Astounding – October 1958
(1958)*
Randall Garrett
If we could only get hold of a working interstellar spaceship, we would of course be out among the stars ourselves. They keep telling us...!
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I DON'T KNOW who got me into it. Somebody mentioned my name to somebody else, I suppose, and then some third party agreed, so my name was sent to the FBI. Those worthy gentlemen stewed over my recorded past and my reputable present, and came up with a forecast on my probable future, all of which was duly forwarded to the persons interested. They chewed it all over, and I was nabbed for the job.
Of course, it wasn't quite as crude as that. They couldn't and didn't draft me; instead, they got Hoffstetter to do it He was the perfect man for the job, too; he knows that the way to whet the scientific appetite is to give it a tidbit that it can't swallow until it's been chewed over for a long time.
He came strolling into my lab one day with a grin spread across his chubby face and said: "Hi, Doc. I asked at your office first, but the girl said you'd be in the lab. I should have known you'd never go in for paper work."
"Hi, Hoff," I said. "Still working for Uncle Sam'l?"
"Well, it feels like work, and I'm drawing a paycheck. What's cooking?"
He meant the question literally. He was pointing at the Wolff flask on the lab bench in front of me. There was a thermometer in one neck, a mercury-sealed electric stirrer in another, and a specially designed fractionating column attached to the third. The whole thing was attached to a vacuum pump, and the stuff in the flask was boiling merrily.
I knew he wasn't really interested, so I just said: "A bunch of benzine derivatives, I hope. What's on your mind, Hoff?"
"I've got a job for you, Doc," Hoffstetter said casually.
I peered at the thermometer, checked the time, and put the figures on my data sheet. "Yeah? What kind of a job?"
His grin grew wider. "Now, what kind of a job would I be giving to the world's greatest chemist? Dishwashing?"
"I've done plenty of that," I told him. "And knock off that 'world's greatest' bunk. I'm not, and you know it"
"You are as far as this job is concerned. Here." He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small box. He set it on the lab bench and flipped it open. It was padded inside like a jeweler's box, and a small sealed flask nestled itself comfortably in the padding. The flask wasn't any bigger than the first joint of my thumb. It was about three-quarters full of some straw-colored liquid.
I didn't pick it up. I just looked at it and then looked up at Hoffstetter. "So?"
"It's all yours," he said, "all one and a half milliliters of it. We want to know what it is."
This time, I picked the flask up. It was a trifle heavier than I'd expected it to be. The liquid inside was more viscous than water. In fact, the stuff looked and flowed like a good grade of light machine oil.
"Where'd you get it?" I asked.
"I can't tell you, Doc," Hoffstetter said.
That irritated me. "Well, is there anything you can tell me? This bottle's sealed. What happens if I break the seal? Does it oxidize on exposure to air, or evaporate, or what?"
"Oh, that. That was just to prevent leakage. No, it's fairly stable, I imagine. Odorless. Nonpoisonous, as far as I know, though I don't think anyone's tried to taste it. Oily. I don't know the boiling point."
I was holding the flask up to the light, and I noticed that the meniscus at the surface was convex. "And it doesn't wet glass," I said.
"Hell," said Hoffstetter, "it doesn't wet anything."
"Interesting," I admitted. "Is this the biggest sample you could get?"
Hoffstetter spread his hands. "It's all I have."
"Not much to work with," I told him, "but I'll see what I can do."
"Fair enough," he said. "Send the analysis and the bill to me, personally." He handed me a card. "And keep it under your hat."
"Fair enough," I said. "I'll let you know in a week or so."
It was a lot less than a week. Three days later, I got Hoffstetter on the phone. "Hoff, where the devil did you get that stuff?"
"Why?" he countered. "What's that got to do with it?"
"Because it doesn't act like anything I ever came across before."
"You mean you can't analyze it?" he asked. His voice sounded worried.
"I didn't say that. The first thing I did was get a spectroscope reading, so I can tell you to a T what elements are in the stuff. But the molecular weight is something fierce. It's way too high."
"What do you mean, 'too high'?"
"Well, the stuff ought to be a solid, not a nice, free-flowing liquid," I told him. "And it's a devil of a lot more stable than it ought to be, all things considered. Can you possibly get me any more of it?"
There was a silence at the other end for a moment. Then Hoffstetter said: "Do you think you could analyze it if you had more time and more of the stuff?"
"Sure. Where can I get it?"
Hoffstetter had me with a gaff, and he knew it. I could almost see his grin coming across the phone wires. He made his proposition. I hemmed and hawed for all of five minutes before I took it.
It didn't take long for me to get a leave of absence from my own company. I just left it in the hands of my business partner, George Avery, and took off. The lab staff could handle almost anything that came along while I was gone. Hoffstetter and I caught a commercial airline stratocruiser out to the West Coast, and an Air Force jet bomber took us from there. I had no idea of where we were headed, except that it was an unidentified island somewhere in the South Pacific.
The plane rolled to a halt at the end of a long runway. A squad of Air Force men, each armed with a heavy pistol at his belt, came sprinting up to help us unload. I'd requisitioned some equipment I needed from the Air Force labs, and it was all neatly packed in crates in the belly of the ship. The Air Force men treated the crates as though they were babies, which I appreciated no little.
The first thing that caught my eyes as I stepped off the plane was the big metal dome that towered over every other building on the base, even the control tower. It looked thick and squat, even so; it looked like a big, flat, black Easter egg sitting on its larger end. It was a hundred feet high and at least seventy-five feet through at its thickest part.
Don't ask me why I didn't recognize it for what it was. I should have, I suppose. I should have taken one look at it, and said to myself: "Well, what do you know? A spaceship!" but somehow I had always assumed that a spaceship would be a tall thin cigar of polished metal, not a fat, eggy-looking, dead black thing like this.
I started to ask Hoffstetter what it was, but he shook his head before I could get my mouth open. "No questions, Doc. Answers first, questions afterward."
I knew Hoffstetter well enough to know that he wasn't just making meaningless noises, so I just kept my mouth shut and followed him to the jeep which was waiting for us a few yards from the plane. The sergeant at the wheel just barely waited until we'd sat down before he gunned the motor and took off towards the nearest of the buildings at the edge of the landing field.
I was beginning to get uncomfortable. The plane had been air-conditioned, but the landing field wasn't. The hot whiteness of the Pacific sun glared down from a pale blue sky and sparkled from the deeper blue of the ocean in the distance. I saw Hoffstetter peeling off his civilian jacket, so I did likewise. If he wasn't going to be formal, neither was I.
The jeep pulled up in front of a two-story wooden building that gleamed whitely with fresh paint. Hoffstetter and I climbed out, and I followed him in through the door.
It was a normal-looking military office. Men and women in uniform sat at desks in the big room or moved through it with quiet efficiency. There was only one jarring note. Every man and woman in the place had a sidearm strapped to their waist, and every one of them gave the impression that he or she was ready, willing, and able to use it.
Hoffstetter led me to the door marked COMMANDING GENERAL. There was an Air Force captain sitting at a desk piled high with papers. At his waist was the ubiquitous sidearm. He looked up as Hoffstetter and I came in.
"Hello, Hoffstetter. I see you got your man." He had a rather tired smile on his thin face. "Let's see the papers."
Hoffstetter pulled a sheaf of official papers out of his brief case and handed them over. The captain leafed through them, nodded, stood up, and saluted. Then he held out his hand.
"Welcome aboard, commander."
I took the hand, but I didn't return the salute. Navy men don't salute unless their head is covered.
"I still don't quite understand why I had to accept active duty for this job," I told him. "I thought I'd be in the United States Naval Reserve. Inactive, for the rest of my life. Why recall me to duty just so I can go on being a chemist?"
The captain frowned. "I think you'd better ask the general about that, sir. He's expecting you."
He punched a button on the intercom on his desk and said: "Commander Barton is here, sir."
"Send him in," said the gravelly bass voice of Lieutenant general Mawson. He didn't sound as though he'd changed a bit since I'd last seen him, eight years before.
He had changed some, though. I saw that as soon as we entered the office. His hair, which had been only gray at the temples, was almost solid gray now, and the lines in his face had deepened, making it look more like weathered brown granite than ever.
"Commander Peter Barton reporting for duty, sir," I said.
He snapped me a salute and waved towards a chair. "Glad to see you, sailor. Sit down." Then he looked at Hoffstetter. "It took you long enough to get him here."
Hoffstetter grinned. "I had to twist his arm, general."
"All right. Give me those papers and scram. You'll take the same plane back as soon as she's refueled. See if you can snare Galvez for us."
"I'll try," said Hoffstetter. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Be good, Doc. I'll see you." And he was gone.
"I don't suppose you brought a uniform," said General Mawson.
"I didn't have time, sir. Everybody was in such an all-fired hurry that I couldn't get everything straightened out at home, much less think of everything I'd need here."
Mawson made a gesture of dismissal. "That's all right You won't need anything here except khakis, anyway. I did manage to get some insignia for you from one of the Navy boys, so you'll be all right" He opened a drawer of his desk and pulled out a handful of hardware—the Naval shield-and-anchors and the silver oak-leaves of a full commander.
"And I got a Navy hat for that big dome of yours—a seven and three-quarters, isn't it? Right. Go down to the QM and get some khakis, then go over to Ordnance and draw a sidearm and holster. Come back here at sixteen hundred, and don't go asking a lot of questions around here. That clear?"
"I stood up. "Yes, sir. But I'd like to ask one question of you."
"Shoot," he said. "But I don't promise an answer."
"Why was it necessary for me to sign up for active duty? Doesn't the Air Force believe in hiring civilian chemists any more?"
The general's face hardened. "Not for this job. We want you under military discipline."
"Why, sir?"
"So we can court-martial you and shoot you if we have to."
I went over to the Quartermaster building to get a uniform. The shavetail in charge gave me three suits of khakis and everything to go with them except a hat. He didn't have the regulation Navy covers. He tried to palm some field boots off on me, but I stuck with my guns and insisted on black oxfords. He gave in and then checked over his list of rooms in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters and assigned me a number and gave me the key.
Then I went over to Ordnance and picked up a sidearm, a holster, and two magazines of ammunition. I wanted to ask the Ordnance officer why it was necessary for everyone to carry a loaded pistol, but I decided that such questions just might be the kind that Mawson didn't want me to ask. And I didn't feel like breaking any regulations until I found out what was going on.
I headed for the BOQ to check in, dump my gear, and get into uniform. In the distance, I could see the towering black dome. I kept wondering what it was, but I decided not to ask any questions about the dome, either.
At sixteen hundred that afternoon, I was back in General Mawson's office. We didn't stay long. Mawson led me outside, and he headed across the compound toward the great black ovoid.
"I know you want to ask a lot of questions, Barton," General Mawson said, "but hold off a little until we can give you a connected story. It'll make things easier in the long run, and take less time. O.K.?"
"You're the general," I said. "You know more about the situation than ...
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