Space Eater (7 page)

Room 17 was darkened, with Wui attacking a small projector somewhere at the back, the light from underneath making his face a devil-mask. “Come right in,” he called. “All ready to go, or nearly so. Our home movies; the space program in a one-point-nine-centimeter nutshell. Cathy, do your suave hostess imitation and show our good guests to their chairs. Oh
shit
, dropped it again...”

While Wui clattered and cursed, Ellan came at us out of the dark, looking sullen as usual, and told us where to sit. “This will be extremely high-classified information,” she said. “Micky Wui’s attitude gives entirely the wrong impression where security is concerned.”

A voice from behind: “Stop that talk, luv, we’re all cleared down here. But you two, this is one of the things you forget over on the other side. Diplomats have to forget all sorts of things in a tactful way, and you’re going to be diplomats...”

Ellan said sourly, “The need-to-know principle...” and the screen came alight.

The AP lab was up there, just as we’d seen it or maybe a few percent messier, but with that ugly great cylinder sitting on the MT rig stage center. “Here’s our piston in position, it moves inside that housing to shove material through the gate.” Another slide: what looked like a length of steel pipe lying on the floor.

“That’s our wizard’s staff. That’s the heart of everything on the other side. We opened our peephole way out in clear space, lucky to get close as fifteen million kilometers from good old Pallas and its moon, and we pumped this through.” A sketch, maybe a cross section down the length of that pipe, badly focused and with unreadable captions. Wui tried adjustments and made the picture worse. “Forget that. See, the

‘staff’ has an MT aperture at
this
end—once we’d got that to Corvus we could tune in again any time.

Aperture at the end, a meter from the MT circuitry
here
, closer than that and even MT interferes with itself via the jammer effect. ‘External’ battery
here
to keep it operating. You see, the circuits are small—it’s not a tunable, velocity-compensating, long-range, super-charged custom job like the one down in our lab—small circuits, sealed and, don’t forget this, booby-trapped; all in a one-point-eighty-five-centimeter tube. The rest—“

A picture of another and much longer staff that was a tight bundle of incredibly thin rods. “Second stage.

We squeeze this lot through the aperture and then spin them.” Picture of rods separating as the bundle spins: turns out they’re linked by almost invisible spider-filaments at top, middle, bottom, like a fine line drawing of that fencing they make of wooden stakes joined up by three straight horizontal wires. The thin cylinder of rods expanded lazily, slide by slide, becoming a circular fence in space—an open-ended cylindrical cage with centrifugal force holding the filaments taut. “Now our mechanical spider gets going, a long job, squirting fiberglass threads soggy with resin; they harden in space and sunlight, like butterfly wings.” Drawing: from the original central tube a spiral of thread goes around and around the spinning framework of rods. “In the end ... a nearly solid cylindrical shell. Now we slow it down...” More drawings. Two more superthin bundles of rods opened like umbrella-skeletons to plug one end of the cylinder, and then the other. “More thread spinning to seal both ends of the hollow working space we’ve now marked out. Still not the sort of seal you can pressurize, of course, the whole thing still leaky as CC

security and anyway all the air would fall back through the gateway. But now we don’t lose anything we put through. Tools drift off into space too easily. Now here’s FACTOTUM ...”

A new slide, a photo of some really weird machine with jointed arms. “Industrial macro/micro robot—hard to get these days. We programmed it—programs are even harder to get—we programmed it to build something small and tough, a seed we could plant through the one-point-nine-centimeter aperture. And the seed built Intermediary One which begat Intermediary Two which, in the end, built us another FACTOTUM out there. Then we were all set—“ Pictures of more and more exotic machinery taking shape out on the other side, obviously they had a camera out there by now. The old working space torn apart and a much huger cylinder assembled. “We simply kept on transmitting raw materials like struts up to one-point-nine-centimeter diameter, sheet steel and aluminum in thin rolls, all sorts of small parts, liquid resins, the technical stocks controller couldn’t
believe
the stuff we got through. Thought we’d eaten it, I suppose. And now—“

More slides of mechanical wonders and delights came and went. Seemed the Corvus base now had a smart computer setup, banks of comm gear, a mini-workshop for making satellites, full pressurization and life-support systems in the new enlarged hull, and of course two FACTOTUM-built Force regeneration tanks. I trusted the robot a lot more than I did eager techies like Wui; the design was old enough to be, maybe, reliable. Which still didn’t mean I was one hundred percent enthusiastic about this jaunt.

“...floated the whole station into L2, the Lagrange point behind Pallas’s moon ... not stable like the orbits around L4 or L5, but better hidden...” An old-fashioned-looking sketch up on the screen, showing Earth (title crossed out and relabeled
Pallas)
, Moon and the libration points where gravity and orbital motion balanced: L1 just this side of the moon, L2 just the other side, L3 a few million miles from Earth the other way from the moon, L4 and L5 out to the sides in what they used to call the Trojan points...

“This is bad,” I whispered half-joking to Corman. “I didn’t mind so much, volunteering to get killed, but they’re more efficient than I thought first time out. Got a horrible feeling this might actually work.”

“I volunteered for this too,” Corman said in a blank voice that might have meant anything.

Wui was showing pretty pictures of Beta Corvi II taken on the way in by his space-going junkshop (which, it seemed, was supposed to be called the
Ambassador
. It figured. No one ever used the name).

None of it seemed much use. It’s hard to look at a picture just like the old blue-and-white ones of Earth, and see from that why people down below should be unfriendly to your satellite transmitters.

The screen flared white. “That’s your lot,” Wui said. “Now you know all about it, and as diplomats you should have some altogether different memories, so try and forget this—and take in the official story as written by Birch and company.”

“That was impressive,” said Corman, a thing that I thought Wui had wanted us to say, which was why I hadn’t said it. More and more I was slipping into a feeling that Force loyalty didn’t mean jumping through hoops for everyone in Tunnel.

“See you at the ‘real’ briefing,” said Wui in a voice that sounded like a wink. Ellan was still mumbling something about the need-to-know principle. Shaven-head from Security was still at the door when we came out.

“My instructions are that you should report to Medical,” he told me.

“Hell, we’ve been there.”

“My instructions are that there’s been a special delivery of material and that Forceman Jacklin only should report for inoculation.”

Corman looked tired suddenly. “I can guess what that is,” she said. “I’ll stay here with the AP people.”

I followed shaven-head, thinking about the need-to-know principle and thinking too that everyone who mattered seemed to know a damn sight more about what was going on than I did. Sometime soon I ought to have a private chat with Rossa Corman: she was the nearest thing here to someone on my side, or that was how it seemed.

Dr.—Mr. , I remembered—Ngabe was none too happy. “I have found my assistant is a medic/6,” he grumbled. “The lowest of the skilled grades. I am not accustomed to such cavalier treatment ... It is for a trained nurse to give injections, not a medic/6 nor yet a surgeon. Roll up your sleeve.”

I sat where he pointed and rolled up the sleeve. He opened his bag and took out an aerosol can printed in curly lettering I didn’t recognize. Lying on a plastic tray, he had a hypodermic filled with something yellowish. Ngabe chose a spot on my arm, sprayed cold stuff on it, gave the syringe a practice squirt into the air and then stuck it in slow and hard. “5cc,” he said. “This is a restricted drug, I am told, and I have no idea what ultimate effect it may have on your metabolism. I am warned that you
may
become briefly feverish, that your sensitivity to pain may increase slightly, and that the major effect, which is classified, will persist for many months. I trust you will find this information as useful as I do.”

I let down the sleeve again. “That’s all you know about the stuff?”

“That is all ... Almost all. I am told that the amount I have injected into you today represents enough currency to pay my salary for two years and a half. Good luck to you.”

I shrugged. “Thanks. If I get feverish I’ll come back for some pills.”

A huge grin from Ngabe. “It is not for surgeons to prescribe pills. Ask my medic/6; he will see to such things.”

“Not if I see him first.” And I was off again down the same bleak stretch of corridor, annoyed at myself for being friendlier to Ngabe than I might have been to some local quack. Behind me, Security kept pace and made me want to try the old ploy: fake stumble, back-kick, a dislocated kneecap for him and spin around to finish him off in my own good time. What I needed was a workout on the Force training ground. It looked as though I wasn’t going to get one for a long time.

The lights were turned up in Room 17 now, and half a dozen chairs had been pulled together at the front.

Birch, empty chair, Wui, Ellan, empty, Corman. “...not expecting trained diplomats, naturally,” Birch was saying as I slid into the chair by Corman. “Ah, Ken, so good of you to drop in. I was saying that your pose should be convincing. The old-time astronauts tended to be air-force test pilots and the like, not the diplomatic sort at all.”

Corman translated: “You and I are uncultured ruffians, Ken, and therefore precisely what the colony will expect from visiting Earth people.”

“I see,” I said. “When they ask us how we got across all those light years, we look wise and say

‘Dunno.’”

Corman: “This gives them such confidence in us that without hesitation they will abandon MT research, simply because we tell them so.”

It had to be the sloppy attitude in this place: I’d never join in backchat like this when it came to an officer’s orders in Combat.

Birch said: “Look. We’re being driven to an old political technique. It’s called the big lie. The people out there have apparently not linked MT with the novae in their sky. Again, apparently, full details of the old colonization gate were not made available to them: they’re working blind in the mere knowledge that it can be done. Probably they want to come home. Firstly we need to
stop
their MT research, and the idea is that a big FTL ship from home will cancel the whole need. Consensus at Central is that a message couldn’t have the same effect. We need a big vessel, a manned one...” His eyes swung between me and Rossa, and when they met mine they had that frank, luminous, honest look of someone who’s trying to put something over on you.

Wui said: “Never mind it’s all a hulk with nothing but a few attitude jets. It’s the thought that counts.”

Birch was leaning forward, elbows on knees, tapping his fingertips together. “Yes,Mick y. We’re limited to a war of propaganda. The first step is to
overawe
the people out there—“

“Stop a minute,” I said. “From what I heard, they were so overawed by the satellite transmitters you sent in, they just knocked them out.”

“The first step is to overawe them with the big ‘ship.’ They’ll be warned it’s coming—when you arrive there, the computer will throw in another satellite. Listen.” He took a cassette player from his pocket and poked a button. The squeaky voice that came out was Ellan’s: “Attention. Attention. Attention. This is a message to all people on Beta Corvi II. A vessel from Earth will arrive in the near future, using the faster-than-light drive, which outmodes the highly dangerous matter transmitters. MT should not, repeat, not be used for any purpose whatever. The visiting craft will be manned. The people of Earth look forward to this new contact with their colony. We repeat: please do not make further use of anomalous-physics devices, which can produce disastrous effects. Message repeats ...
click beep
Attention. Attention. Att—“ Birch shut off the player and put it down carefully on the floor.

“What d’you think of Cathy’s technique?” Wui said to the meeting at large. “Could have made her fortune on national radio in Africa...”

Birch shushed him. “Now you’re going to say, and I admit, that this plan is a bodged one. It is a compromise from Central, but a computer-calculated compromise (they say) and we are not to argue.

With you two actually out there on the spot, there can be a proper dialogue. If you become absolutely convinced that the “big lie” is not succeeding, you are to hand over a version of the one-point-nine-centimeter gate as the only safe and practical MT system we know. Let them test that and explore its limitations.” He looked at Wui. Wui looked at him. It was another moment when I knew I was being left out. Of what?

“Ought to send Wui ...Mick y, if you want an MT teacher out there,” I offered.

Wui flashed a smile. “First, I know too much. They might take me apart and use the know-how to build nullbombs, even deduce the old disastrous gate all over again, which would tend to spoil the point of your jaunt. Secondly, I might not function out there; I might just lie around and be a vegetable like whatever ghastly percentage of your boys drop out on their very first death trauma.
You
two should be able to cope with that.”

I raised an eyebrow and looked over to Corman, back to Birch. “What?” he said. “Ah, Rossa. She is
special
Comm auxiliary and thus accustomed to trauma.” He stopped. That explained everything. What more could he add? Back to that damned Plan: “Ultimately, of course, should everything else fail, we still trust that Rossa will be able to transmit data back to us using her special talents. Then Central can plan further action as necessary.”