Zach Hughes: Pressure Man

“I guess he’s showing his age,” J.J. Barnes said.

“Plus a total lack of alertness and ambition,” said another voice.

“Too much R R in the big city,” J.J. said.

Dom opened one eye. They were standing at the foot of his bed, J.J. in uniform, Art Donald in jeans and pullover. Art was a shattered shell of a man who looked as if he might disintegrate at any moment. He had lung problems. Now and then a few cells would blow a bubble in lung tissue and he’d have a rest in the hospital. His hair was black and lank, his skin pocked by ancient acne, his eyes alert. He was smoking. Art was reckless. At parties he courted blowing a lung by smoking, drinking, and keeping up with the most vigorous on the dance floor. He knew more about metals than any man alive.

“Nice to see you, Art,” Dom said.

“You want to get out of bed now?” J.J. said, with some irritation.

“No,” Dom said.

“OK, if you don’t want to watch a man ride a bomb,” J.J. said.

“I’d rather watch a woman do almost anything,” Dom said, but he swung his legs off the bed and ducked his head down when it started to spin. A nurse came out of the shadows and attacked him without warning with a pointed weapon. Almost immediately the drug began to counteract the sedative.

He was dressed within minutes and joined J.J. and Art in the hall. There was no conversation in the elevator nor in the lower lobby. It was not until they were riding one of the back-breaking underground cars that J.J. explained.

“We’ve got a test vehicle waiting about half an astronomical unit out toward Polaris,” J.J. said.

“The new power plant?”

“First live run.”

“Who’s on it?”

“Neil.”

Neil was Neil Walters. In space circles it was not necessary to use his last name. “Couldn’t ask for better,” Dom said.

He had not seen the control facility. It was a miniature Houston, and the duplication amazed him. He began to wonder what else he didn’t know about DOSEWEX.

J.J. led the way to a good seat directly behind the contact men and the consoles. Communications were established. It was that old, old simplicity of a pilot talking to the control tower. A mid-twentieth-century airlines pilot would have recognized the form and the cant of the exchange, except, possibly, for a few technical terms. Countdown was underway. Checklists were being followed.

“How many on board?” Dom asked.

“Just Neil.”

“High risk?” Dom asked.

“He knows it,” J. J. said.

“Is that smart?” Dom asked. “Neil’s the closest thing to a hero the space service has.”

“Retro switch on,” said a controller.

Seconds later, the lag telling of the distance between that enclosed room and Neil Walters’ precarious perch atop a new nuclear engine in deep space, his voice came, calm. His voice was always calm. “Retro switch on.” Neil rode a test body all the way down into the desert, regaining control just in time to make the crash survivable, and his tone of voice never changed. Only at the last moment had he stopped talking his matter-of-fact reports of engineering gone wrong and computers haywire to perform superhuman things. The cabin padding was impressed with the shape of his body. After a few weeks for allowing bones to knit, he took a reengineered body into the troposphere for a test run.

“It’ll be about fifteen minutes,” J.J. said. “Want some coffee?” When Dom nodded he snapped his fingers at a cadet.

“J.J.,” Dom said. “We’ve had this engine on the boards for years. How’d you manage to get it built now, when things are tight?”

“We didn’t really need it before,” J.J. said. “There’d be just a slight increase in velocity, because the harder you push against the constant the harder it pushes back.”

“And now that we need it for sheer power, how’d you manage it?”

“By using the last dollar of a little cushion we’ve been keeping hidden just for such an ultimate emergency as this,” J. J. said. “If we can lift three thousand tons of alien ship out of the atmosphere of Jupiter it will have been worth it.”

“And the antis have no idea you’re developing the newk engine?”

“Our great director has sworn in front of God and the U.S. Senate’s Space Committee that the newk engine has been abandoned and that DOSE never hides anything from our public servants.”

“I’m sure that God has forgiven him his untruthfulness,” Art said.

“I thought he spoke for God, himself,” Dom said.

“And the Senate will forgive him when we bring home that ship,” J.J. said.

“Minus ten and counting,” the interior sound system boomed.

“So I’m in league with criminals,” Dom said. “Do you realize that men have served hard time for lying about something much less expensive to the Congress of the United States?”

“No one lives without risk,” J. J. said.

“One thing bothers me,” Dom said. “That bogie went into Jupe two months ago and you’ve already got a hydroplant out in space ready for testing. Am I to believe that you built the damned thing in that length of time?”

“We’ve had the main components ready for years,” J.J. said. “Don’t look so grim. It’s not as serious as all that. There isn’t an agency of the government that doesn’t do the same thing. If we all stuck strictly to budget we couldn’t even hold the status quo. All the big agencies slip in a few billion here and there for padding in times of need.”

“How much padding did it take to duplicate the Houston facility here?” Dom asked.

“What would happen to all our ships in space if some Firster got into the Houston facility with a kilo of plastique?” J.J. asked.

“Aside from a few men getting killed,” Art said, “it would kill the program, because Congress would see that as an excellent opportunity to refuse to fund rebuilding the control facility.”

“But, dammit, this is just the kind of stuff the antis yell about,” Dom said. “I have to admit that for the first time I understand a little about the way they feel.”

“Top people know about this place,” J.J. said. “Even our friend from New Mexico knows. Aside from the fact that there’s no way to hide a place which sends out as much communications as we do, it was good politics for our friend, since it was in his home state and put a few million into the economy of New Mexico. He was one of the most sincere supporters of a duplicate facility, but only behind the scenes, of course.”

“Does he know about the hydrogen engine?” Dom asked.

“We hope not. We’ll know within a few days.”

“How?”

“If the senator from New Mexico knows, the Firsters know. If the Firsters know there’ll be a public outcry, at the very least, and at worst an out-and-out assault on DOSEWEX.”

“Are they that strong?” Dom asked.

“They’re strong and growing stronger every day. I’d say it’s fifty-fifty that they’ll try a frontal attack on DOSEWEX. It’s isolated. On the surface it would seem to be an easier target than, say, Houston or Canaveral, but when it comes right down to it it would be easier to take the Pentagon or Fort Knox. We’ve got two divisions of space marines within five minutes’ jump. We’ve got the latest weapons. We can fry and slice and implode and burn and freeze and dope and gas a few thousand Earthfirsters with our own security forces.”

“But you can’t keep them out of the facility,” Dom said, flourishing a bandaged foot.

The busy routine went on around them. The mechanical voice of the test coordinator continued the countdown. Dom finished his coffee. The cadet was on hand to take his empty cup.

Under ideal conditions, every ship in space should be equipped with the hydroplant. If Callisto Explorer had had hydropower it wouldn’t be sitting out there in space, a dead ship with the air going stale. The hydroplant was not absolutely necessary. The old solid-fuel rockets did the job of exploring the system and running the limited commercial traffic between Earth and Mars. Man could no longer afford expensive programs merely for the sake of progress. The offshoots of space were, almost exclusively, luxury items which the world could live without. Teflon, fabrics, micro-electronics, new scientific techniques, the ability to locate planets for the first time around the nearer stars—not one of those things put food on the table, and when a man is hungry he couldn’t care less about a planet orbiting a star so far away that he couldn’t reach it in his lifetime in one of the present-day ships.