Collected Short Fiction, page 523
“Better give it up,” the jet kept hissing. “You know you don’t really need to do this, because now your uncle’s rich. You ought to ask for leave, and make him give you a soft desk job in the Pallasport office, and have another look for Jane Hardin.
“Anyhow, you weren’t evolved for space.”
Perhaps he wasn’t, but Jenkins was a spatial engineer. Son of another engineer, lost in the drift when Jenkins was three. Graduated with honors from the great institute of spatial engineering at Panama City, he was prepared to challenge the merciless hostility of space, with the pride of a fine tradition three centuries old.
Ziolkovsky and Oberth were among the early names—spatial engineers who never left the Earth. Goddard and Ley. Maxim-Gore was the one who looked into the vortices of the sun to discover paragravity—that selective, reversible, directable force, neither gravitation or electromagnetism, which replaced the rocket to lift men spaceward.
Later engineers, wresting the planets from the blind and mindless enmity of space, creating the wealth and might of Interplanet Corporation, also built a more enduring thing—a high code of selfless daring to serve the good of man. That tradition remained untarnished, for the hard abrasion of danger kept it bright. One of its heirs was old Jim Drake.
An old man now, great shoulders bent and roan hair, thinned, Drake had set out fifty years ago to subdue the brooding fury of the contraterrene drift. His first invention was the seetee marker.
Immense spidery wheels spinning in the unresisting vacuum, the Drake markers were placed in close orbits about the more massive fragments and more dangerous swarms of the seetee drift. Broad mirrors caught the unsetting sun, and filtered lenses and prisms winked out the unceasing warnings that had saved many a spaceman from seetee shock.
Jenkins twisted now in his cold seat on the bull, searching the nebula-dusted night. He found the vanishing red spark of the blinker set to mark the meteor swarm whose fringes he was exploring. Automatically, he counted seconds.
The orange point burned four seconds—warning that the mass of the marked swarm was of the order of ten to the fourth metric tons; ten thousand tons of slumbering, unutterable violence. The blue winked three seconds, saying that the mean diameter of the swarm was above a thousand kilometers. The red flamed five seconds again, to tell him that the seetee cloud was estimated to contain a hundred thousand dangerous fragments.
“We’re going to get you, little biped,” the jet was taunting him, “because you’re too soft and clumsy and slow to survive in space. You’ve ventured too far from the warm seas where your kind of life was born. You need too much protection, and you weren’t evolved to work the drift.”
Orienting himself by the blinker, he swung the bull back toward the outskirts of the swarm. He bent to search the scope for another hopeful fragment, trying not to listen to the restless chittering of his fears.
“We’ll kill you, Jenkins,” growled the jet. “We’ll freeze you hard as iron, sometime when a heating unit fails. Or burn you to vapor when the pile you’re sitting on happens to blow out. Or suck your body to a brittle mummy, if a leak ever breaks in your armor. Or, more likely, we’ll get you with the drift!”
The jet made a hissing chuckle, as the valve closed and fluttered open.
“How do you want to die, little engineer?” it mocked him. “Do you want to light up the dark like a nova, when your terrene body reacts with a few kilograms of the Invader? Or do you prefer the slower death of seetee shock?”
Jenkins watched the blhnkness of the scope, and tried to guard himself from such haunting terrors with the magnificent tradition of the spatial engineers. It was close to him. For his own famous uncle, Martin Brand, was no doubt the foremost of them all.
“Wait, young fool!” the jet kept jeering. “Suppose you engineers do unlock contraterrene power—how can you control it? How are you going to hold it for the benefit of man, against the whispering politicians and the cold-eyed financiers and the men of guts and blood?”
Jenkins shook himself uneasily, and clung to the thought of Martin Brand.
“Remember Hiroshima!” mocked the jet. “Remember Interplanet and the Spatial War. The engineers who first cracked the atom hoped to benefit mankind, just as you do. But the few who seized control of fission power soon managed to rule the rest. How can you stop history from repeating the same ugly story with the greater power of seetee?”
Martin Brand could find a way, Jenkins thought. For Brand was something more than a distinguished engineer. He had learned how to defeat the politicians in their smoke-filled caucus rooms, and trim the financiers on their own stock exchanges. Brand could accomplish anything.
Jenkins searched the empty scope, probing back into the outskirts of the swarm. He tried to ignore the thin sighing of the jet, but he couldn’t stop the whispering of his own apprehensions. That dry sibulation became the weary murmuring of the dead, unknown peoples of Adonis and the seetee Invader.
“Leave us alone, reckless stranger,” that sad susurration seemed to breathe. “Let us rest. These broken rocks are our cold tombs. Beware of what you find, rash engineer, if you dare disturb our bones.”
Shivering in the cramping stiffness of his armor, Jenkins sucked a drink of bitter tea from the tube in his helmet, and grimly tried to shake himself awake.
“What are you seeking, little creature?” mocked the whispers. “The secret of our death—so that you can kill your own proud planets, with the fury of seetee?”
Not that, Jenkins told himself resolutely. New life was what the gaudy print of his uncle’s prospectuses always promised the power-famished planets, not death.
“But look around you,” warned those sad voices in his mind. “Look at the shattered fragments of the dead Invader and murdered Adonis, destroyed by the very force you seek!”
Jenkins shrugged uncomfortably, and crouched to watch the scope. Of course there was danger in the drift, but such men as Martin Brand would be great enough to meet it. Firmly, he set his mind upon the brilliant career of his distinguished uncle.
II.
The living tradition of the spatial engineers was built of mighty dreams fashioned into hard reality by human brains and human daring, and Martin Brand was still the mightiest of the dreamers. Jenkins clung to the picture of his red, raw-boned, craggedly candid face, for a kind of talisman against the whisper of his secret terrors in the jet.
The brightest interludes of all his boyhood at Panama City had been the occasional visits of Martin Brand. For the famous engineer had provided generously for his widowed sister and her son, and now and then he came back to the modest suburban apartment he kept for them, to see Earth again and lay out his next audacious project.
Wonderful intervals those had been, in the humdrum of school. Brand brought thrilling gifts from other worlds—a trained mud-devil in a jar from Venus, a bottle of red sand from Mars, a rock from lost Adonis, a rainbow-colored shard from one of the broken Callistonian domes.
There were always wines and foods too rare for common days. There were trips to the beaches or the mountains or the Moon. There was always a girl, usually an exciting blond actress, fluttering with apparent rapture as she clung to the strong arm of the dashing engineer from space.
And Martin Brand talked.
The talk, to Jenkins, was always the best. A tall, gaunt, expansive man, wide of gesture and colorful of garb and magnificent of voice, Brand talked of the vast projects behind him and the grander plans ahead. On the first visit Jenkins could recall, his topic had been a huge paragravity separation plant he was building to refine uranium from the seas of Venus.
“The Empire’s starved for power metals, and I wish you could have seen those little yellow men hiss and blink when they saw my figures on the uranium halide content.” Brand’s wide shoulders lifted lightly, splendid in brocaded Venusian silk. “They nearly balked when they found the installation would cost nine billions, but I pointed out they weren’t buying just a plant—but their economic freedom from Interplanet.”
Next time Brand came to Earth, a few years later, Jenkins wanted to know how the plant was working.
“Genial amusement made pleasant crinkles around the great man’s fine gray eyes.
“The little yellow men lost their faith in me”—proud and straight in splendid purple-and-gold lounging pajamas, Brand shrugged indulgently—“but I settled for half my fees, and now I’m working on a more promising project.”
Smiling at the cold fire of an immense diamond on his lean hand, Brand lowered his rich voice confidentially.
“Don’t tell a soul, Nicky. But I’ve got the Martian industrial trust interested in an atomic furnace to make synthetic terraforming diamonds.”
“Diamonds!” Jenkins gasped with breathless admiration.
“An extremely ingenious process.” Brand tossed the monstrous gem, and caught it gracefully. “The pressurized retorts must be heated above the fusion point of carbon, and cooled under the exact temperature control for five years.”
That process must have been profitable to Martin Brand, for he was back on Earth again, in his sleek new sixty-meter yacht Adonis, a year before the retorts were to be opened. He wore bigger diamonds than ever, and he was already talking of his next undertaking.
“A paragravity caisson!” His deep voice held a hypnotic confidence. “To explore the surface of Jupiter. The Russians on the Jovian moons are desperate for uranium and thorium, and they’ll back me to the limit.”
Jenkins gaped with awe.
“Do you really mean to land on Jupiter?”
“Not in person.” Brand chuckled easily. “I don’t care for the feeling of ten thousand kilometers of methane and ammonia over my head—not even with a repulsion field to hold the pressure back. I’m a spatial engineer, not a suicide.”
And it was just enough, Jenkins thought, for lesser men to take the chances. His uncle’s engineering genius was too precious to be lost. “Fifth Freedom” was proof enough of that. For the project Brand had diagrammed in that thin blue book, it always seemed to Jenkins, was still the most splendid-dream of all those daring dreamers whose visions had conquered space.
Martin Brand still liked to tell the story of the book, over a drink and a good cigar, chuckling at his naive expectation of changing the faces of all the planets. Jenkins had heard it often, always awed at his uncle’s casual greatness.
“Notion first hit me, out in the Mandate.” Brand used to tilt his lean-cheeked head in a way that showed his distinguished profile, smiling with amusement at the open worship of Jenkins. “Just out of the institute, and green to space. But I met this asterite engineer, Jim Drake, and listened to his schemes to work the seetee drift.”
Brand used to toss back his long dark hair, with a cool little smile of watchful daring.
“That’s when the idea hit me, and I came back home to work it out.” The ringing eloquence of his deep voice was always music, to the eager ears of Jenkins. “Lived in a gloomy hall bedroom. Finally spent all I could borrow, to persuade a publisher to put out two thousand copies of my little prospectus for a better world.”
Brand used to chuckle with a wry amusement.
“Pretty optimistic then. Meant to head off the next Spatial War—and make an end of most other human misfortunes, besides. The innocent folly of youth! That little book proclaimed the Fifth Freedom—boundless free power for every man on every planet.”
Casually, Brand had once rewarded the breathless interest of Jenkins with an autographed copy of that first edition. The younger engineer still carried that precious volume in his space bag. He knew the words and the momentous symbols by heart—and he still shared that innocent folly.
“The hypothesis of contraterrene matter was first put forward by the pioneer atomic physicists of the twentieth century,” Brand’s epochal preface began. “That audacious speculation proved itself—even before men reached space—by solving the old mystery of the cosmic rays.
“For dust from the contraterrene drift, as well as a few larger fragments, sifts continually into Earth’s atmosphere. The energetic protons from the tee-seetee reaction in the upper atmosphere were man’s first clue to the boundless power awaiting conquest.
“The spatial drift of the asteroid belt, now politically administered as a mandate of the major planets, is estimated to be twelve percent seetee. That reservoir of energy is vast beyond imagination. Such spatial engineers as Drake have long envisioned that monstrous power chained and channeled to lift the ships and turn the wheels and expand the lives of men, and this small book will deal only with the technology of seetee power transmission.
“For contraterrene energy must obviously be generated far at space—outside any trace of terrene atmosphere. The problem is transmission. Other engineers have dreamed of wireless power—and stumbled over the inverse-square law. For ordinary electromagnetic waves, spreading with the velocity of light, dissipate their energy to the limits of the universe.
“The author tried a new approach. Studying the paragravity fields of the sunspots, he found a departure from the inverse-square law. This book sets forth the mathematical theory of a special paragravity field—in effect, a standing wave of energy—vast enough to inclose the solar system.
“This power field can be maintained with a coefficient of loss—due entirely to the disturbing masses of the sun and the planets—amounting to less than one percent of the transmitted power. Simple tripolar receptors can draw any required flow of power from any point in the field, to operate a child’s toy or a spatial liner.
“The writer hopes that a nonprofit trust can be set up immediately, to build such a transmitter. It would cost less than the planets spend every day preparing for another war over the dwindling uranium reserves—and make that war necessary!
“The operation expense should be negligible, since seetee fuel is abundant and the equipment must be almost altogether automatic. In fact, the by-products of useful metals refined from the terrene half of the fuel should cover operating costs, making the enormous power output genuinely free.
“And power must be free!”
So the youthful idealist had written, twenty years ago.
“What a sentimental fool I must have been!” Martin Brand told Jenkins. “All I knew was engineering. Interplanet, however, soon educated me in other fields.”
“How was that?”
“Interplanet owns most of the known uranium and thorium reserves,” Brand explained cheerfully. “The directors lost the Spatial War, but they won everything back with the political victory of the High Space Mandate. Those reserves are worth three hundred billion—and they mark up prices twice as fast as the supply goes down. They just couldn’t Afford to let a fresh young pup of a spatial engineer wreck that tight little monopoly!”
“So what happened?”
“They taught me a lesson.” The great man shrugged his massive shoulders, smiling. “I haunted lobbies to buttonhole important men, and gave away free copies of the book, and talked on street corners until the cops roughed me up—because the big boys didn’t like it.”
Prand tossed back his flowing hair.
“But there wasn’t any rush of humanitarians to build a free power plant. I learned the lesson at last, and gave it up. I started looking for a job—and found that Interplanet was still teaching me.”
“Huh?”
“No job.” Brand smiled easily. “Interplanet had me on a blacklist. When I discovered that, I put my lesson into practice. Walking past the Venusian legation, I happened to see a poster offering rewards for a uranium strike outside the Mandate. I set down an interesting figure for the uranium in their oceans, and sketched that separation plant on the back of an old envelope while I was waiting to talk to the ambassador.” Brand chuckled genially.
“That was the real beginning—” After Venus there was Mars. Brand left the Jovian Soviet just before the tests of his paragravity caisson. Arriving in the High Space Mandate, alert for another profitable project, he met old Jim Drake again.
Bankrupt, the asterite engineer was free on bond in Pallasport, awaiting trial for violation of a Mandate law against unlicensed experiment with contraterrene matter. Brand listened to Drake’s story, and found his new project.
No longer the innocent idealist who wrote “Fifth Freedom,” Brand used his twenty years of schooling in politics and finance. He hired a legal expert to defeat the charges against Drake, and pulled the necessary wires to obtain a special research license.
He founded Seetee, Inc.
“Back the spatial engineers!” screamed the crimson print of his first prospectus. “Buy a slice of the Seetee Age! Help wake and tame the sleeping giant of contraterrene power—and let him lift your financial cares. Your Seetee shares are one-way tickets to easy street!”
The great man used his lesson. Surprisingly, all five of the Mandate commissioners voted unanimously to charter the corporation and approve that alluring prospectus. The branch manager of Interplanet bought the first block of Seetee stock issued to the public, and tutted a tidy profit on it.
III.
When Jenkins first arrived from Earth, Martin Brand offered him a shiny private office in the advertising department of Seetee, Inc. Jenkins, however, eager to set his new skills against the hard hostility of space, insisted on a real engineering job.
Now, astride the seetee bull, he found another pip on the radarscope. He drove into testing range, and fired a terrene pellet. The flash showed contraterrene iron and tungsten, metal for Lazarene’s special shop. Eagerly he moved in to pick it up.
Still the jet beneath his jaw was hissing, but it didn’t bother now. Absorbed, he had no time to listen to the whisper of his fears. Even with the machine designed for it, collecting seetee wasn’t quite simple or safe.
Slowing the heavy bull, he kept the pip centered in the scope until his eyes could find the jagged lump of deadly stuff ahead. He nosed toward it cautiously, watching the little geiger on his armored wrist.
