Pressure Man

by Zach Hughes

  J.J. said it was a damned good design, but that it wasn’t a tanker. Folly was. He did not call the ship Folly, of course, always speaking her full name in awed reverence. He knew what the workmen were calling her and he knew that Dom agreed.

  “I know you think it’s folly,” he said, emphasizing the word, “but you can’t imagine the difficulty we had in selling the idea in the first place, Dom. While we have more behind-the-scenes support than most people suspect, with a lot of elected officials in favor of space development, they can’t say so openly. If they did, the Firsters and the Worldsavers would put their own nuts into office, because the man on the street wants butter, not bogies from Jupiter. The very fact that the John F. Kennedy is the biggest, most expensive thing ever built is in our favor, because the situation is so bad that only dramatic solutions are attractive. Congress voted us the money because she can carry so much water and so much fertilizer. We couldn’t have built her without extra money. Even if we’d had the money squirreled away, we couldn’t have built her in secrecy, because it’s going to take a maximum effort by the entire industry to do it. She was sold because she can help boost food production and the elected people think that they can get away with announcing the expenditure after the fact on that basis. There are only a dozen men who know why she’s really being built, outside of this facility.”

  “How about that dozen?” Dom asked. “Are they dependable?”

  “How can you tell?” J.J. asked, with a wave of one hand. “It’s fifty-fifty that one of them will leak to the Firsters before she’s finished. If so, they’ll try, sooner or later, to destroy her. That’s why, other than the fact that she can be built best in space, we’re building her out behind the moon. We can screen the moon crews pretty well, because there’s only one way to get there, and that’s on a DOSE ship.”

  “Has there been any indication that the antis suspect that a large project is getting under way?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” J.J. said. “There’s no more ranting against space waste in Congress than usual, but there have been a few editorials from sources which have, in the past, been more or less neutral. There was a Worldsaver rally in New York last week.”

  “Yeah, I heard about it,” Dom said. “Only twenty-five deaths. A mild one.”

  “And they got two spacers in L.A. two days ago,” J.J. said.

  “That I didn’t hear.”

  “We tried to keep it quiet,” J.J. said. “The damned fools went out of the enclave. The Firsters used knives, as usual. After what the Firsters did to them I guess they were lucky to be dead.”

  Dom hadn’t given too much thought to security. “Suppose a man wanted to go for a walk in the desert,” he said.

  “Take out a big insurance policy first. We have constant patrol of the perimeter, but it’s impossible to cover all the ground.”

  “Any unusual activity?”

  “No, the usual scattered pickups of individual nuts trying to be heroes, but nothing organized. Not yet.”

  The Folly project continued at a breakneck pace through planning and design. Tests on mush bonding went well. The results of the Caltech tests were fed into the computer, and the word was go. Material for the interior frames went into fabrication. The power plant was being assembled.

  In a way it was a pleasant operation to watch, and in a way it was sad. It was nice to be associated with a go-for-broke project. Not since Kennedy set the industry to cracking in the months after the Russians sent up their first Sputnik had there been so much activity in the aerospace industry. Long-disused facilities were being reopened. Prime contractors searched the world for techs and scientists. Anyone who had a skill and wanted to use it, instead of drawing government welfare money, was at work.

  Dom was accustomed to working under tight budget restrictions. Once DOSE spent thousands of dollars advising all personnel to use both sides of scratch paper in order to save money. Most scratch pads were advertising handouts from suppliers. He was astounded by his freedom to spend money. If he wanted to get on the horn and put someone to work, say at MTT, he called and sent the bills to J.J. Where Folly was concerned, there was no economizing, no compromising quality, regardless of the cost. Her shipboard computers would be the match of anything on Earth, because no one knew how long she’d be in the murky atmosphere of Jupiter and out of touch with the Earth. Nothing would be left to chance. She was to be given every opportunity to fulfill her mission. If it meant spending a few million for a backup system to prevent a one-in-a-million chance of failure, the money was spent.

  It was pleasant and it was sad—sad because although it was beautiful to see the whole world working again on a vitally important project and impressive to find that the years of attrition did not prevent the industry from rising to the emergency, the mission could fail. Or that alien ship inside Jupiter might not live up to expectations, the implied promise of providing new knowledge, perhaps even for faster-than-light travel. If the mission failed, or if the knowledge gained from the alien was trivial, the building of Folly would be the last act in a drama which began when Americans were shocked by the beeping sounds of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957.

  It was exciting to be a part of a project of such magnitude, and pride extended downward from the top echelon to the lowest construction workers. Many hours of overtime were put in, not to be claimed on pay vouchers.

  Throughout the early stages of the project, Dom’s team did not see the light of natural day, but worked, sometimes around the clock, in the underground labs and offices of DOSEWEX. There was a feeling of extreme urgency. The faint, distant sounds of the alien ship still emanated from Jupiter, but for how long?

  The orders went out from Dom’s office to be spread throughout DOSE and the industry. First tests on the power plant were on the nose. The life-support system was being assembled in portable units, to be lifted to the moon when the hull was ready. The computers were being tested by Doris and her team. Hull metals were now being cast, lifted to the moon. Traffic between the Earthside launch sites and Moon Base was the heaviest in decades. Several shuttles per day blasted from Canaveral, carrying beams and bolts, workers and food.

  One of the best things about it was the feeling of togetherness of DOSEWEX. J.J., usually aloof and bemused with his problems, would take a moment to pass the time of day with a lab tech. Social barriers were down. It was as if everyone were on the same ship, bound for an uncertain destination and pleased to have company. Nostalgia was the order of the day. One heard the antique, rhythmic, exciting old names, Yuri Gagarin and Gus Grissom, Shepard and Gherman Titov, John Glenn and M. Scott Carpenter and Neil Armstrong taking that first step out onto the dry and sterile surface of the moon, Trelawny on Mars and the Jones-Edwin probe to the surface of Venus, Mercury and Gemini and Agena and Voskhod One, Radcliff circling the rings of Saturn.

  But the one prime subject was Folly, frightful Folly, so huge, so complicated, so utterly stupid; and she began to take shape, so very, very beautiful, the network of interior bracings lacy and geometric, her size becoming apparent as she grew.

  Not one of Dom’s crew, with the possible exception of Larry, could have said, without checking dates, how long they had been underground, virtual prisoners of that huge ship which grew, bolt by bolt, weld by weld, in null gravity out behind the moon. Larry could probably have given the time to the hour, because he had performed his main function in the period of one day. He was being used as a contact man. He was the only one who left DOSEWEX at intervals, and he would have said that only those ventures into the outside preserved his sanity. He was bored and he was lonely, because Doris was deeply involved in doing her thing at the console of her computer.

  The weeks became months which ran together in Dom’s mind. It was almost time to start moving the crew out to DOSELUN when the Earthfirsters made their move, announcing their presence with a single mortar round which fell short of the main gate control tower. That signal round was followed by an all-out assault from two sides of the surf
ace compound.

  The sound of the first underground explosion did not register on Dom. The sound did not come from his own complex, and tests of all sorts were always being conducted. He went on with his work until the alert lights in his office blinked flashing red. It still didn’t register, as he looked up in puzzlement, until Larry Gomulka stuck his moon face in the door, not smiling for once.

  “We’re under attack,” Larry announced.

  “Not now,” Dom said absently. “I don’t have time for it.”

  “No choice, old chum,” Larry said, smiling now. “Come along to the shelter.”

  Dom saw to it that his own team, which was vastly expanded by techs, were properly sheltered. He made his way to J.J.’s office, operating the underground rail car by himself. There were space marines in J.J.’s sector. He had to show his identity, and when he was admitted J.J. was not in the office. He was advised by a young cadet to return to his own sector and seek shelter.

  “Well make short work of this, sir,” the cadet said. “Then you can get back to work.”

  Dom walked empty corridors, took an elevator, and bluffed his way into an observation tower. There he found J.J. with a set of binoculars to his eyes.

  A small-scale war was being fought at the fences. The automated defense system had caught the first infiltrators in charged areas. Bodies lay side by side along the fences on two sides. Marines had been moved in, and the sound of their weapons was a continuous roar.

  “How many?” Dom asked.

  “The early estimate was about five thousand,” J.J. said.

  Dom, with a feeling of sickness, thought he could see almost that many bodies.

  “They don’t have any really big stuff,” J.J. said, as an old-fashioned HE shell exploded a hundred yards south of the tower. “I can’t understand it.”

  “I can never understand stupidity,” Dom said.

  “The first thing I asked was, where was the main force?” J.J. said. “This is nothing more than a diversion.”

  “Pretty bloody for a diversion,” Dom said, his eyes trying to move away from the strewn bodies along the fence.

  “We have aircraft out. They have not spotted any major force, just the two groups attacking from opposite sides.”

  It was sheer suicide. What did they hope to gain by attacking a well-defended major facility with hand rifles and a couple of old mortars? A diversion? A diversion from what?

  “The computer,” Dom exploded, already moving.

  “Cool it,” J.J. said. “I thought of that first thing. I sent a guard of marines down there on first alert.”

  “I’ll go take a look,” Dom said.

  The tendency was, after seeing the first interior bracings taking shape, to think of Folly as reality, but a few structural members do not make a ship. At the moment Folly existed only in the abstract, in Dom’s brain and in the brains of Doris and Art, but most of all, she existed in one area, in the circuits of Doris’ primary computer. In that machine were months of work and billions of dollars, and no human brain could recreate the information without starting all over, requiring more months. Destroy the computer’s memory and Folly was a few drawings, a few basic facts in human brains, and nothing more.

  The complex where Dom’s crew worked and lived was in the most secure portion of DOSEWEX, buried very deep, encircled by other facilities. It was served only by the underground transportation system. Between the hidden labs and the surface world were hundreds of feet of rock and soil. This central core was penetrated by the well-guarded underground in one place and in one place only.

  As the car leaped forward, Dom having properly identified himself as a VIP to the marine guards, he told himself that he was worrying for no reason. The stop came quickly. He entered a maze of corridors and trotted toward the shelter, realizing that his months of work had done nothing for his physical condition. He entered the maze to the shelter, designed to prevent radiation entry, and found the inner door standing open. That door was keyed to pass only those whose palm prints were recorded, his among them. He held his breath and peered cautiously around the door.

  Death was more immediate here, closer, having come to men and women he knew. Bodies sprawled in grotesque positions, some atop the others. His senses reeling, he counted. This shelter room, assigned to top personnel, was designed for fourteen people. He counted eleven bodies, recounted to be sure, his brain unwilling to admit to even eleven.

  Explosive bullets had been used. The floor had a new red carpet, sticky, odorous. He had to move three bodies to be able to see the faces. The eleven dead were technicians and scientists who had been added to the team. Art Donald, Doris, and Larry were not among them.

  He left the bloody room and crept slowly down the corridor toward the labs and the computer room. At the first turn he found the bodies of two young space marines. A squad consisted of eight men. With two dead, their weapons beside them, that left six marines of the squad sent by J.J.

  Dom picked up an automatic rifle, a short, deadly, spray-shooting weapon, from beside one of the dead marines. He listened for a moment, and in that moment the corridor reverberated to the blast of an automatic weapon. He sprinted ahead and almost ran into death as he rushed blindly into the corridor leading to the computer room. The door to the room flew open and a man in a dark body suit, his face hidden by a black hood, sent a hail of fire toward Dom. Dom flung his body into a side corridor, hearing the splat-splat of explosive rounds as they whizzed past his head, then the thunder of their strike at the end of the corridor. He could not get enough air into his lungs. He had to force himself to move.

  His impulse was to hole up, watch and wait, but he knew that he had to move. He went down the corridor to the living area, found Doris’ quarters, kicked her door open. The room was empty. He punched the communicator, It was dead. There was an alert button in each room in the complex. Any member of the team could alert security forces with a jab of a button. Dom pushed Doris’ private panic button and waited for the flashing lights and ear-piercing sounds, but there was nothing.

  The complex was, quite obviously, compromised. It was an inside job. There were eleven bodies back there in the shelter, two dead marines in the corridor. How many of them? How many to kill eleven men and women and two marines and maybe more?

  He considered trying to make a break, to seek help from J.J.’s sector. But they had Doris, Larry, and Art. They were in the computer room.

  He knew what he had to do, and he couldn’t take time to stop and think about it or he’d freeze. He left Doris’ quarters and used branching corridors to circle the computer room until he reached a small, flush door which was almost invisible in a wall. His palm opened it. He climbed a narrow flight of steps, palmed open a hatch. The hatch led into the repair and service sections of the vast computer, which towered from floor to high ceiling of the computer room. He entered at mid-level. He was not in sterile suit, but a bit of dust from him would harm the computer less than was intended, he felt sure, by the terrorists. He walked service aisles between banks of equipment in the guts of the computer. At the front, he could look through the facade of the machine through a small port.

  There were three bodies lying on the floor, all three in marine blue. A fourth marine was leaning against a wall, a white look of shock on his face, his arm blown half off. The other two marines held automatic weapons and shared the room with five men in dark body suits and black hoods.

  Doris, Larry, and Art were in a tight grouping, guarded by the two marines. The five men in the Earthfirster combat garb were unpacking back carriers, stacking neat packets of explosives. Two members of the Firster team were placing charges at the base of the control console. Already detonators were in place and activated. The charges were of a type to be detonated by radio signal from a safe distance. The men in the room below Dom must have known they had little chance of escape, but Firsters were known best for fanaticism. With Firsters, escape would not be the prime objective. They would be more interested in sell
ing their lives dearly, although, in Doris, Art, and Larry, they had very important hostages. It might go either way. They could try to buy their way out by using three of the most valuable members of the TTS team for bargaining, or they might use them as shields in order to take down as many men as possible before they were killed.

  Dom had always considered terrorists as the supreme egotists of the universe. The elite suicide squads of Earthfirsters had pulled off some impressive stunts, including the assassination of a President and a head of the defunct CIA, but how could one man, or several men acting in concert, believe that sacrificing a life and then giving their own would change anything? The terrorists just could not see that their actions as individuals, or even as a small, cohesive group, would not affect in any way the inertial rush of society toward devouring itself through overproduction.

  The way Dom looked at it, man, as a race, had enough against him. He still had to contend with the basic forces of nature in the form of flood, fire, earthquake, snow, hurricane, volcanoes. Nature was capable of making all of man’s bloody past seem amateurish. If natural disaster didn’t get you, then nature still got you in the end. Nature seemed intent on killing the race, having instilled a lemminglike breeding instinct that wouldn’t stop until starvation got everyone. Man had enough opposition without fighting himself. If death was the only objective, just let old mother nature take her course. Then, as Robert Frost once said, death could come along as a nice surprise.

  Dom thought he recognized one of the hooded Firsters as an electronics expert taken onto the team on the recommendation of DOSELUN. The man was good, good enough to have been able to cut off the communication and alarm systems.

  The two men placing explosives were moving, shouldering bags of explosives. They started to mount the crawl ladders on the facade toward an entry port on Dom’s level. It would take only three or four charges, placed properly, to destroy the work done to date on Folly.

  Dom concealed himself behind a bank of memory tapes at the entrance to the port. He was wondering if he was not being as egotistical as the Firsters, thinking that he, one man, could stop seven armed and well-trained terrorists. He was a spacer, a hull engineer. He’d had a few weeks on the combat range back at the Academy, and he’d taken hand-combat courses as a part of keeping physically fit. But he was no trained killer. In his favor was the fact that he was still in fairly good shape, in spite of the months of desk work.