Collected Short Fiction, page 455
“I happened to be looking.” His voice was very gentle. “I was watching that blinker, when an asteroid came into the periscope field.”
“Eh?” Drake made a muted sound of astonishment. “What asteroid?”
“I got the orbit, and looked it up in the ‘Ephemeris.’ ” McGee was still unhurried. “Number T-89-AK-44. Listed as unnamed, undeveloped, unclaimed. Diameter nine hundred meters. Density and albedo indicate nickel-iron.”
Impatience overcame Ann. “But what happened?”
“A piece of seetee collided with the asteroid.” McGee smiled at her excitement. “Probably the one that had the blinker, because that has gone out. Quite a smash.” Still his voice was softly unemphatic. “The safety shutter tripped, in the periscope, and saved my eyes.”
Old Jim Drake took a quick step forward, in that tiny crowded room. He had known McGee for nearly forty years, and he could see through that calm restraint.
“Tell us, Rob!”
Rob McGee held a lighter to his pipe. He could be quick when speed was needed, but he had never learned the frantic hurry of men in cities. Sometimes his lack of haste was almost maddening.
“Quite a smash,” he repeated. “Couple thousand tons of seetee, dropping toward the Sun on the usual crazy orbit. It must have burned a pit a hundred meters deep in the asteroid, before it was used up. Vaporized a lot of iron. Made a sort of natural rocket.”
“What will happen now?” Ann burst out again. “Is the fire storm coming to Obania?”
“Obania will miss the dust,” the little man said softly. “What’s coming is the asteroid. The impact and reaction of that first collision was just enough to push it into a new collision orbit. Now it’s coming toward Obania.”
Ann uttered a startled little “oh,” and her gray eyes looked anxiously from McGee to old Jim Drake. With an awkward haste, stooped because he was too tall for that low gray room, Drake went to the periscope. McGee drew slowly on his pipe.
In the dark field of the instrument, the asteroid was only a tiny mote. Swinging back again, to question McGee, Drake saw that Ann looked tense and pale. He knew that she must be picturing the collision—grinding ruin, dust and flame; a billion tons of hard nickel-iron crashing into Obania.
“You don’t have to put on your dead-pan for me, Cap’n Rob.” Her voice was tight. “Of course, Obania’s home—it’s all I know. But I can take it. Don’t try to shield me.” Her anxious fingers caught his arm. “When will it strike? Do we have time to do anything about it?”
With his dark leather smile, McGee nodded at Drake.
“Jim’s the engineer,” McGee said softly. “I only had a glimpse. I haven’t touched the calculator. Maybe I’m wrong.”
“Don’t, Rob.” Ann’s impatience was almost anger. “Vou know a glance is all you need. You never touch the calculator. I don’t think you’re ever wrong.”
“Give us the data, Rob,” the patient giant said humbly. Drake had seen McGee study the hands of a chronometer for a few moments, with those mild, squinted eyes, and then tell how many seconds it would gain or lose in a day—exactly. For himself, he needed no chronometer. Perhaps he was no different from many another mathematical prodigy; but sometimes Drake felt that evolution had created a new sense in him, adapted to fit the harsh and sudden needs of life upon these hurtling bits of iron and stone. Drake had learned to trust that sense.
“Naturally I wanted to see for myself, Rob,” he added, in apology. “But you know it would take me hours of observation and computation to check a collision orbit. That rock must be half a million kilometers away.”
“Nearly a million.” McGee ignored the tone of apology, with his usual blindness to the puzzling, nonmathematical world of human emotions. “To be exact, nine hundred seventy-one thousand five hundred eighty kilometers. The time of impact is forty-one days, seven hours and twelve minutes—from the moment I looked.”
Drake’s haggard roan head nodded slowly. He didn’t question the figures. Astronomical magnitudes and relations were as clearly self-evident to McGee as the sum of four apples to the Earth-born.
“Forty-one days?” exclaimed Ann O’Banion. “That’s not long!” Her tanned face was anxious. “Can we move Obania out of the way?”
McGee shook his straw-colored thatch.
“No time for that, I’m afraid. The peegee installation is old-type, you know—nondirectional. Obania’s too large to move with tugs—its weight in tons would surprise you.” He laid down his pipe. “No, the other’s the one to move.”
With the white pinch of apprehension on her freckled nose, Ann looked quickly at old Jim Drake. Something had frozen him into a deaf gigantic statue of bronze.
“Smaller,” McGee explained softly. “Less than a tenth the mass. There’s plenty of time to land a terraforming crew, to install a new-type directional drive. It’s a job for the Guard.” His square face furrowed into a leather grin. “Give von Sudenhorst a chance to burn some of that new paint off his ships, in the fire storm.”
Ann O’Banion stopped biting her pale lip.
“I’d better call the base?” McGee looked at the motionless giant, with some question in his squinted eyes. “Probably they wouldn’t find out about the collision orbit for some time yet. And I’m afraid that seetee drift will make it a ticklish job, even for our dashing young subaltern. He’ll need all the time there is.”
He reached for the photophone receiver—out along the spatial frontiers, where there was no atmosphere to carry sound or to distort and absorb a beam of modulated light, the photophone was almost the universal means of communication, from ship to ship and rock to rock.
But Jim Drake stopped him.
“Wait!” The haggard giant moved suddenly, so that his lifted roan head almost struck the low gray roof. Under bushy reddish brows, his deep-set eyes turned electric blue. A sudden driving voice of purpose quivered in his voice. “We’ll move that rock.”
“We?” McGee stepped back on nimble feet, astonished. “How can we?”
Drake’s voice was booming now, no longer weary.
“We need a site for the seetee lab—and that rock is it.”
“If we could!” whispered Ann. “But—how?”
“I just remember a law,” the patient giant explained. “A perfectly good law, on the books of the Mandate. In case of imminent collision, when an unclaimed asteroid threatens an improved one, any property holder on the improved asteroid can take the necessary steps to avert collision, and claim the asteroid in recompense.”
Drake’s rugged bronze face looked almost young.
“A few formalities, of course. It’s necessary to file notice of intention, at Pallasport, with data to establish the collision orbit. You’re required to show proof of ability to avert the collision, unless you have already averted it, thirty days before the predicted impact—otherwise the Guard will take over.” Muffled, his deep voice came back from the periscope hood. “But that’s our lab.”
McGee shook his large ugly head. “Maybe.”
III.
Half an hour later, old Jim Drake was in the big, rhodium-paneled library of Bruce O’Banion’s tarnished metal mansion. Ann’s housekeeping had the long room immaculately clean, but even the glowing electric grate failed to banish a sense of empty chill. Beside precious shelves of faded books, a huge window gave a giddy view of the bare black hill slope tumbling sharply down into the blacker gulf of star-shot space. Drake had come, still intense with purpose, to put his idea up to Bruce O’Banion.
Ann was brewing tea—the common drink of the asterites, perhaps because it had served so often to cover the staleness of synthetic water in rusting tanks. She made a graceful hostess, slim in a bright print dress, pouring the tea in small, fragile cups her mother had brought from Earth.
But Drake had no time for tea. Pacing the thin-worn rug, he fought O’Banion’s stubborn skepticism. “We’ve got to have you with us, Bruce. Rob and I have no property here. If we claim this rock, we’ll have to do it in your name.”
Bruce O’Banion sat in his favorite chair—almost a throne, hammered out of dull massive copper, it stood where he could look down through that vast window, down beyond that sheer precipice of iron, into the black and splendid gulf of space.
O’Banion was a heavy man, red-faced, thick-jowled, big-featured, with a white impressive mane. He wore an old blue-and-silver uniform, altered to fit his paunch, and the Iron Cross the Martians had given him for the part the little asterite fleet had played in the space blockade of Earth. But men no longer called him commodore. He had lost much, since the war—wealth, prestige, his faithful wife. The drag of his heavy lips showed bitterness. Gray like Ann’s, his eyes were a little bloodshot—sometimes he drank too much.
But he was sober, now. He followed the striding awkward giant, with his heavy statesman’s head. Drake could feel his skepticism, like a stubborn inertia. O’Banion had the shrewd practical sense of the self-made man—and the smug self-confidence, too. Like most veteran spacemen, he knew that contraterrene matter was hell in chunks.
“If you had uranium on that rock, I’d say yes.” The bitterness was dull in his voice. “The commissioners might let you get away with a claim. Interplanet might even pay you a tenth what the claim was worth.”
Drake protested patiently, “But it’s just the site we need, for the seetee lab.”
“Seetee lab!” O’Banion snorted. “You’re the biggest fool in the Mandate, Jim—I’ve told you so a thousand times. Listen—suppose you had your seetee lab, all nice and shiny. Suppose you had a pretty little seetee pebble—caught nice and safe in some kind of imaginary tongs that wouldn’t explode into neutrons and gamma rays the instant they touched it.”
He paused, with an orator’s effort for drama.
“What would you do with it?”
Patiently, still, Drake launched into the boundless possibilities of conquered contraterrene matter. The years of failure had dropped away; his voice was quick and strong.
“There’s nothing mysterious about seetee. It’s composed of the same three fundamental particles as our common terrene matter: electrons, positrons, neutrons. The only difference is the way they are arranged. Instead of orbital electrons, the seetee atom has orbital positrons. Instead of binding electrons, in the nucleus, it has binding positrons. Instead of nuclear protons, each formed of a neutron-positron couple, it has nuclear negatrons—neutron-electron couples.
“The only difference is that the electric signs of the charged particles are all reversed. Contraterrene atoms form the same series of elements as terrene atoms. They obey identical laws of chemistry and physics. If you had been born on a seetee planet—like the one that smashed into our system, maybe a million years ago, to form the seetee drift—you would never know the difference. The only test is contact.”
O’Banion’s broad red face remained a heavy mask of doubt. Drake strode up to him, across the clean faded rug, his voice throbbing deep with the awakened power of his dream.
“What can you do with it?” he echoed the question. “You can make seetee tools, to work seetee. When you have a complete machine shop—on some airless asteroid like this one—you can do anything.”
Drake’s lean space-burned finger stabbed the air.
“You can feed it into a power generator. Seetee will yield thousands of times the power of uranium—because the atomic breakdown is far more complete, and because native uranium is only one part in two hundred U-235 to begin with. Any kind of seetee will react with any kind of terrene matter. You won’t need any complicated separators.”
Drake leaned over him, gigantic.
“You can machine it into rods, for welding terrene matter. You can use a jet of seetee gas, even seetee nitrogen, for a cutting torch—that would be a handy gadget, when you have to cut a shaft to the heart of a nickel-iron rock, to terraform it. A million possible uses!”
Massive and inert in the huge copper chair, O’Banion shrugged with ponderous skepticism.
“I’ve heard all that before, Jim—and I still think you’re crazy. Maybe you can work seetee with seetee tools—but how are you going to make them, without seetee tools to begin with?”
He gave Drake no time to answer.
“Suppose you had your seetee machine stop, all set up on magical foundations and oiled with seetee oil and running on power from a seetee plant—and then you had the bad luck to stumble against a lever? Your own body would blow the whole works to hell!”
The awkward, anxious giant kept the patience in his voice. That iron skepticism was an old familiar barrier, that he had never learned to overcome. But he tried to be convincing.
“I know it’s difficult—dangerous,” he admitted. “That’s why it hasn’t been done before. But you can move seetee without touching it—with as simple a thing as a magnet. Once the machine shop is built, it can be run by remote control. With time and effort, Bruce, every problem can be solved.”
For all Drake’s awkward urgency, O’Banion remained a heavy bulk of unyielding doubt. Drake stepped a little back and dropped his shrunken ray-burned hands. His deep voice grimly lower, he tried another argument.
“There’s one more use for seetee, Bruce—though it’s one I don’t like to think of. If you had another war to fight, you could make seetee into demolition bombs. I imagine that even an operating machine shop and power plant would be an economic weapon strong enough to set us free of the Mandate, without much actual fighting.”
O’Banion sat up in the big red metal chair, with a dim gleam of hope in his bleary eyes. He had helped to organize the vigorous war effort of the asterites—whose men and metal had contributed a good deal to the victory. As Commodore O’Banion, he had thought he was fighting for a free High Space Union. Like his fellow pioneers, he felt that the Mandate arrangement was a heartless betrayal, by the allied planets.
“I used to hope.” He shook his white, leonine head, bitterly. “You both know that I supported the Free Space Party—until the commissioners began arresting the leaders. But it’s no use. If you did manage to build your seetee machine shop, they would find a way to take it from you—or blow it up with a terrene bomb and build another for themselves.” He shrugged, in the sagging uniform. “A handful of us can’t defeat four united planets, Jim.”
That might be true, Drake knew—but, to him, it didn’t really matter. He was not a politician. His primary enemy was not the organized and ruthless human selfishness that the Mandate represented—it was contraterrene matter, with its danger-guarded prize of human usefulness. Once conquered, the benefit would descend to all mankind.
Paragravity was the triumph of another engineer, but it illustrated the same process. Certainly it had been the tool of politicians; the Interplanet shareholders had used it to make themselves the ruling aristocracy of an interplanetary empire. But the larger benefits, he thought, had more than balanced that. Paragravity had burst the prison of a million years, to set men free of Earth.
Not even an engineer could foresee all the consequences of his work—for either good or harm. Maxim-Gore, when he discovered paragravity, was merely seeking a selective force to extract the power isotope from native uranium. The force-fields of Sunspots, hurling out jets of flaming hydrogen for hundreds of thousands of kilometers against solar gravitation, gave him the clue to paragravity—a force existing in the unexplored region between the phenomena of magnetism and gravitation, and sharing some of the characteristics of each.
Maxim-Gore felt completely triumphant, Drake supposed, when he discovered that the peegee effect could be tuned to separate the atoms of U-235 from molten uranium. He had found something better than the vapor-centrifuge. But the directional space drive; the negative safety field, to guard a ship’s hull from spatial drift; the peegee reducer, that broke up compounds by direct selective attraction, yielding oxygen to breathe and iron for construction out of common hematite; the peegee terraforming unit, that held man and his precious blanket of air to any tiny rock—those were all unexpected gifts, amazing even the engineer.
“It won’t hurt you, Bruce, to let me try.” Urgently, Drake sought to use the tiny advantage he had gained. “There’s not often an opportunity for anybody to claim an asteroid, under the laws of the Mandate—anybody except the corporations. This may be the last chance I’ll ever have.”
The lines in Drake’s brown face bit deep again; for a moment his hollow eyes were tired. The conquest of seetee had been a long race with time, and time was winning out. But he lifted his gaunt shoulders, in the worn gray coat, and launched another argument.
“Interplanet has a big engineering staff, with millions to spend.” His patient voice held no bitterness. “I know, because Rick is working for them—under a contract to sign over his patents for a dollar each. Mars and Venus and the Jovians have plenty of engineers. Some of them are bound to be working on seetee—because it’s the biggest thing in sight. Suppose one of them beats us out?”
Drake gestured, with a gaunt, arresting arm.
“Suppose the Martian Reich wins out? The Germans are good engineers and better strategists—and their victories in the revolution gave them ambitious ideas. They wanted to carry on the war, remember, to total victory. Venus and the Jovians let Earth into the Mandate, just to hold them down. But suppose they had seetee, now?”
O’Banion nodded his white impressive head.
“That would be unfortunate.” He seemed half convinced. “But it isn’t true that we can try this without risk, Jim. Perhaps we haven’t much left—but we do have our lives. How far do you think the commissioners will let you go, with a project that threatens the Mandate? Don’t you realize that they can decree that seetee research is treason—and order all of us shot?”
“I do.” Drake’s hollow eyes were sober. “But people have called me a fool for forty years,” he argued. “The commissioners aren’t going to take me seriously, all at once. We don’t have to tell everything we’re doing. We can call it a metallurgy lab, and apply for patents on a few alloys—not that the commissioners ever grant a patent to an asterite. Seetee will keep till we need it, for a political surprise.”
