“What on earth are they for?”
“Oh, it’s very simple. Now take this report request right here. See, it came in three copies. The Industrial Research Committee of the Planning Board of the Materials Allocation Group of the Defense Control Board wants a report. And I quote. ‘It is requested that on the twelfth and twenty-seventh of each month, beginning with the month following receipt of this directive, that the planned utilization of the appended list of critical metals be reported for three months in the future, each month’s utilization to be expressed as a percentage of total utilization during the six months period immediately preceeding each report.’ And here is their appended list. Seventeen items. Did you see that new girl in my outer office, in the far corner?”
“The little brunette? Yes, I saw her.”
“Well, I route this report to her. She cuts a stencil and mimeographs the directive, runs off a hundred copies. She’s my Coordination Group, my Statistical Committee and my Programming Board. On the twelfth and twenty-seventh of each month she’ll mail in a copy of the directive with one of the rubber stamp marks on it. She’ll send one to the Defense Control Board and one to the Materials Allocation Group and one to the Planning Board and one to the Industrial Research Committee. I let her use any stamp she happens to feel like using at the moment. It seems to work just as well as making out the report. Probably better. I have her put a mysterious file number on the stencil.”
“Oh, Bard, how terrible that your time has to be taken up with this sort of thing!”
“I don’t mind most of them. But here’s a rough one. No more personnel, Sharan. At least, they’re making it so complicated to put on any new person that the delay will run into months. We’ll have to make do with what we have. They’re hamstringing me, very neatly. And I can’t fight back. There’s no one to fight. Just a big vague monster with carbon-paper tentacles, paper-clip teeth, and a hide made of layers of second sheets.”
“Why, Bard? Why are they turning against the Project? They believed in it once.”
“It’s taking too long, I guess.”
“Can’t you go to Washington?”
“I’m no good at that sort of thing. I get a compulsion. I know what to say, how to butter them, but I can’t quite manage to do it.”
She went over to a heavy oak armchair near the window, dropped into it, hooked one slim leg over the arm. She frowned. He walked over and looked out the window, following her glance. “Well, Sharan, even if it never gets off the ground, they can’t say that we didn’t build a big one.”
Even in the brightest sunshine, the light that shone down on the project area was diffused. Four gigantic steel towers of irregular size had been constructed in the form of an irregular oblong. A square mile of tough fabric, painted with all the art of camouflage, was suspended like a grotesque circus tent over the towers. From the air it would appear to be another barren irregular hill of rock and sage and sand. Bard Lane’s office was near the cave-like lip of the south edge of the outsized tent. The Beatty One stood in the middle of the tent. Around the base of the Beatty One was the constant, ant-like activity that had been going on for over a year.
Some of the labs were set into the solid rock of the surrounding hills. All project buildings not under the protection of the vast tent were designed to look, from the air, like just another sleepy village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a village where the flagellationists still whip-cut the back of the selected man who labored under the heavy cross at Easter time.
He looked down at her for a moment, and resisted the impulse to rest his hand on her crisp hair, to feel, under his strong fingers, the delicate configuration of skull, the clean bone-line.
Bard locked his hands behind him and looked out to where he could see the dull metal base of the Beatty One, almost exactly one hundred and seventy feet in diameter, and so tall the round snout almost touched the fabric of the enormous tent. A platform elevator inched upward, carrying men in work clothes. The elevator was built on heavy steel circular tracks so that the operator could raise it to any point on the outside skin of the great vehicle.
“Does anybody expect it to fly, Doc?” she asked.
“I personally guarantee to get it at least twelve inches off the ground.”
She smiled up at him, the smile flavored with rue. “News good and bad,” she said. “The good is about Bill Kornal. We took him apart, every reflex, every neurosis, every response to stimuli, and we reassembled him. There is a change, sure. But it measures out as exactly as much as one would expect as an aftereffect of what happened to him. He is as sound and solid as that mountain over there.”
“Good. Put him on. I’ll sign the confirmation in the morning.”
“And the bad news is that I can’t find any real good reason to wash out Major Tommy Leeber. I don’t have to like him, but I can’t wash him out. Once you dig down through a lot of apparent complexities, the whole thing becomes very simple. He has a mind like a brass hinge. It works in just one direction: What is the best thing for Tommy Leeber? Totally directional, and of course he has a top security rating. So he’s all yours, Bard. I brought him over. He’s waiting out there for the deluxe tour.”
Bard Lane glanced at his watch. “There’s time. See you at dinner. Thanks for all the nice things you do for me.”
Major Leeber had the same reaction as did every other newcomer to the project when he was finally taken close enough to the Beatty One to really appreciate the size of it. After he had been walked all the way around it, he finally shook himself out of his stunned air of disbelief, smiled his lazy smile and said, “So... I still don’t believe it.”
Dr. Bard Lane had the elevator brought to ground level and signaled the operator to take it up to the nose. He stood and leaned against a stanchion and watched Leeber move to the exact center of the platform. At the ogive curve, close under the overhead camouflage, the elevator tipped toward the hull and followed the curve on up to the last port. Leeber did not look well as he leaned away from the direction of the tilt.
“Come along,” Bard said as he stepped over the lip of the port. He lowered himself to the deck inside, and began his familiar indoctrination speech as he gave the major a hand. “This will be the entrance port for the crew. The ship is designed for a crew of six. No passengers. The forward tenth of the overall length contains the living quarters, life maintenance systems, supplies and main control panels. We are in the control room. The three chairs there are on gymbals mounted on hydraulic pedestals designed to compensate for sudden increments in acceleration. They are similar to, but an improvement over, the systems previously used. Impulse screen mounted, as you can see, but not yet tied into either manual or computer control.”
Leeber studied the main control panel and said, “Looks like a king size A-six, and not too much different from the A-five. Where are the directional jets?”
“Eliminated in favor of a twenty-ton gyro that can be turned through a ten-degree arc. In free space it will turn her in any desired attitude. A lot of weight to boost, but not much less than standard attitude jet installation and the necessary fuel controls, and we save a lot by eliminating the initial lift-off with chemical fuels, so we have no booster stages to jettison on the way out.”
“Initial lift on atomic drive? Poison the air?”
“With a very short-life emission. Launch site will be clean in ten hours. At half-diameter outbound, they switch to standard A fuel, and keep it on CA. That means that—”
“—at twelve thousand miles out they go right onto the same old A-six atomic propulsion fuel and stay in constant acceleration. I’m not a civilian, Doctor. So this marvelous ship is just one big son of a bitch of an oversized A-six with a flywheel gyro, a short-life mix for takeoff. Wonderful!” His smile was ironic, his eyes cold.