Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Read online

stabilized almost at once into the features of a platinum-blonde,

  who radiated the kind of smile normally reserved for toothpaste

  commercials.

  "Good morning. Avis San Francisco, City Terminal. This is Sue

  Parker. Can I help you?"

  Gray addressed the grille, located next to the tiny camera lens

  just above the screen.

  "Hi, Sue. Name's Gray-R. J. Gray, airbound for SF, due to arrive

  about two hours from now. Could I reserve an aircar, please?"

  "Sure thing. Range?"

  "Oh-about five hundred. . ." He glanced at Hunt.

  "Better make it seven," Hunt advised.

  "Make that seven hundred miles minimum."

  "That'll be no problem, Mr. Gray. We have Skyrovers, Mercury

  Threes, Honeybees, or Yellow Birds. Any preference?"

  "No-any'll do."

  "I'll make it a Mercury, then. Any idea how long?"

  "No-er-indefinite."

  "Okay. Full computer nav and flight control? Automatic VTOL?"

  "Preferably and, ah, yes."

  "You have a full manual license?" The blonde operated unseen keys

  as she spoke.

  "Yes."

  "Could I have personal data and account-checking data, please?"

  Gray had extracted the card from his wallet while the exchange was

  taking place. He inserted it into a slot set to one side of the

  screen, and touched a key.

  The blonde consulted other invisible oracles. "Okay," she

  pronounced. "Any other pilots?"

  "One. A Dr. V. Hunt."

  "His personal data?"

  Gray took Hunt's already proffered card and substituted it for his

  own. The ritual was repeated. The face then vanished to be replaced

  by a screen of formatted text with entries completed in the boxes

  provided.

  "Would you verify and authorize, please?" said the disembodied

  voice from the grille. "Charges are shown on the right."

  Gray cast his eye rapidly down the screen, grunted, and keyed in a

  memorized sequence of digits that was not echoed on the display.

  The word POSITIVE appeared in the box marked "Authorization." Then

  the clerk reappeared, still smiling.

  "When would you want to collect, Mr. Gray?" she asked.

  Gray turned toward Hunt.

  "Do we want lunch at the airport first?"

  Hunt grimaced. "Not after that party last night. Couldn't face

  anything." His face took on an expression of acute distaste as he

  moistened the inside of the equine rectum he had once called a

  mouth. "Let's eat tonight somewhere."

  "Make it round about eleven thirty hours," Gray advised. "It'll be

  ready."

  "Thanks, Sue."

  "Thank you. Good-bye."

  "Bye now."

  Gray flipped a switch, unplugged the briefcase from the socket

  built into the armrest of his seat, and coiled the connecting cord

  back into the space provided in the lid. He closed the case and

  stowed it behind his feet.

  "Done," he announced.

  The scope was the latest in a long line of technological triumphs

  in the Metadyne product range to be conceived and nurtured to

  maturity by the Hunt-Gray partnership. Hunt was the ideas man,

  leading something of a free-lance existence within the

  organization, left to pursue whatever line of study or experiment

  his personal whims or the demands of his researches dictated. His

  title was somewhat misleading; in fact he was Theoretical Studies.

  The position was one which he had contrived, quite deliberately, to

  fall into no obvious place in the managerial hierarchy of Metadyne.

  He acknowledged no superior, apart from the managing director, Sir

  Francis Forsyth-Scott, and boasted no subordinates. On the

  company's organization charts, the box captioned "Theoretical

  Studies" stood alone and disconnected near the inverted tree head R

  & D, as if added as an afterthought. Inside it there appeared the

  single entry Dr. Victor Hunt. This was the way he liked it-a

  symbiotic relationship in which Metadyne provided him with the

  equipment, facilities, services, and funds he needed for his work,

  while he provided Metadyne with first, the prestige of retaining on

  its payroll a world-acknowledged authority on nuclear

  infrastructure theory, and second-but by no means least-a steady

  supply of fallout.

  Gray was the engineer. He was the sieve that the fallout fell on.

  He had a genius for spotting the gems of raw ideas that had

  application potential and transforming them into developed, tested,

  marketable products and product enhancements. Like Hunt, he had

  survived the mine field of the age of unreason and emerged safe and

  single into his mid-thirties. With Hunt, he shared a passion for

  work, a healthy partiality for most of the deadly sins to

  counterbalance it, and his address book. All things considered,

  they were a good team.

  Gray bit his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe. He always bit

  his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe when he was about to talk

  shop.

  "Figured it out yet?" he asked.

  "This Borlan business?"

  "Uh-huh."

  Hunt shook his head before lighting a cigarette. "Beats me."

  "I was thinking. . . Suppose Felix has dug up some hot sales

  prospect for scopes-maybe one of his big Yank customers. He could

  be setting up some super demo or something."

  Hunt shook his head again. "No. Felix wouldn't go and screw up

  Metadyne's schedules for anything like that. Anyhow, it wouldn't

  make sense-the obvious thing to do would be to fly the people to

  where the scope is, not the other way round."

  "Mmmm . . . I suppose the same thing applies to the other thought

  that occurred to me-some kind of crash teach-in for IDCC people."

  "Right-same thing goes."

  "Mmmm. . ." When Gray spoke again, they had covered another six

  miles. "How about a takeover? The whole scope thing is big-Felix

  wants it handled stateside."

  Hunt reflected on the proposition. "Not for my money. He's got too

  much respect for Francis, to pull a stunt like that. He knows

  Francis can handle it okay. Besides, that's not his way of doing

  things-too underhanded." Hunt paused to exhale a cloud of smoke.

  "Anyhow, I think there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. From

  what I saw, even Felix didn't seem too sure what it's all about."

  "Mmmm . . ." Gray thought for a while longer before abandoning

  further excursions into the realms of deductive logic. He

  contemplated the growing tide of humanity flowing in the general

  direction of C-deck bar. "My guts are a bit churned up, too," he

  confessed. "Feels like a crate of Guinness on top of a vindaloo

  curry. Come on-let's go get a coffee."

  In the star-strewn black velvet one thousand miles farther up, the

  Sirius Fourteen communications-link satellite followed, with cold

  and omniscient electronic eyes, the progress of the skyliner

  streaking across the mottled sphere below. Among the ceaseless

  stream of binary data that flowed through its antennae, it

  identified a call from the Boeing's Gamma Nine master computer,

  requesting details of the latest weather
forecast for northern

  California. Sirius Fourteen flashed the message to Sirius Twelve,

  hanging high over the Canadian Rockies, and Twelve in turn beamed

  it down to the tracking station at Edmonton. From here the message

  was relayed by optical cable to Vancouver Control and from there by

  microwave repeaters to the Weather Bureau station at Seattle. A few

  thousandths of a second later, the answers poured back up the chain

  in the opposite direction. Gamma Nine digested the information,

  made one or two minor alterations to its course and ifight plan,

  and sent a record of the dialogue down to Ground Control,

  Prestwick.

  chapter two

  It had rained for over two days.

  The Engineering Materials Research Department of the Ministry of

  Space Sciences huddled wetly in a fold of the Ural Mountains, an

  occasional ray of sunlight glinting from a laboratory window or

  from one of the aluminum domes of the reactor building. Seated in

  her office in the analysis section, Valereya Petrokhov turned to

  the pile of reports left on her desk for routine approval. The

  first two dealt with run-of-the-mill high-temperature corrosion

  tests. She flicked casually through the pages, glanced at the

  appended graphs and tables, scrawled her initials on the line

  provided, and tossed them across into the tray marked "Out."

  Automatically she began scanning down the first page of number

  three. Suddenly she stopped, a puzzled frown forming on her face.

  Leaning forward in her chair, she began again, this time reading

  carefully and studying every sentence. She finally went back to the

  beginning once more and worked methodically through the whole

  document, stopping in places to verify the calculations by means of

  the keyboard display standing on one side of the desk.

  "This is unheard of!" she exclaimed.

  For a long time she remained motionless, her eyes absorbed by the

  raindrops slipping down the window but her mind so focused

  elsewhere that the sight failed to register. At last she shook

  herself into movement and, turning again to the keyboard, rapidly

  tapped in a code. The strings of tensor equations vanished, to be

  replaced by a profile view of her assistant, hunched over a console

  in the control room downstairs. The profile transformed itself into

  a full face as he turned.

  "Ready to run in about twenty minutes," he said, anticipating the

  question. "The plasma's stabilizing now."

  "No-this has nothing to do with that," she replied, speaking a

  little more quickly than usual. "It's about your report 2906. I've

  just been through my copy."

  "Oh . . . yes?" His change in expression betrayed mild

  apprehension.

  "So-a niobium-zirconium alloy," she went on, stating the fact

  rather than asking a question, "with an unprecedented resistance to

  high-temperature oxidation and a melting point that, quite frankly,

  I won't believe until I've done the tests myself."

  "Makes our plasma-cans look like butter," Josef agreed.

  "Yet despite the presence of niobium, it exhibits a lower

  neutron-absorption cross section than pure zirconium?"

  "Macroscopic, yes-under a millibarn per square centimeter."

  "Interesting . . ." she mused, then resumed more briskly: "On top

  of that we have alpha-phase zirconium with silicon, carbon, and

  nitrogen impurities, yet still with a superb corrosion resistance."

  "Hot carbon dioxide, fluorides, organic acids, hypochiorites- we've

  been through the list. Generally an initial reaction sets in, but

  it's rapidly arrested by the formation of inert barrier layers. You

  could probably break it down in stages by devising a cycle of

  reagents in just the right sequence, but that would take a complete

  processing plant specially designed for the job!"

  "And the microstructure," Valereya said, gesturing toward the

  papers on her desk. "You've used the description fibrous."

  "Yes. That's about as near as you can get. The main alloy seems to

  be formed around a-well, a sort of microcrystalline lattice. It's

  mainly silicon and carbon, but with local concentrations of some

  titanium-magnesium compound that we haven't been able to quantify

  yet. I've never come across anything like it. Any ideas?"

  The woman's face held a faraway look for some seconds.

  "I honestly don't know what to think at the moment," she confessed.

  "But I feel this information should be passed higher without delay;

  it might be more important than it looks. But first I must be sure

  of my facts. Nikolai can take over down there for a while. Come up

  to my office and let's go through the whole thing in detail."

  chapter three

  The Portland headquarters of the Intercontinental Data and Control

  Corporation lay some forty miles east of the city, guarding the

  pass between Mount Adams to the north and Mount Hood to the south.

  It was here that at some time in the remote past a small in-land

  sea had penetrated the Cascade Mountains and carved itself a

  channel to the Pacific, to become in time the mighty Columbia

  River.

  Fifteen years previously it had been the site of the

  government-owned Bonneville Nucleonic Weapons Research Laboratory.

  Here, American scientists, working in collaboration with the United

  States of Europe Federal Research Institute at Geneva, had

  developed the theory of meson dynamics that led to the nucleonic

  bomb. The theory predicted a "clean" reaction with a yield orders

  of magnitude greater than that produced by thermonuclear fusion.

  The holes they had blown in the Sahara had proved it.

  During that period of history, the ideological and racial tensions

  inherited from the twentieth century were being swept away by the

  tide of universal affluence and falling birth rates that came with

  the spread of high-technology living. Traditional rocks of strife

  and suspicion were being eroded as races, nations, sects, and

  creeds became inextricably mingled into one huge, homogeneous

  global society. As the territorial irrationalities of long-dead

  politicians resolved themselves and the adolescent nation-states

  matured, the defense budgets of the superpowers were progressively

  reduced year by year. The advent of the nucleonic bomb served only

  to accelerate what would have happened anyway. By universal assent,

  world demilitarization became fact.

  One sphere of activity that benefited enormously from the surplus

  funds and resources that became available after demilitarization

  was the rapidly expanding United Nations Solar System Exploration

  Program. Already the list of responsibilities held by this

  organization was long; it included the operation of all artificial

  satellites in terrestrial, Lunar, Martian, Venusian, and Solar

  orbits; the building and operation of all manned bases on Luna and

  Mars, plus the orbiting laboratories over Venus; the launching of

  deep-space robot probes and the planning and control of manned

  missions to the outer planets. UNSSEP was thus expanding at just

  the right rate and the right tim
e to absorb the supply of

  technological talent being released as the world's major armaments

  programs were run down. Also, as nationalism declined and most of

  the regular armed forces were demobilized, the restless youth of

  the new generation found outlets for their adventure-lust in the

  uniformed branches of the UN Space Arm. It was an age that buzzed

  with excitement and anticipation as the new pioneering frontier

  began planet-hopping out across the Solar System.

  And so NWRL Bonneville had been left with no purpose to serve. This

  situation did not go unnoticed by the directors of IDCC. Seeing

  that most of the equipment and permanent installations owned by

  NWRL could be used in much of the corporation's own research

  projects, they propositioned the government with an offer to buy

  the place outright. The offer was accepted and the deal went

  through. Over the years IDCC had further expanded the site,

  improved its aesthetics, and eventually established it as their

  nucleonics research center and world headquarters.

  The mathematical theory that had grown out of meson dynamics

  involved the existence of three hitherto unknown transuranic

  elements. Although these were purely hypothetical, they were

  christened hyperium, bonnevillium, and genevium. Theory also

  predicted that, due to a "glitch" in the transuranic

  mass-versus-binding-energy curve, these elements, once formed,

  would be stable. They were unlikely to be found occurring

  naturally, however-not on Earth, anyway. According to the

  mathematics, only two known situations could give the right

  conditions for their formation: the core of the detonation of a

  nucleonic bomb or the collapse of a supernova to a neutron star.

  Sure enough, analysis of the dust clouds after the Sahara tests

  yielded minute traces of hyperium and bonnevillium; genevium was

  not detected. Nevertheless, the first prediction of the theory was

  accepted as amply supported. Whether, one day, future generations

  of scientists would ever verify the second prediction, was another

  matter entirely.

  * * *

  Hunt and Gray touched down on the rooftop landing pad of the IDCC

  administration building shortly after fifteen hundred hours. By

  fifteen thirty they were sitting in leather armchairs facing the