Robert looked at Gail. “Mom, call Dad right now. Tell him it’s going to be all right.”
“Easy, fella,” Hank said softly. “Just get your breath and rest a minute.”
“I told them,” Robert muttered weakly. “I told them everything.”
Hank looked at McEvoy angrily. “Don’t stand there, man! Get some coffee or something.” He turned back to Robert. “How did you tell them?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. I had to open up for them—my whole mind: just tear it open for them. They got the pattern, the force of my thoughts. They understood.” He gulped eagerly at the steaming coffee, took a shaking breath. “Lord, yes. They read me, all right.”
McEvoy’s eyes glittered. “And the transmatter?”
Robert shook his head. “Nothing about the transmatter. I don’t think we ever got that far.”
McEvoy cursed. “You sound as if you don’t care.”
“I don’t.” Robert faced McEvoy defiantly. “I don’t care in the least. The transmatter doesn’t count, anyway. We don’t need it, not in the least.” He lifted his clenched fist and let a handful of rusty-colored sand sift to the floor under McEvoy’s nose. “There’s your iron ore, Dr. McEvoy. Your first consignment. I’ve been on Mars.”
McEvoy’s jaw sagged for a moment as he stared at the sand. He clutched the boy’s hand, peering at the dust still sticking to his palm. Then he flushed with anger and he slapped the boy hard in the face with a heavy hand, jerking his head around. “You’ve got your nerve,” he grated. “Making your jokes, making a fool out of me.”
“McEvoy, I said I’ve been on Mars. Can’t you understand what I said?”
The old man stopped, shook his head helplessly, wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t get it,”
he said weakly. “Why do you keep joking?”
“I’m not joking. I meant what I said. You can forget about your transmatter. You don’t need it, now. All the iron on Mars is yours for the asking. All the uranium on the Moon, all the oil on Venus.” The room was silent and Robert held out his hands, almost tearful in his intensity. “I’m not lying, McEvoy. I showed them why we had to have that machine, I showed them why we needed help. They couldn’t understand, before. All they knew was that we were tearing them to shreds, and they had to stop us. But I showed them everything in my mind, I made them understand. And we can forget about the transmatter, we can forget about lifting ore from Mars by cargo ship and trying to land it on Earth. There’s a universe between us, McEvoy, but the people in that universe are good, they’ll help us and work with us, now that they understand.”
McEvoy blinked, fighting to comprehend as Robert’s voice went on. “They had to make us stop working with that gadget. They literally couldn’t tolerate it. And until they understood why we needed it, all they could do was fight back. But now they know. They know we can build another one if we have to but they showed me that we don’t have to. They’re bargaining, now. They’re offering us free passage through! Guided passage that won’t harm them, easy passage to any place in this universe of ours we want to go. Mars, the Moon, Venus…McEvoy, they’re offering us the stars if we want them!”
McEvoy stared at Robert Benedict, his face working as he tried to comprehend something that he couldn’t believe. He leaned down, picked up a pinch of rusty sand between his fingers, and blinked at it. Incredibly, tears were streaming down his cheeks and he was snatching up the telephone speaker, his fingers fumbling for the dial. They heard his voice as if from a very great distance saying, “Operator, this is McEvoy. Crash priority. I’ve got to talk to the Joint Conference Chairman, and make it fast!”
Part Three
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
—1—
The bed alarm had been designed for maximum annoyance with minimum noise. Buried in the pillow, a tiny speaker emitted a perfectly electronically modulated imitation of the irregular and unrelenting howl of a hungry baby, the most totally intolerable and sleep-shattering racket known to man. It was designed to wake up the heaviest of all sleepers from a drugged sleep in ten seconds flat and keep him awake until he fell out of bed and raced across the room to turn the wretched thing off—your money back and all contingent damages guaranteed if it failed. It worked splendidly as Dr. Hank Merry jerked awake in the darkness, muttering unmentionables, and stumbled to the bedroom console to pick up the phone.
It was Margie at the office, apologetic but insistent. “Dr. Merry, I hate to bother you like this. I suppose it’s the middle of the night there but there’s a very nasty man here to see you, and he’s mad as hops and he won’t leave and he says he’s going to have you fired if you don’t see him this very instant, and lots of other unpleasant things.”
“His name isn’t Tarbox, by any chance?”
“Why, yes!” Margie paused. “How did you know?”
Hank Merry groaned as a picture of a pompous little man with a large fat cigar came to mind. “Red hair?” he asked.
“That’s the one. And he’s smelling up the place with—”
“I know, I know. Someday I’ll get him for aggravated assault because of those cigars.”
Frantically, Hank cast about for escape. “Maybe if you get him a cup of Happy-O—”
“Oh, I tried that. He said I was trying to poison him. Dr. Merry, he’s very offensive, and he says you know why he’s here, and he wants action right now, whether you’re asleep, awake or in limbo.”
“I know.” Hank sighed. “We’ve already met.” He thought of half a dozen ways to avoid seeing one Jonathan Tarbox right then, discarding each in turn as either unworkable, inadvisable, or flagrantly illegal. “Okay,” he said resignedly. “Tell him I’ll get there as soon as I can and start a tape going, in case he gets slanderous. Half an hour, maybe.”
A moment later he was riding the elevator up to the aircar on the roof, getting angrier by the minute. The time-slip you could get used to, an inevitable annoyance you just had to put up with when you rode the Threshold. Your trip was always instantaneous as far as you were concerned, but it could involve up to eight hours gain or loss in Earth time from time of departure to time of arrival. The time-slip was an unavoidable annoyance, but a man like Jonathan Tarbox was something else. Hank set the aircar controls for the Los Angeles Threshold Station and settled back with some coffee. Happy-O was more pleasant for waking up, but he didn’t want to feel pleasant this morning.
He flipped on a news report, and caught the tail end of an early broadcast: “…said the unexpected agreement of the Chinese delegation makes tri-partisan support of Joint Conference Chairman John McEvoy’s program for Venus development almost certain. And now on the Interplanetary front. Threshold Commissioner Henry Merry reported today at a news conference at Ironstone, Mars, that mining operations are 23 per cent ahead of predicted schedule, and that full production of steel can be expected within three years. The commissioner reported that mills at Ironstone might later be built to produce finished steel at the site of the mining, but these plans depend on the number of workers who will permanently colonize Ironstone. And here’s a late bulletin: search parties from Titan have returned from the surface of Saturn empty-handed. There is now little hope remaining that the ill-fated exploring party which disappeared on the surface of the ringed planet two weeks ago could have survived, and search efforts have been abandoned. And now we bring you—”
Hank made a wry face and snapped off the report. Aside from the glaring inaccuracies of the report (he had said nothing whatever to the reporter about milling steel at Ironstone) he was irritated at the bright and cheerful way commentators had of reporting the most tragic stories. In a world that had expanded in five years from the surface of Earth to cover half the galaxy, a disaster on the surface of Saturn grew more and more remote from the ordinary round of daily living. It could be reported with detachment, a cheery news note on a frosty morning, but that didn’t make the disaster any less tragic for the ones involved. Greedy commentators hungry for news to feed to greedy people…