Between Planets (23 page)

Liquidate the Organization—Don translated the jawbreakers into real words: kill all the people who were against them. That meant his parents—

He shook his head to clear it. The thought did not mean anything to him inside. It had been too many years; he could not see their faces—and he could not imagine them dead. He wondered if he himself had become dead inside, unable to feel things. No matter—something had to be done. “What do we do? How can we stop it?”

“We quit wasting time!” answered Phipps. “We’ve lost half a day already. Sir Isaac?”

“Yes, my friend. Let us hurry.”

The room was a laboratory shop, but of dragon proportions. It needed to be, for it held a round dozen of dragons as well as fifty-odd men and a sprinkling of women. Everyone who could manage it wanted to see the opening of the ring. Even Malath da Thon was there, sitting up in his cell with the aid of his power-driven corset and with the colors of emotion rippling gently across his frail body.

Don and Isobel had climbed to the top of the entrance ramp, where they could see without being in the way. Opposite them was a large stereo tank, lighted but with no picture growing in it. Below them was a micromanipulator, dragon style; other pieces of apparatus and power tools filled the rest of the room. They were strange to Don, not because they were of dragon construction and for dragon use, for many of them were not—they were strange in the way in which laboratory equipment is always exotic to the layman. He was used to dragon artifacts; the two technologies, human and dragon, had interpenetrated sufficiently that a human, especially one living on Venus, found nothing odd in joints that were wrung instead of welded or bolted, nothing unusual in interlocking ovoids where a man would use screws.

Sir Isaac was at the micromanipulator, his tendrils at the controls; down over his head fitted a frame with eight eyepieces. He touched the control rack; the tank rippled and a picture built in it—the ring, in full color and three dimensions. It seemed to be about eight feet across. The boss of the ring faced out, displaying the enamel-filled initial cut into it—a capital “H” framed with a simple circle of white enamel.

The picture flickered and changed. Only a portion of the initial was now visible, but so greatly magnified that the enamel rubbed into the shallow grooves of the letter looked like broken paving blocks. A shadowy pointed cylinder, out of focus save at its very end, moved across the picture; a great oily globe formed on the end of it, detached itself and settled on the enamel. The “paving blocks” started to break up.

Montgomery Phipps climbed the ramp, saw Don and Isobel, and sat down on the edge beside them. He seemed to want to be friendly. “This will be something to tell your grandchildren about,” he remarked. “Old Sir Ike at work. The best microtechnician in the system—can darn near pick out a single molecule, make it sit up and beg.”

“It rather surprises me,” Don admitted. “I hadn’t known that Sir Isaac was a laboratory technician.”

“He’s more than that; he’s a great physicist; hadn’t the significance of his chosen name struck you?”

Don felt foolish. He knew how dragons went about picking vocalized names, but he took such names for granted, just as he took his own Venerian name for granted. “His whole tribe tends to be scientific,” Phipps went on. “There’s a grandson who calls himself ‘Galileo Galilei’; have you met him? And there’s a ‘Doctor Einstein’ and a ‘Madame Curie’ and there’s an integrating chemist who calls herself—Egg alone knows why!—‘Little Buttercup.’ But old Sir Ike is the boss man, the top brain—he made a trip to Earth to help with some of the work on this project. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

Donald admitted that he had not known why Sir Isaac was on Earth. Isobel put in, “Mr. Phipps, if Sir Isaac was working on this on Earth, why doesn’t he know what is in the ring before he opens it?”

“Well, he does and he doesn’t. He worked on the theoretical end. But what we will find—unless we get a terrific disappointment—will be detailed engineering instructions worked out for man-type tools and techniques. Very different.”

Don thought about it. “Engineering” and “science” were more or less lumped together in his mind; he lacked the training to appreciate the enormous difference. He changed the subject. “You are a laboratory man yourself, Mr. Phipps?”

“Me? Heavens, no! My fingers are all thumbs. The dynamics of history is my game. Theoretical once—applied now. Well, that’s a dry hole.” His eyes were on the tank; the solvent, sluiced in by what seemed to be hogshead amounts, had washed the enamel out of the groove that defined that part of the initial “H”; the floor of the groove could be seen, bare, amber, and transparent.

Phipps stood up. “I can’t sit still—I get nervous. Excuse me, please.”

“Surely.”

A dragon was lumbering up the ramp. He stopped by them just as Phipps was turning away. “Howdy, Mr. Phipps. Mind if I park here?”

“Not at all. Know these people?”

“I’ve met the lady.”

Don acknowledged the introduction, giving both his names and receiving those of the dragon in turn—
Refreshing Rain
and Josephus (“Just call me ‘Joe’”). Joe was the first dragon, other than Sir Isaac, whom Don had met there who was voder trained and equipped; Don looked at him with interest. One thing was certain: Joe had learned English from some master other than the nameless Cockney who had taught Sir Isaac…a Texan, Don felt quite sure.

“I am honored to be in your house,” Don said to him.

The dragon settled himself comfortably, letting his chin come about to their shoulders. “Not my house. These snobs wouldn’t have me around if there wasn’t a job I can do a little better than the next hombre. I just work here.”

“Oh.” Don wanted to defend Sir Isaac against the charge of snobbery but taking sides between dragons seemed unwise. He looked back at the tank. The scan had shifted to the circle of enamel which framed the “H”; fifteen or twenty degrees of it appeared in the tank. The magnification started to swell enormously until one tiny sector filled the huge picture. Again the solvent floated into the enamel; again it washed away.

“Now we are getting someplace, maybe,” commented Joe.

The enamel was dissolving like snow in spring rain, but, instead of washing down to a bare floor, something dark was revealed under the paint—a bundle of steel pipes, it seemed to be, nested in the shallow groove.

There was dead silence—then somebody cheered. Don found that he had been holding his breath. “What is it?” he asked Joe.

“Wire. What would you expect?”

Sir Isaac stepped up the magnification and shifted to another sector. Slowly, as carefully as a mother bathing her first born, he washed the covering off the upper layer of the coiled wire. Presently a microscopic claw reached in, felt around most delicately, and extracted one end.

Joe got to his feet. “Got to get to work,” he keyed. “That’s my cue.” He ambled down the ramp. Don noticed that he was growing a new starboard-midship’s leg and the process was not quite complete; it gave him a lopsided, one-flat-wheel gait.

Slowly, tenderly, the wire was cleaned and uncoiled. More than an hour later the tiny hands of the micromanipulator stretched out their prize—four feet of steel wire so gossamer fine that it could not be seen at all by naked eye, even by a dragon.

Sir Isaac backed his head out of the eyepiece rack. “Is Malath’s wire ready?” he inquired.

“All set.”

“Very well, my friends. Let us commence.”

They were fed into two ordinary microwire speakers, rigged in parallel. Seated at a control panel for synchronizing the fragmented message latent in the two wires was a worried-looking man wearing earphones—Mr. Costello. The steel spider threads started very slowly through and a high-pitched gabbling came out of the horn. There were very rapid momentary interruptions, like high frequency code.

“Not in synch,” announced Mr. Costello. “Rewind.”

An operator sitting in front of him said, “I hate to rewind, Jim. These wires would snap if you breathed on them.”

“So you break a wire—Sir Isaac will splice it. Rewind!”

“Maybe you’ve got one in backwards.”

“Shut up and rewind.”

Presently the gabbling resumed. To Don it sounded the same as before and utterly meaningless, but Mr. Costello nodded. “That’s got it. Was it recorded from the beginning?”

Don heard Joe’s Texas accents answering, “In the can!”

“Okay, keep it rolling and start playing back the recording. Try slowing the composite twenty to one.” Costello threw a switch; the gabbling stopped completely although the machines continued to unreel the invisible threads. Shortly a human voice came out of the loudspeaker horn; it was deep, muffled, dragging, and almost unintelligible. Joe stopped it and made an adjustment, started over. When the voice resumed it was a clear, pleasant, most careful enunciated contralto.

“Title,” the voice said, “‘Some Notes on the Practical Applications of the Horst-Milne Equations. Table of Contents: Part One—On the Design of Generators to Accomplish Strain-Free Molar Translation. Part Two—The Generation of SpaceTime Discontinuities, Closed, Open, and Folded. Part Three—On the Generation of Temporary Pseudo-Acceleration Loci. Part One, Chapter One—Design Criteria for a Simple Generator and Control System. Referring to equation seventeen in Appendix A, it will be seen that—’”

The voice flowed on and on, apparently tireless. Don was interested, intensely so, but he did not understand it. He found himself growing sleepy when the voice suddenly rapped out: “Facsimile! Facsimile! Facsimile!”

Costello touched a switch, stopping the voice, and demanded, “Cameras ready?”

“Hot and rolling!”

“
Shift!
”

They watched the picture build up—a wiring diagram, Don decided it must be—or else a plate of spaghetti. When the picture was complete the voice resumed.

After more than two hours of this, broken only by desultory conversation, Don turned to Isobel. “I’m not doing any good here and I’m certainly not learning anything. What do you say we leave?”

“Suits.”

They went down the ramp and headed for a tunnel that led toward living quarters. On the way they ran into Phipps, his face glowing with happiness. Don nodded and started to push on past; Phipps stopped him. “I was just going to hunt you up.”

“Me?”

“Yes. I thought you might want this—for a souvenir.” He held out the ring.

Don took it and examined it curiously. There was a very tiny break in one branch of the “H” where the enamel had been eaten away. The framing circle was an empty, slightly shadowed groove, a groove so narrow and shallow that Don could hardly catch his fingernail in it.

“You’ve no more use for it?”

“It’s squeezed dry. Keep it. You’ll be able to sell it to a museum some day, for a high price.”

“No,” said Don. “I reckon I’ll deliver it to my father—eventually.”

D
ON
moved out of the Gargantuan chambers he had been given and in with the other humans. Sir Isaac would have let him stay until the Sun grew cold, monopolizing an acre or so of living space, but to Don it seemed not only silly for one person to clutter up chambers built big enough for dragons but not entirely comfortable—so much open space made a man tuned to bush fighting uneasy.

The human guests occupied one dragon apartment with the great rooms partitioned off into cubicles. They shared its wallowing trough as a plunge bath and had a communal mess. Don roomed with Dr. Roger Conrad, a tall and shaggy young man with a perpetual grin. Don was a bit surprised to find that Conrad was held in high esteem by the other scientists.

He saw very little of his roommate, nor of any of the others—even Isobel was busy with clerical work. The team worked night and day with driving intensity. The ring had been opened and they had engineering data to work from, true—but that task force was already swinging toward Mars. Nobody knew—nobody
could
know—whether or not they could finish in time to save their colleagues.

Conrad had tried to explain it to Don one night late as he was turning in. “We don’t have adequate facilities here. The instructions were conceived in terms of Earth- and Mars-type techniques. The dragons do things differently. We’ve got mighty little of our own stuff and it’s hard to jury-rig what we need from their stuff. The original notion was to install the gear in—you know those little jumpbug ships that people use to get around in on Mars?”

“Seen pictures of them.”

“Never actually seen ’em myself. Useless as rocketships, of course, but they are pressurized and big enough. Now we’ve got to adapt for a shuttle.” A superstratospheric shuttle “with its ears trimmed”—the spreading glider wings unshipped and carried away—waited in a covered bayou outside Sir Isaac’s family seat. It would make the trip to Mars—if it could be prepared. “It’s a headache,” he added.

“Well, can we do it?”

“We’ll
have
to do it. We can’t possibly do the design calculations over again; we don’t have the machines, even if we had time to re-engineer the job—which we haven’t.”

“That’s what I meant. Will you finish in time?”

Conrad sighed. “I wish I knew.”

The pressure of time sat heavily on all of them. In their mess hall they had set up a large chart showing Earth, Sun, Venus, and Mars, each in its proper position. At lunch each day the markers were moved along the scribed orbits, the Earth by one degree, Venus a bit more, Mars by only half a degree and a trifle.

A long dotted line curved from a point on Earth’s orbit to a rendezvous with Mars—their best estimate of the path and arrival date of the Federation task force. The departure date was all they knew with certainty; the trajectory itself and the arrival date were based on the relative positions of the two planets and what was believed to be the maximum performance of any Federation ship, assuming refueling in parking orbit around Earth.

For a rocket ship some orbits are possible, some are impossible. A military ship in a hurry would not, of course, use the economical doubly-tangent ellipse; such a trip from Earth to Mars would require 258 Earth days. But, even using hyperboloids and wasting fuel, there are severe limits to how quickly a reaction-driven ship can make an interplanetary voyage.