The road was stopped.
He shouted, “Halt your men!” to the Cadet Captain. His words echoed hollowly in the unreal silence.
The top of the reconnaissance car swung up as he turned and hurried to it. “Chief!” the cadet within called out. “Relay station calling you.”
The girl in the visor screen gave way to Davidson as soon as she recognized Gaines’s face. “Chief,” Davidson said at once, “Van Kleeck’s calling you.”
“Who stopped the road?”
“He did.”
“Any other major change in the situation?”
“No—the road was practically empty when he stopped it.”
“Good. Give me Van Kleeck.”
The chief conspirator’s face was livid with uncurbed anger when he identified Gaines. He burst into speech.
“So! You thought I was fooling, eh? What do you think now, Mr. Chief Engineer Gaines?”
Gaines fought down an impulse to tell him exactly what he thought, particularly about Van Kleeck. Everything about the short man’s manner affected him like a squeaking slate pencil.
But he could not afford the luxury of speaking his mind. He strove to get the proper tone into his voice which would soothe the other man’s vanity. “I’ve got to admit that you’ve won this trick, Van—the roadway is stopped—but don’t think I didn’t take you seriously. I’ve watched your work too long to underrate you. I know you mean what you say.”
Van Kleeck was pleased by the tribute, but tried not to show it. “Then why don’t you get smart, and give up?” he demanded belligerently. “You can’t win.”
“Maybe not, Van, but you know I’ve got to try. Besides,” he went on, “why can’t I win? You said yourself that I could call on the whole United States Army.”
Van Kleeck grinned triumphantly. “You see that?” He held up a pear-shaped electric push button, attached to a long cord. “If I push that, it will blow a path right straight across the ways—blow it to Kingdom Come. And just for good measure I’ll take an ax, and wreck this control station before I leave.”
Gaines wished wholeheartedly that he knew more about psychiatry. Well—he’d just have to do his best, and trust to horse sense to give him the right answers. “That’s pretty drastic, Van, but I don’t see how we can give up.”
“No? You’d better have another think. If you force me to blow up the road, how about all the people that will be blown up along with it?”
Gaines thought furiously. He did not doubt that Van Kleeck would carry out his threat; his very phraseology, the childish petulance of “If you force me to do this—” betrayed the dangerous irrationality of his mental processes. And such an explosion anywhere in the thickly populated Sacramento Sector would be likely to wreck one, or more, apartment houses, and would be certain to kill shopkeepers on the included segment of strip twenty, as well as chance bystanders. Van was absolutely right; he dare not risk the lives of bystanders who were not aware of the issue and had not consented to the hazard—even if the road never rolled again.
For that matter, he did not relish chancing major damage to the road itself—but it was the danger to innocent life that left him helpless.
A tune ran through his head. “Hear them hum; watch them run. Oh, our work is never done—” What to do? What to do? “While you ride; while you glide; we are—” This wasn’t getting anyplace.
He turned back to the screen. “Look, Van, you don’t want to blow up the road unless you have to, I’m sure. Neither do I. Suppose I come up to your headquarters, and we talk this thing over. Two reasonable men ought to be able to make a settlement.”
Van Kleeck was suspicious. “Is this some sort of a trick?”
“How can it be? I’ll come alone, and unarmed, just as fast as my car can get there.”
“How about your men?”
“They will sit where they are until I’m back. You can put out observers to make sure of it.”
Van Kleeck stalled for a moment, caught between the fear of a trap, and the pleasure of having his erstwhile superior come to him to sue for terms. At last he grudgingly consented.
Gaines left his instructions and told Davidson what he intended to do. “If I’m not back within an hour, you’re on your own, Dave.”
“Be careful, Chief.”
“I will.”
He evicted the cadet driver from the reconnaissance car and ran it down the ramp into the causeway, then headed north and gave it the gun. Now he would have a chance to collect his thoughts, even at two hundred miles per hour. Suppose he pulled off this trick—there would still have to be some changes made. Two lessons stood out like sore thumbs: First, the strips must be cross-connected with safety interlocks so that adjacent strips would slow down, or stop, if a strip’s speed became dangerously different from those adjacent. No repetition of what happened on twenty!
But that was elementary, a mere mechanical detail. The real failure had been in men. Well, the psychological classification tests must be improved to insure that the roads employed only conscientious, reliable men. But hell’s bells—that was just exactly what the present classification tests were supposed to insure beyond question. To the best of his knowledge there had never been a failure from the improved Humm-Wadsworth-Burton method—not until today in the Sacramento Sector. How had Van Kleeck gotten one whole sector of temperament-classified men to revolt?
It didn’t make sense.
Personnel did not behave erratically without a reason. One man might be unpredictable, but in large numbers they were as dependable as machines, or figures. They could be measured, examined, classified. His inner eye automatically pictured the personnel office, with its rows of filing cabinets, its clerks—He’d got it! He’d got it! Van Kleeck, as Chief Deputy, was ex officio personnel officer for the entire road!
It was the only solution that covered all the facts. The personnel officer alone had the perfect opportunity to pick out all the bad apples and concentrate them in one barrel. Gaines was convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that there had been skullduggery, perhaps for years, with the temperament classification tests, and that Van Kleeck had deliberately transferred the kind of men he needed to one sector, after falsifying their records.
And that taught another lesson—tighter tests for officers, and no officer to be trusted with classification and assignment without close supervision and inspection. Even he, Gaines, should be watched in that respect. Qui custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard those selfsame guardsmen? Latin might be obsolete, but those old Romans weren’t dummies.
He at last knew wherein he had foiled, and he derived melancholy pleasure from the knowledge. Supervision and inspection, check and recheck, was the answer. It would be cumbersome and inefficient, but it seemed that adequate safeguards always involved some loss of efficiency.
He should not have entrusted so much authority to Van Kleeck without knowing more about him. He still should know more about him—He touched the emergency-stop button, and brought the car to a dizzying halt. “Relay station! See if you can raise my office.”
Dolores’s face looked out from the screen. “You’re still there—good!” he told her. “I was afraid you’d gone home.”
“I came back, Mr. Gaines.”
“Good girl. Get me Van Kleeck’s personal file jacket. I want to see his classification record.”
She was back with it in exceptionally short order and read from it the symbols and percentages. He nodded repeatedly as the data checked his hunches—masked introvert—inferiority complex. It checked.
“‘Comment of the Board:’” she read, “‘In spite of the potential instability shown by maxima A and D on the consolidated profile curve, the Board is convinced that this officer is, nevertheless, fitted for duty. He has an exceptionally fine record, and is especially adept in handling men. He is, therefore, recommended for retention and promotion.’”
“That’s all, Dolores. Thanks.”
“Yes, Mr. Gaines.”
“I�
�m off for a showdown. Keep your fingers crossed.”
“But Mr. Gaines—” Back in Fresno, Dolores stared wide-eyed at an empty screen.
“Take me to Mr. Van Kleeck!”
The man addressed took his gun out of Gaines’s ribs—reluctantly, Gaines thought—and indicated that the Chief Engineer should precede him up the stairs. Gaines climbed out of the car, and complied.
Van Kleeck had set himself up in the sector control room proper, rather than the administrative office. With him were half a dozen men, all armed.
“Good evening, Director Van Kleeck.” The little man swelled visibly at Gaines’s acknowledgment of his assumed rank.
“We don’t go in much around here for titles,” he said, with ostentatious casualness. “Just call me Van. Sit down, Gaines.”
Gaines did so. It was necessary to get those other men out. He looked at them with an expression of bored amusement. “Can’t you handle one unarmed man by yourself, Van? Or don’t the functionalists trust each other?”
Van Kleeck’s face showed his annoyance, but Gaines’s smile was undaunted. Finally, the smaller man picked up a pistol from his desk, and motioned toward the door. “Get out, you guys.”
“But Van—”
“Get out, I said!”
When they were alone, Van Kleeck picked up the electric push button which Gaines had seen in the visor screen, and pointed his pistol at his former chief. “O.K.,” he growled, “try any funny stuff, and off it goes! What’s your proposition?”
Gaines’s irritating smile grew broader. Van Kleeck scowled. “What’s so damn funny?” he said.
Gaines granted him an answer. “You are, Van—honest, this is rich. You start a functionalist revolution, and the only function you can think of to perform is to blow up the road that justifies your title. Tell me,” he went on, “what is it you are so scared of?”
“I am not afraid!”
“Not afraid? You? Sitting there, ready to commit hara-kiri with that toy push button, and you tell me that you aren’t afraid. If your buddies knew how near you are to throwing away what they’ve fought for, they’d shoot you in a second. You’re afraid of them, too, aren’t you?”
Van Kleeck thrust the push button away from him, and stood up. “I am not afraid!” he screamed, and came around the desk toward Gaines.
Gaines sat where he was, and laughed. “But you are! You’re afraid of me, this minute. You’re afraid I’ll have you on the carpet for the way you do your job. You’re afraid the cadets won’t salute you. You’re afraid they are laughing behind your back. You’re afraid of using the wrong fork at dinner. You’re afraid people are looking at you—and you are afraid that they won’t notice you.”
“I am not!” he protested. “You—You dirty, stuck-up snob! Just because you went to a high-hat school you think you’re better than anybody.” He choked, and became incoherent, fighting to keep back tears of rage. “You, and your nasty little cadets—”
Gaines eyed him cautiously. The weakness in the man’s character was evident now—he wondered why he had not seen it before. He recalled how ungracious Van Kleeck had been one time when he had offered to help him with an intricate piece of figuring.
The problem now was to play on his weakness, to keep him so preoccupied that he would not remember the peril-laden push button. He must be caused to center the venom of his twisted outlook on Gaines, to the exclusion of every other thought.
But he must not goad him too carelessly, or a shot from across the room might put an end to Gaines and any chance of avoiding a bloody, wasteful struggle for control of the road.
Gaines chuckled. “Van,” he said, “you are a pathetic little shrimp. That was a dead give-away. I understand you perfectly; you’re a third-rater, Van, and all your life you’ve been afraid that someone would see through you, and send you back to the foot of the class. Director—pfui! If you are the best the functionalists can offer, we can afford to ignore them—they’ll fold up from their own rotten inefficiency.” He swung around in his chair, deliberately turning his back on Van Kleeck and his gun.
Van Kleeck advanced on his tormentor, halted a few feet away, and shouted: “You—I’ll show you—I’ll put a bullet in you; that’s what I’ll do!”
Gaines swung back around, got up, and walked steadily toward him. “Put that popgun down before you hurt yourself.”
Van Kleeck retreated a step. “Don’t you come near me!” he screamed. “Don’t you come near me—or I’ll shoot you—see if I don’t!”
This is it, thought Gaines, and dived.
The pistol went off alongside his ear. Well, that one didn’t get him. They were on the floor. Van Kleeck was hard to hold, for a little man. Where was the gun? There! He had it. He broke away.
Van Kleeck did not get up. He lay sprawled on the floor, tears streaming out of his closed eyes, blubbering like a frustrated child.
Gaines looked at him with something like compassion in his eyes, and hit him carefully behind the ear with the butt of the pistol. He walked over to the door, and listened for a moment, then locked it cautiously.
The cord from the push button led to the control board. He examined the hookup, and disconnected it carefully. That done, he turned to the televisor at the control desk, and called Fresno.
“Okay, Dave,” he said. “Let ’em attack now—and for the love of Pete, hurry!” Then he cleared the screen, not wishing his watch officer to see how he was shaking.
Back in Fresno the next morning, Gaines paced around the Main Control Room with a fair degree of contentment in his heart. The roads were rolling—before long they would be up to speed again. It had been a long night. Every engineer, every available cadet, had been needed to make the inch-by-inch inspection of Sacramento Sector which he had required. Then they had to cross-connect around two wrecked subsector control boards. But the roads were rolling—he could feel their rhythm up through the floor.
He stopped beside a haggard, stubbly bearded man. “Why don’t you go home, Dave?” he asked. “McPherson can carry on from here.”
“How about yourself, Chief? You don’t look like a June bride.”
“Oh, I’ll catch a nap in my office after a bit. I called my wife, and told her I couldn’t make it. She’s coming down here to meet me.”
“Was she sore?”
“Not very. You know how women are.” He turned back to the instrument board, and watched the clicking “busy-bodies” assembling the data from six sectors. San Diego Circle, Angeles Sector, Bakersfield Sector, Fresno Sector, Stockton—Stockton? Stockton! Good grief!—Blekinsop! He had left a cabinet minister of Australia cooling his heels in the Stockton office all night long.
He started for the door, while calling over his shoulder, “Dave, will you order a car for me? Make it a fast one!” He was across the hall, and had his head inside his private office before Davidson could acknowledge the order.
“Dolores!”
“Yes, Mr. Gaines.”
“Call my wife, and tell her I had to go to Stockton. If she’s already left home, just have her wait here. And Dolores—”
“Yes, Mr. Gaines?”
“Calm her down.”
She bit her lip, but her face was impassive. “Yes, Mr. Gaines.”
“That’s a good girl.” He went out and started down the stairway. When he reached road level, the sight of the rolling strips warmed him inside and made him feel almost cheerful.
He strode briskly away toward a door marked ACCESS DOWN, whistling softly to himself. He opened the door, and the rumbling, roaring rhythm from “down inside” seemed to pick up the tune even as it drowned out the sound of his whistling.
“Hie! Hie! Hee!
The rotor men are we—
Check off your sectors loud and strong!
One!
Two! Three!
Anywhere you go
You are bound to know
That your roadways are rolling along!”
Blowups Happen
“
Put down that wrench!”
The man addressed turned slowly around and faced the speaker. His expression was hidden by a grotesque helmet, part of a heavy, lead-and-cadmium armor which shielded his entire body, but the tone of voice in which he answered showed nervous exasperation.
“What the hell’s eating on you, doc?” He made no move to replace the tool in question.
They faced each other like two helmeted, arrayed fencers, watching for an opening. The first speaker’s voice came from behind his mask a shade higher in key and more peremptory in tone. “You heard me, Harper. Put down that wrench at once, and come away from that ‘trigger.’ Erickson!”
A third armored figure came from the far end of the control. “What ’cha want, doc?”
“Harper is relieved from watch. You take over as engineer-of-the-watch. Send for the standby engineer.”
“Very well.” His voice and manner were phlegmatic, as he accepted the situation without comment. The atomic engineer whom he had just relieved glanced from one to the other, then carefully replaced the wrench in its rack.
“Just as you say, Doctor Silard—but send for your relief, too. I shall demand an immediate hearing!” Harper swept indignantly out, his lead-sheathed boots clumping on the floorplates.
Doctor Silard waited unhappily for the ensuing twenty minutes until his own relief arrived. Perhaps he had been hasty. Maybe he was wrong in thinking that Harper had at last broken under the strain of tending the most dangerous machine in the world—the atomic breeder plant. But if he had made a mistake, it had to be on the safe side—slips must not happen in this business; not when a slip might result in atomic detonation of nearly ten tons of uranium-238, U-235, and plutonium.
He tried to visualize what that would mean, and failed. He had been told that uranium was potentially twenty million times as explosive as T.N.T. The figure was meaningless that way. He thought of the pile instead as a hundred million tons of high explosive, or as a thousand Hiroshimas. It still did not mean anything. He had once seen an A-bomb dropped, when he had been serving as a temperament analyst for the Air Force. He could not imagine the explosion of a thousand such bombs; his brain balked.
Man Who Sold the Moon / Orphans of the Sky Page 10
