“Whoa, baby.” Johnny was up off his stool but Kitty evaded his embrace and faced him, head high, eyes blazing. Johnny grinned at her, a bit crookedly.
“You’re right, honey. You’re dead right.” He looked like a small boy contritely admitting some childish naughtiness. “I’ll be good from now on. I solemnly promise you I won’t say anything about this test, work or fail, and I won’t ever try another that isn’t approved by higher authority. Satisfied?”
“Well-ll, maybe.”
“That’s settled then. Five minutes more and we’ll go out and celebrate.”“Five minutes.” Kitty wasn’t quite sure what was settled. “Why five minutes?”
“Because that’s all I need to finish. See that scope.” He pointed to a porthole-like lens in the radar’s vertical instrument board. Across the otherwise darkened glass a line of green light vibrated like a plucked string. “Two pips — jags in that line — precisely four minutes, fifty-two and three tenths seconds apart and I’ll know my signal has traveled more than twenty-seven million miles to Venus and another twenty-seven millions miles back. Even if I can’t tell anyone I’ll know... Wait! I’ve got a wonderful idea. A veritable flash of genius. You, my beloved, shall have the honor of being the first Earth dweller ever to make contact with another planet. How do you like that?”
“I’m thrilled.” Kitty meant to say it ironically, sensing the Machiavellian design behind the gesture. If she were the one to make that contact, he figured, she could not resist his telling the world about it. She’d spike that. In the meantime —
“What do I do?”
“Sit down here.”
She complied.
“Now put your hand on this.” He guided her fingers to a heavy telegraph key. “When you press it, you’ll start a VHF — very high frequency — pulse across space, beamed for Venus. We’ll see the pip when it returns but the exact time will be recorded by that chronograph.” This was a black box in whose side a stopwatch was embedded. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Watch the scope. Now!” As Johnny pressed her fingers down on the key she heard a shrill peep and saw a bit of the scope’s green line jump angularly almost to its rim. Then the line was straight again.
“Is that all?”
“That’s all till we see the second pip. How about a kiss in the meantime?”
“You don’t deserve one.” But she turned her face up for it. His lips were cold. “You really are worked up over this, aren’t you?”
“A little,” he admitted. “Look, Kitty. I haven’t a class till eleven tomorrow. What say you meet me at City Hall at nine and we’ll get a license?”
“Uh-uh. You know I won’t marry you till your appointment is made permanent.”
“Oh, honey, that’s not fair!” Johnny’s fingers rumpled his already tousled hair. “It would be permanent by now if the Army hadn’t pulled me out to work on that atomic fission thing.”
“And if you hadn’t kicked over the apple cart last year, which cancels that out.” Kitty wanted very much to give in to him but she knew she must not. She explained why, all over again — broke off.
“There it is!” she exclaimed. “There’s the pip.
“Huh!” Startled, he glanced at the stopwatch. “No. Only a little more than a minute and a half. The signal hasn’t even reached Venus yet.”
“But I saw the line jump, Johnny. I’m sure I did.”
“You couldn’t have.” He snapped open the chronograph’s lid, peered in at the tape moving slowly under an inked point. “By Jove, you did see something. There was a pip at eighty-four point seventy-nine seconds. That would mean the radar pulse was reflected from something at — Let me see...” He snatched up a slide rule, deftly manipulated the sliding scale. “It would mean the pulse hit something seven million, eight hundred thousand miles out toward the Sun. But there just isn’t anything at that distance.”Kitty was sorry for him, he looked so crestfallen, but she was glad his experiment had mis-fired. This would take him down a badly-needed peg.
“So you were wrong, Venus’ atmosphere does make a difference.”
“Nonsense. The clouds would damp out or slow the echo if they had any effect at all. I told you that the pulse didn’t reach — I’ve got it!” Johnny was grinning again. “That pip wasn’t made by the echoed pulse, it was static on the same frequency. We’ll wait out the calculated time and there will be another. The real one.”
But there wasn’t.
“Okay,” Johnny muttered, his face a mask. “We’ll try it again. Get up and let me at that key.”
They didn’t talk this time. Johnny watched the scope, his fingers drumming on the edge of the control desk, and Kitty watched him. The echo returned — in exactly eighty-four and seventy-nine hundredths seconds, the same as before.
“That does it.” An astronomer might have questioned the radar’s evidence but Johnny Rober had complete faith in his instrument. “Something’s gotten in between Earth and Venus. I’ll have to try again tomorrow.”
Kitty said nothing, not even when he explained that they couldn’t spend the day together as they’d planned. If Professor Gardlane still was to be kept in ignorance of his experiment, Johnny would have to be in the lab before the first Monday morning class arrived. He’d have to recalculate all his settings for Venus’ new position in the dawn sky and even working through the night he’d be lucky if he finished in time.
No, Kitty didn’t say anything, not even goodbye. She just turned and walked out of the building and it wasn’t until she was out of Johnny’s sight and hearing that she let the tears come.
The first students were not due in the lab until nine the next day but Johnny was at the radar at six. He made the necessary adjustments, pressed the key. The echo returned precisely two and four-hundredths seconds more quickly than it had on Sunday.
The interfering object was still there in space, where nothing should be, but it was a hundred and ninety-one thousand miles nearer than it had been nineteen hours ago. Whatever it was, it was speeding towards Earth at the rate of more than ten thousand miles an hour.
Johnny was not alarmed. Not yet. Overnight he had realized that the space-wanderer probably was a meteor. Even if it were fairly large as meteors go and even if it should reach the Earth, air friction would burn it up before it could strike the surface. It was hardly more than curiosity that prompted him to switch in the Plan Position Indicator, that ingenious device which paints on a screen a luminous representation of any object its radar beam scans.
The PPI he used was far more efficient than those that during the war enabled observers on the British coast to spot enemy planes over Germany’s borders and direct Allied night fighters to them. Nevertheless Johnny expected to see on its screen no more than a microscopic fleck, if anything at all. What he saw was a spot of light almost as large as the ball of his thumb.
His skin tightened but his hands were steady as he measured the spot. When he’d finished his intricate computations, his lips puckered to a long, low whistle. The mass that hurtled across the void towards our planet was too huge to burn up in its atmosphere. If it struck, disaster would ensue.
Deep within Johnny Rober there jittered the beginnings of panic.
Then he grinned sheepishly, ashamed that he for an instant had forgotten his logic. All he knew was that the object existed and that it was traveling through space. To calculate whether there was any danger of collision it was necessary to determine its path with relation to Earth’s orbit and its relative speed. This he could not do until, twenty-four hours from now, he made a third reading.
He managed that day to keep his mind on his teaching well enough to get by, but he completely forgot his intention to phone Kitty at noon and make his peace with her.
As soon as he was free, he immersed himself in the new set of calculations now necessary. For Kitty’s part, she waited near the phone all Monday, cried herself to sleep that night. When at seven-thirty Tuesday morning her father called up to her that J
ohnny was on the phone her anger flared up.
“Tell him I don’t want to speak to him now or ever again,” she called back.
“If you want him told that, you can do it yourself.”
“I certainly will.” By chance she’d scrambled out of bed and was out in the upstairs hall, barefooted and in her pajamas. She snatched off the receiver of the extension there.
“You look here, Johnny Rober. If you think I’m going to stand for — ”
“I want to talk to you, honey,” he broke in. “Meet me at Hare’s Campus Lunchroom in ten minutes.”
“I won’t meet you anywhere. And besides I’m not dressed.”
“Fifteen minutes then.”
She was at Hare’s in thirteen. The room was crowded with breakfasting students but Johnny had taken possession of a booth in the rear and had held it against all comers. He was haggard, his eyes underlined with sooty crescents. The hot words Kitty’d planned died on her lips.
“What’s wrong, Johnny? What’s happened?”
His reply was cryptic. “Nothing yet. Maybe nothing will. Sit down here alongside me and I’ll tell you about it as soon as Bill brings our orders.”
What Bill put on their table was two portions each of orange juice, griddle cakes, country sausage, doughnuts and coffee. By the time he’d ambled off, Kitty had pulled herself together.
“All right, now give,” she demanded. “How bad a jam are you in this time?”
“None. At least I won’t be if you release me from my promise not to say anything about my try for Venus.”
“Oh, no. Nothing doing.”
“Wait. Let me explain.” He drained his orange juice, spilled half a pitcher of syrup on his wheat cakes and went to work on them while he told her about yesterday’s discovery.
“This morning,” he continued, “I had a little trouble locating the thing again but I did find it after some pretty delicate scanning. It’s still speeding along at ten thousand miles an hour and — get this, Kitty — if it sticks to the curve I’ve now been able to plot, approximately thirty-one days from now it will arrive at the same spot in space where we’re due to be.”
“I see what you mean.” Kitty sensed he was not taking it as lightly as his tone and manner implied. “Are you sure, Johnny?”
“I’m sure of my observations and calculations. What’s got me winging is what Bob Hasseltine told me just before I phoned you. I remembered he was on night shift at the Observatory so I called him there and asked him if there was anything in that particular region of space that might explain some unusual electrical phenomena I’d noted. No, he said. Because of Venus’ closeness to Earth most astronomers are concentrating on that section of the sky and nothing out of the ordinary has been reported. You know, don’t you, that those star-gazers flash each other all over the world the instant anything unexpected appears. If Bob says nothing has been seen, it means that no one, anywhere, has seen anything.”
“But it’s so small and so far away. Could they see it?”
“It’s one hundred and fifty miles in diameter. Even in the early part of this century Percival Lowell saw on Mars markings he called canals. They were only about twenty miles wide, and modern telescopes are far more efficient than those of his day.”
Kitty’s fork scraped her empty plate. She’d disposed of her sausages without consciously tasting them.
“Look, Johnny. If there was something there, the astronomers would have seen it. They haven’t seen anything. So there’s nothing there and what are you all in a tizzy about?”
“My radar tells me something is there,” Johnny said doggedly. “The astronomers are all wet.”
“And you want me to let you tell them so. I see.” Kitty put down her coffee cup very carefully. Her voice was low, even, but two white spots had appeared beside either wing of her nose and her eyes were black fire. “All right. I release you from your promise. For all I care, you can go up to the top of Carillon Tower and proclaim to the high heavens that John Rober, probationary instructor in physics, knows more about science than all the world’s astronomers. You can dress yourself in a white robe and announce the end of the world in thirty days. But just remember that the instant you let out your first peep about this, I’m through with you, absolutely and forever.”
She meant it. Johnny knew that this time she meant it and that neither argument nor all his cute tricks would sway her.
We cannot, of course, know what passed through his mind as he stared expressionlessly at the cluttered table but it must have run something like this: To say publicly what he’d just told Kitty not only would be pitting his opinion against scientific authority in a sphere to which he was a stranger but, as she had pungently pointed out, would smack strongly of charlatanism. He had once been discredited in his own field, he could not expect the support of other physicists. If against these odds, he somehow gained a hearing and were proven wrong, his career would be ruined irretrievably and he would have lost the girl he profoundly loved.
Suppose he proved himself right. What, other than the inflation of his ego, would he have gained? The collision he anticipated could not be averted nor could any conceivable precautions be taken against it. Was it, after all, so greatly to be dreaded? The chances were that the meteor would plunge harmlessly into an ocean or strike some unpopulated spot. At the very worst, it could only destroy one city with a cost in lives and property still paltry against that of a single, avoidable World War.
He lifted his head and turned to Kitty. “Okay, honey,” he said. “We’ll skip it.” The few students who’d not hurried out to eight o’clock classes chortled as they saw the black-haired girl throw her arms around the man in the booth and kiss him.
“I’m so glad, Johnny.”
“I’m glad you’re glad, baby. I’m sort of relieved myself.”
Which was true only in part. Marring Johnny’s relief at his decision was a vague feeling that despite its logic there was something wrong with it, some element of the problem that he had missed. This feeling grew until it became almost an obsession. It sent him to the radar morning after morning to dispatch another microwave pulse out into the ether. It drove him to the University’s Observatory every afternoon to pore over the daily summary of reports from the world’s telescopes.
Day by day his radar told him that the mysterious mass still hurtled along the same ominous path, closer each day by nearly a quarter-million miles to its meeting with Earth. Never did the astronomers report any hint of the interloper.
Curiously enough, the first intimation from anyone else that all was not as it should be in the interstellar void appeared in the literature of Johnny’s own field, physics. A small item in the bulletin of a famous Eastern University’s laboratory, it noted a puzzling increase in the number of gamma rays impinging on our atmosphere. The phenomenon was being investigated and other physical laboratories were requested to cooperate.
Johnny asked that he be assigned Midwest’s part of the project. He had no real interest in it but the apparatus was housed in the Electronics Building and so it would give him an excuse for his early morning visits there. He turned the actual work over to three graduate students, assuming merely general supervision. Not even when detailed reports from around the globe made it evident that the phenomenon occurred only during daylight hours did he suspect any connection with the problem by which he was hag-ridden.
Thus matters stood on the second Monday after Johnny Rober’s first attempt to make contact with Venus by radar. That evening he received a bulky special delivery communication from the institution which had initiated the gamma ray study. A worker there had been inspired to check medical records and had made a startling discovery.
All over the world there was manifest an increase of degenerative diseases, more marked in the northern regions where the day was lengthening with summer’s approach. In Norway, Land of the Midnight Sun, the maladies already had reached epidemic proportions and here the symptoms closely resembled those by which im
mediate survivors of the atomic bomb explosions over Japan later had died slowly and horribly.
Gamma rays are one of the products of atomic fission and had been found mainly responsible for those deaths. Was there any relation, the memorandum posed as a question for further study, between the present rise in their atmospheric concentration and the medical phenomena noted?
Enclosed with the message were curves, plotted against time, of the increase in gamma ray concentration at Oslo and the incidence there of the obscure maladies. Pondering the graphs, Johnny’s mind leaped to one of those sudden revelations that mark the born researcher. If he inverted a curve representing the diminishing distance between Earth and the sky-wanderer of which only he was aware, it would match these two graphs almost exactly. The invisible meteor was the source of the rays that from across millions of miles of space already were blasting human life. When it came nearer, when it finally kept its grim rendezvous with our planet, all life on Earth would end.
And he knew now the nature of the thing he had been tracking across the sky. That night he wrote in the notebook in which he kept a meticulous record of his experiments and the speculations involved:
It is a swirl of radioactive gases transparent to light (therefore invisible in the astronomers’ telescopes) but somehow capable of reflecting the microwaves upon which radar depends. I should like to examine the reason for this but that would require more than the twenty-four days or so that are all the time left to any of us.
The gases may have been spewed out by the Sun or by some star beyond our Sun. More likely, I think, they were whirled out into space by one of the atomic bombs we exploded above Japan. We know that the main force of these explosions was expended upwards. They may have fed upon the pure energy of the interstellar void and now somehow have been turned back to destroy us who created them. This would be the ultimate irony.
It occurs to me that whatever the materialistic explanation, the fundamental one well may be that God, finally disgusted with the human race, has decided to wipe it out and start all over again.
The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack Page 44