The Getaway Special

Allen Meisner didn’t look like a mad scientist. He not only didn’t look mad, with his blonde hair neatly brushed to the side and his face set in a perpetual grin, but—at least in Judy Gallagher’s opinion—he didn’t look much like a scientist, either. He looked more like a beach bum.

But his business card read: “Allen T. Meisner, Mad Scientist,” and he had the obligatory doctorate in physics to go with it. He also had a reputation as an outspoken member of INSANE, the politically active International Network of Scientists Against Nuclear Extermination, and he held patents on half a dozen futuristic gadgets, including the electron plasma battery that had revolutionized the automobile industry. He had all the qualifications, but he just didn’t look the part.

That was all right with Judy. In her five years of flying the shuttle, most of the passengers she had taken up had looked like scientists, or worse: politician’s. She enjoyed having a beach bum around for a change.

Right up to the time when he turned on his experiment and the Earth disappeared. She didn’t enjoy that at all.

It started out as a routine satellite deployment and industrial retrieval mission, with two communications satellites going out to geostationary orbit and a month’s supply of processed pharmaceuticals, optical fibers, and microcircuits coming back to Earth from Space Station Freedom. It was about as simple as a flight got, which was why NASA had sent a passenger along. Judy and the other two crewmembers would have time to look after him, and NASA could reduce by one more the backlog of civilians who had paid for trips into orbit.