“Smith,” I said, trying not to move my lips “you have a plan?” The last word sounded more like “hlan.”
“No.”
“No!”
“Shh.”
“No. After that lecture you gave me on six-gun justice—”
“Something more important has come up.”
“What?”
“Our necks.”
The office door slid open. Three men with automatics stepped through. Three more waited outside. They led us through the station to a storeroom, the only rooms with manual locks, and pushed us inside, locking the door behind us.
Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the poor light. I heard something and glanced around at Smith.
He shrugged. “Not me.”
I looked around the room. In an alcove between a set of storage lockers, a gray shape moaned on a cot. I walked to it. Under a blanket, his back to us, lay a man, doubled up and muffling his moans on a pillow.
I squatted next to the cot, shaking the man’s shoulder.
“NOOOO!” he screamed. “I don’t want to die!”
I rolled him onto his back. Staring at me, his face contorted with fear, one eye blackened and a large bruise on his cheekbone, was Dr. Higgins, Spieler’s astronomer.
“I guess he found Spieler,” said Smith, behind me.
“NOOOO!” screamed Dr. Higgins at the mention of the name.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
Dr. Higgins looked at me, still frightened. After several seconds, his eyes showed recognition.
“You’re,” he said, hesitating, “one of those men.”
“Yes. What’s going on?”
“The Crab!” shouted Dr. Higgins. “Oh, God!” He buried his face in the pillow, his voice muffled but intelligible.
“I don’t want to die!”
“Not that damn Crab again,” said Smith, disgusted.
Dr. Higgins looked at him. “Yes. The Crab. You’ve got to stop him!”
“The Crab?”
“No. Mr. Spieler.”
I smiled. Even beaten and terrified, Dr. Higgins said Mr. Spieler.
“It’s no joke,” snapped Higgins, noticing my smile. It faded.
Dr. Higgins looked from Smith to me and back to Smith, his face intensely serious. “He’s insane, you know.”
“We noticed,” said Smith.
“I mean it, really insane, off his rocker, nuts.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“He’s going to bring the Crab—” Dr. Higgins broke off, overcome with emotion. He beat the pillow, screaming that he didn’t want to die. Eventually, he looked up. “Where was I?”
“The Crab.”
“Oh, yes. He’s going to bring it here.”
Slowly, we pieced together Dr. Higgins’ story. That afternoon, after Smith and I were hauled off to the police, Dr. Higgins tried to contact Spieler. He wanted another chance to explain the mistake, hoping to deter Spieler from uselessly sending out a drone ship. The Crab Nebula was the wrong target. When he finally reached Spieler, it was six-thirty. Spieler and fifty men, men Dr. Higgins had never seen before, were in the Space Operations Gate building. Waiting to talk to Spieler, Dr. Higgins heard several conversations, people speculating about the expression on “old Merryweather’s face” when they did whatever it was they were about to do. It puzzled him.
He found Spieler and began explaining the error. Spieler nodded, listening, reassuring Dr. Higgins. Everything was fine, said Spieler. Halfway through the explanation, Dr. Higgins realized the coordinates would never fit into a drone ship computer. He remembered the conversations about Merryweather.
He guessed at part of the truth and confronted Spieler with it. The men were going to take the Merryweather Enterprize. Once secure, Spieler was going to reach out to the Crab Nebula with the Big Gate.
“I asked him why,” said Dr. Higgins. “He just smiled and said he had his reasons. But he doesn’t! He’s insane! Loony! Let him die! I don’t care! But I don’t want to die!” He became incoherent and blubbered into the pillow.
The door behind us opened. Spieler stood in the doorway, flanked by two armed men.
“Dr. Collins,” said Spieler, nodding at me. “And the infamous Scarlyn Smith.” He stepped inside, leaving his henchmen in the corridor. They watched us through the doorway, alert, automatics ready. “I’ve been doing some homework on you, Smith. Yet, I’m still surprised to see you.”
“That was the general idea.”
Spieler laughed, a cold and unsympathetic laugh. Before he could continue, Dr. Higgins darted between Smith and me. He stopped in front of Spieler, his face plaintive, hands clasped, suppliant.
“Sir, you cannot go through with this!” shouted Dr. Higgins. “We will all be killed! And sir, we will die from that!”
Spieler sneered at him.
“Please, sir—”
The back of Spieler’s clenched fist came across Dr. Higgins’ face. I flinched, starting to go to Dr. Higgins’ aid but stopping when the muzzles of the two automatics in the hall turned on me. Dr. Higgins reeled to one side, breaking his fall against the bulkhead. Smith never moved.
Spieler returned his attention to Smith. “I told you I would win, Smith.”
“You’ve got a space station. So what?”
“Not only the station,” said Spieler. “The Big Gate.”
“Big deal.”
Smith’s tone, that of a parent unimpressed with its child’s achievement, struck me as dangerous. I was impressed. Spieler could kill us at any moment. If Smith persisted, the child in Spieler might become angry, strike out at the parent in Smith.
When Spieler smiled, amused at Smith’s attitude, I relaxed a little, a very little.
“Do you know what winning is, Smith?”
“Frankly,” said Smith. “I don’t have time to discuss it right now.” He indicated Dr. Higgins, who was touching his bleeding lower lip with his fingers and looking at them. “There are others who need my attention.”
Spieler’s face clouded over. “You are going to listen to this, whether you want to or not.”
“All right,” said Smith, exasperated, crossing both arms on his chest. “Let’s have it. The sooner you tell me your little thoughts on winning, the sooner I can pay attention to something important.”
Spieler’s mouth had drawn tight. He started to speak, but Smith interrupted, impatient.
“Come on, Freddy. Hurry up.”
Spieler’s index finger came up, pointing at Smith, jabbing the air to accent the words. “I have known people like you all my life! I—”
“I’ll bet you have,” said Smith, bored. “First, there was Wilber and Martha …” It took me a moment to remember Spieler’s parents. “Then who else? Teachers? Coaches? Professors? But you made them listen, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” shouted Spieler. “I made them listen! All of them!”
“Freddy Spieler,” said Smith, contempt in his voice. “The big winner. Chalked up more points than anyone at a dollar a point, a dollar a pat on the head. Money is the way we keep score, isn’t it, Freddy? High scores are good. High scorers are good. Freddy Spieler is a good boy.”
“Shut up, Smith.”
“Let’s talk about winning some more. I hate to discuss it in front of Robert here. He’s so innocent …”
“Me?” I said.
“… but it can’t be helped. After a while, you didn’t need their opinion any more. After all, who were they? Teachers, parents—low scorers. You thought of yourself as the independent man, testing himself against himself. Never flinch from your tests. Isn’t that Nietzsche? The superior man knows how to accept those tests. But Nietzsche also said the superior man knows how to conserve himself, to survive, and you’ll never survive, Freddy.” Smith waved his arm around the room, indicating Dr. Higgins and me. “It doesn’t matter what happens to us …”
“Smith,” I said, trying to interrupt. That kind of loose talk
seemed unnecessary to me.
“It doesn’t matter what happens to anyone. But to win, you have to be free enough to survive. All this dragging poor old Nietzsche and old Machiavelli onto the scene just covers up Freddy Spieler. The will to power,” mocked Smith. “Little Freddy’s just upset because Horace Merryweather has pulled the rug out from under him and won’t let him play anymore, so he’s taking his marbles and going home. If you can’t play, no one can.”
Spieler glared at Smith, then turned on his heels and left. In the corridor, he spoke to the guards, loud enough for us to hear.
“Kill them.”
Kill them. I started to swallow. The lump in my throat refused to let me finish. Smith had definitely gone too far. Psychoanalyzing a madman might have its advantages to society, but psychoanalyzing an armed madman was the mad leading the mad.
Smith leaned over to me. “Don’t say I didn’t try to reason with him.”
“Reason! You call that reason! Scolding him! ‘You’ve been a bad boy, Freddy!’ Why, Smith? What was the point of—” My sentence dribbled to a halt. The two guards, one of them so large his automatic seemed dwarfed in his grip, entered.
“The point is,” whispered Smith, “that now there’s only two of them.”
“Shut up and get over there,” snapped the smaller gunman, indicating the bulkhead with a flick of his pistol.
“NOOOO!” wailed Dr. Higgins.
The big one started to lumber toward Dr. Higgins. I never saw it happen. One minute he lumbered. The next minute he slumbered, supine, out cold. Smith already had the second man’s gun arm. He stepped inside, twisting the gun arm away from himself, ducked under the man’s armpit, and threw him. The man spilled on his back, gun flying. He started to get up, looking around for his missing gun. I stomped on his stomach, somehow tripping and falling. When I looked up, the man was unconscious. I got to my feet.
“I didn’t think it would do that,” I said.
“What?” asked Smith.
“I didn’t think it would knock someone out, stepping on his stomach.”
“It didn’t,” answered Smith, pointing to Dr. Higgins.
Dr. Higgins, embarrassed, stood behind the man, holding the missing automatic like a hammer.
“Oh.”
XVII
“Next time,” said Smith, looking at the man on the floor, “Don’t kick him in the stomach. There are too many things he can do to counter it.”
“Like what?”
He prodded the man on the floor with his foot. “Like what he did.”
“What did he do? I tripped. That’s all.”
Smith smiled, tolerant. “It did happen pretty fast.” He turned to Dr. Higgins. “Tell me Freddy’s plan.”
Dr. Higgins, slurring his words around his swelling lip, launched into his suppositions, pieced together over the last few hours. The longer I listened, the more impressed I got, both with Dr. Higgins’ deductions about Spieler’s plan and with Smith’s insights into Spieler’s character. Spieler had to be paranoid. No other explanation fit. Spieler not only wanted to take his marbles and go home, he wanted to take everyone’s marbles. If he couldn’t have them, no one could. Or, to phrase it more accurately, if Spieler lost his marbles, everyone would.
“I don’t believe it,” I protested, overwhelmed by Dr. Higgins’ ideas.
“It’s true, Cluggins. I assure you.”
Spieler had no intention of going through the Big Gate. He planned to use it exactly as I had used it that morning, with one exception. Instead of ripping up a fifteen-kilometer dirt clod, he wanted to pull a pulsar into the Solar System.
The idea staggered me. I tried to imagine it. A super-massive star spins, gravity and centrifugal force tenuously balancing against each other. Spinning, it loses energy. It contracts to compensate for the loss, growing brighter—a wet ice-skater, tucking in her arms, spinning ever faster on the point of her skate, spewing water.
When enough energy radiates from it, its center collapses under its own weight, a neutron star, its electrons and protons mashed together.
“How large is it?” I asked.
“This one is ten kilometers across.”
A star, once larger than the Sun, now compressed to ten kilometers.
“What would happen,” asked Smith, “if he succeeds?”
Dr. Higgins thought a moment, looking past us at the vacant air, listing the possibilities in his mind. He nodded vaguely, mumbling “yes,” and “ahh,” and “after that … yes.” His thoughts sorted, he looked at us.
“Take your pick. The Sun and the pulsar might form a double star, or the Sun could just accelerate, leaving Mars and Earth and some of the less significant planets to orbit the pulsar and be bombarded—amidst electromagnetic chaos—with massive doses of everything from X-rays to protons, or the Sun and the pulsar could crash into each other and the Sun itself could nova and the remaining glob could form a second neutron star and then lose even more energy and collapse even further until it was so small and so dense that the Swarzschild radius is passed and its gravity is so great even light can’t escape it and a black hole—imagine it, a black hole!—forms. Of course we’re long gone by this time. Everything in this general vicinity is long gone. In spite of that, it’s still magnificent! What an event! One hell of an event!” Dr. Higgins looked at me, beaming, as if he had just discovered the Moon. “If we were here, Cluggins, and did get sucked into the black hole, there are people who think it would throw us into another universe. Imagine it! Another universe! It’s beyond imagination!”
“If only Spieler’s parents,” said Smith, “had paid more attention to him.”
“In any case,” concluded Dr. Higgins, calming down. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
I nodded, but refrained from guessing. Could Spieler do it? The Big Gate, thanks to Parry’s help with the reactor, had potential far beyond Norton’s original design. But moving the mass of a star, even one only ten kilometers across—I didn’t know.
“Dr. Higgins,” I said, “what about the mass?”
“What about it?”
“A collapsed star is not just another hunk of dirt.”
“True. So what?”
“What’s the essential difference between the two?”
“The neutron star’s packed tighter.”
I shook my head from side to side. “Nothing else?”
“Not much. Matter’s matter, as they say. This is not, you know, antimatter. It still has to obey the law, so to speak.”
“Can it be moved?”
“Of course it can be moved. Anything can be moved. Fulcrums and a place to stand won’t do it, but given enough power and the right equipment—” Dr. Higgins reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a notebook and pencil. “You seem to know something about this Gate.”
I nodded.
“Tell me the maximum power output of the reactor Merryweather’s using and I’ll tell you if they can do it.”
“The maximum,” I said, my voice flat.
“Yes,” said Dr. Higgins, waiting, pencil poised on the notebook.
I had a sudden vision of Hilda, the Merryweather computer technician, her Pekingese face in pain at the prospect of rerunning a program.
Dr. Higgins looked up from the notebook, eyebrows raised. “Yes?”
Smith looked at me. “Well?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re a big help,” said Smith, contemptuous.
“If I had a computer,” I pleaded, my voice shaky, “and a few hours—”
“You don’t.”
Dr. Higgins closed his notebook. “Well, there you are. If they have the power, they can do it. Matter is matter.”
“You’re sure about that,” said Smith, already pacing the room, thinking.
“Reasonably.”
Smith paced, weighing the possibilities in his mind, looking up at Dr. Higgins and me every few passes and shaking his head.
“We’ve got to assume,” said Smith on one pa
ss, “they can do it.”
“Why?”
“If we assume anything else, and we’re wrong, the consequences are too great.”
The neat map of the Solar System, left in my mind from a high school science class, crumpled. “I see what you mean.”
During each traverse of the room, Smith stepped over the two unconscious men. Then, approaching the smaller one, he paused, foot in the air, looking at one of them. He lowered his foot to the deck.
“I wonder if he knows.”
I laughed. “That guy wouldn’t know a meson from his mother.”
“No, I mean Spieler’s plan. I wonder if he knows what it means.”
“I doubt it. He probably just collects his pay and lets other people worry about policy.”
“Policy,” said Smith, thinking. He looked at me. “Is there any other access to the PA system?”
“Sure. Every phone has a ‘General Station’ button for emergencies.”
Smith nodded. “Good. This qualifies.”
We locked the two gunmen in the storeroom, taking their guns with us, and started back toward Burgess’ office, Smith leading.
“What’s he doing?” asked Dr. Higgins.
“Beats me.”
Smith sat down at Burgess’ desk and touched the General Station plate. His own face, repeated on phones throughout the station, appeared on the screen.
“Attention, everyone on the Merryweather Enterprize. Frederick Spieler has deceived you. He is attempting to destroy everyone on this space station. Contrary to what you have been told, this is not simply an intercorporate struggle. I have with me Dr. Higgins, the astronomer for Spieler Interstellar.” Smith motioned for Dr. Higgins to take the chair behind the desk. “He will explain what is happening.”
I expected Dr. Higgins to get on camera and begin his “Matter is Matter” speech, larding it so heavily with technical language that Spieler’s men would think it was an educational program and refuse to listen. I underestimated him. Succinctly and simply, even with occasional touches of grim wit, he began telling them what Spieler intended.
Smith satisfied himself of Dr. Higgins’ showmanship, then started back toward the control room, trotting. The station’s “gravity,” generated automatically by the rotation of the great wheel, was slightly less than Earth’s, helping our progress.
Stargate Page 19
