From the nose, it had sloped back to a stubby tail. Under it were two small wheels, and over it a tiny hook, purpose unknown. Aside from that, the only features were the miniature jets on each side where the wings should be, set to swivel in complete circles—forwards, backwards, up or down. In the tail, another swivel nozzle or jet was hidden, which could also be turned in a complete circle sideways.
It obviously could never fly. The jets were designed to burn no fuel. Instead, their six-inch bores were lined with tiny bits of wire that pointed back toward the exit, and there was a coil of peculiar design around the front of each.
Custer came over, shaking his head. "You look better, Mike. Figured how she flies?"
"No. Anything new?"
"A little, but none of it good. Morley thinks those bits of wires work by the point-disdiarge principle that will keep a toy spinning when it's connected to a battery and high-voltage coil. And in that case, those coils must somehow collect the atmosphere ahead and pack it enough for the jets to do all the lifting."
Enright had come up, and was shaking his head vigorously from side to side. "Not now, Morley doesn't. He found the switch that turned them on, and tried it. Nothing happenedl"
They had learned some things, but most of them were like that. The ship was split down the middle, horizon-
tally. All the equipment was in the upper half, behind the pilot cabin. The lower half was apparently packed solid, and encased in something so hard and tough that diamond drills and a monatomic hydrogen torch had made no dent in it. But it held power. They were sure of that, since the big cables came from there to all the rest of the machine.
The metal of the hull was pure iron—chemically pure beyond even a trace of anything else they could find. Yet it was harder and tougher than the best beryllium steel they knew.
At a hundred degrees below zero, it turned as soft as lead, but hardened again at higher temperatures—and then was nothing but soft iron. Something was done to it to give it its rustless, impervious toughness and its tensile strength of almost a million pounds an inch, but they had no idea of what.
He had accepted the experts' word that the controls were worked by magnetic current without too much surprise, though they went around muttering something about Ehrenhaft being proved false and seemed to regard it as something that shouldn't be. Here soft iron was used as insulation, and a peculiar plastic seemed to form the conductor.
Another group was going insane over a transformer that was connected to the big tank the X-rays had showed in the lower half of the ship—without revealing whether it was a storage battery or some kind of atomic converter with no radiation.
The transformer looked normal enough, but its secondary delivered exactly one thousand volts at four hundred cycles per second, whether the primary was hooked to a storage battery, a tiny dry cell, a 1440 volt sixty cycle a.c. line, or a high tension coil that gave better than thirty-thousand volts.
The gadget weighed about twenty pounds, and they'd put as much as fifty amperes through it without its warming up the slightest—fifty kilowatts, and probably only a small fraction of what it could carry!
It had a soft iron core, copper wire wound exactly like a normal transformer, and a thin smear of insulation. Substituting a new iron core made on the spot, or a new winding designed to fit had cut its ability to handle power, but had made no change in its constant output, though the use of both the new coil and core had given them only a rather poor ordinary transformer.
There was another transformer-like gadget on the back of each of the two seats in the cabin, apparently designed to rest on the pilots' shoulders and be strapped on. They had tried putting power into it, but there had been no results. The power disappeared, but nothing happened—no fields around it, no heating up, no sound or movement.
The worst case was something whose purpose they did know. The gadget that transformed electric current into magnetic current was a simple copper plate attached to an iron solenoid, with a winding of electric lines around it. That had worked perfectly with a substitute winding, a copied solenoid, or a new copper plate. But it hadn't worked with more than one thing substituted!
There were bolts whose nuts simply slid on—and then couldn't be removed in any manner they tried. One of the tools they had found behind the seats removed them, but it seemed no more than a simple, transparent piece of plastic that simply grasped the nut loosely.
"How'd you find it worked?" Mike asked.
Custer grimaced. "There's an instruction book, Mike. It was nicely shoved into one of the tool kits, complete. Did you take a look at the lettering on the instruments?"
Mike had seen it. There were at least forty letters in the alphabet they used whenever this ship had been made. Some of them, like the Greek theta for "th" and the reversed e for "uh" were easy enough to decode. Some of the others seemed ridiculous, unless the pronunciation had undergone a change.
"So you couldn't read most of it?" he asked.
"No—we read it. We put a code boy on it, and he worked out a full translation. But did you ever look closely at a service manual on anything issued by the government? Sure, it told you to take such and such a nut off, and screw down such and such a switch. But I'll bet you never found one that gave the real purpose of a machine, how it was made, how to substitute parts if the right ones weren't around—in fact, anything but how to take it to pieces, put it together, and tune it up; even then, you had to know what it was all about by yourself. Right?"
He went back to his desk and returned with close-typed sheets of paper. Mike looked through them, and at the photostatted diagrams. He located the jets. The big coil at the nose was marked as being a supercharger, which would indicate it might somehow compress the air—but he got no further information, and the thing still hadn't worked at all.
Then he gulped. "What the heck is protergy?"
Morley had come up then, and his scowl deepened at the word. He picked up the sheets, rolled them carefully, and handed them back between thumb and forefinger to Custer, making a gesture of holding his nose. He was supposed to be one of the ten top physicists in the country, but he now looked like a simple, tired old mechanic.
"Protergy, kinergy, duration, extension, matter," he said in disgust. "They make their handbooks less intelligent by giving basic theory. And from now on, never let me see a handbook that has that. It does more damage than good.
Protergy is a state of excitation through extension, like gravity and magnetism, but the raw stuff from which they are made. Kinergy is a propagation of excitation through extension with a fixed relation to duration—light is made from it.
Matter is a resonant matrix for the transformation of protergy to kinergy, or vice versa, and is itself composed of protergy in a kinergic state, causing a compression of extension within any given duration ... I... I'm quoting, if you think it's pure mouthwash.
And just between us, it doesn't mean a damned thing, couldn't mean anything, and shouldn't. It has something to do with crystals, too—but somehow, I get the idea that every single atom is a crystal to those boys! Incidentally, Custer, what did you think of that crack there about the non-Einsteinian recognition of the limitations of the law of conservation of matter and energy?"
Mike shook his head and moved away. Fortunately, it wasn't his business to understand, but only to work with Custer in trying to get results. He found one of the men working on a tube of something—or rather, two tubes, each with a liquid oozing out. It was from the repair kit, meant to glue together sheets of the iron covering of the ship. There were half a dozen such tubes.
"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.
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