Mission Earth Volume 8: Disaster Read online

  That done, he hung the weights on the bottom of the rod.

  He put a couple safety lines on the rig. He moved his bench and tools into the lock. He checked to make sure that the rig was simply drifting along with us, well off the hull. He closed the outer airlock door and came in.

  He disrobed and hung the suits up and then went aft.

  Hours passed. The cat looked like he was asleep in the pilot chair but all I had to do was twitch and he opened a baleful eye.

  I hit my head with my knuckles. I must think of some way to get out of this. Didn’t I realize I was going to my death?

  The cat snarled.

  PART SIXTY-THREE

  Chapter 5

  Heller came back on the flight deck. He had shaved and bathed and changed his clothes. Aside from the rather gloomy pallor he now wore, he looked rested.

  “Corky,” he said to the tug, “we don’t want that mass to overshoot. Are you braking?”

  “Yes, sir. I have a compression beam on it now and we have been slowing down for the last three hours.”

  “Good,” said Heller. He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket and read some coordinates and speeds to the tug. It was at that moment that I realized with some horror that he was not wearing ordinary fatigue clothes: he was wearing a scarlet coverall the Fleet uses when near radiation.

  “Is this ship alive?” I stammered.

  “No, Corky is just a robot.”

  “Please! You don’t get my meaning. Is the ship alive with radiation?”

  “All this maneuvering will be eight hundred miles above the surface,” he said. “That is within the magnetosphere, what the Earth people call the Van Allen belt. It ends about six hundred miles above Earth. We’re orbiting this two hundred miles higher since there’s never any orbiting traffic there. The space around the outside of the ship just now is pretty hot. That’s why we’re silver and have all the ports closed.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “You must be suspecting leaks or you wouldn’t be in hot coveralls. I’m totally unprotected! Are you trying to sterilize me?”

  “Thanks for calling it to my attention,” said Heller. He picked up the cat and went to the chief mate’s room and when he came back, the cat was wearing a scarlet blanket.

  “You’re absolutely heartless!” I snarled.

  “I didn’t know you cared,” said Heller. But he unchained me from the pipe and took me to one of the engineer’s cabins and let me go to the toilet. He fed me some standard emergency rations, throwing them down on the table like he might have for a dog. It emphasized more than anything else that my life was very much at risk: he might take it into his head any minute to simply cut my throat.

  He gave me a disposable radiation coverall. I put it on even though I suspected he had cut holes in it or rubbed the insulation off.

  He took me back to the flight deck and chained me to the pipes once more. I crouched there, trying to figure some way out of this.

  He began to have conversations with Corky about orbital direction and velocity and, after quite a while, the big Will-be Was main engines went off and the planetary auxiliaries began to drum.

  More conversations with Corky and then suddenly the auxiliaries went off. The silence was eerie.

  Heller clicked every viewscreen live. There was Earth, looking awfully big. We were right above a red-brown area. But the views appeared a little strange, sort of wavy.

  He checked coordinates, and by consulting a map that appeared on one screen, he located Los Angeles and then Las Vegas and then finally Barstow. His finger traveled east to a desert area marked, Devil’s Playground. He turned to another screen and with a pass of his hand enlarged the view directly below. What a desolate desert it was! All rocks and sand. Unlike so many other places, there was no cloud cover here. He passed his hand again and the image jumped larger. A cluster of what seemed to be newly constructed buildings. Directly in the center of the screen was a large black area.

  He then got to work. Reading the screens, he cast the safety lines off the umbrella he had built. Like threading a needle, he passed a tension beam through the cage that was just below the mantle.

  Then he began to work compression beams and tension beams and the whole rig moved around to the back of the ship.

  He pushed it further and further astern, enlarging its image bit by bit.

  Suddenly the whole thing shivered. It made a sudden movement. The concentric, in-pointing bars of the cage all went into place.

  “Got it,” he said with a sigh of relief.

  “Got what?” I said. I couldn’t see anything.

  “Got the black hole in the middle of the cage without losing the whole rig. All right, now let’s see if it also works as a motor.” He picked up a control plate and began to touch buttons on it. Small jets seemed to come from the center out through one or another of the rods.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “Its position can be adjusted.”

  “With what?” I said.

  “There’s an automatic sensor for these coordinates. It’s in the lowest ring of weights. Excess energy from the hole can be poured through the rods and made to move the whole rig very slowly up or down or back and forth. It’s got to stay in position for the next few million years, orbiting right above this spot in the Devil’s Playground.”

  “What is this thing?”

  “A concentrating mirror. Energy from the black hole inside the cage is reflected down, passed through the converter ring and hot-spotted on that pile on the Earth’s surface. The lowest ring of weights uses Earth gravity to keep it upright. There’s a sensor for coordinates in the weight ring that adjusts position.” He watched it for a bit. “Good. We’re through here.”

  He threw a bunch of switches that turned off all beams. “Corky, take us out of this and into normal time, five hundred miles above surface.”

  “You’re going to leave that there?” I said. “Somebody might run into it!”

  “Nobody’s traveling thirteen minutes in the future,” he said. “Not on this planet. They won’t even see it in a telescope. And if any probe blunders into it, didn’t you see the sign on it?” He was pointing at a screen.

  There was a sign! It was all around the mantle. It was in English and it said:

  POWER FOR PEOPLE, INC.

  No Trespassing

  Hands Off

  HIGH VOLTAGE

  We experienced the sudden flash and grind of a shift back into normal space. I always hated it.

  The viewscreens looked more normal. The Pacific Ocean spread vastly below. It seemed, from the shadow west of Hawaii, that it must be morning in Los Angeles.

  Heller was busy with the viewer-phone. Izzy’s face appeared.

  “Oh, thank heavens, Mr. Jet. We were getting so worried. I hope nothing serious caused the delay.”

  “I just ran into something,” said Heller, “but pushed it out of the way. Is the chief engineer of Power for People there?”

  “Dr. Phil A. Mentor is right in the anteroom. He’s been sleeping there! I’m so glad you are all right, Mr. Jet. I will get him at once.”

  Shortly, a Vandyke-bearded man was on the screen. I suddenly recognized him from the Countess Krak’s classes.

  “Is your ferromagnetic pile in place?” said Heller.

  “Yes, Mr. Jet. Exactly according to your design.”

  “It should be hot now,” said Heller.

  Dr. Mentor was reaching for a phone. It evidently was a lease line as he didn’t make any call. An excited voice was coming through the earpiece and spilling into the viewer-phone. “Devil’s Playground Observation Post One.”

  “Is your pile hot?” said Mentor.

  “Jesus Christ, yes, chief. Hot or something. The whole god (bleeped) thing just disappeared right on schedule. Somebody left a truck in there and it vanished, too!”

  “Very good,” said Mentor. “Are the time step-down capacitors functioning?”

  “I’ll check. We got so excited when the pile v
anished—”

  “Check those capacitors,” said Mentor.

  After a moment, the excited voice came back. “Yes, sir. There’s a stream of microwave power pouring out! They’ve got it beamed into the sky at the moment.”

  Mentor looked into the screen. “Anything else you want to know, sir?”

  “No, that’s fine. Let Izzy in there.”

  Izzy moved in front of the screen. “I’m so glad it’s working. Congratulations, Mr. Jet.”

  “Thank you. How are you coming with the contracts?”

  “Well, some of the cities seem rather skeptical but they’ll come through as soon as we have one getting all the microwave power it needs straight into its mains. I think we are quite safe to begin construction of the microwave-mirror relay systems to deliver the power. It won’t suddenly run out, will it?”

  “Not for the next few million years,” said Heller. “You’re all okay on that, then?”

  “Oh, yes. Just business routine. I think ratepayers will be delighted at a penny a kilowatt. I’m assigning industrial rate at a quarter of a cent. There is one problem, though: it’s going to be a problem reinvesting all our profits, as this isn’t costing us anything but installation and maintenance.”

  “I’m sure you’re up to that,” said Heller.

  “Well, yes,” said Izzy. “But there is one more thing. Mr. Rockecenter is not going to be very happy when the oil and coal contracts start getting canceled left and right.”

  “I suppose he won’t,” said Heller. “Now, have you gotten all the options to sell the oil-company stock?”

  “Options to sell in hand,” said Izzy. “I included on my own initiative a lot of national and small oil companies, too. We have options to sell practically every share of oil stock in the world.”

  “Good,” said Heller. “My next project is to make it go down.”

  “Well, it will certainly fall, with this cheap microwave power network.”

  “True. But when I say ‘down,’ I mean down,” said Heller.

  “It averages eighty to a hundred dollars a share right now,” said Izzy. “How ‘down’ do you think ‘down’ should be?”

  “About fifty cents to a dollar,” said Heller.

  “Oy!” said Izzy. “Mr. Rockecenter will be broke broke.”

  “That’s the idea,” said Heller. “Broke plus broke equals bankrupt. So what I want you to do now is obtain an additional set of options to buy all the oil shares in the world at one dollar.”

  “WHAT?”

  “You heard me. Your sell options will go for a fortune. Then, when the bottom is out, your buy options will put you in control of every oil company in the world.”

  “Oy,” said Izzy. “Our dream of corporations running the planet is going to come true! I hope Fate isn’t listening in on this conversation.”

  “We’ll make it come true somehow,” Heller reassured him.

  “Mr. Jet, just selling cheap power to cities won’t drive the stocks that low.”

  “I know it won’t. But this next project will. Anything else, Izzy?”

  “Yes, Mr. Jet. Don’t do anything dangerous. I worry.”

  “Oh, it’s all very calm where I am,” said Heller. “Bye-bye.”

  The viewer-phone went blank.

  My wits were in a hurricane. (Bleep) this Heller! That black-hole microwave-power system would be the end of Octopus! Cheap power for all of Earth? Unthinkable! What ruin it spelled for poor Mr. Rockecenter!

  Suddenly I remembered that the Russians had long ago perfected satellite killers. I began to try to figure out how I could get free and get the Russians to locate and blast that contrivance and black hole he had put in the sky.

  Oh, would THAT solve my problems! I would be the hero of the hour!

  Somehow, some way, I must get myself out of this! The situation was utterly intolerable for Rockecenter, for Hisst, for me. I could rescue everything if I just put my wits to it. But how was I going to do it?

  PART SIXTY-THREE

  Chapter 6

  Heller addressed the tug, “Any sign of that other assassin pilot?”

  “No, sir. I’ve been checking ever since we returned to normal time. But I would advise extreme caution, sir. I have turned us back to total absorption of any and all waves. But I must bring to your attention that if we go speeding about, we will leave a magnetic wake that can be spotted. I severely . . . sincerely . . . severely . . . sincerely—incorrect nuance. Urgently. I urgently counsel that we just lie still.”

  “Override, negative,” said Heller. He got out a book. “Enter these coordinates in your itinerary data bank and then plot a sequential course to them.” And he began to read a long series of exact spacial positions all over Earth: North America, the Caribbean, South America, Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Russia, Central Europe, Europe, Alaska and Canada—it went on and on and on.

  What was he up to now?

  Finally he finished and the tug said, “I have all of them, sir. They are strung now into sequential numbered positions.”

  “Go to Position One,” said Heller.

  “That is Watson, California,” said the tug. “Just below us.”

  “Aim the bow at it,” said Heller. He was lifting the radiation shields off the ports. The tug giddily tipped up. Five hundred miles below, the Los Angeles area was a smudge of yellow smog.

  Heller adjusted his screens. Magnification of the middle one showed that we were pointed straight at an oil refinery!

  “Just hold there,” he told the tug. He reached over to the viewer-phone and buzzed it. The worried face of Izzy came on.

  “Just checking,” said Heller. “Have you got the buy options yet on all the oil shares in the world at one dollar?”

  “Good heavens,” said Izzy. “They think we’re insane—that we’re wasting our option money. But, yes, our brokers are phoning in right now. Please hold.”

  He chattered into another phone. Then he came back to ours. “Yes—they think we’ve lost our minds, but we’ve got them. Mr. Jet, how could it possibly fall to that?”

  “You’ll see,” said Heller. “Bye-bye.”

  He returned to his magnified view of the refinery below. He was checking a floor plan. “Atmospheric pipefill,” he said. He made a couple of tiny adjustments to the position of the ship.

  Then his hands went out toward the firing control of the laser cannon he had lately installed.

  “NO!” I cried in desperation. “Don’t blow up the refineries!”

  His finger pressed the firing button. The gun overhead made a brief whirr.

  I watched in horror. The enlarged picture of a part of a refinery, I thought, would burst into flame.

  I waited.

  It didn’t!

  “Corky, Position Two,” said Heller.

  “That’s Wilmington, California,” said the tug. And we moved.

  Heller did the same thing as before.

  I could see no change below.

  “Position Three,” said Heller.

  “That’s Long Beach, California,” said the tug.

  Heller repeated his actions.

  “Position Four,” said Heller.

  “That’s El Segundo, California,” said the tug.

  Heller went through his same drill.

  “Say, what the hells is going on?” I said. “Aren’t you going to blow anything up?”

  “I wish you’d make up your mind,” said Heller. “Half an hour ago you were telling me I shouldn’t.”

  “Please tell me what you are doing.”

  He glanced at me. “Everything they do in a refinery first passes into what they call the atmospheric pipefill from the crude oil tanks. From the pipefill it goes on through every other process in the place: jet fuel, diesel fuel, virgin naphtha, you name it. All I’m doing is putting a false radiation charge in the metals of the pipefills. It will register like mad on a Geiger counter but it actually doesn’t affect another thing. You’re not going anywhere, so there is no reason n
ot to tell you that Izzy has the device that nulls the wave.”

  He turned away and went back to work, and between him and the tug, they systematically did the same thing to every blessed oil refinery in the whole world.

  It took a day and a half to cover them all.