Meteor - William T. Powers

Meteor - William T. Powers, ebook, Temp

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First Published: 1950 METEOR by William T. PowersTOBIAS HENDERSON, MASTER OF THE BRITISH FREIGHTER, BRONSON, was relaxing at tea. The Callisto-Mars run was long and dull, but Tobias knew how to be comfortable. In fact, getting comfortable was the one thing at which Tobias was better than average. He had to be. Freight and Martian sauces had combined their effects to make him the third largest item on the Bronson, and one might have debated the advantage held by the computer-detector.For reasons other than jealousy, Tobias hated the computer. The main drive might flatten him somewhat on take-off and landing, but the computer had been known to snatch the Bronson from under its master's feet, causing him to misname countless safety-engineers, just to avoid some pebble. Today, as usual, Tobias squinted at the computer before he injected his cream into the tea bag. Promptly, a red light popped on."Coward!" Tobias muttered. "It won't come within a hundred miles!" The red light went out. Tobias creased his face in brief triumph, then pulled the stopper out of the tea bag and inserted a straw, an uncivilized process made necessary by free-flight. The red light popped on again. Hopefully, Tobias ignored it.Something clicked rapidly in the bulkhead where the monster was hidden; Tobias sighed and braced himself for the recoil of the blasters. Unfortunately, a grip on the desk was not enough to save him. The Bronson shuddered sideways, skittering out of its orbit to let something too big to blast go by. Tobias, unable to express himself, oscillated to a stop in his triple harness and glared in black silence at the globules of tea quivering off the bulkheads. After a suitable pause, the computer went ahem and slid a card out where Tobias could see it.The lettering was red.The meteor was out of sight of the Bronson in a few seconds, plunging on toward the orbit of Mars, aimed a little above the Orion nebula. This , i.11, was a fast meteor from outside the system, nearly zero Kelvin, six miles across. One fiat side might have been a plain at one time; the other surfaces were harsh and jagged, signs of a cataclysm. The sun lit an exposed stratum, picking out the fossil of an ancient tree.Thirty miles a second the meteor traveled. In twenty-four hours, it would have gone the twenty-five hundred kilomiles separating it from the orbit of Mars. The intersection point was no more than a thousand miles from the place where Mars' advancing limb would be tomorrow.Phil Brownyard dropped a penny in the You-Vu-It just in time to see a screenful of little bright spots fade to a shot of an announcer."There you have it, folks. Danvers came up from the sixth quad at well over three miles per second, just in time to avert a scoring play by Syverson and Phelps. His ship snagged the Mark into free territory, but he couldn't turn fast enough to keep in-bounds. That, of course, ended the period. Now a word from--"Phil reached out for a switch, but the commercial droned on. Frustrated, he grumbled and pushed his dessert away. He had a grudge against the game of Ten-Mark that included its sponsors. The pilots who played had a rugged, exciting life, full of pretty girls, big money, and sudden death. Two years were all a man could stand of the screaming accelerations and close shaves, but those two years--! Phil shoved his chair back and headed for the elevators. Pushing his way to the expresses, he glimpsed Fred Holland from Computing coming around the comer; he stood in the doorway of the car until Fred caught up."Hi, Phil!" Fred grinned. "Have a cigar!""Boy?""Yep." Fred grabbed for the handrail as the car shot up the shaft. "Twenty minutes ago. Aggie just vised me and everything's all right.""Tell Aggie Claire will be over tonight to help out.""Thanks. She could use some help. Well ... so long. Wait, your cigar!" Fred thrust a couple at Phil and hopped out the door. The car lifted swiftly and Phil pushed the buzzer."Six-forty." The operator snapped as the door whipped open. Phil stepped out, ducking a little as a monorail messenger-car rushed by overhead. He pushed through the door marked Safety, waving hello to Doris, and went into the office.Run, run, run, he thought. Am I glad I'm not in Public relations! The swivel chair was big and soft, so he relaxed and pulled out a cigar.Behind him, monstrous New York City stretched. The six hundred fortieth story of the Government Building overlooked the city from half a mile above the top passenger levels; sixty miles from Phil's window the lights of the North Highway glowed steadily.Ten thousand square miles, eighteen million people, a vast system of conveyors, highways, terminals; a billion dollars worth of trade every day. New York City, 2055.The periphery was lined with homes that spewed hordes of commuters every eight hours. Past neat factories and a few local airports the subways sped, the crowded tunnels boring into the deepening pile of the city. Above them mounted in higher and higher tiers interlocking roadways, flat, sinuous conveyer-housings, office buildings and freight terminals climbing over each other. The hum of the city deepened to a growl, grew to a rumble, swelled into thunder; the sound drifted up past the levels, picking up the zum of tires and the crowd-babble. The sound filtered around steel and stone and hung among the upthrust skyscrapers, fading at last into the dark upper air.On the tip of every spire were thick-limbed UHF arrays pouring out power to the stars. The million kilowatt beams swept steadily through the sky, balancing on the rotating earth, hurling their messages through the system of planets.Back through the Heaviside Layer, feeble signals returned, to be gathered and sorted by the city's robot brains.In a corner of the government computing room, a silent coder came to life. A card hopped into one of its racks, and the machine buzzed briefly. The card, punched and stamped, slid quickly into the works of the nearest idle router.Plate voltage flashed briefly, and the monster decided to send the card to Safety. Along a hidden wall the card sped, up one floor and into another router that punched it twice and sent it to Spatial Debris.At the first sign of life from the next stage, a signal was shot down five stories to Computing, where the termination of phase one was recorded on microfilm.Phase two began. Electronic fingers probed the card and withdrew. A rudimentary brain thought a moment, and a little set of thumbs descended to press the card, embossing on it the co-ordinates of an orbit. The card jumped ahead ten inches and a metal stamp jolted it. A pneumatic tube flipped open and the last machine capsuled the card, which now bore one red edge and the admonition, "DANGER." The card whistled up five stories and thumped to a stop by Phil's left elbow.Phil looked indecisively at the ash on his cigar, then flipped it off and ground out the stub. He reached for the capsule, tingled a bit when he saw the red edge.A print-send writer stood to the left of the desk; Phil inserted the card and the machine began to clatter. A strip of tape inched out."Meteor. A-2 to B-s. 27-32 mps. det. 2994663.6033. Coord. 270.665-160332 x 103 --710.4 Dir.Cos. 0.000355,-0 554639 29 358 mpsThe rough equation of an hyperbolic orbit followed. Phil went to the lucite plan-map of the minor planets and began to plot points. Four points fed into the Curvator sufficed; an arm descended over the chart and began to trace a heavy black line, jogging at equal-time intervals. The tip of the arm approached the orbit of Mars, intersecting it just as the red spot designating Mars moved into its path. The Curvator, having reached the limit of its accuracy, stopped and flashed an orange light that meant "possible collision."That meant that the meteor would miss the planet by no more than eight thousand miles, if at all. Phil was by now totally alert. The probable mass of the meteor was twelve billion tons, its velocity thirty miles per second. Only the heaviest of equipment would be capable of breaking it up and diverting the pieces into the sun. Were it to strike Mars, it would pick up another three miles per second before it hit, then it would release the equivalent of five billion kilowatt-hours of energy in a fraction of a second. A large piece of Martian vicinity could be vaporized.Another card called Phil back to his desk; he gave it a quick glance and filed it. Now there was work to be done; Mars had to be warned, although New Pitt undoubtedly had received the report.A quick call to Computing set Fred Holland to work on the exact orbit, and Phil turned to the chart again. The markers on the orbit showed that about twenty-two hours remained--New Pitt, on Mars, would pick up the meteor in roughly an hour. Phil sent a copy of the orbit out to Doris, with instructions to get it on the emergency circuit to Mars.The preliminaries over, Phil sat behind his desk and began to have his customary regrets. Whenever a big rock struck the space lanes, Phil wondered what he was doing here. Whenever the rock was really big, the chief of SD slashed the arteries of the Solar System with efficiency and finality. The advent of robot freighters had made the job easier, but still each day's ban cost somebody millions. Phil bit his lip and lit another cigar. The responsibility of his office was not to save millions, but to save lives.The minute hand crept forward, timing the flight of his message. In just seventeen minutes from the time Phil gave Doris the message, acknowledgment arrived. Doris brought in the spacegram personally. 496 William T. Powers "Mr. Brownyard--" She hesitated at the door."Good, they didn't waste any time." Phil reached out and Dor... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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