Mike Seaman 02
Analog Science Fact – Science Fiction June 1964
(1964)
John Berryman
According to the fable, B'rer Rabbit had trouble with Tah Baby, when he attacked it. This little trap wasn't quite the same ... but yet...
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The sign on the door to my office says "Seaman Associates—Solid State Physics." That means that if you cross my palm with silver, I'll give you some advice. Some days people come to me with their space-age problems. Some days I just sit there and read about rockets and communications satellites in the trade journals.
This Monday a caller broke in while I was looking over some attractive ads for physicists from Boeing and General Dynamics, just a little before lunch. He was compactly built, a little past thirty, and with a military-brush haircut. He stood with a straightness that said he hadn't been out of uniform too long. He carried a leather dispatch case about thick enough to hold Time magazine or a couple of secret documents. That meant he thought he was somebody. The bigger the wheel the thinner the case.
"Dr. Seaman?" he snapped, as if he were calling me to attention. I took an immediate dislike to him.
"Mike Seaman," I said sourly, putting my cigar down. The hell with that "Doctor" jazz. I didn't bother to get out of my swivel chair.
Setting his dispatch case down, my caller drew a pin-seal wallet from his jacket, extracted a card and took two precise steps to the edge of my desk. He handed me the card. I read it. It said he was Richard Busch, an employee of the United States Government, never mind what agency. It's supposed to be a big fat secret.
"We have urgent need for your services at Cape Kennedy, Seaman," Busch said brusquely. "We'd like you to come at once."
I tossed the card back to the top of my desk, and Busch picked it up. "No thanks, Busch," I said. "I tried it once. I didn't like it." I picked my stogie from the ash tray and puffed. It was still lit.
"There's no need to be flip, Seaman," he said, sucking in his gut and drawing his chin back.
"There's no need to be pompous, either, Busch," I said. "I sell advice. I don't go tearing around the country just because some card-carrying wise guy comes storming into my office. You got a problem? Tell me what it is. Maybe I can help you." I blew smoke at him.
He took a deep breath and remembered to shift gears. It would always be hard for him to deal with civilians. He wasn't used to getting along with people. Well, he'd learn to get along with me.
"Sorry," Busch said, with a degree of humility I'd never have guessed he had in him. He looked at the chair and nearly asked for permission to sit down. Well, at least we had established the peck-order.
He stepped back to pick up his dispatch case, sat down across from me and put the case on his knees. Opening it with a key, he drew out a manila envelope, apparently all the case contained, and pulled an 8 x 10 glossy photo from it. I reached for it and looked the picture over carefully.
Judging by its pronounced grain, it was an extreme enlargement. The object in its center, against a dead-black background, had that one-sided lighting that said it had been photographed in deep space, with sunlight striking one half, and leaving the other half completely in shadow. The object had a squatty central body, more or less cylindrical, although the coarse grain of the enlargement made it a little difficult to tell. Jutting out from the central body were a number of long, extremely thin arms supporting at their ends what I took to be antennae. Some were round and hinted at being bowl-shaped. Some were rectangular and looked flat. They pointed this way and that, not all focused on the same object. It was plain, too, from the spider-web fragility of the object, that it had been photographed in the weightless free-fall of orbital flight. Nothing so tenuously built could have held together under the strain of gravity.
I looked up and across my desk to Busch's expressionless features. "Well, well," I grinned around the butt in my teeth. "That's a regular old Daddy Long Legs, isn't it?"
"You know what it is. Seaman?" Busch asked.
I shrugged. "A space probe, I guess. It's in space, sure enough, and you got this shot with a telescope of some kind."
He nodded shortly. "We fired a missile with a 'scope to get close enough to make that picture," he said. "Can you tell me what its purpose was—what it was built to probe or sense?"
"From this picture?" I said, irritably. "Don't be silly. Of course not. What do you think it's probing?"
"We're stuck," he admitted, brushing at his close-cropped hair. "We don't know, and we want to find out. That's why we want you to come to the Cape and join Project Stymie."
"Where'd you get the picture?"
He waved a hand vaguely. "Oh, about over North Dakota," he said, getting cagey the way these secret agency guys will do if you let them. "This was the fourth probe that has made a pass over the country. Some unfriendly power is orbiting these things, and they come sneaking over us at odd intervals. We expect more of them."
I scowled at that one, tipped my swivel back and braced one foot in an open desk drawer. I puffed smoke and thought about it. "What do you mean, 'some unfriendly power'?" I asked at last. "Don't you know where it was launched? You've got all kinds of infrared sensors in orbit to pick up booster exhausts."
He paused before he answered. Apparently there was only so much he was allowed to tell me. "Yes," he said carefully. "We know where it was launched, where all four of them were launched. From a submarine in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Which tells us nothing about the country of origin. It could be any of the nuclear powers."
"Especially the United States," I grinned nastily. "We invented the technique."
"Nonsense," he said stiffly. "Would a closer, clearer picture help?" he asked, getting back to what he wanted.
"No," I said, pressing the cigar out in my ash tray. "The only way you can figure out what this probe is sensing is to take it apart and examine its innards."
He gave me his first smile, the small, economy size. "We thought it would call for a trip into space," Busch said. "You've done some of that, haven't you, Seaman?"
"I've done all of that I ever intend to do," I snapped. "Six trips to repair communications satellites for Communications Corporation. And if I ever took another mission, it wouldn't be to chase after a satellite launched by some hostile power. Only a nut wants to stooge around in a spacesuit in free-fall, anyway."
"They were fearful you wouldn't take another mission," Busch conceded. "Not after the probe in your picture, I'll tell you that," I said.
He made a motion of defeat. "All right, so you won't take the mission," Busch said. "But you'd know how to organize it wouldn't you?"
"Of course. Can't think of any reason why I couldn't."
He started putting the picture back in its envelope. "My assignment is to bring you back to the Cape with me to help set up Project Stymie."
I gave him a raised eyebrow.
"My Agency has the assignment," he said. "The task is to determine the purpose and country of origin of these probes."
"So as to stymie the effort?" I asked.
"That, and perhaps something more. My agency will be paying your fee."
"That's nice of it. I'd rather work from here. Advice doesn't have to travel to be effective."
He got the case back on his knees and put the envelope in it and locked the latches. "There's more to the problem than I've told you," he said reluctantly. "And we have only a week until we expect the next probe to come through. Our radars got good fixes on the launch in the Pacific, and we have the orbit down pretty solid. We want you at the Cape."
I thought about it. The Government had never hired me directly. My work had come from the contractors, like Western Electric, Boeing and McDonnell. There's prestige in working for the front office, and prestige is about ninety per cent of success in the consulting racket. Direct Government work would be a nice scalp at my belt.
But there was another side to it. With my deep-space experience, once they got me down there, they'd start pressure for me to take the mission. That's the way it had been at COMCORP. "We need you on this mission, Mike. You're the boy with the knowhow. You are the guy who can do it."
Well, I wasn't about to climb in another bird and get boosted into space in chase of a hostile probe, no matter what the reason.
"You're hiring my advice—just my advice?" I insisted. "No nonsense about my taking the mission?"
"If you insist. Just advice."
"Let's go," I said, feeling sure I'd regret my decision.
We made a quick stop at my place on the East Side for some shirts, while Busch kept the cab waiting, and then made it through the Tunnel and out to the airport. They had one of those cute little Lockheeds with four jets in the tail waiting for Busch and me. Busch had a fatter dispatch case on board, which he quickly got open. He spent most of the two-hour trip to the Cape talking over the radiophone with his boss. I didn't pay much attention to it, preferring to smoke and snooze in the whining quiet of the cabin, and think over the problems that would be thrown at me in Florida. After all, I had to earn my fee.
There was a Jeep and driver waiting for us when we landed at the Cape. That's one thing about a Government job, there's always a Jeep available. Our driver had some sense of the urgency of what we were doing, and drove like the devil.
"The meeting will be in session by the time we get there, Seaman," Busch yelled above the racket of motor and gearboxes as we tore down the highway. He hung onto the Jeep with one hand and his two dispatch cases with the other. He was a real wheel, a two-case man. "I set the meeting up while we were flying down."
I knew he had been doing something. He had sure given a lot of orders over the 'phone. "Nuts," I shouted back, holding on tight. "What ever got accomplished in a meeting? You must have some guy down here who yelped for help, or you wouldn't have come after me. Take me to him. You go to the meeting."
Busch didn't like it, but I was balky. The result was that he had the Jeep take us to the air-conditioned comfort of the ad building, and he led me down a corridor to the two-by-four office of a skinny, stoop-shouldered young guy named Fred Kupek. The sign on his door said, "Orbit Section."
"Beat it," I told Busch. "Go to a meeting." He wanted to argue, but remembered the meeting was waiting for him, I guess, and left me and Fred together.
He was standing, hugging his arms to his hollow chest, behind his desk. I went over to him. "Did you let out a bleat for some help on this Project Stymie thing?" I asked him.
Fred nodded, a sort of a nervous jerk of his head. "If you're Seaman," he said rapidly. "I asked them to get you. I heard about your work with COMCORP. We need you to go after that probe. Nobody here knows how." His words spilled out after each other.
I started back out. "See you in New York, Fred," I sneered. "I told Busch I wasn't flying any mission for you guys."
He conceded defeat and came rushing around his desk to grab me by the elbow at the door. "That's what they said," he told me quickly. "Damn, and we really need an experienced man. All right, Seaman. We'll settle for your advice."
We kind of calmed down after that and sat down on opposite sides of his desk. "Our problem is a very simple one," Kupek told me. "The idea is to intercept one of these probes, take it apart and figure what it is probing, and come back home. We can't figure how to do it in the time we've got."
"A week isn't time enough to point up the launch, you mean?" I asked.
Fred shook his head, bending his round shoulders as he leaned his elbows on his desk. "No, not that. These probes are shot in a sneaky orbit. They fire these things, somewhere out in the Pacific, just about straight up out of the ecliptic, due north. The orbit is a long, thin ellipse, with Earth as one focus, of course. It's a twenty-day affair. But on the way back down, they have a booster which fires and gives their bird a lot more speed, so that from our vantage the orbit changes from an ellipse to a hyperbola. The probe zips down over us from the north, in a close, grazing pass, only about fifty miles high, curves around due to the attraction of Earth, and heads straight out for the Sun."
I got the point. "Well," I said. "So if you fire your own bird to intercept that hyperbolic orbit, you are diving straight into the Sun for whatever time it takes you to open the oyster and see what makes it tick!"
"That's it," Fred said. "You see the problem?"
"Sure. Getting back. I suppose that in the time it will take to analyze the probe you get past the point where your retro fuel can slow your bird down enough to make re-entry possible?"
He nodded, clenching his fist. "You've got it," Fred said in a rush. "They'd be stuck out there. What's the solution? How can we cut analysis time down? How can we short-cut that hyperbolic orbit?"
I got up and walked to the window to look out over the NASA installation while I lit a cigar. I could see several birds on launch pads over in the operations area. A couple "copters were chopping up and down the beach, doing those pointless things that military aircraft always seem to be doing.
"You can't handle it the way you want to," I said, blowing smoke. "My own experience taking junk apart out in space says that it's slow work. And analyzing strange circuits and the little black boxes hitched up to them is ten times tougher. You can't do it that way."
"You mean, we can't solve the problem?"
"You can't stay in that hyperbolic orbit, that's a cinch. So don't. After you intercept the probe, why not bring it back down to Earth for study? Won't one of the vehicles you use to study the permanently orbiting space stations handle that kind of a mission? All you need is some kind of a cargo hold."
Fred got up from his posture chair and came over to my side at the window. "It was considered," he said, slumping. "The gang in charge of the vehicle said it couldn't be done."
"You mean, they couldn't see how to do it," I growled, clenching down on my stogie. "It's purely a technical problem. Nothing the matter with it in theory."
"Of course not," Fred said. "Theoretically it's the right way."
"Well," I said. "I'm the guy in charge of 'how to.' Take me to meet the guy who says it can't be done."
After getting me the right kind of pass to wear, Fred rustled up a Jeep and took me out to Pad Fourteen in the Operations Area. They made me ditch my cigar at the gate.
The guy who said it couldn't be done was one of those quiet, understated test-pilot types with no more nerves than a milch cow. His name was Ralph Burris and he was overseeing the assembly of the fuel grain for the first stage of a really huge bird when Fred pulled the Jeep up to a screeching halt by the gantry.
We walked across the apron to where Burris stood, hands on hips, watching what was going on. Freddy made the introductions. "Seaman has the same idea we talked about, Ralph," he explained. "He thinks the trick is to bring that probe back down in the cargo hold of something like Vehicle Lambda."
Burris looked at me for a moment without expression. "Wouldn't work," he said. "You'd wreck the ship."
It was my turn. "Explain the problem," I said.
He looked at me thoughtfully before speaking, which I was to find was his habit on most occasions. He was a guy who thought first. "No offense, Seaman, but you're an amateur. Space flight isn't like driving a car or running a boat. You've got other problems."
"Name any three," I suggested, a little tired of being patronized. I would have bet I had made more missions than he had.
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