There were four of them this time. The leader approached with outstretched hand, and recognition slowly flamed in Joe’s eyes.
“I’m Mr. Johnson of the President’s office. Perhaps you recall I used to be in Field Inspection,” he said. “These men are—”
“I remember,” said Joe slowly, glancing at Johnson’s graying temples. “You’re the Capitol’s current wonder boy. You write speeches now.”
The man flushed, but he went on. “These men are Mr. Bums, Mr. Cornwall, and Mr. Hansen, who are of the Presidential Advisory Office.”
Joe took the hand of each in sullen challenge.
“We tried to locate you last night to discuss the repair of the Martremant. We finally authorized its entry, since it had already arrived, anyway.”
“I was home asleep until five and down here at five-thirty. You didn’t look very hard for me.”
“Perhaps you have been acquainted with the tremendous significance of this job,” said Johnson.
“I have. You want it done promptly so you can all get your fingers in the big pie to be cut next election day.”
The advisors’ faces grew masklike. “The ship must be repaired with dispatch and accuracy, in order to minimize the inconvenience to the Commissioners and the First Administrator. We are authorized to place every government facility required at your disposal and issue a blank check for the work.”
“On my account!” cried Joe. “You offer me a blank check on my own bank account just like you were Santa Claus.”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Williams, that you don’t understand the matter of appropriations.”
“I’m afraid I do. But if you want this hulk fixed, my advice is to get out and stay out. Every hour you clutter up the field delays the work another day.”
“It is necessary that we remain. The President has delegated us to be on the site and issue him hourly reports on the progress of the work.”
Groaning, Joe turned away. Above their heads, he could see successive floors blasted upward and torn with jagged holes. Swaying fights and miniature shadows of crewmen showed the analysis work going on in those far levels.
“Did you check the files for Radalian analogues?” he asked Litchfield.
“Yes. We’ve never had any in here before of that race. The First and his Radalian Commissioners have already been asked. They refused, of course.”
“Naturally.” Joe growled. “Who could expect a politician to let his brains be poked into? We’d find out what was behind the double-talk we get. Get a transcript of plans from Radal then.”
“We already tried. They report the plans are confidential, top-secret and super secret. Therefore, they cannot be given out.”
Joe stood for perhaps five seconds while his blood pressure mounted. Then he walked quietly to where the four advisors were watching. He spoke to them for approximately thirty seconds. They held a consultation and then moved towards the front end of the ship where the officials held forth in their luxurious suites.
Fifteen minutes later they emerged and went to the communications office. Within an hour the transcript of the plans was on Litchfield’s desk.
It made Joe feel good. He smiled expansively at the stack of sheets.
“That is the first time I ever saw a politician who was any good in a pinch. Now, we ought to be able to go on without any more trouble. We won’t even need an analogue. Maybe I ought to go back to the office and see what Mary’s got for me. If you need me—
Litchfield listened absently. The responsibility for repair was his. The stack of sheets describing the drive was three feet high. It would be necessary to resort to cerebral absorption methods to comprehend all that mass of data, but that didn’t worry him. He had opened the broad structural schematic and the stereoscopic representation of the engines as they were in place.
The tan of his face became suddenly a shade lighter. “Wait a minute, Joe. Our troubles aren’t over yet. This may be the time we don’t make it—”
“What’s the matter now? We’ve got the plans of the ship. All we need to do is follow them. Anything a critter can build, we can fix.”
“Providing we have the tools.”
“Tools? We’ve got a tool department. Art Rawlins can build any tool you need.”
“Think Art ever heard of the molecular spray technique?”
Joe slowly dropped his cigar into a spittoon and retreated from the doorway. “Molecular spray—it’s only a rumor. You hear it at least once a week.”
“Not any more is it just a rumor. These plans specify it.”
Joe bent over the charts. They had been given English titling automatically during transmission. Litchfield was right. The engines were designed to be constructed by spray technique.
He knew what that meant. It was the only way they could be built. Any other construction method would require a new design for the whole power plant.
Joe knew virtually nothing of the technique. He had never found anyone who had even seen it. According to rumor, however, it was remotely akin to the printing of electrical circuits which had been common for hundreds of years.
It was a means of building up three-dimensional objects of unlimited complexity by spraying on molecules in precise streams of variable constituency. The spray was keyed by an intricate matrix system that steered automatically the tool mechanism and changed the quality of the molecules from uranium to soft putty if that was called for. It was possible to leave channels, build in wiring, and assemble parts in any degree of intimacy required by design, a degree far surpassing that possible by clumsy nut and bolt or welding techniques.
“There ought to be spray equipment aboard ship,” said Joe. “If repairs were required, I understand they would have to tear the thing down and build it up again.”
“Could be, but any sign of a machine shop was volatilized. As it stands, we’d have to build a factory to build the tool before we could even start on the ship— provided we could get plans for the tools.”
“That shouldn’t be hard. We could get them the same way we got the drive data.”
“Let’s try once more to get them to settle for conventional drive. We can set them up with a good second-order outfit. Maybe the Presidential Advisors can put some pressure in that direction.”
Joe called them in and explained the situation. They tried to look as if they comprehended what spray technique was all about, but Johnson shook his head.
“I guess we should have mentioned at first,” he said, “that the Administrator asked if you understood the spray methods. We said you did, because we felt sure you would have no trouble with construction methods. He said that was fine, because his people only rented the equipment from the makers—some other race who won’t let it out of their hands. The tool design is not available.”
“Then we’ll have to substitute,” said Litchfield. “There’s no possible way to obtain spray tools in any reasonable time. We can install a good second-order drive. You’ll have to make it right with the First.”
“You want to substitute a simpler, less efficient drive?”
“If the junketeers want to get under way in the next six years.”
“We can’t allow it,” said Johnson. “This represents the thing the President sent us to guard against. The ship has to be repaired as it was.”
“That represents the political mind at work under a full head of steam!” exclaimed Joe. “We can’t be given the tools, but we have to do the job anyway! Now, listen—”
“Suppose you listen, Mr. Williams. How would it look for the First Administrator to go limping around the galaxies explaining that he was behind schedule because his ship got wrecked on Sol III and the Terrestrians were incapable of matching his drives?
“How would it look, not only from our own political viewpoint, but from the standpoint of your technical abilities, your business? Consider the effect if it got spread around that ‘Joe’s Service and Repair’ had muffed the First Administrators job? In spite of my own personal distre
ss in the matter, it is with a great deal of pleasure I view your position over a very rickety barrel.
“Good day, Mr. Williams—Mr. Litchfield.”
“All right—here’s the last word,” said Joe. “We’ll fix the Martremant so well that the original builders won’t know it’s been repaired—and by the end of the week. You may include that in the next hourly report to the President.”
Litchfield didn’t look up when they had gone. He continued to stare down at the drawing, but he spoke to Joe. “You know what you just said?”
“You bet I do! Call in all three crew shifts who’ll be on the repair job. We’ll give them cerebral on the drive plans. Get Art Rawlins and his whole tool crew down here. Start them making matrices from these plans.
“Then tell them to make some spray tools and get to work.”
“Just like that?”
Joe’s face was suddenly more bitter than Litchfield remembered it for a long time. He leaned over the table of drawings to look out the window. The quartet of advisors seemed in a jovial mood as they went towards the ship.
“They may not represent the President’s views,” said Joe, “but for themselves they’ve already written off this crop of plums. They have given up, but they think they’re going to watch us lose our shirts in this deal.
“Remember the times we beat Johnson when he was in Field Inspection? He hates our guts. They all do, because we produce, and they can’t do anything but sit on the sidelines. They make believe they run the show while inside they eat their hearts out because they are so incompetent in the ordinary business of living.
“If we fail on this job, they’ll see that we’re blackballed in every port in the Union. The fact that we represent Terra in the field of service and repair doesn’t matter any more. They figure we can be replaced.”
From long custom Litchfield gave only half an ear to Joe’s political tirades, but he saw that Joe was completely right this time. The politicians whose strangling regulations had been loosed by Joe’s persistence were not going to let this golden opportunity go by.
Suddenly he was mad too. “The end of the week,” he muttered.
Art Rawlins considered himself the biggest man on the place. Physically, he was. Joe wouldn’t have tolerated the huge, slow-moving bulk in any lesser man, but Rawlins was probably the best tool engineer on the planet.
“You can’t make things without tools,” was his motto, “and I’m the man who makes the tools that make the machines,” he finished modestly. “Without me, nobody works.”
He was given the problem without the political angles. There was no dismay in his reaction. Rather, he scented in it the challenge of his career. He exhaled a happy snort of enthusiasm as Joe finished outlining the details.
“Molecular spray!” he exclaimed. “I’ve heard of it half a dozen times in the last three months. But no crew that has come in has ever seen it. Now we’ve got a ship that uses it!”
“But without analogues of the designing race, and with no plans of the spray, can you build it?”
“I don’t see why not. There’s not an artifact made that doesn’t leave tool marks indicating the mental processes of the mind that made it—and the tools with which he built. There should be enough information in the plans of the ship to identify and build the tools.”
“All right. I hope so. We’re setting up a cerebral for the repair crews this morning. You’ll want to get in on that with your crew. Get them into the cerebral room in fifteen minutes.”
Cerebral indoctrination was a method of short-circuiting the acquiring of data. It implanted items of information directly into the cortex without sending it through the long, circuitous, interference-filled channels of the senses.
From the original data, scanning machines produced impulses exactly like the waves of a perfectly healthy brain as it thought through the problem. These impulses acted directly upon the molecules of the recipients’ brains, imposing the data within.
Joe and Litchfield sat in on the session, absorbing the vast flood of information regarding the design of the Martremant. When it was over, they felt sure they could have designed the tools by which the engines would have to be built. But they knew it was an illusion. There was still a tremendous job of analysis to be done, and they lacked Art Rawlins’ special skill in evaluating the data they had.
The repair crews filed out of the room at the end of the two-hour session. Rawlins and his men continued to sit there in their chairs, their headpieces in their laps. It was when he saw them that Joe felt the intense sinking inside him.
“What’s the matter?” he said thinly. “Wasn’t it any good?”
Art Rawlins’ wide jowls circled downward to rest against his upper chest. “Let’s run through it again, Joe. This time change the differential to get fabrication analysis instead of design and function.”
The smaller group of men sat there for another two hours while the machine went through the thousands of drawings and stereoscopes once more. When the lights were on again, Rawlins was slumped still lower.
“I was right the first time,” he muttered. “It’s no wonder the spray technique is so scarce if the inventors want to keep it hidden. Nobody could figure it out from scratch.”
“Why?”
“The tools … the tools to make the spray—we can’t make them”
For about three-quarters of a minute Joe thought he hadn’t heard right. Then he saw that Rawlins wasn’t joking, but was perfectly serious in his absurd-sounding statement.
“What do you mean?” Joe asked. “I don’t understand.”
“We’d have to go down through four or five separate derivations to try to get to the basic technologies involved. By then the trail would be so faint and the variables so large that it would be meaningless.”
“I never heard of taking four or five derivatives of a cerebral,” said Litchfield.
“Neither has anyone else. It’s never come up in such a series as this before. Look: We now have an understanding of what the third-order-drive engines are like. We know what the molecular spray tools to build them are like—but we don’t know how to build the tools to build the tools with which to build the spray—and maybe one order of tools below that. See what I mean?”
Joe’s voice sounded awed by this complexity that he had never imagined. “It still sounds crazy.”
“That’s the way it is. Take our tools. Suppose an aborigine could utilize cerebral processes to analyze a sawed block of wood, for example.
“He would first discover the need of a steel saw and would get a pretty good idea of what it was like. His next derivative would be the machine tools to make the saw. That would be pretty faint. He’d go on down to steel-making processes and discover the necessity for iron ore—but he’d never reach any geological knowledge that would show him how to locate it. He’d never get as far as the technology of smelting it or tempering it. Those items just wouldn’t be there in the sawing process.
“So it is with the spray. There are at least five separate and unknown technologies that step down to any level with which we are now familiar. The chances of our discovering how to build a molecular spray are absolutely, mathematically zero. The information has got to come from outside, or not at all.”
“Nevertheless, the ship has to be repaired and off the field by the end of the week,” said Joe.
The others in the room stared at him with a sort of pity as if his mind had slipped into a rut from which it would never emerge.
“Go over it again,” he said. “Try it on down to the hundredth differential if necessary. Drain it of everything it’s got, and then have a try at it again. I’ll see you later.”
Litchfield followed him out of the analysis building into the hot sunlight of the field. Dingy, dust-colored haze hung over all the desert now and the distant hills were shaded a dirty color. He remembered the splendor of the morning and looked accusingly skyward. If any day was ever a bust, this one was.
They walked half of th
e mile to the site of the wrecked Martremant before either spoke. Then Joe stopped, looking towards the ship with grim defiance shaping his face.
“Howard,” he said slowly, “in all the rumors you’ve heard about the molecular spray, whose name has been connected with it? Did you ever hear before of this mysterious, secret race that’s supposed to have concocted it?”
“Why, no. It’s always mentioned in connection with the Radalians, but I supposed that was because the Radalians appear to be the only ones using it in their third-order ships—after what Johnson reported about the First.”
“I don’t believe it. It’s too thin. I think the Radalians themselves built it.”
“That’s crazy! Why would they be withholding it when we can’t fix their ship without it?”
“Only the special gods of the politicians could answer that one. The whole thing reeks of the thinking of the political mind. Wherever a political deal is going on there are always lies and counterlies. In this deal, one of them is the story of the mysterious builders of the molecular spray. And there is one way we can find out with absolute certainty.”
“How?”
“We’ll get us a Radalian analogue.”
There was a white plume of dust growing slowly in their direction from the damaged Martremant. At its head were twin scooters bearing two of Litchfield’s analysis crew. The illusion of slowness disappeared as the little carriers crackled up and stopped with a burst of gray dust.
“Have you got trouble?” Litchfield asked.
“Trouble!” one exclaimed. “Those crazy politicians —you’ve got to get them out of there.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. They’re loose all over the place. They got tired of sitting in their plush staterooms so they put on pressure suits and now they’re kibitzing all over the place—telling us how to do our jobs! The windbags—!”
“At least our friends from the President’s office ought to be able to keep the VIPs out of our hair while we work,” said Litchfield.
“Not only that,” continued his crewman, “but their suit exhausts smell up the place until we can’t breathe.”
Space, Space, Space - Stories about the Time when Men will be Adventuring to the Stars Page 5
