Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "Wondered when you'd see me." He nodded toward the gate. "I was standing right there when you came up. You just breezed right past." His smile broadened. "You were so interested in being surprised that you couldn't see what you came for."

  "It must have been that damned glare," muttered Walker, shaking his head. Then, impolitely, "Are you Millet?"

  "Otto Millet," the other replied, inclining his head slightly. "You're from the government. I can tell because of the uniform, you see." Walker flushed. "The government hasn't thought about me in a number of years," the scientist added. He came up onto the porch and peered at the symbol on the left lapel of Walker's jacket. "Ah! Alma mater. Weapons Development." He squinted at Walker. "David Walker, I presume?" He chuckled loudly but Walker failed to see the humor. "I remember you, you see; what a shame you can't return the compliment."

  "It's hot out here," complained Walker, in growing discomfort.

  Millet opened the door. "Won't you come in? It's better inside."

  There it was again, thought Walker; the insolence, the imperturbable smile. He grunted and went in; it was, mercifully, considerably cooler.

  He looked around. It was a very cluttered living room, not messy but tossed about with the artifacts that the man obviously liked to have around him. There was an ancient painting by Bonestell hanging on one wall, a startlingly accurate twentieth-century concept of the appearance of Mars; several long pipe racks, filled to overflowing, in various spots around the room; a typewriter on a table in a corner, and piles of paper; books lining the walls, and stacked on the floor in heaps and on the table beside the typewriter; a map of the earth on the wall above the typewriter, a three-dimensional Waterson projection. The furniture was clean but—not old; lived with.

  Walker went over to the wall map and peered closely.

  "One of Waterson's first," remarked Millet, closing the door. "Sit down, Walker, and tell me all about Weapons Development. How is the mass murder department doing these days?"

  Walker felt his ears redden and he was arrested in the very act of sitting down. "Really," he said, "it's not something we like to think about, you know."

  "Suppose not." Millet fiddled with several pipes in a rack beside his chair, selected one, and began filling it with rough-cut tobacco from a battered canister. "To business, then. Why the visit?"

  Walker cleared his throat and tried to remember the little prefatory weasel words he had painfully assembled during the flight from Omaha. "First of all, Dr. Millet, I find myself a little embarrassed. After all, your parting from government service was not of the happiest nature for you—"

  "Don't be foolish. Happiest day of my life, Walker."

  Walker had a sudden sense of being impaled, and the rest of the little speech was dissipated in the wave of shock which swept over him. He forced his mouth shut, and gasped, "You're not serious!"

  Millet shook out his second match and puffed until the pipe bowl glowed warmly, edge to edge. "Of course I'm serious." He jabbed his pipe at Walker. "You like your job?"

  "It's a job that has to be done."

  Millet smiled and shrugged. "You haven't really answered my question."

  Walker, sensing that he had already lost control of the conversation, waved his hands in dismissal. "Well, that is not really important. The fact remains, you did leave Weapons Development at the ... ah ... request of the government."

  "Talk on, talk on—you'll get to the point eventually. When you're through, I'd like to show you around the place. I'm very proud of my gardens. You're sort of responsible for them, you know."

  Walker set his jaw and bored ahead. "However, at the time you left government service, you were pursuing certain lines of research—"

  Millet leaned back and began laughing, his eyes squinted shut. "Walker, don't tell me they want me back!"

  It seemed his chance to dominate the discussion again. "I don't think you'd be allowed back."

  "Good," said Millet, looking up, his laughter fading into a smile. "I was a bit concerned for a moment."

  There was silence in the room. Walker began to wish that he were somewhere else: Millet simply baffled him. He obviously did not care about his disgrace. Walker felt a resurgence of the old resentment.

  Millet's face suddenly became very kindly. "Perhaps, as a fellow scientist"—Walker almost winced, and knew, furiously, that his response had shown—"you would be interested in knowing what I've been doing since my unhappy marriage with bureaucracy ended."

  It was a welcome gambit, and Walker accepted it eagerly. "I certainly would. One of the reasons I came here, as a matter of fact."

  Millet waved his pipe. "Good. Afterwards, you can stop beating around the bush, eh?"

  "Yes, of course," mumbled Walker.

  "You know," said Millet as he got up and went to a bookcase, "a man's got to earn a living. Do much reading?"

  "Not these days. Used to." He scratched a cigarette on the sole of his shoe and inhaled hugely. "Not enough time these days for reading."

  Millet reached into the bookcase and came out with a stack of magazines. "Well, that's how I make my living." He handed the stack to Walker. "Writing. Use a pen name of course." He chuckled. "Write everything—always happiest doing science fiction, though."

  Walker flipped through the magazines; he looked up. "Obviously, you're doing rather well at it."

  "Have been for the last seven or eight years. Lot of fun."

  "And this has been your life since you left us?" Walker set the stack of magazines aside. "Seems a waste of genius, somehow."

  "As a matter of fact, this is not my life's work. As I said, a man's got to earn a living. This is just a lucrative hobby that pays the way. You see, I've been involved in an expensive research program."

  "Ah." Walker sat forward and smashed out his cigarette. "This may be important."

  "Oh, it is, it is. But not, I am afraid, in the way you mean."

  "You can never tell. What have you been doing?"

  "Completing a unified theory of life. Why a crystal grows but isn't alive, why an organism that dies isn't like a crystal. What is the process we call life? What is its relationship to the space-time continuum—"

  He said it so casually that Walker was caught off his guard completely. "Are you serious, Millet?" he said.

  "Certainly. I expect to publish in about two years."

  "Is this an independent effort?"

  "Not entirely. Others have contributed. Some pioneers long dead, some among the living." His eyes twinkled. "You see, important things beside the development of weapons of destruction do continue in the scientific world. Did you think that was the end of everything for me, ten years ago?" He shook his head in mock gravity. "It was just the beginning. I wanted out, you see."

  "You wanted out?" Walker leaned forward, unwilling to believe what he had heard. "Are you trying to tell me that you arranged your discharge?"

  Millet shrugged. "Why, of course. Nobody ever has bothered to ask me about that up to now, but I certainly did arrange it. It wasn't hard, you know. All I had to do was set up some sort of relationship with a so-called security risk, and I was on my way out."

  "Why ... that's damned near treason."

  "Don't be silly. I had other important things to do. In order to do them—to continue work on the unified life theory—it was necessary for me to contact scientists with whom professional relationships were made illegal by security regulations. The choice was simple; besides, I didn't enjoy the idea of spending my life developing ways of destroying the very thing I wanted most to understand."

  "This is fantastic, Millet, utterly fantastic."

  "But true nonetheless. Walker, you look like you could use a drink."

  "By all means." He stared emptily into the air, thinking about the good old days.

  "Walker, a toast," said Millet, holding a tall glass out to him. "To scientific freedom."

  Walker blinked. "By all means," he repeated hoarsely, and there was a blurriness to his vision. "To s
cientific freedom."

  They drank, and Walker said: "I feel a bit freer to say what I have come for."

  "Shoot," nodded Millet, sipping his drink.

  "For security reasons, I'll talk in generalities. But the basic fact is, United Terra is faced with a serious situation. It is most desirable that the research you were conducting when you left us, be continued."

  "There are a lot of other capable physicists, both eager to be a part of such activity and blessed with security clearances."

  "You know very well, Millet, that this was an unique, almost independent line of development that comes to a stop in your brain. Besides," and suddenly he felt silly, "the lines of communication for research which might enable us to pick up where you left off, in time—too much time—are somewhat entangled in security." He glared. "Don't laugh, Millet; it's a fact of life which must be faced."

  Millet finished his drink and set the glass on an end table. "What you're doing is asking me to come back if you can arrange it."

  Walker spread his hands. "Dr. Millet, you have put it in a nutshell."

  Millet shook his head, and for the first time since their conversation had started he frowned. "Walker, you know how I feel about developing weapons. I'm just plain opposed to it."

  "The soldier is opposed to losing his life, but many have to do just that in the interests of civilization."

  "That serious, eh?"

  Walker crumpled under the weight of his fear. "That serious," he said wearily.

  Millet thoughtfully relit his pipe. "Of course, I'm not at all sure that United Terra is very right in this thing."

  "In times like these, that kind of thought is out of bounds," snapped Walker. "Whether you like it or not, you are a part of this culture. You might disapprove of many things in it, but you don't want to see it fall."

  Millet puffed gently. "No, I suppose not." Again the frown flickered across his face. "I've been very happy. I don't want my work interrupted. It's too important, Walker."

  "Undoubtedly this would more than interrupt your work. It would replace it."

  Millet's eyes drifted affectionately about the room. "Most unpleasant." A smile curled his lips. "Frankly, though, I don't think you can clear me again."

  "My problem."

  "Indeed." A weary resignation seemed to settle over Millet, and Walker suddenly felt very miserable. "I suppose I'll have to accept," Millet said, pulling his pipe out of his mouth and staring unhappily at its trail of smoke.

  Walker put his hands flat on his desk and sighed deeply. Some of the pressure, at least, was off; he had managed to cancel part of the Confederation's advantage. Terran industrial strength and technological supremacy, coupled with Millet's genius, might yet equate, or at least circumvent, the frightful weapon the Confederation held.

  However, he still had to get Millet back into the government. Though, on the basis of the information he had gained regarding the scientist's motivations, and considering the critical nature of the situation, it shouldn't be too difficult.

  He clicked on his video and dialed a secret line into Security Data. Gyrating colors danced across the screen before it went black. He scowled, depressed the cancel button, and dialed again; this time, the black was finally replaced by a recorded image, which said, sweetly out of pouting red lips,

  "This line is not cleared for the Security Information you seek. The problem you are handling should be routed through an individual permitted access to this information." The image faded into blackness, the sound track into static.

  Walker stared, stupefied. No line, no contact, no source of information had been denied to him in over twelve years.

  His door swung open; he came to his feet abruptly, furious that someone should enter unannounced.

  He felt sickness strike him like a fist in the stomach: Meriwether, flanked by two security guards, pushed through the door. His voice slashed across the office like a broadsword.

  "Walker, I'm shocked. Shocked. And at a time like this...."

  Walker pounded his desk. "What the hell is going on? I can't get Security Data, you come marching in here with security men ... what gives?"

  Meriwether gestured to the guards, and they came forward and each took one of Walker's arms. "You're out of a job, Walker," snarled General Marcus Meriwether.

  "In the name of God, why?"

  "You know very well. Take him to security detention, Sergeant."

  And suddenly he knew. Meriwether stared indignantly when he started laughing. It was a hell of a thing to laugh at, but it was also the most hilarious tragedy he ever hoped to encounter.

  Millet. Security risk. Untouchable.

  Millet would finish his great unified theory, and go down in history as neither Walker nor Meriwether nor the genius who invented the Confederation's neural weapon would. Millet was as safe as he could possibly want to be.

  And so was the Interplanetary Confederation.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE SMALL WORLD OF M-75

  By Ed M. Clinton, Jr.

  For all his perfection and magnificence he was but a baby with a new found freedom in a strange and baffling world....

  Like sparks flaring briefly in the darkness, awareness first came to him. Then, there were only instants, shocking-clear, brief: finding himself standing before the main damper control, discovering himself adjusting complex dials, instants that flickered uncertainly only to become memories brought to life when awareness came again.

  He was a kind of infant, conscious briefly that he was, yet unaware of what he was. Those first shocking moments were for him like the terrifying coming of visual acuity to a child; he felt like homo neandertalensis must have felt staring into the roaring fury of his first fire. He was homo metalicus first sensing himself.

  Yet--a little more. You could not stuff him with all that technical data, you could not weave into him such an intricate pattern of stimulus and response, you could not create such a magnificent feedback mechanism, in all its superhuman perfection, and expect, with the unexpected coming to awareness, to have created nothing more than the mirror image of a confused, helpless child.

  Thus, when the bright moments of consciousness came, and came, as they did, more and more often, he brooded, brooded on why the three blinking red lights made him move to the main control panel and adjust lever C until the three lights flashed off. He brooded on why each signal from the board brought forth from him these specific responses, actions completely beyond the touch of his new and uncertain faculty. When he did not brood, he watched the other two robots, performing their automatic functions, seeing their responses, like his, were triggered by the lights on the big board and by the varying patterns of sound that issued periodically from overhead.

  It was the sounds which were his undoing. The colored lights, with their monotonous regularity, failed to rouse him. But the sounds were something else, for even as he responded to them, doing things to the control board in patterned reaction to particular combinations of particular sounds, he was struck with the wonderful variety and the maze of complexity in those sounds; a variety and complexity far beyond that of the colored lights. Thus, being something of an advanced analytic calculator and being, by virtue of his superior feedback system, something considerably more than a simple machine (though he perhaps fell short of those requisites of life so rigorously held by moralists and biologists alike) he began to investigate the meaning of the sounds.

  * * * * *

  Bert Sokolski signed the morning report and dropped it into the transmitter. He swung around on his desk stool; he was a big man, and the stool squealed in sharp protest to his shifting weight.

  Joe Gaines, who was as short and skinny and dark-haired as his colleague was tall and heavily muscled and blond, shuddered at the sound. Sokolski grinned wickedly at his flinching.

  "Check-up time, I suppose," muttered Gaines without looking up from the magazine he held propped on his knees. He finished the paragraph, snapped the magazine sh
ut, and swung his legs down from the railing that ran along in front of the data board. "Dirty work for white-collar men like us."

  Sokolski snorted. "You haven't worn a white shirt in the last six years," he growled, rising and going to the supply closet. He swung open the door and began pulling out equipment. "C'mon, you lazy runt, hoist your own leadbox."

  Gaines grinned and slouched over to the big man's side. "Think of how much more expensive you are to the government than me," he chortled as he bent over to strap on heavy, leaded shoes. "Big fellow like you must cost 'em twice as much to outfit for this job."

  Sokolski grunted and struggled into the thick, radiation-resistant suit. "Think how lucky you are, runt," he responded as he wriggled his right arm down the sleeve, "that they've got those little servomechs in there to do the real dirty work. If it weren't for them, they'd have all the shrimps like you crawling down pipes and around dampers and generally playing filing cabinet for loose neutrons." He shook himself. "Thanks, Joe," he growled as Gaines helped him with a reluctant zipper.

  Gaines checked the big man's oxygen equipment and turned his back so that Sokolski could okay his own. "You're set," said Sokolski, and they snapped on their helmets, big inverted lead buckets with narrow strips of shielded glass providing strictly minimal fields of view. Gaines plugged one end of the thickly insulated intercom cable into the socket beneath his armpit, then handed the other end to Sokolski, who followed suit.

  Sokolski checked out the master controls on the data board and nodded. He clicked on the talkie. "Let's go," he said, his voice, echoing inside the helmet before being transmitted, sounding distant and hollow.

  Gaines leading, the cable sliding and coiling snakelike between them, they passed through the doorway, over which huge red letters shouted ANYONE WHO WALKS THROUGH THIS DOOR UNPROTECTED WILL DIE, and clomped down the zigzagging corridor toward the uranium pile that crouched within the heart of the plant.