The Best of Bova: Volume 1 Read Free

into a power-beaming satellite.
    If he could get there.
    And if they were not damaged.
    And if he knew how to put them together.
    Through months that stretched into years, over miles of radioactive wilderness, on horseback, on carts, on foot, those who knew about the satellite spread the word, carefully, secretly, to what was left of North America’s scientists and engineers. Gradually they trickled into the once-abandoned settlement.
    They elected a leader: Jason, the engineer, one of the few men who knew anything about rockets to survive the war and the lunatic bands that hunted down anyone suspected of being connected with prewar science.
    Jason’s first act was to post guards around the settlement. Then he organized the work of rebuilding the power-receiving station and a man-carrying rocket.
    They pieced together parts of a rocket and equipment that had been damaged by the war. What they did not know, they learned. What they did not have, they built or cannibalized from ruined equipment.
    Jason sent armed foragers out for gasoline, charcoal and wood. They built a ramshackle electricity generator. They planted crops and hunted the small game in the local underbrush. A major celebration occurred whenever a forager came back towing a stray cow or horse or goat.
    They erected fences around the settlement, because more than once they had to fight off the small armies of looters and anti-scientists that still roved the countryside.
    But finally they completed the rocket . . . after exhausting almost every scrap of material and every ounce of willpower.
    Then they picked a pilot: Thomas H. Morris, age 41, former historian and teacher. He had arrived a year before the completion of the rocket after walking 1,300 miles to find the settlement; his purpose was to organize some of the scientists and explore the bombed-out cities to see what could be salvaged out of man’s shattered heritage.
    But Tom was ideal for the satellite job: the right size—five-six and one-hundred thirty pounds; no dependents—wife and two sons dead of radiation sickness. True, he had no technical background whatsoever; but with Arnoldsson’s hypnotic conditioning he could be taught all that was necessary for him to know . . . maybe.
    Best of all, though, he was thoroughly expendable.
    So Jason made a deal with him. There could be no expeditions into the cities until the satellite was finished, because every man was needed at the settlement. And the satellite could not be finished until someone volunteered to go up in the rocket and assemble it.
    It was like holding a candy bar in front of a small child. He accepted Jason’s terms.
    The Earth turned, and with it the tiny spark of life alone in the emptiness around the satellite. Tom worked unmindful of time, his eyes and hands following Jason’s engineering commands through Arnoldsson’s post-hypnotic directions, with occasional radio conferences.
    But his conscious mind sought refuge from the strangeness of space, and he talked almost constantly into his radio while he worked, talked about anything, everything, to the woman on the other end of the invisible link.

    “. . . and once the settlement is getting the power beamed from this contraption, we’re going to explore the cities. Guess we won’t be able to get very far inland, but we can still tackle Washington, Philadelphia and New York . . . plenty for us there.”
    Ruth asked, “What were they like before the war?”
    “The cities? That’s right, you’re too young to remember. They were big, Ruth, with buildings so tall people called them skyscrapers.” He pulled a wrench from its magnetic holder in the satellite’s self-contained tool bin. “And filled with life, millions of people lived in each one . . all the people we have at the settlement could have lived on one floor of a good-sized hotel.”
    “What’s a hotel?”
    Tom grinned as he tugged at a pipe fitting. “You’ll find out when you come with us . . . you’ll see