“Leroy, you fool. Why didn’t you let him go ahead? Why did you make that silly switch? My work’s done. Nothing can change it now!”
“Muscles . . . I’m . . . old-line Army. Can’t help it . . . don’t like this . . . brave new . . . never could. You’re fit for it. You made it; you live in it. Besides, you’ll . . . appreciate the joke better than ... I would”
“What do you mean, kid?”
“You underestimated . . . you thought you’d be dead when the . . . spacemen heard your recording.” He laughed weakly. “You won’t be, you know. Things’re moving too fast.”
There was a sudden, horrible spell of coughing.
And then Dr. Simmons was alone, holding his dead brother’s head in his arms, rocking back and forth, buffeted and drowning in an acid flood of grief.
And behind it—far, far behind it, his articulate mind said, dazedly:
Great day in the morning, he’s right! What’ll they make of me— a saint, or a blood-red Satan?
<
~ * ~
Divided no longer, Mankind consolidated its gains and looked to the stars. From the initial moon trip in 1978, space travel rapidly extended to the planets. With Mars and Venus colonized, the twenty-first century’s economy had an interplanetary basis, influenced by the powerful spacemen’s union. By 2145 the union had destroyed the corporations and had instituted, after a bitter fight, a dictatorial rule.
BREAKDOWN
by Jack Williamson
O
fficially, Boss Kellon was merely executive secretary of the Union of Spacemen, Managers & Engineers. But boss, now in 2145, was equivalent to caesar. From the unitron converters on Mercury to the lonely mining outposts scattered across the Jovian moons, the Union dominated mankind.
And Harvey Kellon was the Union.
He was a big man. His shrewd, deep-set, deliberate eyes could be chill as blue Callistonian fire diamonds, but a bland professional smile warmed his cragged red face. He wore a flowing white toupee, and few of Sunport’s millions suspected that the boss was bald as the first caesar of old Rome.
Sunport was his capital. For a hundred years the monopoly of interplanetary commerce had fed its power, until even New York was now only a quaint provincial suburb. The towers of the megalopolis stood like a forest of bright monoliths for a hundred miles about the high Colorado mesa that had become the port of space. Forever the tiny moonlet of the Outstation rode at the city’s meridian, a man-made star of its fortune.
Boss Kellon lived in the crown of the lofty Union Tower. The huge, luxurious halls of his penthouse suite were named for the worlds of the Sun. Tonight there was a ball in the Neptune Room, and he was dancing with Selene du Mars.
The boss was short of breath, and dark perspiration spotted the shoulders of his purple dress pajamas. His feet ached. Perhaps, at sixty, he was too old to be dancing; certainly he had too much weight about the middle. But Selene du Mars could make men seek to banish such uncomfortable thoughts.
She was tall and supple and green-eyed. She had been a famous teleview dancer. He thought she was the most costly and glittering thing in all Sunport. Tonight her hair was platinum, and she was dazzling with fire diamonds. He thought those favorite stones were like herself—cold and bright and hard. But he could admire even her calculating ambition, because it was so akin to his own.
Selene claimed a hereditary degree in militechnic engineering. Once Kellon had ordered a quiet investigation, and the Goon Department reported evidence of forgery. Her father had been merely the servant of a militechnic officer, on Jupiter Station. But Kellon suppressed the report, with not a word to Selene. He knew how hard was the climb up from the gray.
Now, and not for the first time, she was wheedling him to crown himself. Her voice was cool and perfect as her long body, and she used the flattering address that she herself had first suggested:
“Your genius, can we have the coronation soon? Everything is planned. Your historian friend Melkart has dug out the old ceremonials for me. My jewelers are working on a fire-diamond crown.”
“For me to pay for,” Kellon chuckled, and drew her pantherine body close against him. “Darling, I know you want to be Empress of the Sun, but your pretty head is in danger enough, without a coronet.”
Kellon frowned, sobered by the thought. He had climbed to the perilous apex of a human pyramid. He was first of the million hereditary engineers, who, with their families and the various grades of their retainers, occupied nearly all the upper-level towers of Sunport.
But, here in Sunport alone, nearly eighty million more wore the gray of labor. They dwelt and toiled in the subsurface levels, and the Goon Department bound their lives with iron restrictions. Kellon knew how they lived—because he had been one of them.
Most of them hated the technician nobility of the Union. That was the dangerous flaw in the pyramid. Kellon had once tried to mend it, with reforms and concessions. But Melkart warned that he was three generations too late. Yielding to that hatred, he was merely paying out the rope to hang himself.
“We’re dancing on a volcano, darling,” he told Selene. “Better not poke the fire!”
Selene’s bare shoulders tossed, and her eyes flashed dark as her emerald-sequined gown* But she curbed her displeasure. She knew that a hundred other women in the long, green-lit hall would have murdered gladly for her place in Kellon’s arms. Her frown turned to a pretty pout.
“Please, your genius.” Her perfect face winced slightly. Kellon knew that he had stepped on her silver slipper. But she smiled again, shrugging off his apology. “It wasn’t caution that conquered the planets for you,” she chided. “Your genius isn’t getting old?”
That was his vulnerable point, and Selene knew it. Perhaps he was. The details of administration were increasingly burdensome. It was hard to find trustworthy subordinates. Sometimes he felt that the Union itself was slipping into decadence, as he grew older.
“The coronation—” her coaxing voice went on.
But Kellon stopped listening. He let her dance out of his arms. He watched the thin man threading toward him through the press of bright-clad engineering aristocracy wheeling about the dance floor.
The thin man was Chief Marquard of the Goon Department. He wore wine-colored formal pajamas and a jeweled Union star. But he had no partner, and his harassed expression meant bad news. Kellon braced himself for trouble.
“Your genius, it’s the Preacher!” The whisper was hoarse with strain. “He’s here in Sunport.” Marquard gulped and wet his lips. “Still in hiding—somewhere down in the drainage levels.”
This was more than merely trouble. Kellon swayed. The lofty shining murals blurred. He saw instead the dark, dripping tunnels, a thousand feet beneath the pavements of Sunport. Once he had hidden there himself, a hunted man in gray. The syncopated drone of the orchestra was suddenly the throb of drainage pumps.
Kellon’s thick, pink hands made a desperate clutching gesture. He had watched the spread of the Gray Crusade, a poison that attacked the Union and rotted the very fabric of civilization. For years the Goon Department had sought the Preacher, in vain. But it was hard to believe that the fanatic had dared to enter Sunport.
He was getting old, indeed. Old and alone. He felt helpless against the demands of this grim moment. Suddenly he was almost ill with a desperate regret for the quarrel with his son. Family loyalty, in this cynical metropolis, was almost the only dependable bond. Now he needed Roy, terribly.
Dazed by the impact of this emergency, his mind slipped back into the past. To Roy, and Roy’s mother. It had been Melkart who first introduced the slender, gray-eyed girl. They were at a secret meeting, down in the drainage ways. Melkart said proudly, “Ruth is going to be the Joan d’Arc of the New Commonwealth.”
Perhaps Ruth had loved Melkart. Kellon was never sure. For the secret police of the Corporation raided the party headquarters, a few months later. Melkart was captured and transported to Mars. It was only after she had rec
eived a false report of Melkart’s death, that she would marry Kellon.
Kellon was responsible for that report. He had tried to atone for it, however, with the parole he secured for Melkart as soon as he had sufficient influence.
Ruth had never abandoned her dream of the New Commonwealth. She had not approved the methods of Kellon’s rise to power, and she was deeply hurt when he ordered the Union Goons to hunt down the few surviving members of the party. Roy was twelve years old when she died.
Roy was like his mother—lean, intense, idealistic. Kellon was delighted when the boy wanted to take practical degrees in unitronic engineering—it helped him forget that his own hereditary titles were forgeries.
But Roy had been a bitter disappointment. He failed to show any interest in Union politics. He refused to enter the Militechnic College, to prepare for command and promotion in the Fleet. Instead, at twenty, he had gone to waste a year with some meaningless research at the solar power plants on Mercury.
The quarrel happened after Roy returned—five years ago. Roy didn’t like Selene du Mars. She made matters worse by trying to flirt with him. He called her an unpleasant name, and stalked out of the penthouse suite. He had never come back.
But Kellon had followed him, next day, to the great unitronics laboratory on the mesa. A silent crystal egg, his unitron glider sloped down toward the long, low, white-roofed building that stood between the commercial port and the militechnic reservation.
Like an elongated silver bubble, a freighter was lifting from the Venus Docks, bright and strange in the shimmer of its drive field. Gray stevedores were trucking away the gleaming metal ingots and squared hardwood logs it had unloaded. A Martian liner lay in her cradle, spilling dark ore concentrate down a chute. A space-battered Jovian relief ship was loading mountains of crates and bales and drums—food and equipment and power for the miners on Callisto. The Mercury Docks were stacked with crated dynode batteries, freshly charged in the Sun plants. All the commerce of an interplanetary empire!
But Kellon’s pride had a bitter taste. He could remember when the port was far busier, back in the days of the Corporation. Now half the yards were weed grown and abandoned. Dismantled ships were turning red with rust in the cradles at the disused Saturn Docks.
His pilot landed the glider on the white roof. Kellon asked for his son, and a startled watchman guided him down through the laboratory. Space had really been conquered in this building, Kellon knew; all the great advances in unitronic flight had been made here. But most of the halls were deserted now, the old equipment dismantled or ruined.
Kellon found Roy in a long, clean shop whose plastic walls were softly radiant with a clear blue-white. Huge windows looked out across the militechnic reservation, where the unitron cruisers of the Fleet lay like immense dead-black arrows.
Roy was bronzed with spaceburn from his year on Mercury. He looked up, with his mother’s nervous quickness, from some gadget on a bench. Kellon was a little shocked to see the screwdriver in his hands —for an engineer of the higher ranks, any sort of manual work was considered degrading.
Roy seemed glad to see him.
“Sorry I lost my temper.” He smiled—his mother’s intense, grave smile. “I don’t like Selene. But she isn’t important.” His brown, quick fingers touched the gadget, and his gray eyes lit with eagerness. “I’m searching for a way to test the condensation hypothesis.”
“Look, son.” Kellon gestured impatiently at the window, toward the row of mighty black cruisers. “You don’t have to play with abstractions. There’s the Fleet, waiting for you to take command as soon as you are qualified. Your experiments should be left to underlings.”
“I’m sorry, boss.” Roy’s tanned face set with his mother’s unbreakable spirit. “I think my hypothesis is more important than the Fleet.”
“Hypothesis?” Anger boomed in Kellon’s voice. “Important.” He tried to calm his tone. “Can you explain what is important about it?”
“I tried to, before I went to Mercury,” Roy said. “You were too busy to listen. You see, I have a new idea about how the planets were formed. I went to Mercury to check it, with closer observations of the Sun. I believe I am right.”
Kellon attempted to swallow his impatience.
“I’m listening, now,” he said.
“You see, the origin of solar systems has never been well explained,” Roy began in a careful voice. “The tidal theories of the twentieth century were all somewhat strained. There was a statistical difficulty. Only one star in a hundred thousand could possibly pass near enough to another to raise planet-forming tides. But the astronomers of the Outstation long ago convinced themselves that planetary systems are a lot more frequent than that.
“The discovery of the unitron, a hundred years ago, caused a revolution in nearly every science. It was recognized as the ultimate matter-energy unit of the universe. For the first time, it fitted all the various phenomena of electromagnetics and gravitation into a single picture. But most engineers, in the era of the Corporation, were too busy conquering and exploring the planets to devote much time to abstract theories.”
Kellon felt a brief amusement at his son’s simple lecture-room explanations, and then wondered uneasily if Roy knew that his degrees were forged. He frowned, trying to follow.
“The twentieth-century cosmogonists had to deal with a confusing array of concepts,” Roy went on. “Electrons and protons, neutrons and mesotrons and barytrons, photons and light waves, electric fields and magnetic fields and momentum fields and gravity fields. Already they were beginning to grope for a unified-field theory, but they never quite perceived all those things as manifestations of the same ultimate unit. It’s no wonder they never quite understood the Sun, or how the planets came to be born from it!”
“But you do?” Kellon was interested, in spite of himself.
Roy nodded eagerly, and touched the gadget again.
“I think I do,” he said. “It is hard to believe that the existence of planets depends on a freakish accident. In my theory, a star forms planets as normally as it radiates energy. Even now, the Sun is emitting unitron mass at the rate of about four million tons a second. I believe that planets have been condensed out of emitted unitron matter, by a combination of several processes, over periods as long as the life of the stars.”
Roy’s gray eyes were shining.
“That is my hypothesis—that every normal star has formed planets of its own. The tidal theories allowed only a handful of habitable planets in the entire galaxy. I believe there may be—millions!” His quick hand gestured, with the gadget. “Of course, it is still only a hypothesis—though the Outstation astronomers have found evidence of planets about several of the nearer single stars. But I’m going to find out!”
He searched Kellon’s face.
“Do you see it, father?”
Heavily, Kellon shook his rugged white-wigged head.
“Your argument sounds reasonable enough,” he admitted. “Once at the Outstation I saw a graph that had some little dips they said meant planets. But what of it? I don’t see anything to get excited about.”
Tears of frustration came into Roy’s eager eyes.
“I can’t understand it,” he whispered bitterly. “Nobody gets excited. Nobody cares.” His bronzed head lifted defiantly. “But the engineers of a hundred years ago would have been building ships to explore those planets!”
“I don’t think so,” Kellon objected wearily. “It would be too far for commerce. The moons of Saturn haven’t been visited for sixty years. Right now, our Jovian outposts are losing money. Supplies and transportation cost more than we get back. If it wasn’t for Union prestige, I would abandon them today.”
“Science has been slipping back, ever since the uranium process was lost.” Roy’s face was troubled. “I don’t know why.” His brown chin lifted. “But we can go on. The unitron drive can be improved. With time and money, I could build an interstellar ship!”
“Maybe you cou
ld,” Kellon said. “If you are fool enough to want to die on some strange, barren world that men never even saw—when I have an interplanetary empire to give you!”
“I guess I’m just that kind of fool,” Roy said quietly. “I don’t want an empire.”
Kellon lost his temper, then.
“I’m going to cut off your allowance,” he shouted at the white-lipped boy. “That will stop this nonsense. Come to me whenever you are ready to take up militechnics.”
“You had better go back to Selene du Mars,” Roy told him, in a thin, low voice. “I don’t need the allowance.”
And that was true. Within a few months, Kellon learned that Roy had designed a new type drive-field coil for the unitron transports in the Jovian service. It saved three days in the long run out to Jupiter, and increased the power recovery in deceleration nearly forty percent. For the first time in twenty years, the Callistonian mines showed a tiny profit. Roy’s fees, paid by the Union Transport Authority, were a hundred times the cut-off allowance.
Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02] Page 14
