Infinite Dreams (7 page)

I got up. “Look, this is too much, too fast. I’ve got to think about it. Digest it. Got to check out the ship, too.”

Chaim went along with me halfway to the air lock. “Good, good. I’ll start making calls.” He patted the transceiver with real affection. “Good thing this baby came along when it did. It would have been difficult coordinating this thing, passing notes around. Maybe impossible.”

It didn’t seem that bloody easy, even with all those speedy little tachyons helping us. I didn’t say anything.

It was a relief to get back into my own element, out of the dizzying fumes of high finance and revolution. But it was short-lived.

Things started out just dandy. The reason the control board was dead was that its cable to the fuel cells had jarred loose. I plugged it back in and set up a systems check. The systems check ran for two seconds and quit. What was wrong with the ship was number IV-A-1-a. It took me a half-hour to find the manual, which had slid into the head and nestled up behind the commode.

“IV” was fusion power source. “IV-A” was -generation of magnetic field for containment thereof. “IV-A-1” was disabilities of magnetic field generator. And “IV-A-1-a,” of course, was permanent disability. It had a list of recommended types of replacement generators.

Well, I couldn’t run down to the store and pick up a generator. And you can’t produce an umpty-million-gauss fusion mirror by rubbing two sticks together. So I kicked Mlle. Biarritz’s book across the room and went back to the dome.

Chaim was hunched over the transceiver, talking to somebody while he studied his own scribblings in a notebook.

“We’re stuck here,” I said.

He nodded at me and kept up the conversation. “—that’s right. Forty thousand bushels, irradiated, for five hundred thousand CU’s … so
what?
So it’s a gift. It’s
guaranteed. Delivery in about seven years, you’ll get details … all right, fine. A pleasure to do business. Thank
you
, sir.”

He switched off and leaned back and laughed. “They all think I’m crazy!”

“We’re stuck here,” I said again.

“Don’t worry about it, don’t
worry
,” he said, pointing to an oversized credit flash attached to the transceiver. It had a big number on it that was constantly changing, going up. “That is the total assets of Mazel Tov Corporation.” He started laughing again.

“Minims?”

“No, round credits.”

I counted places. “A hundred and twenty-eight billion … credits?”

“That’s right, right: You want to go to Faraway? We’ll have it
towed
here.”

“A hundred and twenty-nine billion?” It was really kind of hard to grasp.

“Have a drink—celebrate!” There was a bowl of ice and a bottle of gin on the floor beside him. God, I hate gin.

“Think I’ll fix a cup of tea.” By the time I’d had my cup, cleaned up and changed out of my suit, Chaim was through with his calls. The number on the credit flash was up to 239,605,967,000 and going up slowly.

He took his bottle, glass and ice to his bunk and asked me to start setting up the rescue mission.

I called Hartford headquarters on Earth. Six people referred me to their superiors and I wound up talking to the Coordinator of Interstellar Transit himself. I found out that bad news travels fast.

“Mazel Tov?” his tinny voice said. “I’ve heard of you, new planet out by Rigel? Next to Faraway?”

“That’s right. We need a pickup and we can pay.”

“Oh, that’s not the problem. Right now there just aren’t any ships available. Won’t be for several months. Maybe a year.”

“What? We only have three months’ worth of air!” By this time Chaim was standing right behind me, breathing gin into my ear.

“I’m really very sorry. But I thought that by the time a planet gets its charter, it should be reasonably self-sufficient.”

“That’s murder!” Chaim shouted.

“No, sir,” the voice said. “Just unfortunate planning on your part. You shouldn’t have filed for—” Chaim reached over my shoulder and slapped the switch off, hard. He stomped back to his bunk—difficult to do with next to no gravity—sat down and shook some gin into his glass. He looked at it and set it on the floor.

“Who can we bribe?” I asked.

He kept staring at the glass. “No one. We can try, but I doubt that it’s worth the effort. Not with Hartford fighting for its life. Its corporate life.”

“I know lots of pilots we could get, cheap.”

“Pilots,” Chaim said without too much respect.

I ignored the slur. “Yeah. Hartford programs the main jump. Nobody’d get a jump to Rigel.”

We sat in silence for a while, the too-sober pilot and the Martian-Russian Jew who was the richest person in the history of mankind. Less than too sober.

“Sure there’s no other ship on Faraway?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Took me half a day to find someone who remembered about the
Bonne Chance.”

He considered that for a minute. “What does it take to build an interplanetary ship? Besides money.”

“What, you mean could they build one on Faraway?” “Right.”

“Let me see.” Maybe. “You need an engine. A cabin and life support stuff. Steering jets or gyros. Guidance and com mo equipment.”

“Well?”

“I don’t know. The engine would be the hard part. They don’t have all that much heavy industry on Faraway.”

“No harm in finding out.”

I called Faraway. Talked to the mayor. He was an old pilot (having been elected by popular vote) and I finally reached him at the University Club, where he was surrounded by other old pilots. I talked to him about engineering. Chaim talked to him about money. Chaim shouted and wept at him about money. We made a deal.

Faraway having such an abundance of heavy metals, the main power generator for the town, the only settlement on the planet, was an old-fashioned fission generator. We figured out a way they could use it.

After a good deal of haggling and swearing, the citizens of Faraway agreed to cobble together a rescue vehicle. In return, they would get control of forty-nine percent of the stock of Mazel Tov Corporation.

Chaim was mad for a while, but eventually got his sense of humor back. We had to kill two months with six already-read books and a fifty-bottle case of gin. I read “War and Peace” twice. The second time I made a list of the characters. I made crossword puzzles out of the characters’ names. I learned how to drink gin, if not how to like it. I felt like I was going slowly crazy—and when the good ship
Hello There
hove into view, I knew I’d gone ’round the bend.

The
Hello There
was a string of fourteen buildings strung along a lattice of salvaged beams; a huge atomic reactor pushing it from the rear. The buildings had been uprooted whole, life support equipment and all, from the
spaceport area of Faraway. The first building, the control room, was the transplanted University Club, Olde English decorations still intact. There were thirty pairs of wheels along one side of the “vessel,” the perambulating shanty-town.

We found out later that they had brought along a third of the planet’s population, since most of the buildings on Faraway were without power and therefore uninhabitable. The thing (I still can’t call it a ship) had to be put on wheels because they had no way to crank it upright for launching. They drove it off the edge of a cliff and pulled for altitude with the pitch jets. The pilot said it had been pretty harrowing, and after barely surviving the landing I could marvel at his power of understatement.

The ship hovered over Mazel Tov with its yaw jets and they lowered a ladder for us. Quite a feat of navigation. I’ve often wondered whether the pilot could have done it sober.

The rest, they say, is history. And current events. As Chaim had predicted Hartford went into receivership, MTC being the receiver. We did throw out all of the old random bastards and install our own hand-picked ones.

I shouldn’t bitch. I’m still doing the only thing I ever wanted to do. Pilot a starship; go places, do things. And I’m moderately wealthy, with a tenth-share of MTC stock.

It’d just be a lot easier to take, if every exbum on Faraway didn’t have a hundred times as much. I haven’t gone back there since they bronzed the University Club and put it on a pedestal.

One good reason for a novelist to write short stories is that they serve as a proving ground for new techniques. If a structure or texture doesn’t work in a short story, you’ve only lost a few days, and learned something. If a novel goes sour, and I do speak from experience, you lose a thick stack of paper and more. And you might not learn as well, be cause of your deeper involvement, as a parent might see his child go wrong and never see how he’d caused it.

I admire the work of John Dos Passos, especially the USA trilogy, and wanted to borrow his intricate technique for a science fiction novel.
^*
I wanted to boil it down, make it even more rapid and nervous. This story was the test case, and I liked it, so I used the technique for
Mindbridge
(St. Martins Press, 1976), which I think is my best novel, so far
.

When I wrote this I was in the process of putting together
an anthology of science fiction alternatives to war, which languished for some years before St
.
Martins Press published it as
Study War No More
(1977). The story was written for the anthology, and was meant to be sarcastic. But at that time its basic premise seemed rather absurd
.

Some few predictive elements of some of my stories have come true. I’m afraid this one will add to the list.

^*
In the real world it’s against the law to take something that somebody else is trying to sell. But since John Brunner already adapted Dos Passos’s technique in his powerful novels
Stand on Zanzibar
(Doubleday, 1968) and
The Sheep Look Up
(Harper & Row, 1972), I guess my crime is the receiving of stolen goods rather than kleptomania.

1. 13 October 1975

Shark Key is a few hundred feet of sand and scrub between two slightly larger islands in the Florida Keys: population, one.

Not even one person actually lives there—perhaps the name has not been attractive to real estate developers—but there is a locked garage, a dock and a mailbox fronting on US 1. The man who owns this bit of sand—dock, box, and carport—lives about a mile out in the Gulf of Mexico and has an assistant who picks up the mail every morning, and gets groceries and other things.

Howard Knopf Ramo is this sole “resident” of Shark Key, and he has many assistants besides the delivery boy. Two of them have doctorates in an interesting specialty, of which more later. One is a helicopter pilot, one ran a lathe under odd conditions, one is a youngish ex-Colonel (West Point, 1960), one was a contract killer for the Mafia, five are doing legitimate research into the nature of gravity, several dozen are dullish clerks and technicians, and one, not living with the rest off Shark Key, is a U.S. Senator
who does not represent Florida but nevertheless does look out for the interests of Howard Knopf Ramo. The researchers and the delivery boy are the only ones in Ramo’s employ whose income he reports to the IRS, and he only reports one-tenth at that. All the other gentlemen and ladies also receive ten-times-generous salaries, but they are all legally dead, so the IRS has no right to their money, and it goes straight to anonymously numbered Swiss accounts without attrition by governmental gabelle.

Ramo paid out little more than one million dollars in salaries and bribes last year; he considered it a sound investment of less than one-fourth of one per cent of his total worth.

2. 7 May 1955

Our story began, well, many places with many people. But one pivotal person and place was 17-year-old Ronald Day, then going to high school in sleepy Winter Park, Florida.

Ronald wanted to join the Army, but he didn’t want to just
join
the Army. He had to be an officer, and he wanted to be an Academy man.

His father had served gallantly in WWII and in Korea until an AP mine in Ch’unch’on (Operation “Ripper”) forced him to retire. At that time he had had for two days a battlefield commission, and he was to find that the difference between NCO’s retirement and officer’s retirement would be the difference between a marginal life and a comfortable one, subsequent to the shattering of his leg. Neither father nor son blamed the Army for having sent the senior Day marching through a muddy mine field, 1955 being what it was, and neither thought the military life was anything but the berries. More berries for the officers, of course, and the most for West Pointers.

The only problem was that Ronald was, in the jargon of another trade, a “chronic underachiever.” He had many fascinating hobbies and skills and an IQ of 180, but he was barely passing in high school, and so had little hope for an appointment. Until Howard Knopf Ramo came into his life.

That spring afternoon, Ramo demonstrated to father and son that he had the best interests of the United States at heart, and that he had a great deal of money (nearly a hundred million dollars even then), and that he knew something rather embarassing about senior Day, and that in exchange for certain reasonable considerations he would get Ronald a place in West Point, class of 1960.

Not too unpredictably, Ronald’s intelligence blossomed in the straitjacket discipline at the Point. He majored in physics, that having been part of the deal, and took his commission and degree—with high honors—in 1960. His commission was in the Engineers and he was assigned to the Atomic Power Plant School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He took courses at the School and at Georgetown University nearby.

He was Captain Ronald Day and bucking for major, one step from being in charge of Personnel & Recruitment, when he returned to his billet one evening and found Ramo waiting for him in a stiff-backed chair. Ramo was wearing the uniform of a brigadier general and he asked a few favors. Captain Day agreed gladly to cooperate, not really believing the stars on Ramo’s shoulders; partly because the favors seemed harmless if rather odd, but reasonable in view of past favors; mainly because Ramo told him something about what he planned to do over the next decade. It was not exactly patriotic but involved a great deal of money. And Captain Day, O times and mores, had come to think more highly of money than of patriotism.