by Hal Clement
The expression which had started to develop on Smith’s face disappeared, and he looked steadily at the old man for perhaps half a minute. Then he spoke.
“Mr. Jones. I think we will have to start Phase Two of the persuasion plan. Will you please prepare for it? We planned this operation, as you call it, Mr. Hoerwitz, quite carefully, in view of certain limitations which faced us. Exactly what those limitations were is none of your business, but remember that we so arranged matters that no one on Earth has been seriously worried by your failure to communicate—nor will they for some time yet. We know that no scheduled freighters are due here for two more revolutions, though we recognize the chance of a tramp tug dropping in with mass to deposit for credit—that is why we plan to have the job done before the next perigee. Our plans also included details for insuring the cooperation of the person we found on duty. The fact that he turned out to be about three times as old as we expected doesn’t affect those plans at all. You have experienced the first part of them. I was rather hoping that no more would be necessary, but you seem to have forgotten that we have the bulge on you. Therefore, you will experience the second part, unless you can think of a way to prove to me that you have been telling the truth—and prove it in a very short time.
I won’t tell you what the time limit is, but I have already decided on it. Start thinking, Mr. Hoerwitz. I believe Mr. Jones is ready.”
Hoerwitz couldn’t think. He probably couldn’t have thought if the same situation had faced him forty or fifty years earlier; he had never claimed to be a hero. He spoke, but—as Smith had intended—it was without any sort of consideration.
“The Class IV stuff that was going when you arrived—it’s cool—you could get a sample of it and test it in your ship’s power plant!”
“Not good enough. I never doubted that you were telling the truth about that load. It will have to be something else. The material that’s finishing now, or your claim that could really go wrong enough to blow this place into vapor if your fail-safe rigs weren’t there—”
“But how could I possibly prove that, except by doing it?” gasped the old man.
“Your problem. Think fast. Mr. Jones will be with you in a moment. In fact, I think he’s on the way now—not hurrying, you understand, because he isn’t really proficient at moving around in this no-weight nuisance—but I think if I looked around I’d see that he had pushed off and was drifting your way. It would be unfair of me to spoil his fun if he gets to you before you’ve thought of something, wouldn’t it?”
Smith of course meant to reduce the manager to a state of complete panic in which he would be unable to lie, or at least to lie convincingly; but just as he had planned badly in not getting hold of a nuclear engineer of his own, he had planned badly in failing to consider all the possible results of panic. He may, of course, have realized that Hoerwitz might try to do something desperate, but failed to foresee how hard such an action would be to stop in the unfamiliar environment of weightlessness. It was easy to take for granted that a person with such a frail physique could be controlled physically by anyone with no trouble. This was perfectly correct—for anyone within reach of the old man.
No one was. Worse, from Smith’s point of view, no one but Robinson was in a position to get there. As a result, Mac was able to do something which he would never have seriously considered if he had been given time to think. He was, of course, within reach of a push-off point as a matter of habit. He used every bit of muscle his frail old body could muster in a dive toward the center of the board—and made it.
Only Robinson had learned his lesson about drifting, and he misjudged his own pushoff and failed to intercept the manager. Hoerwitz reached and opened a plainly labeled switch, and with the action his panic left him as suddenly as it had come, though fear still churned at his stomach.
“At least, you believed me enough not to risk bullets in the controls,” he almost sneered. “There’s your proof, Mr. Smith. I’ve just shut down all the converters. They’re bleeding energy out of the main radiators and will be cool enough to handle in an hour. If you replace that switch, you’ll know I was telling the truth about safeties. Go ahead. Close it. It’s safe. All you’ll get is a bunch of red lights all over the boards, telling you that safety circuits are blocking you. You’ll have to start those processes from the beginning. I can set that up for you, of course. I will if you give the order; but anything else at all, except dumping the loads, of course, will block you with safeties.”
“Why?” Smith was still in control of himself, though it was a visible strain.
“What do you think I am, an astrophysicist? I don’t know why, if you want one of those detailed answers you were complaining about not getting. They come in high-class equations. In words, which is all I understand about it, most of-the processing time in these converters is for setup. The actual conversion is the sort of thing that goes on in the last moments of a supernova’s fling, as I thought everyone knew. The converter has to set up millions of parameters in terms of temperature, density gradients, potential of all sorts—even the changing distance from Earth in this orbit has to be allowed for, I understand—and I don’t know what else before the final step is triggered, if a decent percentage of the desired isotope class is to be produced. I’ve just cleared the setup in eighteen of those converters. If you were actually to build them up to the temperature they had before I hit that switch, you probably would blow the place up. Hence, my friend, the safeties. Working out a reaction that not only produces useful isotopes but also balances endothermic and exothermic processes closely to hold the whole works under control is a perfectly good subject for a doctorate thesis. Do you think we could confine a supernova—or even a few tons of one? Now, do you want me to start these stoves all over, or will you take two loads of Class IV instead of twenty, pull out all my fingernails and fly off in a rage gnashing your teeth?”
During this diatribe Smith had actually calmed down, which was hardly what Hoerwitz had expected. The thief nodded slowly at its end.
“I wouldn’t have said there was anything which could happen here which I wouldn’t blame on you,” he said, “but I have to admit this one is on me. By all means, start the cooking over. I have learned most of what I need to know. I think I can now manage well enough even if visitors show up during this overtime period you have pushed us into.
“You just restart the runs you interrupted, and when that’s done come with me up to the dome. I want you to get the load that was just finished out onto the conveyors. Then you may resume your life of leisure and entertainment. Hop to it, Mr. Hoerwitz.”
The manager hopped. He was too surprised at Smith’s reaction to do anything else. He would have to recheck his Shakespeare memory; maybe there was someone like this after all. He worked the controls rapidly.
Jones looked disappointed except for a moment when Robinson suddenly said, “That’s not the way he had them set before!”
Smith started to raise his eyebrows in surprise, but the manager, who had had no thought of deception at the moment, said, “We’re not starting with the same stuff as before, remember. Many things happen long before the main conversion.”
Smith stopped, thought for a moment, looked carefully at the old man, and nodded. Jones shrugged and relaxed once more.
By this time, certain facts were beginning to fit together in the manager’s mind.
VI
By the time the trip to the dome had been made and the finished load of isotopes transferred to its conveyor, Hoerwitz’s brief sense of elation had evaporated, and he had written himself off as a walking corpse. He realized just what details he had overlooked, and just where the omissions left him. He floated slowly to his quarters, his morale completely flattened and hope for the first time gone.
Robinson’s acute detail memory must have been a major factor in the planning Smith had mentioned. If Hoerwitz himself could run the plant effectively without a real basic understanding of what went on, so could Robinson. B
y arranging what had amounted to another lesson in the operation of the controls, the manager had made himself superfluous from the thieves’ viewpoint.
Also, and much worse, he had completely missed the hole in the logic Smith had used when the fellow had tried to prove that he really wasn’t worried about leaving witnesses. It was quite true that the thieves were taking no care about leaving fingerprints. Why should they bother about such details? No one can analyze individual personality traces from a million-degree cloud of ionized gas, and they certainly knew enough now to leave only that behind them.
Even if wiring around the safety circuits was too much for Robinson, which seemed unlikely in Hoerwitz’s present mood, they could always sacrifice a ton or so of their loot. The Class IV fuels might not be up to hydrogen fusion standards, but they would be quite adequate for the purpose intended. Hiding, inside the asteroid or out, would be meaningless.
The only remaining shred of his original plan which retained any relevance was the desirability of fooling the others about his own attitude. As long as they believed that he expected to come out of the affair with his life, they would not expect him to do anything desperate, and they might let him live until the last moment to save themselves work. If they even suspected that he had convinced himself that they were going to dispose of him, Smith’s dislike of taking chances would probably become the deciding factor.
This might involve a difficult bit of acting. Behaving as though he had forgotten what had happened would certainly be unconvincing. Trying to act as though he had even forgiven it would be little better. On the other hand, any trace of an uncooperative attitude would also be dangerous. Maybe he should go back to Hamlet and rerun the prince’s instructions to the players. No, not worth it. He knew them word for word anyway, and the more he thought of the problem as one of acting the less likely he was to get away with it.
Maybe he should just try, unobtrusively, to keep in Jones’ company as much as possible. His natural feelings toward that member of the group were unlikely to make the others suspicious.
In any case, he wouldn’t have to act for a while. The last couple of hours had been exhausting enough so that not even Smith was surprised when Mac sought his own quarters. One of the men followed and took up watch outside, of course, but that was routine.
The manager was in no mood for music. He brought the Julius Caesar sheet out of standby and let the scanner start at the point where he had left it a couple of days before.
As a result, it was only a few minutes before Brutus solved his problem for him.
It was beautiful. There was no slow groping, no rejection of one detail and substitution of another. It was just there, all at once. It would have Wertheimer, Kohler, and the rest of the Gestalt school dance with glee. The only extraneous thought to enter Hoerwitz’s mind as the idea developed was a touch of amazement that Shakespeare could have written anything so relevant more than four decades before the birth of Isaac Newton. He didn’t wait for the end of the play. There was quite a while remaining before the plan could be put into action, so he went to sleep. After all, a man needs his ten or twelve hours when careful, exhausting, and detailed work is in the offing.
A good meal helps, too, and Hoerwitz prepared himself one when he woke up—one of his fancier breakfasts. With that disposed of, there were seven hours to go before perigee.
He went to check the controls, pointedly ignoring the thief on duty outside his quarters and the second one in the control room. Everything about the converters was going well, as usual, but this time the fact didn’t annoy him. For all he cared, all those loads of explosives could cook themselves to completion.
They hadn’t been ordered properly, but there would be no trouble finding customers for them later on.
He checked in time his impulse to go to the dome for a look outside. Smith’s order had been very clear, so it would be necessary to trust the clocks without the help of a look at Earth. No matter. He trusted them.
Six hours to perigee. Four and a half to action time. He hated leaving things so late, since there was doubt about Smith’s reaction to the key question and time might be needed to influence the fellow. Still, starting too soon would be even more dangerous.
A show killed three of the hours, but he never remembered afterward which show he had picked.
Another meal helped. After all, it might be quite a long time before he would eat anything but tube-mush, if things went right. If they went wrong, he had the right to make his last meal a good one. It brought him almost up to the deadline. He thought briefly of not bothering to clean the dishes, but decided that this was no time to change his habits. Smith was suspicious enough by nature without giving him handles for it.
Now a final check of the controls, which mustn’t look as though it were final. Normal, as usual. Robinson and Brown were in the control room—the latter had accompanied the manager from his quarters—and when the check was finished the old man turned to them.
“Where is your boss?”
Robinson shrugged. “Asleep, I suppose. Why?”
“When you first came, he said it would be all right for me to walk outside, once you’d jimmied the transmitter in my suit. I like to watch Earth as we go by perigee, but I suppose I’d better make sure he still doesn’t object.”
“Why can’t you watch from the dome?”
“Partly because he told me to keep away from there, and partly because in the hour and a half around perigee Earth shifts from one side of this place to the other. You can see only the first part from the dome. I like to go to the North Pole and watch it swing around the horizon—you get a real sense of motion. Whoever Smith sends with me, if he lets me go at all, will enjoy it. Maybe he’d like to go himself.”
Robinson was doubtful. “I suppose he won’t shoot anyone for asking. I take it this happens pretty soon.” Hoerwitz was glad of the chance to look at a clock without arousing suspicion.
“Very soon. There won’t be much more than enough time to check our suits. Remember, there’s no such thing as fast walking, outside.”
“Don’t I know it. All right, I’ll ask him. You stay here with Mr. Brown.”
“You’re sure you didn’t damage anything in my suit except the radio?”
“Positive. Make a regular checkout; I stand by the result.”
“As long as I don’t fall by it.” Robinson shrugged and left. “Mr. Brown, in view of what your friend just said, how about coming with me up to the lock so I can start that suit check early?”
Brown shook his head negatively, and nodded toward the controls.
“Smith said to keep it guarded.” Hoerwitz decided that debate was useless, and waited for the leader. It was not really as long a wait as it seemed.
Smith was accompanied by Robinson, as the manager had expected, and also by Jones, who, Hoerwitz had assumed, must be on guard at the dome. He hadn’t stopped to figure out the arithmetic of three men on watch at once out of a total strength of four.
Smith wasted no time.
“All right, Mr. Hoerwitz, let’s take this walk. Have you checked your suit?”
“I’ve had no chance.”
“All right, let’s get to it. Tell me what you expect to see as we go up. With your suit radio out you won’t be able to give a proper guide’s talk outside.”
The manager obeyed, repeating what he had told Robinson and Brown a few minutes before. The recital lasted to the equipment chamber inside the airlock, where the old man fell silent as he started to make the meticulous checkout which was routine for people who have survived much experience in spacesuits. He was especially careful of the nuclear-powered air-recycling equipment and the reserve tanks which made up for its unavoidable slight inefficiency. He was hoping to depend on them for quite a while.
Satisfied, he looked up and spoke once more.
“I mentioned only the North Pole walk,” he said, “because I assume you’d disapprove of something else I often do. At the place where Earth is overhead a
t perigee, right opposite the radiators, I have a six-foot optical flat with a central hole. You probably know the old distress-mirror trick. I have friends at several places on Earth, and sometimes at perigee I stand there and flash sunlight at them. The beam from the mirror is only about twelve or fifteen miles wide at a thousand miles, and if I aim it right it looks brighter than Venus from the other end—they can spot in full daylight without much trouble. Naturally the mirror has to be in sunlight itself, and as I remember it won’t be this time, but I thought I’d better mention it in ease you came across the mirror as we wandered around and got the idea that I was up to something.”
“That was very wise of you, Mr. Hoerwitz. Actually, I doubt that there will be any random wandering. Mr. Jones will remain very close to you at all times, and unless you yourself approach the mirror he is unlikely to. I trust you will have a pleasant walk and am sure that there is no point in reminding you of the impossibility of finding a man drifting in space.”
“One chance in ten thousand isn’t exactly impossible, but I’d rather not depend on it,” admitted the manager. “But aren’t you coming?”
“No. Possibly some other time. Enjoy yourself.”
Mac wondered briefly whether he had made some mistake. He had told only two lies since bringing up the subject of the walk and felt pretty sure that if Smith had detected either of them the fact would now be obvious.
But he had expected to get out only by interesting Smith himself in the trip. If Smith didn’t want to go, why was he permitting it at all? Out of kindheartedness?
No. Obviously not.
For a moment Hoerwitz wished he hadn’t eaten that last meal. It threatened to come back on him as he saw what must be Smith’s reason. Then he decided he might as well enjoy the memory of it while he could. After that, almost in a spirit of bravado, he made a final remark.
