The Best of Clifford D. Simak

by Clifford D. Simak

  He glared at the publicity man. "You understand?"

  "Yes, sir," said Grant, "I understand perfectly."

  "All right," said Chambers. "And your job, Craven, is to either develop what Page has found or find something we can use in competition."

  Craven growled angrily. "What happens if your damn rumors can't ruin Manning? What if I can't find anything?"

  "In that case," said Chambers, "there are other ways."

  "Other ways?"

  Chambers suddenly smiled at them. "I have a notion to call Stutsman back to Earth."

  Craven drummed his fingers idly on the arm of his chair. "Yes, I guess you do have other ways," he said.

  * * *

  Greg's hand snapped the switch and the screen suddenly was blank as the televisor set returned instantly to the laboratory.

  "That explains a lot of things," he said. "Among them what has happened to my stocks."

  Russ sat in his chair, numbed. "That little weak-kneed, ratting traitor, Wilson. He'd sell his mother for a new ten dollar bill."

  "We know," said Greg, "and Chambers doesn't know we know. We'll follow every move he makes. We'll know every one of his plans."

  Pacing up and down the room, he was already planning their campaign.

  "There are still a few things to do, he added. "A few possibilities we may have overlooked."

  "But will we have time?" asked Russ.

  "I think so. Chambers is going to go slow. The gamble is too big to risk any slip. He doesn't want to get in bad with the law. There won't be any strong arm stuff... not until he recalls Stutsman from Callisto."

  He paused in mid-stride, stood planted solidly on the floor.

  "When Stutsman gets into the game," he said, "all hell will break loose."

  He took a deep breath.

  "But we'll be ready for it then!"

  CHAPTER SIX

  "If we can get television reception with this apparatus of ours," asked Greg, "what is to prevent us from televising? Why can't we send as well as receive?"

  Greg drew doodles on a calculation sheet. "We could. Just something else to work out. You must remember we're working in a four dimensional medium. That would complicate matters a little. Not like working in three dimensions alone. It would..."

  He stopped. The pencil fell from his finger and he swung around slowly to face Manning.

  "What's the matter now?" asked Greg.

  "Look," said Russ excitedly. "We're working in four dimensions. And if we televised through four dimensions, what would we get?"

  Greg wrinkled his brow. Suddenly his face relaxed. "You don't mean we can televise in three dimensions, do you?"

  "That's what it should work out to," declared Russ. He swung back to the table again, picked up his pencil and jotted down equations. He looked up from the sheet. "Three dimensional television!" he almost whispered.

  "Something new again," commented Greg.

  "I'll say it's new!"

  Russ reached out and jerked a calculator toward him. Rapidly he set up the equations, pressed the tabulator lever. The machine gurgled and chuckled, clicked out the result. Bending over to read it, Russ sucked in his breath.

  "It's working out right," he said.

  "That'll mean new equipment, lots of it," Greg pointed out. "Wilson's gone, damn him. Who's going to help us?"

  "We'll do it ourselves," said Russ. "When we're the only ones here, we can be sure there won't be any leak."

  It took hours of work on the math machines, but at the end of that time Russ was certain of his ground.

  "Now we go to work," he said, gleefully.

  In a week's time they had built a triple televisor, but simplifications of the standard commercial set gave them a mechanism that weighed little more and was far more efficient and accurate.

  During the time the work went on they maintained a watch over both the office of Spencer Chambers and the laboratory in which Dr. Herbert Craven worked 16 hours a day. Unseen, unsuspected, they were silent companions of the two men during many hours. They read what the men wrote, read what was written to them, heard what they said, saw how they acted. Doing so, the pair in the high mountain laboratory gained a deep insight into the characters of unsuspecting quarries.

  "Both utterly ruthless," declared Greg. "But apparently men who are sincere in thinking that the spoils belong to the strong. Strange, almost outdated men. You can't help but like Chambers. Hes good enough at heart. He has his pet charities. He really, I believe, wants to help the people. And I think he actually believes the best way to do it is to gain a dictatorship over the Solar System. That ambition rules everything in his life. It has hardened him and strengthened him. He will crush ruthlessly, without a single qualm, anything that stands in his path. That's why we'll have a fight on our hands."

  * * *

  Craven seemed to be making little progress. They could only guess at what he was trying to develop.

  "I think," said Russ, "he's working on a collector field to suck in radiant energy. If he really gets that, it will be something worth having."

  For hours Craven sat, an intent, untidy, unkempt man, sunk deep in the cushions of an easy chair. His face was calm, with relaxed jaw and eyes that seemed vacant. But each time he would rouse himself from the chair to pencil new notations on the pads of paper that littered his desk. New ideas, new approaches.

  The triple televisor was completed except for one thing.

  "Sound isn't so easy," said Russ. "If we could only find a way to transmit it as well as light."

  "Listen," said Greg, "why don't you try a condenser speaker."

  "A condenser speaker?"

  "Sure, the gadget developed way back in the 1920s. It hasn't been used for years to my knowledge, but it might do the trick."

  Russ grinned broadly. "Hell, why didn't I think of that? Here I've been racking my brain for a new approach, a new wrinkle... and exactly what I wanted was at hand."

  "Should work," declared Greg. "Just the opposite of a condenser microphone. Instead of radiating sound waves mechanically, it radiates a changing electric field and this field becomes audible directly within the ear. Even yet no one seems to understand just how it works, but it does... and that's good enough."

  "I know," said Russ. "It really makes no sound. In other words it creates an electric field that doubles for sound. It ought to be just the thing because nothing can stop it. Metal shielding can, I guess, if it's thick enough, but it's got to be pretty damn thick."

  It took time to set the mechanism up. Ready, the massive apparatus, within which glowed a larger and more powerful force field, was operated by two monstrous material energy engines. The controls were equipped with clockwork drives, designed so that the motion of the Earth could be nullified completely and automatically for work upon outlying planets.

  * * *

  Russ stood back and looked at it. "Stand in front of that screen, Greg," he said, "and we'll try it on you."

  Greg stepped in front of the screen. The purr of power came on. Suddenly, materializing out of the air, came Greg's projection. Hazy and undefined at first, it rapidly assumed apparent solidity. Greg waved his arm; the image moved its arm.

  Russ left the controls and walked across the laboratory to inspect the image. Examined from all sides, it looked solid. Russ walked through it and felt nothing. There was nothing there. It was just a three dimensional image. But even from two feet away, it was as if the man himself stood there in all the actuality of flesh and blood.

  "Hello, Russ," the image whispered. It held out a hand. "Glad to see you again."

  Laughing, Russ thrust out his hand. It closed on nothing in mid-air, but the two men appeared to shake hands.

  They tested the machine that afternoon. Their images strode above the trees, apparently walking on thin air. Gigantic replicas of Greg stood on a faraway mountain top and shouted with a thunderous voice. Smaller images, no more than two inches high, shinnied up a table leg.

  Satisfied, they shut
off the machine.

  "That's one of the possibilities you mentioned," suggested Russ.

  Greg nodded grimly.

  AN autumn gale pelted the windows with driving rain, and a wild, wet wind howled through the pines outside. The fire was leaping and flaring in the fireplace.

  Deep in his chair, Russ stared into the flame and puffed at his pipe.

  "The factory wants more money on the spaceship," said Greg from the other chair. "I had to put up some more shares as collateral on a new loan."

  "Market still going down?" asked Russ.

  "Not the market," replied Greg. "My stocks. All of them hit new lows today."

  Russ dragged at the pipe thoughtfully. "I've been thinking about that stock business, Greg."

  "So have I, but it doesn't seem to do much good."

  "Look," said Russ slowly, "what planets have exchanges?"

  "All of them except Mercury. The Jovian exchange is at Ranthoor. There's even one out at Pluto. Just mining and chemical shares listed, though."

  Russ did not reply. Smoke curled up from his pipe. He was staring into the fire.

  "Why do you ask?" Greg wanted to know.

  "Just something stirring around in my mind. I was wondering where Chambers does most of his trading."

  "Ranthoor now," said Greg. "Used to do it on Venus. The listing is larger there. But since he took over the Jovian confederacy, he switched his business to it. The transaction tax is lower. He saw to that.

  "And the same shares are listed on the Callisto market as on the New York boards?"

  "Naturally," said Greg, "only not as many."

  Russ watched the smoke from his pipe. "How long does it take light to travel from Callisto to Earth?"

  "Why, about 45 minutes, I guess. Somewhere around there." Greg sat upright. "Say, what's light got to do with this?"

  "A lot," said Russ. "All commerce is based on the assumption that light is instantaneous, but it isn't. All business, anywhere throughout the Solar System, is based on Greenwich time. When a noon signal sent out from Earth reaches Mars, it's noon there, but as a matter of fact, it is actually 15 minutes or so past noon. When the same signal reaches Callisto, the correct time for the chronometer used in commerce would be noon when it is really a quarter to one. That system simplifies things. Does away with varying times. And it has worked all right so far because there has been, up to now, nothing that could go faster than light. No news can travel through space, no message, no signal can be sent at any speed greater than that. So everything has been fine."

  Greg had come out of the chair, was standing on his feet, the glow of the blaze throwing his athletic figure into bold relief. That calm exterior had been stripped from him now. He was excited.

  "I see what you are getting at! We have something that is almost instantaneous!"

  "Almost," said Russ. "Not quite. There s a time lag somewhere. But it isn't noticeable except over vast distances."

  "But it would beat ordinary light signals to Callisto. It would beat them there by almost 45 minutes."

  "Almost," Russ agreed. "Maybe a split-second less."

  Greg strode up and down in front of the fireplace like a caged lion. "By heaven," he said, "we've got Chambers where we want him. We can beat the stock quotations to Callisto. With that advance knowledge of what the board is doing in New York, we can make back every dime I've lost. We can take Mr. Chambers to the cleaners!"

  Russ grinned. "Exactly," he said. "We'll know 45 minutes in advance of the other traders what the market will be. Let's see Chambers beat that."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ben Wrail was taking things easy. Stretched out in his chair, with his cigar lit and burning satisfactorily, he listened to a radio program broadcast from Earth.

  Through the window beside him, he could look out of his skyscraper apartment over the domed city of Ranthoor. Looming in the sky, slightly distorted by the heavy quartz of the distant dome, was massive Jupiter, a scarlet ball tinged with orange and: yellow. Overwhelmingly luminous, monstrously large, it filled a large portion of the visible sky, a sight that brought millions of tourists to the Jovian moons each year, a sight that even the old-timers still must stare at, drawn by some unfathomable fascination.

  Ben Wrail stared at it now, puffing at his cigar, listening to the radio. An awe-inspiring thing, a looming planet that seemed almost ready to topple and crash upon this airless, frigid world.

  Wrail was an old-timer. For thirty years--Earth years--he had made his home in Ranthoor. He had seen the city grow from a dinky little mining camp en-*

  Now everything had changed. The Jovian worlds today were held in bond by Spencer Chambers. The government was in the hands of his henchmen. Duly elected, of course, but in an election held under the unspoken threat that Interplanetary Power would withdraw, leaving the moons circling the great planet without heat, air, energy. For the worlds of the Jovian confederacy, every single one of them, depended for their life upon the accumulators freighted outward from the Sun.

  Talk of revolt was in the air, closed by a small dome to one that boasted half a million population. The dome that now covered the city was the fourth one. Four times, like the nautilus, the city had outgrown its shell, until today it was the greatest domed city in the Solar System. Where life had once been cheap and where the scum of the system had held rendezvous, he had seen Ranthoor grow into a city of dignity, capital of the Jovian confederacy.

  He had helped build that confederacy, had been elected a member of the constitution commission, had helped create the government and for over a decade had helped to make its laws.

  But now... Ben Wrail spat angrily and stuffed the cigar back

  but, lacking a leader, it would get nowhere. John Moore Mallory was imprisoned on one of the prison spaceships that plied through the Solar System. Mallory, months ago, had been secretly transferred from the Callisto prison to the spaceship, but in a week's time the secret had been spread in angry whispers. If there had been riots and bloodshed, they would have been to no purpose. For revolution, even if successful, would gain nothing. It would merely goad Interplanetary Power into withdrawing, refusing to service the domed cities on the moons.

  * * *

  Ben Wrail stirred restlessly in his chair. The cigar had gone out. The radio program blared unheard. His eyes still looked out the window without seeing Jupiter.

  "Damn," said Ben Wrail. Why did he have to go and spoil an evening thinking about this damned political situation? Despite his part in the building of the confederacy, he was a businessman, not a politician. Still, it hurt to see something torn down that he had helped to build, though he knew that every pioneering strike in history had been taken over by shrewd, ruthless, powerful operators. Knowing that should have helped, but it didn't. He and the other Jovian pioneers had hoped it wouldn't happen and, of course, it had.

  "Ben Wrail," said a voice in the room.

  Wrail swung around, away from the window.

  "Manning!" he yelled, and the man in the center of the room grinned bleakly at him. "How did you come in without me hearing you? When did you get here?"

  "I'm not here," said Greg. "I'm back on Earth."

  "You're what?" asked Wrail blankly. "That's a pretty silly statement, isn't it, Manning? Or did you decide to loosen up and pull a gag now and then?"

  "I mean it," said Manning. "This is just an image of me. My body is back on Earth."

  "You mean you're dead? You're a ghost?"

  The grin widened, but the face was bleak as ever.

  "No. Ben, I'm just alive as you are. Let me explain. This is a television image of me. Three-dimensional television. I can travel anywhere like this."

  Wrail sat down in the chair again. "I don't suppose there'd be any use trying to shake hands with you."

  "No use," agreed Manning's image. "There isn't any hand."

  "Nor asking you to have a chair?"

  Manning shook his head.

  "Anyhow," said Wrail, "I'm damn glad to see you-
-or think I see you. I don't know which. Figure you can stay and talk with me a while?"

  "CERTAINLY," said Manning. "That is what I came for. I want to ask your help."

  "Listen," declared Wrail, "you can't be on Earth, Manning. I say something to you and you answer right back. That isn't possible. You can't hear anything I say until 45 minutes after I say it, and then I'd have to wait another 45 minutes to hear your answer."

  "That's right," agreed the image, "if you insist upon talking about the velocity of light. We have something better than that."

  "We?"

  "Russell Page and myself. We have a two-way television apparatus that works almost instantaneously. To all purposes, so far as the distance between Earth and Callisto is concerned, it is instantaneous."

  Wrail's jaw fell. "Well, I be damned. What have you two fellows been up to now?"

  "A lot," said Manning laconically. "For one thing we are out to bust Interplanetary Power. Bust them wide open. Hear that, Wrail?"

  Wrail stared in stupefaction. "Sure, I hear. But I can't believe it."

  "All right then," said Manning grimly, "we'll give you proof. What could you do, Ben, if we told you what was happening on the stock market in New York... without you having to wait the 45 minutes it takes the quotations to get here?"

  Wrail sprang to his feet. "What could I do? Why, I could run the pants off every trader in the exchange! I could make a billion a minute!" He stopped and looked at the image. "But this isn't like you. This isn't the way you'd do things."

  "I don't want you to hurt anyone but Chambers," said Manning. "If somebody else gets in the way, of course they have to take the rap along with him. But I do want to give Chambers a licking. That's what I came here to see you about."

  "By Heaven, Greg, I'll do it," said Wrail. He stepped quickly forward, held out his hand to close the deal, and encountered only air.

  Manning's image threw back its head and laughed.

  "That's your proof, Ben. Good enough?"

  "I'll say it is," said Wrail shakily, looking down at the solid-seeming hand that his own had gone right through.

  * * *

  November 6, 2153 was a day long remembered in financial circles throughout the Solar System. The Ranthoor market opened easy with little activity. Then a few stocks made fractional gains. Mining dropped fractionally. Martian Irrigation still was unexplainably low, as was Pluto Chemical and Asteroid Mining.