Anti-Grav Unlimited

by Duncan Long

  “Dobrynin,” I said, “you’re going to have some major redecorating to do when we leave.”

  Nikki fired again, putting the knife thrower down for his nap and quickly aced the other two boys as well just to be safe. I reminded myself to ask her where she’d learned to shoot so well if and when we got out of our present predicament.

  At this moment, taking his part as a leader of the world to heart, Sammy Dobrynin fell on the floor and threw a tantrum.

  I don’t exaggerate.

  It was a real chew-the-rug, scream-and-holler, curse-and-threaten, hold-your-breath-and-turn-purple tantrum. If we could have sold tickets, we might have retired right there.

  Lincoln and I started laughing and the show came to an abrupt halt.

  “You… You dirty boys,” he sputtered as he got up onto his chubby knees.

  “Why don’t you just shut up, you tub of lard, and listen to what Mr. Hunter has to say,”

  Lincoln said.

  Another tantrum. But this one didn’t last as long.

  “Are you ready to listen, fatso,” Lincoln asked, demonstrating that he had missed his calling as a diplomat. I also figured he’d hate himself when he realized that we’d filled him full of chemicals in order to get him to bring us in and insult his boss. No doubt he’d be on the run after this. Sammy didn’t look too forgiving.

  “What do you want?” Dobrynin growled, easing his frame into his chair, his face glowing a furious red.

  “Well,” I said, ” I need to talk to you. We need to have an understanding.”

  “Tell me what you want so I can get back to my game.”

  “Yeah, we don’t want to let the state of the world interfere with our ball game,” I said. “We want you to agree to quit hounding us and to release the anti-gravity technology to the public.”

  “You don’t beat around the bush, Mr., uh…whatever your name is. Just what do you stand to gain from that?”

  “My life. I want to be left alone.”

  “Just what would I gain?”

  “Dobrynin, you get all the wealth created by cheap energy.”

  He laughed. “What makes you think I need more wealth?”

  “You must. Otherwise you’d quit trying to get rid of me and my new invention. But I don’t aim to compete with your monopoly. I figure that once you start turning out the rods, all of us will benefit. And you’ll get even richer. Just leave me alone and my secret is yours.”

  Again Dobrynin laughed. And laughed. He all but fell out of his chair. Finally, he wiped the tears out of his eyes and spoke, “You fool. I already have the formula. You don’t understand how things work. Did you ever wonder why we haven’t circled the Earth with solar cells and beamed microwave energy down to Earth? Or how about fusion power? If we took advantage of what we know, of our technology, your anti-gravity wouldn’t make a dent in things. Why are there steel shortages when we could mine the Moon? Did you know we’ve closed our operations down there?”

  I said nothing.

  “Want to know why?”

  “I’ll bite.”

  “Because the operations would be successful. Our goal isn’t to help the unwashed masses. Our goal is to keep the peons poor. And it isn’t easy to keep them poor so we can retain control of all the naughty girls and boys on this planet.”

  “He’s crazy,” I said to Lincoln.

  “No,” Lincoln said. “And he isn’t alone in his thinking. The industrial cartel agrees with him.

  More or less. Listen to what he’s saying. It makes sense.”

  “Yes,” Dobrynin continued. “Think about history. When do you have revolts and uprisings?”

  “Whenever the people don’t have enough. When they’re oppressed.”

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,” Dobrynin whined, shaking his finger at me. ” If you’d study history—really study history, not this tripe we have them telling the school brats—

  you’ll discover that revolts and turmoil occur when people start to get a higher standard of living.

  Or when they see their neighbors getting it and they aren’t. During real times of hardship—the dark ages, the depressions, hyper-inflation—people knuckle under. They look to their government to help them. They become beggars—not fighters.”

  “And that’s what you want?”

  “You bet. By slowly lowering the standard of living, by letting them the peasants expect a price rise on their utilities, we gradually gain control of everything. As long as they sit at home and watch the 3V or come to my games… People like me retain our power and we all live in peace. Since we started manipulating the government, there hasn’t been anything other than border squabbles and on occasional terrorist act.”

  “But…” It was so crazy, I didn’t know what to say. Because in addition to being crazy it had a terrifying ring of truth to it.

  “You,” Dobrynin continued, “would throw in a monkey wrench into things if you had your way with releasing the technology of anti-gravity. Right away everyone is going to want a flying vehicle; but not everyone can have one. The skies can’t hold them all. And if even a few have them, my rocket system will go broke. Next everyone is going to expect cheap energy; what happens to the people who work in the power plants? Are they going to want to be on the public fares while their neighbors continue to work? No. We’ll just have more friction. Those who’ve lost their jobs to your new technology won’t be able to keep up with the others. We’ll have protests and—finally—riots. And who finally loses? The government. And who runs the government?”

  “The people,” I said. And felt instantly foolish as both Lincoln and Dobrynin laughed.

  Dobrynin sneered. “You must think you’re in the good-old-days. No wonder you want to give power away. No, we can’t let that happen. Now why don’t you leave and let me watch my games?”

  He turned back and watched the games. Lincoln sat still, having come to the end of his program. I stood and fumed for what seemed like ten minutes, wondering if I might still be able to do something else. I hadn’t expected to be able to reason with Dobrynin; Yet I had hoped that perhaps we could get everyone off our backs so that we could go about our work. And I had hoped against hope that we’d be able to get my anti-gravity technology released to those on Earth who really needed it to raise their standard of living.

  But I did have a plan.

  It was time to use our drug kit to program Dobrynin.

  Chapter 20

  “Nikki,” I said, “get out your drug kit. Nikki?” She was nowhere around. I gave the room another look. “Nikki!”

  “Don’t panic, Phil,” she said from the room I’d tried to get into earlier. “Just a minute.”

  A few moments later she entered from the doorway leading to the communications room, She’d taken off her bag lady mask and helmet/wig since it was so warm where we were. “I’ve been playing with Dobrynin’s computers. I could see you weren’t going to reach a gentleman’s agreement. I sent out the press releases and public announcements we recorded earlier.” She held up the mini-D we’d recorded them on. “Before too long, the whole world will know about your anti-grav rods.”

  “That can be undone,” Dobrynin said. “A few news broadcasts about the ‘hoax’ and everyone will be laughing about the impossibility of any such thing. We have already got them conditioned to scoff at the idea that there could be anti-gravity anyway. It will be a big joke.” He dismissed us with a wave of his hand and went back to watching the ball game.

  I looked at him a moment. As the game became more violent, he started drooling. I turned back to Nikki, ” I think we’re going to have to help him see things our way. Let’s do for him what we did for Lincoln. That drug worked pretty well.”

  Nikki handed me her shotgun and took the drug kit out of the large pocket in her bag-lady uniform.

  Dobrynin was—I thought—engrossed in it as it seemed. But when the kit came out, he screamed, “No!” and rose to his feet.

  I glanced over as he rose, his f
ace red with rage. Dobrynin was the first obese man I’d really ever seen. Yes, they do have them in the 3V’s but we all know those are just actors in fat suits.

  Maybe even a little synthaskin. But not real flesh-and-blood, honest-to-goodness blubber.

  So I didn’t realize how fast a fat guy can move when he needs to. I just assumed he was sort of like a whale on land. Not so. While Nikki was looking into the kit, Dobrynin’s obese fingers grabbed a tray of fruit as his body lurched forward and he threw it.

  The edge of the try collided with Nikki’s temple and she fell, dropping the black medical case.

  I watched as Nikki, the tray, a rainbow of fruit, and the kit did a complicated ballet with gravity and dropped in a tangle. The case and fruit hit first, then Nikki landed on them. The tray continued past her and shattered another section of the mirrored room.

  I was furious and afraid Nikki might be seriously injured.

  “Good night,” I said grimly, pumping a stun slug into Dobrynin. He blinked in surprise. I suppose he didn’t realize that they were only stun shells. I pumped three more into him figuring anyone with that much mass to him might need an extra-large dose. He just stood there. I got ready to fire again and he toppled face down into a bowl of fruit on the table next to his chair.

  The table wobbled a moment and then collapsed under the enormous weight.

  Lincoln looked at me. Our programming of him had made it impossible for him to do anything once the action started but I decided not to take any chances. I fired at him, missed, and fired again twice, hitting his body.

  His eyebrows shot up as he looked at me with disbelief. “But—”

  “Sorry, but you’re not really on our team. You’re only as good as the chemicals we trained you with.”

  He toppled over without protest further protest. I laid the shotgun down and knelt beside Nikki who was struggling to get up.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a whale of a headache.” She laughed. “That’s probably fitting, isn’t it, considering who threw the tray.” She turned the medical kit over. It was a mess of liquid, fruit, and splinters of glass. We checked the other bag lady, but she had no kit with her.

  “Now what?” Nikki asked.

  “Now, we get out of here the best way we can and get to Jake. We’ll figure out another plan later. If we were smart, we’d kill Dobrynin and end one of the major contributors to Earth’s economic woes. But I know that neither of us can do that.”

  “And someone else would just take his place.”

  “Right.”

  “Wrong,” Nikki said.

  “You’re not going to kill—”

  “No. I did better than that. I was able to get into the computer system while ago and mess things up royally. It’d been left on so I didn’t need any access codes. I just created a major sellout of World Power stocks. Also, I created a few press releases. The company is going to make an announcement of your discovery and how you made it. The population is going to be primed for cheap energy, space exploration, and you-name-it in a few minutes.”

  I swallowed and tried to let it sink in. “Are you sure that…will it…what?”

  “Never at a loss for words, Phil.” She grabbed me and gave me a quick kiss. “Now let’s get out of here.”

  “Right. Now let’s see. We can’t drug them. You can get out as a bag lady. Maybe I could be the prisoner and you could…”

  “I have a better idea. See that bag lady sleeping on the floor? If I can dress up like one of them, then so can—”

  “Now wait a minute. You will never, ever get me to dress up in women’s clothing. Never.”

  I soon had her clothes on; it was either that or one of the cute pink G-strings the boys were wearing. I figured the bag lady outfit was more masculine.

  We calmly slipped out the door and let it close behind us and marched down the hall to caught the elevator without being stopped. We knew we had to get away quickly because all hell was going to break out in the stadium in five minutes. Nikki had explained that while she had been in the communications room, she had taken the liberty of ordering the game to end, its broadcast to be replaced by a continuous loop of our canned release stating that anti-gravity technology was available and would change the world with new modes of travel and energy production.

  Now an angry roar was rumbling from the stadium. “Let the games end,” was not going over well.

  Over the next few hours, Nikki realized that she had underestimated the love of a fans for their sports. Once the unrest started, it spread like wildfire through the city. And yes, in case you haven’t guessed it, that was the game that the fans tore down the Miami stadium. The destruction of the structure was added to the many other losses World Power totaled up that day.

  Chapter 21

  We had just managed to flag down a taxi outside of the stadium elevator when inside the high walls of the stadium, the din of thousands of voices cursing and hollering grew to a roar. The dozens of bag ladies outside Dobrynin’s elevator went scurrying and four headed up the elevator as we opened the taxi doors and climbed in, knowing we didn’t want to be around when word came back that their fearless leader was down for the count.

  “Where to, ladies?” the tiny little man behind the wheel asked unaware of the impending riot.

  I slid into the seat behind him, “The rocket port,” I said. Then cleared my throat and tried it again in my best falsetto, “The rocket port.”

  “No,” Nikki said from her side of the seat as she slammed the door.

  The driver turned around. It was only then that I saw that he was standing on the seat, “Come on ladies, I don’t have all day.”

  Nikki was studying a computer printout she’d produced from her pocket and spoke without looking up, “Take us to the prison. And don’t get smart or we’ll cut a couple more inches off you.”

  “OK. OK. No need to get upset,” He said. He turned around and grabbed a control stick to shift the vehicle into gear and spun away from the curb.

  As we accelerated away from the stadium, I turned to see if anyone was following us. Amid the flurry of bag ladies, no one seemed to be even looking our way. As I watched, a large section of the stadium’s plastic siding was hurled to the ground from above by a group of fans. One seemed to have forgotten to let go of it and fell to his death and managed to crush a number of those who were still waiting to buy tickets to a game that wasn’t going to be finished due to a lack of power.

  I turned around and settled into the seat and—as we jumped up onto the curb to miss a large police riot truck barreling toward the stadium—decided to fasten my seat belt.

  Like the driver of the limo, our taxi driver didn’t seem concerned about pedestrians. Though he did slow down to let an old man get out of the way, he was quick to explain, “Those old codgers put big dents in my car. Got to be careful.”

  As if to make up for it, he clipped a monopod, spilling the rider onto the pavement as we passed.

  I leaned over and whispered to Nikki, “Why are we going to the prison? That should be where we’re trying not to go.”

  She handed me the sheet.

  “Terminate” it read across the top in large letters. The date was…Tomorrow, I decided after a little thought (so much had been going on, it was hard to keep track of the days). I read the list of names that didn’t mean much to me. Then the names started to ring bells. Scientists. A whole list that was a who’s who of the scientific community. And then one name stuck out: A member of my anti-gravity research team.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “From Dobrynin’s computer while our press releases were uploading into the broadcast system.”

  I studied the list. If one team member has survived the attempts to hide our secret, have others? I wondered. The names were in alphabetical order. I started checking up and down the list. All but one of the team and myself were listed.

  Then they were still alive.

  But not for long if some
thing wasn’t done.

  “Couldn’t you have released them through the computer?”

  Nikki shook her head, ” I tried. But such an order needs to have personal authorization.”

  “Dobrynin’s personal authorization?”

  “None other. If we’d had the suggestion drug to use on him. But when he caused me to fall and break the vial… Let’s just say I didn’t think he looked like he’d be interested in doing that voluntarily last time I saw him.”

  “OK. But… Do you have a plan?”

  “No. I figured you could come up with something.”

  “Yeah, right. We’ll just wing it. Our best laid plans don’t seem to be having such a great track record these days anyway.”

  “I’d say you’re doing pretty well so far. You took us into the jaws of death and we got back out again. Look here,” Nikki pointed at a name on the list. “Recognize her name?”

  I shook my head.

  “That just happens to be one of the top bot designers in this hemisphere. Her name is what caught my eye when I happened to see the list by the computer.”

  “Executing these people must be Dobrynin’s way of helping to keep things stagnant.” I shook my head.

  “Here it is,” the driver said as he screeched to a halt and threw us up against the back of his seat.

  “What do you think?” Nikki asked. ” It doesn’t look too formidable.”

  I looked at the small concrete archway of the prison. The entrance looked like it was all door and no building. It didn’t look big. “We’re here. Let’s see if we can do something.”

  We got out.

  “Hey. How about my pay?”

  Nikki clicked off the safety of her shotgun and pointed it in the driver’s direction. “Wait here.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the short driver said with a gulp.

  “And don’t try any tricks. We have your license number and will track you down if you leave.”

  The tiny man tried to speak but only managed another gulp.

  “Just a minute,” I said. “We’ll be needing, uh,” I looked at the list and did some quick figuring, “some more transportation if we succeed.” I turned toward the driver, “Get ten more taxis here. Get them here in a hurry.”