Dianna, Stephen's former lover, was a part-time tutor and research student at the university, and our agent had arranged a meeting in her room in the Geography Department. She was fresh faced and well scrubbed, and wore no makeup whatever. Her long pale hair was drawn tightly back into a neat pony tail. Her room was likewise severe and spotless, with only a desk, five chairs, and a bookcase.
Most of the time that we were there she sat behind her totally clear, polished desk, perhaps using it as a rampart against the memories that we wanted to exhume.
“Stephen and I were an item for about a year, and he lived with me for five months,” she began in a flat, controlled voice. “I met him at a friend's party, and found him interesting... different. He had a marvellous dry sense of humour, and delightfully different ways of looking at things. He would ask people things like 'if your right hand becomes your left in a mirror, why doesn't your head get swapped with your feet', and 'if I put a book on this chair, then take the chair away but maintain the book's potential energy, will the book fall?'“
“His mother said nothing about you,” said Taylor. “Were there problems between you?”
“Were there ever! He must have been the most badly house-trained person I've ever met, and I'm sure Mrs Cole did it deliberately—so that the likes of me would never go near him. He never washed his own clothes and dishes, he just let things pile up until I couldn't stand it any more and did them myself. When he moved in with me he seemed to think that I was taking over from his mother. I put up with it for a while, but then he started to yell at me for even tidying up after him. He said I was disturbing the order of his mess! One day I decided that I'd had enough, so I changed the lock on my student flat, packed his gear into cartons and had it delivered to his mother's house. Then I left for a conference in Sydney that I'd been thinking of attending.”
“From what I know of Stephen, he would not have taken all that lying down,” I said.
“True. He tried tears, threats, and presents, then he went through a stage of following me about everywhere—and I mean everywhere. It was then that I met Brian, who was on an exchange program from the US. Apart from being a trainee astronaut in the Shuttle program he was also clean, patient, considerate, organised and mature, everything that Stephen was not. I mean, at last I had someone that I was actually game to introduce to my parents!
“One night Brian and I arrived at my flat to find that my slob of an ex had picked the lock, then got drunk on two of my best bottles of Hunter Valley red. I told Brian to go for a walk, then had a row with Stephen, a really bad one. I was shouting the whole time so that the neighbours could hear, and there was plenty to listen to. Stephen was easily embarrased, you know.
“He was a lousy lover, had the manners of a pig, dressed like an ape in an op shop, actually preferred to live in squalor, and couldn't finish a major project to save himself. He said that I was just looking for excuses to leave him for an astronaut, and that he was as good as any astronaut. That was the end. I pushed him out of his chair and told him to get out. As he got up he took a little tin box from his pocket, the type that pipe tobacco comes in. He pressed a switch that protruded from the lid, and when he released the box it just hung in mid-air. Then he pressed the switch again and handed it to me.
“It was just some cheap trick, I'm sure of that, but at the time I was speechless. Then he said 'I'm better than Einstein, too!' and something really snapped inside me. He was still the same arrogant, opinionated pig as before, and I shouted it in his face. I threw the box in the waste-bin, got his arm in a judo lock and marched him through the door and down the stairs. I warned him that I could have him charged with breaking and entering, and that he'd go to jail when the judge saw his past record.
“That was eight months ago. Friends told me that he had suddenly become very neat and well dressed, had started wearing contact lenses, had learned to drive, and was taking flying lessons. I'm sure you know more about the rest of his story than I do.”
A working model of the Pharaoh's drive! It had to be.
“You wouldn't know what happened to that floating tin box, would you?” Taylor asked, her voice calm and her intonation giving nothing away. “We're doing a study of Stephen's discoveries, and it could be quite interesting.”
“That toy? I threw it in the garbage, so it would have gone out with the weekly collection.”
“And what happens to that?”
“It's... er, it's taken to a depot, incinerated, then dumped in an old quarry. You'd need an army to dig it out again.” She sighed. “He was a virgin when we first met.”
How could I tell her that we had the power to have an army excavate the quarry?
“Could you describe the tin?” I asked instead.
“It was round, about three inches in diameter and just over an inch deep, coloured gold, brown and green. There was a plastic switch in the middle of the lid, and it weighed about as much as four small radio batteries. Virgins get so obsessive about the first lover.”
She took a notepad from a drawer and drew a rough sketch of the model, then got up and handed it to Taylor.
“Stephen was working fairly hard to get you back,” said Taylor as she studied the sketch.
Dianna walked over to the window and stared out across the courtyard.
“I know, and I also know that I would never have gone back. Sure he smartened himself up superficially, but that was only to prove something to me. The main trouble was that he was an inverted intellectual slob, and a snob as well. He was never happier than when he was re-reading old 'Space Patrol' comics, and he said that the 'Star Wars' film was a greater art form than any opera. The better I got to know him, the worse he looked. Honestly, he could have given me the moon and I wouldn't have gone back. I told him that, too.”
We were lucky that she was looking the other way just then. The sketch slipped from Taylor's fingers, and the alarm on both our faces must have been unmistakable. For one perverse moment I felt like handing Dianna the piece of moonrock in my pocket, but the gesture would have done nothing but change her uneasy remorse into intense guilt.
I sat on a wooden bench on the campus lawns, watching boats on the Brisbane River, drowsy in the pleasant winter sunlight. Beside me the driver filled in a crossword, while in the car Taylor radioed a coded report to her superiors.
My daydream returned, and in it the Pharaoh had decided that he wanted to fly too. The chief engineer, for all his theories about invisible wings, could produce no results. His head was now on a platter, and the face had a strong resemblance to that of Richards’. A new chief engineer was hard at work, examining scraps of papyrus and wicker from the aviator's house in minute detail, and interviewing the neighbours. A big bag and a fire! Perhaps he was making a continual burnt sacrifice to the gods, and they were levitating him? The lump of moonrock lay in the palm of my hand, mocking me. It is so simple to fly, one needs only a large, light bag and a source of hot air. It is so simple to reach the moon, one needs only... what? Something that an amateur welder could assemble out of commonly available material in a few months, and which would cost no more than a good used car. It had taken the multi-billion dollar might of Project Apollo to put me on the moon, yet this kid had done it for perhaps ten million times less.
For the lack of an idea, a universe is lost. I took the accident report of the fighter pilot from my briefcase and re-read it for at least the twentieth time:
'There had been sightings of a UFO from a commercial jetliner, and a radar anomaly confirmed them. I was on a training flight in the area, flying an F/A-18 Hornet. Base radioed the coordinates, bearing and speed to me and ordered an intercept for observation. My aircraft was not armed at the time.
'I observed a craft of unknown design moving at a speed of about sixty knots, and travelling so close to the water that it left a slight wake. It was headed for mangrove flats on the coast, not directly for Brisbane. We were ten nautical miles out to sea at the time.
'On my second pass I app
roached the craft from behind, and had slowed to just above stalling speed for a better view. Suddenly the craft rose into my path with phenomenal acceleration, and I was unable to avoid a collision. I ejected successfully, and as my parachute opened I noticed that part of the craft's wreckage was travelling upwards at a steep angle. I concluded that the craft's drive unit had been torn away, but was still functioning. I could see no details of the mechanism.'
Flying submarine indeed! I conjured up the image of Richards' head on a platter again. If it had been a submarine Stephen could have easily dived into the sea to escape, but the kid knew as well as anyone that seals designed for a vaccum would be of little use when they were under water and the pressure was from the other direction. He also knew that the Pharaoh could go back into space, where a mere jet fighter could never follow.
The sequence of events, if nothing else, was fairly clear. Stephen had taken off at night, and had flown straight up from his backyard. Apparently the drive allowed him to navigate by dead reckoning, as there was not so much as a pair of binoculars found in the wreck's cabin. Once on the surface of the moon he had used the robot arm to fill a cannister with rocks without going outside. He had probably planned the trip to take three days, but for some reason he was twelve hours late returning to Earth. Finding that it was after dawn in Brisbane, he had descended far out to sea.
Perhaps Stephen did not want publicity, or perhaps he remembered his earlier problems with the police over unauthorised flying machines. In his position I would have flown the Pharaoh to the coast at sea level, then hidden it in the mangrove swamps until after sunset. When he realised that a jet fighter was investigating him and possibly preparing to shoot him down, he tried to escape back into space. He was in too much of a panic to check where the jet was when he steered the Pharaoh straight up.
Taylor finished her report, and I returned to the car. As we left for the air force base she seemed quite pleased with herself.
“It looks like we finish here quite soon,” she said when I asked her how long our remaining work would take.
“Soon? But it would take a big team of diggers months to search the dump for that model of the drive. And what about a search of the sea bed for extra fragments from the Pharaoh?”
“These two operations have been costed out at near ten million dollars,” she replied with strict patience. “We are to proceed with questioning Mrs Cole under hypnosis, and with the searching of her house and garage. If nothing results from all that, we are to return. Oh yes, and all evidence that shows the Pharaoh was a viable space vehicle is to be secured and turned over to the Pentagon.”
“Are you trying to say that the investigation is off unless we find a quick, cheap solution?”
“In a word, yes.”
“But we spent billions on Project Apollo and the Shuttles.”
“And we were pretty sure that we would have something at the end of it all. What guarantee do we have this time? The tin can with the model drive in it was probably crushed in a garbage compactor, then melted in some incinerator. Even if it survived the heat, the components inside would have been fried beyond recognition. As for what a search of the sea bed could turn up, there was so much of the drive's mechanism torn free in one piece that it continued to function. The pilot saw it rising into the sky, and that means any bits that hit the water are not going to tell us anything about what powered it.”
I slumped back in my seat, stunned. The Pharaoh had become bored with the airship project. Told that the secret of flight might only be rediscovered after years of experimentation with charcoal burners, wicker baskets and papyrus bags, he ordered his engineers to return to the problem of designing a theft-proof pyramid. He had thought that his airship would be driven aloft by a great, glorious pair of wings. Wicker baskets and charcoal burners were ignoble.
“It's always the same!” I said, slamming my fist against the car door. “The technology is there, but we ignore it. If Goddard and his rocket pioneers had had support from the US government we could have had the first satellite in orbit before the Second World War. Today we have the technology to establish a lunar base, and even land an expedition on Mars. As it is, we're lucky to even have the Shuttle.”
“The Shuttle is no mean achievement,” replied Taylor, a distinct chill in her voice. “And you seem to have forgotten our development of the atomic bomb, and the lunar landings. That's a strange thing for a former Apollo astronaut to do.”
Her reply was calculated to tell me that my views were deviant and disloyal. There were no votes in this issue, so it should not concern loyal citizens.
“Yes, yes, they were fantastic achievements,” I said wearily, “but it took fear to loosen the purse strings to pay for all that. Fear of Nazi Germany, and fear of the Soviets. Why haven't we reached Mars?”
“We don't have to do something just because it's technically possible to do it. Look at the size of the deficit, then tack the cost of an expedition to Mars onto that, then tell me what the returns are expected to be.”
“But Stephen's drive would be dirt cheap, once we know how it works. Never mind space, it would revolutionise transport here on Earth. You could attach the drive to cars and fly anywhere on Earth for peanuts.”
She slumped back in her seat, shaking her head. I knew her well enough to realise that she was too loyal and tidy to dream, and that I was failing her. Determine the facts, then secure the physical evidence that Stephen had actually reached the moon , we had been told. We had done the job well, yet while she was pleased with a job well done, I was daring to think about our findings. Now we had new orders, for which she would build new justifications.
“In a way Stephen's drive is too good,” she said finally, the issues and her orders reconciled in her mind. “People would have so much freedom of movement that governments would lose control. Anyway, try to imagine the economic chaos if the petroleum, automobile and aircraft industries collapsed overnight. Even if we do discover the secret, we'll need to guard it carefully and use it responsibly until the world is ready. If the discovery is really lost, so much the better.”
“But all new inventions upset the status quo!” I insisted. “Think of all the errand boys put out of work by the telephone, or the number of stables that went broke because of the car. The world goes on, and is usually a better place on the whole.”
“This invention is dangerous at this time.”
“That's just the opinion of some timid CIA civil servant.”
Her eyes flashed with annoyance, but she said nothing.
“Adele, the model drive will corrode away if we wait too long. I mean... the idea could be like that of the airship: the ancient Egyptians had the materials and technology to fly before 1000 BC, but the idea had to wait another 3000 years. This might be the same.”
“The airship might have also destroyed civilisation as they they knew it,” she muttered, folding her arms and frowning. That was her signal that the subject was closed. I was not able to retort that I would gladly trade a few pyramids for the chance to fly to the stars by 1986.
The next two days were a disaster on one level, a triumph on another. All that we managed to learn from Mrs Cole was that the Pharaoh had two large batteries, a bank of solar cells, four small gas tanks, and a refrigeration unit. Our search of her house and garage revealed nothing, apart from some quite ordinary metalworking tools. Taylor was pleased, as the case was drawing out to a tidy conclusion, and the status quo would be maintained. I was tormented by the thought of whole worlds slipping out of our grasp for many centuries.
My work became more administration than investigation, and I patiently checked and crosschecked the reports and evidence for consistency. This involved, among other things, checking the security clearences of all Australians concerned, and it was thus that I discovered that Richards was British. His background was good: he had worked on the British Black Arrow rocket that had launched their Prospero satellite back in 1971.
I smiled and shook my head s
adly. Surely such a man would— but of course such a man would realise! The moonrock in my pocket had been released and sent out by accident, he had told me so himself. The offending assistant had probably had his backside kicked very hard.
I drove out to the city dump to do some checking for myself. Everything was as we had been told. There was an incinerator, piles of ash, and a disused quarry. I checked the records, and they confirmed that the load containing the model drive had been burned, but there was more. Some loads were dumped as general fill at other sites, and these had not been burned. The records were in a loose-leaf folder, and there was ample scope for forgery.
With the aid of a street directory and a list of dumps and old quarries, I began a very strange tourist trip of Brisbane. Eleven dumps and forty miles of driving on the left hand side of the road later, I found what I was looking for. The dump was closed, but there was evidence of intense and recent activity by heavy earthmoving equipment. I pretended to have a flat tyre, and as I changed a wheel for the spare, the inevitable group of small kids gathered to watch. From them I learned that the dump had been closed two months ago, but that the army had moved in for some sort of training exercise. The locals had been told that it was an exercise in handling rubbish in the sorts of quantities that would be generated by a nuclear attack.
Back in my office I checked the dates: Stephen had died ten weeks ago, and the recovery of the wreckage had begun the next day. The investigators would have had plenty of time to discover the micrometeorite pitting on the rock samples in the cannister, then go on to compare them with the chemical composition of such rocks as I had brought home from the moon. Taylor entered, and I handed her the files that I had been working on.
“The case is pretty well wrapped up,” she said, sitting on the edge of my desk. “Look, I'm sorry that we couldn't go all out on this one, but you know how it is. Why put a huge amount of effort into discovering something that may be more trouble than it's worth?”
Ghosts of Engines Past Page 18