“Good. Then we can talk. You do talk, don’t you?”
“When necessary,” Crag said. “Right now, I’d rather listen.”
“All right. They told you you were being offered a job as my private pilot, and I presume you accepted.”
“Yes.”
“You can operate a J-14?”
“With a day or so to study the manual on it and familiarize myself with the controls.”
“Good. You’ll have a week before we take off for Mars. It’s in Berth Ninety-six at the Port, and you can take as much time as you need to check yourself out on it. I can pilot it myself, but I never go into space without someone who can relieve me.”
“And after we get to Mars?”
“You’ll quit your nominal job and start on your real one. I’ll tell you about it enroute; we’ll have plenty of time.”
“For the details, if you want to wait till then. But you can give me a general idea now. Maybe it’s something I don’t want to do, or think I can’t do. Even for the price you offer I’m not taking on any suicide job. If I’m going to turn it down, it might as well be now.”
“It’s dangerous, but not that dangerous. I think you’ll try it. I’ll gamble that you will; you can still turn it down after we reach Mars.”
“I’ll wait for the details, but I still want to know the general nature of the job. Maybe I’ll be wanting to make preparations even this coming week. Maybe there’ll be something I’ll want to get for the job that I can get on Earth more easily than on Mars.”
“All right, I see your point on that. I suppose it might save time later to let you start planning as soon as possible. In fact, if you’ll agree definitely to accept or decline the job now, I’ll tell you everything about it right now—except one thing, and you can decide without knowing that.”
“All right, go ahead.”
“I want you to steal a certain object from Menlo.”
Crag whistled softly. “Practically a fortress,” he said.
“Yes, but not impregnable to someone taking a job as a guard to get inside it. And that’s where your psycher certificate is important. Men otherwise qualified and with recent psycher certificates are known to be honest, are much more readily hired as guards than anyone else, no matter what they were before. In fact, no one even cares what they were before, and some of them never ask so you can safely deny that you know your former identity.”
Crag smiled grimly. “And if there aren’t any openings, I can waylay a guard in town and make one.”
“Won’t be necessary. Menlo is isolated and Eisen doesn’t allow any women there. For those two reasons Eisen has to pay a premium price to get employees, and even so has quite a turnover. You’ll have no trouble getting a job.”
“And this object I’m to steal—is it easily portable?”
“You can carry it in a pocket.”
“Menlo’s a big place. Will you be able to tell me where to look for this object?”
“Yes, but not how to get it.”
“Has anyone else made a previous attempt to get it?”
“Yes. I—we had a spy in Menlo, Crag, six months ago. As a technician, not a guard. He helped Eisen work on this—object, and told me about it. I ordered him to try to get it, made him the same offer I’m making you. A few weeks later I read a report that he’d been killed accidentally. Whether that was true or whether he was caught and privately executed or not, I don’t know.”
“Probably sprang a deathtrap. I’ve heard Menlo is full of them.”
Olliver shrugged. “He wasn’t a professional criminal. Not in your league at all. I should have been satisfied with using him as a source of information and not have expected more of him. But ever since then I’ve been looking for the right man for the job—until I saw your name on the docket a week ago and applied for jurisdiction. Well, Crag?”
“That’s all there is to it? I obtain this object and give it to you?”
“One other thing, if possible. You’re good with tools, aren’t you?”
“Yes. If a guard job won’t get me close enough I can probably get myself into the machine shop.”
“Might help. But it wasn’t what I had in mind in asking you. If you can possibly fabricate a dummy duplicate of the object and leave it in place of the real one, it will help. The object will be worth much more to us if Eisen doesn’t know it’s missing. But I’ll settle for your getting it, under any circumstances.”
“How many people aside from yourself and Eisen know of the existence of this object, and its value?”
“No one, to my knowledge, outside Menlo. And probably not very many there. That’s as to its existence. Crag. As to its value, I don’t believe anyone—not even Eisen himself—knows that, besides me. It’s an invention of his which he thinks is impractical and almost worthless. But I see in it a possibility for making billions of dollars—and billions of dollars is what the Cooperationist Party is going to need before it comes out into the open against the two established parties.” Olliver paused and then asked again, “Well, Crag?”
“One more question. Have you got a million dollars, in cash? Or am I supposed to wait for a pay-off out of hypothetical billions?”
“The million is in cash. Not my own personal funds, but in the war chest of the party. My collaborators in the party know only that I know a way to invest that million—which would be a drop in the bucket for launching a new political party—in such a way as to bring in all the money we’ll need. They have agreed to trust me to do so, without knowing how. As head of the party and its future candidate for system coordinator, they’ve given me carte blanche in the disbursement of party funds. If I could tell you who was associated with me in this, Crag, you’d realize what a big thing it is.”
“I don’t care about that,” Crag said. “The million’s in cash and in your hands. That’s all I wanted to know, and the deal is on. But I’ll need an advance for expenses. A thousand ought to do it.”
Olliver frowned. “You won’t need that much, Crag. You’re going to be living here, as my employee, for the week before we take off. I have an extra car you can use for your few trips to the Port. What do you need money for?”
“A wardrobe, for one thing. A binge, for another.”
“I recovered the suitcases you had when you were arrested. They’re in your room. As is, you’ve got a better wardrobe than you should have, to be looking for a guard’s job. As for the binge, that’s out, Crag. You’ll have to stay sober until you’ve seen this through.”
“Have to? I don’t take orders, Olliver. I have been in jail, haven’t had a drink in a month. Once we get to Mars I won’t take a drink till the job’s done, however long it takes. But in between, I’m going to get drunk once, whether you like it or not. If you won’t advance me the money, I can get it.”
“What if you get in trouble?”
“I’m a solitary drinker. I’ll lock myself in my room and you can lock it from the outside, if you’re worried.”
“A lock that you couldn’t get through?”
“A lock I’ll have no inclination to get through. You can even put a guard outside the door.”
Olliver laughed. “And how explain it to the guard, when he thinks you’ve been psyched? Psyched men do only social drinking. Besides, you could take care of the guard as easily as the lock, and I haven’t any guards to spare. But all right, I’ll go along on your having one binge, provided you agree to stay in your room. And that you sober up in time to check yourself out on the J-14.”
“Right. Five hundred will be enough, since I’ve got my clothes back. How about your servants?”
“We have only two inside servants. I’ll send them away for a few days. Judeth and I can eat out. But how about your meals? Or will you be eating any?”
“I won’t. Where’s my room? I’d rather change into some of my own clothes.”
“Second floor opposite the head of the stairs. And here’s five hundred. The servants will be gone by the time you come
back.”
Crag took the money and found his room. He checked through his luggage and found that the police had stolen only a few small, if valuable items, nothing that he’d have to replace immediately. He was lucky; a criminal, even if acquitted, was lucky to get any of his belongings back, and he hadn’t counted on it.
He changed clothes quickly and went out. The psychological need for a spree was becoming more and more pressing, now that drinks were in sight, and he was in a hurry to get started. He found a shopping district with a liquor store that sold what he wanted. The price was three times what it would have cost him on Mars and half again what it would have cost in the spacemen’s district downtown, but it was still less than two hundred dollars and he paid it without argument.
In his room he drank himself into drugged insensibility and kept himself that way throughout that day and the next by drinking more every time he returned to consciousness. On the morning of the third day he decided he’d had enough and poured what little was left of the liquor down the drain of the sink in his bathroom. There had been no pleasure in the binge, but it had filled a psychic need, and now he could go without drinking until such time as he could do it safely in a more pleasant manner.
He was not quite steady on his feet and his eyes were bloodshot and bleary, but he was under control mentally. He was haunted by a half-memory of having, several times in a half-conscious state, seen Judeth standing beside his bed looking down at him. But he checked the bolt on the door and decided that it must have been hallucination, along with the other dreams and hallucinations he’d had.
In the downstairs hallway he passed Judeth, about to leave. Her look took in his Condition and she passed him without speaking. Which was what he wanted.
Olliver wasn’t in his study, but Crag wrote a brief note and left it on his desk: “All right, you can get your servants back.” He found the kitchen and prepared and ate a sizeable meal, then went back to his room and slept. He woke the next morning feeling fit.
Most of the next few days he spent at the Port inside Olliver’s J-14, studying its operation manual and the books on space navigation it contained.
He did his thinking there too, and his planning for the job to come insofar as it could be planned in advance. He also read there books he bought in a book and tape store about Eisen and Menlo.
He already knew, of course, considerable about Eisen. Eisen was a scientist and inventor who, early in his career, must have been struck by the similarities—even the slight similarity of names—between himself and Edison, an inventor of several centuries before, and for that reason had named his workshop Menlo after Edison’s Menlo Park. Like Edison, Eisen was an empiric rather than a theoretical scientist; his quick mind saw practical possibilities in what to others were abstract facts and purely mathematical equations. Like Edison, he made things work and he himself was an indefatigable worker. But he had gone far beyond Edison in the number and scope of his inventions and had become incomparably richer, one of the richest men in the system. He could have bought and sold governments, but had no interest in politics. Nor in power or glory, solely in his work.
Menlo had grown into a rambling building combining sleeping quarters and workshops, isolated—the nearest Martian village was several miles away and very small—and surrounded by reputedly impregnable defenses. Eisen lived there with an all-male ménage of employees and guards, about thirty of each.
Olliver had been right, Crag knew, in saying that the only way to steal anything from Menlo would be to get employment there first. Even so, there’d be traps within traps, and it was going to be the hardest thing Crag had ever tried. But then, a million dollars was the biggest prize he’d ever tried for.
Meanwhile, Crag kept to himself and avoided contact with the Ollivers, especially Judeth, as much as possible. He paid the servants extra to bring breakfasts to his room on a tray, and his other meals he ate downtown or at the Port restaurant.
After a week he knocked on the door of Olliver’s den and was bidden to enter. He asked Olliver if he’d decided on a departure time and Olliver nodded. “Day after tomorrow. Everything in order on the cruiser?”
“Yes,” Crag said. “Ready to take off any minute. Want me to arrange clearance?”
“Yes. Make it for 10 A.M. Or as soon after as possible if anything else is clearing then. Need any more money?”
Crag shook his head. “I’ve got enough to last me till I get to Menlo. If I get the job there I’ll be searched—Eisen’s guards are thorough—and don’t want to have much on me.”
“Right. And they’ll investigate whatever you tell them, Crag. Not back of your psycher certificate, although they’ll verify that, but your subsequent actions. Have you got a good story as to why you’re going to quit your pilot’s job when we reach Mars, to take a job that’ll pay a lot less?”
“Yes. Meant to check with you on it so your story will back mine if they investigate. Psyched men sometimes lose their space guts, and that’s what will have happened to me. I’ll have been scared stiff all the way to Mars and never want to go into space again, at any price.”
“Good. I’ll back you on that, and so will Judeth.”
Crag frowned. “Is she going?”
“Yes. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of room. That’s a four-man cruiser. You don’t mind?”
“No, if she lets me alone. You may as well tell me now what the object is that you want from Menlo. Why not now? I’m as committed now as I’ll ever be. I’m not going to back out no matter what you tell me it is.”
“All right. It’s a device that looks like a flat pocket flashlight. Blued steel case. Lens in the center of one end—but you can tell it from an ordinary flashlight because the lens is green and is opaque—opaque to light, that is. I could give you a more exact description, but not exact enough for you to fabricate a duplicate in advance.”
“And I couldn’t take it in with me if I did. Where is it?”
“In the vault off Eisen’s private workshops don’t know just where in the vault but there’s a card index to the drawers in the vault and the index is on Eisen’s desk. The object is filed under the code designation DIS-I.”
“That’s all you can give me?”
“Yes. But a few other instructions. Don’t steal anything else. Maybe there are other valuable things but I don’t want them, and we don’t want Eisen to know anything was stolen. And if you get it—”
“After I get it.”
“All right, after you get it, don’t try monkeying with it or using it. Promise me that.”
“It’ll be easier for me to promise that if I know what it is. My curiosity might get the better of me.”
“All right, it’s a disintegrator. It’s designed to negate the binding force—well, I’m not up on atomic theory so I can’t give it to you technically. But it collapses matter into neutronium.”
Crag whistled softly. “A disintegrator—and you say Eisen considers it worthless?”
“Yes, because its range is short. The size needed increases with the cube of the distance. The model you’re after works up to a distance of only two feet. To make one that would work at twenty feet the apparatus would have to be as big as a house, and to make one that would work at a thousand feet—well, there aren’t enough raw materials in the system to make one; it would have to be the size of a small planet.
“Besides, there’s a time lag. The ray from the disintegrator sets up a chain reaction in any reasonably homogeneous object it’s aimed at, within its range, but it takes seconds for it to get started. No, it’s valueless as a weapon, Crag. Take my word for it.”
Crag said, “Then the value—if it’s worth a million to you—must be in the by-product, neutronium. But what can it be used for?” Crag was familiar with the concept of neutronium, of course; every spaceman was. Even school children knew that some of the stars were made of almost completely collapsed matter weighing dozens of tons to the cubic inch. There were dwarf stars smaller than Earth and weighing more
than its sun. But no such collapsed matter existed in the Solar System. Pure neutronium, completely collapsed matter, would be unbelievably heavy, heavier than the center of any known star. Certainly, if it could be handled, it would have more important uses than weighting chessmen. But when the atoms of an object collapsed wouldn’t they simply fall through the interstices of the atoms of whatever you tried to keep it in and simply fall through to the center of the Earth—or of whatever other planet you were on?
Olliver was smiling. “That’s not your department to worry about, Crag. I may tell you later, if it fits into my plans. I’ve given you everything I can that can possibly be helpful to you.”
Crag nodded. But he kept on wondering what Olliver’s angle was. What value could there be in a weapon that would work only at shorter range than his own left hand, and much less suddenly? Or was there a way of saving and using the neutronium? Well, he’d worry about the answer to those questions when he had the thing in his hands—but before he turned it over to Olliver, even for a million.
The trip to Mars was dull and boring, as are all space trips. Fortunately, the J-14 is relatively a luxury ship and he had a cabin of his own. He spent most of his time in it, except when he was at the controls. He slept as much as he could and spent the rest of his time reading and listening to tapes. He talked as little as possible to Olliver and not at all—except occasionally to answer a direct question—to Olliver’s wife.
Crag took the controls for the landing and set the ship down perfectly. He turned to Olliver. “Where’ll I get in touch with you?”
“We have reservations at the Phobos. But you’re coming that far with us, Crag. I took a room for you too.”
“Why? I might as well head right for Menlo.”
“Because I’ve got connections through which I can get you dope on the current situation there. Give me this evening and you can take off tomorrow morning knowing more than you know now.”
Crag nodded. At the Phobos Hotel, he went right to his room and stayed there. In the morning he was dressed and ready when his phone rang and Olliver said he was ready.
Rogue in Space Page 6
