Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “Better show me where the controls are, anyway,” he said. “You better stay here,” he added to Brown. “I’ll be with Hoerwitz, but Smith said this panel was never to be left unwatched. We might not have time to explain if he found us both gone.” The other man nodded. Hoerwitz, keeping his face as expressionless as he could, led the way to the station he had mentioned.

  This was about as far from the control chamber as anything could be, since it was at the surface. It lay near the main entrance, a quarter of the way around the asteroid’s equator from the radiators. The converters themselves were scattered at fairly regular intervals just under the surface. The general idea was that if one of them did misbehave it would meet only token resistance outward, and the rest of the plant might have a chance. Access and loading tunnels connecting the converters with the cargo locks and the living quarters were deliberately crooked. All these tricks would of course be futile in a major blowup, but it is possible to have minor accidents even in nuclear engineering.

  The dome containing the loading control panels was one of the few places offering a direct view to the outside of the asteroid. It had served as a conning site while the body was being driven in from beyond Mars; it still was sometimes used that way. The thrust pits were still in service, as the present long, narrow orbit was heavily perturbed by the Moon and required occasional correction near apogee. This was not done by Hoerwitz, who could no more have corrected an orbit than he could have built a spaceship. The thrust controls were disconnected except when a ballistics engineer was on hand.

  The dome was small, little more than a dozen feet across, and its entire circle was rimmed with conveyor control panels. Hoerwitz, quite unintentionally, had exaggerated their simplicity. This might have gotten him into trouble with anyone but Robinson. Without worrying about this situation, since he failed to recognize it, the manager promptly began explaining.

  “First, you want to be careful about these guarded switches on each panel,” he pointed out. “They’re designed to bypass the safeties which normally keep you from putting too hot a load on the conveyors, so that you can dump a converter in an emergency. At the moment, since all the units are hot, you couldn’t operate any part of the conveyor system except by those switches.

  “Basically, the whole thing is simple enough. One panel is concerned with each of the twenty separate conveyor systems, and all panels are alike, so—”

  “Why didn’t they make just one panel, then, and have a selector to set it on any one of the reactors?” asked Robinson. Hoerwitz sadly revised upward his estimate of the fellow’s brain power, as he answered.

  “Often several ships are loading, or several reactors unloading, at one time. It turned out to be simpler and safer to have independent control systems. Also, the system works both ways—customers get credit for mass brought to the station for conversion. We have to take material to the converters as well as away from them, and it’s more efficient to be able to carry on several operations at once. The original idea, as you probably know, was to use the mass of the asteroid itself for conversion; but with laws about controlling rotation so that the radiators would point away from Earth most of the time, and the expense of the original installation, and the changes in orbit and angular momentum and so on, they finally decided it was better to try to keep the mass of the place fairly constant. They did use quite a bit of material from it at first. There are a lot of useless tunnels inside, and quite a few pits outside, left over from lose days.”

  Hoerwitz was watching his listener covertly as he spoke, trying to judge how much of this information was being absorbed, but the other’s face was unreadable. He gave up and went on with the lesson.

  They were joined after about a quarter of an hour by Smith, but the head thief said little, merely ordering the instruction to continue. The factory manager decided to take no more chances testing his listeners with double-talk; Smith had impressed him as being a different proposition from his followers. The decision to play safe in his presence proved a wise one.

  It took another ten minutes for Mac to wind up the lesson.

  “You’ll need some practice,” he concluded, “and there’s no way to get it just yet. I was never a schoolteacher, but I understand that your best way of making sure how well you know something is to try to teach it to someone else. I trust Mr. Smith approves of that thought.”

  “I do.” Smith’s face didn’t show approval or anything else, but the words were encouraging.

  “Give me a lesson right now, Rob. I’d particularly like to know just what this switch does—or did Mr. Hoerwitz forget to mention it?” He indicated the emergency-dump override.

  “Oh, no, he showed me that first. We’d better keep clear of it, because it empties that particular converter onto its conveyor and dumps it into space, even though it’s still hot.”

  For a moment there might have been a flicker of surprise on Smith’s face.

  “And he told you about it? I rather thought he might skip items like that in the hope that one of us might make a mistake he could not be blamed for.” Hoerwitz decided that it would be less suspicious to answer that remark than to let it pass.

  “Is there anything that could possibly go wrong that you would not blame me for?” he asked.

  “Probably not, at that. I’m glad you realize it, Mr. Hoerwitz. Perhaps I’ll be spared the nuisance of having to leave a man on guard here as well as at the main controls.” He glanced through the dome’s double wall at Earth’s fat crescent, which dominated the sky on one side of the meridian as the Moon did on the other. “Is there any way of shutting off access to this place until we’re ready to use it? Think how much more at ease we’d both feel if there were.”

  Hoerwitz shrugged. “No regular door. There are a couple of safety air-breaks in the corridor below; you could get one of them closed easily enough, since there are manual switches for them as well as the pressure and temperature differential sensors, but it would be a lot harder to open. If one of those things does shut, it’s normally because air is being lost or dangerous reactions going on on one side or the other. A good deal of red tape is necessary to convince the machinery that all is well after all.”

  “Hmph.” Smith looked thoughtful. “All right, we’ll consider it. Rob, you stay here until I decide. You come with me, old fellow.” Hoerwitz obeyed with mixed feelings.

  It was lucky he hadn’t tried to dump the reactors and shut himself off in the dome section, in view of Smith’s perspicacity, but he couldn’t thank his own intelligence or foresight for saving him. The sad fact was that he’d never thought of the trick until he was explaining matters to Robinson. Now it was certainly too late. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, since someone like Robinson could presumably get air doors open again in short order; and there was an even brighter side, now that he thought of it. The last few minutes might well have gone far in convincing Smith that the manager was really reconciled to the situation. One could not be sure of that, naturally, with a person like Smith, but one could hope. Time would no doubt tell—and quite possibly in bad language.

  As they floated back down toward the living section—Hoerwitz noted with some regret that Smith was getting better at handling himself in free-fall—the head thief spoke briefly.

  “Maybe you’ve learned your lesson. From what’s just happened, I guess we can both hope so. Just the same, I don’t want to see you anywhere near that place where we just left Robinson, except when I tell you myself to go there for my own reasons. Is that clear?”

  “It is.”

  “Good. I don’t really enjoy persuading people the hard way, but you may have noticed that Mr. Jones does. If you’ve really accepted the fact that I have the bulge on you, though, we won’t have to amuse him.”

  “You’ve made everything very clear. Do you want the reactor which was working on Class IV when you came, and which will be ready pretty soon, to be unloaded as soon as it’s done?”

  “Hmph. I don’t kno
w. Does your loading machine deliver to any spot on the surface, or just by that dome?”

  “Just at the dome, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t have been practical to run conveyors all over the place, and it’s even less so to drive trucks around on the surface.”

  “All right. If it would mean moving our ship an extra time we’ll wait until everything is ready. It would be a nuisance to have to guard it, too.”

  “Then you’re not really convinced I’ve learned my lesson, after all?”

  “Don’t ask too many questions, Mr. Hoerwitz. Why not just assume that I don’t like to take chances?”

  The manager was not inclined to act on impulse, but he sometimes talked on that basis. This was one of the times.

  “I don’t want to assume that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because one of your most obvious ways of not taking chances would be to leave no witnesses. If I believed you were that thorough, I might as well stop everything now and let you shoot me—not that I really enjoy the prospect, but I could at least die with the satisfaction that I hadn’t helped you.”

  “That’s logical,” Smith answered thoughtfully. “I have only two answers to it. One you already know—we wouldn’t just shoot you. The other, which I hope will make you feel better, is that we aren’t worried about witnesses. You’ve been reading too much. We’ll have lived in this place for several days before we’re done, but you must have noticed that we aren’t wearing gloves to keep from leaving fingerprints, or spacesuits to foil the scent analyzers, or anything else of that sort. I’m sure the law will know who was here after we’ve gone, but that doesn’t worry us. They already want us for so many different things that our main care is to avoid getting caught up with, not identified.”

  “Then why those names? Do you expect me to believe they’re real?”

  For almost the first time, Smith showed emotion. He grinned. “Go back to your drama sheets, Mr. Hoerwitz, but stick to Shakespeare. Lord Peter Wimsey is leading you astray. Just remember what I said about the conveyor controls; keep away from them.”

  V

  If his finger hadn’t been so painful, Hoerwitz would have been quite happy as he made his way back to the lounge and let the air currents settle him into the hammock. He shunted Julius Caesar into the “hold” stack without zeroing its tracker, started The Pajama Game, and remained awake through the whole show. It was quite an occasion.

  For the next couple of days everyone was on almost friendly terms, though Hoerwitz’s finger kept him from forgetting entirely the basic facts of the situation or warming up very much to Jones. Some of the men watched shows with him, and there was even casual conversation entirely unconnected with reactors and fuel processing. Smith’s psychology was working fairly well.

  It did not backfire on him until about twenty hours before perigee.

  At that time Mac had been making one of his periodic control checks, and had reported that the runs would be finishing off during the next ten or twelve hours. He would have to stay at the board, since they would not all end at the same time, and it was safer to oversee the supposedly automatic cooling of each converter as its job ended.

  “What’s all that for?” asked Smith. “I thought it didn’t matter much what was in the converters at the start. Why will it hurt if a little of this is still inside when you begin your next job? Won’t it just be converted along with everything else?”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” replied the manager. “Basically you are right; we don’t deal in pure products, and what we deliver is processed chemically by our customers. Still, it’s best to start clean. If too much really hot stuff were allowed to accumulate in the converters between runs, it could be bad. If Class I or II fuel intended to power a chemical industry, for example, were contaminated with Class IV there could be trouble on Earth—especially if the plant in question were doing a chemical separation of nuclear fuels.”

  “But it’s all Class IV this time,” pointed out Smith, “unless you’ve been running a major bluff on us, and I’m sure you wouldn’t do that.” His face hardened, and once more Hoerwitz mentally kicked himself. He hadn’t even thought of such a trick, and he could probably have gotten away with it. There was no easy way to identify directly the isotopes being put out by the converters; it took specialized apparatus and specialized knowledge. It was pretty certain that Smith had neither. Well, too late now.

  “It’s all one class, as you said,” the manager admitted with what he hoped was negligible delay, “but that’s just it. With Class IV in every converter and on every conveyor it’s even more important than usual to watch the cooling. I live here, you know. I’m not an engineer and don’t know what would happen if any of that stuff found its way into the hydrogen reactors, but I’d rather not find out.”

  “But you must be enough of an engineer to handle the fusion units.”

  “That doesn’t demand an engineer. I’m a button pusher. I can operate them very sensibly, but they don’t waste a trained engineer out, here with the price of skilled labor what it is. The trouble frequency of these plants is far too low to keep one twiddling his thumbs on standby the whole time.”

  “But how about safety? If this place blows apart, it would take quite a few centuries of engineers’ pay to replace it, I’d think.”

  “No doubt. I suspect that’s the point they’re trying to make, in order to modify or get rid of that law about hydrogen reactors on Earth. The idea is that if the company trusts them enough to risk all this capital without a resident engineer, what’s everyone worried about?”

  “But the place could really let go if the right—or I should say the wrong—things happened.”

  “I suppose so, but I don’t know what they’d be, short of deliberate mishandling. In the forty years I’ve been here nothing out of line had ever happened. I’ve never had to use that emergency dump I’ve showed you, or even the straight shutoff on the main board. Engineers come twice a year to check everything over, and I just move switches—like this.” He began manipulating controls. “Number thirteen has flashed over. I’m shutting down, and in about an hour it can be transferred from field-bottle to physical containers.”

  “Why not now? What’s this field-bottle?”

  Hoerwitz was genuinely surprised, and once again annoyed. He had supposed everyone knew about that; if he had realized that Smith didn’t . . . Well, another chance gone.

  “At conversion energies no material will hold the charge in. Three hundred tons of anything at all, at star-core temperature, would feel cramped in a hundred cubic miles of space, to say nothing of a hundred cubic yards. It’s held in by fields, since nothing else will do it, and surrounded by a free-electron layer that reflects just about all the radiation back into the plasma. The little bit that isn’t reflected is carried, also by free-electron field, to the radiators.”

  “I think you’re trying something,” Smith said sternly, and the manager felt his stomach misbehave again. “You said that those loads could be dumped in an emergency by the conveyors. And you described the conveyors as simply mechanical belt-and-bucket systems, a couple of days ago. Stuff that you just described would blow them into gas. Which was the lie?”

  “Neither!” Hoerwitz gasped desperately. “I didn’t say that the emergency dumping was instantaneous—it isn’t. The process involves fast chilling, using the same conductor fields; and even with them, we’d expect the conveyors to need replacing if we ever used the system!”

  “If that’s so,” Smith asked, “what do you mean by saying a while ago that you didn’t know what could happen to blow this place up? If one of those fields let go—”

  “Oh, but it couldn’t. There are all sorts of automatic safety systems. I don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. If a field starts to weaken, the energy loss automatically drains into conductor fields, and they carry plasma energy that much faster to the radiators, so the plasma cools and the pressure drops—I can’t give you all the details because I don’t un
derstand them myself, but it’s a real fail-safe.”

  Smith still looked suspicious, though he was as accustomed as any civilized person to trusting machinery. It wasn’t the machinery that bothered him just now.

  “You keep switching,” he snapped, “and I don’t like it. One minute you say nothing can happen, and the next you talk about all these emergency features in case it does. Either the people who built this place didn’t know what they were doing, or you’re not leveling.”

  Hoerwitz’s stomach felt even worse, but he kept up the battle.

  “That’s not what I said! I told you things couldn’t happen because of the safety stuff! They knew what they were doing when they built this place—of course, half the major governments on Earth were passing laws about the way it should be done—”

  “Passing laws? For something off Earth?”

  “Sure. Ninety-five percent of the company’s potential customers were nationals of those countries, and there’s nothing like economic pressure. Now, will you stop this nonsense and let me work, or decide you don’t trust me and do it all yourself? There are more reactors almost ready to flash over.”

  It was the wrong line for the old man to take, but Smith also made a mistake in resenting it. It was here that his psychology really went wrong.

  “I don’t trust you’,” he said. “Not one particle. You’ve evaded every detailed question I asked. I don’t even know for certain that that’s Class IV stuff you’ve been cooking for me.”

  “That’s right. You don’t.” Hoerwitz, too, was losing his tact and foresight. “I’ve been expecting you to make some sort of test ever since I set up the program. Or did you take for granted that whoever you found here would be scared into doing just what you wanted? Surely it isn’t possible that you and the friends you said were somewhere else just don’t have anyone able to make such a test! Any properly planned operation would have made getting such a person its first step, I should think—or have I been reading too much again?”