Island Worlds (20 page)

Thierry's face turned crimson but Hjalmar just stood confidently. He didn't appear to be armed but Thor was sure he was. Hjalmar turned to Shaw. "I know, Martin. Good help's hard to find, isn't it? I guess every political boss needs an assassin. That was another of his specialties, you know. Take good care of him and keep his nose clean. If I ever find half an excuse, he's a dead man. Don't turn your back when he's around, either."

"You talk like some kind of official," Shaw said. "In a few days, you could just be an ordinary citizen and I could be President of the Confederacy. "

Hjalmar grinned. "These people may be ornery," he said, "but they aren't likely to pick a butcher for their first president. Come on, Thor, we're late."

"Good to talk to you, Martin," Thor said, picking up the coded sheets. "Come see me again. Alone."

The two walked out into the warehouse cavern and Hjalmar's men closed discreetly around them. "Thanks, Hjalmar. That almost turned really bad."

"When my people said Shaw was heading for the place where you were meeting Roseberry, I came on the double. When are you going to let me assign you a bodyguard?"

"Never. But get to Roseberry right away. Don't let Shaw's people find him."

"I'll hide him in Saburo's
saké
works. He'll be happy as a mouse on a grain ship." He nodded to one of his men, who trotted off to do his bidding.

"Shaw knew about this coded message," Thor said, holding out the sheets, "and he knows it's something important. I didn't know myself until a little while ago.'

"How he found out about it is no question," Hjalmar said. "Cat would sell out her family for that man."

"You don't know that," Thor said stubbornly, knowing in his heart that Hjalmar was right.

"Be that as it may, he might not really know anything. Maybe he's guessing. When people don't have much confidence in their capabilities, they start casting about for secret weapons. Old Bob wouldn't have sent it coded unless it was something he wanted to keep from Earth authority. Maybe Shaw figures it's some kind of weapon design. "

"It isn't Bob's," Thor told him. "It's Ugo's. And I think it's something so crazy I can't even speculate about it. You'll think I'm crazy too."

"I think we're all crazy," Hjalmar said. "But if it's one of Ugo's inventions, it may be worth looking into. Probably a damn time machine, if half of what I've heard about him is true."

TEN

"There she is." Roseberry withdrew his head from the prospectors little observation bubble. Thor thrust his inside and looked around until he saw an irregular chunk of rock, one side of it brightly washed by sunlight. It was no more than one half kilometer on its longest axis. As Roseberry had said, it was just a dinky little chunk of rock. But it was quite large enough to hold the biggest laboratory on Earth with plenty of rock to spare.

Expertly, Thor guided the tiny, cramped vessel toward the rock. The prospector was equipped with proximity detectors to prevent a collision, but Thor knew better than to trust them completely. He followed Roseberry's directions until they drifted over a shallow depression with a streak of silver-flecked black rock running across its bottom. Roseberry ran their broadcaster through a series of frequencies and the entire depression swung inward, exposing a small landing dock.

"I'll take over now," Roseberry said. In spite of his reservations about the man's competence, Thor was willing to let him take the helm. It was a decidedly odd-looking landing dock. Gently, the old man eased the ship inside until they were floating within the dock, and the disguised hatch slid shut. Lights came on and Thor could see that the dock was smoothly finished inside, a far more elaborate setup than the usual asteroid dock. Roseberry rotated the ship and brought it to rest against the "outer" wall—the one nearest the outside of the rock. He placed anchors to secure the ship firmly.

"Why are we anchored here?" Thor asked.

"So's well be oriented right when I start the spin on this old sucker. We'll get about one-sixth gee when she's spun up to speed. Takes about half an hour."

"Artificial gravity in this little place? Old Ugo went first class, didn't he?"

"You would too, if you could afford it. No exterior-mounted rockets, either. You could search out there for a month without finding where the exhausts are hid. He rigged a specially designed reaction wheel for the spin." He glanced at the screens on the console before him. "Good. Pressure's coming right up outside. Won't need no pressure suit in the dock. Ugo always hated to suit up just to get out of his ship, and he thought an umbilical tube was undignified, for some reason. 'I like to get outta my car and walk to the front door,' he used to say. Feel that? Gravity's taking hold now."

There had been no trace of vibration as the rock had begun to spin. First class all the way. They ran through a routine checkout sequence until the dock was fully pressurized and maximum rotation had been achieved. Then they dropped through the hatch in the belly of the ship and Thor followed Roseberry to a large hatch at one end. Thor figured that Ciano must have had some fairly large objects to move between the lab and the dock.

"This place brings back some memories," Roseberry said.

"Is the combination to the door among them?"

"Lessee, did it start with nine or a hundred thirty-seven?" He scratched his head and grinned at Thor's look of dismay. He poked a small, green plate with a finger and the door swung open. "There's a combination, all right, but this is quicker. It's keyed to my fingerprint." Thor wondered why he never seemed to link up with anyone normal.

Lights came up as they entered the lab. There was no hesitancy or flickering, despite the decades since the switches had last been tripped. There was nothing in the place that wasn't the best. The room was cavernous, parts of it devoted to computer space, parts to chemical apparatus, and some areas that Thor was sure a medieval sorcerer would have felt at home in. Here and there small, old-fashioned robots waited patiently for their orders.

"So, somebody showed up at last." Thor was obscurely proud that he hadn't jumped. The voice came from a catwalk above them.

"It's him!" Roseberry said, superstitious awe in his voice. "It's Ciano! Them stories was true, about how he never died!"

"They were your stories to begin with," Thor said. "This is just a holo. There's one like it back at Brunhilde's place."

Fifty meters from where they stood, Ciano descended from the catwalk. The illusion was perfect except that his feet made no sound on the metal stairs. "Never fooled me," Roseberry muttered.

"I made a bunch of these for when somebody showed up," Ciano said when he or his ghost was closer. "Most of 'em is pretty short on account of the intruders get laser-fried out in the lock. This one's for when it's Roseberry brings someone in. Good to know you're still alive, Roseberry, which is more than I can say for me. Don't take it personal, but I wish it was Bob that showed up instead of whoever you are. However, the scan must've cleared you as part of the extended Ciano-Taggart clan, or it'd be a different holo playing right now.

"Anyway, welcome to Castle Ciano and I'll bet you're desperate to know what the hell it was I was working on here, right? Well, come along and follow Uncle Ugo and he'll show you." The little image whirled and stalked away. They followed after and Thor was amazed to see tears glittering in the corners of Roseberry's eyes. The recitation had come out in a rapid staccato, almost in a single breath, with much arm-waving. It was an astonishing performance for a man who had been ranting for no audience but a holographic recorder. It must have been one of dozens of recordings he had made against different eventualities. Ciano was the kind of man who threw himself whole-heartedly into everything he did.

Somewhere along the way to the rear of the lab, Thor saw the figure make a minute twitch. The greeting sequence had been blended with the standard lab lecture, Thor presumed, so he only had to make the latter once. Ciano halted before a glass wall and flung his arms wide. "There it is! Ta-daaaa! The secret of the antimatter drive!"

Thor looked inside. There was nothing but an empty room. Maybe Ciano had just gone crazy in his old age. That figured. He had been crazy when he was young, too. But what had made the flash?

"I know what you're thinking," Ciano said. "Old Ugo's nuts. There ain't no antimatter drive. Of course, maybe somebody else's discovered it by now, but I doubt it. Brains like mine don't come along very often. So listen up, and all shall be made plain."

Ciano stuck a finger in the air, as if testing the direction of the wind. "What's the big question that stumped all the geniuses of the twentieth century? Except me, I mean."

Thor could think of several. "The existence of God?" he hazarded.

"Why you can't tickle yourself?" Roseberry chimed in.

"Right!" Ciano said, triumphantly. "The Unified Field Theory. The problem was, there wasn't enough fields, or maybe too many, if you look at it another way. We had all the known four-dimensional fields; gravitational, electromagnetic, nuclear and so forth. But I knew, in my brilliantly intuitive way, that all these fields had to be mere manifestations of an underlying, all-pervasive field that exists in indeterminate n-space. Assuming such a field, all the problems afflicting the Unified Field Theory become as snowflakes in hell, as farts in the whirlwind, as the dew which flees before the rising of the sun." He clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace frantically up and down before the blank window. "I thought long and hard about what to call this field. It was, after all, the most momentous discovery in the history of humanity. At last, I came up with the perfect name: the Ciano Field. Having figured out how everything works and named it, I set about proving its existence."

"Kind of did things backwards, didn't he?" Thor said.

Roseberry shrugged. "Always worked for him."

Ciano was going on obliviously, as might be expected. "What, you may ask, has all this to do with the antimatter drive? Well, it was a byproduct of my experiments to prove the Ciano Field. See, using the Ciano Field, which exists in indeterminate n-space, I could safely store antimatter atoms. Nothing new about making them, just storing them. But I did figure out how to make anti-matter, using the field, without some godawful particle accelerator taking up a hundred miles of desert. Reversing pair annihilation was my first discovery. I developed a method for reversing the process of particle-antiparticle pair annihilation, which produced a gamma-ray photon. My process converts a gamma-ray photon into a particle (e.g., proton) and antiparticle (e.g., anti-proton) pair!" Thor had never heard anyone use e.g. and parentheses in conversation.

"Are you following all this?" Thor asked.

"Hell, I don't even understand ordinary electricity," Roseberry answered.

"Given a suitable supply of energy," Ciano bulled on, gesticulating wildly, "the Ciano Field can be used to energize visible light photons or even radio wavelength photons and turn them into gamma-ray photons. I worked this up utilizing the old inverse-Compton effect. If the energy of the gamma ray is appropriate, you can produce proton and antiproton pairs. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh?"

He whirled around and stared at where he thought they should be, which was a few degrees off true. Unconsciously, Thor and Roseberry edged over to be standing in the right place. "And that ain't all! I even figured out a way to combine antielectrons, antiprotons, antineutrons and a bunch of other anti-elementary particles to create antimatter atoms! Man, sometimes I dazzle myself!"

He spread his hands expressively. "The antimatter is isolated and stored using the Ciano Field. Of course, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to create the antimatter. The most abundant supply of energy in the solar system is from the sun. I knew my work was gonna take lots and lots of energy, so that's why I built all those big power stations when me'n Ian first set up shop in space. Everybody said I was crazy because it d be a century before the space colonists would need that much energy, but old Ugo was thinking all the time. It about drove Ian's auditors nuts trying to figure out where all that power was going, but I never gave 'em a clue. Heh, heh." Ciano chuckled at the discomfiture of his plodding contemporaries. "Now, I know what you're thinking: Why, you're asking, does anyone want to convert solar energy, or nuclear energy, for that matter, into antimatter? Especially since you're just gonna get it back in energy form again?" In fact, Thor was wondering exactly that.

"Ain't it amazing how he could read minds?" Roseberry said.

"Well, I'll tell you!" Ciano shouted, bringing both fists down and springing several feet from the floor. When he came down, he went on more calmly. "Despite the inevitable loss of energy in the conversion process, antimatter as an energy source provides a means of packing tremendous energy into an extremely small mass." He demonstrated his point by holding his forefinger and thumb a minute distance apart. "I mean, them little suckers is
small
!"

"Atoms usually are," Thor muttered.

"Shh," Roseberry chided.

"Think how efficient this stuff is for rocket fuel," Ciano said. The thought had already occurred to Thor. "Now, there is one little effect of this stuff that I maybe would've preferred it didn't have," Ciano muttered into his beard. My God, Thor thought, he's embarrassed! The great Ugo Ciano is capable of embarrassment! "See, inevitably, something this compact, that releases so much energy, is just the greatest stuff ever devised for making bombs."

Thor felt a prickling at the back of his neck and he remembered Shaw's fingernail poking the top sheet of the stack Bob had sent him. "I mean," Ciano went on, "not just bombs, but BOMBS!" He flung his arms wide to demonstrate the magnitude of the concept. "In fact, it's my considered opinion that, using this stuff, you could probably blow up the whole damned galaxy, which is predominantly made of matter. It'd be a little redundant, though. Wouldn't take all that much to wipe out everyplace people live."

A look of aggrieved hurt took over his gnomish countenance. "Hey, don't blame me! Is it my fault my fellow men are so uncivilized? Hell, somebody just like me discovered how to make fire. Was it his fault that the rest of the cavemen devised burning at the stake before they thought up cooking? Hell, no. Just remember: When I give you the code key to decipher my process, you got a hell of a responsibility. Use it wisely, okay?"

Thanks, Thor thought, for delivering into my hands the secret of how to destroy the galaxy. It's just what I needed. But he knew he had to accept it. To hell with bombs, if this antimatter drive was for real the Confederacy had to have it. He could foresee a time when escape would be far more crucial than destruction.

"What can I do with this?" Thor fretted on the way back. He had been thinking the question since they left the lab and now said it aloud for the first time.

Roseberry thought about it for a while. "Set up in business? He give you the patent rights, after all."

"Sure," Thor said disgustedly. "Just trot these over to the U.N. patent office and register them in my name."

"Guess that wouldn't be such a good idea after all, now that you mention it."

Who could be trusted? The Sálamids? Somehow he had an aversion to handing a potential super-weapon to people who spent all their time planning for war. None of the new political parties were yet coherent enough to weigh their trustworthiness, not even his own. Besides, he had a conviction that, in time, the outerworld politicians would prove to be no more savory than their Earth counterparts. Not knowing why, he voiced some of his predicament to Roseberry. He had to talk to somebody.

"Don't make much difference, I reckon," Roseberry said. "Might as well hand it over to one of the high-tech outfits to develop for you. You ain't gonna get that genie back into the bottle whatever you try."

After a few minutes of thought, he decided the old man was right. For all of human history, people had tried to disinvent one new development or another. He was aware of no instance of success at the attempt. Science and technology were as inexorable as any other historical trend—they grabbed people by the nose and dragged them to whatever destination was waiting for them. No, he couldn't expect to eliminate this threat, but he could try to guide its course.

"Let's forget Avalon for a few days," Thor said. "I'm setting course for Aeaea."