The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Novak did—super-smooth surfaces, the kind on hundred-dollar gauges. Put two of those surfaces together and they clung as if they were magnetized. The theory was that the molecules of the surfaces interpenetrate and the two pieces become—almost—the same piece. “Ingenious,” he said.

  “Ingenious,” muttered Clifton. “I guess that’s the word. Because nobody ever in the history of machine shops put a jo-block finish on pieces that size. I got a friend in South Bend, so I sent him the rough-machined manhole cover and seating. The Studebaker people happen to have a big super-finish boring mill left over from the war, sitting in a corner covered with cosmoline. Maybe my friend can con them into taking off the grease and machining a super-finish onto our parts. If not, I’ll try to hand scrape them. If I can’t do it on circular pieces—and I probably can’t—I’ll scrap them and order square forgings. You think you got troubles with your throat liner?”

  “Generally, what kind of shape is Proto in?”

  “Generally, damn fine shape. I finish testing the acceleration couch today. If it passes I order two more pads from Akron and install them. Then we’re all ready to go except for the manhole problem and a little matter of a fuel and propulsion system that oughtta be cleared up in eight-ten years. A detail.”

  Clifton picked his teeth and led Novak to a blue-print file. He yanked open one of the big, flat drawers and pulled out a 36-by-48 blue print. “Here we are,” he said. “The chamber, liner, and vane. You’re gonna have to make it; you might as well look it over. I’m gonna appoint a volunteer and supervise some more crash dives.”

  Novak took the print to an empty corner of the shop and spread it out on a work-bench. He looked first at the ruled box in the lower right-hand corner for specifications. He noted that the drawing had been made some three months ago by “J. MacI.” and checked by him. Material: ceramic refractory; melting point higher than 3,000°C.; coefficient of expansion, less than .000,004; bulk modulus…

  Novak laughed incredulously.

  It was all there—stretch, twist, and bulk moduli, coefficient of elasticity, everything except how to make it. MacIlheny had laid down complete specifications for the not-yet-developed liner material. A childish performance! He suspected that the president of the A.S.F.S.F. was simply showing off his technical smattering and was mighty proud of himself. Novak wondered how to tell MacIlheny tactfully that under the circumstances it would be smarter to lay down specifications in the most general terms.

  He studied them again and laughed again. Sure he could probably turn out something like that—one of the boron carbides. But it would be a hell of a note if A.E.C. came up with a 3,750-degree fuel and they had a 3,500-degree liner, or if the A.E.C. came up with a hydroxide fuel that would dissolve a liner which was only acidproof. What MacIlheny should have said was something simpler and humbler, like: “Give us the best compromise you can between strength and thermal-shock resistance. And, please, as much immunity to all forms of chemical attack as you can manage.”

  Well, he’d tell him nicely—somehow.

  Novak looked from the specifications to the drawings themselves and thought at first that there had been some mistake—the right drawings on the wrong sheet, the wrong drawings on the right sheet—but after a puzzled moment he recognized them vaguely as a reaction chamber and throat liner.

  They were all wrong; all, all wrong.

  He knew quite well from N.E.P.A. what reaction chambers and throat liners for jet aircraft looked like. He knew standard design doctrine for flow, turbulence, Venturi effect, and the rest of it. There were tricks that had been declassified when newer, better tricks came along. This—this thing—blithely by-passed the published tricks and went in for odd notions of its own. The ratio of combustion volume to throat volume was unheard of. The taper was unheard of. The cross section was an ellipse of carefully defined eccentricity instead of the circle it should be. There was only one hole for fuel injection—only one hole! Ridiculous.

  While the shop was filled with the noise of a youngster inexpertly hack-sawing sheet metal in a corner, Novak slowly realized that it was not ridiculous at all. It wasn’t MacIlheny showing off; no, not at all. Anybody who could read a popular-science magazine knew enough not to design a chamber and throat like that.

  But MacIlheny knew better.

  He walked slowly out to the back of the shop where Clifton was clocking dives into the acceleration couch. “Cliff,” he said, “can I see you for a minute?”

  “Sure, Mike. As long as ya don’t expect any help from me.”

  Together they looked down at the spread blue print, and Novak said: “The kid at the gate was right. They are going to take off some day and they just aren’t telling the public about it.”

  “What ya talking?” demanded Clifton. “All I see there is lines on paper. Don’t try to kid a kidder, Mike.”

  Novak said: “The specs are for me to develop a material to handle a certain particular fuel with known heat, thrust, and chemical properties. The drawings are the wrong shape. Very wrong. I know conventional jet theory and I have never seen anything like the shapes they want for the chamber and throat of that—thing—out there.”

  “Maybe it’s a mistake,” Clifton said uncertainly.

  Then he cursed himself. “Mistake! Mistake! Why don’t I act my age? Mistakes like this them boys don’t make. The acceleration couch. They designed it eight years ago on paper. It works better than them things the Air Force been designing and building and field-testing for fifteen years now.”

  Novak said: “People who can do that aren’t going to get the throat and chamber so wrong they don’t look like any throat and chamber ever used before. They’ve got a fuel and they know its performance.”

  Clifton was looking at the data. “MacIlheny designed it—it says here. An insurance man three months ago sat down to design a chamber and throat, did it, checked it, and turned it over to you to develop the material and fabricate the pieces. I wonder where he got it, Mike. Russia? Argentina? China?”

  “Twenty countries have atomic energy programmes,” Novak said. “And one year ago the A.S.F.S.F. suddenly got a lot of money—a hell of a lot of money. I ordered thirty-two thousand dollars’ worth of gear and Friml didn’t turn a hair.”

  Clifton muttered: “A couple of million bucks so far, I figure it. Grey-market steel. Rush construction—overtime never bothered them as long as the work got done. Stringing the power line, drilling the well. A couple million bucks and nobody tells ya where it came from.” He turned to Novak and gripped his arm earnestly. “Nah, Mike,” he said softly. “It’s crazy. Why should a country do research on foreign soil through stooges. It just ain’t possible.”

  “Oh, God!” said Novak. His stomach turned over.

  “What’s the matter, kid?”

  “I just thought of a swell reason,” he said slowly. “What if a small country like the Netherlands, or a densely populated country like India, stumbled on a rocket fuel? And what if the fuel was terribly dangerous? Maybe it could go off by accident and take a couple of hundred miles of terrain with it. Maybe it’s radiologically bad and poisons everybody for a hundred miles around if it escapes. Wouldn’t they want the proving ground to be outside their own country in that case?”

  There was a long pause.

  Clifton said: “Yeah. I think they might. If it blows up on their own ground they lose all their space-ship talent and don’t get a space ship. If it blows up on our ground they also don’t get a space ship, but they do deprive Uncle Sam of a lot of space-ship talent. But how—if the fuel don’t blow up California—do they take over the space ship?”

  “I don’t know, Cliff. Maybe MacIlheny flies it to Leningrad and the Red Army takes it from there. Maybe Friml flies it to Buenos Aires and the Guardia Peronista.”

  “Maybe,” said Cliff. “Say, Mike, I understand in these cloak-and-dagger things they kill you if you find out
too much.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of that, Cliff. Maybe we’ll get the Galactic Cross of Merit posthumously. Cliff, why would anybody want to get to the Moon bad enough to do it in a crazy way like this?”

  The engineer took a gnawed hunk of tobacco from his hip pocket and bit off a cud. “I can tell ya what MacIlheny told me. Our president, I used to think, was just a space hound and used the military-necessity argument to cover it up. Now, I don’t know. Maybe the military argument was foremost in his mind all the time.

  “MacIlheny says the first country to the Moon has got it made. First rocket ship establishes a feeble little pressure dome with one man left in it. If he’s lucky he lives until the second trip, which brings him a buddy, more food and oxygen, and a stronger outer shell for his pressure dome. After about ten trips you got a corporal’s squad on the Moon nicely dug in and you can start bringing them radar gear and launchers for bombardment rockets homing on earth points.

  “Nobody can reach you there, get it? Nobody. The first trip has always gotta bring enough stuff to keep one man alive—if he’s lucky—until the next trip. It takes a lotta stuff when ya figure air and water. The first country to get there has the bulge because when country two lands their moon pioneer the corporal’s squad men hike on over in their space suits and stick a pin in his pressure dome and—he dies. Second country can complain to the U.N., and what can they prove? The U.N. don’t have observers on the Moon. And if the second country jumps the first country with an A-bomb attack, they’re gonna die. Because they can’t jump the retaliation base on the Moon.”

  He squirted tobacco juice between his teeth. “That’s simplified for the kiddies,” he said, “but that’s about the way MacIlheny tells it.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Novak said. “Personally I am going right now to the nearest regional A.E.C. Security and Intelligence Office. You want to come along?” He hoped he had put the question casually. It had occurred to him that, for all his apparent surprise, Clifton was a logical candidate for Spy Number One.

  “Sure,” said Clifton. “I’ll drive you. There’s bound to be one in L.A.”

  V.

  There was, in the Federal Building.

  Anheier, the agent in charge, was a tall, calm man. “Just one minute, gentlemen,” he said, and spoke into his intercom. “The file on the American Society for Space Flight, Los Angeles,” he said, and smiled at their surprise. “We’re not a Gestapo,” he said, “but we have a job to do. It’s the investigation of possible threats to national security as they may involve atomic energy. Naturally, the space-flight group would be of interest to us. If the people of this country only knew the patience and thoroughness—here we are.”

  The file was bulky. Anheier studied it in silence for minutes. “It seems to be a very clean organization,” he said at last. “During the past fifteen years derogatory informations have been filed from time to time, first with the F.B.I. and later with us. The investigations that followed did not produce evidence of any law violations. Since that’s the case, I can tell you that the most recent investigation followed a complaint from a certain rank-and-file member that Mr. Joel Friml, your secretary-treasure, was a foreign agent. We found Mr. Friml’s background spotless and broke down the complainant. It was a simple case of jealousy. There seems to be a certain amount of, say, spite work and politics in an organization as—as visionary as yours.”

  “Are you suggesting that we’re cranks?” Novak demanded stiffly. “I’m a Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Illinois and I’ve held a responsible position with the A.E.C. And Mr. Clifton has been a project engineer with Western Aircraft.”

  “By no means, by no means!” Anheier said hastily. “I know your backgrounds, gentlemen.” There was something on his face that was the next thing to a smile. Novak was suddenly, sickeningly sure that Anheier, with patience and thoroughness, had learned how he had socked his A.E.C. director in the jaw and how Clifton had been fired after a fight with his boss. A couple of congenital hotheads, Anheier would calmly decide; unemployables who can’t get along with people; crank denouncers and accusers.

  Anheier was saying, poker-faced: “Of course we want complete depositions from you on your—your information.”

  He buzzed and a stenographer came in with a small, black, court machine. “And if investigation seems in order, of course we’ll get going with no lost time. First give your name and personal data to the stenographer and then your facts, if you please.” He leaned back calmly, and the stenographer zipped out the paper box of his machine and poised his fingers. He looked bored.

  “My name is Michael Novak,” Novak said, fighting to keep his voice calm and clear. The stenographer’s fingers bumped the keys and the paper tape moved up an inch. “I live at the Revere Hotel in Los Angeles. I am a ceramic engineer with the B.Sc. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. I was employed after getting my doctorate by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in various grades, the last and highest being A.E.C. 18. I—I left the A.E.C. last month and took employment with an organization called the American Society for Space Flight at its Los Angeles headquarters.

  “I had no previous knowledge of this organization. I was told by officers that it is now making a full-scale metal mock-up of a moon ship to study structural and engineering problems. Purportedly it has no space-ship fuel in mind and intends to ask the co-operation of the A.E.C. in solving this problem after it has solved all the other problems connected with the design of a space ship.

  “I believe, however, that this is a cover story. I believe that about one year ago the organization was supplied with funds to build an actual space ship by a foreign power which has developed a space-ship fuel.

  “My reasons for believing this are that the organization has liberal funds behind it which are supposed to be private contributions from industry, but there are no signs of outside interests in the project; further, I was ordered to execute an extremely unorthodox design for a reaction chamber and throat liner, which strongly suggests that the organization has an atomic space-ship fuel and knows its characteristics.

  “I want to emphasise that the unorthodox design which aroused my suspicions was purportedly drawn and checked by James MacIlheny, president of the organization, an insurance man who disclaims any special technical training. In other, nonvital details of the space ship, designing was done mostly by technical men employed in the aircraft industry and by local college students and teachers following space flight as a hobby of a technical nature. It is my belief that the reaction chamber and throat liner were designed by a foreign power to fit their atomic fuel and were furnished to MacIlheny.

  “I do not know why a foreign power should erect a space ship off its own territory. One possibility that occurs to me is that their fuel might be extremely dangerous from a radiological or explosive standpoint or both, and that the foreign power may be unwilling to risk a catastrophic explosion on its own ground or radiation sickness to large numbers of its own valued personnel.”

  He stopped and thought—but that was all there was to say.

  Anheier said calmly: “Thank you, Dr. Novak. And now Mr. Clifton, please.”

  The engineer cleared his throat and said aggressively: “I’m August Clifton. I been a self-educated aero engineer for nine years. For Douglas I designed the B-108 air frame and I rode production line at their Omaha plant. Then I worked for Western Air, specializing in control systems for multijet aircraft. Last year I left Western and went to work for the A.S.F.S.F.

  “My ideas about the A.S.F.S.F.’s backing and what they’re up to are the same as Novak’s. I been around the Society longer, so I can say more definitely than him that there is not one sign of any business or industry having any stake in what’s going on out at the field. That’s all.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Clifton. They’ll be typed in a moment.” The stenographer left. “I understand t
here’s one prominent industrialist who shows some interest in the Society? Mr. Stuart?” There was a ponderously roguish note in Anheier’s voice.

  “Ya crazy, Anheier,” Clifton said disgustedly. “He’s just looking after his daughter. You think we’re nuts? You should hear Iron Jaw take off on us?”

  “I know,” smiled Anheier hastily. “I was only joking.”

  “What about MacIlheny?” asked Novak. “Have you investigated him?”

  Anheier leafed through the A.S.F.S.F. file. “Thoroughly,” he said. “Mr. MacIlheny is a typical spy—”

  “What?”

  “—I mean to say, he’s the kind of fellow who’s in a good position to spy, but he isn’t and doesn’t. He has no foreign contacts and none of the known foreign agents in this country have gone anywhere near him—”

  “What ya talking?” demanded Clifton. “You mean there’s spies running around and you don’t pick them up?”

  “I said foreign agents—news-service men, exchange students, businessmen, duly registered propaganda people, diplomatic and consular personnel—there’s no end to them. They don’t break any laws, but they recruit people who do. God knows how they recruit them. Every American knows that since the Rosenberg cases the penalty for espionage by a citizen is, in effect, death. That’s the way the country wanted it, and that’s the way it is.”

  “Why do you say MacIlheny’s typical?” asked Novak. He had a half-formed hope that this human iceberg might give them some practical words on technique, even if he refused to get excited about their news.

  “Mata Hari’s out,” said Anheier comfortably. “You’ve seen spies in the papers, Dr. Novak.” To be sure, he had—ordinary faces, bewildered, ashamed, cowering from the flash bulbs. “I came up via the accountancy route myself so I didn’t see a great deal of the espionage side,” Anheier confessed a bit wistfully. “But I can tell you that your modern spy in America is a part-timer earning a legitimate living at some legitimate line. Import-export used to be a favourite, but it was too obvious.”