The Crack In Space Read Free

comer by himself, sat Phil Danville. No one talked to Danville; the party bigwigs, passing in and out of the studio, astutely ignored his existence.
    A technician nodded to Jim. Time to begin his speech.
    ‘It’s very popular these days,’ Jim Briskin said to the TV camera, ‘to make fun of the old dreams and schemes for planetary colonization. How could people have been so nutty? Trying to live in completely inhuman environments  . . . on worlds never designed for Homo sapiens. And it’s amusing that they tried for decades to alter these hostile environments to meet human needs—and naturally failed.’ He spoke slowly, almost drawlingly; he took his time. He had the attention of the nation, and he meant to make thorough use of it. ‘So now we’re looking for a planet ready-made, another "Venus", or more accurately what Venus specifically never was. What we had hoped it would be: lush, moist and verdant and productive, a Garden of Eden just waiting for us to show up.’
    Reflectively, Patricia Heim smoked her El Producto alta cigar, never taking her eyes from him.
    ‘Well,’ Jim Briskin said, ‘we’ll never find it. And if we do, it’ll be too late. Too small, too late, too far away. If we want another Venus, a planet we can colonize, we’ll have to manufacture it ourselves. We can laugh ourselves sick at Bruno Mini, but the fact is, he was right.’
    In the control room Sal Heim stared at him in gross anguish. He had done it. Sanctioned Mini’s abandoned scheme of recasting the ecology of another world. Madness revisited.
    The camera clicked off.
    Turning his head, Jim Briskin saw the expression on Sal Heim’s face. He had been cut off there in the control room; Sal had given the order.
    ‘You’re not going to let me finish?’ Jim said.
    Sal’s voice, amplified, boomed, ‘No, goddam it. No!’
    Standing up, Pat called back, ‘You have to. He’s the candidate. If he wants to hang himself, let him.’
    Also on his feet, Danville said hoarsely, ‘If you cut him off again I’ll spill it publicly. I’ll leak the entire thing how you’re working him like a puppet!’ He started at once toward the door of the studio; he was leaving. Evidently he meant what he had said.
    Jim Briskin said, ‘You better turn it back on, Sal. They’re right; you have to let me talk.’ He did not feel angry, only impatient. His desire was to continue, nothing else. ‘Come on, Sal,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m waiting.’
    The party brass and Sal Heim, in the control room, conferred.
    ‘He’ll give in,’ Pat said to Jim Briskin. ‘I know Sal.’ Her face was expressionless; she did not enjoy this, but she intended to endure it.
    ‘Right,’ Jim agreed, nodding.
    ‘But will you watch a playback of the speech, Jim?’ She said, ‘For Sal’s sake. Just to be sure you intend what you say.’
    ‘Sure,’ he said. He had meant to anyhow.
    Sal Heim’s voice boomed from the wall speaker. ‘Damn your black Col hide, Jim!’
    Grinning, Jim Briskin waited, seated at his desk, his arms folded.
    The read light of the central camera clicked back on.

TWO
    After the speech Jim Briskin’s press secretary, Dorothy Gill, collared him in the corridor. ‘Mr Briskin, you asked me yesterday to find out if Bruno Mini is still alive. He is, after a fashion.’ Miss Gill examined her notes. ‘He’s a buyer for a dried fruit company in Sacramento, California, now. Evidently Mini’s entirely given up his planet-wetting career, but your speech just now will probably bring him back to his old grazing ground.’
    ‘Possibly not,’ Briskin said. ‘Mini may not like the idea of a Col taking up his ideas and propagandizing them. Thanks, Dorothy.’
    Coming up beside him, Sal Heim shook his head and said, ‘Jim, you just don’t have political instinct.’
    Shrugging, Jim Briskin said, ‘Possibly you’re right.’ He was in that sort of mood, now he felt passive and depressed. In any case the damage had been done; the speech was on