Operation: Outer Space Part 10

"You can tell Jones, Babs," he said, "that all the high financing's done. He can spend money. And you can transmit my resignation to Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. And since this is a pretty risky operation, you'd better send a service message asking what you're to do with yourself. They'll probably tell you to take the next rocket back and report to the secretarial pool, I'm afraid. The same fate probably awaits West and Jamison and Bell."

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 s.p.a.ce 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.

s.p.a.ceways, 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 s.p.a.ce-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 s.h.i.+p, 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. n.o.body 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 a.s.soci-[Missing text] that planet's divided rings. The red spot of Jupiter and the bands on that gas-giant world moved in orderly fas.h.i.+on about its circ.u.mference. 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 s.p.a.ceways corporation. He got your man West drunk and bought his shares of s.p.a.ceway 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ceways 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt by press conferences about the injury done his client by s.p.a.ceways, Inc., who had stolen his invention to travel through s.p.a.ce faster than light. Somebody in the Senate made a speech accusing the s.p.a.ceway 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 s.p.a.ceways would die in committee.