Ahead of Time Page 7

  "Brandy, Van," the voice said. "Pour a little in my box."

  Talman started to obey, but Quentin checked him. "Not out of the bottle. It's been a long time since I mixed rum and coke in my mouth. Use the inhaler. That's it. Now. Have a drink yourself and tell me how you feel."

  "About——?"

  "Don't you know?"

  Talman went to the window and stood looking down at the reflected fluorescent shining in the St. Lawrence. "Seven years, Quent. It's hard to get used to you in this—form."

  "I haven't lost anything."

  "Not even Linda," Talman said. "You're lucky."

  Quentin said steadily, "She stuck with me. The accident, five years ago, wrecked me. I was fooling around with atomic research, and there were chances that had to be taken. I was mangled, butchered, in the explosion. Don't think Linda and I hadn't planned in advance. We knew the occupational risk."

  "And yet you——"

  "We figured the marriage could last, even if—— But afterward I almost insisted on a divorce. She convinced me we could still make a go of it. And we have."

  Talman nodded. "I'd say so."

  "That . . . kept . . . me going, for quite a while," Quentin said softly. "You know how I felt about Linda. It's always been just about a perfect equation. Even though the factors have changed, we've adjusted." Suddenly Quentin's laugh made the psychologist swing around. "I'm no monster, Van. Try and get over that idea!"

  "I never thought that," Talman protested. "You're——"

  "What?"

  Silence again. Quentin grunted.

  "In five years I've learned to notice how people react to me. Give me some more brandy. I still imagine I taste it with my palate. Odd how associations hang on."

  Talman poured liquor from the inhaler. "So you figure you haven't changed, except physically."

  "And you figure me as a raw brain in a metal cylinder. Not as the guy you used to get drunk with on Third Avenue. Oh, I've changed—sure. But it's a normal change. There's nothing innately alien about limbs that are metal extensions. It's one step beyond driving a car. If I were the sort of supergadget you subconsciously think I am, I'd be an utter introvert and spend my time working out cosmic equations." Quentin used a vulgar expletive. "And if I did that, I'd go nuts. Because I'm no superman. I'm an ordinary guy, a good physicist, and I've had to adjust to a new body. Which, of course, has its handicaps."

  "What, for example?"

  "The senses. Or the lack of them. I helped develop a lot of compensatory apparatus. I read escapist fiction, I get drunk by electrical irritation, I taste even if I can't eat. I watch teleshows. I try to get the equivalent of all the purely human sensory pleasures I can. It makes a balance that's very necessary."

  "It would be. Does it work, though?"

  "Look. I've got eyes that are delicately sensitive to shades and gradations of color. I've got arm attachments that can be refined down until they can handle microscopic apparatus. I can draw pictures—and, under a pseudonym, I'm a pretty popular cartoonist. I do that as a sideline. My real job is still physics. And it's still a good job. You know the feeling of pure pleasure you get when you've worked out a problem, in geometry or electronics or psychology—or anything? Now I work out questions infinitely more complicated, requiring split-second reaction as well as calculation. Like handling a spaceship. More brandy. It's volatile stuff in a hot room."

  "You're still Bart Quentin," Talman said, "but I feel surer of that when I keep my eyes shut. Handling a spaceship——"

  "I've lost nothing human," Quentin insisted. "The emotional basics haven't changed. It . . . isn't really pleasant to have you come in and look at me with plain horror, but I can understand the reason. We've been friends for a long time, Van. You may forget that before I do."

  Sweat was suddenly cold on Talman's stomach. But despite Quentin's words, he felt certain by now that he had part of the answer for which he had come to Quebec. The Transplant had no abnormal powers—there were no telepathic functions.

  There were more questions to be asked, of course.

  He poured more brandy and smiled at the dully-shining cylinder across the table. He could hear Linda singing softly from the kitchen.

  The spaceship had no name, for two reasons. One was that she would make only a single trip, to Callisto; the other was odder. She was not, essentially, a ship with a cargo. She was a cargo with a ship.

  Atomic power plants are not ordinary dynamos that can be dismantled and crated on a freight car. They are tremendously big, powerful, bulky, and behemothic. It takes two years to complete an atomic setup, and even after that the initial energizing must take place on Earth, at the enormous standards control plant that covers seven counties of Pennsylvania. The Department of Weights, Measures, and Power has a chunk of metal in a thermostatically-controlled glass case in Washington; it's the standard meter. Similarly, in Pennsylvania, there is, under fantastic precautionary conditions, the one key atomic-disruptor in the Solar System.

  There was only one requirement for fuel; it was best to filter it through a wire screen with, approximately, a one-inch gauge. And that was an arbitrary matter, for convenience in setting up a standard of fuels. For the rest, atomic power ate anything.

  Few people played with atomic power; the stuff's violent. The research engineers worked on a stagger system. Even so, only the immortality insurance—the Transplantidae—kept neuroses from developing into psychoses.

  The Callisto-bound power plant was too big to be loaded on the largest ship of any commercial line, but it had to get to Callisto. So the technicians built a ship around the power plant. It was not exactly jury-rigged, but it was definitely unstandardized. It occasionally, in matters of design, departed wildly from the norm. The special requirements were met deftly, often unorthodoxly, as they came up. Since the complete control would be in the hands of the Transplant Quentin, only casual accommodations were provided for the comfort of the small emergency crew. They weren't intended to wander through the entire ship unless a breakdown made it necessary, and a breakdown was nearly impossible. In fact, the vessel was practically a living entity. But not quite.

  The Transplant had extensions—tools—throughout various sections of the great craft. Yet they were specialized to deal with the job in hand. There were no sensory attachments, except auditory and ocular. Quentin was, for the nonce, simply a super spaceship drive control. The brain cylinder was carried into the craft by Summers, who inserted it—somewhere!—plugged it in, and that finished the construction job.

  At 2400 the mobile power plant took off for Callisto.

  A third of the way to the Martian orbit, six spacesuited men came into an enormous chamber that was a technician's nightmare.

  From a wall amplifier, Quentin's voice said, "What are you doing here, Van?"

  "O.K.," Brown said. "This is it. We'll work fast now. Cunningham, locate the connection. Dalquist, keep your gun ready."

  "What'll I look for?" the big blond man asked.

  Brown glanced at Talman. "You're certain there's no mobility?"

  "I'm certain," Talman said, his eyes moving. He felt naked exposed to Quentin's gaze, and didn't like it.

  Cunningham, gaunt, wrinkled and scowling, said, "The only mobility's in the drive itself. I was sure of that before Talman double-checked. When a Transplant's plugged in for one job, it's limited to the tools it needs for that job."

  "Well, don't waste time talking. Break the circuit."

  Cunningham stared through his vision plate. "Wait a minute. This isn't standardized equipment. It's experimental . . . casual. I've got to trace a few . . . um."

  Talman was surreptitiously trying to spot the Transplant's eye lenses, and failing. From somewhere in that maze of tubes, coils, wires, grids and engineering hash, he knew, Quentin was looking at him. From several places, undoubtedly—there'd be over all vision, with eyes spotted strategically around the room.

  And it was a big room, this central control chamber. The light was misty
yellow. It was like some strange, unearthly cathedral in its empty, towering height, a hugeness that dwarfed the six men. Bare grids, abnormally large, hummed and sparked; great vacuum tubes flamed eerily. Around the walls above their heads ran a metal platform, twenty feet up, a metal guard rail casually precautionary. It was reached by two ladders, on opposite walls of the room. Overhead hung a celestial globe, and the dim throbbing of tremendous power murmured in the chlorinated atmosphere.

  The amplifier said, "What is this, piracy?"

  Brown said casually, "Call it that. And relax. You won't be harmed. We may even send you back to Earth, when we can figure out a safe way to do it."

  Cunningham was investigating lucite mesh, taking care to touch nothing. Quentin said, "This cargo isn't worth highjacking. It isn't radium I'm carrying, you know."

  "I need a power plant," Brown remarked curtly.

  "How did you get aboard?"

  Brown lifted a hand to mop sweat from his face, and then, grimacing, refrained. "Find anything yet, Cunningham?"

  "Give me time. I'm only an electronics man. This setup's screwy. Fern, give me a hand here."

  Talman's discomfort was growing. He realized that Quentin, after the first surprised comment, had ignored him. Some indefinable compulsion made him tilt back his head and say Quentin's name.

  "Yeah," Quentin said. "Well? So you're in with this gang?"

  "Yes."

  "And you were pumping me, up in Quebec. To make sure I was harmless."

  Talman made his voice expressionless. "We had to be certain."

  "I see. How'd you get aboard? The radar automatically dodges approaching masses. You couldn't have brought your own ship alongside in space."

  "We didn't. We got rid of the emergency crew and took their suits."

  "Got rid of them?"

  Talman moved his eyes toward Brown. "What else could we do? We can't afford half measures in a gamble as big as this. Later on, they'd have been a danger to us, after our plans started moving. Nobody's going to know anything about it, except us. And you." Again Talman looked at Brown. "I think, Quent, you'd better throw in with us."

  The amplifier ignored whatever implied threat lay in the suggestion.

  "What do you want the power plant for?"

  "We've got an asteroid picked out," Talman said, tilting his head back to search the great crowded hollow of the ship, swimming a little in the haze of its poisonous atmosphere. He half expected Brown to cut him short, but the fat man didn't speak. It was, he thought, curiously difficult to talk persuasively to someone whose location you didn't know. "The only trouble is, it's airless. With the plant, we can manufacture our own air. It'd be a miracle if anybody ever found us in the Asteroid Belt."

  "And then what? Piracy?"

  Talman did not answer. The voicebox said thoughtfully, "It might make a good racket, at that. For a while, anyhow. Long enough to clean up quite a lot. Nobody will expect anything like it. Yeah, you might get away with the idea."

  "Well," Talman said, "if you think that, what's the next logical step?"

  "Not what you think. I wouldn't play along with you. Not for moral reasons, especially, but for motives of self-preservation. I'd be useless to you. Only in a highly intricate, widespread civilization is there any need for Transplants. I'd be excess baggage."

  "If I gave you my word——"

  "You're not the big shot," Quentin told him. Talman instinctively sent another questioning look at Brown. And from the voicebox on the wall came a curious sound like a smothered laugh.

  "All right," Talman said, shrugging. "Naturally you won't decide in our favor right away. Think it over. Remember you're not Bart Quentin any more—you've got certain mechanical handicaps. While we haven't got too much time, we can spare a little—say ten minutes—while Cunningham looks things over. Then . . . well, we aren't playing for marbles, Quent." His lips thinned. "If you'll throw in with us and guide the ship under our orders, we can afford to let you live. But you've got to make up your mind fast. Cunningham is going to trace you down and take over the controls. After that——"

  "What makes you so sure I can be traced down?" Quentin asked calmly. "I know just how much my life would be worth once I'd landed you where you want to go. You don't need me. You couldn't give me the right maintenance even if you wanted to. No, I'd simply join the crewmen you've already disposed of. I'll give you an ultimatum of my own."

  "You'll—what?"

  "Keep quiet and don't monkey with anything, and I'll land in an isolated part of Callisto and let you all escape," Quentin said. "If you don't, God help you."

  For the first time Brown showed he had been conscious of that distant voice. He turned to Talman.

  "Bluff?"

  Talman nodded slowly. "Must be. He's harmless."

  "Bluff," Cunningham said, without looking up from his task.

  "No," the amplifier told him quietly, "I'm not bluffing. And be careful with that board. It's part of the atomic hookup. If you fool with the wrong connections, you're apt to blast us all out of space."

  Cunningham jerked back from the maze of wires snaking out of the bakelite before him. Fern, some distance away, turned a swarthy face to watch. "Easy," he said. "We've got to be sure what we're doing."

  "Shut up," Cunningham grunted. "I do know. Maybe that's what the Transplant's afraid of. I'll be plenty careful to stay clear of atomic connections, but——" He paused to study the tangled wires. "No. This isn't atomic —I think. Not the control leads, anyway. Suppose I break this connection——" His gloved hand came up with a rubber-sheathed cutter.

  The voicebox said, "Cunningham—don't." Cunningham poised the cutter. The amplifier sighed.

  "You first, then. Here it is!"

  Talman felt the transparent faceplate slap painfully against his nose. The immense room bucked dizzily as he went reeling forward, unable to check himself. All around him he saw grotesque spacesuited figures reeling and stumbling. Brown lost his balance and fell heavily.

  Cunningham had been slammed forward into the wires as the ship abruptly decelerated. Now he hung like a trapped fly in the tangle, his limbs, his head, his whole body jerking and twitching with spasmodic violence. The devil's dance increased in fury.

  "Get him out of there!" Dalquist yelled.

  "Hold it!" Fern shouted. "I'll cut the power——" But he didn't know how. Talman, dry-throated, watched Cunningham's body sprawling, arching, shaking in spastic agony. Bones cracked suddenly.

  Cunningham jerked more limply now, his head flopping grotesquely.

  "Get him down," Brown snapped, but Fern shook his head.

  "Cunningham's dead. And that hookup's dangerous."

  "How? Dead?"

  Under his thin mustache Fern's lips parted in a humorless smile. "A guy in an epileptic fit can break his own neck."

  "Yeah," Dalquist said, obviously shaken. "His neck's broken, all right. Look at the way his head goes."

  "Put a twenty-cycle alternating current through yourself and you'd go into convulsions too," Fern advised.

  "We can't just leave him there!"

  "We can," Brown said, scowling. "Stay away from the walls, all of you." He glared at Talman. "Why didn't you——"

  "Sure, I know. But Cunningham should have had sense enough to stay away from bare wires."

  "Few wires are insulated around here," the fat man growled. "You said the Transplant was harmless."

  "I said he had no mobility. And that he wasn't a telepath." Talman realized that his voice sounded defensive.

  Fern said, "A signal's supposed to sound whenever the ship accelerates or decelerates. It didn't go off that time. The Transplant must have cut it out himself, so we wouldn't be warned."

  They looked up into that humming, vast, yellow emptiness. Claustrophobia gripped Talman. The walls looked ready to topple in—to fold down, as though he stood in the cupped hand of a titan.

  "We can smash his eye cells," Brown suggested.

  "Find 'em." Fern indicated the m
aze of equipment.

  "All we have to do is unhitch the Transplant. Break his connection. Then he goes dead."

  "Unfortunately," Fern said, "Cunningham was the only electronic engineer among us. I'm only an astrophysicist!"

  "Never mind. We pull one plug and the Transplant blacks out. You can do that much!"

  Anger flared. But Cotton, a little man with blinking blue eyes, broke the tension.

  "Mathematics—geometry—ought to help us. We want to locate the Transplant, and——" He glanced up and was frozen. "We're off our course!" he said finally, licking dry lips. "See that telltale?"

  Far above, Talman could see the enormous celestial globe. On its dark surface a point of red light was clearly marked.

  Fern's swarthy face showed a sneer. "Sure. The Transplant's running to cover. Earth's the nearest place where he can get help. But we've plenty of time left. I'm not the technician Cunningham was, but I'm not a complete dope." He didn't look at the rhythmically-moving body on the wires. "We don't have to test every connection in the ship."

  "O.K., take it, then," Brown grunted.

  Awkward in his suit, Fern walked to a square opening in the floor and peered down at a mesh-metal grating eighty feet below. "Right. Here's the fuel feed. We don't need to trace connections through the whole ship. The fuel's dumped out of that leader tube overhead there. Now look. Everything connected with the atomic power is apparently marked with red wax crayon. See?"

  They saw. Here and there, on bare plates and boards, were cryptic red markings. Other symbols were in blue, green, black and white.

  "Go on that assumption," Fern said. "Temporarily, anyhow. Red's atomic power. Blue . . . green . . . um."

  Talman said suddenly, "I don't see anything here that looks like Quentin's brain case."

  "Did you expect to?" the astrophysicist asked sardonically. "It's slid into a padded socket somewhere. The brain can stand more gravs than the body, but seven's about tops in any case. Which, incidentally, is fine for us. There'd be no use putting high-speed potential in this ship. The Transplant couldn't stand it, any more than we could."