The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 05

by Anthology

  Li^{7} + H^{1} --> 2He^{4} + energy

  An atom of lithium-7 plus an atom of hydrogen-1 yields two atoms of helium-4 and plenty of energy. One gram of lithium hydride would give nearly fifty-eight kilowatt-hours of energy in one blast. A pound of the stuff would be the equivalent of nearly seven tons of TNT.

  In addition, it was a nice, clean bomb. Nothing but helium, radiation, and heat. In the early nineteen fifties, such a bomb had been constructed by surrounding the LiH with a fission bomb--the so-called "implosion" technique. But all that heavy metal around the central reaction created all kinds of radioactive residues which had a tendency to scatter death for hundreds of miles around.

  Now, suppose a man had a pair of tweezers small enough to pick up a single molecule of lithium hydride and pinch the two nuclei together. Of course, the idea is ridiculous--that is, the tweezer part is. But if the pinch could be done in some other way....

  Snookums had done it.

  "Homemade atomic bombs in your back yard or basement lab," said Mike the Angel.

  Fitzhugh nodded emphatically. "Exactly. We can't let that technique out until we've found a way to keep people from doing just that. The UN Government has inspection techniques that prevent anyone from building the conventional types of thermonuclear bombs, but not the pinch bomb."

  Mike the Angel thought over what Dr. Fitzhugh had said. Then he said: "That's not all of it. Antarctica is isolated enough to keep that knowledge secret for a long time--at least until safeguards could be set up. Why take Snookums off Earth?"

  "Snookums himself is dangerous," Fitzhugh said. "He has a built-in 'urge' to experiment--to get data. We can keep him from making experiments that we know will be dangerous by giving him the data, so that the urge doesn't operate. But if he's on the track of something totally new....

  "Well, you can see what we're up against." He thoughtfully blew a cloud of smoke. "We think he may be on the track of the total annihilation of matter."

  A dead silence hung in the air. The ultimate, the super-atomic bomb. Theoretically, the idea had been approached only in the assumption of contact between ordinary matter and anti-matter, with the two canceling each other completely to give nothing but energy. Such a bomb would be nearly fifty thousand times as powerful as the lithium-hydride pinch bomb. That much energy, released in a few millimicroseconds, would make the standard H-bomb look like a candle flame on a foggy night.

  The LiH pinch bomb could be controlled. By using just a little of the stuff, it would be possible to limit the destruction to a neighborhood, or even a single block. A total-annihilation bomb would be much harder to control. The total annihilation of a single atom of hydrogen would yield over a thousandth of an erg, and matter just doesn't come in much smaller packages than that.

  "You see," said Fitzhugh, "we had to get him off Earth."

  "Either that or stop him from experimenting," Mike said. "And I assume that wouldn't be good for Snookums."

  "To frustrate Snookums would be to destroy all the work we have put into him. His circuits would tend to exceed optimum randomity, and that would mean, in human terms, that he would be insane--and therefore worthless. As a machine, Snookums is worth eighteen billion dollars. The information we have given him, plus the deductions and computations he has made from that information, is worth...." He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows? How can a price be put on knowledge?"

  12

  The William Branchell--dubbed Brainchild--fled Earth at ultralight velocity, while officers, crew, and technical advisers settled down to routine. The only thing that disturbed that routine was one particularly restless part of the ship's cargo.

  Snookums was a snoop.

  Cut off from the laboratories which had been provided for his special work at Chilblains, he proceeded to interest himself in the affairs of the human beings which surrounded him. Until his seventh year, he had been confined to the company of only a small handful of human beings. Even while the William Branchell was being built, he hadn't been allowed any more freedom than was absolutely necessary to keep him from being frustrated.

  Even so, he had developed an interest in humans. Now he was being allowed full rein in his data-seeking circuits, and he chose to investigate, not the physical sciences, but the study of Mankind. Since the proper study of Mankind is Man, Snookums proceeded to study the people on the ship.

  Within three days the officers had evolved a method of Snookums-evasion.

  Lieutenant Commander Jakob von Liegnitz sat in the officers' wardroom of the Brainchild and shuffled a deck of cards with expert fingers.

  He was a medium-sized man, five-eleven or so, with a barrel chest, broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and lean hips. His light brown hair was worn rather long, and its straight strands seemed to cling tightly to his skull. His gray eyes had a perpetual half-squint that made him look either sleepy or angry, depending on what the rest of his broad face was doing.

  He dealt himself out a board of Four Cards Up and had gone through about half the pack when Mike the Angel came in with Lieutenant Keku.

  "Hello, Jake," said Keku. "What's to do?"

  "Get out two more decks," said Mike the Angel, "and we can all play solitaire."

  Von Liegnitz looked up sleepily. "I could probably think of duller things, Mike, but not just immediately. How about bridge?"

  "We'll need a fourth," said Keku. "How about Pete?"

  Mike the Angel shook his head. "Black Bart is sleeping--taking his beauty nap. So Pete has the duty. How about young Vaneski? He's not a bad partner."

  "He is out, too," said von Liegnitz. "He also is on duty."

  Mike the Angel lifted an inquisitive eyebrow. "Something busted? Why should the Maintenance Officer be on duty right now?"

  "He is maintaining," said von Liegnitz with deliberate dignity, "peace and order around here. He is now performing the duty of Answerman-in-Chief. He's very good at it."

  Mike grinned. "Snookums?"

  Von Liegnitz scooped the cards off the table and began shuffling them. "Exactly. As long as Snookums gets his questions answered, he keeps himself busy. Our young boot ensign has been assigned to the duty of keeping that mechanical Peeping Tom out of our hair for an hour. By then, it will be lunch time." He cleared his throat. "We still need a fourth."

  "If you ask me," said Lieutenant Keku, "we need a fifth. Let's play poker instead."

  Jakob von Liegnitz nodded and offered the cards for a cut.

  "Deal 'em," said Mike the Angel.

  A few minutes less than an hour later, Ensign Vaneski slid open the door to the wardroom and was greeted by a triune chorus of hellos.

  "Sirs," said Vaneski with pseudo formality, "I have done my duty, exhausting as it was. I demand satisfaction."

  Lieutenant Keku, upon seeing Mike the Angel dealt a second eight, flipped over his up cards and folded.

  "Satisfaction?" he asked the ensign.

  Vaneski nodded. "One hand of showdown for five clams. I have been playing encyclopedia for that hunk of animated machinery for an hour. That's above and beyond the call of duty."

  "Raise a half," said Mike the Angel.

  "Call," said von Liegnitz.

  "Three eights," said Mike, flipping his hole card.

  Von Liegnitz shrugged, folded his cards, and watched solemnly while Mike pulled in the pot.

  "Vaneski wants to play showdown for a fiver," said Keku.

  Mike the Angel frowned at the ensign for a moment, then relaxed and nodded. "Not my game," he said, "but if the Answerman wants a chance to catch up, it's okay with me."

  The four men each tossed a five spot into the center of the table and then cut for deal. Mike got it and started dealing--five cards, face up, for the pot.

  When three cards apiece had been dealt, young Vaneski was ahead with a king high. On the fourth round he grinned when he got a second king and Mike dealt himself an ace.

  On the fifth round Vaneski got a three, and his face froze as Mike dealt himself a second ace.

&nbs
p; Mike reached for the twenty.

  "You deal yourself a mean hand, Commander," said Vaneski evenly.

  Mike glanced at him sharply, but there was only a wry grin on the young ensign's face.

  "Luck of the idiot," said Mike as he pocketed the twenty. "It's time for lunch."

  "Next time," said Keku firmly, "I'll take the Answerman watch, Mike. You and this kraut are too lucky for me."

  "If I lose any more to the Angel," von Liegnitz said calmly, "I will be a very sour kraut. But right now, I'm quite hungry."

  Mike prowled around the Power Section that afternoon with a worry nagging at the back of his mind. He couldn't exactly put his finger on what was bothering him, and he finally put it down to just plain nerves.

  And then he began to feel something--physically.

  Within thirty seconds after it began, long before most of the others had noticed it, Mike the Angel recognized it for what it was. Half a minute after that, everyone aboard could feel it.

  A two-cycle-per-second beat note is inaudible to the human ear. If the human tympanum can't wiggle any faster than that, the auditory nerves refuse to transmit the message. The wiggle has to be three or four octaves above that before the nerves will have anything to do with it. But if the beat note has enough energy in it, a man doesn't have to hear it--he can feel it.

  The bugs weren't all out of the Brainchild, by any means, and the men knew it. She had taken a devil of a strain on the take-off, and something was about due to weaken.

  It was the external field around the hull that had decided to goof off this time. It developed a nice, unpleasant two-cycle throb that threatened to shake the ship apart. It built up rapidly and then leveled off, giving everyone aboard the feeling that his lunch and his stomach would soon part company.

  The crew was used to it. They'd been on shakedown cruises before, and they knew that on an interstellar vessel the word "shakedown" can have a very literal meaning. The beat note wasn't dangerous, but it wasn't pleasant, either.

  Within five minutes everybody aboard had the galloping collywobbles and the twittering jitters.

  Mike and his power crew all knew what to do. They took their stations and started to work. They had barely started when Captain Quill's voice came over the intercom.

  "Power Section, this is the bridge. How long before we stop this beat note?"

  "No way of telling, sir," said Mike, without taking his eyes off the meter bank. "Check A-77," he muttered in an aside to Multhaus.

  "Can you give me a prognosis?" persisted Quill.

  Mike frowned. This wasn't like Black Bart. He knew what the prognosis was as well as Mike did. "Actually, sir, there's no way of knowing. The old Gainsway shook like this for eight days before they spotted the tubes that were causing a four-cycle beat."

  "Why can't we spot it right off?" Quill asked.

  Mike got it then. Fitzhugh was listening in. Quill wanted Mike the Angel to substantiate his own statements to the roboticist.

  "There are sixteen generator tubes in the hull--two at each end of the four diagonals of an imaginary cube surrounding the ship. At least two of them are out of phase; that means that every one of them may have to be balanced against every other one, and that would make a hundred and twenty checks. It will take ten minutes if we hit it lucky and find the bad tubes in the first two tries, and about twenty hours if we hit on the last try.

  "That, of course, is presuming that there are only two out. If there are three...." He let it hang.

  Mike grinned as Dr. Morris Fitzhugh's voice came over the intercom, confirming his diagnosis of the situation.

  "Isn't there any other way?" asked Fitzhugh worriedly. "Can't we stop the ship and check them, so that we won't be subjected to this?"

  "'Fraid not," answered Mike. "In the first place, cutting the external field would be dangerous, if not deadly. The abrupt deceleration wouldn't be good for us, even with the internal field operating. In the second place, we couldn't check the field tubes if they weren't operating. You can't tell a bad tube just by looking at it. They'd still have to be balanced against each other, and that would take the same amount of time as it is going to take anyway, and with the same effects on the ship. I'm sorry, but we'll just have to put up with it."

  "Well, for Heaven's sake do the best you can," Fitzhugh said in a worried voice. "This beat is shaking Snookums' brain. God knows what damage it may do unless it's stopped within a very few minutes!"

  "I'll do the best I can," said Mike the Angel carefully. "So will every man in my crew. But about all anyone can do is wish us luck and let us work."

  "Yes," said Dr. Fitzhugh slowly. "Yes. I understand. Thank you, Commander."

  Mike the Angel nodded curtly and went back to work.

  Things weren't bad enough as they were. They had to get worse. The Brainchild had been built too fast, and in too unorthodox a manner. The steady two-cycle throb did more damage than it would normally have done aboard a non-experimental ship.

  Twelve minutes after the throb started, a feeder valve in the pre-induction energy chamber developed a positive-feedback oscillation that threatened to blow out the whole pre-induction stage unless it was damped. The search for the out-of-phase external field tubes had to be dropped while the more dangerous flaw was tackled.

  Multhaus plugged in an emergency board and began to compensate by hand while the others searched frantically for the trouble.

  Hand compensation of feeder-valve oscillation is pure intuition; if you wait until the meters show that damping is necessary, it may be too late--you have to second-guess the machine and figure out what's coming before it happens and compensate then. You not only have to judge time, but magnitude; overcompensation is ruinous, too.

  Multhaus, the Chief Powerman's Mate, sat behind the emergency board, a vernier dial in each hand and both eyes on an oscilloscope screen. His red, beefy face was corded and knotted with tension, and his skin glistened with oily perspiration. He didn't say a word, and his fingers barely moved as he held a green line reasonably steady on that screen.

  Mike the Angel, using unangelic language in a steady, muttering stream, worked to find the circuit that held the secret of the ruinous feedback tendency, while other powermen plugged and unplugged meter jacks, flipped switches, and juggled tools.

  In the midst of all this, in rolled Snookums.

  Whether Snookums knew that his own existence was in danger is problematical. Like the human brain, his own had no pain or sensory circuits within it; in addition, his knowledge of robotics was small--he didn't even know that his brain was in Cargo Hold One. He thought it was in his head, if he thought about it at all.

  Nonetheless, he knew something was wrong, and as soon as his "curiosity" circuits were activated, he set out in search of the trouble, his little treads rolling at high speed.

  Leda Crannon saw him heading down a companionway and called after him. "Where are you going, Snookums?"

  "Looking for data," answered Snookums, slowing a little.

  "Wait! I'll come with you!"

  Leda Crannon knew perfectly well what effect the throb might have on Snookums' brain, and when something cracked, she wanted to see what effect it might have on the behavior of the little robot. Like a hound after a fox, she followed him through the corridors of the ship.

  Up companionways and down, in and out of storerooms, staterooms, control rooms, and washrooms Snookums scurried, oblivious to the consternation that sometimes erupted at his sudden appearance. At certain selected spots, Snookums would stop, put his metal arms on floors and walls, pause, and then go zooming off in another direction with Leda Crannon only paces behind him, trying to explain to crewmen as best she could.

  If Snookums had been capable of emotion--and Leda Crannon was not as sure as the roboticists that he wasn't--she would have sworn that he was having the time of his life.

  Seventeen minutes after the throb had begun, Snookums rolled into Power Section and came to a halt. Something else was wrong.


  At first he just stopped by the door and soaked in data. Mike's muttering; the clipped, staccato conversation of the power crew; the noises of the tools; the deep throb of the ship itself; the underlying oddness of the engine vibrations--all these were fed into his microphonic ears. The scene itself was transmitted to his brain and recorded. The cryotronic maze in the depths of the ship chewed the whole thing over. Snookums acted.

  Leda Crannon, who had lost ground in trying to keep up with Snookums' whirling treads, came to the door of Power Section too late to stop the robot's entrance. She didn't dare call out, because she knew that to do so would interrupt the men's vital work. All she could do was lean against the doorjamb and try to catch her breath.