Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars
Page 3
desk in Borlan's luxurious office on the tenth floor, while he
poured three large measures of scotch at the teak bar built into
the left wall. He walked back to the center, passed a glass to each
of the Englishmen, went back around the desk, and sat down.
"Cheers, then, guys," he offered. They returned the gesture.
"Well," he began, "it's good to see you two again. Trip okay? How'd
you make it up so soon-rent a jet?" He opened his cigar box as he
spoke and pushed it across the desk toward them. "Smoke?"
"Yes, good trip. Thanks, Felix," Hunt replied. "Avis." He inclined
his head toward the window behind Borlan, which presented a
panoramic view of pine-covered hills tumbling down to the distant
Columbia. "Some scenery."
"Like it?"
"Makes Berkshire look a bit like Siberia."
Borlan looked at Gray. "How are you keeping, Rob?"
The corners of Gray's mouth twitched downwards. "Gutrot."
"Party last night at some bird's," Hunt explained. "Too little
blood in his alcohol stream."
"Good time, huh?" Borlan grinned. "Take Francis along?" "You've got
to be joking!"
"Jollificating with the peasantry?" Gray mimicked in the impeccable
tones of the English aristocracy. "Good God! Whatever next!"
They laughed. Hunt settled himself more comfortably amid a haze of
blue smoke. "How about yourself, Felix?" he asked. "Life still
being kind to you?"
Borlan spread his arms wide. "Life's great."
"Angie still as beautiful as the last time I saw her? Kids okay?"
"They're all fine. Tommy's at college now-majoring in physics and
astronautical engineering. Johnny goes hiking most weekends with
his club, and Susie's added a pair of gerbils and a bear cub to the
family zoo."
"So you're still as happy as ever. The responsibilities of power
aren't wearing you down yet."
Borlan shrugged and showed a row of pearly teeth. "Do I look like
an ulcerated nut midway between heart attacks?"
Hunt regarded the blue-eyed, deep-tanned figure with close-cropped
fair hair as Borlan sprawled relaxedly on the other side of the
broad mahogany desk. He looked at least ten years younger than the
president of any intercontinental corporation had a right to.
For a while the small talk revolved around internal affairs at
Metadyne. At last a natural pause presented itself. Hunt sat
forward, his elbows resting on his knees, and contemplated the last
drop of amber liquid in his glass as he swirled it around first
from right to left and then back again. Finally he looked up.
"About the scope, Felix. What's going on, then?"
Borlan had been expecting the question. He straightened slowly in
his chair and appeared to think for a moment. At last he said:
"Did you see the call I made to Francis?"
"Yep."
"Then. . ." Borlan didn't seem sure of how to put it. ". . . I
don't know an awful lot more than you do." He placed his hands
palms-down on the desk man attitude of candor, but his sigh was
that of one not really expecting to be believed. He was right.
"Come on, Felix. Give." Hunt's expression said the rest.
"You must know," Gray insisted. "You fixed it all up."
"Straight." Borlan looked from one to the other. "Look, taking
things worldwide, who would you say our biggest customer is? It's
no secret-UN Space Arm. We do everything for them from Lunar data
links to-to laser terminal clusters and robot probes. Do you know
how much revenue I've got forecast from UNSA next fiscal? Two
hundred million bucks. . . two hundred million!"
"So?"
"So. . . well-when a customer like that says he needs help, he gets
help. I'll tell you what happened. It was like this: UNSA is a big
potential user of scopes, so we fed them all the information we've
got on what the scope can do and how development is progressing in
Francis's neck of the woods. One day-the day before I called
Francis-this guy comes to see me all the way from Houston, where
one of the big UNSA outfits has its HQ. He's an old buddy of
mine-their top man, no less. He wants to know can the scope do this
and can it do that, and I tell him sure it can. Then he gives me
some examples of the things he's got in mind and he asks if we've
got a working model yet. I tell him not yet, but that you've got a
working prototype in England; we can arrange for him to go see it
if he wants. But that's not what he wants. He wants the prototype
down there in Houston, and he wants people who can operate it.
He'll pay, he says-we can name our own figure-but he wants that
instrument-something to do with a top-priority project down there
that's got the whole of UNSA in a flap. When I ask him what it is,
he clams up and says it's 'security restricted' for the moment."
"Sounds a funny business," Hunt commented with a frown. "It'll
cause some bloody awful problems back at Metadyne."
"I told him all that." Borlan turned his palms upward in a gesture
of helplessness. "I told him the score regarding the production
schedules and availability forecasts, but he said this thing was
big and he wouldn't go causing this kind of trouble if he didn't
have a good reason. He wouldn't, either," Borlan added with obvious
sincerity. "I've known him for years. He said UNSA would pay
compensation for whatever we figure the delays will cost us."
Borlan resumed his helpless attitude. "So what was I supposed to
do? Was I supposed to tell an old buddy who happens to be my best
customer to go take a jump?"
Hunt rubbed his chin, threw back his last drop of scotch, and took
a long, pensive draw on his cigar.
"And that's it?" he asked at last.
"That's it. Now you know as much as I do-except that since you left
England we've received instructions from UNSA to start shipping the
prototype to a place near Houston-a biological institute. The bits
should start arriving day after tomorrow; the installation crew is
already on its way over to begin work preparing the site."
"Houston. . . Does that mean we're going there?" Gray asked.
"That's right, Rob." Borlan paused and scratched the side of his
nose. His face screwed itself into a crooked frown. "I, ah-I was
wondering . . . The installation crew will need a bit of time, so
you two won't be able to do very much there for a while. Maybe you
could spend a few days here first, huh? Like, ah . . . meet some of
our technical people and clue them in a little on how the scope
works-sorta like a teach-in. What d'you say-huh?"
Hunt laughed silently inside. Borlan had been complaining to
Forsyth-Scott for months that while the largest potential markets
for the scope lay in the USA, practically all of the know-how was
confined to Metadyne; the American side of the organization needed
more in the way of backup and information than it had been getting.
"You never miss a trick, Felix," he conceded. "Okay, you bum, I'll
buy it."
Borlan's face split into a wide grin.
"This UNSA character you were talking about," Gray
said, switching
the subject back again. "What were the examples?"
"Examples?"
"You said he gave some examples of the kind of thing he was
interested in knowing if the scope could do."
"Oh, yeah. Well, lemme see, now. . . He seemed interested in
looking at the insides of bodies-bones, tissues, arteries-stuff
like that. Maybe he wanted to do an autopsy or something. He also
wanted to know if you could get images of what's on the pages of a
book, but without the book being opened."
This was too much. Hunt looked from Borlan to Gray and back again,
mystified.
"You don't need anything like a scope to perform an autopsy," he
said, his voice strained with disbelief.
"Why can't he open a book if he wants to know what's inside?" Gray
demanded in a similar tone.
Borlan showed his empty palms. "Yeah. I know. Search me-sounds
screwy!"
"And UNSA is paying thousands for this?"
"Hundreds of thousands."
Hunt covered his brow and shook his head in exasperation. "Pour me
another scotch, Felix," he sighed.
chapter four
A week later the Mercury Three stood ready for takeoff on the
rooftop of IDCC Headquarters. In reply to the queries that appeared
on the pilot's console display screen, Hunt specified the Ocean
Hotel in the center of Houston as their destination. The DEC
minicomputer in the nose made contact with its IBM big brother that
lived underground somewhere beneath the Portland Area Traffic
Control Center and, after a brief consultation, announced a flight
plan that would take them via Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, and Fort
Worth. Hunt keyed in his approval, and within minutes the aircar
was humming southeast and climbing to take on the challenge of the
Blue Mountains looming ahead.
Hunt spent the first part of the journey assessing his office files
held on the computers back at Metadyne, to tidy up some of the
unfinished business he had left behind. As the waters of the Great
Salt Lake came glistening into view, he had just completed the
calculations that went with his last experimental report and was
adding his conclusions. An hour later, twenty thousand feet up over
the Colorado River, he was hooked into MIT and reviewing some of
their current publications. After refueling at Santa Fe they spent
some time cruising around the city on manual control before finding
somewhere suitable for lunch. Later on in the day, airborne over
New Mexico, they took an incoming call from IDCC and spent the next
two hours in conference with some of Borlan's engineers discussing
technicalities of the scope. By the time Fort Worth was behind and
the sun well to the west, Hunt was relaxing, watching a murder
movie, while Gray slept soundly in the seat beside him.
Hunt looked on with detached interest as the villain was unmasked,
the hero claimed the admiring heroine he had just saved from a fate
worse than death, and the rolling captions delivered today's moral
message for mankind. Stifling a yawn, he flipped the mode switch to
MONITOR/CONTROL to blank out the screen and kill the theme music in
midbar. He stretched, stubbed out his cigarette, and hauled himself
upright in his seat to see how the rest of the universe was getting
along.
Far to their right was the Brazos River, snaking south toward the
Gulf, embroidered in gold thread on the light blue-gray of the
distant haze. Ahead, he could already see the rainbow towers of
Houston, standing at attention on the skyline in a tight defensive
platoon. Houses were becoming noticeably more numerous in the
foreground below. At intervals between them, unidentifiable
sprawling constructions began to make their appearance-random
collections of buildings, domes, girder lattices, and storage
tanks, tied loosely together by tangles of roadways and pipelines.
Farther away to the left, a line of perhaps half a dozen slim
spires of silver reared up from a shantytown of steel and concrete.
He identified them as gigantic Vega satellite ferries standing on
their launch-pads. They seemed fitting sentinels to guard the
approaches to what had become the Mecca of the Space Age.
As Victor Hunt gazed down upon this ultimate expression of man's
eternal outward urge, spreading away in every direction below, a
vague restlessness stirred somewhere deep inside him.
Hunt had been born in New Cross, the shabby end of East London,
south of the river. His father had spent most of his life on strike
or in the pub on the corner of the street debating grievances worth
going on strike for. When he ran out of money and grievances, he
worked on the docks at Deptford. Victor's mother worked in a bottle
factory all day to make the money she lost playing bingo all
evening. He spent his time playing football and falling in the
Surrey Canal. There was a week when he stayed with an uncle in
Worcester, a man who went to work dressed in a suit every day at a
place that manufactured computers. And his uncle showed Victor how
to wire up a binary adder.
Not long afterward, everyone was yelling at everyone more often
than usual, so Victor went to live with his aunt and uncle in
Worcester. There he discovered a whole new, undreamed-of world
where anything one wanted could be made to happen and magic things
really came true-written in strange symbols and mysterious diagrams
through the pages of the books on his uncle's shelves.
At sixteen, Victor won a scholarship to Cambridge to study
mathematics, physics, and physical electronics. He moved into
lodgings there with a fellow student named Mike who sailed boats,
climbed mountains, and whose father was a marketing director.
When his uncle moved to Africa, Victor was adopted as a second son
by Mike's family and spent his holidays at their home in Surrey or
climbing with Mike and his friends, first in the hills of the Lake
District, North Wales, and Scotland, and later in the Alps. They
even tried the Eiger once, but were forced back by bad weather.
After being awarded his doctorate, he remained at the university
for some years to further his researches in mathematical
nucleonics, his papers on which were by that time attracting
widespread attention. Eventually, however, he was forced to come to
terms with the fact that a growing predilection for some of the
more exciting and attractive ingredients of life could not be
reconciled with an income dependent on research grants. For a while
he went to work on thermonuclear fusion control for the government,
but rebelled at a life made impossible by the meddlings of
uninformed bureaucracy. He tried three jobs in private industry but
found himself unable to muster more than a cynical indisposition
toward playing the game of pretending that annual budgets, gross
margins on sales, earnings per share, or discounted cash flows
really meant anything that mattered. And so, when he was just
turning thirty, the loner he had always been finally asserted
lettered with degrees, credited with achievements, bestowed with
awards, cited with honors-and out of a job.
For a while he paid the rent by writing articles for scientific
journals. Then, one day, he was offered a free-lance assignment by
the chief R and D executive of Metadyne to help out on the
mathematical interpretation of some of their experimental work.
This assignment led to another, and before long a steady
relationship had developed between him and the company. Eventually
he agreed to join them full-time in return for use of their
equipment and services for his own researches-but under his
conditions. And so the Theoretical Studies "Department" came into
being.
And now. . . something was missing. The something within him that
had been awakened long ago in childhood would always crave new
worlds to discover. And as he gazed out at the Vega ships. .
His thoughts were interrupted as a stream of electromagnetic
vibrations from somewhere below was transformed into the code which
alerted the Mercury's flight-control processor. The stubby wing
outside the cockpit dipped and the aircar turned, beginning the
smooth descent that would merge its course into the eastbound
traffic corridor that led to the heart of the city at two thousand
feet.
chapter five
The morning sun poured in through the window and accentuated the
chiseled crags of the face staring out, high over the center of
Houston. The squat, stocky frame, conceivably modeled on that of a
Sherman tank, threw a square slab of shadow on the carpet behind.
The stubby fingers hammered a restless tattoo on the glass. Gregg
Caldwell, executive director of the Navigation and Communications
Division of UN Space Arm, reflected on developments so far.
Just as he'd expected, now that the initial disbelief and
excitement had worn off, everyone was jostling for a slice of the
action. In fact, more than a few of the big wheels in some
divisions-Biosciences, Chicago, and Space Medicine, Farnborough,
for instance-were mincing no words in asking just how Navcomms came
to be involved at all, let alone running the show, since the
project obviously had no more connection with the business of