Operation Interstellar, George O. Smith [best mobile ebook reader .txt] 📗

"I'm most sorry."

"Miss Phillips, Doctor Haedaecker. She is the woman I met last night, Doctor Haedaecker."

"What are you doing here?" demanded Haedaecker.

"I did not know this was any kind of conference," she explained. "I came to see Mister Grayson, and the guard said he was in this room, talking."

"Why didn't you wait?" stormed Haedaecker.

Nora smiled, wanly. "I was excited," she said. "It may have occurred to you, too, that the man who tried to steal Mister Grayson's spacecraft last night was not playing a game. Everything seemed wrong. He was not smart. I got to wondering why he just didn't get into the ship and take off.

"Well, less than fifteen minutes ago a flash came over the air. Among the news was the statement that the criminal killed last night in attempted spacecraft theft was Joel Walsh. He was an escapee from penitentiary in Antarctica. That explained it."

"How?" demanded Haedaecker, "does that explain anything?"

"Of course it does," said Nora. "He was in jail for ten years. He must have been sent away when he was about twenty. How many men are competent space pilots at that age?"

"Not many," agreed Paul.

"And being in jail for the last ten years, it's natural that he did not know how to run the ship."

"Um," grumbled Haedaecker.

"He probably wanted to stow away," said Nora. "Once he did that, he could hold a gun at the pilot's head and make the pilot do his bidding until he learned how to run the ship."

There was one very fine flaw in Nora's reasoning, but Paul did not want to belabor this point at this moment. He had not intended to push Haedaecker to the point of firing him for impertinence, insubordination, or rank carelessness. For on the "BurAst 33.P.G.1" was the Z-wave gear that Haedaecker's vindictive nature accused him of stowing away.

Paul laughed. "So much for your intrigue," he said.

Haedaecker glared at Paul angrily. "Your intrigue," he said with heavy emphasis on the first word. "Just let me find you trying it!"

Paul smiled crookedly and looked Haedaecker in the eye coldly. "Doctor Haedaecker," he said in a level, voice, "if I ever try it and fail, no one will know of my failure. If I try and succeed, I assure you that you will be able to do nothing to me."

Haedaecker nodded, his manner as cold as Paul's voice had been. The gage had been hurled, the swords measured and weighed. So far it was stalemate. But only until Paul Grayson really did something against the rules, large enough to let Haedaecker really clip him deep, lasting, and legally justifiable.

Haedaecker left and Paul turned to Nora Phillips. She smiled at him and asked: "What is this intrigue business, or is it a top secret?"

Paul shook his head. "I'd prefer to tell you after I return."

"Do that," she said. "I'd like to hear about it."

Paul pondered briefly. The obvious thing was to offer her a chance to look over his ship. He could do that, now that he had all of his credentials and papers back. But the Z-wave gear was evidence against him, and even though it was parked in a convenient locker, certain hunks of cable-endings and associated bits of equipment were a dead giveaway; the same sort of evidence in the shape of capped pipes will tell the observer that plumbing once existed in a certain room. Paul had no intention of trusting anybody at this moment.

Mayhap Nora's timely information about the deceased thief were true. Still, there was a hole in her tale. If the thief wanted only to stow away until take-off time, he would pick another spacecraft than the BurAst P.G.33-1. The registry number glowed in luminescent paint a yard high, and matched the numbers on his identification card. Certainly no half-idiot would try to stow away in an official ship that was almost certain to be investigated as soon as the hue-and-cry was heard.

He suspected Haedaecker's hand in this; anything to keep Haedaecker's Theory in high gear, to keep Haedaecker top man in his field. He might as well suspect Nora, too. At least until motive or innocence could be shown.

He decided to lie glibly. "Normally I could take you aboard and show you the crate," he said. "But this is an experimental run and subject to security, though I'll not be able to explain why they think it so."

Nora laughed and shook her head. "Space ships are cold, powerful, and dangerous things to me," she said. "I'd feel uncomfortable on one of them."

"Then let me show you the elecalc."

"What?"

"Elecalc. Short word for electronic calculator. I'm here to get an aiming point for my trip tonight."

"Now that I would like to see," said Nora, hooking an arm in Paul's.

CHAPTER 5

"I'm pointing for Alpha Centauri," said Paul. "And so that's what we calculate for."

Nora looked at the bays of neat equipment and shook her head. "Why not aim at it and run?" she asked. "Surely you do not need this billion dollars' worth of stuff to point out your destination."

"We do," objected Paul. "You see, if I took off with my telescope pointed along the axis of drive with the cross-hairs pointing at Alpha Centauri, I'd be heading for the star where it was four years ago. I intend to be on the way for nine days. So I'll want to point the nose of the ship at the spot where Alpha will be nine days in the future instead of four years in the past. Since Sol and Alpha drift in space, the motion and velocities of both systems must be taken into account, a correction-angle found, and then used to aim my ship. My telescope will angle away from the ship's axis by that correction-angle. Add to that the fact that I am taking off from earth, which will give me some angular velocity and some rotational velocity differing from an hypothetical take-off from Sol itself. Furthermore, I want Proxima Centauri instead of Alpha, and that must be taken into consideration too.

"Then there is the question of velocity and time. We cannot see when we are exceeding the velocity of light. We must run at so many light-velocities for so many seconds. A minor error in timing or velocity will create a rather gross error in position at the end of the run."

"Oh," said Nora, but her tone indicated a lack of comprehension.

Paul smiled. "One second of error at one light-velocity equals a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles of error. One second of error at a hundred times the velocity of light equals eighteen millions of miles error. Not much as cosmic distance goes, but a long way to walk."

Nora understood that, and said so.

Grayson's data had been handed to him by Haedaecker. But apparently the long-range calculations that had been temporarily halted were still halted, for the operator was taking this opportunity of feeding some future flight-constant information to the big machine.

It was not a complex calculation as some computations may go, but there were a myriad of factors. Terran latitude and longitude, the instant of take-off as applied to the day and the year, an averaging of previous dispersion-factors noted from previous trips, velocities, vector angles, momentum, and others, all obtained from tables and entered in the machine before the start lever was pulled. The machine mulled the information over, tossed electrons back and forth, chewed and digested a ream of binary digits, and handed forth a strip of paper printed with an entire set of coordinates in decimal angles.

Paul showed Nora his folder of data. "The rest," he said, "is up to me."

He led Nora from the computation room, intending to hit the dining room for coffee. Half-way across the lobby of the administration building he was hailed by the autocall. He went to the telephone.

It was Stacey.

"I've a couple of things to let you think over," said Stacey.

"So?"

"I've been on the job. I haven't much, but there are a few items you might mull over."

"Shoot."

"One. Your deceased thief was an ex-convict, escaped from the penal colony on Antarctica."

"This I've heard."

"Then I suppose you know that the guy was cashiered from the Neoterra run for smuggling."

"Huh?" blurted Paul.

"An ex-pilot, tossed out on his right ear for conduct hardly becoming a safecracker and a thief, let alone an officer and a gentleman."

"That I didn't know. How long ago?"

"Five years, almost."

It was not quite the ten that Nora had claimed.

"Well, that makes it—"

"That ain't all," came Stacey's voice. "The weapons carried by the Spaceport guards are regulation Police Positives. Our erstwhile felon was shot once, right between the eyes, with a forty-five, which according to all of the expert opinion, came from an automatic at a distance of three feet, plus or minus six inches. Know what that means?"

"I'm just digesting the information now. You tell me."

"It means that the ex-crook was killed by a party or parties unknown, someone other than one of the guards. Furthermore, he was facing his executioner, not taking it on the lam. How do you make that?"

"It doesn't make good sense."

"Sure it does. It keystones nicely. Men of that calibre are often chilled because they fumble a job and the mainspring doesn't enjoy the prospect of having a fumbler running around with information that might lead to the capture, arrest, conviction, and/or demise of aforementioned mainspring. They made one error. They should have used a thirty-eight revolver instead of a forty-five automatic. The forty-five is a gangster's weapon. And they should have drilled their ex-companion from behind between the scapulae to make it look as though the guards were better shots than they really are."

"That's food for thought," said Paul.

"That isn't all," said Stacey. "Here's one more bit of information that may be either juicy or full of sawdust depending upon how you taste it. Your girl friend, Nora Phillips was born and raised on Neoterra."

"You're certain of that?"

"So the Bureau of Vital Statistics claims."

"But how—?"

"Negative evidence, my fine scientist. Negative evidence. I offer you two alternatives. Either she was born on Neoterra, or she is employing an alias, pseudonym, or nom de jour." Stacey's French lacked a certain vocabulary, but it was none the less to the point. "She is certainly not born Nora Phillips of Terra. I'll let you pick your choice. But enough of that. A couple of hours ago she received a telephone call. Nice position she must have. She chinned for about three minutes and then leaped to her feet and took off like jet propelled. Didn't bother to say anything to the management of the joint at all. Then—"

"Where does she work?" asked Paul.

"Timothy, McBride, and Webster, Attorneys-at-Law. We couldn't tap their telephone, but we had a lip-reader peering at her through a telescope from a room in the building opposite hers."

"What did he catch?"

"Nothing, she just listened, and then took off. And can that dame drive! If we didn't have an idea of where she was going after the first few minutes, my man would have lost her for certain. She with you now?"

"Uh-huh."

Paul thought fast. Just what unearthly reason why people would try to stop his plans for creating voice-fast communications with Neosol, Paul could not fathom. Obviously there was one faction working against him. But how had they—

Paul paled.

Had the criminal hoped to lay Paul low enough to keep him quiet until the criminal could take off in Paul's place? True identification would be impossible once the crook were in space. But what could he accomplish? Certainly—

Suppose the thief that clipped him intended to place Paul in a position where he could be captured easily. To take Paul's place to perform certain acts in Paul's name, while Paul was held captive. Then, once these acts were consummated Paul could be found in the wreck of a spacecraft or the ruin of a radio beacon on Proxima Centauri I.

But why? Columbus had been kicked around for having screwy ideas, and the Brothers Wright had been thoroughly laughed-at. But people did not try to murder characters who had cockeyed ideas. Of course, there was Galileo, but Galileo had publicized his screwy ideas, whereas Paul Grayson's theories were known to very few.

But Nora Phillips could not be held as part of that particular mob. It seemed to Paul that the woman had done a fine job towards keeping Paul hale, hearty, healthy, and imbued with ideas available only to a man in the finest of health of mind and body. If Nora belonged to some group intent on stopping Paul Grayson, she was working against them, too. For she had done a fine job of smoothing the headache out of his skull with fingers that acted with experience and practise.

On the other hand, Nora Phillips had behaved as though she wanted Paul to succeed, and she acted—if this were an act—as though she