Running Blind / The Freedom Trap

by Desmond Bagley

  ‘Breakfast first,’ she said. ‘I know a good cafĂ here.’

  When I walked into Nordlinger’s office and dumped the rifles in a corner he looked at me with some astonishment, noting the sagging of my pockets under the weight of the rifle ammunition, my bristly chin and general uncouthness. His eyes flicked towards the corner. ‘Pretty heavy for fishing tackle,’ he commented. ‘You look beat, Alan.’

  ‘I’ve been travelling in rough country,’ I said, and sat down. ‘I’d like to borrow a razor, and I’d like you to look at something.’

  He slid open a drawer of his desk and drew out a battery-powered shaver which he pushed across to me. ‘The washroom’s two doors along the corridor,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to look at?’

  I hesitated. I couldn’t very well ask Nordlinger to keep his mouth shut no matter what he found. That would be asking him to betray the basic tenets of his profession, which he certainly wouldn’t do. I decided to plunge and take a chance, so I dug the metal box from my pocket, took off the tape which held the lid on, and shook out the gadget. I laid it before him. ‘What’s that, Lee?’

  He looked at it for a long time without touching it, then he said, ‘What do you want to know about it?’

  ‘Practically everything,’ I said. ‘But to begin with—what nationality is it?’

  He picked it up and turned it around. If anyone could tell me anything about it, it was Commander Lee Nordlinger. He was an electronics officer at Keflavik Base and ran the radar and radio systems, both ground-based and airborne. From what I’d heard he was damned good at his job.

  ‘It’s almost certainly American,’ he said. He poked his finger at it. ‘I recognize some of the components—these resistors, for instance, are standard and are of American manufacture.’ He turned it around again. ‘And the input is standard American voltage and at fifty cycles.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now—what is it?’

  ‘That I can’t tell you right now. For God’s sake, you bring in a lump of miscellaneous circuitry and expect me to identify it at first crack of the whip. I may be good but I’m not that good.’

  ‘Then can you tell me what it’s not?’ I asked patiently.

  ‘It’s no teenager’s transistor radio, that’s for sure,’ he said, and frowned. ‘Come to that, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’ He tapped the odd-shaped piece of metal in the middle of the assembly. ‘I’ve never seen one of these, for example.’

  ‘Can you run a test on it?’

  ‘Sure.’ He uncoiled his lean length from behind the desk. ‘Let’s run a current through it and see if it plays “The Star-Spangled Banner.”‘

  ‘Can I come along?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Nordlinger lightly. ‘Let’s go to the shop.’ As we walked along the corridor he said, ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘It was given to me,’ I said uncommunicatively.

  He gave me a speculative glance but said no more. We went through swing doors at the end of the corridor and into a large room which had long benches loaded with electronic gear. Lee signalled to a petty officer who came over. ‘Hi, Chief; I have something here I want to run a few tests on. Have you a test bench free?’

  ‘Sure, Commander.’ The petty officer looked about the room. ‘Take number five; I guess we won’t be using that for a while.’

  I looked at the test bench; it was full of knobs and dials and screens which meant less than nothing. Nordlinger sat down. ‘Pull up a chair and we’ll see what happens.’ He attached clips to the terminals on the gadget, then paused. ‘We already know certain things about it. It isn’t part of an airplane; they don’t use such a heavy voltage. And it probably isn’t from a ship for roughly the same reason. So that leaves ground-based equipment. It’s designed to plug into the normal electricity system on the North American continent—it could have been built in Canada. A lot of Canadian firms use American manufactured components.’

  I jogged him along. ‘Could it come from a TV set?’

  ‘Not from any TV I’ve seen.’ He snapped switches. ‘A hundred ten volts—fifty cycles. Now, there’s no amperage given so we have to be careful. We’ll start real low.’ He twisted a knob delicately and a fine needle on a dial barely quivered against the pin.

  He looked down at the gadget. ‘There’s a current going through now but not enough to give a fly a heart attack.’ He paused, and looked up. ‘To begin with, this thing is crazy; an alternating current with these components isn’t standard. Now, let’s see—first we have what seems to be three amplification stages, and that makes very little sense.’

  He took a probe attached to a lead. ‘If we touch the probe here we should get a sine wave on the oscilloscope…’ He looked up. ‘…which we do. Now we see what happens at this lead going into this funny-shaped metal ginkus.’

  He gently jabbed the probe and the green trace on the oscilloscope jumped and settled into a new configuration. ‘A square wave,’ said Nordlinger. ‘This circuit up to here is functioning as a chopper—which is pretty damn funny in itself for reasons I won’t go into right now. Now let’s see what happens at the lead going out of the ginkus and into this mess of boards.’

  He touched down the probe and the oscilloscope trace jumped again before it settled down. Nordlinger whistled. ‘Just look at that spaghetti, will you?’ The green line was twisted into a fantastic waveform which jumped rhythmically and changed form with each jump. ‘You’d need a hell of a lot of Fourier analysis to sort that out,’ said Nordlinger. ‘But whatever else it is, it’s pulsed by this metal dohickey.’

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Not a damn thing,’ he said. ‘Now I’m going to try the output stage; on past form this should fairly tie knots into that oscilloscope—maybe it’ll blow up.’ He lowered the probe and we looked expectantly at the screen.

  I said, ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘I’m waiting for nothing.’ Nordlinger looked at the screen blankly.

  ‘There’s no output.’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  He looked at me oddly. In a gentle voice he said, ‘It’s impossible.’

  I said, ‘Maybe there’s something broken in there.’

  ‘You don’t get it,’ said Nordlinger. ‘A circuit is just what it says—a circle. You break the circle anywhere you get no current flow anywhere.’ He applied the probe again. ‘Here there’s a current of a pulsed and extremely complex form.’ Again the screen jumped into life. ‘And here, in the same circuit, what do we get?’

  I looked at the blank screen. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said firmly. He hesitated. ‘Or, to put it more precisely, nothing that can show on this test rig.’ He tapped the gadget. ‘Mind if I take this thing away for a while?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’d like to put it through some rather more rigorous tests. We have another shop.’ He cleared his throat and appeared to be a little embarrassed. ‘Uh…you won’t be allowed in there.’

  ‘Oh—secret stuff.’ That would be in one of the areas to which Fleet’s pass would give access. ‘All right, Lee; you put the gadget through its paces and I’ll go and shave. I’ll wait for you in your office.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Where did you get it, Alan?’

  I said, ‘You tell me what it does and I’ll tell you where it came from.’

  He grinned. ‘It’s a deal.’

  I left him disconnecting the gadget from the test rig and went back to his office where I picked up the electric shaver. Fifteen minutes later I felt a lot better after having got rid of the hair. I waited in Nordlinger’s office for a long time—over an hour and a half—before he came back.

  He came in carrying the gadget as though it was a stick of dynamite and laid it gently on his desk. ‘I’ll have to ask you where you got this,’ he said briefly.

  ‘Not until you tell me what it does,’ I said.

  He sat behind his desk and looked at the complex of metal and plastic with
something like loathing in his eyes. ‘It does nothing,’ he said flatly. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘It must do something.’

  ‘Nothing!’ he repeated. ‘There is no measurable output.’ He leaned forward and said softly, ‘Alan, out there I have instruments that can measure any damn part of the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves of such low frequency you wouldn’t believe possible right up to cosmic radiation—and there’s nothing coming out of this contraption.’

  ‘As I said before—maybe something has broken.’

  ‘That cat won’t jump; I tested everything.’ He pushed at it and it moved sideways on the desk. ‘There are three things I don’t like about this. Firstly, there are components in here that are not remotely like anything I’ve seen before, components of which I don’t even understand the function. I’m supposed to be pretty good at my job, and that, in itself, is enough to disturb me. Secondly, it’s obviously incomplete—it’s just part of a bigger complex—and yet I doubt if I would understand it even if I had everything. Thirdly—and this is the serious one—it shouldn’t work.’

  ‘But it isn’t working,’ I said.

  He waved his hand distractedly. ‘Perhaps I put it wrong. There should be an output of some kind. Good Christ, you can’t keep pushing electricity into a machine—juice that gets used up—without getting something out. That’s impossible.’

  I said, ‘Maybe it’s coming out in the form of heat.’

  He shook his head sadly. ‘I got mad and went to extreme measures. I pushed a thousand watts of current through it in the end. If the energy output was in heat then the goddamn thing would have glowed like an electric heater. But no—it stayed as cool as ever.’

  ‘A bloody sight cooler than you’re behaving,’ I said.

  He threw up his hands in exasperation. ‘Alan, if you were a mathematician and one day you came across an equation in which two and two made five without giving a nonsensical result then you’d feel exactly as I do. It’s as though a physicist were confronted by a perpetual motion machine which works.’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘A perpetual motion machine gets something for nothing—energy usually. This is the other way round.’

  ‘It makes no difference,’ he said. ‘Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.’ As I opened my mouth he said quickly, ‘And don’t start talking about atomic energy. Matter can be regarded as frozen, concentrated energy.’ He looked at the gadget with grim eyes. ‘This thing is destroying energy.’

  Destroying energy! I rolled the concept around my cerebrum to see what I could make of it. The answer came up fast—nothing much. I said, ‘Let’s not go overboard. Let’s see what we have. You put an input into it and you get out…’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Nordlinger.

  ‘Nothing you can measure,’ I corrected. ‘You may have some good instrumentation here, Lee, but I don’t think you’ve got the whole works. I’ll bet that there’s some genius somewhere who not only knows what’s coming out of there but has an equally involved gadget that can measure it.’

  ‘Then I’d like to know what it is,’ he said. ‘Because it’s right outside my experience.’

  I said, ‘Lee, you’re a technician, not a scientist. You’ll admit that?’

  ‘Sure; I’m an engineer from way back.’

  ‘That’s why you have a crew-cut—but this was designed by a long-hair.’ I grinned. ‘Or an egghead.’

  ‘I’d still like to know where you got it.’

  ‘You’d better be more interested in where it’s going. Have you got a safe—a really secure one?’

  ‘Sure.’ He did a double-take. ‘You want me to keep this?’

  ‘For forty-eight hours,’ I said. ‘If I don’t claim it in that time you’d better give it to your superior officer together with all your forebodings, and let him take care of it.’

  Nordlinger looked at me with a cold eye.’ I don’t know but what I shouldn’t give it to him right now. Forty-eight hours might mean my neck.’

  ‘You part with it now and it will be my neck,’ I said grimly.

  He picked up the gadget. ‘This is American and it doesn’t belong here at Keflavik. I’d like to know where it does belong.’

  ‘You’re right about it not belonging here,’ I said. ‘But I’m betting it’s Russian—and they want it back.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ he said. ‘It’s full of American components.’

  ‘Maybe the Russians learned a lesson from Macnamara on cost-effectiveness. Maybe they’re shopping in the best market. I don’t give two bloody hoots if the components were made in the Congo—I still want you to hold on to it.’

  He laid the gadget on his desk again very carefully. ‘Okay—but I’ll split the difference; I’ll give you twenty-four hours. And even then you don’t get it back without a full explanation.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to be satisfied with that,’ I said. ‘Providing you lend me your car. I left the Land-Rover in Laugarvatn.’

  ‘You’ve got a goddamn nerve.’ Nordlinger put his hand in his pocket and tossed the car key on the desk.

  ‘You’ll find it in the car park near the gate—the blue Chevrolet.’

  ‘I know it.’ I put on my jacket and went to the corner to pick up the rifles. ‘Lee, do you know a man called Fleet?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘No.’

  ‘Or McCarthy?’

  ‘The CPO you met in the shop is McCarthy.’

  ‘Not the same one,’ I said. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Lee. We’ll go fishing sometime.’

  ‘Stay out of jail.’

  I paused at the door. ‘What makes you say a thing like that?’

  His hand closed over the gadget. ‘Anyone who walks around with a thing like this ought to be in jail,’ he said feelingly.

  I laughed, and left him staring at it. Nordlinger’s sense of what was right had been offended. He was an engineer, not a scientist, and an engineer usually works to the rule book—that long list of verities tested through the centuries. He tends to forget that the rule book was originally compiled by scientists, men who see nothing strange in broken rules other than an opportunity to probe a little deeper into the inexplicable universe. Any man who can make the successful transition from Newtonian to quantum physics without breaking his stride can believe anything any day of the week and twice as much on Sundays. Lee Nordlinger was not one of these men, but I’d bet the man who designed the gadget was.

  I found the car and put the rifles and the ammunition into the boot. I was still wearing Jack Case’s pistol in the shoulder holster and so now there was nothing to spoil the set of my coat. Not that I was any more presentable; there were scorch marks on the front from the burning peat of Kennikin’s fire, and a torn sleeve from where a bullet had come a shade too close at Geysir. It was stained with mud and so were my trousers, I was looking more and more like a tramp—but a clean-shaven tramp.

  I climbed into the car and trickled in the direction of the International Airport, thinking of what Nordlinger hadn’t been able to tell me about the gadget. According to Lee it was an impossible object and that made it scientifically important—so important that men had died and had their legs blown off and had been cooked in boiling water because of it.

  And one thing made me shiver. By Kennikin’s last words just before I escaped from the house at Thingvallavatn he had made it quite clear that I was now more important than the gadget. He had been prepared to kill me without first laying his hands on it and, for all he knew, once I was dead the gadget would have been gone forever with me.

  I had Nordlinger’s evidence that the gadget was of outstanding scientific importance, so what was it about me that made me even more important than that? It’s not often in this drear, technological world that a single man becomes of more importance than a scientific breakthrough. Maybe we were returning to sanity at last, but I didn’t think so.

  There was a side entrance to the Icelandair office which one could use wi
thout going through the public concourse, so I parked the car and went in. I bumped pleasantly into a hostess, and asked, ‘Is Elin Ragnarsdottir around?’

  ‘Elin? She’s in the waiting-room.’

  I walked into the waiting-room and found her alone. She jumped up quickly. ‘Alan, you’ve been so long!’

  ‘It took longer than I expected.’ Her face was strained and there seemed to be a sense of urgency about her. ‘You didn’t have trouble?’

  ‘No trouble—not for me. Here’s the newspaper.’

  I took it from her. ‘Then what’s the matter?’

  ‘I think you’d better…you’d better read the paper.’ She turned away.

  I shook it open and saw a photograph on the front page, a life-size reproduction of my sgian dubh. Underneath, the black headline screamed: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS KNIFE?

  The knife had been found embedded in the heart of a man sitting in a car parked in the driveway of a house in Laugarvatn. The man had been identified as a British tourist called John Case. The house and the Volkswagen in which Case had been found belonged to Gunnar Arnarsson who was absent, being in charge of a pony-trekking expedition. The house had been broken into and apparently searched. In the absence of Gunnar Arnarsson and his wife, Sigurlin Asgeirsdottir, it was impossible to tell if anything had been stolen. Both were expected to be contacted by the police.

  The knife was so unusual in form that the police had requested the newspaper to publish a photograph of it. Anyone who had seen this knife or a similar knife was requested to call at his nearest police station. There was a boxed paragraph in which the knife was correctly identified as a Scottish sgian dubh, and after that the paragraph degenerated into pseudo-historical blather.

  The police were also trying to find a grey Volvo registered in Reykjavik; anyone having seen it was requested to communicate with the police at once. The registration number was given.

  I looked at Elin. ‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ I said quietly.

  ‘It is the man you went to see at Geysir?’