Microcosmic God (42 page)

Bell thought, and snickered: “You stick around and watch ’em. I’m going to take a ride. I’ll leave fifty gallons of coke with you. They’re too plastered to keep you from opening their ugly faces and pouring more coke in. Don’t let them sober up. Just keep telling them that they’ll drink it or you’ll drown them in it.”

Together they lifted the limp bodies and dropped them in the sand outside. “We ought to knock them off,” said Slimmy.

“I thought of that. But if you could see farther than your excuse for a nose, you might remember that we have nothing but a shrewd guess as to the accuracy of our idea about the process. If we’re wrong, these guys might come in handy again.”

“Anything you say,” said Slimmy reluctantly. “I’ll take good care of them until you get back. After that, I can’t promise. Take care of yourself, incidentally.”

“Worry not, little man. Ought to be back inside of fifty hours. So long.” He slapped Slimmy’s back and dove back into the ship.

The port closed with a clang, and the silver ship rose, circled twice, and dwindled to a point before it slipped under the horizon. Slimmy looked after it longingly and then turned to the helpless Martians.

“Time for your bottles, babies,” he said, and went to work pouring the cocola into their gullets.

Bell followed the planet’s surface until he was sure he was out of sight of the drunken Martians, and then curved up and away into space. As soon as he was out of the planet’s effective space warp, he slipped into hyperspace and traveled toward Procyon and its dark companion at many times the speed of light. Watching his chronometers closely, he spun dials and flipped switches in each phase of acceleration and deceleration, and then went spatial again not two thousand miles from the inner planet. In spite of the almost perfect physical insulation of the craft, it was already growing warmer in the control room. Bellew set up a small warp around the ship to convert the heat into light that could be sent back toward the twin suns, and then began circling the planet. Delicate instruments felt into the depths of every crater, every boiling sea of rock on the hot little world. Bell let the ship fall into an orbit, and with one eye glued to a teleo-spectrograph and the other to his detector instruments, he searched every inch of area as it passed beneath him. The hunt didn’t take long—there was uranium aplenty down there. There were great pits of U-236 and ’37, something he didn’t know existed in the Universe, so rare are they.

But—and his teeth flashed in a wide grin as he saw it—there were correspondingly great masses of both ’238 and ’235. He brought the ship close to the surface, cloaked in its light-building warp, near a fiery plain where both isotopes could be detected. Through a screened telescope he saw what he was after—a field of writhing growth, nearly hidden by a fine dust of spores. They weren’t plants—they were molds; and at enormous magnification he observed their life cycle as they ate into the uranium, turning the rarer isotopes into their structures, throwing out all impurities, including U-235. Their
rate of metabolism was astonishingly fast; and when a colony of them had exhausted all the uranium near it, the molds cast off their spores and died. The spores, heavily encysted, drifted about in the hot gases at the surface, until the nearness of their food drew them to the planet’s semi-molten surface. Then they sprouted, fed, spored and died again.

Bellew let his ship settle even more, and dropped a tube of berylu-steel from the hull to a drift of spores. A few of them were drawn upward by the suction he set up; then, tube and all, he snapped the ship into space. Once out there, he experimented briefly and thoroughly with his prize. The mold certainly filled the bill. The cysts apparently could stay alive without nourishment indefinitely. They germinated readily at any temperature, as long as they were in the presence of uranium. Happily, Bellew slipped into hyperspace and dove back toward Artna.

The search of the inner planet and the capture of the spores had taken considerably longer than Bell had expected; he was twenty hours overdue when at last he sighted the great Artnan probability wave transmitter. He cast about anxiously for the spot where he had left Slimmy and the Martians. There was nothing there but tumbled sand.

Bell flung the ship down and, through a telescope, examined the ground. There had been a scuffle, apparently, and if Bell knew Slimmy, it must have been a pip, in spite of the fact that Martians are three times as strong as any human.

“A hell of a mess,” he murmured, and swung the ship toward the hollow where lay the Martian cruiser.

Landing next to it, he hunted through Slimmy’s locker until he found what he wanted, concealed in a cleverly devised secret compartment. Then he opened the air lock and strode over to the Martian ship.

The port swung open as he approached. Its Wonders stood there, apparently suffering little from what must have been quite a hangover. “What do you want?”

“Slimmy. What have you done with him?”

“Your companion is safe. He will be returned to you alive if you give us what you went away to get.”

“You’ve killed him!”

Its Wonders stood aside. “Come in and see for yourself.”

Bell pushed past him. Slimmy was there, looking very sheepish in the iron grip of the other two Martians.

“Hiya, boy,” he said.

“Slimmy! What happened?”

“What happened to you in Cincinnati that night we spent at Bert’s place?”

Bellew remembered the occasion. He wasn’t proud of it. He’d tried to outdrink half a dozen boron miners and had failed rather miserably. He remembered with distaste the oily feeling at the pit of his stomach, and how liquor had suddenly turned from one of the greater pleasures of life into nothing more nor less than an emetic. “What’s that got to do—”

“They fooled me, that’s all. After you’d been gone about eight hours or so they stopped trying not to swallow the stuff and began to get greedy. I missed the gag—I fed it to them as fast as they would take it. They all got sick. Very sick. Then they started to sober up, and I had to feed ’em more while they were still weak. Gallon for gallon, they threw off what I fed them. I don’t know how they did it—they sure can take it. Anyhow, I ran plumb out of cocola. We shoulda killed ’em.”

“We will,” said Bell grimly, his jaw bunching. “O.K., fellers—let him go now.” He reached casually into his pocket and pulled out a blue-steel automatic blaster. The Martians stiffened indignantly.

“Where did you get that?” said Heaven. “We had your promise to allow us to destroy every weapon you had aboard. You destroyed all of ours. How is it that you kept that?”

Again Bell found himself wishing that a Martian could express emotion. He’d have given anything to know just how mad the tall Martian was.

“This,” said Bellew, stepping aside to let the released Slimmy past him, “is what we call, on Earth, an ace in the hole.”

The Martians started and stopped a concerted rush at Bell as he glanced over to see if Slimmy was safe in the silver ship, and then turned to them again.

“Nice to’ve known you,” he said, and backed out.

As the Earth ship rose gently away from Artna, Slimmy looked happily up from the controls. “You know, Bell, in spite of the fact that it was a dirty trick to hold out that blaster after giving our word, I’m glad you did it.”

Bell looked at the blaster and grinned, moving toward the refuse lock. “Swing her a little left,” he said, sighting through a port. “You got the wrong idea, chum.” He dropped the gun into the lock, closed the upper door, and put his hand on the dumping lever. “We promised to let them destroy all our deadly weapons. They did. Am I glad to do
this!”
and he threw the lever. The gun curved down and dropped right in front of the air lock of the Martian ship. Three lanky figures pounced on it, and a jet of soapy water shot futilely up at them.

I
T IS EVEN TRUER
in fact than in fiction that more important business is transacted in palaces of pleasure than is ever handled in austere offices. Such a deal was taking place in such a hangout between two swarthy individuals who sat in a semiprivate room just off the dance floor of the Purple Pileus, the most expensive drinkery in the most exclusive section of the richest city on three planets.

“I thought you might like it,” said one of the two men. “Inside and out, it’s a standard model—two wheels, gyro-stabilized, antigrav plates to support it while the wheels drive it; conventional controls. Old George Carrington himself couldn’t tell it from the latest Carrington ’78.”

“What’s that to me?” said the other. “I’m satisfied with the cars I have.”

“You won’t be, Eric, when you’ve seen this one. It’s just a little bit special.”

“With a special price on it, hey?”

“Nothing you couldn’t afford. You can have it for a present if you’ll play ball with me. I mean”—he added at the other’s quick glance—“if you’ll allow me to play ball with you.”

“What’s your proposition?”

“Something like this—I am cut to the quick when my own brother is victimized by such a creature as The Fang. A terrible thing. The finest ship in your fleet, wasn’t she? And pirated, burned to a cinder, crew and all, by that spectacular criminal with the melodramatic name.
Tsk, tsk!”

“Get to the point,” growled Eric. “Even if I had nothing to do with my time, you’d still be wasting it.”

“I’ll get there,” said his brother happily. “That piracy—it was particularly tough on the insurance company, wasn’t it? The cargo
was insured for ten times the value of the ship, which in itself was plenty.”

“It cost me ten times the value of the ship,” said Eric shortly.

“Of course it did. I read the record of the investigation. A government man stood by a sealed meter and watched the stuff being pumped into the tanks. Only thing is, one of my men was watching the flow in your secret chamber under the loading platform. Every drop that went into the ship wound up in the tank it came from. Two million barrels of lucasium, the finest atomic fuel yet synthesized. The insurance company paid you for it; then you sold it to Martian Spaceways, whose stock you control, at a phony high price ‘justified’ by the shortage created by The Fang’s highjacking.”

Eric’s knuckles whitened against the background of the blue champagne in his glass; otherwise he gave no sign of having heard.

“Before I go on,” continued his brother easily, “I want to point out that my death will result in the delivery of two cans of sound film to the government. They tell the whole story. I’ll run off a print of them for you any time you’d like to see them. In other words, it’ll pay you to see that nothing happens to me.”

“The air in here,” said Eric absently, “smells of blackmail.”

“Perish the thought!” said the other primly. “Have I demanded anything?”

“Not yet,” said Eric. “And to tell you the truth, that’s what bothers me a little. I know the way you work—I should, by this time—and I don’t doubt that you have the film you mentioned. You’re the only man I ever heard of who was oily enough to get it. What else can you want but a payoff?”

“I want to help you. I want to fight this menace shoulder to shoulder with you. After all, blood is thicker than water. Never let it be said that Budd Arnik wouldn’t risk half the danger that threatens his brother.”

“I get it. For half the ‘danger,’ half the profits. Right? You got a busy liver, son, building up all that gall. The answer is
no!”

Budd stretched out his legs, shoved his hands deep in his pockets and smiled at his brother. “When I said I could help you, I meant it. You’ve set yourself up a nice racket there, but you always did lack
imagination. You haven’t begun to tap the possibilities. Now, about that car I was trying to give you, because I like you so much. It’s—well, look!” He pointed at the glass brick wall, through which could be seen the exquisitely landscaped driveway which led up to the Purple Pileus.

A beautifully clean vehicle swept in at the gate, just one long, lean sliver of chrome and iridescent blue. There was bulk there, and weight, but it took an engineer to spot it, so fine were its ultra-streamlined curves. Its two wheels, which thrust themselves far ahead and behind the car, were individually sprung, and supported the great teardrop about six feet off the ground. Both wheels ran inside a tread which moved on shaped tracks, so that they were rounded in front and sharply pointed in the rear. From the ground up, then, each fore-and-aft cross section of the machine was a perfect streamline. The car came to a whispering stop at the entrance, and the wheels retracted, setting the hull swiftly and gently to the ground. A lovely sight.

“Carrington ’78,” said Eric. “What about it?”

“Just the thing for the man about town, isn’t it? To look at, it is simply the right vehicle for a man of your position. The one I have parked outside is exactly the same in every respect—with a slight difference. It has every feature of a stock car with just one or two more.”

“Such as—”

“A momentum neutralizer. An automatic refueling screen—repels large bodies, sweeps in small ones for transmutation into air, food, fuel. And—an armament. Why, I couldn’t begin to tell you—”

“You don’t have to,” snapped Eric. “What the hell use is a car like that to me? Or—to my organization?” He sipped slowly, digesting the items Budd had just reeled off. “What’s the idea of all that gadgetry on a surface car?”

“The idea is that it isn’t a surface car, obviously. Why, that machine will operate practically forever without having to stop for fuel and supplies. It will fly. It will push the speed of light between here and anything you can see with a telescope. Don’t you see, or is it that you won’t admit it? It’s the perfect getaway. The perfect front. Piracy?
Pal, you haven’t touched the subject. For example, suppose you ship a cargo of automobiles to Mars, and there is another regrettable incident like The Fang’s little coup. The ship just might explode gently enough to strew that portion of space with parts of the cargo. Thereafter, any other ship on the same run, sighting an automobile afloat in space, would pay little attention—until the automobile began spouting atomic shells and setting up a sleep-destroying field.