Cricket was in the control room. Suzie was there, too. Soon Seth and seven other men who had been helping him tie the lander to the trees appeared, and I realized we were rising. The craft surged away from the ground like a thing alive, but so gently I could have stood on tiptoe and balanced with the greatest of ease.

  For a time we made our way through a long, dark canyon. When we were out of the mountains, Gallagher let the craft really rise, and we were up and away into the higher atmosphere.

  Eventually the ocean of atmosphere through which we had risen became tenuous, and Gallagher cut in drives that were still quiet, but that produced a different motion in the ship. Again we began to climb.

  I had waited for hours to ask the questions I wanted to ask. I had thought to ask Suzie or Cricket, but they were stretched out on foam-rubber mats, sleeping, as were the eight men. Now Gallagher woke one of the men, turned over the controls to him, and stretched out. He was undoubtedly dead tired, but I had to know. I moved over beside him.

  "How'd you capture it?" I asked softly.

  "Didn't," he said. "It's ours." His voice was sleepy.

  "But…"

  "Told you I'd been tooling up for a revolution while we were on Betsy Ann; it was part of the tooling up."

  "How'd it get here?"

  "Came with us."

  I was stumped. Gallagher had shrunk the Glacier back nearly to its normal size before we boarded her at Betsy Ann. On the way from Betsy Ann to Durango I'd gone with Gallagher all through the ship. There hadn't been any large holds, and those there were were practically empty. There hadn't been a thing in the way of materials for a revolution, and that had both surprised and distressed me, though I'd kept my mouth shut at the time.

  Evidently the authorities on Durango had been stumped too. They'd sent up a boarding party a few days after we'd escaped from the port, and had been greeted only by Cricket. They'd inspected the craft from end to end, and then left, finding nothing but a bit of automatic machinery on board, and a few passages and cabins.

  They probably figured that Gallagher was leaving the Glacier in synchronous orbit for use as a radio relay through Cricket, and that by letting it alone they could tune in on the communications.

  It hadn't occurred to them, any more than it had to me, that there might be holds that simply did not connect either with the surface or with other parts of the ship, bubbles in the ice that could be opened into the rest of the ship or sealed from it by the ice mice.

  One more question I asked. "Have you built a solar tap base on the planet?"

  "Wasn't time," he answered in a far-away voice as he fell asleep.

  I worried the matter a long while, then fell asleep myself so that when we reached the Glacier we were ready for action.

  Gallagher didn't pause in the control room when we reached the Glacier. He headed aft. Seth and Suzie stayed in the control room, but Cricket followed Gallagher and the seven men, and I tagged along.

  We entered a big hold open to space and to the planet below. Down the length of the hold stretched a gigantic gun barrel, aimed straight down. I shivered.

  The gun was obviously one of the most powerful laser beam generators I'd ever met, but Gallagher and Cricket were ranging it in a way that would, it seemed, make it useless as a weapon. I was puzzled, but said nothing as they worked.

  Finally, Gallagher chuckled quietly.

  "Okay, Cricket. Check the sweep."

  Cricket leaned forward and flipped a switch. The laser began putting out a middle C cheeee.

  The sound sent shivers down my back, because it meant to me that an enemy had been sighted and was in range, though there seemed to be none of the tenseness that one would find in the control room of a war vessel swinging on target. There was nothing but a planet out there for a target.

  The ridiculousness of shooting at a planet with the ineffective sting of a fine-focused laser began to creep up on me. The focus on it was so fine that it would probably make no more than a centimeter hole in whatever target it hit, and though that's enough to play havoc with a space vehicle, it would be less than the sting of a mosquito as far as the planet was concerned.

  "Set power pulse to three seconds."

  Gallagher's voice was slightly edged, but Cricket's came back in a singsong that showed no overtones of emotion.

  "Power pulse on three seconds by off point five seconds. n

  "Initiate pulse."

  Cricket didn't have to respond to that because the machinery did it for her. There was a slow, rhythmic, mmmm-pop, mmmm-pop from the power supply that went on and on and combined with the cheeee to form a now familiar repetitive pattern, the song of power that I had heard on Betsy Ann: cheee-ops; cheee-ops.

  "I'll be damned," I yelled. "This thing's an upside-down solar tap."

  There was a choke behind Gallagher's laugh, and his voice had a sweep and flow that spoke of tensions releasing.

  "We're way above the radiation belts," he said, "but the oscillating lens of our zoom focus makes an ionized path from Durango's ionosphere to its ground, and that's all you need for a tap. We didn't have time to build a pyramid down there, so we turned the tap upside down."

  Then I realized that we had won, that the battle was over and we had won.

  There would not be a company electric plant on the whole planet of Durango that hadn't quit working in the last thirty seconds. Though broadcast power and hydroelectric power can work side by side, our side had set its power to be antagonistic to the other.

  "Not even the spy-satellite system will be worth a damn now," I heard Cricket's satisfied voice say.

  "And the port?" I asked, though I knew the answer.

  "The port? Oh, much more than just the port!" It was Suzie's voice this time, and it held a deep, internal quiet. "The port's knocked out of course. The effect reaches out several planetary radü. I'm quoting Gallagher," she added, "but he knows. It reaches out several planetary radü, and any ships that come close will be easy prizes, for their electrical systems will be knocked out, their motors and their instruments and—they can't even come close without our letting them."

  I could see her face through her helmet, and she was beautiful. The lines were smoothed out, and there was only a quiet triumph and a peace such as I have seldom seen on a human being.

  "We've won," she said. "We've won for Durango and for all the planets. We'll not be slaves again."

  I stood there looking at them each, Cricket, Gallagher, Suzie and Seth, in their suits in that ice chamber by the big barrel that pointed out to a planet. It took a minute for what Suzie had said to sink in.

  Won for all the planets? But of course, when you can establish a powTer tap from outside, no corporation can keep the outside from coming in. They wouldn't have to set up pyramids on Durango or any of the other planets. They'd simply set up a satellite to take the place of the Glacier and they'd surround it with smaller satellites to make the Jacob's ladder, and they could land their own ships.

  The deep ringing voice that I heard, the cheee-ops, cheee-ops, cheee-ops of an upside-down tap was a freedom bell ringing across the starways.

  I looked at Gallagher and I felt that it's men that make history, not history that makes men, for it takes a man to dream freedom so hard that the stupidities are brushed out of the way. It takes a man to burst through the static forms that keep their shape by being rigid, the forms that can't change because any major change destroys them. It takes a man to replace that static stability with a dynamic stability that can change, adapt, grow and evolve.

  It was then I began to feel the laughter that was bubbling up from my toes, and I knew finally what it is that makes a free man laugh. There's a price for anything, and there's its value. But the value I saw then is beyond price. The question of price simply drops out of the equation.

  I looked down the barrel of the cannon pointing power for a planet and a pathway to the stars, and laughter enveloped me.

  There comes a time when a man's got a right to lean back and laugh.

 

 

  Walt Richmond, Gallagher's Glacier (UC)

 

 

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