The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

by Randall Garrett

  “Now if your publishers continue to expand the publication at the rate of a thousand planets a year, your book should easily last for another century. They can’t really expand that rapidly, of course, since the sales on the planets they have already covered will continue with diminishing success over the next several years. Actually, your publishers will continue to put a billion books a year on the market and expand to new planets at a rate that will balance the loss of sales on the planets where it has already run its course. Yes, professor, you will have a good income for life.”

  “What about my heirs?”

  “Heirs?” The Galactic Resident blinked. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you.”

  “My relatives. Anyone who will inherit my property after my death.”

  The Resident still looked puzzled. “What about them?”

  “How long can they go on collecting? When does the copyright run out?”

  The Galactic Resident’s puzzlement vanished. “Oh my dear professor! Surely you see that it is impossible to…er…inherit money one hasn’t earned! The income stops with your death. Your children or your wife have done nothing to earn that money. Why should it continue to be paid out after the earner has died? If you wish to make provisions for such persons during your lifetime, that is your business, but the provisions must be made out of money you have already earned.”

  “Who does get the income, then?” McLeod asked.

  The Galactic Resident looked thoughtful. “Well, the best I can explain to you without going into arduous detail is to say that our…er…government gets it. ‘Government’ is not really the proper word in this context, since we have no government as you think of it. Let us merely say that such monies pass into a common exchequer from which…er…public servants like myself are paid.”

  McLeod had a vision of a British Crown Officer trying to explain to a New Guinea tribesman what he meant when he said that taxes go to the Crown. The tribesman would probably wonder why the Chief of the English Tribe kept cowrie shells under his hat.

  “I see. And if I am imprisoned for crime?” he asked.

  “The payments are suspended until the…er…rehabilitation is complete. That is, until you are legally released.”

  “Is there anything else that can stop the payments?”

  “Not unless the publishing company fails—which is highly unlikely. Of course, a man under hypnotic compulsion or drugs is not considered legally responsible, so he cannot transact any legal business while he is in that state, but the checks are merely held for him until that impediment is removed.”

  “I see.” McLeod nodded.

  He knew perfectly well that he no more understood the entire workings of the Galactic civilization than that New Guinea tribesman understood the civilization of Great Britain, but he also knew that he understood more of it than Jackson, for instance, did. McLeod had been able to foresee a little of what the Resident had said.

  “Would you do me the service, sir,” McLeod said, “of opening a bank account for me in some local bank?”

  “Yes, of course. As Resident, I am empowered to transact business for you at your request. My fees are quite reasonable. All checks will have to go through me, of course, but…hm-m-m…I think in this case a twentieth of a per cent would be appropriate. You will be handling fairly large amounts. If that is your wish, I shall so arrange it.”

  “Hey!” Jackson found his tongue. “The Earth Union Government has a claim on that! McLeod owes forty-nine thousand Galactic credits in income taxes!”

  If the Galactic Resident was shocked at the intimation that the Galactic “government” would take earned money from a man, the announcement that Earth’s government did so was no surprise to him at all. “If that is so, I am certain that Professor McLeod will behave as a law-abiding citizen. He can authorize a check for that amount, and it will be honored by his bank. We have no desire to interfere with local customs.”

  “I am certain that I can come to an equitable arrangement with the Earth authorities,” said McLeod, rising from his chair. “Is there anything I have to sign or—”

  “No, no. You have expressed your will. Thank you, Professor McLeod; it is a pleasure to do business with you.”

  “Thank you. The pleasure is mutual. Come on, Jackson, we don’t need to bother the Resident any more just now.”

  “But—”

  “Come on, I said! I want a few words with you!” McLeod insisted.

  Jackson sensed that there would be no point in arguing any further with the Resident, but he followed McLeod out into the bright Hawaiian sunshine with a dull glow of anger burning in his cheeks. Accompanied by the squad, they climbed into the car and left.

  * * * *

  As soon as they were well away from the Residence, Jackson grabbed McLeod by the lapel of his jacket. “All right, humorist! What was the idea of that? Are you trying to make things hard for yourself?”

  “No, but you are,” McLeod said in a cold voice. “Get your hands off me. I may get you fired anyway, just because you’re a louse, but if you keep acting like this, I’ll see that they toss you into solitary and toss the key away.”

  “What are you talking about?” But he released his hold.

  “Just think about it, Jackson. The Government can’t get its hands on that money unless I permit it. As I said, we’ll arrive at an equitable arrangement. And that will be a damn sight less than ninety-eight percent of my earnings, believe me.”

  “If you refuse to pay, we’ll—” He stopped suddenly.

  “—Throw me in jail?” McLeod shook his head. “You can’t get money while I’m in jail.”

  “We’ll wait,” said Jackson firmly. “After a little while in a cell, you’ll listen to reason and will sign those checks.”

  “You don’t think very well, do you, Jackson? To ‘sign’ a check, I have to go to the Galactic Resident. As soon as you take me to him, I authorize a check to buy me a ticket for some nice planet where there are no income taxes.”

  Jackson opened his mouth and shut it again, frowning.

  “Think about it, Jackson,” McLeod continued. “Nobody can get that money from me without my consent. Now it so happens that I want to help Earth; I have a certain perverse fondness for the human race, even though it is inconceivably backward by Galactic standards. We have about as much chance of ever becoming of any importance on the Galactic scale as the Australian aborigine has of becoming important in world politics, but a few thousand years of evolution may bring out a few individuals who have the ability to do something. I’m not sure. But I’m damned if I’ll let the boneheads run all over me while they take my money.

  “I happen to be, at the moment—and through sheer luck—Earth’s only natural resource as far as the galaxy is concerned. Sure you can put me in jail. You can kill me if you want. But that won’t give you the money. I am the goose that lays the golden eggs. But I’m not such a goose that I’m going to let you boot me in the tail while you steal the gold.

  “Earth has no other source of income. None. Tourists are few and far between and they spend almost nothing. As long as I am alive and in good health and out of prison, Earth will have a nice steady income of fifty thousand Galactic credits a year.

  “Earth, I said. Not the Government, except indirectly. I intend to see that my money isn’t confiscated.” He had a few other plans, too, but he saw no necessity of mentioning them to Jackson.

  “If I don’t like the way the Government behaves, I’ll simply shut off the source of supply. Understand, Jackson?”

  “Um-m-m,” said Jackson. He understood, he didn’t like it, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

  “One of the first things we’re going to do is start a little ‘information’ flowing,” McLeod said. “I don’t care to live on a planet where everybody hates my guts, so, as the Resident suggested, we’re going to have to start a propaganda campaign to counteract the one that denounced me. For that, I’ll want to talk to someone a little higher in the Go
vernment. You’d better take me to the head of the U.B.I. He’ll know who I should speak to for that purpose.”

  Jackson still looked dazed, but it had evidently penetrated that McLeod had the upper hand. “Wha…er…what did you say, sir?” he asked, partially coming out of his daze.

  McLeod sighed.

  “Take me to your leader,” he said patiently.

  THIN EDGE (1963)

  I

  “Beep!” said the radio smugly. “Beep! Beep! Beep!”

  “There’s one,” said the man at the pickup controls of tugship 431. He checked the numbers on the various dials of his instruments. Then he carefully marked down in his log book the facts that the radio finder was radiating its beep on such-and-such a frequency and that that frequency and that rate-of-beep indicated that the asteroid had been found and set with anchor by a Captain Jules St. Simon. The direction and distance were duly noted.

  That information on direction and distance had already been transmitted to the instruments of the tugship’s pilot. “Jazzy-o!” said the pilot. “Got ’im.”

  He swiveled his ship around until the nose was in line with the beep and then jammed down on the forward accelerator for a few seconds. Then he took his foot off it and waited while the ship approached the asteroid.

  In the darkness of space, only points of light were visible. Off to the left, the sun was a small, glaring spot of whiteness that couldn’t be looked at directly. Even out here in the Belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, that massive stellar engine blasted out enough energy to make it uncomfortable to look at with the naked eye. But it could illuminate matter only; the hard vacuum of space remained dark. The pilot could have located the planets easily, without looking around. He knew where each and every one of them were. He had to.

  A man can navigate in space by instrument, and he can take the time to figure out where every planet ought to be. But if he does, he won’t really be able to navigate in the Asteroid Belt.

  In the Nineteenth Century, Mark Twain pointed out that a steamboat pilot who navigated a ship up and down the Mississippi had to be able to identify every landmark and every changing sandbar along the river before he would be allowed to take charge of the wheel. He not only had to memorize the whole river, but be able to predict the changes in its course and the variations in its eddies. He had to be able to know exactly where he was at every moment, even in the blackest of moonless nights, simply by glancing around him.

  An asteroid man has to be able to do the same thing. The human mind is capable of it, and one thing that the men and women of the Belt Cities had learned was to use the human mind.

  “Looks like a big ’un, Jack,” said the instrument man. His eyes were on the radar screen. It not only gave him a picture of the body of the slowly spinning mountain, but the distance and the angular and radial velocities. A duplicate of the instrument gave the same information to the pilot.

  The asteroid was fairly large as such planetary debris went—some five hundred meters in diameter, with a mass of around one hundred seventy-four million metric tons.

  * * * *

  Within twenty meters of the surface of the great mountain of stone, the pilot brought the ship to a dead stop in relation to that surface.

  “Looks like she’s got a nice spin on her,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  He waited for what he knew would appear somewhere near the equator of the slowly revolving mass. It did. A silvery splash of paint that had originally been squirted on by the anchor man who had first spotted the asteroid in order to check the rotational velocity.

  The pilot of the space tug waited until the blotch was centered in the crosshairs of his peeper and then punched the timer. When it came around again, he would be able to compute the angular momentum of the gigantic rock.

  “Where’s he got his anchor set?” the pilot asked his instrument man.

  “The beep’s from the North Pole,” the instrument man reported instantly. “How’s her spin?”

  “Wait a bit. The spot hasn’t come round again yet. Looks like we’ll have some fun with her, though.” He kept three stars fixed carefully in his spotters to make sure he didn’t drift enough to throw his calculations off. And waited.

  Meanwhile, the instrument man abandoned his radar panel and turned to the locker where his vacuum suit waited at the ready. By the time the pilot had seen the splotch of silver come round again and timed it, the instrument man was ready in his vacuum suit.

  “Sixteen minutes, forty seconds,” the pilot reported. “Angular momentum one point one times ten to the twenty-first gram centimeters squared per second.”

  “So we play Ride ’em Cowboy,” the instrument man said “I’m evacuating. Tell me when.” He had already poised his finger over the switch that would pull the air from his compartments, which had been sealed off from the pilot’s compartment when the timing had started.

  “Start the pump,” said the pilot.

  The switch was pressed, and the pumps began to evacuate the air from the compartment. At the same time, the pilot jockeyed the ship to a position over the north pole of the asteroid.

  “Over” isn’t quite the right word. “Next to” is not much better, but at least it has no implied up-and-down orientation. The surface gravity of the asteroid was only two millionths of a Standard Gee, which is hardly enough to give any noticeable impression to the human nervous system.

  “Surface at two meters,” said the pilot. “Holding.”

  * * * *

  The instrument man opened the outer door and saw the surface of the gigantic rock a couple of yards in front of him. And projecting from that surface was the eye of an eyebolt that had been firmly anchored in the depths of the asteroid, a nickel-steel shaft thirty feet long and eight inches in diameter, of which only the eye at the end showed.

  The instrument man checked to make sure that his safety line was firmly anchored and then pushed himself across the intervening space to grasp the eye with a space-gloved hand.

  This was the anchor.

  Moving a nickel-iron asteroid across space to nearest processing plant is a relatively simple job. You slap a powerful electromagnet on her, pour on the juice, and off you go.

  The stony asteroids are a different matter. You have to have something to latch on to, and that’s where the anchor-setter comes in. His job is to put that anchor in there. That’s the first space job a man can get in the Belt, the only way to get space experience. Working by himself, a man learns to preserve his own life out there.

  Operating a space tug, on the other hand, is a two-man job because a man cannot both be on the surface of the asteroid and in his ship at the same time. But every space tug man has had long experience as an anchor setter before he’s allowed to be in a position where he is capable of killing someone besides himself if he makes a stupid mistake in that deadly vacuum.

  “On contact, Jack,” the instrument man said as soon as he had a firm grip on the anchor. “Release safety line.”

  “Safety line released, Harry,” Jack’s voice said in his earphones.

  Jack had pressed a switch that released the ship’s end of the safety line so that it now floated free. Harry pulled it towards himself and attached the free end to the eye of the anchor bolt, on a loop of nickel-steel that had been placed there for that purpose. “Safety line secured,” he reported. “Ready for tug line.”

  In the pilot’s compartment, Jack manipulated the controls again. The ship moved away from the asteroid and yawed around so that the “tail” was pointed toward the anchor bolt. Protruding from a special port was a heavy-duty universal joint with special attachments. Harry reached out, grasped it with one hand, and pulled it toward him, guiding it toward the eyebolt. A cable attached to its other end snaked out of the tug.

  Harry worked hard for some ten or fifteen minutes to get the universal joint firmly bolted to the eye of the anchor. When he was through, he said: “O.K., Jack. Try ’er.”

  The tug moved gently away from the
asteroid, and the cable that bound the two together became taut. Harry carefully inspected his handiwork to make sure that everything had been done properly and that the mechanism would stand the stress.

  “So far so good,” he muttered, more to himself than to Jack.

  Then he carefully set two compact little strain gauges on the anchor itself, at ninety degrees from each other on the circumference of the huge anchor bolt. Two others were already in position in the universal joint itself. When everything was ready, he said: “Give ’er a try at length.”

  The tug moved away from the asteroid, paying out the cable as it went.

  Hauling around an asteroid that had a mass on the order of one hundred seventy-four million metric tons required adequate preparation. The nonmagnetic stony asteroids are an absolute necessity for the Belt Cities. In order to live, man needs oxygen, and there is no trace of an atmosphere on any of the little Belt worlds except that which Man has made himself and sealed off to prevent it from escaping into space. Carefully conserved though that oxygen is, no process is or can be one hundred per cent efficient. There will be leakage into space, and that which is lost must be replaced. To bring oxygen from Earth in liquid form would be outrageously expensive and even more outrageously inefficient—and no other planet in the System has free oxygen for the taking. It is much easier to use Solar energy to take it out of its compounds, and those compounds are much more readily available in space, where it is not necessary to fight the gravitational pull of a planet to get them. The stony asteroids average thirty-six per cent oxygen by mass; the rest of it is silicon, magnesium, aluminum, nickel, and calcium, with respectable traces of sodium, chromium, phosphorous manganese, cobalt, potassium, and titanium. The metallic nickel-iron asteroids made an excellent source of export products to ship to Earth, but the stony asteroids were for home consumption.