Unwise Child Read online

  11

  "What I want to know," said Lieutenant Keku, "is, what kind of ship isthis?"

  Mike the Angel chuckled, and Lieutenant Mellon, the Medical Officer,grinned rather shyly. But young Ensign Vaneski looked puzzled.

  "What do you mean, sir?" he asked the huge Hawaiian.

  They were sitting over coffee in the officers' wardroom. Captain Quill,First Officer Jeffers, and Lieutenant Commander von Liegnitz were on thebridge, and Dr. Fitzhugh and Leda Crannon were down below, givingSnookums lessons.

  Mike looked at Lieutenant Keku, waiting for him to answer Vaneski'squestion.

  "What do I mean? Just what I said, Mister Vaneski. I want to know whatkind of ship this is. It is obviously not a warship, so we can forgetthat classification. It is not an expeditionary ship; we're notoutfitted for exploratory work. Is it a passenger vessel, then? No,because Dr. Fitzhugh and Miss Crannon are listed as 'civilian technicaladvisers' and are therefore legally part of the crew. I'm wondering ifit might be a cargo vessel, though."

  "Sure it is," said Ensign Vaneski. "That brain in Cargo Hold One iscargo, isn't it?"

  "I'm not certain," Keku said thoughtfully, looking up at the overhead,as if the answer might be etched there in the metal. "Since it is builtin as an intrinsic part of the ship, I don't know if it can be countedas cargo or not." He brought his gaze down to focus on Mike. "What doyou think, Commander?"

  Before Mike the Angel could answer, Ensign Vaneski broke in with: "Butthe brain is going to be removed when we get to our destination, isn'tit? That makes this a cargo ship!" There was a note of triumph in hisvoice.

  Lieutenant Keku's gaze didn't waver from Mike's face, nor did he say aword. For a boot ensign to interrupt like that was an impoliteness thatKeku chose to ignore. He was waiting for Mike's answer as though Vaneskihad said nothing.

  But Mike the Angel decided he might as well play along with Keku's gagand still answer Vaneski. As a full commander, he could overlookVaneski's impoliteness to his superiors without ignoring it as Keku wasdoing.

  "Ah, but the brain _won't_ be unloaded, Mister Vaneski," he said mildly."The ship will be _dismantled_--which is an entirely different thing.I'm afraid you can't call it a cargo ship on those grounds."

  Vaneski didn't say anything. His face had gone red and then white, asthough he'd suddenly realized he'd committed a _faux pas_. He nodded hishead a little, to show he understood, but he couldn't seem to find hisvoice.

  To cover up Vaneski's emotional dilemma, Mike addressed the MedicalOfficer. "What do you think, Mister Mellon?"

  Mellon cleared his throat. "Well--it seems to me," he said in a dry,serious tone, "that this is really a medical ship."

  Mike blinked. Keku raised his eyebrows. Vaneski swallowed and jerked hiseyes away from Mike's face to look at Mellon--but still he didn't sayanything.

  "Elucidate, my dear Doctor," said Mike with interest.

  "I diagnose it as a physician," Mellon said in the same dry, earnesttone. "Snookums, we have been told, is too dangerous to be permitted toremain on Earth. I take this to mean that he is potentially capable ofdoing something that would either harm the planet itself or amajority--if not all--of the people on it." He picked up his cup ofcoffee and took a sip. Nobody interrupted him.

  "Snookums has, therefore," he continued, "been removed from Earth inorder to protect the health of that planet, just as one would remove apotentially malignant tumor from a human body.

  "This is a medical ship. Q.E.D." And only then did he smile.

  "Aw, now...." Vaneski began. Then he shut his mouth again.

  With an inward smile, Mike realized that Ensign Vaneski had been takingseriously an argument that was strictly a joke.

  "Mister Mellon," Mike said, "you win." He hadn't realized that Mellon'smind could work on that level.

  "Hold," said Lieutenant Keku, raising a hand. "I yield to no one in myadmiration for the analysis given by our good doctor; indeed, myadmiration knows no bounds. But I insist we hear from Commander Gabrielbefore we adjourn."

  "Not me," Mike said, shaking his head. "I know when I'm beaten." He'dbeen going to suggest that the _Brainchild_ was a training ship, fromSnookums' "learning" periods, but that seemed rather obvious and puerilenow.

  He 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 LedaCrannon, 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, ofcourse, absolutely correct--which was the sad part about it, really. Ohwell, what the hell.

  Leda Crannon had agreed to have coffee with Mike in the office suite sheshared 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 sloshdown a dozen more to talk to Leda Crannon. It was not, he insisted tohimself, that he was in love with the girl, but she had intelligence andpersonality in addition to her striking beauty.

  Furthermore, she had given Mike the Angel a dressing-down that had beenquite impressive. She had not at all cared for the remarks he had madewhen Snookums was being loaded aboard--patting him on the head andasking him his age, for instance--and had told him so in no uncertainterms. Mike, feeling sheepish and knowing he was guilty, had acceptedthe tongue-lashing and tendered an apology.

  And she had smiled and said: "All right. Forget it. I'm sorry I gotmad."

  He knew he wasn't the only man aboard who was interested in Leda. Jakobvon Liegnitz, all Teutonic masterfulness and Old World suavity, hadobviously made a favorable impression on her. Lew Mellon was often seenin deep philosophical discussions with her, his eyes never leaving herface and his earnest voice low and confidential. Both of them had knownher longer than he had, since they'd both been stationed at ChilblainsBase.

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

  Blithely opening the door of the office, Mike the Angel stepped insidewith 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 bein session for an hour yet. She asked me to convey her apologies." Hegestured toward the coffee urn. "But the coffee's all made, so you mayas well have a cup."

  Mike was thankful he had not had a dozen cups in the wardroom. "I don'tmind 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 thehot, black liquid. Then Mike said, "Dr. Fitzhugh, you said, at thebriefing back on Earth, that Snookums knows too much about nuclearenergy. 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'twant this to get out to the general public, of course," he saidthoughtfully, "but, as a ship's officer, you can be told. I believesome of your fellow officers know already, although we'd rather itwasn't discussed in general conversation, even among the officers."

  Mike nodded wordlessly.

  "Very well, then." Fitzhugh gave the tobacco a final shove with histhumb. "As a power engineer, you should be acquainted with the 'pincheffect,' eh?"

  It was a rhetorical question. The "pinch effect" had been known for overa century. A jet of highly ionized gas, moving through a magnetic fieldof the proper structure, will tend to pinch down, to become narrower,rather than to spread apart, as a jet of ordinary gas does. As thescience of magnetohydrodynamics had progressed, the effect had becomemore and more controllable, enabling scientists to force the nuclei ofhydrogen, for instance, closer and closer together. At the end of thelast century, the Bending Convert
er had almost wrecked the economy ofthe entire world, since it gave to the world a source of free energy.Sam Bending's "little black box" converted ordinary water into heliumand oxygen and energy--plenty of energy. A Bending Converter could bebuilt relatively cheaply and for small-power uses--such as powering aship or automobile or manufacturing plant--could literally run on air,since the moisture content of ordinary air was enough to power theconverter 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 tonothing? Billions upon billions of dollars worth of generating equipmentwere rendered valueless. The great hydroelectric dams, the hundreds ofsteam turbines, the heavy-metal atomic reactors--all useless for powerpurposes. The value of the stock in those companies dropped to zero andstayed there. The value of copper metal fell like a bomb, with almostequally devastating results--for there was no longer any need for themillions of miles of copper cable that linked the power plants with theconsumer.

  The Depression of 1929-42 couldn't even begin to compare with The GreatDepression of 1986-2000. Every civilized nation on Earth had been hitand hit hard. The resulting governmental collapses would have made thedisaster even more complete had not the then Secretary General of theUN, Perrot of Monaco, grabbed the reins of government. Like theAmericans Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, he had forced throughunconstitutional bills and taken extra-constitutional powers. And, likethose Americans, he had not done it for personal gain, but to preservethe society. He had not succeeded in preserving the old society, ofcourse, but he had built, almost single-handedly, a world government--anew society on the foundations of the old.

  All these thoughts ran through Mike the Angel's mind. He wondered ifSnookums had discovered something that would be as much a disaster tothe 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 pincheffect to lithium hydride. It's a batch reaction rather than a flowreaction such as the Bending Converter uses. But it's as simple to buildas a Bending Converter."

  "Jesus," said Mike the Angel softly.

  Lithium hydride. LiH. An atom of hydrogen to every atom of lithium. If ahydrogen nucleus is driven into the lithium nucleus with sufficientforce, the results are simple:

  Li^{7} + H^{1} --> 2He^{4} + energy

  An atom of lithium-7 plus an atom of hydrogen-1 yields two atoms ofhelium-4 and plenty of energy. One gram of lithium hydride would givenearly fifty-eight kilowatt-hours of energy in one blast. A pound of thestuff 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 beenconstructed by surrounding the LiH with a fission bomb--the so-called"implosion" technique. But all that heavy metal around the centralreaction created all kinds of radioactive residues which had a tendencyto scatter death for hundreds of miles around.

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

  Snookums had done it.

  "Homemade atomic bombs in your back yard or basement lab," said Mike theAngel.

  Fitzhugh nodded emphatically. "Exactly. We can't let that technique outuntil we've found a way to keep people from doing just that. The UNGovernment has inspection techniques that prevent anyone from buildingthe 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 thatknowledge secret for a long time--at least until safeguards could beset 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 makingexperiments that we know will be dangerous by giving him the data, sothat the urge doesn't operate. But if he's on the track of somethingtotally new....

  "Well, you can see what we're up against." He thoughtfully blew a cloudof smoke. "We think he may be on the track of the total annihilation ofmatter."

  A dead silence hung in the air. The ultimate, the super-atomic bomb.Theoretically, the idea had been approached only in the assumption ofcontact between ordinary matter and anti-matter, with the two cancelingeach other completely to give nothing but energy. Such a bomb would benearly fifty thousand times as powerful as the lithium-hydride pinchbomb. That much energy, released in a few millimicroseconds, would makethe 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 thestuff, it would be possible to limit the destruction to a neighborhood,or even a single block. A total-annihilation bomb would be much harderto control. The total annihilation of a single atom of hydrogen wouldyield over a thousandth of an erg, and matter just doesn't come in muchsmaller 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 assumethat wouldn't be good for Snookums."

  "To frustrate Snookums would be to destroy all the work we have put intohim. His circuits would tend to exceed optimum randomity, and that wouldmean, in human terms, that he would be insane--and therefore worthless.As a machine, Snookums is worth eighteen billion dollars. Theinformation we have given him, plus the deductions and computations hehas made from that information, is worth...." He shrugged his shoulders."Who knows? How can a price be put on knowledge?"