The IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 14

  Martinu grinned and walked on.

  The lovers had gone, presumably in search of more privacy. He set a tall frosted glass beside the professor and sat down himself. “I got you julep,” he said. “Is that all right?”

  “Perfect.” Aylward produced a length of tubing and dropped one end into the glass to save himself the effort of holding it up while he drank. “What are you having?”

  “Slivovitz,” said Martinu. “Sort of homage to my Balkan ancestry. Anyway, what brings you back to Earth after such a long time, professor?”

  “Oh, someone seems to be infringing the patents on the Field,” Aylward answered. “Angus told me I was needed, so I came down. He’s my agent, you know—and very good he is. I don’t know how I’d manage without him. I’ve always found the world of commerce far more complicated than any problem in astrophysics, because it’s easier to improve your equipment than yourself.”

  “You have quite a setup at Copernicus, don’t you? They tell me it’s the best-equipped observatory in the System, and you financed practically all of it yourself. May I inquire—does the Field bring you in a good income?”

  Aylward gave a tired smile. “Excellent! I never expected so much return for so little effort.”

  He drew out the tube from his now half-empty glass and began to run it absently between his fingers. “People sometimes ask me,” he went on, “why I stick at my job when I’m wealthy enough to live in luxury on Earth. I think you’ll probably understand me when I say I think I made a sensible decision.” He cocked an eyebrow at Martinu.

  The captain suddenly found himself liking Aylward a lot. He smiled, and as he nodded agreement his hair bobbed mound his face. It was too soft for the Fijian style, so he had to settle for curls like a Queen Anne wig. Being used to a free-fall crewcut he found it a permanent irritation. Damn these silly Earthside fads!

  “I wouldn’t even have come to this party but for Angus’s insistence,” Aylward went on. “I depend completely on him, as I said, and he does have this tendency to fly off into space over the littlest things . . . We were on the Algol together when we located the buster which started the whole thing. Did he ever tell you the story?”

  Almost, Martinu said, “He’s told everybody!” But he checked himself. For one thing, Angus’s version of the story had probably been colored by the passage of time, while Aylward’s might give a different slant. And for another, though the professor’s tone had been conventionally light, Martinu sensed that he was actually aching to find someone to listen to him. Angus had more than likely gone around warning all his other guests about Aylward’s obsession with the buster problem.

  He set his glass down on his knee. “That was when Rusch was in command, wasn’t it?” he said. “Yes, I’d very much like to hear about it.”

  II

  The radar tech first class at number three screen held his breath for a long moment. When he let it out, it was to speak in a voice shaky with excitement.

  “Buster, sir!” he said.

  The lieutenant on the other side of the room whipped around and bounded over with a hard kick at the far wall. He caught the back of the tech’s chair with one hand and hung there floating, his eyes wide. “Where—where do you see it?” he demanded.

  “There, sir.” The tech put his finger on a large green blip near the center of the screen. “It broke through about ten seconds ago. I saw it arrive. And the range and mass are exactly right.”

  He hardly waited for an answer before shouting to the orderly at the phone desk.

  “Green, get me a line to the bridge!”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” said the orderly unemotionally.

  The lieutenant turned to the screen again. He said, “What’s the range?”

  “About four and a half kill, sir. Right under our feet.”

  The lieutenant whistled. “Well, for sure it didn’t sneak up on us. Read it for relative velocity, will you?”

  The tech slid cross-hairs over the screen, centered on the blip, pressed the switch of the doppler integrator. They waited the necessary five seconds and a figure went up on the dial.

  “Six hundred,” the lieutenant said. “Hasn’t settled into its natural orbit yet. I think—”

  He was going to say he thought the tech was right, but the communications orderly interrupted. “Bridge, sir!”

  “Chuck it over,” said the lieutenant, and picked the phone out of the air as it soared across the room. He continued into it, “Ahmed, screen-room watch, sir. One of my techs thinks we’re on a buster.”

  “Hah!” said Captain Rusch skeptically. “How are we doing for white whales this week?”

  “It showed up without warning on number three screen at four and a half kilomiles, sir. We haven’t had a chance to check its orbit yet, but its relative velocity is only six hundred.

  There was a pause. At length Rusch grunted. “Right, I’ll get a ’scope on it,” he said. “Bearing?”

  “Oh-seven-six and a half, sir.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll let you know the verdict. Don’t get too worked up till we’re sure, will you?”

  That, of course, was a pious hope, Rusch reflected as he gave the bridge phone back to his own communications orderly. He could tell from the expressions on the faces around him. Even the normally placid Commander Gabrilov, who had been close enough to hear what Ahmed said, was showing excitement.

  “Okay,” Rusch said. “O-kay. I don’t have to say it again.” Gabrilov gave a shamefaced grin and pushed himself over to the ’scope controls. “Oh-seven . . . six and a half,” he said under his breath as he set them. “Four and a half kil . . . Yes, there’s something there all right.”

  “Get it on the screens,” Rusch said. “Come on now!” He felt his heart pounding faster as he glanced at the big screen mounted over the pilot board at the forward end of the bridge. A click. An ill-defined, misshapen object appeared in the center of the square frame. It could have been anything out of the asteroid belt.

  There was a long silence. At last Gabrilov said, “Do you think it could really be a buster?”

  “Well, why the hell don’t you take steps to find out?” Rusch snapped.

  Gabrilov colored. “Sorry, sit!” he mumbled. He barked at the communications orderly. “Tell Warrant Officer Fisher to draw power for a laser beam! Ask Lieutenant Ahmed to stand by for spectroanalysis!”

  “Aye-aye!” said the orderly fervently, his eyes bright. While they were waiting. Rusch glanced at Gabrilov. He said as though there had been no interruption, “It could be a buster, of course. It’s some while since the last one was found, but there have been forty-five of the things, and they turned up all over the System. One was found in a lunar equilateral, wasn’t it? But even if this is a buster, you’ve got to remember one thing.”

  “What?”

  “They may not all be worth picking up. Some of them may only be lumps of iron, for instance. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s possible.”

  Gabrilov bit his lip and looked lugubrious.

  The communications orderly said, “Sir! Screen room I” Rusch seized the phone. Gabrilov came diving over to hover beside him.

  “Get this, sir! Ahmed’s voice said. “Spectroanalysis” shows iron—cobalt—nickel—”

  Gabrilov pulled a face, looking down at the floor.

  “But also!” Ahmed said triumphantly. “Also silver, gold, uranium, thorium, platinum, osmium, iridium . . .”

  He went on, but Rusch had lowered the phone.

  “Number forty-six,” he said quietly.

  Whatever the reason for all that shouting and banging and laughing, Aylward wished they would stop it and let him concentrate. He was trying to cope with more figures than his portable calculator could handle, and running side factors in his head always gave him a headache.

  The door of his cabin slammed back and Angus burst in, frantic with excitement. The chain of figures vanished into limbo and Aylward clapped his hands to his face.

  “For hea
ven’s sake, what are you playing at?” he snarled.

  “Didn’t you hear?” said Angus, braking himself on the far wall with his foot and bouncing back towards Aylward. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to resolve some survey data—if you’ll kindly give me the chance to finish the job.” Aylward spoke with heavy sarcasm; he was an old-young man of thirty-five with glasses and an expression which was usually mild but now was thunderous. “I never heard such a racket!”

  “But we’ve picked up a buster!” Angus exclaimed.

  Aylward sighed and pushed his papers under a clip to hold them to the table before sliding his chair back in its guides. “Is that serious?” he said. “Does it take long?”

  Angus hooked a leg under the tabletop and shook his head pityingly. “Are you trying to say you don’t know what a buster is?” he demanded incredulously. “You can carry an ivory-tower pose too far, you know I”

  “All right, tell me what it is,” Aylward snapped.

  Angus rolled his eyes, but shrugged and complied. “Nobody knows what they are—exactly. They’re lumps of matter that apparently drop from nowhere. Radar doesn’t show them till they’re well within detector range, and they think this may have something to do with the fact that they’re fuller of high-number radioactives than a pudding is of plums.”

  “Oh, yes!” Aylward said. “Of course I’ve heard of them! But there haven’t been any for some time, have there? What are they like?”

  “Turn your screen on, and you’ll see one. Captain Rusch had the ’scope image piped in for everyone to look at.”

  Alyward did so. The screen lit with a knife-sharp picture of a roughly spherical object, scarred across by the sweep of the high-powered laser beam. It was approximately a hundred feet in diameter. Lights from the ship were playing on it now, and made it gleam against the black depths of space.

  “I wonder how much we’ll get,” Angus said in an awed tone.

  “Come again?”

  “These things contain fabulous riches!” Angus gave him a supercilious glance. “So your ignorance doesn’t show too much, listen and I’ll give you the background.

  “The first one was found by the Aurora about six years ago. They couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw it drop out of nowhere—a hundred-foot ball of concentrated wealth. They got thousands of tons of platinum out of it, gold, silver, uranium, and so many diamonds they practically bankrupted the commercial manufacturers. All the rest—there’ve been forty-five to date—have been cast in the same mold. The precious metals have more or less flooded the market, but the demand for radioactives is still high, and everyone who’s found a buster has become rich for life.

  “After the Aurora case there was a gold rush to the asteroid belt—no, don’t interrupt, let me finish! But you don’t seem to find busters with the ordinary planetoids. They showed up all over the System. And another odd thing—this is the first to be discovered in some years, although at one time they were being found at the rate of about two a month. Of course, this is probably a statistical accident; they’re virtually undetectable until you’re right on top of them.”

  Aylward said, “All right, all right! I remember now. They predicted chaos. But in the event we absorbed the impact pretty well.”

  “So well you don’t seem to have noticed it at all,” Angus commented dryly.

  Aylward ignored the jab. “Just a second,” he said. He was frowning, for no reason Angus could think if. “If forty-five were found, and they were coming at an average two per month, the rush lasted two years. You don’t know the dates of the first and last reported findings, do you?”

  “Huh?” Angus blinked. “Well, the Aurora got the first on twenty-seventh April, eight-six—uh—and the Capella got the forty-fifth some time in March of eighty-eight. Middle of March—I think the seventeenth. Why?”

  Aylward said, “And it’s ninety-two now!” He began frantically unstrapping himself from his chair.

  “Hey! Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

  Aylward looked grim. “Not being a seasoned space-traveler,” he said, “I was a bit worried before making this trip about the number of ships that have been lost lately. I looked into it fairly closely to make sure I had a statistical chance of getting home.”

  “What’s that got to do with—?”

  “Since you have such a good memory for dates, you can tell me when the current run of losses started. They said thirty had gone missing in the past four years—more than in the preceeding two decades!”

  Bewildered, Angus said, “Sure I can tell you. The Dubhe was lost on the Venus run some time between tenth March and first April of eighty-eight.”

  “And the next ship to go?”

  “The Lucifer. She vanished—” He broke off and bit his lip”

  “About two weeks later,” Aylward said, kicking himself through the door. Angus hung where he was for a moment; then he gave a gasp and dived in the other’s wake.

  III

  The door of the bridge slid back with a squeal of complaint.

  Rusch turned. When he saw who the intruder was, he frowned. It was all very well to say that young Aylward was potentially the greatest Kviag authority on theoretical astrophysics; it was all very well ‘for him to want to make surveys distant from the sun—but on simple principle Rusch disapproved of non-service personnel shipping on anything other than a proper passenger liner.

  However, the rosy glow attendant on the discovery of a buster had mellowed him to the point at which he did not even ask brusquely who had authorized Aylward to trespass on the bridge. He merely said, “Yes, Mr. Aylward? What do you want?”

  “Angus tells me you’ve located what they call a buster.” Aylward said. His face was pale, and his eyes were very wide behind his glasses.

  “Yes, we have,” Rusch agreed. A thought struck him, and lie called to Gabrilov on the other side of the room. “I forgot to order ‘splice the mainbrace, Mr. Gabrilov! I imagine the men are expecting it.”

  “Aye-aye, sir!”

  “Captain!” Aylward said desperately. Rusch turned a frosty eye on him; he had jumped to the obvious conclusion.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Aylward. There’s enough valuable material in that thing out there to keep all of us in comfort for the rest of our natural lives. And spatial law provides that non-service personnel are entitled to two-thirds of a crewman’s share. All we can do right now is stake our claim, of course, and with luck tow it into orbit at our destination. But we’ll start the mining as soon as—”

  “Captain, if I were you I’d be very chary even of staking a claim, let along mining that thing!” Aylward regretted that force of habit had made him draw his feet down to the door, because the captain was floating a foot off it, and so looked a long way down at him.

  There was a frigid silence. At last Rusch said, “Would you like to explain yourself, Mr. Aylward? If you can, that is.”

  “Well, it seems to me—” Aylward hesitated: how to make this clear? Then he plunged on. “Isn’t it a fact that no buster has been reported for four years, though there was a positive spate of them before that? And didn’t the start of the current run of ships lost in space—thirty known vessels and who knows how many others belonging to prospectors and freebooters—didn’t this coincide with the end of the stream of reported busters?”

  “By God, that’s right!” The exclamation came from Gabrilov. “I’m sorry, sir,” he added to Rusch. “But the Dubhe was the first to go since they perfected atomics. And I have every reason to remember that she vanished about a fortnight after the forty-fifth buster—the Capellas. I was due to be aboard, but I was held back by an ear infection.”

  “The odds against this are tremendous,” Aylward said. He saw that Gabrilov’s interruption had impressed Rusch, and was in haste to seize his momentary advantage. “Which is why I think it would be terribly dangerous to come too close to the buster. Uh—what exactly is involved in what you call ‘staking a claim.’ “

 
“Just a moment!” Rusch said. “Are you envisaging that the buster might be unstable and blow up?”

  “Well . . .” Aylward looked at the floor. “There’s an awful lot of reactive material in it, they tell me.”

  “Hmph! It can’t be very sensitive, then. We spectroanalyzed it with a laser beam intense enough to boil some of its surface off. What do you think, Gabrilov?”

  Gabrilov was silent for a few seconds. At length he said, “Well, sir—we don’t lose anything by being careful. To stake our claim, we’d normally match velocities and coast in close, wouldn’t we? Were still calculating whether we have enough reaction mass to take the thing in tow. But I don’t think we have, so we’ll have to send someone over and plant an identification beacon—but much of the surface will be hot. I see several reasons why we should stand well off and take time out to program a remote-controlled missile to act as a marker.”

  Rusch pondered. “Yes, it’d be cutting things fine to try and get something that massive into orbit at the end of this trip. I was working on the assumption that all we could do would be to mark her with a long-life beacon and come back under no load to fetch her . . . Very well, Mr. Aylward. I’ll arrange to send out an unmanned lifeboat with the beacon in it. There’s enough iron in the buster for electromagnets to get a grip. And to satisfy your qualms, we’ll keep our distance.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Aylward said. He was surprised to find, now that he’d made his point, that he was shaking all over and his forehead was slippery with sweat.

  They tied the lifeboat controls directly in to the pilot board on the bridge, and Gabrilov took charge. On the screen was a split-image projection: one screen-showed the view from the lifeboat itself, the other the picture from the side of the ship as the lifeboat curved outwards towards the buster.

  Almost a quarter of an hour crept by on leaden feet as Gabrilov delicately maneuvered the tiny lifeboat closer and closer to the buster. Abruptly a tiny buzzer on the control board beeped and kept on beeping.