The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (104 page)

Burke nodded. He said almost apologetically, “I’m putting in a minimum of power. Maybe nothing will happen. It’s pretty silly.”

Sandy’s hands twisted one within the other when he turned his back to her. He made connections, took a deep breath, and said in a strained voice, “Here goes.”

He flipped a switch.

There was a cracking sound. It was horribly loud. There was a crash. Bricks began to fall. The end of the metal-lathe bounced out of a corner. Steel cables gave off high-pitched musical notes which went down in tone as the stress on them slackened. One end of the lathe was gone—snapped off, broken, flung away into a corner. There was a hole in the brick wall, over a foot in diameter.

The fifteen-foot object was gone. But they heard a high-pitched shrilling noise, which faded away into the distance.

That afternoon the Russians announced that their manned space-probe had taken off for Asteroid M-387. Naturally, they delayed the announcement until they were satisfied that the launching had gone well. When they made their announcement, the probe was fifty thousand miles out, they had received a message from its pilot, and they predicted that the probe would land on M-387 in a matter of seven weeks.

In a remote small corner of the afternoon newspapers there was an item saying that a meteorite had fallen in a ploughed field some thirty miles from where Burke’s contrivance broke loose. It made a crater twenty feet across. It could not be examined because it was covered with frost.

Burke had the devil of a time recovering it. But he needed it badly. Especially since the Russian probe had gone out from Earth. He explained that it was a shipment to his plant, which had fallen out of an aeroplane, but the owner of the ploughed field was dubious. Burke had to pay him a thousand dollars to get him to believe.

That night he had his recurrent dream again. The fluting signals were very clear.

CHAPTER 4

The public abruptly ceased to be interested in news of the signals. Rather, it suddenly wanted to stop thinking about them. The public was scared. Throughout all human history, the most horrifying of all ideas has been the idea of something which was as intelligent as a man, but wasn’t human. Evil spirits, ghosts, devils, werewolves, ghouls—all have roused maddened terror wherever they were believed in. Because they were intelligent but not men.

Now, suddenly, the world seemed to realize that there was a Something out on a tiny frozen rock in space. It signaled plaintively to Earth. It had to be intelligent to be able to send a signal for two hundred seventy million miles. But it was not a man. Therefore it was a monster. Therefore it was horrible. Therefore it was deadly and intolerable and scarey, and humans abruptly demanded not to hear any more about it. Perhaps they thought that if they didn’t think about it, it would go away.

Newspaper circulations dropped. News-magazine sales practically vanished. A flood of hysterical letters demanded that the broadcasting networks leave such revolting things off the air. And this reaction was not only in America. Violent anti-American feeling arose in Europe, which psychologists analyzed as resentment caused by the fact that the Americans had answered the first broadcast. If they hadn’t answered the first, there wouldn’t have been a second. But also, even more violent anti-Russian feeling rose up, because the Russians had started a man off to meddle with the monster who piped so pleadingly. This antipathy to space caused a minor political upset in the Kremlin itself, where a man with a name ending in ov was degraded to much lower official rank and somebody with a name ending in sky took his place. This partly calmed the Russian public but had little effect anywhere else. The world was frightened. It looked for a victim, or victims for its fear. Once upon a time, witches were burned to ease the terrors of ignorance, and plague-spreaders were executed in times of pestilence to assure everybody that now the plague would cease since somebody had been killed for spreading it.

Organizations came into being with the official and impassioned purpose of seeing that space research ceased immediately. Even more violent organizations demanded the punishment of everybody who had ever considered space travel a desirable thing. Congress cut some hundreds of millions from a guided-missile-space-exploration appropriation as a starter. A poor devil of a crackpot in Santa Monica, California, revealed what he said was a spaceship he’d built in his back yard to answer the signals from M-387. He intended to charge a quarter admission to inspect it, using the money to complete the drive apparatus. The thing was built of plywood and could not conceivably lift off the ground, but a mob wrecked his house, burned the puerile “spaceship” and would have lynched its builder if they’d thought to look in a cellar vegetable closet. Other crackpots who were more sensitive to public feelings announced the picking up of messages addressed to the distant Something. The messages, said this second class of crackpot, were reports from spies who had been landed on Earth from flying saucers during the past few decades. They did not explain how they were able to translate them. A rush of flying-saucer sightings followed inevitably—alleged to be landing-parties from M-387—and in Peoria, Illinois, a picnicking party sighted an unidentified flying object shaped like a soup spoon, the handle obviously being its tail. Experienced newspapermen anticipated reports of the sighting of unidentified flying objects shaped like knives and forks as soon as somebody happened to think of it.

Sandy called a conference on the subject of security. She did not look well, nowadays. She worried. Other people thought about the messages from space, but Sandy had to think of something more concrete. Six months earlier, the construction going on within a plaster of Paris mould would have been laughed at, tolerantly, and some hopeful people might have been respectful about it. But now it was something utterly intolerable to public opinion. Newspapers who’d lost circulation by talking sanely about space travel now got it back by denouncing the people who’d answered the first broadcast. And naturally, with the whole idea of outer space agitatedly disapproved, everybody connected with it was suspected of subversion.

“A reporter called up today,” said Sandy. “He said he’d like to do a feature story on Burke Development’s new research triumph—the new guided missile that flew thirty miles and froze everything around where it landed. I said it fell out of an aeroplane and the last completed project was for Interiors, inc. Then he said that he’d been talking to one of Mr. Holmes’ men and the man said something terrific was under way.”

Burke looked uneasy. Holmes said uncomfortably, “There’s no law against what we’re building, but somebody may introduce a bill in Congress any day.”

“That would be reasonable under other circumstances. There’s a time for things to be discovered. They shouldn’t be accomplished too soon. But the time for the ship out there is right now!” Burke said.

Pam raised her eyebrows. “Yes?”

“Those signals have to be checked up on,” explained Burke. “It’s necessary now. But it could have been bad if our particular enterprise had started, say, two years ago. Just think what would have happened if atomic fission had been worked out in peacetime ten years before World War Two! Scientific discoveries were published then as a matter of course. Everybody’d have known how to make atom bombs. Hitler would have had them, and so would Mussolini. How many of us would be alive?”

Sandy interrupted, “The reporter wants to do a feature story on what Burke Development is making. I said you were working on a bomb shelter for quantity production. He asked if the rocket you shot off through the construction-shed wall was part of it. I said there’d been no rocket fired. He didn’t believe me.”

“Who would?” asked Holmes.

“Hmmmmm,” said Burke. “Tell him to come look at what we’re doing. The ship can pass for a bomb shelter. The wall-garden units make sense. I’m going to dig a big hole in the morning to test the drive-shaft in. It’ll look like I intend to bury everything. A bomb shelter should be buried.”

“You mean you’ll let him inside?” demanded Sandy.

“Sure!” said Burke. “All inventors are expected to be idiots. A lot of them are. He’ll think I’m making an impossibly expensive bomb shelter, much too costly for a private family to buy. It will be typical of the inventive mind as reporters think of it. Anyhow, everybody’s always willing to believe other people fools. That’ll do the trick!”

Pam said blandly, “Sandy and I live in a boardinghouse, Joe. You don’t ask about such things, but an awfully nice man moved in a couple of days ago—right after that shaft got away and went flying thirty miles all by itself. The nice man has been trying to get acquainted.”

Holmes growled, and looked both startled and angry when he realized it.

Pam added cheerfully, “Most evenings I’ve been busy, but I think I’ll let him take me to the movies. Just so I can make us all out to be idiots,” she added.

“I’ll make the hole big enough to be convincing,” said Burke. “Sandy, you make inquiries for a rigger to lift and move the bomb shelter into its hole when it’s ready. If we seem about to bury it, nobody should suspect us of ambitions they won’t like.”

“Why the hole, really?” asked Sandy.

“To put the shaft in,” said Burke. “I’ve got to get it under control or it won’t be anything more than a bomb shelter.”

Keller, the instrument man, had listened with cheerful interest and without speaking a word. Now he made an indefinite noise and looked inquiringly at Burke. Burke said, explanatorily, “The shaft seems to be either on or off—either a magnet that doesn’t quite magnetize, or something that’s hell on wheels. It flew thirty miles without enough power supplied to it to make it quiver. That power came from somewhere. I think there’s a clue in the fact that it froze everything around where it landed, in spite of traveling fast enough to heat up from air-friction alone. I’ve got some ideas about it.”

Keller nodded. Then he said urgently, “Broadcast?”

Burke frowned, and turned to Sandy. “That part of the broadcast from space that changes—is it still changing?”

“Still changing,” said Sandy.

“I didn’t think to ask you to keep a check on that. Thanks for thinking of it, Sandy. Maybe someday I can make up to you for what you’ve been going through.”

“I doubt it very much,” said Sandy grimly. “I’ll call the reporter back.”

She waited for them to leave. When they’d gone, she moved purposefully toward the telephone.

Pam said, “Did you hear that growl when I said I’d go to the movies with somebody else? I’m having fun, Sandy!”

“I’m not,” said Sandy.

“You’re too efficient,” the younger sister said candidly. “You’re indispensable. Burke couldn’t begin to be able to put this thing through without you. And that’s the trouble. You should be irresistible instead of essential.”

“Not with Joe,” said Sandy bitterly.

She picked up the telephone to call the newspaper. Pam looked very, very reflective.

There was a large deep pit close by the plaster mould when the reporter came next afternoon. A local rigger had come a little earlier and was still there, estimating the cost for lifting up the contents of the mould and lowering it precisely in place to be buried as a bomb shelter under test should be. It was a fortunate coincidence, because the reporter brought two other men who he said were civilian defense officials. They had come to comment on the quality of the bomb shelter under development. It was not too convincing a statement.

When they left, Burke was not happy. They knew too much about the materials and equipment he’d ordered. One man had let slip the fact that he knew about the very expensive computer Burke had bought. It could have no conceivable use in a bomb shelter. Both men painstakingly left it to Burke to mention the thirty-mile flight of a bronze object which arrived coated with frost of such utter frigidity that it appeared to be liquid-air snow instead of water-ice. Burke did not mention it. He was excessively uneasy when the reporter’s car took them away.

He went into the office. Pam was in the midst of a fit of the giggles.

“One of them,” she explained, “is the nice man who moved into the boardinghouse. He wants to take me to the movies. Did you notice that they came when it ought to be my lunchtime? He asked when I went to lunch…”

Holmes came in. He scowled.

“One of my men says that one of those characters has been buying him drinks and asking questions about what we’re doing.”

Burke scowled too.

“We can let your men go home in three days more.”

“I’m going to start loading up,” Holmes announced abruptly. “You don’t know how to stow stuff. You’re not a yachtsman.”

“I haven’t got the shaft under control yet,” said Burke.

“You’ll get it,” grunted Holmes.

He went out. Pam giggled again.

“He doesn’t want me to go to the movies with the nice man from Security,” she told Burke. “But I think I’d better. I’ll let him ply me with popcorn and innocently let slip that Sandy and I know you’ve been warned that bomb shelters won’t find a mass market unless they sell for less than the price of an extra bathroom. But if you want to go broke we don’t care.”

“Give me three days more,” said Burke harassedly.

“Well try,” said Sandy suddenly. “Pam can fix up a double date with one of her friend’s friends and well both work on them.”

Burke frowned absorbedly and went out. Sandy looked indignant. He hadn’t protested.