Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (9 page)

Babs said guiltily:

"Mr. Cochrane—you've been so busy I had to use my own judgment. I
didn't want to interrupt you—."

"What now?" demanded Cochrane.

"The publicity on the torp-test," said Babs guiltily, "was so good
that the firm was worried for fear we'd seem to be doing it for
a client of the firm—which we are. So we've all been put on a
leave-with-expenses-and-pay status. Officially, we're all sick and the
firm is paying our expenses until we regain our health."

"Kind of them," said Cochrane. "What's the bite?"

"They're sending up talent contracts for us to sign," admitted Babs.
"When we go back, we would command top prices for interviews. The firm,
of course, will want to control that."

Cochrane raised his eyebrows.

"I see! But you'll actually be kept off the air so Dabney can be
television's fair-haired boy. He'll go on Marilyn Winter's show, I'll
bet, because that has the biggest audience on the planet. He'll lecture
Little Aphrodite Herself on the constants of space and she'll flutter
her eyelashes at him and shove her chest-measurements in his direction
and breathe how wonderful it is to be a man of science!"

"How'd you know?" demanded Babs, surprised.

Cochrane winced.

"Heaven help me, Babs, I didn't. I tried to guess at something too
impossible even for the advertising business! But I failed! I failed!
You and my official gang, then, are here with the firm's blessing, free
of all commands and obligations, but drawing salary and expenses?"

"Yes," admitted Babs. "And so are you."

"I get off!" said Cochrane firmly. "Forward my resignation. It's a
matter of pure vanity. But Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe do move
in a mysterious way to latch onto a fast buck! I'm going to get some
sleep. Is there anything else you've had to use your judgment on?"

"The contracts for re-broadcast of the torp-test. The original broadcast
had an audience-rating of seventy-one!"

"Such," said Cochrane, "are the uses of fame. Our cash?"

She showed him a neatly typed statement. For the original run of the
torp-test film-tape, so much. It was to be re-run with a popularization
of the technical details by West, and a lurid extrapolation of things to
come by Jamison. The sponsors who got hold of commercial time with that
expanded and souped-up version would expect, and get, an audience-rating
unparalleled in history. Dabney was to take a bow on the rebroadcast,
too—very much the dignified and aloof scientist. There were other
interviews. Dabney again, from a script written by Bell. And Jones.
Jones hated the idea of being interviewed, but he had faced a
beam-camera and answered idiotic questions, and gone angrily back to his
work.

Spaceways, Inc., had a bank-account already amounting to more than
twenty years of Cochrane's best earning-power. He was selling publicity
for sponsors to hang their commercials on, in a strict parallel to
Christopher Columbus' selling of spices to come. But Cochrane was
delivering for cash. Freight-rockets were on the way moonward now, whose
cargoes of supplies for a space-journey Cochrane was accepting only when
a bonus in money was paid for the right to brag about it. So-and-so's
oxygen paid for the privilege of supplying air-reserves.
What's-his-name's dehydrated vegetables were accepted on similar terms,
with whoosit's instant coffee and somebody else's noodle soup in bags.

"If," said Cochrane tiredly, looking up from the statement, "we could
only start off in a fleet instead of a single ship, Babs, we'd not only
be equipped but so rich before we started that we'd want to stay home to
enjoy it!" He yawned prodigiously. "I'm going to get some sleep. Don't
let me sleep too long!"

He went off to his hotel-room and was out cold before his head had
drifted down to its pillow. But he was not pleased with himself. It
annoyed him that his revolt against being an expendable employee had
taken the form of acting like one of his former bosses in collecting
ruthlessly for the brains—in the case of Jones—and the neurotic
idiosyncrasies—in the case of Dabney—of other men. The gesture by
which he had become independent was not quite the splendid, scornful one
he'd have liked. The fact that this sort of gesture worked, and nothing
else would have, did not make him feel better.

But he slept.

He dreamed that he was back at his normal business of producing a
television show. Nobody but himself cared whether the show went on or
not. The actual purpose of all his subordinates seemed to be to cut as
many throats among their fellow-workers as possible—in a business way,
of course—so that by their own survival they might succeed to a better
job and higher pay. This is what is called the fine spirit of teamwork
by which things get done, both in private and public enterprise.

It was a very realistic dream, but it was not restful.

While he slept, the world wagged on and the cosmos continued on its
normal course. The two moons of Earth—one natural and one
artificial—swung in splendid circles about. A psychiatrist should not
be the means of associ-
(Missing text)
that planet's divided rings. The
red spot of Jupiter and the bands on that gas-giant world moved in
orderly fashion about its circumference. Light-centuries away, giant
Cepheid suns expanded monstrously and contracted again, rather more
rapidly than their gravitational fields could account for. Double stars
sedately swung about each other. Comets reached their farthest points
and, mere aggregations of frigid jagged stones and metal, prepared for
another plunge back into light and heat and warmth.

And various prosaic actions took place on Luna.

When Cochrane waked and went back to the hotel-room in use as an office,
he found Babs talking confidentially to a woman—girl, rather—whom
Cochrane vaguely remembered. Then he did a double take. He did remember
her. Three or four years before she'd been the outstanding television
personality of the year. She'd been pretty, but not so pretty that you
didn't realize that she was a person. She was everything that Marilyn
Winters was not—and she'd been number two name in television.

Cochrane said blankly:

"Aren't you Alicia Keith?"

The girl smiled faintly. She wasn't as pretty as she had been. She
looked patient. And an expression of patience, on a woman's face, is
certainly not unpleasant. But it isn't glamorous, either.

"I was," she said. "I married Johnny Simms."

Cochrane looked at Babs.

"They live up here," explained Babs. "I pointed him out at the
swimming-pool the day we got here."

"Wonderful," said Cochrane. "How—"

"Johnny," said Alicia, "has bought into your Spaceways corporation. He
got your man West drunk and bought his shares of Spaceway stock."

Cochrane sat down—not hard, because it was impossible to sit down hard
on the moon. But he sat down as hard as it was possible to sit.

"Why'd he do that?"

"He found out you had hold of the old Mars colony ship. He understands
you're going to take a trip out to the stars. He wants to go along. He's
very much like a little boy. He hates it here."

"Then why live—." Cochrane checked the question, not quite in time.

"He can't go back to Earth," said Alicia calmly. "He's a psychopathic
personality. He's sane and quite bright and rather dear in his way, but
he simply can't remember what is right and wrong. Especially when he
gets excited. When they fixed up Lunar City as an international colony,
by sheer oversight they forgot to arrange for extradition from it. So
Johnny can live here. He can't live anywhere else—not for long."

Cochrane said nothing.

"He wants to go with you," said Alicia pleasantly. "He's thrilled. The
lawyer his family keeps up here to watch over him is thrilled, too. He
wants to go back and visit his family. And as a stockholder, Johnny can
keep you from taking a ship or any other corporate property out of the
jurisdiction of the courts. But he'd rather go with you. Of course I
have to go too."

"It's blackmail," said Cochrane without heat. "A pretty neat job of it,
too. Babs, you see Holden about this. He's a psychiatrist." He turned to
Alicia. "Why do you want to go? I don't know whether it'll be dangerous
or not."

"I married Johnny," said Alicia. Her smile was composed. "I thought it
would be wonderful to be able to trust somebody that nobody else could
trust." After a moment she added: "It would be, if one could."

A few moments later she went away, very pleasantly and very calmly. Her
husband had no sense of right or wrong—not in action, anyhow. She tried
to keep him from doing too much damage by exercising the knowledge she
had of what was fair and what was not. Cochrane grimaced and told Babs
to make a note to talk to Holden. But there were other matters on hand,
too. There were waivers to be signed by everybody who went along off
Luna. Then Cochrane said thoughtfully:

"Alicia Keith would be a good name for film-tape ..."

He plunged into the mess of paper-work and haggling which somebody has
to do before any achievement of consequence can come about. Pioneer
efforts, in particular, require the same sort of clearing-away process
as the settling of a frontier farm. Instead of trees to be chopped
and dug up by the roots, there are the gratuitous obstructionists
who have to be chopped off at the ankles in a business way, and
the people who exercise infinite ingenuity trying to get a cut of
something—anything—somebody else is doing. And of course there are
the publicity-hounds. Since Spaceways was being financed on sales of
publicity which could be turned on this product and that,
publicity-hounds cut into its revenue and capital.

Back on Earth a crackpot inventor had a lawyer busily garnering free
advertisement by press conferences about the injury done his client by
Spaceways, Inc., who had stolen his invention to travel through space
faster than light. Somebody in the Senate made a speech accusing the
Spaceway project of being a political move by the party in power for
some dire ultimate purpose.

Ultimately the crackpot inventor would get on the air and announce
triumphantly that only part of his invention had been stolen, because
he'd been too smart to write it down or tell anybody, and he wouldn't
tell anybody—not even a court—the full details of his invention unless
paid twenty-five million in cash down, and royalties afterward. The
project for a congressional investigation of Spaceways would die in
committee.

But there were other griefs. The useless spaceship hulk had to be
emptied of the mining-tools stored in it. This was done by men working
in space-suits. Occupational rules required them to exert not more than
one-fourth of the effort they would have done if working for themselves.
When the ship was empty, air was released in it, and immediately froze
to air-snow. So radiant heaters had to be installed and powered to warm
up the hull to where an atmosphere could exist in it. Its generators had
to be thawed from the metal-ice stage of brittleness and warmed to where
they could be run without breaking themselves to bits.

But there were good breaks, too. Presently a former
moonship-pilot—grounded to an administrative job on Luna—on his own
free time checked over the ship. Jones arranged it. With rocket-motors
of adamite—the stuff discovered by pure accident in a steel-mill back
on Earth—the propelling apparatus checked out. The fuel-pumps had been
taken over in fullness of design from fire-engine pumps on Earth. They
were all right. The air-regenerating apparatus had been developed from
the aeriating culture-tanks in which antibiotics were grown on Earth. It
needed only reseeding with algae—microscopic plants which when supplied
with ultraviolet light fed avidly on carbon dioxide and yielded oxygen.
The ship was a rather involved combination of essentially simple
devices. It could be put back into such workability as it had once
possessed with practically no trouble.

It was.

Jones moved into it, with masses of apparatus from the laboratory in the
Lunar Apennines. He labored lovingly, fanatically. Like most spectacular
discoveries, the Dabney field was basically simple. It was almost
idiotically uncomplicated. In theory it was a condition of the space
just outside one surface of a sheet of metal. It was like that
conduction-layer on the wires of a cross-country power-cable, when
electricity is transmitted in the form of high-frequency alterations and
travels on the skins of many strands of metal, because high-frequency
current simply does not flow inside of wires, but only on their
surfaces. The Dabney field formed on the surface—or infinitesimally
beyond it—of a metal sheet in which eddy-currents were induced in
such-and-such a varying fashion. That was all there was to it.

So Jones made the exterior forward surface of the abandoned spaceship
into a generator of the Dabney field. It was not only simple, it was too
simple! Having made the bow of the ship into a Dabney field plate, he
immediately arranged that he could, at will, make the rear of the ship
into another Dabney field plate. The two plates, turned on together,
amounted to something that could be contemplated with startled awe, but
Jones planned to start off, at least, in a manner exactly like the
distress-torp test. The job of wiring up for faster-than-light travel,
however, was not much more difficult than wiring a bungalow, when one
knew how it should be done.

Two freight-rockets came in, picked up by radar and guided to landings
by remote control. The Lunar City beam receiver picked up music aimed up
from Earth and duly relayed it to the dust-heaps which were the
buildings of the city. The colonists and moon-tourists became familiar
with forty-two new tunes dealing with prospective travel to the stars.
One work of genius tied in a just-released film-tape drama titled
"
Child of Hate
" to the Lunar operation, and charmed listeners saw and
heard the latest youthful tenor gently plead, "
Child of Hate, Come to
the Stars and Love.
" The publicity department responsible for the
masterpiece considered itself not far from genius, too.