Far-out Show (9781465735829)

by Hanna, Thomas

  The image zoomed out to a view from a higher orbit from which it nicely showed an NASA unmanned lunar satellite as that circled around the edge of the moon in an equatorial plane.

  “I'm monitoring its detectors. It doesn't see anything unusual,” Svenly said in a tense whisper. “Its image capturing system only records a strip of the surface on each orbit and, as our guys calculated, we're beyond the current strip.”

  “The controls are programmed and ready,” Eroder announced.

  The screen image zoomed in on the lunar satellite.

  “Each time their device goes around to the other side we move to a spot where it won't see us next time,” Eroder said.

  “While our one orbiting zerpy records this view and the other one records the messages to and from their device and among the tense masses on the surface waiting for reports from that machine,” Feedle noted with satisfaction. “When we get home safe we'll have more than enough material for the best show in Pacification By Distraction With Entertainment history.”

  “All we have to do is get home safely,” Hasley said.

  Eroder said, “Forgive my interruption but the techs are signaling that the engines are fixed. We can recover the orbiting zerpies and head home at your go-ahead.”

  Hasley, Feedle, and Lacrat shouted in unison, “Go-ahead!”

  With nothing more noticeable to those onboard than a little lurch, Whizybeam rose off the lunar surface, made a curving sweep during which it retrieved the two orbiting zerpies on the fly without even slowing down, then shot into deep space on a direct path that would keep it behind the moon long enough for that orb to block any detection systems on the Earth surface monitoring for such movements.

  As the ship traveled through the vastness Hasley noted, “As far as they know on Ormelex we no longer exist.”

  “Until we break our radio silence when we're close enough to send messages to the rival companies offering the new show to the highest bidder now that we totally own it since A.D.U. legally divorced us,” Feedle chuckled.

  “We make sure to share the wealth with all our employees and we all prosper with minimum risk of being undercut by sneaky-sneaks like ourselves,” Lacrat added as a reminder.

  “I'll go through all the recordings to see what we have before I recommend how we can stretch it to maximize its value,” Feedle said.

  “If we can set a new model for actually interesting entertainment, the whole planet will benefit,” Lacrat said.

  “That'd give us more clout with the governors to go along with our new wealth,” Hasley agreed.

  “We really have figured all the angles and hit a streak of best-most luck,” Feedle said feeling very self-satisfied.

  “That last message to the Bang-Boom home office should keep them hopeful of our return no matter what the official news so they'll continue to pay our contacts for insider recordings. I can hardly wait to see what's happening at A.D.U. and the Power Players right now,” Hasley said with a smirk.

  Without warning the ship shook, quivered, wiggled, and bobbed. Those not seated had to grab onto something fixed to avoid falling. Those seated had a bit of a non-joy ride as their wheeled chairs took them sliding around like bumper cars at a county fair until they could grab the console and hold themselves and the chairs in position.

  Eroder got their attention with, “Uh, guys.”

  “What's happening to the ship, Eroder?” Hasley shouted without bothering to try to keep panic out of his voice.

  “It seems that going back through the snaggiewarp will be a rougher ride than coming here. That reading can't be right can it? Is it possible they didn't fix the right parts after all? Wait a second, did the self-destruct signal mess some things up? Uh, the return trip is likely to be more dangerous and more damaging. Maybe a lot more of each of those. Can I... No, we're caught in the pull so it looks like I couldn't turn us back if I tried. Oh, this is so bad. Who's gonna have the last laugh after all? Zebedee, are you smirking at us? Great goolimansions not that! We're..! Oops!”

  All those in the room said in unison, “Oops?”

  Chapter 39

  In the security pod Nerber scanned the readouts on the console monitor screen with dismay. He said, “Record this for my records, Wowseyla. Disaster at least momentarily avoided. For my on-going record of events, the condition of the control systems is as bad as I could imagine and worse than I feared. I detected problems in my early scans while I was on the planet but I couldn’t take enough control to change them even with a powerful zerpy like Wowseyla. Plus revealing that I had that device would have given me problems in my role as contestant and first contact member of my kind.

  “My current analysis of the situation is that the control systems have deteriorated beyond the easy-fix stage. I am shutting down several of the ship’s non-essential in the short-term systems to see if that will clear away enough of the crupsminz in the command sequences to let me make effective corrections. I’m not confident it will work but I’ll try it since the longer I get to work without interference, the greater the chances I’ll succeed.

  “At this point it is essential that I keep control of several things, starting with access to this security pod. After what the Bang-Boom Shows guys put me through my mass of recorded material that could be used for shows will be for my exclusive use. Wowseyla recorded every moment I was on the planet from three different views. Those three silward fidgemits of producers would try to confiscate that and never give me credit for, much less the value of it. I’m sure they’d be willing to accidentally-on-purpose kill me to get it the moment they find out it exists.

  “Closely related to keeping them out of the pod, I must thwart all attempts to eject the pod from the ship or tamper with its life-support systems. The crew might do that to try to force me out of here; the producers would do it to kill me with the expectation that they could shift the blame for it to someone else but claim my recorded material. And I admit that I have a healthy amount of paranoia about my situation.

  “I also need to take and keep control of the propulsion system long enough to get the ship headed quickly back toward the snaggiewarp. Just before Mr. Krinkle took me from the residential unit we heard what the inhabitants’ call the radio news guy report that an Earth-made unit on the surface of the back side of their moon has spotted Whizybeam and aimed what they call a strong laser at the ship that is expected to seriously damage her.

  “That will happen as soon as they get the signal to that unit. The command to pass along that signal has been sent to another of their units, this one in orbit around this moon. When it gets to this, the back side of the body, we will be blasted. It is most unlikely that the captain or anyone on the ship know about this very recent development. Even if they do it is likely they will dawdle until it is too late, in part to see if they can analyze that orbiting unit and maybe even bring it aboard to take home to please the governors with a prize to be learned from.

  “Or that the current condition of the engines won’t allow us to get out of the way even if we want to. I must correct the systems but again I understand that they will insist on talking too much and doing too little until things are beyond being reversed. I must be the bad guy acting like what on this planet they call a pirate long enough to save us all. Who would have imagined such a working out of the events?”

  * * *

  Hasley and Lacrat stood in the hall beside a hovering zerpy that was recording this event as Feedle struggled to force open the security pod door with a metal pry bar, brute force, and sheer determination. She was working up a sweat but making no progress in that.

  “As soon as I heard the crew members talking about not being able to locate Nerber I thought of this thing but I knew he couldn’t get inside because we’re all locked out of it by a command code the techs can’t crack,” Halsey said.

  “Or won’t admit they can,” Lacrat said. “With only room inside for two what’s the advantage to them in letting anyone else know they can open it? I admit that I
tried it once before we came through the snaggiewarp and couldn’t get in. The pod seemed like the safest place to sit out the trip through that travel way that had never been tried before.”

  “So getting this open will give us more clout with the crew as take-charge guys to be kept in the loop,” Hasley said.

  Feedle gave up her assault on the door. “Zerpy, end recording. I’ve checked it several times. It’s always been locked. He’s probably not in there. How could he be? He could only pass through walls in the transport system beam and I don’t know if even that can penetrate the reinforced walls of this thing.”

  “We should try to find out about that without giving away why we’re interested,” Hasley said.

  “Maybe he went inside and right into a stasis unit,” Lacrat said. “Inside the pad he’d be as safe as we think it’s possible to be on this ship. If he did that he wouldn’t leave it so we could get in and throw him out.”

  “Why would he do that?” Feedle asked. “He has a contract. He knows he has to sit for extensive debriefing interviews.”

  “Why would he care about those details if he believes the ship’s about to break up?” Hasley said. “We’ve been sending signals suggesting that idea home so maybe some of those leaked into the messages to him. He’s smart so he knows that in the pod he is likely to be the only one to survive. He’s probably thought about how in demand as a celebrity that would make him.”

  “If he’s in there he must have had a key to open the door. But maybe his key is that the A.D.U. guys let him in. They control the door. Maybe they have plans for him that don’t include us,” Lacrat said.

  “Always with the paranoia,” Feedle grumbled.

  “His idea makes sense to me,” Hasley said.

  “Me too but I’d hate them so much if I let myself think about it that I might lose my composure. Like this!” Gritting her teeth she raised the pry bar again. The others stepped back.

  Hasley said quietly, “Zerpy, record.”

  Feedle went a short distance down the hall, then turned back and got a running start. She raised the pry bar overhead and, as she got close, swung that down to smash at the door. She muttered, “If I can’t be safe in there, nobody will be allowed to be. He also owes us answers to a lot of questions.”

  The bar never made contact with the door.

  Instead Feedle and the piece of metal were thrown backwards and into the wall opposite the door. The force of that collision made her drop the bar – that landed hard on her foot which made her cry out in pain and try to jump around. The slightly delayed result of her impact with the wall finally clicked in though, and she fell to the floor and lay there stunned into no more than twitching.

  Hasley and Lacrat glanced back and forth between Feedle and the door but made no move to help her up or even check closely on her condition.

  “What did that mean?” Lacrat asked in a whisper.

  “Most likely that he is in there, can see and hear us, and isn’t about to give up his safe place without a fight. Oh, and that he has powerful tools like that shock system to use,” Hasley said. “I’m glad I remembered to get this event recorded. It will be good show material. Has Nerber gone crazy? Did his contest experience make that happen because he has a weaker mind that our screening revealed?”

  “Okay, so an open frontal attack is stymied by strong mechanical defenses but we still need to get into this thing,” Feedle said as she struggled to her feet. “We need a plan.”

  * * *

  In the security pod Nerber watched on a monitor as the three producers moved off down the hall.

  “Dear diary, knowing them they’ll be back in some form but for now I seem secure in here. While I’m waiting for results from analyses being done by Wowseyla and now some of the ship’s systems working with my zerpy I can record more of my story.

  “From early on I figured this pod is the part of the ship most likely to survive a disaster so I hoped to sneak in and close it up. I didn’t anticipate the A.D.U. guys locking everyone out but I’m taking advantage of that since I could override their program but leave them with the blame. I wrote a program that should orient the pod right toward the snaggiewarp if it’s released from the ship, whether that’s because the ship breaks up or because they do something really stupid and I eject the pod.

  “My hope is that the pod will pass through the snaggiewarp in one piece so my records may survive and make me or my heirs very rich and also be helpful to my kind even if I die. Even if the rest of the crew perish, if the ship doesn’t break up until close to home I can send messages ‘from the grave’ about adventures I can make up to meet the audience demand.

  “At first Wowseyla wasn’t as good as Wilburps at picking up the inhabitants’ talk-talk to one another signals so it didn’t give me better warning about the dangers from the inhabitants and their devices. But when it got proficient at interpreting those Wowseyla did such a good job of making me aware of what was happening that endangered me that I started to panic.

  “I also began to suspect that those on Whizybeam were keeping Wilburps from telling me all it detected on the earth news and made it keep its reports low key and reassuring. I am not certain about this and now I have more important things to worry about but I consider it possible, even likely.

  “For this record, I become a Far-Out Show contestant in part so I could less conspicuously check out Whizybeam for the governors. They feared that the A.D.U. guys would have the main control systems reprogrammed at the last minute but they couldn’t be sure about that without revealing how much the governors knew of what was happening in supposed secret. They need strong proof of that alteration of the ship to justify exposing their backing of the project and their true reasons for that at an especially politically sensitive time.

  “The bottom-most lineage is that P.D.Q., with the secret okay from the governors, sent Whizybeam off with what they knew were less than cutting edge control and operating systems because of their concern about what would happen in the snaggiewarp. Their engineers felt they could predict the expected effects on those old systems but had no idea how safe and reliable the latest generation of systems would be. They expected that and calculated that the feedback from the ship after it got through the Snaggiewarp would let them improve the control programs. They would even try to transmit revised versions to the ship to make its return safer if they saw what would work more reliably.

  “Too bad that the A.D.U. guys had programs installed that are so radically altered that the P.D.Q. guys apparently haven’t been able to sort it out so we’re operating with severely inadequate controls. What now?”

  * * *

  Feedle stood behind Svenly and Venrik who were in their chairs at the console of the program edit room.

  “You need to authorize this for the record,” Svenly said.

  “Feedle says do it,” she shouted.

  “No good. You must specify,” Venrik said.

  “Feedle authorizes the attempt to open the security pod using the modified special unlock program,” Feedle grumbled.

  Svenly tapped a button, then sat back to watch the result.

  Venrik watched a monitor and announced, “Didn’t unlock it.”

  “That’s the last of the standard modifications written for that sub-routine,” Svenly said. “Unless you have some secret tech info to offer I don’t know what else to try.”

  “Uh oh,” Venrik said. He quickly tapped a console button and winced. When nothing seemed to happen he relaxed a bit.

  “What was that about?” Feedle asked.

  Venrik tapped that button again and the room filled with loud, distorted sounds – several voice messages repeated many times but out of synch so they were confused chaos. Those sounds were overlaid with various beeps, clattering sounds, and electronic gurgles that also repeated but out of synch.

  Venrik quickly shut that off again, his point made.

  “What did you fools do?” Feedle asked.

  “We can’t take credit
for that. It’s Nerber’s cleverness. He has created interference to annoy us and keep us from messing up what he’s trying to do,” Svenly said.

  “He learned from the inhabitant’s device,” Venrik pointed out with reluctant admiration. “But he’s added a factor. We learned to filter the relevant signal from the extra ones being overlaid on it by the earth system. He’s found a way to set up echoes of all the transmitted signals so that we can’t filter those out because they’re out of synch but that together they make such annoying noise we can’t stand to listen to it.”

  “Those echoes are special because they have to dampen in the communications systems, they don’t stop immediately,” Svenly explained. “So once his program makes that happen there will be too much noise for us to make sense of anything for at least several minutes. If his program keeps reinforcing the signals they could last for hours.”

  “It seems that Nerber doesn’t want us interfering for at least a while and right now it seems we won’t,” Venrik said.

  “That’s unacceptable,” Feedle shouted.

  “Then take over the controls and make him stop,” Svenly said.

  * * *

  In the pod Nerber brought up Eroder on the small monitor.

  “What are you doing? Eroder asked. “And then, how are you doing it? I see things being shut down and nothing I’m doing changes that. As captain that really upsets me.”

  “I’m going to reassure you that the ship is not yet out of control but that if I don’t do what I’m doing I believe it will be soon. For now I am hanging onto control. Understandably you and the techs are trying to cut off my access and control but to my relief the signs are that so far you haven’t been able to do that. I don’t have time to argue or debate this, Eroder. I’m sending you the full description of what I’m attempting to do and why.”

  “At least give me a hint what this is about,” Eroder said.

  “It’s in the material I just sent you. During the trip through the snaggiewarp to earth Wowseyla, a top of the line newest design zerpy I brought with me, found and copied all the ship’s program schematics from the hidden and triple password protected sections of the ship’s stored information that is largely hidden from most searches.