Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "General Morganson," she said, handing him the receiver.

  Forster took the receiver, sat down at his desk and took a deep breath, fighting hard to regain his self control.

  "Forster," he said into the mouthpiece when the office door closed behind the girl.

  "Forster! What the dickens has happened to Preston? My driver met the train here this morning, but there was no sign of him. But the Pullman porter checked him in last night, and we found all his gear and papers in his compartment!"

  "He left here in plenty of time to catch the train, General," Forster heard himself say. "He took the train to get a night's rest." He realized how irrelevant the last statement was only after he had made it.

  The General was talking again ... important meeting with the Joint Chiefs ... whole briefing team was being held up ... he'd reported it to the C.I.A. as a precautionary measure....

  Forster could see the words on the roll, the roll that wasn't, as though they were engraved on his eye-retinas: As a beginning, and to prove this isn't just a bit of hocus-pocus, one of the people at your Center is due to leave for here any time now.

  "General," Forster broke in hoarsely. "I've got some very important information which you must have. I'll leave by heliplane right away."

  He replaced the phone receiver in its cradle, wondering how convincing he would be able to make his story. At least, even if he didn't have Bentley's letter, he had the container. That should help.

  But when he looked across the desk, he saw that it too had disappeared, without a trace.

  General Morganson was the newest product of the Atomic Age, half soldier, half scientist—shrewd and perceptive, an intellectual giant.

  He listened carefully, without comment or change of expression, as Forster doggedly went through his story in chronological order.

  Half way through, he held up his hand and started pushing buttons on the console built into his desk. Within a few moments men began filing into the room, and sat down around Forster.

  Then the general motioned to the clerk seated in the corner by a tape recorder.

  "Gentlemen, listen to this playback and then I'll have Dr. Forster here go on from there."

  What was left of Forster's confidence leaked away as he heard his own diffident voice filling the room again. It was like being awake in the middle of a weird dream.

  But when the tape recorder hissed into silence, he went on, staring straight ahead of him in quiet desperation.

  When he ended his story, there was silence for a moment. Everyone sat motionless.

  Then Morganson looked up and around.

  "Well gentlemen? Mr. Bates, C.I.A. first."

  This was no longer a story told by one man; it had become a problem, a situation to be evaluated objectively.

  "Well, sir ... the only part of the thing I can comment on at this point is the stuff about O'Connor and Walters. That checks. They both disappeared without a trace. It was treated as a maximum security situation, and we did give out the story they had been assigned to special duty." He glanced briefly at Forster. "Up until now, we assumed that only the directors at Aiken and Oak Ridge knew the real situation—outside of the Atomic Energy Commission and C.I.A., of course. This represents a very serious leak—or...." His voice trailed away.

  "Colonel Barfield, Intelligence?"

  The young colonel tried to sound flippant, unsuccessfully.

  "General, acting on the assumption the story is true, it would answer about two hundred question marks in our files. Maybe more, with further study."

  The C.I.A. man cleared his throat and raised a finger.

  "For everybody's information," he said, "a preliminary field check shows that Dr. Preston's train was stopped for ten minutes by fog last night. The train's radar installation failed simultaneously. There wouldn't be anything odd about that except the temperature at the time was about 65 degrees, and the humidity was only 55 per cent. Consider that, gentlemen.

  "Theoretically, fog can't form under such conditions. Similar local fog occurred on the occasions when O'Connor and Walters were reported missing. The Met. people couldn't explain that, either. That's all."

  Morganson sat up straight, as though he had suddenly made a decision.

  "I don't think there's any value in further discussion at this point. You will all have transcripts of Dr. Forster's statement within a few minutes. According to that statement, we are due to lose a number of key men in the next few hours. I'll have Code One emergency precautions instituted at all research establishments, and I think the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should hear from me right away. Colonel Barfield, I'd like you to ask Colonel Malinowski, the Russian military attaché to see me here not later than an hour from now. We'll have a full dress conference here at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning, with written evaluation reports in detail from all branches. Dr. Forster, consider yourself assigned to Pentagon duty as of now, and until further notice."

  Forster sat, dazed, until he realized that the others had left, and the general was standing in front of him.

  "Go get some rest, Forster," the other man said with surprising gentleness. "You've had a tough day."

  As Forster slept that early summer night, weathermen across the world were marking their weather maps with thousands of observations—feathery wind arrows, temperatures, barometric pressures and relative humidities.

  Then, as they drew their isobars, the pattern for the northern hemisphere emerged. A giant high pressure system with its center in northern Oklahoma promised warm fair weather across America. Another, centered east of the Ural Mountains, forecast clear weather for most of Europe and northern Asia.

  A low pressure trough between was dropping light warm rain on the green fields of England, but from Seattle to Washington, D. C, from Stettin to Vladivostock the sun was rising or setting in clear skies.

  Then about 9 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, a thickening mist descended over warm and drowsy southwest South Carolina. It was a fog that was not a fog, observers said afterwards, because there was no damp, no coldness—just a steady loss of visibility until a man couldn't see his hand held up in front of his face, even though a bright moon was shining. Most of the reporting night shift at the Aiken hydrogen bomb plant never reached the tightly-guarded gates. Those who did were not allowed in.

  At the same hour, across the world at the newly-built underground heavy water factory of Rossilovskigorsk, west of the southern tip of Lake Baikal, the late morning sun cast deep shadows into the gaping holes in the hillside which marked the plant entrances and exits. Deep below, miles of filtration chambers hissed quietly as they prepared their deadly concentrate.

  Then, without warning, the sun grew watery and paled, and within a few minutes a haze began to form at ground level. It grew thicker and thicker; the sun became a dim orange sphere, then was blotted out. Total darkness enveloped the area.

  And at the same hour, the watchers manning the lonely circle of probing radar domes, facing each other across the frozen wastes of the Arctic, cursed softly in Russian and English as their scopes sweeping the upper air first went blank and then dark.

  They were shaken men at the meeting in General Morganson's office the next morning.

  "Over 30 key men gone from Aiken," Morganson was saying. "In terms of goals, it means that our 1960 program now cannot possibly be fulfilled until 1965. If the situation develops as forecast in Dr. Forster's statement, our entire nuclear weapons program will grind to a halt within two weeks. If we drain men from civilian research, it will cause a total breakdown in the civilian atomic power production program. As you all know, the nation's entire economic expansion program is based on the availability of that power. Without it, industry will be forced into a deep freeze. That in turn means we might as well run up a white flag on the White House lawn."

  He smiled thinly. "I would be a lot more worried than I am except we have the first indications that the other side is in the same boat. I broke every regulation in the book last night when I t
alked to Malinowski. I took the liberty of warning him, on the basis that there was nothing to lose. His reaction then was that it was all a Wall Street-capitalist plot—'psychological warfare,' he called it.

  "He phoned me an hour ago. Sounded as though he'd just seen a ghost. He said the Russian ambassador had asked for an appointment with the Secretary of State this morning...."

  Forster, bewildered and out of his depth in these global problems, let the flood of words pour over him.

  Then he realized that Morganson was staring at him over the telephone receiver at his ear, and that the room was very quiet.

  Then Morganson said respectfully: "Very well, Mr. President. We'll have Doctor Forster there."

  Forster was relegated to the sidelines after his interview with the grave-faced man in the White House. Events were moving swiftly—events which Forster could read behind the blurred black headlines of the newspapers.

  The Russian ambassador was closeted with the Secretary of State for a record six-hour talk. Then the Soviet Foreign Minister took off for Washington at 30 minutes' notice, and another record was made when he spent all day with the President. The Washington columnists began to hint of lessening tension in the cold war, and the wire services carried reports of Russian radio broadcasts talking of a new era of cooperation between East and West.

  Only fragments of the broadcasts could be monitored, because radio reception had suddenly deteriorated right across the world. The reports could not be confirmed because Russia had cut all phone communication with the outside world. There was no possible mode of contact.

  Meanwhile, in the United States, television reception was blacking out for hours at a time, with no explanation available. The Civil Aeronautics Administration and the Air Force banned all plane movements under instrument flight conditions, because radar navigational equipment had become so unreliable as to be useless.

  Newspapers across the nation were reporting sudden fogs of short duration which baffled local weathermen. The U. S. Weather Bureau in Washington refused to comment.

  For the first time in the history of an East-West conference, there was no haggling, no propaganda speeches. Hour after hour, even as the talks went on, the cream of the world's scientific brains quietly continued to disappear, it was revealed later.

  In three days, the major powers accomplished what they had failed to do in the previous 15 years. Just 4 days and 21 hours after Forster had first talked to General Morganson at the Pentagon, a treaty was signed ending the world atomic weapons race.

  And it had all happened, was over and done, before the people of the globe could realize what was happening, before they could rise in mass panic in the face of the incredible unknown.

  Almost immediately after the announcement, radio and radar communications suddenly returned to normal, and reports of the mysterious fogs ceased.

  Back at the Center, as he walked down the floodlit ramp of the heliport towards his car, Forster found himself thinking of the experimental work on the dream state which he had performed as a graduate student. He knew that a dream which might take half an hour to recount took only a fraction of a second to occur in the sub-conscious of the sleeper as he awoke.

  It was the same way with the events of the last five days; already details were becoming fuzzy and blurred as though they had happened five years ago.

  He opened the car door, and the soft glow of the dome light filled the interior.

  Then he saw again the neat rectangular discoloration on the seat covers, and the jolt back to reality was almost a physical thing. Relief, overwhelming, flooded over him.

  He looked up into the indigo-velvet sky. Above him was the enormous triangle formed by Deneb, Vega, and Altair. Framed within it were a thousand other dimmer stars, but all, he knew, far, far bigger than the speck of solidified gases called Earth.

  Somewhere out there, living, thinking, breathing was Bentley.

  "Good night," Forster said out loud.

  And somehow, he was sure he wasn't talking into thin air.

  * * *

  Contents

  IN THE CARDS

  By Alan Cogan

  It is one thing to safeguard the future ... and something else entirely to see someone you love cry in terror two years from now!

  The first thing I did when I bought my Grundy Projector was take a trip to about two years ahead and see what was going to happen to me. Everyone was doing it around that time; students were taking short trips into the future to learn whether or not they would pass their exams, married couples were looking ahead to see how many kids they were going to have, businessmen were going into the future to size up their prospects.

  I took the trip because I was getting married and I couldn't resist the temptation of finding out how things would work out with my fiancee Marge and myself. Not that I had any doubts about Marge, but the Grundy Projectors were guaranteed harmless and there's no point in taking chances with a serious step like marriage.

  Everybody was looking ahead then. Within a week after the Grundy Projectors were introduced, you could walk past homes every evening and see people with those shimmering bird-cages around them. Their bodies were there, but heaven knows when their minds were--months and often even years ahead of time.

  I knew exactly when to go on my first time trip. I even knew where: I'd already put a down payment on a home in the new dome housing area where Marge and I would be living after the wedding. Knowing where to go on a time trip is important. On this one, for instance, I hadn't been assigned an address yet and there were all sorts of changes in the place--buildings and streets where there had only been empty lots and sections marked off by string--and I just had to hunt until I came to our home.

  You can imagine how much more difficult finding my future self would be if I hadn't known the exact location. That's about the only major drawback to making time trips and I don't see how it can be overcome. Directories would be one answer, but how would you go about putting them together if your crews can't ask questions or touch filing cards or even open future visiphone books?

  * * * * *

  Eventually, after setting the dial around the two-year mark, which is about the maximum limit on most models, I found myself in my future home in the dome housing area. I was watching myself as I would be and Marge as she would be. Only I didn't like what I saw.

  We were fighting and screaming at each other. You could tell at a glance that we hated each other. And after only two years!

  I was completely stunned as I watched that scene. Future Marge looked furious; she had the kind of look I never even suspected she could get on her face. But I think I was more enraged at my future self than at her. At the time, I was seriously in love with Marge--although it seemed evident it wasn't going to last--and I loathed myself for acting that way toward her. And after all those rash promises I had been making, too!

  I was really a tangled mess of emotions as I watched our future selves battling it out.

  I became conscious of not being alone as I watched. It didn't take long to discover that it was Marge who had come to join me. I should have expected her--she must have been just as curious about her marriage as I was and, like myself, would naturally take her Projector to the two-year limit. Of course we couldn't hold hands the way we would have if our bodies had been there, but then we probably wouldn't have held them long. We were both pretty embarrassed by what we saw.

  The cause of the fight was very obscure, and though we saw and heard everything perfectly, we still didn't really understand. However, the emotions expressed were plain enough.

  "You aren't going to die, Marge," my future self was yelling at her. "Try and get that through your damned thick stupid skull!"

  "I am! I am!" she was screaming back at me. "You know I'm going to die. You want to get rid of me. Our marriage has been one long fight from the start."

  "Don't talk such damned rot," my future self hollered back at her. "There's probably a perfectly good explanation for it all and you
're too ignorant to see it!"

  "The only explanation is that I'm going to die," future Marge insisted. She broke down, sobbing into an already saturated handkerchief.

  My future self stamped around the room, cursing and furiously kicking the furniture. "Why don't you find out for sure? Why don't you go in closer and find out the real reason?"

  She sobbed even louder. "I daren't! You do it for me. Go find out for yourself and then tell me."

  That seemed to make my future self even madder. "You know I wouldn't touch one of those things even to save my life. I mean it, too! Besides, if you do die, it'll be your own fault. You'll have believed yourself to death! You think you're going to die and now you won't be happy until you are dead."

  Future Marge began to sob hysterically and my Marge, who had been right beside me, suddenly seemed to grow a little more remote.

  Then a strange thing happened. My future self stopped pacing up and down the room and turned to look straight at me with the queerest expression on his face. That was enough for me. I got out of there fast and flipped back to the peace and security of 2017.

  * * * * *

  I climbed out of my Grundy Projector, glad to be back in the relative calm of my body, although it still took me a long time to get settled down. I felt like smashing the Projector there and then, and I guess I should have done it.

  The problem that had me all tied in knots was whether or not I should go ahead and marry Marge after what I had seen. I know it looked as though I was going to marry her anyway, but in my innocence I figured I could beat that.

  I soon realized I was going to get nowhere sitting all by myself in my room, so I went over to Marge's place. She was waiting for me, swinging quietly to and fro on the hammock on the dark patio. Normally I would have sat right down beside her, but this time I just stood back sheepishly and waited.

  Neither of us said anything for a while and I just watched as the hammock floated in the faint bluish light from some nearby lamps. Marge seemed to shine almost angelically as the glow caught her dark eyes and her softly tanned arms and legs.