Microcosmic God (43 page)

“Outlets for the stuff? Well, there’s the colony on Neptune—remember? It was a prison once, and they revolted just for the privilege of staying where they were to colonize like free men. I don’t have to tell you about Mars and Venus and the asteroid colonies. We’d do all right.”

“On principle,” said Eric. “I hate to confess it, but you really have something there.” He beamed. “Yes, you most certainly—” The two swarthy heads moved close together over the table.

Neither of the Arnik brothers was in a position to see the man who stepped out of the blue Carrington and strode purposefully into the Purple Pileus. Protecting his jauntiness with a hundred-dollar bill, he evaded the grim headwaiter’s intention of locking him out, and marched up to the bar.

He was a most extraordinary figure, from the top of his mauve streamlined hat, through his iridescent vest to his flexi-glastic shoes. He barely cleared five feet. His body was tubby but his arms apparently couldn’t understand that, for they were long and scrawny. From his brow to an inch below his eyes, his nose turned up; from there on, down. His short upper lip slanted sharply toward his tonsils, which had the effect of making his chinlessness positively jut. He ordered
lyanka
, which is the Martian word for “equalizer,” with the air of a man who couldn’t possibly hold even one but who has just had three. The large bill on the bar overcame the barkeep’s desire to protect a customer against himself, and the man was served. He slurped from the goblet and looked around him.

“So this is the top. This is the—wha’ you call—ul-timate.”

“This is the Poiple Pileus,” said the bartender.

“Oh, yeah … yeah … I know. What I mean, this’s what people
work up to. People put down numbers in books, maybe, drive transports—stuff like that, five hours a day, five days a week, week in, week out.” He ran out of breath and inhaled some
lyanka
with his air. “People … 
fft
 … ‘scuse me … all got the idea someday they’ll be rich. When they get rich, they come to a place like this.
Fft
. What I want to know is, why? Get just as drunk at Casey’s Hardwater Store.”

“Casey’s ain’t exclusive,” the barkeep pointed out.

“Take me, now,” said the fantasy on the paying side of the board. “Biddiver’s my name. Two days ago I’m on the assembly line up at General, and somebody name of Phoebe Biddiver dies. Yesterday I got two million bucks, free and clear. Today I buy everything I ever thought I wanted and go every place I ever wanted to see. An’ now what?”

“What?”

“An’ now I don’t know what to do tomorrow.” The bartender was fascinated by the way the teardrops proceeded down Biddiver’s amazing nose. One drop would dash almost halfway, and then hesitate, daunted by the hump. Then it would be joined by another teardrop, and the two, merging, would surmount the obstacle and slip down to hang glittering over the disappearing lip until a sob came along to shake them off. “I ain’t done nothin’ to nobody,” complained Biddiver brokenly. “I don’t want to do nothin’ to nobody. What did I do to deserve this?”

“Guys what don’t want to do nothin’ to nobody,” said the bartender, in a philosophic flash, “most generally don’t amount to nothin’.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I say. This place, now, it crawls with big shots. Every one of them walked up to the top on other guys’ faces. Take that Fang feller now, that’s in all the papers. Bad egg, sure. But at the top all the same. Sneaks up on a tanker on the Earth-Venus run, swipes the cargo, burns the ship and the crew, and disappears. Then he tells three planets an’ the whole Belt, speakin’ through every ultraradio set that happens to be turned on, that he is The Fang, an’ he is the one who done it, an’ he’ll do it again whenever he feels like it. Not a direction indicator in the System can locate where he’s broadcasting
from. See what I mean? He’s smart an’ he doesn’t give a damn about who he roughs up. Now look. See those two guys in that semiprivate over there? They’re the Arnik brothers. One’s a shipper an’ the other’s a kind of freelance gorilla. They operate the same way as The Fang. They must like it or they wouldn’t keep it up.” He nodded sagely. “If I had as much change as you do, I wouldn’t get down in the mouth about it. The main idea in gettin’ really rich is to be rich in the first place; then you make your money, take people out, lose ’em and come back with their bank accounts. I seen it done right here.”

Biddiver shook his head weakly. “I don’t think I could be that kind of a heel.”

“You can be. Rich people can’t afford to be nice about things. Only guys who work for a living can do that, an’ even then they got to watch themselves or they’ll get took over.” He peered at Biddiver, judging expertly his state of insobriety, and then pointedly took away his goblet, rinsed it and put it away.

Biddiver took the hint because, by now, he wasn’t feeling so good. He waved the change from his bill back to the bartender and weaved out. The barkeep pocketed the money, shaking his head sourly, quite unaware of the fact that his little speech had created an interplanetary menace.

Biddiver somehow reached the Carrington and nudged the door open. He sprawled into the driver’s seat and touched the starting lever. The door locked as the machine rose up on its two wheels, gyroscopes whirring ever so faintly. On each side of Biddiver, an upholstered arm swung upward until it embraced him in foamy comfort. He pressed the panel which presented itself to his right forefinger; the brakes released themselves and the machine started forward. Pulling gently with his right and then his left hand, he turned the car and wheeled it out of the gate and into the street. Plastered as he was, he realized that in this machine he had one thing that it would take him a long, long while to tire of. He pressed the accelerator under his finger, and as he passed the 150-k.p.h. mark the speedometer’s mechanical whisper cut in—“One sixty—One sixty-eight—One eighty—” He loved the sleepy surge of the car, its metrical
obedience. “Damn if she won’t up an’ take off one of these days,” he muttered as he leaned over to turn on the radio.

And when he flipped the switch she did take off.

“What I don’t understand,” said Eric Arnik, “is why you bother to come to me at all. You have the goods on me, to a certain extent; you have the car and you have some rather sweet ideas on how to use it.”

“Oh, that.” Budd inspected his stylishly scalloped fingernails. “I have to have a lot of research done, you see. I could have it taken care of easily enough, but news gets around, you know. You have all the facilities in your little undercover laboratories. If I work along with you, I can get it done right and fast. Particularly since you realize how much it will be to your own interest.”

“What sort of research?”

“On the car, of course. You don’t think I built it myself, do you? It was like this—I ran across a bright old fellow who had a few ambitious ideas along the lines of auto design. I asked him if he could build something like this baby of mine. He could and he did, but he was curious about why I wanted it and was fool enough to ask me some questions. Luckily for all concerned, he died of natural causes.”

“You mean you just naturally slipped him a ticket out?”

“Something like that,” said Budd carelessly. “Terrible, the filtrable viruses that can get accidentally into a man’s air conditioning unit. Anyway, here I am with the car and no plans or blueprints of any kind. I’ll have to get it to someone who can knock it down and duplicate it. That’s up to your boys.”

“I see. Is the car really on the up-and-up? I mean, have you tested it?”

“And how.” A gleam of enthusiasm crept across Budd’s deadpan face. “Come on—let’s get out of here. I’ll show you.” Eric paid the bill and they left. When they were seated in the big blue Carrington Budd said, “Oh—by the way. I can’t show you any altitude yet. The one thing the old boy hadn’t quite perfected was the Heaviside screen.”

“He didn’t?” Eric’s face flushed with anger. “Damn it, what good is the car to us without that? You expect my technicians to build a
Heaviside unit small enough to fit into this jalopy? Why, the smallest one ever built weighs more than three tons!”

“Take it easy, pal,” soothed his brother. “There are a lot of new principles involved in this wagon. Your boys are pretty good—they ought to get a lead after looking over the rest of the equipment.”

“I hope so. Damn that Heaviside business anyway.”

“You ought to be glad that the layer’s there, chum, and that science knows a way to synthesize one for spacecraft. Did you ever hear what happens to a man when he’s exposed to unfiltered cosmic radiation?”

“I heard.” Unaccountably, Eric Arnik shuddered. Budd started the car.

Biddiver was in that enviable state of inebriation in which he could not be surprised. When he threw the switch to get some music and nothing happened, he did what any trained driver will do—glance far ahead through the windshield to see if the road is clear enough to allow him to investigate his controls for a few seconds. Only there wasn’t any road. He blinked carefully and looked again, and there still was no road. Just a blankness, with a silly little cloud in the middle of it. He suddenly realized that he was looking into the sky; but he was looking, not up, but
ahead
into it. He grunted surprisedly and hauled at the left chair arm. The cloud ahead disappeared and was replaced by a rapidly expanding relief map. It struck Biddiver as a little ominous; he pulled at the right chair arm until the windshield framed a horizon.

For no reason at all he was reminded of a satire, centuries old, which he had read, concerning a college boy who yielded to the temptation of his evil companions, drank a glass of beer and staggered out of the saloon with delirium tremens. “Been a good boy all m’ life,” he reflected bitterly, “because I couldn’t afford to be any other way. And now—four drinks, an’ this.” He wagged his head, hauled back on both arms at once. When he saw the little cloud again, he let go and slumped down in his seat. He was quite convinced he was dreaming, but he didn’t want to dream about a crack-up in a flying automobile, and he felt he would far rather bump the cloud. He went
quite peacefully to sleep then, ignoring the new whispering voice that joined that of the speedometer:

“Four hundred twelve k.p.h.—”

“Altitude twenty-three thousand fifty—”

“Four eighty-three k.p.h.—”

“Altitude twenty-five thousand, thirty-three—”

But he woke, completely sober, when the car hurtled through the Heaviside layer.

Twenty minutes after the second Carrington ’78 pulled away from the Purple Pileus, it swept back again and two men leaped out. One was flushed and one was pale, but both were furious. They pounced on the frightened doorman.

“Where’s my car? What happened to the other Carrington?”

“Wh—Mr. Arnik, I—” His eyes bulged in terror. He had heard of the Arniks. “A gentleman drove off in it. He had only stayed a half hour or so. His car was exactly like—”

“That’s what you think,” spat Budd, hurling the man down the resilient plastic steps. The brothers went in and collared the bartender.

That worthy was a true philosopher; that is, his morbid view of life extended to himself as well as to his fellow man. He came along uncomplainingly when it was demanded of him, which was immediately after he had said that he had spoken with the man who drove the Carrington. They whisked him to Eric’s shipping offices, into an inner room, and down an elevator whose entrance was under Eric’s desk. Far underground he was seized by a staff of highly trained men who lived out their lives in secrecy underground because they dared not show their faces above.

The bartender was given four injections in rapid succession and for the next six hours was subjected to the most thorough of grillings. He was powerless to tell anything but the truth. Highly detailed information about the man in the other Carrington was fed, item by item, into a monster card-sorting machine. His name; height; weight; probable age; dress; accent; timbre of voice; physical peculiarities; each of these was gone into with incredible nicety.

The machine dealt in probabilities; if a man of a given height and
weight reacts in such and such a way to such a statement, uttered so, then he may have spent a specified number of years in any one of eight professions. Each of these was taken in order, compared with other characteristics, canceled out or in. Each result was checked and rechecked, compared with every other result. At the end of the grilling, the Arniks had a complete dossier on Biddiver, as well as a slightly conventionalized full-length portrait. Looking at it, they doubted that their machine was working correctly, but it hadn’t failed so far.

“Well,” said Budd, scratching his head, “we know what we’re after. Where is it?”

“It’s probably well out of the way,” said Eric. He turned away to give orders about the disposal of the mindless wreck that had been the head bartender of the Purple Pileus. He would be found dead days later, after wandering through the city, starving because he was incapable of realizing it, freezing because he couldn’t understand that he needed shelter. “You see,” he went on, staring at the picture, “from what you tell me, the space-travel mechanisms on the car had their master switch where any other Carrington has its radio. This guy was apparently one of those people who can’t breathe unless a radio’s pounding their ear. Drunk as he was, you can bet that the first thing he did after he started the car was to turn on the radio. As soon as he did that, he took off. He hasn’t crashed; I’d have heard about it if he had. He hasn’t been seen flying around, either. He must have gone—straight up.”

“And the car isn’t shielded against the cosmics. So—”

“So they probably got the rat. I hope.”

Budd shook his head. “You can’t count on it. What that radiation did to him depends on factors that no one’s been able to chart. I hope it killed him. Maybe it didn’t—but what’s the difference? That car’s as fast as anything in space. By this time it’s reached terminal velocity and is ‘way out of reach. I’m out an automobile, I guess. Oh, well. I should kick. At least I’m where I know my dear brother will look out for me.” He smirked at Eric and the way he made an infinitesimal move toward his shoulder holster and then visibly thought better of it.