The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  The frantic disclaimers of Cinna the Poet awakened him. He had drifted and been held against the hammock by the current from the air circulator. The feeble gravity which gave the visiting ship a weight of five hundred pounds at the surface was of course absent in the living quarters at the center of the asteroid. Almost automatically he pushed himself back to the console and shut off the sheet-scanner at the end of the third act. Obviously this wasn’t helping him to think. He’d better check the converter monitors just to wake himself up and then get some exercise.

  Robinson was in the tunnel outside the lounge and without saying a word followed Mac along the passage. The fellow was certainly not very much at home in zero gravity; his coordination as he passed himself from handhold to handhold was worse than sloppy. If this were equally true of the others, it might be a help.

  As things turned out, it was.

  Smith and Jones were in the control room, drifting idly away from the walls. Another good sign. Either they, too, were unused to free-fall or had completely dismissed Hoerwitz from their minds as a menace. Neither of them could have gotten into action for quite a few seconds, since neither had a pushoff point within reach—not even each other.

  They said nothing as the manager and his satellite entered, but watched the former as he aimed and pushed off from a point beside the door and drifted along the indicator panels, taking in their readings as he went. Somewhat to his regret, though not to his surprise since no alarms had sounded, Mac found everything going as programmed. He reached the far end of the room and reversed his drift, aiming for the door. The new course took him within reach of Robinson, and that individual at a nod from Smith seized the old man’s arm as he went by.

  This was a slight mistake. The result was a two-body system spinning with a period of about five seconds and traveling toward the door at about a quarter of Hoerwitz’s former speed. The manager took advantage of the other’s confusion to choose the time and style of his breakaway from the system. He came to a halt, spin gone, four or five yards from the meeting point. Robinson, who had been made a free gift of their joint angular momentum, brought up with his head in painful contact with the edge of the doorway. Mac couldn’t pretend to be sorry; Jones concealed a grin rather unsuccessfully, and Smith showed no sign of caring either way. His order to stop Hoerwitz for a conversation had been obeyed; the details didn’t bother him.

  “How long is our fuel going to take?” he asked.

  “Another fifty to fifty-five hours, barring offtrack developments,” replied the manager. “I gave you an estimate at the beginning, and there’s no reason to change it so far. I trust these instruments, unless you or one of your friends have been playing with circuits. I know you jimmied the radio, but if your man knew what he was about that shouldn’t have bothered this board.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know. Do what you want until it’s time to check your instruments again.”

  “It’s night by my clocks. I’m sleeping for a few hours, now that I’ve had my daily workout. I see you know where my quarters are—what were you searching for, guns or radios? You brought the only weapons this place has ever seen yourselves, and a radio able to reach Earth is a little too large to hide in a photo album.”

  “Spacesuit radios are pretty small.”

  “But they’re in spacesuits.”

  “All right. We just like to be sure. Wouldn’t you be happier to know that we weren’t worrying about you?” Hoerwitz left without trying to answer that. Smith looked after him for a few seconds, and then beckoned to Brown.

  “Don’t interfere with his routine, but keep an eye on the old fellow. I’m not so sure we really convinced him, after all. I’d much rather keep him around to do the work, but the job is much too important to take chances.” Brown nodded, and followed Hoerwitz back to the latter’s quarters. Then he took up his station outside, glanced at his watch, helped himself to a set of the pills needed to keep human metabolism in balance under zero-G, and relaxed. The “night” wore on.

  Hoerwitz had been perfectly sincere about his intention of sleeping. He had developed the habit of spending much of his time in that state during his years at the station. His age may have been partly responsible, but the life itself was hardly one to keep a man alert. Few people could be found to accept the lonely and boring jobs in the off-Earth factories—so few that many of them had to be run entirely by computer and remote control. Hoerwitz happened to be one of the sort who could spend all his time quite happily with abstract entertainment—books, plays, music or poetry. He could reread a book, or see the same play over and over again, with full enjoyment, just as many people can get pleasure out of hearing the same music repeatedly. Few jobs on Earth would have permitted him to spend so much time amusing himself; the arrangement was ideal both for him and his employers. Still, he slept a lot.

  He therefore woke up refreshed, if not exactly vigorous, some nine hours after Brown had taken up his guard station. He was not only refreshed but enthusiastic. He had a plan. It was not a very complicated one, but it might keep him alive.

  It had two parts. One was to convince Smith that the intruders could not load their loot without Mac’s help. This should be simple enough, since it was pretty certainly true. Shifting twelve million pounds of mass by muscle power, even in zero-G, is impractical for four men in any reasonable time. The alternative was the station’s loading equipment, and it was unlikely that anyone but Hoerwitz would be expert in its use. If the thieves were convinced of that, at least they’d keep him alive until the last minute.

  The second part of the plan was to arrange for himself a refuge or hiding place good enough to discourage the four from spending the time necessary to get him. This assumed that they had assigned high priority to getting away as soon as possible after loading the stolen fuel, which seemed reasonable. Details here, however, required more thinking. It might be better to trust to concealment; on the other hand, there was something to be said for a place whose location was known to the enemy but which obviously couldn’t be penetrated without a lot of time and effort.

  On the whole, the latter choice would make him feel safer, but offhand he couldn’t think of a really impregnable spot. There were very few doors of any kind in the station, and even fewer of these could be locked. Air-breaks were solid, but not made to resist intelligent attack. None of the few locks in the place was any better in that respect, if one assumed that the thieves were of professional caliber.

  Of course, much of the factory equipment itself, designed to contain nuclear reactions, would have resisted any imaginable tools. None of this could, however, be regarded as practical for hiding purposes; one might as well get inside a blast furnace or sulfuric-acid chamber.

  All in all, it looked as though straight concealment were going to be more practical, and this pretty well demanded the outside of the asteroid.

  The tunnels of the station were complex enough to make a fairly good labyrinth, but there was a reasonable basic pattern underlying their arrangement. Hoerwitz knew this pattern so well, quite naturally, that it never occurred to him that his unwelcome guests might have trouble finding him in the maze once he got out of sight. He did think of turning out the lights to complicate their job, but they should have little trouble turning them back on again. Robinson, at least, must know something about electricity. Besides, darkness and weightlessness together were a very bad combination even for someone as used to the latter as Hoerwitz. No, outside would be best.

  The asteroid was far from spherical, had a reasonable amount of surface area, and its jagged surface promised all sorts of hiding places. This was especially true in the contrasty lighting of airlessness. Mac could think of a dozen possible spots immediately—his years of residence had not been spent entirely inside. During safe periods he had taken several trips outside (safe periods meant, among other things, the presence of company; taking a lone walk in a spacesuit is about as sensible as taking a lone swim in the Indian Ocean).

  More fami
liarity with the surface would have been nice, but what little he had should at least be greater than the others did. If he were to drop casually some remark which would give the impression that he knew the outside like one of his own Shakespeare sheets, they might not even bother to search once he was out of sight—provided he waited until there was very little time left before they were leaving, and provided he was able to disappear at all. Too many ifs? Maybe.

  It was also important that Smith not change his mind about letting Hoerwitz take walks outside. It wouldn’t require careful guarding to prevent such an excursion; five seconds’ work on Mac’s spacesuit would take care of that. It was annoying that so much of the plan depended more on Smith’s attitude than on Hoerwitz’s action, especially since Smith didn’t seem to believe in taking chances. The attitude would be hard to control. The manager would have to seem completely harmless—but he’d better take Hamlet’s advice about overacting.

  That was a matter of basic behavior. On the question of useful action, there was another factor to consider. At the present setup rate, the isotopes the thieves wanted would be ready ten or a dozen hours before perigee, which Mac was still taking as the latest time they’d want to stay around. Something really ought to be done to delay the conversion and delivery process, to keep at a minimum the supply of spare moments which could be devoted to looking for missing factory managers. Could he slow down the converters without arousing suspicion? He knew much about the machines, and the others presumably knew very little, but trying to fool them with some piece of fiction would be extremely risky. His left hand gave an extra twinge at the thought.

  Of course, some genuine trouble could develop. It hadn’t in all his years at the station, but it could. There was no point waiting for it, and even if it did they’d probably blame him anyway, but—could he, perhaps, arrange for something to happen which would obviously be Jones’ fault? Or Smith’s own? The basic idea was attractive, but details failed to crystallize.

  It was certainly high time for action, though if he hoped to accomplish anything such as living, the closer to completion the process came, the less good a slowdown would accomplish. In fact, it was time to stop daydreaming and get to work. Hoerwitz nodded slowly to himself as ideas began to shape up.

  IV

  He went to the galley and prepared breakfast, noting without surprise that the others had been using his food. It was too bad that he didn’t have anything to dose it with for their benefit. He measured out and consumed his daily supply of null-G medicines, and put the utensils in the washer—one common aspect of his job he had refused to accept. Difficult as such things as ham and eggs are to manage in free-fall, he had insisted on regular food instead of tubes of paste. He worked out techniques of his own for keeping things in the plate. Someday, he had been telling himself for a couple of decades, he would write a book on zero-G cookery.

  With the galley chores done, he aimed himself down the corridor toward the control chamber. Brown and Robinson were inside, both looking bored. The latter was drifting within reach of a wall, the manager noticed; perhaps his experience of the day before had taught him something. Hoerwitz hoped not. Brown was near the center of the room and would be useless to his party for quite a few seconds if action were required.

  The instruments were disgustingly normal. All twenty converters were simmering along as programmed. Not all were doing just the same things, of course; they had been loaded with different substances originally and had been interrupted in various stages of differing processes when Hoerwitz had been forced to reprogram. One of them had already been processing a Class IV order and was now approaching the climax of its run. It seemed wiser to point this out to the thieves so that they wouldn’t think he was up to anything when he shut this one down, as he would have to do in a few hours. He did so.

  “At least you people won’t have to do everything at once,” he remarked.

  “What do you mean?” asked Brown.

  “When you came, I told you that one of the units was on Four already. You can tell your boss that it should be ready to load in eight hours or so. I’ll show you where the loading conveyors are handled from—or do you want to lug it out by hand? You were bragging about carting five hundred pounds of ship around when you came.”

  “Don’t be funny, old fellow,” cut in Robinson. “You might as well have that loading machinery ready. You might even be ready to show a couple of us how to use it. If Smith should decide he doesn’t like your attitude, we might be the only ones able to.”

  “All right with me,” replied the manager. He felt reasonably safe as long as Smith himself was not present. It had seemed likely that none of the others would dare do anything drastic to him without direct orders, and Robinson’s remark had strengthened the belief. “The controls are in a dome at the surface. They’re simple enough, like a chess game.”

  “What does that crack mean?”

  “Just what it sounded like. Any six-year-old can learn the rules of chess in an hour, but that doesn’t make him a good player. I’m sure Mr. Smith won’t need you to remind him of that when you suggest that you ought to do the loading.” The two men glanced at each other, and Robinson shrugged.

  “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 two 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—custo
mers 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 those 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.