Selected Stories of Alfred Bester

by Alfred Bester

  “Guard's come to,” breathed Dunn. “How much longer, Lewis? We haven't much time.”

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  With frantic fingers, Cole yanked cartridges from his belt and pried the bullet-heads from the shells.

  He dumped out the bound stalks of cordite, split open the bundles and began to lay a long string of individual stalks across the smooth floor of the projector room. Dunn pitched in, and together they laid a long train weaving in and out around the sides of the tower.

  When they returned to the laboratory, the mass in the beaker had set into a huge lump of yellowish gelatin. “Careful, now!” gasped Cole. He lifted up the beaker and carried it gently outside, placed it on the floor with open mouth adjacent to the end of the train.

  “Mercury fulminate,” he called to Dunn. “You'll find the powder in a watch crystal on the table.”

  Cole took the powder and heaped it in a pile just touching the gelatin and train. Then he arose painfully and bit his lip.

  “Let's go,” he said. He bent over again and applied a match to the far end of the train. The cordite flared and burned rapidly along its length. Dunn scooped up the rifles and together they dashed down the hatchway, and out on the stairs. They galloped down, three at a jump. As they reached the landing Dunn called:

  “Stand by, Lewis, trouble ahead!” The officer and guards were assembled on the landing with an excited, uniformless man. They glanced at Cole and Dunn and raised their rifles. Before a shot was fired, the two scientists had smashed into them, sending them reeling. They darted down the lower stairs. A volley roared after them, missed.

  Far up the tower the shots continued to belch out. Then they had reached the bottom and were tearing through the radio room. The operator sprang to his feet. Cole sprinted past Dunn, swung up his rifle, and sent the man smashing back into his control board. They panted through the door, reached the head of the broad staircase, and there Dunn twisted his ankle. He collapsed like a deflated balloon, reeled and tottered forward down the broad expanse of steps like a rag doll.

  Cole almost fell himself as he burst down with all the speed he could manage. Dunn was semi-conscious when he reached him. He tried to rise and slipped back again.

  “Go ahead, Lewis,” he grinned. “No Merriwell stuff!”

  Cole cursed and picked up the light man and eased him over his shoulder. Feet were trampling down the staircase as he tugged open the guard room door and burst into the astonished group of men loitering there.

  “Sick,” he yelled. “I'm getting him below.” He crossed the room in three giant steps and was through the curtain before they could answer.

  HE must hurry. Time was precious. He managed to pull open the heavy outer door and was out in the open. The train wasn't too long. It was due any moment now. He lurched across the grounds, gasping with split lungs. The fence was a hundred yards distant. Would it be far enough?

  Could he reach it before— A hundred yards. It seemed like a hundred miles. He heard men shouting behind him and suddenly the gate loomed up and he was surrounded by alert men with poised rifles. He sagged against the wire mesh, eyes popping with the strain.

  And at that moment the tower blew up.

  It seemed to shake itself loose from Black Tor and spray out against the bright morning sky. There was a titanic explosion and a hideous fountain of flames ripped down the length of the stone and masonry. It stopped and showed sudden space where solid brick had been a moment before. Then the concussion threw them to the ground and Cole lay amid the whistling fragments that rained down.

  He thought he must have lost consciousness for a long time, for it seemed hours later when at last he arose and looked about. The tower was entirely demolished. Only a few fragments of the foundation still stood. The entire peak of the Tor was littered with chunks of broken stone and here and there he could see bewildered guards in torn uniforms struggling to their feet. But, curiously, the explosions still went on.

  He stared at the little craters of earth that blasted up over the peak.

  “Give me a hand up, Lewis.”

  Startled, Cole saw that Dunn was apparently unharmed, although his left shoulder looked bloody and twisted. He raised him gently, then the two crouched back and wondered at the reason for the explosions. At last Dunn snapped his fingers.

  “National Guard,” he said, and tried a grin. “Isn't it just like them to get here too late? They're shelling the peak from below with a Stokes mortar. Probably they took that look around this morning and got the story from the boys below.”

  Cole nodded and, as if by common consent, they turned and hurried down the road away from the well meant destruction. A hundred yards below they paused to rip off the gelatin uniforms and stare down at the little town. They could see brown uniforms bustling about and the glitter of bayonets. For some time they walked in silence and at last Dunn grunted and asked: “How'd you do it, Lewis?”

  “Blasting gelatin,” answered Cole. “That's why I was almost busted out of Columbia. Learned how to make it at school. Explosives always were a hobby of mine.”

  “I see.” Dunn sighed and tried to adjust his smashed shoulder a little. “Tell me, Lewis. How did you know it was Miller?”

  “Oh, that! Well, you gave me the clue yourself. Remember the photograph of Miller and Gurwitsch?

  You mentioned at the time that Gurwitsch had done remarkable things with abnormal plant growth and told me to look it up in the Journal of Zoology. I did, and discovered it was Gurwitsch who had done the initial work on mitogenetic rays at the Moscow Institute.”

  “But just because Miller studied with him—” objected Dunn.

  “Naturally that's not conclusive proof,” interrupted Cole. “But there was another matter that seemed to clinch it. Among Miller's papers at the hospital I found a curious item. A bill for six thousand dollars worth of raw beef bones. Know what you make from bones? Gelatin. Yes! Miller had been preparing this coup for years. Manufactured his own special gelatin fabric for the uniforms in secret. He organized everything without a clue. Probably conceived the plan back in Moscow. Evidently he learned more than biology back there. He had the will to lead and direct, the love of authority and domination.”

  “I see,” repeated Dunn. He gazed around at the cool morning with something of relief in his pain-stricken face, “I suppose this finishes it.”

  “Not quite,” answered Cole slowly. “We've smashed the projector and its inventor, and the army's taking care of the Boys in White down there, but—” His eyes took in the stricken land and he pointed toward the distorted things. “No, our work's just beginning, Dunn. We must bring health and sanity back.” Suddenly he noticed the revolver still clenched in his fist. He tossed it into the crackling brush with ashiver of unconcealed relief.

  “Thank God,” he said, “I've no more use for that. I'm a doctor—not a destroyer.”

  * * *

  Something Up There Likes Me

  There were these three lunatics, and two of them were human. I could talk to all of them because I speak languages, decimal and binary. The first time I ran into the clowns was when they wanted to know all about Herostratus, and I told them. The next time it was Conus gloria maris. I told them. The third time it was where to hide. I told them and we've been in touch ever since.

  He was Jake Madigan (James Jacob Madigan, Ph.D., University of Virginia), chief of the Exobiology Section at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which hopes to study extraterrestrial life forms if they can ever get hold of any. To give you some idea of his sanity, he once programmed the IBM 704 computer with a deck of cards that would print out lemons, oranges, plums and so on. Then he played slot-machine against it and lost his shirt. The boy was real loose.

  She was Florinda Pot, pronounced “Poe.” It's a Flemish name. She was a pretty towhead, but freckled all over, up to the hemline and down into the cleavage. She was an M.E. from Sheffield University and had a machine-gun English voice. She'd been in the Sounding Rocket Division until
she blew up an Aerobee with an electric blanket. It seems that solid fuel doesn't give maximum acceleration if it gets too cold, so this little Mother's Helper warmed her rockets at White Sands with electric blankets before ignition time. A blanket caught fire and Voom.

  Their son was S-333. At NASA they label them “S” for scientific satellites and “A” for application satellites. After the launch they give them public acronyms like IMP, SYNCOM, OSO, and so on. S-333 was to become OBO, which stands for Orbiting Biological Observatory, and how those two clowns ever got that third clown into space I will never understand. I suspect the director handed them the mission because no one with any sense wanted to touch it

  As Project Scientist, Madigan was in charge of the experiment packages that were to be flown, and they were a spaced-out lot. He called his own ELECTROLUX, after the vacuum cleaner. Scientist-type joke. It was an intake system that would suck in dust particles and deposit them in a flask containing a culture medium. A light shone through the flask into a photomultiplier. If any of the dust proved to be spore forms, and if they took in the medium, their growth would cloud the flask, and the obscuration of light would register on the photomultiplier. They call that Detection by Extinction.

  Cal Tech had an RNA experiment to investigate whether RNA molecules could encode an organism's environmental experience. They were using nerve cells from the mollusk Sea Hare. Harvard was planning a package to investigate the Orcadian effect. Pennsylvania wanted to examine the effect of the earth's magnetic field on iron bacteria, and had to be put out on a boom to prevent magnetic interface with the satellite's electronic system. Ohio State was sending up lichens to test the effect of space on their symbiotic relationship to molds and algae. Michigan was flying a terrarium containing one (1) carrot which required forty-seven (47) separate commands for performance. All in all, S-333 was strictly Rube Goldberg.

  Florinda was the Project Manager, supervising the construction of the satellite and the packages; the Project Manager is more or less the foreman of the mission. Although she was pretty and interestingly lunatic, she was gung ho on her job and displayed the disposition of a freckle-faced tarantula when she was crossed. This didn't get her loved.

  She was determined to wipe out the White Sands goof, and her demand for perfection delayed the schedule by eighteen months and increased the cost by three-quarters of a million. She fought with everyone and even had the temerity to tangle with Harvard. When Harvard gets sore they don't beef to NASA, they go straight to the White House. So Florinda got called on the carpet by a Congressional Committee. First they wanted to know why S-333 was costing more than the original estimate.

  “S-333 is still the cheapest mission in NASA,” she snapped. “It'll come to ten million dollars, including the launch. My God! We're practically giving away green stamps.”

  Then they wanted to know why it was taking so much longer to build than the original estimate.

  “Because,” she replied, “no one's ever built an Orbiting Biological Observatory before.”

  There was no answering that, so they had to let her go. Actually all this was routine crisis, but OBO was Florinda's and Jake's first satellite, so they didn't know. They took their tensions out on each other, never realizing that it was their baby who was responsible.

  Florinda got S-333 buttoned up and delivered to the Cape by December 1st, which would give them plenty of time to launch well before Christmas. (The Cape crews get a little casual during the holidays.) But the satellite began to display its own lunacy, and in the terminal tests everything went haywire. The launch had to be postponed. They spent a month taking S-333 apart and spreading it all over the hangar floor.

  There were two critical problems. Ohio State was using a type of Invar, which is a nickel-steel alloy, for the structure of their package. The alloy suddenly began to creep, which meant they could never get the experiment calibrated. There was no point in flying it, so Florinda ordered it scrubbed and gave Madigan one month to come up with a replacement, which was ridiculous. Nevertheless Jake performed a miracle. He took the Cal Tech backup package and converted it into a yeast experiment. Yeast produces adaptive enzymes in answer to changes in environment, and this was an investigation of what enzymes it would produce in space.

  A more serious problem was the satellite radio transmitter which was producing “birdies” or whoops when the antenna was withdrawn into its launch position. The danger was that the whoops might be picked up by the satellite radio receiver, and the pulses might result in a destruct command, NASA suspects that's what happened to SYNCOM I, which disappeared shortly after its launch and has never been heard from since. Florinda decided to launch with the transmitter off and activate it later in space.

  Madigan fought the idea. “It means we'll be launching a mute bird,” he protested. “We won't know where to look for it.”

  “We can trust the Johannesburg tracking station to get a fix on the first pass,” Florinda answered. “We've got excellent cable communications with Joburg.”

  “Suppose they don't get a fix. Then what?”

  “Well, if they don't know where OBO is, the Russians will.”

  “Hearty-har-har.”

  “What d'you want me to do, scrub the entire mission?” Florinda demanded. “It's either that or launch with the transmitter off.” She glared at Madigan. “This is my first satellite, and d'you know what it's taught me?

  There's just one component in any spacecraft that's guaranteed to give trouble all the time: scientists!”

  “Women!” Madigan snorted, and they got into a ferocious argument about the feminine mystique.

  They got S-333 through the terminal tests and onto the launch pad by January 14th. No electric blankets.

  The craft was to be injected into orbit a thousand miles downrange exactly at noon, so ignition was scheduled for 11:50 a.m., January 15th. They watched the launch on the blockhouse TV screen and it was agonizing. The perimeters of TV tubes are curved, so as the rocket went up and approached the edge of the screen, there was optical distortion and the rocket seemed to topple over and break in half.

  Madigan gasped and began to swear. Florinda muttered, “No, it's all right. It's all right Look at the display charts.”

  Everything on the illuminated display charts was nominal. At that moment a voice on the P.A. spoke in the impersonal tones of a croupier, “We have lost cable communication with Johannesburg.”

  Madigan began to shake. He decided to murder Florinda Pot (and he pronounced it “Pot” in his mind) at the earliest opportunity. The other experimenters and NASA people turned white. If you don't get a quick fix on your bird you may never find it again. No one said anything. They waited in silence and hated each other. At one-thirty it was time for the craft to make its first pass over the Fort Meyers tracking station, if it was alive, if it was anywhere near its nominal orbit. Fort Meyers was on an open line and everybody crowded around Florinda, trying to get his ear close to the phone.

  “Yeah, she waltzed into the bar absolutely stoned with a couple of MPs escorting her,” a tinny voice was chatting casually. “She says to me—Got a blip, Henry?” A long pause. Then, in the same casual voice,

  “Hey, Kennedy? We've nicked the bird. It's coming over the fence right now. You'll get your fix.”

  “Command 0310!” Florinda hollered. “0310!”

  “Command 0310 it is,” Fort Meyers acknowledged.

  That was the command to start the satellite transmitter and raise its antenna into broadcast position. A moment later the dials and oscilloscope on the radio reception panel began to show action, and the loudspeaker emitted a rhythmic, syncopated warble, rather like a feeble peanut whistle. That was OBO transmitting its housekeeping data.

  “We've got a living bird,” Madigan shouted. “We've got a living doll!”

  I can't describe his sensations when he heard the bird come beeping over the gas station. There's such an emotional involvement with your first satellite that you're never the same. A ma
n's first satellite is like his first love affair. Maybe that's why Madigan grabbed Florinda in front of the whole blockhouse and said,

  “My God, I love you, Horrie Pot” Maybe that's why she answered, “I love you too, Jake.” Maybe they were just loving their first baby.

  By Orbit 8 they found out that the baby was a brat They'd gotten a lift back to Washington on an Air Force jet. They'd done some celebrating. It was one-thirty in the morning and they were talking happily, the usual get-acquainted talk: where they were born and raised, school, work, what they liked most about each other the first time they met. The phone rang. Madigan picked it up automatically and said hello. A man said, “Oh. Sorry. I'm afraid I've dialed the wrong number.”

  Madigan hung up, turned on the light and looked at Florinda in dismay. “That was just about the most damn fool thing I've ever done in my life,” he said. “Answering your phone.”

  “Why? What's the matter?”

  “That was Joe Leary from Tracking and Data. I recognized his voice.”

  She giggled. “Did he recognize yours?”

  “I don't know.” The phone rang. “That must be Joe again. Try to sound like you're alone.”

  Florinda winked at him and picked up the phone. “Hello? Yes, Joe. No, that's all rigjht, I'm not asleep.

  What's on your mind?” She listened for a moment, suddenly sat up in bed and exclaimed, “What?”

  Leary was quack-quack-quacking on the phone. She broke in. “No, don't bother. I'll pick him up. We'll be right over.” She hung up.

  “So?” Madigan asked.

  “Get dressed, OBO's in trouble.”

  “Oh, Jesus! What now?”

  “It's gone into a spin-up like a whirling dervish. We've got to get over to Goddard right away.”

  Leary had the all-channel print-out of the first eight orbits unrolled on the floor of his office. It looked like ten yards of paper toweling filled with vertical columns of numbers. Leary was crawling around on his hands and knees following the numbers. He pointed to the attitude data column. “There's the spin-up,” he said. “One revolution in every twelve seconds.”