Kenneth Bulmer

CONSPIRACY OF GENIUS

His height barely reached five feet, his
spindly legs supported a bulging chest, and his eyes protruded grotesquely
from a gnome-like head—but within that absurd-looking man lay the mind of a
genius.

It was a genius that had carried mankind deep
into the secrets of creation and was now on the verge of producing living
organisms from test tubes filled with inert chemicals. The world, however,
ridiculed the theories of Professor Cheslin Randolph and the government refused
to advance the millions needed for the final series of experiments.

But Professor Randolph was determined to get
the money—even if it meant turning his powerful brain to robbing a spaceship in
mid-flight, using trained viruses as his accomplices.

Turn
this
book over for second complete novel

KENNETH
BULMER
has been rated by
New Worlds
magazine as "Great Britain's hardest
working science-fiction writer." A native of London, he has produced many
novels and short stories, as well as non-fiction articles on scientific
subjects.

Buhner
states that he has been reading and writing science-fiction for longer than he
cares to remember, starting both while still at school in the early 1920's.
During the war he served with the Royal Corps of Signals and published and
edited a Service magazine in Africa, Sicily and Italy. It was while basking in
the Italian sunshine that he first heard of an atomic bomb having been
detonated over Japan—and thought it was just another hoax of his comrades.

He
is an active member of London "fan" circles, but also includes among
his hobbies model ship construction, motor racing and the study of the
Napoleonic legend.

THE
WIZARD
OF STARSHIP
POSEIDON

by

KENNETH
  
BULMER

ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas
New York 36, N.Y.

the
wizard
of
stabshtp
poseidon

Copyright
©, 1963, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Ace
Books
by
Kenneth
Bulmer
include'.

THE
SECRET OF ZI (D-331) THE CHANGELING WORLDS (D-369) THE EARTH GODS ARE COMING
(D-453) BEYOND THE SILVER SKY (D-507) NO MAN'S WORLD (F-104)

LET THE SPACEMEN BEWAB
e
I

Copyright
©, 1963, by Ace Books, Inc.

Printed in U.S.A.

CHAPTER ONE

_{A™
                                                      
^ - ^ „}

ceeding
attack with merciless and sacrificial ruthlessness, Black Queen scissored
across the board in the final onslaught like a teeth-heavy monster of the
deeps. White's black bishop crumpled, was removed. White's king's rook, engulfed,
was laid back in the box. The white king, at bay, surrounded and under heavy
fire, covered by a lone and pitiable pawn, surrendered unconditionally.

"Mate,"
said Professor Cheslin Randolph, and turned away from the chess table, picked
up the latest copy of
Nature
and and leafed through the slick pages.
"Have you seen Kishimura's letter? He claims to have synthesised
poly-amino acids using Matsuoka's nought-nine-seven technique. Oh,
I
know he's using a whole primitive planet as a laboratory under
stringently sterile conditions, just as I shall on Pochalin Nine; but—"

Professor
Randolph stopped speaking, lifting his gnome's head to return his guest's deep
and half-amused stare.

"You're
an amazing man, Cheslin," said Dudley Har-court, Vice-Chancellor.
"Your mind has just grappled with the utmost concentration on a complex
chess situation, yet you turn away the second the game is over and just as intensely
concentrate on a fresh subject."

"Chess
is just a game. Speed, decision, attack—to win is not very clever. And it grows
less amusing week by week. I'm chafing to space out to Pochalin Nine."

The two men sat comfortably ensconced under
discreet lighting in Randolph's chambers. About them the unseen but omnipresent
breath of the University pulsed beyond the glass and porcelain walls. The
decanter and tobacco jars caught vagrant gleams of light as the men moved. The
chambers were furnished with meticulous taste, heavy, authoritative, somehow
mechanical, completely lacking any feminine grace.

"Are
you over-working, Cheslin?" The Vice Chancellor spoke with the brutal
frankness he reserved for friends. "Your own work devours you. Why not
give it a rest—for a little time. Take a long holiday."

Professor
Randolph dropped the copy of
Nature.
He
selected a cigar and, uncharacteristically, sniffed it, looking up with his
frog's-eyes over the rolled leaves at the Vice Chancellor. Randolph stood five
feet in his socks, and his chest measurement was proportionate; only his head
appeared in normal proportion to a grown man's—and that appearance was
deceptive.

"Vice
Chancellor," he now said with precise meaning. "You invite yourself
for our friendly contest over the chess board. I accept because for an hour I
can spare the time from my laboratory. But then you suggest: one, that I rest
for a little time, and, two, that I take a long vacation." Randolph's
smile transferred the image of his Black Queen to his own creased face.
"What is it you have to say to me?"

As
he had on the chess board, the Vice Chancellor crumpled under the directness of
the attack.

Dudley
Harcourt, as Vice Chancellor, had grown wearily resigned to swinging to the
winds of desires in the University. Like some moss-encrusted weathercock, he
merely pointed up the trend of events. When he exercised his own discretion, he
did so deviously, through third parties. He had been unable to find anyone
willing to risk the barrage of fire from tiny Professor Cneslin Randolph. So,
here he was himself, uncomfortably mustering his own arsenal of weapons to
combat this frightening gnome.

Harcourt
had not been bom on Earth. His outward face to the Galaxy was the usual tough,
cynical, relaxed countenance of the star colonial, very much a stock figure,
and an expected one. Over that he had carefully laid the shining veneer of
academic distinction so that, at this point in his career, he was Vice
Chancellor of Lewistead and not too unhappy with progress so far.
Unfortunately, Professor Cheslin Randolph, occupying the chair of
extraterrestrial micro-biology, posed the type of problem best represented by a
nine-inch crowbar between the spokes of a turning wheel.

Unused
to prolonged delay in response to a question-even from backward
students—Professor Randolph took the cigar from his mouth and said, "Well,
Dudley?"

Harcourt
lifted both hands and let them fall, softly, onto his knees. He did not look at
Randolph.

"It's the Maxwell
Fund."

"You
mean there's a hold up? I thought everything had been settled—more
negotiations? What now?"

"As
I said to the Trustees. Unfortunately, this year there very well may be—further
negotiations."

Randolph
sat forward, hunched in his own special chair. His tiny feet stamped
impatiently on his footstool. His creased, wide face with its angry frog's-eyes
might, in a lesser man, have been merely ludicrous. When Professor Randolph
puffed up his face, turned down the comers of his mouth, suddenly and with
devastating effect slitted those protruding eyes, he became even to the Vice
Chancellor of Lewistead a formidable and daunting figure.

When
he spoke the habitual rasp had left his voice; he purred like a cat with a
mouse.

"Is
there to be more delay with the Maxwell Fund? This is my year for it. I've
waited ten years for this. All my work is arranged, the Extraterrestrial Bureau
has granted me Pochalin Nine, I've taken on Doctor Howland as chief
assistant—everything for the last decade has been built up ready for this
coming year. You know that. The whole establishment knows it. With the
equipment I'm buying with the Maxwell Fund I shall initiate a series of
experiments on Pochalin Nine culminating in—life!"

He leaned back, and his thoughts now were
gripped by the
obsession of his life's work.
                               
,

"I
am absolutely convinced, despite certain scoffers, that I can create artificial
life—of a rudimentary type, naturally. And to do that I need equipment and
funds far beyond the normal college allowance. Old Maxwell with his Nuclear
Weapons and his conscience created the Maxwell Fund— I've waited ten years. Ten
years!" His cramped face radiated the tenseness which even a minor
obstacle could create these days. "I'm opening up the future, Dudley!
Don't hold me back now!"

The glass and porcelain walls filtered the
ribald sounds of students; in the all electric rooms not even the ticking of a
clock could serve to abate the ominous silence.

At
last: "Well, Dudley? This is my year for the Fund. What is your
problem?"

"Cast
your mind back a moment, Cheslin. Last year the Fund went to Gackenbach of
Managerial Ratio-analysis. Year before to Mesarovic for Wave Mechanics. Year
before that to Lewis for Endocrinology. Before that—ah—"

"Physics
or Nucleonics, I expect. But what of it? That's what the Fund is designed for.
And my whole department is geared for the new equipment—we're hungry for
it."

Randolph
had refused to read into the Vice Chancellor's attitude any menace of serious
threat—the Fund was his all right—but something was bothering Harcourt "If
there is a delay my whole department would suffer. Doctor Howland is a great asset;
but he's only here on the strength of the new work. All my work would be wasted
if— My results cannot be published until they have been shown to be so. I'm
convinced I can do what I claim, even if people like Kawaguchi scoff. But we
cannot wait too long for the Fundi"

"As
you know, Cheslin, the Fund has been scheduled for a considerable number of
years into the future. We have to look very carefully at the relative degrees
of importance—"

"I must have the
Fund—this year. It's mine!"

"Nothing has ever been
officially agreed—"

"Officially!" Something very like
panic touched Randolph now; an emotion he could not at first recognize. His
calm scientific manner began to fray under the ruthless ambition that was his
chief characteristic, and the dominance of his personality sought blindly for a
concrete target to smash and destroy. Nothing was going to stand in the way of
his life's work—
nothing!

"I'm very sorry, Cheslin." Vice
Chancellor Harcourt spoke stiffly, finding the words red-hot in his mouth.
"You must by now have realized that there has been
a
change in plan for the Maxwell Fund."

"No! I don't believe it! They—the
Trustees—you, you wouldn't take the fund away now. . . ."

"It's not a question of taking away the
Fund, Cheslin. No firm decision had been reached on its disbursement this
year."

"But it was to come to me. That had been
agreed as 'long ago as ten years. . .

"No, Cheslin." Slowly Harcourt
shook his head. "Not so. Nothing was said, nothing was written—"

"But it was implied! The Chancellor
himself told me the fund would be mine this year."

"If that is so,
Cheslin, the Chancellor has no memory of it"

"No memoryl"

Randolph's
tiny hand groped for the arm of his chair, gripped and clutched as though
seeking the feel of
a
solid object in an ocean of madness. "No
memory . .."

"I
can only say I am sorry. We've been good griends, Cheslin. I rather hope that
will not be altered by all this, this unfortunate development." Harcourt
stared at the little man hunched in the deep armchair. Hesitatingly, he went
on, "Quite off the record, I will say that my loyalty to the Chancellor
and the Trustees has been seriously strained over this decision. There was talk
of
a
resignation-mine. But you can't fight all the
deadweight of authority, Cheslin. The men with the power see they keep the
power— and to hell with anyone else."

"Power," said
Randolph, softly.

Harcourt felt profound unease. He had never
before seen the little Professor so crushed, so woeful, so shattered. And that
reaction surprised him. He had expected anger, indignation, righteous wrath.
Those Randolph had displayed; but he had gone through them at dizzy speed to
end up like this—beaten.

"Tell
me, Dudley. What is to happen to the Fund this year?"

"Those people who have received the Fund
over the past ten or eleven years. They have one thing in common."
"They've all been lucky."

Harcourt shook his head. "No. They're
all of the Sciences. The Maxwell Fund was designed for the use of the faculty
as a whole."

"Am
I, then, no longer a member of the faculty?" Harcourt ignored that, went
doggedly on. "This year the Maxwell Fund is going to Professor Helen
Chase~" "The glamorous female with the titian hair?"
"Yes."

"I've
never really understood what it is she does.* "She holds the chair of
Shavian Literature—" "The what?"

"Chair of Shavian Literature."

Professor
Randolph had to make a conscious effort to remember just what that was. He had
to bring his mind away from the universe of science, back to a world and a
galaxy around
him
that he took for granted and never thought about from
one decade to the next.

"Does
that mean she's a member of the weirdies? Those odd people who creep about
muttering outlandish tongues, dead these thousand years, who don't know a
parsec from an electron volt?"

"The Humanities, my
dear Cheslin. The Arts."

"And
they're the infestation stealing the Fund from me.
...
This is a mockery! What do they need the Fund for?"

"The
University badly needs a new tri-di live theatre— we have rather a good name in
the Galaxy for our work there, you know."

"Why can't they watch television like
everyone else?"

Harcourt
smiled sadly. "That's commercial. Here we are dealing with Art—with an
oversize capital 'A'."

Randolph began to comprehend the magnitude of
the calamity that had wrecked him. He pointed with a narrow finger. "A
theatre of however exotic a design can't cost all that much. My equipment,
travel and transportation costs to Pochalin Nine—that's a perfect planet for
the workl Primitive, absolutely sterile, not a single living cell on
planet—living expenses there, everything will absorb every last penny of the
Fund. But I would stand to deduct the cost of a measly theatre.
..
."

"No good-"

"Oh, I can see the reasoning. Spend the
Fund here, right in the University, have something here and now to show for
it."

"It's
not only the theatre. Helen Chase has the opportunity of buying for the
University a most wonderful collection of Shavian manuscripts, marginalia,
trivia, and, also, a number of documents in dispute."

"Dispute.
I like the sound of that." Randolph's words carried a bitterness that cut
Harcourt.

"Professor
Chase is working to prove her theory that George Bernard Shaw and Herbert
George Wells were one and the same man. One was the pseudonym for the other. If
she can prove that Wells was a pseudonym used by Shaw then she, as a Shavian,
will throw the Wellsians into utter confusion. It will be a greater triumph
than merely proving, as many have tried, that either Wells wrote Shaw's work,
or Shaw wrote Wells'."

Exasperated beyond reasonable control,
Randolph pushed his little legs down into the soft carpeting, stood up, and
began pacing agitatedly and threateningly about the room.

"But
who cares?" he demanded with a vicious swish of a tiny hand. "These
men—or man—have been dead for thousands of years. They belong, as I remember,
to the Dark Ages. They probably didn't even have typewriters or ball points to
work with. What, did they chip these master-works out of stone?"

"I'm
sorry, Cheslin." Harcourt, too, stood up. With his usual tact he did not
stand too close to the little man. Al-thought, come to think of it, the
aggressive power of Randolph usually obliterated his small stature from the
memories of acquaintances. "Damned sorry." He'd had about as much as
he could take. Killing a man's life work was not sport for which he cared.
"I'd better be getting along. You'll-"