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Long Ago, Far Away, a novel by Murray Leinster |
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Chapter 9 |
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_ The color of the blue-green flame which had flared so fiercely outside the generator-buildings was no mystery at all. It was the color of vaporized copper, the same coloring found in burning driftwood in which copper nails have rusted. Its cause was no mystery, either. There'd been a gigantic short-circuit where the main power-leads left the dynamo-rooms to connect with cross-country power lines. Soames and Fran knew directly, and some few security officers guessed, that Fran had caused the short. There was melted-down, cryptic metal below the place where the short appeared. Fran had undoubtedly placed it. How he escaped electrocution the security officers did not try to figure out. But they knew he'd tried to do something with apparatus that burned itself out without operating, and that he'd tumbled down a ten-foot drop while fleeing from the searing green arc, and even that he'd appealed for help with the words, "Try! Try! Try!" And they knew that somebody had helped him get away from the scene of his exploit and injury. But they didn't know how, nor that it was Soames. Soames was assumed to be on his way East to confer with a group of scientists who now had added certain skilled instrument-makers to their number and triumphantly worked themselves to twitching exhaustion. Fran's part in the affair was naturally a secret. Lights and power in five Colorado counties went off and stayed off. Local newspapers printed indignant editorials. Theirs was a strictly local view. In high official quarters the feeling was quite different. The reaction there was more like paralyzed horror. Fran was known to be behind the breakdown of the plant. He'd caused it by trying to tap its lines for a monstrous amount of power. He'd been trying to signal to so great a distance that tens of thousands of kilowatts were required. He'd failed, but the high brass knew with absolute certainty that he'd tried to signal to his own race. And to the high brass this meant that he'd tried to summon a space-fleet with invincible weapons to the conquest of Earth. So there were two directives from the highest possible policy-making levels. First, Fran must be caught at any cost in effort, time, money, and man-power. Second, the rest of the world must not know that one of the four spaceship's crew members was at large. So the hunt for Fran intensified to a merciless degree. Soames headed north. He wore a leather jacket, and he rode a battered, second-hand motorcycle, and on the saddle behind him an obvious kid brother rode, leather-jacketed as Soames was, capped as he was, scowling as Soames did, and in all ways imitating his elder. Which was so familiar a sight that nobody noticed Fran at all. He was visibly a tough younger brother of the kind of young man who goes in for battered motorcycles because he can't afford anything better. Naturally no one suspected him of being a telepathic monster, a creature of space, or the object of a desperate search. * * * * * It was helpful that Soames was not missed at first and was not searched for. It was a full day after the Navajo Dam breakdown before anybody thought to have him check on the melted-down apparatus. It was two days before anybody was concerned about him, and three before flights out of Denver had been checked futilely for his name. But on the fourth day after a green flame reached up toward the sky, Soames and a silent, scowling, supposed younger brother occupied a fishing-shack on the shores of Calumet Lake. They were seven hundred miles from Denver, and the way they'd come was much longer than that. They were far removed from the tumult of the world. They'd made bivouacs in the open on the journey, and this would be the first time they'd settled anywhere long enough to take stock. "Now," said Soames, as sunset-colorings filled the sky beyond the lake's farther edge, "now we figure out what we're going to do. We ought to be able to do something, though I don't yet know what. And first we act the parts we're playing. We came here to catch some fish. You shouldn't be able to wait. So we go out and catch fish for our dinner." He led the way to a tiny wharf where a small boat lay tied. He carried fishing-rods and bait. He untied the boat and rowed out to the middle of the lake. He surveyed his surroundings and dropped anchor. He baited a hook, with Fran watching intently. Soames handed him the rod. Fran waited. He imitated Soames' actions when Soames began to fish. He watched his line as closely as the deepening dusk permitted. "Hmmm," said Soames. "Your ankle's doing all right. Lucky it was a wrench instead of a break or a sprain. Four days of riding and no walking have fixed it pretty well. It's fairly certain nobody knows where you are, too. But where do we go from here?" Fran listened. "You came out of time," said Soames vexedly. "But time-travel can't be done. The natural law of the conservation of matter and energy requires that the total of substance and force in the cosmos, taken together, be the same at each instant that it was in the instant before and the one after. It's self-evident. That rules out travelling in time." * * * * * He jerked at his fishing-rod. He did not hook his fish. "I don't think you understand me," he observed. "No," said Fran matter of factly. "It doesn't matter," Soames told him. "I'm saying that you can't put a gallon of water in a full keg of wine. And you can't, unless you draw off wine as fast as you add water. Unless you exchange. So you can't shift an object from time-frame A to time-frame B without shifting a corresponding amount of matter and energy from time-frame B to time-frame A. Unless you keep the amount of matter and energy unchanged in each. Unless you exchange. So you came to here and now from there and then--your home time-frame, let's say--by a process of swapping. By transposition. By replacement. Transposition's the best word. The effect was time-travel but the process wasn't, like a telephone has the effect of talking at a distance but the method is distinctly something else." Fran jerked his fishing-rod. A nine-inch lake-trout flapped in the boat's bottom. "I'm supposed to be teaching you how to fish!" said Soames. He watched as Fran rather gingerly extracted the hook and rebaited as he'd seen Soames do. Soames continued, "Your ship was transposed from your time into mine. Simultaneously, gram molecular weight for gram molecular weight, something had to be transposed into yours. Since you were to come into my time twenty thousand feet high and there was nothing else handy to be transposed into your time--why--air had to leave here and turn up there. To make up the mass and energy of your ship and you and the other children." As if to indicate that he listened, Fran said: "Zani, Mal and Hod." "Right!" Soames jerked his rod and brought up a fingerling which he silently unhooked and threw back overboard. "Considering the thinness of the air where you came out, maybe half a cubic mile of it had to transpose into your time to let your ship come into this." He dropped the line overboard again. "Which means that there was an implosion of anywhere from a quarter to half a cubic mile of vacuum. It made an earth-shock and a concussion wave, and it battered your ship until it went out of control. It would seem to make sense that the tumult and the shouting would appear here, where plain force was operating without much guidance, but not in your time where the machinery and the controls were operating. Your people had to handle more energy there--and consequently acted upon more energy here--than my people could produce with all the engines now on Earth hooked together." He fished, frowning thoughtfully. "I suspect," said Soames, after a long interval, "that with machinery and controls at this end as well as the other, instead of at one end only, that time-transposition would be a fairly tranquil process. It would be under accurate control. It'd probably need infinitely less power. A ship would vanish from your time and simultaneously a mass-and-energy equivalent would take its place. And a ship would appear in this time and simultaneously a mass-and-energy equivalent would vanish to appear in your time. But I think it must have been because the whole business was done from one end that the business was so spectacular, with lightning, earthquake, and all the rest. With equipment at both ends, there should be no static, no earth-shock, no concussion, nothing but a very peaceful transfer." Soames' expression became sardonic. "Which I am prepared to prevent at any cost," he added. "Yet I've some responsibility to you, Fran. I think I'm getting an idea of a kind of bluff that we might pull off, if we could get the other kids safe away. It would be a bluff, and the biggest in history. But we might just get away with it...." Fran caught a three-quarter-pound lake-trout. Soames caught one weighing half a pound. They caught two smaller ones before full darkness fell. Then Soames put up his fishing-rod and picked up the oars. He began to row toward the shore. "I'll show you how to clean and cook the fish," he observed. "I think you'll like the flavor." He pulled hard on one oar, and swung the boat around, and caught one of the small piles of the wharf. Fran climbed up and Soames handed him the fish. He followed Fran shoreward toward the rickety little week-end cottage he'd rented. There he showed Fran how fish with scales are cleaned, and then how they can be cooked over an open fire. * * * * * After Fran had gone to bed, it occurred to Soames that he hadn't heard the news of the world for four days. On the run, as he and Fran had been, they hadn't seen a newspaper or heard a news broadcast. Now Soames turned on the small radio that went with the fishing cottage, to give advance information on the weather. News came on immediately. It was all bad. The United States had shown no signs of having profited by the telepathic powers of Fran and his companions. No spies were seized. A submarine installation that could lob missiles into New York from the edge of the hundred-fathom line was not depth-bombed. There were other failures to act on information obtained through the children. No nation could imagine another allowing spies to operate if it could detect them. So a raging guess began to spread among the anti-American peoples of the world. The guess was that the broadcast was a lie. Nobody doubted the landing of a spaceship, of course. The static and the earth-shock were evidence, and the Russians had photographs. But the children were too suspiciously like human children. They could be child actors, coached to impersonate aliens who could not be produced. And there was an easy answer to the question of why the true aliens weren't revealed. They could be dead. Earth's atmosphere might be fatal to them. They could have died of some infection against which they had no defense. The politicians and the rulers of the world suspected the United States of bad faith and trickery. They were not certain. But there were ways of making sure. When Soames tuned in to the news at Calumet Lake, the United States had been forced to use a veto in the United Nations for the first time. A resolution passed, calling on the United States to turn over "the crew of an extraterrestrial space vessel" to a committee to be appointed by the UN assembly. The United States vetoed it. Ironically, with Fran run away and not found again, the United States could not have complied with the resolution in any case. But the veto lent plausibility to suspicions. There was intensified distrust. The Nato countries asked to share in technical information obtained from outer space. There wasn't any. They asked to study the devices salvaged by the children. This could have been done, but recent political developments inside Nato made it certain that anything one particular nation learned would immediately be known to Russia. This was to be avoided if possible. * * * * * The mess went farther. South America was so deeply suspicious of the colossus of the north that various Latin nations sought engagements by European countries to defend them against aggression by the United States. There had been two great concentrations of military power on Earth. Russia headed one group of nations, and the United States the other. Now it looked like there would soon be three. Russia would head one. A second would be a group detached from the United States. The third would be the United States standing alone. It was an absolutely perfect set-up for flaming total war to be begun at any instant. The news Soames picked up on a cheap radio on a Calumet Lake fishing shack was enough to make any man heartsick. When Fran waked in the morning, an unsmiling Soames greeted him. "We're going to ride again, Fran. I'm going to make a long-distance call." * * * * * They rode two hundred miles before noon, and Soames got silver from a filling-station where he bought gas. At one of the out-of-door phone-booths lately a part of the American scene, he put through a call to New York. He got the tall physicist who'd come West to the hidden missile base. "This is Soames," he said very distinctly. "I've got a tip for you. Pretend that you want to make something like the gadget that stops winds and warms places. You know the thing." The tall physicist's voice babbled. "I know!" said Soames bitterly, "I'm supposed to be dead or a traitor or something. But listen to me! You're a castaway and savages snipe at you. You want to make something like the thing that stops wind, but you want it to stop arrows instead. It's quite a job. Perhaps the only useful thing you've got on this savage world is a way to make magnetic fields with minus self-induction. That's got to stop the arrows. You can assume the arrowheads are metal. Do you follow me?" A pause. Then a tinny voice, singularly calm and astonished at the same time: "_Why--yes! A very interesting approach! In fact, we've got some very surprising results lately. One of them will fit in beautifully! Yes! Beautifully!_" "If you make it designed for large enough areas," said Soames, "you'll know where to use it, and how. And--" Soames' voice was sardonic indeed, "If you do get it, this is one thing that shouldn't be kept secret! Get it broadcast! Get it everywhere! Give it to the Russians and the Greeks and the Chinese and the French and everybody else! Understand? The more who know about it the better." The tinny voice said: "_We just developed a thing to refine metals_ in situ.... _An induction furnace that sets up the heating field at almost any distance from the elements that handle the power. It will fit in perfectly! Of course! Certainly! This is magnificent, Soames!_" "If you can get it working and in production before hell breaks loose," said Soames, "you may deserve well of the republic." "_Where are you, Soames? We need you on several matters--_" Soames hung up. His call, of course, could be traced. He'd travelled two hundred miles so that tracing it would do no good. He returned to where Fran dangled his legs from the back saddle of the motorbike, and they headed back to Calumet Lake for a few more days of peace and quiet. _ |
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