by Jerry
“Let’s wait until he comes back, then,” Ted suggested. “There’s no hurry.”
“Yes, there is.” Carla produced an official-looking document from her purse. “This pass is good only for this afternoon’s train. It involves transportation to the observatory, entrance into the observatory, and everything else. If you don’t use it properly it’s worthless.”
Ted studied the pass, then decided: “I’ll go, anyway. Maybe you can get hold of Dietrich before I reach Cape—”
Carla’s fingers clutching his arm hard interrupted him. She pulled at his arm in the direction of a gate.
“Come on,” she whispered. “We’ve got to get aboard the train; that supervisor just came in and he’s looking for me.”
Ted followed the tattoo of her feet across the concrete of the station floor. A moment later, they were aboard.
“I can’t face that man now,” Carla said desperately. “If he looks for me on the train, I’ll hide somewhere. You keep the pass out of sight so that he doesn’t spot you; he doesn’t know your face.”
But the train pulled out before the supervisor came in sight.
“I’ve needed a vacation for a long time,” Carla said ruefully, “and it looks like I’m getting one now.”
2
THE TRAIN fought its way eastward all night. Sitting bolt upright in the uncomfortable seats of the day coaches, Ted and Carla tried to catch sleep. Austerity regulations had long ago done away with pullman service on railroads.
Time after time, the train’s wheels shrieked in an upward keening, as the train stuck on iced rails or snowdrifts. Each time, there was a delay until the special crew, equipped with flame-throwers, cleared the way. The temperature aboard the train dipped to the freezing-point, because the fight against the icy rails cut the power available for the train’s heating units.
Nearly two days later, the train halted to let Ted and Carla off at a tiny station that was its closest approach to the observatory.
No one was on duty in the station, and the scene around resembled a cartoon of pioneer days in Siberia. There was a layer of snow on the ground, reaching almost to Ted’s shoulders. Leafless trees stuck up in dead-looking fashion through the snow.
They struggled to fit snowshoes over their hip boots, then clambered up steps that had been cut into the packed snow at the edge of the rails, and found a snowtaxi that had apparently been lea. for just such unexpected travelers.
“You just cut across the fields, and keep the high hill to your left,” the friendly conductor aboard the train had explained to them. “The observatory is so big that you’ll find it even if you got a couple of miles off course.”
Ted helped Carla into the cramped single seat of the snowtaxi, climbed behind the controls, and gingerly tested the jets. They weren’t smooth, but the skeleton-like snow vehicle leaped ahead willingly with a jerk that nearly threw him from the seat.
“A fine driver you are,” Carla laughed; “I’m glad you don’t have to go up any mountains.”
Ted, struggling with the controls, had no time to answer. It was his first experience with one of these snowtaxis, whose flaming rear-jets made them impossible for city use, but represented the only fast travel method in rural regions. The snowtaxi insisted on moving faster than he liked, and its skis constantly skidded giddily sidewards, throwing them down grades and off course.
“I don’t like the looks of that sky,” Ted muttered. “It would be easy to get lost out here if it started to snow.”
“Don’t worry. You won’t get a speeding ticket.” Suddenly Carla’s voice sobered. “Isn’t it awful out here, though?”
The land might have been the Antarctic, except for the cable-carrying pole that occasionally poked out of the snow, a rare abandoned farmhouse built before the climate made this area unlivable in the winter, and a few trees.
“Over there,” Carla pointed with a pudgy, gloved hand. “Isn’t that part of the observatory?”
TED SQUINTED at a black tower that arose behind a snow dune, then shifted the course of the snowtaxi slightly toward it. “It looks like it,” he said. “I didn’t think they’d need towers so high, though.”
“It looks like one of those towers you drew a picture of on your plans.”
“Damned if it doesn’t. It might be a radio relay-station, or something.” Ted jammed desperately on the rudder of the snowtaxi as a fence loomed up suddenly before them, ghost-like and almost invisible for lack of contrast between its pale, heavy wire and the snow fields.
‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’,” Carla hummed nervously as they followed the fence. They might have gone a mile when little lights began to twinkle in the distance. Ted slowed the snowtaxi. as the lights neared and a gate became visible.
“No one’s allowed inside,” a huge guard in I WO uniform, bars on his shoulders, said. The guard shivered a little, looked longingly at the little kiosk from which he had emerged, but stood solidly before the closed gate. “You’ll have to keep moving.”
“We’re expected,” Ted lied fumbling with gloved fingers to get the credentials from a pocket.
The guard looked at the papers, went inside the kiosk, and used the telephone. When he emerged, the gate began to swing open. “Take it slow,” he warned. “The inner works start about a half mile inside this fence. They’re so well camouflaged that you might ram them without seeing them.”
Throttling down the snowtaxi to minimum speed, Ted and Carla watched wonderingly as they headed toward a long, low line of buildings. More towers poked up on the more distant horizon, circular structures like enormous igloos stood to their left and right, and there were tracks of vehicles crisscrossing everywhere on the snow.
“What in the world do they do with all those buildings and towers and things?” Carla asked. “Are they filled with thermometers?”
“It’s got me beat,” Ted said, wanting to scratch his head, but fearing frostbite. “I think I know something about weather-recording methods, but I don’t see why they’d need all that stuff.”
Again he braked violently the snowtaxi, just in time to avoid collision with a new fence that loomed up before them. This one was made of wood, painted to blend perfectly with the snow, and was a dozen feet tall.
A barred gate was only a hundred yards away. They stopped there.
“What do we do now?” Ted wondered. “There’s no horn on this contraption.” There was no sign of life around the gate, no guard-sheltering kiosk.
“Yell,” Carla suggested. They did, Ted’s baritone blending with Carla’s soprano.
FINALLY a panel swung open in the center of the gate. The head and shoulders of a fur-clad man poked through. The tip of a rifle barrel was visible in his hands.
“We’re here to see Dr. Dietrich,” Ted told him, shoving the pass under his nose.
“Identification papers, please,” the guard demanded.
“I have mine; I’m with the IWO. Mr. Foreman is a weather expert,” Carla countered.
“This place is restricted to IWO people,” the guard insisted. “You can come in,” and he pointed to Carla. “He can’t.”
“But I have important information for Dr. Dietrich,” Ted argued.
“No exceptions.” The guard started to swing shut the panel.
“What do you expect me to do?” Ted demanded.
The gate swung open slightly and the guard poked his head through the opening. “You, buster, can go over the snow to grandmother’s house, for all I care.” A thick arm shot out, grabbed Carla around the waist, and pulled her inside the fence. The gate snapped shut as Ted darted toward it. There was a loud, final click, and Carla’s protesting voice dying away in the distance.
Ted pounded on the high barrier with his fists, tried to pry open the parcel, and shouted. There was no response.
Beating his hands together to try to keep warm, he felt his temper boiling up to the danger point. He wasn’t going to leave Carla to face the music alone; and he wasn’t going to leave this place unti
l he learned exactly what all those towers and igloos did.
Ted tried to build a rampart with the snow to permit climbing over the wall. But the snow was too dry and powdery; it crumbled, each time that he neared the top of the barrier, collapsing and almost burying him.
Then, as the sun sank, Ted drove the snowtaxi slowly around the entire wall. It was a circular journey that took perhaps an hour. The vehicle had no speedometer, but Ted estimated the circumference at ten miles, at least. He yelled each time he passed a gate, and was ignored.
Light was beginning to fail, but Ted wanted to try something before giving up and going back to the outer wall. He selected a spot which was directly between two large cluster of towers. Then he stopped, jumped out of the snowtaxi, and began to dig clumsily into the banked snow, with his padded gloves. Miniature avalanches of snow attempted to fill the hole as fast as he scooped it out. But he gave a satisfied grunt, four feet down.
Huge cables, thick as his arm, were uncovered by his excavations. They ran close to the ground, wrapped in thick insulation, obviously carrying a heavy power load between the towers.
Ted climbed out of his ditch with effort, bewildered. He was no power-engineer, couldn’t guess at the power that would be carried by cables of such size; but he knew that such giant amounts of juice would be useless for mere recording and observing instruments.
He knew that this weather station was more than it was supposed to be. Some project of unknown nature was being conducted here.
THE SUN had eased down behind a snowy hill, and the temperature was becoming perceptibly lower. Ted’s hands and feet felt as if he had received injections of novacain in each limb. Already the outlines of the mysterious structures were blurring with approaching night.
Suddenly a multi-colored brilliance appeared on the snow around Ted.
He wheeled, and stared at the spectacle in the northern sky. Giant waves of color, reddish and yellowish, flowed out of the north, silently bursting as they neared the zenith, then coming back in new tidal waves of color.
“The northern lights!” Ted told himself. Reading about them was one thing; seeing them was something awesome. They were infinitely brighter these years than they had been before the climate worsened. But Ted had never seen them in open country, undiluted by city lights.
“There’s nothing to do standing out here,” he told himself. “If I can get to a town, maybe I can get into this place by phone . . .”
But when he wheeled the snowtaxi, preparing to return, Ted found himself in a new world. The northern lights, reflecting from the snowfields, made it impossible to say where the horizon lay. The aurora now covered the entire city. The huge fence seemed to run in all directions, moving like a living thing in the shifting, unnatural light. Ted drove a few hundred yards, in what might have been the direction to the outer fence. Then he stopped, confused.
His numbed hands could barely control the vehicle, and he no longer was certain in which direction lay the invisible outer and inner walls. He felt a moment’s panic, and pounded an unfeeling fist against the throttle of the snowtaxi; it darted off like a bullet. Stubbornly refusing to yield to an impulse to turn, he held his course for ten full minutes. He encountered nothing but weirdly colored snow and once a ghostly pole that loomed suddenly before him and flashed by, only feet away.
“I’ve got to stop and think,” he told himself, braking recklessly. If he’d collided with that pole, it would have taken two men to pick up the pieces. “Ten minutes should have brought me to one wall or the other, if I was going straight. So this thing is probably skidding enough to cause me to go in circles. I could pass within fifty feet of a guard and not see him in this glare.”
He forced himself to sit stock still and try to think. The sudden quiet was strangely soothing. He sank into a lassitude in which he didn’t even think. A little warning voice within his brain tried to signal the rest of his body: This is the feeling that comes over a person who is freezing to death.
SINKING into reverie, Ted wished only one thing: that all his work on the weather control possibilities hadn’t been in vain. Drowsily, he reflected that it would be ridiculous for the man who had decided to change the climate to fall a victim to a chilly Massachusetts night.
As if he were watching an actor on the stage, Ted realized that he was forcing his arm under his heavy coat, groping with stiffened fingers for his cigarette-lighter. He touched it, but he could not force his mitten to pull it out; it slithered like a live eel into the depths of his pocket.
Clenching his teeth, Ted worked his fingers out of the mitten. Even under the coat, the cold pounced on the bare flesh greedily, and its sharp bite snapped Ted back to full awareness. Convulsively, he clenched the lighter and pulled his hand out to full exposure.
The hand was purplish and looked lifeless. But with his other hand, Ted forced a thumb down onto the button. A tiny tongue of flame appeared at the light’s wick, paled by the aurora’s glow. Instantly Ted eased the lighter down to the seat of the snowtaxi. The flame wavered, almost went out, then licked at a shred of torn upholstery. It spread over the upholstery like ink spilled on a blotter. Ted half-tumbled out of the little vehicle, an instant before its interior became a mass of flame.
Crouching in the snow beside the snowtaxi, he prayed that the heat would be sufficient to ignite the fuel. Its welcome warmth increased, then faded as the upholstery was consumed.
But a whoosh, and a brighter, steadier column of flame signaled the ignition of the fuel supply.
New pain swept through Ted’s half-frozen body, as the warmth penetrated it. It took the last dregs of his willpower to remain close to the burning vehicle, knowing that the numbing absence of sensation would return if he moved a few feet more distant into the treacherous cold.
Thanking the scientists who had made jet fuel non-explosive, only a couple of years ago, Ted estimated that he had a half-hour to live. When the fuel was exhausted, the flames would die out; there was nothing to burn on this snowless plain.
But the flame was still bright when a new, artificial light came shining across the snow. Ted saw a combination of snowplow and station wagon moving into his direction. It stopped in a cloud of blood-colored snow. Ted felt himself lifted into its cheerfully lighted interior, then blacked out.
“Good thing they spotted that fire from the tower,” the driver told the attendant as they drove toward the inner wall.
3
THE JABBING of a needle into his arm brought Ted back to half-consciousness. Dreamlike voices were talking about him. with frequent references to “authority” and “unauthorized” entrance. He forced his eyes open, and a white-uniformed, elderly man with a hypodermic swam out of the dizzy mists.
“I guess I’d better say thanks to someone,” Ted muttered drowsily. “Who do I see about it?”
The doctor waved his hands vaguely. “All I know is, they were already alerted for a prowler, and then someone saw a light out there. Old Man Dietrich got excited and sent out searching parties.”
Ted winced as he sat up. His joints felt as if they had been borrowed from Rip Van Winkle, but the agonizing ache of the cold had been driven away by the injections. He stretched cautiously, then suddenly thought of something: “That briefcase . . . I pulled it out of the snowtaxi. Did they find that, too?”
As if he had pronounced a magic formula, the door opened and a shriveled little man bobbed into the infirmary, briefcase in hand.
“We thought you’d be looking for this,” the little man said. He waved his hand in dismissal to the doctor, who gathered up his needles and left. “Do you feel well enough to leave us?”
“I guess so,” Ted said, standing up, and hoping the room would stop describing circles. “Are you Dr. Dietrich?”
“No, I’m Mason, just an assistant. He wanted me to tell you that your plans are very interesting, but your basic ideas have been suggested many times before; he fears they’re impractical.”
“What does he know about my ideas? Hav
e I been raving while I was out?”
“The girl explained all that to him while you were being treated; she did an excellent propaganda job.”
Ted yanked a sheaf of papers out of the briefcase, saying: “But she couldn’t have shown you how my calculations run. You see, so much energy expended here would have enough effect on natural forces to multiply itself . . .”
“No, no,” Mason interrupted. “I have no authority even to listen. Dr. Dietrich has already made his decision, and he’s the boss; you’ll have to come this way.”
Ted resignedly picked up his fur jacket and boots, and followed Mason into a long hallway, feeling less tottery. His eyes searched the side passages, catching tantalizing glimpses of giant machinery bulking in the distance. Men armed with charts and data sheets were scurrying everywhere.
“I’m afraid that you’ll have to let me blindfold you from this point forward,” Mason said, producing a black cloth. “You’re really fortunate to be allowed out of here without a jail-sentence; it was accidental that you got inside, so we’ll be lenient.”
Anger flashed into Ted’s face and he backed away from Mason. “No, you don’t,” he warned. “I’m not a spy in a military installation, and you’re not going to hide anything from me. Where’s Miss Cole, anyway? I’ve got to see her.”
“She’s already left; we escorted her out an hour ago. She didn’t say where she would wait for you.”
TED REFUSED to budge from the spot, and his hand clenched into a fist when Mason raised the blindfold again.
“Do you want me to call the guards and use force?” Mason asked. “I’m a busy man and we have rules here.”
“Look,” Ted said, suddenly lowering his voice to a confidential tone. “Not as an official but as a man of science—don’t you think that all this equipment here could be converted to the purpose that I’m fighting for? I’ve seen enough already around here to know that you have more than just an observatory here. Now, if you promised to look seriously into my idea, I’d not raise much of a stink on the outside about the danger of other nations boring into the United States through secret weapons at what’s supposed to be an observatory.”