Tales of the Flying Mountains Page 5

  “How small she seems,” the girl said, with the same note of wonder as before. “And how huge when you’re aboard.”

  Big, all right, Blades knew, and loaded to the hatches with nuclear hellfire. But not massive. A civilian spaceship carried meteor plating, but since that was about as useful as wet cardboard against modern weapons, warcraft sacrificed it for the sake of mobility. The self-sealing hull was thin magnesium, the outer shell periodically renewed as cosmic sand eroded it.

  “I’m not surprised we orbited, instead of docking,” Ellen remarked. “We’d have butted against your radar and bellied into your control tower.”

  “Well, actually, no,” said Blades. “Even half finished, our dock’s big enough to accommodate you, as you’ll see today. Don’t forget, we anticipate a lot of traffic in the future. I’m puzzled why you didn’t accept our invitation to use it.”

  “Doctrine!” Warburton clipped.

  The sun came past the blind and touched the officers’ faces with incandescence. Did some look startled, one or two open their mouths as if to protest and then snap them shut again at a warning look? Blades’s spine tingled. I never heard of any such doctrine, he thought, least of all when a North American ship drops in on a North American station.

  “Is … er … is there some international crisis brewing?” he inquired.

  “Why, no.” Ellen straightened from the telescope. “I’d say relations have seldom been as good as they are now. What makes you ask?”

  “Well, the reason your captain didn’t——”

  “Never mind,” Warburton said. “We’d better continue the tour, if you please.”

  Blades filed his misgivings for later reference. He might have fretted immediately, but Ellen Ziska’s presence forbade that. A sort of Pauli exclusion principle. One can’t have two spins simultaneously, can one? He gave her his arm again. “Let’s go on to Central Control,” he proposed. “That’s right behind the people section.”

  “You know, I can’t get over it,” she told him softly. “This miracle you’ve wrought. I’ve never been more proud of being human.”

  “Is this your first long space trip?”

  “Yes. I was stationed at Port Colorado before the new Administration reshuffled armed service assignments.”

  “They did? How come?”

  “I don’t know. Well, that is, during the election campaign the Social Justice party did talk a lot about oldline officers who were too hidebound to carry out modern policies effectively. But it sounded rather silly to me.”

  Warburton compressed his lips. “I do not believe it is proper for service officers to discuss political issues publicly,” he said like a machine gun.

  Ellen flushed. “S-sorry, Commander.”

  Blades felt a helpless anger on her account. He wasn’t sure why. What was she to him? He’d probably never see her again. A hell of an attractive target, to be sure; and after so much celibacy he was highly vulnerable; but did she really matter?

  He turned his back on Warburton and his eyes on her—a 5,000 percent improvement—and diverted her from her embarrassment by asking, “Are you from Colorado, then, Miss Ziska?”

  “Oh, no. Toronto.”

  “How’d you happen to join the Navy, if I may make so bold?”

  “Gosh, that’s hard to say. But I guess mostly I felt so crowded at home. So pigeonholed. The world seemed to be nothing but neat little pigeonholes.”

  “Uh-huh. Same here. I was also a square pigeon in a round hole.” She laughed. “Luckily,” he added, “space is too big for compartments.”

  Her agreement lacked vigor. The Navy must have been a disappointment to her. But she couldn’t very well say so in front of her shipmates.

  Hm-m-m … if she could be gotten away from them.… “How long will you be here?” he inquired. His pulse thuttered.

  “We haven’t been told,” she said.

  “Some work must be done on the missile launchers,” Warburton said. “That’s best carried out here, where extra facilities are available if we need them. Not that I expect we will.” He paused. “I hope we won’t interfere with your own operations.”

  “Far from it.” Blades beamed at Ellen. “Or, more accurately, this kind of interference I don’t mind in the least.”

  She blushed and her eyelids fluttered. Not that she was a fluffhead, he realized. But to avoid incidents, Navy regulations enforced an inhuman correctness between personnel of opposite sexes. After weeks in the black, meeting a man who could pay a compliment without risking court-martial must be like a shot of adrenalin. Better and better!

  “Are you sure?” Warburton persisted. “For instance, won’t we be in the way when the next ship comes from Jupiter?”

  “She’ll approach the opposite end of the asteroid,” Blades said. “Won’t stay long, either.”

  “How long?”

  “One watch, so the crew can relax a bit among those of us who’re off duty. It’d be a trifle longer if we didn’t happen to have an empty bag at the moment. But never very long. Even running under thrust the whole distance, Jupe’s a good ways off. They’ve no time to waste.”

  “What is the next ship due?”

  “The Pallas Castle is expected in the second watch from now.”

  “Second watch. I see.” Warburton stalked on with a brooding expression on his puritan face.

  Blades might have speculated about that, but someone asked him why the station depended on spin for weight. Why not put in an internal field generator, like a ship? Blades explained patiently that an Emett large enough to produce uniform pull through a volume as big as the Sword was rather expensive. “Eventually, when we’re a few megabucks ahead of the game——”

  “Do you really expect to become rich?” Ellen asked. Her tone was awed. No Earthsider had that chance any more, except for the great corporations. “Individually rich?”

  “We can’t fail to. I tell you, this is a frontier like nothing since the conquistadores. We could very easily have been wiped out in the first couple of years—financially or physically—by any of a thousand accidents. But now we’re too far along for that. We’ve got it made, Jimmy and I.”

  “What will you do with your wealth?”

  “Live like an old-time sultan,” Blades grinned. Then, because it was true as well as because he wanted to shine in her eyes: “Mostly, though, we’ll go on to new things. There’s so much that needs to be done. Not simply more asteroid mines. We need farms, timber, parks, passenger and cargo liners, every sort of machine. I’d like to try getting at some of that water frozen in the Saturnian System. Altogether, I see no end to the jobs. It’s no good our depending on Earth for anything. Too expensive, too chancy. The Belt has to be made completely self-sufficient.”

  “With a nice rakeoff for Sword Enterprises,” Gilbertson scoffed.

  “Why, sure. Aren’t we entitled to some return?”

  “Yes. But not so out of proportion as the Belt companies seem to expect. They’re only using natural resources that rightly belong to the people and the accumulated skills and wealth of an entire society.”

  “Huh! The people didn’t do anything with the Sword. Jimmy and I and our boys did. No society was around here grubbing nickel-iron and riding out gravel storms; we were.

  “Let’s leave politics alone,” Warburton snapped. But it was mostly Ellen’s look of distress that shut Blades up.

  To everybody’s relief, they reached Central Control about then. It was a complex of domes and rooms, crammed with more equipment than Blades could put a name to. Computers were in Chung’s line, not his. He wasn’t able to answer all of Warburton’s disconcertingly sharp questions.

  But in a general way he could. Whirling through vacuum with a load of frail humans and intricate artifacts, the Sword must be at once machine, ecology, and unified organism. Everything had to mesh. A failure in the thermodynamic balance, a miscalculation in supply inventory, a few mirrors perturbed out of proper orbit, might spell Ragnarok. The chemical p
lant’s purifications and syntheses were already a network too large for the human mind to grasp as a whole, and it was still growing. Even where men could have taken charge, automation was cheaper, more reliable, less risky of lives. The computer system housed in Central Control was not only the brain, but the nerves and heart of the Sword.

  “Entirely cryotronic, eh?” Warburton commented. “That seems to be the usual practice at the stations. Why?”

  “The least expensive type for us,” Blades answered. “There’s no problem in maintaining liquid helium here.”

  Warburton’s gaze was peculiarly intense. “Cryotronic systems are vulnerable to magnetic and radiation disturbances.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s one reason we don’t have a nuclear power plant. This far from the sun, we don’t get enough emission to worry about. The asteroid’s mass screens out what little may arrive. I know the TIMM system is used on ships; but if nothing else, the initial cost is more than we want to pay.”

  “What’s TIMM?” inquired the Altair’s chaplain.

  “Thermally Integrated Micro-Miniaturized,” Ellen said crisply. “Essentially, ultraminiaturized ceramic-to-metal-seal vacuum tubes running off thermionic generators. They’re immune to gamma ray and magnetic pulses, easily shielded against particle radiation, and economical of power.” She grinned. “Don’t tell me there s nothing about them in Leviticus, Padre!”

  “Very fine for a ship’s autopilot,” Blades agreed. “But as I said, we needn’t worry about rad or mag units here, we don’t mind sprawling a bit, and as for thermal efficiency, we want to waste some heat. It goes to maintain internal temperature.

  “In other words, efficiency depends on what you need to effish,” Ellen bantered. She grew grave once more and studied him for a while before she mused, “The same person who swung a pick, a couple of years ago, now deals with something as marvelous as this.…” He forgot about worrying.

  But he remembered later, when the gig had left and Chung called him to his office. Avis came too, by request. As she entered, she asked why.

  “You were visiting your folks Earthside last year,” Chung said. “Nobody else in the station has been back as recently as that.”

  “What can I tell you?”

  “I’m not sure. Background, perhaps. The feel of the place. We don’t really know, out in the Belt, what’s going on there. The beamcast news is hardly a trickle. Besides, you have more common sense in your left little toe than that big mick yonder has in his entire copper-plated head.”

  They seated themselves in the cobwebby low-gee chairs around Chung’s desk. Blades took out his pipe and filled the bowl with his tobacco ration for the day, Wouldn’t it be great, he thought dreamily, if this old briar turned out to be an Aladdin’s lamp, and the smoke condensed into a blonde she-Canadian——

  “Wake up, will you?” Chung barked.

  “Huh?” Blades started. “Oh. Sure. What’s the matter? You look like a fish on Friday.”

  “Maybe with reason. Did you notice anything unusual with that party you were escorting?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “What?”

  “About one hundred seventy-five centimeters tall, yellow hair, blue eyes, and some of the smoothest fourth-order curves I ever——”

  “Mike, stop that!” Avis sounded appalled. “This is serious.”

  “I agree. She’ll be leaving in a few more watches.”

  The girl bit her lip. “You’re too old for that mooncalf rot and you know it.”

  “Agreed again. I feel more like a bull.” Blades made pawing motions on the desktop.

  “There’s a lady present,” Chung said.

  Blades saw that Avis had gone quite pale. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I never thought … I mean, you’ve always seemed like——”

  “One of the boys,” she finished for him in a brittle tone. “Sure. Forget it. What’s the problem, Jimmy?”

  Chung folded his hands and stared at them. “I can’t quite define that,” he answered, word by careful word. “Perhaps I’ve simply gone spacedizzy. But when we talked with Admiral Hulse, didn’t you get the impression of, well, wariness? Didn’t he seem to be watching and probing, every minute we were together?”

  “I wouldn’t call him a cheerful sort,” Blades nodded. “Stiff as molasses on Pluto. But I suppose … supposed he’s just naturally that way.”

  Chung shook his head. “It wasn’t a normal standoffishness. You’ve heard me reminisce about the time I was on Vesta with the North American technical representative, when the Convention was negotiated.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that story a few times,” said Avis dryly.

  “Remember, that was right after the Europa incident. We’d come close to a space war—undeclared, but it would have been nasty. We were still close. Every delegate went to that conference cocked and primed.

  “Hulse had the same manner.”

  A silence fell. Blades said at length, “Well, come to think of it, he did ask some rather odd questions. He seemed to twist the conversation now and then, so he could find out things like our exact layout, emergency doctrine, and so forth. It didn’t strike me as significant, though.”

  “Nor me,” Chung admitted. “Taken in isolation, it meant nothing. But these visitors today—Sure, most of them obviously didn’t suspect anything untoward. But that Liebknecht, now. Why was he so interested in Central Control? Nothing new or secret there. Yet he kept asking for details like the shielding factor of the walls.”

  “So did Commander Warburton,” Blades remembered. “Also, he wanted to know exactly when the Pallas is due, how long she’ll stay … hm-m-m, yes, whether we have any radio linkage with the outside, like to Ceres or even the nearest Commission base——”

  “Did you tell him that we don’t?” Avis asked sharply.

  “Yes. Shouldn’t I have?”

  “It scarcely makes any difference,” Chung said in a resigned voice. “As thoroughly as they went over the ground, they’d have seen what we do and do not have installed so far.”

  He leaned forward. “Why are they hanging around?” he asked. “I was handed some story about overhauling the missile system.”

  “Me, too,” Blades said.

  “But you don’t consider a job complete till it’s been tested. And you don’t fire a test shot, even a dummy, this close to a station. Besides, what could have gone wrong? I can’t see a ship departing Earth orbit for a long cruise without everything being in order. And they didn’t mention any meteoroids, any kind of trouble, en route. Furthermore, why do the work here? The Navy yard’s at Ceres. We can’t spare them any decent amount of materials or tools or help.”

  Blades frowned. His own half-formulated doubts shouldered to the fore, which was doubly unpleasant after he’d been considering Ellen Ziska. “They tell me the international situation at home is okay,” he offered.

  Avis nodded. “What newsfaxes we get in the mail indicate as much,” she said. “So why this hanky-panky?” After a moment, in a changed voice: “Jimmy, you begin to scare me a little.”

  “I scare myself,” Chung said.

  “Every morning when you debeard,” Blades said; but his heart wasn’t in it. He shook himself and protested: “Damnation, they’re our own countrymen. We’re engaged in a lawful business. Why should they do anything to us?”

  “Maybe Avis can throw some light on that,” Chung suggested.

  The girl twisted her fingers together. “Not me,” she said. “I’m no politician.”

  “But you were home not so long ago. You talked with people, read the news, watched the ThreeV. Can’t you at least give an impression?”

  “N-no—well, of course the preliminary guns of the election campaign were already being fired. The Social Justice party was talking a lot about … oh, it seemed so ridiculous that I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “They talked about how the government had been pouring billions and billions of dollars into space, while overpopulation produced crying need
s in America’s back yard,” Chung said. “We know that much, even in the Belt. We know the appropriations are due to be cut, now the Essjays are in. So what?”

  “We don’t need a subsidy any longer,” Blades remarked. “It’d help a lot, but we can get along without if we have to, and personally, I prefer that. Less government money means less government control.”

  “Sure,” Avis said. “There was more than that involved, however. The Essjays were complaining about the small return on the investment. Not enough minerals coming back to Earth.”

  “Well, for Jupiter’s sake,” Blades exclaimed, “what do they expect? We have to build up our capabilities first.”

  “They even said, some of them, that enough reward never would be gotten. That under existing financial policies, the Belt would go in for its own expansion, use nearly everything it produced for itself and export only a trickle to America. I had to explain to several of my parents’ friends that I wasn’t really a socially irresponsible capitalist.”

  “Is that all the information you have?” Chung asked when she fell silent.

  “I … I suppose so. Everything was so vague. No dramatic events. More of an atmosphere than a concrete thing.”

  “Still, you confirm my own impression,” Chung said. Blades jerked his undisciplined imagination back from the idea of a Thing, with bug eyes and tentacles, cast in reinforced concrete, and listened as his partner summed up:

  “The popular feeling at home has turned against private enterprise. You can hardly call a corporate monster like Systemic Developments a private enterprise! The new President and Congress share that mood. We can expect to see it manifested in changed laws and regulations. But what has this got to do with a battleship parked a couple of hundred kilometers from us?”

  “If the government doesn’t want the asterites to develop much further—” Blades bit hard on his pipestem. “They must know we have a caviar mine here. We’ll be the only city in this entire sector.”

  “But we’re still a baby,” Avis said. “We won’t be important for years to come. Who’d have it in for a baby?”