The People didn’t do anything with the Sword. Jimmy and I and our boys did. No Society was around here grubbing nickel-iron and riding out gravel storms; we were.”
“Let’s leave politics alone,” Warburton snapped. But it was mostly Ellen’s look of distress which shut Blades up.
To everybody’s relief, they reached Central Control about then. It was a complex of domes and rooms, crammed with more equipment than Blades could put a name to. Computers were in Chung’s line, not his. He wasn’t able to answer all of Warburton’s disconcertingly sharp questions.
But in a general way he could. Whirling through vacuum with a load of frail humans and intricate artifacts, the Sword must be at once machine, ecology, and unified organism. Everything had to mesh. A failure in the thermodynamic balance, a miscalculation in supply inventory, a few mirrors perturbed out of proper orbit, might spell Ragnarok. The chemical plant’s purifications and syntheses were already a network too large for the human mind to grasp as a whole, and it was still growing. Even where men could have taken charge, automation was cheaper, more reliable, less risky of lives. The computer system housed in Central Control was not only the brain, but the nerves and heart of the Sword.
“Entirely cryotronic, eh?” Warburton commented. “That seems to be the usual practice at the Stations. Why?”
“The least expensive type for us,” Blades answered. “There’s no problem in maintaining liquid helium here.”
Warburton’s gaze was peculiarly intense. “Cryotronic systems are vulnerable to magnetic and radiation disturbances.”
“Uh-huh. That’s one reason we don’t have a nuclear power plant. This far from the sun, we don’t get enough emission to worry about. The asteroid’s mass screens out what little may arrive. I know the TIMM system is used on ships; but if nothing else, the initial cost is more than we want to pay.”
“What’s TIMM?” inquired the Altair’s chaplain.
“Thermally Integrated Micro-Miniaturized,” Ellen said crisply. “Essentially, ultraminiaturized ceramic-to-metal-seal vacuum tubes running off thermionic generators. They’re immune to gamma ray and magnetic pulses, easily shielded against particule radiation, and economical of power.” She grinned. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing about them in Leviticus, Padre!”
“Very fine for a ship’s autopilot,” Blades agreed. “But as I said, we needn’t worry about rad or mag units here, we don’t mind sprawling a bit, and as for thermal efficiency, we want to waste some heat. It goes to maintain internal temperature.”
“In other words, efficiency depends on what you need to effish,” Ellen bantered. She grew grave once more and studied him for a while before she mused, “The same person who swung a pick, a couple of years ago, now deals with something as marvelous as this . . . . ” He forgot about worrying.
*
But he remembered later, when the gig had left and Chung called him to his office. Avis came too, by request. As she entered, she asked why.
“You were visiting your folks Earthside last year,” Chung said. “Nobody else in the Station has been back as recently as that.”
“What can I tell you?”
“I’m not sure. Background, perhaps. The feel of the place. We don’t really know, out in the Belt, what’s going on there. The beamcast news is hardly a trickle. Besides, you have more common sense in your left little toe than that big mick yonder has on his entire copperplated head.”
They seated themselves in the cobwebby low-gee chairs around Chung’s desk. Blades took out his pipe and filled the bowl with his tobacco ration for today. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought dreamily, if this old briar turned out to be an Aladdin’s lamp, and the smoke condensed into a blonde she-Canadian—?
“Wake up, will you?” Chung barked.
“Huh?” Blades started. “Oh. Sure. What’s the matter? You look like a fish on Friday.”
“Maybe with reason. Did you notice anything unusual with that party you were escorting?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“What?”
“About one hundred seventy-five centimeters tall, yellow hair, blue eyes, and some of the smoothest fourth-order curves I ever—”
“Mike, stop that!” Avis sounded appalled. “This is serious.”
“I agree. She’ll be leaving in a few more watches.”
The girl bit her lip. “You’re too old for that mooncalf rot and you know it.”
“Agreed again. I feel more like a bull.” Blades made pawing motions on the desktop.
“There’s a lady present,” Chung said.
Blades saw that Avis had gone quite pale. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I never thought . . . I mean, you’ve always seemed like—”
“One of the boys,” she finished for him in a brittle tone. “Sure. Forget it. What’s the problem, Jimmy?”
Chung folded his hands and stared at them. “I can’t quite define that,” he answered, word by careful word. “Perhaps I’ve simply gone spacedizzy. But when we called on Admiral Hulse, and later when he called on us, didn’t you get the impression of, well, wariness? Didn’t he seem to be watching and probing, every minute we were together?”
“I wouldn’t call him a cheerful sort,” Blades nodded. “Stiff as molasses on Pluto. But I suppose . . . supposed he’s just naturally that way.”
Chung shook his head. “It wasn’t a normal standoffishness. You’ve heard me reminisce about the time I was on Vesta with the North American technical representative, when the Convention was negotiated.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that story a few times,” said Avis dryly.
“Remember, that was right after the Europa Incident. We’d come close to a space war—undeclared, but it would have been nasty. We were still close. Every delegate went to that conference cocked and primed.
“Hulse had the same manner.”
*
A silence fell. Blades said at length, “Well, come to think of it, he did ask some rather odd questions. He seemed to twist the conversation now and then, so he could find things out like our exact layout, emergency doctrine, and so forth. It didn’t strike me as significant, though.”
“Nor me,” Chung admitted. “Taken in isolation, it meant nothing. But these visitors today—Sure, most of them obviously didn’t suspect anything untoward. But that Liebknecht, now. Why was he so interested in Central Control? Nothing new or secret there. Yet he kept asking for details like the shielding factor of the walls.”
“So did Commander Warburton,” Blades remembered. “Also, he wanted to know exactly when the Pallas is due, how long she’ll stay . . . hm-m-m, yes, whether we have any radio linkage with the outside, like to Ceres or even the nearest Commission base—”
“Did
