Lucy and Ray Read online

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. There’s a complete media lock on the whole problem. You’ll be given all the information you need in order to go over it as you get to the station. I’ve arranged to have Arthur Bolt put in charge of your division. He’ll be picking it up this afternoon.”

  “Bolt’s family is from Puerto Rico,” Ray pointed out.

  “You’re suggesting he might fail to exhibit sufficient detachment from the situation?”

  Ray swallowed. He didn’t want to get Bolt in trouble, but standard policy was to keep people away from major corporate maneuvers near their relatives, and Ray had always thought it was a good policy. Certainly not everyone, but some people did tend to shy away from arranging pre-emptive strikes against their old neighbourhoods. Not that Puerto Rico was going to require anything nearly so drastic. Not if everything went well.

  “You may want to partition my work. Bolt would be fine for the work in Indonesia, but I’d want to find somebody else for the islands.”

  “Owen doesn’t have enough seniority.”

  “I know that. That’s why we need to have this three-hour meeting.”

  “He’ll have to get by without it. You’re going to be off the planet.”

  “What if I don’t like it?”

  “You don’t have to like it. You wouldn’t believe the number of things I do every day that I don’t like. Liking has nothing to do with it.”

  “So you’ll use Owen for Puerto Rico?”

  “Whatever. I don’t feel strongly one way or the other. Handle it internally.”

  Now what the heck is that all about? Ray thought. Nobody can avoid running things when they get half a chance. Was Jones sick? Not sick, but clearly impatient to get onto the next chore.

  “I’m sure you can take care of booking your own flight,” Jones said, which was supposed to be a dismissal.

  In Ray’s opinion, this was not worth having waited half an hour for.

  “That’s not enough,” he said. “I want to hear more.”

  “I can’t tell you more. Because I don’t know anything that isn’t in the reports you’ll get. And you’ll have plenty of time to read those while you’re on your way out there, so you shouldn’t have to waste time that both of us could be spending on other things.”

  “Whose budget does it come out of?” Ray asked. “Do I get an account number for this?”

  Ted put his caller on hold.

  “Actually,” he said. “You’ll be on sick leave. We’ll pay your regular salary, plus whatever legitimate expenses, provided you submit the usual receipts. But you won’t be officially working on this project, if you understand me.”

  Then Ted Jones went back to listening to his ear jack, and he waved Ray carelessly toward the door.

  And that was that.

  Historical interlude

  Phoenix II was the RISK corporation’s second attempt at an interstellar space station. It was set up outside the asteroid belt, where materials had been handy and Earth itself not too far away. The original Phoenix station had been the product of a joint effort by a number of governments. At least, that was the popular understanding.

  In actual fact, it had been built almost entirely by RISK, which had contracted its services to the various agencies responsible. It made good economic sense for the different governments to employ a single supplier of services, since whoever did the work had to get people and equipment out past the asteroid belt.

  The station was finished late in the twenty-first century and within less than a decade it was rendered uninhabitable by a nuclear accident. But it had operated long enough for Earth to get her first interstellar missions sent out. Unfortunately, the accident at the space station took place before the survivors of the interstellar missions returned, so they had no place to dock. The first ship back had placed itself in orbit around Earth and shuttled its people down, but as a long-term solution, operating without a station would be expensive, and therefore seemed inadvisable. Since that ship was only the first of many, an RFP had gone out for the station that would replace Phoenix. It would be one of the biggest construction projects ever undertaken.

  The already-wealthy RISK corporation won the bid. There were complaints from rival companies, but RISK’s success was actually a foregone conclusion, since it had wielded its substantial political power at every stage of the process. RISK officials had first broached the idea in several high government offices around the globe. RISK engineers had proposed the design of the station. RISK writers worded the offer to tender. Since RISK had been involved in every large station ever built, from early permanently-staffed geo-synchronous Earth platforms to the Mars station and outpost at Saturn, not to mention the first Phoenix, it did have the most expertise. And the most clout when it came to handling things right. If you wanted to get off Earth in the twentieth century, you joined the military. If you wanted off Earth in the twenty-first century, you worked for RISK. Many of the employees looked back wistfully to the good old days.

  Ray leaves town

  The rest of Ray’s afternoon was full of meetings and phone calls.

  “What do you mean we can’t meet?” Owen said. “We had this appointment booked for weeks already. Then your secretary tells me to make it tomorrow instead. And now you say we can’t get together at all. You can’t dump something like Puerto Rico in my lap without filling me in. Lives are at stake here, Ray.”

  “I’m leaving town tomorrow,” Ray said. “In fact, I’m leaving the whole planet. I’m booked on the first shuttle out.”

  “What is it? Some kind of emergency, or what?”

  Ray sighed and shrugged, embarrassed to even have to try to uphold such a ridiculous premise.

  “I’m taking a vacation,” he said, “and heading out to Phoenix II.”

  “You’re joking. You call that a vacation?”

  “That’s what I’m calling it, and that’s all I want to say about it.”

  There, he thought, now I’ve already said too much.

  “You could confide in somebody once in a while.”

  Ray didn’t even consider it.

  “I don’t know why we didn’t catch it at our end, but I’m sorry it’s going to leave you in the lurch.”

  “I’ll muddle through somehow.”

  “My administrative people can get you my working notes,” Ray offered. “That ought to help a little.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  It’s no wonder nobody likes this guy, Owen thought. He’s just not reliable.

  Ray’s next caller was Arthur Bolt.

  “So they’re pulling you out of Jakarta?” Bolt said. “I don’t want to sound critical, old man, but I do think it’s a good choice on their part. I have a few ideas about how we should handle things down there, and it looks like somebody up top has been listening to me. Don’t take it too hard, though. I’m sure it’s just a change in policy and not anything personal.”

  “I’m sure you’ll take good care of it,” Ray said. “You can get all the budget details out of the system. Just talk to my secretary while I’m gone.”

  “That’s very decent of you. I’m sure we’ll take good care of it. I hear via the grapevine you’re getting a bit of a breather.”

  “That’s right. Nothing like a break to put the life back in you.”

  “Vitamins. That’s what I use. You need plenty of B12. And sunlight. You wouldn’t believe all the things your body can do for you if you give it the right tools to work with.”

  “Vitamins. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Stock in Arthur Bolt, Bolt thought, is definitely rising.

  “Toodley-oo,” he said. “Catch you on the flip side.”

  “I’ll talk to you when I get back,” Ray said. “Good luck.”

  He reached in his drawer and found a bottle of something for headaches and another bottle of antacid.

  Does the base in the antacid, he wondered, cancel out the acid in the headache remedy? That would be the kind of thing
Bolt would know. Or believe that he knew.

  Ray’s 4:00 meeting ran over until 6:15, and he stopped on the way home to pick up a hamburger. When he got home there was, as usual, nobody there, and no messages on the machine. His brother, who lived in another city, had decided to get Ray some fish one time, but they’d all been dead within a month.

  “I don’t have any time for a pet,” he said to his brother.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” his sister-in-law had answered. “Anybody can take care of a couple of fish.”

  “And they’ll keep you company,” his brother added. “You need some life in that place. You’ve got that huge apartment and you’re the only living thing in sight. Why did you get rid of those African violets, for instance?”

  “I gave them to a friend,” Ray lied. “All her plants had died, and so I gave mine to her. I was always forgetting to water them. You’re the one with the green thumb in the family.”

  “You should see our garden,” his sister-in-law said. “It’s really great this year. We’ve already got corn higher than our heads, and it’s not even mid-July.”

  “You guys are amazing,” Ray said. “And thanks for the fish. Really. I’m sure they’re going to be great.”

  *

  The expert at the pet store explained it was something to do with salt-water environments.

  “Tropical fish are hard,” he sympathized. “You can practically kill them with a draft.”

  “A draft?” Ray said. “They’re underwater.”

  “They’re very sensitive to temperature change,” the expert said, “And also to any change in the composition of the water. We had a whole tank go bad one time because somebody threw a pencil into it, and we never noticed. The pencil floated on top of the water, and all the fish got lead poisoning or something.”

  “You mean graphite.”

  “They all died, anyway,” the guy answered. “So do you want to replace them, or what?”

  “I want to find out if I can get anything for the aquarium,” Ray said.

  “We’ll put it on our list. If anybody asks about used equipment, we’ll have them call you.”

  “Can’t I just sell it to you guys? I’m not at home very much.”

  “Sure. We can’t give you very much for it, though.”

  “I don’t care about the money. I just want it to be somebody else’s problem.”

  *

  He looked around his apartment now. No plants, because he would only have to pay somebody to come in and water them. No animals, because they were even less forgiving than plants. He wondered briefly if there was anyone he should call, to let them know he’d be out of town. His brother’s family was on holidays somewhere, and they only ever met with Ray once or twice a year anyway, when they happened to be in town. There was nobody else.

  Ray packed a few essentials in a bag, then realized he wasn’t sure how long he’d be away.

  “Computer,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Change my phone message. Record the following: Hi, this is Ray. I’m not going to be able to return your call, so there’s not much point leaving a message. If you need to get ahold of me, try leaving a message with my secretary at work.”

  He added the secretary’s number, and that was the end of his travel preparations.

  A bad flight

  Ray’s computer woke him up at 5:00 a.m. and he made it to the launch site in time to pick up some magazines, and still get on board with more than an hour to spare. The seat beside his was vacant, so Ray got out the file from Jones and scanned its contents.

  The problem out at Phoenix II was simple. An unmanned probe had shown up and docked itself, then tied into the station’s computers and started draining information. The media had been kept out of it by the simple expedient of clamping down all station transmissions to Earth except the one packet coming direct from the station manager’s office. The military had nothing to do with it—in fact, may not have even heard about it—because RISK security, especially at Phoenix II, was legendary.

  The first question that came to Ray’s mind was who owned the probe. There were at least three rival companies that might be big enough to build one, and two of them had been recently escalating their infighting. That kind of behaviour, Ray thought, could easily be set up to camouflage a joint move on RISK. Together there was no question they would’ve had sufficient resources to build an unmanned probe. The question was, how could their probe be technologically advanced enough to dock at Phoenix II on autopilot, and how could it break the computer security? The station’s records would be worth something to the competition, but the investment seemed too big to be cost-effective. They could much easier have just hired a spy to violate station security.

  Maybe, Ray thought, it was a military maneuver. But there weren’t any countries powerful enough to take on even the smallest of RISK’s competitors, let alone RISK itself.

  Ray turned back to the notes.

  The probe had started broadcasting on all frequencies. Its message declared that it was a friendly probe from an alien race. Since everything they had tried against it had proven ineffectual, everyone was relieved to hear the friendly part. They’d already sent an urgent message to the head offices of the RISK corporation asking for further instructions. The machine was, after all, draining all the information available on humanity as fast as it could.

  When the message got to Earth it seemed particularly sensitive, so it was handed to a variety of official levels for debate, and to one unofficial level—Ted Jones—for action. Most important business was handled that way, allowing the decision to be made and enacted in time for the public decision-makers to work the results into their deliberations. Ted’s decision was to hand the problem to Ray, without any further instructions. It was Ray’s responsibility to get the probe away from the station.

  Ray looked up from his reading.

  “How long before we take off?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?’ the stewardess said. “We’re already underway.”

  “Oh. Are we? Then turn this ship around.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that, sir. But would you like a glass of wine before your meal?”

  “Just a coffee, thanks,” Ray said, and closed his briefcase.

  “First time up?” someone asked from across the aisle. “It always makes me nervous, too. But don’t worry—you’ll get over it.”

  “No,” Ray protested. “I’ve flown before. I—”

  “I remember the first time. I thought I’d never keep my lunch down. That was on the old shuttle service. I was just a kid, of course, but there I was, headed up into space.”

  “Why was that?” Ray asked, finding himself caught with a mild curiousity.

  “Engineer,” the man said. “My mom was a big engineer with Conway, if you remember them. Part of RISK, now, of course, like everybody else. The big fish, they swallow the little fish. But Conway had their day, let me tell you. So they took me up to see where she worked. I’ll never forget it.”

  “It was exciting,” Ray gave up altogether and prompted the man.

  “Nothing like it. I never got over it. That’s what I am these days—an engineer, just like my mom.”

  “With RISK?”

  “Yeah. I’m a RISKee, all right. I helped design this ship we’re in right now.”

  He leaned conspiratorially over to Ray.

  “I tried to get them to leave more leg room, you know? These seats aren’t what I would’ve put in, not by a long shot. But I’m just an engineer. Nobody listens to me.”

  “It’s always tough on the little guy.”

  “You can say that again. I remember the fights we used to have about it. You wouldn’t think it’s such a big deal, would you? How much leg room there is in a shuttle. But the guy in charge was just this little tiny guy, like one of them action figures the kids used to have when they were little.”

  “I know the ones.”

  “Yeah. So you know what they say—the smalle
r the man, the more he has to prove he’s a big shot.”

  “That’s just a stereotype. I know lots of little guys that are okay.”

  “Yeah,” the engineer admitted. “But this one, he was a real cock rooster. ‘If I had an extra twenty-eight inches,’ he said, ‘I’d put a quarter of a million dollars’ extra cargo space in her.’ That was what the difference was. Twenty eight lousy inches, and we’d all’ve had room to stretch our legs a bit.”

  “But they wouldn’t approve the extra space?”

  “Not a snowball’s chance in perdition, if you’ll pardon my French. It’d cost them something to the tune of an extra ten million dollars, is what they come up with. If you can imagine that. Ten million dollars for bigger seats.”

  “It seems unlikely.”

  “You bet it is. They said they’d have to make the cabin bigger, and that’s going to affect the wing span, and the engines would have to be X amount stronger to take care of the longer wings. ‘Just move the bulkhead,’ I said. ‘You got thirty-seven inches worth of dead air back there, where we come up by the door.’ But no, this designer, he had a bunch of fancy answers about that thirty-seven inches, how the aerodynamics weren’t going to be stable if we pushed the weight back by that much. I figure if that was true, which I never had it proved that it was, then the thing wasn’t stable enough to be flying in the first place.”

  “And is it?”

  “Not really. These old models, they got computers’re actually changing the shape of the wing surface while it flies. One of them computers goes down, the whole thing explodes like an egg in a microwave.”

  “It can’t be that bad. They must have backup computers.”

  “Sure they do. But do you think anybody ever checks that they’re running? Answer me that.”

  Then the stewardess came back, and Ray stowed the briefcase under his seat, to make room for his coffee cup.

  Alien machine

  The alien machine on Phoenix II was still draining the computers like mad. George Mendes, President of Phoenix Industries, was beside himself.

  “Thank God you’re here,” he said, grabbing Ray by the arm and leading him away from the lineup at the return-ticket counter.