Hmph. I don’t know. Does your loading machine deliver to any spot on the surface, or just by that dome?”
“Just at the dome, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t have been practical to run conveyors all over the place, and it’s even less so to drive trucks around on the surface.”
“All right. If it would mean moving our ship an extra time we’ll wait until everything is ready. It would be a nuisance to have to guard it, too.”
“Then you’re not really convinced I’ve learned my lesson, after all?”
“Don’t ask too many questions, Mr. Hoerwitz. Why not just assume that I don’t like to take chances?”
The manager was not inclined to act on impulse, but he sometimes talked on that basis. This was one of the times.
“I don’t want to assume that.”
“Why not?”
“Because one of your most obvious ways of not taking chances would be to leave no witnesses. If I believed you were that thorough, I might as well stop everything now and let you shoot me—not that I really enjoy the prospect, but I could at least die with the satisfaction that I hadn’t helped you.”
“That’s logical,” Smith answered thoughtfully. “I have only two answers to it. One you already know—we wouldn’t just shoot you. The other, which I hope will make you feel better, is that we aren’t worried about witnesses. You’ve been reading too much. We’ll have lived in this place for several days before we’re done, but you must have noticed that we aren’t wearing gloves to keep from leaving fingerprints, or spacesuits to foil the scent analyzers, or anything else of that sort. I’m sure the law will know who was here after we’ve gone, but that doesn’t worry us. They already want us for so many different things that our main care is to avoid getting caught up with, not identified.”
“Then why those names? Do you expect me to believe they’re real?”
For almost the first time, Smith showed emotion. He grinned. “Go back to your drama sheets, Mr. Hoerwitz, but stick to Shakespeare. Lord Peter Wimsey is leading you astray. Just remember what I said about the conveyor controls; keep away from them.”
V
If his finger hadn’t been so painful, Hoerwitz would have been quite happy as he made his way back to the lounge and let the air currents settle him into the hammock. He shunted Julius Caesar into the “hold” stack without zeroing its tracker, started The Pajama Game, and remained awake through the whole show. It was quite an occasion.
For the next couple of days everyone was on almost friendly terms, though Hoerwitz’s finger kept him from forgetting entirely the basic facts of the situation or warming up very much to Jones. Some of the men watched shows with him, and there was even casual conversation entirely unconnected with reactors and fuel processing. Smith’s psychology was working fairly well.
It did not backfire on him until about twenty hours before perigee.
At that time Mac had been making one of his periodic control checks, and had reported that the runs would be finishing off during the next ten or twelve hours. He would have to stay at the board, since they would not all end at the same time, and it was safer to oversee the supposedly automatic cooling of each converter as its job ended.
