Inside Man and Other Science Fiction Stories Part 2

"I see, but can you do it?" she asked worriedly.

"Diversion does the trick. If I receive, I just make sure I receive something else. The Prof suggested trying people. So I did, down at the tavern."

"How did you make out?"

"Noisy d.a.m.ned place," he said. "And full of alcoholic thoughts. But I concentrated and it blanked out the screeching fan and the pump in the cellar that needs cleaning so badly."

"People's thoughts," said Thalia uneasily. "I don't know if I like that. I know I wouldn't feel comfortable around you."

He plumped up the pillow, accidentally dropped it on the floor, tried to decide whether to pick it up, realized he would fall on top of it.

"Doesn't work that way at all, sweetheart. It's" He hunted for an a.n.a.logy. "It comes out like machinery.""Like what?" she exclaimed.

"Here, maybe I can show you." He stood beside the bed and gazed down searchingly at her.

"Mm humm. Your radiator is boiling over."

"What a crude way to put it!"

He continued standing there, his gaze gone remote and unseeing.

"Well?" Thalia asked irritably. "How's your radiator?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out," he replied in a distant voice.

"And?"

"It's percolating a little," he answered.

She threw the covers aside. "Come on, get in," she said. "It's better than nothing."

PERSONNEL PROBLEM.

Dowd caught hold of a stanchion and braced himself it was easier to be forceful when you didn't float off the ground with every word.

He said persuasively: "You can still change your mind, Eggleston.

"Where are you going to get another job like this? Look, you've been getting ten shares how about if we make it twelve? The, committee will go along. That's eighty thousand dollars a year, man!"

"No," said Eggleston.

"Be reasonable! Ceres isn't as bad as all that as asteroids go it's in a cla.s.s by itself.

Maybe we're a little cramped, but we're still getting organized why, next year we'll have it fixed up so you can I get annual leave on Earth and"

"No!" said Eggleston, even more positively than before.

Dowd blew through his nostrils, once, hard, a snort of anger and exasperation. Being general manager of the miners' co-op that had the Ceres franchise was an unrelieved headache. Here he was promising this nincomp.o.o.p Eggleston twelve shares he himself had only three, and an able-bodied vacuum-miner, risking his life and his health every day, got only one. And all because Eggleston had an engineering degree!

"It isn't the money," Eggleston said. "You know what it is."

"No" said Dowd grimly. "I don't. No."

Eggleston looked longingly at the open port of the s.h.i.+p. He hesitated and set down his bag eight hundred and fifty pounds of personal belongings and equipment. Itwould weigh that much on Earth; here it was only a feather-light balloon.

He said tiredly: "I've told you dozens of times. I don't see why I'm bothering to tell you again. You didn't understand it before and you won't understand it now."

"Try me!" said Dowd. "Maybe I'll finally get it!"

"All right. There's no work for me here, Dowd. And who wants to live inside a chunk of rock?"

"Two thousand of us do!"

"Then do it!" snapped Eggleston. "Not me! I'm tired of never, seeing the sun except through filters, after I put on a s.p.a.cesuit, I'm tired of breathing last year's, air.

I'm tired of living with two thousand miners and their squalling brats, all cooped up in an oversized mine shaft. And when it comes right down to it, Dowd, I'm tired of you! That's why I'm leaving right now, at fourteen twenty-two hours on June third, mean solar time and you can take your twelve shares and"

"Okay, okay," Dowd broke in.

"So long."

He slipped his shoes back into the magnetic galoshes that held him to the floor and clumped, teetering, away.

Behind him, he heard the shrill mechanical whine of the lock motors, sealing off the chamber where the rocket s.h.i.+p lay, and then the pumps that sucked the air out of the giant lock. When the lock was empty, the outer panels whined open, the noise coming shrilly through the rock; there was a sharp, shattering jar as the rockets started then silences.

Dowd didn't even look around. It wasn't very interesting any more. Eggleston wasn't the first engineer to depart in a huff. He was the seventeenth and the whole process was becoming unpleasantly familiar.

Dowd took the elevator down and reported failure to the rest of the managing committee. They accepted the news without comment; they were getting used to it too.

Manson, the gray-haired supply manager, was the nearest to cheerful of the lot it wasn't his problem. Except that of course, production was everybody's problem; if there wasn't enough production, there wasn't enough pay. Still, he was able to say: "Well, that's that. What do we do now?"

Dowd said glumly: "Call a general meeting. We'll have to put it up to the whole members.h.i.+p."

Traffic Manager Pickett scowled. "Put what up? We haven't got an engineer and we're not likely to get one. What's to discuss?"Dowd shrugged, wis.h.i.+ng he had the guts to call the s.h.i.+p back and join Eggleston in leaving this place. "The only thing we can do, as I see it, is try to get along without an engineer for a while. But that's a matter of Policy!"

Manson nodded. Policy required a general meeting; everybody knew that. He reached over, picked up the P.A. microphone, flipped it on and spoke into it: "Attention, everyone. Attention, everyone. General meeting in the Common at" he glanced at his watch "fifteen hundred hours exactly."

The committee was down at the mouth, but the miners didn't seem perturbed. It was a kind of holiday for them. There wasn't much doing inside the 488 mile diameter of Ceres, and even a general meeting, that invariable precursor of trouble, was better than nothing.

The miners and their families came up out of the rock-built "houses" really cubicles. Really, said the more disgruntled inhabitants, caves. They were laid out in geometrically straight streets in the great, high-ceilinged chamber under the surface of the asteroid. They were not notably pretty or comfortable, but they would do.

Enormous sun lamps hung, violet-glowing, on spindly cables from the ceiling; giant street ventilators sucked out the old air and pumped in well, the same air, but dried, cooled, de-carboned and re-oxidated.

It sounded like the noise of wind in trees or, anyway, that's what Dowd was in the habit of saying in his wheedling letters to prospective members of the co-op.

Actually, what it sounded like was ventilators.

As general manager, Dowd led the committee toward the Common at the center of town. It was the community's showplace synthetic gra.s.s, imitation trees, even a small pool that used to have the unpleasant habit of creeping up over its margins and drenching everything around. This was due to a combination of the high surface-tension of water and the low gravity in the interior of and the only thing that could be done about it was to roof the thing over with gla.s.s, which more or less spoiled the effect. From a distance, though, it didn't look bad, particularly when you observed the surrounding shops, the theater, the restaurant.

Dowd couldn't see any gra.s.s at all this time, not even the gla.s.sed-over pool. Every square foot of the Common was covered with people. Dowd climbed to the bandstand once there really had been a band there, and dancing on the green; but that hadn't worked too well either, because the low gravity made even the best dancers p.r.o.ne to fall all over their partners.

He picked up the loud-hailer and addressed the crowd. In a few brief words, he told the miners what they already knew, and outlined the problem they had already faced: "We don't have an engineer. We aren't likely to get one. We have to try to get along without one; and that's the size of it. Now," Dowd went on, "I'll entertain a motion that we proceed on our own power."

He got his motion and it was pa.s.sed unanimously if you could call it that. At least,there weren't any 'nay' votes, but there were also only a scattering of 'ayes' and if the expressions on the faces of the two thousand miners and their families had been ballots, the whole Ceres Mining Co-operative would have faced a veto that afternoon.

The committee went back to its work. The miners returned to their homes. The whole community kept its fingers crossed, fearing the worst.

And, two days later, an oversize blast went off and one-nineteenth of the asteroid of Ceres was blown away into s.p.a.ce.

First concern was casualties. Dowd raced into a pressure suit and headed a party that grappled and clung its way around the mottled rock surface of the asteroid to where the accident had occurred. They found the miners sheepish enough, pinioned under what, on Earth, would have been tons of rock, some of them; but unhurt.

The second concern was the airtightness of the living quarters and that, thank heaven, thought Dowd, was still all right The blast had occurred seventy miles from the town-cavern.

The third concern was the Solar System Conservation Society.

Dowd returned to the main operations area and boarded a scout rocket with Manson and Simon Brodsky, the accountant. They jetted a few miles out into s.p.a.ce, arrested their relative motion and took a good long look.

Asteroid Ceres looked like a cake with a big chunk hacked out of it.

"Oh, my G.o.d," groaned Brodsky. "Now we're in for it."

Dowd said shortly: "I know."

Manson said: "What happened? Did you find out?"

Dowd shrugged. "They had the charge all figured, and then they got worried it wasn't enough, so they added more. They were so busy arguing, they tied in with the stored explosive and the whole business went up. Lucky they weren't all killed maybe all of the rest of us, too!"

"You can say lucky if you want to," Brodsky complained. "I'm not so sure. This is going to cost us our franchise, you know!"

Manson said: "You mean the Solar System Conservationists?"

"What else? Our contract said we couldn't do anything that would affect the external appearance or the orbit of Ceres. Believe me, this does both. Look at it!"

They looked, in an atmosphere of gloom. "Curse them," Dowd said angrily. "It's a b.l.o.o.d.y big slice, all right."It was. The raw cut was as deep and wide as a sea, and the undiffused sunlight cast a s.p.a.ce-black shadow that made it seem even deeper and more naked among the jagged asteroidal peaks.

"There's no doubt about it," Dowd added. "Palomar will spot that next time they look this way, if a liner from one of the outer planets doesn't beat them to it!"

"Wait a minute," said Brodsky, thoughtfully. "There aren't any liners this time of year none of the big planets are in opposition."

"Well?"

"And Palomar isn't going to bother with us till it has to. Listen," Brodsky went on, growing excited, "what if we get that piece and stick it back?"

Dowd stared. "Do what?"

"You heard me," Brodsky insisted. "Why not?"

Dowd looked at him in astonishment. He began to laugh until he realized that Brodsky was serious, and then he got annoyed. "That's crazy. We're miners, Brodsky. We dig out; we don't put back."

Manson interrupted: "No, listen to him. Why shouldn't we?"

Dowd rubbed his square jaw, squinting down at the asteroid. "Well I don't know, maybe it's an idea. Certainly we couldn't be any worse off"

"Let's try it," Brodsky urged eagerly. "What can we lose?" It was a very good question and they all knew the answer.

"All by ourselves," Dowd mused. "No engineer to tell us what to do; no experience in this sort of thing. Well, you're right, Brodsky. We don't have any choice, do we?"

What had happened to Ceres was this: A wedge of rock had flown off into s.p.a.ce, like an axehead hurled off the handle; it was getting farther away every second, and it had picked up a fair amount of spin. Moreover, the remaining eighteen-nineteenths of Ceres had acquired, by natural law, an equal and opposite thrust, seriously disturbing its own orbit.

The ore freighter department head checked in. "Yeah, we've got the s.h.i.+ps," he said.

"We've got eight that we can use for towing, which is enough. We can kill the spin, sure. Don't worry about that. We'll get the chunk back to Ceres, right over the cavity. Then it's up to the ground crews to take over. Of course," he added, "we'll need an engineer to check our acceleration and bearings and all that, you know. Say, when is the new engineer going to"

"Thanks," Dowd said bitterly. "Thanks a lot. Just stand by. I'll let you know."

The loading section foreman was less confident, but he grudgingly agreed that theproblem of getting the chunk back down in place wasn't impossible. He dragged Dowd to his drafting office and showed him the plans his section had made. They all gathered around his desk, arguing over a diagram.

"See," the foreman said, "I guess we could winch it down, like. From the bottom and sides, you understand? It might mean losing a few winches underneath, but I guess it's cheaper than losing the franchise."

"Hold on," Dowd said sharply. "You guess you can winch it down? It might mean losing a couple of winches?"

"Well, what do you expect me to say?' the foreman demanded righteously. "I'm no engineer."

"d.a.m.n it," exploded Dowd, "You've been doing this kind of work for twenty years!

All Eggleston would have done is check over your own diagram. Why can't you do that?"

The foreman said stubbornly: "Stress factors, things like that what do I know about them, Dowd? It looks all right, but how can I say for sure?"

Dowd pulled his lips over his teeth and sought out the head blaster.

The blaster pointed out: "I ain't an engineer, but the way it looks to me, we can fuse the wedge in place once the loading section gets it down. Same as we did when we put in the cargo lock for the rockets, remember?"

Dowd asked: "And do you think fusing it would hold it in place permanently, allowing for orbital spin and gravitational attraction?"

The blaster spread his hands. "How do I know? Now if I were an engineer"

"That's what I thought" said Dowd. "I'll let you know."

Dowd called the Managing Committee meeting to order in the board room. He locked the door and started the tape recorder; for several minutes, it recorded only his profane remarks about lack of guts and self-confidence.

"Hold it, Dowd," Manson said at last. "We've most of us dug all our lives all but Brodsky. That's why he doesn't know the problems in a job like this. There are all kinds of tricky things involved."

"Like what?" Dowd savagely wanted to know.