Stargate

by Stephen Robinett

  “Did you hear him, Janet? He asks what matter! First he convinces poor Scarlyn to ride off like Don Quixote—and just as blindly! Then he gets Scarlyn shot to pieces and from what the media say almost wipes out the human race! Then he alienates Julia from us! And he wants to know what matter! I tell you—”

  “Julia?”

  “Our daughter,” said Janet Tuttle.

  “I know. What’s she got to do with—”

  “You, and Scarlyn, and”—he pointed in a generally northern direction—“that so-called school up there—”

  “Berkeley?”

  “Yes! All of you are combining to corrupt my daughter! She no longer listens to me! She listens only to that crazy old—old—” He waved his hand at Smith’s door, unable to find the right pejorative. “To him!”

  “She could do worse.”

  Harold’s eyes narrowed, suspicious. “Where did you go to school?”

  “Berkeley.”

  “Ah-ha! I thought so! You, Scarlyn, Julia—they should tear that place down stone by stone and salt the earth!”

  “How’s Mr. Smith?” Dolores asked Janet Tuttle.

  “Weak, but recovering. They say he has a very sound constitution.”

  Harold snorted, beginning a philippic against doctors. They knew nothing, nothing at all. Appearances were deceiving. Inside, a man Smith’s age was worn out, finished. The doctors only took him off the critical list because there was nothing more they could do.

  “Frankly,” I said, “I don’t think you should let Scarlyn hear you say that.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s liable to get up off what you seem to think is his deathbed and kick the hell out of you.”

  A nurse came out of Smith’s room. I introduced myself.

  “Ah, yes. Mr. Collins. You may go right in. Don’t stay too long. He’s still weak.”

  Harold looked startled; frowning at the nurse. “They can go in?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But we can’t?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Smith left strict orders and his doctor agrees.”

  Dolores and I left Harold arguing with the nurse.

  Smith, propped up in bed, looked weak but alert, his complexion pale. A stack of magazine tapes stood on the table next to his bed. He looked up from the viewer, glad to see us.

  “And you brought Gladstone with you,” he said.

  “I had to. Harold’s threatening to sue.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t think he knows yet. How are you feeling?”

  “Better, they tell me. The worst of it was over before I woke up.” He patted his side lightly. “Plastic rib in here.”

  We sat down on chairs next to his bed, talking a few minutes about his health. Something other than his convalescence seemed to be bothering him. I had a suspicion what it was. He seemed reluctant to bring it up with Dolores present. I assured him she knew everything that happened on the Merryweather Enterprize.

  “I don’t,” said Smith.

  “What do you want to know?” “First, why didn’t you shoot Spieler?”

  “I tried.”

  “You tried, but you didn’t.”

  “I couldn’t.” I thought about it, remembering that moment in the control-room. “I kept thinking, you’re about to kill a man, Collins. Everything else seemed sort of abstract, unreal. I couldn’t justify killing for that abstract a reason.”

  “Humanity is a pretty abstract idea.”

  “Maybe if he’d shot at me—” I shrugged. “Who knows?” I didn’t like saying my next thought. “Maybe I’m a coward.”

  “No. A coward would have turned back a dozen times before he ever got to that control-room. It’s just the way you’re built. Some people can and some people can’t. I should have seen it coming, but I was too concerned about Freddy’s mind to worry about yours.”

  “Seen what coming?”

  “All that moral crap. I should have known when you started worrying about the moral implications of the Gate.”

  “Someone has to worry about that kind of crap, as you call it.”

  “True.” He nodded at Dolores. “Lawyers, maybe. Preachers. Me—I get paid, I work.”

  Watching him, it struck me. I had seen Smith play the old man. I had seen him play the demented old man. What was he playing now? Tough guy? Hero? Forget all that moral crap, Louie, and fire the machinegun. I laughed.

  “Totally mercenary, huh? You never worry about little things like who’s right and who’s wrong.”

  “It’ll give you gray hair.”

  “You’ve already got gray hair.”

  “I got it learning not to worry.”

  A better way of putting it occurred to me. “Suppose Spieler had offered you the job instead of Mr. Merryweather. Would you have taken it, knowing what you know now?”

  Smith’s mercenary pose broke. He laughed, then held his side. “Hurts. OK, you win. What are you going to do now?”

  Dolores beamed, answering before I could say anything. “Get married.”

  Smith eyed me. “I suppose he’ll do.”

  Dolores hugged my upper arm. “He’ll do just fine.”

  “Then what?” asked Smith.

  “Mr. Merryweather wants me to build three more Big Gates.”

  We talked a few more minutes. Smith began to look tired. I suggested we leave and stood up.

  “By the way,” said Smith, “there’s one detail that’s escaped me, a minor point but—” He hesitated, wanting to draw me out.

  “What is it?”

  “Why,” he asked, reaching over and pulling a cigar from the cabinet next to his bed, “wasn’t the Solar System destroyed?”

  It had taken Burgess, Steichen and I five hours and a computer to clean up that detail. The Gate, intended for planetary mineral extraction and designed to reach through a planetary magnetic field, could work perfectly in a planetary environment. Given enough power, it could bore a fifteen-kilometer hole through a planet. The pulsar provided a radically different electromagnetic environment.

  The magnetic field of Earth, and coincidentally the Sun, is one gauss at the surface, one line of magnetic force per square centimeter of surface. The Crab Nebula’s neutron star, ten kilometers of shrunken sun, has a surface magnetic field of ten billion gauss. When our Gate reached out, its focal point on the pulsar’s surface, the intense magnetic field acted exactly like a second focusing ring, tightening the focus. Because of the added power, we removed a chunk of the pulsar with almost twice the mass of our planetary sample—twice the mass and less than a centimeter across. Impressive objects, pulsars. I hesitated telling Smith. I felt like needling his pose of the uninvolved mercenary.

  “You don’t really care about details like that, do you?” I asked. “You got your pay.”

  “True, but my granddaughter asked when she called. I told her. I’d find out. One of the professors at Berkeley—old gaffer, Emeritus, I think—wanted to know.”

  “Not Jenson.”

  Smith snapped his fingers, grinning. “That was the name. Slipped my mind. He thinks you didn’t build the Gate properly. I’d like to know why we’re still here for his benefit.”

  When I finished, he nodded, pensive, chewing on his unlit cigar. “What happened to Spieler?”

  Spieler, intending to trade places with the pulsar—to arrive safely in the space it vacated—arrived instead at its surface. The titanic forces at the surface, sufficient to squeeze the Big Gate’s focus from fifteen kilometers to less than button-hole size, had applied themselves to his spacecraft.

  I held up my thumb and index finger, spacing them a fraction of an inch apart.

  Smith looked at them blankly a moment, thinking, then smiled, nodding. “Oh.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “What are you going to do?”

  “Horace wants me to look into some problems he’s having in Mutombu Mukulu.”

  I looked at Dolores. “I think he’s a little old for that, don’t you, Dol
ores?”

  “Definitely. He should feed pigeons or something.”

  “What,” I inquired, my expression as grave as I could muster. “did you tell him?”

  “I told him I’d think about it.“targate