Mission Earth 8: Disaster

by L. Ron Hubbard

  He pushed it further and further astern, enlarging its image bit by bit.

  Suddenly the whole thing shivered. It made a sudden movement. The concentric, in-pointing bars of the cage all went into place.

  "Got it," he said with a sigh of relief.

  "Got what?" I said. I couldn't see anything.

  "Got the black hole in the middle of the cage without losing the whole rig. All right, now let's see if it also works as a motor." He picked up a control plate and began to touch buttons on it. Small jets seemed to come from the center out through one or another of the rods.

  "That's fine," he said. "Its position can be adjusted."

  "With what?" I said.

  "There's an automatic sensor for these coordinates. It's in the lowest ring of weights. Excess energy from the hole can be poured through the rods and made to move the whole rig very slowly up or down or back and forth. It's got to stay in position for the next few million years, orbiting right above this spot in the Devil's Playground."

  "What is this thing?"

  "A concentrating mirror. Energy from the black hole inside the cage is reflected down, passed through the converter ring and hot-spotted on that pile on the Earth's surface. The lowest ring of weights uses Earth gravity to keep it upright. There is a sensor for coordinates in the weight ring that adjusts position." He watched it for a bit. "Good. We're through here."

  He threw a bunch of switches that turned off all beams. "Corky, take us out of this and into normal time, five hundred miles above surface."

  "You're going to leave that there?" I said. "Somebody might run into it!"

  "Nobody's travelling thirteen minutes in the future," he said. "Not on this planet. They won't even see it in a telescope. And if any probe blunders into it, didn't you see the sign on it?" He was pointing at a screen.

  There was a sign! It was all around the mantle. It was in English and it said:

  POWER FOR PEOPLE, INC. No Trespassing

  Hands Off HIGH VOLTAGE

  We experienced the sudden flash and grind of a shift back into normal space. I always hated it.

  The viewscreens looked more normal. The Pacific Ocean spread vastly below. It seemed, from the shadow west of Hawaii, that it must be morning in Los Angeles.

  Heller was busy with the viewer-phone. Izzy's face appeared.

  "Oh, thank heavens, Mr. Jet. We were getting so worried. I hope nothing serious caused the delay."

  "I just ran into something," said Heller, "but pushed it out of the way. Is the chief engineer of Power for People there?"

  "Dr. Phil A. Mentor is right in the anteroom. He's been sleeping there! I'm so glad you are all right, Mr. Jet. I will get him at once."

  Shortly, a Vandyke-bearded man was on the screen. I suddenly recognized him from the Countess Krak's classes.

  "Is your ferromagnetic pile in place?" said Heller.

  "Yes, Mr. Jet. Exactly according to your design."

  "It should be hot now," said Heller.

  Dr. Mentor was reaching for a phone. It evidently was a lease line as he didn't make any call. An excited voice was coming through the earpiece and spilling into the viewer-phone. "Devil's Playground Observation Post One."

  "Is your pile hot?" said Mentor.

  "Jesus Christ, yes, chief. Hot or something. The whole God (bleeped) thing just disappeared right on schedule. Somebody left a truck in there and it vanished, too!"

  "Very good," said Mentor. "Are the time step-down capacitors functioning?"

  "I'll check. We got so excited when the pile vanished——"

  "Check those capacitors," said Mentor.

  After a moment, the excited voice came back. "Yes, sir. There's a stream of microwave power pouring out! They've got it beamed into the sky at the moment."

  Mentor looked into the screen. "Anything else you want to know, sir?"

  "No, that's fine. Let Izzy in there."

  Izzy moved in front of the screen. "I'm so glad it's working. Congratulations, Mr. Jet."

  "Thank you. How are you coming with the contracts?"

  "Well, some of the cities seem rather skeptical but they'll come through as soon as we have one getting all the microwave power it needs straight into its mains. I think we are quite safe to begin construction of the microwave-mirror relay systems to deliver the power. It won't suddenly run out, will it?"

  "Not for the next few million years," said Heller. "You're all okay on that, then?"

  "Oh, yes. Just business routine. I think ratepayers will be delighted at a penny a kilowatt. I'm assigning industrial rate at a quarter of a cent. There is one problem, though: It's going to be a problem reinvesting all our profits, as this isn't costing us anything but installation and maintenance."

  "I'm sure you're up to that," said Heller.

  "Well, yes," said Izzy. "But there is one more thing. Mr. Rockecenter is not going to be very happy when the oil and coal contracts start getting cancelled left and right."

  "I suppose he won't," said Heller. "Now, have you gotten all the options to sell the oil-company stock?"

  "Options to sell in hand," said Izzy. "I included on my own initiative a lot of national and small oil companies, too. We have options to sell practically every share of oil stock in the world."

  "Good," said Heller. "My next project is to make it go down."

  "Well, it will certainly fall, with this cheap microwave-power network."

  "True. But when I say 'down,' I mean down," said Heller.

  "It averages eighty to a hundred dollars a share right now," said Izzy. "How 'down' do you think 'down' should be?"

  "About fifty cents to a dollar," said Heller.

  "Oy!" said Izzy. "Mr. Rockecenter will be broke broke."

  "That's the idea," said Heller. "Broke plus broke equals bankrupt. So what I want you to do now is obtain an additional set of options to buy all the oil shares in the world at one dollar."

  "WHAT?"

  "You heard me. Your sell options will go for a fortune. Then, when the bottom is out, your buy options will put you in control of every oil company in the world."

  "Oy," said Izzy. "Our dream of corporations running the planet is going to come true! I hope Fate isn't listening in on this conversation."

  "We'll make it come true somehow," Heller reassured him.

  "Mr. Jet, just selling cheap power to cities won't drive the stocks that low."

  "I know it won't. But this next project will. Anything else, Izzy?"

  "Yes, Mr. Jet. Don't do anything dangerous. I worry."

  "Oh, it's all very calm where I am," said Heller. "Bye-bye."

  The viewer-phone went blank.

  My wits were in a hurricane. (Bleep) this Heller! That black-hole microwave-power system would be the end of Octopus! Cheap power for all of Earth? Unthinkable! What ruin it spelled for poor Mr. Rockecenter!

  Suddenly I remembered that the Russians had long ago perfected satellite killers. I began to try to figure out how I could get free and get the Russians to locate and blast that contrivance and black hole he had put in the sky.

  Oh, would THAT solve my problems! I would be the hero of the hour!

  Somehow, some way, I must get myself out of this! The situation was utterly intolerable for Rockecenter, for Hisst, for me. I could rescue everything if I just put my wits to it. But how was I going to do it?

  Chapter 6

  Heller addressed the tug, "Any sign of that other assassin pilot?"

  "No, sir. I've been checking ever since we returned to normal time. But I would advise extreme caution, sir. I have turned us back to total absorption of any and all waves. But I must bring to your attention that if we go speeding about, we will leave a magnetic wake that can be spotted. I severely... sincerely... severely... sincerely—incorrect nuance. Urgently. I urgently counsel that we just lie still."

  "Override, negative," said Heller. He got out a book. "Enter these coordinates in your itinerary data bank and then plot a sequential course to them." And he began to r
ead a long series of exact spacial positions all over Earth: North America, the Caribbean, South America, Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Russia, Central Europe, Europe, Alaska and Canada—it went on and on and on.

  What was he up to now?

  Finally he finished and the tug said, "I have all of them, sir. They are strung now into sequential numbered positions."

  "Go to position one," said Heller.

  "That is Watson, California," said the tug. "Just below us."

  "Aim the bow at it," said Heller. He was lifting the radiation shields off the ports. The tug giddily tipped up. Five hundred miles below, the Los Angeles area was a smudge of yellow smog.

  Heller adjusted his screens. Magnification of the middle one showed that we were pointed straight at an oil refinery!

  "Just hold there," he told the tug. He reached over to the viewer-phone and buzzed it. The worried face of Izzy came on.

  "Just checking," said Heller. "Have you got the buy options yet on all the oil shares in the world at one dollar?"

  "Good heavens," said Izzy. "They think we're insane—that we're wasting our option money. But, yes, our brokers are phoning in right now. Please hold."

  He chattered into another phone. Then he came back to ours. "Yes—they think we've lost our minds, but we've got them. Mr. Jet, how could it possibly fall to that?"

  "You'll see," said Heller. "Bye-bye."

  He returned to his magnified view of the refinery below. He was checking a floor plan. "Atmospheric pipefill," he said. He made a couple of tiny adjustments to the position of the ship.

  Then his hands went out toward the firing control of the laser cannon he had lately installed.

  "NO!" I cried in desperation. "Don't blow up the refineries!"

  His finger pressed the firing button. The gun overhead made a brief whirr.

  I watched in horror. The enlarged picture of a part of a refinery, I thought, would burst into flame.

  I waited. ! It didn't!

  "Corky, position two," said Heller.

  "That's Wilmington, California," said the tug. And we moved.

  Heller did the same thing as before.

  I could see no change below.

  "Position three," said Heller.

  "That's Long Beach, California," said the tug.

  Heller repeated his actions.

  "Position four," said Heller.

  "That's El Segundo, California," said the tug.

  Heller went through his same drill.

  "Say, what the Hells is going on?" I said. "Aren't you going to blow anything up?"

  "I wish you'd make up your mind," said Heller. "Half an hour ago you were telling me I shouldn't."

  "Please tell me what you are doing."

  He glanced at me. "Everything they do in a refinery first passes into what they call the atmospheric pipefill from the crude-oil tanks. From the pipefill it goes on through every other process in the place: jet fuel, diesel fuel, virgin naphtha, you name it. All I'm doing is putting a false radiation charge in the metals of the pipefills. It will register like mad on a Geiger counter but it actually doesn't affect another thing. You're not going anywhere, so there is no reason not to tell you that Izzy has the device that nulls the wave."

  He turned away and went back to work, and between him and the tug, they systematically did the same thing to every blessed oil refinery in the whole world.

  It took a day and a half to cover them all.

  Then Heller caught some sleep. We were over Canada now, having been everywhere else above the globe.

  I crouched there thinking, what a strange thing to do. He wasn't actually destroying anything at all. It seemed very impractical to me. Certainly not an Apparatus textbook procedure. He might be a Royal officer, but he would certainly never qualify for a real organization like ours. No explosions! What an oversight!

  Bathed and shaved and in fresh clothes, he came back to the flight deck. He fed the cat and then he fed me. He chained me back up to the pipe and sat down in the planetary-pilot chair. He buzzed Izzy and gave him a phone number and told him to ring it and, when he had the party, to hold the instrument close to the viewer-phone.

  Izzy told the party that someone wanted to speak with them. He put the telephone where he had been told.

  "This is Wister," Heller said.

  "Oh! Oh, dear Wister—what a wonderful surprise! I will always be eternally grateful to you, you know."

  MISS SIMMONS!

  "And I will always remember you," said Heller. "Listen. I have something you will be very interested in. Did you know that every oil refinery in the world is registering as radioactive on Geiger counters?"

  "NO!"

  "Yes, it's a fact. I think you should get field teams out at once and check it. Every time you go near one of them a Geiger counter will click its head off!"

  "GOOD HEAVENS!"

  "Will you check that for me?" said Heller.

  "Oh, good Lord! If that is true, Wister, the Antinuclear Protest Marchers in every land will rise in a howling storm!"

  "That's what I hoped," said Heller. "Demonstrations everyplace."

  "Oh, you'll have them, Wister. And thank you, thank you, thank you, you dear boy! THE (BLEEPARDS)!" She hung up.

  "Oy!" said Izzy.

  * "Yes," said Heller. "Double oy. The oil shares will go down like a rocket in reverse. When they get near bottom, sell. And use the cash for Maysabongo to exercise their contracts for every drop of oil in reserve in the U.S. Then in July, purchase every oil company in the world for a song."

  "Oh, Mr. Jet, our every dream is coming true! I just hope Fate doesn't intervene."

  "I'll try to see it doesn't," Heller said. "Bye-bye.

  "Now I'll take care of the last small bit of this program and the mission will be done," said Heller.

  "Done?" I cried aghast. "For Gods' sakes, what more could you do?"

  "Oh, this last is just a little thing. The south pole has a tendency to wander over the sea. I have to give the globe a little tap to straighten up its rotation. Corky, take off for the planet Saturn now."

  Saturn?

  My head was in a whirl indeed.

  All I could think of, really, was that he had just set motions in train which would utterly smash Octopus and all the other oil companies. Not even their massive control of news could quash the panic that would ensue. Rockecenter, unless I got loose, was through!

  I reviewed how I could remedy this catastrophe. Actually all I had to do was get Rockecenter to put a satellite killer on to that umbrella device, bomb the Empire State Building, atom-bomb the Republic of Maysabongo out of existence and announce to the waiting world that their refineries were NOT radioactive. Yes, I could handle this.

  But now for some mysterious reason we were heading for Saturn.

  HOW COULD I GET LOOSE?

  Chapter 7

  Heller was dropping radiation shields again so we could pass once more through the magnetosphere. I could hear the planetary drives winding up higher and higher. I was chained very close to their partition just back of the flight deck and the sound began to hurt my ears.

  "I don't think these auxiliaries are meant to run this fast," I said fearfully.

  "Oh, stop worrying. They take this ship up to the brink of the speed of light. They sound just fine to me."

  They would, I grated to myself. Oh, Gods, why did I ever get involved with anyone from the most insane corps of the Fleet, combat engineers? No wonder their average service life was only two years. Heller was long overdue, having gone three or more times that. And on top of that he was a speed maniac. "What's the hurry?"

  "There's no sense dawdling around. What with acceleration and braking, it will take us hours as it is." He glanced at a readout that was whirring too fast for me to read. "Saturn, right now, is 782,617,819 miles away. It's not at minimal distance. The closest it ever gets to Earth is about 740,000,000 miles."

  "Why Saturn?" I said.

  Heller shrugged. He indicated the view
screens with his hand. "You don't see any comets, do you?" Comets? Saturn? Now I knew he was crazy.

  I made another try. "If you leave this fast, that other assassin ship is certain to spot our turbulence and even if they don't get us on a scope, they'll be waiting for our return."

  "True. They won't be able to follow us. They haven't got the speed we have."

  "No, no. You don't understand. If we return, they'll be lying in wait for us. They can find us even with the locators gone."

  It had been on the tip of my tongue to say that this proved he should go to Voltar right now. That would put me home perfectly safe, as Lombar would have him grabbed on sight and I would be freed. But even as I opened my mouth to speak, a sledgehammer thought hit me: The actions this Devil had just set in train spelled utter ruin for Rockecenter.

  If I went home and left that mess, Lombar Hisst would have me exterminated so slowly it would take months. It would be quite different if I could come galloping in and cry "I had to return so I could save your life," or something like that. I had no excuse whatever to go back except that I had been captured. Lombar wouldn't like that.

  No, I must think of some way to get free and undo the fiendish and diabolical work of Heller. I could not go back and leave Earth with no Rockecenter, clean air, cheap fuel and happy riffraff. Heller a total success? It was unthinkable!

  I crouched down and thought harder.

  He told the cat and the tug to keep an eye on me and went aft.

  Earth, seen on the scopes, was dwindling like a ball thrown away. I realized suddenly that we were going to go through the asteroid belt with, to all intents and purposes, no pilot. It froze my wits.