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  Worlds of IF

  September 1968

  Vol. 18, No. 9

  Issue 130

  Custom eBook created by

  Jerry eBooks

  June 2016

  I

  Mac Hoerwitz came back to awareness as the screen went blank, and he absently flicked the switch and reset the sheet-scanner. He had not really watched the last act. At least, he didn’t think he had. He knew it so perfectly that there was no way to be certain whether Prospero’s closing words were really still in his ears or that it was simply memory from earlier times.

  Two things had been competing with The Tempest for his attention. One was the pain where his left index fingernail had formerly been, and the other was a half-serious search through his memory to decide whether Shakespeare had ever used a character quite like Mr. Smith. The two distractions were closely connected, even though Smith had not removed the nail himself. He had merely ordered Jones to do it.

  Hoerwitz rather doubted that Shakespeare would have been satisfied with a Smith. The fellow was too simple. He knew what he wanted and went after it without knowing or caring what anyone else in the picture might care. He was an oversized two-year-old. Shakespeare would have made him more complicated and more believable, even back in his Henry the Sixth days.

  It was a nice idea, with perhaps some scholarly merit. But it didn’t really help with the present problem. This was more a piece of post-Edwardian melodrama than a carefully thought out Shakespearean plot. The hero had been trapped by armed villains, in a situation from which there was no obvious escape, and was being forced to help them commit grand larceny.

  Of course in a piece of Prohibition-era fiction he would have refused steadfastly to help, but Hoerwitz was no flapper’s hero. He was eighty-one years old and had a mass of just one hundred pounds distributed along his seventy inches of height. He could not possibly have lifted that mass against Earth’s gravity. He smiled in spite of the pain of his hand when he recalled the facial expressions when Smith and his three followers had first seen him.

  They had gone to a great deal of trouble to make their approach unobtrusive. They had arrived near the apogee point of the station’s six-day period instead of making the just-after-perigee rendezvous which the freighters found more economical. This had served the double purpose of making fairly sure there would be no other ships present and of being harder to observe from Earth. At one hundred seventy thousand miles or so, a one-mile asteroid is visible to the naked eye and a modest-sized spaceship can be seen in a good telescope, but one has to be looking for them deliberately.

  It was a rendezvous, of course, rather than a landing. The latter word means nothing on a celestial body where a spacesuited man weighs about a quarter of an ounce. They had made the rendezvous skillfully enough so that Hoerwitz had not felt the contact—or at least, hadn’t noticed it over the sound effects accompanying Hamlet’s stepfather’s drinking. There had been no trouble about entering, since the airlock leading “underground” or “inside,” whichever way one preferred to think of it, was plainly visible and easily operated from without. The possibility of anyone’s stealing the horse from this particular stable had not occurred seriously to anyone responsible for building the place; or if it had, he had attached more weight to the likelihood of space emergencies which would need fast lock action.

  So Mr. Smith and his men had entered and drifted down the tunnel to the asteroid’s center not only unopposed but completely unnoticed, and Mac Hoerwitz’s first realization that he was in trouble had come after the final peal of ordnance ordered by Fortinbras.

  Then he had turned on the lights and found that Hamlet had four more spectators, all carrying weapons. He had been rather startled.

  So had the others, very obviously, when they had their first good look at him. Just what they had expected was hard to say, but it must have been something capable of more violence than the station manager. The leader had put away his gun with almost an embarrassed air, and the others had followed his example.

  “Sorry to surprise you, Mr. Hoerwitz,” the intruder had opened. “That was a very good sheet. I’m sorry we missed so much of it. Perhaps you’d let me run it again sometime in the next few days.”

  Mac had been at a loss to reconcile the courtesy with the armament.

  “If all you want is to see my library, the weapons are a bit uncalled for,” he finally got out. “I don’t know what else I can offer you except accommodation and communication facilities. Do you have ship trouble? Did I miss a distress call? Maybe I do pay too much attention to my sheets—”

  “Not at all. We’d have been very disappointed if you had spotted our approach, since we made it as unobtrusive as possible. You are also wrong about what you can give us. Not to waste time, we have a four-thousand-ton ship outside which we expect to mass up to ten thousand before we leave, with the aid of your Class IV isotopes.”

  “Six thousand tons of nuclear fuel? You’ve been expanding your consciousness. It would take sixty hours or more if I reprogrammed every converter in the place—only one of them is making Class IV now, and the others are all running other orders. There’s barely enough conversion mass in the place for what you want, unless you start chipping rock out of the station itself. I’d guess that on normal priority you’d get an order like that in about a year, counting administrative time for the initial request.”

  “We’re not requesting. As you know perfectly well. You will do any programming necessary, without regard to what is running now, and if necessary we will use station rock. I would have said you’d chip it for us, but I admit there’s a difference between the merely illegal and the impossible. Why do they keep a wreck like you on duty out here?”

  Hoerwitz flushed. He was used to this attitude from the young and healthy, but more accustomed to having it masked by some show of courtesy.

  “It’s the only place I can live,” he said shortly. “My heart, muscles, and bones can’t take normal gravity. Most people can’t take free-fall—or rather, they don’t like the consequences of the medication needed to take It indefinitely. That makes no difference to me. I don’t care about muscle, and I had my family half a century ago. This job is good for me, and I’m good for it. For that reason, I don’t choose to ruin it. I don’t intend to do any reprogramming for you, and I’d be willing to bet you can’t do it yourself.”

  Smith’s gun reappeared, and its owner looked at it thoughtfully. The old man nodded toward it and went on, “That’s an argument, I admit. I don’t want to die, but if you kill me it certainly won’t get you further.” Mac found that he wasn’t as brave as his words sounded; there was an odd and uncomfortable feeling in his stomach as he looked at the weapon. He must have covered it well, however, because after a moment of thought the intruder put the gun away again.

  “You’re quite right,” he said. “I have no intention of killing you, because I do need your help. We’ll have to use another method. Mr. Jones, please carry out our first stage of planned persuasion?”

  II

  Fifteen minutes later Hoerwitz was reprogramming the converters as well as he could with an unusable left hand.

  Smith, who had courteously introduced himself during the procedure, had gone to the trouble of making sure his victim was right-handed before allowing Jones to start work. It would, as he said, be a pity to slow the station manager down too much. The right hand could wait.

  “How about my toes?” Hoerwitz had asked sarcastically, not yet fully convinced that the affair was serious.

  “It seems to have been pro
ved that feet have fewer nerves and don’t feel pain as intensely,” replied Smith. “Of course, the toes will still be there if we need them. Mr. Jones, start with the left hand.”

  Mac had decided almost at once that the visitors were sincere, but Jones had insisted on finishing his job in workmanlike style. Smith had supported him.

  “It would be a pity for you to get the idea that we weren’t prepared to finish anything we started,” he pointed out.

  As he floated in front of the monitor panels readjusting potentiometers and flow-control relays, Hoerwitz thought furiously. He wasn’t much worried about his guests actually getting away with their stolen fuel; what he was now doing to the controls must be showing on repeaters in Elkhart, Papeete, and Bombay already. The station was, after all, part of a company supposed to be doing profitable business, and the fact that fusion power plants were still forbidden on Earth didn’t mean that the company wasn’t keeping close track of its products. There’d be radioed questions in the next few minutes, and when they weren’t answered satisfactorily there’d be arrangements to send a ship. Of course, the company would wait two or three days and make a perigee rendezvous, but if the indicators bothered the directors sufficiently they might ask a police launch to investigate sooner. On the whole, it was unlikely that anything would happen until shortly after perigee; but something would happen to prevent the thieves’ escape.

  The trouble seemed to be that that something wouldn’t do Mac himself any good. Up to now, genuine criminals who were willing to use actual violence had been strictly reading material for him; but he had done plenty of reading. He had a vivid mental picture of the situation. The belief that they would kill him before leaving was not so much insight as it was reflex.

  They might not even wait until the job was done. The new program was set up for the converters, and he would not be essential unless something went seriously astray. It never did, but he hoped the thieves were the sort of people who worried about things going wrong.

  He found his stomach reacting again when Smith approached him after the converters had been restarted. The gun was, not in sight, but Mac knew it was there. For that matter, it wasn’t necessary; any of the visitors could break his neck with one hand. However, Smith didn’t seem to have violence on his mind at the moment. In fact, his speech was encouraging. He would hardly have bothered to give warnings about Hoerwitz’s behavior unless he planned to keep the manager around for a while.

  “A few points you should understand, Mr. Hoerwitz,” the boss-thief explained. “You must be supposing that the change in converter program will attract, or has already attracted, notice at home. You are wrong. A mysterious ailment has affected the monitor computers at the central plant. Signals are coming in quite normally from the space factories, but they are not being analyzed. The engineers are quite frantic about it. They hope to get matters straightened out in a few days, but in the meantime no one is going to worry more about one space factory than another unless some such thing as a distress message is received.

  “I know you wouldn’t be foolish enough to attempt to send such a message, since you still have nine fingers available for Mr. Jones’ attention, but to remove temptation Mr. Robinson has disabled your station’s radio transmitters. To make really sure, he is now taking care of those in the spacesuits. We realize that a suit radio could hardly be received, except by the wildest luck, at Earth’s present distance; but that distance shrinks to only about a thousand miles at perigee, as I recall.

  “If you do wish to go outside, by all means indulge the impulse. I might enjoy a walk with you myself. Our ship is a former police supply boat, heavily armored and solidly locked. One of us has the only key—I wouldn’t dream of telling you which one. Even if you forced your way aboard, which seems possible, its transmitter channels are not standard. They would be received by my friends, not yours. You could not take the ship away, supposing you are enough of a pilot to try it, because it is parked beside your waste radiators, and the exhaust would wreck them—”

  “You landed beside the radiators?” For the first time, Mac was really alarmed.

  “Oh, no. We know better than that. We landed by your airlock and carried the ship around to the radiators. It weighs only about five hundred pounds here. I fear you couldn’t carry it away again by yourself, and it’s on rough enough ground so I don’t think rolling would be practical.

  “So, Mr. Hoerwitz, you may as well relax. We’ll appreciate your attending to your normal business so that our order is ready as soon as possible, but if you prefer to go out for a walk occasionally we don’t really mind. I suppose even you could jump off into space, since I understand that escape velocity here is only about a foot a second, and we’d be sorry to lose you that way; but it’s entirely up to you. You are perfectly free in all matters which don’t interfere with our order. Personally, if I were you I’d go back to quarters and enjoy that really excellent sheet library.”

  Hoerwitz had gone, but hadn’t really been able to concentrate on The Tempest. Some of Caliban’s remarks had caught his attention because they expressed his own feelings quite well, and he caught himself once or twice wishing for a handy Ariel. However, he was much too old to spend much mental effort on wishing, and the only spirits available at the station were material mechanisms of very restricted versatility. Worse, he was probably not completely free to command them, unless Smith and Company were unbelievably incompetent.

  Of course, if something appeared to be going wrong, they would have to trust him to fix it; maybe something could be worked up from that side.

  But what could be done, anyway? Just what did he have? The plant turned over vast quantities of energy, but it certainly wasn’t a magic wand. It had the complex gear of a hydrogen fusion unit, and a modest tonnage of hydrogen-deuterium slush; while it would require deliberate bypassing of a host of safety devices to do it, it would be quite possible to blow the asteroid into a cloud of plasma. This had certain disadvantages besides the likelihood of blinding the unfortunates on Earth who happened to be looking toward the station at the key moment. For one thing, it didn’t really deal satisfactorily with Smith and his friend. It merely promised to dispose of them, and the way Mac’s finger felt at the moment that wasn’t quite bad enough. What else did he have?

  There were a score of converters, each designed to take matter and transform it, using the energy of the fuser, into isotopes which could be used on Earth legally and more or less safely as power sources. At the moment, all were working on the Class IV mixtures—the fast-yield substances usable for spacecraft fuel, industrial blasting, and weaponry, which Smith had demanded. Whether he and his friends planned to use the stuff themselves for bank robbery or political subversion, or merely feed the black market, Hoerwitz neither knew or greatly cared. A minute charge of any Class IV product, assuming that he would get hold of it, could certainly get him into the thieves’ ship, no matter how well she were armored. Whether the ship would be worth getting into after such treatment was debatable. A production controller is one thing and a nuclear-explosives expert quite another. Hoerwitz happened to be the first. Trying to abstract explosives under the eyes of Smith, Jones and Associates seemed not only dangerous but probably useless.

  There were the radiators, the most conspicuous part of the plant from outside. They were four gigantic structures, each some five hundred feet across and nearly as high. The outer walls were cylindrical and contained high-powered refrigeration circuits; their inner surfaces carried free-election fields which rendered them nearly perfect reflectors. Inside the cylinders, out of contact with their walls, were the radiators themselves—huge cores of high-conductivity alloy, running at a temperature which would have evaporated them into space in minutes if they had not been held together by fields similar to those which restrained the fusion units. The whole structure was designed to get rid of waste energy, of course.

  Any serious absorption by the planetoid of the flood being radiated from those units would have star
ted a sequence of troubles of which the warming of the fusion-fuel slush would have been a minor preliminary. Secondarily, the units were arranged to shine away from Earth; their location on the asteroid and the latter’s rotation had been arranged with this in view. It was not a perfect success in one way, since the extremely eccentric orbit in which the asteroid had been placed to facilitate freight-handling work produced a longitude libration of over a hundred degrees each way; but Earth had agreed to put up with this. The periodic flashes of light from the space factories were rather scenic in their way, and most of the astronomers had moved to the Moon or to orbiting observatories anyway.

  But those radiators did throw away an awful lot of energy. One should be able to do something with it in a situation like this; something really useful. But what?

  III

  It was really a pity that the library contained no Fu Manchu or Bulldog Drummond. Hoerwitz needed ideas. Since it looked as though he would have to furnish his own, he selected a sheet for background material, slipped it into the scanner, and drifted toward the cobwebby hammock in the center of the lounge while Flavius berated the holiday-making citizens of Rome on the screen. It was reasonably appropriate, the manager drowsed; there was certainly an Ides of March coming. He wished his finger would stop hurting. The script and background music flowed along a track that his awareness had followed a hundred times before . . .

  The frantic disclaimers of China the Poet awakened him. He had drifted and been held against the hammock by the current from the air circulator. The feeble gravity which gave the visiting ship a weight of five hundred pounds at the surface was of course absent in the living quarters at the center of the asteroid. Almost automatically he pushed himself back to the console and shut off the sheet-scanner at the end of the third act. Obviously this wasn’t helping him to think. He’d better check the convertor monitors just to wake himself up and then get some exercise.