The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert

by Frank Herbert

  He backed off four steps. The throw was a chancey thing when you were this close—and if interfering radiation ever touched that beam …

  Ing crouched, sighted along the beam, waited for the throw. An experienced troubleshooter could tell more from the way the beam whipped than banks of instruments could reveal. Did it push out a double bow? Look for faulty field focus. Did it waver up and down? Possible misalignment of vertical hold. Did it split or spread into two loops? Synchronization problem.

  But you had to be in here close and alert to that fractional margin between good seeing and good night! forever.

  Cleaners began paying more attention to him in this close, but he planted himself with his AI markings visible to them, allowing them to fix his position and go on about their business.

  To Ing’s trained eye, cleaner action appeared more intense, faster than normal. That agreed with all the previous reports—unless a perimeter gap had admitted stray foreign particles, or perhaps tiny shades dislodged from the tube’s walls by the pulse of the moon’s own life.

  Ing wondered then if there could be an overlooked hole in the fanatic quadruple-lock controls giving access to the tube. But they’d been sniffing along that line since the first sign of trouble. Not likely a hole would’ve escaped the inspectors. No—it was in here. And cleaner action was increased, a definite lift in tempo.

  “Program condition?” Ing asked.

  “Transmission’s still Whorf positive, but we haven’t found an angspace opening yet.”

  “Time?”

  “Eight minutes to program termination.”

  “Cleaner action’s way up,” Ing said. “What’s the dirt count?”

  A pause, then: “Normal.”

  Ing shook his head. The monitor that kept constant count on the quantity of debris picked up by the cleaners shouldn’t show normal in the face of this much activity.

  “What’s the word from Mare Nubium transmitter?” Ing asked.

  “Still shut down and full of inspection equipment. Nothing to show for it at last report.”

  “Imbrium?”

  “Inspection teams are out and they expect to be back into test phase by 0900. You’re not thinking of ordering us to shut down for a complete clean-out?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ve a budget to consider, too, Ing. Remember that.”

  Huh! Ing thought. Not like Poss to worry about budget in this kind of an emergency. He’s trying to tell me something?

  What did the handbook say? “The good troubleshooter is cost conscious, aware that down time and equipment replacement are factors of serious concern to the Haigh Company.”

  Ing wondered then if he should order the tube opened for thorough inspection. But the Imbrium and Nubium tubes had revealed nothing and the decontamination time was costly. They were the older tubes, though—Nubium the first to be built. They were smaller than Nectaris, simpler locks. But their beams weren’t getting through any better than the Nectaris tube with its behemoth size, greater safeguards.

  “Stand by,” Washington said. “We’re beginning to get whipcount on the program.”

  In the abrupt silence, Ing saw the beam curl. The whiplash came down the twelve kilometers of tube curling like a purple wave, traveling the entire length in about two thousandths of a second. It was a thing so fast that the visual effect was of seeing it after it had happened.

  Ing stood up, began analyzing what he had seen. The beam had appeared clean, pure—a perfect throw … except for one little flare near the far end and another about midway. Little flares. The after-image was needle shaped, rigid … pointed.

  “How’d it look?” Washington asked.

  “Clean,” Ing said. “Did we get through?”

  “We’re checking,” Washington said, then: “Limited contact. Very muddy. About thirty per cent … just about enough to tell us the container’s still there and its contents seem to be alive.”

  “Is it in orbit?”

  “Seems to be. Can’t be sure.”

  “Give me the cleaner count,” Ing said.

  A pause, then: “Damnation! We’re down another two.”

  “Exactly two?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Dunno yet. Do your instruments show beam deflections from hitting two cleaners? What’s the energy sum?”

  “Everyone thinks the cleaners are causing this,” Washington muttered. “I tell you they couldn’t. They’re fully phased with the beam, just add energy to it if they hit. They’re not debris!”

  “But does the beam really eat them?” Ing asked. “You saw the anomaly report.”

  “Oh, Ing, let’s not go into that again.” Washington’s voice sounded tired, irritated.

  The stubbornness of Washington’s response confused Ing. This wasn’t like the man at all. “Sure,” Ing said, “but what if they’re going somewhere we can’t see?”

  “Come off that, Ing! You’re as bad as all the others. If there’s one place we know they’re not going, that’s into angspace. There isn’t enough energy in the universe to put cleaner mass around the corner.”

  “Unless that hole in our theories really exists,” Ing said. And he thought: Poss is trying to tell me something. What? Why can’t he come right out and say it? He waited, wondering at an idea that nibbled at the edge of his mind—a concept … What was it? Some half-forgotten association …

  “Here’s the beam report,” Washington said. “Deflection shows only one being taken, but the energy sum’s doubled all right. One balanced out the other. That happens.”

  Ing studied the purple line, nodding to himself. The beam was almost the color of a scarf his wife had worn on their honeymoon. She’d been a good wife, Jennie—raising Lisa in Mars camps and blister pods, sticking with her man until the canned air and hard life had taken her.

  The beam lay quiescent now with only the faintest auroral bleed off. Cleaner tempo was down. The test program still had a few minutes to go, but Ing doubted it’d produce another throw into angspace. You acquired an instinct for the transmission pulse after a while. You could sense when the beam was going to open its tiny signal window across the light-years.

  “I saw both of those cleaners go,” Ing said. “They didn’t seem to be torn apart or anything—just flared out.”

  “Energy consumed,” Washington said.

  “Maybe.”

  Ing thought for a moment. A hunch was beginning to grow in him. He knew a way to test it. The question was: Would Poss go along with it? Hard to tell in his present mood. Ing wondered about his friend. Darkness, the isolation of this position within the tube gave voices from outside a disembodied quality.

  “Poss, do me a favor,” Ing said. “Give me a straight ’lash-gram. No fancy stuff, just a demonstration throw. I want a clean ripple the length of the beam. Don’t try for angspace, just lash it.”

  “Have you popped your skull? Any lash can hit angspace. And you get one fleck of dust in that beam path…”

  “We’d rip the sides off the tube; I know. But this is a clean beam, Poss. I can see it. I just want a little ripple.”

  “Why?”

  Can I tell him? Ing wondered.

  Ing decided to tell only part of the truth, said: “I want to clock the cleaner tempo during the program. Give me a debris monitor and a crossing count for each observation post. Have them focus on the cleaners, not on the beam.”

  “Why?”

  “You can see for yourself cleaner activity doesn’t agree with the beam condition,” Ing said. “Something’s wrong there—accumulated programming error or … I dunno. But I want some actual facts to go on—a physical count during a ’lash.”

  “You’re not going to get new data running a test that could be repeated in the laboratory.”

  “This isn’t a laboratory.”

  Washington absorbed this, then: “Where would you be during the ’lash?”

  He’s going to do it, Ing thought. He said: “I’ll be close to the anode end here. ’Lash
can’t swing too wide here.”

  “And if we damage the tube?”

  Ing hesitated remembering that it was a friend out there, a friend with responsibilities. No telling who might be monitoring the conversation, though … and this test was vital to the idea nibbling at Ing’s awareness.

  “Humor me, Poss,” Ing said.

  “Humor him,” Washington muttered. “All right, but this’d better not be humorous.”

  “Wait ’till I’m in position,” Ing said. “A straight lash.”

  He began working up the tube slope out of Zone Yellow into the Gray and then the White. Here, he turned, studied the beam. It was a thin purple ribbon stretching off left and right—shorter on the left toward the anode. The long reach of it going off toward the cathode some twelve kilometers to his right was a thin wisp of color broken by the flickering passage of cleaners.

  “Any time,” Ing said.

  He adjusted the suit rests against the tube’s curve, pulled his arms into the barrel top, started the viewplate counter recording movement of the cleaners. Now came the hard part—waiting and watching. He had a sudden feeling of isolation then, wondering if he’d done the right thing. There was an element of burning bridges in this action.

  If it isn’t there, you can’t study it, Ing thought.

  “You will take your work seriously,” he muttered. Ing smiled then, thinking of the tragicomic faces, the jowly board chairman he visualized behind the handbook’s pronouncements. Nothing was left to chance—no task, no item of personal tidiness, no physical exercise. Ing considered himself an expert on handbooks. He owned one of the finest collections of them dating from ancient times down to the present. In moments of boredom he amused himself with choice quotes.

  “Program going in,” Washington said. “I wish I knew what you hope to find by this.”

  “I quote,” Ing said. “‘The objective worker makes as large a collection of data as possible and analyzes these in their entirety in relation to selected factors whose relationship to a questioned phenomenon is to be investigated.’”

  “What the devil’s that supposed to mean?” Washington demanded.

  “Damned if I know,” Ing said, “but it’s right out of the Haigh Handbook.” He cleared his throat. “What’s the cleaner tempo from your stations?”

  “Up a bit.”

  “Give me a countdown on the ’lash.”

  “No sign yet. There’s … wait a minute! Here’s some action—twenty-five … twenty seconds.”

  Ing began counting under his breath.

  Zero.

  A progression of tiny flares began far off to his right, flickered past him with increasing brightness. They were a blur that left a glimmering afterimage. Sensors in his suit soles began reporting the fall of debris.

  “Holy O’Golden!” Washington muttered.

  “How many’d we lose?” Ing asked. He knew it was going to be bad—worse than he’d expected.

  There was a long wait, then Washington’s shocked voice: “A hundred and eighteen cleaners down. It isn’t possible!”

  “Yeah,” Ing said. “They’re all over the floor. Shut off the beam before that dust drifts up into it.”

  The beam disappeared from Ing’s faceplate responders.

  “Is that what you thought would happen, Ing?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “You wouldn’t have given me that ’lash.”

  “Well how the devil’re we going to explain a hundred and eighteen cleaners? Accounting’ll be down on my neck like a…”

  “Forget Accounting,” Ing said. “You’re a beam engineer; open your eyes. Those cleaners weren’t absorbed by the beam. They were cut down and scattered over the floor.”

  “But the…”

  “Cleaners are designed to respond to the beam’s needs,” Ing said. “As the beam moves they move. As the debris count goes up, the cleaners work harder. If one works a little too hard and doesn’t get out of the way fast enough, it’s supposed to be absorbed—its energy converted by the beam. Now, a false ’lash catches a hundred and eighteen of them off balance. Those cleaners weren’t eaten: they were scattered over the floor.”

  There was silence while Washington absorbed this.

  “Did that ’lash touch angspace?” Ing asked.

  “I’m checking,” Washington said. Then: “No … wait a minute: there’s a whole ripple of angspace … contacts, very low energy—a series lasting about an eighty-millionth of a second. I had the responders set to the last decimal or we’d have never caught it.”

  “To all intents and purposes we didn’t touch,” Ing said.

  “Practically not.” Then: “Could somebody in cleaner programming have flubbed the dub?”

  “On a hundred and eighteen units?”

  “Yeah. I see what you mean. Well, what’re we going to say when they come around for an explanation?”

  “We quote the book. ‘Each problem should be approached in two stages: (1) locate those areas which contribute most to the malfunction, and (2) take remedial action designed to reduce hazards which have been positively identifying hazards.’”

  * * *

  Ing stepped over the lock sill into the executive salon, saw that Washington already was seated at the corner table which convention reserved for the senior beam engineer on duty, the Supervisor of Transmission.

  It was too late for day lunch and too early for the second shift coffee break. The salon was almost empty. Three junior executives at a table across the room to the right were sharing a private joke, but keeping it low in Washington’s presence. A security officer sat nursing a teabulb beside the passage to the kitchen tram on the left. His shoulders bore a touch of dampness from a perspiration reclaimer to show that he had recently come down from the surface. Security had a lot of officers on the station, Ing noted … and there always seemed to be one around Washington.

  The vidwall at the back was tuned to an Earthside news broadcast: There were hints of political upsets because of the beam failure, demands for explanations of the money spent. Washington was quoted as saying a solution would be forthcoming.

  Ing began making his way toward the corner, moving around the empty tables.

  Washington had a coffeebulb in front of him, steam drifting upward. Ing studied the man—Possible Washington (Impossible, according to his junior engineers) was a six-foot eight-inch powerhouse of a man with wide shoulders, sensitive hands, a sharply Moorish-Semitic face of café au lait skin and startlingly blue eyes under a dark crew-cut. (The company’s senior medic referred to him as “a most amazing throw of the genetic dice.”) Washington’s size said a great deal about his abilities. It took a considerable expenditure to lift his extra kilos moonside. He had to be worth just that much more.

  Ing sat down across from Washington, gestured to the waiter-eye on the table surface, ordered Marslichen tea.

  “You just come from Assembly?” Washington asked.

  “They said you were up here,” Ing said. “You look tired. Earthside give you any trouble about your report?”

  “Until I used your trick and quoted the book: ‘Every test under field conditions shall approximate as closely as possible the conditions set down by laboratory precedent.’”

  “Hey, that’s a good one,” Ing said. “Why didn’t you tell them you were following a hunch—you had a hunch I had a hunch.”

  Washington smiled.

  Ing took a deep breath. It felt good to sit down. He realized he’d worked straight through two shifts without a break.

  “You look tired yourself,” Washington said.

  Ing nodded. Yes, he was tired. He was too old to push this hard. Ing had few illusions about himself. He’d always been a runt, a little on the weak side—skinny and with an almost weaselish face that was saved from ugliness by widely set green eyes and a thick crewcut mop of golden hair. The hair was turning gray now, but the brain behind the wide brow still functioned smoothly.


  The teabulb came up through the table slot. Ing pulled the bulb to him, cupped his hands around its warmth. He had counted on Washington to keep the worst of the official pressure off him, but now that it had been done, Ing felt guilty.

  “No matter how much I quote the book,” Washington said, “they don’t like that explanation.”

  “Heads will roll and all that?”

  “To put it mildly.”

  “Well, we have a position chart on where every cleaner went down,” Ing said. “Every piece of wreckage has been reassembled as well as possible. The undamaged cleaners have been gone over with the proverbial comb of fine teeth.”

  “How long until we have a clean tube?” Washington asked.

  “About eight hours.”

  Ing moved his shoulders against the chair. His thigh muscles still ached from the long session in the Skoarnoff tube and there was a pain across his shoulders.

  “Then it’s time for some turkey talk,” Washington said.

  Ing had been dreading this moment. He knew the stand Washington was going to take.

  The Security officer across the room looked up, met Ing’s eyes, looked away. Is he listening to us? Ing wondered.

  “You’re thinking what the others thought,” Washington said. “That those cleaners were kicked around the corner into angspace.”

  “One way to find out,” Ing said.

  There was a definite lift to the Security officer’s chin at that remark. He was listening.

  “You’re not taking that suicide ride,” Washington said.

  “Are the other beams getting through to the Seed Ships?” Ing asked.

  “You know they aren’t!”

  Across the room, the junior executives stopped their own conversation, peered toward the corner table. The Security officer hitched his chair around to watch both the executives and the corner table.

  Ing took a sip of his tea, said: “Damn tea here’s always too bitter. They don’t know how to serve it anywhere except on Mars.” He pushed the bulb away from him. “Join the Haigh Company and save the Universe for Man.”