Inherit the Stars Read online

  "Did you see the call I made to Francis?"

  "Yep."

  "Then . . ." Borlan didn't seem sure of how to put it. ". . . I don't know an awful lot more than you do." He placed his hands palms-down on the desk in an attitude of candor, but his sigh was that of one not really expecting to be believed. He was right.

  "Come on, Felix. Give." Hunt's expression said the rest.

  "You must know," Gray insisted. "You fixed it all up."

  "Straight." Borlan looked from one to the other. "Look, taking things worldwide, who would you say our biggest customer is? It's no secret—UN Space Arm. We do everything for them from Lunar data links to—to laser terminal clusters and robot probes. Do you know how much revenue I've got forecast from UNSA next fiscal? Two hundred million bucks . . . two hundred million!"

  "So?"

  "So . . . well—when a customer like that says he needs help, he gets help. I'll tell you what happened. It was like this: UNSA is a big potential user of scopes, so we fed them all the information we've got on what the scope can do and how development is progressing in Francis's neck of the woods. One day—the day before I called Francis—this guy comes to see me all the way from Houston, where one of the big UNSA outfits has its HQ. He's an old buddy of mine—their top man, no less. He wants to know can the scope do this and can it do that, and I tell him sure it can. Then he gives me some examples of the things he's got in mind and he asks if we've got a working model yet. I tell him not yet, but that you've got a working prototype in England; we can arrange for him to go see it if he wants. But that's not what he wants. He wants the prototype down there in Houston, and he wants people who can operate it. He'll pay, he says—we can name our own figure—but he wants that instrument—something to do with a top-priority project down there that's got the whole of UNSA in a flap. When I ask him what it is, he clams up and says it's 'security restricted' for the moment."

  "Sounds a funny business," Hunt commented with a frown. "It'll cause some bloody awful problems back at Metadyne."

  "I told him all that." Borlan turned his palms upward in a gesture of helplessness. "I told him the score regarding the production schedules and availability forecasts, but he said this thing was big and he wouldn't go causing this kind of trouble if he didn't have a good reason. He wouldn't, either," Borlan added with obvious sincerity. "I've known him for years. He said UNSA would pay compensation for whatever we figure the delays will cost us." Borlan resumed his helpless attitude. "So what was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to tell an old buddy who happens to be my best customer to go take a jump?"

  Hunt rubbed his chin, threw back his last drop of scotch, and took a long pensive draw on his cigar.

  "And that's it?" he asked at last.

  "That's it. Now you know as much as I do—except that since you left England we've received instructions from UNSA to start shipping the prototype to a place near Houston—a biological institute. The bits should start arriving day after tomorrow; the installation crew is already on its way over to begin work preparing the site."

  "Houston . . . Does that mean we're going there?" Gray asked.

  "That's right, Rob." Borlan paused and scratched the side of his nose. His face screwed itself into a crooked frown. "I, ah—I was wondering . . . The installation crew will need a bit of time, so you two won't be able to do very much there for a while. Maybe you could spend a few days here first, huh? Like, ah . . . meet some of our technical people and clue them in a little on how the scope works—sorta like a teach-in. What d'you say—huh?"

  Hunt laughed silently inside. Borlan had been complaining to Forsyth-Scott for months that while the largest potential markets for the scope lay in the USA, practically all of the know-how was confined to Metadyne; the American side of the organization needed more in the way of backup and information than it had been getting.

  "You never miss a trick, Felix," he conceded. "Okay, you bum, I'll buy it."

  Borlan's face split into a wide grin.

  "This UNSA character you were talking about," Gray said, switching the subject back again. "What were the examples?"

  "Examples?"

  "You said he gave some examples of the kind of thing he was interested in knowing if the scope could do."

  "Oh, yeah. Well, lemme see, now . . . He seemed interested in looking at the insides of bodies—bones, tissues, arteries—stuff like that. Maybe he wanted to do an autopsy or something. He also wanted to know if you could get images of what's on the pages of a book, but without the book being opened."

  This was too much. Hunt looked from Borlan to Gray and back again, mystified.

  "You don't need anything like a scope to perform an autopsy," he said, his voice strained with disbelief.

  "Why can't he open a book if he wants to know what's inside?" Gray demanded in a similar tone.

  Borlan showed his empty palms. "Yeah. I know. Search me—sounds screwy!"

  "And UNSA is paying thousands for this?"

  "Hundreds of thousands."

  Hunt covered his brow and shook his head in exasperation. "Pour me another scotch, Felix," he sighed.

  Chapter Four

  A week later the Mercury Three stood ready for takeoff on the rooftop of IDCC Headquarters. In reply to the queries that appeared on the pilot's console display screen, Hunt specified the Ocean Hotel in the center of Houston as their destination. The DEC minicomputer in the nose made contact with its IBM big brother that lived underground somewhere beneath the Portland Area Traffic Control Center and, after a brief consultation, announced a flight plan that would take them via Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, and Fort Worth. Hunt keyed in his approval, and within minutes the aircar was humming southeast and climbing to take on the challenge of the Blue Mountains looming ahead.

  Hunt spent the first part of the journey accessing his office files held on the computers back in Metadyne, to tidy up some of the unfinished business he had left behind. As the waters of the Great Salt Lake came glistening into view, he had just completed the calculations that went with his last experimental report and was adding his conclusions. An hour later, twenty thousand feet up over the Colorado River, he was hooked into MIT and reviewing some of their current publications. After refueling at Santa Fe they spent some time cruising around the city on manual control before finding somewhere suitable for lunch. Later on in the day, airborne over New Mexico, they took an incoming call from IDCC and spent the next two hours in conference with some of Borlan's engineers discussing technicalities of the scope. By the time Fort Worth was behind and the sun well to the west, Hunt was relaxing, watching a murder movie, while Gray slept soundly in the seat beside him.

  Hunt looked on with detached interest as the villain was unmasked, the hero claimed the admiring heroine he had just saved from a fate worse than death, and the rolling captions delivered today's moral message for mankind. Stifling a yawn, he flipped the mode switch to MONITOR/CONTROL to blank out the screen and kill the theme music in midbar. He stretched, stubbed out his cigarette, and hauled himself upright in his seat to see how the rest of the universe was getting along.

  Far to their right was the Brazos River, snaking south toward the Gulf, embroidered in gold thread on the light blue-gray of the distant haze. Ahead, he could already see the rainbow towers of Houston, standing at attention on the skyline in a tight defensive platoon. Houses were becoming noticeably more numerous in the foreground below. At intervals between them, unidentifiable sprawling constructions began to make their appearance—random collections of buildings, domes, girder lattices, and storage tanks, tied loosely together by tangles of roadways and pipelines. Farther away to the left, a line of perhaps half a dozen slim spires of silver reared up from a shantytown of steel and concrete. He identified them as gigantic Vega satellite ferries standing on their launchpads. They seemed fitting sentinels to guard the approaches to what had become the Mecca of the Space Age.

  As Victor Hunt gazed down upon this ultimate expression of man's eternal outward urge
, spreading away in every direction below, a vague restlessness stirred somewhere deep inside him.

  Hunt had been born in New Cross, the shabby end of East London, south of the river. His father had spent most of his life on strike or in the pub on the corner of the street debating grievances worth going on strike for. When he ran out of money and grievances, he worked on the docks at Deptford. Victor's mother worked in a bottle factory all day to make the money she lost playing bingo all evening. He spent his time playing football and falling in the Surrey Canal. There was a week when he stayed with an uncle in Worcester, a man who went to work dressed in a suit every day at a place that manufactured computers. And his uncle showed Victor how to wire up a binary adder.

  Not long afterward, everyone was yelling at everyone more often than usual, so Victor went to live with his aunt and uncle in Worcester. There he discovered a whole new, undreamed-of world where anything one wanted could be made to happen and magic things really came true—written in strange symbols and mysterious diagrams through the pages of the books on his uncle's shelves.

  At sixteen, Victor won a scholarship to Cambridge to study mathematics, physics, and physical electronics. He moved into lodgings there with a fellow student named Mike who sailed boats, climbed mountains, and whose father was a marketing director. When his uncle moved to Africa, Victor was adopted as a second son by Mike's family and spent his holidays at their home in Surrey or climbing with Mike and his friends, first in the hills of the Lake District, North Wales, and Scotland, and later in the Alps. They even tried the Eiger once, but were forced back by bad weather.

  After being awarded his doctorate, he remained at the university for some years to further his researches in mathematical nucleonics, his papers on which were by that time attracting widespread attention. Eventually, however, he was forced to come to terms with the fact that a growing predilection for some of the more exciting and attractive ingredients of life could not be reconciled with an income dependent on research grants. For a while he went to work on thermonuclear fusion control for the government, but rebelled at a life made impossible by the meddlings of uninformed bureaucracy. He tried three jobs in private industry but found himself unable to muster more than a cynical indisposition toward playing the game of pretending that annual budgets, gross margins on sales, earnings per share, or discounted cash flows really meant anything that mattered. And so, when he was just turning thirty, the loner he had always been finally asserted itself; he found himself gifted with rare and acknowledged talents, lettered with degrees, credited with achievements, bestowed with awards, cited with honors—and out of a job.

  For a while he paid the rent by writing articles for scientific journals. Then, one day, he was offered a free-lance assignment by the chief R & D executive of Metadyne to help out on the mathematical interpretation of some of their experimental work. This assignment led to another, and before long a steady relationship had developed between him and the company. Eventually he agreed to join them full-time in return for use of their equipment and services for his own researches—but under his conditions. And so the Theoretical Studies "Department" came into being.

  And now . . . something was missing. The something within him that had been awakened long ago in childhood would always crave new worlds to discover. And as he gazed out at the Vega ships . . .

  His thoughts were interrupted as a stream of electromagnetic vibrations from somewhere below was transformed into the code which alerted the Mercury's flight-control processor. The stubby wing outside the cockpit dipped and the aircar turned, beginning the smooth descent that would merge its course into the eastbound traffic corridor that led to the heart of the city at two thousand feet.

  Chapter Five

  The morning sun poured in through the window and accentuated the chiseled crags of the face staring out, high over the center of Houston. The squat, stocky frame, conceivably modeled on that of a Sherman tank, threw a square slab of shadow on the carpet behind. The stubby fingers hammered a restless tattoo on the glass. Gregg Caldwell, executive director of the Navigation and Communications Division of UN Space Arm, reflected on developments so far.

  Just as he'd expected, now that the initial disbelief and excitement had worn off, everyone was jostling for a slice of the action. In fact, more than a few of the big wheels in some divisions—Biosciences, Chicago, and Space Medicine, Farnborough, for instance—were mincing no words in asking just how Navcomms came to be involved at all, let alone running the show, since the project obviously had no more connection with the business of navigation than it had with communication. The down-turned corners of Caldwell's mouth shifted back slightly in something that almost approached a smile of anticipation. So, the knives were being sharpened, were they? That was okay by him; he could do with a fight. After more than twenty years of hustling his way to the top of one of the biggest divisions of the Space Arm, he was a seasoned veteran at infighting—and he hadn't lost a drop of blood yet. Maybe this was an area in which Navcomms hadn't had much involvement before; maybe the whole thing was bigger than Navcomms could handle; maybe it was bigger than UNSA could handle; but—that was the way it was. It had chosen to fall into Navcomms' lap and that was where it was going to stay. If anyone wanted to help out, that was fine—but the project was stamped as Navcomms-controlled. If they didn't like it, let them try to change it. Man—let 'em try!

  His thoughts were interrupted by the chime of the console built into the desk behind him. He turned around, flipped a switch, and answered in a voice of baritone granite:

  "Caldwell."

  Lyn Garland, his personal assistant, greeted him from the screen. She was twenty-eight, pretty, and had long red hair and big, brown, intelligent eyes.

  "Message from Reception. Your two visitors from IDCC are here—Dr. Hunt and Mr. Gray."

  "Bring them straight up. Pour some coffee. You'd better sit in with us."

  "Will do."

  * * *

  Ten minutes later formalities had been exchanged and everyone was seated. Caldwell regarded the Englishmen in silence for a few seconds, his lips pursed and his bushy brows gnarled in a knot across his forehead. He leaned forward and interlaced his fingers on the desk in front of him.

  "About three weeks ago I attended a meeting at one of our Lunar survey bases—Copernicus Three," he said. "A lot of excavation and site-survey work is going on in that area, much of it in connection with new construction programs. The meeting was attended by scientists from Earth and from some of the bases up there, a few people on the engineering side and certain members of the uniformed branches of the Space Arm. It was called following some strange discoveries there—discoveries that make even less sense now than they did then."

  He paused to gaze from one to the other. Hunt and Gray returned the look without speaking. Caldwell continued: "A team from one of the survey units was engaged in mapping out possible sites for clearance radars. They were operating in a remote sector, well away from the main area being leveled . . ."

  As he spoke, Caldwell began operating the keyboard recessed into one side of his desk. With a nod of his head he indicated the far wall, which was made up of a battery of display screens. One of the screens came to life to show the title sheet of a file, marked obliquely with the word RESTRICTED in red. This disappeared to be replaced by a contour map of what looked like a rugged and broken stretch of terrain. A slowly pulsing point of light appeared in the center of the picture and began moving across the map as Caldwell rotated a tracker ball set into the panel that held the keyboard. The light halted at a point where the contours indicated the junction of a steep-sided cleft valley with a wider gorge. The cleft valley was narrow and seemed to branch off from the gorge in a rising curve.

  "This map shows the area in question," the director resumed. "The cursor shows where a minor cleft joins the main fault running down toward the left. The survey boys left their vehicle at this point and proceeded on up to the cleft on foot, looking for a way to the top of tha
t large rock mass—the one tagged 'five sixty.'" As Caldwell spoke, the pulsing light moved slowly along between the minor sets of contours, tracing out the path taken by the UN team. They watched it negotiate the bend above the mouth of the cleft and proceed some distance farther. The light approached the side of the cleft and touched it at a place where the contours merged into a single heavy line. There it stopped.

  "Here the side was a sheer cliff about sixty feet high. That was where they came across the first thing that was unusual—a hole in the base of the rock wall. The sergeant leading the group described it as being like a cave. That strike you as odd?"

  Hunt raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "Caves don't grow on moons," he said simply.

  "Exactly."

  The screen now showed a photo view of the area, apparently taken from the spot at which the survey vehicle had been parked. They recognized the break in the wall of the gorge where the cleft joined it. The cleft was higher up than had been obvious from the map and was approached by a ramp of loose rubble. In the background they could see a squat tower of rock flattened on top—presumably the one marked "560" on the map. Caldwell allowed them some time to reconcile the picture with the map before bringing up the second frame. It showed a view taken high up, this time looking into the mouth of the cleft. A series of shots then followed, progressing up to and beyond the bend. "These are stills from a movie record," Caldwell commented. "I won't bother with the whole set." The final frame in the sequence showed a hole in the rock about five feet across.