The Golden Age Of Science Fiction Vol X Part 47

Dr. Frank touched a b.u.t.ton on the bedside panel, and the upper portion of the bed rose smoothly at an angle. "Better?"

"Fine. Much better."

"You were saying--"

"Yeah. About Matt Fisher. He has to know. He'll guess eventually, in the next four years, anyway--unless I hide away somewhere. And I have no intention of doing that.

"Oh, I'm not trying to show Matt what a great guy I am, Frank. You know better than that, and so will he. But Matt will have to have all the facts at hand, if he's to do his job right, and it seems to me that this is a pretty important fact. What do you say, Frank?"

The doctor nodded slowly. "I think you know more about the situation than I do. And I trust your judgment, kid. And Matt's, too, I guess."

"No." President Cannon's voice was firm as he looked at his brother with one bright eye. "Don't trust Matt's judgment, because he doesn't have any."

Dr. Frank looked astonished. "Then what--?" He stopped.

"Matthew Fisher," said President Cannon authoritatively, "doesn't need judgment any more than you need instinct. No more so, and no less. I said he doesn't have any judgment, but that's not exactly true. He has it, but he only uses it for routine work, just as you or I use instinct. We can override our instinctive reactions when we have to. Matt can override his judgment when he has to.

"I don't pretend to know how Fisher's mind works. If I did, I wouldn't be doing this. But I do know that Matt Fisher--by some mental process I can't even fathom--almost invariably knows the right thing to do, and he knows it without using judgment."

"And you're still convinced that this is the only way out?" Dr. Frank asked. "Couldn't you stay in office and let him run things under cover?"

"We discussed all this months ago, Frank," Cannon said wearily. "My reasons remain the same. Matt couldn't possibly operate efficiently if he had to go through me every time. And I am human, too; I'd have a tendency to impose my own judgment on his decisions.

"No, Frank; this is the only way it can work. This country needs Matthew Fisher as President, but he could never have been elected. Now I've done my job; now it's time for me to get out of the way and turn the Presidency over to a man who can handle the office far better than any other man I know."

"You make him sound like some sort of superman," said Dr. Frank with a wry grin.

"h.e.l.l," said President Cannon, "you don't think I'd turn this job over to anything less, do you?" He chuckled. "Call him in, will you?"

PRESIDENT CANNON RESIGNS! Ill Health Given As Reason; Doctors Say Recovery Unlikely In Near Future. VP Fisher To Take Oath Tomorrow.

THIN EDGE.

By Randall Garrett I.

"Beep!" said the radio smugly. "Beep! Beep! Beep!"

"There's one," said the man at the pickup controls of tugs.h.i.+p 431. He checked the numbers on the various dials of his instruments. Then he carefully marked down in his log book the facts that the radio finder was radiating its beep on such-and-such a frequency and that that frequency and that rate-of-beep indicated that the asteroid had been found and set with anchor by a Captain Jules St. Simon. The direction and distance were duly noted.

That information on direction and distance had already been transmitted to the instruments of the tugs.h.i.+p's pilot. "Jazzy-o!" said the pilot. "Got 'im."

He swiveled his s.h.i.+p around until the nose was in line with the beep and then jammed down on the forward accelerator for a few seconds. Then he took his foot off it and waited while the s.h.i.+p approached the asteroid.

In the darkness of s.p.a.ce, only points of light were visible. Off to the left, the sun was a small, glaring spot of whiteness that couldn't be looked at directly. Even out here in the Belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, that ma.s.sive stellar engine blasted out enough energy to make it uncomfortable to look at with the naked eye. But it could illuminate matter only; the hard vacuum of s.p.a.ce remained dark. The pilot could have located the planets easily, without looking around. He knew where each and every one of them were. He had to.

A man can navigate in s.p.a.ce by instrument, and he can take the time to figure out where every planet ought to be. But if he does, he won't really be able to navigate in the Asteroid Belt.

In the Nineteenth Century, Mark Twain pointed out that a steamboat pilot who navigated a s.h.i.+p up and down the Mississippi had to be able to identify every landmark and every changing sandbar along the river before he would be allowed to take charge of the wheel. He not only had to memorize the whole river, but be able to predict the changes in its course and the variations in its eddies. He had to be able to know exactly where he was at every moment, even in the blackest of moonless nights, simply by glancing around him.

An asteroid man has to be able to do the same thing. The human mind is capable of it, and one thing that the men and women of the Belt Cities had learned was to use the human mind.

"Looks like a big 'un, Jack," said the instrument man. His eyes were on the radar screen. It not only gave him a picture of the body of the slowly spinning mountain, but the distance and the angular and radial velocities. A duplicate of the instrument gave the same information to the pilot.

The asteroid was fairly large as such planetary debris went--some five hundred meters in diameter, with a ma.s.s of around one hundred seventy-four million metric tons.

Within twenty meters of the surface of the great mountain of stone, the pilot brought the s.h.i.+p to a dead stop in relation to that surface.

"Looks like she's got a nice spin on her," he said. "We'll see."

He waited for what he knew would appear somewhere near the equator of the slowly revolving ma.s.s. It did. A silvery splash of paint that had originally been squirted on by the anchor man who had first spotted the asteroid in order to check the rotational velocity.

The pilot of the s.p.a.ce tug waited until the blotch was centered in the crosshairs of his peeper and then punched the timer. When it came around again, he would be able to compute the angular momentum of the gigantic rock.

"Where's he got his anchor set?" the pilot asked his instrument man.

"The beep's from the North Pole," the instrument man reported instantly. "How's her spin?"

"Wait a bit. The spot hasn't come round again yet. Looks like we'll have some fun with her, though." He kept three stars fixed carefully in his spotters to make sure he didn't drift enough to throw his calculations off. And waited.

Meanwhile, the instrument man abandoned his radar panel and turned to the locker where his vacuum suit waited at the ready. By the time the pilot had seen the splotch of silver come round again and timed it, the instrument man was ready in his vacuum suit.

"Sixteen minutes, forty seconds," the pilot reported. "Angular momentum one point one times ten to the twenty-first gram centimeters squared per second."

"So we play Ride 'Em Cowboy," the instrument man said "I'm evacuating. Tell me when." He had already poised his finger over the switch that would pull the air from his compartments, which had been sealed off from the pilot's compartment when the timing had started.

"Start the pump," said the pilot.

The switch was pressed, and the pumps began to evacuate the air from the compartment. At the same time, the pilot jockeyed the s.h.i.+p to a position over the north pole of the asteroid.

"Over" isn't quite the right word. "Next to" is not much better, but at least it has no implied up-and-down orientation. The surface gravity of the asteroid was only two millionths of a Standard Gee, which is hardly enough to give any noticeable impression to the human nervous system.

"Surface at two meters," said the pilot. "Holding."

The instrument man opened the outer door and saw the surface of the gigantic rock a couple of yards in front of him. And projecting from that surface was the eye of an eyebolt that had been firmly anch.o.r.ed in the depths of the asteroid, a nickel-steel shaft thirty feet long and eight inches in diameter, of which only the eye at the end showed.

The instrument man checked to make sure that his safety line was firmly anch.o.r.ed and then pushed himself across the intervening s.p.a.ce to grasp the eye with a s.p.a.ce-gloved hand.

This was the anchor.

Moving a nickel-iron asteroid across s.p.a.ce to nearest processing plant is a relatively simple job. You slap a powerful electromagnet on her, pour on the juice, and off you go.

The stony asteroids are a different matter. You have to have something to latch on to, and that's where the anchor-setter comes in. His job is to put that anchor in there. That's the first s.p.a.ce job a man can get in the Belt, the only way to get s.p.a.ce experience. Working by himself, a man learns to preserve his own life out there.

Operating a s.p.a.ce tug, on the other hand, is a two-man job because a man cannot both be on the surface of the asteroid and in his s.h.i.+p at the same time. But every s.p.a.ce tug man has had long experience as an anchor setter before he's allowed to be in a position where he is capable of killing someone besides himself if he makes a stupid mistake in that deadly vacuum.

"On contact, Jack," the instrument man said as soon as he had a firm grip on the anchor. "Release safety line."

"Safety line released, Harry," Jack's voice said in his earphones.

Jack had pressed a switch that released the s.h.i.+p's end of the safety line so that it now floated free. Harry pulled it towards himself and attached the free end to the eye of the anchor bolt, on a loop of nickel-steel that had been placed there for that purpose. "Safety line secured," he reported. "Ready for tug line."

In the pilot's compartment, Jack manipulated the controls again. The s.h.i.+p moved away from the asteroid and yawed around so that the "tail" was pointed toward the anchor bolt. Protruding from a special port was a heavy-duty universal joint with special attachments. Harry reached out, grasped it with one hand, and pulled it toward him, guiding it toward the eyebolt. A cable attached to its other end snaked out of the tug.

Harry worked hard for some ten or fifteen minutes to get the universal joint firmly bolted to the eye of the anchor. When he was through, he said: "O.K., Jack. Try 'er."

The tug moved gently away from the asteroid, and the cable that bound the two together became taut. Harry carefully inspected his handiwork to make sure that everything had been done properly and that the mechanism would stand the stress.

"So far so good," he muttered, more to himself than to Jack.

Then he carefully set two compact little strain gauges on the anchor itself, at ninety degrees from each other on the circ.u.mference of the huge anchor bolt. Two others were already in position in the universal joint itself. When everything was ready, he said: "Give 'er a try at length."

The tug moved away from the asteroid, paying out the cable as it went.

Hauling around an asteroid that had a ma.s.s on the order of one hundred seventy-four million metric tons required adequate preparation. The nonmagnetic stony asteroids are an absolute necessity for the Belt Cities. In order to live, man needs oxygen, and there is no trace of an atmosphere on any of the little Belt worlds except that which Man has made himself and sealed off to prevent it from escaping into s.p.a.ce. Carefully conserved though that oxygen is, no process is or can be one hundred per cent efficient. There will be leakage into s.p.a.ce, and that which is lost must be replaced. To bring oxygen from Earth in liquid form would be outrageously expensive and even more outrageously inefficient--and no other planet in the System has free oxygen for the taking. It is much easier to use Solar energy to take it out of its compounds, and those compounds are much more readily available in s.p.a.ce, where it is not necessary to fight the gravitational pull of a planet to get them. The stony asteroids average thirty-six per cent oxygen by ma.s.s; the rest of it is silicon, magnesium, aluminum, nickel, and calcium, with respectable traces of sodium, chromium, phosphorous manganese, cobalt, pota.s.sium, and t.i.tanium. The metallic nickel-iron asteroids made an excellent source of export products to s.h.i.+p to Earth, but the stony asteroids were for home consumption.

This particular asteroid presented problems. Not highly unusual problems, but problems nonetheless. It was ma.s.sive and had a high rate of spin. In addition, its axis of spin was at an angle of eighty-one degrees to the direction in which the tug would have to tow it to get it to the processing plant. The asteroid was, in effect, a huge gyroscope, and it would take quite a bit of push to get that axis tilted in the direction that Harry Morgan and Jack Latrobe wanted it to go. In theory, they could just have latched on, pulled, and let the thing precess in any way it wanted to. The trouble is that that would not have been too good for the anchor bolt. A steady pull on the anchor bolt was one thing: a nickel-steel bolt like that could take a pull of close to twelve million pounds as long as that pull was along the axis. Flexing it--which would happen if they let the asteroid precess at will--would soon fatigue even that heavy bolt.

The cable they didn't have to worry about. Each strand was a fine wire of two-phase material--the harder phase being borazon, the softer being tungsten carbide. Winding these fine wires into a cable made a flexible rope that was essentially a three-phase material--with the vacuum of s.p.a.ce acting as the third phase. With a tensile strength above a hundred million pounds per square inch, a half inch cable could easily apply more pressure to that anchor than it could take. There was a need for that strong cable: a snapping cable that is suddenly released from a tension of many millions of pounds can be dangerous in the extreme, forming a writhing whip that can lash through a s.p.a.cesuit as though it did not exist. What damage it did to flesh and bone after that was of minor importance; a man who loses all his air in explosive decompression certainly has very little use for flesh and bone thereafter.

"All O.K. here," Jack's voice came over Harry's headphones.

"And here," Harry said. The strain gauges showed nothing out of the ordinary.

"O.K. Let's see if we can flip this monster over," Harry said, satisfied that the equipment would take the stress that would be applied to it.

He did not suspect the kind of stress that would be applied to him within a few short months.

II.

The hotel manager was a small-minded man with a narrow-minded outlook and a brain that was almost totally unable to learn. He was, in short, a "normal" Earthman. He took one look at the card that had been dropped on his desk from the chute of the registration computer and reacted. His thin gray brows drew down over his cobralike brown eyes, and he muttered, "Ridiculous!" under his breath.

The registration computer wouldn't have sent him the card if there hadn't been something odd about it, and odd things happened so rarely that the manager took immediate notice of it. One look at the t.i.tle before the name told him everything he needed to know. Or so he thought.

The registration robot handled routine things routinely. If they were not routine, the card was dropped on the manager's desk. It was then the manager's job to fit everything back into the routine. He grasped the card firmly between thumb and forefinger and stalked out of his office. He took an elevator down to the registration desk. His trouble was that he had seized upon the first thing he saw wrong with the card and saw nothing thereafter. To him, "out of the ordinary" meant "wrong"--which was where he made his mistake.

There was a man waiting impatiently at the desk. He had put the card that had been given him by the registration robot on the desk and was tapping his fingers on it.

The manager walked over to him. "Morgan, Harry?" he asked with a firm but not arrogant voice.

"Is this the city of York, New?" asked the man. There was a touch of cold humor in his voice that made the manager look more closely at him. He weighed perhaps two-twenty and stood a shade over six-two, but it was the look in the blue eyes and the bearing of the man's body that made the manager suddenly feel as though this man were someone extraordinary. That, of course, meant "wrong."

Then the question that the man had asked in reb.u.t.tal to his own penetrated the manager's mind, and he became puzzled. "Er ... I beg your pardon?"

"I said, 'Is this York, New?'" the man repeated.

"This is New York, if that's what you mean," the manager said.

"Then I am Harry Morgan, if that's what you mean."

The manager, for want of anything better to do to cover his confusion, glanced back at the card--without really looking at it. Then he looked back up at the face of Harry Morgan. "Evidently you have not turned in your Citizen's Identification Card for renewal, Mr. Morgan," he said briskly. As long as he was on familiar ground, he knew how to handle himself.

"Odd's Fis.h.!.+" said Morgan with utter sadness, "How did you know?"

The manager's comfortable feeling of rightness had returned. "You can't hope to fool a registration robot, Mr. Morgan," he said "When a discrepancy is observed, the robot immediately notifies a person in authority. Two months ago, Government Edict 7-3356-Hb abolished t.i.tles of courtesy absolutely and finally. You Englishmen have clung to them for far longer than one would think possible, but that has been abolished." He flicked the card with a finger. "You have registered here as 'Commodore Sir Harry Morgan'--obviously, that is the name and anti-social t.i.tle registered on your card. When you put the card into the registration robot, the error was immediately noted and I was notified. You should not be using an out-of-date card, and I will be forced to notify the Citizen's Registration Bureau."

"Forced?" said Morgan in mild amazement. "Dear me! What a terribly strong word."

The manager felt the hook bite, but he could no more resist the impulse to continue than a cat could resist catnip. His brain did not have the ability to overcome his instinct. And his instinct was wrong. "You may consider yourself under arrest, Mr. Morgan."

"I thank you for that permission," Morgan said with a happy smile. "But I think I shall not take advantage of it." He stood there with that same happy smile while two hotel security guards walked up and stood beside him, having been called by the manager's signal.

Again it took the manager a little time to realize what Morgan had said. He blinked. "Advantage of it?" he repeated haphazardly.

Harry Morgan's smile vanished as though it had never been. His blue eyes seemed to change from the soft blue of a cloudless sky to the steely blue of a polished revolver. Oddly enough, his lips did not change. They still seemed to smile, although the smile had gone.

"Manager," he said deliberately, "if you will pardon my using your t.i.tle, you evidently cannot read."

The manager had not lived in the atmosphere of the Earth's Citizen's Welfare State as long as he had without knowing that dogs eat dogs. He looked back at the card that had been delivered to his desk only minutes before and this time he read it thoroughly. Then, with a gesture, he signaled the Security men to return to their posts. But he did not take his eyes from the card.

"My apologies," Morgan said when the Security police had retired out of earshot. There was no apology in the tone of his voice. "I perceive that you can read. Bully, may I say, for you." The bantering tone was still in his voice, the pseudo-smile still on his lips, the chill of cold steel still in his eyes. "I realize that t.i.tles of courtesy are illegal on earth," he continued, "because courtesy itself is illegal. However, the t.i.tle 'Commodore' simply means that I am ent.i.tled to command a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p containing two or more persons other than myself. Therefore, it is not a t.i.tle of courtesy, but of ability."

The manager had long since realized that he was dealing with a Belt man, not an Earth citizen, and that the registration robot had sent him the card because of that, not because there was anything illegal. Men from the Belt did not come to Earth either willingly or often.

Still unable to override his instincts--which erroneously told him that there was something "wrong"--the manager said: "What does the 'Sir' mean?"

Harry Morgan glowed warmly. "Well, now, Mr. Manager, I will tell you. I will give you an a.n.a.logy. In the time of the Roman Republic, twenty-one centuries or so ago, the leader of an Army was given the t.i.tle Imperator. But that t.i.tle could not be conferred upon him by the Senate of Rome nor by anyone else in power. No man could call himself Imperator until his own soldiers, the men under him, had publicly acclaimed him as such. If, voluntarily, his own men shouted 'Ave, Imperator!' at a public gathering, then the man could claim the t.i.tle. Later the t.i.tle degenerated--" He stopped.

The manager was staring at him with uncomprehending eyes, and Morgan's outward smile became genuine. "Sorry," he said condescendingly. "I forgot that history is not a popular subject in the Welfare World." Morgan had forgotten no such thing, but he went right on. "What I meant to say was that the s.p.a.cemen of the Belt Cities have voluntarily agreed among themselves to call me 'sir'. Whether that is a t.i.tle of ability or a t.i.tle of courtesy, you can argue about with me at another time. Right now, I want my room key."

Under the regulations, the manager knew there was nothing else he could do. He had made a mistake, and he knew that he had. If he had only taken the trouble to read the rest of the card-- "Awfully sorry, Mr. Morgan," he said with a lopsided smile that didn't even look genuine. "The--"

"Watch those courtesy t.i.tles," Morgan reprimanded gently. "'Mister' comes ultimately from the Latin magister, meaning 'master' or 'teacher'. And while I may be your master, I wouldn't dare think I could teach you anything."

"All citizens are ent.i.tled to be called 'Mister'," the manager said with a puzzled look. He pushed a room key across the desk.