Pressure Man Read online

  “Not officially. There’s nothing on paper to connect you with me or any aspect of DOSE other than the Spacearm. However, in the eyes of the Earthfirsters, any man coming into DOSEWEX is a high-priority target. It’s likely that the DOSE vehicle was enough to make you a target. They’re getting less and less selective. Just being a spacer is enough to get you killed.”

  “I know that. I’m used to spending my time in a guarded enclave while I’m on dear old mother Earth.”

  “And all you want to do is get back into space,” J.J. said.

  “You know it.”

  “It’s going to take a while,” J.J. said. “You’re being pulled off Spacearm duty and assigned here.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” Dom said.

  Barnes unlocked a desk drawer and put a player on the top of the desk. “I guess it’s time,” he said. “We’ve edited out the time lapse between dialogue.” He pushed a button.

  The sound of deep space filled the room. There was the familiar hiss and crackle of the big emptiness and a wave of homesickness hit Dom as he leaned forward. The voices were calm and professional, the voices of spacers, good at their work, a long way from home, linked to Earth only by fragile radio waves.

  “Houston Control, this is Callisto Explorer. Zero-nine-three-five hours CSET. Do you read?”

  “Go ahead Callisto Explorer.”

  “Houston, request check of vehicles in area 1-77-343. Repeat. Request check of all vehicles in area 1-77-343.”

  “Hold one, Callisto Explorer. Stand by, Callisto Explorer. V.K. ship Queen Anne is nearest you, beyond your instruments at 186 degrees relative reference point two-seven-Baker. V.S.S.R. exploration ship Khrushchev relative your position 313 degrees reference point two-nine-Baker.”

  “Houston, Callisto Explorer. Request check bearing relative our position zero-nine-seven, reference point three-three-Charlie. Do you copy?”

  “Got you, Callisto. Hold one. Nothing there but empty space.”

  “Houston, unless your computer is fouled up, there’s a bogie out there.”

  “Callisto Explorer, repeat please.”

  “Houston, we’ve got a bogie. Closing on the orbit of Jupiter. Estimated speed one hundred thousand miles per second. Repeat, estimated speed one hundred thousand miles per second. Mass estimated at three-zero-zero-zero tons. Repeat, three-zero-zero-zero tons. Houston, we are tracking. Bogie on collision course with planetary mass. E.T.A, outer atmosphere four hours twenty-three minutes.”

  “Callisto Explorer, are you filming?”

  “That is affirmative. We are filming. Is that you, Paul? Listen, this thing is really something. Hold it. Hold one. Yes, we now have visual. Whats that, Dell? Let me see. Jesus, that bastard is big. Houston? Put this baby on the ground and you could lay your football fields inside her length. Estimated length, four-zero-zero yards. Profile cylindrical, tapered at both ends. No visible blast. Possible thrusters at rear. She’s closing fast.”

  “Callisto Explorer, where is your bogie now?”

  “She’s going to pass behind the planet relative to us in approximately five minutes, Houston. Hold it. Dell, did you see what I saw? Houston, there was some sort of activity aboard the bogie. A glow. It showed on our visual and on the heat scopes. Front and relative the planet. Possible braking activity. Yes, she’s slowed slightly. Houston, she slowed faster than is possible. She took off fifty percent of her speed in ten seconds. We’re losing her now, Houston. She’s getting fuzzy because of the atmosphere. She’s not going straight in, but is approaching in an orbital posture. She’s fading now and we’re getting nothing but the planet.”

  Dom was sitting on the edge of his chair. He felt an atavistic crawling at the nape of his neck as his hair tried to stand up in an age-old response to the unknown. His pulse rate was up and he was breathing fast.

  “Interesting?” J.J. asked, with a wry smile.

  “What’s a bogie?” Dom asked, not familiar with the term but knowing without doubt that it had been used to refer to an unidentified ship of gargantuan proportions.

  “It’s antique slang used by some of the exploration ships,” J.J. said. “It goes all the way back to the wars of the last century. I looked it up once. There was a fellow named Bogart who played bad men in filmed melodramas. They called him Bogie. In the air wars an enemy fighter was a bad guy, a bogie.”

  “This ship out there, how do you know it’s a bogie, a bad guy?”

  “We don’t. Later on in time the term came to be applied to any unidentified flying object.”

  “And is this one still unidentified?” Dom asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It went into the atmosphere of Jupiter?”

  “Yes. Two months ago Callisto Explorer was pulled off her mission and sent into Jupiter orbit, closer than we’ve been before. It was almost too close. They used too much fuel getting out of the gravity well and we had to send a rescue ship from Mars. We’ll get them, but they’re still in space.”

  “The ship came from outside the system,” Dom said.

  “Without a doubt.”

  “And it’s lost.”

  “Not necessarily,” Barnes said, tenting his hands under his chin.

  “Quit playing games, J.J.,” Dom said.

  “Listen.” J.J. pushed the play button on the machine. Dom heard the great flare of sound which is the background noise of Jupiter. “We have to listen closely,” J.J. said.

  He heard it then, a thin, weak series of pulses, repeated in the same pattern at intervals of a few seconds. It was difficult to imagine the power of a transmitter which could make itself heard through the great rush of Jupiter’s radio output, the crushing radiations of a failed sun.

  “Impossible,” Dom said. “She’d go right on down toward the core, into a pressure of one hundred thousand atmospheres. Nothing could withstand such pressure.”

  “We’ve run this series of pulses through every computer in the world,” J.J. said. “We’ve got the best men in the world working on it, but there’s not enough. If someone who didn’t speak our language picked up one of our ships sending Mayday he’d be as helpless as we are to figure out what the ship was saying. But we know the signal is amazingly powerful. It has to be to be heard over Jupe’s noise. That makes us think she’s orbiting just inside the atmosphere. After a careful study of Callisto Explorer’s film it seems that the ship went in at the right angle and the right speed to establish a stable orbit.”

  “How deep?” Dom asked.

  “Remember that diving hull you designed?”

  “It was good to forty thousand feet of ocean,” Dom said. “Over a thousand atmospheres of pressure.”

  “You’ll have to more than double those specifications.”

  “No,” Dom said, shaking his head. “You quickly get into the area of diminishing returns.”

  “We’re talking about three thousand atmospheres,” J.J. said.

  “No way.”

  “There is a way,” J.J. said. His eyes were serious. “There is a way because there’s an alien ship down there inside Jupe’s atmosphere which is withstanding the pressure.”

  “If Callisto Explorer’s observations were accurate,” Dom said, “it’s faster and bigger than anything we’ve got, or anything we’ve got on the drawing boards. It came from outside the system. That means it has either traveled a long, long time, or they’ve beaten the constant. Either way that puts them far ahead of us.”

  “Dom, what would be the benefit if we could lift a hundred million people off the Earth and establish them on a life-zone planet of Centauri?”

  “If Centauri has a life-zone planet.”

  “A couple of hundred million more for each new planet discovered,” J.J. said.

  “It’s an old, old dream,” Dom said. “And without a sublight drive, that’s all it is, a dream.”

  “What if there’s a sublight drive on that alien ship?”

  Dom shook his head, thinking of the impossibility of construction of a hull to resi
st three thousand atmospheres of pressure.

  “Do you know how bad it is?” J.J. asked. “We’re losing. We’re keeping Earth alive by spending the last of our resources flying back fertilizer from Mars so that we can grow just enough food to keep billions of people just above the starvation level. You and I know that space should be more, that it’s our last hope, but those hungry people don’t see it that way. They look at the space budget and they say that the money could be better spent on Earth researching ways to grow more food, to farm the oceans, to develop the last of the tropical rain forests and to irrigate the deserts. We’ve been fighting the budget cutters since before the first moon landing. They cut and they slash, and they will win in the end. Every second that passes sees a few more mouths to feed. The Earthfirsters have already put China out of space, and Japan has only a token program. The U.K. is about ready to cave in and give them what they want. Even Russia is having problems. We’re fighting now just to hold the current budget, and there’s not a chance that we’ll win. We’re outnumbered. The budget will be cut, and that means an end to exploration and development. All we’ll be able to do is make the fertilizer runs. The Publicrats have an absolute majority in both houses, and the President is a Publicrat.”

  “I don’t see—” Dom began.

  J.J. waved him into silence. “The President is a good man. Secretly, he’s on our side, but he can’t fight public opinion. This is an inevitable fact. They’re going to cut our budget. First we lost exploration, then development of new programs. The Canaveral site will be the first to be closed, sure as hell. There will be no more building of ships. There’s even a move under way to close the Academy, to consolidate it with West Point to save money. You know what that means. They say it’s partly for the safety of the students.”

  “I heard about the last incident,” Dom said. “Those kids should have stayed in the campus enclave.”

  “They didn’t, and the Firsters got six of them,” J.J. said. “And that seemed to be the first incident in a new wave of terrorism. The bleeding hearts say we can stop the bloodshed by getting out of space. Leave the useless, empty planets alone. Come home to Earth and work together to make it livable. But we’re a little late for that. We’ve used her up, and she’s just a shell. We’ve given her too much of a human load to carry. Too many people, not enough common sense. Do you know that one of the latest terrorist groups kills lumber cutters in the name of freedom for trees?”

  J.J. snorted and continued. “Trees, for Christ’s sake. Trees have rights. Trees have as much right to live as we. I don’t know what they expect us to use to replace the products of the forests, which is the only area where man ever was worth a damn in competition with nature, in that he figured out how to grow trees faster than nature. But they want us to quit killing trees. They say it’s murder and against the individual freedom acts.”

  “Sounds like the crowded-rat syndrome to me,” Dom said.

  “We can see that,” J.J. said. “They can’t. Space is our last hope. We’re going to lose that hope unless we can go down into the atmosphere of Jupiter and bring that ship back with us.”

  “Uh,” Dom grunted.

  “Dom, you’re the best hull man in the service, and, therefore, the best in the world. You’re a pressure man. If you can design a hull for a thousand atmospheres, you can design one for three thousand.”

  “There’s the matter of power,” Dom said. “We get into impossible figures just trying to furnish enough power for such a ship.”

  “We’ve got a power plant. It’s new and it’s untested, but we’ve got it.”

  “The newk?” Dom asked.

  “It will be like riding an exploding bomb.”

  “Whee.”

  “You’re the man, Flash,” J.J. said. “You’re on the spot. You can pull in anyone you want to work with you.”

  “Art Donald.”

  “He’s already here.”

  “Doris and Larry Gomulka.”

  “Doris is on the way. Larry is finishing a project and will be here within a week.”

  “That’s a good start,” Dom said.

  “The team you used to develop the deepwater hull.”

  “Will there be budget problems?”

  “Not on this one, Flash. We’re going to shoot the works.”

  “Good, I’ll start by charging some work clothes at the company store.”

  “They’ll be deducted from your pay.”

  “You’re all heart,” Dom said.

  “Oh, we’re very generous here in DOSEWEX,” J J. said.

  Chapter Three

  Voices awakened Dom. He was back in the hospital to facilitate dosage of the drugs which were healing his burns so rapidly that he felt, as he came out of sleep, no pain, only an itch under the bandages. His head was fuzzy. He’d taken a sedative to knock thoughts of a three-thousand-atmosphere pressure hull from his mind. He was not ready to open his eyes and face the problem.

  “I guess he’s showing his age,” J.J. Barnes said.

  “Plus a total lack of alertness and ambition,” said another voice.

  “Too much R R in the big city,” J.J. said.

  Dom opened one eye. They were standing at the foot of his bed, J.J. in uniform, Art Donald in jeans and pullover. Art was a shattered shell of a man who looked as if he might disintegrate at any moment. He had lung problems. Now and then a few cells would blow a bubble in lung tissue and he’d have a rest in the hospital. His hair was black and lank, his skin pocked by ancient acne, his eyes alert. He was smoking. Art was reckless. At parties he courted blowing a lung by smoking, drinking, and keeping up with the most vigorous on the dance floor. He knew more about metals than any man alive.

  “Nice to see you, Art,” Dom said.

  “You want to get out of bed now?” J.J. said, with some irritation.

  “No,” Dom said.

  “OK, if you don’t want to watch a man ride a bomb,” J.J. said.

  “I’d rather watch a woman do almost anything,” Dom said, but he swung his legs off the bed and ducked his head down when it started to spin. A nurse came out of the shadows and attacked him without warning with a pointed weapon. Almost immediately the drug began to counteract the sedative.

  He was dressed within minutes and joined J.J. and Art in the hall. There was no conversation in the elevator nor in the lower lobby. It was not until they were riding one of the back-breaking underground cars that J.J. explained.

  “We’ve got a test vehicle waiting about half an astronomical unit out toward Polaris,” J.J. said.

  “The new power plant?”

  “First live run.”

  “Who’s on it?”

  “Neil.”

  Neil was Neil Walters. In space circles it was not necessary to use his last name. “Couldn’t ask for better,” Dom said.

  He had not seen the control facility. It was a miniature Houston, and the duplication amazed him. He began to wonder what else he didn’t know about DOSEWEX.

  J.J. led the way to a good seat directly behind the contact men and the consoles. Communications were established. It was that old, old simplicity of a pilot talking to the control tower. A mid-twentieth-century airlines pilot would have recognized the form and the cant of the exchange, except, possibly, for a few technical terms. Countdown was underway. Checklists were being followed.

  “How many on board?” Dom asked.

  “Just Neil.”

  “High risk?” Dom asked.

  “He knows it,” J. J. said.

  “Is that smart?” Dom asked. “Neil’s the closest thing to a hero the space service has.”

  “Retro switch on,” said a controller.

  Seconds later, the lag telling of the distance between that enclosed room and Neil Walters’ precarious perch atop a new nuclear engine in deep space, his voice came, calm. His voice was always calm. “Retro switch on.” Neil rode a test body all the way down into the desert, regaining control just in time to make the crash survivable, and his
tone of voice never changed. Only at the last moment had he stopped talking his matter-of-fact reports of engineering gone wrong and computers haywire to perform superhuman things. The cabin padding was impressed with the shape of his body. After a few weeks for allowing bones to knit, he took a reengineered body into the troposphere for a test run.

  “It’ll be about fifteen minutes,” J.J. said. “Want some coffee?” When Dom nodded he snapped his fingers at a cadet.

  “J.J.,” Dom said. “We’ve had this engine on the boards for years. How’d you manage to get it built now, when things are tight?”

  “We didn’t really need it before,” J.J. said. “There’d be just a slight increase in velocity, because the harder you push against the constant the harder it pushes back.”

  “And now that we need it for sheer power, how’d you manage it?”

  “By using the last dollar of a little cushion we’ve been keeping hidden just for such an ultimate emergency as this,” J. J. said. “If we can lift three thousand tons of alien ship out of the atmosphere of Jupiter it will have been worth it.”

  “And the antis have no idea you’re developing the newk engine?”

  “Our great director has sworn in front of God and the U.S. Senate’s Space Committee that the newk engine has been abandoned and that DOSE never hides anything from our public servants.”

  “I’m sure that God has forgiven him his untruthfulness,” Art said.

  “I thought he spoke for God, himself,” Dom said.

  “And the Senate will forgive him when we bring home that ship,” J.J. said.

  “Minus ten and counting,” the interior sound system boomed.

  “So I’m in league with criminals,” Dom said. “Do you realize that men have served hard time for lying about something much less expensive to the Congress of the United States?”

  “No one lives without risk,” J. J. said.

  “One thing bothers me,” Dom said. “That bogie went into Jupe two months ago and you’ve already got a hydroplant out in space ready for testing. Am I to believe that you built the damned thing in that length of time?”

  “We’ve had the main components ready for years,” J.J. said. “Don’t look so grim. It’s not as serious as all that. There isn’t an agency of the government that doesn’t do the same thing. If we all stuck strictly to budget we couldn’t even hold the status quo. All the big agencies slip in a few billion here and there for padding in times of need.”