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IncommunicadoKATHERINE MacLEAN--------------------------------------------------------------------------------The solar system is not a gentle place. Ten misassorted centers of gigantic pulls and tensions, swinging around each other in ponderous accidental equilibrium, filling space with the violence of their silent battle. Among these giant forces the tiny ships of Earth were overmatched and weak. Few could spend power enough to climb back to space from the vortex of any planet’s field, few dared approach closer than to the satellite spaceports.Ambition always overreaches strength. There will always be a power shortage. Space became inhabited by underpowered private ships. In a hard school of sudden death new skills were learned. In understanding hands the violence of gravitation, heat, and cold, became sustenance, speed, and power. The knack of traveling was to fall, and fall without resistance, following a free line, using the precious fuel only for fractional changes of direction. To fall, to miss and “bounce” in a zigzag of carom shots—it was a good game for a pool shark, a good game for a handball addict, a pinball specialist, a kinetics expert…“Kinetics expert” is what they called Cliff Baker.At the sixth hour of the fourth week of Pluto Station project he had nothing more to worry about than a fragment of tune which would not finish itself. Cliff floated out of the master control room whistling softly and looking for something to do.A snatch of Smitty’s discordant voice raised in song came from a hatch as he passed. Cliff changed direction and dove through into the darkness of a glassite dome. A rubbery crossbar stopped him at the glowing control panel.“Take a break, Smitty. Let me take over for a while.”“Hi, chief,” said Smitty, his hands moving deftly at the panel. “Thanks. How come you can spare the time? Is the rest of the circus so smooth? No emergencies, everything on schedule?”“Like clockwork,” said Cliff. “Knock wood.” He crossed fingers for luck and solemnly rapped his skull. “Take a half hour, but keep your earphones tuned in case something breaks.”“Sure.” Smitty gave Cliff a slap on the shoulder and shoved off. “Watch yourself now. Look out for the psychologist.” His laugh echoed back from the corridor.Cliff laughed in answer. Obviously Smitty had seen the new movie, too. Ten minutes later when the psychologist came in, Cliff was still grinning. The movie had been laid in a deep-space construction project that was apparently intended to represent Pluto Station project, and it had been commanded by a movie version of Cliff and Mike; Cliff acted by a burly silent character carrying a heavy, unidentified tool, and Mike Cohen of the silver tongue by a handsome young actor in a wavy pale wig. In this version they were both bachelors and wasted much time in happy pursuit of a gorgeous blonde.The blonde was supposed to be the visiting psychologist sent up by Spaceways. She was a master personality who could hypnotize with a glance, a sorceress who could produce mass hallucinations with a gesture. She wound up saving the Earth from Cliff. He was supposed to have been subtly and insanely arranging the Pluto Station orbit, so that when it was finished it would leave Pluto and fall on Earth like a bomb.Cliff had been watching the movie through an eyepiece-earphone rig during a rest period, but he laughed so much he fell out of his hammock and tangled himself in guide lines, and the others on the rest shift had given up trying to sleep and decided to play the movie on the big projector. They would be calling in on the earphones about it soon, kidding him.He grinned, listening to the psychologist without subtracting from the speed and concentration of handling the control panel. Out in space before the ship, working as deftly as a distant pair of hands, the bulldog construction units unwrapped floating bundles of parts, spun, pulled, magnetized, fitted, welded, assembling another complex perfect segment of the huge Pluto Station.“I’d like to get back to Earth,” said the psychologist in a soft tenor voice that was faintly Irish, like a younger brother of Mike. “Look, Cliff, you’re top man in this line. You can plot me a short cut, can’t you?” The psychologist, Roy Pierce, was a slender dark Polynesian who seemed less than twenty years old. During his stay he had floated around watching with all the innocent awe of a tourist, and proved his profession only in an ingratiating skill with jokes. Yet he was extremely likeable, and seemed familiar in some undefinable way, as if one had known him all his life.“Why not use the astrogator?” Cliff asked him mildly.“Blast the astrogator! All it gives is courses that swing around the whole rim of the System and won’t get me home for weeks!”“It doesn’t have to do that,” Cliff said thoughtfully. The segment was finished. He set the controls of the bulldogs to guide it to the next working sector and turned around, lining up factors in his mind. “Why not stick around? Maybe someone will develop a split personality for you.”“My wife is having a baby,” Pierce explained. “I promised I’d be there. Besides, I want to help educate it through the first year. There are certain things a baby can learn that make a difference later.”“Are you willing to spend four days in the acceleration tank just to go down and pester your poor kid?” Cliff floated over to a celestial sphere and idly spun it back and forth through the planetary positions of the month.“Of course.”“O.K. I think I see a short cut. It’s a little risky, and the astrogator is inhibited against risk. I’ll tell you later.”“You’re stalling,” complained Pierce, yanking peevishly at a bending crossbar. “You’re the expert who keeps the orbits of three thousand flying skew bodies tied in fancy knots, and here I want just a simple orbit for one little flitter. You could tell me now.”Cliff laughed. “You exaggerate, kid. I’m only half the expert. Mike is the other half. Like two halves of a stage horse. I can see a course that I could take myself, but it has to go on automatic tapes for you. Mike can tell me if he can make a computer see it, too. If he can, you’ll leave in an hour.”Pierce brightened. “I’ll go pack. Excuse me, Cliff.”As Pierce shoved off towards the hatch, Mike Cohen came in, wearing a spacesuit unzipped and flapping at the cuffs, talking as easily as if he had not stopped since the last conversation. “Did you see the new movie during rest shift, Cliff? That hulking lout who played yourself—” Mike smiled maliciously at Pierce as they passed in the semi-dark. “Hi, Kid. Speaking of acts, who were you this time?”“Michael E. Cohen,” said the youth, as he floated out. He looked back to see Mike’s expression and before shoving from sight added maliciously, “I always pick the character for whom my subject has developed the greatest shock tolerance.”“Ouch!” Mike murmured. “But I hope I have no such edged tongue as that.” He gripped a crossbar and swung to a stop before Cliff. “The boy is a chameleon,” he said, half admiringly. “But I wonder has he any personality of his own.”Cliff said flatly, “I like him.”Mike raised his villainous black eyebrows and spread his hands, a plaintive note coming into his voice. “Don’t we all? It is his business to be liked. But who is it that we like? These mirror trained sensitives—”“He’s a nice honest kid,” Cliff said. Outside, the constructor units flew up to the dome and buzzed around in circles waiting for control. Another bundle of parts from the asteroid belt foundry began to float by. Hastily Cliff seized a pencil and scrawled a diagram on a sheet of paper, then returned to the controls. “He wants to go back to Earth. Could you tape that course? It cuts air for a sling turn at Venus.”An hour later Mike and Cliff escorted the psychologist to his ship and inserted the control tapes with words of fatherly advice.Mike said cheerfully: “You will be running across uncharted space with no blinker buoys with the rocks, so you had better stay in the shock tank and pray.”And Cliff said cheerfully, “If you get off course below Mars, don’t bother signalling for help. You’re sunk.”“You know, Cliff,” Mike said, “too many people get cooked that way. Maybe we should do something.”“How about Mercury?”“Just the thing, Cliff. Listen, Kid, don’t worry. If you fall into the Sun, we’ll build a rescue station on Mercury and name it after you.”A warning bell rang from the automatics, and the two pushed out through the air lock into space with Cliff protesting. “That’s not it. About Mercury I meant—”“Hear the man complaining,” Mike interrupted. “And what would you do without me around to finish your sentences for you?”Eight hours later Mike was dead. Some pilot accidentally ran his ship out of the assigned lanes and left the ionized gas of his jets to drift across a sector of space where Mike and three assistants were setting up the nucleus of the station power plant.They were binding in high velocities with fields that put a heavy drain on the power plants of distant ships. They were working behind schedule, working fast, and using space gaps for insulation.When the ionized gas drifted in everything arced.The busy engineers in all the ring of asteroids and metalwork that circled Pluto saw a distant flash that filled their earphones with a howl of static, and at the central power plants certain dials registered a sudden intolerable drain, and safety relays quietly cut off power from that sector. Binding fields vanished and circular velocities straightened out. As the intolerable blue flash faded, dull red pieces of metal bulleted out from the damaged sector and were lost in sp... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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