Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  * * * * *

  The McGuire ship was a little beauty. A nice, sleek, needle, capable of atmospheric as well as spatial navigation, with a mirror-polished, beryl-blue surface all over the sixty-five feet of her--or his?--length.

  It was standing upright on the surface of the planetoid, a shining needle in the shifting sunlight, limned against the star-filled darkness of space. We looked at it through the transparent viewport, and then took the flexible tube that led to the air lock of the ship.

  The ship was just as beautiful inside as it was outside. Neat, compact, and efficient. The control room--if such it could be called--was like no control room I'd ever seen before. Just an acceleration couch and observation instruments. Midguard explained that it wasn't necessary to be a pilot to run the ship; any person who knew a smattering of astronavigation could get to his destination by simply telling the ship what he wanted to do.

  Jack Ravenhurst took in the whole thing with wide-eyed interest.

  "Is the brain activated, Mr. Midguard?" she asked.

  "Oh, yes. We've been educating him for the past month, pumping information in as rapidly as he could record it and index it. He's finished with that stage now; we're just waiting for the selection of a test pilot for the final shakedown cruise." He was looking warily at Jack as he spoke, as if he were waiting for something.

  Evidently, he knew what was coming. "I'd like to talk to him," Jack said. "It's so interesting to carry on an intelligent conversation with a machine."

  "I'm afraid that's impossible, Miss Ravenhurst," Midguard said rather worriedly. "You see, McGuire's primed so that the first man's voice he hears will be identified as his master. It's what we call the 'chick reaction'. You know: the first moving thing a newly-hatched bird sees is regarded as the mother, and, once implanted, that order can't be rescinded. We can change McGuire's orientation in that respect, but we'd rather not have to go through that. After the test pilot establishes contact, you can talk to him all you want."

  "When will the test pilot be here?" Jack asked, still as sweet as sucrodyne.

  "Within a few days. It looks as though a man named Nels Bjornsen will be our choice. You may have heard of him."

  "No," she said, "but I'm sure your choice will be correct."

  Midguard still felt apologetic. "Well, you know how it is, Miss Ravenhurst; we can't turn a delicate machine like this over to just anyone for the first trial. He has to be a man of good judgment and fast reflexes. He has to know exactly what to say and when to say it, if you follow me."

  "Oh, certainly; certainly." She paused and looked thoughtful. "I presume you've taken precautions against anyone stealing in here and taking control of the ship."

  Midguard smiled and nodded wisely. "Certainly. Communication with McGuire can't be established unless and until two keys are used in the activating panel. I carry one; Colonel Brock has the other. Neither of us will give his key up to anyone but the accredited test pilot. And McGuire himself will scream out an alarm if anyone tries to jimmy the locks. He's his own burglar alarm."

  She nodded. "I see." A pause. "Well, Mr. Midguard, I think you've done a very commendable job. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you feel I should see?"

  "Well--" He was smilingly hesitant. "If there's anything else you want to see, I'll be glad to show it to you. But you've already seen our ... ah ... piece de resistance, so to speak."

  She glanced at her wrist. It had been over four hours since we'd started. "I am rather tired," Jack said. "And hungry, too. Let's call it a day and go get something to eat."

  "Fine! Fine!" Midguard said. "I'll be honored to be your host, if I may. We could have a little something at my apartment."

  I knew perfectly well that he'd had a full lunch prepared and waiting.

  The girl acknowledged his invitation and accepted it. Brock and I trailed along like the bodyguards we were supposed to be. I wondered whether or not Brock suspected me of being more than I appeared to be. If he didn't, he was stupider than I thought; on the other hand, he could never be sure. I wasn't worried about his finding out that I was a United Nations agent; that was a pretty remote chance. Brock didn't even know the United Nations Government had a Secret Service; it was unlikely that he would suspect me of being an agent of a presumably nonexistent body.

  But he could very easily suspect that I had been sent to check on him and the Thurston menace, and, if he had any sense, he actually did. I wasn't going to give him any verification of that suspicion if I could help it.

  * * * * *

  Midguard had an apartment in the executive territory of the Viking reservation, a fairly large place with plastic-lined walls instead of the usual painted nickel-iron. Very luxurious for Ceres.

  The meal was served with an air of subdued pretension that made everybody a little stiff and uncomfortable, with the possible exception of Jack Ravenhurst, and the definite exception of myself. I just listened politely to the strained courtesy that passed for small talk and waited for the chance I knew would come at this meal.

  After the eating was all over, and we were all sitting around with cigarettes going and wine in our glasses, I gave the girl the signal we had agreed upon. She excused herself very prettily and left the room.

  After fifteen minutes, I began to look a little worried. The bathroom was only a room away--we were in a dining area, and the bathroom was just off the main bedroom--and it shouldn't have taken her that long to brush her hair and powder her face.

  I casually mentioned it to Colonel Brock, and he smiled a little.

  "Don't worry, Oak; even if she does walk out of this apartment, my men will be following her wherever she goes. I'd have a report within one minute after she left."

  I nodded, apparently satisfied. "I've been relying on that," I said. "Otherwise, I'd have followed her to the door."

  He chuckled and looked pleased.

  Ten minutes after that, even he was beginning to look a little worried. "Maybe we'd better go check," he said. "She might have hurt herself or ... or become ill."

  Midguard looked flustered. "Now, just a minute, colonel! I can't allow you to just barge in on a young girl in the ... ah ... bathroom. Especially not Miss Ravenhurst."

  Brock made his decision fast; I'll give him credit for that.

  "Get Miss Pangloss on the phone!" he snapped. "She's just down the corridor. She'll come down on your orders."

  At the same time, he got to his feet and made a long jump for the door. He grabbed the doorpost as he went by, swung himself in a new orbit, and launched himself toward the front door. "Knock on the bathroom door, Oak!" he bawled as he left.

  I did a long, low, flat dive toward the bedroom, swung left, and brought myself up sharply next to the bathroom door. I pounded on the door. "Miss Ravenhurst! Jack! Are you all right?"

  No answer.

  Good. There shouldn't have been.

  Colonel Brock fired himself into the room and braked himself against the wall. "Any answer?"

  "No."

  "My men outside say she hasn't left." He rapped sharply on the door with the butt of his stun gun. "Miss Ravenhurst! Is there anything the matter?"

  Again, no answer.

  I could see that Brock was debating on whether he should go ahead and charge in by himself without waiting for the female executive who lived down the way. He was still debating when the woman showed up, escorted by a couple of the colonel's uniformed guards.

  Miss Pangloss was one of those brisk, efficient, middle-aged career-women who had no fuss or frills about her. She had seen us knocking on the door, so she didn't bother to do any knocking herself. She just opened the door and went in.

  The bathroom was empty.

  Again, as it should be.

  All hell broke loose then, with me and Brock making most of the blather. It took us nearly ten minutes to find that the only person who had left the area had been an elderly, thin man who had been wearing the baggy protective clothing of a maintenance man.

  By that
time, Jack Ravenhurst had been gone more than forty minutes. She could be almost anywhere on Ceres.

  Colonel Brock was furious and so was I. I sneered openly at his assurance that the girl couldn't leave and then got sneered back at for letting other people do what was supposed to be my job. That phase only lasted for about a minute, though.

  Then Colonel Brock muttered: "She must have had a plexiskin mask and a wig and the maintenance clothing in her purse. As I recall, it was a fairly good-sized one." He didn't say a word about how careless I had been to let her put such stuff in her purse. "All right," he went on, "we'll find her."

  "I'm going to look around, too," I said. "I'll keep in touch with your office." I got out of there.

  * * * * *

  I got to a public phone as fast as I could, punched BANning 6226, and said: "Marty? Any word?"

  "Not yet."

  "I'll call back."

  I hung up and scooted out of there.

  I spent the next several hours pushing my weight around all over Ceres. As the personal representative of Shalimar Ravenhurst, who was manager of Viking Spacecraft, which was, in turn, the owner of Ceres, I had a lot of weight to push around. I had every executive on the planetoid jumping before I was through.

  Colonel Brock, of course, was broiling in his own juices. He managed to get hold of me by phone once, by calling a Dr. Perelson whom I was interviewing at the time.

  The phone chimed, Perelson said, "Excuse me," and went to answer. I could hear his voice from the other room.

  "Mr. Daniel Oak? Yes; he's here. Well, yes. Oh, all sorts of questions, colonel." Perelson's voice was both irritated and worried. "He says Miss Ravenhurst is missing; is that so? Oh? Well, does this man have any right to question me this way? Asking me? About everything!... How well I know the girl, the last time I saw her--things like that. Good heavens, we've hardly met!" He was getting exasperated now. "But does he have the authority to ask these questions? Oh. Yes. Well, of course, I'll be glad to co-operate in any manner I can ... Yes ... Yes. All right, I'll call him."

  I got up from the half-reclining angle I'd been making with the wall, and shuffled across the room as Dr. Perelson stuck his head around the corner and said, "It's for you." He looked as though someone had put aluminum hydrogen sulfate in his mouthwash.

  I picked up the receiver and looked at Brock's face in the screen. He didn't even give me a chance to talk. "What are you trying to do?" he shouted explosively.

  "Trying to find Jaqueline Ravenhurst," I said, as calmly as I could.

  "Oak, you're a maniac! Why, by this time, it's all over Ceres that the boss' daughter is missing! Shalimar Ravenhurst will have your hide for this!"

  "He will?" I gave him Number 2--the wide-eyed innocent stare. "Why?"

  "Why, you idiot, I thought you had sense enough to know that this should be kept quiet! She's pulled this stunt before, and we always managed to quiet things down before anything happened! We've managed to keep everything under cover and out of the public eye ever since she was fifteen, and now you blow it all up out of proportion and create a furore that won't ever be forgotten!"

  He gave his speech as though it had been written for him in full caps, with three exclamation points after every sentence, and added gestures and grimaces after every word.

  "Just doing what I thought was best," I said. "I want to find her as soon as possible."

  "Well, stop it! Now! Let us handle it from here on in!"

  Then I lowered the boom. "Now you listen, Brock. I am in charge of Jack Ravenhurst, not you. I've lost her, and I'll find her. I'll welcome your co-operation, and I'd hate to have to fight you, but if you don't like the way I'm handling it, you can just tell your boys to go back to their regular work and let me handle it alone, without interference. Now, which'll it be?"

  He opened his mouth, closed it, and blew out his breath from between his lips. Then he said: "All right. The damage has been done, anyhow. But don't think I won't report all this to Ravenhurst as soon as I can get a beam to Raven's Rest."

  "That's your job and your worry, not mine. Now, have you got any leads?"

  "None," he admitted.

  "Then I'll go out and dig up some. I'll let you know if I need you." And I cut off.

  Dr. Perelson was sitting on his couch, with an expression that indicated that the pH of his saliva was hovering around one point five.

  I said, "That will be all, Dr. Perelson. Thank you for your co-operation." And I walked out into the corridor, leaving him with a baffled look.

  * * * * *

  At the next public phone, I dialed the BANning number again.

  "Any news?"

  "Not from her; she hasn't reported in at all."

  "I didn't figure she would. What else?"

  "Just as you said," he told me. "With some cute frills around the edges. Ten minutes ago, a crowd of kids--sixteen to twenty-two age range--about forty of 'em--started a songfest and football game in the corridor outside Colonel Brock's place. The boys he had on duty there recognized the Jack Ravenhurst touch, and tried to find her in the crowd. Nothing doing. Not a sign of her."

  "That girl's not only got power," I said, "but she's bright as a solar flare."

  "Agreed. She's headed up toward Dr. Midguard's place now. I don't know what she has in mind, but it ought to be fun to watch."

  "Where's Midguard now?" I asked.

  "Hovering around Brock, as we figured. He's worried and feels responsible because she disappeared from his apartment, as predicted."

  "Well, I've stirred up enough fuss in this free-falling anthill to give them all the worries they need. Tell me what's the overall effect?"

  "Close to perfect. It's slightly scandalous and very mysterious, so everybody's keeping an eye peeled. If anyone sees Jaqueline Ravenhurst, they'll run to a phone, and naturally she's been spotted by a dozen different people in a dozen different places already.

  "You've got both Brock's Company guards and the civil police tied up for a while."

  "Fine. But be sure you keep the boys who are on her tail shifting around often enough so that she doesn't spot them."

  "Don't worry your thick little head about that, Dan," he said. "They know their business. Are you afraid they'll lose her?"

  "No, I'm not, and you know it. I just don't want her to know she's being followed. If she can't ditch her shadow, she's likely to try to talk to him and pull out all the stops convincing him that he should go away."

  "You think she could? With my boys?"

  "No, but if she tries it, it'll mean she knows she's being followed. That'll make it tougher to keep a man on her trail. Besides, I don't want her to try to convince him and fail."

  "Ich graben Sie. On the off chance that she does spot one and gives him a good talking to, I'll pass along the word that the victim is to walk away meekly and get lost."

  "Good," I said, "but I'd rather she didn't know."

  "She won't. You're getting touchy, Dan; 'pears to me you'd rather be doing that job yourself, and think nobody can handle it but you."

  I gave him my best grin. "You are closer than you know. O.K., I'll lay off. You handle your end of it and I'll handle mine."

  "A fair exchange is no bargain. Go, and sin no more."

  "I'll buzz you back before I go in," I said, and hung up.

  * * * * *

  Playing games inside a crowded asteroid is not the same as playing games in, say, Honolulu or Vladivostok, especially when that game is a combination of hide-and-seek and ring-around-the-Rosie. The trouble is lack of communication. Radio contact is strictly line-of-sight inside a hunk of metal. Radar beams can get a little farther, but a man has to be an expert billiards player to bank a reflecting beam around very many corners, and even that would depend upon the corridors being empty, which they never are. To change the game analogy again, it would be like trying to sink a ninety-foot putt across Times Square on New Year's Eve.

  Following somebody isn't anywhere near as easy as popular fiction might le
ad you to believe. Putting a tail on someone whose spouse wants divorce evidence is relatively easy, but even the best detectives can lose a man by pure mischance. If the tailee, for instance, walks into a crowded elevator and the automatic computer decides that the car is filled to the limit, the man who's tailing him will be left facing a closed door. Something like that can happen by accident, without any design on the part of the tailee.

  If you use a large squad of agents, all in radio contact with one another, that kind of loss can be reduced to near zero by simply having a man covering every possible escape route.

  But if the tailee knows, or even suspects, that he's being followed, wants to get away from his tail, and has the ability to reason moderately well, it requires an impossibly large team to keep him in sight. And if that team has no fast medium of communication, they're licked at the onset.

  In this case, we were fairly certain of Jack Ravenhurst's future actions, and so far our prophecies had been correct ... but if she decided to shake her shadows, fun would be had by all.

  And as long as I had to depend on someone else to do my work for me, I was going to be just the teenchiest bit concerned about whether they were doing it properly.

  I decided it was time to do my best to imitate a cosmic-ray particle, and put on a little speed through the corridors that ran through the subsurface of Ceres.

  My vac suit was in my hotel room. One of the other agents had picked it up from my flitterboat and packed it carefully into a small attaché case. I'd planned my circuit so that I'd be near the hotel when things came to the proper boil, so I did a lot of diving, breaking all kinds of traffic regulations in the process.

  I went to my room, grabbed the attaché case, checked it over quickly--never trust another man to check your vac suit for you--and headed for the surface.

  Nobody paid any attention to me when I walked out of the air lock onto the spacefield. There were plenty of people moving in and out, going to and from their ships and boats. It wasn't until I reached the edge of the field that I realized that I had over-played my hand with Colonel Brock. It was only by the narrowest hair, but that had been enough to foul up my plans. There were guards surrounding the perimeter with radar search beams.