Collected short fiction, p.608
Collected Short Fiction, page 608
He was not surprised to find that she knew the way. There seemed to be very little this girl didn’t know!
But the situation was getting out of hand.
This girl was giving orders to an entire Research Team. It wasn’t her place to do that. Everybody knew that! Under the Plan of Man it was the Machine that gave orders. Human beings—even Planner’s daughters—were supposed to do their own job (perfectly), and nobody else’s. That was plain logic, the logic of the Plan.
He stood stiffly holding the door to his room, meditating what to say to her. She walked in, looking curiously about; he followed, leaving the door ajar.
“Oh, close it,” she said impatiently. “Don’t you think my Peace Doves are chaperones enough?” She laughed at the expression on his face, threw herself at full length on his bed and lit a cigarette. The dislodged Peace Doves cooed complaininsly and found roosts for themselves on the iron headboard.
Grudgingly Ryeland closed the door. He nodded to the teletype. “Don’t you want to check in?”
“The Machine’ll find me,” Donna Creery said cheerfully. “You watch.” And, sure enough, the words were hardly out of her mouth when the keys began to rattle away:
Information. Marseilles Planning Council asks Donna Creery give annual Plan Awards. Information. Life Magazine requests permission use photograph Donna Creery on Woman of the Year cover. Information—
“Someone’s always available to tell the Machine where I’ve gone,” the girl told Ryeland seriously. “And if not—well, the Machine can usually make a pretty good guess where I’ll be. It knows me pretty well by now.”
She spoke, Ryeland noticed wonderingly, as though the Machine were an old friend. But she didn’t give him much chance to speculate on that; she said abruptly: “You’re not much, Steve, but you’re better than those others. Can you keep my spaceling alive?”
“Your spaceling?”
She laughed. “It’s mine because I like it. Everything I like belongs to me—that’s the way I want it.” She added seriously: “But I don’t know yet whether or not I like you.”
He said, the back of his neck bristling, “I have my duty, Miss Creery. I’m going to do it! I hope it won’t mean any further discomfort to the spaceling, but, if it does—Do you see this?” He tugged angrily at his collar. “I want that off! If I have to kill a million spacelings to get it off, I’ll do it!”
She stubbed out her cigarette lazily. “That isn’t what you told Gottling,” she observed.
“How do you know what I told Gottling?”
“Oh, I know very many things. Why shouldn’t I? The Machine goes everywhere, and my father is practically part of the Machine. And, oh, yes, I like the Machine, and everything I like—” She shrugged winsomely.
Ryeland stared. She was mocking him. She had to be. It was a joke in terribly bad taste, but surely that was all it was. He said stiffly: “Miss Creery, I don’t appreciate that sort of remark about the Machine. I believe in the Plan of Man.”
“That’s terribly good of you,” she said admiringly.
“Blast you,” he yelled, pushed a step too far, “don’t make fun of me! The Plan of Man needs the jetless drive, you silly little skirt! If the spaceling has to die so the Plan can discover its secret, what possible difference does that make?”
She swung her feet to the ground and got up, walking over close to him. Her face was relaxed and sympathetic. She looked at him for a second.
Then she said suddenly: “Do you still love that girl?”
It caught him off balance. “What—what girl?”
“Angela Zwick,” she said patiently. “The daughter of Stefan Zwick. The blonde, twenty years old, five feet four and a quarter, with green eyes, who became your teletype operator late one afternoon and made you kiss her that very night. The one who turned you in. Do you still love her?”
Ryeland’s eyes popped. “I—I know you’ve got special sources of information,” he managed, “but, really, I had no idea—”
“Answer the question,” she said impatiently.
He took a deep breath and considered.
“Why, I don’t know,” he said at last. “Perhaps I do.”
Donna Creery nodded. “I thought so,” she said. “All right, Steve. I thought for a moment—But, no, it wouldn’t work out, would it? But I admire your spirit.”
Ryeland took a deep breath again. This girl, she had a talent for confusing him. It wasn’t possible for him to keep up with her, he decided, it was only possible for him to cling to the basic facts of his existence. He said stiffly: “It doesn’t take spirit to defend the Plan of Man. If the Plan needs to learn the secret of the jetless drive, that’s my plain duty.”
She nodded and sat again on his bed, the Peace Doves settling gently on her shoulders. “Tell me, Steve, do you know why the Plan of Man requires this information?”
“Why—no, not exactly. I suppose—”
“Don’t suppose. It’s to explore. Do you know what the Plan wants in the reefs?”
“No, I can’t say that—”
“It wants Ron Donderevo, Steve.”
“Ron?” He frowned.
“The man who got out of his iron collar, Steve,” the girl said, nodding. “A man you might like to know again. That booby-trapped, tamperproof collar, that nobody can possibly get off until the Machine authorizes it—the Machine wants to talk to Donderevo about it, very badly. Because he took his collar off, all by himself.”
Ryeland stared at her.
She nodded. “And Donderevo is out in the reefs now,” she Said, “and the Machine wants to do something about it. It might simply destroy the reefs. I understand you are working on some such project. But if it can’t do that, it wants to send someone out there to find him.
“Someone with a radar gun, Steve! To kill him! And that’s why the Machine wants the secret of the jetless drive!”
TO BE CONTINUED
The Reefs of Space
Everybody had to be useful. If he was totally useless in every respect—there was still a use!
THE CHARACTERS
STEVE RYELAND knew that he was a criminal, who had failed the Plan of Man . . . but he could not remember his crime. Around his neck he wore the iron collar that contained an explosive charge that would destroy him if he tried escape; but what the deed was that had put it there he could only remember in tantalizing fragments. With his fellow convicted Risk,
ODDS OPORTO, Ryeland was ordered to take up a new job in the service of the Plan. Still a prisoner, he traveled aboard the luxurious private subtrain car of
THE PLANNER, the greet, powerful men who was the voice of The Machine, unquestioned ruler of the world’s thirteen billion people. The Planner told him that his job was to develop a “jetless drive”—a new space propulsion system that would permit the forces of the Plan to expand into the Reefs of Space, the half-mythical bodies that circled the solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto.
DONNA CREERY, the daughter of the Planner, also told Ryeland of the spaceling, the strange creature from the distant Reefs that lived on energy and itself seemed to have a “jetless drive”. Arriving at his destination, Ryeland was astonished to find that he himself was in charge of a whole project under the Plan of Man—although a convicted Risk, wearing the iron collar, he had authority over high-ranking officers and important research workers. Yet there was something strange about his authority, almost as though he were not so much the conductor of an experimental project as its subject. And there was the chronic, nagging worry of his past always in his mind! For he could not remember the parts of his life that should have been crystal-clear . . .
PART II
VII
Ryeland’s new authority as leader of the Attack Team did nothing to endear him to his colleagues.
He didn’t care. He had work enough to keep him busy. Oddball Oporto made himself useful. The little man’s talent for lightning computing saved Ryeland a good deal of time. Not that Oporto was faster than a computer. He wasn’t; but Oporto had a distinct advantage over the binary digital types in that problems didn’t have to be encoded and taped, then decoded.
Still, in the final analysis there were not too many problems to compute. In fact, that was the big problem: Ryeland could find no handle by which to grasp the question of the jetless drive.
But Oporto made himself useful in other ways as well. He had a prying nose for news, for example, which kept Ryeland informed of what was going on in the Team Project. “Fleemer’s got the sulks,” he reported one day. “Holed up in his room, doesn’t come out.”
“AH right,” said Ryeland absently. “Say, where’s my Physical Constants of Steady-State Equations?”
“It’s indexed under 603.811,” Oporto said patiently. “The word is that Fleemer is having an argument with the Machine. Messages are going back and forth, back and forth, all the time.”
“What?” Ryeland looked up, momentarily diverted from the task of scribbling out a library requisition for the book he needed. “Nobody can argue with the Machine!”
Oporto shrugged. “I don’t know what you’d call it, then.”
“General Fleemer is filing reports,” Ryeland said firmly. He beckoned to Faith, brooding in a corner. The Togetherness girl came eagerly forward, saw the slip, looked glum, shrugged and went off to get the book.
“Sure,” said Oporto. “Say, have you heard anything from Donna Creery?”
Ryeland shook his head.
“I hear she’s in Port Canaveral.” Ryeland snapped: “That’s her problem. No doubt the Planner’s daughter has plenty of occasions for off-Earth trips.”
“No doubt,” agreed Oporto, “but—”
“But you could mind your business,” said Ryeland, closing the discussion.
Faith came back with the book. Ryeland verified a couple of figures and turned a sheet of calculations over to Oporto. “Here, solve these for me. It’ll give you something to do,” he said. He stood up, looking absently around the room. This was his A Section, devoted to the Hoyle Effect. He had a whole sub-Team of workers going here. Still, he thought, it was a waste of time.
“No sweat,” said Oporto cheerfully, handing back to the completed equations.
“Thanks.” Ryeland glanced at them, then dumped them on the desk of one of the other workers. There wasn’t much to be done but routine; he could leave it to the others now. That was why it was a waste of time. All the prior art was in hand and digested; it was only a matter of checking out the math now. Then he could answer the Machine’s questions—but in fact, he knew, he could pretty well answer them now. Under what conditions could hydrogen growth occur? That was easy. Basic theory gave most of the answer; an analysis of the data from Lescure’s expedition in the Cristobal Colon gave a clue to the rest. And what was the possibility of halting or reversing the formation? That was easy too. Humans could have little control over the processes that could build stars. With finite equipment, in finite time, the probability was zero.
But it was a measure of the Machine’s—desperation? Was that a word you could apply to the Machine—a measure of the Machine’s, well, urgency that it could even ask such questions as these.
Ryeland said uncomfortably: “Come on, Oporto. Let’s go take a look at the spaceling.”
And that was B Section, and it was going badly indeed.
Jetless drive! It was impossible, that was all. If Ryeland hadn’t had the maddening spectacle of the spaceling right there before him, he would have sworn that the laws were right.
For every action, Newton had stated centuries before, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That law of motion accounted for every movement of every creature on Earth. The cilia of the first swimming paramecium propelled the creature forward by propelling an equal mass of water backward. It was the same with the thrust of a propeller, in water or in air. Rockets thrust forward by reaction, as the mass of the ejected jet’s hot molecules went one way, the vessel the rockets drove went another. Action and reaction!
It was an equation that was easy to write—Mass times Acceleration equals Mass-prime times Acceleration-prime—and it was an equation that was hard to doubt.
But it did not happen to be true. The evidence of the dazed little creature from space made a liar out of Newton. The spaceling’s trick of floating without visible reaction confounded the greatest genius the world has ever known.
The spaceling showed no reaction mass at all.
Whatever it was that permitted the spaceling to hover, it (call it “X”) did not:
Disturb the currents of the air; affect plumb-bobs hung all about; register on photographic film; discharge a gold-leaf electroscope; disturb a compass; produce a measurable electric, magnetic or electronic field; add to the weight of the cage when the entire structure was supported on a scale; make any audible sound; affect the basal metabolism of the spaceling itself; or produce a discoverable track in a cloud chamber.
“X” did, on the other hand, do a few things.
It affected the “brain waves” of the spaceling; there was a distinctive trace on the EEG.
It seemed to have a worrisome effect on certain other mammals. This was noticed by chance when a cat happened to wander into the rocket pit; when the spaceling lifted itself the cat was “spooked”, leaping about stiff-legged, fur bristling, eyes aglare.
And finally, it worked. Whatever “X” was, it lifted the spaceling with great ease.
They even wrapped the spaceling in chains once, more than six hundred pounds of them. And as if amused the spaceling floated with all six hundred pounds for an hour, purring to itself.
It was maddening.
Still, thought Ryeland, though the comfort was small—at least the thing seemed healthier. The wounds were healing. The small symbiotic animals that were left seemed to survive. The spaceling showed life and energy.
Donna Creery would be pleased.
Nobody else seemed very pleased with Ryeland, though. General Fleemer stayed in his room, venturing forth only occasionally to make sardonic comments and get in the way. The other high brass of the Team didn’t have Fleemer’s ready escape, since they had specific tasks; but they made sure to be as unpleasant to Ryeland as they could manage.
Only Major Chatterji was affable at all, and that was second nature to him. He came by every hour on the hour for a report. He was very little trouble. If Ryeland was busy the major waited inconspicuously m the background. If Ryeland was free, the major asked a minimum of questions and then departed. Ryeland was pretty sure that all the information went, first, to the Machine and, second, almost as promptly to General Fleemer; but he could see no reason why he should attempt to interfere with the process. And he could also see no reason to believe he would be successful if he tried.
He kept busy.
Oporto said one afternoon: “Say, it’s definite about your girl friend.”
Ryeland blinked up from his papers. “Who?” He was genuinely confused for a moment; then he remembered Oporto’s previous remarks. “You mean Miss Creery?”
“Miss Creery, yeah.” The little man grinned. “She’s off to the Moon. Her daddy, too.”
“That’s nice,” said Ryeland. Carefully he kept his voice noncommittal, though he wondered who he was fooling. No matter how well he disguised his interest from Oporto, he couldn’t disguise it from himself: Something inside him reacted to the thought of Donna Creery.
Oporto sprawled lazily over Ryeland’s desk. “Well, I don’t know if it is so nice, Steve,” he said seriously. “Maybe they ought to stay home and attend to business. Did you hear about the Paris tube collapse?”
“What?” Ryeland wearily put down the sheaf of reports and blinked at his friend. His eyes smarted. He rubbed them, wondering if he needed sleep. But that didn’t seem reasonable, he figured; he’d had at least eight hours sleep in the previous forty-eight. In any case, he didn’t have the time; so he put the thought out of his mind and said: “What the devil are you talking about, Oporto?”
The little man said: “Just what I said. The Paris subtrain to Finland. The tube collapse. More than a hundred people missing—and that means dead, of course. When a tube gives out a hundred miles down you aren’t ‘missing.’ ”
Ryeland said, starred: “But that isn’t possible! I mean, I know the math for those tubes. They can collapse all right, but not without plenty of warning. They can’t break down without three hours of field degeneration—plenty of time to halt transits.”
Oporto shrugged. “A hundred dead people would be glad to know that. Steve,” he said.
Ryeland thought for a second “Well,” he said wearily, “maybe you’re right, maybe the Planner ought to be around to keep an eye on things like that . . . Oh, hello, Major.”
Chatterji came smiling in, peering amiably through his gold glasses. “I wondered if there was anything to report, Mr. Ryeland.”
While Ryeland searched through the papers on his desk, Oporto said: “We were just talking about the Paris trouble. Major.”
Chatterji’s brown eyes went opaque. There was a marked silence.
Ryeland took it in, and realized that Machine Major Chatterji was concerned about the tube failure between Paris and the Finland center. Odd, he thought, why should Chatterji care? But he was too weary to pursue the subject further. He found the requisition he was looking for and silently passed it across the Chatterji.
The major glanced at it casually, then intently. His crew-cut black hair seemed to stand on end. “But, dear Ryeland!” he protested, blinking through his gold-rimmed glasses. “This equipment—”
“I’ve checked it with the Machine,” Ryeland said obstinately. “Here,” He showed the teletape to Major Chatterji.
Action Request approved. Action. Concert with Major Chatterji. Information. Power sources at Point Circle Black not adequate to demand?
