Hal Clement by The Best of Hal Clement (epub)

Author:The Best of Hal Clement (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Bulge

I

MAC HOERWITZ CAME back to awareness as the screen went blank, and he absently flicked the switch and reset the sheet-scanner. He had not really watched the last act. At least, he didn’t think he had. He knew it so perfectly that there was no way to be certain whether Prospero’s closing words were really still in his ears or that it was simply memory from earlier times.

Two things had been competing with The Tempest for his attention. One was the pain where his left index fingernail had formerly been, and the other was a half-serious search through his memory to decide whether Shakespeare had ever used a character quite like Mr. Smith. The two distractions were closely connected, even though Smith had not removed the nail himself. He had merely ordered Jones to do it.

Hoerwitz rather doubted that Shakespeare would have been satisfied with a Smith. The fellow was too simple. He knew what he wanted and went after it without knowing or caring what anyone else in the picture might care. He was an oversized two-year-old. Shakespeare would have made him more complicated and more believable, even back in his Henry the Sixth days.

It was a nice idea, with perhaps some scholarly merit. But it didn’t really help with the present problem. This was more a piece of post-Edwardian melodrama than a carefully thought out Shakespearean plot. The hero had been trapped by armed villains, in a situation from which there was no obvious escape, and was being forced to help them commit grand larceny.

Of course in a piece of Prohibition-era fiction he would have refused steadfastly to help, but Hoerwitz was no flapper’s hero. He was eighty-one years old and had a mass of just one hundred pounds distributed along his seventy inches of height. He could not possibly have lifted that mass against Earth’s gravity. He smiled in spite of the pain of his hand when he recalled the facial expressions when Smith and his three followers had first seen him.

They had gone to a great deal of trouble to make their approach unobtrusive. They had arrived near the apogee point of the station’s six-day period instead of making the just-after-perigee rendezvous which the freighters found more economical. This had served the double purpose of making fairly sure there would be no other ships present and of being harder to observe from Earth. At one hundred seventy thousand miles or so, a one-mile asteroid is visible to the naked eye and a modest-sized spaceship can be seen in a good telescope, but one has to be looking for them deliberately.

It was a rendezvous, of course, rather than a landing. The latter word means nothing on a celestial body where a spacesuited man weighs about a quarter of an ounce. They had made the rendezvous skillfully enough so that Hoerwitz had not felt the contact—or at least, hadn’t noticed it over the sound effects accompanying Hamlet’s stepfather’s drinking. There had been no trouble about entering, since the

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