The Lagrangists. Mack Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ sighed, wondering still once again, what all this was building up to. He knew perfectly well that John Mickoff was a big-wig in the Inter-American Bureau of Investigation of the United States of the Americas. They had worked together, in a glancing sort of way, before. Usually they’d met on assignments when the government didn’t want to admit they were involved and so hired Rex to do the dirty work. Mickoff, when Rex had first met him, had been the right hand man of John Coolidge, the long-time Director of the IABI. But since Coolidge’s death they had a new administration. What sort of title Mickoff held now, Rex Bader didn’t have the vaguest idea. But the very fact that John Mickoff was here with this girl—rather, this Doctor of Physics—must mean something.

      He said now. “Flattery will get you everywhere, Doctor…”

      “Call me Susie. I seem to be the type that invariably gets called by the first name.”

      “The fact remains that when I applied for a job with the L5 Project, they turned me down.”

      “Well,” Mickoff said, “Younger brother, it looks as though they are just about to give you one.” He looked at Doctor Susie Hawkins, her eyebrows high in question.

      Susie nodded.

      “What the hell are you talking about?” Rex said.

      “You’ve just landed a job on the Lagrange Five Project,” Mickoff said cheerfully.

      Rex sipped his scotch. “Good booze,” he said, “but lousy joke.”

      “Well, you told us that the private eye business was shot all to pieces. No crime worth speaking of, what with Universal Credit Cards and all. No divorce, for all practical purposes. By the way, I can just see you crawling around with an infra-red Nikon-Polaroid, snapping pictures of some poor bastard in bed with a chorus girl.”

      “Wizard,” Rex said. “Come on, come on. Doctor Hawkins, Susie, has the confidence of a woman with a job. Let me guess: she’s connected with the Lagrange Five Project. What’s this got to do with my being a largely unemployed private investigator?”

      “I was just telling you,” Mickoff said in mock plaintiveness. “You said no crime jobs, no divorces, no other usual jobs for private eyes. How about bodyguarding?”

      CHAPTER TWO

      Rex Bader looked at the other as though he had slipped completely around the bend. He said, “Bodyguarding! In this day and age? Who in the name of Holy leaping Zen needs a bodyguard, except possibly the President and a few other top politicians?”

      Susie Hawkins cleared her throat and said, “In actuality, the term we were going to use was Research Aide. You’ll be a Research Aide.”

      “With a Gyro-jet pistol,” Mickoff grinned.

      Rex ignored him and looked back at the young woman. He said suspiciously, “What’s a research aide?”

      She nodded at the validity of the request and said, “That’s a good question. I, among others, am a research aide. It’s an imposing sounding title. What it actually means is a Man, or Girl, Friday. The one who does the real work, a flunky. Call it what you will. It’s the sort of title one can have that is never questioned, in the sciences. You can be on the payroll as a research aide, and nobody ever thinks to wonder why, or exactly what you do. The professor has at least a dozen research aides. You’ll be invisible among the rest of us.”

      “What professor?” he said. For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, he didn’t like the sound of this. Possibly it was because of the presence of John Mickoff. He’d never exactly prospered whilst in Mickoff’s vicinity. To the contrary, he usually wound up with his ass in a sling.

      Mickoff said now, more seriously, “Professor George R. Casey, the inspirational guide, the—what would you call it?—the motivating intellectual symbol, or something like that, behind the Lagrange Five Project. Call him a prophet of man’s expansion into space.”

      “That was very well put, Mr. Mickoff,” Susie Hawkins said. She blinked her blue eyes. “Everybody who works on the project or under the professor is inspired by him.”

      “Now wait a goddam minute,” Rex blurted. “You mean that Professor Casey needs a bodyguard? Now come on. Who’d want to kill Professor George Casey? Why, everybody in the world is caught up in the explosion of humanity into space.”

      John Mickoff cleared his throat. “Not quite everybody, it seems. At least two, perhaps more that we don’t know about, attempts have been made on his life in the past couple of weeks.”

      Rex Bader stared at him for a long moment, then got up and took their glasses and went over to the autobar and refreshed them, forgetting that this was going to drain his current treasury. He brought the new drinks back to his visitors and reseated himself.

      “Wizard. Let’s have the story,” he said. “I still can’t get a picture of someone wanting to kill Professor Casey. What do they call him? The Father of the Lagrange Five Project. It would be like somebody wanting to kill Albert Einstein, back in the old days.”

      John Mickoff snorted and said, “Younger brother, suppose you were an Arab sheik, sitting on a lake of oil. What happens to you when Island Number One, the first space colony, is completed, and it damn near is, and begins to turn out the SPSs, the Solar Power Satellites? They figure the first power will be microwaved down only nine years from the beginning of the construction on the moon and at Lagrange Five. They figure that the building of Island One will take eight years, but Island Two, three times as big, only two years. From then on, it’s a geometric progression; each island builds more islands. On the stable orbit, they figure there’s room for several thousand of them, each capable of turning out the Solar Power Stations which in turn will milk the sun for what amounts to practically free power. Younger brother, what happens to that sheik’s oil?”

      Susie added, “For that matter, what’s going to happen to the coal barons in Pennsylvania, or wherever?”

      “I see what you mean,” Rex said, scowling. “But what would be accomplished by assassinating George Casey? He’s just one man. Finishing him off would hardly stop the project. Hell, the Lagrange Five Project has some two thousand men up doing the actual construction alone. There’s other thousands involved in getting materials up to them in the space shuttles and space tugs, not to mention the tens of thousands here on Earth working in all the other aspects of it.”

      Susie admitted to that and said, “No, it might not stop it, but it wouldn’t do it any good. You see, in a way the professor is our catalyst. He was right from the beginning. Something like Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project; something like Von Braun in the early days of space travel. It’s his dream. He’s the focal point. It’s he who worms through the appropriations. It’s he who converts the hardest nosed Congressmen to the need for the building of space colonies. It’s he who goes on Tri-Di every week and brings the people up to date on how the construction of Island One is progressing. He keeps the whole country inspired with the dream.”

      “There are other aspects,” Mickoff got in. “If whoever is behind this attempt to get Professor Casey would pull such a callous romp as an attempt on his life, how do we know who’s next? How do we know what other aspects of sabotage might be planned—or even already accomplished?”

      Rex thought about it. “Yeah,” he said. “And I just thought of something else.” He regarded the girl. “Some of the politicians who drag their feet over appropriations СКАЧАТЬ