The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  * * * *

  “Well?” he asked fretfully. “Chuka said you needed me here. What’s the matter?”

  Ralph Redfeather nodded very formally. Aletha was here, too, and two of Chuka’s foremen—one did not look happy—and four of the Amerind steel-workers. They grinned at Bordman.

  “I wanted you to see,” said Aletha’s cousin,“before we threw on the current. It doesn’t look like that little grid could handle the sand it took care of. But Lewanika wants to report.”

  A dark man who worked under Chuka—and looked as if he belonged on solid ground—said carefully:

  “We cast the beams for the small landing grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into molds as it flowed down.”

  He stopped. One of the Indians said:

  “We made the girders into the small landing grid. It bothered us because we built it on the sand that had buried the big grid. We didn’t understand why you ordered it there. But we built it.”

  The second dark man said with a trace of swagger:

  “We made the coils, Mr. Bordman. We made the small grid so it would work the same as the big one when it was finished. And then we made the big grid work, finished or not!”

  Bordman said impatiently:

  “All right. Very good. But what is this? A ceremony?”

  “Just so,” said Aletha, smiling. “Be patient, Mr. Bordman!”

  Her cousin said conversationally:

  “We built the small grid on the top of the sand. And it tapped the ionosphere for power. No lack of power then! And we’d set it to heave up sand instead of ships. Not to heave it out into space, but to give it up to mile a second vertical velocity. Then we turned it on.”

  “And we rode it down, that little grid,” said one of the remaining Indians, grinning. “What a party! Manitou!”

  Redfeather frowned at him and took up the narrative.

  “It hurled the sand up from its center. As you said it would, thesand swept air with it. It made a whirlwind, bringing more sand from outside the grid into its field. It was a whirlwind with fifteen megakilowatts of power to drive it. Some of the sand went twenty miles high. Then it made a mushroom-head and the winds up yonder blew it to the west. It came down a long way off, Mr. Bordman. We’ve made a new dune-area ten miles downwind. And the little grid sank as the sand went away from around it. We had to stop it three times, because it leaned. We had to dig under parts of it to get it straight up again. But it went down into the valley.”

  Bordman turned up the power to his heat-suit motors. He felt uncomfortably warm.

  “In six days,” said Ralph, almost ceremonially, “it had uncovered half the original grid we’d built. Then we were able to modify that to heave sand and to let it tap the ionosphere. We were able to use a good many times the power the little grid could apply to sand-lifting! In two days more the landing grid was clear. The valley bottom was clean. We shifted some hundreds of millions of tons of sand by landing grid, and now it is possible to land the Warlock, and receive her supplies, and the solar-power furnace is already turning out pigs for her loading. We wanted you to see what we have done. The colony is no longer in danger, and we shall have the grid completely finished for your inspection before the ship is ready to return.”

  Bordman said uncomfortably:

  “That’s very good. It’s excellent. I’ll put it in my survey report.”

  “But,” said Ralph, more ceremonially still, “we have the right to count coup for the members of our tribe and clan. Now—”

  Then there was confusion. Aletha’s cousin was saying syllables that did not mean anything at all. The other Indians joined in at intervals, speaking gibberish. Aletha’s eyes were shining and she looked incredibly pleased and satisfied.

  “But what…what’s this?” demanded Bordman when they stopped.

  Aletha spoke proudly.

  “Ralph just formally adopted you into the tribe, Mr. Bordman—and into his clan and mine! He gave you a name I’ll have to write down for you, but it means, ‘Man-who-believes-not-his-own-wisdom.’ And now—”

  Ralph Redfeather—licensed interstellar engineer, graduate of the stiffest technical university in this quarter of the galaxy, wearer of three eagle-pinion feathers and clad in a pair of insulated sandals and a breechcloth—whipped out a small paint-pot and a brush from somewhere and began carefully to paint on a section of girder ready for the next tier of steel. He painted a feather on the metal.

  “It’s a coup,” he told Bordman over his shoulder.“Your coup. Placed where it was earned—up here. Aletha is authorized to certify it. And the head of the clan will add an eagle-feather to the headdress he wears in council in the Big Tepee on Algonka, and—your clan-brothers will be proud!”

  Then he straightened up and held out his hand.

  Chuka said benignly:

  “Being civilized men, Mr. Bordman, we Africans do not go in for uncivilized feathers. But we…ah…rather approve of you, too. And we plan a corroboree at the colony after the Warlock is down, when there will be some excellently practiced singing. There is…ah…a song, a sort of choral calypso, about this…ah…adventure you have brought to so satisfying a conclusion. It is quite a good calypso. It’s likely to be popular on a good many planets.”

  Bordman swallowed. He was acutely uncomfortable. He felt that he ought to say something, and he did not know what.

  But just then there was a deep-toned humming in the air. It was a vibrant tone, instinct with limitless power. It was the eighteen-hundred-foot landing grid, giving off that profoundly bass and vibrant, note it uttered while operating. Bordman looked up.

  The Warlock was coming down.

  THE MACHINE THAT SAVED THE WORLD (1957)

  The first broadcast came in 1972, while Mahon-modified machines were still strictly classified, and the world had heard only rumors about them. The first broadcast was picked up by a television ham in Osceola, Florida, who fumingly reported artificial interference on the amateur TV bands. He heard and taped it for ten minutes—so he said—before it blew out his receiver. When he replaced the broken element, the broadcast was gone.

  But the Communications Commission looked at and listened to the tape and practically went through the ceiling. It stationed a monitor truck in Osceola for months, listening feverishly to nothing.

  Then for a long while there were rumors of broadcasts which blew out receiving apparatus, but nothing definite. Weird patterns appeared on screens high-pitched or deep-bass notes sounded—and the receiver went out of operation. After the ham operator in Osceola, nobody else got more than a second or two of the weird interference before blowing his set during six very full months of CC agitation.

  Then a TV station in Seattle abruptly broadcast interference superimposed on its regular network program. The screens of all sets tuned to that program suddenly showed exotic, curiously curved, meaningless patterns on top of a commercial spectacular broadcast. At the same time incredible chirping noises came from the speakers, alternating with deep-bass hootings, which spoiled the ju-ju music of the most expensive ju-ju band on the air. The interference ended only with a minor break-down in the transmitting station. It was the same sort of interference that the Communications Commission had thrown fits about in Washington. It threw further fits now.

  * * * *

  A month later a vision-phone circuit between Chicago and Los Angeles was unusable for ten minutes. The same meaningless picture-pattern and the same preposterous noises came on and monopolized the line. It ceased when a repeater-tube went out and a parallel circuit took over. Again, frantic agitation displayed by high authority.

  Then the interference began to appear more frequently, though still capriciously. Once a Presidential broadcast was confused by interference apparently originating in the White House, and again a three-way top-secret conference between the commanding officers of three military departments ceased when the unhuman-sounding noises and the scrambled picture pattern inserted itself into the
closed-circuit discussion. The conference broke up amid consternation. For one reason, military circuits were supposed to be interference-proof. For another, it appeared that if interference could be spotted to this circuit or this receiver it was likely this circuit or that receiver could be tapped.

  For a third reason, the broadcasts were dynamite. As received, they were badly scrambled, but they could be straightened out. Even the first one, from Osceola, was cleaned up and understood. Enough so to make top authority tear its hair and allow only fully-cleared scientific consultants in on the thing.

  The content of the broadcasts was kept considerably more secret than the existence of Mahon units and what they could do. And Mahon units were brand-new, then, and being worked with only at one research installation in the United States.

  The broadcasts were not so closely confined. The same wriggly patterns and alien noises were picked up in Montevideo, in Australia, in Panama City, and in grimly embattled England. All the newspapers discussed them without ever suspecting that they had been translated into plain speech. They were featured as freak news—and each new account mentioned that the broadcast reception had ended with a break-down of the receiving apparatus.

  Guarded messages passed among the high authorities of the nations that picked up the stuff. A cautious inquiry went even to the Compubs.

  The Union of Communist Republics answered characteristically. It asked a question about Mahon units. There were rumors, it said, about a new principle of machine-control lately developed in the United States. It was said that machines equipped with the new units did not wear out, that they exercised seeming intelligence at their tasks, and that they promised to end the enormous drain on natural resources caused by the wearing-out and using-up of standard-type machinery.

  The Compub Information Office offered to trade data on the broadcasts for data about the new Mahon-modified machines. It hinted at extremely important revelations it could make.

  The rest of the world deduced astutely that the Compubs were scared, too. And they were correct.

  * * * *

  Then, quite suddenly, a break came. All previous broadcast receptions had ended with the break-down of the receiving instrument. Now a communicator named Betsy, modified in the Mahon manner and at work in the research installation working with Mahon-modified devices, began to pick up the broadcasts consistently, keeping each one on its screen until it ended.

  Day after day, at highly irregular intervals, Betsy’s screen lighted up and showed the weird patterns, and her loudspeakers emitted the peepings and chirps and deep-bass hootings of the broadcasts. And the high brass went into a dither to end all dithers as tapes of the received material reached the Pentagon and were translated into intelligible speech and pictures.

  * * * *

  This was when Metech Sergeant Bellews, in charge of the Rehab Shop at Research Installation 83, came into the affair. Specifically, he entered the picture when a young second lieutenant came to the shop to fetch him to Communications Center in that post.

  The lieutenant was young and tall and very military. Sergeant Bellews was not. So he snorted, upon receipt of the message. He was at work on a vacuum cleaner at the moment—a Mahon-modified machine with a flickering yellow standby light that wavered between brightness and dimness with much more than appropriate frequency. The Rehabilitation Shop was where Mahon-modified machines were brought back to usefulness when somebody messed them up. Two or three machines—an electric ironer, for one—operated slowly and hesitantly. That was occupational therapy. A washing-machine churned briskly, which was convalescence. Others, ranging from fire-control computers to teletypes and automatic lathes, simply waited with their standby lights flickering meditatively according to the manner and custom of Mahon-modified machines. They were ready for duty again.

  The young lieutenant was politely urgent.

  “But I been there!” protested Sergeant Bellews. “I checked! It’s a communicator I named Betsy. She’s all right! She’s been mishandled by the kinda halfwits Communications has around, but she’s a good, well-balanced, experienced machine. If she’s turning out broadcasts, it’s because they’re comin’ in! She’s all right!”

  “I know,” said the young lieutenant soothingly. His uniform and his manners were beautiful to behold. “But the Colonel wants you there for a conference.”

  “I got a communicator in the shop here,” said Sergeant Bellews suspiciously. “Why don’t he call me?”

  “Because he wants to try some new adjustments on—ah—Betsy, Sergeant. You have a way with Mahon machines. They’ll do things for you they won’t do for anybody else.”

  Sergeant Bellews snorted again. He knew he was being buttered up, but he’d asked for it. He even insisted on it, for the glory of the Metallurgical Technicians’ Corps. The big brass tended to regard Metechs as in some fashion successors to the long-vanished veterinary surgeons of the Farriers’ Corps, when horses were a part of the armed forces. Mahon-modified machines were new—very new—but the top brass naturally remembered everything faintly analogous and applied it all wrong. So Sergeant Bellews conducted a one-man campaign to establish the dignity of his profession.

  But nobody without special Metech training ought to tinker with a Mahon-modified machine.

  “If he’s gonna fool with Betsy,” said the Sergeant bitterly, “I guess I gotta go over an’ boss the job.”

  He pressed a button on his work-table. The vacuum cleaner’s standby light calmed down. The button provided soothing sub-threshold stimuli to the Mahon unit, not quite giving it the illusion of operating perfectly—if a Mahon unit could be said to be capable of illusion—but maintaining it in the rest condition which was the foundation of Mahon-unit operation, since a Mahon machine must never be turned off.

  The lieutenant started out of the door. Sergeant Bellews followed at leisure. He painstakingly avoided ever walking the regulation two paces behind a commissioned officer. Either he walked side by side, chatting, or he walked alone. Wise officers let him get away with it.

  * * * *

  Reaching the open air a good twenty yards behind the lieutenant, he cocked an approving eye at a police-up unit at work on the lawn outside. Only a couple of weeks before, that unit had been in a bad way. It stopped and shivered when it encountered an unfamiliar object.

  But now it rolled across the grass from one path-edge to another. When it reached the second path it stopped, briskly moved itself its own width sidewise, and rolled back. On the way it competently manicured the lawn. It picked up leaves, retrieved a stray cigarette-butt, and snapped up a scrap of paper blown from somewhere. Its tactile units touched a new-planted shrub. It delicately circled the shrub and went on upon its proper course.

  * * * *

  Once, where the grass grew taller than elsewhere, it stopped and whirred, trimming the growth back to regulation height. Then it went on about its business as before.

  Sergeant Bellews felt a warm sensation. That was a good machine that had been in a bad way and he’d brought it back to normal, happy operation. The sergeant was pleased.

  The lieutenant turned into the Communications building. Sergeant Bellews followed at leisure. A jeep went past him—one of the special jeeps being developed at this particular installation—and its driver was talking to someone in the back seat, but the jeep matter-of-factly turned out to avoid Sergeant Bellews. He glowed. He’d activated it. Another good machine, gathering sound experience day by day.

  He went into the room where Betsy stood—the communicator which, alone among receiving devices in the whole world, picked up the enigmatic broadcasts consistently. Betsy was a standard Mark IV communicator, now carefully isolated from any aerial. She was surrounded by recording devices for vision and sound, and by the most sensitive and complicated instruments yet devised for the detection of short-wave radiation. Nothing had yet been detected reaching Betsy, but something must. No machine could originate what Betsy had been exhibiting on her screen and emitting from her sp
eakers.

  Sergeant Bellews tensed instantly. Betsy’s standby light quivered hysterically from bright to dim and back again. The rate of quivering was fast. It was very nearly a sine-wave modulation of the light—and when a Mahon-modified machine goes into sine-wave flicker, it is the same as Cheyne-Stokes breathing in a human.

  He plunged forward. He jerked open Betsy’s adjustment-cover and fairly yelped his dismay. He reached in and swiftly completed corrective changes of amplification and scanning voltages. He balanced a capacity bridge. He soothed a saw-tooth resonator. He seemed to know by sheer intuition what was needed to be done.

  After a moment or two the standby lamp wavered slowly from near-extinction to half-brightness, and then to full brightness and back again. It was completely unrhythmic and very close to normal.

  “Who done this?” demanded the sergeant furiously. “He had Betsy close to fatigue collapse! He’d ought to be court-martialed!”

  He was too angry to notice the three civilians in the room with the colonel and the lieutenant who’d summoned him. The young officer looked uncomfortable, but the colonel said authoritatively:

  “Never mind that, Sergeant. Your Betsy was receiving something. It wasn’t clear. You had not reported, as ordered, so an attempt was made to clarify the signals.”

  “Okay, Colonel!” said Sergeant Bellews bitterly. “You got the right to spoil machines! But if you want them to work right you got to treat ’em right!”

  “Just so,” said the colonel. “Meanwhile—this is Doctor Howell, Doctor Graves, and Doctor Lecky. Sergeant Bellews, gentlemen. Sergeant, these are not MDs. They’ve been sent by the Pentagon to work on Betsy.”

  * * * *