Mission: Earth "Disaster" (8 page)

"About fifty cents to a dollar," said Heller.

"Oy!" said Izzy. "Mr. Rockecenter will be broke broke."

"That's the idea," said Heller. "Broke plus broke equals bankrupt. So what I want you to do now is obtain an additional set of options to buy all the oil shares in the world at one dollar."

"WHAT?"

"You heard me. Your sell options will go for a fortune. Then, when the bottom is out, your buy options will put you in control of every oil company in the world."

"Oy," said Izzy. "Our dream of corporations running the planet is going to come true! I hope Fate isn't listening in on this conversation."

"We'll make it come true somehow," Heller reassured him.

"Mr. Jet, just selling cheap power to cities won't drive the stocks that low."

"I know it won't. But this next project will. Anything else, Izzy?"

"Yes, Mr. Jet. Don't do anything dangerous. I worry."

"Oh, it's all very calm where I am," said Heller. "Bye-bye."

The viewer-phone went blank.

My wits were in a hurricane. (Bleep) this Heller! That black-hole microwave-power system would be the end of Octopus! Cheap power for all of Earth? Unthinkable! What ruin it spelled for poor Mr. Rockecenter!

Suddenly I remembered that the Russians had long ago perfected satellite killers. I began to try to figure out how I could get free and get the Russians to locate and blast that contrivance and black hole he had put in the sky.

Oh, would THAT solve my problems! I would be the hero of the hour!

Somehow, some way, I must get myself out of this! The situation was utterly intolerable for Rockecenter, for Hisst, for me. I could rescue everything if I just put my wits to it. But how was I going to do it?

Heller addressed the tug, "Any sign of that other assassin pilot?"

"No, sir. I've been checking ever since we returned to normal time. But I would advise extreme caution, sir. I have turned us back to total absorption of any and all waves. But I must bring to your attention that if we go speeding about, we will leave a magnetic wake that can be spotted. I severely... sincerely... severely... sincerely—incorrect nuance. Urgently. I urgently counsel that we just lie still."

"Override, negative," said Heller. He got out a book. "Enter these coordinates in your itinerary data bank and then plot a sequential course to them." And he began to read a long series of exact spacial positions all over Earth: North America, the Caribbean, South America, Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Russia, Central Europe, Europe, Alaska and Canada—it went on and on and on.

What was he up to now?

Finally he finished and the tug said, "I have all of them, sir. They are strung now into sequential numbered positions."

"Go to position one," said Heller.

"That is Watson, California," said the tug. "Just below us."

"Aim the bow at it," said Heller. He was lifting the radiation shields off the ports. The tug giddily tipped up. Five hundred miles below, the Los Angeles area was a smudge of yellow smog.

Heller adjusted his screens. Magnification of the middle one showed that we were pointed straight at an oil refinery!

"Just hold there," he told the tug. He reached over to the viewer-phone and buzzed it. The worried face of Izzy came on.

"Just checking," said Heller. "Have you got the buy options yet on all the oil shares in the world at one dollar?"

"Good heavens," said Izzy. "They think we're insane—that we're wasting our option money. But, yes, our brokers are phoning in right now. Please hold."

He chattered into another phone. Then he came back to ours. "Yes—they think we've lost our minds, but we've got them. Mr. Jet, how could it possibly fall to that?"

"You'll see," said Heller. "Bye-bye."

He returned to his magnified view of the refinery below. He was checking a floor plan. "Atmospheric pipefill," he said. He made a couple of tiny adjustments to the position of the ship.

Then his hands went out toward the firing control of the laser cannon he had lately installed.

"NO!" I cried in desperation. "Don't blow up the refineries!"

His finger pressed the firing button. The gun overhead made a brief whirr.

I watched in horror. The enlarged picture of a part of a refinery, I thought, would burst into flame.

I waited. ! It didn't!

"Corky, position two," said Heller.

"That's Wilmington, California," said the tug. And we moved.

Heller did the same thing as before.

I could see no change below.

"Position three," said Heller.

"That's Long Beach, California," said the tug.

Heller repeated his actions.

"Position four," said Heller.

"That's El Segundo, California," said the tug.

Heller went through his same drill.

"Say, what the Hells is going on?" I said. "Aren't you going to blow anything up?"

"I wish you'd make up your mind," said Heller. "Half an hour ago you were telling me I shouldn't."

"Please tell me what you are doing."

He glanced at me. "Everything they do in a refinery first passes into what they call the atmospheric pipefill from the crude-oil tanks. From the pipefill it goes on through every other process in the place: jet fuel, diesel fuel, virgin naphtha, you name it. All I'm doing is putting a false radiation charge in the metals of the pipefills. It will register like mad on a Geiger counter but it actually doesn't affect another thing. You're not going anywhere, so there is no reason not to tell you that Izzy has the device that nulls the wave."

He turned away and went back to work, and between him and the tug, they systematically did the same thing to every blessed oil refinery in the whole world.

It took a day and a half to cover them all.

Then Heller caught some sleep. We were over Canada now, having been everywhere else above the globe.

I crouched there thinking, what a strange thing to do. He wasn't actually destroying anything at all. It seemed very impractical to me. Certainly not an Apparatus textbook procedure. He might be a Royal officer, but he would certainly never qualify for a real organization like ours. No explosions! What an oversight!

Bathed and shaved and in fresh clothes, he came back to the flight deck. He fed the cat and then he fed me. He chained me back up to the pipe and sat down in the planetary-pilot chair. He buzzed Izzy and gave him a phone number and told him to ring it and, when he had the party, to hold the instrument close to the viewer-phone.

Izzy told the party that someone wanted to speak with them. He put the telephone where he had been told.

"This is Wister," Heller said.

"Oh! Oh, dear Wister—what a wonderful surprise! I will always be eternally grateful to you, you know."

MISS SIMMONS!

"And I will always remember you," said Heller. "Listen. I have something you will be very interested in. Did you know that every oil refinery in the world is registering as radioactive on Geiger counters?"

"NO!"

"Yes, it's a fact. I think you should get field teams out at once and check it. Every time you go near one of them a Geiger counter will click its head off!"

"GOOD HEAVENS!"

"Will you check that for me?" said Heller.

"Oh, good Lord! If that is true, Wister, the Antinuclear Protest Marchers in every land will rise in a howling storm!"

"That's what I hoped," said Heller. "Demonstrations everyplace."

"Oh, you'll have them, Wister. And thank you, thank you, thank you, you dear boy! THE (BLEEPARDS)!" She hung up.

"Oy!" said Izzy.

* "Yes," said Heller. "Double oy. The oil shares will go down like a rocket in reverse. When they get near bottom, sell. And use the cash for Maysabongo to exercise their contracts for every drop of oil in reserve in the U.S. Then in July, purchase every oil company in the world for a song."

"Oh, Mr. Jet, our every dream is coming true! I just hope Fate doesn't intervene."

"I'll try to see it doesn't," Heller said. "Bye-bye.

"Now I'll take care of the last small bit of this program and the mission will be done," said Heller.

"Done?" I cried aghast. "For Gods' sakes, what more could you do?"

"Oh, this last is just a little thing. The south pole has a tendency to wander over the sea. I have to give the globe a little tap to straighten up its rotation. Corky, take off for the planet Saturn now."

Saturn?

My head was in a whirl indeed.

All I could think of, really, was that he had just set motions in train which would utterly smash Octopus and all the other oil companies. Not even their massive control of news could quash the panic that would ensue. Rockecenter, unless I got loose, was through!

I reviewed how I could remedy this catastrophe. Actually all I had to do was get Rockecenter to put a satellite killer on to that umbrella device, bomb the Empire State Building, atom-bomb the Republic of Maysabongo out of existence and announce to the waiting world that their refineries were NOT radioactive. Yes, I could handle this.

But now for some mysterious reason we were heading for Saturn.

HOW COULD I GET LOOSE?

Heller was dropping radiation shields again so we could pass once more through the magnetosphere. I could hear the planetary drives winding up higher and higher. I was chained very close to their partition just back of the flight deck and the sound began to hurt my ears.

"I don't think these auxiliaries are meant to run this fast," I said fearfully.

"Oh, stop worrying. They take this ship up to the brink of the speed of light. They sound just fine to me."

They would, I grated to myself. Oh, Gods, why did I ever get involved with anyone from the most insane corps of the Fleet, combat engineers? No wonder their average service life was only two years. Heller was long overdue, having gone three or more times that. And on top of that he was a speed maniac. "What's the hurry?"

"There's no sense dawdling around. What with acceleration and braking, it will take us hours as it is." He glanced at a readout that was whirring too fast for me to read. "Saturn, right now, is 782,617,819 miles away. It's not at minimal distance. The closest it ever gets to Earth is about 740,000,000 miles."

"Why Saturn?" I said.

Heller shrugged. He indicated the viewscreens with his hand. "You don't see any comets, do you?" Comets? Saturn? Now I knew he was crazy.

I made another try. "If you leave this fast, that other assassin ship is certain to spot our turbulence and even if they don't get us on a scope, they'll be waiting for our return."

"True. They won't be able to follow us. They haven't got the speed we have."

"No, no. You don't understand. If we return, they'll be lying in wait for us. They can find us even with the locators gone."

It had been on the tip of my tongue to say that this proved he should go to Voltar right now. That would put me home perfectly safe, as Lombar would have him grabbed on sight and I would be freed. But even as I opened my mouth to speak, a sledgehammer thought hit me: The actions this Devil had just set in train spelled utter ruin for Rockecenter.

If I went home and left that mess, Lombar Hisst would have me exterminated so slowly it would take months. It would be quite different if I could come galloping in and cry "I had to return so I could save your life," or something like that. I had no excuse whatever to go back except that I had been captured. Lombar wouldn't like that.

No, I must think of some way to get free and undo the fiendish and diabolical work of Heller. I could not go back and leave Earth with no Rockecenter, clean air, cheap fuel and happy riffraff. Heller a total success? It was unthinkable!

I crouched down and thought harder.

He told the cat and the tug to keep an eye on me and went aft.

Earth, seen on the scopes, was dwindling like a ball thrown away. I realized suddenly that we were going to go through the asteroid belt with, to all intents and purposes, no pilot. It froze my wits.

Then I saw the time-sight dial slowly turn all by itself. It spooked me. Was this tug really some sort of a ghost? I couldn't figure out where its voice came from and Heller had even stopped using a microphone to speak to it.

Oh, more than ever, I made up my mind, I had to get off this thing.

But even more than that, I had to warn Rockecenter before it was too late. Even now that (bleeped) Faht Bey might be turning Black Jowl loose. Supposing I should go back to Voltar and simply tell Lombar, "Well, my friend, I have just had the whole Earth base seized." Yes, there was no doubt of it. Lombar would react, and not favorably at all.

How the HELLS could I get out of this mess?

Some time later we began to brake and perhaps a half an hour after that, Saturn was in view.

I had never seen the planet before. It was immense. We were coming in at an angle to the rings and I stared at those strange circles. The outer two were very bright and the one nearest us seemed thinner.

Heller came back to the flight deck.

The tug had slowed now almost to a stop. "I'll take over, Corky," Heller said.

"Sir, could I warn you that the gravity is very strong. I am continuing to brake. We are also quite near one of its moons and a new volcano seems to be erupting on it."

Heller looked at it and it was a colorful sight. But then, the whole place was colorful: The planet itself was yellowish but near its equator seemed pastel green, and there were patches of reddish brown. But it looked very dangerous.

"You're not going to try to land on it," I said.

Heller snorted. "The surface is gas. Be quiet while I figure this out."

I had no faintest notion what he was figuring out. He was passing a scope down the outermost ring. It seemed to be made up of thousands, millions, billions of massive particles tumbling in slow motion, a circular parade.