stabilized almost at once into the features of a platinum-blonde,
who radiated the kind of smile normally reserved for toothpaste
commercials.
"Good morning. Avis San Francisco, City Terminal. This is Sue
Parker. Can I help you?"
Gray addressed the grille, located next to the tiny camera lens
just above the screen.
"Hi, Sue. Name's Gray-R. J. Gray, airbound for SF, due to arrive
about two hours from now. Could I reserve an aircar, please?"
"Sure thing. Range?"
"Oh-about five hundred. . ." He glanced at Hunt.
"Better make it seven," Hunt advised.
"Make that seven hundred miles minimum."
"That'll be no problem, Mr. Gray. We have Skyrovers, Mercury
Threes, Honeybees, or Yellow Birds. Any preference?"
"No-any'll do."
"I'll make it a Mercury, then. Any idea how long?"
"No-er-indefinite."
"Okay. Full computer nav and flight control? Automatic VTOL?"
"Preferably and, ah, yes."
"You have a full manual license?" The blonde operated unseen keys
as she spoke.
"Yes."
"Could I have personal data and account-checking data, please?"
Gray had extracted the card from his wallet while the exchange was
taking place. He inserted it into a slot set to one side of the
screen, and touched a key.
The blonde consulted other invisible oracles. "Okay," she
pronounced. "Any other pilots?"
"One. A Dr. V. Hunt."
"His personal data?"
Gray took Hunt's already proffered card and substituted it for his
own. The ritual was repeated. The face then vanished to be replaced
by a screen of formatted text with entries completed in the boxes
provided.
"Would you verify and authorize, please?" said the disembodied
voice from the grille. "Charges are shown on the right."
Gray cast his eye rapidly down the screen, grunted, and keyed in a
memorized sequence of digits that was not echoed on the display.
The word POSITIVE appeared in the box marked "Authorization." Then
the clerk reappeared, still smiling.
"When would you want to collect, Mr. Gray?" she asked.
Gray turned toward Hunt.
"Do we want lunch at the airport first?"
Hunt grimaced. "Not after that party last night. Couldn't face
anything." His face took on an expression of acute distaste as he
moistened the inside of the equine rectum he had once called a
mouth. "Let's eat tonight somewhere."
"Make it round about eleven thirty hours," Gray advised. "It'll be
ready."
"Thanks, Sue."
"Thank you. Good-bye."
"Bye now."
Gray flipped a switch, unplugged the briefcase from the socket
built into the armrest of his seat, and coiled the connecting cord
back into the space provided in the lid. He closed the case and
stowed it behind his feet.
"Done," he announced.
The scope was the latest in a long line of technological triumphs
in the Metadyne product range to be conceived and nurtured to
maturity by the Hunt-Gray partnership. Hunt was the ideas man,
leading something of a free-lance existence within the
organization, left to pursue whatever line of study or experiment
his personal whims or the demands of his researches dictated. His
title was somewhat misleading; in fact he was Theoretical Studies.
The position was one which he had contrived, quite deliberately, to
fall into no obvious place in the managerial hierarchy of Metadyne.
He acknowledged no superior, apart from the managing director, Sir
Francis Forsyth-Scott, and boasted no subordinates. On the
company's organization charts, the box captioned "Theoretical
Studies" stood alone and disconnected near the inverted tree head R
& D, as if added as an afterthought. Inside it there appeared the
single entry Dr. Victor Hunt. This was the way he liked it-a
symbiotic relationship in which Metadyne provided him with the
equipment, facilities, services, and funds he needed for his work,
while he provided Metadyne with first, the prestige of retaining on
its payroll a world-acknowledged authority on nuclear
infrastructure theory, and second-but by no means least-a steady
supply of fallout.
Gray was the engineer. He was the sieve that the fallout fell on.
He had a genius for spotting the gems of raw ideas that had
application potential and transforming them into developed, tested,
marketable products and product enhancements. Like Hunt, he had
survived the mine field of the age of unreason and emerged safe and
single into his mid-thirties. With Hunt, he shared a passion for
work, a healthy partiality for most of the deadly sins to
counterbalance it, and his address book. All things considered,
they were a good team.
Gray bit his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe. He always bit
his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe when he was about to talk
shop.
"Figured it out yet?" he asked.
"This Borlan business?"
"Uh-huh."
Hunt shook his head before lighting a cigarette. "Beats me."
"I was thinking. . . Suppose Felix has dug up some hot sales
prospect for scopes-maybe one of his big Yank customers. He could
be setting up some super demo or something."
Hunt shook his head again. "No. Felix wouldn't go and screw up
Metadyne's schedules for anything like that. Anyhow, it wouldn't
make sense-the obvious thing to do would be to fly the people to
where the scope is, not the other way round."
"Mmmm . . . I suppose the same thing applies to the other thought
that occurred to me-some kind of crash teach-in for IDCC people."
"Right-same thing goes."
"Mmmm. . ." When Gray spoke again, they had covered another six
miles. "How about a takeover? The whole scope thing is big-Felix
wants it handled stateside."
Hunt reflected on the proposition. "Not for my money. He's got too
much respect for Francis, to pull a stunt like that. He knows
Francis can handle it okay. Besides, that's not his way of doing
things-too underhanded." Hunt paused to exhale a cloud of smoke.
"Anyhow, I think there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. From
what I saw, even Felix didn't seem too sure what it's all about."
"Mmmm . . ." Gray thought for a while longer before abandoning
further excursions into the realms of deductive logic. He
contemplated the growing tide of humanity flowing in the general
direction of C-deck bar. "My guts are a bit churned up, too," he
confessed. "Feels like a crate of Guinness on top of a vindaloo
curry. Come on-let's go get a coffee."
In the star-strewn black velvet one thousand miles farther up, the
Sirius Fourteen communications-link satellite followed, with cold
and omniscient electronic eyes, the progress of the skyliner
streaking across the mottled sphere below. Among the ceaseless
stream of binary data that flowed through its antennae, it
identified a call from the Boeing's Gamma Nine master computer,
requesting details of the latest weather
forecast for northern
California. Sirius Fourteen flashed the message to Sirius Twelve,
hanging high over the Canadian Rockies, and Twelve in turn beamed
it down to the tracking station at Edmonton. From here the message
was relayed by optical cable to Vancouver Control and from there by
microwave repeaters to the Weather Bureau station at Seattle. A few
thousandths of a second later, the answers poured back up the chain
in the opposite direction. Gamma Nine digested the information,
made one or two minor alterations to its course and ifight plan,
and sent a record of the dialogue down to Ground Control,
Prestwick.
chapter two
It had rained for over two days.
The Engineering Materials Research Department of the Ministry of
Space Sciences huddled wetly in a fold of the Ural Mountains, an
occasional ray of sunlight glinting from a laboratory window or
from one of the aluminum domes of the reactor building. Seated in
her office in the analysis section, Valereya Petrokhov turned to
the pile of reports left on her desk for routine approval. The
first two dealt with run-of-the-mill high-temperature corrosion
tests. She flicked casually through the pages, glanced at the
appended graphs and tables, scrawled her initials on the line
provided, and tossed them across into the tray marked "Out."
Automatically she began scanning down the first page of number
three. Suddenly she stopped, a puzzled frown forming on her face.
Leaning forward in her chair, she began again, this time reading
carefully and studying every sentence. She finally went back to the
beginning once more and worked methodically through the whole
document, stopping in places to verify the calculations by means of
the keyboard display standing on one side of the desk.
"This is unheard of!" she exclaimed.
For a long time she remained motionless, her eyes absorbed by the
raindrops slipping down the window but her mind so focused
elsewhere that the sight failed to register. At last she shook
herself into movement and, turning again to the keyboard, rapidly
tapped in a code. The strings of tensor equations vanished, to be
replaced by a profile view of her assistant, hunched over a console
in the control room downstairs. The profile transformed itself into
a full face as he turned.
"Ready to run in about twenty minutes," he said, anticipating the
question. "The plasma's stabilizing now."
"No-this has nothing to do with that," she replied, speaking a
little more quickly than usual. "It's about your report 2906. I've
just been through my copy."
"Oh . . . yes?" His change in expression betrayed mild
apprehension.
"So-a niobium-zirconium alloy," she went on, stating the fact
rather than asking a question, "with an unprecedented resistance to
high-temperature oxidation and a melting point that, quite frankly,
I won't believe until I've done the tests myself."
"Makes our plasma-cans look like butter," Josef agreed.
"Yet despite the presence of niobium, it exhibits a lower
neutron-absorption cross section than pure zirconium?"
"Macroscopic, yes-under a millibarn per square centimeter."
"Interesting . . ." she mused, then resumed more briskly: "On top
of that we have alpha-phase zirconium with silicon, carbon, and
nitrogen impurities, yet still with a superb corrosion resistance."
"Hot carbon dioxide, fluorides, organic acids, hypochiorites- we've
been through the list. Generally an initial reaction sets in, but
it's rapidly arrested by the formation of inert barrier layers. You
could probably break it down in stages by devising a cycle of
reagents in just the right sequence, but that would take a complete
processing plant specially designed for the job!"
"And the microstructure," Valereya said, gesturing toward the
papers on her desk. "You've used the description fibrous."
"Yes. That's about as near as you can get. The main alloy seems to
be formed around a-well, a sort of microcrystalline lattice. It's
mainly silicon and carbon, but with local concentrations of some
titanium-magnesium compound that we haven't been able to quantify
yet. I've never come across anything like it. Any ideas?"
The woman's face held a faraway look for some seconds.
"I honestly don't know what to think at the moment," she confessed.
"But I feel this information should be passed higher without delay;
it might be more important than it looks. But first I must be sure
of my facts. Nikolai can take over down there for a while. Come up
to my office and let's go through the whole thing in detail."
chapter three
The Portland headquarters of the Intercontinental Data and Control
Corporation lay some forty miles east of the city, guarding the
pass between Mount Adams to the north and Mount Hood to the south.
It was here that at some time in the remote past a small in-land
sea had penetrated the Cascade Mountains and carved itself a
channel to the Pacific, to become in time the mighty Columbia
River.
Fifteen years previously it had been the site of the
government-owned Bonneville Nucleonic Weapons Research Laboratory.
Here, American scientists, working in collaboration with the United
States of Europe Federal Research Institute at Geneva, had
developed the theory of meson dynamics that led to the nucleonic
bomb. The theory predicted a "clean" reaction with a yield orders
of magnitude greater than that produced by thermonuclear fusion.
The holes they had blown in the Sahara had proved it.
During that period of history, the ideological and racial tensions
inherited from the twentieth century were being swept away by the
tide of universal affluence and falling birth rates that came with
the spread of high-technology living. Traditional rocks of strife
and suspicion were being eroded as races, nations, sects, and
creeds became inextricably mingled into one huge, homogeneous
global society. As the territorial irrationalities of long-dead
politicians resolved themselves and the adolescent nation-states
matured, the defense budgets of the superpowers were progressively
reduced year by year. The advent of the nucleonic bomb served only
to accelerate what would have happened anyway. By universal assent,
world demilitarization became fact.
One sphere of activity that benefited enormously from the surplus
funds and resources that became available after demilitarization
was the rapidly expanding United Nations Solar System Exploration
Program. Already the list of responsibilities held by this
organization was long; it included the operation of all artificial
satellites in terrestrial, Lunar, Martian, Venusian, and Solar
orbits; the building and operation of all manned bases on Luna and
Mars, plus the orbiting laboratories over Venus; the launching of
deep-space robot probes and the planning and control of manned
missions to the outer planets. UNSSEP was thus expanding at just
the right rate and the right tim
e to absorb the supply of
technological talent being released as the world's major armaments
programs were run down. Also, as nationalism declined and most of
the regular armed forces were demobilized, the restless youth of
the new generation found outlets for their adventure-lust in the
uniformed branches of the UN Space Arm. It was an age that buzzed
with excitement and anticipation as the new pioneering frontier
began planet-hopping out across the Solar System.
And so NWRL Bonneville had been left with no purpose to serve. This
situation did not go unnoticed by the directors of IDCC. Seeing
that most of the equipment and permanent installations owned by
NWRL could be used in much of the corporation's own research
projects, they propositioned the government with an offer to buy
the place outright. The offer was accepted and the deal went
through. Over the years IDCC had further expanded the site,
improved its aesthetics, and eventually established it as their
nucleonics research center and world headquarters.
The mathematical theory that had grown out of meson dynamics
involved the existence of three hitherto unknown transuranic
elements. Although these were purely hypothetical, they were
christened hyperium, bonnevillium, and genevium. Theory also
predicted that, due to a "glitch" in the transuranic
mass-versus-binding-energy curve, these elements, once formed,
would be stable. They were unlikely to be found occurring
naturally, however-not on Earth, anyway. According to the
mathematics, only two known situations could give the right
conditions for their formation: the core of the detonation of a
nucleonic bomb or the collapse of a supernova to a neutron star.
Sure enough, analysis of the dust clouds after the Sahara tests
yielded minute traces of hyperium and bonnevillium; genevium was
not detected. Nevertheless, the first prediction of the theory was
accepted as amply supported. Whether, one day, future generations
of scientists would ever verify the second prediction, was another
matter entirely.
* * *
Hunt and Gray touched down on the rooftop landing pad of the IDCC
administration building shortly after fifteen hundred hours. By
fifteen thirty they were sitting in leather armchairs facing the
Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Page 2