by Duncan Long
Especially since the old bat wouldn’t quit blasting away with her rifle.
But the pistol was the only thing I had so I decided to make the best of it and hope for a lucky shot.
Things had quieted down and I figured she was ready to make another charge. But she had another tactic; suddenly the room was again filled with the ocean. She had turned on the 3V.
Great. I peeked out from behind the couch and squinted through the water that a small school of rainbow-colored fish was swimming through. The bag lady was nowhere to be seen.
I ducked back and rolled toward where I knew the outer wall was, continuing in that direction until it stopped my movement. Even though it looked like a limitless expanse behind me, it wasn’t. Only a 3D projection. So now I new that the bag lady wasn’t behind me.
Okay, I thought. Now, where is she?
A shark darted to my left. Beyond it was a large octopus. There. Her ragged yellow dress stuck out from behind a boulder.
I fired three times through the boulder and then rolled behind a large, pink fan coral. Just before I got there, I saw the bag lady fall, hold her head a moment and then straighten up. I might not be stopping her but she’d have a whale of a headache, I thought, firing another three shots.
I made a dash for where I hoped the couch was. A rain of needles followed me and licked through the heel of my right shoe. Finding the couch by feel, I dropped behind it, safe for a moment. After taking a deep breath, I peered around the now invisible couch and fired two more rounds at the bag lady who was standing in plain sight on the ocean floor. She stumbled as both bullets hit her. I took careful aim and placed two more hits on her face and saw a bit of her mask break away.
I held my breath and watched as she again fell. Then she struggled to get up again.
She was one tough old battle-ax.
I crouched out of her sight and realized the slide on my Beretta was locked open. Empty. I’m sure glad I have a box of shells out in the van, I thought grimly.
I peeked around the couch again. The bag lady was slowly rising to her feet once again.
Escape out the door? Maybe. But where was it? I looked in the direction where I knew it must be, but could see only endless ocean with a small saucer sub in the distance. I turned back and—
There she was standing over me, the muzzle of her smoking weapon trained right over my chest.
I froze.
Her broken plastic ballistic mask fell away as she tugged at it to reveal a leathery, wrinkled face with a number of red welts and a cut where my bullets had hit her mask. She didn’t look at all happy. Her rifle moved up from my heart to my face in her rock-steady hands.
At least it will be quick, I thought. She suddenly got a funny, twitchy grin and her whole face contorted into a wicked smile.
I waited for a swarm of needles to rip off my face.
Instead, her head rolled off her shoulders. Her decapitated body stood for a moment, spurting blood, then crumpled. It didn’t look like she was having any fun at all.
“What the… ?” I muttered.
The ocean faded out and I was again in the living room with a grinning, scared head at my feet. I stepped back as the old lady’s blood soaked into the thick carpeting.
“Sorry I took so long,” Nikki said, trying not to look at the body.
She stood in the hallway with a power laser whose beam had been deadly if invisible. ” It took a while to find where Craig had stored this. And I didn’t want to cut too low and… Hit you by mistake.”
She put the laser down on the couch and was crying again, back in my arms. And I was ready to add a few sobs of my own.
* * *
Ten minutes later, Nikki was cried out and I was at a loss as to what to do next. Run? Looked like I’d have to; bag ladies don’t just go berserk for the fun of it. Not with all that garbage down there on the street. This gal had been working for whoever was after me and I was betting there were others to take up where she’d left off.
Nikki? Undoubtedly she was in great danger, too, thanks to me.
I led Nikki into the kitchen. “Look, I’ve really messed up. I should never have come here.
Now I’ve managed to get you into the middle of things. These—people—whoever they are, knew I was coming, or were waiting for me… They play for keeps. You’re going to have to lie low for a while. Or something… Hell.” I didn’t even know what to say.
“What’s going on, Phil?”
Good question. I explained what had happened during the last few days, talking as fast as I could because I knew we didn’t have much time.
Chapter 3
It all started when Hampton Weisenbender stomped into the sunlit lab. When Hampton comes into a room, it’s kind of like having a normal person walk out. I could almost feel clouds crossing over the face of the sun as he spoke, “What in the world are you doing in here this early?”
This was a new twist because normally Hampton is after me for being late—he thinks I get paid by the hour rather than for thoughts and ideas. Putting me down for being in the lab early was one of the few times he’s ever engaged in creative thinking.
“I’ve been here since last night. Never went home. We’ve made a fantastic breakthrough with—”
“Forget it. We gave the pink slips to your crew on their way out last night. That explains why yours wasn’t picket up last night. So here’s yours.”
“Wait a minute, sir. There’s something you need to know. Last night I—”
“Forget it, Hunter.” (After working there for six years, we were still on a last-name basis.) While I stood tongue-tied, Hampton looked past the electronic equipment, magnetic bubble smelters, and bots directly at the rods which were floating in a group about eight centimeters off the ground, swaying slightly with the air movement in the room. They were anchored by chains, but it was obvious to anyone who cared to study them that they were floating. I figured even a simpleton like Hampton could see something very special was going on here.
Instead he looked right at the rods and didn’t even blink. “Get this junk stowed away and get cleared out by noon.”
“But…” I sputtered. “Can’t you see? We—”
“No back talk. That’s how it is. You’re leaving.”
I decided to take a new tact. Hampton’s a stickler to the compulsive cubed. I tried a proper-paper-work-and-forms angle. “I’ll need to get the inventory and records straightened out…”
Surely he would bite on that.
“The new owners are closing your section up. We’re to junk your equipment; sell it for scrap. World tax write-off. Now get your personal stuff and clear out by noon or I’ll have the guards toss you out.”
So much for my paper-pusher strategy.
I couldn’t speak. I was in shock. Here was the greatest break-through since fire (in my humble opinion) and Hampton the cave man was going to pass it up so he could continue to chew his mastodon blubber cold.
I was also getting a little mad at the thought that I, and my lab crew, had been fired without any notice at all, while we were in the middle of a scientific breakthrough.
While I stood doing a quiet melt-down, Hampton checked the dust on the clear silicon counter like he usually does—my crew says that’s a carryover from his military space service—and turned to leave the lab. “Pick up the rest of your month’s pay on your way out,” he said over his shoulder. Since the labbots didn’t get pay chips so I figured he must have been talking to me.
I watched he wiggle out the door my mouth open. Finally I closed it and then asked, “Now what?” That was what I thought and I guess I even said it to the empty room.
Now what? Who would have thought that while I’d worked through the night a takeover deal had been arranged by World United Oil half way around the world… Blasted Corporations had taken over the world and now they were shuffling things around to play their games. While I perfected and put the final touches on the rods, a group of men in expensive glow suits had probabl
y been signing away each member of my group, totally oblivious to what we were doing.
I guess it isn’t too surprising.
Our whole end of things had been developed as a pet project of the chairman of the board who retired a year later when she went senile. That always looks bad on paper.
And if I hadn’t been in the middle of our project, I would have thought our anti-gravity lab was probably next door to the UFO research bureau and the grow-hair-on-cue-balls research lab.
OK. It probably made sense to think about closing us down.
But the irony was that in their haste to close us down and save a few credits, the “yes sir, no sir, cover my posterior” guys probably missed the greatest chance for money since the Arabs sold their oil fields at the point of Russian bayonets.
After Hampton Weisenbender had broken the news to me, at first I was tempted to call someone higher up and tell them what kind of a mistake they’d made. But then I got to thinking about how things always work out.
It’s simple really. No matter who I work for, I always lose my job. And this time my crew of lab assistants—who’d become good friends—had lost theirs as well. All because some group of money grubbers didn’t have the sense to check out what they had and some manager like Hampton Weisenbender couldn’t look past the dust on the tables to see what was floating under his fat nose.
During those few minutes, something inside me changed. I decided their loss would be my gain. I would go into business for myself. I could imagine it already.
Anti-grav, Unlimited.
As I stood there, I also realized that Hampton had managed to give me some interesting information, now that I had made my decision. According to him: No real inventory would be taken of the lab,
I knew that my crew didn’t know if we’d succeeded or not. I had achieved the miracle after they had left. So I was really the only one who knew that the rods existed and worked.
A grin crossed my face as I hatched my hair-brained scheme. It was bold and simple: Steal everything I could.
First I supervised the labbot while it got the last load of rods out of the molds (without launching any more!) and got them clamped to the other rods floating in the room.
Maybe I should explain a little so you’ll know what makes the rods so wild to handle. (No, no boring science lecture…just the basics.)
The anti-gravity rods are a lot like bar magnets. Only instead of having a north and south pole, they have a positive and a negative gravity end. One end is attracted toward other matter while the other “pole” is repelled by normal matter. Yeah, sounds crazy but that’s how it works.
(If you want to come by and spend a week with your compucalc, I’ll show you the fundamental concept—but remember we’d been working full time for six years to get these things straightened out and you’ll need to understand how math works in six dimensions.) My lab team had thought things out before I ever started making the rods the night before I was fired. The rods were quite dangerous. They each weighed about fifty kilograms if the plus side were pointed toward the earth while they could lift about fifty kilograms if they were pointed up (more if there was something over them). But…you have to remember that for every reaction there’s an opposite one; we’re not dealing with magic here.
That means that if you happened to get your foot under one of the rods that was trying to lift off just a few inches from the ground, your foot would be pinned under it by the fifty kilogram push. Have a bunch of them hover near your head and you could be turned to jelly.
They weren’t for fooling around with.
Likewise, if two—one up, the other down—were put on a pole that pivoted in the center, you could have a virtual perpetual motion machine. The catch was that it was pretty hard to such a device stopped. And if the pivot burned out (as it quickly would since all that kept the rods’ speed down was the friction of the air)—well don’t be in the area when the things took off at who-knows-what speed. And stand close to it while your perpetual motion machine is running and the gravitational wake could literally beat you to death.
Now you know what I had—something as dangerous as a swimming pool of nitroglycerin but also capable of making almost endless free energy if harnessed up right.
Even though I was aware of how dangerous the things were, I was still fuming from Hampton’s visit and was getting tired, punchy, and careless—so when the last group of rods were released from the mold, one rod departed right through the roof leaving a hole the width of the rod. (I spent a few tense minutes waiting for a plane or pleasure dirigible to come crashing down…Fortunately for all involved, none was overhead when the rod departed for deep space.) After a quick check of the vidtables, I found that the moon and all listed manned stations were not in its path (as near as I could figure—I was never too patient with plotting those things).
Provided the rod made it past all the spy eyes in orbit, it was beyond worrying about—I hoped.
I tried to be a bit more careful after that.
I’d been fastening the rods together. One rod up and one down so that they had a weight only equal to the fasteners. The last rod was then fastened to counteract the weight of most of the connectors so the whole thing weighed about five kilograms (though it still had the real physical sideward mass of the rods).
So I then had:
1) The rods.
2) My van.
3) And a friend who—I hoped—was on duty as the head security guard.
The catch to my steal-everything plan was to get the van to where I could load the rods into it.
So that was the next step to my caper. I made a quick call on the vidphone to my friend at the front gate.
Ralph answered. I was glad to see him but tried to hide it.
“Hi, Phil,” he said. “Sorry about the job.”
“That’s all part of the game,” I said, trying to look the part of the forlorn rather than the criminal element. I haven’t done anything crooked—except maybe for last year’s regional tax form—since cheating on my second grade computing quiz. But Ralph didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. Or maybe he was hoping I’d even things up and would look the other way.
“I’ll be needing to bring my van around to the side door to get some stuff packed, Ralph. Any problem?”
“Nope. I’ll pass the word. And—”
I held my breath. Please no inspection on the way out.
“—keep in touch, Phil.”
“Yeah. Will do.”
“And good luck.”
“Thanks.” I knew I’d be needing it.
A few minutes later I had my blue van parked at the side door. I managed to get it there without running over anyone or wrecking it. To say I was a little nervous would be an understatement. Between the two days without sleep, liters of caffinex, and my lack of practice at being a criminal, I was a little shaky.
Once back in the lab, I felt like a kid at Christmas. It’s one thing to work with expensive equipment day after day…another to take it home with you. The main thing was to pick up what I needed and what wouldn’t be missed. I figured that if Hampton Weisenbender thought I’d taken anything, he’d personally lead the SWAT commando raid on my house.
So I had to split the difference between being overly cautious and bloodsucker greedy.
We had about eight super mini-computers and umpteen compucalcs; in went three compucalcs and two computers (which I told to shut down so they’d not chatter at me when I drove through the check point later on).
What next?
I plugged a power cable into my van’s batteries. Might as well use a little power for my last day at work.
Then a lot of odds and ends of equipment that I thought I might need, one labbot (a very small one—the space in the van would be a bit tight with the rods), a whole box of notes that hadn’t yet been given to the computers to read, and a nice array of tools—including the laser cutting/welding torch. That should all just fit into the van.
The tricky part was get
ting the rods into the van. They weighed five kilograms if they didn’t get tilted. There was a little leeway, but if they passed the point of no return, they went from weighing five kilograms to almost a thousand! Obviously I didn’t want to let them tip over in the van. The disaster would be hard to explain if I survived the experience.
So two of the large labbots and I inched them into the van after I had checked to be sure no one was around to see what was going on. The bots helped me anchor the rods in the van. Then I shut down all the bots in the lab.
By 11:30 it I was finished. I looked around. “OK, what did I forget?”
My pay chip for the rest of the month. I needed that. It was crazy, but while I had a bit of priceless technology in my van, there was no capital to work with. Especially since my Mastivisa account was in borrowed-to-the-quick condition. And I knew my local friendly electric banker wouldn’t be giving me a loan to work on a whacko idea like anti-gravity devices.
A few moments later, with pay chip in my hot fist, I headed around the huge plastic bubble that formed the lab and administration complex, got into the van and—very carefully so that the rods wouldn’t break lose from their moorings—eased toward the front gate that was the only exit through the mass of mines and electrified barbed ribbon surrounding me.
That’s where things started looking bad.
Ralph wasn’t there; in his place swaggered Frank Small, whom my staff maintained was Hampton Weisenbender’s bastard son. They were half right at least, if not about the son part. If anyone would make an effort to go through my van and give me fits, it was Frank.
I slowed down very carefully.
“Hear you got canned,” he smirked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t do it sooner.”
I gave a weak grin, trying to play the part of someone who’d lost his job. I’m pretty good at swallowing my pride when it might keep me out of jail. I eased the van forward.
“Wait a minute!” Frank yelled.
I stopped, swallowing hard. “Yes?”
“I need your badge and compukeys.”