A Matter of Matter (Stories from the Golden Age) Read online

  “Well, kid,” said Sleepy, “if you go on worrying like that you’ll get ulcers. And when you have ulcers you can’t drink. And when you can’t drink you can’t stand places like Planet Six, and there goes your career. Come over here and get somebody to drill me some holes.”

  They had the tower up, well pinned into the native rock, in about two hours. Sleepy looked admiringly up at this giddy spire into the methane clouds.

  “I guess that’ll do it,” he said. “That reception was getting so darned bad that Mart won five pots today. When they get the other one—”

  Maloney, straw boss of the dirt gangs, interrupted him. “You mean we been puttin’ this thing up just so you could play poker with that crazy Lonegan?”

  Sleepy yawned and smiled. “Well, Maloney, when you get as old as I am—”

  “I’m five times older than you and you know it! Somebody just hooked every fuse we’ve got. Unless you can invent one, we ain’t got a single detonator in camp. Who the devil is doin’ this? By golly, if I get my mitts—”

  “Now, now,” said Sleepy. “We’ll invent something. It’d be two months before we could get a new order of anything up here.”

  “Two months!” cried Doyle, who had toiled perspiringly toward them over the rubble which had been a mountain range. “Two months! I’ll have colonists here in thirty days! McGee, I insist we line up these men and interrogate them one by one. There’s somebody in this camp who doesn’t want this planet completed!”

  “You interrogate one by one,” said Sleepy, “and they’ll quit two by two. These men are loyal. You’ll have to find something else. Maybe a methane-metabolism goon or a lost race. You let me do the worrying, Doyle.”

  “But you aren’t worrying!” cried Doyle. “I have to think of my company’s reputation. Do you have any idea how much money is being tied up here?”

  “Well,” said Sleepy, considering, “if you figure this planet at a billion arable acres and the acres at two dollars apiece, I got some idea.”

  “But they’re not arable yet!” cried Doyle.

  And he swept a despairing hand across the twilight vista. Truly, it was an ugly sight. In the shrinkings and contortings of a new-made world, vast escarpments had been heaved up. In the bluish, ghastly light, the raw, soilless, plantless valleys and mountains were nightmare stuff.

  “You’ll never finish!” cried Doyle.

  Sleepy shrugged. He turned around and went back into the construction shack and threw his helmet down.

  Tommer went into the communications dome and sent a long, telltale message to Planetary Engineering Construction Co., Inc. Doyle, shortly afterward, poured a flood of grief into the ether on his own.

  At eight-seventeen there was a loud flash and men poured from their quarters to find that the cable shed was a shambles with not one foot of their remaining cable in usable condition. They poked in the ruins and went to report to Sleepy. But he was snoring in his bunk and Barteber would not let him be disturbed.

  In the morning, Sleepy McGee shoveled in twenty hot cakes, washed them down with a quart of milk, chased it with a brandy and was ready to face the day.

  He found Maloney and Tommer sitting disconsolate on a pile of demolished scenery and pulled them into his wake. He found half a dozen welders and drew them some drawings on a piece of sheet metal and sent them on their business.

  “I heard footsteps walking around last night,” said Doyle, coming up.

  “Footsteps most always do,” said Sleepy.

  “Are you trying to be nasty?”

  Doyle, for all his fat, was a big man. Sleepy looked him over.

  “Now that I come to think of it, yes,” Sleepy answered finally. “We’ve been having a lot of hard luck on this job. Some rival of yours, or ours, has slowed us down to a walk. You haven’t made things any easier.”

  “I don’t sit around all day and play poker and drink liquor!” Doyle snapped.

  “I’m not dumb and I don’t have dirty fingernails,” said Sleepy.

  “Are you being insulting?”

  “I never mix words,” said Sleepy. “I am being insulting. In a brief four-letter word—”

  Doyle struck at him. It is very difficult to work or fight in a methane-ammonia suit, but the blow staggered Sleepy. He went down on one knee and stayed there, with the eye of every construction man upon him. Languidly he got to his feet.

  Suddenly he grabbed Doyle, avoided a second blow, and pitched the Colonial man about ten feet. Doyle hit, and he started to get up, but Sleepy’s boot sent him down again. Doyle tried to rise a second time. Sleepy let him get all the way to his feet and then, with a short one to the midriff, knocked him gasping.

  “I’ll get you for this!” Doyle wheezed. “I’ll report you!”

  “Not on my visograph!”

  “I’ll . . . I’ll return to your company! This will cost you millions, do you hear?”

  And Doyle got up and ran to the Colonial Enterprises ship in the valley. Sleepy watched him go, watched the ship take off, watched the weird glow of the wake after it was gone.

  “He’ll make a lot of trouble,” said Tommer.

  “Kid, I was born out of Calamity by Trouble. Any engineer is. Maloney, put a strong seal on Mr. Doyle’s hut and don’t let anybody disturb it. We wouldn’t want to be accused of stealing his clothes.”

  “He’ll be back here in a month,” said Tommer. “That ship isn’t any freighter. And he may bring in the Space Police for assault.” He looked at Sleepy. Brawling—it was uncouth, ungentlemanly.

  “Be that as he will,” said Sleepy. “Let’s go to work.”

  The mystified welders were putting hulls under the huts and it took them a long time to understand that Sleepy wasn’t entirely crazy. Every now and then one of them would come into the construction shack, see Sleepy playing poker, open his mouth to speak, remember Doyle and back out.

  They passed two nights of double-shift construction, with guards posted against sabotage, and then Sleepy condescended to come out and inspect what Tommer had been overseeing.

  Twelve huts were all on sledges, as though to be dragged away. The men, glad that the work was done, dragged themselves into their bunks and slept. Sleepy sent for the atomic electrician, a driller and a shooter.

  They put a few tools into a thousand-mile-an-hour ground-scanner and disappeared in a cloud of country rock, leaving a worried Tommer to sit and twiddle his thumbs and wait for the message he thought would come from Planetary, relieving Sleepy.

  For five days Sleepy and the three men were “whereabouts unknown,” and then they returned, tired, hungry and dirty, parked the scanner and turned in.

  The following morning Sleepy got up around about eleven, yawning and stretching and making jokes with Barteber. Tommer was all disapproval.

  “Where did you go?” said Tommer.

  “Had to block in the oceans and rivers, didn’t we?” said Sleepy, with a wink at Barteber. “Have a drink, kid?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Well, there’s no harm in that, but I always say that a good engineer is a lot better a quart later. Why, you ought to hear some of the things I’ve planned when I had two quarts! One time I figured out a scheme to build a bridge from Mars to Jupiter and I would have done it too, only the sun kept getting in the way. You see, it would have radized the metal and nobody could have crossed.

  “And then there was the asteroid assembly project,” he continued. “I did that on a bottle and a half. You ball up all the asteroids of some busted planet and they catch fission and you’ve got a sun close to cold planets which revolve around the original sun and lights the—”

  “I’m sure it is impractical,” said Tommer.

  “Mister Kaltenborn, if Mister Sleepy says it will work,” said Barteber, “it will work. I seen him take—”

  But Tommer had left in disgust.

  About one o’clock, Sleepy called the men together and made them take loose tools and equipment into the twelve sledged huts. T
hen he ordered the men themselves into the huts. At three, he and the atomic electrician took a lonely stand on the “deck” of the construction hut.

  Sleepy pulled out a bottle. “Here’s how.”

  “How,” said the electrician with a grin.

  Sleepy put his boot on a plunger and pressed.

  Suddenly the upper atmosphere of Planet Six began to glow in pulsing sheets. The glow spread and brightened until it blotted the daylight. A beating concussion was faintly felt on the ground and Sleepy braced himself against the outer wall. He gravely presented the bottle again.

  Suddenly the upper atmosphere of Planet Six began to glow in pulsing sheets.

  “Here’s how,” he said.

  The electrician grinned. “How,” he said.

  They wiped their mouths by scrubbing them into their fur collars. The electrician shoved down on the second plunger.

  There was a growing roar and the ground began to shake harder and harder until the mountains reeled and danced under the pounding of the upper flashes.

  Suddenly the rain came. It was torrential. A man without a helmet would have drowned in a moment. The great drops battered at the rocks and rebounded until the entire surface everywhere was a racing glaze of water, water which mirrored the upper flashes. In a few minutes the valley where the cats had worked so long was so full that all was covered from sight. In half an hour the sledges themselves had become boats and were floating.

  The water was shocked and beaten by the repeated earthquakes, and the ranges of mountains, invisible through the downpour, suddenly displayed themselves by their gigantic flashes. They were exploding into volcanoes.

  The twenty-thousand-foot tower, anchored by force rays, shook under the onslaught, bending and quivering but standing just the same.

  Sleepy pushed the bottle inside his helmet trap, said “Here’s how,” and drank once more, handing it to the electrician.

  “How!”

  And the third plunger went down.

  It was time to duck. The sledges were bobbing already. Shortly something else would hit them. Wind. The blow began to scream in earnest about seven, and it kept up ceaselessly for the next three days.

  The sledges were protected by the volcanoes to some extent, but they were battered, nevertheless, by a hundred-mile-an-hour storm. What the speed of wind must have been five miles up, no one could calculate. What batterings the hills and mountains took was not subject to mere computation.

  Like a million banshees cut loose all at the same time, the hurricane roared on and on. Now and again mountains belched. Again and again new chain reactions went off in the upper atmosphere. And the water rose and rose and the waves surged and beat.

  Sleepy played no poker. The visograph was out of operation for the moment. He lay in his bunk and read an erudite treatise called “Shady Ladies” and sipped his whiskey thoughtfully. Whatever Tommer might be thinking about all this was no concern of one Sleepy McGee.

  About nine o’clock the morning of the tenth day, Barteber shoved a cup of hot coffee into Sleepy’s sleeping hand and said, “The rain’s stopped.”

  That woke Sleepy. He went to the leaded glass port where somebody had written the names and addresses of a half a dozen faraway girls and wiped off the chalk smears. Indeed, the rain had stopped. But the hurricane wind continued.

  Sleepy drank his coffee and let the gale blow itself out. At three that afternoon the waters were calm and settling and he stood on the deck of his sledge and waved to men coming out on theirs. All twelve had weathered the elements, being undentable and self-contained, but two had dragged their moorings and were about a mile farther on.

  Lifting his helmet gingerly, Sleepy took a sniff at the air. It was good and he removed his helmet. Jetabo’s bluish haze was not so blue now, being filtered through a mist, and the aspect of this planet was something to gratify Sleepy’s heart.

  The water was draining away in huge rivers. The wind, having eroded mightily against every protrusion, had provided enough silt to color the streams brown. There would be bottom land and soil.

  The following morning, Sleepy went off in a scout ship they had dredged up and took a look at the planet. He flew at ninety thousand feet, with tracers taking down all necessary data of coastlines, prominent rivers and mountains.

  The geology had changed enormously, due to some thirty pounds of plutonium, a crude explosive, injected into this planet’s core. The rarefied atmosphere had broken down the component parts of methane and ammonia into something which could be breathed everywhere on the planet. There were enough seas to provide air saturation and guarantee rainfall, and enough deposits of eroded soil to make crops possible.

  When he returned just after dark, he had a map of the planet as it now existed and he could send, by latitude and longitude, four other planes to scatter tons of various seeds.

  When he had sent them he found Tommer recovering from a bad case of seasickness. Tommer was sitting by the galley stove being consoled by Barteber and trying to get warm.

  Sleepy was about to add his condolences when a sputter of jets told of a landing spacecraft and visitors.

  Doyle was in complete helmet and ammonia suit, as were the rest, and they were astonished to find a window open. Nervously, Doyle made a motion to close it, saw that Sleepy, Barteber and Tommer wore no helmets and gingerly removed his own.

  “I got action,” said Doyle. “I brought your vice-president in charge of construction and he has seen fit—”

  “Hello, Bainsly,” said Sleepy.

  “Hello, Sleepy. What’s up?”

  “You’re in time to inspect,” said Sleepy. “But have a drink.” He poured several tumblers full. “She’s got a proper atmosphere, with plenty of water in the right places. She’s got soil and the boys are out scattering seeds to hold it where it is, and I guess that is about that. We’re nine days ahead of deadline so that’s a nine million bonus.”

  Doyle didn’t drink. “That’s impossible! When I left here twenty-one days ago, nothing had been done. You worked for four months—”

  “You mean we studied potentials for four months,” said Sleepy.

  “You could have done this in half the time!” Doyle raged. “I demand to know why you fooled around with those cats!”

  “Come,” said Sleepy, and moved his languid length out to the deck.

  He took the others over to the hut which had been sealed on Doyle’s departure and had the seal struck off.

  “Witnesses will state that this has not been opened since you last entered it, Doyle. . . . Come in, gentlemen.”

  Sleepy then began to tear up the flooring with a crowbar and shortly there were revealed cat-track pins, detonators and all manner of necessary small equipment.

  “The cats were bait, Doyle,” said Sleepy. “Bainsly here can tell you all about such things. You wanted to slow us down and you thought you did. You would have gotten an entire planet remake for nothing, and transportation for your colonists as well, if this sabotage had succeeded. But you didn’t kill any men, and so I don’t think my company will make a charge. You’ll have to talk it over with Bainsly, of course, but unless you’ve got nine million cash here and now, Planetary Engineering Construction Co., Inc., will be putting up one planet for auction. And that’s profitable enough, Doyle.”

  The inspection party had left early in the afternoon, taking the hope of Colonial Enterprises with them. Barteber was getting dinner and singing about a “gal who wouldn’t say her prayers,” and Tommer sat listening to the sad, sad fate of that creature.

  Tommer’s gaze shifted to the visograph and the stud poker game with Mart Lonegan.

  Mart was winning today and his debt was down to eighteen thousand dollars.

  “Mr. McGee,” Tommer said at last, “do you think it would take me very long to learn stud poker?”

  “Why no, Tommer. Not at all. In fact, I’d be willing to teach you myself.”

  The Obsolete Weapon

  The Obsolete Weapon

/>   RATS squeaked, vermin scuttled, drunks stank and the noisome dark oppressed. The American Military Prison in Rome was exceedingly unkind to the senses.

  Now that the Tedeschi had fled northward, American arms sought to integrate a conquest and a people.

  In the dankest, foulest cell that G-2 could provide, a brace of allegedly choice criminals kept diffident company.

  “Anguis in herba!” howled one from the caldron of his troubled slumber. This, and the other Latin gibberish he had screamed, did not soothe his companion, who now finally protested.

  Danny West was some minutes pulling himself from the muddy maelstrom of his nightmares, but at last he scrubbed his eyes with horny knuckles and blinked nervously at his companion.

  “You were dreaming,” said his cellmate.

  “If that was a dream,” said Danny West, “then this cell is Allah’s number one Paradise!”

  “You’re an American, aren’t you?” queried his cellmate with polite interest.

  “Sure, from Teague County, Texas!”

  “Then why the Latin?”

  Danny West scuttled backward two feet and watched from there, gaping suspiciously.

  “What Latin?” he said.

  “You just called somebody ‘a snake in the grass.’”

  Danny hedged. “Well, he was . . . well . . . er— Forget it!”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said his cellmate. “You’ve got me curious, that’s all. What are you, an American soldier, doing with a mouth full of Latin?”

  “I was associate professor of ancient languages before they snatched me into this cockeyed mess,” said Danny West. He was plainly hoping to change the subject. “Lay it to aqua vitae.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say so. From what I could pick up—”

  Danny West looked dangerous.

  “Shut up!” he said. “Shut up! Leave me alone!”

  There was quiet then, the cellmate having retired offendedly to the farthest corner, where he sat brooding for more than half an hour.