by Duncan Long
“Here come two missiles,” I said as I saw two small blips break off of the larger one behind us.
“Two! Can’t out maneuver two,” Nikki said. ” I’ve heard pilots talk… The new programs take alternate routes. One will always get you. How much time?”
“Coming fast. About… Oh… ten seconds away at a guess.”
I counted mentally as we accelerated and I watched the blip come racing at us, Three, two—
The van shuddered as Nikki flipped a switch on the control computer then jammed the van’s controls to cause it to go straight up (though our momentum kept us going forward as well). The metal skin of the van groaned; it was designed for low air resistance when it traveled forward, but not if it went straight up.
The two blips caught up with us and started to circle upward but as they went below us, they hit our anti-gravity field. I saw what Nikki was trying to do; deflect them with our repelling power. The missiles followed us but at ever slower speeds. Finally, they started to lose the race, fell back, then suddenly veered downward, tumbling out of control as we traveled upward. The missiles fell toward the ocean and auto-destructed, exploding far below us.
“All right,” I said, “Good job, Nikki. Oh, blank it. Another blip.”
“How long until impact?”
“About eight seconds this time, seven, six, wait, now six… It’s dropping off. We’re outrunning it.”
We left the missile behind and it finally ran out of fuel and dropped into the Florida swamp with a brilliant flash.
Nikki pushed the van through a series of twists and finally we were following the rocket toward Houston, hoping anyone watching us on radar would lose us when we left the atmosphere and would fail to realize we were following the Houston rocket to its destination.
We soon found ourselves dropping toward Houston to the tune of Jake’s snoring. We were afraid we weren’t close enough to the rocket to stay within its radar blip and we fully expected another fighter to be waiting for us when we reached the Houston field.
But there wasn’t one.
Nikki dropped us down on a road near the rocket port and we drove around to the huge parking lot and made our way on wheels toward the entrance rocket port buildings.
As we slowed down, we met the sixteen people we had freed. We parked the van nearby and everyone gathered around us as we stepped out. They cheered and clapped.
I smiled a moment. “Thanks. Well, I guess you’re free men and women tonight. We can give each of you some cash, uh… We can borrow a little from Jake, he’s the third member of our group and—”
“He caught a stun shell and is sleeping it off in the van,” Nikki explained.
“Yeah,” I added needlessly. “Anyway, you’re free to go if you want. But we’re in the process of starting up a, uh, factory, to make the anti-gravity rods. We have a lot of plans, a trip to the asteroids to get water, a couple of Moon bases, maybe even a starship down the way. We could use some people like you guys. So if any of you wants a job, whether you used to be on my team or were on the government’s black list, I can give you one. The pay isn’t much; in fact it’s nothing right now—”
Everyone chuckled politely.
“…but you’ll be as safe or safer than you’ll be on your own. And you can keep anything you steal and get away with.”
They were silent a moment as my words sunk in.
“I have a husband,” one of the women that had been trapped in the elevator shaft with me said. ” I couldn’t leave—”
“You’re free to return to him,” I said. “Just get some cash from us and head home. Later, if you and your husband would like to join up—”
“I’d like that,” she said.
“Yeah, well, any of you that have a family might want to head home, collect everyone, and then join us later.”
“What about kids?”
“Well, if we set up a real colony on the Moon or Mars, I suppose we’ll want some kids to keep it going,” I said, even though the thought of mouthy little children getting into things made me have second thoughts about what I was saying.
“Where do we meet you after we collect our families?”
Where? Good question. “Well. I guess you folks can keep a secret as well as anyone. Don’t suppose there are many traitors among those that Dobrynin was about to cancel.”
A nervous laugh this time.
“Our meeting place is a military surplus store near Galveston.” I gave them the directions to it. “Be there as soon as you can. After a week or two, I can’t guarantee that we’ll be there anymore. I suspect that there’ll be quite a few unsavory folks trying to find us after today. We probably won’t be staying there for long.”
A short time later, six of the group left after I insisted that they take some of the cash we fished out of Jake’s pocket to help them get to where they were going. I figured I could afford to be generous with Jake’s money.
All of my old team stayed with me. They waited while Nikki and I purchased an old junker from a near by used car lot and then we returned with it and everyone piled into it and the van (which meant we couldn’t fly without endangering them).
Jake was still snoring when we pulled into the parking lot of his surplus store. And with saliva snaking down his chin, he didn’t look a bit better after his long beauty rest. Nikki glanced at him and then quickly looked away.
We finally draped Jake across the table as we throw the best coming-home party I’d ever seen.
When things were winding down, Nikki took my hand and led outdoors, away from the dining room turned party center.
Chapter 25
Things flew along quickly. Within a week, we had all the rods cut up and incorporated into a fleet of junk vehicles that were to fly our huge party to the Moon. (After looking over some of the cars and vans we’d be taking, I figured we would be making Earth about three percent more beautiful simply by our leaving in the junkers.)
Other groups of people worked equally hard. Our space-suit repair team had all the suits that could be made workable in Jake’s surplus business patched up and ready to go; air tanks were filled to full capacity to support our band during our jump across the black airless space between Earth and our lunar base. Those with electrical skills repaired old radios or rewired vehicle radios to power small speakers sewn into suits so we could all communicate while in space.
All in all, we would be traveling on a wing and a prayer with epoxy, chewing gum, and paper clips holding everything together.
We’d be taking quite a party of people and equipment since more and more people had been coming in to join us. Not only did the original sixteen that we’d freed from the prison show up, but their families, pets, children, and colleagues as well. As might be expected with all the people involved, word leaked out and we soon had old spacers wandering in with their own worn suits and needed skills asking if it was true that we were mounting a space expedition. We converted their vehicles they came in, slowly assembling more and more “space craft” for our expedition to the Moon; we aimed to take everyone who really wanted to go.
In the evenings after we’d finished work for the day, old spacers told their tales while the newer members talked of harvesting the asteroids, colonizing the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, or even creating a starship with the rods. The possibilities seemed limitless as dreams were spun into the small hours of the day before we started work again after a few hours of sleep laced with dreams of space.
There was a rush to get things done. We all knew it would only be a matter of time until word got out about the group we were collecting to take to the Moon. And soon after that, basic rebels that we were, we had little doubt that some zealous bureaucrat might well order a fleet of fighters to do a napalm number on Jake’s store. So everyone was pushing toward getting everything wrapped up so we could escape to the Moon. Once there, we would have an edge since Earth had dismantled its space program. Once in space, and with a little luck, our expedition could drop out of sight
of the World Government.
* * *
After what seemed like an eternity of the hard work, we were nearly ready to leave.
“How’s it going, Jake,” I said as I made the rounds with a cup of caffinex to keep me awake.
A shower of sparks marked another weld on the car Jake was working on then he flipped up the protective mask. “Real well. This is the last of the fleet and its nearly ready. It’s lucky that a lot of the folks coming to us are bringing in their own computers.”
“Yeah. We wouldn’t have been able to fly all the vehicles if that hadn’t happened,” I agreed.
We had run out of money the first day we’d started this latest project and would have had no money to buy computers. “Even so, I wish we could have back-up computers in each of the cars.”
“Would be nice. But I don’t think it’s too risky. According to Danny Hill, the sun isn’t spitting out much radiation right now so the computers should be pretty reliable. If things really got bad, folks could probably tag along with the group and fly by the seat of their pants. We’ll just cross our fingers for the flight.”
“That’s how I fly anyway,” I said. “Know where Nikki is?”
“She was around here a minute ago,” Jake said. ” I bet she went up to our ‘command center,’”
he smiled and winked at me, then dropped his welding mask over his face and went back to work on the car.
I walked off to our so-called command center; it consisted of three phones and an inventory computer that was our connection to the Net, all spread across Jake’s kitchen table. On the wall was a huge bulletin board and under it the ever-being-used caffinex machine. The room had become the heart of our planning sessions and Nikki, Jake, and I spent most of our free time there trying to coordinate our group’s efforts.
Nikki hung up the phone and brushed her dark hair from her eyes, “Well, that’s the last of them. I’ve contacted every major reporter we could think of. Our take-off tomorrow should have a lot of coverage.”
“I just hope it doesn’t have a fireworks display as well.”
“I don’t think anyone would be dumb enough to attack with the news people there. I think the general public is so fed up with high utility bills that they’ll riot if it looks like someone’s throwing a monkey wrench into things. Anyway, we’ve told everyone that we’ll be in downtown Houston. We’ll give a last minute call and Net announcement tomorrow morning to reroute the news crews here in time for the take off. It’d be hard for the Government to get rounded up in time to do much damage.”
“Provided they don’t get wind of what’s going on. I hope that Frank really knew how to rig the phones and Net connections to make impossible to trace our calls.”
“I’m sure he does. He’s the communications whiz, you know.”
I looked at Nikki’s beautiful dark eyes a moment. ” It all just bothers me. More and more, it seems like things are out of our hands and in the hands of the experts we seem to be attracting.”
“That’s the price you pay for launching the project that got all this going. It takes on a life of its own.”
“I just wish I’d had a choice. Everything snowballed. I certainly don’t mind loosing a lot of my responsibilities… It’s just that…”
“Security is gone when you start depending on so many other people.”
“Right.”
Nikki reached over the table and held my hand, “Phil Hunter, you are one big worry wart.”
“Compliments will get you nowhere.” I gave her hand a squeeze and then looked at my thumb-nail watch. “Oops. Late again. If anyone needs me, I’ll be with my team up in the loft. We have something we’re cooking up.”
“Sounds mysterious,” Nikki said.
“Unbelievably. It looks like we’ve made a mistake in our calculations. I think. But I can’t figure out where. And if we haven’t…”
“Something wrong with the rods?”
“No. Nothing to worry about. Just a side effect that occurs when you get a bunch of the rods together. We think.”
“OK. Be mysterious.”
“See you in a bit.”
She rolled her eyes, shook her head, then blew me a kiss as I left.
The air conditioner was pushing out waves of cold air as I climbed the ladder into the loft of the old barn. My five team members were arguing heatedly about something. They all stopped when my head got even with the loft.
“No need to stop for me. I like a good argument as long as it doesn’t end in fisticuffs.” I climbed over the top of the ladder onto the old wooden floor.
Fran Wescott adjusted the antique glasses that she insisted on wearing, and flipped back a lock of blond hair. “We went over it all again,” she said pointing to the projection screen tacked to the barn wall, “but it still comes out wrong.”
I looked at the screen. “We’ve all assumed that we made a mistake. Maybe we should look at it as if the measurements are correct.”
“But quantum mechanics…”
I raised a hand and everyone was quiet for a moment.
“Let’s just assume that it’s correct for now. We’ll be able to test out our theory or formula or—
whatever this mess is—shortly. The bots we left working on the Moon—if they haven’t screwed up… We should have enough rods to actually see the effect. If it’s not there, then our measurements are out of whack. If it is there then…”
“But it doesn’t seem possible that such a small gravity field could warp space that much!”
Fran protested. Everyone nodded.
“I agree. Yet, it doesn’t seem like the rods should work at all. Remember when we started out? The thing that held us back for weeks was that we didn’t think they could possibly work.
When we finally settled down and tried making some rods, they worked. And here we are today.
I’d suggest that there is a hole in physics and the rods are pointing this out to us, operating in the cracks as it were.”
“So what now?” Tom Barrel, a tall, thin black in his twenties asked.
“I want you guys to generate all the information we’ll need to…uh…”
“Warp space,” Steve finished.
“Yeah,” I said looking perplexed. ” It still sounds impossible doesn’t it?”
They all laughed. Sometimes, that’s the job of a good team leader; make the individuals relax so that they don’t cut each other’s throats.
“Well, to heck with the impossibility. Give me the calculations I’ll need to set up…oh…let’s call them gates. Give me the calculations to set up space-warping gates to get to each of the planets in our solar system. And maybe even a few of the close stars.”
I looked at each of the young faces in front of me. It was beginning to sink in, I thought. We might be working out a way other than sub-light speed travel to quickly hop to the stars!
“What are we going to call this formula and theory?” Tom asked.
“That’s simple,” Fran said. “Hunter’s Principle.”
There was a murmur of agreement among the team.
“Let’s don’t worry about naming it right now,” I said. I liked the sound of it but wanted to at least appear to be humble. “Just get the information generated so we can test this all out when we get to the Moon.” I left them, knowing that they’d probably give me much more than I was asking for.
Hunter’s Principle. I liked the sound of that. And if the calculations proved correct, rather than being an intellectual dead end, our little Moon base was apt to change the course of human history even more than I cared to imagine. We might soon be opening up gateways that lead to the stars.
Chapter 26
The news conference was a let down. It was as good as we’d hoped for. Better. Jake’s lot was packed with news cars and vans. But I was tired of being in such a constant state of flux and was ready to return to being inconspicuously ordinary.
There were hundreds of reporters, each holding a mini-cam and asking a barrage
of either intelligent or idiotic questions but never anything in between. After Nikki put the van through its paces for them, I could almost see the electricity flowing through each brain as they realized the possibilities of the rods. Nothing like an old van, pocked with bullet holes and dented from crashes, to blow minds as it does acrobatics in the air overhead.
“Here’s something else of interest,” I said after the van landed. “Monny Prell, a design engineer we’ve picked up, has rigged this little generator from the rods. Now… we’ll hook up a couple strings of electric lights and some power equipment…” A bunch of us quickly had a string of appliances and lights running off the generator. “That’s about what a small apartment uses. The cost of the generator, if they were produced on a large scale, would be about one week’s salary.
As you can see, for a small price, every home in the world can afford to make their own power for household appliances.”
The questions stopped after that for a minute while everyone mulled it over.
“I’m having Tom hand out some little sections of rods we’ve cut out of the last of the rods we’ve made. I figured that having a little bit of a rod in your hand, trying to keep it from floating away, would give you something to remember us by.”
There was a mad scramble by reporter to get one of the rod sections. Tom had trouble keeping his footing in the jostle but finally got the sections more or less distributed to the press.
I lectured a bit more then finished up my sales pitch, “The time of massive generators, pollution, and terrorist acts that leave us… in the dark… are soon to be things of the past,” I said.
“Now, I’d like—”
The reporters had recovered. Not willing to let me finish where I wanted to, they started calling out questions.
“Will you ever make flying belts for individuals?” a dark-haired woman toward the back of the group asked.
“We thought about that,” I said. “But it’s too dangerous. If you get your legs in the way, it can cause severe injury when the rods try to push your feet away from your body. Too, if you miscalculate just a little, it would be easy to drop like a rock. Some day, we might be able to make an array of pin-sized rods and have them controlled by miniature servo motors and a computer… Until then, though, a flying belt would be a terribly dangerous way of traveling.”