The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thin Edge, by Gordon Randall Garrett
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Title: Thin Edge
Author: Gordon Randall Garrett
Illustrator: John Schoenherr
Release Date: January 6, 2010 [EBook #30869]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THIN EDGE ***
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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction December
1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.
THIN EDGE
There are inventions of great value that one type of society
can use--and that would, for another society, be most
nastily deadly!
BY JOHNATHAN BLAKE MAC KENZIE
ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN SCHOENHERR
* * * * *
I
"Beep!" said the radio smugly. "_Beep! Beep! Beep!_"
"There's one," said the man at the pickup controls of tugship 431. He
checked the numbers on the various dials of his instruments. Then he
carefully marked down in his log book the facts that the radio finder
was radiating its beep on such-and-such a frequency and that that
frequency and that rate-of-beep indicated that the asteroid had been
found and set with anchor by a Captain Jules St. Simon. The direction
and distance were duly noted.
That information on direction and distance had already been
transmitted to the instruments of the tugship's pilot. "Jazzy-o!" said
the pilot. "Got 'im."
He swiveled his ship around until the nose was in line with the beep
and then jammed down on the forward accelerator for a few seconds.
Then he took his foot off it and waited while the ship approached the
asteroid.
In the darkness of space, only points of light were visible. Off to
the left, the sun was a small, glaring spot of whiteness that couldn't
be looked at directly. Even out here in the Belt, between the orbits
of Mars and Jupiter, that massive stellar engine blasted out enough
energy to make it uncomfortable to look at with the naked eye. But it
could illuminate matter only; the hard vacuum of space remained dark.
The pilot could have located the planets easily, without looking
around. He knew where each and every one of them were. He had to.
A man can navigate in space by instrument, and he can take the time to
figure out where every planet ought to be. But if he does, he won't
really be able to navigate in the Asteroid Belt.
In the Nineteenth Century, Mark Twain pointed out that a steamboat
pilot who navigated a ship up and down the Mississippi had to be able
to identify every landmark and every changing sandbar along the river
before he would be allowed to take charge of the wheel. He not only
had to memorize the whole river, but be able to predict the changes in
its course and the variations in its eddies. He had to be able to know
exactly where he was at every moment, even in the blackest of moonless
nights, simply by glancing around him.
An asteroid man has to be able to do the same thing. The human mind is
capable of it, and one thing that the men and women of the Belt Cities
had learned was to use the human mind.
"Looks like a big 'un, Jack," said the instrument man. His eyes were
on the radar screen. It not only gave him a picture of the body of the
slowly spinning mountain, but the distance and the angular and radial
velocities. A duplicate of the instrument gave the same information to
the pilot.
The asteroid was fairly large as such planetary debris went--some five
hundred meters in diameter, with a mass of around one hundred
seventy-four million metric tons.
* * * * *
Within twenty meters of the surface of the great mountain of stone,
the pilot brought the ship to a dead stop in relation to that surface.
"Looks like she's got a nice spin on her," he said. "We'll see."
He waited for what he knew would appear somewhere near the equator of
the slowly revolving mass. It did. A silvery splash of paint that had
originally been squirted on by the anchor man who had first spotted
the asteroid in order to check the rotational velocity.
The pilot of the space tug waited until the blotch was centered in the
crosshairs of his peeper and then punched the timer. When it came
around again, he would be able to compute the angular momentum of the
gigantic rock.
"Where's he got his anchor set?" the pilot asked his instrument man.
"The beep's from the North Pole," the instrument man reported
instantly. "How's her spin?"
"Wait a bit. The spot hasn't come round again yet. Looks like we'll
have some fun with her, though." He kept three stars fixed carefully
in his spotters to make sure he didn't drift enough to throw his
calculations off. And waited.
Meanwhile, the instrument man abandoned his radar panel and turned to
the locker where his vacuum suit waited at the ready. By the time the
pilot had seen the splotch of silver come round again and timed it,
the instrument man was ready in his vacuum suit.
"Sixteen minutes, forty seconds," the pilot reported. "Angular
momentum one point one times ten to the twenty-first gram centimeters
squared per second."
"So we play Ride 'Em Cowboy," the instrument man said "I'm evacuating.
Tell me when." He had already poised his finger over the switch that
would pull the air from his compartments, which had been sealed off
from the pilot's compartment when the timing had started.
"Start the pump," said the pilot.
The switch was pressed, and the pumps began to evacuate the air from
the compartment. At the same time, the pilot jockeyed the ship to a
position over the north pole of the asteroid.
"Over" isn't quite the right word. "Next to" is not much better, but
at least it has no implied up-and-down orientation. The surface
gravity of the asteroid was only two millionths of a Standard Gee,
which is hardly enough to give any noticeable impression to the human
nervous system.
"Surface at two meters," said the pilot. "Holding."
* * * * *
The instrument man opened the outer door and saw the surface of the
gigantic rock a couple of yards in front of him. And projecting from
that surface was the eye of an eyebolt that had been firmly anchored
in the depths of the asteroid, a nickel-steel shaft thirty feet long
and eight inches in diameter, of which only the eye at the end showed.
The instrument man checked to make sure that his safety line was
firmly anchored and then pushed himself across the intervening space
to grasp the eye with a space-gloved hand.
This was the anchor.
Moving a nickel-iron asteroid across space to nearest processing plant
is a relatively simple job. You slap a powerful electromagnet on her,
pour on the juice, and off you go.
The stony asteroids are a different matter. You have to have something
to latch on to, and that's where the anchor-setter comes in. His job
is to put that anchor in there. That's the first space job a man can
get in the Belt, the only way to get space experience. Working by
himself, a man learns to preserve his own life out there.
Operating a space tug, on the other hand, is a two-man job because a
man cannot both be on the surface of the asteroid and in his ship at
the same time. But every space tug man has had long experience as an
anchor setter before he's allowed to be in a position where he is
capable of killing someone besides himself if he makes a stupid
mistake in that deadly vacuum.
"On contact, Jack," the instrument man said as soon as he had a firm
grip on the anchor. "Release safety line."
"Safety line released, Harry," Jack's voice said in his earphones.
Jack had pressed a switch that released the ship's end of the safety
line so that it now floated free. Harry pulled it towards himself and
attached the free end to the eye of the anchor bolt, on a loop of
nickel-steel that had been placed there for that purpose. "Safety line
secured," he reported. "Ready for tug line."
In the pilot's compartment, Jack manipulated the controls again. The
ship moved away from the asteroid and yawed around so that the "tail"
was pointed toward the anchor bolt. Protruding from a special port was
a heavy-duty universal joint with special attachments. Harry reached
out, grasped it with one hand, and pulled it toward him, guiding it
toward the eyebolt. A cable attached to its other end snaked out of
the tug.
Harry worked hard for some ten or fifteen minutes to get the universal
joint firmly bolted to the eye of the anchor. When he was through, he
said: "O.K., Jack. Try 'er."
The tug moved gently away from the asteroid, and the cable that bound
the two together became taut. Harry carefully inspected his handiwork
to make sure that everything had been done properly and that the
mechanism would stand the stress.
"So far so good," he muttered, more to himself than to Jack.
Then he carefully set two compact little strain gauges on the anchor
itself, at ninety degrees from each other on the circumference of the
huge anchor bolt. Two others were already in position in the universal
joint itself. When everything was ready, he said: "Give 'er a try at
length."
The tug moved away from the asteroid, paying out the cable as it
went.
Hauling around an asteroid that had a mass on the order of one hundred
seventy-four million metric tons required adequate preparation. The
nonmagnetic stony asteroids are an absolute necessity for the Belt
Cities. In order to live, man needs oxygen, and there is no trace of
an atmosphere on any of the little Belt worlds except that which Man
has made himself and sealed off to prevent it from escaping into
space. Carefully conserved though that oxygen is, no process is or can
be one hundred per cent efficient. There will be leakage into space,
and that which is lost must be replaced. To bring oxygen from Earth in
liquid form would be outrageously expensive and even more outrageously
inefficient--and no other planet in the System has free oxygen for the
taking. It is much easier to use Solar energy to take it out of its
compounds, and those compounds are much more readily available in
space, where it is not necessary to fight the gravitational pull of a
planet to get them. The stony asteroids average thirty-six per cent
oxygen by mass; the rest of it is silicon, magnesium, aluminum,
nickel, and calcium, with respectable traces of sodium, chromium,
phosphorous manganese, cobalt, potassium, and titanium. The metallic
nickel-iron asteroids made an excellent source of export products to
ship to Earth, but the stony asteroids were for home consumption.
This particular asteroid presented problems. Not highly unusual
problems, but problems nonetheless. It was massive and had a high rate
of spin. In addition, its axis of spin was at an angle of eighty-one
degrees to the direction in which the tug would have to tow it to get
it to the processing plant. The asteroid was, in effect, a huge
gyroscope, and it would take quite a bit of push to get that axis
tilted in the direction that Harry Morgan and Jack Latrobe wanted it
to go. In theory, they could just have latched on, pulled, and let the
thing precess in any way it wanted to. The trouble is that that would
not have been too good for the anchor bolt. A steady pull on the
anchor bolt was one thing: a nickel-steel bolt like that could take a
pull of close to twelve million pounds as long as that pull was along
the axis. Flexing it--which would happen if they let the asteroid
precess at will--would soon fatigue even that heavy bolt.
The cable they didn't have to worry about. Each strand was a fine wire
of two-phase material--the harder phase being borazon, the softer
being tungsten carbide. Winding these fine wires into a cable made a
flexible rope that was essentially a three-phase material--with the
vacuum of space acting as the third phase. With a tensile strength
above a hundred million pounds per square inch, a half inch cable
could easily apply more pressure to that anchor than it could take.
There was a need for that strong cable: a snapping cable that is
suddenly released from a tension of many millions of pounds can be
dangerous in the extreme, forming a writhing whip that can lash
through a spacesuit as though it did not exist. What damage it did to
flesh and bone after that was of minor importance; a man who loses all
his air in explosive decompression certainly has very little use for
flesh and bone thereafter.
"All O.K. here," Jack's voice came over Harry's headphones.
"And here," Harry said. The strain gauges showed nothing out of the
ordinary.
"O.K. Let's see if we can flip this monster over," Harry said,
satisfied that the equipment would take the stress that would be
applied to it.
He did not suspect the kind of stress that would be applied to him
within a few short months.
II
The hotel manager was a small-minded man with a narrow-minded outlook
and a brain that was almost totally unable to learn. He was, in short,
a "normal" Earthman. He took one look at the card that had been
dropped on his desk from the chute of the registration computer and
reacted. His thin gray brows drew down over his cobralike brown eyes,
and he muttered, "Ridiculous!" under his breath.
The registration computer wouldn't have sent him the card if there
hadn't been something odd about it, and odd things happened so rarely
that the manager took immediate notice of it. One look at the title
before the name told him everything he needed to know. Or so he
thought.
The registration robot handled routine things routinely. If they were
not routine, the card was dropped on the manager's desk. It was then
the manager's job to fit everything back into the routine. He grasped
the card firmly between thumb and forefinger and stalked out of his
office. He took an elevator down to the registration desk. His trouble
was that he had seized upon the first thing he saw wrong with the card
and saw nothing thereafter. To him, "out of the ordinary" meant
"wrong"--which was where he made his mistake.
There was a man waiting impatiently at the desk. He had put the card
that had been given him by the registration robot on the desk and was
tapping his fingers on it.
The manager walked over to him. "Morgan, Harry?" he asked with a firm
but not arrogant voice.
"Is this the city of York, New?" asked the man. There was a touch of
cold humor in his voice that made the manager look more closely at
him. He weighed perhaps two-twenty and stood a shade over six-two, but
it was the look in the blue eyes and the bearing of the man's body
that made the manager suddenly feel as though this man were someone
extraordinary. That, of course, meant "wrong."
Then the question that the man had asked in rebuttal to his own
penetrated the manager's mind, and he became puzzled. "Er ... I beg
your pardon?"
"I said, 'Is this York, New?'" the man repeated.
"This is New York, if that's what you mean," the manager said.
"Then I am Harry Morgan, if that's what you mean."
The manager, for want of anything better to do to cover his
confusion, glanced back at the card--without really looking at it.
Then he looked back up at the face of Harry Morgan. "Evidently you
have not turned in your Citizen's Identification Card for renewal, Mr.
Morgan," he said briskly. As long as he was on familiar ground, he
knew how to handle himself.
"Odd's Fish!" said Morgan with utter sadness, "How did you know?"
The manager's comfortable feeling of rightness had returned. "You
can't hope to fool a registration robot, Mr. Morgan," he said "When a
discrepancy is observed, the robot immediately notifies a person in
authority. Two months ago, Government Edict 7-3356-Hb abolished titles
of courtesy absolutely and finally. You Englishmen have clung to them
for far longer than one would think possible, but that has been
abolished." He flicked the card with a finger. "You have registered
here as 'Commodore Sir Harry Morgan'--obviously, that is the name and
anti-social title registered on your card. When you put the card into
the registration robot, the error was immediately noted and I was
notified. You should not be using an out-of-date card, and I will be
forced to notify the Citizen's Registration Bureau."
"Forced?" said Morgan in mild amazement. "Dear me! What a terribly
strong word."
The manager felt the hook bite, but he could no more resist the
impulse to continue than a cat could resist catnip. His brain did not
have the ability to overcome his instinct. And his instinct was wrong.
"You may consider yourself under arrest, Mr. Morgan."
"I thank you for that permission," Morgan said with a happy smile.
"But I think I shall not take advantage of it." He stood there with
that same happy smile while two hotel security guards walked up and
stood beside him, having been called by the manager's signal.
Again it took the manager a little time to realize what Morgan had
said. He blinked. "Advantage of it?" he repeated haphazardly.
* * * * *
Harry Morgan's smile vanished as though it had never been. His blue
eyes seemed to change from the soft blue of a cloudless sky to the
steely blue of a polished revolver. Oddly enough, his lips did not
change. They still seemed to smile, although the smile had gone.
"Manager," he said deliberately, "if you will pardon my using your
title, you evidently cannot read."
The manager had not lived in the atmosphere of the Earth's Citizen's
Welfare State as long as he had without knowing that dogs eat dogs. He
looked back at the card that had been delivered to his desk only
minutes before and this time he read it thoroughly. Then, with a
gesture, he signaled the Security men to return to their posts. But he
did not take his eyes from the card.
"My apologies," Morgan said when the Security police had retired out
of earshot. There was no apology in the tone of his voice. "I perceive
that you can read. Bully, may I say, for you." The bantering tone was
still in his voice, the pseudo-smile still on his lips, the chill of
cold steel still in his eyes. "I realize that titles of courtesy are
illegal on earth," he continued, "because courtesy itself is illegal.
However, the title 'Commodore' simply means that I am entitled to
command a spaceship containing two or more persons other than myself.
Therefore, it is not a title of courtesy, but of ability."
[Illustration]
The manager had long since realized that he was dealing with a Belt
man, not an Earth citizen, and that the registration robot had sent
him the card because of that, not because there was anything illegal.
Men from the Belt did not come to Earth either willingly or often.
Still unable to override his instincts--which erroneously told him
that there was something "wrong"--the manager said: "What does the
'Sir' mean?"
Harry Morgan glowed warmly. "Well, now, Mr. Manager, I will tell you.
I will give you an analogy. In the time of the Roman Republic,
twenty-one centuries or so ago, the leader of an Army was given the
title _Imperator_. But that title could not be conferred upon him by
the Senate of Rome nor by anyone else in power. No man could call
himself _Imperator_ until his own soldiers, the men under him, had
publicly acclaimed him as such. If, voluntarily, his own men shouted
'_Ave, Imperator!_' at a public gathering, then the man could claim
the title. Later the title degenerated--" He stopped.
The manager was staring at him with uncomprehending eyes, and Morgan's
outward smile became genuine. "Sorry," he said condescendingly. "I
forgot that history is not a popular subject in the Welfare World."
Morgan had forgotten no such thing, but he went right on. "What I
meant to say was that the spacemen of the Belt Cities have voluntarily
agreed among themselves to call me 'sir'. Whether that is a title of
ability or a title of courtesy, you can argue about with me at another
time. Right now, I want my room key."
[Illustration]
Under the regulations, the manager knew there was nothing else he
could do. He had made a mistake, and he knew that he had. If he had
only taken the trouble to read the rest of the card--
"Awfully sorry, Mr. Morgan," he said with a lopsided smile that didn't
even look genuine. "The--"
"Watch those courtesy titles," Morgan reprimanded gently. "'Mister'
comes ultimately from the Latin _magister_, meaning 'master' or
'teacher'. And while I may be your master, I wouldn't dare think I
could teach you anything."
"All citizens are entitled to be called 'Mister'," the manager said
with a puzzled look. He pushed a room key across the desk.
"Which just goes to show you," said Harry Morgan, picking up the key.
He turned casually, took one or two steps away from the registration
desk, then--quite suddenly--did an about-face and snapped: "_What
happened to Jack Latrobe?_"
"Who?" said the manager, his face gaping stupidly.
Harry Morgan knew human beings, and he was fairly certain that the
manager couldn't have reacted that way unless he honestly had no
notion of what Morgan was talking about.
He smiled sweetly. "Never you mind, dear boy. Thank you for the key."
He turned again and headed for the elevator bank, confident that the
manager would find the question he had asked about Jack Latrobe so
completely meaningless as to be incapable of registering as a useful
memory.
He was perfectly right.
III
The Belt Cities could survive without the help of Earth, and the
Supreme Congress of the United Nations of Earth knew it. But they
also knew that "survive" did not by any means have the same semantic
or factual content as "live comfortably". If Earth were to vanish
overnight, the people of the Belt would live, but they would be
seriously handicapped. On the other hand, the people of Earth could
survive--as they had for millennia--without the Belt Cities, and while
doing without Belt imports might be painful, it would by no means be
deadly.
But both the Belt Cities and the Earth knew that the destruction of
one would mean the collapse of the other as a civilization.
Earth needed iron. Belt iron was cheap. The big iron deposits of Earth
were worked out, and the metal had been widely scattered. The removal
of the asteroids as a cheap source would mean that iron would become
prohibitively expensive. Without cheap iron, Earth's civilization
would have to undergo a painfully drastic change--a collapse and
regeneration.
But the Belt Cities were handicapped by the fact that they had had as
yet neither the time nor the resources to manufacture anything but
absolute necessities. Cloth, for example, was imported from Earth. A
society that is still busy struggling for the bare necessities--such
as manufacturing its own air--has no time to build the huge looms
necessary to weave cloth ... or to make clothes, except on a minor
scale. Food? You can have hydroponic gardens on an asteroid, but
raising beef cattle, even on Ceres, was difficult. Eventually,
perhaps, but not yet.
The Belt Cities were populated by pioneers who still had not given up
the luxuries of civilization. Their one weakness was that they had
their cake and were happily eating it, too.
Not that Harry Morgan didn't realize that fact. A Belt man is, above
all, a realist, in that he must, of necessity, understand the Laws of
the Universe and deal with them. Or die.
Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was well aware of the stir he had created
in the lobby of the Grand Central Hotel. Word would leak out, and he
knew it. The scene had been created for just that purpose.
"_Grasshopper sittin' on a railroad track,
Singin' polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day!
A-pickin' his teeth with a carpet tack,
Singin' polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day!_"
He sang with gusto as the elevator lifted him up to the seventy-fourth
floor of the Grand Central Hotel. The other passengers in the car did
not look at him directly; they cast sidelong glances.
_This guy_, they seemed to think in unison, _is a nut. We will pay no
attention to him, since he probably does not really exist. Even if he
does, we will pay no attention in the hope that he will go away._
On the seventy-fourth floor, he _did_ go away, heading for his room.
He keyed open the door and strolled over to the phone, where a message
had already been dropped into the receiver slot. He picked it up and
read it.
COMMODORE SIR HARRY MORGAN, RM. 7426, GCH: REQUEST YOU CALL
EDWAY TARNHORST, REPRESENTATIVE OF THE PEOPLE OF GREATER LOS
ANGELES, SUPREME CONGRESS. PUNCH 33-981-762-044 COLLECT.
"How news travels," Harry Morgan thought to himself. He tapped out the
number on the keyboard of the phone and waited for the panel to light
up. When it did, it showed a man in his middle fifties with a lean,
ascetic face and graying hair, which gave him a look of saintly
wisdom.
* * * * *
"Mr. Tarnhorst?" Morgan asked pleasantly.
"Yes. Commodore Morgan?" The voice was smooth and precise.
"At your service, Mr. Tarnhorst. You asked me to call."
"Yes. What is the purpose of your visit to Earth, commodore?" The
question was quick, decisive, and firm.
Harry Morgan kept his affability. "That's none of your business, Mr.
Tarnhorst."
Tarnhorst's face didn't change. "Perhaps your superiors haven't told
you, but--and I can only disclose this on a sealed circuit--I am in
sympathy with the Belt Cities. I have been out there twice and have
learned to appreciate the vigor and worth of the Belt people. I am on
your side, commodore, in so far as it does not compromise my position.
My record shows that I have fought for the rights of the Belt Cities
on the floor of the Supreme Congress. Have you been informed of that
fact?"
"I have," said Harry Morgan. "And that is precisely why it is none of
your business. The less you know, Mr. Tarnhorst, the safer you will
be. I am not here as a representative of any of the City governments.
I am not here as a representative of any of the Belt Corporations. I
am completely on my own, without official backing. You have shown
yourself to be sympathetic towards us in the past. We have no desire
to hurt you. Therefore I advise that you either keep your nose out of
my business or actively work against me. You cannot protect yourself
otherwise."
Edward Tarnhorst was an Earthman, but he was not stupid. He had
managed to put himself in a position of power in the Welfare World,
and he knew how to handle that power. It took him exactly two seconds
to make his decision.
"You misunderstand me, commodore," he said coldly. "I asked what I
asked because I desire information. The People's Government is trying
to solve the murder of Commodore Jack Latrobe. Assuming, of course,
that it was murder--which is open to doubt. His body was found three
days ago in Fort Tryon Park, up on the north end of Manhattan Island.
He had apparently jumped off one of the old stone bridges up there and
fell ninety feet to his death. On the other hand, it is possible that,
not being used to the effects of a field of point nine eight Standard
gees, he did not realize that the fall would be deadly, and
accidentally killed himself. He was alone in the park at night, as far
as we can tell. It has been ascertained definitely that no
representative of the People's Manufacturing Corporation Number 873
was with him at the time. Nor, so far as we can discover, was anyone
else. I asked you to call because I wanted to know if you had any
information for us. There was no other reason."
"I haven't seen Jack since he left Juno," Morgan said evenly. "I don't
know why he came to Earth, and I know nothing else."
"Then I see no further need for conversation," Tarnhorst said. "Thank
you for your assistance, Commodore Morgan. If Earth's Government needs
you again, you will be notified if you gain any further information,
you may call this number. Thank you again. Good-by."
The screen went blank.
* * * * *
_How much of this is a trap?_ Morgan thought.
There was no way of knowing at this point. Morgan knew that Jack
Latrobe had neither committed suicide nor died accidentally, and
Tarnhorst had told him as much. Tarnhorst was still friendly, but he
had taken the hint and got himself out of danger. There had been one
very important piece of information. The denial that any
representative of PMC 873 had been involved. PMC 873 was a
manufacturer of biological products--one of the several corporations
that Latrobe had been empowered to discuss business with when he had
been sent to Earth by the Belt Corporations Council. Tarnhorst would
not have mentioned them negatively unless he intended to imply a
positive hint. Obviously. Almost too obviously.
Well?
Harry Morgan punched for Information, got it, got a number, and
punched that.
"People's Manufacturing Corporation Ey-yut Seven Tha-ree," said a
recorded voice. "Your desire, pu-leeze?"
"This is Commodore Jack Latrobe," Morgan said gently. "I'm getting
tired of this place, and if you don't let me out I will blow the whole
place to Kingdom Come. Good bye-eye-eye."
He hung up without waiting for an answer.
Then he looked around the hotel suite he had rented. It was an
expensive one--very expensive. It consisted of an outer room--a
"sitting room" as it might have been called two centuries before--and
a bedroom. Plus a bathroom.
Harry Morgan, a piratical smile on his face, opened the bathroom door
and left it that way. Then he went into the bedroom. His luggage had
already been delivered by the lift tube, and was sitting on the floor.
He put both suitcases on the bed, where they would be in plain sight
from the sitting room. Then he made certain preparations for invaders.
He left the door between the sitting room and the bedroom open and
left the suite.
Fifteen minutes later, he was walking down 42nd Street toward Sixth
Avenue. On his left was the ancient Public Library Building. In the
middle of the block, somebody shoved something hard into his left
kidney and said. "Keep walking, commodore. But do what you're told."
Harry Morgan obeyed, with an utterly happy smile on his lips.
IV
In the Grand Central Hotel, a man moved down the hallway toward Suite
7426. He stopped at the door and inserted the key he held in his hand,
twisting it as it entered the keyhole. The electronic locks chuckled,
and the door swung open.
The man closed it behind him.
He was not a big man, but neither was he undersized. He was five-ten
and weighed perhaps a hundred and sixty-five pounds. His face was dark
of skin and had a hard, determined expression on it. He looked as
though he had spent the last thirty of his thirty-five years of life
stealing from his family and cheating his friends.
He looked around the sitting room. Nothing. He tossed the key in his
hand and then shoved it into his pocket. He walked over to the nearest
couch and prodded at it. He took an instrument out of his inside
jacket pocket and looked at it.
"Nothin'," he said to himself. "Nothin'." His detector showed that
there were no electronic devices hidden in the room--at least, none
that he did not already know about.
He prowled around the sitting room for several minutes, looking at
everything--chairs, desk, windows, floor--everything. He found
nothing. He had not expected to, since the occupant, a Belt man named
Harry Morgan, had only been in the suite a few minutes.
Then he walked over to the door that separated the sitting room from
the bedroom. Through it, he could see the suitcases sitting temptingly
on the bed.
Again he took his detector out of his pocket. After a full minute, he
was satisfied that there was no sign of any complex gadgetry that
could warn the occupant that anyone had entered the room. Certainly
there was nothing deadly around.
Then a half-grin came over the man's cunning face. There was always
the chance that the occupant of the suite had rigged up a really
old-fashioned trap.
He looked carefully at the hinges of the door. Nothing. There were no
tiny bits of paper that would fall if he pushed the door open any
further, no little threads that would be broken.
It hadn't really seemed likely, after all. The door was open wide
enough for a man to walk through without moving it.
Still grinning, the man reached out toward the door.
He was quite astonished when his hand didn't reach the door itself.
There was a sharp feeling of pain when his hand fell to the floor,
severed at the wrist.
The man stared at his twitching hand on the floor. He blinked stupidly
while his wrist gushed blood. Then, almost automatically, he stepped
forward to pick up his hand.
As he shuffled forward, he felt a _snick! snick!_ of pain in his
ankles while all sensation from his feet went dead.
It was not until he began toppling forward that he realized that his
feet were still sitting calmly on the floor in their shoes and that he
was no longer connected to them.
It was too late. He was already falling.
He felt a stinging sensation in his throat and then nothing more as
the drop in blood pressure rendered him unconscious.
His hand lay, where it had fallen. His feet remained standing. His
body fell to the floor with a resounding _thud!_ His head bounced once
and then rolled under the bed.
When his heart quit pumping, the blood quit spurting.
A tiny device on the doorjamb, down near the floor, went _zzzt!_ and
then there was silence.
V
When Representative Edway Tarnhorst cut off the call that had come
from Harry Morgan, he turned around and faced the other man in the
room. "Satisfactory?" he said.
"Yes. Yes, of course," said the other. He was a tall, hearty-looking
man with a reddish face and a friendly smile. "You said just the right
thing, Edway. Just the right thing. You're pretty smart, you know
that? You got what it takes." He chuckled. "They'll never figure
anything out now." He waved a hand toward the chair. "Sit down, Edway.
Want a drink?"
Tarnhorst sat down and folded his hands. He looked down at them as if
he were really interested in the flat, unfaceted diamond, engraved
with the Tarnhorst arms, that gleamed on the ring on his finger.
"A little glass of whiskey wouldn't hurt much, Sam," he said, looking
up from his hands. He smiled. "As you say, there isn't much to worry
about now. If Morgan goes to the police, they'll give him the same
information."
Sam Fergus handed Tarnhorst a drink. "Damn right. Who's to know?" He
chuckled again and sat down. "That was pretty good. Yes sir, pretty
good. Just because he thought that when you voted for the Belt Cities
you were on their side, he believed what you said. Hell, _I've_ voted
on their side when it was the right thing to do. Haven't I now, Ed?
Haven't I?"
"Sure you have," said Tarnhorst with an easy smile. "So have a lot of
us."
"Sure we have," Fergus repeated. His grin was huge. Then it changed to
a frown. "I don't figure them sometimes. Those Belt people are crazy.
Why wouldn't they give us the process for making that cable of theirs?
Why?" He looked up at Tarnhorst with a genuinely puzzled look on his
face. "I mean, you'd think they thought that the laws of nature were
private property or something. They don't have the right outlook. A
man finds out something like that, he ought to give it to the human
race, hadn't he, Edway? How come those Belt people want to keep
something like that secret?"
Edway Tarnhorst massaged the bridge of his nose with a thumb and
forefinger, his eyes closed. "I don't know, Sam. I really don't know.
Selfish, is all I can say."
_Selfish?_ he thought. _Is it really selfish? Where is the dividing
line? How much is a man entitled to keep secret, for his own benefit,
and how much should he tell for the public?_
He glanced again at the coat of arms carved into the surface of the
diamond. A thousand years ago, his ancestors had carved themselves a
tiny empire out of middle Europe--a few hundred acres, no more. Enough
to keep one family in luxury while the serfs had a bare existence.
They had conquered by the sword and ruled by the sword. They had taken
all and given nothing.
But had they? The Barons of Tarnhorst had not really lived much better
than their serfs had lived. More clothes and more food, perhaps, and a
few baubles--diamonds and fine silks and warm furs. But no Baron
Tarnhorst had ever allowed his serfs to starve, for that would not be
economically sound. And each Baron had been the dispenser of Justice;
he had been Law in his land. Without him, there would have been
anarchy among the ignorant peasants, since they were certainly not fit
to govern themselves a thousand years ago.
Were they any better fit today? Tarnhorst wondered. For a full
millennium, men had been trying, by mass education and by mass
information, to bring the peasants up to the level of the nobles. Had
that plan succeeded? Or had the intelligent ones simply been forced to
conform to the actions of the masses? Had the nobles made peasants of
themselves instead?
Edway Tarnhorst didn't honestly know. All he knew was that he saw a
new spark of human life, a spark of intelligence, a spark of ability,
out in the Belt. He didn't dare tell anyone--he hardly dared admit it
to himself--but he thought those people were better somehow than the
common clods of Earth. Those people didn't think that just because a
man could slop color all over an otherwise innocent sheet of canvas,
making outré and garish patterns, that that made him an artist. They
didn't think that just because a man could write nonsense and use
erratic typography, that that made him a poet. They had other beliefs,
too, that Edway Tarnhorst saw only dimly, but he saw them well enough
to know that they were better beliefs than the obviously stupid belief
that every human being had as much right to respect and dignity as
every other, that a man had a _right_ to be respected, that he
_deserved_ it. Out there, they thought that a man had a right only to
what he earned.
But Edway Tarnhorst was as much a product of his own society as Sam
Fergus. He could only behave as he had been taught. Only on
occasion--on very special occasion--could his native intelligence
override the "common sense" that he had been taught. Only when an
emergency arose. But when one did, Edway Tarnhorst, in spite of his
environmental upbringing, was equal to the occasion.
Actually, his own mind was never really clear on the subject. He did
the best he could with the confusion he had to work with.
"Now we've got to be careful, Sam," he said. "Very careful. We don't
want a war with the Belt Cities."
Sam Fergus snorted. "They wouldn't dare. We got 'em outnumbered a
thousand to one."
"Not if they drop a rock on us," Tarnhorst said quietly.
"They wouldn't dare," Fergus repeated.
But both of them could see what would happen to any city on Earth if
one of the Belt ships decided to shift the orbit of a good-sized
asteroid so that it would strike Earth. A few hundred thousand tons of
rock coming in at ten miles per second would be far more devastating
than an expensive H-bomb.
"They wouldn't dare," Fergus said again.
"Nevertheless," Tarnhorst said, "in dealings of this kind we are
walking very close to the thin edge. We have to watch ourselves."
[Illustration]
VI
Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was herded into a prison cell, given a
shove across the smallish room, and allowed to hear the door slam
behind him. By the time he regained his balance and turned to face the
barred door again, it was locked. The bully-boys who had shoved him in
turned away and walked down the corridor. Harry sat down on the floor
and relaxed, leaning against the stone wall. There was no furniture of
any kind in the cell, not even sanitary plumbing.
"What do I do for a drink of water?" he asked aloud of no one in
particular.
"You wait till they bring you your drink," said a whispery voice a few
feet from his head. Morgan realized that someone in the cell next to
his was talking. "You get a quart a day--a halfa pint four times a
day. Save your voice. Your throat gets awful dry if you talk much."
"Yeah, it would," Morgan agreed in the same whisper. "What about
sanitation?"
"That's your worry," said the voice. "Fella comes by every Wednesday
and Saturday with a honey bucket. You clean out your own cell."
"I _thought_ this place smelled of something other than attar of
roses," Morgan observed. "My nose tells me this is Thursday."
There was a hoarse, humorless chuckle from the man in the next cell.
"'At's right. The smell of the disinfectant is strongest now. Saturday
mornin' it'll be different. You catch on fast, buddy."
"Oh, I'm a whiz," Morgan agreed. "But I thought the Welfare World took
care of its poor, misled criminals better than this."
Again the chuckle. "You shoulda robbed a bank or killed somebody. Then
theyda given you a nice rehabilitation sentence. Regular prison. Room
of your own. Something real nice. Like a hotel. But this's
different."
"Yeah," Morgan agreed. This was a political prison. This was the place
where they put you when they didn't care what happened to you after
the door was locked because there would be no going out.
Morgan knew where he was. It was a big, fortresslike building on top
of one of the highest hills at the northern end of Manhattan
Island--an old building that had once been a museum and was built like
a medieval castle.
"What happens if you die in here?" he asked conversationally.
"Every Wednesday and Saturday," the voice repeated.
"Um," said Harry Morgan.
"'Cept once in a while," the voice whispered. "Like a couple days ago.
When was it? Yeah. Monday that'd be. Guy they had in here for a week
or so. Don't remember how long. Lose tracka time here. Yeah. Sure lose
tracka time here."
There was a long pause, and Morgan, controlling the tenseness in his
voice, said: "What about the guy Monday?"
"Oh. Him. Yeah, well, they took him out Monday."
Morgan waited again, got nothing further, and asked: "Dead?"
"'Course he was dead. They was tryin' to get somethin' out of him.
Somethin' about a cable. He jumped one of the guards, and they
blackjacked him. Hit 'im too hard, I guess. Guard sure got hell for
that, too. Me, I'm lucky. They don't ask me no questions."
"What are you in for?" Morgan asked.
"Don't know. They never told me. I don't ask for fear they'll
remember. They might start askin' questions."
Morgan considered. This could be a plant, but he didn't think so. The
voice was too authentic, and there would be no purpose in his
information. That meant that Jack Latrobe really was dead. They had
killed him. An ice cold hardness surged along his nerves.
* * * * *
The door at the far end of the corridor clanged, and a brace of heavy
footsteps clomped along the floor. Two men came abreast of the
steel-barred door and stopped.
One of them, a well-dressed, husky-looking man in his middle forties,
said: "O.K., Morgan. How did you do it?"
"I put on blue lipstick and kissed my elbows--both of 'em. Going
widdershins, of course."
"What are you talking about?"
"What are you talking about?"
"The guy in your hotel suite. You killed him. You cut off both feet,
one hand, and his head. How'd you do it?"
Morgan looked at the man. "Police?"
"Nunna your business. Answer the question."
"I use a cobweb I happened to have with me. Who was he?"
The cop's face was whitish. "You chop a guy up like that and then
don't know who he is?"
"I can guess. I can guess that he was an agent for PMC 873 who was
trespassing illegally. But I didn't kill him. I was in ... er ...
custody when it happened."
"Not gonna talk, huh?" the cop said in a hard voice. "O.K., you've had
your chance. We'll be back."
"I don't think I'll wait," said Morgan.
"You'll wait. We got you on a murder charge now. You'll wait. Wise
guy." He turned and walked away. The other man followed like a trained
hound.
* * * * *
After the door clanged, the man in the next cell whispered: "Well,
you're for it. They're gonna ask you questions."
Morgan said one obscene word and stood up. It was time to leave.
He had been searched thoroughly. They had left him only his clothes,
nothing else. They had checked to make sure that there were no
microminiaturized circuits on him. He was clean.
So they thought.
Carefully, he caught a thread in the lapel of his jacked and pulled it
free. Except for a certain springiness, it looked like an ordinary
silon thread. He looped it around one of the bars of his cell, high
up. The ends he fastened to a couple of little decorative hooks in his
belt--hooks covered with a shell of synthetic ruby.
Then he leaned back, putting his weight on the thread.
Slowly, like a knife moving through cold peanut butter, the thread
sank into the steel bar, cutting through its one-inch thickness with
increasing difficulty until it was half-way through. Then it seemed to
slip the rest of the way through.
He repeated the procedure thrice more, making two cuts in each of two
bars. Then he carefully removed the sections he had cut out. He put
one of them on the floor of his cell and carried the other in his
hand--three feet of one-inch steel makes a nice weapon if it becomes
necessary.
Then he stepped through the hole he had made.
The man in the next cell widened his eyes as Harry Morgan walked by.
But Morgan could tell that he saw nothing. He had only heard. His eyes
had been removed long before. It was the condition of the man that
convinced Morgan with utter finality that he had told the truth.
VII
Mr. Edway Tarnhorst felt fear, but no real surprise when the shadow in
the window of his suite in the Grand Central Hotel materialized into a
human being. But he couldn't help asking one question.
"How did you get there?" His voice was husky. "We're eighty floors
above the street."
"Try climbing asteroids for a while," said Commodore Sir Harry Morgan.
"You'll get used to it. That's why I knew Jack hadn't died
'accidentally'--he was murdered."
"You ... you're not carrying a gun," Tarnhorst said.
"Do I need one?"
Tarnhorst swallowed. "Yes. Fergus will be back in a moment."
"Who's Fergus?"
"He's the man who controls PMC 873."
Harry Morgan shoved his hand into his jacket pocket "Then I have a
gun. You saw it, didn't you?"
"Yes. Yes ... I saw it when you came in."
"Good. Call him."
When Sam Fergus came in, he looked as though he had had about three or
four too many slugs of whiskey. There was an odd fear an his face.
"Whats matter, Edway? I--" The fear increased when he saw Morgan.
"Whadda you here for?"
"I'm here to make a speech Fergus. Sit down." When Fergus still stood,
Morgan repeated what he had said with only a trace more emphasis. "Sit
down."
Fergus sat. So did Tarnhorst.
"Both of you pay special attention," Morgan said, a piratical gleam in
his eyes. "You killed a friend of mine. My best friend. But I'm not
going to kill either of you. Yet. Just listen and listen carefully."
Even Tarnhorst looked frightened. "Don't move, Sam. He's got a gun. I
saw it when he came in."
"What ... what do you want?" Fergus asked.
"I want to give you the information you want. The information that you
killed Jack for." There was cold hatred in his voice. "I am going to
tell you something that you have thought you wanted, but which you
really will wish you had never heard. I'm going to tell you about that
cable."
Neither Fergus nor Tarnhorst said a word.
"You want a cable. You've heard that we use a cable that has a tensile
strength of better than a hundred million pounds per square inch, and
you want to know how it's made. You tried to get the secret out of
Jack because he was sent here as a commercial dealer. And he wouldn't
talk, so one of your goons blackjacked him too hard and then you had
to drop him off a bridge to make it look like an accident.
"Then you got your hands on me. You were going to wring it out of me.
Well, there is no necessity of that." His grin became wolfish. "I'll
give you everything." He paused. "If you want it."
Fergus found his voice. "I want it. I'll pay a million--"
"You'll pay nothing," Morgan said flatly. "You'll listen."
Fergus nodded wordlessly.
"The composition is simple. Basically, it is a two-phase material-like
fiberglass. It consists of a strong, hard material imbedded in a
matrix of softer material. The difference is that, in this case, the
stronger fibers are borazon--boron nitride formed under tremendous
pressure--while the softer matrix is composed of tungsten carbide. If
the fibers are only a thousandth or two thousandths of an inch in
diameter--the thickness of a human hair or less--then the cable from
which they are made has tremendous strength and flexibility.
"Do you want the details of the process now?" His teeth were showing
in his wolfish grin.
Fergus swallowed. "Yes, of course. But ... but why do you--"
"Why do I give it to you? Because it will kill you. You have seen what
the stuff will do. A strand a thousandth of an inch thick, encased in
silon for lubrication purposes, got me out of that filthy hole you
call a prison. You've heard about that?"
Fergus blinked. "You cut yourself out of there with the cable you're
talking about?"
"Not with the cable. With a thin fiber. With one of the hairlike
fibers that makes up the cable. Did you ever cut cheese with a wire?
In effect, that wire is a knife--a knife that consists only of an
edge.
"Or, another experiment you may have heard of. Take a block of ice.
Connect a couple of ten-pound weights together with a few feet of
piano wire and loop it across the ice block to that the weights hang
free on either side, with the wire over the top of the block. The wire
will cut right through the ice in a short time. The trouble is that
the ice block remains whole--because the ice melts under the pressure
of the wire and then flows around it and freezes again on the other
side. But if you lubricate the wire with ordinary glycerine, it
prevents the re-freezing and the ice block will be cut in two."
Tarnhorst nodded. "I remember. In school. They--" He let his voice
trail off.
* * * * *
"Yeah. Exactly. It's a common experiment in basic science. Borazon
fiber works the same way. Because it is so fine and has such
tremendous tensile strength, it is possible to apply a pressure of
hundreds of millions of pounds per square inch over a very small area.
Under pressures like that, steel cuts easily. With silon covering to
lubricate the cut, there's nothing to it. As you have heard from the
guards in your little hell-hole.
"Hell-hole?" Tarnhorst's eyes narrowed and he flicked a quick glance
at Fergus. Morgan realized that Tarnhorst had known nothing of the
extent of Fergus' machinations.
"That lovely little political prison up in Fort Tryon Park that the
World Welfare State, with its usual solicitousness for the common man,
keeps for its favorite guests," Morgan said. His wolfish smile
returned. "I'd've cut the whole thing down if I'd had had the time.
Not the stone--just the steel. In order to apply that kind of pressure
you have to have the filament fastened to something considerably
harder than the stuff you're trying to cut, you see. Don't try it with
your fingers or you'll lose fingers."
Fergus' eyes widened again and he looked both ill and frightened. "The
man we sent ... uh ... who was found in your room. You--" He stopped
and seemed to have trouble swallowing.
"Me? _I_ didn't do anything." Morgan did a good imitation of a shark
trying to look innocent. "I'll admit that I looped a very fine
filament of the stuff across the doorway a few times, so that if
anyone tried to enter my room illegally I would be warned." He didn't
bother to add that a pressure-sensitive device had released and reeled
in the filament after it had done its work. "It doesn't need to be
nearly as tough and heavy to cut through soft stuff like ... er ...
say, a beefsteak, as it does to cut through steel. It's as fine as
cobweb almost invisible. Won't the World Welfare State have fun when
that stuff gets into the hands of its happy, crime-free populace?"
Edway Tarnhorst became suddenly alert. "What?"
"Yes. Think of the fun they'll have, all those lovely slobs who get
their basic subsistence and their dignity and their honor as a free
gift from the State. The kids, especially. They'll _love_ it. It's so
fine it can be hidden inside an ordinary thread--or woven into the
hair--or...." He spread his hands. "A million places."
Fergus was gaping. Tarnhorst was concentrating on Morgan's words.
"And there's no possible way to leave fingerprints on anything that
fine," Morgan continued. "You just hook it around a couple of nails or
screws, across an open doorway or an alleyway--and wait."
"We wouldn't let it get into the people's hands," Tarnhorst said.
"You couldn't stop it," Morgan said flatly. "Manufacture the stuff and
eventually one of the workers in the plant will figure out a way to
steal some of it."
"Guards--" Fergus said faintly.
"_Pfui._ But even you had a perfect guard system, I think I can
guarantee that some of it would get into the hands of the--common
people. Unless you want to cut off all imports from the Belt."
Tarnhorst's voice hardened. "You mean you'd deliberately--"
"I mean exactly what I said," Morgan cut in sharply. "Make of it what
you want."
"I suppose you have that kind of trouble out in the Belt?" Tarnhorst
asked.
"No. We don't have your kind of people out in the Belt, Mr. Tarnhorst.
We have men who kill, yes. But we don't have the kind of juvenile and
grown-up delinquents who will kill senselessly, just for kicks. That
kind is too stupid to live long out there. We are in no danger from
borazon-tungsten filaments. You are." He paused just for a moment,
then said: "I'm ready to give you the details of the process now, Mr.
Fergus."
"I don't think I--" Fergus began with a sickly sound in his voice. But
Tarnhorst interrupted him.
"We don't want it, commodore. Forget it."
"Forget it?" Morgan's voice was as cutting as the filament he had been
discussing. "Forget that Jack Latrobe was murdered?"
"We will pay indemnities, of course," Tarnhorst said, feeling that it
was futile.
"_Fergus_ will pay indemnities," Morgan said. "In money, the
indemnities will come to the precise amount he was willing to pay for
the cable secret. I suggest that your Government confiscate that
amount from him and send it to us. That may be necessary in view of
the second indemnity."
"Second indemnity?"
"Mr. Fergus' life."
Tarnhorst shook his head briskly. "No. We can't execute Fergus.
Impossible."
"Of course not," Morgan said soothingly. "I don't suggest that you
should. But I do suggest that Mr. Fergus be very careful about going
through doorways--or any other kind of opening--from now on. I suggest
that he refrain from passing between any pair of reasonably solid,
well-anchored objects. I suggest that he stay away from bathtubs. I
suggest that he be very careful about putting his legs under a table
or desk. I suggest that he not look out of windows. I could make
several suggestions. And he shouldn't go around feeling in front of
him, either. He might lose something."
"I understand," said Edway Tarnhorst.
So did Sam Fergus. Morgan could tell by his face.
* * * * *
When the indemnity check arrived on Ceres some time later, a short,
terse note came with it.
"I regret to inform you that Mr. Samuel Fergus, evidently in a state
of extreme nervous and psychic tension, took his own life by means of
a gunshot wound in the head on the 21st of this month. The enclosed
check will pay your indemnity in full. Tarnhorst."
Morgan smiled grimly. It was as he had expected. He had certainly
never had any intention of going to all the trouble of killing Sam
Fergus.
* * * * *
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