Pressure Man

by Zach Hughes

  “He’s still there,” J.J. said.

  “Ellen was with me on the Saturn expedition and on one Mars run. She’s good at her job.”

  “I’ll start the checks on them,” J.J. said. “What about Ellen? I know Jensen, but I know her only from her service record.”

  “She’s the independent type, the complete woman. I don’t know a lot about her politics, because I wasn’t that close to her.”

  “Would you personally vouch for both of them?”

  “For Jensen, yes. I’d like to know more about Ellen. And I’ll qualify my vote for Jensen by saying that I’ll vouch for him as much as you can vouch for anyone these days. As far as his abilities go, I’d put my life in his hands in space.”

  “You’ll be doing that if he’s chosen,” J.J. said. “Anyone aboard could abort the project or destroy it completely. You know how many ways there are aboard ship to do damage.”

  Dom nodded. “Still, you have to have crew.”

  “Have you had a briefing lately on the world situation?” He continued without waiting for an answer. “The Worldsavers are in complete control in China. They’re training an army. Japan is pulling out of space to avoid invasion from China. The government fell in the U.K. and the new prime minister has put both Worldsavers and Earthfirsters in his cabinet. France is tottering. Germany is going through the throes of repression of individual rights in an effort to wipe out the Firsters there. It’s civil war for all practical purposes. The Russians are compromising with their own Firsters. They’ve pulled five exploration ships out of space and are refitting them to carry phosphates.”

  “And here?” Dom asked.

  “It’s strangely quiet,” J.J. said. “There hasn’t been a major incident in months, not since the battle of DOSEWEX. It’s as if they’re mustering their strength. There’s the usual claptrap in the media and in Congress, but the killers are being quiet. A lot of people, including the FBI, are worried. Hedges reports to me from over there that several FBI plants have been exposed and killed in the last month. He thinks he has a top-level traitor right in the Washington office, and he’s working desperately to find out what’s going on. His private theory is that there’ll be one major push before we can take off for Jupiter.”

  “Any guesses as to what kind of push?”

  “Maybe revolution,” J.J. said.

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Take one small unit,” J.J. said, “that squad of space marines at DOSEWEX. It was fifty percent infiltrated. How many Firsters are in a company of the army? A dozen men could wipe out a company if they hit a barracks in the middle of the night, killing men who thought they were buddies.”

  “You think armed revolution would succeed?”

  “I don’t know. No one does, because we don’t know their strength. There are times when I feel that ninety percent of the population must be radical or radical in sympathy, but the great and unwashed masses are still a question mark. Would they support a radical armed revolution? In spite of what’s been done to democracy in the name of equality of opportunity and freedom from want, there just might be a strong, hard core of democracy in the masses. It’s impossible to guess how the public would turn. They hear political promises day after day, and day after day their food gets worse. They might buy the Firsters’ propaganda. Get the world out of space and the milk and honey will flow.”

  “But, damnit, phosphates from Mars fertilize the fields which feed them,” Dom said.

  “We know that. Tell it to a welfare bum in Detroit who wants real steak every day instead of once a month. The Firsters tell him they’ll develop better agricultural methods with the money now wasted in space.”

  “Is anyone thinking of a preemptive strike against them?” Dom asked.

  “We think about it, but they’re spread all over the country. They mass only for specific attacks, such as on DOSEWEX. They have no strong, individual leaders. They’re splintered. That’s the thing which has saved us so far. There’s almost as much blood shed in fighting between radical groups jockeying for power as in their attacks on the government. If they ever form a united front, it will be big trouble, and that’s one thing they might be doing now. If they were having internal consolidation meetings, that would account for the quiet.”

  “I’ve got a flight to catch,” Dom said.

  “There’s time,” J.J. said, looking at his watch. “Dom, when you get back, I want you to take charge of the security forces on the moon. Start a system of rotating teams, the membership changing each day at random. If they’re planning something there it might help break up their organization.”

  “Will do.”

  J.J. looked thoughtful. “You know, if we could just feed the world we’d break the radicals in five years. There’s a certain strength in what has often been called the average man. All he wants to do is live a peaceful and good life with enough food on the table to feed his family, good programs on the tube, a few luxuries. You know when this mess really started? It started when the shortage of petroleum took the citizen’s automobile away from him. That is the dominant factor in our current troubles. The automobile gave a man freedom. When he was at the wheel of his own vehicle, he could feel that he was in control of his own fate. He had freedom of movement. In his car, he was isolated from the world, freed of his worries. That’s when the discontent began, when the oil ran out. That left room for the nuts, the people who have such overwhelming egos that they think they’re more capable of running things than anyone else. They don’t care how many people starve, how many are killed. They just want to give orders. They want to instill fear in others. We’ve had them on Earth since the earliest recorded history, since Sargon the Conqueror, of old Ur. The power types. A kid reads two books and thinks he knows how to run the world. The idealists, the nuts, the sadists, the out-and-out psychos. They’re joined by shiftless malcontents who are interested only in loot and plunder. If we could feed the world there’d be support against them. We could use the common decency of mankind to overcome the Sargon complex and then man would be unstoppable.”

  Dom arrived on the moon hours after two Earthfirsters died in a soundless explosion while trying to smuggle explosives into the shuttle area. He put J.J.’s orders into effect. Things were quiet for days. Kennedy was nearing completion.

  The big boom came on a Sunday morning. It came in the form of a small freighter which had been Earthside for repairs. The incident demonstrated the most frightening penetration to date, for the small nuclear bomb aboard the freighter must have been placed there at Canaveral base.

  The ship approached the lunar base on schedule, in contact with control, and veered off at the last minute to accelerate into a suicidal collision course with the Kennedy as she orbited, huge and vulnerable. A missile from the surface got the freighter while she was still far enough away so that the explosion did no damage to Kennedy. The flash lit the surface of the moon and blinded a few workers who happened to be watching the freighter.

  The near miss inspired Dom. He knew that it was going to give J.J. a bad moment, for he did not want to risk compromising his plan through communications which could be intercepted. He stopped all flights from the moon to Earth and sent down the news that radical terrorists had destroyed an experimental ship, the John F. Kennedy. The news was greeted with public cheers and private gloom on Earth, and it brought J.J. on the next ship. He looked ten years older.

  “How bad is it?” he asked, when Dom met him at the landing pad.

  “J.J., I hated to do it to you,” Dom said. “She’s all right and untouched.”

  J.J. used choice parts of a vocabulary built from years of service and, having let off steam, took a drink and whooped in relief. He had to admit that it was a good idea. Now there would be no further attempts on the Kennedy from Earthside and they merely had to control the underground members on the moon. He delayed sending down a one-man courier ship to give the correct story to top DOSE brass.

  No calls were allowed to go out to Ea
rth. Travel was frozen. Marine guards stood watch over all communications facilities, their individual members shifted in random patterns.

  A ship carrying the two remaining crew members was allowed to land. Dom’s first choices had checked out. The engineer, Paul Jensen, was short, dark, a silent man in his fifties. Ellen Overman, life-systems specialist, was in her thirties, a tiny woman, small in every respect, but perfectly proportioned, dark-haired, brown eyes, a beautiful woman; she was talkative and thrilled at being a part of the project.

  J.J. sent down word that the Firsters had destroyed the moon’s water supplies, built up over a period of many years and constantly recycled. A fleet of tankers began to arrive, supposedly to replenish the moon’s water supply, but actually to fill the Kennedy’s hold with water. It was against all common sense to take an untested ship into space with a full cargo, but as Dom continued to point out, she would work or she wouldn’t, and if she couldn’t carry a load of water she couldn’t go down into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The water would be a valuable bonus in the operation. Taking it to Mars would add only a few days to the trip, since the planets were in the proper configuration, and it would be a boon to dry Mars. The Kennedy’s cargo would represent a year’s supply of water for the planet.

  Neil Walters pronounced the Kennedy as ready as she’d ever be without extensive in-flight testing. He, too, disliked carrying a full cargo, but he shrugged and said, “What the hell?” If she could fly at all the weight of the water was insignificant. She had enough power to lift a hundred times the weight without strain. If she failed, it would not be for lack of power.

  J.J. called a briefing in his quarters. He was in field uniform. He had two comets on his collar.

  Dom saw the new insignia. “Congratulations, admiral.”

  “Just a belated recognition of ability, Flash,” J.J. said. “When we bring home the bacon I’m going to see to it that you get one of these little doodads.” He tapped a comet insignia.

  “You’re all heart,” Dom said, remembering that it was J.J. who had refused his last chance at promotion because he’d happened to take a swing at a stupid and inefficient one-comet admiral.

  “Meantime, you’re promoted to captain,” J.J. said. “You deserve it and the Kennedy deserves it. I wouldn’t want her to be commanded by a mere commander.”

  The others arrived one by one. J.J. went through the chain of command aboard ship, although all were familiar with it already. Dom was in overall command. Neil was flying captain. J.J. was third in command, second to Neil in flying matters, to Dom in matters of ship’s operation and safety. When the briefing was completed, J.J. made a little speech. He concluded by saying that things looked good.

  “We’ll announce the truth when we’re in space,” he said. “Right now the rads think their lousy suicides blew up the Kennedy. We’ve announced major cutbacks in the space program to give them another victory and, we hope, keep them quiet until we get back. We turned a billion and a half dollars back into the general fund. That made a big splash.”

  “So we’re burning our bridges behind us,” Doris said.

  “Exactly,” J.J. said grimly. “We bring home the bacon or we forget the space program. If we come back without it we’ll be cut down to the Mars fertilizer run, and that won’t last long before we’ll be forced to pull all the ships home and close down the Mars base. But it had to be done. We think they were on the verge of armed revolt, and we weren’t sure we could win. Now we’ve poured some oil on the troubled waters. They’ll think they have unlimited time now. And well come back with something which will knock them on their asses and have the whole world on our side.”

  “I wish I could be as confident as you,” Dom said.

  “I have to be confident, Flash,” J. J. said. “If I didn’t feel that way I’d strap on as much plastique as I could carry and walk into an Earthfirster rally and pull the pin.”

  Chapter Eight

  A million and one things can go wrong with a collection of complicated components, and the Kennedy was the most complex ship ever constructed. Every system aboard had been tested time and time again, but never in flight with all of them operating to move a huge mass of metal and a cargo of water.

  Just in case, the entire backside of the moon was evacuated. Dom said a silent prayer, and he was sure that each of the others aboard were doing the same as Neil, buckled into the pilot’s chair, finished the last preflight checklist and looked over at J.J. and winked. Neil’s blue eyes were squinted and his mouth twisted into a grin which was not amusement, but his way of showing tension.

  There was no dramatic countdown. When all systems were ready and all the thousands of little things checked out, J.J. gave a thumbs-up sign and Neil pressed a switch which ignited the preheater. Down in the engineroom Paul Jensen saw the light go on and ran a visual of the automatics. The sound of the preheater was a muffled rumble in Jensen’s ears. There was a tiny vibration which only a trained man would notice. It came up to his senses through the soles of his feet.

  “All right, baby,” Neil said. “Do it for old Neil.” When the awesome power began to build there was no loud noise, only a small hum. The sensation of power was there, however, and something in the closed atmosphere of the ship seemed to absorb it, to become alive with it. There was a charge in the air, a tingling which went beyond skin-deep to become a part of the entire sensory system.

  Slowly power overcame inertia. Slowly the heavily laden monster of a ship moved, the force which powers the stars building, building, as crew members checked and reported, and it was “Go. Go. Go.”

  Dom’s eyes flashed back and forth among an array of instruments which read stress and loading on hull and internal components. Inertial strain registered and was noted, but she had been built well, built with pride and loving care by men who felt that she might be the last of her breed, the last ship they’d ever build.

  Acceleration was smooth and more rapid than a conventional rocket. The moon’s gravity was a mere feather of force to be brushed aside by the brute power in Kennedy’s drive.

  Up and out she went smoothly. Neil goosed her, and the sudden acceleration pushed the crew against the backs of their seats. She was in position to turn, to assume the stance for the long, hard drive for acceleration which would take her to a rendezvous with Mars. She did it with only a fraction of her available muscle, a creature of free space, proud, beautiful, huge. There she lay as the crew examined her from stem to stern.

  Although she handled like a dream and was doing great, Neil Walters was still aware that he was flying an untested ship with a crew aboard. He knew that Kennedy had been a crash project, and he didn’t like flying the results of crash projects. He knew his space history. The first crash construction project produced the Vanguard series of rockets, and he’d seen the old films of Vanguards melting down on the launch pad. Crash programs did that. In the 1950s, the United States had pushed hard to catch up with the Russians, who had put a dog, Laika, into space with a total payload of over one thousand pounds. Up to that point the prestige of the United States had rested on a super job of jury-rigging by a crew under Wernher von Braun. They used spit and scrap wire, antique rockets, a lot of determination and imagination, and placed thirty-point-eight pounds of payload into orbit with a tiny Jupiter C.

  Von Braun proved that crash techniques do not always fail, but still there was the Vanguard, which blew with spectacular regularity to prove that if you persist in crash techniques in things as complicated as space hardware you’re going to have a few loud bangs.

  The big question in Neil’s mind was this: Was the Kennedy an inspired job of jury-rigging in the von Braun mold, or was she a Vanguard? If she stayed in one piece and performed, future historians would call her a technical miracle. If she blew, or simply fizzled, brought down by the failure of one tiny and relatively insignificant system somewhere deep inside her, they would go back to calling her what she was called in the beginning, Folly.

  She checked out. Doris’ c
omputer ticked out, for the automatics, course settings and power settings and thousands of pieces of individual information which formed the word “Go.”

  Neil missed the familiar bellow of burning rockets, soundless in space, loud and all-pervasive inside a ship. His eyes squinted again as he activated her and started her on that long, long drive. His voice was professionally calm. His words went to the crew and on a tight beam back to Lunar Control.

  “All systems normal, all systems go.”

  The next pucker period began, an attempt to get the big bird up to cruising speed without blowing her wide open. It was more than just opening a throttle, but it was handled, in its complexity, by the shipboard computers, matching power to stress, every action monitored in a half-dozen ways, both electronic and visual. The ship hummed with that inaudible energy and began to move, faster and faster, the acceleration creating an artificial gravity pushing the crew members backward in their seats.

  She didn’t blow. Neil kept the crew working long hours during that initial period of acceleration. She reached cruise speed sixty-five percent faster than conventional ships and was moving faster than anything man had built. Every system was checked and rechecked, tested in flight.

  At last Neil was satisfied. Rotating watches began, and some of the crew had time for a nap. The Kennedy performed as if she’d gone through the most thorough flight testing.

  Neil took first watch. Dom, who had the second watch, knew he would be unable to sleep. He stayed near his panel, checking stress and loading. Paul Jensen kept an eye on the powerplant. Only Doris and Art retired to their cabins.

  It was J.J. who took the call from Lunar Base. Even before the message was complete, his hand flicked an alarm and the lights flashed and the alarm whooped throughout the ship.

  With the crew at emergency quarters, J.J. fed the message from the base into the sound system.