“Maybe those gadgets can be directionally spotted,” he said. “Security wants you, Fran. If there’s a way to get a directional fix on you, they’ll find it! So, make it short!”
On Thursday morning all broadcasts broke off to report that the DEW line of radars across Canada had reported objects in the air moving across the North Pole toward the United States. America clenched its fists and waited for missiles to strike or be blasted by counter-missiles, as fate or chance might determine. Twenty minutes later a correction came. The radar-detected objects had not been missiles, but aircraft flying in formation. They’d changed course and returned to their bases. They were probably foreign fighter-planes patrolling far beyond their usual range.
Soames had held his breath with the rest of the country. He was just beginning to breathe freely again when Fran came running from the week-end-shack. His eyes shone.
“I got—” he swallowed—”Zani. I said”—he swallowed again, “we will come.” He added: “Our language.”
Soames looked at him sharply.
“Maybe you do read minds. Was anybody listening in? Anybody else beside Zani?”
“Two men,” said Fran. “Two. They talked. Fast. English.”
“One man would be a monitor,” said Soames grimly. “Two means a directional fix. Let’s go!”
By that night they were hundreds of miles from Calumet Lake.
The highways were crowded with the people who’d evacuated the cities. The high population of remote places was a protection for Soames and Fran. He worried, though, about Gail, her situation, and that of the three other children, was far from enviable. In the present increasing confusion and tension they were hardly likely to have any improvement in their state.
“I think,” Soames told Fran reflectively, “that at night, and with the kind of disorganization that seems to be increasing, you can get away with talking to the kids again. Nobody’ll try a parachute drop in these mountains in the darkness.” They were then a hundred miles south of Denver. “They couldn’t get organized before daybreak, and I doubt that they could block the highways. See if you can make contact, eh? And find out how they’re getting along?”
Fran nodded. He moved so that the heat of their fire would not fall on him, to tell that he camped out-of-doors. He found a place to lie down in comfort, so that there would be no distracting sensation. He closed his eyes. Soames saw him press the end of his tiny communicator and release it quickly. After an instant’s pause he pressed it again. He held the communicator on for several seconds, half a minute. He released it and sat up.
“You try,” he said in a puzzled fashion. “You try!”
Soames closed his eyes. He pressed the little pin-head button at the end of the instrument which was hardly larger than a match-stick. He felt the sensations of another body. That other body opened its eyes. Soames saw who it was, Gail’s face was reflected in a mirror. She was pale. Her expression was drawn and harried. But she smiled at her reflection, because she knew Soames would see what she saw.
He spoke, so she’d hear his voice as he did.
“Gail!”
He felt a hand—which was her hand—spill something on a levelled surface before her. It smoothed the spilled stuff. It was face-powder, spread on a dressing-table top. A finger wrote. She looked down at what was written there.
“Help Fran,” he read. “You Must!”
He felt her hand swiftly smoothing the message away. Rage swept over him. Instantly he knew what had happened. Fran’s escape from Calumet Lake had proved that he knew that his communications were intercepted and directionally analyzed. Therefore the other children were no longer a means by which he might be trapped. So their communicators had been taken away from them for the second time, and now they were watched with an unceasing closeness. Every glance, every word, every gesture was noted.
“This has to be quick,” said Soames coldly, for her to hear. “I would help him, but he’d want to get in touch with his people.”
Gail opened her eyes again. Her image in the mirror nodded.
“And if he did,” said Soames as coldly as before, “they’d come here and conquer us. And I’d rather that we killed each other off than that the most kindly-disposed of conquerors enslaved us.”
He felt her hand again smoothing the spilled face-powder. She wrote in it. He knew what she had written before she dropped her eyes to it. He couldn’t believe it. She’d written three words, no, two words and a numeral. Soames felt an almost physical shock. He was incredulous. If this was true…
Then he felt a hand closed firmly on Gail’s shoulder. Captain Moggs spoke, authoritative and stern and reproachful:
“Gail! How could you! You have one of those horrible telepathic things too! This is a very grave matter, Gail!”
Then the contact was broken. Captain Moggs had snatched away Gail’s communicator.
Raging, Soames took Fran and left that spot which was undoubtedly pin-pointed by now. As they sped away he tried to consider the meaning of the two words and the numeral which was completely unbelievable at first thought.
* * * *
Shortly after sunrise he bought a two-day-old newspaper. It was the latest he could find for sale. He rode a certain distance and stopped where the highway made an especially dramatic turn and there was a turn-out for tourists to park in while they admired the view. He stopped there and deliberately read the news affecting war and peace and the children and therefore Gail. At the end he folded the newspaper painstakingly and with careful self-control tore it to bits. Then he said angrily:
“Fran, a question it never occurred to me to ask you before.”
He posed the question. Fran could have answered it with two English words and a numeral, and the same words and numeral that Gail had used. But he didn’t have the words. Especially, he did not have the number. Fran’s way of writing numbers was as complex as the system used in ancient Rome, and Soames had no key. It took a long time to grasp the quantity Fran had in mind. Then Soames had to make sure he had it right.
Then, abruptly, he knew that it was true. He knew why it was true. It increased his anger over the situation and the treatment of Gail and the children.
“According to this paper,” he said icily, “my fellow-countrymen have decided to pay a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, and to sell you down the river. They suggest an international UN committee to receive custody of you children. That committee could then set to work on you to find out where you came from, why, and when you are likely to be searched for. Now, you know and so do I that part of what they found out they wouldn’t accept. Time-travel is impossible. So when you children told them where you come from they wouldn’t believe it. They’d try to pry back behind what they’d consider a lie. They’d use different techniques of inquiry. They’d use inhibition-releasing drugs. They’d…”
* * * *
Fran’s expression did not change. Yet it was not passive.
“Which will not happen,” said Soames in sudden fury, “except over my dead body! Gail feels the same way. So let’s go! We’ve got to plan a really king-size monkey-wrench to throw into these works!”
He stepped on the motorbike pedal. He swung on down the winding mountain road for the lowlands. He went into a relatively small town. He bought a pup-tent, pliers, a small camp-stove; a camp-lantern; food; blankets; matches.
They went back into the foothills and settled down to the strangest scientific conference in history. The scene of the conference was a remote and strictly improvised encampment by the side of a briskly-flowing trout-stream. They fished. They talked. They drew diagrams at each other.
Fran’s English had improved remarkably, but this was a highly technical discussion. It was two days before Soames had the information he needed firmly in his mind. He made a working drawing of what had to be built. He realized that the drawing itself was a simplification of a much more sophisticated original device. It was adapted to be made out of locally available materials. It was
what Fran had made and tried at Navajo Dam.
“Which,” said Soames, frowning, “proved not to work. You didn’t realize the local resources. This thing works, obviously, because a terrifically strong electric field is cut off abruptly and collapses instantly. The original apparatus—the one I burnt—no doubt had a very fine gimmick to break a heavy current flow without making an arc. The trouble at Navajo Dam was that it did arc—and how! That was a mess!”
He paused, considering. Since Soames was not looking at him, Fran regarded him with infinite respect.
“The problem,” said Soames, thinking hard, “is a glorified job of turning off an electric light without making a spark at the switch. That’s all. It doesn’t matter how long the current flows. The thing is that it must stop instantly. So we turn the whole business inside out.
“Instead of making a terrific steady current and cutting it off, I’m going to start with it not flowing and use a strobe-light pack. Every amateur photographer has one. They give a current of eight hundred amperes and twenty-five hundred volts for the forty-thousandth of a second. The juice doesn’t flow long enough to burn anything out. It cuts itself off. There’s nothing to maintain an arc.
“The really tricky part,” he said uncomfortably, “may be the stealing of a helicopter. But I guess I can manage it.”
* * * *
He left Fran fishing and went down to the nearest town again to buy eccentric items of equipment. Copper foil. Strobe-light packs, two of them. He could use foil instead of large-area heat-dissipating units, because the current would flow so briefly. He would get a terrific current, of course. Two strobe-light packs in series would give him four million watts of power for part of the wink of an eyelid.
When he got back to the camp, Soames called to Fran. “We’ve got to get to work. I don’t think we’ve got much time. I had hopes of a castaway-gadget coming up, but it hasn’t.”
He began to assemble the device which would substitute for the larger, heavier, much more massive apparatus he’d destroyed on the Antarctic ice-sheet. The work went swiftly. Soames had re-designed the outfit, and a man can always build a thing of his own design more easily than something from another man’s drawings.
Before sunset the thing was done. Fran was very respectful. This apparatus was less than a quarter the size of the one his own people had prepared for the same purpose. And it was self-powered, too; it was independent of outside power-supply.
“I’d like to talk to your people about this,” said Soames grimly. “I do think things can be transposed in space, and this should work that way as well as in time. But starting at one end has me stymied.”
He abandoned the pup-tent and equipment.
“Either we won’t need them,” he said, “or we won’t be able to use them.”
The battered, ancient motorcycle took them into the night. Soames had studied road-maps and he and Fran had discussed in detail the route to Navajo Dam—using stilts to cross electrified fences—from the hidden missile base. Soames was sure that with Fran’s help he could find the pseudo-village where Gail and the children remained. It would call for a helicopter. But before that there was a highly necessary operation which would also go best with a helicopter to help. So when they left that pup-tent camp they headed toward a very minor, local airfield where Soames had once landed. It had hangars for half a dozen cheap private planes and for two helicopters used mostly for crop-dusting.
* * * *
At the airfield Soames laid the motorcycle beside the edge of the clear area, and left Fran with it, to wait. He moved quietly through the darkness toward close-up buildings with no lights anywhere except in one room reserved for a watchman.
Fran waited, breathing fast. He heard night-insects and nothing else. It seemed a horribly long time—before he heard the grinding noise of a motor being cranked. It caught immediately. There was a terrific roaring tumult inside a building. The large door of a hangar tilted and went upward, and a door opened from the watchman’s lighted room and he came shouting outside.
The roaring of motors changed. The door of the hangar was quite open. A bellowing thing came moving out, whirling huge black vanes against the sky. It boomed more loudly still, and lifted, and then drifted with seeming clumsiness across the level airfield while the night watchman shouted after it.
* * * *
Fran turned on the motorcycle headlight as he’d been told, and picked up the apparatus Soames had made to use strobe-light packs in. The ’copter swept toward him, six feet above-ground. It came down and Fran swarmed up into its cabin. Then the motors really thundered and the ’copter climbed for the sky.
Soames drove without lights and headed southward.
A transcontinental highway appeared below. It was plainly marked by the headlights of more than usually heavy traffic on it. He followed that highway.
Fran rode in a sort of stilly rapture. Soames said:
“Not worried, Fran?”
Fran shook his head. Then, boy-like, he turned on the transistor radio to show his nonchalance. A voice spoke. He’d have shifted to music but Soames caught a word or two.
“Hold it!” he commanded. “Put it so I can hear!”
Fran raised the volume and held the small radio so Soames could hear it above the motor-noise.
What he heard, at this moment, was the official United States broadcast announcing the ending of all real menace of atomic attack. By a fortunate freak of fate, somebody in authority realized that it was more important to get the news out than to make a professionalized production of it. So a tired but confident voice said very simply that American technicians seemed to have solved the problem of defense attack by atomic bombs and guided missiles. There had been, the voice said steadily, recent marked improvements in electric induction furnaces. The basic principle of an induction furnace was the evolution of heat in the material it was desired to melt, instead of merely in a container for the stuff that was to be melted. Within the past four days induction furnaces of a new type had proved able to induce heat in chosen objects up to miles. It had been expected to smelt metal ore in the veins in which it was found, and to make mines yield their product as metal without digging up and puttering with useless rock. But now this apparatus had been combined with radar.
When a radar detected a missile or an enemy plane, the broadcast said carefully, an induction furnace of the new type was turned upon the plane or missile. The effect was exactly that of enclosing the missile in a burning blast-furnace. It melted. The most careful tests assured America, then, that any city protected by radar-controlled remote-induction furnaces was safe against atomic attack and its dread destruction.
And at the time of this broadcast, every major center of population in the United States was already protected by the new defense-system. The cities which had been most vulnerable were now the safest places in the nation. And it was found, added the contented voice, that atomic bombs were not detonated by the induction fields. The induced currents seemed to freeze firing mechanisms. It appeared impossible to design a detonating device which would blow up a bomb before it melted.
The broadcast ended in a matter-of-fact statement that plans for the defense-system had been given to all the allies of the United States, that London was already protected and Paris would be within hours, and that within days the nations which were not allies would be assisted to establish defenses, so that atomic war need not be feared in the future.
Soames listened with an odd expression on his face.
“That,” he said, “started out as a gadget for a castaway to stop arrows that savages were sniping at him with. I’m very pleased.”
There was no more for him to say. The pleasure he felt, of course, would be the only reward he was likely to get. At the moment he was bent upon an enterprise his fellow-Americans would have regarded with horror.
* * * *
Far, far below and surrounded by the blackness of tree-covered ground in starlight, there was an irregular shape of bright
ness. It was miles long. It reflected the stars. It was the flood-control reservoir behind the Polder Dam. There was no power-plant here. This reservoir merely took the place of some hundreds of thousands of acres of timbered-off forest which once had controlled floods more effectively.
Without a word, Soames slanted the ’copter down. Presently it hovered delicately over the dam’s crest and at its very center. It touched. The rotor ceased to whirl. The motor stopped. There was a great silence.
Fran scrambled down. Soames swung after him. Together, they set up the device which was a time-transposition unit, with its complicated small antenna aimed out at the waters of the reservoir.
“I’ve gambled,” said Soames, “that we understand each other. Now you pull the string.”
There was a cord which would discharge the strobe-packs through the apparatus itself. The discharge would cease with absolute abruptness. The packs would then recharge themselves from the special batteries included in the device.
Fran pulled the cord.
There was no noise except a small and inadequate “snap.” It seemed that nothing happened. But there was suddenly a hole in the surface of the reservoir. It was a large hole.
Something came up out of it. It glittered in ghostly fashion in the starlight. It rose up and up and up. It was a cylinder with a rounded top and a diameter of fifty feet or so. It rose and rose, very deliberately. Then a rounded lower end appeared. It floated in the air.
Fran jerked the cord again. Another hole in the lake. Another round metal thing rising slowly, one would even say peacefully into the starlight. Fran, grinning happily, jerked the cord again and yet again.…
There were eight gigantic shining cylinders in the air when he stopped and stood back, his eyes shining. A vast metal thing floated ponderously near. A port opened and a voice called down in the language the children used among themselves. Fran spoke back, remembering to turn on his sensory communicator.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 181
