Collected Short Fiction, page 493
Back aboard the lifecraft, I told Lord what the strangers wanted. His pale, peering eyes went round with wonderment, and then narrowed to hard yellow slits. He glared malevolently out at Cameron.
“I suppose that civilian is the chief witness? Well, I’ll fix the lot of them!” And he shouted up the ladder well to the astrogator, now replacing the missing signal officer: “Get me Mr. Hudd!”
I followed him into the narrow signal room.
“It’s your pet civilian,” he shouted bitterly, when Hudd’s shaggy-browed face appeared huge and interrogative on the screen. “And a couple of yokels with some nonsense about arresting me for murder. We let them get away with the bodies.”
“So?” Hudd rubbed his blue, multiple chin, thoughtfully. “Now, I want to talk to them. Offer them all three safe-conduct, to come aboard. Tell them I’ll discuss compensation for the killing. You can bring them on the lifecraft, Mr. Lord.”
The negotiations which ensued were somewhat involved. I went back and forth, between Lord and Cameron. Cameron returned to consult with the watchful two by the ravine. Hudd and Lord conferred by television, Lord’s nasal voice rising steadily with ill-concealed anger, Hudd frowning with increasing concern.
“I’d accept Mr. Hudd’s safe-conduct, myself,” Cameron said. “But the Enlows don’t want to trust him. They are willing to talk to Mr. Hudd, but he’ll have to come out here.”
With a surprising boldness, Hudd agreed to do that.
“But, Mr. Hudd!” Lord protested sharply. “We can’t treat with a deserter and two ragged peasants. And think of your own safety—that weapon Cameron found! Why not let us take off, sir, and then wipe them out with a salvo of radiotoxin shells from the cruiser?”
Hudd shook his head, ponderously determined.
“I’m coming over, Victor, to handle this myself.” His red, worried eyes turned to me. “Chad, you go back and tell Jim Cameron to wait till I get there.”
Lord’s heavy-lidded eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“Don’t you give me up, Hudd.” His angry nasal voice was hard and dangerous. “If you do, you’re also giving up your New Directorate.”
“I know that,” Hudd assured him blandly. “You can trust me, Victor.”
Lord dismissed me, with a curt, sullen nod. I went back across the burned grass to Cameron, and told him that Hudd was coming.
“He’s smart.” Cameron nodded, approvingly. “Maybe he can save his neck.” He took up the white flag again. “Now we had better rejoin the Enlows,” he said. “They might misunderstand something.”
We walked back to the people waiting at the dam. I thought of Lord’s gunmen crouching in the lock behind us, and the skin on my back crawled uneasily.
The two were a man and a young woman. They both looked sun-browned, lean and sturdy; their dark hair and gray level eyes showed a family likeness. Their faces were tight with the shock of what they had found under the blanket, and hard with purpose.
“Are they coming out?” The man’s quiet voice was taut as his gaunt face.
“Not yet.” Cameron was urgently persuasive. “But please give me a chance to tell Mr. Hudd about the equalizer. I think he’s smart enough to listen.”
The man nodded his lean, weatherbeaten head. I saw that he carried what looked like a bulky flare pistol. His deep-set angry eyes peered up at the enormous flagship, not at all afraid.
“If he wants to listen,” he agreed. “But we’re going to get the killers.”
“I’ll try to get Mr. Hudd to give them up,” Cameron promised, and then he introduced me. “Chad Barstow. A likely candidate for the Brotherhood, as soon as he learns to use the equalizer.”
The girl wore a radiophone, much like the one we had seen in the house—it must have been such units that made those scrambled signals we had heard. The little plastic case was snapped to her belt, with the headset over her dark lustrous hair. She had been listening to that, but now she looked at me, her eyes wide with a surprised interrogative interest.
“Yes, he’s Dane Barstow’s son.” Seeing her troubled glance toward the gully, Cameron added quickly: “He had nothing to do with that.” She gave me a quick, strong handclasp.
“Jane Enlow,” Cameron said. “And her father, Frank Enlow.” The gaunt man took my hand, silently, and his angry, watchful eyes went back to the lifecraft and the cruiser.
“Before the equalizer,” Cameron told him, “Mr. Enlow was a janitor in Tyler’s Squaredeal Hall. He was just telling me about the Director’s last days. After the equalizer, he smuggled Tyler out through the mob that was shouting for him, under the balcony. Tyler lived for years, in Mr. Enlow’s house over the ridge, yonder, writing a history—trying to justify his career.”
“A nasty old man!” Jane Enlow pouted her full lips. “He wouldn’t leant the equalizer, so Dad had to take care of him.”
High up on the bright side of the cruiser, blue fire spurted. Frank Enlow crouched toward the ravine, swinging up his pistollike device. Cameron called out, hastily:
“Don’t shoot—that’s probably Mr. Hudd.”
The gaunt man relaxed, and I studied his weapon with a shocked fascination. It looked like a miniature guided-missile launcher, rather than a gun. It seemed fantastically small, and yet the lank man had a strange, confident air of facing the cruiser’s appalling weapons on even terms.
The girl was listening again to her radiophone. She twisted knobs on the case at her belt, and finally shook her dark head.
“Nothing.” Her voice was gloomy. “They’re taking too long.”
Hudd’s lifecraft approached us swiftly, a bright projectile floating nearly upright on a jet of screaming fire. It crossed the burning forest, and landed near the other craft. The valves slammed open, as soon as the dust had cleared, and Hudd’s aide jumped out.
The hard-bitten commander darted across the blasted ground, and hurried up to us. He seemed quite upset by Hudd’s decision to risk his important skin in the open. First he wanted Cameron and the Enlows to come aboard the lifecraft to talk; then he wanted to send out a bodyguard with Hudd; finally he warned that a general bombardment of the surrounding country would begin at once, if anything happened to Hudd.
“We’ve come for the killers,” the lean man informed him gravely. “Mr. Cameron has taken the Brotherhood oath, and the three of us form a competent court. We’re bound to listen to any evidence that Mr. Hudd can offer. He will not be harmed, unless he tries to interfere.”
Outraged, the commander went back, and immediately Mr. Julian Hudd climbed down between the bright fins. lie came out of the burned area at a painful, heavy run. Still gasping for breath, he waddled up to the dam.
“Well, Jim!” His great voice was bold, even hearty.
He shook hands with the raw-boned man, and gave the girl a bow of open admiration, when Cameron introduced them. His small, shrewd eyes studied the unfinished dam, and the abandoned machine in the gully.
“The incident here was most re-regrettable.” Hudd’s voice was a chesty, confident rumble. “I’ll see that adequate compensation is paid. Personally. You people needn’t concern yourselves any further.”
His keen bloodshot eyes studied the gaunt man.
“Now, I want to take up something more important. I’ve been trying to get in touch with your government.” His broad, blue-tinged face was still a genial mask, but his loud voice turned imperious. “I demand that your government—”
The lank man’s voice was very quiet, yet the cold ring of it made Hudd stop to listen.
“We have no government,” said Frank Enlow.
Hudd puffed out his cheeks, slowly turning a mottled red with anger.
“That’s the surprising fact, Mr. Hudd,” Cameron assured him gravely. “You’ll have to get used to it.
When the equalizer happened, nations became extinct.”
Ignoring him, Hudd glared at the lank man.
“You must have some organization.”
“Only the Brotherhood,” Enlow said. “It has no power to surrender anything to you, because membership is voluntary.”
Hudd’s red eyes blinked, skeptical and defiant.
“Get in touch with this Brotherhood.” His voice was rasping, arrogant. “Have them send a responsible agent, to be here by noon, local time.” He paused, ominously. “Otherwise, the Task Force and Fort America will open fire, at every likely target we can find.”
Cameron made a startled gesture, as if to catch his arm.
“Please, Mr. Hudd,” he protested sharply. “Wait till you know what you’re doing.”
Hudd kept his savage, shaggy-browed little eyes on Enlow.
“The young lady, I see, has a radiophone.” His voice was loud and ominous. “You had better start calling this Brotherhood—and get their answer by noon.”
“We came here for another purpose.” The lank man met his truculent gaze, unimpressed. “We’ve come for the killers.”
Hudd’s bluish face swelled again with anger.
“Nonsense!” he shouted. “Mr. Lord is my second in command. He was acting under orders. I assume the responsibility. I’ll pay for any unjust damage, but I refuse to subject him to any humiliation.”
The lean man listened to that, and nodded his rawboned head, and stalked away silently toward the ravine. Cameron hurried after him, visibly alarmed.
“The killers can wait,” he called urgently. “Because Doyle must be trying, and Mr. Hudd doesn’t understand the equalizer. Please give me time to tell him about it.”
The lank man turned back, solemn.
“If he wants to listen,” he agreed, “We’ll wait half an hour.”
With a question on his face, Cameron turned to Hudd.
“All right, Jim,” Hudd gasped, explosively. “I wanted to know about this equalizer, anyhow.” His red angry eyes went back to the gaunt man, and he added harshly: “But my ships, and the fort will open fire at noon.”
IX.
Hudd sat down on a hummock of grass, breathing hard with the effort of moving his clumsy bulk. His massive shoulders bunched with bold defiance. Only the quick movements of his eyes betrayed the intense and desperate working of his mind—they were the eyes of a fighting animal, fearful, yet audacious, and altogether ruthless.
“Now!” he gasped. “This equalizer?”
Cameron squatted on his heels, facing Hudd. Behind us, as he talked, the sun rose higher. The flat green valley lay motionless under its hot light, and a pungent blue haze settled about us from the green forest burning.
“I heard the story last night. The beginning of the equalizer takes us back nearly twenty years.” Cameron’s tired, dark-smudged eyes came for a moment to me. “To your own father, Chad.”
His haggard and yet animated face turned back to, Hudd.
“I think you remember Dane Barstow?”
“The traitor?” rumbled Hudd. “He died, I believe, in the labor camps.”
“But he didn’t,” Cameron said. “Because Tyler learned that he was on the trail of something remarkable, and had him taken out of the camps, out to a solitary cell at Fort America. The SBI went to work on him there, with extreme interrogation.”
Cameron glanced at me again, and I noticed a strange thing. The story and the memory of my father’s misfortunes brought me a bitter resentment, but now I noticed that all the old pain and hatred were gone from Cameron’s drawn and stubbled face. Something had swept away his old saturnine reserve. He seemed friendly even to Hudd.
“Finally,” he went on, “Barstow talked. He told the SBI what he had done, and admitted all he had hoped to do. He even agreed to complete his interrupted work.”
I knelt down beside him to listen, breathless.
“Though he was half-blind and crippled from the extreme treatment, and sometimes out of his head, they took pretty drastic precautions. They kept him locked in that steel cell on the Moon—one of those we saw there, I imagine, Chad. Two guards were always with him. He was allowed paper and pencil, but no other equipment. If he wanted calculations made, or any experiments tried, that was done for him by Atomic Service engineers.”
Cameron briefly smiled, as if he shared my pride.
“Yes, Chad, your old man was all right. Working under such difficult conditions, shattered as he was, he charted a new science and created a new technology. And then—when we had been out at space about two years with the Task Force—he overturned the Directorate.”
Hudd’s bold eyes had drifted back to the sun-browned girl—who was listening, not to Cameron, but anxiously to the little portable radiophone. But now he started ponderously, at Cameron’s last words, and gasped heavily for his breath, and wheezed incredulously:
“How could he do that?”
“Not so hard, with the equalizer.” Cameron grinned at Hudd’s blinking, startled stare. “Barstow smashed the Directorate, from his cell on the Moon. He didn’t need any weapons, or any equipment. All he had to do was tell his jailors what he had discovered.”
Hudd made a hollow, croaking sound. “How’s that?”
“The news of the equalizer spread, from one man to another,” Cameron said. “Those same engineers, who had been assigned to get the invention from him, set up a little illicit transmitter and beamed the details back to Earth with equalizer power, on every frequency they could get through the ionosphere. “That finished the Directorate.” Hudd picked up a red pebble and began nervously tapping the sod with it, reminding me of the way he had drummed on his polished desk with the little gold head of Tyler. His furtive eyes flashed to the lean man’s weapon, and back to Cameron’s face.
“That’s too much!” His loud voice was harshly unbelieving. “No mere fact of science could defeat the Atomic Service, or wreck the Squaredeal Machine.”
“Barstow’s equalizer did,” Cameron assured him gravely. “Perhaps because the old technology of the Atomic Age had already reached the breaking point of over-complexity and super-centralization. When Barstow created this new technology, there was a natural swing to the opposite extreme—to simplicity, individualism, and complete personal freedom.”
“So?” Hudd thumped on the sod with his pebble, scowling at Cameron. “Just how does it work, this equalizer?”
Cameron glanced doubtfully at Frank Enlow.
“Tell him.” the gaunt man said. “Barstow wanted every man to know, and generally it has a good effect.” He glanced at a watch on his brown wrist. “But hurry—your time is running out.”
Hudd’s great shoulders lifted with aggression.
“And so is yours,” he snapped. “I’m willing to listen, but my men won’t hear. I’m not yielding anything. And your Brotherhood had better throw the towel in, by noon.”
“Tell him,” Enlow repeated.
And Cameron launched into his explanation. His fatigue seemed forgotten, and some inner excitement made his haggard face almost vivacious.
“The old atomic power pile, you know, was an enormously clumsy and wasteful and dangerous way of doing an extremely simple thing. Pure energy exists in the atom, and that is what we want. But the pile used intractable and inadequate processes, to change kinetic and electrical and binding energy into heat, and then required expensive and inefficient machinery to turn a little of that heat back into electricity.
“Even with all its elaborate complexity, the pile could tap only a little of the binding energy, which holds electrons and protons and neutrons together into atoms. The mass energy of the particles themselves, composing nearly all the actual energy of the atom, it couldn’t even reach.
“Barstow’s dream—like my own—was merely a simple way of doing a simple thing. Material energy exists, as Einstein first demonstrated. Barstow dreamed of a simple way to let it flow. The equalizer is his dream, realized.”
I couldn’t help the breathless interruption:
“That piece of wire?”
“Just a solenoid.” Cameron nodded. “But wound in a certain way, not helically, so that its field slightly alters the co-ordinates of space, and slightly changes the interaction of mass and energy. The atomic particles of the solenoid are equalized, as your father termed the process, and the converted energy appears as direct current in the wire.
“The fact is simple—even though the tensors of a new geometry are required to describe the solenoid field. That apparent complexity is more in the awkward description, however, than in the vital fact. The actual specifications of the equalizer can be memorized in five minutes.”
Cameron’s intent, elated eyes looked aside at me.
“The safety feature is what threw us, Chad, with our induction furnace experiments,” he told me. “Our gadget annihilated matter—degenerating iron atoms into sodium—and produced electric current. The increased output intensified the conversion field, and the intensified field increased the output. An excellent arrangement, if you want a matter bomb—but highly unsafe for a power plant.
“Your father solved that problem, Chad—very simply, too. Just a secondary solenoid, in series with the primary, which develops an opposing voltage as the equalizing field expands. It gives you a safe, guaranteed maximum voltage—the value determined by the way it’s wound.”
Hudd’s deep-sunken eyes blinked skeptically.
“You mean, you can generate electricity?” he rasped. “With just a coil of wire?”
“And a few stray ions to excite it,” Cameron told him. “A pound of copper solenoid would drive the cruiser, yonder, out to the Dark Star. Or iron, or silver—the metal doesn’t matter; it’s only the precise shape and alignment and spacing of the turns of wire.”
Hudd shook his head, in massive unbelief.
“Perpetual motion!” he scoffed.
“Almost.” Cameron grinned. “Equalized mass is converted into energy, according to the Einstein equation. The solenoid wastes away—but slowly. One pound of solenoid will generate ten billion kilowatt hours of electricity.”
