They Came From Outer Space

by Jim Wynorski (editor)

  He saw the faintly appearing internal structure that Joe had puzzled over.

  “It would be funny if that’s what these things actually were, wouldn’t it?” he said. “Aw—it’s crazy!”

  “You could just about build a fifty kw transmitter in a suitcase, provided you had other corresponding components to go along.”

  Cal picked up the rest of the beads and dropped them in his shirt pocket.

  “Get another letter off right away. Better call them on the teletype instead. Tell them this job is plenty hot and we’ve got to have those condensers right away.”

  “Okay. What are you going to do with the beads?”

  “I might put ten thousand volts across them and see how long it takes to melt them down. See if you can find out who pulled this gag.”

  Cal Meacham left for the transmitter lab. For the rest of the morning he checked over the ante a on his new set, which wasn’t getting the soup out the way it should. He forgot about the glass beads completely until late in the afternoon.

  As he bent his head down into the framework of the ground transmitter, one of the sharp leads of the alleged condensers struck him through his shirt.

  He jerked sharply and bumped his head on the iron framework. Cursing the refractory transmitter, the missing condensers and the practical joker who had sent the beads, he grabbed the things out of his shirt pocket and was about to hurl them across the room.

  But a quirk of curiosity halted his hand in midair. Slowly he lowered it and looked again at the beads that seemed to glare at him like eyes in the palm of his hand.

  He called across the lab to a junior engineer. “Hey, Max, come here.

  Put these things on voltage breakdown and see what happens.”

  “Sure.”

  The junior engineer rolled them over in his palm. “What are they?”

  “Just some gadgets we got for test. I forgot about them until now.”

  He resumed checking the transmitter. Crazy notion, that—as if the beads actually were anything but glass beads. There was only one thing that kept him from forgetting the whole matter. It was the way that one wire seemed to slide around on the bead when you looked at it In about five minutes Max was back. “I shot one of your gadgets all to heck. It held up until thirty-three thousand volts—and not a microamp of leakage. Whatever they are they’re good. Want to blow the rest?”

  Cal turned slowly. He wondered if Max were in on the gag too. “A few hundred volts would jump right around the glass from wire to wire without bothering to go through. Those things are supposed to be condensers but they’re not that good.”

  “That’s what the meter read. Too bad they aren’t big enough to have some capacity with a voltage breakdown like that.”

  “Come on,” said Cal. “Let’s check the capacity.”

  First he tried another on voltage test. He watched it behind the glass shield as he advanced the voltage in steps of five kv. The bead held at thirty—and vanished at thirty-five.

  His lips compressed tightly, Cal took the third bead to a standard capacity bridge. He adjusted the plugs until it balanced—at just four microfarads.

  Max’s eyes were slightly popped. “Four mikes—they can’t be!”

  “No, they can’t possibly be, can they?”

  Back in the purchasing office he found Joe Wilson sitting morosely at the desk, staring at a yellow strip of teletype paper.

  “Just the man I’m looking for,” said Joe. “I called the Continental Electric and they said—“ “I don’t care what they said.” Cal laid the remaining beads on the desk in front of Joe. “Those little dingwhizzits are four-mike condensers that don’t break down until more than thirty thousand volts. They’re everything Continental said they were and more. Where did they get them? Last time I was over there Simon Foreman was in charge of the condenser department. He never “Will you let me tell you?” Joe interrupted. “They didn’t come from Continental—so Continental says. They said no order for condensers has been received from here in the last six weeks. I sent a reorder by TWX.”

  “I don’t want their order then. I want more of these!” Cal held up the bead. “But where did they come from if not from Continental?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  “What do you mean, you want to know? What letterhead came with these?

  Let’s see that letter again.”

  “Here it is. It just says, ‘Electronic Service—Unit Sixteen.” I thought that was some subsection of Continental. There’s no address on it.”

  Cal looked intently at the sheet of paper. What Joe said was true.

  There was no address at all. “You’re sure this came back in answer to an order you sent Continental?”

  Wearily, Joe flipped over a file. “There’s the duplicate of the order I sent.”

  “Continental always was a screwball outfit,” said Cal, “but they must be trying to top themselves. Write them again. Refer to the reference on this letter. Order a gross of these condensers. While you’re at it ask them for a new catalogue if ours is obsolete. I’d like to see what else they list besides these condensers.”

  “Okay,” said Joe. “But I tell you Continental says they didn’t even get our order.”

  “I suppose Santa Claus sent these condensers!”

  Three days later Cal was still ironing the bugs out of his transmitter when Joe Wilson called again.

  “Cal? Remember the Continental business? I just got the condensers—and the catalogue! For the love of Pete, get up here and take a look at it!”

  “A whole gross of condensers? That’s what I’m interested in.”

  “Yes—and billed to us for thirty cents apiece.”

  Cal hung up and walked out towards the Purchasing Office. Thirty cents apiece, he thought. If that outfit should go into the business of radio instruments they could probably sell a radio compass for five bucks at that rate.

  He found Joe alone, an inch-thick manufacturer’s catalogue open on the desk h front of him.

  “Did this come from Continental?” said Cal.

  Joe shook his head and turned over the front cover. It merely said, Electronic Service—Unit 16. No indication of address.

  “We send letters to Continental and stuff comes back,” said Cal.

  “Somebody over there must know about this! What did you want? What’s so exciting about the catalogue?”

  Joe arched his eyebrows. “Ever hear of a catherimine tube? One with an endiom complex of plus four, which guarantees it to be the best of its kind on the market?”

  “What kind of gibberish is that?”

  “I dunno but this outfit sells them for sixteen dollars each.” Joe tossed the catalogue across the desk. “This is absolutely the cockeyedest thing I ever saw. If you hadn’t told me those beads were condensers I’d say somebody had gone to a lot of work to pull a pretty elaborate gag. But the condensers were real—and here’s a hundred and forty-four more of them.”

  He picked up a little card with the beads neatly mounted in small holes.

  “Somebody made these. A pretty doggoned smart somebody, I’d say—but I don’t think it was Continental.”

  Cal was slowly thumbing through the book. Besides the gibberish describing unfamiliar pieces of electronic equipment there was something else gnawing at his mind. Then he grasped it. He rubbed a page of the catalogue between his fingers and thumb.

  “Joe, this stuff isn’t even paper.”

  “I know. Try to tear it.”

  Cal did. His fingers merely slipped away. “That’s as tough as sheet iron!”

  “That’s what I found out. Whoever this Electronic Service outfit is, they’ve got some pretty bright engineers.”

  “Bright engineers! This thing reflects a whole electronic culture completely foreign to ours. If it had come from Mars it couldn’t be any more foreign.”

  Cal thumbed over the pages, paused to read a description of a volterator incorporating an electron sorter based on entirely new pr
inciples. The picture of the thing looked like a cross between a miniature hot air furnace and a backyard incinerator and it sold for six hundred dollars.

  And then he came to the back of the book, which seemed to have a unity not possessed by the first half. He discovered this to be true when he came to an inner dividing cover in the center of the catalogue.

  For the first time, the center cover announced, Electronic Service—Unit 16 offers a complete line of interocitor components. In the following pages you will find complete descriptions of components which reflect the most modern engineering advances known to interocitor engineers.

  “Ever hear of an interocitor?” said Cal.

  “Sounds like something a surgeon would use to remove gallstones.”

  “Maybe we should order a kit of parts and build one up,” said Cal whimsically.

  “That would be like a power engineer trying to build a high-power communications receiver from the ARRL Amateur’s Handbook catalogue section.”

  “Maybe it could be done,” said Cal thoughtfully. He stopped abruptly and stared down at the pages before him. “But good heavens, do you realize what this means—the extent of the knowledge and electronic culture behind this?

  It exists right here around us somewhere.”

  “Maybe some little group of engineers in a small outfit that doesn’t believe in mixing and exchanging information through the IRE and so on?

  But are they over at Continental? If so why all the beating about the bush telling us they didn’t get our order and so on?”

  “It looks bigger than that,” said Cal doubtfully. “Regardless, we know their mail goes through Continental.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Do? Why, I’m going to find out who they are, of course. If this is all it seems to be I’ll hit them up for a job. Mind if I take this catalogue along? I’d like to use it at home tonight. I’ll see you get it back in the morning. I’ll probably want to order some more of this stuff just to see what happens.”

  “It’s all right with me,” said Joe. “I don’t know what it’s all about.

  I’m no engineer—just a dumb purchasing agent around this joint.”

  “For some things you can be thankful,” said Cal.

  CHAPTER II

  The Tumbling BarRel

  THE SUBURB of Mason was a small outlying place, a moderately concentrated industrial center. Besides Ryberg Instrument there were Eastern Tool and Machine Company, the Metalcrafters, a small die-making plant and a stapling-machine factory.

  This concentration of small industry in the suburb made for an equally concentrated social order of engineers and their families. Most of them did have families but Cal Meacham was not yet among these.

  He had been a bachelor for all of his thirty-five years and it looked as if he were going to stay that way. He admitted that he got lonesome sometimes but considered it well worth it when he heard Frank Staley up at two a.m. in the apartment above his, coaxing the new baby into something resembling silence.

  Cal enjoyed his engineering work with an intensity that more than compensated for any of the joys of family life he might be missing.

  He ate at the company cafeteria and went home to ponder the incredible catalogue that Joe Wilson had obtained. The more he thought about the things listed and described there, the more inflamed his imagination became.

  He couldn’t understand how such engineering developments could have been kept quiet. And now, why were they being so prosaically announced in an ordinary manufacturer’s catalogue? It made absolutely no sense whatever.

  He settled down in his easy chair with the catalogue propped on his lap.

  The section on interocitor components held the greatest fascination for him. All the rest of the catalogue listed merely isolated components and nowhere was any other device besides the interocitor mentioned.

  But there was not a single clue as to what the interocitor was, its function or its purpose. To judge from the list of components, however, and some of the sub-assemblies that were shown, it was a terrifically complex piece of equipment.

  He wondered momentarily if it were some war-born apparatus that hadn’t come out until now.

  He picked up the latest copy of the Amateur’s Handbook and thumbed through the catalogue section. Joe had been about right in comparing the job assembling an interocitor to that of a power engineer trying to build a radio from the ARRL catalogue. How much indication would there be to a power engineer as to the purposes of the radio components in the catalogue?

  Practically none. He couldn’t hope to figure out the interocitor with no more clues than a components catalogue. He gave up the speculation.

  He had already made up his mind to go to Continental and find out what this was all about—and maybe put in his application for a job there.

  He had to know more about this stuff.

  At seven there was a knock on his door. He found Frank Staley and two other engineers from upstairs standing in the hall.

  “The wives are having a gabfest,” said Frank. “How about a little poker?”

  “Sure, I could use a little spending money this week. But are you guys sure you can stand the loss?”

  “Ha, loss, he says,” said Frank. He turned to the others. “Shall we tell him how hot we are tonight, boys?”

  “Let him find out the hard way,” said Edmunds, one of Eastern’s top mechanical engineers.

  By nine-thirty Cal had found out the hard way. Even at the diminutive stakes they allowed themselves he was forty-five dollars in the hole.

  He threw in his final hand. “That’s all for me for tonight. You can afford to lose your lunch money for a couple of months but nobody will make mine up at home if I can’t buy it at the plant.”

  Edmunds leaned back in his chair and laughed. “I told you we were hot tonight. You look about as glum as Peters, our purchasing agent, did today.

  I had him order some special gears from some outfit for me a while back and they sent him two perfectly smooth wheels.

  “He was about ready to hit the ceiling and then he discovered that one wheel rolled against the other would drive it. He couldn’t figure it out.

  Neither could I when I saw it. So I mounted them on shafts and put a motor on one and a pony brake on the other.

  “Believe it or not those things would transfer any horsepower I could use and I had up to three hundred and fifty. There was perfect transfer without measurable slippage or backlash, yet you could remove the keys and take the wheels off the shafts just as if there was nothing holding them together.

  The craziest thing you ever saw.”

  Like some familiar song in another language Edmunds’ story sent a wave of almost frightening recognition through Cal. While Staley and Larsen, the third engineer, listened with polite disbelief, Cal sat in utter stillness, knowing it was all true. He thought of the strange catalogue over in his bookcase.

  “Did you ever find out where the gears came from?” he asked.

  “No, but we sure intend to. Believe me, if we can find out the secret of those wheels it’s going to revolutionize the entire science of mechanical engineering. They didn’t come from the place we ordered them from. We know that much. They came from some place called merely ‘Mechanical Service—Unit Eight.” No address. Whoever they are they must be geniuses besides screwball business people.”

  Electronic Service—Unit 16, Mechanical Service—Unit 8--they must be bigger than he had supposed, Cal thought.

  He went out to the little kitchenette to mix up some drinks. From the other room he heard Larsen calling Edmunds a triple-dyed liar. Two perfectly smooth wheels couldn’t transmit power of that order merely by friction.

  “I didn’t say it was friction,” Edmunds was saying. “It was something else—we don’t know what.”

  Something else, Cal thought. Couldn’t Edmunds see the significance of such wheels? They were as evident of a foreign kind of mechanical culture as the condensers were evid
ence of a foreign electronic culture.

  He went up to the Continental plant the next day, his hopes of finding the solution there considerably dimmed. His old friend, Simon Foreman, was still in charge of the condenser development.

  He showed Simon the bead and Simon said, “What kind of a gadget is that?”

  “A four-mike condenser. You sent it to us. I want to know more about it.”

  Cal watched the engineer’s face closely.

  Simon shook his head as he took the bead. “You’re crazy! A four-mike condenser—we never sent you anything like this!”

  He knew Simon was telling the truth.

  It was Edmunds’ story of the toothless gears that made it easier for Cal to accept the fact that the condensers and catalogue had not come from Continental. This he decided during the train ride home.

  But where were the engineers responsible for this stuff? Why was it impossible to locate them? Mail reached Electronic Service through Continental. He wondered about Mechanical Service. Had Eastern received a catalogue of foreign mechanical components?

  But his visit to Continental had thrown him up against a blank wall.

  No one admitted receiving the condenser orders and Cal knew none of Simon Foreman’s men were capable of such development.

  And that catalogue! It wasn’t enough that it should list scores of unfamiliar components. It had to be printed on some unknown substance that resembled paper only superficially.

  That was one more item that spoke not merely of isolated engineering advances but of a whole culture unfamiliar to him. And that was utterly impossible. Where could such a culture exist?

  Regardless of the fantastic nature of the task, he had made up his mind to do what he had suggested only as a joke at first. He was going to attempt the construction of an interocitor. Somehow he felt that there would be clues to the origin of this fantastic engineering.

  But could it be done? He’d previously dismissed it as impossible but now that it was a determined course the problem had to be analyzed further. In the catalogue were one hundred and six separate components but he knew it was not simply a matter of ordering one of each and putting them together.