Pressure Man

by Zach Hughes

  Dom picked up a piece and looked at it. It had a slightly grainy texture. It had the spongy feel of a good, rich bread. He nibbled it tentatively, then took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. It was unlike anything he’d ever eaten. It had a wholesome, hearty taste, a pleasing richness.

  “Do you want to listen to me for a minute now, Flash?” J J. asked, grinning broadly.

  “J.J.,” Dom said, “I have to admit that you have my full attention.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Carbohydrates are not the most healthful of foods, when taken as a major portion of the diet, but a hungry man doesn’t concern himself with nutrition, only with filling his belly. Carbohydrates are easily utilized by the body. They can supply a quick burst of energy, especially if rich in sugars. The blood sugar level rises immediately, and the eater feels a surge of energy.

  Rationing was necessary at first, but, when added to the dwindling store of food stocks under the control of the government, the tons of carbohydrates which were ferried from the moon to Earthside turned the tide in the battle for the stomachs of the people.

  At first, not too much care was taken about sanitation. Foodstuff was being delivered to fighting men on short rations and to civilians who didn’t care too much about cleanliness, as long as the roughly carved chunks tasted good.

  Later, as the country began to come back to normal and the forces of the Shaw Alliance were gradually pushed back into southern California and exterminated ruthlessly, the stuff was delivered in sanitary wrappings, carefully weighed, but available in plenty.

  By the time Admiral Dominic Gordon returned from Jupiter with another load of raw material, there was a functioning government. Small amounts of the foodstuff went a long way, because it was rich. When released from the pressurized hold of the John F. Kennedy, the stuff expanded into tons and tons of richness.

  The space industry had new life. War damage slowed the recovery, but space was a high-priority field. A second Kennedy class ship was being built out beyond the moon. Plans for the ship were given to the governments of the U.K., Japan, Germany, and the U.S.S.R., and within months they had their own tankers under construction. There was plenty of room out beyond the moon.

  It was not all generous and selfless, the donation of the research which went into the Kennedy, and the distribution, without cost, of tons of rich carbohydrates to India, Africa, and Asia. No one gets something for nothing, and the price was dictated by a hard-nosed U.S. government operating with a temporary Congress of only fifty-two members, one man from each state, more than half of them military men. Before a country got the Kennedy, that country instituted a very tough program of birth control. Before a nonindustrial country received food, the governments provided heavy penalties for unlicensed births. The freedom to breed was, very definitely, put into cold storage, and when starving millions protested, food shipments were cut off until the starving millions saw the light and obeyed government edicts to use birth control. On the New York Stock Exchange, the stocks of companies in the birth-control field shot out of sight.

  Parliamentary democracy was not popular in the United States. The politicians who had sat for centuries in the halls of government without solving even the most pressing problems were sent home to work the fields to help restore American agriculture, for the manna from heaven made an excellent fertilizer. Actually, only a few of the ex-movers and shakers did manual labor, but many fancied themselves to be gentlemen farmers, and it made a good story when it was told to the press by J.J. Barnes, Minister of Supply of the Second Republic.

  Admiral Gordon was not totally satisfied with the new government in Washington, but it was better than anything the country had known since the last of the hard-nosed American Presidents, Harry Truman, died in the middle of the twentieth century. Dom began to have hope, as he talked to traditionalists in the services, that a total military dictatorship would be avoided, and that a measure of freedom would be maintained, to be expanded upon in the future. Never, however, would something so precious as a vote be extended to people steeped in ignorance and indolence. The right to vote would be available to all, but it would be earned, and not by owning money or property. The vote could be exercised only by those who, by written test, demonstrated a working knowledge of the choices of free men. The franchise would be available to any person if it was earned, but it was not a God-given right. Future elections would not be won by the man who looked best on television, or by a man who got votes because his father and the voter’s father had been Publicrat all their lives.

  Admiral Neil Walters took the Kennedy on her third trip to Jupiter after completing flight tests on the second of the huge tankers. Admiral Gordon raced him there on the New Republic, the Kennedy’s sister ship. To his pleasure, the old girl beat her younger sister into orbit by two hours and thirty-two minutes.

  It was a long trip to Dom, for Doris was Earthside, designing a computer which would link qualified voters to a referendum center in Washington. By the time he got back to the moon, ten million citizens had qualified, and were in a position to let their voices be heard on all questions, not merely who was to sit on the throne of power. An entirely new form of government of the people and by the people was slowly being put into effect.

  When she met the shuttle which took him down, she was in full dress uniform. Dom had never seen her look more beautiful. He found her to smell and feel equally wonderful as he seized her in a bear hug and lifted her from her feet. He had only one plan. It involved privacy and Doris. And, in the future, if she didn’t go, he didn’t go.

  “You’re not being dignified, admiral,” Doris said, tugging at her tunic. “And we’re on camera.”

  Dom looked up into the eye of a television camera. “Again?” he asked.

  “This one is special,” Doris said. “The media have been released from censorship. We’re operating with a free press again, and the network wants to do a full documentary on the first flight of the Kennedy.”

  “Later,” Dom said, seizing her arm and trying to lead her away.

  “There are orders from on high to cooperate,” Doris said.

  “J.J.?” Dom asked. She nodded. “Oh, hell,” he said. “Let him be interviewed. I’m taking you home.”

  But he was blocked by another camera crew and a young woman. “Admiral Gordon, we won’t take much of your time.”

  “All right,” Dom said. “Let’s get on with it.”

  “We’d like to do one segment of filming on the construction site,” the young lady said. A third tanker was taking shape out on the moon. “We can do that after you’ve had a chance to rest from your trip.”

  “You’re all heart,” Dom said.

  John Marrow was to conduct the interview with Dom. He cornered Dom. “I think you’d like to know what goes before,” he said. “It’ll only take a minute.” He placed Dom in front of a portable monitor.

  The introduction to the documentary opened with dramatic closeup shots of Jupiter. The Kennedy was superimposed against the gas giant. Marrow’s voice was talking about the state of the world at the time of the Kennedy’s first voyage and of the brave men and women who set out aboard an untested vessel on a mission which would change the world.

  “Here’s where we come in,” Marrow said. “We’re on.” He faced the camera. “And now a third tanker of the Kennedy class is nearing completion. As she takes shape, out beyond the moon, we have with us the man who designed the original Kennedy, a man who has just returned from his third expedition to Jupiter. His friends call him Flash Gordon.”

  “You’re not my friend,” Dom said. “To you it’s Admiral Gordon.”

  “Cut,” Marrow said. “I’m sorry, admiral. Shall we try again?” He went through his introduction. “And now, Admiral Gordon, can you tell us the results of your latest trip to Jupiter?”

  “We brought home the bacon, same as before,” Dom said.

  “An apt phrase, admiral, for in a sense that’s exactly what you did, isn’t it?”

 
“That’s what I said.”

  “For, indeed, the hold of the New Republic contains enough material to furnish food for millions of people.”

  “To be specific,” Dom said, “the hold contains several hundred thousand tons of carbonigenous cloud from the three-thousand-atmosphere layer of the planet Jupiter.”

  “Now, Admiral Gordon, let’s go back to the beginning, when you and J.J. Barnes were designing the original Kennedy.”

  “J.J. had nothing to do with designing the ship,” Dom said. “He was project head. The design was done by me and my team, which included Larry and Doris Gomulka—”

  “Cut,” Marrow said. “Let’s go back to ‘let’s go back to the beginning.’ Roll ’em. Let’s go back to the beginning, admiral, to the time when you and your team were designing the original Kennedy. I understand that you did not know the true function of the ship. Is that true?”

  “We were told that there was an alien ship inside the atmosphere of Jupiter,” Dom said.

  “Is it true that only one or two men knew the true purpose of the first expedition?”

  “I don’t know how many,” Dom said. “J.J. Barnes knew.”

  “But you, admiral, soon saw, once you were down in the atmosphere, that J.J. Barnes was a man of true vision, a man with brilliant insight and wisdom?”

  “I thought he was crazy,” Dom said.

  “You no longer feel that way, I’m sure.” Marrow laughed.

  “I still think he’s a nut, but an inspired and very lucky nut. He took a gamble and it paid off. It was a brilliant gamble and we owe a lot to J.J.”

  “Would you cast your vote for J.J. Barnes as President of the United States?”

  “No,” Dom said.

  “Cut,” Marrow said.

  “What the fuck kind of a question is that?” Dom demanded.

  “Don’t you know that J.J. filed for the Presidency in the next election?” Marrow asked.

  “No.”

  “Would you vote for him?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll leave that out,” Marrow said. “Roll ’em.”

  He thought for a minute. “Are you a qualified voter, Admiral Gordon?”

  “Not yet. I’ll probably have to have my wife coach me to pass the test.”

  Marrow was forming another question when Dom interrupted. “Did J.J. line this up so that I would give him a testimonial as a candidate?”

  “Let ’em roll,” Marrow said. “Well cut it out later.” He changed tactics. “As the man who designed the Kennedy and was her captain on her first voyage, could you, Admiral Gordon, give us your explanation of what some people call a miracle?”

  “Well, it wasn’t really a miracle,” Dom said. “It came at the right time, and that made it seem miraculous. The materials were there. We merely had the hardware to go get them and put them to use. The most puzzling part of it, to most people, is actually the simplest. That part of the miracle is repeated over and over, every day, somewhere on Earth. When the air is overcharged with vapor, the vapor condenses and falls as precipitation. If you overcharge an atmosphere with the proper amounts and the proper compounds of carbon and hydrogen, then the predpation will be in the form of carbon-hydrogen compounds, or carbohydrates.”

  “Or manna from heaven,” Marrow said.

  “The ancient Jews called it that,” Dom said. “The Talmud said bread rained from heaven. In Icelandic legend, people ate the morning dew; Buddhists called it heavenly oil, perfume, and ointment. It came in a time of troubles, and was called a miracle, just as it comes to us in a time of trouble. The only difference is that instead of a god or goddess bringing it to us, we went out and got it.”

  “Yes, thanks to the foresight of that great man, J.J. Barnes,” Marrow said, smiling directly into the camera.

  “Thanks to Immanuel Velikovsky,” Dom said. “Who is long dead.”

  “Ah, yes,” Marrow said.

  “That’s why the third ship is to be named the Velikovsky.” Dom said.

  Much later, Dom lay in a hammock watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. It was a lovely evening. He felt good. The warm softness of a summer evening caressed his skin. An empty drink glass was in his hand, and he was trying to work up enough energy to go inside and fill it when Doris came out.

  “Hey, admiral,” she called. “Your interview is on.”

  He ambled in. He saw himself standing beside John Marrow. He grunted and went to mix a drink, but he was human so he came back to see himself as others saw him. However, he couldn’t keep his eyes on his own face, because Doris was standing behind him, looking quite nice…

  “You look good in living color,” he said.

  “You look sleepy.”

  “I was.”

  “There are nuts and there are nuts,” Dom was saying. “Velikovsky was a nut who lived and wrote in the middle part of the twentieth century. Briefly, he evolved a theory, by bringing together information from hundreds of ancient writings—”

  “Material which was highly suspect,” Marrow put in.

  “Suspect only because of the limitations of early writing,” Dom said. “Take the Bible, for example. It was written in Hebrew. Hebrew is a primitive and very inexact language. In Hebrew, as in most ancient languages, one word can mean several things. Thus, depending on the translator, you can read just about anything you want to read into the Bible or any other writings from the early times. Shortly after Velikovsky’s time, for example, a German used the same sources to prove to a lot of people that Earth had been visited by spacers from another planet. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Velikovsky had a slight advantage with thinking people, because he proved to be right in a couple of predictions. He predicted the higher-than-estimated surface temperature on Venus.”

  “Doesn’t that higher surface temperature on Venus play a vital part in Velikovsky’s theory?”

  “Velikovsky said that Venus was thrown out of the planet Jupiter into an erratic orbit which brought her into near collision with both Mars and the Earth,” Dom said.

  “At the time of the Exodus, and again in the time of Joshua, in the Bible,” Marrow said.

  “But the Velikovsky theory didn’t account for all known phenomena,” Dom said, “so it was treated as a rather scary and very harebrained idea. It was largely forgotten.”

  “But not by J.J. Barnes,” Marrow said.

  “Yes,” Dom said, “Velikovsky’s theory was that the carbonigenous clouds torn out of Jupiter by the planet Venus made carbohydrates fall onto Earth during the moments of near collision. One nut remembered another nut and we went off to Jupiter and found it to be, truly, a land of milk and honey.”

  “At this moment,” Marrow said, “a cargo of carbonigenous cloud from Jupiter is being pumped into a vast cloud chamber on the moon. There, the carbohydrates will precipitate out, be shaped into loaves, loaves which you and I will be eating in the near future.”

  “Well,” Dom said, “that’s that.” He switched off the set.

  “He’s an insufferable little man,” Doris said.

  “I don’t want to talk about him,” Dom said.

  “Would you like to review a little history to get ready for the voter’s test?”

  “Not now.”

  “Something is on your mind,” she said.

  “You,” he said. “Velikovsky.”

  “I understand the first,” she said, with a leer.

  “Was Velikovsky right?”

  “At least about the properties of the Jovian atmosphere.”

  “Was it a lucky guess?”

  “He doesn’t explain everything, of course,” she said. “You’re thinking about those frozen mammoths, aren’t you?”

  “He’s the only one who even had a good guess about them.”

  “Perhaps it’s good that everything can’t be explained,” Doris said. “It leaves us something to worry about and something to learn, a little bit at a time, so that we won’t sit around and think about what you’re thinking abo
ut all the time.”

  He grinned. “I’ll get around to that.” He stood and looked out a window. “Mars was a living planet once. The sun may have been hotter, the planet was certainly wetter. A change in orbit would explain why she died, and Velikovsky said Mars had troubles with Venus before she settled down into a stable orbit. Velikovsky uses the changes in Earth calendars to make some good points. People who had good math seemed to make silly mistakes about the length of the day and changed their calendars later. And why, in all of the primitive races, was there a fear of comets?”

  “Are you leading up to something?” she asked.

  “Envision the orbits of Pluto and Neptune.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” she said. “Pluto actually comes inside the orbit of Neptune at one point.”

  “Will there ever be a collision? Pluto’s a small planet. If he got knocked off his orbit and came cruising across the orbits of the inner planets, what would happen?”

  “They’re not in the same plane, Pluto and Neptune, but I think you have my attention. I’ll do some calculations. And that takes care of Velikovsky for the moment. What about taking care of me?”

  “I want to do some research,” he said. “Can you get me all the observations of the outer planets? Figure a cost on taking one of the new hydropower scouts out there at the next conjunction. I think it’s within the next three years.”

  “You’ve been thinking about this for some time,” she said.

  “Do you think the two of us can handle one of the new Explorer class scouts?”

  “A second honeymoon to Pluto,” she said. “I’m underwhelmed. Don’t you have any immediate work I could, ah, help you with?”

  She stood and looked into his eyes. She was dressed in shorts and halter. The very feminine spread of her hips reminded him that he did have immediate plans for her.

  Pluto would have to wait.

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