Complete Stories (30 page)

A huge wall-map of the world dominated the room. Built-in electronic graphics had shaded a large grey circle around D.C. To the south it took in most of Virginia; to the north it had just reached New York City.

“Harry,” called a man’s high, choky voice. “Fletcher.”

It was General Moritz. He was seated with the other brass at a long oak table. Nancy, Harry and I shuffled closer.

Max Moritz was a plump Pennsylvania Dutchman who wore his blond hair combed straight back from the forehead. His cheeks were chubby and his eyes a merry delft-blue. For him war was fun. He had the cheerful viciousness of a child who likes to torture animals. Harry and I had endeared ourselves to him a few years back when we’d invented a way to make water radioactive. It was a beam that a satellite could shine at the enemy’s reservoirs. The beam started a quark resonance process leading to proton-decay. If you drank any of our irradiated water, you’d glow in the dark. Moritz was still hoping for a chance to try it out.

“Is this true that you have caused the big blackout?” yodeled the general. He always sounded like he was swallowing something. “By thunder, I’m hoping so!”

“Yes, it’s true,” I said. “Harry made something called an inertia-winder. It snaps our ties to the rest of the universe. Inertial field-lines are broken, and electromagnetic radiation is blocked as well. The problem …”

“These men are insane,” snapped a grim-faced civilian to Moritz’s right. “Get them out of here.”

“So it’s you, Baumgard,” crowed Harry. “Still stupid and blind?”

“General Moritz!” The civilian rose to his feet, his angrily waving arms jerking his inertialess body around. He had conservatively long hair, the same grey color as his face. His suit was dark-blue with dandruff on the shoulders. I recognized him as Dr. Dana Baumgard, a very well-respected government physicist, formerly of M.I.T. Harry and I had beat-en him out on that radioactive water project. He’d never forgiven Harry for refusing to explain how our beam worked…Harry never really knew how any of his inventions worked.

“I have known Harry Gerber for years,” continued Baumgard. “The man is an unscrupulous charlatan. To be sure, he has cobbled together one or two ingenious devices. But never has he offered any scientific explanations of why his machines should work. Whatever he tells you will be nonsense, I can assure you.”

“I am thanking you for your opinion, Dr. Baumgard,” gargled Moritz. “And now I am asking you, please, to sit down.”

“We need a rocket,” said Harry. “We have to get the inertia-winder on a rocket right away.”

“To send at the Russians,” chortled Moritz. “If only we could. But these politicians are such cautious snails. I can ask permission, but …”

“Not to send at the Russians,” I broke in. “To send to outer space. The Moon will fall on us in less than twenty hours!”

“Can’t you make it fall on the Russians?” asked Moritz petulantly. “Why does it have to fall on us?”

“It will kill us all no matter where it falls,” cried Nancy. “Please don’t waste time!”

“Where is this device that you have purportedly concocted?” asked Baumgard.

“Right in the center,” said Harry, pointing at the map. “Right in the center of that big grey circle. A bit northeast of here, I’d say. We meant to bring it, but Fletcher dropped it.”

“I don’t suppose you drunken fools can give me any kind of description of what your machine does?” demanded Baumgard.

“It’s an inertia-winder,” said Harry calmly. “Basically, what I have is a rotating sphere of unconfined quarks. As you know from Mach’s Principle, inertia exists only relative to the mass of the distant stars. My device cuts the inertia-lines that stretch to us from these distant objects. Isolated inside this sphere we have only our self-inertia, which is virtually zero.”

“If we are cut off,” interrupted Baumgard, “then why is it that we still feel the gravitational attraction of Earth? Why aren’t we weightless? Surely you are not denying the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass?”

“Of course I am,” gloated Harry. “You can feel it yourself. Your inertia is gone, but the Earth still pulls you against the floor. Unless you jump.” Harry gave a little hop and whisked up to the ceiling and back. He was really getting smooth at this. “Gravitation is a type of spacetime curvature. My inertia-winder does nothing to change that. But inertia is a synchronistic quantum-mechanical effect.”

“The stars can’t see what we’re doing,” put in Nancy. “They don’t know where we are, so we don’t have to stay still so much. Can’t you feel it? Don’t you feel…looser?”

“Shut up, Nancy,” I muttered. “It’ll be a cold day in hell when the Situation Room crowd starts feeling loose.”

“Gibberish!” declaimed Baumgard. “Complete gibberish.”

General Moritz signed. “Yes indeed, Doctor, yes indeed. But what we’re doing next, I have no inkling.”

“You’re going to help us,” I insisted. “The inertia-winder’s sphere of influence is growing. We are unable to stop it. Within twenty hours, it’s influence will reach to the Moon. With no centrifugal force of inertia, the Moon will fall down and smash our whole planet. The only solution is to send the inertia-winder away from our solar system.”

“How do you know you could rocket it away faster than the sphere of influence is growing?” demanded Baumgard.

“The rocket will have the advantage of taking off with virtually no air-resistance to fight,” said Harry tapping one hand with his broad fore-finger. “Moreover, there will be a fantastic gain of momentum for each particle of exhaust which leaves the sphere of inertialessness. According to my calculations, the rocket will soon reach near-light velocity, while the sphere’s radius will continue to expand at only a few hundred miles per hour.

“And what happens to the sphere then?” asked Baumgard, his voice carrying the wistfulness of a boy whose worst enemy has received a much better Christmas present.

“Won’t it ruin any other solar system that it runs into? Eventually it could collapse our whole galaxy!”

“You’re talking about thousands of years from now,” said Harry airily. “Millions. By then we’ll think of something. Hell, if I can just get the bugs worked out, we can fly out to turn the inertia-winder off by next year.”

There was a sudden, earth-shaking crash. Then another and another. Moritz snatched up a red telephone, his face aglow with excitement. “Is it the Russians? Can we retaliate?”

The answer he heard seemed not to be to his liking. A few moments later he’d slammed the receiver down, bouncing a little from the motion. “It’s our satellites,” he said. “They’re starting to fall down. Where did you boys say you were losing that furshlugginer inertia-winder?”

“I’ll back your plan to send it into space,” added Baumgard, his face pale and sweating. “But God help you, Gerber, if you don’t make good on your promise to go out and turn it off by next year.”

“Next year” has a way of rolling around a little sooner than you expect. Nine months after that eventful September day when we’d built and launched the inertia-winder, Harry and I were rocketing after it, strapped into a spaceship of our design. And Nancy? I’d lost her over Christmas. She’d gone to visit her sister down South, and it didn’t look like she was ever coming back. In mid-February Harry had moved in with me and we’d been hard at work ever since. I’d meant to go after Nancy, but somehow I hadn’t gotten around to it. And now I was racing out of the plane of the solar system at about ninety-five percent the speed of light.

Our spaceship was unconventional, to say the least. It was basically a big old Ford station wagon…with a few modifications. Why a Ford? Because Harry’s mother had one that she didn’t need much anymore.

We’d torn out the tailgate and rear-window and replaced them with an air lock just big enough to cycle us through one at a time. We’d beefed up the windshield with a transparent slab of titaniplast, hoisted out the engine and packed the life-support unit in under the hood. The actual rocket-drive was mounted down where the transmission had been, with the nozzles pointing out like dual exhausts. To finish the ship off, we’d sprayed everything but the windshield and rocket-nozzles with airtight urethane foams, and then coated that with a skin of reflective Mylar. It was a hell of a vehicle.

The secret of our rocket-drive was that Harry had finally perfected the inertia-winder. He’d found a way to turn it on and off, and even better, a way to keep the black sphere of influence from growing indefinitely. To move our ship we needed only to surround ourselves with a five-meter sphere of inertialessness and shoot matter out of our rocket-nozzles. Under inertialess conditions, it was easy to accelerate the matter with an electromagnetic mass-driver; and whenever matter left the black sphere of inertialessness, it gave us a fantastic push forward.

The two major factors limiting our range were, firstly, how much matter we could bring along with us for the mass-driver to throw out, and, secondly, how much power we could store to run the mass-driver. We beat the matter-storage problem by using powdered neutronium, a sort of degenerate matter massing about one hundred kilos per dust-speck. And we handled the energy-storage by using a power-pack based on unconfined quark-antiquark pairs. The thing held a charge big enough to run New York City for months. With the runaway inertia-winder’s head start, it was going to take us awhile to catch it.

So as far as rocket-power went, we were in pretty good shape. Air and food were okay too: we had a nice culture of DNA-doctored slime-mold growing under the hood. The stuff absorbed carbon dioxide, gave off oxygen, and tasted more or less like tuna fish. All it asked in return was our waste, and a steady supply of heat from the power-pack.

Physically we were all set for a trip of up to a year our time, which could come to something like three or four years Earth-time, taking relativistic time-dilation into account. Physically we were all set, but mentally, well…imagine a month-long car-trip with no view, no change in diet, no chance to stretch your legs, and with Harry Gerber in the car with you. Or with Joseph Fletcher, for that matter.

“Harry,” I whined. “Let’s turn the drive off for awhile again. I’ve got to see.” The bad thing about our drive was that when it was on, we were cut off from the rest of the universe by our inertia-winder’s five-meter black sphere. According to the Ford’s dashboard calendar-clock this was our ninety-third day out. We’d had the drive on for the last ten days solid. Sitting behind the steering wheel and staring out through the windshield, I could see nothing but our ship’s shiny hood faintly reflecting our small ceiling-light.

“We really ought to keep accelerating,” said Harry testily. He was behind me, floating there in the wagon’s roomy rear. “The sooner we catch up, the sooner we can go home. And you shouldn’t be talking to me anyway. It’s my turn to sleep.”

“I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care!” I slapped the gearshift from Drive to Neutral. The mass-driver’s irritating whine stopped instantly, and moments later the inertia-winder stopped, too.

Harry surged forward, as eager as I to look out the window. His knee caught my head a nasty jolt.

“You stupid stinking slob,” I hissed through clenched teeth. I didn’t bother to turn my head to glare at him. The view was too important to me.

The view. When I was little, my parents used to take us to visit some friends in Georgia. They lived on the Savannah River, with a dock going out into it. Nights we’d sit there, all of us, the big people smoking and talking, and we kids staring up at the sky. That was the most stars I’d ever seen till this trip. And now, oh now, great skeins and marbled streamers of light, so living, so static. I loved to look at it, to let my mind flow out of our cramped quarters, flow out into the All.

Dead ahead of us was a black dish the size of your fist at arm’s length. That’s where we were going; that was the sphere of influence of the inertia-winder we’d launched in September.

“Look how big it is,” I said to Harry after awhile. “Twice as big as the last time we looked. We’re gaining fast.”

“Or it’s growing fast.”

“You stupid stinking slob.”

“That’s twice, Fletcher.” Something in Harry’s voice compelled me to look over at the too-familiar features. It was not a pleasant sight.

“Harry, don’t look at me that way.”

“
That’s twice
. You know where that line comes from? It’s a joke my grandfather used to tell. It goes like this; it’s an old-time story. A man and a woman had just gotten married. They got into a rented horse-and-buggy and started out on their honeymoon trip, the man holding the reins. It was a wet day and there were puddles in the road. The horse shied at one particularly large puddle, and the bridegroom had to get down and lead the animal through the puddle. ‘
That’s once
,’ he said to the horse as he remounted the driver’s seat. Well, pretty soon there came another large puddle. Once again …”

Garbage. I stopped listening and let my mind flow back out that window. The runaway inertia-winder was still so far off. After we shut it down, we’d still have to fly all the way back. And for what? By rights we should be back on Earth marketing our new rocket-drive…not that Harry was able to explain how to build one. Even more important, I should be back there wooing Nancy. Now that the excitement of the rocket-building was over, I missed her more every day.

”…stopped at a third puddle,” Harry was saying. ”’
That’s three times
,’ cried the bridegroom, and then he took out a pistol and shot the horse dead. ‘I don’t think you should have done that,’ says the bride, and the man says, ‘
That’s once!
’”

“Are you trying to threaten me, Harry? You’re a stupid stinking slob. That’s three times. Like it or lump it and shut the goddamn hell up while I’m enjoying the view.” Trembling with some mad rage I’d never known, I awaited his reaction.

Like a fool, he went for my neck. That was just what I’d been expecting, and I blocked his lunge with my forearm. But I hadn’t realized that Harry had a knife in his right hand. It cut deeply into my flesh.

Bright globs of my blood shot out and danced. Almost immediately, Harry showed signs of remorse. He dropped his knife and tried to stanch my blood’s flow, pressing his dirty handkerchief onto the incision.