CHAPTER 3.

Hamilton left Forsythe and Ian Harris sitting on opposite sides of the fore-cabin of the SPR helirocket which was taking them swiftly southward to Antarctica. In the rear cabin were Miss Alderman and an unhappily reawakened Sven Ryan.

Hamilton nodded to his assistant and said, “Nancy, you’d better go forward and keep those two tigers from tearing each other limb from limb. I want to talk to Ryan alone. It’s of great importance.”

Miss Alderman slipped silently from the rear cabin and Hamilton sat down in the seat she had left vacant and studied the inventor in tight-lipped concern. Despite the fact that he had spent two years under the skin-tanning Antarctic sun and snow-glare, Sven Ryan’s face was white. Quite obviously he was the sort of milk-skinned redhead who does not react to exposure by turning red or brown.

At the moment, his face was a near-pistachio green—a delicate pastel shade that contrasted vividly with the bright red of his hair and eyeballs. He sat despondently on his cot, with his chin in his hands, flanked by an oxygen inhalator and a half-empty bottle of anti-fatigue tablets.

He eyed his chief with resignation. “What are you going to do to me, Park?” he said. “Boot me out of the SPR?”

“For heaven’s sake, why?” Hamilton asked, surprised.

“For blowing a couple of million bucks,” was the solemn reply.

Hamilton had expected to find Ryan in the throes of physical reaction to his bender, but he had not expected such abject mental misery. He said, soothingly, “Sven, you know as well as I do that SPR funds are primarily for the use of its scientists—for their research and experimentation. The only thing that puzzles me is why you went gallivanting off and spilled your large flannel mouth all over New York last night.”

Hamilton was prepared for every answer but the one he got. Incredibly, the inventor lifted his bleary eyes to the other’s face and said, “Why shouldn’t I drown my sorrows after blowing all that money and work on a miserable failure? And if I chose to talk about it, that’s my business.”

Hamilton felt as if the helirocket had hit an old-fashioned air pocket. The very breath seemed to go out of him. He said, “But according to the reports, your transmitter was a success. It worked.”

Sven Ryan made a gesture of disgust. “Sure it worked,” he said, “over one kilometer with a few kilos of dead weight. But you know what I was working for. My whole aim has been to invent some method of transport that will make interplanetary travel economically feasible. But what good is a transporter that cannot send organic life?”

He paused to take a whiff of oxygen and his looks and spirits almost visibly improved. “I must have been out of my mind, Park. I ran a dozen extra tests with white mice.” He shook his head wretchedly. “What came out in the receiver was sickening. I felt like a sadist.”

“So you took off and got drunk,” said Hamilton. “You wanted to drown your sorrows.”

Here, he thought, was a perfect example of the creative, scientific mind—a mind so wrapped up in fulfillment of a dream, in the attainment of a single end, that everything else remained in fuzzy focus. Here was that persistent anomaly, the completely dedicated man who would never cease to be a problem to the more scatter-gunned mass of humanity. It was a problem that ranged all the way from the absentminded professor to the discoverer of new theories and machines that were constantly threatening to disrupt the balances by which other men lived.

“Seven years!” said Ryan gloomily. “Seven years and almost three million SPR dollars—and it’s a tragic bust. Do you wonder I blew my top, Park?” He paused again and for an instant his eyes lighted up. “Chief, do you know who I ran into last night? I’m not going to tell you where, but it was—”

“It was Ian Harris of the UN, and you stumbled over him at Molly Sadler’s house of joy,” said Hamilton.

“How’d you know?” Ryan asked. Then, before his chief could answer, “Lord, Park, it was almost worth it. But I was in no mood to trade shop talk with Ian Harris then. So I grabbed me an armful of girls and took off. The next thing I remember, Nancy—your girl Friday—was hauling me away from them. And the next thing I remember after that is waking up here with the same face before me. Park, is part of her job tormenting poor scientists out for a little ill-deserved fun?”

Hamilton chuckled. Then he said, “Didn’t she tell you anything, Sven?”

“She tried to,” was the reply, “but I shut her up. As it was my ears were ringing in three different keys. Why do you ask?”

“Brace yourself, boy,” said Hamilton, deciding it was time to discuss some home truths with a youth who was showing every sign of rapid recovery. “We’re on our way to Antarctica. Did you know that?”

“That I got,” said Ryan. “Are you planning to have me flayed alive or merely drawn and quartered?”

“Hardly,” Hamilton assured him. “Though there are a couple of chaps up in the front cabin who might not be averse to such a plan. One of them is Charles Forsythe, the American Secretary for Science and Industry. The other is your old friend Ian Harris.”

Ryan sat bolt upright on his cot, his clearing eyes wide with surprise. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “How come they’re in on this? Are they planning to participate in my courtmartial? I’m sorry, Park, if I’ve made things tough for you. But I don’t quite see what I did to—”

“All you did,” Hamilton interrupted, “was to invent the first successful instantaneous matter-transmitter in history. In your preoccupation with discovering a way to send men to the stars it evidently didn’t occur to you that your little gadget, right here on Earth, can make every other means of transport from a mountain burro to the latest A-rocket obsolete overnight. And then you had to get drunk and spill it all over New York! Charlie Forsythe tried to put you under security lock and key for the United States.”

Hamilton went on to explain exactly what had happened. How Nancy Alderman had plucked him to precarious safety, how Forsythe had attempted protective custody, how Harris had foiled Forsythe, and finally how Hamilton himself, after a prolonged and fruitless argument, had stepped in with a compromise suggestion.

“You mean you want me to run off a test for these characters?” Ryan inquired with amazing perspicacity.

“Exactly,” said Hamilton. “You can, can’t you?”

“Sure,” was the prompt reply. “But it won’t prove anything. The ground-level projection range is only a couple of kilometers. Even with towers, it won’t transmit far enough to amount to anything. Who wants to haul heavy freight up to the top of a hundred-meter tower to move it a few more kilometers? Park, it just doesn’t make sense.”

“How far did the first airplane fly?” Hamilton asked the inventor. “A hundred and thirty-seven feet, wasn’t it?”

“Hmmph!” Ryan took another whiff of oxygen. “I hadn’t thought of the Earth-transport angle. But the bugs in this creation of mine are going to be a hell of a lot harder to work out. Earth-transport—why, it’s like using a diecaster to crack a nut.” Then, with a look of alarm, “Chief, you aren’t giving up on the space-travel dream, are you?”

Hamilton shook his head. “You know better than that,” he said. “In fact—” He let it hang, adding quickly, “But forget about your invention being a flop. It’s potentially the most important single device any SPR man has ever come up with. I’m sorry we had to cut off your spree in mid-flight, but we couldn’t afford an international panic just now.”

A brief, boyish smile lent charm to the inventor’s almost ugly face. He said wistfully, “I guess it would kick over a lot of applecarts at that. Hey, Park, where are you going?”

“You may not have noticed,” said Hamilton drily, “but we’re coming in to land. Don’t you want to come forward and join the others? After all, you are the lion of this occasion.” Ryan hesitated, then shook his head. “I might embarrass Harris,” he said, and winced at the accidental rhyme.

“Impossible,” said Hamilton, rising. Then, recalling the Englishman’s blush in his office only that morning, “Well, have it your own way. Just remember you’re a hero, son.”

“I’ll try, Father Hamilton,” said Ryan, patting his diaphragm and belching vigorously. “Sometimes I don’t know what’s worse—the hangover or its cure.”

“You’re cured,” said Hamilton from the doorway. “See you at the base. Run these tests off and you’ll get all the liberty and girls you want—liquor, too.”

“Don’t make me ill again,” said Ryan. “I’ve had it for another five years. I’m even looking forward to seeing the girls at the base again. Thanks, Park—for everything.”

An hour later, they were seated at a luncheon table in the CANTSPR’s private dining room, where Jack Witherspoon and his aides had whipped together a remarkable short-notice meal of foods raised or grown on the SPR Breeding and Agricultural Station.

There was a delicious plankton-and-shark-fin soup, followed by filets of musk-oxen that had been so treated by SPR husbandry and food experts that it rivaled the finest Argentine beef. These were accompanied by an astonishing array of locally-grown fruits and vegetables, some out of doors, some under artificial lights, and all of them hydroponically.

When dessert was served Witherspoon—a lean, nut-brown man with a high, near-bald forehead—remarked, “One thing we never have to worry about here is the sherbet. We always have plenty of ice.”

The sally brought a chuckle, but it was of short duration. Forsythe and Ian Harris were still locked in their marathon argument as to the rights of the individual nation, and the individual citizen balanced against the stern edicts of a world control.

“You can’t go against human nature,” Forsythe said for the fifteenth time. “People are people, and they’ll always want to take care of their own before they share with others.”

“Some people, Forsythe,” said Harris drily. “Fortunately or otherwise, there are a number of us who consider loyalty to self and species above loyalty to any institution or set of institutions, however traditional.”

“I suppose,” said Forsythe in his booming voice, “that the UN is not an institution—and you are not loyal to it?”

“A specious argument, I fear,” replied Harris, stroking his neat black mustache. “I’ll grant you that institutions are necessary, man being what he is. But it is therefore necessary for us to create and serve institutions that grow constantly larger in scope and embrace more and more people in their pattern of expansion. Should we not instead draw a line and say, ‘Here I stop—I go no further.’”

“What will happen when we colonize the planets?” Sven Ryan asked.

Harris regarded the inventor with mild astonishment, while Forsythe looked actually baleful. The American cabinet member said, “I thought the space-dream was halted for the time being, after the last Moon-mission failed. How much did that one cost you people? Forty-one billions, wasn’t it?”

“And the lives of seventeen men and women when the appropriations bill was cut—thanks largely to American influence in the UN,” retorted the inventor hotly.

“If they’d come back as ordered, no one would have died,” said Forsythe angrily. “What was the sense of maintaining a Moon station when all they could do was observe conditions there—at the staggering cost of fifteen billion dollars a year?”

“I opposed the appropriations cut, Mr. Ryan,” Ian Harris reminded him. “However, expenses were running a bit hog-wild.”

“Do you think of nothing but dollars?” Ryan asked pugnaciously. His hangover safely buried, he had acquired a new belligerence. Hamilton broke the embarrassed silence that followed. Laying his napkin on the table, he rose and asked, “Don’t you think we’d better be getting on with the test?”

Actually, he was on the inventor’s side of the argument, but he dared not risk alienating the others. Leaving the dining room, they were taken underground, where they donned temperature-proof aluminum coveralls. Then they rode a swift, monorail subway to the proving ground. Hamilton wished his chest would stop itching. It always began the moment he found himself unable to scratch it.

Miss Alderman caught his arm for an instant as they left the monorail at the end of their journey. “What have you got in mind, Chief?” she asked him in a cautious whisper.

“Wait and see,” was his whispered reply. “We’ve still got an ace or two up our sleeves.”

“I hope so,” she said earnestly. “If Mr. Forsythe gets frightened enough, I’m afraid he’ll ask the Americans to drop a bomb on the whole base.”

“We can stop a bomb,” Hamilton told her quietly. “We’ve got to stop any effort to put clamps on SPR through UN channels. I’m not even sure how Ian would stand on such a move if your boyfriend’s invention looks too good. But that’s my job. You concentrate on keeping Ryan in hand. You didn’t do too well at the lunch table.” “He’s not my boyfriend!” was Miss Alderman’s hot retort—a trifle too heated, Hamilton thought. He replied with his most irritating chuckle.