Zach Hughes: Pressure Man

“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 resist 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.

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.