Robert Heinlein - The Number of the Beast

This makes Pop sound like Paul Bunyan. Pop could have built Snug Harbor with his own hands. But Spanish-speaking labor from Nogales built the underground and assembled the prefab shell of the cabin. An air crane fetched parts and materials from an Albuquerque engineering company Jane had bought for Pop through a front-lawyers in Dallas. The company's manager drove the air crane himself, having had it impressed on him that this was for a rich client of the law firm, and that it would be prudent to do the job and forget it. Pop bossed the work in TexMex, with help from his secretary-me- Spanish being one language I had picked for my doctorate.

Laborers and mechanics never got a chance to pinpoint where they were, but they were well paid, well fed, comfortably housed in prefabs brought in by crane, and the backbreaking labor was done by power-who cares what "locos gringos" do? Two pilots had to know where we were building, but they homed in on a radar beacon that is no longer there.

"Blokes in Black Hats" had nothing to do with this secrecy; it was jungle caution I had learned from Mama: Never let the revenooers know anything. Pay cash, keep your lips closed, put nothing through banks that does not appear later in tax returns-pay taxes greater than your apparent standard of living and declare income accordingly. We had been audited three times since Mama died; each time the government returned a small "overpayment"- I was building a reputation of being stupid and honest.

My inquiry of "Swim, anybody?" was greeted with silence. Then Pop said, "Zeb, your wife is too energetic. Deety, later the water will be warmer and the trees will give us shade. Then we can walk slowly down to the pool. Zeb?"

"I agree, Jake. I need to conserve ergs."

"Nap?"

"I don't have the energy to take one. What were you saying this morning about reengineering the system?"

Aunt Hilda looked startled. "I thought Miss Gay Deceiver was already engineered? Are you thinking of changing everything?"

"Take it easy, Sharpie darlin'. Gay Deceiver is finished. A few things to stow that have been weighed and their moment arms calculated."

I could have told her. In the course of figuring what could be stowed in every nook and cranny and what that would do to Gay's balance, I had discovered that my husband had a highly illegal laser cannon. I said nothing, merely included its mass and distance from optimum center of weight in my calculations. I sometimes wonder which of us is the outlaw: Zebadiah or I? Most males have an unhealthy tendency to ob&y laws. But that concealed Lcannon made me wonder.

"Why not leave well enough alone?" Aunt Hilda demanded. "Jacob and God know I'm happy here... But You All Know Why We Should Not Stay Here Longer Than We Must."

"We weren't talking about Gay Deceiver; Jake and I were discussing reengineering the Solar System."

"The Solar System! What's wrong with it the way it is?"

"Lots of things," Zebadiah told Aunt Hilda. "It's untidy. Real estate going to waste. This tired old planet is crowded and sort o' worn in spots. True, industry in orbit and power from orbit have helped, and both Lagrange-Four and -Five have self-supporting populations; anybody who invested in space stations early enough made a pile." (Including Pop, Zebadiah!) "But these are minor compared with what can be done-and this planet is in worse shape each year. Jake's six-dimensional principle can change that."

"Move people into another universe? Would they go?"

"We weren't thinking of that, Hilda. We're trying to apply Clarke's Law."

"I don't recall it. Maybe it was while I was out with mumps."

"Arthur C. Clarke," Pop told her. "Great man-too bad he was liquidated in The Purge. Clarke defined how to make a great discovery or create a key invention. Study what the most respected authorities agree can not be done- then do it. My continua craft is a godchild of Clarke via his Law. His insight inspired my treatment of six-dimensional continua. But this morning Zeb added corollaries."

"Jake, don't kid the ladies. I asked a question; you grabbed the ball and ran."

"Uh, we heterodyned. Hilda, you know that the time-space traveler doesn't require power."

"I'm afraid I don't know, darling man. Why were you installing power packs in Gay Deceiver?"

"Auxiliary uses. So that you won't have to cook over an open fire, for example."

"But the pretzel bender doesn't use po~er," agreed Zebadiah. "Don't ask why. I did, and Jake started writing equations in Sanskrit and I got a headache."

"It doesn't use power, Aunt Hilda," I agreed. "Just parasitic power. A few microwatts so that the gyros never slow down, milliwatts for instrument readouts and for controls-but the widget itself uses none."

"What happened to the law of conservation of energy?"

"Sharpie," my husband answered, "as a fairish mechanic, an amateur electron pusher, and as a bloke who has herded unlikely junk through the sky, I never worry about theory as long as machinery does what it is supposed to do. I worry when a machine turns and bites me. That's why I specialize in fail-safes and backups and triple redundancy. I try never to get a machine sore at me. There's no theory for that but every engineer knows it."

"Hilda my beloved, the law of conservation of mass-energy is not broken by our continua craft; it is simply not relevant to it. Once Zeb understood that-"

"I didn't say I understood it."

"Well... once Zeb stipulated that, he raised interesting questions. For example: Jupiter doesn't need Ganymede-"

"Whereas Venus does. Although Titan might be better."

"Mmm... possible."

"Yes. Make an inhabitable base more quickly. But the urgent prob1em~:

Jake, is to seed Venus, move atmosphere to Mars, put both of them through;, forced aging. Then respot them. Earth-Sol Trojan points?"

"Certainly. We've had millions of years of evolution this distance from the Sun. We had best plan on living neither closer nor farther. With careful attention to stratospheric protection. But I still have doubts about anchoring in the Venerian crust. We wouldn't want to lose the planet on Tau axis."

"Mere R. & D., Jake. Calculate pressures and temperatures; beef up the vehicle accordingly-spherical, save for exterior anchors-then apply a jigger factor of four. With automatic controls quintuply redundant. Catch it when it comes out and steady it down in Earth's orbit, sixty degrees trailing-and start selling subdivisions the size of old Spanish Land Grants. Jake, we should gather enough mass to create new earths at all Trojan points, a hexagon around the Sun. Five brand-new earths would give the race room enough to. breed. On this maiden voyage let's keep our eyes open."

Aunt Hilda looked at Zebadiah with horror. "Zebbie! Creating planets in~ deed! Who do you think you are? Jesus Christ?"

"I'm not that junior. That's the Holy Ghost over there, scratching his belly., The Supreme Inseminator. I'm the other one, the Maker and Shaper. But ii~ setting up a pantheon for the Celestial Age, we're going to respect women'S rights, Hilda. Deety is Earth Mother; she's perfect for the job. You are Moofl Goddess, Selene. Good job, dear-more moons than earths. It fits you. You'r~ little and silvery and you wax and wane and you're beautiful in all your phaseS~ How about it? Us four and no more."

"Quit pulling my leg!"

My husband answered, "I haven't been pulling your leg. Come closer and I will; you have pretty legs, Step-Mother-in-Law. These things Jake and I have been discussing are practical-once we thought about the fact that the spacetime twister uses no power. Move anything anywhere-all spaces, all times. I add the plural because at first I could not see what Jake had in mind when he spoke of forced aging of a planet. Rotate Venus into the Tau axis, fetch it back along Teh axis, reinsert it centuries-or millennia-older at this point in 't' axis. Perhaps translate it a year or so into the future-our future-so as to be ready for it when it returns, all sweet and green and beautiful and ready to grow children and puppies and butterflies. Terraformed but virginal."