Unwise Child by Randall Garrett (world best books to read TXT) 📗

glanced at his watch, saw the time, and stood up. “Excuse me, gentlemen; I have things to do.” He had an appointment to talk to Leda Crannon, but he had no intention of broadcasting it.

As he closed the wardroom door, he heard Ensign Vaneski’s voice saying: “I still say this should be classified as a cargo ship.”

Mike sighed as he strode on down the companionway. The ensign was, of course, absolutely correct—which was the sad part about it, really. Oh well, what the hell.

Leda Crannon had agreed to have coffee with Mike in the office suite she shared with Dr. Fitzhugh. Mike had had one cup in the officers’ wardroom, but even if he’d had a dozen he’d have been willing to slosh down a dozen more to talk to Leda Crannon. It was not, he insisted to himself, that he was in love with the girl, but she had intelligence and personality in addition to her striking beauty.

Furthermore, she had given Mike the Angel a dressing-down that had been quite impressive. She had not at all cared for the remarks he had made when Snookums was being loaded aboard—patting him on the head and asking him his age, for instance—and had told him so in no uncertain terms. Mike, feeling sheepish and knowing he was guilty, had accepted the tongue-lashing and tendered an apology.

And she had smiled and said: “All right. Forget it. I’m sorry I got mad.”

He knew he wasn’t the only man aboard who was interested in Leda. Jakob von Liegnitz, all Teutonic masterfulness and Old World suavity, had obviously made a favorable [98] impression on her. Lew Mellon was often seen in deep philosophical discussions with her, his eyes never leaving her face and his earnest voice low and confidential. Both of them had known her longer than he had, since they’d both been stationed at Chilblains Base.

Mike the Angel didn’t let either of them worry him. He had enough confidence in his own personality and abilities to be able to take his own tack no matter which way the wind blew.

Blithely opening the door of the office, Mike the Angel stepped inside with a smile on his lips.

“Ah, good afternoon, Commander Gabriel,” said Dr. Morris Fitzhugh.

Mike kept the smile on his face. “Leda here?”

Fitzhugh chuckled. “No. Some problems came up with Snookums. She’ll be in session for an hour yet. She asked me to convey her apologies.” He gestured toward the coffee urn. “But the coffee’s all made, so you may as well have a cup.”

Mike was thankful he had not had a dozen cups in the wardroom. “I don’t mind if I do, Doctor.” He sat down while Fitzhugh poured a cup.

“Cream? Sugar?”

“Black, thanks,” Mike said.

There was an awkward silence for a few seconds while Mike sipped at the hot, black liquid. Then Mike said, “Dr. Fitzhugh, you said, at the briefing back on Earth, that Snookums knows too much about nuclear energy. Can you be more specific than that, or is it too hush-hush?”

Fitzhugh took out his briar and began filling it as he spoke. “We don’t want this to get out to the general public, of course,” he said thoughtfully, “but, as a ship’s officer, you [99] can be told. I believe some of your fellow officers know already, although we’d rather it wasn’t discussed in general conversation, even among the officers.”

Mike nodded wordlessly.

“Very well, then.” Fitzhugh gave the tobacco a final shove with his thumb. “As a power engineer, you should be acquainted with the ‘pinch effect,’ eh?”

It was a rhetorical question. The “pinch effect” had been known for over a century. A jet of highly ionized gas, moving through a magnetic field of the proper structure, will tend to pinch down, to become narrower, rather than to spread apart, as a jet of ordinary gas does. As the science of magnetohydrodynamics had progressed, the effect had become more and more controllable, enabling scientists to force the nuclei of hydrogen, for instance, closer and closer together. At the end of the last century, the Bending Converter had almost wrecked the economy of the entire world, since it gave to the world a source of free energy. Sam Bending’s “little black box” converted ordinary water into helium and oxygen and energy—plenty of energy. A Bending Converter could be built relatively cheaply and for small-power uses—such as powering a ship or automobile or manufacturing plant—could literally run on air, since the moisture content of ordinary air was enough to power the converter itself with plenty of power left over.

Overnight, all previous forms of power generation had become obsolete. Who would buy electric power when he could generate his own for next to nothing? Billions upon billions of dollars worth of generating equipment were rendered valueless. The great hydroelectric dams, the hundreds of steam turbines, the heavy-metal atomic reactors—all useless for power purposes. The value of the stock in those [100] companies dropped to zero and stayed there. The value of copper metal fell like a bomb, with almost equally devastating results—for there was no longer any need for the millions of miles of copper cable that linked the power plants with the consumer.

The Depression of 1929-42 couldn’t even begin to compare with The Great Depression of 1986-2000. Every civilized nation on Earth had been hit and hit hard. The resulting governmental collapses would have made the disaster even more complete had not the then Secretary General of the UN, Perrot of Monaco, grabbed the reins of government. Like the Americans Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, he had forced through unconstitutional bills and taken extra-constitutional powers. And, like those Americans, he had not done it for personal gain, but to preserve the society. He had not succeeded in preserving the old society, of course, but he had built, almost single-handedly, a world government—a new society on the foundations of the old.

All these thoughts ran through Mike the Angel’s mind. He wondered if Snookums had discovered something that would be as much a disaster to the world economy as the Bending Converter had been.

Fitzhugh got out his miniature flame thrower and puffed his pipe alight. “Snookums,” he said, “has discovered a method of applying the pinch effect to lithium hydride. It’s a batch reaction rather than a flow reaction such as the Bending Converter uses. But it’s as simple to build as a Bending Converter.”

“Jesus,” said Mike the Angel softly.

Lithium hydride. LiH. An atom of hydrogen to every atom of lithium. If a hydrogen nucleus is driven into the [101] lithium nucleus with sufficient force, the results are simple:

Li7 + H1 → 2He4 + energy

An atom of lithium-7 plus an atom of hydrogen-1 yields two atoms of helium-4 and plenty of energy. One gram of lithium hydride would give nearly fifty-eight kilowatt-hours of energy in one blast. A pound of the stuff would be the equivalent of nearly seven tons of TNT.

In addition, it was a nice, clean bomb. Nothing but helium, radiation, and heat. In the early nineteen fifties, such a bomb had been constructed by surrounding the LiH with a fission bomb—the so-called “implosion” technique. But all that heavy metal around the central reaction created all kinds of radioactive residues which had a tendency to scatter death for hundreds of miles around.

Now, suppose a man had a pair of tweezers small enough to pick up a single molecule of lithium hydride and pinch the two nuclei together. Of course, the idea is ridiculous—that is, the tweezer part is. But if the pinch could be done in some other way....

Snookums had done it.

“Homemade atomic bombs in your back yard or basement lab,” said Mike the Angel.

Fitzhugh nodded emphatically. “Exactly. We can’t let that technique out until we’ve found a way to keep people from doing just that. The UN Government has inspection techniques that prevent anyone from building the conventional types of thermonuclear bombs, but not the pinch bomb.”

Mike the Angel thought over what Dr. Fitzhugh had said. Then he said: “That’s not all of it. Antarctica is isolated enough to keep that knowledge secret for a long time—at [102] least until safeguards could be set up. Why take Snookums off Earth?”

“Snookums himself is dangerous,” Fitzhugh said. “He has a built-in ‘urge’ to experiment—to get data. We can keep him from making experiments that we know will be dangerous by giving him the data, so that the urge doesn’t operate. But if he’s on the track of something totally new....

“Well, you can see what we’re up against.” He thoughtfully blew a cloud of smoke. “We think he may be on the track of the total annihilation of matter.”

A dead silence hung in the air. The ultimate, the super-atomic bomb. Theoretically, the idea had been approached only in the assumption of contact between ordinary matter and anti-matter, with the two canceling each other completely to give nothing but energy. Such a bomb would be nearly fifty thousand times as powerful as the lithium-hydride pinch bomb. That much energy, released in a few millimicroseconds, would make the standard H-bomb look like a candle flame on a foggy night.

The LiH pinch bomb could be controlled. By using just a little of the stuff, it would be possible to limit the destruction to a neighborhood, or even a single block. A total-annihilation bomb would be much harder to control. The total annihilation of a single atom of hydrogen would yield over a thousandth of an erg, and matter just doesn’t come in much smaller packages than that.

“You see,” said Fitzhugh, “we had to get him off Earth.”

“Either that or stop him from experimenting,” Mike said. “And I assume that wouldn’t be good for Snookums.”

“To frustrate Snookums would be to destroy all the work we have put into him. His circuits would tend to exceed optimum randomity, and that would mean, in human [103] terms, that he would be insane—and therefore worthless. As a machine, Snookums is worth eighteen billion dollars. The information we have given him, plus the deductions and computations he has made from that information, is worth....” He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? How can a price be put on knowledge?”

[104]

12

The William Branchell—dubbed Brainchild—fled Earth at ultralight velocity, while officers, crew, and technical advisers settled down to routine. The only thing that disturbed that routine was one particularly restless part of the ship’s cargo.

Snookums was a snoop.

Cut off from the laboratories which had been provided for his special work at Chilblains, he proceeded to interest himself in the affairs of the human beings which surrounded him. Until his seventh year, he had been confined to the company of only a small handful of human beings. Even while the William Branchell was being built, he hadn’t been allowed any more freedom than was absolutely necessary to keep him from being frustrated.

Even so, he had developed an interest in humans. Now he was being allowed full rein in his data-seeking circuits, and he chose to investigate, not the physical sciences, but the study of Mankind. Since the proper study of Mankind is Man, Snookums proceeded to study the people on the ship.

Within three days the officers had evolved a method of Snookums-evasion.

[105] Lieutenant Commander Jakob von Liegnitz sat in the officers’ wardroom of the Brainchild and shuffled a deck of cards with expert fingers.

He was a medium-sized man, five-eleven or so, with a barrel chest, broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and lean hips. His light brown hair was worn rather long, and its straight strands seemed to cling tightly to his skull. His gray eyes had a perpetual half-squint that made him look either sleepy or angry, depending on what the rest of his broad face was doing.

He dealt himself out a board of Four Cards Up and had gone through about half the pack when Mike the Angel came in with Lieutenant Keku.

“Hello, Jake,” said Keku. “What’s to do?”

“Get out two more decks,” said Mike the Angel, “and we can all play solitaire.”

Von Liegnitz looked up sleepily. “I could probably think of duller things, Mike, but not just immediately. How about bridge?”

“We’ll need a fourth,” said Keku. “How about Pete?”

Mike the Angel shook his head. “Black Bart is sleeping—taking his beauty nap. So Pete has the duty. How about young Vaneski? He’s not a bad partner.”

“He is out, too,” said von Liegnitz. “He also is on duty.”

Mike the Angel lifted an inquisitive eyebrow. “Something busted? Why should the Maintenance Officer be on duty right now?”

“He is maintaining,” said von Liegnitz with deliberate dignity, “peace and order around here. He is now performing the duty of Answerman-in-Chief. He’s very good at it.”

Mike grinned. “Snookums?”

Von Liegnitz scooped the cards off the table and began [106] shuffling them. “Exactly. As long as Snookums gets his questions answered, he keeps himself busy. Our young boot ensign has been assigned to the duty of keeping that mechanical Peeping Tom