Bulge

by Hal Clement

  “Is there anything that could possibly go wrong that you would not blame me for?” he asked.

  “Probably not, at that. I’m glad you realize it, Mr. Hoerwitz. Perhaps I’ll be spared the nuisance of having to leave a man on guard here as well as at the main controls.” He glanced through the dome’s double wall at Earth’s fat crescent, which dominated the sky on one side of the meridian as the Moon did on the other. “Is there any way of shutting off access to this place until we’re ready to use it? Think how much more at ease we’d both feel if there were.”

  Hoerwitz shrugged. “No regular door. There are a couple of safety air-breaks in the corridor below; you could get one of them closed easily enough, since there are manual switches for them as well as the pressure and temperature differential sensors, but it would be a lot harder to open. If one of those things does shut, it’s normally because air is being lost or dangerous reactions going on on one side or the other. A good deal of red tape is necessary to convince the machinery that all is well after all.”

  “Hmph.” Smith looked thoughtful. “All right, we’ll consider it. Rob, you stay here until I decide. You come with me, old fellow.” Hoerwitz obeyed with mixed feelings.

  It was lucky he hadn’t tried to dump the reactors and shut himself off in the dome section, in view of Smith’s perspicacity, but he couldn’t thank his own intelligence or foresight for saving him. The sad fact was that he’d never thought of the trick until he was explaining matters to Robinson. Now it was certainly too late. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, since someone like Robinson could presumably get air doors open again in short order; and there was an even brighter side, now that he thought of it. The last few minutes might well have gone far in convincing Smith that the manager was really reconciled to the situation. One could not be sure of that, naturally, with a person like Smith, but one could hope. Time would no doubt tell—and quite possibly in bad language.

  As they floated back down toward the living section—Hoerwitz noted with some regret that Smith was getting better at handling himself in free-fall—the head thief spoke briefly.

  “Maybe you’ve learned your lesson. From what’s just happened, I guess we can both hope so. Just the same, I don’t want to see you anywhere near that place where we just left Robinson, except when I tell you myself to go there for my own reasons. Is that clear?”

  “It is.”

  “Good. I don’t really enjoy persuading people the hard way, but you may have noticed that Mr. Jones does. If you’ve really accepted the fact that I have the bulge on you, though, we won’t have to amuse him.”

  “You’ve made everything very clear. Do you want the reactor which was working on Class IV when you came, and which will be ready pretty soon, to be unloaded as soon as it’s done?”

  “Hmph. I don’t know. Does your loading machine deliver to any spot on the surface, or just by that dome?”

  “Just at the dome, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t have been practical to run conveyors all over the place, and it’s even less so to drive trucks around on the surface.”

  “All right. If it would mean moving our ship an extra time we’ll wait until everything is ready. It would be a nuisance to have to guard it, too.”

  “Then you’re not really convinced I’ve learned my lesson, after all?”

  “Don’t ask too many questions, Mr. Hoerwitz. Why not just assume that I don’t like to take chances?”

  The manager was not inclined to act on impulse, but he sometimes talked on that basis. This was one of the times.

  “I don’t want to assume that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because one of your most obvious ways of not taking chances would be to leave no witnesses. If I believed you were that thorough, I might as well stop everything now and let you shoot me—not that I really enjoy the prospect, but I could at least die with the satisfaction that I hadn’t helped you.”

  “That’s logical,” Smith answered thoughtfully. “I have only two answers to it. One you already know—we wouldn’t just shoot you. The other, which I hope will make you feel better, is that we aren’t worried about witnesses. You’ve been reading too much. We’ll have lived in this place for several days before we’re done, but you must have noticed that we aren’t wearing gloves to keep from leaving fingerprints, or spacesuits to foil the scent analyzers, or anything else of that sort. I’m sure the law will know who was here after we’ve gone, but that doesn’t worry us. They already want us for so many different things that our main care is to avoid getting caught up with, not identified.”

  “Then why those names? Do you expect me to believe they’re real?”

  For almost the first time, Smith showed emotion. He grinned. “Go back to your drama sheets, Mr. Hoerwitz, but stick to Shakespeare. Lord Peter Wimsey is leading you astray. Just remember what I said about the conveyor controls; keep away from them.”

  V

  If his finger hadn’t been so painful, Hoerwitz would have been quite happy as he made his way back to the lounge and let the air currents settle him into the hammock. He shunted Julius Caesar into the “hold” stack without zeroing its tracker, started The Pajama Game, and remained awake through the whole show. It was quite an occasion.

  For the next couple of days everyone was on almost friendly terms, though Hoerwitz’s finger kept him from forgetting entirely the basic facts of the situation or warming up very much to Jones. Some of the men watched shows with him, and there was even casual conversation entirely unconnected with reactors and fuel processing. Smith’s psychology was working fairly well.

  It did not backfire on him until about twenty hours before perigee.

  At that time Mac had been making one of his periodic control checks, and had reported that the runs would be finishing off during the next ten or twelve hours. He would have to stay at the board, since they would not all end at the same time, and it was safer to oversee the supposedly automatic cooling of each converter as its job ended.

  “What’s all that for?” asked Smith. “I thought it didn’t matter much what was in the converters at the start. Why will it hurt if a little of this is still inside when you begin your next job? Won’t it just be converted along with everything else?”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” replied the manager. “Basically you are right; we don’t deal in pure products, and what we deliver is processed chemically by our customers. Still, it’s best to start clean. If too much really hot stuff were allowed to accumulate in the converters between runs, it could be bad. If Class I or II fuel intended to power a chemical industry, for example, were contaminated with Class IV there could be trouble on Earth—especially if the plant in question were doing a chemical separation of nuclear fuels.”

  “But it’s all Class IV this time,” pointed out Smith, “unless you’ve been running a major bluff on us, and I’m sure you wouldn’t do that.” His face hardened, and once more Hoerwitz mentally kicked himself. He hadn’t even thought of such a trick, and he could probably have gotten away with it. There was no easy way to identify directly the isotopes being put out by the converters; it took specialized apparatus and specialized knowledge. It was pretty certain that Smith had neither. Well, too late now.

  “It’s all one class, as you said,” the manager admitted with what he hoped was negligible delay, “but that’s just it. With Class IV in every converter and on every conveyor it’s even more important than usual to watch the cooling. I live here, you know. I’m not an engineer and don’t know what would happen if any of that stuff found its way into the hydrogen reactors, but I’d rather not find out.”

  “But you must be enough of an engineer to handle the fusion units.”

  “That doesn’t demand an engineer. I’m a button pusher. I can operate them very sensibly, but they don’t waste a trained engineer out, here with the price of skilled labor what it is. The trouble frequency of these plants is far too low to keep one twiddling his thumbs on standby the whole time.”<
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  “But how about safety? If this place blows apart, it would take quite a few centuries of engineers’ pay to replace it, I’d think.”

  “No doubt. I suspect that’s the point they’re trying to make, in order to modify or get rid of that law about hydrogen reactors on Earth. The idea is that if the company trusts them enough to risk all this capital without a resident engineer, what’s everyone worried about?”

  “But the place could really let go if the right—or I should say the wrong—things happened.”

  “I suppose so, but I don’t know what they’d be, short of deliberate mishandling. In the forty years I’ve been here nothing out of line had ever happened. I’ve never had to use that emergency dump I’ve showed you, or even the straight shutoff on the main board. Engineers come twice a year to check everything over, and I just move switches—like this.” He began manipulating controls. “Number thirteen has flashed over. I’m shutting down, and in about an hour it can be transferred from field-bottle to physical containers.”

  “Why not now? What’s this field-bottle?”

  Hoerwitz was genuinely surprised, and once again annoyed. He had supposed everyone knew about that; if he had realized that Smith didn’t . . . Well, another chance gone.

  “At conversion energies no material will hold the charge in. Three hundred tons of anything at all, at star-core temperature, would feel cramped in a hundred cubic miles of space, to say nothing of a hundred cubic yards. It’s held in by fields, since nothing else will do it, and surrounded by a free-electron layer that reflects just about all the radiation back into the plasma. The little bit that isn’t reflected is carried, also by free-electron field, to the radiators.”

  “I think you’re trying something,” Smith said sternly, and the manager felt his stomach misbehave again. “You said that those loads could be dumped in an emergency by the conveyors. And you described the conveyors as simply mechanical belt-and-bucket systems, a couple of days ago. Stuff that you just described would blow them into gas. Which was the lie?”

  “Neither!” Hoerwitz gasped desperately. “I didn’t say that the emergency dumping was instantaneous—it isn’t. The process involves fast chilling, using the same conductor fields; and even with them, we’d expect the conveyors to need replacing if we ever used the system!”

  “If that’s so,” Smith asked, “what do you mean by saying a while ago that you didn’t know what could happen to blow this place up? If one of those fields let go—”

  “Oh, but it couldn’t. There are all sorts of automatic safety systems. I don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. If a field starts to weaken, the energy loss automatically drains into conductor fields, and they carry plasma energy that much faster to the radiators, so the plasma cools and the pressure drops—I can’t give you all the details because I don’t understand them myself, but it’s a real fail-safe.”

  Smith still looked suspicious, though he was as accustomed as any civilized person to trusting machinery. It wasn’t the machinery that bothered him just now.

  “You keep switching,” he snapped, “and I don’t like it. One minute you say nothing can happen, and the next you talk about all these emergency features in case it does. Either the people who built this place didn’t know what they were doing, or you’re not leveling.”

  Hoerwitz’s stomach felt even worse, but he kept up the battle.

  “That’s not what I said! I told you things couldn’t happen because of the safety stuff! They knew what they were doing when they built this place—of course, half the major governments on Earth were passing laws about the way it should be done—”

  “Passing laws? For something off Earth?”

  “Sure. Ninety-five percent of the company’s potential customers were nationals of those countries, and there’s nothing like economic pressure. Now, will you stop this nonsense and let me work, or decide you don’t trust me and do it all yourself? There are more reactors almost ready to flash over.”

  It was the wrong line for the old man to take, but Smith also made a mistake in resenting it. It was here that his psychology really went wrong.

  “I don’t trust you’,” he said. “Not one particle. You’ve evaded every detailed question I asked. I don’t even know for certain that that’s Class IV stuff you’ve been cooking for me.”

  “That’s right. You don’t.” Hoerwitz, too, was losing his tact and foresight. “I’ve been expecting you to make some sort of test ever since I set up the program. Or did you take for granted that whoever you found here would be scared into doing just what you wanted? Surely it isn’t possible that you and the friends you said were somewhere else just don’t have anyone able to make such a test! Any properly planned operation would have made getting such a person its first step, I should think—or have I been reading too much again?”

  The expression which had started to develop on Smith’s face disappeared, and he looked steadily at the old man for perhaps half a minute. Then he spoke.

  “Mr. Jones. I think we will have to start Phase Two of the persuasion plan. Will you please prepare for it? We planned this operation, as you call it, Mr. Hoerwitz, quite carefully, in view of certain limitations which faced us. Exactly what those limitations were is none of your business, but remember that we so arranged matters that no one on Earth has been seriously worried by your failure to communicate—nor will they for some time yet. We know that no scheduled freighters are due here for two more revolutions, though we recognize the chance of a tramp tug dropping in with mass to deposit for credit—that is why we plan to have the job done before the next perigee. Our plans also included details for insuring the cooperation of the person we found on duty. The fact that he turned out to be about three times as old as we expected doesn’t affect those plans at all. You have experienced the first part of them. I was rather hoping that no more would be necessary, but you seem to have forgotten that we have the bulge on you. Therefore, you will experience the second part, unless you can think of a way to prove to me that you have been telling the truth—and prove it in a very short time.

  I won’t tell you what the time limit is, but I have already decided on it. Start thinking, Mr. Hoerwitz. I believe Mr. Jones is ready.”

  Hoerwitz couldn’t think. He probably couldn’t have thought if the same situation had faced him forty or fifty years earlier; he had never claimed to be a hero. He spoke, but—as Smith had intended—it was without any sort of consideration.

  “The Class IV stuff that was going when you arrived—it’s cool—you could get a sample of it and test it in your ship’s power plant!”

  “Not good enough. I never doubted that you were telling the truth about that load. It will have to be something else. The material that’s finishing now, or your claim that could really go wrong enough to blow this place into vapor if your fail-safe rigs weren’t there—”

  “But how could I possibly prove that, except by doing it?” gasped the old man.

  “Your problem. Think fast. Mr. Jones will be with you in a moment. In fact, I think he’s on the way now—not hurrying, you understand, because he isn’t really proficient at moving around in this no-weight nuisance—but I think if I looked around I’d see that he had pushed off and was drifting your way. It would be unfair of me to spoil his fun if he gets to you before you’ve thought of something, wouldn’t it?”

  Smith of course meant to reduce the manager to a state of complete panic in which he would be unable to lie, or at least to lie convincingly; but just as he had planned badly in not getting hold of a nuclear engineer of his own, he had planned badly in failing to consider all the possible results of panic. He may, of course, have realized that Hoerwitz might try to do something desperate, but failed to foresee how hard such an action would be to stop in the unfamiliar environment of weightlessness. It was easy to take for granted that a person with such a frail physique could be controlled physically by anyone with no trouble. This was perfectly correct—for anyone within reach of the old ma
n.

  No one was. Worse, from Smith’s point of view, no one but Robinson was in a position to get there. As a result, Mac was able to do something which he would never have seriously considered if he had been given time to think. He was, of course, within reach of a push-off point as a matter of habit. He used every bit of muscle his frail old body could muster in a dive toward the center of the board—and made it.

  Only Robinson had learned his lesson about drifting, and he misjudged his own pushoff and failed to intercept the manager. Hoerwitz reached and opened a plainly labeled switch, and with the action his panic left him as suddenly as it had come, though fear still churned at his stomach.

  “At least, you believed me enough not to risk bullets in the controls,” he almost sneered. “There’s your proof, Mr. Smith. I’ve just shut down all the converters. They’re bleeding energy out of the main radiators and will be cool enough to handle in an hour. If you replace that switch, you’ll know I was telling the truth about safeties. Go ahead. Close it. It’s safe. All you’ll get is a bunch of red lights all over the boards, telling you that safety circuits are blocking you. You’ll have to start those processes from the beginning. I can set that up for you, of course. I will if you give the order; but anything else at all, except dumping the loads, of course, will block you with safeties.”

  “Why?” Smith was still in control of himself, though it was a visible strain.

  “What do you think I am, an astrophysicist? I don’t know why, if you want one of those detailed answers you were complaining about not getting. They come in high-class equations. In words, which is all I understand about it, most of-the processing time in these converters is for setup. The actual conversion is the sort of thing that goes on in the last moments of a supernova’s fling, as I thought everyone knew. The converter has to set up millions of parameters in terms of temperature, density gradients, potential of all sorts—even the changing distance from Earth in this orbit has to be allowed for, I understand—and I don’t know what else before the final step is triggered, if a decent percentage of the desired isotope class is to be produced. I’ve just cleared the setup in eighteen of those converters. If you were actually to build them up to the temperature they had before I hit that switch, you probably would blow the place up. Hence, my friend, the safeties. Working out a reaction that not only produces useful isotopes but also balances endothermic and exothermic processes closely to hold the whole works under control is a perfectly good subject for a doctorate thesis. Do you think we could confine a supernova—or even a few tons of one? Now, do you want me to start these stoves all over, or will you take two loads of Class IV instead of twenty, pull out all my fingernails and fly off in a rage gnashing your teeth?”