by Paul Preuss
Yet most of the whirling planet, wondrously, maintained an awkward peace. The North Continental Treaty Alliance, consisting of the Russians, Europeans, Canadians, and Americans, usually called the Euro-Americans, had been on good terms for many years with the Azure Dragon Mutual Prosperity Sphere, usually known as the Nippon-Sino-Arabs. Together the industrial conglomerates had cooperated to build stations on or around the inner planets and in the Mainbelt. The Latin-Africans and the Indo-Asians had stations of their own, and had founded tenuous settlements on two of Jupiter’s moons. The lure of solar system colonization had both sharpened and, paradoxically, attenuated Earthly rivalries: the rivalry was real, but no group wanted to risk its lines of communication.
Space travel had never been inexpensive, but early in the century an economic watershed had been crossed, like a saddle in low hills that nevertheless marks a continental divide. Nuclear technology moved into its most appropriate sphere, outer space; the principles were sufficiently simple and the techniques sufficiently easy to master that private companies could afford to enter the interplanetary shipping market. With the shippers came the yards, the drydocks, the outfitters.
The Falaron shipyards, one of the originals, orbited Earth two hundred and fifty miles up. Presently the only vessel in the yards was an old atomic freighter, getting an overhaul and a face lift—a new reactor core, new main engine nozzles, refurbished life-support systems, new paint inside and out. When all the work was done the ship was to be recommissioned and given a new, rather grand, name: Star Queen.
The huge atomic engines had been mounted and tested. Spacesuited workers wielding plasma torches were fitting new holds, big cylinders that fastened to the thin central shaft of the ship below the spherical crew module.
The flicker and glare of the torches cast planes of shadow through the windows of the outfitter’s office. In the odd light young Nikos Pavlakis’s bristling mustache sprouted horns of black shadow, rendering his appearance demonic. “Curse you for a liar and a thief, Dimitrios. Repeatedly you assured us everything was on schedule, everything was under control. No problem, no problem, you told me! Now you say we will be a month late unless I am prepared to bear the cost of overtime!”
“My boy, I am terribly sorry, but we are helpless in the hands of the workers’ consortium.” Dimitrios spread his own hands to demonstrate helplessness, although it was hard to find remorse on his broad, wrinkled face. “You cannot expect me to absorb the entire cost of the extortion by myself.”
“How much are you getting back from them? Ten percent? Fifteen? What is your commission for helping to rob your friends and relatives?”
“How do you find the hardness to say such things to me, Nikos?”
“Easily, old thief.”
“I have dandled you on my knee as if you were my own godson!” the old man objected.
“Dimitrios, I have known you for what you were since I was ten years old. I am not blind, like my father.”
“Your father is hardly blind. Do not doubt that I will report these slanders to him. Perhaps you had better leave—before I lose my patience and dandle you into the vacuum.”
“I’ll wait while you make the call, Dimitrios. I would like to hear what you have to say to him.”
“You think I won’t?” Dimitrios shouted, his face darkening. But he made no move to reach for the radiolink. A magnificent scowl gathered on his brow, worthy of Pan. “My hair is gray, my son. Your hair is brown. For forty years I have…”
“Other shipyards hold to their contracts,” Pavlakis impatiently interrupted. “Why is my father’s own cousin an incompetent? Or is it more than mere incompetence?”
Dimitrios stopped emoting. His face froze. “There is more to business than what is written in contracts, little Nikos.”
“Dimitrios, you are right—you are an old man, and the world has changed. These days the Pavlakis family runs a shipping line. We are no longer smugglers. We are not pirates.”
“You insult your own fa—”
“We stand to make more money from this contract with Ishtar Mining Corporation than you have dreamed of in all your years of petty larceny,” Pavlakis shouted angrily. “But the Star Queen must be ready on time.”
What hung in the close artificial air between them, known to them both but unmentionable, was the desperate situation of the once powerful Pavlakis Lines, reduced from the four interplanetary freighters it had owned to the single, aging vessel now in the yards. Dimitrios had intimated that he had creative solutions to such problems, but young Pavlakis would not hear of them.
“Instruct me, young master,” the old man said poisonously, his voice trembling. “How does one, in this new world of yours, persuade workers to finish their jobs without the inducement of their accustomed overtime?”
“It’s too late, isn’t it? You’ve seen to that.” Pavlakis drifted to the window and watched the flashing of the plasma torches. He spoke without facing the old man. “Very well, keep them at it, and meanwhile take as many bribes as you can, gray-hair. It will be the last job you do for us. And who else will deal with you then?”
Dimitrios thrust his chin up, dismissing him.
Nikos Pavlakis took a convenient shuttle to London that same afternoon. He sat cursing himself for losing his temper. As the craft descended, screaming through the atmosphere toward Heathrow, Pavlakis kept a string of amber worry beads moving across his knuckles. He was not at all certain his father would support him against Dimitrios; the two cousins went back a long way, and Nikos did not even want to think about what they might have gotten up to together in the early, loosely regulated days of commercial space shipping. Perhaps his father could not disentangle himself from Dimitrios if he wanted to. All that would change when Nikos took over the firm, of course … if the firm did not collapse before it happened. Meanwhile, no one must know the true state of the Company’s affairs, or everything would collapse immediately.
The worry beads clicked as Nikos muttered a prayer that his father would enjoy a long life. In retirement.
It had been a mistake to confront Dimitrios before Pavlakis was sure of his own position, but there could be no backing down now. He would have to put people he could trust on the site to see to the completion of the work. And—this was a more delicate matter—he would have to do what he could about extending the launch deadline.
Freighters, blessedly, did not leave for the planets every month; it was not a simple matter to find room for a shipment as massive as this consignment of robots from the Ishtar Mining Corporation. A delay in Star Queen’s departure for Venus was not the most auspicious beginning to a new contract, but with luck it would not be fatal. Perhaps he could arrange an informal discussion with Sondra Sylvester, the Ishtar Mining Corporation’s chief executive, before talking the situation over with his father.
Rehearsing his arguments, Pavlakis descended toward London.
At the same moment Mrs. Sondra Sylvester was flying through the dark overcast sky west of London in a Rolls-Royce executive helicopter, accompanied by a ruddy, tweedy fellow, Arthur Gordon by name, who having failed to press a cup of Scotch whiskey upon her was helping himself from a Sterling Silver decanter from the recessed bulkhead bar. Gordon was head of Defence Manufactures at Rolls-Royce, and he was much taken with his tall, dark-eyed passenger in her elegant black silks and boots. His helicopter flew itself, with just the two of them in it, toward the army proving grounds on the Salisbury Plain.
“Lucky for us the army were eager to help,” Gordon said expansively. “Frankly your machine is of great interest to them—they’ve been pestering us for details ever since we undertook development. Haven’t given them anything proprietary, of course,” Gordon said, fixing her with a round brown eye over the lip of the silver cup. “And they’ve declined to go all official on us, so there’s been no unpleasantness.”
“I can’t imagine the army is planning maneuvers on the surface of Venus,” Sylvester remarked.
“Bless me, neither can
I, ha ha.” Gordon took another sip of the whiskey. “But I imagine they’re thinking that a machine which can operate in that sort of hell can easily do so in the mundane terrestrial variety as well.”
Two days earlier Sylvester had arrived at the plant to inspect the new machines, designed to Ishtar Mining Corporation’s specifications and virtually handmade by Rolls-Royce. They were lined up at attention, waiting for her on the spotless factory floor, six of them squatting like immense horned and winged beetles. Sylvester had peered at each in turn, looking at her slim reflection in their polished titanium-alloy skins, while Gordon and his managers stood by beaming. Sylvester had turned to the men and briskly announced that before taking delivery she wished to see one of the robots in action. See for herself. No use hauling all that mass to Venus if it wouldn’t do the job. The Rolls-Royce people had traded shrewd glances and confident smiles. No difficulty there. It had taken them very little time to make the arrangements.
The helicopter banked and descended. “Looks like we’re just about there,” Gordon said. “If you look out the window to your left you can catch a glimpse of Stonehenge.” Without undue haste he screwed the top back on the silver flask of Scotch; instead of returning it to the bar he tucked it into the pocket of his overcoat.
The helicopter came down on a wind-blasted moor, where a squad of soldiers in battle fatigues stood to attention, their camouflage trousers flapping about their knees like flags in a stiff breeze. Gordon and Sylvester dismounted from the helicopter. A group of officers approached.
A lieutenant colonel, the highest ranking among them, stepped forward smartly and inclined his head in a sharp bow. “Lieutenant Colonel Guy Witherspoon, madame, at your service.” He pronounced it “lef-tenant.”
She held out her hand and he shook it stiffly. She had the impression he would rather have saluted. The colonel turned and shook Gordon’s hand. “Marvelous beast you’ve constructed here. Awfully good of you folks to let us look on. May I introduce my adjutant, Captain Reed?”
More handshakes. “Are you making records of these tests, Colonel?” Sylvester asked him.
“We had planned to do, Mrs. Sylvester.”
“I have no objection to the army’s knowing, as long as the information is kept strictly confidential. Ishtar is not the only mining company on Venus, Colonel Witherspoon.”
“Quite. The Arabs and Ni … hmm, that is, the Japanese—need no help from us.”
“I’m glad you understand.” Sylvester hooked a loose strand of her long black hair away from her red lips. She had one of those faces that was impossible to place—Castilian? Magyar?—and equally impossible to overlook or forget. She gave the belted young officer with the gingery mustache a warm smile. “We are grateful for your cooperation, Colonel. Please proceed whenever you’re ready.”
The colonel’s flat-fingered right hand sprang to the bill of his peaked cap, his urge to salute having proved irrepressible. He instantly turned away and barked orders at the waiting soldiers.
The machine to be tested, one chosen at random by Sylvester from among the six on the factory floor, had been airlifted to the proving ground yesterday; it was now crouched at the edge of the raw earth landing pad. Six jointed legs held its belly only inches from the ground, but it was a fat beast, its back as high as a man’s head. Two soldiers in white suits with hoods and faceplates stood at ease beside the machine; their overalls bore bright yellow radiation warning signs. Silhouetted against a sky of scudding black clouds, the robot’s diamond-studded eye ports and spiny electromagnetic sensors gave it the visage of a samurai crab or beetle. No wonder the very sight of it had fired the military imagination.
“Captain Reed, when you’re ready.” The white-suited team double-timed to a truck plastered with yellow radiation warnings and opened its rear doors. They removed a three-foot metal cylinder, which they carried slowly and carefully to the robot, then proceeded to load it into the metal insect’s abdomen.
Meanwhile Colonel Witherspoon led Sylvester and Gordon to a bank of seats erected on the lip of the landing pad, shielded from the blustery wind by plastic windscreens. The little observation post looked northward from a low ridge into a wide, shallow valley. The ridge crests on both sides were pocked with pillboxes, and the ground around had been torn up by generations of horses’ hooves, gun-carriage wheels, cleated tires, tank treads, and countless booted feet.
While they waited Sylvester once more declined Gordon’s urgings to sip from his flask.
Within a few seconds the robot was fueled and critical. The soldiers stood well back. Witherspoon gave the signal and Captain Reed manipulated the sticks and knobs on the tiny control unit he held in his left hand.
On the control unit’s screen Reed could see what the robot saw, a view of the world that encompassed almost two hundred radial degrees but was oddly distorted, like an anamorphic lens—a distortion programmed to compensate for the glassy atmosphere of Venus.
Within moments, the carbon-carbon cooling fins on the back of the robot began to glow—first dull orange, soon a bright cherry, finally a pearly white. The robot was powered by a high-temperature nuclear reactor cooled by liquid lithium. The extreme temperature of the cooling fins was excessive on Earth, but essential to create a sufficient gradient for radiative cooling in the eight-hundred degree surface temperatures on Venus.
The smell of hot metal reached them across the flat, windy ground. Witherspoon turned to his guests. “The robot is now fully powered, Mrs. Sylvester.”
She cocked her head. “Possibly you have a demonstration of your own in mind, Colonel?”
He nodded. “With your permission, ma’am—first, unguided terrain navigation according to stored satellite maps. Objective, the crest of that far ridge.”
“Carry on,” Sylvester said, her lips curving in an anticipatory smile.
Witherspoon signaled his adjutant. With a chorus of whining motors the robot came to life. It raised its radiator-crested, antennaed head. Its chassis was of heat-resistant molybdenum steel and titanium-alloy, mounted on six titanium-alloy legs for traversing terrain more wildly irregular than any that could be found in England or anywhere else on Earth. It moved its legs with intricate and startling rapidity, and as it scuttled forward, turned, then plunged down the hillside, a novel set of tracks was left in the earth of Salisbury Plain.
The gigantic metal beast scurried along, raising a plume of dust behind it that blew strongly to the east, like a dust devil racing across the desert.
For some forgotten exercise in siegecraft, moats had been dug across the breadth of the valley and berms piled behind them; the robot scurried into trenches and over the rises without pause, thundering straight up the valley like the entire Light Brigade at Balaklava. Now outcroppings of gray rock blocked it from its goal at valley’s end. The robot ran around the sheerer cliffs, but where the slope was not too steep, it simply scrambled over them, scrabbling for purchase among cracks and ledges of stone. Within a few moments it had reached its objective, a row of concrete pillboxes on the scudding heights. There it stopped.
“Those emplacements were constructed in the 19th century, Mrs. Sylvester,” Witherspoon informed her. “Four feet of steel-reinforced concrete. The army have declared them surplus.”
“I would be delighted for you to proceed with the second part of your demonstration,” Sylvester said. “I only wish I had a better view.”
“Captain Reed? Over here, if you will,” Witherspoon called sharply. Reed brought his control unit close enough for Sylvester and the others to see the robot’s-eye view on its videoplate. “And please take these, ma’am.” Witherspoon handed her a pair of heavy binoculars, sheathed in sticky black plastic.
The binoculars were electromagnetically stabilized oil-lens viewers with selective radiation filtration and image enhancement. When she held them to her eyes she saw the robot so close and sharp she could have been standing ten feet away, although the perspective was markedly flat and graphic. There it crouched, a f
irebug, implacable, facing the squat bunker.
The robot needed to do more than move about on the surface of Venus. It was a prospector and a miner; it was equipped to seek out and analyze mineral samples and, when it came upon ore of commercial value, to dig out and partially process the ore, preparing it for further processing by other machines and eventual transportation off-planet.