Shoemaker remembered. Davies’ math was all right; it was the only language he really knew his way around in. And he had the fuel, and the motor. All he needed was money to build a ship. But he’d picked the wrong time for it.
It had been just five years after the end of World War III when Davies had started making plans for his ship. The World Federation was only four and a half years old, and still bogged down in a quagmire of difficulties. What with two Balkan and three Indian principalities still “unreconstructed,” ousted officials of other retarded nations raising hell with underground movements, the world rearming for still another war-plus a smashed, half-starving empire, smouldering with atomic fire, to deal with-the Supreme Council had little time or money to give to space flight.
Davies, though, had had his first and only non-mathematical idea, and it was a good one. This is the way it added up. The World Federation argued, reasonably, that the only way to police the world effectively against the possibility of another war was for everybody to come into the W.F. But the hold-out nations in Europe and America, who had been neutral during the last conflict-and were powerful out of all proportion simply because they had-plus the millions of emigres who had set up shop in South America and Africa, replied that the W.F. wasn’t going to police them, and that they’d sooner have another war and, furthermore, that if the W.F. thought it could win it, let them go ahead and drop the first bomb.
The result was an impasse that was throwing the World’s Cultural Rehabilitation Program all out of kilter. Well, said Davies, suppose it were possible to prove to the reactionary nations that Venus was habitable-wouldn’t they jump at the chance to avoid World War IV by moving out entirely? Then the W.F. would be able to go about its business, organizing the Earth into One World-until it was so strong that the Venus colony would be a pushover, and serve them right.
Meanwhile, what if there were intelligent life on Venus-intelligent enough to be a new source of cheap labor, now that every world citizen was demanding that his working day be cut immediately to five hours?
The bored Bureau Chief to whom Davies had talked had nodded thoughtfully and said there might be something in it, and a few months later Davies had been set up as head of a new Department, with a wholly inadequate appropriation.
Burford and Hale had been assigned to the project by the North American Labor Bureau, and Shoemaker, appealed to by Davies, had joined up principally because it was a tough job. Then they’d gone to work, spending the money in driblets as they got it. They’d had to revise the specifications downward half a dozen times, and when they were through, the Space Queen was a rule-of-thumb monstrosity that only a mechanical genius could hold together. Shoemaker was the genius.
He thought about the time the meteor had hulled them, piercing both shop walls and banging hell out of the compartment across the corridor. Shoemaker had been in the shop, so drunk he could hardly stand up; but he’d held his breath long enough to slap a patch over the hole through which all the air in that section had gone whistling out, and seal it tight. Then he’d staggered to an oxygen flask, turned it on full and got enough air in his lungs to keep from passing out. By the time the others rolled out of bed and came down to see whether he was alive or dead, pressure was back to normal.
He remembered Hale’s white face poked through the open seal-door in the corridor. “What happened, for Pete’s sake?”
“Termites,” Shoemaker had said.
What a trip, ye gods, what a trip. He’d done some cockeyed things in his life, but this junket a million miles from anywhere took the oscar. And now, if he was going to have the screaming meemies, he wanted to have them in a nice comfortable hospital-not in this watered-down version of a surrealist’s nightmare.
Burford was saying something to him. Shoemaker roused himself. “What?”
“I said, what’s with you, Edison? You’ve been sitting there with a dopey look on your face for half an hour. You haven’t heard a word we’ve been saying, have you?”
Shoemaker made a quick recovery. “I was thinking, bird-brain. That’s a little pastime us intellectuals indulge in. I’d teach it to you, but I don’t think you’d like it.”
Burford looked at him sharply. Shoemaker began to sweat. Was it showing on him already?
Burford said casually, “No offense. Well, think I’ll turn in. Big day tomorrow.” He strolled out, closing the door behind him.
Shoemaker got up to go a few minutes later, but Davies said, “Say, Jim, there was something I wanted to ask you. I know. Now just what was it? Wait a minute, it’ll come back to me. Oh, yes. Jim, do you think-now, you understand, I just want a rough guess on this-do you reckon if we were to use up all the mercury we got, we could scout around and get us some of this sand, or maybe some ore from lower down-”
When he finally got it out, it appeared that he wanted to know if Shoemaker thought they’d be able to refine some local mineral enough to put it through the transmutator without blowing themselves up.
Exasperated, Shoemaker said, “Sure, easy. It would only take us five or six years to dig up the stuff, build a refinery, get hold of a couple of tons of reagents from Lord knows where, and adjust the trans-M to take the final product. Just a nice little rest-cure, and then we can all go home to glory and show off our long gray beards.”
That started the old argument all over again. Davies said, “Now, Jim, don’t excite yourself. Don’t you see the thing is, if we go home with nothing but some mud and moss that we could have picked up anywhere, or some pictures that we could have faked, why, the Supreme Council will want to know what they spent all that money for. You know we’ll get disciplined, sure as-”
Shoemaker’s nerves got jumpier by the minute. Finally he said, “Oh, blow it out a porthole!” and slammed the galley door behind him.
He met Bur ford down the corridor, just turning in to his cubby.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
“Where do you think?” Bur ford said rudely.
Shoemaker was half undressed when a horrible thought struck him. In his stocking feet, he hurried up to the compartment where his liquor was hidden. The patch was lying propped against the bulkhead; the concealed space was empty. A crowbar lay on the deck, fragments of real solder from other patches clinging to its edge.
Burning, he went back to the engine-room.
Burford had been thorough. The microspectrograph had been carefully pried off and disconnected from the rest of the transmutation rig. Without it, the setup was useless for either the designer’s purpose-making fissionable plutonium-or Shoemaker’s-the manufacture of 200-proof happy water.
Shoemaker didn’t have to look to know that the spares were gone, too.
Luckily, he had about five quarts of the stuff hidden for emergencies in a canister marked “Hydrochloric Acid” down in the shop. With rationing, it would do. It would have to. Green men or no, he couldn’t go dry. He’d been a quart-a-day man for as long as he could remember, and it would take more than a spook or two to scare him off it.
He had to admit to a certain apprehension, though, as he sat on watch in the sallyport the next evening. Land, sea and sky were the same slimy monotone; the occasional breath of wind that came in from the ocean bore the same broad hint of decaying marine life. It had been just about this time last night when that-Restless, he got up and tramped around the ship. On the seaward side, beyond the huge muzzles of the rocket tubes, the greenish sand sloped downward abruptly in a six-foot embankment to the stagnant edge of the water. There was nothing out there, not even a ripple.