At near-light-speed, the trip to the nearest star still takes a little over four and a quarter years. Spieler’s drone ships took over eight years to deliver their first load. Now, ships appeared monthly and probably would continue appearing for the next fifteen years. The Merryweather Big Gate, designed to reach across the light-years and rip out a hunk of planet fifteen kilometers in diameter, would cut the trip in half. It would cut the expense by a factor of ten. Once the ore arrived, it could be mined in orbit, undercutting Spieler’s price and destroying his capital investment in drone ships.
Norton had taken the proposition one step further. Once something in the transmitter accelerated, he drained it of energy, converting the entire mass into tachyon particles. Tachyons, existing only at superlight-speeds, lose mass, as their speed increases. At the end of the journey (or the beginning, depending on your viewpoint; both the beginning and the end are actually the same event, observed from a different space-time position) the process is reversed. Energy is added to the tachyon particles, slowing them to light-speed and near-infinite-mass, then integration into sub-light-matter slows them to below-light-speed. Eventually, at something like rest, they pop out of the Gate’s field:
“I hope you realize the implications, sir.”
He smiled, tolerant. “Norton and I discussed them several times. It is my prime reason for continuing. I think the capital outlay is justified by the possibility of almost instantaneous travel to the stars, don’t you?”
Hearing the idea vocalized for the first time, and believing it, stunned me. Each pinpoint of light I had seen from the control room of the Merryweather Enterprize would be as near as Corona Del Mar.
“There’s only one problem, Mr. Collins.”
“What’s that?”
“According to what Smith said, Spieler got wind of it before Norton’s death. I intentionally had Norton omit any reference to it in his reports. You don’t have any lead on that, do you?”
I remembered Parry saying he and Norton had eaten lunch at the Vier Jahreszeiten often.
“One.”
“Good. Look into it. I have a meeting with our Soviet affiliate in Kharkov this evening.” He paused. “Or will it be morning there? Keep at it, Mr. Collins. If Smith calls here, I’ll have the call referred to you.”
He hung up.
Look into it. Keep at it. How was I supposed to look into or keep at anything? I only knew three things about Parry. He worked, indirectly, for Spieler. He was either an industrial spy or a diligent salesman. He liked German food. Why would Norton, aware of the need for secrecy, talk to him about the super-light-phase of the Big Gate project? He wouldn’t. I scratched my head. Would he?
The phone hummed.
“Collins,” I said.
It was Pamela at the Merryweather Building. “There’s a Mr. Tuttle here. He insists on talking to someone in authority.”
“Tuttle?”
“He says it’s about Scarlyn—I mean, Mr. Smith.”
Tuttle … H. Winton Tuttle … Harold. “Tell him I’m gone. Give him to Mr. Duff.”
“Mr. Duff is gone.”
I considered passing Harold on to Mr. Merryweather, then changed my mind. Mr. Merryweather had enough problems.
“Put him on.”
Harold came on the screen, his face florid and hair windblown. “Listen, Collins, I warned you!”
“You did?”
“I forbade you to employ my father-in-law. I want you down here this instant to talk about it!”
“You do.”
“I will wait”—he gestured at something off camera—“by the elevator!” He hung up.
He would have a long wait. I began collecting the things I wanted to take home: document viewer, containing the critical portions of Norton’s program; my notes from the afternoon with Webber; a small—the phone hummed.
“So!” accused Harold, furious “You’re not here!”
“Right.”
“If you think you can avoid me with this … this … ruse, you are sadly mistaken!”
“How can I avoid you?”
“You can’t!”
“I’m a little tired of this, Tuttle. Can you get to the point?”
“The point is my father-in-law. He came by our house this afternoon to get some of his things!”
“I don’t see—”
“No! You wouldn’t! He was bleeding, Collins, bleeding!”
Suddenly, Harold had my attention. “Seriously?”
“I’m quite serious.”
“I mean, was he bleeding seriously?”
“It was only a small cut over his eye, but he limped! He tried to conceal it, but I saw it! He definitely limped!”
“What happened?”
“He wouldn’t say. He was—how shall I put it—difficult to handle. I was afraid, frankly, that he might get physical.”
“He didn’t?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Where did he go?”
“That’s what I want to know. You have to talk some sense into him. Do you know what he took with him?”
“No.”
“A gun! I didn’t even know there was one in the house! I forbid his getting involved in this!”
“It doesn’t sound as if you have too much to say in the matter, Mr. Tuttle.”
“Perhaps this will convince you. I followed him outside. I tried to reason with him. The man is impossible. I told him to look at himself. A seventy-five-year-old man, running around like some fool in his twenties. Really, Mr. Collins! I admit he seems to be in good shape, but no one seventy-five is in good shape”—he tapped his chest—“inside. I don’t care what the doctors say. I told him that. I told him he should come back and let us take care of him. It just made him angrier! He’s crazy, Collins! Demented, senile, and crazy! I told him just that! I told him he should act his age, be like the other old gentlemen in the neighborhood, enjoy his sunset years!”
“What did he say?”
“He laughed and called me a pipsqueak.”
I laughed.
“This is not a joke, Collins.”
“Did he say anything else? Where he was going?”
“No. He just checked that horrible revolver, got in his car and left. He almost ran over me pulling out! That’s when I saw the rear window of the car. There was a bullethole in it! A bullethole, Collins! I intend, at the first opportunity, to take legal action. Commitment, if necessary!”
“You missed your chance.”
I hung up.
When the phone hummed again, I let it hum. I collected my things and started for the station Gate. As I passed the control room, Captain Wilkins called my name. I went in.
The night crew, two men, monitored the equipment. Captain Wilkins looked worried.
“What is it, Captain?”
He pointed at a radar screen. “Look at this.”
I looked. The random pattern of blips was meaningless.
“That,” he said, pointing at a blip near the center of the screen, “is the transmitter focusing ring. The smaller blips are constructors and our equipment.”
“What are those other two blips?”
“Spacecraft.”
“Government?”
“Private.”
“Whose are they?”
“It’s impossible to say. They’re unmarked. They’ve taken up orbits matching ours. We tried hailing, but got no answer.”
“Are they drone ships?”
“No. Too small and drones automatically set off beacons after their second shift. These ships don’t have beacons.”
“What do you think they want?”
“Who knows?”
“Thank you, Captain. Inform me immediately of any change.”
I suited up and returned to the surface. On the way home, standing in the packed mono rail car, I reviewed Norton’s program, holding the strap with one hand and the document viewer with the other. Jenson, starting with nothing, had created the matter transmitter. Norton, starting with
Jenson’s Gate, had opened the stars to man.
The implications staggered my imagination. Norton could have opened either a treasure chest or a Pandora’s box. I remembered staying awake nights in college, debating the moral issues of technology with my roommate, a social science major. He would pose some hypothetical discovery—dynamite, atomic fusion, genetic manipulation, Jenson Displacement, anything—pointing out its potential for evil. Each could be used to kill and enslave. He expected me to take the opposite side. Each could also save lives and liberate. I never did. Whatever man discovers or invents can be perverted. Split table salt, and you get sodium and chlorine, poisons. The question is how technology is used; not what it is. How to use a discovery is a political question for those in power, not us worker ants.
Yet, Norton’s addition to technology was potentially devastating to human society. Did the scale of its possible impact become a moral question in itself? If the English longbows at the Battle of Agincourt enabled them to pierce French armor, so what? True, it was a technological advantage. But a small corner of medieval Europe, where a battle was won or lost because of technology, remained a small corner of medieval Europe. Norton’s technology could enslave a galaxy. Was it still a question of how the Gate was used? Or was the Gate itself now at the center of the moral storm?
Getting off the monorail, walking down the escalator to the street, it hit me. I had to know the answer to my question. If the Big Gate’s very existence was the issue, I was the only person with the power to enforce the moral decision. I could, if I had to, destroy Norton’s work. I shivered, turning the corner onto our block. Smith’s red Ferrari stood in front of my house. “So what happened to you?”
Smith sat back in my easy-chair, crossing one long leg over the other. A small cut, closed with Plastaid, showed over his left eyebrow. He touched it. “You mean this?”
“And the limp, and the gun, and the bullethole in your car window.”
“The limp’s gone.” He patted his ribs. “The gun isn’t, and the bullet-hole—” He shrugged. “They couldn’t run fast enough to catch me on foot.”
He liked being evasive, heightening the suspense. Smith as hero. He enjoyed telling it as much as doing it. I wondered whether Smith, nowhere near his second childhood, had ever left his first.
“Who couldn’t catch you?”
“The leader looked short.”
“And grizzly?”
“You could say that. I dropped you off and I got to thinking. A dangerous practice, I know, but I got to doing it anyway. Whatever Spieler wanted—”
“That I can tell you.”
“He didn’t get. He had two choices. Forget it or try something else. A man who would steal Norton, crack his skull like a walnut and literally pick his brain, wouldn’t forget about it. What, I asked myself, next?”
Smith had driven out to the Spieler Space Operations Center in Tustin, eleven acres of prime real estate. Drone ships, built in space, were prepared and tracked from the Center. Incoming ships transferred their cargoes to lunar shuttles. From the Moon, ore was fed to the purchaser through a Jenson Gate. Repair crews, dispatched from the center, refurbished the drone fleet. If, as Dr. Perkov indicated, Spieler knew Norton’s phase-shift solution, the Space Operations Gate could now transfer men or ore through a series of relay satellites, thus eliminating transshipment via the Moon.
Smith applied for a job, Gatekeeper. He knew enough from talking to the Merryweather Gatekeepers to convince a personnel man of his abilities. During a tour of the facilities, he noticed a squad of armed mil assembled outside the Gate blockhouse. Security, explained the tour guide, a Gatekeeper himself. Approaching the group, Smith made his mistake. He asked how the tachyon aspect was progressing.
“I must be getting stupid,” said Smith. “Senile. I’d heard the word from you and Father Porky. I wouldn’t know one if it bit me. But it seemed to be the crux of the matter.”
“It is.”
Smith thought if he dropped the word—tachyon—casually enough, he might get a lead. He dropped it.
“The guy looked at me like I had just handed him Norton’s liver.”
Pardon me? said the Gatekeeper.
Tachyon? repeated Smith.
The Gatekeeper started yelling his head off. Grizzly—according to Smith, the meanest midget he had ever seen, though I doubt the man was that short—ran over to them.
What’s up? asked Grizzly.
The Gatekeeper pointed at Smith like he was Jack the Ripper and yelled, He knows!
Knows what? asked Grizzly, looking up at Smith.
About the tack-tack-tachyon! sputtered the Gatekeeper.
“The man stuttered something awful. Too much pressure on him. Too many secrets,” mused Smith. “Secrets. Don’t talk. Can’t talk—something to it.”
“What did you say?”
“I looked at Grizzly and tried to play dumb. ‘Me?’ I said, `Tachywhat?’ It was too late to play dumb. Grizzly started to pull out his sidearm.” Smith sighed, shaking his head. “I don’t know, buddy boy. I must be slowing up. Ten years ago I would have seen it coming and decked them both.”
Smith knocked Grizzly’s gun to the ground. Grizzly came around with a right, clipping Smith’s forehead.
Smith elbowed him in the solar plexus.
“He went down like a bag of cement.”
The Gatekeeper had the gun. The side of Smith’s shoe caught the Gatekeeper’s wrist, possibly breaking it. The Gatekeeper yelled. The gun flew. Smith ran. Keystone Cops. Except the bad guys were the cops.
Smith was lost. He cut through an office building at full tilt. Women screamed. He bumped into one with her arms full. Papers flew, settling like a flock of seagulls. He tripped on a wastebasket and jammed his leg against a sharp desk corner.
“Hurt like hell.”
As Smith picked himself up, Grizzly and his men exploded into the room. When the secretaries saw the guns, they started running around screaming as if the fox was in the hen house. Grizzly, prudent, decided against shooting through them.
Out the opposite door went the fox. Smith loped down the corridor, his leg hurting. He was still lost. He stopped at the Information Desk.
Which way out?
The girl pointed. He ran. His, foot hit the proximity detector field for the double, doors just as Grizzly and company rounded the corner behind him. The doors opened long enough for Smith and a bullet to get out. He never heard the explosion. Just the zip of the bullet going past. He made it to the car, hit the starter and prayed.
The turbine caught. He jammed the accelerator to the floor. The Ferrari shot across the parking area toward a dirt field. He wanted get to the dirt before they started shooting again. Someone got off a round. Smith heard a thunk. He thought at first it was a rock. The seat next to him bobbed forward and a two-inch hole bloomed in the headrest. When he glanced in the rear-view mirror, he saw the other hole. Dime size. He bounced into the field.
A dust cloud rose behind him, obscuring his view. He veered toward the street, hoping the dust camouflaged him. He hit the street doing fifty and let out the Ferrari. No one followed.
“Smith.”
“Hm-m-m?”
“Duff thinks you’re a menace.”
X
“What now?” I asked.
Smith withdrew a file card from his coat pocket and looked around for a document viewer. I handed him mine. He inserted the card and handed it back.
“That’s Spieler. We talk to him.”
The face—sharp-edged, tough, intelligent—looked younger than thirty-nine. I indexed the viewer. The second picture showed Spieler in a sweatsuit, running.
“Another runner,” I said.
“The man has his good points.”
At six every morning, rain or shine, Spieler ran five miles, his chauffeur trailing in the limousine. A detective’s report, stamped “Merryweather Security,” appeared after the pictures. Spieler arrived at his office every morning at eight sharp. He worked until pas
t seven each evening. Other than running, he had no hobbies. Sometimes he stayed at the building for days, leaving only for his morning run.
Once a week, Saturday evening, he relaxed. From seven to ten PM, he went to a club he owned, The Hollywood Star, in Hollywood. He never drank or smoked. He listened to the music and left at ten, usually alone, occasionally with a girl. It was never the same girl.
Smith walked across the room and sat down next to me, noticing where I was in the report.
SPIELER, FREDERICK, MARCUS
BORN: 23.Jan 1983, Bangor, Maine.
PARENTS: Martha and, Wilber (Moved Calif. 3-2-85).
SIBLINGS: Four brothers, two sisters (See Appendix “A”).
Smith pointed to the sibling entry. “Spieler was in the middle. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“I’m an only child.”
“Older brothers are louder and stronger. Younger brothers are cuter and more lovable. There’s something to it.”
“What?”
“Little Freddy had to compete for Martha and Wilber.”
I continued reading.
EDUCATION: Long Beach Polytechnic High School; Track, football; GPA, 3.80; Grad. June, 1999.
UCLA: Track, football; Maj., Bus. Ad; Minor, psychology, philosophy; GPA, 3.95; Grad. Summer, 2002.
Stanford, School of Business Administration: MBA, Grad. June, 2003 (Note: two-year program, completed one year).
“Why do you suppose,” interrupted Smith, “he minored in psychology and philosophy?”
“He liked them?” I suggested.
“He wanted something from them. Psychology might tell him how his mind worked. He wanted to know that. Who am I? It didn’t tell him. Psychology can’t. If you know how a computer words, you don’t necessarily know what’s in it. He switched to philosophy, superseding form for content. But philosophy—” Smith turned up his hands. “Who ever got anything from philosophy?”
“I always liked it.”
“Sure. So did I. I rather like Hume myself. Very witty. He can prove you aren’t reading the book you are reading to get his proof. Fun, but hardly something to hang your hat on for life, especially if you’re a man like Spieler. Philosophy’s like art. Personal. Everyone has to develop his own.”
Stargate Page 11
