Unto Him That Hath (2 page)

The controls were being tested carefully by Bruce Dane, and the man nodded. He began to move them carefully, according to his chart. Finally, he threw a switch. Above the banks of capacitors, a huge relay switched down.

Even outside, there was a peculiar strain, and the air between the two big silver grids seemed to crackle with invisible fury.

Something began to form there. At first it seemed far away and tenuous. Then, without seeming to move, it yet appeared to rush in and grow. A corona of bluish fire sprang up around it, and then vanished.

Bruce Dane was working frantically at the control-board, and now he seemed to be driven by sudden desperation. His hands shot out toward the big switch—Something wrenched at the bank of capacitors, and the generators arced violently. But it was hardly visible before darkness hit the laboratory, to be followed by
a.
deafening explosion, like the air rushing together to make thunder, after a lightning bolt. The wall where Mike and Custer stood shook.

They were at the big door at once, and Custer had a flashlight, either grabbed up or in his hands all along. He worked the lock frantically. Then the door opened

ponderously, and they were inside the room.

At one end, something that might have been either a wingless plane or a guided missile rested between the grids. But most of the power equipment, including the control-board, was completely gone, without a trace. And there was no sign of Bruce Dane.

It took a week to adjust to it. Captain Dane stayed on while they searched futilely, and gave up. It was Captain Dane who dragged out the only possible answer—that there was a reaction for every action, and that something had been sucked forward to balance what was brought back.

He helped them inspect the queer thing they had brought back, and he gave the first order that they go to work on it, once he realized that the odd arrangement his father had made in getting the contract left him in charge, with Custer only his second.

He did what he could with the group of research experts who came flooding down on them, bringing the tools of their sciences. Each evening, he went automatically back to his father's apartment, ate, and went out to a bar to drink himself just tight enough to be sleepy.

Captain Dane had seen his friends killed for four years on the see-sawing fields of Europe, and he could take it. But he was an automation, created around the flesh of Mike Dane, and sooner or later, Mike had to find it out for himself.

That came on the seventh night, while he sat in the little bar. He was thinking dully of his father's words: "In a big city, the only place where a man has privacy— real privacy, even from his own habits—is in a bar."

And suddenly, he realized his father was dead, within all the abilities they had to tell. He lifted the scotch to his lips and drank it slowly, letting Captain Dane sink back, while Mike Dane grew used to the idea. For a while, it was rough, even though his father had gone in a peak of triumph few men could have equalled. Then his mind took the ache and the pain and put them where they should be—as real as ever, but in a corner where they could no longer keep him from continuing his own life.

He swallowed the drink, and realized that he'd been seeing Molly for at least five minutes without noticing her. She stood at the front of the place, staring uncertainly back toward him, and started back as he looked up and nodded.

"Sober, Mike?" Her words were nervous, and her fin-gers were doing strange things to the lapels of her little jacket.

"Reasonably," he answered truthfully. He ordered her old drink automatically, and managed a passable grin. "I was in the lunchroom, but they told me you'd left. Figured you'd gone to Caltech in a hurry."

Her eyes seemed to shine suddenly at that. "Better, Mike. I rate you, boy. I'm now a full colonel in the Air Forces, Research branch. My doctorate work is now a full project, and I'm in charge! Right near you—they cleared out the old Dowell hangar, rigged it up, and are almost ready to go—will be by the time I get my uniform. I've been looking all over to tell you the news—almost forgot this place."

"Top Secret, of course?"

"No higher! I've arrived!"

He grinned at that. "Me, too, Molly. I may even be more no-higher than you are, now that Dad's . . . gone away. I'm in full charge of the works."

She finished her drink, and nodded. "I heard he was on some kind of secret mission. And I saw Morley coming out of your place at one ayem—so maybe you do rate my top secret, if he's working for you. No more drinks, Mike. I need coffee more."

"My place?" he suggested. She nodded, and he felt relief wash over him. It wouldn't be so hard to face the empty apartment and realize his father was gone completely. The ache still lay in his mind, but he had learned that grief must never interfere with living.

It was afternoon when he went through the main hangar and back to the side building that still housed the Enigma. Now, almost as if for the first time, he shoved his way through the crowd of top-level experts and studied the thing.

It was no more than twenty feet long, and about half that diameter at its largest. There were no wings or fins, such as any normal plane or even guided missile should have, but he knew now that it had been designed as a fighter plane. The nose swept up bluntly, the upper half covered by a clear bubble of heavy plastic.

That had been smashed when they had stolen it from the future, and there had been three guns sticking from it, all horribly twisted—as twisted as the body of the young man in the strange, abbreviated uniform inside. He had been dead, even to the cells of his hair and skin. But the machine seemed unharmed except for its cabin, which had now been repaired.

From the nose, it had sloped back to a stubby tail. Under it were two small wheels, and over it a tiny hook, purpose unknown. Aside from that, the only features were the miniature jets on each side where the wings should be, set to swivel in complete circles—forwards, backwards, up or down. In the tail, another swivel nozzle or jet was hidden, which could also be turned in a complete circle sideways.

It obviously could never fly. The jets were designed to burn no fuel. Instead, their six-inch bores were lined with tiny bits of wire that pointed back toward the exit, and there was a coil of peculiar design around the front of each.

Custer came over, shaking his head. "You look better, Mike. Figured how she flies?"

"No. Anything new?"

"A little, but none of it good. Morley thinks those bits of wires work by the point-disdiarge principle that will keep a toy spinning when it's connected to a battery and high-voltage coil. And in that case, those coils must somehow collect the atmosphere ahead and pack it enough for the jets to do all the lifting."

Enright had come up, and was shaking his head vigorously from side to side. "Not now, Morley doesn't. He found the switch that turned them on, and tried it. Nothing happenedl"

They had learned some things, but most of them were like that. The ship was split down the middle, horizon-

tally. All the equipment was in the upper half, behind the pilot cabin. The lower half was apparently packed solid, and encased in something so hard and tough that diamond drills and a monatomic hydrogen torch had made no dent in it. But it held power. They were sure of that, since the big cables came from there to all the rest of the machine.

The metal of the hull was pure iron—chemically pure beyond even a trace of anything else they could find. Yet it was harder and tougher than the best beryllium steel they knew.

At a hundred degrees below zero, it turned as soft as lead, but hardened again at higher temperatures—and then was nothing but soft iron. Something was done to it to give it its rustless, impervious toughness and its tensile strength of almost a million pounds an inch, but they had no idea of what.

He had accepted the experts' word that the controls were worked by magnetic current without too much surprise, though they went around muttering something about Ehrenhaft being proved false and seemed to regard it as something that shouldn't be. Here soft iron was used as insulation, and a peculiar plastic seemed to form the conductor.

Another group was going insane over a transformer that was connected to the big tank the X-rays had showed in the lower half of the ship—without revealing whether it was a storage battery or some kind of atomic converter with no radiation.

The transformer looked normal enough, but its secondary delivered exactly one thousand volts at four hundred cycles per second, whether the primary was hooked to a storage battery, a tiny dry cell, a 1440 volt sixty cycle a.c. line, or a high tension coil that gave better than thirty-thousand volts.

The gadget weighed about twenty pounds, and they'd put as much as fifty amperes through it without its warming up the slightest—fifty kilowatts, and probably only a small fraction of what it could carry!

It had a soft iron core, copper wire wound exactly like a normal transformer, and a thin smear of insulation. Substituting a new iron core made on the spot, or a new winding designed to fit had cut its ability to handle power, but had made no change in its constant output, though the use of both the new coil and core had given them only a rather poor ordinary transformer.

There was another transformer-like gadget on the back of each of the two seats in the cabin, apparently designed to rest on the pilots' shoulders and be strapped on. They had tried putting power into it, but there had been no results. The power disappeared, but nothing happened—no fields around it, no heating up, no sound or movement.

The worst case was something whose purpose they did know. The gadget that transformed electric current into magnetic current was a simple copper plate attached to an iron solenoid, with a winding of electric lines around it. That had worked perfectly with a substitute winding, a copied solenoid, or a new copper plate. But it hadn't worked with more than one thing substituted!

There were bolts whose nuts simply slid on—and then couldn't be removed in any manner they tried. One of the tools they had found behind the seats removed them, but it seemed no more than a simple, transparent piece of plastic that simply grasped the nut loosely.

"How'd you find it worked?" Mike asked.

Custer grimaced. "There's an instruction book, Mike. It was nicely shoved into one of the tool kits, complete. Did you take a look at the lettering on the instruments?"

Mike had seen it. There were at least forty letters in the alphabet they used whenever this ship had been made. Some of them, like the Greek
theta
for "th" and the reversed
e
for "uh" were easy enough to decode. Some of the others seemed ridiculous, unless the pronunciation had undergone a change.

"So you couldn't read most of it?" he asked.

"No—we read it. We put a code boy on it, and he worked out a full translation. But did you ever look closely at a service manual on anything issued by the government? Sure, it told you to take such and such a nut off, and screw down such and such a switch. But I'll bet you never found one that gave the real purpose of a machine, how it was made, how to substitute parts if the right ones weren't around—in fact, anything but how to take it to pieces, put it together, and tune it up; even then, you had to know what it was all about by yourself. Right?"

He went back to his desk and returned with close-typed sheets of paper. Mike looked through them, and at the photostatted diagrams. He located the jets. The big coil at the nose was marked as being a supercharger, which would indicate it might somehow compress the air—but he got no further information, and the thing still hadn't worked at all.

Then he gulped. "What the heck is protergy?"

Morley had come up then, and his scowl deepened at the word. He picked up the sheets, rolled them carefully, and handed them back between thumb and forefinger to Custer, making a gesture of holding his nose. He was supposed to be one of the ten top physicists in the country, but he now looked like a simple, tired old mechanic.

"Protergy, kinergy, duration, extension, matter," he said in disgust. "They make their handbooks less intelligent by giving basic theory. And from now on, never let me see a handbook that has that. It does more damage than good.

Protergy is a state of excitation through extension, like gravity and magnetism, but the raw stuff from which they are made. Kinergy is a propagation of excitation through extension with a fixed relation to duration—light is made from it.

Matter is a resonant matrix for the transformation of protergy to kinergy, or vice versa, and is itself composed of protergy in a kinergic state, causing a compression of extension within any given duration ... I... I'm quoting, if you think it's pure mouthwash.

And just between us, it doesn't mean a damned thing, couldn't mean anything, and shouldn't. It has something to do with crystals, too—but somehow, I get the idea that every single atom is a crystal to those boys! Incidentally, Custer, what did you think of that crack there about the non-Einsteinian recognition of the limitations of the law of conservation of matter and energy?"

Mike shook his head and moved away. Fortunately, it wasn't his business to understand, but only to work with Custer in trying to get results. He found one of the men working on a tube of something—or rather, two tubes, each with a liquid oozing out. It was from the repair kit, meant to glue together sheets of the iron covering of the ship. There were half a dozen such tubes.