Collected Short Fiction, page 528
Jenkins hurried past the clinic building without going inside. Ann and Karen and the other wives and relatives would be there now, he knew, crying over the lax bodies on the beds or standing tightly silent in their grief, and he didn’t want to see them.
Behind the clinic, he walked through a crooked radiation trap into the safety well where he had left the drift-battered Good-by Jane. A fluorescent sign, which the clinic attendants must have posted on the air lock, checked him briefly with its red-lettered warning:
CONTAMINATED CRAFT!
Dangerous Radiation
DO NOT APPROACH
Grinning wryly, Jenkins ripped off the poster and tossed it aside. Dangerous radiation didn’t matter to him now. He closed the valves and climbed the ladder to the pilothouse and lifted the rusty tug toward far-off Pallasport.
TO BE CONTINUED
Seetee Shock
Second of three parts. Some doubted it would work; some didn’t doubt—and didn’t want it. But everyone seemed determined to stop the new power plant for one reason—selfish or otherwise—or another!
SYNOPSIS
Nick Jenkins, spatial engineer, was out in space on the seetee bull—a fission-powered machine designed to prospect and mine the untouchable contraterrene meteor-drift—when the photophone beacon on Freedonia went out, leaving him lost in a deadly swarm of seetee fragments.
Cosmic debris of the seetee Invader, which collided, ages ago, with the lost terrene planet Adonis, the contraterrene drift, is matter inside out, with negative nuclei and orbital positrons. Unlike charges cancel out when it touches ordinary terrene matter, releasing a thousand times the energy of atomic fission.
The power laboratory on the airless asteroid Freedonia was first established by the old asterite engineer, Jim Drake, to tame the unimaginable violence of that reaction, for useful power. Drake was bankrupt and in legal difficulties, however, when Martin Brand founded the great Seetee Corporation, to finance him.
Now a successful expert at what he calls politico-financial engineering, Brand—the uncle of Jenkins—is also a gifted spatial engineer. His first great invention was the Brand transmitter, which could broadcast unlimited free power from the seetee generator on Freedonia to all the planets.
But the mighty power plant on Freedonia is not completed—and Martin Brand’s old, idealistic dream of a Fifth Freedom of power has become a pawn of interplanetary jealousies, with Brand himself turned cynical toward it by the bitterness of his early defeats.
The four major planets are waging a cautious cold war for supremacy. The vast arena of their struggle is the High Space Mandate, a political device set up after the Spatial War to rule the asteroids and referee the division of the old terrene power metals, uranium and thorium.
All the planets fear the impact of seetee power, as an overwhelming threat to the status quo. The notion of the Fifth Freedom appears uncomfortably revolutionary. All, however, are engaged in a desperate race to turn uneasy stalemate into decisive victory with the first use of seetee weapons.
Martin Brand had persuaded Drake to develop self-guided, missiles with seetee war heads, to protect the precious installations on Freedonia from attack by any of the jealous major planets. Lazarene, an able Earth-born engineer, was in charge of the secret arsenal.
Lost when the beacon went but, Nick Jenkins groped his way out of the swarm of untouchable meteors and back to the plant on Freedonia. Landing the bull, he found all the staff of engineers except one man fallen mysteriously unconconscious, and the seetee arsenal looted.
The missing man was Jean Lazarene, who has apparently betrayed the priceless secrets of Freedonia to agents of one of the intriguing rival planets. The drug ametine hydrate, developed to slow the metabolism of space-disaster victims, was used to overcome the loyal engineers. The traitor escaped in an unidentified craft, which fired a seetee shot at the rock to stop pursuit.
While that super-atomic explosion did little visible damage to the iron planetoid, the multibillion-electron-volt photons released caused intense secondary radiations, which reached Jenkins and all the unconscious men. Deadly radio-isotopes were also formed in the rock itself.
Jenkins carries the disabled men to the radiation specialist, Worringer, on the asteroid Obania. Worringer finds they all have suffered radiation burns of the fifth degree—which means death after eight to twelve days. Spacemen call that radiation sickness seetee shock.
Jenkins alone is offered a slender chance at life, if he will stay at the clinic for treatment. He declines—deciding to use his few remaining days of activity for a desperate effort to complete the Brand transmitter, before the unidentified enemy plunges all the planets into Spatial War.
The creative power of seetee—the Fifth Freedom—offers, he feels, the only hope of peace. The unlimited free power from Freedonia, he believes, can remove the causes of the impending conflict.
Leaving his fellow engineers deep in the coma of ametine and dying of radiation illness, Jenkins goes out to break the cruel news to their families—to Rick Drake’s wife, and to Mrs. Paul Anders, the former Ann O’Banion, who is soon to have a child.
Saying nothing of his own sentence of death, Jenkins asks help from Ann’s father, old Bruce O’Banion, once a prominent leader of the pioneer people of the rocks and now a Seetee employee. The sullen old asterite turns evasive, refusing any aid.
Desperately, Jenkins starts to Pallasport, aboard the rusty old tug, Good-by Jane, which is dangerously contaminated with secondary radioactivity from the seetee blast on Freedonia. He is going to ask his uncle for the precious condulloy, with which Brand has promised to finish the transmitter.
Part 2
VIII.
Contraterrene power could one day terraform all Pallas—that was part of the undying dream of the spatial engineers. The unbounded energy from the Brand transmitter could drive a shaft to the planetoid’s heart and power a paragravity unit there. Free power could manufacture air and soil and water, cloak in green life all the riven stone of a world born dead.
But Brand’s Fifth Freedom was still a dream.
Pallasport, capital city of the High Space Mandate, was a lonely crown of life on a terraformed hill. Costly fission energy drove the paragravity unit, a few kilometers deep, which held its wisp of atmosphere. All around it lay stark, airless desolation.
An hour out, Jenkins called the Pallasport tower on the tug’s photophone, and got permission to land his ray-contaminated craft on the emergency field outside the town. He asked for a wire relay to Martin Brand, in the Seetee Building. A girl’s voice said:
“Mr. Brand’s office.”
For an instant Jenkins forgot that he was going to die. Because he knew the voice—it had haunted him through two years of exile on Freedonia; it had mocked him in the murmur of his air jet all the while he was trying to forget.
He knew he couldn’t be mistaken. The girl was Jane Hardin, whom he had met on the liner from Earth, and thought he loved, and lost inexplicably when she learned that he was going to work for Seetee, Inc.
“Mr. Brand’s office,” she was repeating briskly now. “Who is calling, please?”
Jenkins couldn’t speak. Because the crisp melody of her voice was the sound of Earth and life. Sigh of wind in pines, purr of traffic in concrete canyons, drum of breaking waves on coral sand—sounds never heard in airless space. Choked with bitter sudden loneliness, he whispered at last:
“Give me Mr. Brand.”
For it didn’t matter who she was. He had no time to patch up old romances. Thought of Dr. Worringer’s verdict stabbed him like a poisoned blade, and he tried defensively to remember something Martin Brand had told him.
It was the day he first arrived at Pallasport and his tall uncle met him on the field. Jenkins was still looking for Jane Hardin, still trying to discover why the mere mention of. Seetee had chilled her against him; and he asked, hopefully, if Brand knew anything about her.
“ ’Course I know her, Nicky.” The famous man laughed at him, genially. “And you had better watch your step.”
“Who is—?”
“Never heard the name,” Brand broke in, “but still I know the type. Earth women who come to the Mandate are all alike. Predators. They’ve all come to get their own slice of the wealth of the asteroids, and carry it back to Panama City. So forget her, Nicky. Better stick to your spatial engineering.”
And Jenkins had tried to do that, reluctantly, after he failed to find the girl. But he had never been happy about it. A predator, it seemed to him, wouldn’t have been quite so elusive. Now the clipped, impersonal voice of Jane Hardin recalled him to the present.
“Sorry, sir, but Mr. Brand is Busy. I’m his private secretary, Hardin. Perhaps I can help you, if you’ll state your name and business.”
“Nick Jenkins.” His voice came abrupt and harsh. “Maybe you remember.”
“Nick!” She gasped his name—perhaps with pleasure; perhaps with dismay, or merely with astonishment. All he could hear, for another long second, was the amplified hiss and mutter of stray starlight. He sat waiting anxiously, trying to recall the color of her eyes and the way she fixed her hair. He couldn’t help hoping—
No! He fought that impulse. Certain death was in him; he had no right even to dream of life and love. Neither Jane Hardin’s cool charm nor the cruel riddle of her behavior was important any longer—not unless she could help him start the Brand transmitter.
“Why, Mr. Jenkins!” Her voice was aloof and quiet now, expressing only mild surprise. “I didn’t know you had asked for leave from the laboratory rock—or have you? I hope there’s nothing wrong.”
“Please—Jane!” He tried to crush the shudder of emotion from his tone. “Let me talk to my uncle.”
“I’m sorry, but he’s talking on another spatial beam. He told me not to interrupt him. If there’s anything that I can do—”
Jenkins caught his breath, trying to forget that he had ever seen her. He refused to wonder how she came to be employed by Seetee now when once the mere name of the firm had turned her against him.
“Maybe you can.” He tried to match the casual crispness of her voice. “I’m landing in an hour, at the emergency field west of town. I need eighty tons of condulloy that Mr. Drake requisitioned for Freedonia—right away. Do you know anything about it?”
“I saw the order.” He thought she sounded faintly puzzled. “I thought the metal had already been shipped.”
“It hasn’t.”
“Then it must be ready,” she assured him, “because I know your uncle has been buying condulloy, through Mr. Gast and other associates, for nearly a year. He must have bought three hundred tons.”
“Good!” Jenkins grinned at the gray bulkhead with a weary relief; he should have known that Martin Brand wouldn’t let Freedonia down. “Please tell my uncle—”
“Here he is,” the girl broke in; and then Jenkins heard the great man’s voice, bluff and hearty, deep now with a grave concern.
“Nicky—are you hurt?”
“No.” He tried to lie calmly. “But I’ve bad news from Freedonia—”
“Careful, Nicky!” Brand interrupted hastily. “We may be overheard, and rumors can affect the market position of Seetee. I’ll meet you at the emergency field.”
The emergency spaceport was the farther face of a second peak, not so tall as the one beneath the town. The synthetic air was thin there, and the oblique direction of the paragravity unit—the direction that was down—made the stark crags of Pallas seem insanely tilted. A steep road zigzagged toward the other summit.
Jenkins landed the tug in a lead-walled safety pit. He watched an uneasy attendant measure the emanations from the ray-contaminated hull, and hastily post a warning sticker outside the valves. Displaying his own wrist geiger with the counter needle set back out of the caution sector, he went inside the building and bared his arm for a routine anti-radiation injection.
“Better get a skin test,” the attendant warned him. “These shots don’t help much. You may be dying, if you’ve had a whiff of radiation—and never feel a thing.”
Jenkins nodded bleakly and looked around for his uncle.
Martin Brand hadn’t come. Nobody answered the office telephone. Worried, Jenkins frowned at his watch. Seventeen-ten, Mandate time. The office must be closed, but his uncle had promised—
“Nicky!”
Brand’s jovial greeting boomed across the dingy little waiting room. Past forty now, the famous engineer had kept his stomach flat and preserved his lean erectness. His wavy black mane was impressively silvered at the temples, and his reddish, hollow-cheeked face had a look of cragged candor. The somber honesty of his gray, wide-set eyes was almost hypnotic.
“Thank God you weren’t in the blast, Nicky!” Brand gripped his hand. “I was just talking to old O’Banion on the scrambled beam, and he says poor Drake and McGee and the rest are in a bad way.”
“Dying,” Jenkins whispered, trying to swallow a throbbing tightness in his throat.
“Sorry I’m late.” Brand’s florid, rawboned face grinned apologetically. “But some rumor got into the market—some wild report that the whole Freedonia lab had blown up. Seetee Common fell ten points in ten minutes. I had to head off the bears.”
Jenkins swallowed again, to find his voice. An old confidence in his distinguished kinsman was lifting his spirits, and he was glad to think of something besides the clinical aspects of radiation sickness.
“And—did you?”
“A neat little problem in financial engineering.” Brand nodded easily, dropping his bluff voice. “I just countered that rumor with a better one—that Seetee was about to merge with Interplanet. The smart boys, I let ’em think, were smearing Seetee, to drive it down and buy it cheap. That report put it up sixteen points, before the exchange closed.” Brand chuckled genially.
“Too bad about those friends of ours, out on Obania.” He nodded toward the dark sky, briefly sober. “But this little incident has made me a cool four million in paper profits, anyhow.” Glancing at a diamond-cased watch, he turned quickly. “Let’s go, Nicky. We’re having dinner at the Tor. Got any luggage?” Jenkins shook his head silently, trying to recognize, in this practical man of affairs, the audacious spatial engineer who had been the idol of his youth. He tried to swallow a vague sense of puzzled disappointment.
“No matter,” Brand was rumbling. “Got everything at the Tor. You must stay out there till you get over this—you look done in, even if you weren’t caught in the blast. Then I hope you’ll consider an opening in the office here—”
“Hold on!” Jenkins caught the tall man’s arm. “I’ve got to talk to you—privately.”
“Right, Nicky.” They were outside the building. The small sun was just rising above the tilted landscape—for Pallas didn’t turn on Mandate time. The naked, topping peaks were all savage highlight and liquid night, and Jenkins shuddered to a brief illusion that they were all tumbling down upon him in a monstrous avalanche.
“Talk tonight, Nicky.” Brand beckoned to a uniformed chauffeur in a long electric car, who pulled quickly toward them. “No time, now. We’re picking up a couple of people, and Santiago likes to serve his dinners on time.”
“Just a minute,” Jenkins protested. “I want to tell you about that seetee blast. It’s terribly important—”
He checked himself, as the silent car drew in beside them. Any rumor that contraterrene weapons and machines had been captured from Freedonia would be enough to disrupt the Mandate. One careless word could kill his feeble chance of completing the Brand transmitter. “So’s this.” Chuckling genially, Brand waited for him to get in the car. “Several Interplanet stockholders called, you see, about that merger. With a little financial engineering we can nurse it into something more profitable than a rumor. We’re working out a proposition tonight.”
“Please—” Jenkins whispered, but Brand was speaking to the chauffeur.
“Mr. Gast’s office.” He turned back to Jenkins, urging gravely: “Nicky, you must try to forget Freedonia. I know this tragedy has shaken you, but we’re going to build something bigger out of the ruins. If this deal goes through, we won’t need Freedonia.”
Jenkins sank back against the cushions. Overcome with a dazed amazement at the ruthless energy of this shrewd tycoon, he felt too dull and heavy with exhaustion to look for the youthful idealist who had written “Fifth Freedom”—or even to ask about Jane Hardin.
The driver whisked them deftly down the winding pavement to the other peak, and into the narrow streets that bound the terraformed hill. In his two years on lonely Freedonia, Pallasport had come to seem a splendid outpost of men against space, but now the reality of it was shabbily depressing.
The buildings, of sheet metal and colored glass, all seemed too flimsy and too crowded and too cheaply gaudy. The men and women he saw wore the garbs and spoke the tongues of all the planets; he thought they should have seemed brave and hardy pioneers against eternal night, but they were all too hurried and too grim. He recalled his uncle’s cynical dictum. They were all predators, come to loot the asteroids for their planets or their corporations or their own private pockets.
Wistfully, he thought of the change that should come from the Brand transmitter. For the prize these men fought and schemed to control was the dwindling reserve of the fissionable elements. Free power would wipe out the unique value of them, and create greater values in their place. With all Pallas terraformed, men could really live here, instead of camping like restless vandals.
The unbounded power of the contraterrene drift could smooth the dark, topping crags beyond these poor streets into pleasant hills, cloaked with terrestrial green. Free power could build a better sort of civilization upon them, a world where want of energy and the things it made would never pinch the faces of men and women with the cruel, veiled ferocity he saw everywhere.
