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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  The senator—and his secretary—were watching him narrowly.

  Holland said: “You figure you’ve got a news peg?”

  The senator tapped cigar ash to the floor. “I might come up with one,” he said. “A scandal and an investigation—the biggest ever, Dan. A blowup that will be on every tongue for a solid month. Housewives, factory hands, professional people, children—there’ll be something in it for everybody. Dan! What would you think of a public servant who ignored a great discovery instead of promulgating it for the use of the people of the United States? Wouldn’t it be—treason?”

  “I thought you used to be a lawyer, Bob,” Holland said. “It sounds like malfeasance to me.”

  “What if every indication was that this public servant behaved in no way different from an enemy agent, Dan?”

  “Look,” said Holland. “If you’re going to denounce any of my A.E.C. boys for incompetence or malfeasance or mopery with intent to gawk, go ahead and do it. We’ve screened and processed our people to the utmost limit of practicability. You’re hinting that a spy got through in spite of it. So all I can say is, that’s too bad. Tell me who he is and I’ll have Security and Intelligence grab him. Is that what you came to see me about?”

  “Oh,” the senator said mildly, “we just wanted your general reaction to the situation. Thanks for hearing me out so patiently. If anything else turns up I’ll let you know.”

  He smiled and gave Holland a manly handshake. The general manager saw them to the door of his office, closed the door and latched it. He leaned against the oak panels with sweat popping from his brow. Somebody at Hanford had been talking to a Bennet reporter.

  They didn’t seem to have anything yet on the fiscal or personnel angles.

  Time was getting very short.

  IX.

  The story on page four of Novak’s morning paper said:

  SPACE SHIP ENGINEER FOUND SHOT TO DEATH AT ROCKET CLUB MEET

  The soaring interplanetary dreams of 146 rocket-club members turned to nightmare at Slovak Sokol Hall last night when the body of engineer August Clifton, trusted employee of the American Society for Space Flight, was found in a washroom of the hall as a meeting of the society was in full swing on the same floor. Assistant medical examiner Harry Morales said death apparently was caused by a head wound from a single .25-calibre bullet. A Belgian automatic of that calibre was found lying near Clifton’s right hand, with one shot fired according to Homicide Bureau Lieutenant C. F. Kahn.

  The victim’s attractive blonde wife Lilly, 35, was taken in a state of collapse to the Beverly Hills home of aircraft manufacturer Wilson Stuart by his daughter Amelia Stuart, a friend of the Cliftons and a member of the rocket club.

  The club secretary, Joe Friml, 26, said Clifton had been authorized to spend “sizable” sums of club money in the course of his work, which was to build a pioneer space ship that club members hoped would go to the Moon. Friml said he did not know of any irregularities in Clifton’s accounts but added that he will immediately audit club financial records for the past year with an eye to any bearing they may have on the death.

  Other friends of Clifton said he was in good health but “moody” and “eccentric.”

  Lieutenant Kahn said he will not comment until police fingerprint and ballistics experts have analyzed the evidence. An inquest will be held Wednesday morning.

  The body was discovered by Dr. Michael Novak, 30, an engineer also employed by the club, when he slipped out of the meeting room during the showing of a film. Novak immediately called in the aid of A.E.C. security agent J. W. Anheier, who was attending the meeting as a visitor. Anheier stood guard in the washroom to prevent evidence from being disturbed until police arrived. He later told reporters: “There is no security angle involved. It was just a coincidence that I happened to be there and Dr. Novak called on me.”

  Two one-column photographs flanked the story. One was of Amy Stuart, very society-page looking, captioned: “Socialite shelters stricken wife.” The other was a view of the Prototype: “Dead engineer’s unfinished ‘moon rocket.’”

  All tied up in a neat little package with a bow, Novak thought bitterly. Without saying it, the newspaper told you that Clifton had blown his brains out, probably after embezzling A.S.F.S.F. money. If you didn’t know Clifton, you’d believe it of course. Why not? “They wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true.”

  He went from the lobby newsstand to the hotel coffee shop and ordered more breakfast than he thought he could eat. But he was a detective now; he’d have to act unconcerned and unsuspicious while he was slowly gathering evidence—

  Oh, what the hell.

  It wasn’t real. None of it had been real, for months. Assignment to Neutron Path Prediction, when he didn’t know whether neutrons should take paths or four-lane super-highways. Slugging his boss, quitting his job under a cloud—research and development men didn’t act like that. Going to work for the A.S.F.S.F., an organization as screw-ball as Clifton himself.

  He wanted to laugh incredulously at the whole fable, finish his coffee, get up and walk into the job he should be holding at N.E.P.A.: a tidy salary, a tidy lab, and tidy prospects for advancement. But the climax had eclipsed even the lunacy of the past months. Somehow he had talked himself into pretending he was a detective. Detectives were hard-eyed, snap-brimmed, trench-coated, heroic. On all counts he fell down badly, Novak thought.

  But a man was dead, and he thought he knew why.

  And he had been threatened cold-bloodedly with a smear backed up by all A.E.C.’s prestige, and perhaps with a perjury frame-up, if he tried to get help. Novak looked helplessly at his scrambled eggs, gulped his coffee, and got up to call on the A.S.F.S.F. business office. There was a disagreeable, uncontrollable quiver in his knees.

  * * * *

  Friml and MacIlheny were there. It was incredible that they might be spies or killers—until he remembered the bewildered, ashamed, ordinary faces of spies on the front pages of tabloid newspapers.

  “Hello, Dr. Novak,” the president of the A.S.F.S.F. said. “Friml and I were discussing the possibility of you taking over Clifton’s job as engineer in charge.”

  There was no time to stop and think of what it might mean. Friml and MacIlheny might be innocent. Or they might be guilty but not suspicious of him. There was no time. He forced surprise: “Me? Oh, I don’t think so; I’ll be busy enough on my own. And I don’t think I could handle it anyway.”

  “I see you had some years of aeronautical engineering.”

  “Well, yes—undergraduate stuff. Still, Clifton did say there wasn’t a lot of work left.”

  “He did that much for us,” MacIlheny said bitterly. “The damned fool.”

  “Mr. MacIlheny!” said Friml, with every appearance of outrage.

  “Yes, Mr. Friml,” said the insurance man sardonically. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum, as you B.B.A.s and C.P.A.s put it. If he was so nuts he had to kill himself why didn’t he resign first? And if he didn’t have time to resign, why did he have to do it at a meeting? Everything happens to the poor old A.S.F.S.F. Clifton’s death is going to set us back ten years in getting public recognition. And our industrial sponsors—” MacIlheny buried his head in his hands.

  “I never thought he was a very stable person—” Friml began smugly.

  “Oh, shut up!” MacIlheny snarled. “Just stick to your knitting. If I want your learned opinion I’ll ask for it.”

  Novak was appalled at the naked enmity that had flared between the two men. Or the pretence of enmity? Nothing would hold still long enough to be examined. You had to keep talking, pretending. “Could I see,” he asked conciliatingly, “just where we stand with respect to structural work on Proto?”

  “Show him the cumulatives, Friml,” said the president, not looking up. With his lips compressed, Friml pulled a folder from the files and handed it to Novak. It was lettered:
“Engineering Cumulative Progress Reports.”

  Novak sat down and forced himself to concentrate on the drawings and text. After a few minutes he no longer had to force it. The papers told what was to a technical man the greatest story in the world: research and development; cool, accurate, thoughtful; bucking the cussedness of inanimate nature, bucking the inertia of industrial firms; bucking the conservatism, ignorance, and stupidity of hired hands—and getting things done. It was the story of Prototype’s building told by the man who could tell it best, Clifton.

  It started about one year ago. “Contacted Mr. Laughlin of the American Bridge Company. I don’t think he believed a word I said until Friml took out the A.S.F.S.F. passbook and showed him our balance. After that, smooth sailing.”

  Sketches and text showed how the American Bridge Company, under Clifton’s anxious, jealous eyes, executed ten-year old A.S.F.S.F. blue prints for the skeleton of Prototype. The tower of steel girders rose in the desert to six times the height of a man, guyed down against the wind. There was a twelve-foot skeleton tetrahedron, base down, for its foot. From the apex of the tetrahedron rose the king post, a specially fabricated compound member exactly analogous to the backbone of a vertebrate animal. It bore the main stresses of Proto’s dead weight; it was calculated to bear the strains of Proto in motion; and it was hollow: through its insulated core would run the cables of Proto’s control systems. Structural members radiated laterally from the king post to carry the weight of Proto’s skin, and from its top sprouted girders over which the nose would be built.

  Reports from Detroit: “I been going the rounds for a solid week and still no dice. If a plant’s got the forming presses, its toolroom stinks. If its toolroom is okay, the superintendent won’t let me barge in to stand over their die-makers and tell them what to do. But that’s the way it’s going to be; those hull plates are too tricky to order on an inspect-or-reject basis.”

  Later: “I found a good little outfit named Allen Body Company that does custom-built jobs. They got one Swedish-built forming press 40 × 40 (very good), a great toolroom with a wonderful old kraut named Eichenberg heading it up who’s willing to work closely with me, and a good reputation in the trade. Told them to submit bid to Friml fast and suggest he fires back certified check without haggling. These guys are real craftsmen.”

  Later: “Oskar and me finished the forming and trimming dies for first tier of plates today. Twenty-four tiers of plates to go, plus actually stamping and machining them. I guess ninety days tops.”

  Eighty-five days later: “Mr. Gowan of the Union Pacific says he’ll have a sealable freight car at the Allen siding tomorrow, but that it’s out of the question for me to ride aboard with the plates. That’s what he thinks. I bought my folding cot, Sterno stove and beans already.”

  Sketches showed what “the plates” were like: mirror-finished steel boxes, formed and machined to exact curvature. The basic size was 36” × 36” × 6”, with some larger or smaller to fit. The outer, convex wall of the box was of threequarter-inch steel; the inner, concave wall was one-inch armour plate. Each box was open along one of its narrow 6” × 36” faces, and each was stuffed with compressed steel wool—the best shock absorber A.S.F.S.F. brains had devised to slow down and stop a pebble-sized meteorite if one should punch through the outer shell. There were six hundred and twenty-five of the plates, each numbered and wrapped in cotton wool like the jewel it was.

  Three days later Clifton arrived aboard his freight car in the Barstow yards. When a twenty-four-hour guard of A.S.F.S.F. volunteers was mounted over the freight car, he located a trucking company that specialized in fine furniture removals. “Not a scratch and not a hitch. We got them stacked in order under the tarps at the field. I think it will be okay to use some volunteers on the welding. I checked with the Structural Ironworkers, the Shipbuilders, and the Regional C.I.O. people. It seems nobody has union jurisdiction on building space ships, so Regional said we could use unpaid helpers so long as they don’t touch the welding torches while they’re hot. Tomorrow I go down to the shipyards to get myself the six best damn master welders on the Coast. I figure on letting them practice two—three days at beadless welding on scrap before I let them start tacking Proto’s hide on. Meanwhile I rent a gantry crane. It’ll make a better platform for the welders than scaffolding and cut down your chance of spoilage. Also we’ll need one later when we come to installing heavy equipment.”

  He got his master welders and his gantry crane. Two of the welders grinned behind their hands, refusing to follow his rigid specifications on the practice work; he fired them and got two more. The fired welders put in a beef with the union and the others had to down their torches. Clifton lost a day. “I went down to the hall and gave the pie cards hell. I brought some of the junk those two bums did and I threw it on their desks and they said they’d kill the beef and let them know if there’s any more trouble, which I don’t think there will be with the new boys.”

  There wasn’t. The first tier of plates went on, and fitted to a thousandth of an inch. Volunteer kids working at the field were horrified to see the latticework skeleton of the Prototype sag under their weight, and Clifton told them it was all provided for down to the last hairsbreadth of sag.

  As the shining skin of Proto rose from the ground in yard-high tiers, the designers of the A.S.F.S.F. passed through the acid test and came out pure gold. Nameless aero-engineers, some long gone from the Society and some still with it, engineering professors and students at U.C.L.A., Cal Tech and Stanford, girl volunteers punching calculators in batteries, had done their job. The great equation balanced. Strength of materials, form of members, distributed stresses and strains, elasticities and compressibilities added and equaled one complete hull: a shiningly perfect bomb shape that could take escape velocity. Six plates equally spaced around the eleventh tier and one plate in the eighth tier were not welded in. The six were to be fitted with deadlights and the one with a manhole.

  The welders crawled through the eighth-tier hole for their last job: two bulkheads which would cut the ship into three sections. The first cut off Proto’s nose at the ninth tier. It was the floor of her combined living quarters and control room—a cramped, pointed dome some ten feet in diameter and twelve feet high at the peak. From this floor protruded the top of the king post, like a sawed-off tree stump sprouting girders that supported the nose. The second bulkhead cut Proto at the seventh tier. It made a cylindrical compartment aft of the control room that could store five hundred cubic feet of food, water, and oxygen. This compartment also doubled as the airlock. The outside manhole would open into it, and from it a second manhole would open into the control room above.

  Aft of the bulkhead was two-thirds of the ship—an empty shell except for structural members radiating from the king post. It was reserved territory; reserved for a power plant. The stiff paper rattled in Novak’s hands for a moment before he could manage them. He had almost been lost in cool, adult satisfaction, as he followed the great engineering story, when fear struck through. This triumph—whose? MacIlheny and Friml glanced briefly at him, and he sank into the reports again.

  “Sorry to say… repeated twelve times… seems conclusive… obviously a bonehead play… some of the new silicones may… deadlight gaskets …” Novak’s heart beat slower and calmer, and the words began to arrange themselves into sense. Clifton’s report on the six planned deadlights was negative. Vacuum-chamber tests of the proposed gasketing system showed that air leakage would be prohibitive. There simply wasn’t a good enough glass-to-metal seal. The ring of deadlights was out, but a single deadlight in the nose was indispensable. Air leakage from the nose deadlight was cut to an almost bearable minimum by redesigning the assembly with great, ungainly silicone gaskets.

  This meant blind uncertainty for any theoretical occupants of Proto during a theoretical ascent. The nose deadlight, an eighteen-inch optical flat at the very tip of the craft, was to be covered during the
ascent by an “aerodynamic nose” of sheet metal. In space the false nose would be jettisoned by a power charge.

  The next series of reports showed Clifton in his glory—control devices, his specialty.

  In one month, working sometimes within A.S.F.S.F. specifications and quite often cheerfully overstepping them, he installed: an electric generator, manhole motors, lighting and heating systems, oxygen control, aerodynamic nose jettison, jato igniters, jato jettison, throat vane servos (manual), throat vane servos (automatic, regulated by a battery of fluid-damped plumb bobs). Controls for these systems were sunk into the head of the king post that jutted from the control-room floor. There was nothing resembling a driver’s seat with a console of instruments and controls.

  And there were two other control systems indicated in the drawings. At the input end they had provisions for continuous variation of voltage from zero to six, the power plant’s maximum. At the output end there was—nothing. The two systems came to dead ends in Proto’s backbone, one at the third tier and one at the fifth.

  Novak had a short struggle with himself. Play dumb, or ask about it? They say they think you’re smart enough to take over… He asked.

  “Fuel-metering systems,” MacIlheny said. “We assumed of course that something of the sort would be needed eventually, so we had Clifton put in dead-end circuits.”

  “I see.”

  He was nearing the end of the sheets. The last report said acceleration-couch tests were proceeding satisfactorily with no modifications yet indicated. And then the folder came to an end.

  “I think,” Novak said slowly, “that I can handle it after all. He’s just about finished the job—as far as any private outfit can take it.”

  MacIlheny looked up and said evenly: “There’s some more construction work to be done—on the same basis as the dead-end control systems. Naturally there’s got to be a fuel tank, so we’re going to put one in. Here’s the drawings—” He had them ready in a blue-print file.