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.
