Pressure Man

Chapter Three

Voices awakened Dom. He was back in the hospital to facilitate dosage of the drugs which were healing his burns so rapidly that he felt, as he came out of sleep, no pain, only an itch under the bandages. His head was fuzzy. He’d taken a sedative to knock thoughts of a three-thousand-atmosphere pressure hull from his mind. He was not ready to open his eyes and face the problem.

“I guess he’s showing his age,” J.J. Barnes said.

“Plus a total lack of alertness and ambition,” said another voice.

“Too much R R in the big city,” J.J. said.

Dom opened one eye. They were standing at the foot of his bed, J.J. in uniform, Art Donald in jeans and pullover. Art was a shattered shell of a man who looked as if he might disintegrate at any moment. He had lung problems. Now and then a few cells would blow a bubble in lung tissue and he’d have a rest in the hospital. His hair was black and lank, his skin pocked by ancient acne, his eyes alert. He was smoking. Art was reckless. At parties he courted blowing a lung by smoking, drinking, and keeping up with the most vigorous on the dance floor. He knew more about metals than any man alive.

“Nice to see you, Art,” Dom said.

“You want to get out of bed now?” J.J. said, with some irritation.

“No,” Dom said.

“OK, if you don’t want to watch a man ride a bomb,” J.J. said.

“I’d rather watch a woman do almost anything,” Dom said, but he swung his legs off the bed and ducked his head down when it started to spin. A nurse came out of the shadows and attacked him without warning with a pointed weapon. Almost immediately the drug began to counteract the sedative.

He was dressed within minutes and joined J.J. and Art in the hall. There was no conversation in the elevator nor in the lower lobby. It was not until they were riding one of the back-breaking underground cars that J.J. explained.

“We’ve got a test vehicle waiting about half an astronomical unit out toward Polaris,” J.J. said.

“The new power plant?”

“First live run.”

“Who’s on it?”

“Neil.”

Neil was Neil Walters. In space circles it was not necessary to use his last name. “Couldn’t ask for better,” Dom said.

He had not seen the control facility. It was a miniature Houston, and the duplication amazed him. He began to wonder what else he didn’t know about DOSEWEX.

J.J. led the way to a good seat directly behind the contact men and the consoles. Communications were established. It was that old, old simplicity of a pilot talking to the control tower. A mid-twentieth-century airlines pilot would have recognized the form and the cant of the exchange, except, possibly, for a few technical terms. Countdown was underway. Checklists were being followed.

“How many on board?” Dom asked.

“Just Neil.”

“High risk?” Dom asked.

“He knows it,” J. J. said.

“Is that smart?” Dom asked. “Neil’s the closest thing to a hero the space service has.”

“Retro switch on,” said a controller.

Seconds later, the lag telling of the distance between that enclosed room and Neil Walters’ precarious perch atop a new nuclear engine in deep space, his voice came, calm. His voice was always calm. “Retro switch on.” Neil rode a test body all the way down into the desert, regaining control just in time to make the crash survivable, and his tone of voice never changed. Only at the last moment had he stopped talking his matter-of-fact reports of engineering gone wrong and computers haywire to perform superhuman things. The cabin padding was impressed with the shape of his body. After a few weeks for allowing bones to knit, he took a reengineered body into the troposphere for a test run.

“It’ll be about fifteen minutes,” J.J. said. “Want some coffee?” When Dom nodded he snapped his fingers at a cadet.

“J.J.,” Dom said. “We’ve had this engine on the boards for years. How’d you manage to get it built now, when things are tight?”

“We didn’t really need it before,” J.J. said. “There’d be just a slight increase in velocity, because the harder you push against the constant the harder it pushes back.”

“And now that we need it for sheer power, how’d you manage it?”

“By using the last dollar of a little cushion we’ve been keeping hidden just for such an ultimate emergency as this,” J. J. said. “If we can lift three thousand tons of alien ship out of the atmosphere of Jupiter it will have been worth it.”

“And the antis have no idea you’re developing the newk engine?”

“Our great director has sworn in front of God and the U.S. Senate’s Space Committee that the newk engine has been abandoned and that DOSE never hides anything from our public servants.”

“I’m sure that God has forgiven him his untruthfulness,” Art said.

“I thought he spoke for God, himself,” Dom said.

“And the Senate will forgive him when we bring home that ship,” J.J. said.

“Minus ten and counting,” the interior sound system boomed.

“So I’m in league with criminals,” Dom said. “Do you realize that men have served hard time for lying about something much less expensive to the Congress of the United States?”

“No one lives without risk,” J. J. said.

“One thing bothers me,” Dom said. “That bogie went into Jupe two months ago and you’ve already got a hydroplant out in space ready for testing. Am I to believe that you built the damned thing in that length of time?”

“We’ve had the main components ready for years,” J.J. said. “Don’t look so grim. It’s not as serious as all that. There isn’t an agency of the government that doesn’t do the same thing. If we all stuck strictly to budget we couldn’t even hold the status quo. All the big agencies slip in a few billion here and there for padding in times of need.”

“How much padding did it take to duplicate the Houston facility here?” Dom asked.

“What would happen to all our ships in space if some Firster got into the Houston facility with a kilo of plastique?” J.J. asked.

“Aside from a few men getting killed,” Art said, “it would kill the program, because Congress would see that as an excellent opportunity to refuse to fund rebuilding the control facility.”

“But, dammit, this is just the kind of stuff the antis yell about,” Dom said. “I have to admit that for the first time I understand a little about the way they feel.”

“Top people know about this place,” J.J. said. “Even our friend from New Mexico knows. Aside from the fact that there’s no way to hide a place which sends out as much communications as we do, it was good politics for our friend, since it was in his home state and put a few million into the economy of New Mexico. He was one of the most sincere supporters of a duplicate facility, but only behind the scenes, of course.”

“Does he know about the hydrogen engine?” Dom asked.

“We hope not. We’ll know within a few days.”

“How?”

“If the senator from New Mexico knows, the Firsters know. If the Firsters know there’ll be a public outcry, at the very least, and at worst an out-and-out assault on DOSEWEX.”

“Are they that strong?” Dom asked.

“They’re strong and growing stronger every day. I’d say it’s fifty-fifty that they’ll try a frontal attack on DOSEWEX. It’s isolated. On the surface it would seem to be an easier target than, say, Houston or Canaveral, but when it comes right down to it it would be easier to take the Pentagon or Fort Knox. We’ve got two divisions of space marines within five minutes’ jump. We’ve got the latest weapons. We can fry and slice and implode and burn and freeze and dope and gas a few thousand Earthfirsters with our own security forces.”

“But you can’t keep them out of the facility,” Dom said, flourishing a bandaged foot.

The busy routine went on around them. The mechanical voice of the test coordinator continued the countdown. Dom finished his coffee. The cadet was on hand to take his empty cup.

Under ideal conditions, every ship in space should be equipped with the hydroplant. If Callisto Explorer had had hydropower it wouldn’t be sitting out there in space, a dead ship with the air going stale. The hydroplant was not absolutely necessary. The old solid-fuel rockets did the job of exploring the system and running the limited commercial traffic between Earth and Mars. Man could no longer afford expensive programs merely for the sake of progress. The offshoots of space were, almost exclusively, luxury items which the world could live without. Teflon, fabrics, micro-electronics, new scientific techniques, the ability to locate planets for the first time around the nearer stars—not one of those things put food on the table, and when a man is hungry he couldn’t care less about a planet orbiting a star so far away that he couldn’t reach it in his lifetime in one of the present-day ships.

The harnessing of hydrogen power had eased a few problems. There was plenty of electricity in the industrial countries, but you couldn’t use a hydroplant to propel a ground vehicle. The best use for portable hydroplants was in space, and not even almost unlimited power would push a ship past the speed of light and make the stars possible for this generation.

As a spacer, he would feel more secure in the future to know that there was a backup control for Houston. He was even pleased that the hydroplant was, at last, going to be tested. With the world in turmoil, covert actions were the only method available in a continued effort to conquer space before it was too late.

The antis would point out that only five men were breathing stale air in the Callisto Explorer as they waited for a rescue ship, while millions were starving. The antis would, if they discovered that billions had been spent to develop a space hydrogen engine, mount war horses and take to the streets to kill the first spacer or cadet they encountered.

Dom didn’t like to have to think about such things. He liked to be left free to do his job aboard a good ship and leave the problems of the planet to the politicians. Before J.J. had called him to DOSEWEX, he’d figured that he’d be able to ride the thunderbirds out into space for the rest of his life, even if it meant only the Mars run for fertilizer. Sometimes he dreamed that somewhere, some hidden lab would break the constant during his lifetime, but he had little hope. It would happen, perhaps. He could not believe that man had been created, or had grown, to be confined to Earth and its immediate family of barren planets. If tiny subatomic particles could travel faster than light, there had to be a way to make a ship travel faster than light.

If that alien ship out there in orbit around Jupiter held a key to sublight travel, any deception was justifiable. Even if the mission failed there would be gain. Power would never again be a problem. There would never be a shortage of hydrogen in the universe.

“Almost time,” J.J. said.

“Igniter system go,” Neil’s voice said, thinned by distance.

“I want Neil,” Dom said. “I want him to fly the thing.”

“He’s already assigned,” J.J. said.

So it all depended on an untested engine so far away from the control room that, if it exploded when Neil ignited it, it would take high-resolution telescopes on the orbiting observatories to see the flash of light.

“Preheater on,” Neil said.

Now it was all Neil. The countdown was in its last seconds and the time lag did not allow for two-way communication.

“Igniter switch on.” The words came calmly, smoothly, space static crackling among them. “Backup igniter switch on.”

Even as the words echoed around the silent control room, it had already happened. Neil, Walters had set off the bomb under the seat of his pants even before his voice counted: “Four, three, two, one, fire.”

Dom could hear the blood pounding in his ears. Fifty people held their breath.

“That is a roger on ignition,” Neil’s voice said, so calmly. A cheer went up in the control room.

“Acceleration factor point-one-oh-five. All systems go. Stand by for cutoff.”

It worked. In spite of strikes in key plants, in spite of demonstrations at space facilities and aerospace plants, in spite of official red tape and the starving millions and social laws against secrecy in government agencies, it worked.

Data was still pouring into the control computers when Dom followed J.J. and Art to a track car which whisked them back to the living complex.

Power was no problem. They would have enough power to jar the earth out of orbit if they wanted to build a plant big enough. With a ship powered by the hydrogen engine there would be more than enough power to grapple on and lift that bogie out of Jupiter’s atmosphere and carry it home.

If the bogie didn’t resist being lifted out.

If they could build a ship to withstand three thousand atmospheres of pressure without imploding.

If the Earthfirsters didn’t mount an attack and do too much damage before the pressure hull could fly.

If they didn’t all go to jail.