"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already
working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire you because _you're_ working for
Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both
working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we
co-operate.
"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may
render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?"
His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. "Loud
and clear. It's a deal."
I held up a hand, palm toward him. "Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'
involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for
friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?"
"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts
and figures."
"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle."
* * * * *
Seven and a half hours later, the phone in the bedroom of the company
apartment that Brock had arranged for me made loud musical sounds, and
I rolled over in bed and slapped at the "_audio only_" switch.
"Yeah?" I said sleepily.
"You asked to be called at oh eight hundred, sir." said a pleasant
feminine voice.
"Yah. O.K., thanks. I'm awake."
"You're welcome, sir."
I cut off and blinked the sleep out of my eyes. I'd spent an hour and
a half in Brock's office, soaking up all the information he gave me
and giving him all the information I could. I hoped that he had been
more honest and straightforward with me than I had been with him. The
trouble with being a double agent is that you frequently have to play
dirty with someone you like, respect, and trust.
I looked at the watch on my wrist. Oh eight oh six, Greenwich Standard
Time. The girl had been a little late in calling, but it didn't matter
that much.
All over the Solar System, except on Earth itself, the clocks read the
same as they do in Greenwich, England. Time zones don't mean anything
anywhere except on Earth, where the natives feel that the sun should be
at the zenith when the clock says twelve. An irrational concept, to say
the least.
Well, not really. Let's say that it's an emotional concept. A man feels
better if he has the comfortable notion that the position of the sun
has something to do with the numbers on the clock. It gives him a sense
of security. Only the fact that a man in the Belt--or anywhere else
in the System, for that matter--is not dependent on Sol for lighting
purposes makes it possible to establish a Standard Time for everyone.
Oddly enough, Greenwich Standard Time serves an emotional and religious
purpose, too. It's only by the clock that a Jew can tell when the
Sabbath begins; it's only by the clock a Catholic can tell when to
begin his abstinence on Friday; it's only by the clock that a Moslem
can tell when to begin and end the fasts of Ramadan.
And it is only by the clock that the various eight-hour work shifts can
operate in the Belt. On Earth, the four-hour workday is standard, but
there's a lot more work to be done in the Belt.
I got up and got dressed and took the tubeway to Viking Test Area Four,
where McGuire was the ruler of the roost. The guard at the main door
took one look at my pass, smiled me in, and headed for his phone as
soon as I went inside. By the time I had arrived at the office of Chief
Engineer Sven Midguard, the whole staff had been alerted, and the top
men were waiting for me in Midguard's office.
Midguard himself met me in his outer office--a graying man in his
sixties, still handsome in the telly-idol way, but running a bit to
paunch now that he was approaching middle age.
"Mr. Oak! So glad to see you! So glad we could get you to help us."
"Happy to be of service," I said.
"Yes, yes, of course. Come along, come on in and meet the staff.
They're ... uh ... anxious to meet you."
I'd have bet they would be. As far as they knew, I was just the guy who
was supposed to take the boss' daughter to school on Luna, empowered
only to make sure she didn't get into trouble, and had accidentally
become McGuire's lord and master when I'd gone to take her off the
ship. I was an errand boy who'd managed to get control of a spaceship
that was worth millions, a layman who was holding up the work of
responsible scientists and technicians. In simple words, a jerk.
In spite of the socially acceptable smiles on all their faces, every
one of them managed to convey his or her opinion of me by facial
expression alone when Miguard introduced me around.
* * * * *
Ellsworth Felder was short, big-bellied, round-faced, and slightly
red-nosed, like a well-shaved Santa Claus. He was introduced as the
head of the Viking robotics staff, and he shook hands firmly when he
said he was glad to meet me.
Irwin Brentwood, the electronocist, was a slight, spare man with the
body of a young boy and a gentle, soft tenor voice. His "How do you do,
Mr. Oak" was almost apologetic, and his small hand in mine exerted more
pressure than I'd expected.
Theodore Videnski looked more like a wrestler than a robotics expert.
He was as tall as I was and much wider and heavier, and his expression
and voice conveyed the idea that he could have lived a good deal longer
without missing my acquaintance.
Vivian Devereaux was the only one of the five who gave the impression
that she could, if given a chance, begin to like me. She was a
tough-cored, no-nonsense, finely-muscled, alert, and very pretty
woman in her late twenties--a not uncommon type in the Belt, although
they usually don't come as lovely as that. The red, silver, and blue
pattern of her union suit didn't at all distract my attention from
the magnificently molded body beneath; I made a mental note to write
a letter to the editor of a certain psychological journal. I decided
that if this gal could think as good as she looked, she was probably
one hell of a fine mathematician.
The conference room was small, cozy, and ringed with couches. On Earth,
they would have been called padded benches, and they would have been
uncomfortably hard, but you don't need innersprings and sponge rubber
when your weight has dropped by ninety-seven per cent.
Midguard served coffee all around while we all kept up a patter of
chatter that served to get us acquainted before we launched into deep
thinking and heavy conversation.
"Well," said Midguard, when he finally sat down, "now that Mr. Oak is
here, I suggest we begin scheduling our program."
There was a momentary silence, then the boyish Brentwood said, "I think
we ought to explain to Mr. Oak just what our problem is."
That was generally agreed on, and for the next half hour I heard
another re-run of information I already had. I just tried to look
receptive and kept my mouth shut.
"... So you see," Midguard finally wound up, "in order to put McGuire
through his paces, your co-operation is vitally necessary."
"The first thing to do," rumbled the barrel-chested Videnski, "is to
run a verbal check on him, to see how the brain is functioning."
"His circuits should be checked, too," said Brentwood softly. "But that
can be done later. I'll get my testing equipment ready, so that I can
hook it in immediately after you get through with the verbal check." He
looked over at Miss Deveraux. "Vivian?"
"I thought perhaps it might be quicker if we ran a few straight math
checks on him before the verbal check," she said. "It wouldn't take
long, and if there's anything wrong in that area, we'll know what to
look for in the later checks. Would that be all right with you, Ted?"
Videnski nodded. "Certainly, certainly. Save us some backtracking,
maybe."
Nobody asked me anything. I was just a tool; I was the switch that
would turn on the machine these people wanted to play with, that was
all. I could see a long, boring day ahead for Daniel Oak.
* * * * *
If anything, my prediction was short-sighted. Not only was that day
boring, but so were the next three. In effect, I told McGuire that he
should let the nice people into his hull and answer all their pretty
questions.
After that, there was nothing much to do but stand around and watch
while the others worked. Mostly, I watched Brentwood doing his circuit
checks; it was a great deal more interesting to watch lights flash and
meter needles wiggle and lines dancing on oscilloscope plates than it
was to listen to conversations that sounded as if they'd been lifted
from C. L. Dodgson's treatise on logic.
"A man is marooned on an asteroid without food or water and only
one day's supply of air in the tanks of his vac suit. If there is an
emergency air tank on the asteroid, it contains enough air to last
him for two weeks. If there is a flare bomb on the asteroid, then
there is an air tank. There is either a dismantled communicator on the
asteroid or an emergency water supply, but not both. There is either an
emergency food package, or flare bomb, or a single hibernine injection;
or there is both an emergency food package and a flare bomb, but no
hibernine. If there is an emergency water supply, it contains enough
water to last the man four days. If there is a hibernine injection,
then there is a dismantled communicator on the asteroid. If there is an
emergency food package, there is enough in it to last him for one day,
and there is a dismantled communicator, but if they are not both there,
then neither is there. If there is emergency air tank, then there is an
emergency water supply.
"If there is a flare bomb, he can set it off immediately, and rescue
will arrive within two days. If there is a dismantled communicator, it
will take the man one day to put it together before he can call for
help, and rescue will arrive in an additional two days.
"If there is an emergency water tank, there is either a single
hibernine injection or a food package or both. If there is a hibernine
injection, the man can use it to put himself into suspended animation
for exactly twenty-four hours, during which time he will need neither
air, nor food, nor water. If there is air, or water, or food on the
asteroid, or any two of them or all three, the man will use each at the
normal rate until it is exhausted, or the man dies, or he is rescued.
"Assuming that, without hibernine, the man can live for exactly two
days without water, exactly one week without food, and exactly five
minutes without air, can he be rescued? If so, how long will it be
before he is rescued? If not, what is his maximum survival time?
"Does this problem have more than one valid answer? If so, give and
explain both.
"Or is the problem unsolvable as given? If so, explain why it is
unsolvable."
Sit around listening to that sort of stuff for very long, and you begin
to wish you _were_ out on an uninhabited asteroid somewhere. Problems
like that are the sort of thing that any simple-minded computer can
solve in a fraction of a second if they're reduced to binary notation
first, but poor McGuire had to do his own mathematical interpretations
from English, and the things got more complicated as they went along.
And McGuire went right on answering them in his calm, matter-of-fact
baritone.
I remember that particular problem because, while Videnski was reciting
it, Brentwood pointed at an oscilloscope plate that had nothing on it
but a wide, bright, flickering band of light that wavered a little
around the upper and lower edges.
"See that?" he asked in his tenor voice. "That's a tracing of McGuire's
thinking processes. Actually, it's a very thin, very bright tracing,
but it's moving over that area so fast that you can't see it. A
high-speed camera could pick it up, and if the film were projected
at normal speed, you could see every little bit of data being
processed." Then he patted a small instrument that was sitting near the
oscilloscope plate. "Of course, we don't go to all that trouble; we
record it directly and analyze it later."
* * * * *
"And that analysis can be pretty maddening at times," said a very
lovely voice behind me. I turned around and gave Vivian Deveraux my
best smile. Her close-cropped blond hair looked a little disheveled,
but it didn't make her any the less beautiful.
"What does Videnski say?" I asked. "Is McGuire still passing his exams?"
She smiled. "Ted says that if this keeps up, we can get McGuire a
scholarship at Cal Tech." Then she frowned slightly. "It all depends on
the analysis, of course. We'll have to see how his timing is, and how
many actual computations he's using for each problem. It'll take a lot
of work."
I could hear Videnski's voice still droning away in the control room,
alternating with an occasional answer from McGuire. Normally, McGuire
only used the speaker in whatever compartment I happened to be in, but
I'd given him orders to stick with Videnski during the testing. I'd
also had him shut off his pick-ups every-where in the control room, so
that our chatter wouldn't be going into his brain along with Videnski's.
In the lounge, where we were, Brentwood had removed a panel that gave
him access to the testing circuits. To actually get into McGuire's
inner workings and tamper with him would be a lot tougher. McGuire
wouldn't allow it unless I told him to, but even if he did, getting
to the brain required three separate keys and the knowledge of the
combination on the dial of the durasteel door to the tank that held his
brain. Explosives would wreck the brain if they were powerful enough to
open the door, and so would a torch. Viking Spacecraft had taken every
precaution to make sure that nobody stole their pet.
"How long before we can give McGuire his test flight?" I asked. McGuire
had been into space once, but it hadn't been a shakedown cruise.
Vivian looked at Brentwood. "Tomorrow, unless something unforeseen
shows up, huh, Irwin?"
"That's what the schedule says," murmured Brentwood.
"Great," I said. "Just great. There's schedule, and no one's told me
anything about it. Anything else I should know about, perhaps? Some
little thing like where we're going, or whether I should pack a bag, or
whether I'm even invited along?"
Vivian Devereaux blinked. It was a very pretty blink. "Oh, my goodness.
I'm sorry. I guess we haven't kept you very much in touch, really, have
we? We're so used to working together that...." She let the words trail
off with a sheepish smile.
Brentwood chuckled a soft, good-humored chuckle. "I thought the Chief
had told you." By "the Chief," he meant Ellsworth Felder, the head
robotocist. As far as these people were concerned, Sven Midguard was
just a spacecraft engineer.
"Not a word," I said, mentally making a note to find out why Santa
Claus Felder had failed to notify me.
"Well, bring a suitcase," Vivian said. "We--or, rather, you--are taking
McGuire on a test hop to Phobos. Mars is pretty close right now, so
it'll be an easy drive sunwards.
"If all goes well, you're to set him down at Syrtisport, for his first
planet landing. Then to Luna for a day or two. Then directly to Earth
and Long Island Spaceport. We should know by then how he behaves."
"Why Earth?" I asked. There didn't seem much point to it.
"Keep it under your hat," she said. "Manager Ravenhurst is planning a
big publicity campaign. First ship to make the voyage without a human
hand at the controls, and all that. I don't know why, but he wants to
make a big splash on Earth if McGuire has checked out perfectly as far
as Luna."
"Oh. Well, Ravenhurst's the boss." I knew why. The general public
didn't know how shaky Viking Spacecraft was, and neither, presumably,
did the robotics staff. That knowledge was strictly managerial level.
But a big splash on Earth would boost Viking's prestige tremendously,
with a possible rise in stock values which would take some of the
shakiness out of Viking.
* * * * *
By the time the day's work was over, I'd heard all of Videnski's
rumbling baritone that I wanted to hear. I was grateful to get back to
the relative silence of my apartment.
I opened a beer, lit a cigarette, and relaxed on my bed for a few
minutes before I made a phone call. I punched BANning 6226, and got an
answer almost immediately. The screen didn't come to life, but a voice
said: "Marty here. Hullo, Oak." He could see me, even if I couldn't see
him. If anyone punched that number by accident, Marty would simply turn
on a recording that said: "The number you have punched is not a working
number; please disconnect and punch again; this is a recorded message."
There is no point in letting just anyone get in touch with the Ceres
branch of the Political Survey Division through their secret channels.
"Marty," I said, "the test hop is tomorrow." I gave him all the details
as I knew them.
"Hm-m-m." He sounded thoughtful. "If either Thurston or Baedecker
agents are going to try anything, it seems as though this would be the
time to do it."
"I think so, too. Do you have any new information at all?"
"Not much. Thurston's men don't know what Baedecker is up to, as far
as we can gather. But the Baedecker agents have an idea that Thurston
is trying to take over Viking, and they don't mind at all; they're
evidently hoping that the Ravenhurst-Thurston battle will create enough
confusion so that it won't take much push on their part to topple
the whole mess and take control. We know most of the regular agents
on both sides, and we've managed to get a lot of that information to
Colonel Brock so that he can handle quite a bit of the work for us."
Marty chuckled a little. "That's what I call a _really_ secret agent.
Brock has no idea that he's an agent for a service he doesn't even know
exists."
"Harrington Brock is a good man, Marty. Don't underestimate him."
"I don't. It's a shame he just doesn't have quite what it takes to be
good PSD material."
"I hate to be referred to as 'material', good or bad. Do you have any
idea how Baedecker or Thurston might be going to pull the grand-stand
play?"
"Not a one, so far. How about that robotics team, or the engineers who
are working on the ship? Think any of them could be in the pay of a
rival?"
"It's possible," I said, "but I don't know which one or ones it might
be. I've been watching them for three days, and they all seem on the
up-and-up to me. And that worries me."
"How so?"
"You'd think that at least one of them would behave suspiciously by
accident once in a while. You know--nerves or jumpiness from purely
personal reasons. Hang-over, maybe, or woman trouble. But, no."
"The clue of the dog in the night, huh? Does that mean you suspect all
of them?" he asked dryly.
"Sure. Isn't that what a good detective is supposed to do?"
"I wouldn't know; I'm just an information post. I will say this,
though: If any of that bunch is connected with either Baedecker or
Thurston, he isn't a professional. He's someone who's been contacted
secretly and offered a heavy bribe. We're checking back on all of
them now, to see if there's anything in their pasts which might
indicate that their ethics are not what they should be. Or any unusual
circumstance that might indicate blackmail or financial pressure."
"Nothing so far, though?"
"Nothing."
I thought for a second, then said: "Is there any known rival agent in
any position to sabotage McGuire on Phobos, Mars, or Luna?"
"Several, in each place. But we'll have agents there to keep an eye on
them. To be honest with you, Oak, I don't think there's much to worry
about. I don't mean you shouldn't keep your eyes open, but--"
"I know what you mean," I said. "Do my own worrying, and don't worry
you with it. All right. Meanwhile, if you get anything I can use, call
me. And I'll let you know at this end."
"Fair enough. Good luck."