Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  “I’m . . . your brother,” said the colonel in a low voice, “and, like always, I want you to get what you deserve.”

  “I could puddle up and bawl like a baby,” said Dr. Simmons suddenly, warmly. “Let’s stop playing around, Leroy, and I’ll tell you the whole story.”

  “Is it true you’ve been working with the Outsider?”

  “Yes, you idiot!”

  The colonel slumped back and said, glumly: “Then that settles it. Go ahead and talk if you want to. It can’t make any difference now.” He looked at his watch.

  The scientist rose and went to a wall panel, which he pulled out, revealing a compact tape recording outfit. From a rack above it he selected a reel, set it on the peg, and drew the end of the tape into the self-threader. Without switching on, he returned to his chair.

  “Just a couple of preliminaries, Leroy, and then you can have the whole story. I have done what I have done because of what you used to call my “dewy-eyed idealism.’ It has worked. We live now in a unified world. It must remain unified until the threat of the Outsider is done with; it has no alternative. I don’t think that the Outsider will be removed for a while yet, and the longer the world lives this way, the harder it will be for it to go back to the old cut-up, mixed-up way of life it has followed for the last fifteen thousand years or so.

  “I’ll tell you what will happen from now on out. The Space Station will be completed and put into action. A new fuel will be developed which will speed things just at the boredom point. Shortly afterward, the three Outsiders will put out their hovering bombs again. It’ll throw the world into a panic, but with the Station and the new fuel and the whole world working at it, a fighting ship will leave the Station—outbound.

  “It will sling some torps at the Outsiders, and they won’t go off, or they’ll miss, or they’ll explode prematurely. The Outsider won’t hit back. The warship will move in close, and when it gets close enough to do real damage, it will get a message.

  “This message will be broadcast on the three most likely frequencies, and signals will go out all over the other bands advertising those three frequencies. The message will start like this: ‘Stop and listen. This is the Outsider.’ This will be repeated in English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic and, for good measure, Esperanto. This is the message.”

  He rose again, put his hand on the switch, smiled, and turned to face the colonel. “Funny . . . this was designed only to speak to the future. And you’re the first to hear it.”

  “Why is that funny?”

  “You’re the past.” He flipped the switch. “You’ll pardon the tone of it,” he said gently. “I had a chance to make a deep purple oration, and I find I ramble on like an old lady over her knitting.”

  “You?”

  “Me. The Outsider. Listen.”

  ~ * ~

  This is the message, as it came from the tape in Dr. Simmons’ leisurely mellow voice:

  I am the Outsider. Do not fear me. There will be no battle. I am your friend. Hear me out.

  I am four ships and a noise in the Jansky radiations. The ships are not ships, and they came from Earth, not from Outside. The Jansky signals do not come from the stars. Listen.

  I am one man, one man only, without helpers, without any collaborators, except possibly thinkers—a little Thoreau, a little Henry George, maybe a smattering of H. G. Wells . . . you can believe me. Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever long enough, and a place for a fulcrum, and I shall move the earth!” Given the tools, one man can do anything. There’s plenty of precedent for this. Aside from the things which produce a man, aside from the multitude of factors which make his environment, if the man is capable, and if the environment provides tools and a time ripe for action, that man can use his tools to their utmost extent. Hitler did it. John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould did it. Kathleen Winsor did it. I read somewhere, long ago, a beautiful allegory. “Take a naked human being, and set him down beside the Empire State building, and ask, what have these two things in common?” Given the tools, mankind can do anything.

  I was given the greatest single tool in history. I stumbled on it. I’ll tell you the truth: I worked like a hound dog to find it, once I suspected that it was there.

  It’s a theory and a device. The theory has to do with binding energy; the device releases and controls it. It is all completely and clearly explained elsewhere; I’ll come to that in time. Roughly speaking, however, it is a controlled diffusion of matter. Any gas can be rarefied and diffused. So, I have discovered, can any matter. Further, it can be diffused analytically. Binding energy is actually a component of matter. If a close-orbit situation can be induced between the electrons and the nucleus of an atom, its binding energy can be withdrawn, if equally diffused, to form a field around the atom. The field is toroidal, and has peculiar qualities.

  For one thing, it does crazy things to the apparent center of gravity of the mechanism producing the field. Any seeking device which tends to locate mass, directs itself at the e.g. But on approaching a field of this sort, the closer it gets, the harder it becomes for it to find the c.g., since the apparent center of mass is out at the edges. When directed at the actual center of the device, your seeker veers violently to the edge— hard enough, generally, to make it pass the mechanism altogether.

  The field distorts and reflects radio and light waves in an extremely complex fashion. These waves are led powerfully to follow the outlines of the toroid; but since the field is a closed one—closed as tightly as only binding energy can close anything—light and radio cannot penetrate, no matter how strong the temptation. And so they are thrown back, rather than reflected in reflection’s ordinary sense, and return to their detectors—receivers, photographic plates, or what have you—in a rather distorted pattern.

  The field has also a strange effect on valence, making it possible to build chemical compounds out of elements of similar valence. The atomic situation within the toroid—in the hole of the doughnut, as it were—is weird, and is the place where such compounding can be done. Exact data on this will also be given you.

  Now, here is exactly what was done. Having found the way to generate this field, I debated the wisdom of giving it to a world on the verge of war. I contemplated destroying all my evidence, but could not; the thing was too big; humanity needed it too much. But it was too big for even a unified humanity on one planet. It’s big enough for all of space, and needs a humanity big enough to control it. I felt that if humanity were big enough to unify, it would be big enough for this device. It is, now, or you spacemen would not be listening to me.

  After having developed the binding-energy field, I invented another device—the Spy-Eye. I knew that the little eavesdroppers would be produced by the thousands, so that a few would not be missed. A half-dozen were launched with their selector circuits altered, and some of their equipment replaced. Their fueling was different, too; there is a reaction-formula using the b.e. field which will be found with the rest of these things.

  My half-dozen Spy-Eyes, powered vastly beyond any of their little brothers and sisters, went Outside and took up their positions in space.

  They are the Outsiders!

  The noise in the Jansky radiation was pure propaganda, and its execution was simple—practically primitive. It was a trick once used by illegal radio stations during one of the Wars—I forget which. Three of them, widely separated and synchronized, sent out the same signal, beamed to an Earth diameter. Direction-finders on Earth obediently pointed out their resultant—a direction in which they did not exist! The Spy-Eyes themselves were too small and too far away to be detectable, unless one knew exactly what to look for and where to look. The amplitude of the signals was raised gradually until it reached a preselected volume. Then one of the Spy-Eyes set up a b.e. field and dropped toward Earth. It looked strange and huge. It came in close and circled Earth twice at a high velocity. I think I had more trouble there than at any other point; but I managed, finally, to wangle the Board of Strategy into fi
ring on it. Their shell hit nothing; the b.e. field disrupted its atomic warhead, for in the presence of a hard-radiation source, the field increases the effective critical mass. The Spy-Eye itself is what fell on Japan; it was armed, of course, and was mistaken for a little bomb. What made the explosion so intense was the fact that the field held the disrupting matter together for a fraction of a millisecond longer than it had ever been done before. The object which fell near Minsk was a piece of stage-property I had made earlier. It, too, had a b.e. field generator on its back. Again it exhibited its exclusiveness and its penetrating power; it acted like a thing of great mass when it hit the ground. The generator was, of course, blown to dust on impact, leaving only the supposed specimen.

  The other three Outsider ships were Spy-Eyes, b.e. field equipped. The bombs were real bombs, however. They were supplied by Satellite 18, which, if examined, will be found inexplicably empty of its interceptors. I put guiding heads on them, and sent one to each of my “Outsider” Spy-Eyes.

  I think that explains everything. If you question my motives, regard the Earth as you deep-spacemen see it today—unified, powerful, secure within and without. Humanity is ready, now, to take the first steps toward greatness. Therefore:

  Send my name—Simmons—in the old International Morse code on 28.275 meters, from a distance of ten statute miles from any of the three Invader ships, at one thousand watts power. Repeat the name four times. The field will break down; you may then locate the Spy-Eyes and pull them in. Dismantle them; inside you will find this recording and certain papers, which contain everything I know about the binding-energy field. Use it well.

  ~ * ~

  Colonel Simmons leaned back in his chair. His face was gray. “Muscles—is this all true?”

  “You know it is. You’ve seen it in action.”

  “Now what have I done?” muttered the colonel.

  “Jumped to conclusions,” said the doctor easily.

  The colonel’s mouth opened and closed spasmodically. Then in violent reaction, he swore. “You couldn’t’ve done it!” he roared. “You set the timetable for this whole thing and built it into those Spy-Eyes. Well, what about all that was done here—the interceptors from White Sands, and the development of the satellites, and all that?”

  “Leroy, old horse, take it easy, will you? Who had charge of all that development? Who had the final say on design? Who outlined the exact use of each piece of equipment—by way, of course, of using it to its greatest efficiency?”

  “You did. You did.” The colonel covered his face. “All that power. All that control. You could have had the whole world for the taking, if you’d wanted it. Instead—”

  “Instead, everyone on earth has a job, enough food, good quarters, and an equal chance at education. I have it on good authority that the next session of Congress will unify divorce laws and traffic laws in this country. Russia has not only a second party, but a third one. Social legislation is beginning to follow the lines of the Postal Union, and already a movement has started to have the Governments pay the people their full wages during a six-week vacation. No Communism, no Fascism; function is the law, and social security—lower case—is function.”

  “Shut up!” mouthed the colonel in a peculiar tone, half moan, half roar. He held his head and he rocked.

  The doctor clasped his shoulder and laughed. “Listen to me, Leroy,” he said, “and I’ll tell you something funny. You know how little, stupid anecdotes will stick with you, like the limerick about the young lady from Wheeling, and the time you took the ball of tar to bed with you and we had to shave your head? Well, believe it or not, I honestly think that this job I have just done had its source in a couple —no; three—things that happened to me when I was young. When I think of them, and look at the world today—my!”

  He took a turn around the floor. His brother sat still.

  “Wells had something to do with it. Wells pointed out, mostly indirectly, that only a miracle could make humans work together. And sometimes his miracle was entertaining but untenable, because it constituted a common aim for mankind. That never did work. World peace is the finest aim a race could have, but it never tempted us much. Wells’ other miracle was a common enemy—the Martian invasion, for example. Now, that makes sense. It did then and it does now.

  “And here are the silly little things that have stuck with me. Remember that summer when I got a job as a dirt-moving foreman on a canal job? Two of the muckers got into a fight out by one of the machines. I got up into the dragline and dumped a load of sand on the two of them. They stopped fighting, ganged up on me, and punched the daylights out of me.” He laughed.

  “Then there was the other one. It was even sillier. It was in a restaurant, right after I started to teach at Drexel Tech. There were two bubble-headed little chicks sitting at a nearby table, verbally clawing each other’s eyes out over a young man. Just as I was about to get up and move back out of the combat area, they spotted the young man in question submitting to the wiles of a very cute redhead. Whereupon the combatants were suddenly allies, and on the spot”—he laughed again—”concocted a devilish scheme to squirt ink on the contents of the redhead’s clothesline!”

  The colonel was looking at him dully.

  “The common denominator,” continued the doctor, “in the analysis of Wells, the fight on the canal job, and the feline fiddle-faddle in the cafe, was surprisingly valid, considering the wide difference in the nature of the fields of combat. It boils down to this: that human conflicts cease to be of importance in the face of a common enemy. ‘Divide and rule’ has its obverse; ‘unite and conquer.’ That’s what the world has done during the Attack; except that instead of conquering the Outsider, it has conquered itself—still its common enemy.”

  “Wells,” murmured the colonel. “I remember that. I was reading him and told you the miracle idea. I was in military prep., and you were a freshman in college.”

  “Gosh yes,” said the doctor. “I remember, Leroy.”

  The colonel seemed to be thinking hard, and slowly. He spoke slowly. “Muscles,” he said, “remember how I wore your freshman dinky when you came home for a week end?”

  “Do I!” chuckled the doctor. “You wouldn’t give it back, and I spent the next six weeks sweeping out seniors’ rooms because I showed up at school without it. Heh! Remember me strutting around in your gray cape when you were at the Point?”

  “Yeh. We were always doing that. Your tie, my tie, our tie. Those were the days. You wouldn’t fit my clothes now, Fatso.”

  “Is that so!” laughed the doctor, delighted to see his brother making some effort to come up out of his doldrum. “Listen, son; you rate too much to be in shape. Too many flunkies to bend over for you when you want your shoes tied.”

  The colonel whipped off the coat with all those shiny buttons. “You couldn’t button that around your fallen chest.”

  In answer the grinning doctor shucked out of his laboratory smock and put his arms into the uniform jacket. With some difficulty and a certain amount of sucking in and holding back, he got it buttoned. “The hat,” he demanded. He put it on. It was too small.

  Meanwhile the colonel slipped into the smock, with its solder-flux stains and its worn elbows. He flapped it in front of him. “What do you do with all this yardage? Smuggle stuff? Hey, Muscles; let’s have a look in the cheval glass in the office. I want to see what I would look like as a Great Brain.”

  They went into the office, through the door in the shower stall. The doctor, all aglitter in his brother’s jacket, went first. There was a man standing just by the outside door. He had a black cloth over his nose and mouth and a silenced automatic in his hand.

  The colonel, his smock flapping, pushed past his brother and walked out into the room. The man shot him twice and disappeared through the door.

  ~ * ~

  “Leroy! Who did it, kid?”

  “I did,” said the colonel. “No! No doctor. Too late. Stay—”

  “You ... oh. Oh!
That bullet was meant for me. The jacket switch, hm-m-m? But why? Who was it?”

  “Never mind . . . him,” said the colonel. “Hired. Psychoed. Whole thing planned. Foolproof escape. All witnesses called away. He doesn’t know you. Or me. My idea. Was very . . . careful.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “Found out you . . . work with . . . enemy—” His voice trailed off. He closed his eyes sleepily and lay still for a moment. Then, his face twisted with effort, he sat suddenly upright. His voice returned— his normal, heavy, crackling tone. “I had proof—proof enough that you were a traitor, Muscles. I was afraid you’d get clear if you got a chance to work on a court. But I couldn’t bring myself to kill you with my own hands. I figured it out this way.”

  “So he’d be there, and shoot me when we came out of the office. But why didn’t you call him off?”

  “Couldn’t. He had orders to shoot the civilian. You were an officer for the moment. He didn’t know us, I tell you. I radioed to a third party, who knows nothing. He gave this hood the starting gun.” He raised his left hand. On the wrist was the miniature transmitter. “I called him when you admitted you worked with the Outsider . . . then you explained . . . and I couldn’t call back; he was on his way here.”