Microcosmic God (49 page)

Bjornsen said, “You are an insult to this institution. You were in a position, certainly, to know yourself before you applied for admission; therefore, the very act of applying was dishonest and insincere. You must have known that you were unfit even to enter these buildings, to say nothing of daring to perpetuate the mistake of the board of examiners in staying here. I am thoroughly disgusted with you.” Bjornsen smiled his disgust, and it was a smile that perfectly matched his words. He bent to flip the switch on the communicator, cutting off its mellow buzz. “Yes?”

“Dr. Bjornsen! Professor Nudnick is—”

The annunciator’s hollow voice was drowned out in the crashing of a hard, old foot against the door. Nudnick kicked it open because he knew it could not be slammed, and he liked startling Bjornsen. “What sort of nonsense is this?” he demanded, in a voice that sounded like flatulence through ten feet of lead pipe. “Since
when has that vinegar-visaged female out there been instructed to announce me? Damn it, you’ll see me whether you’re busy or not!”

Bjornsen had bounced out of his chair to indulge in every sort of sycophantism short of curtsying. “Professor Nudnick! I am delighted to see you!” This was perfect. The only thing that could possibly increase Hughie McCauley’s agony was to have an audience to his dismissal; and what better audience could he have than the great endower of the school himself? Bjornsen rubbed his hands, which yielded an unpleasant dry sound, and began.

“Professor Nudnick,” he said, catching Hughie’s trembling shoulder and using it to thrust the attached boy between him and Nudnick, “you could not have picked a better time to arrive. This shivering example of negation is typical of the trash that has been getting by the examiners recently. Now I may prove to you that my recent letter on the subject was justified.”

Nudnick looked calmly at Hughie. “I don’t read your letters,” he said. “They bore me. What’s he done?”

Bjornsen, a little taken aback, put this new resentment into his words. “Done? What he hasn’t done is more important. He has neglected to tidy up his thinking habits. He indulges in reading imaginative fiction during his hours of relaxation instead of reading books pertaining in some way to his studies. He whistles in corridors. He asks impertinent questions of his instructors. He was actually discovered writing a letter to a … a
girl!”

“Tsk, tsk,”
chuckled the professor. “This during classes?”

“Certainly not! Even he would not go that far, though I expect it hourly.”

“Hm-m-m. Is he intelligent?”

“Not very.”

“What kind of questions does he ask?”

“Oh—stupid ones. About the nature of a space-warp, whatever that may be, and about whether or not time travel is possible. A dreamer—that’s what he is, and a scientific institution is no place for dreamers.”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“Expel him, of course.”

Nudnick reached over and pulled the boy out of Bjornsens’s claw. “Then why not post him as expelled and spare him this agony? It so happens, Bjornsen, that this is just the kind of boy I came here to get. I’m going to take him with me on a trip to the Asteroid Belt. Salary at two thousand a month, if he’s willing. Are you, what’s-your-name?”

Hughie nodded swimmingly.

“Eh.” Beckoning the boy, Nudnick started for the door. “My advice to you, Bjornsen,” grated the scientist, “is as follows. Keep your nose out of the students’ lives on their off hours. If you must continue in these little habits of yours, take it out in pulling the wings off flies. And get married. Take this advice or hand in your resignation effective this date next month.”

Hughie paused at the door, looking back. Nudnick gave him a quick look, shoved him toward Bjornsen. “Go ahead, kid. I’d like it, too.”

Hughie grinned, walked up to Bjornsen, and with a quick one-two knocked the principal colder than a cake of ice.

They were eight days out now, and these were the eight:

The day when the unpredictable Professor Nudnick had whisked Hughie up to his mountain laboratory, and had put him to work loading the last of an astonishingly inclusive list of stores into the good ship
Stoutfella
. Hughie began to regard the professor as a little less than the god he had imagined, and a little more as a human being. The old man was perpetually cheerful, pointing out Hughie’s stupidities and his little triumphs without differentiating between them. He treated Hughie with a happy tolerance, and seemed to be more delighted with the lad’s ignorance than by his comparatively meager knowledge. When Hughie had haltingly asked if he might take a suitcase full of fiction with him, Nudnick had chuckled dryly and sent him off to the nearest town with a pocketful of money. Hughie arrived back at the laboratory laden and blissful. They took off.

And the day when they heard the last broadcast news report before they whisked through the Heaviside layer. Among other items was one to the effect that Dr. Emil Bjornsen, principal of the Nudnick
Institute, had resigned to accept a government job. Hughie had laughed gleefully at this, but Nudnick shook his shaggy old head. “Not funny, Hughie,” he said. “Bjornsen’s a shrewd man. I’ve an idea why he did that, and it has nothing to do with my … our … ultimatum.”

Struck by the scientist’s sober tone, Hughie calmed down to ask, “What did he do it for?”

Nudnick clapped a perforated course card into the automatic pilot, reeled its lower edge into the integrator, and checked his controls before switching them over to the “Iron Mike.”

“It has to do with this trip,” he said, waving the kid into the opposite seat, “and it’s about time you knew what this is all about. What we’re after is a mineral deposit of incalculable value. How it is, I don’t know, but somewhere in that mess of nonsense out there”—he indicated the Asteroid Belt—“is a freak. It’s a lump like the rest of the asteroids, but it differs from the rest of them. It must’ve been a wanderer, drifting heaven alone knows how far in space until it got caught in the Belt. It’s almost pure, through and through—an oxide of prosydium. That mean anything to you?”

Hughie pushed a couple of freckles together over his nose. “Yeah. Rare Earth element. Used for … lessee … something to do with Nudnick Metal, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Do you know what Nudnick Metal is?”

“No. Far as I know it’s a trade secret, known only to the workers in the Isopolis Laboratories.” The Isopolis Laboratories were half heaven and half prison. By government grant, the great Nudnick plant there turned out the expensive metal. It was manned by workers who would never again set foot outside the walls—men who did not have to, for everything they could possibly want was supplied to them. There was no secret about the way they lived, nor about anything in the fifty-square-mile enclosure except the process itself. “Nudnick Metal is a synthetic element, thousands of times denser than anything else known. That’s about all I remember,” Hughie finished lamely.

Nudnick chuckled. “I’ll let you in on it. The metal is the ideal substance for coating spaceships, because it’s as near being impenetrable
as anything in the Universe. This ship, for instance, is coated with a layer of the stuff less than one one-hundred-fifty-thousandths of an inch thick, and yet is protected against practically anything. We could run full tilt into an object the size of Earth, and though the impact would drill a molten hole thirty miles deep and most likely kill us a little bit, the hull wouldn’t even be scratched. Heh. Want to know what Nudnick Metal is? I’ll tell you. Copper. Just plain, ordinary, everyday Cu!”

Hughie said, “Copper? But what makes it—How is it—”

“Easy enough. You know, Hughie, it’s the simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that. Nudnick Metal is
collapsed
copper; collapsed in the way that the elements of the companions of Sirius and Procyon are collapsed. You know the analogy—pile wine-glasses into a barrel, and there’ll be a definite, small number of glasses that can be packed in. But crush them to fine powder, and then start packing. The barrel will hold thousands upon thousands more. The molecules of Nudnick Metal are crushed that way. You could build four hundred ships this size, from stem to stern of solid copper, and you’d use less copper than that which was used to coat this hull.

“The process is only guessed at because copper is synthesized from the uranium we ship into Isopolis ostensibly for power. As you just said, it is known that we import prosydium. That’s the only clue anyone but I and the Isopolites have as to the nature of the process. But prosydium isn’t an ingredient. It’s more like a catalyst. Of all the elements, only prosydium can, by its atomic disintegration, absorb the unbelievable heat liberated by the collapse of the copper molecules. I won’t go into the details of it, but the energy thus absorbed and transmuted can be turned back to hasten the collapsing process. The tough thing about prosydium is that it’s as rare as a hairy egg, and so far no one’s been able to synthesize it in usable quanities. All of which makes Nudnick Metal a trifle on the expensive side. This lump of prosydium in the Belt will cut the manufacturing cost way down, and the man or concern or planet that gets hold of it can write his—its—own ticket. See?”

“I will,” said Hughie slowly, “if you’ll say all that over again a
few thousand times a day for the next couple of years.” The boy was enormously flattered by the scientist’s confiding in him. Though he himself was not qualified to use it, he knew that the information he had just received was worth countless millions in the right quarters. It frightened him a little. He wanted to keep the old man talking, and so reached for a question. “Why do we have to sneak out in a little ship like this? Why not take a flotilla of destroyers from Earth and take possession?”

“Can’t do things that way, son. The Joint Patrol puts the kibosh on that. You can blame the jolly old idealism of the Interplanetary Peace Congress for that, and the Equal Armament Amendment. You see, Mars and Earth are forced by mutual agreement to maintain absolutely equal armament, to share all new developments and to police space with a Joint Patrol. A flotilla of Earth ships taking off without the knowledge or consent of the Patrol constitutes an act of war. War is a nasty business for a lot of people who weren’t in on starting it. We can’t do it that way. But if I turn over the location of my find to the Patrol, it becomes the property of the Joint Patrol, neatly tied up in red tape, and it doesn’t do anybody any good—particularly the Nudnick Laboratories. However—here’s where we come in.

“If an independent expedition lands on, or takes in tow, any body in space that is not the satellite of a planet, said body becomes the sole property of that expedition. Therefore, I’ve got to keep this expedition as secret from Earth as from Mars, so that Earth—and Nudnick—can get the ultimate benefit. In two months my little treasure will be in opposition with Earth. If I have taken it in tow by then, I can announce my discovery by ultraradio. The signal reaches Earth before it reaches Mars; by the time the little red men can send out a pirate to erase me, I am surrounded by a Patrol Fleet, and quite safe. But if Mars gets wind of what I am up to, son, we are going to be intercepted, followed, and rubbed out for the glory and profit of the red planet. Get it?”

“I get it. But what’s all this got to do with Bjornsen?”

The old scientist scratched his nose. “I don’t know. Bjornsen’s a most peculiar egg, Hughie. He worked most of his life to get to be
principal of the Institute, and it seems to me he didn’t do it just for the salary and prestige attached. More than once that egocentric martinet tried to pump me for information about what I was doing, about the Nudnick Metal process, about a hundred things of the sort. I’m sure he hasn’t got any real information, but he might possibly have a hunch. A good hunch is plenty to put a Martian ship on our tail and a lot of money in Bjornsen’s pocket. We’ll see.”

And then there was the day when Hughie had made bold enough to ask Nudnick why he had picked him for the trip, when he had his choice of thousands upon thousands of other assistants. Nudnick unwrapped his white teeth in one of his indescribable grins.

“Lots of reasons, son, among which are the fact that I delight in displeasing the contents of Bjornsen’s stuffed shirt, and the fact that I dislike being bored, and since I must needs make this trip myself, I might as well be amused while I am cooped up. Also, I have found that baby geniuses are inclined to be a little cocky about what they know, and the fact that they knew it at such a tender age. A trained assistant, on the other hand, is almost certain to be a specialist of sorts, and specialists have inflexible and dogmatic minds. Bjornsen said that one of your cardinal crimes was that you relaxed in fantasy. I, with all of my scientific savvy, can find it in me to admire a mind which can conceive of the possibility of a space-warp, or time travel. Don’t look at me that way—I’m not kidding you. I can’t possibly imagine such a thing—my mind is far too cluttered up with facts. I don’t know whether or not a Martian ship will pick up our trail on this trip. If one does, it will take fantastic thinking to duck him. I’m incapable of thinking that way, so it’s up to you.”

Hughie, hearing the old man’s voice, watching his eyes as he spoke, recognized the sincerity there, and began to realize that he carried an unimaginable responsibility on his shoulders.

On the fourth and fifth days out, there was little to do and Hughie amused both of them by reading aloud, at Nudnick’s insistence, from some of his store of books and magazines. At first Hughie was diffident; he could not believe that Nudnick, who had so outdone any fictional scientist, could be genuinely interested; but Nudnick put it
as an order, and Hughie began to read, with many a glance at the old man to see if he could find the first glimmerings of derision. He found difficulty in controlling his voice and his saliva until Nudnick slowed him down. Soon he was lost in the yarn. It was a good one.

It concerned one Satan Strong, Scientist, Scourge of the Spaceways and Supporter of the Serialized Short-story. Satan was a bad egg whose criminality was surpassed only by his forte for Science on the Spot. Pursued particularly by the Earth sections of the Space Patrol, Satan Strong was always succeeding in the most dastardly deeds, which always turned out to be the preliminaries to greater evils which were always thwarted by the quick thinking of Captain Jaundess of the Patrol, following which, by “turning to the micro-ultra-philtmeter he rapidly tore out a dozen connections, spot-welded twenty-seven busbars, and converted the machine into an improved von Krockmeier hyperspace lever, which bent space like the blade of a rapier and hurtled him in a flash from hilt to point” and effected his escape until the next issue. Nudnick was entranced.