Tales of the Flying Mountains Read online

  “There is! There is! Gyrogravitics is, uh, at the s-s-stage nuclear physics was in … in 1930.… They couldn’t have used a, a gigatron and the whole huge outfit which serves one—not then.”

  “Oh, yes, they could, Mr. Emett. Not directly, perhaps; but as means for getting more funds for the work they really wanted to do. Think. Government employees are also voters, and closer knit than average. Prestige and influence are proportional to numbers.” Harleman sighed. “I guess I’d better take charge till I can locate a suitable subadministrator for you. But you understand this means you’ll have to accept a lower title and salary.”

  “I d-don’t care. Just let me do my job.” Apparently nature had designed Quentin Emett for precisely one thing. All else, like eating, was incidental.

  It did not cross Harleman’s mind till later that similar remarks had been made about such folk as Oberth and Von Braun. He was too preoccupied with phone calls, memos, interviews, conferences, and tables of organization. For a while, press and TV were after him, too. But Dyna-Thrust was not an especially good story: only a few men puttering around with abstruse calculations and unspectacular experiments. After the Christmas battles between the People’s Union for Righteous Excellence and the Friends Upholding Closer Kinship had run their bloody course through the streets of various cities, the media never did get back to NASA.… Whenever he could steal a few hours, Harleman was angling for a new post in another agency, against the day when this one would be dismantled.

  Thus he paid scant attention to Dyna-Thrust’s progress reports. They were dull, difficult reading; and in truth, the whole thing was nothing but a sideshow. Other projects, like Stormwind, Aldebaran, and Paul Bunyan, survived yet and were larger, splashier, and costlier. Indeed, sufficiently many new ones were being proposed that the public relations office had trouble thinking up names for them. A giant establishment, like a giant redwood, dies slowly, and may keep on growing and branching in some degree to the very end.

  Harleman knew that Emett’s gang were discovering things. He hoped those things would justify enlarging their division next year. Other than that, he was too busy to care.

  Until the day when the CIA man came.

  That was in February. Snow lay dingy along Washington’s streets. Cars moved through slush with soft, sloppy noises. The air was raw and wet, the trees leafless, the low gray sky might never have held any stars. Harleman shivered at the prospect of venturing out, and considered an excuse for eating dinner downtown. The Kreemi-Rich Hour would be on. He decided that what with Martha’s latest medical bill the bank account couldn’t well stand it, and returned from the window to his desk. Once more he was looking over data for preparing a budget request. As he would the following year, he thought, and the following year, and the following year.… Eight to go before he retired.… He welcomed the time of Alfred Wheatley’s appointment.

  “Come in, come in. Sit down. Cigarette? What can I do for you?”

  He had expected some routine matter. The CIA had inquired of him before. It had never involved anything sinister, no espionage or subversion or drama, nothing but help in keeping track of details like the state of the art in other countries. He supposed the CIA had to produce reasons for its own appropriations.

  Wheatley was different from its previous representatives. In physical appearance he could have been a lawyer or accountant or petty commissioner. But his eyes burned. He spoke in a high, taut voice.

  “Mr. Harleman, what do you know about Soviet work on gyrogravitics?”

  “What?” Harleman realized he was gaping. “Why … I daresay they’re interested, like us,” he hedged. “If I remember correctly, part of the theory is due to Russian physicists. But of course, my agency as such is no longer privy to classified information.” He attempted a chuckle. “Not that the Russians would offer us a look at their secrets, would they?”

  “Still, some of your people must have contacts,” Wheatley said. “Like at that conference in Bucharest a few months ago, where applications of advanced physics to astronautical research were discussed. Several NASA men attended.”

  “Well … yes, no doubt. We try to keep abreast—Why don’t you ask them directly?”

  “That’s being done. To get blunt, Mr. Harleman. I’m here more to give you a preliminary briefing than the other way around. Nothing classified … not yet … beyond Administratively Confidential. However, a leak would be most undesirable at this stage of the game.” Wheatley spoke with emphasis.

  “I understand,” Harleman said, quite truthfully after his decades in government. His heart skipped a beat and started ticking faster. Could it be—could it be—?

  Wheatley said: “We have intelligence that the Soviets are mounting a sizable effort in the field of gyrogravitic propulsion.”

  Glory exploded over Harleman. As through a shining mist and choirs of angels, he heard himself reply, “I’m not surprised, considering that the work I instigated has been reported in the open literature. Its progress has surpassed my expectations.”

  “We don’t want the United States to fall behind.”

  “Absolutely not. The prerequisite expansion of infrastructure will demand——”

  ——bigger appropriations! More personnel! Larger offices! Advancement for everybody!

  The object was not even a toy. It was too ugly, as well as small: some batteries, some haywired circuits, some less identifiable apparatus, cobbled in haphazard fashion onto a sheet of Masonite. It was grotesquely inefficient; waste power came out as a shrill whine and a weird bluish shimmer that made the whole thing look doubly unreal.

  But it rose. At the end of its tether, it pulled on a spring with a force equal to 3.2 times its weight.

  “W-w-we did it,” Emett said to his crew. Tears coursed down his face.

  “A lot of engineering left before you can raise a spacecraft,” cautioned an assistant.

  Emett brushed the words off as if they were flies. “Leave that to the engineers,” he said scornfully. “We’ve done the real job.”

  Both Junius and Martha Harleman would have preferred spending a particular week, five years later, in their old home town. He could have gone fishing when he wasn’t impressing the Lions Club and she could have traded Washington gossip for local with her former bridge companions. However, it was more or less incumbent on the head of NASA to attend the first International Gyrogravitics Conference. Besides, it meant several days off work that did not come out of annual leave; and neither of them had visited Paris before.

  He found himself lonely and bored among the scientists. She thought it was inconsiderate that most clerks in the stores spoke French. Both were glad to return.

  Still, they enjoyed a few high moments, especially the climactic banquet. Martha gloated over the dresses and jewels she saw. As for Harleman, well, it wasn’t every day that one got to sit between two Nobel Prize winners, the man affable and the lady (he did not add to Martha afterward) good-looking. And then when the toasts came, and the head of the Russian project arose—using English, too!—

  “—cannot be denied that the recent Soviet triumph, in the flight of Vladimir Three to the moon and back under piloting of Captain I. E. Novikov, it cannot be denied that this achievement of the great Soviet peoples drew inspiration, if not information, from the earlier flights of the American, ah, the American flights. We trust that the great Soviet peoples will return the inspiration through the fleet that this very evening they have launched on its historic mission—not to Mars, not to Venus, but to the moons of Jupiter!” After the excitement had died away a bit: “We trust also that the ease and economy of these flights, already at our present stage of cosmonautical gyrogravitics, will inspire the peoples of Western Europe, Asia, yes, Africa, Latin America, Australia, every continent, every fraternal people … we hope they too will be inspired to join in man’s great conquest of the Solar System. I trust that my American colleague, Mr. Garleman, ah, H-H-Harleman, to whose farseeing vision the world is so indebted, will join m
e in proposing a toast, not to any individual, however high the honors that are due Premier Bogdanovitch, Party Secretary Kuropatkin, and, ah, many others … no, I ask my American colleague to join me in proposing a toast to the genius of mankind!”

  And Junius Harleman stood up before God and everybody, raised his champagne glass, and responded firmly: “To the genius of mankind! May it carry us to the stars!”

  Meanwhile he looked across the table, straight into the eyes of his opposite number, and once again it was like telepathy. You were in the same mess as me, weren’t you? And you found the same way out, didn’t you? Including the argument that if one side was working on such a project, yours dared not refrain, however screwball it looked.

  Don’t worry. I’ll keep quiet if you will.

  Interlude 1

  “Do you mean that the geegee was invented merely because a couple of bloated bureaucracies were bound and determined to keep going?” Lindgren says. “Why, that’s not a dangerous disillusionment, it’s a truism. Been one ever since Gray published his researches into the period.”

  “I am not speaking of children in the Asteroid Republic,” Conchita replies. “By school age, they have already experienced so much rough-and-tumble give-and-take that the fact their ancestors were not omniscient saints comes as no surprise. I am worrying about children here, for whom this ship will be the only immediate reality.”

  “M-m … if anything, I’m inclined to believe that makes it especially important that we level with them,” Amspaugh says carefully. “For instance, if they don’t know how bureaucracies work, they could easily fall into the same trap that Earth did.”

  “Besides,” Dworczyk adds, “the Republic specifically disavowed that kind of government when it became independent. The kids’ll find plenty to be proud of in their asterite forebears.” McVeagh chuckles. “What’s funny?”

  “The thought of those unwashed, greedy, turbulent rock rats—what they’d think if somebody had told them they were noble dreamers!” McVeagh laughs aloud.

  “Hoy, wait,” I protest. “You can go too far in the opposite direction. None of the pioneers would have survived if they’d lacked courage, intelligence, good technical educations at a minimum, persistence … and, yes, cooperativeness where it was needed. They didn’t uniformly leave home in search of a material fortune. I’ve read old letters as well as books. A lot of them wanted room to live and grow, freedom, a better chance for the next generation.”

  “The economic incentive was important, though,” Lindgren argues. “In fact, without it, no colonization would ever have taken place. Poor, gutted, jam-packed Earth couldn’t afford largescale enterprises that didn’t have a high chance of a high profit. The geegee made spaceflight cheap, but not that cheap. It was the asteroids that counted.”

  Yes, I recite in my mind, that’s correct: not the inner planets, but the flying mountains of the Belt—thousands of them, minerals right there for the taking, gravity so weak that hauling costs dropped to something a small entrepreneur might be able to meet. And Jupiter, there was the other factor that gave us the freedom of space.

  It wasn’t foreseen. Predictions had to do with Luna, Mars, Venus, not naked rocks and a poisonous giant. But then, Columbus was looking for the Indies when he found America. I wonder what serendipities are waiting among the stars?

  Lindgren, who has strong lungs, continues. “Nevertheless, friends, in spite of the potential payoff, I needn’t tell you how hard and dangerous those early days were. You might assign people to go out into space, live like monks for years on end, risk death in any of a hundred nasty forms, the way some countries in fact did. But the North American government didn’t have that power. Aside from military personnel and, all right, I’ll grant you a few dreamers … there was nothing to attract our ancestors except the hope of getting hog-rich.

  “I don’t think an honest historian can neglect greed as a factor.”

  “I might insert a footnote,” McVeagh offers. “Probably the self-reliant individualism we asterites brag of didn’t come about because anyone really wanted it. People simply had no choice. Scattered across airless cold worldlets, millions of kilometers apart, if they couldn’t deal personally with whatever might befall—that was the end of them.”

  “Well, I suppose it can do no harm for our texts to trace the origin of our institutions, as long as a proper respect is shown for those institutions,” Conchita yields. “After all, ruthless natural selection, over generations, did produce a more fit race.”

  “Come off it!” snorts Missy Blades. “You know better. Racism is proof of inferiority. The superior person doesn’t need it. Besides, consider the average crewman on Astra.”

  “I should have spoken more precisely, no doubt,” Conchita says. “The point I was trying to make—that I think our texts and teachers ought to make—is this: Selection produced a type of human being better adapted to space than the typical Earthling. Likewise for the two life styles. Therefore the revolution was both inevitable and desirable.”

  “Now that’s been debated through several tons of scholarly prose,” Amspaugh says. “The causes of the revolution, I mean. I would oppose trying to straitjacket our children’s education with any single theory. Rather, I believe we can do best by describing earlier, similar events, like the American Revolution—putting our own into historical context, you see.”

  “But the similarities are so superficial, so misleading,” Conchita retorts.

  “Well yes,” Amspaugh admits, “it was a unique war in several regards, including its origins. However, there are plenty of analogies to other colonial revolts——”

  “I know,” says Lindgren. “Earth’s mercantile policies and so forth.” He, like Amspaugh, fancies himself a student of interplanetary history. Mostly their debates are good. I go to the bar and mix myself a drink, listening as the former mine owner’s big voice proceeds:

  “However, what was the proximate cause? When did the asterites first start realizing they weren’t pseudo-pods of a dozen terrestrial nations, but a single nation in their own right? There’s the root of the revolution. And it can be pinned down, too.”

  “‘Ware metaphor!” cries someone at my elbow. I turn and see Missy. She’s quietly joined me to mix a gin and bitters.

  The viewport frames her white head in Orion as we return to the little cluster of seated people. She pulls a cigar from her tunic pocket, strikes it on her shoe sole, and adds her special contribution to the blue cloud in this room as she takes her chair again.

  “Excuse me,” she says. “I couldn’t help that. Please go on.” Which I hope relieves you of any fear that she’s an Unforgettable Character. Oh, yes, she’s old as Satan now; her toil and guts and conniving make up half the biography of the Sword; she manned a gun turret at Ceres during the war, and afterward was mate of the Tyrfing on some of the early Saturn runs when men took their lives between their teeth because they needed both hands free; her sons, grandsons, great-grandsons fill the Belt with their wild ventures; she can drink any ordinary man to the deck. But she’s also one of the few genuine ladies I’ve known in my life.

  “Well.” Lindgren grins at her. “You know my pet hypothesis, Missy. The germ of the revolution was when the stations armed themselves. That meant more than police powers. It implied a degree of sovereignty. Over the years, the implication grew.”

  “Correct.” Orloff nods his big bald head. “I remember how my governing commission squalled when our station managers first demanded the right. My superiors foresaw trouble. But if the stations belonging to one country put in space weapons, what else could the others do?”

  “They should have stuck together and all been firm about refusing to allow it,” Lindgren says. “From the standpoint of their own best interests, I mean.”

  “They tried to,” Orloff replies. “I hate to think how many communications we sent to Moscow from our office; and those of the other nations must have done the same. But Earth was a long way off. The station bosses were
close. Inverse square law of political pressure.”

  “I grant you, arming each new little settlement proved important,” Amspaugh says. “But really, it expressed nothing more than the first inchoate stirrings of asterite nationalism. And the origins of that are much more subtle and complex. For instance … er——”

  “You’ve got to have a key event somewhere,” Lindgren insists. “I say this was the one.”

  A silence falls. No one seems to want to go directly back to the main topic of discussion. Or are we at the precise crux of it? Missy stares for a while into her drink, and then out to the stars. The Dippers are visible. Her faded eyes seek Polaris—but it’s Earth’s, not ours any more—and I wonder what memories she and it are sharing. She shakes herself a little and says:

  “I don’t know about the sociological ins and outs. All I know is, a lot of things happened, and there wasn’t any pattern to them at the time. We just slogged through as best we were able, which wasn’t really very good. But I can identify one of those wriggling roots for you, Sigurd. I was there when the question of arming the stations first came up. Or, rather, when the incident occurred that led to the question being raised.”

  Our whole attention goes to her. She doesn’t dwell on the past as often as we would like. Thanks to antisenescence, we have a number of persons aboard who experienced those days of more than a hundred years ago. But mostly they were non-American space-folk, like Orloff, or Earthlings, like Echevaray (though he is young), who became citizens of the Republic later. None among us were as close to the core of things as Missy.

  A slow, private smile crosses her lips. Again she looks beyond us. “As a matter of fact,” she murmurs, “I got my husband out of it.” Then quickly, as if to keep from recalling too much:

  “Do you care to hear the story? It was when the Sword was first getting started. They’d established themselves on SSC forty-five—oh, never mind the catalogue number. Sword Enterprises, because Mike Blades’s name suggested it. What kind of name could you get out of Jimmy Chung, even if he was the senior partner? It’d sound like a collision with a meteoroid. So naturally the rock also came to be called the Sword.