“Do you have to, darl?”
“Yes, Christine. It’s quite important. Tell Peter I’ll be late and not to wait up for me.”
Christine sniffed audibly and hung up without another word. Fortune shrugged and threaded his way out through the offices of the headquarters block. A cold, dark wind slapped aimlessly at him as he walked past the greenly lit hangars and workshops of the Unit. He switched on the heater as soon as he had closed the bubble of his staff copter, relaxing in the gusts of rubber-smelling warmth until the tower cleared him for takeoff. At eight hundred feet he headed south-west across the trembling lights of Hafnarfjordr and followed the coastline for thirty miles before angling down on the familiar lights of Bill Geissler’s works shining in the rolling blackness like a scimitar.
On the ground he walked towards Geissler’s office, noting that the big gun was out of its housing and probing almost vertically into the sky, which meant Geissler Orbital Deliveries was getting ready to put a package into orbit. Geissler was the only real-life genius Fortune had ever known and he looked nothing like the part. He was a stocky little man with ridged black hair and the hard, swarthy face of a Mexican bandit. Three years before he had bought a section of land on the south-west tip of Iceland, moved in with two common law wives and an ex-naval sixteen-inch gun, set up a workshop and since then had supported his menage a trois by placing instrument capsules in orbit. He specialised in polar and near-polar orbits for a number of universities and new governments scattered across the globe.
Geissler was seated at his glass-topped desk making pencil marks on a dark grey punched tape. “Come in, John. I didn’t expect you. What’s the matter? You getting this 1753?”
“I think so, Bill. It’s a one-in-three shot, but I have a feeling about this one.”
“So have I, pal—and I’m never wrong. You’d better clear a space in your backyard for it.” He snorted and pushed the coils of punched tape away. In the workshop beyond the glass wall of the little office an electric welder briefly drenched its surroundings in needles of violent brilliance.
Fortune unbuttoned his coat and sat down. “Have you had time to … ?”
Geissler thrust out his hand like a traffic cop. “What have you forgotten, John?”
“Nothing. Oh, that! What the hell’s the use of my asking you these things when I don’t know if your answer is right?”
“Ask me anyway. You know I like the practice.”
“All right, all right. What is …’ Fortune began picking numbers at random,‘… 973827 times 426458?”
Geissler’s eyes darkened momentarily. “It’s 415,296,314,766. Try another one.”
“Can you get a message to Mars?” Fortune spoke angrily, feeling the Nesster ship drumming down an invisible wire attached to the top of his head.
Geissler looked dubious. “I could, but I hate to think what it would cost. Private research organisations—that includes me, by the way—can buy time on the Cripple Creek dish but they charge about twenty thousand kroner, say five thousand dollars, a minute at the present orbital positions, and if you want a reply the rate would be about twice that. Are you going to do what I think you’re going to do?”
Fortune nodded. “Yes. It can’t wait. I want them to run a check on our five suspects.”
“Well, even if I condense the orbital data to the limit the transmission is bound to take at least three minutes, that’s sixty thousand kroner. The reply won’t take as long, of course, but I think there will be a minimum charge for a Mars-Earth transmission, possibly another twenty thousand.” Geissler’s brown eyes narrowed in almost physical pain—he was a business man as well as a genius. “That’s big money for squirting a few electrons into the sky. If you could wait another month I think I can eliminate four of the suspects.”
“I can’t wait.”
‘But eighty thousand kroner! I know you made plenty out of the Captain Johnny thing, John, but you’re bound to go broke at this rate. All the work you’re getting me to do, and now this Mars transmission, should be financed by UNO money. I’m going to make some coffee. Think it over.”
Waiting for the coffee, Fortune thought it over. He remembered how he had felt when the theory had first been propounded that the Nesster caravan was homing on Earth by means of signals from a scout satellite. It was easy to visualise the great train of fully automatic ships nearing the Solar System, the leader dispatching an advance probe into orbit around each planet, and the probe circling Earth suddenly emitting the signal which meant, yes—this world will support life. It was exactly what had always been done by tramps who put chalk marks on the gate posts of friendly houses. So, all that was necessary was to rub out this particular chalk mark with an orbital interceptor and the tramps would stop coming to the door.
High-level action had been taken to check the theory, but there were snags—not the least of which was the fact that in 1983 the number of man-made objects tumbling round the Earth was in the region of fifty thousand. Only a fraction of these were useful satellites, the bulk being made up of bits and pieces of the vehicles which had placed them in orbit. Some of the more complicated experiments had been known to release as many as fifty sections of rocket motor casing and ejection mechanisms in one mission, which was why even by the later Sixties the number had risen well past the one thousand mark.
The profusion of sky litter had made it impossible simply to pin-point an alien satellite, so a series of capsules were thrown into distant, minutely precessive orbits to pick up possible transmissions to the Nessters. They had been given the inevitable tag, in this case PULP—for Precessive Unmanned Listening Posts. When these drew a complete blank the scout satellite theory was officially discarded and the main research effort put back into the, as yet unsuccessful, efforts to devise a deep space interceptor which could beat the meteor screens surrounding the Nesster ships.
Fortune’s pre-Army years in the unfashionable field of sub-millimetre tight beam radiation had given him a few private doubts about the efficacy of Project PULP, but there was no arguing with fifty thousand orbiting pieces of scrap metal. Then one night he had met Geissler, the prodigy, in a bar in Reykjavik….
The concept of instinctive mathematics had been new to Fortune, but according to Geissler everybody had the facility to some extent. It showed up in good gamblers as ‘luck’; it showed up in even the most mediocre chess player, who could defeat any computer ever conceived because the machine would have had to spend its time methodically checking out whole regions of moves which are perfectly logical but which the man instinctively knows are not good enough. Geissler claimed the difference between him and anybody else was purely one of degree, but he had guaranteed that with access to the Unit’s computing equipment he could find the Nesster satellite—if it existed—in a year.
And Fortune had hired him on the spot.
“Sorry there’s nothing to eat,” Geissler said, setting the coffee on his desk. “Unless you want to come over to the house and have dinner with us. Jenny and Avis would be glad of an extra man to even up the score.”
“Have one of these.” Fortune pulled out three Captain Johnny bars with sagging heads held in place by foil only.
“No thanks. Why do you eat those things all the time, John? All that weight you carry around….”
“Outside every thin man,” Fortune replied, munching comfortably, ‘there’s a fat man trying to get in. Now about this signal to Mars. We don’t need to explain what’s happening, do we? The Army objects strongly to Unit commanders who go in to research.”
“No, that part is all right. If the scout satellite theory is correct we can make two assumptions—firstly, one of our five suspects is of Nesster origin; secondly, every planet in the Solar System will have an identical satellite; in a predictable orbit corresponding to one of our five. I can send five sets of orbital elements to the Mars observatory and legitimately have them checked out—I could easily be doing some work on one of the dozens of old Mars probes.”