Unto Him That Hath (3 page)

"Works fine," the man said. "Spread A on one of the sheets, squirt B over it, and stick on another sheet. Only it won't work on anything except that cockeyed iron of theirs—won't work on that after the temper is drawn by too much cooling. But it sure does what it's mean to— the two sheets fuse together, exactly as strong as if they'd been one from the first."

Mike nodded and went on to look at other problems. The glue had obviously replaced welding and riveting in the future. At least he could understand its purpose. But most of the men here were working with machines that he couldn't understand, much less trying to grasp the principle of the gadget they were testing.

He moved slowly back toward the big X-ray machine, wondering how much more they could cramp into this building, and how long such a concentration of great brains could exist without Pan-Asia finding it out and sending over a super-special bomb.

The Alliance had been crowded back even further now, and the few men in Washington who knew what was going on here were practically hanging on their phones for a word of something they could use to change the tide. They were desperate enough to accept time-machines as they'd once accepted an atomic-bomb which they couldn't really believe in.

The X-ray and torsion meter were apparently cooperating on one of the tiny "bombs" they had found at the nose of the ship. They looked like tin cans of normal size, with rounded noses and small finned tails. Apparently, they were loosely joined together at the center, but the full strength of the big torsion machine was making no progress in separating them.

The X-ray of one showed an inside that seemed to be mostly solid metal, but there was a confusion of parts near the end that could only be the elaborate check-and-balance arrangement of a fuse. There was nothing that seemed capable of holding the front and back together, in spite of what the torsion machine was failing to do.

"Can't even get one of these apart," the technician said, picking up one of the tiny "bullets" that had been on a belt on one of the ruined machine guns at the front of the Enigma. "I've got a couple of guys out in the inner field, trying to crack one open. Thought they might contain some liquid or gas that was bad medicine. But. ..."

"Get them back!" Mike told him sharply. "Before they blow off an arm or leg. Besides, this stuff stays inside this building, unless you want to run a security stretch of five years! Call them in!"

The technician scowled, and then began to look scared. He was gone at a run toward the entrance, to double through the main hangar toward the inner field.

Mike turned the thing over in his hand gingerly, looking at its X-ray picture, which seemed to show nothing but a rough roll of metal inside the waxy coating, and something that might have been a percussion cap —it was too faint to tell. The thing itself looked like a small tubular capacitor without the wires trailing from the ends.

Enright seemed to have the same idea. He came up, with Custer and Morley arguing something esoteric a few feet behind, and took the little bullet out of Mike's hands. "Might glue wires on them and sell them for tubular condensers," he said.

Morley let out a sudden yell. "Electrostatics!" He caught the power switch on the torsion machine in a running jump, and set it into reverse. His face was white when he turned back.

"Electrostatic force ... it has to be. The plates of a charged capacitor don't separate easily, either. And yet . . . my God, the number of
farads
that would take! Dane, Custer, you can be glad that machine couldn't crack it—or the whole building would be dust—nothing but dust. . ."

Something slapped against the back wall, and the two feet of reinforced concrete jerked inwards. Mike felt himself hit the floor, while the big X-ray machine crashed within inches of him. There was a roaring sharper than any explosion he had heard, and the laboratory shook again. But its construction had been sound enough to save them, except for bruises. They got up, staring through the dust that was everywhere.

"Pan-Asia. . . ." Custer began.

Mike shook his head, finding trouble with his tongue at first. "A damned fool—and the end of a couple of men who followed orders," he said. "They cracked one of these smaller bullets!"

He limped forward to peer out, and then turned back, sick. The technician whose bright idea it had been was still partly there, though completely dead. There was nothing he could see at a quick glance of the two men who had done the trick somehow. And that had been only the smallest of the gadgets!

Mike sat glumly in the seat beside Molly, staring up at the stars. She had given up trying to talk, and was now driving quietly.

How did those stars look, he wondered, where the Enigma had been made? Hoto far ahead? And if they cracked her mystery, could a weapon like that end wars for good and for all? He could see no possibility for a nation ever risking fighting another when even the bullets of the time were the equal of a blockbuster, the small bombs must be as good as A-bombs, and the big ones— well, if Custer and Morley were right, the huge capacitor that lay in the belly of the Enigma and furnished her " power must be far stronger than any H-bomb could be.

How many electrons . . . no, that was meaningless. They didn't pack electrons in so much as they somehow strained space ... as meaningless as the babble about protergy and kinergy. The result was that one hundred percent of the energy could be released in a billionth of a second or less—probably millions of horsepower hours, in almost no time!

He wondered how they got the energy they stored there, and why they should use so much to power a plane, if the size of the huge capacitor tank meant anything. With the constant voltage transformer working in reverse, they could pack it in; feed in a steady thousand volts, and it would go on working, even if the voltage inside the capacitor went up into the millions. But how could they hold such voltages?

With such a weapon, there could be no war. And that was the dream of the scientists like Molly, whatever she had found; it had been the dream of his father, and he had always shared it.

Yet up there in the future, where such power was used on a small pursuit ship, war was obviously a part of their life! Mass production fighters weren't made without a role to play. He shook his head in the breeze the car was creating, trying to picture such a world into which this world was headed. Or was it?

If they cracked the secret, then they would have something that future had not had in its past. And with a multiple-choice future, they might even find a road to permanent peace for themselves!

Molly stopped the car outside the gate, where the same guards were still posted, in a pretense that all was normal inside, and that no special protection was necessary. She ruffled his hair and kissed him quickly. "Be careful, whatever you're up to, Mike."

Then she was gone back toward the city. He passed the guards, and went inside to the office. There, his flying clothes were all laid out, together with an oxygen tank and mask. He'd thought of taking a parachute, but there wasn't room for it in his case; his body was too long for the cramped space inside the Enigma, anyhow.

Only Custer and Enright were there, where they'd knocked down the rest of the wall, and wheeled the Enigma out in the darkness onto the inner field.

"All set up?" he asked Custer.

The general nodded. "Every bit of test equipment on board. And I hope you can learn something more in actual flight than we seem to be getting the other way. Sure you still want to try it? We've got test pilots for such tilings."

"I started out testing Dad's planes and flying jitneys by

the seat of my pants." Mike took a last drag on his cigarette and mashed it out. "Anybody you'd rather see go in her?"

Enright croaked hoarsely. "Me. I've flown them off the drawing board, too, Mike—before I went into the shop. I. ..."

His face was pleading, almost tearful in the light of the small, deeply shaded bulb. But Custer shook his head quickly, and the little man stepped back, his fists knotted convulsivly. Mike tried to grin a farewell, and climbed in.

There was barely room in the pilot's seat, once he had stopped to get under the transformer gadget that used up power with no result. He squirmed in, and reached for the throttle; at least the handbook had shown which parts were which, and he had spent all the afternoon studying the transliteration. He'd even found that one gadget kept it from starting when it had no room to fly. He cut on power.

The only result was a red bulb that flashed on at the top of his control panel. He bent forward, trying to read the tiny letters of light it revealed. "Safety straps unfastened" was as close as he could decode it. He started to look down at the seat, but the movement made him brush against the straps hanging from the mystery transformer. On a guess, he shoved his arms through them. The light went out.

This time, as he moved the single control back, indicators flashed green. He'd already figured how the thing worked, though. Back for up, twist for turn, sideways to roll over, and a tighter or looser grip to regulate his speed. It seemed simple.

He pulled the lever all the way back, and squeezed down on it. Ahead, the side of the building suddenly flashed down out of sight, and a steady roar came from beside him.

It was easy. The jets could lift the ship like a helicopter, but at a speed no helicopter could match. And the ship seemed to be inherently stable, in spite of its forbidding appearance. The response to any control was instantaneous and effortless, but he climbed to something he guessed to be three miles up before he tried any real maneuvering. Then he switched to horizontal, and felt her leap ahead. He increased the power. The wind roared, and the ship bucked faintly with the old familiar feeling of crossing the supersonic barrier. If the dial meant what he thought it did, his airspeed was now better than 1200 miles per hour, and he'd only started to put on power.

He changed back to vertical and went straight up, but this time the ship tilted—apparently by some automatic device, since he knew of no forward and backward tilting control--and kept her blunt nose facing the flight line. She lifted, rising to thirty thousand feet. The thrust was still full powered, even in the thinner air—the coils that serve as superchargers must work, somehow, but only when in actual flight.

However they managed to compress the air, they were efficient. He lifted further, going up to forty thousand, sixty thousand, and beyond. His estimate of the heights on the indicator showed a top of better than twenty-five miles, though the air should have been too thin there for any compressor to work. But she was up to twenty miles now, and still rising.

It was enough for him. He set her on a straight course, and tried the maximum speed. At what looked like a little better than twenty-five hundred miles an hour, she began to shake—the plastic replacement they had made was unable to take it. He slowed back to a thousand, wondering how they kept the ship cool. There was no sign of her heating up from friction. He cut into a tight spiral, and began heading downwards a little. The response was amazing. At that speed, she turned about in the air like a light-plane stunting.

Then it hit him—there was no blackout, though such a circle must be putting at least twenty gravities pressure on himl It felt like a leisurely turn in a slow carl And the tension that should have warned him to ease off on the controls had never hit him.

Anti-gravity, or synthetic gravity neutralizing the pull by an exact counter pull? It must be some such device— probably the gadget that he'd called a transformer at the back of his neck. If it were adjusted to maintain a feeling of one gravity, naturally it would show no results when lying quietly in a one gravity field!

He found his course toward the testing ground that had been cleared and abandoned during the beginning of the war. It was again posted and waiting for him. He came over it at fifty thousand feet, set the cross-hairs of the tiny sight, and pulled down on the bomb-trigger that was to release one of the tin-can sized bombs.

The ship steadied and went into a climb, without a move on his part. It went up to eighty-thousand feet. Then something clicked, just as his eyes caught the target in the cross-hairs again. He seemed to hang there for long minutes, before he finally realized he was again cruising on.

Then, at last, hell blossomed below him. His work was finished, and Custer and Morley would have their check on whether the stuff worked as they expected. But he already knew that a ship with a
full
load of
such
cans could do more damage than their top-sized bombers, all combined.

The return was routine. He centered the field in the same cross-hairs, lining them up to touch the spot from which he'd taken off. For a second, he had to stop to realize it was still dark down there—but the system must have worked by infra-red, since the image was clearly lighted in the little sight. Mike touched a button marked "Land," and waited. The ship began dropping smoothly, and came to an exact landing on her own. She even cut power and released the straps from his shoulders.

He snapped off his mask, and ducked down and out of the little door, squinting through the darkness. "Back safe and sound," he shouted softly. "And after this, a comet will seem like an ox-cart."

A flashlight picked him out, and Ouster's voice drifted out to him. "Come in here, Mike!"