Prescription for Chaos (33 page)

Stu

Heyden swallowed and sat back dizzily.

When his vision cleared, there stood, across the desk, an apologetic individual from Purchasing. "Sorry, sir, but it seems we have to have your signature on this."

Heyden took it, and scowled at the figures. "Are you sure the addition is right?"

"Yes, sir. That special silver wire is expensive stuff."

Heyden sat still for a moment, then scratched out his name. The paper was briskly whisked away.

"Thank you, sir." The door shut, and the incident was gone beyond recall. Heyden picked up the note, read it through again, and shook his head. He started to get up, then changed his mind. He sat still a minute, then drew in a deep breath and let it out in a rough sigh. The realization went though him with inescapable finality that in seven days the ship would be ready or not ready.

And then something else, that he'd been vaguely aware of theoretically took on a sudden solidness and reality.

In seven days, he would be either a hero of broad vision, or a fool and a traitor.

And there was not a thing he could do about it.

He had made his move, and if it didn't work out, he could never, never explain it.

The first four or five days after that crawled past with Heyden almost in a daze. Time and again, between emergencies, he dredged up memories, trying to discover exactly how he had gotten into this. The astonishing thing was that, in retrospect the decision seemed to have been so easy. Blandly, calmly, he had given the decision that might wreck the corporation, and land him, personally, in the worst mess he'd ever been in.

His meditations were enlivened, toward the end of the week, by a telephone call from the comptroller.

"Hello, Jim?"

"Right here, Sam." Heyden tried without success to inject a little warmth into his voice. His voice retained a calm unconcerned coolness.

There was a hesitant cough over the phone. "Say, no offense, Jim, but what the devil is going on there?"

"Business as usual," came Heyden's voice, cool and totally assured. "Granted the changes that I'm sure Stu must have told you about."

"Well, Stu told me—" There was a brief pause. "Do you know something I don't know? Is that it?"

Heyden laughed. The sound was that of a man without a worry in the world. "Sam," his voice said cheerfully, "before I know if I know anything you don't know, I know you know I have to know what
you
know, otherwise I won't know, you know, if what I know is something you
don't
know."

"Ah, for—" Over the phone, the cautious voice sounded irritated but relieved. "Listen, we can kid all we want, but this is serious business."

"It
is
," said Heyden emphatically. After a moment, he added, "Thank heaven."

"What do you mean? Wait a minute, now, do you mean—" There was a long silence. "I know of course, that the merger went through, but I didn't realize—Do you mean that we're frying
their
fish?"

"All I can say is, this here is
serious
business. If Stu didn't tell you, I'm not going into it over the phone."

"What if I come down there?"

"Glad to see you anytime, Sam. But I can't mention it if Stu didn't."

"Did Stu say, specifically,
not
to tell me?"

"No. Of course not."

"Then why can't you—"

"Because he didn't tell me
to
mention it."

"Maybe I better call
him
up."

"No harm in it. Just don't give anything away over the phone."

"Then how the devil am I—"

Heyden said irritatedly, "Look, Sam, I'm sure it was an oversight on his part. Stu doesn't make a practice of leaving anyone in the dark. But he was worn out. I don't know what he had to do to put the merger across, but he seemed pretty thoroughly wrung out to me. Now, you can either try to locate him now, or you can wait a couple of days till he can tell you himself."

"All right. But meanwhile we're spending—"

Heyden exploded. "What do I have to do, spell it out? For Pete's sake, Sam! Look, do you think Stuart Grossrad is a commercial moron? With things the way they are now, would he deliberately stretch us out as thin as a rubber band? This merger wasn't a cheap proposition, you know."

"Well—the point of the merger was that, ultimately we'd reap the advantages of diversification."

"How would that get us through the next six months?"

There was a lengthy silence. Finally there was a long sigh over the telephone. "Did Stu tell you this beforehand?"

"Beforehand, all he told me was such a tale of misery I almost drowned in my own tears. No. He didn't tell me a thing,
beforehand
. What I couldn't figure out was why he was so eager for this merger, if there wasn't more in it than what he mentioned."

"He's smooth, all right. He wanted us psychologically set up to take full advantage of this. Or, if the merger fell through, he didn't want us moping around, thinking we'd lost our last chance. Either way it went, he was ready."

"I suppose that must have been it."

"Well—I just had to find out. No hard feelings, Jim?"

"Of course not, Sam. Any time."

"See you, boy."

"So long, Sam."

Heyden put the phone in its cradle, and mopped his forehead. He had, if Sam remained convinced, succeeded in hanging on to two more days. If, that is, Grossrad didn't decide to come back early. If there were no other catastrophes. Heyden glanced at his watch, and decided to go take a look and see how Benning was coming along.

It took Heyden some time to walk down the long corridor, but only a few moments more to find his answer. The big boiler shape stood in solitary glory in the hangar-like building, apparently forgotten. Everyone was fifty feet away, crowded around a smoldering mess about a foot-and-a-half long and eight inches in diameter, and that had, apparently, once been something useable. Benning had his hand at his chin, staring at this ruin. He, and the rest of the men, all looked so dazed and tired that Heyden didn't have the heart to ask what had happened. Wearily, he shut the door, went back to his office, and sat down.

"Well, Stu," he said mentally, "you see I thought we could make it to the moon . . . Yes, the
moon
 . . . Yes, I know the thing doesn't work, Stu . . . That's where all the money went, Stu . . . That's right . . . Yes, Stu . . . Sorry . . . Yes . . . That's right, Stu—I mean Mr. Grossrad . . . Yes, Mr. Grossrad, I did it on my own responsibility . . . Yes, sir, I know, but—You see, sir, if somebody else had got it—And if it
had
worked, Mr. Grossrad, then . . . I know it didn't sir, but—"

Heyden abruptly sat up, and smashed his fist on the desk. "Damn it," he said savagely, "it's
got
to work!"

By the time he got to Benning again, Benning looked glassy-eyed with pure stupefaction, and the others had expressions that varied from ordinary gloom to total defeatist resignation.

Heyden told himself that he would have to keep himself under tight control.

"What's this?" he said abruptly, and a good deal louder than he'd intended.

Instantly, every eye in the room was focused on him. They watched him with the alert attention a man gets when he breaks the silence by cracking a bullwhip.

Benning turned around, his expression that of bafflement and disbelief. "This size builds up heat faster than we imagined. It's got to have a cooling system."

"Is that the drive-unit for the ship?"

"No, this is the forward unit. The ship drive-unit is bound to be worse yet."

"How long to rig up a cooling system?"

"Too long. We've not only got to cool the drive-unit itself, we've then got to unload all the heat from the cooling system. The stupefying thing is, we tested for this with smaller units, and the heat build-up was gradual and well within bounds. We've apparently run into some effect that increases exponentially with mass, while thrust—"

"Can you get the same thrust with a group of small units as with one large one?"

Benning blinked. "It wouldn't be as
efficient
, but yes, we
could
do that."

"Any drawbacks to having a bunch of them?"

"Yes. All the mounts have to be duplicated."

"Why not mount them together?"

"If they're too close, we've discovered they interact."

"Can you mount them far enough apart so they don't interact, but not so far apart as to make control impossible?"

"Yes, but the expense—"

"Damn the expense," said Heyden savagely. "How long will it take?"

Benning mopped his forehead. "If we work straight through without a break we can have it ready the day after tomorrow."

"All right. Starting now, everyone who volunteers to work straight through, and who sticks with it, gets quadruple pay, and a thousand-dollar bonus after taxes, if the job's done on time."

There was a brief sudden burst of excitement.

"My God!" blurted Benning.

"Look what's at stake!" said Heyden angrily. "Control of space! A drive that can reach the planets! All the high-grade ore in the asteroid belt! Are we going to fold up, or are we going to get it?" He paused just long enough to see the glint in their eyes, then turned to Benning. "What do you need?"

Benning said soberly, "A list as long as your arm."

"Let's have it."

Benning got him off away from the others. "Listen, do you know what's going to happen to you if—"

"It's too late for that."

"I wish I'd never brought that damned thing to your office."

"We've taken a flying jump, and we're now halfway out over the crevasse. There's no point wishing we'd never jumped. We've got to go the rest of the way and put our mind on grabbing any bush or clump of grass that will get us over the lip of that drop."

Benning swallowed. "Okay."

"Now listen," said Heyden. "You're going to need plenty of hot coffee in here, and I don't know if you can literally keep going without
any
break. We don't want a bunch of zombies staggering around in here holding the wrong end of the wrench."

"You're right. Could we have some rough army blankets and some narrow folding cots? That's heaven for an exhausted man, but he shouldn't be too reluctant to get up."

"Good idea. Now
can
you finish it by the day after tomorrow?"

Benning nodded. "If, God willing, nothing
else
goes wrong."

The next day was a nightmare. Suppliers were beginning to need reassurance about pay. A weird rumor was making the rounds, to the effect that Grossrad had stripped the corporation treasury and was now settled down in Brazil with a nicely tanned blonde mistress, the two of them living cozily in a mansion with an Olympic-sized swimming pool outdoors, and gold-plated faucets indoors.

Heyden put the rumor down temporarily by showing the two hand-addressed envelopes from Grossrad, with their recent postmarks, but the rumor failed to
stay
down. It popped up again with new refinements. Someone who looked just like Grossrad had been seen in Brazil by Milton Sharpbinder, vice-president of Interdisciplinary Intellectronetics, and Milton had immediately called back to sell his holdings in Continental Multitechnikon before the bottom fell out. Somebody else had actually been out near Grossrad's Brazilian mansion, and had seen him lolling with a bottle in a deck chair while the blonde did laps in the Olympic-sized pool.

The details mounted up fantastically. Grossrad had been seen wheeling around the streets of Rio driving a Mercedes-Benz roadster. Later information had it that it was a 1959 300SL Mercedes-Benz with removable hardtop, and Grossrad was gripping a long thin cigar between his teeth, and had one arm casually around the blonde. Somehow, the burgeoning details added further solidity to the rumor, which grew yet more solid as Grossrad moved on and was seen with the blonde at Copacabana.

That this was not just a local rumor developed as Continental Multitechnikon began to slide on the stock market while other space stocks were creeping upward. This, in turn, seemed to support the rumor. In the midst of this, with suppliers demanding payment, the phone rang, and a familiar voice jumped out:

"Say, Heyden, what the hell is going on out there? I just got a phone call from Sam, and he's—"

"Stu?" shouted Heyden, his voice filled with synthetic delight. "Hello? Is that you?"

"Is it me? Who the—"

"Hold on! Listen, we've got a bunch of guys here who think—wait a minute. Where are you calling from?"

"Where am I calling from? Santa Barbara. What about it? Listen, what—"

"Where have you been the last week?"

"I've been holed up, getting over what we had to go through to get that merger across, what do you think? Didn't you get my letter? Listen, what the—"

"We've got a bunch of guys here that claim they won't supply us, because you're down in Brazil with a blonde, rolling around in a Mercedes 300SL."

"I'm what?"

Before Heyden could say anything, one of the men in the room said nervously, "Is that him? How do we know—"

Heyden said, "I don't know if you heard that, Stu. They think maybe this isn't you. Could you talk to a few of these—"

"Wait a minute now. What is this? I don't get this."

"Brace yourself. There's a rumor afloat that you've disappeared, vanished completely, and someone like you has been seen in Rio by—get this, Stu—by Milton Sharpbinder, who immediately dumped all his holdings in Continental before the news of what had happened got out."

"Sharpbinder, eh?"

"Yes, and someone else definitely saw you living in a mansion down there with gold plumbing and a big swimming pool. It seems you were outside by the pool, taking the sun, watching this blonde plow back and forth."

Grossrad laughed.

Heyden said, "Before you laugh this off have you taken a look at the financial page lately?"

On the other end of the line, Grossrad was starting to have hysteria, but that brought him around.

"No," he said, "that's one thing I
haven't
been doing. I've been trying to get a rest. Is this stupid play by Sharpbinder actually—"