That would be like ordering one tuning condenser, one coil, one tube and so on and expecting to build a super-het from them. In the interocitor there would be multiples of some parts, and different electrical values.
And, finally, if he ever got the thing working how would he know if it were performing properly or not?
He quit debating the pros and cons. He had known from the moment he first looked through the catalogue that he was going to try.
He went directly to the Purchasing Office instead of his lab the next morning. Through the glass panels of the outer room he could see Joe Wilson sitting at his desk with his face over a shoe box, staring with an intent and agonized frown.
Cal grinned to himself. It was hard to tell when Joe’s mugging was real or not but he couldn’t imagine him sitting there doing it without an audience.
Cal opened the door quietly, and then he caught a glimpse of the contents of the box. It was wriggling. He scowled, too.
“What have you got now? An earthworm farm?”
Joe looked up, his face still wearing a bewildered and distant expression.
“Oh, hello, Cal. This is a tumbling barrel.”
Cal stared at the contents of the box. It looked like a mass of tiny black worms in perpetual erratic motion. “What’s the gag this time?
That box of worms doesn’t look much like a tumbling barrel .”
“It would—if they were metallic worms and just walked around the metal parts that needed tumbling.”’ “This isn’t another Electronic Service--16 product, is it?”
“No. Metalcrafters sent over this sample. Wanted to know if they could sell us any for our mechanical department. The idea is that you just dump whatever needs tumbling into a box of this compound, strain it out in a few minutes and your polishing job is done.”
“What makes the stuff wiggle?”
“That’s the secret that Metalcrafters won’t tell.”
“Order five hundred pounds of it,” said Cal suddenly. “Call them on the phone and tell them we can use it this afternoon.”
“What’s the big idea? You can’t use it.”
“Try it.”
Dubiously, Joe lifted the phone and contacted the order department of Metalcrafters. He placed the order. After a moment he hung up. “They say that due to unexpected technological difficulties in production they are not accepting orders for earlier than thirty-day delivery.”
“The crazy dopes! They won’t get it in thirty days or thirty months.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Where do you think they got this stuff? They didn’t discover it.
They got it the same way we got these condensers and they’re hoping to cash in on it before they even know what it is. As if they could figure it out in thirty days!”
Then he told Joe about the gears of Edmunds.
“This begins to look like more than accident,” said Joe.
Cal nodded slowly. “Sample of products of an incredible technology were apparently mis-sent to three of the industrial plants here in Mason. But I wonder how many times it has happened in other places.
It almost looks like a deliberate pattern of some sort.”
“But who’s sending it all and how and why? Who developed this stuff?
It couldn’t be done on a shoestring, you know. That stuff smells of big money spent in development labs. Those condensers must have cost a half million, I’ll bet.”
“Make out an order for me,” said Cal. “Charge it to my project.
There’s enough surplus to stand it. I’ll take the rap if anybody snoops.”
“What do you want?”
“Send it to Continental as before. Just say you want one complete set of components as required for the construction of a single interocitor model.
That may get me the right number of duplicate parts unless I get crossed up by something I’m not thinking of.”
Joe’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re going to try to build one by the Chinese method?”
“The Chinese method would be simple,” Cal grunted. “They take a finished cake and reconstruct it. If I had a finished interocitor I’d gladly tackle that. This is going to be built by the Cal Meacham original catalogue method.”
He worked overtime for the next couple of days to beat out the bugs in the airline ground transmitter and finally turned it over to the production department for processing. There’d still be a lot of work on it because production wouldn’t like some of the complex sub-assemblies he’d been forced to design—but he’d have time for the interocitor stuff if and when it showed up.
After two weeks he was almost certain that something had gone wrong and they had lost contact with the mysterious supplier. His disappointment vanished when the receiving clerk called him and said that fourteen crates had just been received for him.
Fourteen crates seemed a reasonable number but he hadn’t been prepared for the size of them. They stood seven feet high and were no smaller than four by five feet in cross section.
Cal groaned as he saw them standing on the receiving platform. He visioned cost sheets with astronomical figures on them. What had he got himself into?
He cleared out one of his screen rooms and ordered the stuff brought in.
Then he began the job of unpacking the crates as they were slowly dollied in. He noted with some degree of relief that approximately one half the volume of the crates was taken up by packing materials—but that still left an enormous volume of components.
In some attempt to classify them he laid the like units together upon the benches around the room. There were plumbing units of seemingly senseless configuration, glass envelopes with innards that looked like nothing he had ever seen in a vacuum tube before. There were boxes containing hundreds of small parts which he supposed must be resistances or condensers—though his memory concerning the glass beads made him cautious about jumping to conclusions regarding anything.
After three hours, the last of the crates had been unpacked and the rubbish carted away. Cal Meacham was left alone in the midst of four thousand, eight hundred and ninety-six—he’d kept a tally of them—unfamiliar gadgets of unknown purposes and characteristics. And he hoped to assemble them into a complete whole-of equally unknown purposes.
He sat down on a lab stool and regarded the stacks of components glumly.
In his lap rested the single guide through this impossible maze—the catalogue.
CHAPTER III
Assembly Problem
AT QUITTING TIME he went out for dinner at the plant cafeteria, then returned to the now empty lab and walked around the piles, sizing up the job he’d let himself in for. It would take all his nights for months to come.
He hoped there wouldn’t be too much curiosity about his project but he could see little chance of keeping it entirely under cover. Most of all he was concerned with keeping Billingsworth, the chief engineer, from complaining about it. Not that he and Billingsworth weren’t on good terms but his was big for a sideline project.
It was obvious that certain parts of the miscellaneous collection constituted a framework for the assembly to be mounted on. He gathered these together and set them up tentatively to see if he could get some idea of the size and shape of the finished assembly.
One thing stood out at once. On the bench was a cube of glass, sixteen inches on a side, filled with a complex mass of elements. Twenty-three terminals led from the elements to the outside of the cube. One side of it was coated as if it were some kind of screen. And within one of the framework panels there was an opening exactly the right size to accommodate the face of the cube.
That narrowed the utility of the device, Cal thought. It provided an observer with some kind of intelligence which was viewed in graphic or pictorial form as with a cathode-ray tube.
But the complexity of the cube’s elements and the multiple leads indicated another necessity. He would have to order duplicates of many parts because these would have to be dissected to destruction
in order to determine some possible electrical function.
Nearly all the tubes fell into this classification and he began listing these parts so that Joe could reorder.
He then turned to familiarizing himself with the catalogue name of each part and establishing possible functions from the descriptions and specifications given.
Slowly through the early morning hours the clues increased. Pieces were fitted together as if the whole thing were a majestic jigsaw puzzle designed by some super-brain.
At three a.m. Cal locked the screen room and went home for a few hours’ sleep. He felt elated by the slight success he’d had, the few clues that he seemed to have discovered.
He was in at eight again and went to Joe’s office. As always Joe was there. Cal sometimes wondered if he slept in the place.
“I see your stuff came,” said Joe. “I wanted to come down, but I thought you’d like to work it out alone for a while.”
“I wish you had,” Cal said. He understood Joe’s frustrations. “Come on down anytime. There’s something I’d like you to do. On the crates the stuff came in there was an address of a warehouse in Philadelphia.
I wrote it down here. Could you get one of the salesmen to see what kind of a place it is when he’s through there? I’d rather not have him know I’m interested.
This may be a lead.”
“Sure. I think the Sales Office has a regular trip through there next week. I’ll see who’s on it. What have you found out?”
“Not too much. The thing has a screen for viewing but no clue as to what might be viewed. There’s a piece of equipment referred to as a planetary generator that seems to be a sort of central unit, something like the oscillator of a transmitter, perhaps. It was mounted in a support that seems to call for mounting on the main frame members.
“This gives me an important dimension so I can finish the framework.
But there’s about four hundred and ninety terminals-more or less—on that planetary generator. That’s what’s got me buffaloed but good.
These parts seem to be interchangeable in different circuits, otherwise they might be marked for wiring.
“The catalogue refers to various elements, which are named, and gives electrical values for them—but I can’t find out which elements are which without tearing into sealed units. So here’s a reorder on all the parts I may have to open up.”
Joe glanced at it. “Know what that first shipment cost?”
“Don’t tell me it cleaned my project out?”
“They billed us this morning for twenty-eight hundred dollars.”
Cal whistled softly. “If that stuff had been produced by any of the technological methods I know anything about they would have sent a bill nearer twenty-eight thousand.”
“Say, Cal, why can’t we track this outfit down through the patent office.
There must be patents on the stuff.”
“There’s not a patent number on anything. I’ve already looked.”
“Then let’s ask them to send us either the number or copies of the patents on some of these things. They wouldn’t distribute unpatented items like this, surely. They’d be worth a fortune.”
“All right. Put it in the letter with your reorder. I don’t think it will do much good.”
Cal returned to the lab and worked impatiently through the morning on consultations with the production department regarding his transmitter.
After lunch he returned to the interocitor. He decided against opening any of the tubes. If anything should happen to their precarious contact with the supplier before they located him He began work on identification of the tube elements. Fortunately the catalogue writers had put in all voltage and current data. But there were new units that made no sense to Cal—albion factors, inverse reduction index, scattering efficiency.
Slowly he went ahead. Filaments were easy but some of the tubes had nothing resembling filaments or cathodes. When he applied test voltages he didn’t know whether anything was happening or not.
Gradually he found out. There was one casual sketch showing a catherimine tube inside a field-generating coil. That gave him a clue to a whole new principle of operation.
After six days he was able to connect proper voltages to more than half his tubes and get the correct responses as indicated by catalogue specifications. With that much information available he was able to go ahead and construct the entire power supply of the interocitor.
Then Joe called him one afternoon. “Hey, Cal! Have you busted any of those tubes yet?”
“No. Why?”
“Don’t! They’re getting mad or something. They aren’t going to send the reorder we asked for and they say there are no patents on the stuff. Besides, that address in Philadelphia turned out to be a dud.
“Cramer, the salesman who looked it up, says there’s nothing there but an old warehouse that hasn’t been used for years. Cal, who can these guys be?
I’m beginning to not like the smell of this business.”
“Read me their letter.”
“’Dear Mr. Wilson,’ they say, ‘We cannot understand the necessity of the large amount of reorder which you have submitted to us. We trust that the equipment was not broken or damaged in transit. However, if this is the case please return the damaged parts and we will gladly order replacements for you. Otherwise we fear that, due to the present shortage of interocitor equipment, it will be necessary to return your order unfilled.
“’We do not understand your reference to patents. There is nothing of such a nature in connection with the equipment. Please feel free to call upon us at any time. If you find it possible to function under present circumstances will you please contact us by interocitor at your earliest convenience and we will discuss the matter further.”’ “What was that last line?” Cal asked.
“—‘contact us by interocitor—“’
“That’s the one! That shows us what the apparatus is—a communication device.”
“But from where to where and from whom to whom?”
“That’s what I intend to find out. Believe me I do—now as never before!”
They weren’t going to let him open up the tubes or other sealed parts, that was obvious. Cal arranged for an X-ray and fluoroscope equipment and began to obtain some notion of the interior construction of the tubes he could not otherwise analyze. He could trace the terminals back to their internal connections and be fairly sure of not burning things up with improper voltages to the elements.
Besides the power supply the entire framework with the planetary generator was erected and a bank of eighteen catherimine tubes was fed by it. The output of these went to a nightmare arrangement of plumbing that included unbelievable flares and spirals. Again he found prealigned mounting holes that enabled him to fit most of the plumbing together with only casual reference to the catalogue.
Growing within him was the feeling that the whole thing was some incredible intricately designed puzzle and that clues were deliberately placed there for anyone who would look.
Then one of the catherimine tubes rolled off a table and shattered on the floor. Cal thought afterwards that he must have stood staring at the shards of glass for a full five minutes before he moved. He wondered if the whole project were Lying there in that shattered heap.
Gently, with tweezers, he picked out the complex tube elements and laid them gently on a bed of dustless packing material. Then he called Joe.
“Get off another letter to Continental—airmail,” he said. “Ask if we can get a catherimine replacement. I just dropped one.”
“Aren’t you going to send the pieces along as they asked?”
“No. I’m not taking any chances with what I’ve got. Tell them the remains will be forwarded immediately if they can send a replacement.”
“O.K. Mind if I come down tonight and look things over?”
“Not at all. Come on down.”
It was a little before five when Joe Wilson finally entered the screen room. He looked around an
d whistled softly. “Looks like you’re making something out of this after all.”
A neat row of panels nearly fifteen feet long stretched along the center of the room. In the framework behind was a nightmarish assemblage of gadgets and leads. Joe took in the significance of the hundreds of leads that were in place.
“You’re really figuring it out!”
“I think so,” said Cal casually. “It’s pretty tricky.”
Joe scanned the mass of equipment once more. “You know, manufacturers’ catalogues are my line,” he said. “I see hundreds of them every year.
I get so I can almost tell the inside layout just by the cover.
“Catalogue writers aren’t very smart, you know. They’re mostly forty-fifty-dollar-a-week kids that come out of college with a smattering of journalism but are too dumb to do much about it. So they end up writing catalogues.
“And no catalogue I ever saw would enable you to do this!”
Cal shrugged. “You never saw a catalogue like this before.”
“I don’t think it’s a catalogue.”
“What do you think it is?”
“An instruction book. Somebody wanted you to put this together.”
Cal laughed heartily. “You must read too much science fiction on your days off. Why would anyone deliberately plant this stuff so that I would assemble it?”
“Do you think it’s just a catalogue?”
Cal stopped laughing. “All right, you win. I’ll admit it but I still think it’s crazy. There are things in it that wouldn’t be quite necessary if it were only a catalogue. For instance, look at this catherimine tube listing.
“It says that with the deflector grid in a four-thousand-gauss field the accelerator plate current will be forty mils. Well, it doesn’t matter whether it’s in a field or not. That’s normal for the element under any conditions.
“But that’s the only place in the whole book that indicates the normal operation of the tube is in this particular field. There were a bunch of coils with no designation except that they are static field coils.
“On the basis of that one clue I put the tubes and coils together and found an explanation of the unknown ‘albion factor’ that I’ve been looking for. It’s that way all along. It can’t be merely accidental.
They Came From Outer Space Page 25
