The Lagrangists. Mack Reynolds
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purposes. By the way, I can just see you crawling around with an infra-red Nikon-Polaroid, snapping pictures of some poor bastard in bed with a chorus girl.”
“Wizard,” Rex said. “Come on, come on. Doctor Hawkins, Susie, has the confidence of a woman with a job. Let me guess: she’s connected with the Lagrange Five Project. What’s this got to do with my being a largely unemployed private investigator?”
“I was just telling you,” Mickoff said in mock plaintiveness. “You said no crime jobs, no divorces, no other usual jobs for private eyes. How about bodyguarding?”
CHAPTER TWO
Rex Bader looked at the other as though he had slipped completely around the bend. He said, “Bodyguarding! In this day and age? Who in the name of Holy leaping Zen needs a bodyguard, except possibly the President and a few other top politicians?”
Susie Hawkins cleared her throat and said, “In actuality, the term we were going to use was Research Aide. You’ll be a Research Aide.”
“With a Gyro-jet pistol,” Mickoff grinned.
Rex ignored him and looked back at the young woman. He said suspiciously, “What’s a research aide?”
She nodded at the validity of the request and said, “That’s a good question. I, among others, am a research aide. It’s an imposing sounding title. What it actually means is a Man, or Girl, Friday. The one who does the real work, a flunky. Call it what you will. It’s the sort of title one can have that is never questioned, in the sciences. You can be on the payroll as a research aide, and nobody ever thinks to wonder why, or exactly what you do. The professor has at least a dozen research aides. You’ll be invisible among the rest of us.”
“What professor?” he said. For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, he didn’t like the sound of this. Possibly it was because of the presence of John Mickoff. He’d never exactly prospered whilst in Mickoff’s vicinity. To the contrary, he usually wound up with his ass in a sling.
Mickoff said now, more seriously, “Professor George R. Casey, the inspirational guide, the—what would you call it?—the motivating intellectual symbol, or something like that, behind the Lagrange Five Project. Call him a prophet of man’s expansion into space.”
“That was very well put, Mr. Mickoff,” Susie Hawkins said. She blinked her blue eyes. “Everybody who works on the project or under the professor is inspired by him.”
“Now wait a goddam minute,” Rex blurted. “You mean that Professor Casey needs a bodyguard? Now come on. Who’d want to kill Professor George Casey? Why, everybody in the world is caught up in the explosion of humanity into space.”
John Mickoff cleared his throat. “Not quite everybody, it seems. At least two, perhaps more that we don’t know about, attempts have been made on his life in the past couple of weeks.”
Rex Bader stared at him for a long moment, then got up and took their glasses and went over to the autobar and refreshed them, forgetting that this was going to drain his current treasury. He brought the new drinks back to his visitors and reseated himself.
“Wizard. Let’s have the story,” he said. “I still can’t get a picture of someone wanting to kill Professor Casey. What do they call him? The Father of the Lagrange Five Project. It would be like somebody wanting to kill Albert Einstein, back in the old days.”
John Mickoff snorted and said, “Younger brother, suppose you were an Arab sheik, sitting on a lake of oil. What happens to you when Island Number One, the first space colony, is completed, and it damn near is, and begins to turn out the SPSs, the Solar Power Satellites? They figure the first power will be microwaved down only nine years from the beginning of the construction on the moon and at Lagrange Five. They figure that the building of Island One will take eight years, but Island Two, three times as big, only two years. From then on, it’s a geometric progression; each island builds more islands. On the stable orbit, they figure there’s room for several thousand of them, each capable of turning out the Solar Power Stations which in turn will milk the sun for what amounts to practically free power. Younger brother, what happens to that sheik’s oil?”
Susie added, “For that matter, what’s going to happen to the coal barons in Pennsylvania, or wherever?”
“I see what you mean,” Rex said, scowling. “But what would be accomplished by assassinating George Casey? He’s just one man. Finishing him off would hardly stop the project. Hell, the Lagrange Five Project has some two thousand men up doing the actual construction alone. There’s other thousands involved in getting materials up to them in the space shuttles and space tugs, not to mention the tens of thousands here on Earth working in all the other aspects of it.”
Susie admitted to that and said, “No, it might not stop it, but it wouldn’t do it any good. You see, in a way the professor is our catalyst. He was right from the beginning. Something like Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project; something like Von Braun in the early days of space travel. It’s his dream. He’s the focal point. It’s he who worms through the appropriations. It’s he who converts the hardest nosed Congressmen to the need for the building of space colonies. It’s he who goes on Tri-Di every week and brings the people up to date on how the construction of Island One is progressing. He keeps the whole country inspired with the dream.”
“There are other aspects,” Mickoff got in. “If whoever is behind this attempt to get Professor Casey would pull such a callous romp as an attempt on his life, how do we know who’s next? How do we know what other aspects of sabotage might be planned—or even already accomplished?”
Rex thought about it. “Yeah,” he said. “And I just thought of something else.” He regarded the girl. “Some of the politicians who drag their feet over appropriations for Lagrange 5, claim it’s too dangerous. They put up a howl every time some construction workers up in space or on the moon get hurt, or especially when somebody gets killed. If somebody as big as your professor got killed, supposedly by accident, they’d really have a lever to work with. They might even attempt steps to close the whole project down.”
Mickoff growled, “You can’t have major construction, buildings, bridges, dams and so forth, without a certain amount of casualties. So far, the building of Island One has been amazingly free from tragedy.”
“I’m not arguing with you,” Rex told him. “But why me? Why don’t you IABI people put a few bodyguards on him? Since all the police organizations in the country have been merged into one, including the CIA, the FBI and the Secret Service, you must have a glut of experienced agents suitable for bodyguard work.”
John Mickoff said patiently, “Because it’s too controversial. Sooner or later the word would get out that we had bodyguards with Professor Casey. Sooner or later someone would leak the fact. Then the pro-Lagrange Five people would hit the ceiling, throwing accusations all over the place. And the anti-Lagrange Five forces would be indignant over the fact that the professor was so controversial that his life had to be protected. We don’t want a controversial image.”
“Besides,” Susie said, “we’d rather not let the word get out that the attempts have been made. It encourages the crackpot element to get into the act. You’ve seen it happen before. Somebody takes a shot at the President, or whoever, and before the month is out, half a dozen others have taken a shot at him, or whatever. It becomes an epidemic.”
“Wizard,” Rex said. “Now these attempts. You said, at least two. What do you mean, at least? Might there have been more that you don’t know of?”
“That’s right,” Mickoff told him. “The first attempt was on Luna at the mines and the mass-driver which launches the ores up to Lagrange Five for processing. A cable, connected with the mass-driver, snapped and almost caught the professor. It would have sliced him in two. The thing is, it didn’t snap accidently. It had been cut. The second attempt was even more flagrant. The professor was eating alone in a restaurant in Greater Washington. He had hardly gotten his meal when a message came, calling him to Capitol Hill where he was to testify before some House committee.