Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Read online

desk in Borlan's luxurious office on the tenth floor, while he

  poured three large measures of scotch at the teak bar built into

  the left wall. He walked back to the center, passed a glass to each

  of the Englishmen, went back around the desk, and sat down.

  "Cheers, then, guys," he offered. They returned the gesture.

  "Well," he began, "it's good to see you two again. Trip okay? How'd

  you make it up so soon-rent a jet?" He opened his cigar box as he

  spoke and pushed it across the desk toward them. "Smoke?"

  "Yes, good trip. Thanks, Felix," Hunt replied. "Avis." He inclined

  his head toward the window behind Borlan, which presented a

  panoramic view of pine-covered hills tumbling down to the distant

  Columbia. "Some scenery."

  "Like it?"

  "Makes Berkshire look a bit like Siberia."

  Borlan looked at Gray. "How are you keeping, Rob?"

  The corners of Gray's mouth twitched downwards. "Gutrot."

  "Party last night at some bird's," Hunt explained. "Too little

  blood in his alcohol stream."

  "Good time, huh?" Borlan grinned. "Take Francis along?" "You've got

  to be joking!"

  "Jollificating with the peasantry?" Gray mimicked in the impeccable

  tones of the English aristocracy. "Good God! Whatever next!"

  They laughed. Hunt settled himself more comfortably amid a haze of

  blue smoke. "How about yourself, Felix?" he asked. "Life still

  being kind to you?"

  Borlan spread his arms wide. "Life's great."

  "Angie still as beautiful as the last time I saw her? Kids okay?"

  "They're all fine. Tommy's at college now-majoring in physics and

  astronautical engineering. Johnny goes hiking most weekends with

  his club, and Susie's added a pair of gerbils and a bear cub to the

  family zoo."

  "So you're still as happy as ever. The responsibilities of power

  aren't wearing you down yet."

  Borlan shrugged and showed a row of pearly teeth. "Do I look like

  an ulcerated nut midway between heart attacks?"

  Hunt regarded the blue-eyed, deep-tanned figure with close-cropped

  fair hair as Borlan sprawled relaxedly on the other side of the

  broad mahogany desk. He looked at least ten years younger than the

  president of any intercontinental corporation had a right to.

  For a while the small talk revolved around internal affairs at

  Metadyne. At last a natural pause presented itself. Hunt sat

  forward, his elbows resting on his knees, and contemplated the last

  drop of amber liquid in his glass as he swirled it around first

  from right to left and then back again. Finally he looked up.

  "About the scope, Felix. What's going on, then?"

  Borlan had been expecting the question. He straightened slowly in

  his chair and appeared to think for a moment. At last he said:

  "Did you see the call I made to Francis?"

  "Yep."

  "Then. . ." Borlan didn't seem sure of how to put it. ". . . I

  don't know an awful lot more than you do." He placed his hands

  palms-down on the desk man attitude of candor, but his sigh was

  that of one not really expecting to be believed. He was right.

  "Come on, Felix. Give." Hunt's expression said the rest.

  "You must know," Gray insisted. "You fixed it all up."

  "Straight." Borlan looked from one to the other. "Look, taking

  things worldwide, who would you say our biggest customer is? It's

  no secret-UN Space Arm. We do everything for them from Lunar data

  links to-to laser terminal clusters and robot probes. Do you know

  how much revenue I've got forecast from UNSA next fiscal? Two

  hundred million bucks. . . two hundred million!"

  "So?"

  "So. . . well-when a customer like that says he needs help, he gets

  help. I'll tell you what happened. It was like this: UNSA is a big

  potential user of scopes, so we fed them all the information we've

  got on what the scope can do and how development is progressing in

  Francis's neck of the woods. One day-the day before I called

  Francis-this guy comes to see me all the way from Houston, where

  one of the big UNSA outfits has its HQ. He's an old buddy of

  mine-their top man, no less. He wants to know can the scope do this

  and can it do that, and I tell him sure it can. Then he gives me

  some examples of the things he's got in mind and he asks if we've

  got a working model yet. I tell him not yet, but that you've got a

  working prototype in England; we can arrange for him to go see it

  if he wants. But that's not what he wants. He wants the prototype

  down there in Houston, and he wants people who can operate it.

  He'll pay, he says-we can name our own figure-but he wants that

  instrument-something to do with a top-priority project down there

  that's got the whole of UNSA in a flap. When I ask him what it is,

  he clams up and says it's 'security restricted' for the moment."

  "Sounds a funny business," Hunt commented with a frown. "It'll

  cause some bloody awful problems back at Metadyne."

  "I told him all that." Borlan turned his palms upward in a gesture

  of helplessness. "I told him the score regarding the production

  schedules and availability forecasts, but he said this thing was

  big and he wouldn't go causing this kind of trouble if he didn't

  have a good reason. He wouldn't, either," Borlan added with obvious

  sincerity. "I've known him for years. He said UNSA would pay

  compensation for whatever we figure the delays will cost us."

  Borlan resumed his helpless attitude. "So what was I supposed to

  do? Was I supposed to tell an old buddy who happens to be my best

  customer to go take a jump?"

  Hunt rubbed his chin, threw back his last drop of scotch, and took

  a long, pensive draw on his cigar.

  "And that's it?" he asked at last.

  "That's it. Now you know as much as I do-except that since you left

  England we've received instructions from UNSA to start shipping the

  prototype to a place near Houston-a biological institute. The bits

  should start arriving day after tomorrow; the installation crew is

  already on its way over to begin work preparing the site."

  "Houston. . . Does that mean we're going there?" Gray asked.

  "That's right, Rob." Borlan paused and scratched the side of his

  nose. His face screwed itself into a crooked frown. "I, ah-I was

  wondering . . . The installation crew will need a bit of time, so

  you two won't be able to do very much there for a while. Maybe you

  could spend a few days here first, huh? Like, ah . . . meet some of

  our technical people and clue them in a little on how the scope

  works-sorta like a teach-in. What d'you say-huh?"

  Hunt laughed silently inside. Borlan had been complaining to

  Forsyth-Scott for months that while the largest potential markets

  for the scope lay in the USA, practically all of the know-how was

  confined to Metadyne; the American side of the organization needed

  more in the way of backup and information than it had been getting.

  "You never miss a trick, Felix," he conceded. "Okay, you bum, I'll

  buy it."

  Borlan's face split into a wide grin.

  "This UNSA character you were talking about," Gray
said, switching

  the subject back again. "What were the examples?"

  "Examples?"

  "You said he gave some examples of the kind of thing he was

  interested in knowing if the scope could do."

  "Oh, yeah. Well, lemme see, now. . . He seemed interested in

  looking at the insides of bodies-bones, tissues, arteries-stuff

  like that. Maybe he wanted to do an autopsy or something. He also

  wanted to know if you could get images of what's on the pages of a

  book, but without the book being opened."

  This was too much. Hunt looked from Borlan to Gray and back again,

  mystified.

  "You don't need anything like a scope to perform an autopsy," he

  said, his voice strained with disbelief.

  "Why can't he open a book if he wants to know what's inside?" Gray

  demanded in a similar tone.

  Borlan showed his empty palms. "Yeah. I know. Search me-sounds

  screwy!"

  "And UNSA is paying thousands for this?"

  "Hundreds of thousands."

  Hunt covered his brow and shook his head in exasperation. "Pour me

  another scotch, Felix," he sighed.

  chapter four

  A week later the Mercury Three stood ready for takeoff on the

  rooftop of IDCC Headquarters. In reply to the queries that appeared

  on the pilot's console display screen, Hunt specified the Ocean

  Hotel in the center of Houston as their destination. The DEC

  minicomputer in the nose made contact with its IBM big brother that

  lived underground somewhere beneath the Portland Area Traffic

  Control Center and, after a brief consultation, announced a flight

  plan that would take them via Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, and Fort

  Worth. Hunt keyed in his approval, and within minutes the aircar

  was humming southeast and climbing to take on the challenge of the

  Blue Mountains looming ahead.

  Hunt spent the first part of the journey assessing his office files

  held on the computers back at Metadyne, to tidy up some of the

  unfinished business he had left behind. As the waters of the Great

  Salt Lake came glistening into view, he had just completed the

  calculations that went with his last experimental report and was

  adding his conclusions. An hour later, twenty thousand feet up over

  the Colorado River, he was hooked into MIT and reviewing some of

  their current publications. After refueling at Santa Fe they spent

  some time cruising around the city on manual control before finding

  somewhere suitable for lunch. Later on in the day, airborne over

  New Mexico, they took an incoming call from IDCC and spent the next

  two hours in conference with some of Borlan's engineers discussing

  technicalities of the scope. By the time Fort Worth was behind and

  the sun well to the west, Hunt was relaxing, watching a murder

  movie, while Gray slept soundly in the seat beside him.

  Hunt looked on with detached interest as the villain was unmasked,

  the hero claimed the admiring heroine he had just saved from a fate

  worse than death, and the rolling captions delivered today's moral

  message for mankind. Stifling a yawn, he flipped the mode switch to

  MONITOR/CONTROL to blank out the screen and kill the theme music in

  midbar. He stretched, stubbed out his cigarette, and hauled himself

  upright in his seat to see how the rest of the universe was getting

  along.

  Far to their right was the Brazos River, snaking south toward the

  Gulf, embroidered in gold thread on the light blue-gray of the

  distant haze. Ahead, he could already see the rainbow towers of

  Houston, standing at attention on the skyline in a tight defensive

  platoon. Houses were becoming noticeably more numerous in the

  foreground below. At intervals between them, unidentifiable

  sprawling constructions began to make their appearance-random

  collections of buildings, domes, girder lattices, and storage

  tanks, tied loosely together by tangles of roadways and pipelines.

  Farther away to the left, a line of perhaps half a dozen slim

  spires of silver reared up from a shantytown of steel and concrete.

  He identified them as gigantic Vega satellite ferries standing on

  their launch-pads. They seemed fitting sentinels to guard the

  approaches to what had become the Mecca of the Space Age.

  As Victor Hunt gazed down upon this ultimate expression of man's

  eternal outward urge, spreading away in every direction below, a

  vague restlessness stirred somewhere deep inside him.

  Hunt had been born in New Cross, the shabby end of East London,

  south of the river. His father had spent most of his life on strike

  or in the pub on the corner of the street debating grievances worth

  going on strike for. When he ran out of money and grievances, he

  worked on the docks at Deptford. Victor's mother worked in a bottle

  factory all day to make the money she lost playing bingo all

  evening. He spent his time playing football and falling in the

  Surrey Canal. There was a week when he stayed with an uncle in

  Worcester, a man who went to work dressed in a suit every day at a

  place that manufactured computers. And his uncle showed Victor how

  to wire up a binary adder.

  Not long afterward, everyone was yelling at everyone more often

  than usual, so Victor went to live with his aunt and uncle in

  Worcester. There he discovered a whole new, undreamed-of world

  where anything one wanted could be made to happen and magic things

  really came true-written in strange symbols and mysterious diagrams

  through the pages of the books on his uncle's shelves.

  At sixteen, Victor won a scholarship to Cambridge to study

  mathematics, physics, and physical electronics. He moved into

  lodgings there with a fellow student named Mike who sailed boats,

  climbed mountains, and whose father was a marketing director.

  When his uncle moved to Africa, Victor was adopted as a second son

  by Mike's family and spent his holidays at their home in Surrey or

  climbing with Mike and his friends, first in the hills of the Lake

  District, North Wales, and Scotland, and later in the Alps. They

  even tried the Eiger once, but were forced back by bad weather.

  After being awarded his doctorate, he remained at the university

  for some years to further his researches in mathematical

  nucleonics, his papers on which were by that time attracting

  widespread attention. Eventually, however, he was forced to come to

  terms with the fact that a growing predilection for some of the

  more exciting and attractive ingredients of life could not be

  reconciled with an income dependent on research grants. For a while

  he went to work on thermonuclear fusion control for the government,

  but rebelled at a life made impossible by the meddlings of

  uninformed bureaucracy. He tried three jobs in private industry but

  found himself unable to muster more than a cynical indisposition

  toward playing the game of pretending that annual budgets, gross

  margins on sales, earnings per share, or discounted cash flows

  really meant anything that mattered. And so, when he was just

  turning thirty, the loner he had always been finally asserted
/>   itself; he found himself gifted with rare and acknowledged talents,

  lettered with degrees, credited with achievements, bestowed with

  awards, cited with honors-and out of a job.

  For a while he paid the rent by writing articles for scientific

  journals. Then, one day, he was offered a free-lance assignment by

  the chief R and D executive of Metadyne to help out on the

  mathematical interpretation of some of their experimental work.

  This assignment led to another, and before long a steady

  relationship had developed between him and the company. Eventually

  he agreed to join them full-time in return for use of their

  equipment and services for his own researches-but under his

  conditions. And so the Theoretical Studies "Department" came into

  being.

  And now. . . something was missing. The something within him that

  had been awakened long ago in childhood would always crave new

  worlds to discover. And as he gazed out at the Vega ships. .

  His thoughts were interrupted as a stream of electromagnetic

  vibrations from somewhere below was transformed into the code which

  alerted the Mercury's flight-control processor. The stubby wing

  outside the cockpit dipped and the aircar turned, beginning the

  smooth descent that would merge its course into the eastbound

  traffic corridor that led to the heart of the city at two thousand

  feet.

  chapter five

  The morning sun poured in through the window and accentuated the

  chiseled crags of the face staring out, high over the center of

  Houston. The squat, stocky frame, conceivably modeled on that of a

  Sherman tank, threw a square slab of shadow on the carpet behind.

  The stubby fingers hammered a restless tattoo on the glass. Gregg

  Caldwell, executive director of the Navigation and Communications

  Division of UN Space Arm, reflected on developments so far.

  Just as he'd expected, now that the initial disbelief and

  excitement had worn off, everyone was jostling for a slice of the

  action. In fact, more than a few of the big wheels in some

  divisions-Biosciences, Chicago, and Space Medicine, Farnborough,

  for instance-were mincing no words in asking just how Navcomms came

  to be involved at all, let alone running the show, since the

  project obviously had no more connection with the business of