Mission: Earth "Disaster" (7 page)

"Store it for future reference. How close are we now to the black hole?"

"About thirty miles, sir."

Seconds ticked off. "Stand by for time shift, sir. I am braking hard."

Suddenly there was a dreadful physical wrench. My brain flashed and my heart skipped. The identical sensation one got when entering the gates of Palace City on Voltar. Blast, I hated it!

"The black hole is just three miles in front of us, sir. I am holding."

I stood up. I looked through the viewports. I couldn't see anything.

"There's nothing out there," I said.

Heller was slamming and locking the viewports.

"Well, you'd be doing pretty good to see it," said Heller. "It's no bigger than a proton. That's one of the reasons they never find these primordial black holes. The other one is we're now thirteen minutes in the future. Haven't you ever been in and out of Palace City?"

"I've been there," I said defensively. I needn't tell him that every time my Academy class went, I had been in punishment drill instead. The only time I'd ever entered Palace City was that dreadful day when Lombar had managed to seize control of this fateful mission to Blito-P3. All Heller's fault for surveying the place.

"Data," said Heller.

"Yes, sir. I'll also duplicate it on printout. Mass, 7.93 billion tons. Expected longevity before final explosion, 2.754 billion years. Exudation, 5.49 billion megawatts. Space sphere warp, 10.23 miles in diameter."

"Thank you," said Heller. "Turn around, tail to it. Engage traction towing beams. Set a course for Blito-P3. Engage Will-be Was main engines. When all ready, begin towing. Gong me when we are eight hundred miles above planetary surface so I can assist in adjusting its orbit."

"Yes, sir." And the tug got busy complying with the orders.

Soon the subdued thunder of the enormous power plant began to vibrate through the ship. Heller checked the instruments to make sure all was progressing well.

I relaxed a little bit. It had suddenly occurred to me that, being thirteen minutes in the future, we were quite invisible to the remaining assassin pilot. And I was just about to relax when it suddenly flashed across my wits that once we had separated from this tow and were back in normal space, we would be sitting ducks.

Heller seemed oblivious of this. He unrolled a set of plans and began to study them. He went back to the big converter drum and began to haul out more parts. He piled these in the airlock.

Then he climbed into a scarlet antiradiation suit. Its face mask made him look diabolical to me. A Manco Devil in truth! I cowered against the pipes. Oh, Gods, why couldn't I think of something bright that would get rid of him once and for all? I must! I must! I must!

He was now climbing into a pressure suit as a second covering. When he put the helmet in place, the mirror dome reflected everything around in twisted distortion. The cat looked fifty feet long. The pilot chairs appeared all out of shape. I looked like I was a little speck cringing in some distant closet. It matched the unreality which saturated my poor, abused mind. Heller went into the airlock and closed it. Then he opened the outer door. He left it open and I could see through the inner door ports. He had a long safety line on himself. He set up a rudimentary bench that simply sat on empty space. He began to get to work assembling something. He had left the plans inside, pinned across the pilot port. They were very curious.

It looked like a huge umbrella. Just below the mantle was a sort of cage. Below that, what would be halfway down the handle, was a big ring marked CONVERTER. And at the bottom was a huge ring that said WEIGHTS.

I looked out through the inner ports. He was putting the mantle together. It was nothing more or less than a sectional mirror which, assembled, would have great size.

He got that done and put together the next item, which looked like a cage: It had a lot of prongs pointed toward the center. He fastened it on a rod which went to the peak of the mantle.

Next he assembled the plate which was labelled, on the plans,

CONVERTER.

That done, he hung the weights on the bottom of the rod.

He put a couple safety lines on the rig. He moved his bench and tools into the lock. He checked to make sure that the rig was simply drifting along with us, well off the hull. He closed the outer airlock door and came in.

He disrobed and hung the suits up and then went aft. Hours passed. The cat looked like he was asleep in the pilot chair but all I had to do was twitch and he opened a baleful eye.

I hit my head with my knuckles. I must think of some way to get out of this. Didn't I realize I was going to my death?

The cat snarled.

Heller came back on the flight deck. He had shaved and bathed and changed his clothes. Aside from the rather gloomy pallor he now wore, he looked rested.

"Corky," he said to the tug, "we don't want that mass to overshoot. Are you braking?"

"Yes, sir. I have a compression beam on it now and we have been slowing down for the last three hours."

"Good," said Heller. He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket and read some coordinates and speeds to the tug. It was at that moment that I realized with some horror that he was not wearing ordinary fatigue clothes: he was wearing a scarlet coverall the Fleet uses when near radiation.

"Is this ship alive?" I stammered.

"No, Corky is just a robot."

"Please! You don't get my meaning. Is the ship alive with radiation?"

"All this maneuvering will be eight hundred miles above the surface," he said. "That is within the magnetosphere, what the Earth people call the Van Alien belt. It ends about six hundred miles above Earth. We're orbiting this two hundred miles higher since there's never any orbiting traffic there. The space around the outside of the ship just now is pretty hot. That's why we're silver and have all the ports closed."

"Hey, wait a minute," I said. "You must be suspecting leaks or you wouldn't be in hot coveralls. I'm totally unprotected! Are you trying to sterilize me?"

"Thanks for calling it to my attention," said Heller. He picked up the cat and went to the chief mate's room and when he came back, the cat was wearing a scarlet blanket.

"You're absolutely heartless!" I snarled.

"I didn't know you cared," said Heller. But he unchained me from the pipe and took me to one of the engineer's cabins and let me go to the toilet. He fed me some standard emergency rations, throwing them down on the table like he might have for a dog. It emphasized more than anything else that my life was very much at risk: He might take it into his head any minute to simply cut my throat.

He gave me a disposable radiation coverall. I put it on even though I suspected he had cut holes in it or rubbed the insulation off.

He took me back to the flight deck and chained me to the pipes once more. I crouched there, trying to figure some way out of this.

He began to have conversations with Corky about orbital direction and velocity and after quite a while the big Will-be Was main engines went off and the planetary auxiliaries began to drum.

More conversations with Corky and then suddenly the auxiliaries went off. The silence was eerie.

Heller clicked every viewscreen live. There was Earth, looking awfully big. We were right above a red-brown area. But the views appeared a little strange, sort of wavy.

He checked coordinates, and by consulting a map that appeared on one screen, he located Los Angeles and then Las Vegas and then finally Barstow. His finger travelled east to a desert area marked Devil's Playground. He turned to another screen and with a pass of his hand enlarged the view directly below. What a desolate desert it was! All rocks and sand. Unlike so many other places, there was no cloud cover here. He passed his hand again and the image jumped larger. A cluster of what seemed to be newly constructed buildings. Directly in the center of the screen was a large black area. He then got to work. Reading the screens, he cast the safety lines off the umbrella he had built. Like threading a needle, he passed a tension beam through the cage that was just below the mantle. Then he began to work compression beams and tension beams and the whole rig moved around to the back of the ship.

He pushed it further and further astern, enlarging its image bit by bit.

Suddenly the whole thing shivered. It made a sudden movement. The concentric, in-pointing bars of the cage all went into place.

"Got it," he said with a sigh of relief.

"Got what?" I said. I couldn't see anything.

"Got the black hole in the middle of the cage without losing the whole rig. All right, now let's see if it also works as a motor." He picked up a control plate and began to touch buttons on it. Small jets seemed to come from the center out through one or another of the rods.

"That's fine," he said. "Its position can be adjusted."

"With what?" I said.

"There's an automatic sensor for these coordinates. It's in the lowest ring of weights. Excess energy from the hole can be poured through the rods and made to move the whole rig very slowly up or down or back and forth. It's got to stay in position for the next few million years, orbiting right above this spot in the Devil's Playground."

"What is this thing?"

"A concentrating mirror. Energy from the black hole inside the cage is reflected down, passed through the converter ring and hot-spotted on that pile on the Earth's surface. The lowest ring of weights uses Earth gravity to keep it upright. There is a sensor for coordinates in the weight ring that adjusts position." He watched it for a bit. "Good. We're through here."

He threw a bunch of switches that turned off all beams. "Corky, take us out of this and into normal time, five hundred miles above surface."

"You're going to leave that there?" I said. "Somebody might run into it!"

"Nobody's travelling thirteen minutes in the future," he said. "Not on this planet. They won't even see it in a telescope. And if any probe blunders into it, didn't you see the sign on it?" He was pointing at a screen.

There was a sign! It was all around the mantle. It was in English and it said:

POWER FOR PEOPLE, INC. No Trespassing

Hands Off HIGH VOLTAGE

We experienced the sudden flash and grind of a shift back into normal space. I always hated it.

The viewscreens looked more normal. The Pacific Ocean spread vastly below. It seemed, from the shadow west of Hawaii, that it must be morning in Los Angeles.

Heller was busy with the viewer-phone. Izzy's face appeared.

"Oh, thank heavens, Mr. Jet. We were getting so worried. I hope nothing serious caused the delay."

"I just ran into something," said Heller, "but pushed it out of the way. Is the chief engineer of Power for People there?"

"Dr. Phil A. Mentor is right in the anteroom. He's been sleeping there! I'm so glad you are all right, Mr. Jet. I will get him at once."

Shortly, a Vandyke-bearded man was on the screen. I suddenly recognized him from the Countess Krak's classes.

"Is your ferromagnetic pile in place?" said Heller.

"Yes, Mr. Jet. Exactly according to your design."

"It should be hot now," said Heller.

Dr. Mentor was reaching for a phone. It evidently was a lease line as he didn't make any call. An excited voice was coming through the earpiece and spilling into the viewer-phone. "Devil's Playground Observation Post One."

"Is your pile hot?" said Mentor.

"Jesus Christ, yes, chief. Hot or something. The whole God (bleeped) thing just disappeared right on schedule. Somebody left a truck in there and it vanished, too!"

"Very good," said Mentor. "Are the time step-down capacitors functioning?"

"I'll check. We got so excited when the pile vanished–"

"Check those capacitors," said Mentor.

After a moment, the excited voice came back. "Yes, sir. There's a stream of microwave power pouring out! They've got it beamed into the sky at the moment."

Mentor looked into the screen. "Anything else you want to know, sir?"

"No, that's fine. Let Izzy in there."

Izzy moved in front of the screen. "I'm so glad it's working. Congratulations, Mr. Jet."

"Thank you. How are you coming with the contracts?"

"Well, some of the cities seem rather skeptical but they'll come through as soon as we have one getting all the microwave power it needs straight into its mains. I think we are quite safe to begin construction of the microwave-mirror relay systems to deliver the power. It won't suddenly run out, will it?"

"Not for the next few million years," said Heller. "You're all okay on that, then?"

"Oh, yes. Just business routine. I think ratepayers will be delighted at a penny a kilowatt. I'm assigning industrial rate at a quarter of a cent. There is one problem, though: It's going to be a problem reinvesting all our profits, as this isn't costing us anything but installation and maintenance."

"I'm sure you're up to that," said Heller.

"Well, yes," said Izzy. "But there is one more thing. Mr. Rockecenter is not going to be very happy when the oil and coal contracts start getting cancelled left and right."

"I suppose he won't," said Heller. "Now, have you gotten all the options to sell the oil-company stock?"

"Options to sell in hand," said Izzy. "I included on my own initiative a lot of national and small oil companies, too. We have options to sell practically every share of oil stock in the world."

"Good," said Heller. "My next project is to make it go down."

"Well, it will certainly fall, with this cheap microwave-power network."

"True. But when I say 'down,' I mean down," said Heller.

"It averages eighty to a hundred dollars a share right now," said Izzy. "How 'down' do you think 'down' should be?"