As Mart stepped inside the conference room he caught his breath involuntarily. Besides the brilliant array of his colleagues in fields closely allied to his own, there was a display of gold-splashed uniforms of all military services. He had quick recognition of several lieutenant generals, vice admirals, and at least one member of the JCS.
Berk ushered him to a seat in the front row. He felt doubly guilty that these men had been kept waiting, although it was no direct fault of his.
At the front of the room a projection screen was unrolled on the wall. A sixteen mm. projector was set up near the rear. On a table on the far side a tarpaulin covered some kind of irregular object.
Keyes stepped to the front of the room and cleared his throat briefly.
‘We will dispense with the formality of introducing each of you gentlemen. Many of you are acquainted, professionally or personally, and I trust that all will be before this project is many hours old.
‘The top classification nature of the material we are about to discuss has been emphasized to you by the triple filter of security officers who have passed upon your admission to this room. That which is discussed here you will properly regard as worthy of protection with your own life, if such an extreme consideration should be forced upon you at some future time.’
The military members of the audience remained immobile, but Martin Nagle observed an uneasy shifting among his fellow scientists. All of them were to some degree uncomfortable in the presence of the military assumption that you could lock up the secrets of nature when they lay all about like shells upon the seashore.
But Keyes wasn’t a military man. Mart felt his muscles become a little more rigid as the significance of this penetrated.
‘Ten days ago,’ said Keyes very slowly, ‘we were approached by a young man, an inventor of sorts, who claimed to have produced a remarkable and revolutionary invention.
‘His name was Leon Dunning. He had an unusual regard for his own abilities, and expected, apparently, that everyone else would have the same regard on sight. This trait led him to a rather unpleasant presentation of himself. He would talk with no one but the Director of the Office, and made such a nuisance that it became a question of seeing him or calling the police.
‘His case was drawn to my attention, and I finally chose to see him. He had some rather startling claims. He claimed to have solved the problem of producing an anti-gravity machine.’
Martin Nagle felt a sudden sinking sensation within him - and an impulse to laugh. For this he had cancelled the kids’ summer vacation! Maybe it wasn’t too late to get back—
He glanced at his colleagues. Dykstra was bending over and rubbing his forehead to hide the smile that appeared on his lips. Lee and Norcross gave each other smiles of pitying indulgence. Berkeley, Mart noted, was almost the only scientist who did not move or smile. But, of course, Berk was a psychologist,
‘I see that some of you gentlemen are amused,’ continued Keyes. ‘So was I. I wondered what was the best means of getting rid of this obnoxious crackpot who had forced his way into my office. Again, it was a question of listening until the ridiculousness of his claims became self-evident, or having him thrown out. I listened.
‘I tried to draw him out regarding the theories upon which his device operated, but he refused to discuss this in detail. He insisted such discussion could be held only after a demonstration of his device.
‘With a free Saturday afternoon that week, I agreed to watch. Dunning insisted that certain military personnel also be invited and that films and tape recording equipment be available. Having gone as far as I had, I agreed also to this and rounded up some of the gentlemen who are with us this afternoon.
‘He wanted no other kind of publicity, and so we arranged to meet at the small private airfield at the Dover club. That was just one week ago today. He demonstrated.
‘A small pack was attached to his shoulders by straps. I assisted him in putting it on. It weighed perhaps thirty-five or forty pounds. It had no visible means of propulsion such as propeller or jets, and no connection to an external power source. Seeing it, I felt extremely ridiculous for having invited my military guests to such a futile performance.
‘We stood in a circle about ten feet in diameter around him. When the pack was fastened, he gave us a kind of pitying smile, it seemed, and pressed a switch at his belt.
‘Instantly, he rose straight up into the air in a smoothly accelerated climb. We spread apart to watch him. At about five hundred feet, he came to a stop and hung motionless for a moment. Then he dropped back down to the centre of the circle.’
Keyes paused. ‘I see a variety of expressions on your faces. I presume some of you consider us who observed it as victims of hallucinations or out and out liars. We agreed afterwards that it was very fortunate that Dunning insisted on motion pictures of the demonstration. These we have for your inspection. If you will, please—’
He signalled to his assistants. The shades were drawn and the projector at the rear started with a whirr. Mart found himself leaning forward, his hand clutching the desk arm of the chair. This was something he didn’t even want to believe, he thought!
On the screen there appeared a scene of the encircling men. In the centre, Dunning appeared to be in his late twenties. Mart could detect at once the type that Keyes had described -a snotty young jerk who knew he was good and figured others better catch on to that real fast. Mart knew the type. You run into them in senior engineering classes in every school in the country.
He watched the circle back from Dunning. There was a clear shot of the alleged inventor standing with the weird pack on his back. He fumbled a moment with the key switch at his belt, then rose abruptly from the ground.
Mart stared. The picture panned up jerkily as the operator evidently retreated for a longer range view. He watched closely for any sign of emanation from the pack. He had to remind himself of the foolishness of looking for such. There was certainly no type of jet that could operate this way.
But anti-gravity - Mart caught a feeling that was a cross between a prickle and a chill moving slowly along the upper length of his spine.
The motion on the screen came to a halt. Then slowly Dunning lowered himself to the middle of the circle once more.
The screen went dark, and lights flashed on in the room. Mart jerked, as if waking from a hypnotic spell.
‘We paused at this point,’ said Keyes. ‘Dunning became more talkative and discussed somewhat the basic theories of his machine. For this we used the tape recorder he had insisted on us bringing along.
‘Unfortunately, the record is so poor due to high noise level and distortion that it is next to unintelligible, but we will play it for you in a moment.
‘Following the discussion, he agreed to make another demonstration showing an additional factor, horizontal flight control. We’ll have the movie of this, now.’
He touched the light button. The scene appeared once more. This time the circle opened at one side and Dunning rose in a rather steep arc and levelled off. Against the background, he seemed about as high as the roof of the hangar beyond. For about a hundred feet he drifted slowly, then accelerated his pace. Mart felt a wholly irrational impulse to laugh. It was Buck Rogers in full attack.
Abruptly the screen flared. A puff of light exploded from the pack on Dunning’s back. For a terrible moment he seemed suspended in an attitude of violent agony. Then he plunged like a dropped stone.
The camera lost him for an instant, but it caught the full impact of his body on the field. During the fall, he turned over. The pack was beneath him as he crashed. His body bounced and rolled a short way and lay still.
Keyes moved to the light switch, and signalled for the raising of the shades. Someone rose to do this. No one else moved. The room seemed caught in a suspension of time.
‘There you have it, gentlemen,’ said Keyes in a quiet voice. ‘You will begin to understand why you were called here today. Dunning had it - anti-gravity. Of that we are
absolutely sure. And Dunning is dead.’
He drew a corner of the canvas from the table by the far wall. ‘The remains of the device are here for your examination. So far, we see only burned and bloody wreckage in it. Under your Supervision it will be carefully photographed and dismantled.’
He dropped the cover and returned to the centre of the platform. ‘We went immediately to Dunning’s house with a crew of investigators from ONR assisted by security officers of the services.
‘Dunning’s quite evident paranoia was carried out in an utter lack of notes. He must have lived in constant fear that his work would be stolen. His laboratory was excellent for a private worker. What his income was we don’t know as yet.
‘He also had an astonishing library - astonishing in that it covered almost every occult field as well. This, too, remains somewhat of a mystery.
‘We investigated his college background. He appears to have had difficulty in getting along at any one college, and attended at least four. His curriculum was as varied as his library. He studied courses in electrical engineering, comparative religion, advanced astronomy, Latin, the theory of groups, general semantics and advanced comparative anatomy.
‘We managed to contact about twenty of his instructors and fellow students. Their uniform opinions describe him as paranoid. He was utterly without intimates of any kind. If he communicated his theories to anyone, we do not know about it.
‘So the only record we have of the expressions of the man who first devised an anti-gravity machine is this poor-quality tape.’
He nodded again to the operator at the rear of the room. The latter turned on the recorder whose output was fed to a speaker on the table in front.
At once the room was rilled with a hissing, roaring garble. The sound of planes taking off - the everyday noise of the airport. Beneath the racket was the dead man’s voice, a thin, rather high-pitched sound carrying through the background noise a tone of condescension and impatient tolerance.
Mart listened with ears strained to make sense of the garble. His eyes caught Berk’s and reflected his despair of ever getting anything out of the mess. Keyes signalled the operator.
‘I see that you are impatient with this recording, gentlemen. Perhaps there is no purpose in playing it in this conference. But each of you will be given a copy. In the privacy of your own laboratories you will have opportunity to make what you can of it. It is worth your study simply because, as far as we know, it contains the only clues we possess.’
Mart raised a hand impatiently. ‘Dr Keyes, you and the others at the demonstration heard the original discussion. Can’t you give us more than is on the tape?’
Keyes smiled rather bitterly. ‘I wish that we could, Dr Nagle. Unfortunately, at the time it seemed that the semantic noise in Dunning’s explanation was as high as the engineering noise on the tape. We have, however, filled in to the best of our recollection on the written transcript, which we will give you.
‘This transcript gives what has been pieced together by phonetic experts who have analysed the tape. Observers’ additions are in parentheses. These were added only if all observers agreed independently, and may or may not be accurate. Is there any other question?’
There were, they all knew, but for the moment the impact seemed to have stifled the response of the whole audience.
Keyes took a step forward. ‘I wonder if there is any one of you who underestimates the seriousness of this problem now. Is there anyone who does not understand that this secret must be regained at all cost?
‘We know that within the field of present knowledge there lies the knowledge necessary to conquer gravity - to take us beyond the Earth, to the stars, if we wish to go.
‘We know that if one young American could do it, some young Russian could also. We have to duplicate that work of Dunning’s.
‘The full facilities of ONR are at your disposal. Access to Dunning’s laboratory and library and the remains of his machine will be granted, of course. Each of you has been selected, out of all whom we might have called, because we believed you possess some special qualification for the task. You cannot fail.
‘We will meet again this evening, gentlemen. I trust you understand now the necessity for absolute security on this project.’
* * * *
II
A long time afterwards, Martin Nagle recalled that he must have been in a partial stupor when he left that conference room. He felt a vague and unpleasant sensation about his head as if it had been beaten repeatedly with a pillow.
He and Kenneth Berkeley went out together. They paused only long enough to make polite greetings to his fellow physicists whom he had not seen for a long time. But he was in a hurry to leave. To get rid of that feeling in his head.
In front of the ONR building he stopped with his hands in his pockets and looked over the unpleasant grey of the city’s buildings. He could close his eyes and still see a man rising straight up into the air - soaring at an angle - dropping like a plummet.
All at once he realized he hadn’t even stopped to examine the remains of the instrument under the tarpaulin. He turned suddenly on Berkeley.
‘The psychology of this thing - is that where you’re in on it, Berk?’
His companion nodded. ‘Keyes called me in when he wanted an investigation into Dunning’s past. I’m staying, I guess.’
‘You know it’s impossible, don’t you?’ said Mart. ‘Utterly and completely impossible! There’s nothing in our basic science to explain this thing, let alone duplicate it.’
‘Impossible? Meaning what?’
‘Meaning that I’ve got to ... that every one of us has got to shift gears, back up, retrace who knows how far - twenty years of learning - five hundred years of science? Where did we go off the track? Why was it left to a screwball like Dunning to hit it right?’
‘He was an odd character,’ mused Berk. ‘Astrology, mysticism, levitation. There’s quite a bit in the tape about levitation. That’s not so far removed from the concept of anti-gravity at that, is it?’
Mart made a rough noise in his throat. ‘I expect to hear any moment that his first successful flight was aboard a broomstick.’
‘Well, there’s quite a bit of lore about broomsticks - also magic carpets and such. Makes you wonder how it all got started.’
The shock was slow in wearing down. Martin returned to the hotel after the evening conference, which was spent mostly in examination of the wreckage.
It was as Keyes had said, hopeless. But there was an indefinable something about gazing upon the remains of what had been the realization of an impossible dream. Mart felt a kind of frantic yearning to reach out and touch that mass and convert it back to the instrument it had once been by sheer force of will. As if believing it possible would make it so.
And wasn’t there some essence of truth in this, he thought? Dunning had believed it could be done and had done it. Reputable men in science didn’t believe such things possible—
Now, in his hotel room, Mart sat on the edge of the bed looking out of the window and across the night lights of the city. There were certain things you had to accept as impossible. The foundation of science was built upon the concept of the impossible as well as the possible.
Perpetual motion.
The alchemist’s dream - as the alchemist dreamed it, anyway.
Anti-gravity—
All man’s experience in attempting to master nature showed these things could not be done. You had to set yourself some limitations. You had to let your work be bounded by certain Great Impossibles or you could spend a lifetime trying to solve the secret of invisibility or of walking through a brick wall.
Or trying to build a magic carpet.
He stood up and walked to the window. There had been growing all afternoon a sense of faint panic. And now he identified it. Where could you draw the line? It had to be drawn. He was sure of that.
It had been drawn once before, quite definitely. In the 1890s they had closed the boo
ks. Great minds believed then that science had encompassed the universe. All that was not known belonged to the Great Impossibles.
Then had come radium, the Roentgen tube, relativity, cosmic rays.
The line vanished. Where was it now? A few hours ago he would have said he could define it with fair accuracy. Tonight he did not know.
He went to bed. After an hour he got up and called Kenneth Berkeley. The clock said almost midnight. It didn’t matter.
‘Berk,’ he said into the phone. ‘Mart. I’ve just been thinking. The whole crowd will be going through Dunning’s lab and his library. What’s the chance of you getting me out there first thing in the morning? Just the two of us. I’d like to beat the crowd.’
‘I think I can arrange it,’ said Berk. ‘Keyes wants each of you to work as you wish. I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. I’ll call you as early as I can.’
Spectrum 5 - [Anthology] Page 7
