Short Science Fiction

will take all night to build another stall, and no doubt the inspector is waiting up there with a squad of cops, hoping something will happen. After all, we’re costing LaBombard a million bucks.” His eyes opened suddenly. “I’ll bet he sent the woman down here to spy on us.”

A car came down the ramp and went into the reducing stall, and Slim automatically set the dial.

---

The telephone rang, and I could hear the voice from where I stood. “The building inspector wants his car.”

“Coming right up,” Slim said.

Then he looked at me. I looked at him. “Get that safe open,” he jerked out. I dived for it.

I was spinning the combination when I heard the voices. The building inspector was riding the ramp down to the basement. Then I heard more voices and saw the bottom half of two cops and Richard LaBombard on the freight elevator.

Slim hissed to me. “Make it snappy!”

I was trying to, but I couldn’t get the thing open. Five thousand dollars in that safe and I couldn’t get it. I spun the dial frantically and started over.

But now the ramp was filled with people. The cops were getting off the elevator. I jumped up and ran over to where Steve was standing.

The building inspector was staring bug-eyed at his huge car. Somebody went around the stall and saw the six-inch car crawling out. Somebody else took hold of the stall and shook it. “Where’s my car? What’s going on?”

Well, a mob is a funny thing. In about half a minute there were eight hundred people in that basement, and all of them tearing apart the reducing stall.

Slim and I hesitated no longer. We ran up the stairway and sifted out through the crowd.⁠ ⁠…

---

At three o’clock in the morning Slim said to me, “You think that brakeman will kick us off?”

The brakeman came to us, sitting up there in the fresh night breeze on top of a carload of lettuce going east from California. He looked at me and then, as if he didn’t believe it, he held his lantern up and examined my head all the way around.

“Why don’t you go back to the farm? This ain’t no life for you,” he growled.

“I am considering that very seriously,” I said with as much dignity as I could.

The Bryd

The Bryd was awakened with a rude jolt. It didn’t even have time for a mental yawn. Something terrible was going on in Dale Stevenson’s mind, and the turmoil there made the Bryd most uncomfortable. It shook off the lethargy of its long sleep. It knew instinctively that Dale Stevenson was about to get in trouble and make his mind unsuitable for the Bryd’s occupancy.

The Bryd sighed. These humans were so unstable, so impulsive. The Bryd took a look around.

They⁠—Dale Stevenson and he⁠—were not on Earth. They seemed to be in space somewhere, 5,100 miles from Earth. Well, well, so men finally were breaking the shackles of gravitation. The Bryd became a little more interested.

But Dale Stevenson was reaching for a button that would fire a rocket to position the mirror and burn a path across the biggest city in Europe. Hey! what was going on here, anyway?

The Bryd had about a quarter of a second to do a lot of research. What was Dale Stevenson doing up here? What had he done with himself in the twenty-four years since the Bryd had curled up in the boy’s cozy four-year-old mind and settled down for a long nap?

The Bryd could have stayed Dale’s hand for a while, but the Bryd very much believed in minding its own business. It didn’t like to interfere with humans; that was policy. So it decided to get busy. It had a quarter of a second to find out things and decide what, if anything, to do about them. Certainly it couldn’t expect to stay comfortably in a mind as upset as Dale Stevenson’s⁠ ⁠… so it got busy.

---

The first thing to do was get oriented. The Bryd took a quick look around. Dale Stevenson, doctor of physics, was in charge of this sun-station, which was a man-made island in space, some three miles in diameter. The rim of the island was composed mainly of a steel framework like the rim of a wheel, with little cabins at various intervals to house a power plant, various controls, rocket berths, repair shops, and living quarters for the sun-station’s crew.

The center area of the sun-station was a giant mirror, three miles across, made up of thin sheets of metallic sodium fastened to a skeleton of wire nets. The sodium was very light in weight, and being in airless and heatless space, was inert. Also it was highly reflective.

The whole business was kept at a point approximately 5,100 miles from Earth, where Earth’s gravitational attraction approached neutrality and where the entire space station could be maintained in a given position or moved at will with a minimum expenditure of energy.

Technically the station was owned by Night Sun, Inc., along with nearly a hundred others around Earth, and this particular station, No. 18, was under contract to furnish illumination at night over Paris, France, by staying out of Earth’s shadow and reflecting sunlight on Paris during the night.

Management of such a station involved many mathematical factors in distance, triangulation with Paris, velocity and angulation, and control of the curve of the mirror. Normally this was a parabolic curve, but it was constantly varied with other factors to produce the desired degree of illumination.

No. 18 was under the sole control of Dale Stevenson, who had been psych-tested and certified by the United Nations licensing board.

That made the Bryd feel a little better. It looked as if he had made a mistake twenty-four years ago, but it also looked as if the licensing board had been fooled within the last year, for Dale certainly was getting ready to cause a lot of trouble in Paris. He could actuate the controls to expand or contract