The Earth In Peril

by Donald A Wollheim (ed)

  The girl licked her lips. Her eyes were strange and troubled, but they met his desperately.

  “I’m not,” she said unsteadily. “Honestly! I’ll swear it by any oath you can contrive!”

  “That’s too bad,” said Braddick grimly. “I’ve got to make that deal somehow, and if you were a spy you could help.

  I suspect it’s going to be a tough one, but I’ve got to go ahead.”

  Then he smiled sardonically.

  “The worst of it is, I’m afraid they’ll take it as a business matter and a swell opportunity to murder me. The men who run Atomic Power are that sort!”

  He rose from the table and headed for the communica

  tor. On the way, with a scornful gesture, he flung on the switch of the boardcast visiphone.

  II

  The Deal Is Made

  THE Atomic Power Company, you may remember, was founded by a young man named Brent, who made a mass-nullifier on purpose and discovered that he had made a time-field by accident. In consequence he had found the secret of atomic power.

  He made a field-generator which lessened the mass of any object within the circuit of the cable through which the field-generating impulses surged. As a necessary corollary, it increased the time rate of the object affected.

  A watch, for example, put into the mass-nullifying field with its mass reduced to one one-hundredth of normal, ran one hundred times as fast. But the field could reduce the mass of an object contained in it almost to actual zero, with a time-rate only to be expressed in astronomical figures.

  And when Brent, after divers adventures put mildly radioactive elements in the mass time field, he speeded up their rate of disintegration under strict control so that they were highly useful sources of power.

  In fact, before his death, Atomic Power produced more than half the horsepower used in Earth’s industries, and in twenty years more it produced ninety-seven-point-three per cent of all the fixed generator power used on the planet.

  And the power tubes lately invented by Dirk Braddick promised to give the corporation a monopoly of all the power used on earth in any form. But it was not an amiable corporation by that time.

  It was too big to be human. Its higher executive positions were places of power and of riches practically equal to the headship of nations. They were the subject of such feverish ambition as no other “private” employment ever fostered.

  By the very nature of the masstime field, too, it was too dangerous a device for its principles to be publicly known. Power was generated by its means in giant power stations turning out millions of kilowatts.

  The few technicians who understood the process were sworn to secrecy, enormously rewarded, and guarded by national as well as company secret police against threats or attempts at bribery. But the business policies of Atomic Power were under no such guard to prevent the undesirable.

  In 1992, Atomic Power was nearly a tyranny. Its monopoly of cheap power gave it almost life and death power over industries. And obviously, the little men in its organization, hoping feverishly for promotions, developed a coldblooded ruthlessness for the purpose of impressing their bosses.

  An explosion apparently wiped out all of Brent’s heirs, in 1991. The ownership of the majority of the company’s shares was thrown into trusteeship for the courts to settle, while the men who managed the company no longer had to account to anyone but purely hypothetical future owners of the majority stock.

  They then set to work to secure themselves in their jobs and their power, which was great enough to begin with. For a time, it looked as if Atomic Power would end up trying to run the Earth.

  But to Dirk Braddick, that morning, it looked as if there soon might not be any earth left to run. He put in a call for the head of the giant corporation, and while he waited for the call to go through, the broadcast visiphone verified his worst fears.

  A commercial visiplay was still being broadcast when the screen lighted up. Before he put in his call, the commercial was abruptly cut. A well-known N.A.B. newscaster announced curtly that a second cosmoquake had shaken the whole earth. An impromptu sequence of newscasts would follow until the damage had been assessed.

  Instantly a dark-featured man with a cut on his temple read hoarsely from flimsy sheets in his hands. His hands shook. The entire Amazon River basin was wiped out. Belim was a shambles, made so by fires which sprang up in the debris caused by the cosmoquake itself.

  He turned his head to receive a fresh batch of flimsies, and blood trickled down the side of his face and into his collar. He read on, his face twitching and his voice hoarse. Rio . . . Pernambuco. . . .

  He was cut off. The first newscaster cut in again.

  “Damage in the United States is great, especially in the southern parts and in California. Transport planes are being made ready to carry doctors, nurses, and medical supplies to areas of greatest destruction.

  "Note to all doctors and nurses—if casualties in your community are less than one per cent of the total population, report to the Red Cross for orders.”

  His face flashed off. A sun-browned man spoke harshly: “Mauna Loa, here in the Hawaiian Islands, is beginning its greatest eruption in history. Evacuations are proceeding at top speed. Honolulu is partly destroyed. Earth shocks of mounting intensity are practically continuous. We do not know what is coming. . . .”

  Braddick’s private visiphone call came through. The face of the head of Atomic Power looked out. Rogers, chairman of the board, was obviously shaken by the event just past, but his features would never really thaw. He spoke crisply: “My secretary said you called me about this thing that has just happened. What is it?”

  “They call it a cosmoquake,” said Braddick. "I know what it is. There are more coming and worse—much worsel I have a chance of doing something about them. I need mass time field power units and a technician—an engineer who can design and build the units I want in the sizes and for the purposes I’ll specify. I can work out the field if I have to, but I’m in a hurry. How much?”

  “It’s impossible!” said Rogers sharply. ‘‘We don’t allow outside experimental work with our fields!”

  “Your own men will handle this one,” said Braddick, “and I’m in no mood to bargain. I need those field units, and I need them fast! Your life as well as mine is in the balance, and the life of everybody else on earth. Your company won’t be worth much if the earth is depopulated!”

  Behind him, newscasters flashed successively on the screen, each with a curtly told tale of tragedy. In the Baltic, the cosmoquake impulse had not been overhead and then underfoot, but almost half the way around the horizon. In consequence, a tidal wall of water a hundred feet high had overwhelmed lower Sweden.

  “You’re an alarmist,” said Rogers—though still pale from

  his own experience in the cosmoquake—“You’re an inventor, not a scientist. I’ll wait and see what the physicists say.” “Meaning,” said Braddick coldly, “you want to know what I’ll offer. All right. I’ll waive all royalties Atomic Power owes me, while I have a technician at my disposal.”

  Rogers’ expression was frankly that of a shrewd bargainer now. A dyed-in-the-wool business man will be a business man until the heavens fall.

  "Not good enough.”

  The visiphone muttered behind Braddick. All along the western edge of Europe cities lay in wreckage from the twisting effects of the cosmoquake there. Eastern Asia was hard hit. Southern Africa was smashed. The loss of life was terrific. In—

  “Then I’ll give you the things outright!” snapped Braddick. “That’s presenting you with a monopoly of broadcast power! If you don’t know how worthless money is right now, I do! I’ve got a job to do!”

  Rogers looked smug.

  “You’ll transfer those two patents,” he said shrewdly, “and take a salary while our technician is working with you. Then we’ll own any discoveries you make while using a mass time field. It’s a deal on that basis, but no other.”

  “All right! I a
ccept it!” Braddick said savagely. “One technician. No spies.”

  “He has to have a guard,” said Rogers.

  “No!” snapped Braddick. “I’ve no intention of being killed by an ‘accident’ when you think you’ve got everything you can. Send your man here fast!"

  He cut off the visiphone. Almost at the same instant the girl shut off the broadcast instrument. She was white as marble.

  "There’ve been more people killed in the last five minutes,” she said shakenly, “than—than in centuries of wars!”

  “Quite so,” said Braddick, seething, "and the rest of us are slated to follow them. Look herel I’ve just made a deal with Atomic Power.”

  He repeated the terms of the bargain, his voice sardonic. "That’s the price I have to pay for trying to save Rogers’ neck, among others. I’m telling you this because I still think you’re a spy. If you are, you’ll have had a decent technical education, most likely, and I need technical help badly. Will you work for me for awhile? You’ll still be working for Atomic Power! ”

  The girl went white.

  “I told you I was afraid of the name of Atomic Power. If its men come here—’’

  “They’re coming,” said Braddick grimly, “even if you’re telling the truth. You don’t count. I don’t count. Nothing counts but getting this job done, and I can’t spare the time to try to work out the mass time field for myself.

  “But if by any chance you’re really trying to hide from somebody—do you want to leave? Are you broke? By the way, have you looked in your pockets for identification?" She licked her lips and nodded.

  "I looked. There’s nothing. But if you really beggared yourself to get something you need to work with—if it’s that important—I’ll stay here and try to help.”

  “Then what can you do?” he demanded. "I’ve got to build a spaceship. I’ve got to design a space drive. I’ve got to—Heaven only knows what I’ve got to do or how long I’ve got to do it in!”

  “I’m a fair draftsman,” she said unsteadily, “and I do know some physics. But you can’t make a space drive! There’s never been a spaceship except rockets, and they—’’

  “There’s going to be one now!" said Braddick. “It’s going to be made right herel I’ve got some gadgets that will help. Come on over to the drafting board. Since you don’t know your name, I’m going to call you Jane.”

  Far, far away, the Things hurtled on. Two of the far-flung scouts—light weeks ahead of even the advanced-guard-had already passed Sol. They went on toward their unguessable destination. Their velocity was an infinitesimal fraction less than the speed of light.

  Because of their speed, the mass of the Things was monstrous. Einstein first established the law by which objects near the speed of light gain mass. At their speed, the Things had an effective mass of twelve sols each—twelve times the mass of the sun which is the center of the solar system.

  Yet they were not large. They would not have showed even as pin-points in the largest telescopes on earth.

  But in their light fast progress through Sol’s family of planets, each of the first two had shaken the sun to fury, and the first had made a turmoil on the earth, and the second had wrought havoc. With thousands of others to follow.

  For the next twenty-four hours, Braddick worked in a frenzy of sustained effort. He was perhaps a queer sort of person to save the earth and probably a queerer one still to have made three fortunes by really practical inventions.

  His real line was psychology, and his passion was the technique of research. It was his life work to study the methods by which discoveries are made, and to devise new techniques by which research could become more effective.

  He discovered a neglected principle of discovery and set to work to write a paper explaining it. To show how it worked, he undertook research to make a direct current transformer.

  He carefully noted down every single step in the effort.

  When his paper was published, he absently noted that he had a valuable property in the discovery he’d made to prove a psychological point.

  A second paper on another point of research technique yielded as a by-product a vacuum power-tube, which handled unprecedented amounts of power without even a heated filament.

  A third paper required to be illustrated by an actual bit of research, so Braddick made a step-by-step log of the process of discovering a new method of casting metals, by which castings could be made with such accuracy that they needed no machining.

  It had not occurred to him at first that he would make machine tools almost obsolete except for the making of first models—but he did. And he did not have to worry about money after that.

  His laboratory had been built on an isolated sixty-acre tract he’d bought with the proceeds of the D.C. transformer and made nearer to his heart’s desire with the profits of the others. Now, in the heterogenous mass of machinery and apparatus in the various silent buildings, he could work on any type of problem he chose, in order to test out his theories of research methods.

  While he worked frantically, setting up the foundation for his present self-assigned task, Jane labored earnestly to translate his sketches into a highly specialized type of working-drawing. A good deal of Braddick’s labor was the conversion of perfectly normal bits of apparatus to uses merely allied to their original purposes.

  Then the Atomic Power helicopter arrived with the technician. His name was Thorn, and he was gray-haired and bulky, with an air of enormous repose and complacency. But there was another man with him—Hamlin.

  Hamlin was definitely not a technician. He had the hair-trigger manner of a minor Atomic Power executive, all driving urge and dynamic air, who would perform any antic or cut any throat to impress his superiors of his company loyalty and fitness for a better job than he had.

  Braddick took them straight to the big shed.

  “I’ve got an impossible job on my hands,” he told them, “and if I succeed at it, there’s an inconceivable one to follow. To show you the start of it, here’s a construction machine I’ve built.

  “Ordinarily, you make a specialized machine-tool to turn out one particular part, and it will produce that part cheaper than any other method can do. But if you try to change the product, the machine is useless. You get efficiency at the cost of flexibility.

  “For that reason, there aren’t any mass-production machines for big objects like ships and so on. It’s cheaper to be inefficient and flexible. But this constructor is both efficient and flexible. I feed magnetronic plastics—the stuff they make houses and ships of nowadays—into this moving arm.

  “It makes drawings in the air following drawings it scans with photo-cells. But plastic comes out of the end of the drawing arm and hardens as it comes. This thing will start at one end of a ship or a house and build it complete to the other end, following drawings only.

  “It’s ready to make a spaceship hull now.-1 need one. To power that ship I’m going to need three and possibly four mass time field units. One is to include the whole ship in its influence when it’s turned on.

  “Two others are to be set up along a tube fore and aft. They needn’t be big. Come along and I’ll show you the rough sketches, and you can plan them out, Thom.”

  The big, white-haired man shook his head condescendingly.

  “A mass time field isn’t a space drive, Mr. Braddick,” he said tolerantly. “I can do anything you say if Mr. Hamlin authorizes it, but—"

  “He authorizes it,” said Braddick. He looked at Hamlin.

  “Oh, surely! Surely!” said Hamlin, beaming.

  Braddick spoke gently:

  “You’re the trigger-man, aren’t you, Hamlin?”

  “Eh? What?”

  “It’s an obsolete term,” said Braddick. “You’re to see that I have an accident if I seem likely to do Atomic Power any harm, aren’t you?”

  Hamlin’s mouth dropped open. He looked scared for a moment.

  “Oh, don’t worry!” Braddick told him. “I’m a suck
er, this time—another obsolete term. I’m not a business man. There’s some dangerous stuff coming this way, and I want to go out and meet it.

  “My purpose is not to make profits, but to keep people from being killed. Quaint, eh? But I’m one of the people I don’t want killed. Here’s the drafting room.”

  He opened the door. The girl he called Jane was bent over the drafting board, making a working-drawing in three-colored inks with extraordinary pains to be accurate. She looked up, her eyes fearful. They flickered swiftly from one to the other of the men who represented Atomic Power. A vast relief seemed to fill her.

  Then she turned back to her work. But Braddick saw Hamlin’s face as he caught the first glimpse of Jane. Hamlin started and stared and an enormous inner excitement filled him. He fairly quivered, and his hand made an obscure movement, instantly checked.

  "My assistant, Jane—er—Smith,” said Braddick. "Thom, look over those sketches. I’ve marked where I need the smaller time mass fields. As I said, a field has also to enclose the whole ship.

  “Give Miss Smith the outside dimensions of the apparatus you’ll make to generate the fields and tell her where they’ll have to be placed. She’ll provide for them. Hamlin, come here a moment.”

  He led Hamlin through two doors.

  “I’ll take that flash-pistol, Hamlin,” he said quietly. “In this pocket.” He pointed to the pocket toward which Hamlin had made an arrested gesture on sight of Jane. “I wouldn't try to use it. Definitely not!”

  Hamlin had had a shock. He had been terrifically excited. This was a new shock. Braddick took the flash-pistol.

  “Who is she that you want to kill her the instant you see her? What’s Atomic Power got against her?”

  Hamlin protested vehemently. Braddick listened. Then he spoke.

  “She’s my assistant now, Hamlin. If you touch so much as her little finger, I’ll kill you. You’ve run into somebody at work meeting an emergency. Don’t make me use emergency methods on you!”

  The first line of scouts—of which two had passed through the solar system—drove through space toward the Southern Cross. There was an infinitesimal resistance to their movement, caused by the one atom per cubic centimetre to be found in even the remotest part of interstellar emptiness, so the drive of the Things stayed on.