Allan Cole: Sten

The Baron nodded. "Report."

The Chief Tech punched keys, the screen split and the details of the leak into The Row scrolled down one side. The Baron took it in instantly. The computer projected that the deadly gas would fill the rec dome in fifteen minutes.

"Why don't you fix it, Technician?"

"Because the clotting computer keeps spitting ‘Bravo Project, Bravo Project' at me," the Chief Tech snarled. "All I need is a go from you and I'll have this thing fixed in no time flat and no skin off anybody's—I'll have it fixed."

The Baron thought a moment.

"There's no approach to that leak by now except through the Bravo Project lab? Can't you just put a vacuum maintenance Tech out?"

"Not a chance. The pipe's so badly warped we'll have to chop it off at the source. Yessir. We'll have to get into the lab."

"Then I can't help you."

The Chief Tech froze.

"But—that leak won't stop at Rec Twenty-six. Clotting fluorine'll combine, and then eat anything except a glass wall."

"Then dump Twenty-six."

"But we've got almost fourteen hundred people—"

"You have your orders."

The Chief Tech stared at Thoresen. Suddenly nodded and keyed off.

The Baron sighed. He made a mental note to have Personnel up recruiting for the new unskilled-labor quotient. Then rolled the event around, to make sure he wasn't missing anything.

There was a security problem. The Chief Tech and, of course, his assistants. He could transfer the men, or, more simply—Thoresen wiped the problem out of bis mind. His dinner menu was flashing on the screen.

The Chief Tech whistled tunelessly and slowly tapped a fingernail on the screen. His assistant hovered nearby.

"Uh, don't we have to. . ."

The Chief Tech looked at him, then decided not to say anything. He turned away from the terminal, and swiftly unlocked the bright red EMERGENCY PROCEDURES INPUT control panel.

Sten pyloned off an outraged Tech and hurtled down the corridor toward The Row's entrance, fumbling for his card. The young Sociopatrolman blocked his entrance.

"I saw that, boy."

"Saw what?"

"What you did to that Tech. Don't you know about your betters?"

"Gee, sir, he was slipping. Somebody must have spilled something on the slideway. I guess it's a long way to see what exactly happened. Especially for an older man. Sir." He looked innocent.

The younger patrolman brought an arm back, but his partner caught his wrist. "Don't bother. That's Sten's boy."

"We still oughta. . .oh, go ahead, Mig. Go on in."

"Thank you, sir."

Sten stepped up to the gate and held his card to the pickup.

"Keep going like you are, boy, and, you know what'll happen?"

Sten waited.

"You'll run away. To the Delinqs. And then we'll go huntin' you. You know what happens when we rat those Delinqs out? We brainburn 'em."

The patrolman grinned.

"They're real cute, then. Sometimes they let us have the girls for a few shifts. . .before they put them out on the slideways."

Hydraulics screamed suddenly, and the dome seal-off doors crashed across the entrance. Sten fell back out of the way, going down.

He looked at the two patrolmen. Started to say something. . .then followed their eyes to the flashing red lights over the entrance:

ENTRANCE SEALED. . .EMERGENCY. . .EMERGENCY. . .

He slowly picked himself up. "My parents," Sten said numbly. "They're inside!"

And then he was battering at the solid steel doors until the older patrolman pulled him away.

Explosive bolts fired around six of the dome panels. The tiny snaps were lost in the typhoon roar of air blasting out into space.

Almost in slow motion, the escaping hurricane caught the shanty cubicles of The Row, and the people in them, and spat them through the holes into blackness.

And then the sudden wind died.

What remained of buildings, furniture, and the stuff of life drifted in the cold gleam of the faraway sun. Along with the dry, shattered husks of 1,385 human beings.

Inside the empty dome that had been The Row, the Chief Tech stared out the port of the control capsule. His assistant got up from his board, walked over and put his hand on the Tech's arm.

"Come on. They were only Migs."

The Chief Tech took a deep breath.

"Yeah. You're right. That's all they were."

IMAGINE VULCAN.

A junkyard, hanging in blackness and glare. Its center a collection of barrels, mushrooms, tubes, and blocks stacked haphazardly by an idiot child.

Imagine the artificial world of Vulcan, the megabillion-credit heart of the Company. The ultimate null-environment machine shop and factory world.

The Company's oreships streamed endlessly toward Vulcan with raw materials. Refining, manufacture, sub- and in many cases final assembly of products was completed, and the Company's freighters delivered to half the galaxy. To an empire founded on a mercantile enterprise, the monstrous vertical trust was completely acceptable.

Six hundred years before, Thoresen's grandfather had been encouraged by the Eternal Emperor to build Vulcan. His encouragement included a special C-class tankerload of Antimatter 2, the energy source that had opened the galaxy to man.

Work began with the construction of the eighty-by-sixteen-kilometer tapered cylinder that was to house the administrative and support systems for the new world.

Drive mechanisms moved that core through twenty light-years, to position it in a dead but mineral-rich system.

Complete factories, so many enormous barrels, had been prefabricated in still other systems and then plugged into the core world. With them went the myriad life-support systems, from living quarters to hydroponics to recreational facilities.

The computer projections made the then unnamed artificial world seem impressive: a looming ultraefficient colossus for the most efficient exploitation of workers and materials. What the computer never allowed for was man.

Over the years, it frequently was simpler to shut down a factory unit after product-completion rather than to rebuild it. Other, newer factories, barracks, and support domes were jammed into place as needed. In a world where gravity was controlled by McLean generators, up and down were matters of convenience only. In two hundred years, Vulcan resembled a metal sculpture that might have been titled Junk in Search of a Welder .

Eventually, atop the catch-as-catch-can collection of metal The Eye was mounted—Company headquarters linked to the original cylinder core. The sixteen-kilometer-wide mushroom was, in Sten's time, only two hundred years old, added after the Company centralized.

Below The Eye was the cargo loading area, generally reserved for the Company's own ships. Independent traders docked offworld and were forced to accept the additional costs of cargo and passenger transfer by Company space-lighter.

Under the dock was the visitors' dome. A normal, wide-open port, except that every credit spent by a trader or one of his crew went directly into the Company's accounts.

The visitors' dome was as far South as offworlders were permitted. The Company very definitely didn't want anyone else dealing with—or even meeting—their workers.

Vague rumors floated around the galaxy about Vulcan. But there had never been an Imperial Rights Commission for Vulcan. Because the Company produced.

The enormous juggernaut delivered exactly what the Empire needed for centuries. And the Company's internal security had kept its sector very quiet.

The Eternal Emperor was grateful. So grateful that he had named Thoresen's grandfather to the nobility. And the Company ground on.

Any juggernaut will continue to roll strictly on inertia, whether it is the Persian Empire or General Motors of the ancients, or the sprawling Conglomerate of more recent history. For a while. If anyone noticed in Sten's time that the Company hadn't pioneered any manufacturing techniques in a hundred years, or that innovation or invention was discouraged by the Company's personnel department, it hadn't been brought to the Baron's attention.