It all started when Hampton Weisenbender stomped into the sunlit lab. When Hampton comes into a room, it's kind of like having a normal person walk out. I could almost feel clouds crossing over the face of the sun as he spoke, "What in the world are you doing in here this early?"
This was a new twist because normally Hampton is after me for being late--he thinks I get paid by the hour rather than for thoughts and ideas. Putting me down for being in the lab early was one of the few times he's ever engaged in creative thinking.
"I've been here since last night. Never went home. We've made a fantastic breakthrough with--"
"Forget it. We gave the pink slips to your crew on their way out last night. That explains why yours wasn't picket up last night. So here's yours."
"Wait a minute, sir. There's something you need to know. Last night I--"
"Forget it, Hunter." (After working there for six years, we were still on a last-name basis.)
While I stood tongue-tied, Hampton looked past the electronic equipment, magnetic bubble smelters, and bots directly at the rods which were floating in a group about eight centimeters off the ground, swaying slightly with the air movement in the room. They were anchored by chains, but it was obvious to anyone who cared to study them that they were floating. I figured even a simpleton like Hampton could see something very special was going on here.
Instead he looked right at the rods and didn't even blink. "Get this junk stowed away and get cleared out by noon."
"But..." I sputtered. "Can't you see? We--"
"No back talk. That's how it is. You're leaving."
I decided to take a new tact. Hampton 's a stickler to the compulsive cubed. I tried a proper-paper-work-and-forms angle. " I'll need to get the inventory and records straightened out..." Surely he would bite on that.
"The new owners are closing your section up. We're to junk your equipment; sell it for scrap. World tax write-off. Now get your personal stuff and clear out by noon or I'll have the guards toss you out."
So much for my paper-pusher strategy.
I couldn't speak. I was in shock. Here was the greatest break-through since fire (in my humble opinion) and Hampton the cave man was going to pass it up so he could continue to chew his mastodon blubber cold.
I was also getting a little mad at the thought that I, and my lab crew, had been fired without any notice at all, while we were in the middle of a scientific breakthrough.
While I stood doing a quiet melt-down, Hampton checked the dust on the clear silicon counter like he usually does--my crew says that's a carryover from his military space service--and turned to leave the lab. "Pick up the rest of your month's pay on your way out," he said over his shoulder. Since the labbots didn't get pay chips so I figured he must have been talking to me.
I watched he wiggle out the door my mouth open. Finally I closed it and then asked, "Now what?" That was what I thought and I guess I even said it to the empty room.
Now what? Who would have thought that while I'd worked through the night a takeover deal had been arranged by World United Oil half way around the world... Blasted Corporations had taken over the world and now they were shuffling things around to play their games. While I perfected and put the final touches on the rods, a group of men in expensive glow suits had probably been signing away each member of my group, totally oblivious to what we were doing.
I guess it isn't too surprising.
Our whole end of things had been developed as a pet project of the chairman of the board who retired a year later when she went senile. That always looks bad on paper.
And if I hadn't been in the middle of our project, I would have thought our anti-gravity lab was probably next door to the UFO research bureau and the grow-hair-on-cue-balls research lab.
OK. It probably made sense to think about closing us down.
But the irony was that in their haste to close us down and save a few credits, the "yes sir, no sir, cover my posterior" guys probably missed the greatest chance for money since the Arabs sold their oil fields at the point of Russian bayonets.
After Hampton Weisenbender had broken the news to me, at first I was tempted to call someone higher up and tell them what kind of a mistake they'd made. But then I got to thinking about how things always work out.
It's simple really. No matter who I work for, I always lose my job. And this time my crew of lab assistants--who'd become good friends--had lost theirs as well. All because some group of money grubbers didn't have the sense to check out what they had and some manager like Hampton Weisenbender couldn't look past the dust on the tables to see what was floating under his fat nose.
During those few minutes, something inside me changed. I decided their loss would be my gain. I would go into business for myself. I could imagine it already.
Anti-grav, Unlimited.
As I stood there, I also realized that Hampton had managed to give me some interesting information, now that I had made my decision. According to him: No real inventory would be taken of the lab,
I knew that my crew didn't know if we'd succeeded or not. I had achieved the miracle after they had left. So I was really the only one who knew that the rods existed and worked.
A grin crossed my face as I hatched my hair-brained scheme. It was bold and simple: Steal everything I could.
First I supervised the labbot while it got the last load of rods out of the molds (without launching any more!) and got them clamped to the other rods floating in the room.
Maybe I should explain a little so you'll know what makes the rods so wild to handle. (No, no boring science lecture...just the basics.)
The anti-gravity rods are a lot like bar magnets. Only instead of having a north and south pole, they have a positive and a negative gravity end. One end is attracted toward other matter while the other "pole" is repelled by normal matter. Yeah, sounds crazy but that's how it works. (If you want to come by and spend a week with your compucalc, I'll show you the fundamental concept--but remember we'd been working full time for six years to get these things straightened out and you'll need to understand how math works in six dimensions.)
My lab team had thought things out before I ever started making the rods the night before I was fired. The rods were quite dangerous. They each weighed about fifty kilograms if the plus side were pointed toward the earth while they could lift about fifty kilograms if they were pointed up (more if there was something over them). But...you have to remember that for every reaction there's an opposite one; we're not dealing with magic here.
That means that if you happened to get your foot under one of the rods that was trying to lift off just a few inches from the ground, your foot would be pinned under it by the fifty kilogram push. Have a bunch of them hover near your head and you could be turned to jelly.
They weren't for fooling around with.
Likewise, if two--one up, the other down--were put on a pole that pivoted in the center, you could have a virtual perpetual motion machine. The catch was that it was pretty hard to such a device stopped. And if the pivot burned out (as it quickly would since all that kept the rods' speed down was the friction of the air)--well don't be in the area when the things took off at who-knows-what speed. And stand close to it while your perpetual motion machine is running and the gravitational wake could literally beat you to death.
Now you know what I had--something as dangerous as a swimming pool of nitroglycerin but also capable of making almost endless free energy if harnessed up right.
Even though I was aware of how dangerous the things were, I was still fuming from Hampton's visit and was getting tired, punchy, and careless--so when the last group of rods were released from the mold, one rod departed right through the roof leaving a hole the width of the rod. (I spent a few tense minutes waiting for a plane or pleasure dirigible to come crashing down...Fortunately for all involved, none was overhead when the rod departed for deep space.)
After a quick check of the vidtables, I found that the moon and all listed manned stations were not in its path (as near as I could figure--I was never too patient with plotting those things). Provided the rod made it past all the spy eyes in orbit, it was beyond worrying about--I hoped.
I tried to be a bit more careful after that.
I'd been fastening the rods together. One rod up and one down so that they had a weight only equal to the fasteners. The last rod was then fastened to counteract the weight of most of the connectors so the whole thing weighed about five kilograms (though it still had the real physical sideward mass of the rods).
So I then had:
1) The rods.
2) My van.
3) And a friend who--I hoped--was on duty as the head security guard.
The catch to my steal-everything plan was to get the van to where I could load the rods into it. So that was the next step to my caper. I made a quick call on the vidphone to my friend at the front gate.
Ralph answered. I was glad to see him but tried to hide it.
"Hi, Phil," he said. "Sorry about the job."
"That's all part of the game," I said, trying to look the part of the forlorn rather than the criminal element. I haven't done anything crooked--except maybe for last year's regional tax form--since cheating on my second grade computing quiz. But Ralph didn't seem to notice anything wrong. Or maybe he was hoping I'd even things up and would look the other way.
"I'll be needing to bring my van around to the side door to get some stuff packed, Ralph. Any problem?"
"Nope. I'll pass the word. And--"
I held my breath. Please no inspection on the way out.
"--keep in touch, Phil."
"Yeah. Will do."
"And good luck."
"Thanks." I knew I'd be needing it.
A few minutes later I had my blue van parked at the side door. I managed to get it there without running over anyone or wrecking it. To say I was a little nervous would be an understatement. Between the two days without sleep, liters of caffinex, and my lack of practice at being a criminal, I was a little shaky.
Once back in the lab, I felt like a kid at Christmas. It's one thing to work with expensive equipment day after day...another to take it home with you. The main thing was to pick up what I needed and what wouldn't be missed. I figured that if Hampton Weisenbender thought I'd taken anything, he'd personally lead the SWAT commando raid on my house.
So I had to split the difference between being overly cautious and bloodsucker greedy.
We had about eight super mini-computers and umpteen compucalcs; in went three compucalcs and two computers (which I told to shut down so they'd not chatter at me when I drove through the check point later on).
What next?
I plugged a power cable into my van's batteries. Might as well use a little power for my last day at work.
Then a lot of odds and ends of equipment that I thought I might need, one labbot (a very small one--the space in the van would be a bit tight with the rods), a whole box of notes that hadn't yet been given to the computers to read, and a nice array of tools--including the laser cutting/welding torch. That should all just fit into the van.
The tricky part was getting the rods into the van. They weighed five kilograms if they didn't get tilted. There was a little leeway, but if they passed the point of no return, they went from weighing five kilograms to almost a thousand! Obviously I didn't want to let them tip over in the van. The disaster would be hard to explain if I survived the experience.
So two of the large labbots and I inched them into the van after I had checked to be sure no one was around to see what was going on. The bots helped me anchor the rods in the van. Then I shut down all the bots in the lab.
By 11:30 it I was finished. I looked around. "OK, what did I forget?"
My pay chip for the rest of the month. I needed that. It was crazy, but while I had a bit of priceless technology in my van, there was no capital to work with. Especially since my Mastivisa account was in borrowed-to-the-quick condition. And I knew my local friendly electric banker wouldn't be giving me a loan to work on a whacko idea like anti-gravity devices.
A few moments later, with pay chip in my hot fist, I headed around the huge plastic bubble that formed the lab and administration complex, got into the van and--very carefully so that the rods wouldn't break lose from their moorings--eased toward the front gate that was the only exit through the mass of mines and electrified barbed ribbon surrounding me.
That's where things started looking bad.
Ralph wasn't there; in his place swaggered Frank Small, whom my staff maintained was Hampton Weisenbender's bastard son. They were half right at least, if not about the son part. If anyone would make an effort to go through my van and give me fits, it was Frank.
I slowed down very carefully.
"Hear you got canned," he smirked.
"Yeah."
"I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner."
I gave a weak grin, trying to play the part of someone who'd lost his job. I'm pretty good at swallowing my pride when it might keep me out of jail. I eased the van forward.
"Wait a minute!" Frank yelled.
I stopped, swallowing hard. "Yes?"
"I need your badge and compukeys."
At this point I was hoping Frank couldn't smell fear. I tried to swallow again and discovered I couldn't. " I already turned them in," I explained. "At the front desk when I picked up my pay chip." How ironic. Here cowboy Frank was worrying about next to nothing while I was trying to sneak out with the crown jewels. I looked at my scared face reflected in his mirrored glasses and wondered what it would be like to be in jail with a three hundred pound synthapunk who called me Honeybunch.
I don't know why, but instead of playing it cozy, I said, "Go ahead and check, you'll just be wasting your time." I said it half-heartedly because I was afraid that Frank was about to search the van.
Instead he thought I was lying about turning in the compukeys and my badge.
So he thought it was his big chance to catch a petty thief. "Yeah, we'll see," he said, a broad grin crossing his face with his icy eyes putting the lie to his smile. He turned to the vidphone and told it what extension to contact for the head desk. He murmured to it for a few moments while I wished I had a machine gun to fire at his fat rump.
After what seemed an eternity in neck high slime, he turned back with a look of sheer disappointment. "OK. You can go."
I started to ease forward again when...
"Wait a minute. What's in the van?"
Well, my last smart answer had paid off, why not try up the ante and try again?
With a big fake smile, I told the truth, "A stolen labbot, two computers, several boxes of lab tools, and anti-gravitation rods worth more than anyone can probably imagine. Want to look?"
He didn't even glance toward the back of the van. Lucky for me he couldn't see into its dark interior with his sunglasses. "Yeah, right," he snarled and waved me through.
We probably both thought goodbye and good riddance. But I had the valuables and he only had the bad taste in his mouth.
The noon Kansas City traffic leading to my home was the usual hassle. All the crazies were out with the usual unipeds, bikes, modif-horses--and my blue van. All the while I was trying to accelerate/brake without causing the massive rods to come loose and either drop out the back doors of the van or come sliding forward to crush me. If I had to choose between driving those things through rush hour traffic or juggling primed RAW grenades, I'd go for the grenades every time.
I was doing well until I almost smacked into the robed figure of a Dweller on a bicycle when he suddenly cut into the van's path. As I bore down on him, it was the first time I've ever seen one of those guys show any emotion; also the first time I've ripped anyone's robes off their back when passing.
No police unipeds or traffic eyes were about so I just speeded up a little and left the guy before he could get his privates covered and get my van's tag number.
Needless to say, I was very, very glad to get to my little green bubble dome and open the garage door with my scramble coder. If I'd been more alert I would have noticed the bars had been pried off the side window with all the finesse of a cosmetic surgeon using a machete. But I was too preoccupied for the sight to register as I glanced at the bent bars.
When the plastic garage door closed behind the van, I opened my van door and heard the intruder alarm inside the house. Great. I quickly closed the van door.
The house system gives off a false alarm about once a month (which is why I removed it from the vidphone cable; if the police come, they charge per trip for false alarms, plus you're apt to get on their black list.) I was cautious but had that old "It can't happen to me" attitude. Nevertheless, I reached down under the driver's seat of the van and pulled out the plastic bag that contained my old Beretta 92-F nine millimeter semiautomatic pistol.
Now before you go moral on me, I know that having a firearm is illegal. But if you're fair, you'll also admit that just about everyone has an unregistered gun squirreled away somewhere. I'm no different than the next guy.
So I pulled out the weapon and clicked off the safety (I always carry it with a round in the chamber, ready to fire once the safety is released).
While I was fumbling around with the pistol, the door from the dome to the garage opened and two "gentlemen," who were unmistakably pukers, stepped through the opening: Mohawks, flowered shirts, chains...you know the look. They acted like they owned the place.
Maybe they did.
There I sat in the van, trying to look invisible.
Since the alarm was blaring in the house, they had apparently not heard me come into the garage. Lucky for me since they were armed; one had an old Colt M4 assault carbine--old but deadly--and the other had a three-shot rail gun. In my book, an assault rifle and a rail gun beat out one pistol. Especially a pistol manned by someone who hadn't ever fired the thing in anger.
And pukers aren't noted for leaving behind breathing victims. These guys definitely didn't look like they'd be leaving without checking out the van. I knew I couldn't race out of the garage without the rods crunching around--which would be even worse than anything the pukers could do--so I was going to have to take care of the guys or get shot trying.
I sat tight, slumped down in the van, sweat pouring out of my arm pits. While they were looking away, I slowly opened up the side vent on the van, waited, and prayed my "please God, just this once" prayer asking that they would walk over where I could get a clear shot at them.
They took their time and didn't cooperate at all with my brilliant tactic.
After an eternity, they finally headed toward the front of the van, walked past (whew...without looking in), and started pawing through the tools on my work bench.
That also lined them up with my open window vent. Ever so quietly and carefully, I brought my Beretta up to the window and tried to aim at the one carrying the rail gun. (I am here to tell you that aiming is not easy when your hand is doing a little jig out on the end of your arm.)
I jerked the trigger and down went one while I screamed from the painfully loud report of the pistol--magnified inside the van.
Fortunately, the remaining puker wasn't too bright. Or maybe he just hadn't watched the right 3V ads. At any rate, the one left turned and brought up his rifle and proceeded to spray the van's windshield with automatic fire.
Like most other folks who can afford it, I had gotten a van with carbopolythene glass. It's just as tough as the ads say and--as proved by my independent, highly personal, puker tests--bullet proof. If the puker had fired through the door or side windows, I would have been dead meat. But instead he only fired directly at me, sending a spray of bullets careening off the windshield.
After a few noisy moments of full auto fire, he was standing there with an empty rifle, his mouth hanging open and I sat in the van with my jaw clenched shut. Suddenly we were in a race. He went for his partner's weapon and I fumbled with the vent window, finally got it open, and fired three times.
The puker crumpled.
The spectacle over, I carefully got out of the van and enjoyed the dry heaves while my ear rang.
Of course most people would tell you I'd made the world a better place since two pukers were dead. But I would not be truthful if I didn't tell you that I was more than a little upset; this was the first time I'd actually had to defend myself and I didn't relish it.
Sure, legally you can kill anyone that's in your house uninvited. At least you can in our region. Also, using an unregistered weapon to do it is not too big of a deal as far as the police are concerned when the end result is two dead pukers and a little bribe on the side.
But I also had a load of stolen rods and equipment. And I really couldn't afford to take the next few days filling out forms, telling compupolice my life story, and maybe even feeling the wrath of other pukers should they find out what I'd done.
So I calmly got two body bags out of the locker in the garage and filled them up.
Maybe you're wondering why I happened to have two body bags.
I traded for them on the black market after I'd talked to a friend who had reported a killing to the police. I didn't care to go through the ordeal myself after hearing of the hassle. Life is just too short and the government already does its part to make it as tense as possible.
At the same time, don't think I was callous about this. I still had a bad case of the shakes and these were the first dead bodies I'd ever had the pleasure of working with and at the time hoped they would be the last as well, thank you very much.
I finally got the guys zipped up and--with a lot of straining on my part--pulled the two bags into the corner of the garage for the time being. That done, I turned off the alarm and enjoyed another bought of the dry heaves.
That ordeal once again over, I opened the van and could have kicked myself for straining with the bags--the labbot was sitting right there waiting to move at my beck and call. Some days I could give absent-minded scientists a bad name.
"Labbot 3 on," I told the bot. It perked right up and swiveled its camera to look at me. With the tedious instructions needed to control a bot, I got it to do what I wanted, and we managed to move the rods out of the van and fastened them to the side of the garage. Provided we didn't have an earthquake, I figured they'd be pretty safe there for a while.
We--I seem to think of labbots as living entities so I say "we"--unloaded the equipment, and the labbot stuffed the two corpses into the van. I closed and locked it and then had the bot stand in the corner where I covered it with a drop cloth.
I went inside for a quick, hour-long nap but slept for the next eight hours instead.