Read Online Mission: Earth "Disaster" by Ron L. Hubbard - Free Book Online

a disposable radiation coverall. I put it on even though I suspected he had cut holes in it or rubbed the insulation off.
    He took me back to the flight deck and chained me to the pipes once more. I crouched there, trying to figure some way out of this.
    He began to have conversations with Corky about orbital direction and velocity and after quite a while the big Will-be Was main engines went off and the planetary auxiliaries began to drum.
    More conversations with Corky and then suddenly the auxiliaries went off. The silence was eerie.
    Heller clicked every viewscreen live. There was Earth, looking awfully big. We were right above a red-brown area. But the views appeared a little strange, sort of wavy.
    He checked coordinates, and by consulting a map that appeared on one screen, he located Los Angeles and then Las Vegas and then finally Barstow. His finger travelled east to a desert area marked Devil's Playground. He turned to another screen and with a pass of his hand enlarged the view directly below. What a desolate desert it was! All rocks and sand. Unlike so many other places, there was no cloud cover here. He passed his hand again and the image jumped larger. A cluster of what seemed to be newly constructed buildings. Directly in the center of the screen was a large black area. He then got to work. Reading the screens, he cast the safety lines off the umbrella he had built. Like threading a needle, he passed a tension beam through the cage that was just below the mantle. Then he began to work compression beams and tension beams and the whole rig moved around to the back of the ship.
    He pushed it further and further astern, enlarging its image bit by bit.
    Suddenly the whole thing shivered. It made a sudden movement. The concentric, in-pointing bars of the cage all went into place.
    "Got it," he said with a sigh of relief.
    "Got what?" I said. I couldn't see anything.
    "Got the black hole in the middle of the cage without losing the whole rig. All right, now let's see if it also works as a motor." He picked up a control plate and began to touch buttons on it. Small jets seemed to come from the center out through one or another of the rods.
    "That's fine," he said. "Its position can be adjusted."
    "With what?" I said.
    "There's an automatic sensor for these coordinates. It's in the lowest ring of weights. Excess energy from the hole can be poured through the rods and made to move the whole rig very slowly up or down or back and forth. It's got to stay in position for the next few million years, orbiting right above this spot in the Devil's Playground."
    "What is this thing?"
    "A concentrating mirror. Energy from the black hole inside the cage is reflected down, passed through the converter ring and hot-spotted on that pile on the Earth's surface. The lowest ring of weights uses Earth gravity to keep it upright. There is a sensor for coordinates in the weight ring that adjusts position." He watched it for a bit. "Good. We're through here."
    He threw a bunch of switches that turned off all beams. "Corky, take us out of this and into normal time, five hundred miles above surface."
    "You're going to leave that there?" I said. "Somebody might run into it!"
    "Nobody's travelling thirteen minutes in the future," he said. "Not on this planet. They won't even see it in a telescope. And if any probe blunders into it, didn't you see the sign on it?" He was pointing at a screen.
    There was a sign! It was all around the mantle. It was in English and it said:
    POWER FOR PEOPLE, INC. No Trespassing
    Hands Off HIGH VOLTAGE
    We experienced the sudden flash and grind of a shift back into normal space. I always hated it.
    The viewscreens looked more normal. The Pacific Ocean spread vastly below. It seemed, from the shadow west of Hawaii, that it must be morning in Los Angeles.
    Heller was busy with the viewer-phone. Izzy's face appeared.
    "Oh, thank heavens, Mr. Jet. We were getting so worried. I hope nothing serious caused the delay."
    "I