“Look, Howard, there’s no way that I can get down there before the fly-in from L-4. That’s only twenty days away, and we’re on a round-the-clock schedule. Can’t you tell me the highlights now, and save the rest?”
Rob Merlin’s image on the screen was disturbing. Howard Anson adjusted the magnification and looked closely at the enlarged picture. There was no doubt about it. Rob showed all the signs of severe strain. His eyes were black-pouched and deep in their sockets, and his face was paler and thinner than ever. Anson wondered how close to the limit Rob had been driving himself.
“You still have twenty days, Rob,” he said. “That’s a long time, and you’ll never have the beanstalk ready for descent if you work yourself to death first. Can’t you find somebody else to pick up some of the effort?”
“Not at this stage.” Rob gave a grim smile. “I’ve been through all this before on the bridge construction jobs. You can delegate the mechanics but not the responsibility. Don’t worry, I’ll last out. If only I could get my mind off those damned Goblins, the rest of the work would be a lot easier to take. I’ve had new ideas about them. After the beanstalk is landed and tethered I’d like to have another session with you. I want to be sure that I’m not inventing something where there’s really nothing, or making a theory that’s contradicting known facts. I wish now that I’d done more last time I was out on Atlantis.”
“No.” Anson shook his head firmly. He was sitting at a long desk in his Information Service office, a great pile of papers stacked untidily in front of him. “I’ve checked further on Morel. You took too many risks as it is. He could have found ten ways to kill you, and from the sound of it he’d do it if he had a strong enough reason to. The records all show that he’s super-logical, and the things that he wants to do are always more important than anything else. You did well to get away with that trip in the aquasphere, but when you go there again you need to be better prepared.”
“I plan to be. Look, I’ll be on Atlantis again in less than a week, then straight back to Earth for the beanstalk landing and tether. I’ve sent you a list of equipment that I’ll want to take with me on the ship going out.”
“Wait until you’ve heard what I have to say, Rob. Then your plans may change. That’s the whole reason why I called you. We’ve found new evidence of Goblins.”
“What! More than the two you told me about?” Rob in his excitement leaned closer to the screen, so that the image of his intent face filled the whole wall display in Anson’s office. His eyes were alert, but everything else about his appearance suggested a man who had spent no time on personal care for many weeks. “When was it? A long time ago? Was it back when my parents were killed?”
“Stop right there.” Anson held up a well-manicured hand. “You’re asking four questions at once. Let me play you what I have, then you can ask questions. Get ready to record. This is audio only, but video wouldn’t add a thing.”
“Just a minute.” Rob cut in a data storage unit. The beanstalk control station, one of a dozen scattered between L-4 and synchronous orbit, permitted line-of-sight communications with Anson’s office back on Earth. To men who had been talking to each other with many seconds of round-trip delay, the fraction of a second that they were now experiencing was a pleasant luxury. Anson waited for the control check that would indicate that he could transmit straight to the recording mode.
“It’s not old information,” he said. “In fact, we almost missed it because it’s too new. We’ve been screening reports that mostly go back over twenty years. Then last week one of my people turned one up that’s only two weeks old. He got it from a `Can You Believe It?’ spot on a Tycho Base news station — just about the last place in the System that I’d have thought of looking. I was going to ignore it until I got to the physical descriptions, then I changed my mind and took a closer look. All right, get ready to record.”
“Well, it seems that the Little People are with us again, folks. At least, they are if you’re willing to believe Lenny Pascal.”
Anson held up his hand. “I’m holding the playback for a second, Rob. I’m used to the `Can You Believe It?’ spot, but if you don’t know it I ought to warn you. The news style is so cute you’ll probably throw up when you hear it. But I thought you ought to hear it word for word. Just ignore the form and settle for the content. All right? Then back to the recording.”
“Ole Lenny has been out there doin’ repair work on one of the big antennas, out by the relay station. He’s a systems engineer with ST T, and he’s been on that job nearly twenty-five years. He’s sittin’ there at the base of the antenna array when his suit tells him there’s this big ole rock floatin’ up towards him. It’s movin’ so slow and so near that he gets a real strong signal from the rangefinder. He says it’s up there near close enough to spit on, but the detection radars don’t flag it so he knows there’s no chance of it hittin’ anythin’. So he’s not worried any, and not much interested. You seen one rock, you seen `em all.
So ole Lenny he sits up there, and he thinks a’ this rock. Don’t often see `em that close, he thinks. After a while he says to himself, if it’s all that close, I ought to be able to see it with my eyes, not just my rangefinder. So he looks round, and sure enough, he can really see that rock. Only it isn’t a rock. It’s a sealed space pod, with a Mischener Drive stuck on one end of it. Reminds me of the time that I saw one of them pods myself.”
Anson paused. “I’m going to skip a bit here, Rob. There were about three minutes of broadcast where Tinman Petey — that’s the name of the half-witted fistula who was doing the broadcast — tells his audience all about the way that he met his third wife. I don’t know what they thought of it, but it was too much for me. I’ll skip to the point where he gets back to talking about Lenny Pascal.
“So Lenny claps on the old suit jets, and he hustles on over for a closer look. The rock’s goin’ on by at maybe ten meters a second, so he won’t be able to take too long lookin’ before he has to turn on around and get on back to the antennas. He’s in front of that pod now, and what do you think he’s seein’? Lindy Lamarr, maybe, naked as an overspun Kerr-Newman? Nope. Bet he wishes it was, eh?
“It’s two little men, floatin’ inside the pod, and they’re bare as a baby, except for a sort of collar. They don’t move none, so Lenny he figures he ought to take a closer look. Ain’t no law ’gainst naked little men, he figures, providin’ they’re after their own business, but he can’t help bein’ a wee bit curious. So he bangs on the outside of the pod.
“They don’t move a bit. So Lenny figures that’s near as good as an invite to go in, and in he goes through the lock. Full-size lock, he says, nothing midget about that. Now he sees why they’re not after tellin’ him to come in. Seems they’re dead, both of ’em. Two little men, beards on their faces and ugly as sin, half a meter long and dead as Marley. Spooky, eh?
“Ole Lenny takes a look around inside there, but he sees nothin’ as would have killed ’em, like wounds ’n burns. He takes a closer look at ’em, and he finds they’ve got a whole lot of broken bones, under the skin, just like somebody took and squeezed ’em flat. That’s scary, so Lenny calls out the computer log, but he can’t make no sense of that. Pod come on out of the Belt, thirty days back, now it’s a-floatin’ on past the Moon goin’ to god-knows-where. No power left on it.
“By now Lenny’s beginnin’ to feel spooked, and he’s gettin’ a long way from home, and he’s itchy about leavin’ his job on the antenna for so long. So he calls on over to Medaris Base and asks ’em to come on out where he is and look at the Little People.
“Would you believe it, over there on Medaris they don’t seem to want to listen to him at all?
“Seems like Lenny’s had a problem with the Base one time before, when he saw a space-dog out on the antenna after he’d been a while in Gippo’s Bar. This time, nobody will give him half an ear. He has to head back to work, and by the time he hits Tycho again he don’t have any idea where that pod’s heading to. Maybe down to Earth, maybe off into the Sun.
“So there you got it, friends. What do you think? Do we have the Little People, moved out here mebbe now Earth’s not so friendly as it used to be? Or do you think there might be an engineer who’s firin’ skew on one or two jets? One thing’s for sure. We won’t know which, ’less one of you can take off after ole Lenny’s rock and check it for yourself.”
Anson leaned across and flipped a switch. “There you have it, Rob. That’s the whole thing, except for Tinman Petey’s sign-off. And that’s the same every time.”
“You talked to Pascal?”
“Sure. Tinman Petey too. I couldn’t get much more than what you heard from either of them. Lenny Pascal’s physical description was a little more complete, but he couldn’t tell me any more about how the pod first appeared or where it was heading.” Anson picked up a sheet from the desk in front of him. “You ought to photo-record this, but I can give you the main points in a couple of sentences. Body mass for the Goblins, as near as Pascal could judge, would be about five kilos. He thought their bone structure was pretty normal, though it was hard to tell because they were so broken up. The air in the pod was breathable, so they didn’t die of asphyxiation like the other Goblins we’ve encountered. Pascal says that their skin color was odd, but it was more like bruises, not cyanosis.”
“Too much acceleration?” Rob interrupted. “That’s what it sounds like. Did Pascal check the drive log?”
“That’s the odd part. He had the same thought as you did, and he felt they must have been exposed to more than thirty gees. He looked at the drive log in the pod and all it had been used for was small control maneuvers. Nothing big. In fact, Pascal said that he didn’t think a Mischener can give much thrust, even at top power.”
“He’s quite right.” Rob rubbed thoughtfully at his forehead. “I’d forgotten that it was a Mischener Drive. They’re controlled to half a gee or less. You could never modify one to get more than a couple of gees out of it — the whole thing would blow up.”
“I couldn’t modify any drive to do anything, but I know what you mean. I checked out that information on the Mischener Drive myself. I’ll get to that in a minute. Here’s something else for you. Atlantis is just about out in the Belt now, but I’ve been tracking its position as it moved. Take a look at this.”
Howard Anson held another sheet up to the camera. “Forty-five days old. A tracking station near the inner edge of the Belt recorded an unauthorized launch of a life-support pod from a point very close to Atlantis. Nobody sent out a Mayday, so the pod didn’t get tracked by Search and Rescue. All that happened was a violations report to Central Records. See how that would fit with what Pascal said about the pod’s log? The pod computer shared reference readings that say it started out in the Belt, thirty days before it drifted past the antenna farm. The time would fit perfectly. If the Goblins had started out from Atlantis in that pod, thirty days before Pascal sighted it, they’d have been just right to match that unauthorized launch. It would all be consistent, except” — he shrugged, a bewildered expression on his tanned face — “I don’t see how the Mischener Drive could do it.”
“It couldn’t.” Rob was shaking his head firmly. “Your argument won’t fly, Howard. I’ll do the detailed calculations for you if you like, but I already know the answer. There is no way you could fly from out near the Belt, where Atlantis was a month and a half ago, and get to the Moon on a Mischener Drive in thirty days. The orbit geometry is wrong. Anyway, the Mischeners don’t have the capacity for a continuous impulse trajectory, even at a fraction of a gee. They were designed for free-flight Hohmann transfer orbits, with a little bit of thrust at the beginning and a little bit more at the end.”
“So you’re saying the Goblins would have to have come in some other ship?”
“Must have, if they were going to get to the Moon in thirty days. If you want to do a fast transit from the Belt to the Earth-Moon system, you have two ways to go. You can ride a continuous-impulse ship, like the best medical vessels — and you’d still be limited to three gees, unless you could prove to the USF controllers that you had a real emergency on your hands. Did you know that the flight computers on every ship and every pod are sealed, and they keep a log of every time that the drives go on and off? I don’t know of any way to trick them. And you’d somehow have to fake the reaction mass you used, as well. I don’t think that’s feasible. The only other way you can get a really fast transit is to use a monster short-duration acceleration in place of a small continuous thrust. You’d do it twice, once at the beginning of the flight and again at the end. That would speed it up a lot at the beginning. You’d fly in fast, then slow down fast when you were close to Earth. People have talked about ships with that much acceleration for years, but nobody has ever built one. Not even for medical ships.”
“All right.” Howard Anson held up a protesting hand. “I’ll believe you, no need for the lecture. Ask you a simple question and you throw a book at me. So the Mischener Drive won’t do it, and the other drives can’t do it secretly. Doesn’t it seem too much of a coincidence, though, to have the Goblins arrive here with just the right timing for a pod launch from Atlantis? Aren’t you convinced that the Goblins live on Atlantis?”
“You know I am.”
“So if you won’t take my explanation, what’s yours?”
“I don’t have one.” Rob’s irritation was clear in his expression. “I’m with you, the Goblins started out from Atlantis. I believe there are some on Atlantis right now. But we can’t use magic to get them here. There’s some rational explanation to what Lenny Pascal saw and to what your Information Service dug up. I just can’t see it yet.”
Anson leaned forward to the camera. “You know I’m not a scientist, but I’ve got one other idea you haven’t mentioned. What about gravitational swing-by? The way I’ve heard about it, you can put a ship past a big mass, and if the positions are right you can pick up speed doing it. They used to use it to get ships past Jupiter and Saturn to the Outer System, when they didn’t have reaction mass available. Wouldn’t that be the way to speed up a passage in to Earth?”
“Yes — but no.” Rob saw Anson’s frustration. “Don’t blow yet, Howard. I’m giving you a serious answer, and I know you want to sort this thing out as much as I do. You are right in a way. Gravitational swing-bys are a good method of picking up free momentum, if you happen to be going past a big mass. But when I say a big mass, I mean a big mass. There’s nothing between here and Atlantis that could possibly do it.”
“You mean nothing that we know about. But what about the possibility of a black hole? That could do it. It would be very small, and we couldn’t see it. And Morton says that the Halo—”
He stopped. Rob was shaking his head again.
“Sorry to spoil your idea, Howard, but if there were a decent-sized black hole — one with significant mass — anywhere in the System, we’d have found it long ago. Its gravitational effects would perturb all the other bodies. Same applies to an unknown planet. There just can’t be an undiscovered mass in the Inner System. Not one big enough to have an appreciable gravitational field.” He shook his head. “Sorry, Howard, but we won’t find an explanation so easily. Anyway, your idea wouldn’t fit with what Pascal said about the way that the Goblins died.”
Rob noted again the way in which Anson’s eyes lost all expression when he was receiving new information of a factual nature. It was as though he became an object without feelings or personality, a blank tablet on which the facts would be permanently stored. As soon as the storage was finished, the other Howard Anson turned back on, the pleasant and sympathetic gentleman with his own strong personality. That Howard was again in control, and frowning at Rob’s last comment.
“What do you mean, wouldn’t fit with what Pascal said? You’d get big forces if you swing by a black hole — the acceleration ought to be fierce.”
“It would be.” Rob nodded. “But you wouldn’t feel a thing. The gravitational and dynamic accelerations would balance exactly. You’d feel tidal forces if you were near enough, but they fall off very fast with distance. Before they were a factor you’d have to get really close. For most swing-bys, you’d feel as though you were in free fall all the way. It’s no good, Howard, you might as well forget about gravitational forces. They can’t explain what Pascal told you.”
“That’s it then.” Anson shrugged. “That was my last arrow. You’re the expert, so you tell me. What did happen to the Goblins, and where did they come from? You’ve ruled out the only things I can think of.”
“It’s worse than you realize.” Rob smiled ruefully. “I’ve ruled out the only things I can think of, too. Let me stew on it for a while. At the moment I’ve got my head so full of beanstalk movement and new mining methods, there’s not room for anything else.”
“Do you have to go out to Atlantis to observe the mining of Letitia?”
“It uses my Spider. And I promised Regulo that I would.”
“Maybe. But is either of those the reason why you’re going? Are you sure it’s not obsession with the Goblins, and learning more about them?”
Rob did not answer. After a few moments Anson shook his head and said, “I don’t know why I bothered to ask. All right, you’re going. Be careful, and come back quickly.”
“No question of that. Regulo won’t delay me — he’s as keen to see the beanstalk landing and tether as I am.”
“You’ll be able to get me a seat for the landing?”
“A front seat. I can’t allow you into the Control Center itself — it’s over-full already. But I can promise the outside room, and you’ll be seeing all the same displays that I’ll be using.”
“I’m looking forward to it. I guess you wouldn’t have time to talk to me, even if I was in the Control Center with you.”
“Certainly I would. Howard, all my work will have been done before the beanstalk landing begins — finished, checked, and checked again. I would never give a go-ahead otherwise. I have to be in the Control Center, but my plan is to sit, relax, and enjoy the action.”
“I don’t believe the relax part. But the action?” Curiosity replaced concern in Anson’s voice. “What ought we expect to see? Something spectacular?”
“That’s a great question. I know what I hope you’ll see. If something goes wrong, your guess is as good as mine — but it would sure be spectacular.” Rob smiled. “The better it goes, the less fireworks we’ll have to watch. I’ll make sure there are passes for you and Senta, for the Control Center in Santiago.”
“That’s one of the things I don’t understand. Why Santiago ? Why not at the tether point down in Quito ?”
“You can’t afford to put the control where it might get wiped out if things go wrong. If the stalk snapped, or if we can’t attach the ballast correctly at the upper end, nowhere along the equator will be safe. In the worst case, we might have to sacrifice Tether Control to save worse damage. We’ll have more than enough cable to wrap it round the Earth a couple of times.”
Anson was silent for a moment. A startled look came on his face. “You’re not joking, are you? I’m beginning to realize how much a hundred thousand kilometers of cable really is. Lordie. You and Regulo have built a monster, haven’t you? It’s bigger than Ourobouros — twice around the world instead of once.”
“Regulo insists that this is just the beginning. As soon as we have easy mass transfer from Earth we can really go to work on the System. We’ll put some of Earth’s water out on Mars, or bring asteroids down to the surface, bit by bit.”
“You’d need a Martian beanstalk, too.”
“That’s easy. We could have put one there long ago if we wanted one. You don’t need anything like as much strength in a Mars beanstalk — you could build one using ordinary graphite whiskers for the load-bearing cable. Anyway, Howard, I wasn’t serious about shipping Earth water to Mars. That wouldn’t be economical. It’s cheaper and easier to fly a comet in from the Outer System.”
“Could you do that?”
“I don’t know, but I expect so. I’m playing Regulo’s game, speculating in all directions.” Rob leaned back in his seat and rubbed at his reddened eyes. “I find I do that better when I’m tired out.”
“Of course you do.” Anson saw Rob take a quick look at his watch, and realized that the beanstalk’s schedule would control everything in Merlin’s life until the fly-in and tether. “It’s only when you’re tired out that you can let your mind run free. After this job is over, Rob, you’d better plan on a long holiday. You need a re-charge.”
“We can talk about that after the beanstalk is in position and working. Twenty more days. I leave for Atlantis in just a few hours. Will you look at a couple of other things for me while I’m away? I just don’t have time to follow them myself.”
Rob’s manner was becoming increasingly restless. His schedule was calling.
Anson nodded. “Tell me what you need.”
“I’m not quite sure. More about Cancer pertinax, that’s one item. I need to know how many people suffer from it, what the treatments are, and how close we are to finding a cure. It tends to be hereditary, but I’d like you to find out if there’s an infection possibility, too.”
“That should all be easy. The information will all be in public data banks or in research programs. Hmm. Unless Morel has treatments that he hasn’t reported yet. He might have. He always preferred to wait until his techniques were perfected before he would talk about them. But I’ll see what I can find. Anything else?”
Rob hesitated. “I don’t think this will be in any data banks, but I want to know about Corrie. Senta says she’s Regulo’s daughter. Corrie says she doesn’t believe it. Is there any way of finding out for sure, through chromosome tests or genetic matching?”
“Ah.” Howard Anson rubbed at his chest thoughtfully, running a lightning search of some internal data bank. “Sure there is, in principle. It would be dead easy if the genetic data banks were open, but they’re closed so tight I don’t know if I can crack them. It’s a privacy issue. I know there won’t be anything in the public files. A couple of years ago I talked about the same thing with Senta. I had the same reaction as you when I was told that Corrie is Regulo’s daughter. There’s nothing to support it in the birth records, and no other direct evidence. I asked Senta for more details, but she has big blanks in what she can remember. It’s probably part of the same set of memories that we’ve been trying to tap through the taliza trances.” He shrugged. “I’ll dig again, but don’t hold your breath waiting for answers. Can you think of any reason why Senta wouldn’t be telling the truth?”
“No.” Rob was reaching out to cut the connection switch. “No reason at all. Put it the other way round, though. Can you think of any reason why Corrie would be lying? They can’t both be right.”