The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  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. By 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 a
t 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 at 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 case 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.

  “Jones, I don’t pretend to care what happens to you outside, but you might remember one thing.”

  “What?” The fellow paused with his helmet almost in place.

  “If I do anything that you think calls for shooting me, be sure you are holding on to something tightly or that your line of fire is upward.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, as Mr. Smith pointed out some time ago, the escape velocity of this asteroid is about one foot a second. I don’t know too much about guns, but I seem to recall that an ordinary pistol shot will provide a spacesuited man with a recoil velocity of around a third of that. You wouldn’t be kicked entirely into space, but you’d be some time coming down; and just think of the embarrassment if your first shot had missed me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  He clamped down his own helmet without waiting for an answer from either man. Then he wished he’d mentioned something about the danger to a spacesuit from ricochet, but decided that it would be an anticlimax.

  * * *

  He would have liked to hear the remarks passed between them, but he had already discovered that Robinson hadn’t wasted time cutting out his transmitter but avoiding the receiver. He had simply depowered the whole unit, and Mac could neither transmit nor receive.

  He stepped—using the word loosely—in the inner lock door, hit the switch that opened it and stepped through. Turning to see whether Jones was with him, he was surprised to discover that the latter still had not donned his helmet and was engaged in an animated discussion with Smith.

  Hoerwitz sometimes spoke on impulse, but it had been well over fifty years since he had performed an important action on that basis; the mental machinery concerned was rather corroded. It might be possible to get the inner lock door closed and the air pumps started before either of the two men could reach the inner switch; if he could do that, it would give him nearly two minutes’ start—quite long enough to disappear on the irregular, harshly lit surface of the asteroid. On the other hand, if they stopped the cycle before the inner door was closed and the inside switch out of circuit, they would presumably shoot him on the spot.

  His spacesuit had the usual provisions for sealing small leaks, but it was by no means bulletproof. He wished he had taken the time to make that remark about ricochet; it would apply well to the metal-walled chambers they were all standing in. Unfortunately the thieves might not think of that in time.

  Hoerwitz might, if given another minute or two to mull it over, have taken the chance on that much data; but before he made up his mind the conversation ended. Jones donned his helmet, safetied its clamps and looked toward the airlock. At that same moment all three men suddenly realized that Smith and Jones were both out of touch with pushoff points. They were “standing” on the floor, of course, since they had been in the room for some time and weighed several grams each, but that weight would not supply anything like the traction needed to get them to the switch quickly. An experienced spaceman would have jumped hard, in any direction, and trusted to the next wall collision to provide steerage; but it had become perfectly evident in the last couple of days that these men were not experienced spacemen. Hoerwitz’s impulses broke free with an almost audible screech of metal on rust, and he slapped the cycling control.

  VII

  Jones had drawn his gun. He might have fired, but the action of drawing had spoiled his stance. Hoerwitz thought he had fired, but that the sound failed to get through his suit; the bullet, if any, must have gone bouncing around the equipment room. The inner door was shut, and the red light indicated pump cycling before any really interesting details could be observed.

  The pumps took fifty seconds to get the pressure down, and the motors ten more to get the outer door open. Hoerwitz would have been outside almost on the instant, but his low-gravity reflexes took over.

  One simply does not move rapidly in a place where the effort which would lift a man half a millimeter on Earth will give him escape velocity. This is true even when someone can be counted on to be shooting at you in the
next minute or so; a person drifting helplessly out of touch with pushoff mass is a remarkably easy target. The idea was to get out of sight, rather than far away.

  The asteroid was not exactly porous—no one has found a porous body made of lava yet—but it was highly irregular from a few hundred million years of random collisions out beyond Mars. There were explosion pits and crevices from this source, and quite a few holes made by men in the days when the material of the body itself had been used for conversion mass.

  There were plenty of nice, dark cracks and holes to hide in. Hoerwitz maneuvered himself into one of the former five yards from the airlock and vanished.

  He didn’t bother to look behind him. He neither knew nor cared whether they would follow. All things considered, they might not even try. However, they would very probably send out at least two men, one to hunt for the fictitious mirror and the other to guard the spaceship—not that they could guess, the old man hoped, what he intended to do about the latter.