"You have a full manual license?" The blonde operated unseen keys as she spoke.
"Yes."
"Could I have personal data and account-checking data, please?"
Gray had extracted the card from his wallet while the exchange was taking place. He inserted it into a slot set to one side of the screen, and touched a key.
The blonde consulted other invisible oracles. "Okay," she pronounced. "Any other pilots?"
"One. A Dr. V. Hunt."
"His personal data?"
Gray took Hunt's already proffered card and substituted it for his own. The ritual was repeated. The face then vanished to be replaced by a screen of formatted text with entries completed in the boxes provided.
"Would you verify and authorize, please?" said the disembodied voice from the grille. "Charges are shown on the right."
Gray cast his eye rapidly down the screen, grunted, and keyed in a memorized sequence of digits that was not echoed on the display. The word POSITIVE appeared in the box marked "Authorization." Then the clerk reappeared, still smiling.
"When would you want to collect, Mr. Gray?" she asked.
Gray turned toward Hunt.
"Do we want lunch at the airport first?"
Hunt grimaced. "Not after that party last night. Couldn't face anything." His face took on an expression of acute distaste as he moistened the inside of the equine rectum he had once called a mouth. "Let's eat tonight somewhere."
"Make it round about eleven thirty hours," Gray advised.
"It'll be ready."
"Thanks, Sue."
"Thank you. Good-bye."
"Bye now."
Gray flipped a switch, unplugged the briefcase from the socket built into the armrest of his seat, and coiled the connecting cord back into the space provided in the lid. He closed the case and stowed it behind his feet
"Done," he announced.
The scope was the latest in a long line of technological triumphs in the Metadyne product range to be conceived and nurtured to maturity by the Hunt-Gray partnership. Hunt was the ideas man, leading something of a free-lance existence within the organization, left to pursue whatever line of study or experiment his personal whims or the demands of his researches dictated. His title was somewhat misleading; in fact he was Theoretical Studies. The position was one which he had contrived, quite deliberately, to fall into no obvious place in the managerial hierarchy of Metadyne. He acknowledged no superior, apart from the managing director, Sir Francis Forsyth-Scott, and boasted no subordinates. On the company's organization charts, the box captioned "Theoretical Studies" stood alone and disconnected near the inverted tree head R & D, as if added as an afterthought. Inside it there appeared the single entry Dr. Victor Hunt. This was the way he liked it—a symbiotic relationship in which Metadyne provided him with the equipment, facilities, services, and funds he needed for his work, while he provided Metadyne with first, the prestige of retaining on its payroll a world-acknowledged authority on nuclear infrastructure theory, and second—but by no means least—a steady supply of fallout.
Gray was the engineer. He was the sieve that the fallout fell on. He had a genius for spotting the gems of raw ideas that had application potential and transforming them into developed, tested, marketable products and product enhancements. Like Hunt, he had survived the mine field of the age of unreason and emerged safe and single into his midthirties. With Hunt, he shared a passion for work, a healthy partiality for most of the deadly sins to counterbalance it, and his address book. All things considered, they were a good team.
Gray bit his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe. He always bit his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe when he was about to talk shop.
"Figured it out yet?" he asked.
"This Borlan business?"
"Uh-huh."
Hunt shook his head before lighting a cigarette. "Beats me."
"I was thinking . . . Suppose Felix has dug up some hot sales prospect for scopes—maybe one of his big Yank customers. He could be setting up some super demo or something."
Hunt shook his head again. "No. Felix wouldn't go and screw up Metadyne's schedules for anything like that. Anyhow, it wouldn't make sense—the obvious thing to do would be to fly the people to where the scope is, not the other way round."
"Mmmm . . . I suppose the same thing applies to the other thought that occurred to me—some kind of crash teach-in for IDCC people."
"Right—same thing goes."
"Mmmm . . ." When Gray spoke again, they had covered another six miles. "How about a takeover? The whole scope thing is big—Felix wants it handled stateside."
Hunt reflected on the proposition. "Not for my money. He's got too much respect for Francis to pull a stunt like that. He knows Francis can handle it okay. Besides, that's not his way of doing things—too underhanded." Hunt paused to exhale a cloud of smoke. "Anyhow, I think there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. From what I saw, even Felix didn't seem too sure what it's all about."
"Mmmm . . ." Gray thought for a while longer before abandoning further excursions into the realms of deductive logic. He contemplated the growing tide of humanity flowing in the general direction of C-deck bar. "My guts are a bit churned up, too," he confessed. "Feels like a crate of Guinness on top of a vindaloo curry. Come on—let's go get a coffee."
* * *
In the star-strewn black velvet one thousand miles farther up, the Sirius Fourteen communications-link satellite followed, with cold and omniscient electronic eyes, the progress of the skyliner streaking across the mottled sphere below. Among the ceaseless stream of binary data that flowed through its antennae, it identified a call from the Boeing's Gamma Nine master computer, requesting details of the latest weather forecast for northern California. Sirius Fourteen flashed the message to Sirius Twelve, hanging high over the Canadian Rockies, and Twelve in turn beamed it down to the tracking station at Edmonton. From here the message was relayed by optical cable to Vancouver Control and from there by microwave repeaters to the Weather Bureau station at Seattle. A few thousandths of a second later, the answers poured back up the chain in the opposite direction. Gamma Nine digested the information, made one or two minor alterations to its course and flight plan, and sent a record of the dialogue down to Ground Control, Prestwick.
Chapter Two
It had rained for over two days.
The Engineering Materials Research Department of the Ministry of Space Sciences huddled wetly in a field of the Ural Mountains, an occasional ray of sunlight glinting from a laboratory window or from one of the aluminum domes of the reactor building.
Seated in her office in the analysis section, Valereya Petrokhovna turned to the pile of reports left on her desk for routine approval. The first two dealt with run-of-the-mill high-temperature corrosion tests. She flicked casually through the pages, glanced at the appended graphs and tables, scrawled her initials on the line provided, and tossed them across into the tray marked "Out." Automatically she began scanning down the first page of number three. Suddenly she stopped, a puzzled frown forming on her face. Leaning forward in her chair, she began again, this time reading carefully and studying every sentence. She finally went back to the beginning once more and worked methodically through the whole document, stopping in places to verify the calculations by means of the keyboard display standing on one side of the desk.
"This is unheard of!" she exclaimed.
For a long time she remained motionless, her eyes absorbed by the raindrops slipping down the window but her mind so focused elsewhere that the sight failed to register. At last she shook herself into movement and, turning again to the keyboard, rapidly tapped in a code. The strings of tensor equations vanished, to be replaced by a profile view of her assistant, hunched over a console in the control room downstairs. The profile transformed itself into a full face as he turned.
"Ready to run in about twenty minutes," he said, anticipating the question. "The plasma's stabilizing now."
"No—this has nothing to do with
that," she replied, speaking a little more quickly than usual. "It's about your report 2906. I've just been through my copy."
"Oh . . . yes?" His change in expression betrayed mild apprehension.
"So—a niobium-zirconium alloy," she went on, stating the fact rather than asking a question, "with an unprecedented resistance to high-temperature oxidation and a melting point that, quite frankly, I won't believe until I've done the tests myself."
"Makes our plasma-cans look like butter," Josef agreed.
"Yet despite the presence of niobium, it exhibits a lower neutron-absorption cross section than pure zirconium?"
"Macroscopic, yes—under a millibar per square centimeter."
"Interesting . . ." she mused, then resumed more briskly. "On top of that we have alpha-phase zirconium with silicon, carbon, and nitrogen impurities, yet still with a superb corrosion resistance."
"Hot carbon dioxide, fluorides, organic acids, hypochlorites—we've been through the list. Generally an initial reaction sets in, but it's rapidly arrested by the formation of inert barrier layers. You could probably break it down in stages by devising a cycle of reagents in just the right sequence, but that would take a complete processing plant specially designed for the job!"
"And the microstructure," Valereya said, gesturing toward the papers on her desk. "You've used the description fibrous."
"Yes. That's about as near as you can get. The main alloy seems to be formed around a—well, a sort of microcrystalline lattice. It's mainly silicon and carbon, but with local concentrations of some titanium-magnesium compound that we haven't been able to quantify yet. I've never come across anything like it. Any ideas?"
The woman's face held a faraway look for some seconds.
"I honestly don't know what to think at the moment," she confessed. "But I feel this information should be passed higher without delay; it might be more important than it looks. But first I must be sure of my facts. Nikolai can take over down there for a while. Come up to my office and let's go through the whole thing in detail."
Chapter Three
The Portland headquarters of the Intercontinental Data and Control Corporation lay some forty miles east of the city, guarding the pass between Mount Adams to the north and Mount Hood to the south. It was here that at some time in the remote past a small inland sea had penetrated the Cascade Mountains and carved itself a channel to the Pacific, to become in time the mighty Columbia River.
Fifteen years previously it had been the site of the government-owned Bonneville Nucleonic Weapons Research Laboratory. Here, American scientists, working in collaboration with the United States of Europe Federal Research Institute at Geneva, had developed the theory of meson dynamics that led to the nucleonic bomb. The theory predicted a "clean" reaction with a yield an order of magnitude greater than that produced by thermonuclear fusion. The holes they had blown in the Sahara had proved it.
During that period of history, the ideological and racial tensions inherited from the twentieth century were being swept away by the tide of universal affluence and falling birth rates that came with the spread of high-technology living. Traditional rocks of strife and suspicion were being eroded as races, nations, sects, and creeds became inextricably mingled into one huge, homogeneous global society. As the territorial irrationalities of long-dead politicians resolved themselves and the adolescent nation-states matured, the defense budgets of the superpowers were progressively reduced year by year. The advent of the nucleonic bomb served only to accelerate what would have happened anyway. By universal assent, world demilitarization became fact.
One sphere of activity that benefited enormously from the surplus funds and resources that became available after demilitarization was the rapidly expanding United Nations Solar System Exploration Program. Already the list of responsibilities held by this organization was long; it included the operation of all artificial satellites in terrestrial, Lunar, Martian, Venusian, and Solar orbits; the building and operation of all manned bases on Luna and Mars, plus the orbiting laboratories over Venus; the launching of deep-space robot probes and the planning and control of manned missions to the outer planets. UNSSEP was thus expanding at just the right rate and the right time to absorb the supply of technological talent being released as the world's major armaments programs were run down. Also, as nationalism declined and most of the regular armed forces were demobilized, the restless youth of the new generation found outlets for their adventure-lust in the uniformed branches of the UN Space Arm. It was an age that buzzed with excitement and anticipation as the new pioneering frontier began planet-hopping out across the Solar System.
And so NWRL Bonneville had been left with no purpose to serve. This situation did not go unnoticed by the directors of IDCC. Seeing that most of the equipment and permanent installations owned by NWRL could be used in much of the corporation's own research projects, they propositioned the government with an offer to buy the place outright. The offer was accepted and the deal went through. Over the years IDCC had further expanded the site, improved its aesthetics, and eventually established it as their nucleonics research center and world headquarters.
The mathematical theory that had grown out of meson dynamics involved the existence of three hitherto unknown transuranic elements. Although these were purely hypothetical, they were christened hyperium, bonnevillium, and genevium. Theory also predicted that, due to a "glitch" in the transuranic mass-versus-binding-energy curve, these elements, once formed, would be stable. They were unlikely to be found occurring naturally, however—not on Earth, anyway. According to the mathematics, only two known situations could give the right conditions for their formation: the core of the detonation of a nucleonic bomb or the collapse of a supernova to a neutron star.
Sure enough, analysis of the dust clouds after the Sahara tests yielded minute traces of hyperium and bonnevillium; genevium was not detected. Nevertheless, the first prediction of the theory was accepted as amply supported. Whether, one day, future generations of scientists would ever verify the second prediction, was another matter entirely.
* * *
Hunt and Gray touched down on the rooftop landing pad of the IDCC administration building shortly after fifteen hundred hours. By fifteen thirty they were sitting in leather armchairs facing the desk in Borlan's luxurious office on the tenth floor, while he poured three large measures of scotch at the teak bar built into the left wall. He walked back to the center, passed a glass to each of the Englishmen, went back around the desk, and sat down.
"Cheers, then, guys," he offered. They returned the gesture. "Well," he began, "it's good to see you two again. Trip okay? How'd you make it up so soon—rent a jet?" He opened his cigar box as he spoke and pushed it across the desk toward them. "Smoke?"
"Yes, good trip. Thanks, Felix," Hunt replied. "Avis." He inclined his head toward the window behind Borlan, which presented a panoramic view of pine-covered hills tumbling down to the distant Columbia. "Some scenery."
"Like it?"
"Makes Berkshire look a bit like Siberia."
Borlan looked at Gray. "How are you keeping, Rob?"
The corners of Gray's mouth twitched downwards. "Gutrot."
"Party last night at some bird's," Hunt explained. "Too little blood in his alcohol stream."
"Good time, huh?" Borlan grinned. "Take Francis along?"
"You've got to be joking!"
"Jollificating with the peasantry?" Gray mimicked in the impeccable tone of the English aristocracy. "Good God! Whatever next!"
They laughed. Hunt settled himself more comfortably amid a haze of blue smoke. "How about yourself, Felix?" he asked. "Life still being kind to you?"
Borlan spread his arms wide. "Life's great."
"Angie still as beautiful as the last time I saw her? Kids okay?"
"They're all fine. Tommy's at college now—majoring in physics and astronautical engineering. Johnny goes hiking most weekends with his club, and Susie's added a pair of gerbils and a bear cub to the famil
y zoo."
"So you're still as happy as ever. The responsibilities of power aren't wearing you down yet."
Borlan shrugged and showed a row of pearly teeth. "Do I look like an ulcerated nut midway between heart attacks?"
Hunt regarded the blue-eyed, deep-tanned figure with close-cropped fair hair as Borlan sprawled relaxedly on the other side of the broad mahogany desk. He looked at least ten years younger than the president of any intercontinental corporation had a right to.
For a while the small talk revolved around internal affairs at Metadyne. At last a natural pause presented itself. Hunt sat forward, his elbows resting on his knees, and contemplated the last drop of amber liquid in his glass as he swirled it around first from right to left and then back again. Finally he looked up.
"About the scope, Felix. What's going on, then?"
Borlan had been expecting the question. He straightened slowly in his chair and appeared to think for a moment. At last he said:
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