The Collection (80 page)

* * * *

He
slept, then, until late afternoon of the next day. When he woke, he drank the
rest of the liquor and then went downstairs, not quite steady on his feet and
with his eyes bloodshot and bleary. But under control, mentally.

And
it was probably well that he was, for in the downstairs hallway, he encountered
Evadne for the first time since his return to Olliver
^'
s. She glanced
at him and took in his condition, then passed him without speaking and with a
look of cold contempt that-well, if he
hadn't
been under control
mentally.

The
next day he was sober, and stayed that way. He told himself he hated Evadne too
much to let her see him otherwise. And after that he spent most of his time
reading. He had breakfast and lunch alone, but ate dinner with Olliver and
Evadne, and spent part of the evening with them.

He
didn't mention the job again; it was up to Olliver, he thought, to bring that
up. And Oliver did, on the evening of the third day.

He
said, "We're going to Mars tomorrow, Crag. Forgot to ask you one thing.
Can you pilot a Class AB space cruiser, or do I hire us a pilot?
^"

"I
can handle one."

"You're
sure? It
^'
s space-warp drive, you know. As I understand it, the last
slip you worked on was rocket.
^"

Crag
said,
^"
The last ship I flew legally was rocket. But how about a
license, unless you want to land in a back alley on Mars?
^"

"You're
licensed. If a license is invalidated for any reason other than incompetency,
it
^'
s automatically renewed if you
^'
ve been readjusted
through the psycher. And today I picked up a stet of your license and a copy of
the psycher certificate. After I got them, though, I remembered I didn
^'
t
know whether you could handle space-warp."

Evadne
said, "It doesn't matter, Jon. I
^'
m licensed; I can handle the
cruiser.
^"

^"
I know, my dear. But I
^'
ve
told you; I do not think it safe to travel in space with only one person who is
qualified to pilot the ship. Perhaps I
^'
m ultra-conservative, but
why take unnecessary risks?
^"

Crag
asked, "Ready now to tell me about the job?"

^"
Yes. When we reach Mars, we
^'
ll
separate. Evadne and I will stay in Marsport until you have accomplished your
mission.
^"

^"
Which is to be done where?"

^"
You
^'
ve heard of Kurt
Eisen?
^"

^"
The one who helped develop space-warp?"

^"
That
^'
s
the
one. He has his laboratory and home just outside Marsport. He
^'
s
fabulously wealthy; it's a tremendous estate. About eighty employees, thirty
of them armed guards. The place is like a fortress. It'll almost have to be an
inside job-another good reason why you couldn
^'
t have handled it
without a psycher certificate.
^"

Crag
nodded.
^"
At least it will be easier if I can get in. And just
what am I looking for after I get there?"

"A
device that looks like a flat pocket flashlight. Blued steel cast. Lens in the
center of one end, just like an atomic flashlight, but the lens is green and
opaque-opaque to light, that is."

^"
You
^'
ve seen it?
^"

"No.
The party
^'
s source of information is a technician who used to work
for Eisen. He's now a member of the party. He worked with Eisen in developing
it, but can't make one by himself; he wasn
^'
t fully in Eisen
^'
s
confidence-just allowed to help with details of design. Oh, and if you can get
the plans, it'll help. We can duplicate the original, but it
^'
ll be
easier from the plans. And one other thing. Don't try it out.
^"

^"
All right,
^"
Crag
said,
^"
I won
^'
t try it out-on one condition. That you
tell me what it is and what it does. Otherwise, my curiosity might get the
better of me."

Olliver
frowned, but he answered. "It
^'
s a disintegrator. It's designed
to negate the-well, I'm not up on atomic theory, so I can
^'
t give it
to you technically. But it negates the force that holds the electrons to the
nucleus. In effect, it collapses matter into neutronium."

Crag
whistled softly.
^"
And you say it's an ineffective weapon?"

"Yes,
because its range is so short. The size needed increases as the cube of the
cube of the distance-or something astronomical like that. The one you're after
works up to three feet. To make one that would work at a hundred feet it would
have to be bigger than a house. And for a thousand feet-well, there aren
^'
t
enough of the necessary raw materials in the Solar System to build one; it
would have to be the size of a small planet. And besides, there
^'
s a
time lag. The ray from the disintegrator sets up a chain reaction in any
reasonably homogeneous object it
^'
s aimed at, but it takes seconds to
get it started. So if you shoot at somebody-at a few feet distance-they're dead
all right, but they've got time to kill you before they find it out.
^"
Olliver smiled.
^"
Your left hand is much more effective, Crag,
and has about the same range.
^"

^"
Then why is it worth a million
credits to you?
^"

"I
told you, the by-product. Neutronium."

Crag
had heard of neutronium; every spaceman knew that some of the stars were made
of almost completely collapsed matter weighting a dozen tons to the cubic inch.
Dwarf stars, the size of Earth and the weight of the sun. But no such collapsed
matter existed in the Solar System. Not that there was any reason why it
shouldn't-if a method had been found to make atoms pack themselves solidly
together. Pure neutronium would be unbelievably heavy, heavier than the center
of any known star.

"Neutronium,"
he said, thoughtfully. "But what would you use it for? How could you
handle it? Wouldn't it sink through anything you tried to hold it in and come
to rest at the center of the earth-or whatever planet you made it on?
^"

"You're
smart, Crag. It would. You couldn't use it for weighting chessmen. I know how
to capitalize on it-but that's one thing I don't think you have to know.
Although I may tell you later, after you've turned over the
disintegrator."

Crag
shrugged. It wasn't his business, after all. A million credits was enough for
him, and let Olliver and his party capitalize on neutronium however they
wished. He asked, "Did this technician who worked for Eisen give you a
diagram of the place?
^"

Olliver
opened a drawer of the desk and handed Crag an envelope.

Crag
spent the rest of the evening studying its contents.

* * * *

They
took off from Albuquerque spaceport the following afternoon and landed on Mars
a few hours later. As soon as the cruiser was hangared, they separated, Crag
presumably quitting his job with Olliver. He promised to report in not more
than two weeks.

A
man named Lane Knutson, was his first objective. He had full details about
Knutson and an excellent description of him; that had been an important part
of the contents of the envelope he had studied the final evening on Earth.
Knutson was the head guard at Eisen
^'
s place and did the hiring of
the other guards. According to Crag
^'
s information, he hung out, in
his off hours, in spacemen's dives in the tough section of Marsport.

Crag
hung out there, too, but spent his time circulating from place to place instead
of settling down in any one. He found Knutson on the third day. He couldn
^'
t
have missed him, from the description. Knutson was six feet six and weighed two
hundred ninety. He had arms like an ape and the strength and disposition of a
Venusian
draatr.

Crag
might have made friends with him in the normal manner, but he took a short cut
by picking a quarrel. With Knutson's temper, the distance between a quarrel and
a fight was about the same as the distance between adjacent grapes under
pressure in a wine press.

Crag
let himself get the worst of it for a minute or two, so Knutson wouldn
^'
t
feel too bad about it, and then used his left hand twice, very lightly, pulling
his punches. Once in the guts to bend the big man over, and then a light flick
to the side of the jaw, careful not to break bone. Knutson was out cold for
five minutes.

After
that, they had a drink together and got chummy. Within half an hour Crag had
admitted that he was looking for a job-and was promptly offered one.

He
reported for work the following day and, after Knutson had shown him around, he
was glad he hadn't decided to try the outside. The place really was a
for-tress. A twenty-foot-high electronic barrier around the outside; inside
that, worse things. But it didn't matter, since he was already inside. Even so,
he had to undergo a strenuous physical and verbal examination and Olliver had
been right about the psycher certificate; without it, he'd have been out on his
ear within an hour.

He
spent the next five days learning all the ropes. He knew where the big safe
was-in the laboratory. But he wanted to learn the position of every guard and
every alarm between the room in which he slept and the laboratory itself.
Fortunately, he was given a day shift.

On
the fifth night he made his way to the laboratory and found himself facing the
blank sheet of durasteel that was the door of the safe. All his information
about that safe was that the lock was magnetic and that there were two alarms.

He
^'
d
brought nothing with him-all employees were searched on their way in as well as
on their way out-but all the materials he needed to make anything he wanted
were there at hand in the laboratory. He made himself a detector and traced two
pairs of wires through the walls from the safe into adjacent rooms and found
the two alarms-both hidden inside air ducts-to which they were connected. He
disconnected both alarms and then went back to the safe. On Eisen
^'
s
desk near it, he'd noticed a little horseshoe magnet-a toy-that was apparently
used as a paperweight. He got the hunch (which saved him much time) that, held
in the proper position against that sheet of steel-six by six feet square-it
would open the door.

And,
unless it was exactly at one corner, there'd have to be a mark on the door to
show where the magnet was to be held. The durasteel door made it easy for him;
there weren
^'
t any accidental marks or scratches on it to confuse
him. Only an almost imperceptible fly-speck about a foot to the right of the
center. But fly-specks scrape off and this mark didn
^'
t-besides,
there are no flies on Mars.

He
tried the magnet in various positions about the speck and when he tried holding
it with both poles pointing upward and the speck exactly between them, the door
swung open.

The
safe-it was a vault, really, almost six feet square and ten or twelve feet
deep-contained so many things that it was almost harder to find what he was
looking for than it had been to open the safe. But he found it. Luckily, there
was a tag attached to it with a key number which made it easy to find the plans
for the disintegrator in the file drawers at the back of the safe.

He
took both disintegrator and plans to the workbenches of the laboratory. Eisen
couldn't possibly have provided better equipment for a burglar who wished to
leave a possible duplicate of whatever object he wanted to steal. And he'd even
provided a perfectly sound-proofed laboratory so even the noisier of the
power-tools could be used safely. Within an hour, Crag had made what,
outwardly, was a reasonably exact duplicate of the flashlight-sized object he
was stealing. It didn't have any insides in it, and it wouldn't have
disintegrated anything except the temper of a man who tried to use it, but it
looked good. He put the tag from the real one on it and replaced it in the
proper drawer in the safe.

He
spent a little longer than that forging a duplicate of the plans. Not
quite
a
duplicate; he purposely varied a few things so that no one except Eisen
himself could make a successful disintegrator from them.

He
spent another hour removing every trace of his visit. He reconnected the
alarms, removed every trace-except a minute shortage of stock-of his work in
the laboratory, made sure that every tool was restored to place, and put back
the toy magnet on the exact spot and at the exact angle on Eisen
^'
s
desk that it had been before.