The Worlds of Frank Herbert Page 6

  "Poss, do me a favor," Ing said. "Give me a straight 'lash-gram. No fancy stuff, just a demonstration throw. I want a clean ripple the length of the beam. Don't try for angspace, just 'lash it."

  "Have you popped your skull? Any 'lash can hit angspace. And you get one fleck of dust in that beam path..."

  "We'd rip the sides off the tube; I know. But this is a clean beam, Poss. I can see it. I just want a little ripple."

  "Why?"

  Can I tell him? Ing wondered.

  Ing decided to tell only part of the truth, said: "I want to check the cleaner tempo during the program. Give me a debris monitor and a crossing count for each observation post. Have them focus on the cleaners, not on the beam."

  "Why?"

  "You can see for yourself cleaner activity doesn't agree with the beam condition," Ing said. "Something's wrong there-accumulated programming error or... I dunno. But I want some actual facts to go on-a physical count during a 'lash."

  "You're not going to get new data running a test that could be repeated in the laboratory."

  "This isn't a laboratory."

  Washington absorbed this, then: "Where would you be during the 'lash?"

  He's going to do it, Ing thought. He said: "I'll be close to the anode end here. 'Lash can't swing too wide here."

  "And if we damage the tube?"

  Ing hesitated remembering that it was a friend out there, a friend with responsibilities. No telling who might be monitoring the conversation, though... and this test was vital to the idea nibbling at Ing's awareness.

  "Humor me, Poss," Ing said.

  "Humor him," Washington muttered. "All right, but this'd better not be humorous."

  "Wait till I'm in position," Ing said. "A straight 'lash."

  He began working up the tube slope out of Zone Yellow into the Gray and then the White. Here, he turned, studied the beam. It was a thin purple ribbon stretching off left and right-shorter on the left toward the anode. The long reach of it going off toward the cathode some twelve kilometers to his right was a thin wisp of color broken by the flickering passage of cleaners.

  "Any time," Ing said.

  He adjusted the suit rests against the tube's curve, pulled his arms into the barrel top, started the viewplate counter recording movement of the cleaners. Now came the hard part-waiting and watching. He had a sudden feeling of isolation then, wondering if he'd done the right thing. There was an element of burning bridges in this action.

  What did the handbook say? "There is no point in planning sophisticated research on a specific factor's role unless that factor is known to be present."

  If it isn't there, you can't study it, Ing thought.

  "You will take your work seriously," he muttered. Ing smiled then, thinking of the tragicomic faces, the jowly board chairmen he visualized behind the handbook's pronouncements. Nothing was left to chance-no task, no item of personal tidiness, no physical exercise. Ing considered himself an expert on handbooks. He owned one of the finest collections of them dating from ancient times down to the present. In moments of boredom he amused himself with choice quotes.

  "Program going in," Washington said. "I wish I knew what you hope to find by this."

  "I quote," Ing said. "The objective worker makes as large a collection of data as possible and analyzes these in their entirety in relation to selected factors whose relationship to a questioned phenomenon is to be investigated."

  "What the devil's that supposed to mean?" Washing­ton demanded.

  "Damned if I know," Ing said, "but it's right out of the Haigh Handbook." He cleared his throat. "What's the cleaner tempo from your stations?"

  "Up a bit."

  "Give me a countdown on the 'lash."

  "No sign yet. There's... wait a minute! Here's some action-twenty-five... twenty seconds."

  Ing began counting under his breath.

  Zero.

  A progression of tiny flares began far off to his right, flickered past him with increasing brightness. They were a blur that left a glimmering afterimage. Sensors in his suit soles began reporting the fall of debris.

  "Holy O'Golden!" Washington muttered.

  "How many'd we lose?" Ing asked. He knew it was going to be bad-worse than he'd expected.

  There was a long wait, then Washington's shocked voice: "A hundred and eighteen cleaners down. It isn't possible!"

  "Yeah," Ing said. "They're all over the floor. Shut off the beam before that dust drifts up into it."

  The beam disappeared from Ing's faceplate responders.

  "Is that what you thought would happen, Ing?"

  "Kind of."

  "Why didn't you warn me?"

  "You wouldn't have given me that 'lash."

  "Well how the devil're we going to explain a hundred and eighteen cleaners? Accounting'll be down on my neck like a..."

  "Forget Accounting," Ing said. "You're a beam engineer; open your eyes. Those cleaners weren't absorbed by the beam. They were cut down and scattered over the floor."

  "But the..."

  "Cleaners are designed to respond to the beam's needs," Ing said. "As the beam moves they move. As the debris count goes up, the cleaners work harder. It one works a little too hard and doesn't get out of the way fast enough, it's supposed to be absorbed-its energy converted by the beam. Now, a false 'lash catches a hundred and eighteen of them off balance. Those cleaners weren't eaten; they were scattered over the floor."

  There was silence while Washington absorbed this,

  "Did that 'lash touch angspace?" Ing asked.

  "I'm checking," Washington said. Then: "No...wait a minute: there's a whole ripple of angspace... contacts, very low energy-a series lasting about an eighty-millionth of a second. I had the responders set to the last decimal or we'd have never caught it."

  "To all intents and purposes we didn't touch," Ing said.

  "Practically not." Then: "Could somebody in cleaner programming have flubbed the dub?"

  "On a hundred and eighteen units?"

  "Yeah. I see what you mean. Well, what're we going to say when they come around for an explanation?"

  "We quote the book. 'Each problem should be approached in two stages: (1) locate those areas which contribute most to the malfunction, and (2) take remedial action designed to reduce hazards which have been positively identified.' We tell 'em, Poss, that we were positively identifying hazards."

  Ing stepped over the lock sill into the executive salon, saw that Washington already was seated at the corner table which convention reserved for the senior beam engineer on duty, the Supervisor of Trans­mission.

  It was too late for day lunch and too early for the second shift coffee break. The salon was almost empty.

  Three junior executives at a table across the room to the right were sharing a private joke, but keeping it low in Washington's presence. A security officer sat nursing a teabulb beside the passage to the kitchen tram on the left. His shoulders bore a touch of dampness from a perspiration reclaimer to show that he had recently come down from the surface. Security had a lot of officers on the station, Ing noted... and there always seemed to be one around Washington.

  The vidwall at the back was tuned to an Earthside news broadcast: There were hints of political upsets because of the beam failure, demands for explanations of the money spent. Washington was quoted as saying a solution would be forthcoming.

  Ing began making his way toward the corner, moving around the empty tables.

  Washington had a coffeebulb in front of him, steam drifting upward. Ing studied the man-Possible Washington (Impossible, according to his junior engineers) was a six-foot eight-inch powerhouse of a man with wide shoulders, sensitive hands, a sharply Moorish-Semitic face of cafe au lait skin and startingly blue eyes under a dark crewcut. (The company's senior medic referred to him as "a most amazing throw of the genetic dice.") Washington's size said a great deal about his abilities. It took a considerable expenditure to lift his extra kilos moonside. He had to be worth just that much
more.

  Ing sat down across from Washington, gestured to the waiter-eye on the table surface, ordered Mars-lichen tea.

  "You just come from Assembly?" Washington asked.

  "They said you were up here," Ing said. "You look tired, Earthside give you any trouble about your report?"

  "Until I used your trick and quoted the book: 'Every test under field conditions shall approximate as closely as possible the conditions set down by laboratory precedent.'"

  "Hey, that's a good one," Ing said. "Why didn't you tell them you were following a hunch-you had a hunch I had a hunch."

  Washington smiled.

  Ing took a deep breath. It felt good to sit down. He realized he'd worked straight through two shifts without a break.

  "You look tired yourself," Washington said.

  Ing nodded. Yes, he was tired. He was too old to push this hard. Ing had few illusions about himself. He'd always been a runt, a little on the weak side- skinny and with an almost weaselish face that was saved from ugliness by widely set green eyes and a thick crewcut mop of golden hair. The hair was turning gray now, but the brain behind the wide brow still functioned smoothly.

  The teabulb came up through the table slot. Ing pulled the bulb to him, cupped his hands around its warmth. He had counted on Washington to keep the worst of the official pressure off him, but now that it had been done, Ing felt guilty.

  "No matter how much I quote the book," Washing­ton said, "they don't like that explanation."

  "Heads will roll and all that?"

  "To put it mildly."

  "Well we have a position chart on where every cleaner went down," Ing said. "Every piece of wreckage has been reassembled as well as possible. The undamaged cleaners have been gone over with the proverbial comb of fine teeth."

  "How long until we have a clean tube?" Washington asked.

  "About eight hours."

  Ing moved his shoulders against the chair. His thigh muscles still ached from the long session in the Skoarnoff tube and there was a pain across his shoulders.

  "Then it's time for some turkey talk," Washington said.

  Ing had been dreading this moment. He knew the stand Washington was going to take.

  The Security officer across the room looked up, met Ing's eyes, looked away. Is he listening to us? Ing wondered.

  "You're thinking what the others thought," Wash­ington said. "That those cleaners were kicked around the corner into angspace."

  "One way to find out," Ing said.

  There was a definite lift to the Security officer's chin at that remark. He was listening.

  "You're not taking that suicide ride," Washington said.

  "Are the other beams getting through to the Seed Ships?" Ing asked.

  "You know they aren't!"

  Across the room, the junior executives stopped their own conversation, peered toward the corner table. The Security officer hitched his chair around to watch both the executives and the corner table.

  Ing took a sip of his tea, said: "Damn' tea here's always too bitter. They don't know how to serve it anywhere except on Mars." He pushed the bulb away from him. "Join the Haigh Company and save the Universe for Man."

  "All right, Ing," Washington said. "We've known each other a long time and can speak straight out. What're you hiding from me?"

  Ing sighed.

  "I guess I owe it to you," he said. "Well, I guess it begins with the fact that every transmitter's a unique individual, which you know as well as I do. We map what it does and operate by prediction statistics. We play it by ear, as they say. Now, let's consider something out of the book. A tube is, after all, just a big cave in the rock, a controlled environment for the beam to do its work. The book says: 'By anglespace transmission, any place in the universe is just around the corner from any other place.' This is a damned loose way to describe something we don't really understand. It makes it sound as though we know what we're talking about."

  "And you say we're putting matter around that corner," Washington said, "but you haven't told me what you're-"

  "I know," Ing said. "We place a modulation of energy where it can be seen by the Seed Ship's instruments. But that's a transfer of energy, Poss. And energy's interchangeable with matter."

  "You're twisting definitions. We put a highly unstable, highly transitory reflection phenomenon in such a position that time/space limitations are" changed. That's by the book, too. But you're still not telling me..."

  "Poss, I have a crew rigging a cleaner for me to ride. We've analyzed the destruction pattern-which is what I wanted from that test 'lash-and I think we can kick me into angspace aboard one of these wild geese."

  "You fool! I'm still Supetrans here and I say you're not going in there on..."

  "Now, take it easy, Poss. You haven't even..."

  "Granting you get kicked around that stupid corner, how do you expect to get back? And what's the purpose, anyway? What can you do if you..."

  "I can go there and look, Poss. And the cleaner we're rigging will be more in the nature of a lifeboat. I can get down on TA-IV, maybe take the container with me, give our seeds a better chance. And if we learn how to kick me around there, we can do it again with..."

  "This is stupidity!"

  "Look," Ing said. "What're we risking? One old man long past his prime."

  Ing faced the angry glare in Washington's eyes and realized an odd thing about himself. He wanted to get through there, wanted to give that container of embryos its chance. He was drunk with the same dream that had spawned the Seeding Compact. And he saw now that the other troubleshooters, the six who'd gone before him, must have been caught in the same web. They'd all seen where the trouble had to be. One of them would get through. There were tools in the container; another beam could be rigged on the other side. There was a chance of getting back,.. afterward...

  "I let them talk me into sending for you," Washington growled. "The understanding was you'd examine the set up, confirm or deny what the others . saw-but I didn't have to send you into that..."

  "I want to go, Poss," Ing said. He saw what was eating on his friend now. The man had sent six troubleshooters in there to die-or disappear into an untraceable void, which was worse. Guilt had him.

  And I'm refusing permission, Washington said.

  The Security officer arose from his table, crossed to stand over Washington. "Mr. Washington," he said, "I've been listening and it seems to me if Mr. Gump wants to go you can't..."

  Washington got to his feet, all six feet eight inches of him, caught the Security man by the jacket. "So they told you to interfere if I tried to stop him!" He shook the man with an odd gentleness. "If you are on my station after the next shuttle leaves, I will see to it per­sonally that you have an unexplained accident." He released his grip.

  The Security agent paled, but stood his ground. "One call from me and this no longer will be your station."

  "Poss," Ing said, "you can't fight city hall. And if you try they'll take you out of here. Then I'll have to make do with second best at this end. I need you as beam jockey here when I ride that wild goose."

  Washington glared at him. "Ing, it won't work!"

  Ing studied his friend, seeing the pressures which had been brought to bear, understanding how Earthside had maneuvered to get that request sent from a friend to Ivar Norris Gump. It all said something about Earthside's desperation. The patterns of secrecy, the Security watch, the hints in the newscasts-Ing felt something of the same urgency himself which these things betrayed. And he knew if Washington could overcome this guilt block the man would share mankind's need to help those drifting containers.

  "No matter how many people get hurt-or killed," Ing said, "we have to give the embryos in those containers their chance. You know, I'm right-this is the main chance. And we need you, Poss. I want everything going for me I can get. And no matter what happens, we'll know you did your best for me..."

  Washington took two short breaths. His shoulders slumped. "And nothing I say.
.."

  "Nothing you say."

  "You're going?"

  "I'm going where the wild goose goes."

  "And who faces the family afterward?"

  "A friend, Poss. A friend faces the family and makes the blow as soft as possible."

  "If you'll excuse me," the Security officer said.

  They ignored him as the man returned to his table.

  Washington allowed himself a deep, sighing breath. Some of the fire returned to his eyes. "All right," he growled. "But I'm going to be on this end every step of the way. And I'm telling you now you get no Go signal until everything's rigged to my satisfaction."