Planet in Peril

by John Christopher

  “I’m not so sure. Humayun may or may not be able to work faster than you and Sara, whoever he is working for. I doubt if he will be able to work much faster?”

  “Probably not. The snags stage tends to level things out.”

  “And our chief concern is to prevent whoever is using Humayun from having the monopoly on the completed invention. For that purpose any fairly close finish will do.”

  Charles said: “Yes. I see that.” He looked around, at the dignified solidity of his surroundings. Suddenly he didn’t want to leave them. Raven would let him go if he wanted to—but where should he go? And how would he remain free from Ledbetter and the others? And was he prepared to lose Sara, so recently found again?

  He said: “I’ll transfer. I’ll work for you, sir.”

  Charles found it difficult to make up his mind about Sara. It had been inevitable, as he saw, that the course of his acquaintance with her—knowing her for so short a time and then separated suddenly and left to brood about her under very abnormal circumstances—should have produced an uncertainty when he found her again; but the uncertainty seemed to be more than was natural. He found a softness in her which was disconcertingly unfamiliar.

  The explanation dawned on him unexpectedly. He had left out half of the equation; accounting for the effect of shock on his own attitude he had not remembered that Sara’s shock had been a worse one. It would naturally produce changes in her.

  Having come to this view, he was prepared to make excuses. She had already, it appeared, been two or three days in the lab, but nothing substantial was there to show for it. He suggested that she should sketch out again her scheme for the rectifier, and she retired into her small office—they had one each—to get on with this. He himself was checking the installation of the scaifes, when the wall screen glowed with a call from the roof lobby. Charles smiled. It was Dinkuhl.

  Dinkuhl said: “Charlie boy, so they tied you down already. Any chance of your taking a break for coffee?”

  “I have it on the job. Should be up soon. Why not come down and have it here?”

  Dinkuhl looked around him with interest when he was brought in. He shook his head, wonderingly.

  “Not that I know anything about anything, but how does this stack up against the set-up Ledbetter arranged? As good?”

  “A good deal better. We operate smoothly in Atomics —smoothly and fast.”

  Dinkuhl grinned. “Ah, the new-fledged patriot! You moved fast, all right. I always had my doubts about making a pessimist of you. There was one argument you kept at the back of your mind. Where is the argument, by the way?”

  “The argument?”

  “Sara. I’ve been painting a sign for you. ‘Here is good horse to hire. Here you may see Charlie the married man’ ”

  “Not quite as bad as that yet. Or as good. Here she is.”

  Sara came out of her office. She had the sketch in her hand. She stopped when she saw Dinkuhl.

  Charles said: “This is Hiram, Sara.”

  Dinkuhl said: “I’ve seen your picture, lady. But you look nicer.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. Charles has told me about you.”

  “About our death-defying escape from an impregnable fortress?”

  Sara laughed. “Tm glad to know you, Hiram.”

  Dinkuhl looked at her searchingly. “You are?”

  Charles said: “You’ve got that sketch? Run it through the projector, will you?”

  Dinkuhl looked at the screen with interest. “Doesn’t mean a damn thing. Is that the super-diamond-bomb or a section of the New York subway?”

  “Neither.” Charles flicked a circle round a salient point on the pilot screen and its blown-up counterpart glowed on the wall screen. “Only a rectifier. But a rather unusual one, and most elegant. Sara’s work.”

  Dinkuhl said: “Tell your Uncle Hiram how it works, honey.”

  Sara gestured toward Charles. “Charles makes the explanations. I’m just the help.”

  “Wouldn’t help to tell you, Hiram,” Charles said. “No chance of your ignorance becoming visible.”

  “I guess not.” Dinkuhl turned to Sara again. “You both look happy. What’s it like being in Atomics? You got the secret of ultimate bliss? Think I should maybe join up, too?”

  “Why not?”

  “Yes, why not?” Dinkuhl echoed. “It makes a nice bolt-hole. Comes the big bang, bolt-holes are going to be handy. They give you at least five minutes extra, before someone comes along and pumps gas in from the top.”

  Grinning, Charles switched the screen off.

  “You’re an anarchist, Hiram, and anarchists always underestimate the reorganizational powers of society.”

  “Five minutes,” Dinkuhl insisted. “Five minutes, and then a gentle hissing sound.” He shot a glance at Sara. “What do you think, honey?”

  She said: “You may be right, I suppose. But we might as well try to do what we can while we have the chance.” “Pollyanna in her moated grange,” Dinkuhl remarked, “believing where she cannot prove.”

  Sara smiled. “I suppose so.”

  Charles said: “Philosophy—even so wise and bitter a philosophy as yours, Hiram—must attend on more practical matters. Sara, I’d like you to tell me what you think of installing the polishing bench in the little room. You coming along, Hiram? Do you know anything about diamond polishing benches?”

  “As much as I do about rectifiers. I’ll stick here and steal the odd secret to flog to Ledbetter. Maybe there’s a chance I can put KF back in the black.”

  When they returned to the main room, perhaps five minutes later, Dinkuhl was sitting on one of the stools watching the TV screen. He switched off as they came in. “In the act,” Charles said. “Cosy Bright?”

  “The practiced ascetic knows where to draw a line. Red League’s good enough for me. Whenever the springs of optimism begin to well up in my unlikely breast, I only have to watch the old Red League for a couple of minutes. Realism infallibly sets in again.”

  “Preserve your perspective,” Charles said. “At least, Red League’s no worse than it would have been in the later Roman Empire, if they had had TV then.”

  Dinkuhl shook his head. “Inferior by omission. We haven’t got any Christians, and all the lions have been emasculated. I won’t keep you two from the great work any longer. Nice to see the place, though. I’ll drop in again.”

  “You were going to have coffee with us. It’ll be up any minute now.”

  “Drink a toast,” Dinkuhl said, “to absent friends. I’ve remembered there’s someone I want to look up while I’m here, and I’ve got to be back in Detroit for the afternoon.” He bowed solemnly to Sara. “I am glad to have known you, too, lady. I hope I shall see more of you in the future.”

  “We'll always be glad to see you here, Hiram. Both of us.”

  Dinkuhl nodded. "I'm touched.”

  Sara and Charles worked late that night and started early the next morning. The first hitch occurred soon after lunch; the plasbestos they were using for heat insulation turned out to be badly flawed. Charles got through to Conway, who was handling the supplies for them. He was a man of melancholy appearance, but of surprising charm and forcefulness whenever the need arose. He listened to Charles’ explanation carefully.

  He said: “UC material. Not really surprising. But we asked for grade A plus and we paid grade A plus prices for it. Leave it to me. I’ll send a man down right away to collect a sample of the dud stuff.”

  “And replacement?” Charles asked. “How long will that take?”

  Conway smiled. “UC replacement schedules are twenty-four-hour jobs. Normally they take two to three days. I’ll have the stuff with you in six hours.”

  As the glow died from the screen, Sara said:

  “Six hours. We could take a break.”

  Charles nodded. There were a number of minor jobs which they could get on with, but he didn’t have much enthusiasm for them.

  “What do you -suggest?”

 
“It’s a long time since I went airsphering. There’s a good wind. It ought to be fun.”

  The airsphere hangar was reached through the roof-garden. Above and beyond the summer through which they walked, the sky was gray and angry, and tossed with scudding clouds. Airsphering aficionados had always held, with near fanatical dogmatism, that the sport should not be described as airsphering at all with winds at less than force 5, but, as in most sports, they were outnumbered by the casuals. The hangar was full. Atomics HQ apparently did not boast many really keen airspherers.

  “Singles?” Charles asked.

  The singles were the small one-man spheres; there were also doubles, and multiples capable of taking parties of six.

  “I’d rather a double.”

  Her look was of uncertainty and trust; very feminine and very flattering.

  He said: “My preference, too. All right if we take a blue?”

  The blues were spheres whose plaspex was delicately tinged with azure, and whose Sokije valves had hair-trigger sensitivity. It made them fast in response, but correspondingly risky in inexpert hands. Charles had not done a great deal of airsphering, but he knew himself to be competent at it. Just at present, he recognized with inner amusement, he was playing up to the situation caused by Sara’s choice of a double: the masterful male.

  They pulled the sphere clear of the hangar, and climbed in. There were two seats, each with controls but the controls had automatic cut-offs which prevented both being used together. The seats were adjustable from ninety degrees to a hundred and eighty. Charles took the right-hand seat and controls. He decompressed and there was the slight hiss of air being driven out and helium taking its place. The sphere rose gently through the quiet air trapped in the roof-garden. Then it emerged, above the conditioning range, above the plane of sunlets, and the wind struck it like a giant’s bat, lifting and swinging it away into the outfield. The blustering sky was suddenly all round them; the shock of the transition was a thrill in itself.

  “Cut off,” Sara said. “Quite cut off from everything.”

  They had jumped to a thousand feet in a few seconds, and were still rising. The Atomics building had fallen away behind them; with the plaspex giving them vision all round—above and below and to all the corners of the horizon—they could see with sharp clarity just how isolated they were.

  Philadelphia was drifting away, too. There were a few gyros battling through the wind and a stratoliner was coming in to land at the field by the city’s northern limits. They were in a private world, more isolated with each passing moment.

  “See the sun?” Charles asked. “The real sun?”

  “Love to.”

  They were in cloud, a sea of mist pressing about them, now lighter, now darker. Like a bubble bursting through depths of water, the sphere burst free. The sunlight was radiant everywhere, and reflected from the dazzling white surface of the world through which they had just emerged. That world was one of continual movement —a plain where crevasses sprang out and were swallowed up again, where tentacles, reaching slimly from the ground, became squat towers until the towers themselves collapsed back into the ground from which they had risen. And all white, all feathery snow.

  Sara gasped. “It’s wonderful.”

  “Perhaps we should stay here.”

  She smiled. “And live on?” She poked in the side locker and produced three bars of candy. “On these?” “On angel’s food,” Charles said. “On light.”

  The air was less turbulent here; the sphere continued to rise, but only slowly. The enchanted landscape merged more and more into a great glistening plain stretching in every direction. Charles compressed slightly, and the sphere began to drop. The landscape opened up again, in shifting whorl and contour. They grazed the woolly surface and he maneuvered the controls with fine delicacy so that they bounced along, as though sledding on living snow. At times a dazzling upflung cliff would appear in front of them, and the sphere would plough through its pearl-gray interior, to re-emerge into sunshine. And again the cloud beneath them would open up into some vast ravine, through which, once or twice, there were brief glimpses of the other world two thousand feet below—the world that held them on an elastic rope, the managerial world.

  Sara said: “Up. Charles, up now.”

  “To the sun?”

  “Or higher.”

  As he decompressed to the full, the sphere shot up, and cliffs and ravines dwindled again and were lost in the all-extending, all-embracing white of the plain. Soon it was bereft of all individual features. It was a carpet of dazzling snow that stretched in every direction to the downward curving horizon. It was difficult to believe in the real existence of the world beneath the cloud belt.

  Charles adjusted the controls for height stabilization. The altimeter needle bobbed gently just above the 3,000 figure. He did not know what horizontal orientation they might have; the airspheres were equipped with position fixing equipment based on the triangulation of Telecom’s beacon transmitters, but there was no hurry to find out how far they might have drifted from Philadelphia. However far it might be, it was always possible to find a return current at some altitude. It was enough at present to relax in a warm sea of golden light, under an azure sky.

  Sara slipped her tunic-coat off. Beneath it she was wearing a short one-piece dress; it was a shade of blue that went well with her dark coloring. She pushed her chair back to horizontal, and lay back. She looked up at Charles, shading her eyes against the sunlight.

  “Aren’t you hot?”

  He slipped his own coat off, and tossed it to the back of the airsphere; it lay beside Sara’s discarded garment. There was a significance about that, which he was not sure if he wanted to think about. He was wearing the sleeveless shirt and shorts he normally wore when off duty in conditioned atmospheres. The sun was very pleasantly warm on his arms and legs.

  He looked down at Sara. Her eyes half closed, she was looking at him quizzically. She showed to her best advantage: the bronze of her skin against the deep crimson of the airfoam, and the faintly blued white of the far-away background.

  He said: “I think I might relax, too.”

  She smiled, but made no reply. He pushed his own chair back, and turned to face her. The smile still lingered.

  “I wondered…”

  Her lips barely parted. “Yes?”

  “A scientific question.”

  “If I can help you…”

  “The well-known Siraqi inhibitions—I wondered if they functioned with the same precision at all altitudes.” The smile deepened. ‘1 should think, a very interesting question. What would be the scientific approach to it?”

  “Experimental.”

  He moved toward her. Her willingness was certain even before she opened her arms to him.

  Dinkuhl had explained that he was only stopping off at Philadelphia in the course of a trip to New York. He had had the idea of making the detour simply in order to have a meal with Charles, on the way. On his expense account, he further explained. He was at Oak Ridge, which was the Atomics men-only club, so Charles had to make his excuses and leave Sara.

  Dinkuhl had tall glasses of hot rum and ginger waiting when Charles arrived.

  He said: “Drink it up, Charlie boy. How’s life. You look like a cat that’s been living on alcoholic cream.” Charles eased himself into a chair, and took the glass from the adjoining table. “Very fair. No complaints. How about you? No trouble from Ledbetter?”

  It had been Charles’ idea that Dinkuhl should be given an Atomics bodyguard in view of his having been concerned with Charles both in imprisonment and escape. Atomics had been willing, but Dinkuhl had laughed at the idea. In his view, Telecom would be anxious to keep the defeat of their plans as private as possible. Taking it out on him would merely be an exercise in vindictiveness; it would give them no material advantage and might well provoke the reverse, should Charles urge Atomics into retaliatory action.

  “Trouble?” Dinkuhl laughed. “You know, the first morni
ng back, Gillray called me up. Asked me if I'd been taking a holiday. If that character were any smoother, his face would slide off the screen.”

  They had lunch. While they talked, Charles was aware that there was something worrying Dinkuhl; he talked and joked but the talk and the jokes were perfunctory. He made no attempt to find out what it was; Dinkuhl was not the kind of person who encouraged solicitous probing into his troubles. But Dinkuhl brought things out into the open himself, over coffee.

  “I’ve got a problem, Charlie boy,” he said.

  Charles nodded. “Unusual. So unusual that 111 offer my help. If I can help.”

  “I’d appreciate your advice. It’s not personal. That is, it’s not my worry actually. It’s Burt’s.”

  “Awkright’s?”

  “Yes. You know your new outfit used him to get in touch with us—with Sara. They spun him a yam about the wonders of Atomics Contact Section that enabled them to know he was one of my little gang of rebels— by God, if the PRO’s don’t get the fattest salary in the Contact Sections they ought to, the line of guff they hand out. He was happy enough thinking it was just Atomics that were exceptionally clever—still is. I wasn’t as happy as he was. I started looking around. I found that Atomics were not the only people in the know-very far from it. I had known that Telecom knew, of course—they had to know to pick you up through me. But it was more than two, even—Mining, Steel Genetics Division—”

  “Genetics?”

  “Yes. Burt’s own managerial. The boys took some precautions, but not that many. We thought we weren’t interesting. We weren’t, but I guess it kept the Contact brigades in practice. We are all neatly docketed and ticketed.”

  “For action?”

  “For information. The boys are all useful workers, and they find that useful workers mostly have aberrations nowadays; they put up with them providing there’s nothing dangerous there.”