Then it hit him—there was no blackout, though such a circle must be putting at least twenty gravities pressure on himl It felt like a leisurely turn in a slow carl And the tension that should have warned him to ease off on the controls had never hit him.
Anti-gravity, or synthetic gravity neutralizing the pull by an exact counter pull? It must be some such device— probably the gadget that he'd called a transformer at the back of his neck. If it were adjusted to maintain a feeling of one gravity, naturally it would show no results when lying quietly in a one gravity field!
He found his course toward the testing ground that had been cleared and abandoned during the beginning of the war. It was again posted and waiting for him. He came over it at fifty thousand feet, set the cross-hairs of the tiny sight, and pulled down on the bomb-trigger that was to release one of the tin-can sized bombs.
The ship steadied and went into a climb, without a move on his part. It went up to eighty-thousand feet. Then something clicked, just as his eyes caught the target in the cross-hairs again. He seemed to hang there for long minutes, before he finally realized he was again cruising on.
Then, at last, hell blossomed below him. His work was finished, and Custer and Morley would have their check on whether the stuff worked as they expected. But he already knew that a ship with a full load of such cans could do more damage than their top-sized bombers, all combined.
The return was routine. He centered the field in the same cross-hairs, lining them up to touch the spot from which he'd taken off. For a second, he had to stop to realize it was still dark down there—but the system must have worked by infra-red, since the image was clearly lighted in the little sight. Mike touched a button marked "Land," and waited. The ship began dropping smoothly, and came to an exact landing on her own. She even cut power and released the straps from his shoulders.
He snapped off his mask, and ducked down and out of the little door, squinting through the darkness. "Back safe and sound," he shouted softly. "And after this, a comet will seem like an ox-cart."
A flashlight picked him out, and Ouster's voice drifted out to him. "Come in here, Mike!"
The tones were warning that something was up. But it was a totally inadequate warning for what the flashlight revealed.
The end of the laboratory beyond was a complete wreck. There was no pattern, even, to the twisted, distorted shapes that lay there. It was as if a fire beyond any heat men had experienced had suddenly melted two sets of machinery into one, and yet had left parts of each untouched.
Mike stared stupidly about.
"The capacitor bank and dynamos have come home," Custer said, and his voice was almost a whisper. "I was just moving back when I saw it. They were just a ghost— then here they were, right in the middle of our equipment. Two objects, one space. The riddle is answered— they didn't explode. They just got out of each other's way, molecule by molecule. From the wind, I'd say the air got completely out of the way."
He swept the beam around again. "A minute before you landed. I've been trying to think. Machinery heavier than the ship . . . didn't go as far ... maybe action and reaction not the same. . . ."
But the torch was still centered on the foreground of the ruins, and his mind was clearly not on what he was saying.
Mike took die flash, and began going over what he could of the rubble. Then he turned. "No. No control panel here. And that means that Dad—or whatever is left of him—didn't come back. Better get the few men we can trust completely to clear this mess out with arc cutters and clear it away."
"I'll take care of it," Custer agreed heavily. "It looks as if we're washed up here, Mike. Most of our stuff is ruined between the explosion and this. And we can't work here, anyhow, if there's—more to come!"
"The scientists and technicians can take what's left. And the readings on my flight and whatever they need from the Enigma. They'll know where to ship it. I suppose you'll have to go to Washington to arrange for it— one of us will, anyhow. . . ."
His leg ached again, as if the toes were curled up tightly and he was resting his full weight on them. But there was no time to think of that. The mess had to be cleared away, space had to be left for anything that came
back, or whatever it might do. He'd have to post guards here, and somehow make them keep watch without tellr ing the whole story.
No wonder Pan-Asia was nearing the Rhine. They hadn't developed a time machine to curse them with false gifts.
The same idea was in his mind, only greatly strengthened, when they met with those in Washington who knew of Project Swipe. At six hundred feet below street level, where most of the higher echelon actually met, even the best construction and air-conditioning had never overcome the cold and the dampness that was in spirit more even than fact. Mike's missing leg ached worse, and his thoughts were more bitter than ever.
The assistant to the Secretary of Defense opened the business briefly. "So far, gentlemen, we've spent months of preparing, a great deal of effort concealing, and five weeks of actual operation of this project.
The Dane Aircraft works have come to approximately a standstill— and you know the need for those planes as well as I do— because we've been forced to screen out most of the workers, and keep only a token staff there; since our contract guarantees normal operations, the tax-payers will have to foot that bill.
We've also tied up most of the great research organizations of the Alliance this last month. And unless my preliminary information is false, the enemy has only failed to penetrate our security because there has been nothing to learn, not because our most strenuous efforts have kept an airtight net. Dr. Morley, will you sum up what the laboratories keyed to your section have discovered?"
"Just a minute," another man asked. Mike didn't know him, but he could guess that he must be from the President's office, from the looks directed his way. "How do we know this wasn't meant for us to find? Can we say it was a genuine plane?"
Custer stood up. "It was an actual war-plane, and one that had seen combat. Nothing we have short of an H-bomb could have ruined the plastic bubble, as it was first found. Nothing could have killed every cell in the
pilot's body, to our current knowledge. The notice pasted inside the handbook, recommending action if forced down in enemy territory, confirms the desperation of those using the plane. We don't know whom they were fighting—or what—but this was no fake. It was a die-stamped job, mostly—and that means mass production. They've got war up there, and it's something we'd better forget, if we want to stay sane. All right, Dr. Morley."
Morley shook himself, and began reciting what they knew. The capacitors—big and little—were just that; the piece they had recovered from Mike's single bombing had proved it. But it was impossible for such capacitors to exist. Capacitors carried a charge according to the product of the plate area and number, times the dielectric constant of insulation, all divided by the thickness of the dielectric.
Size, number of plates, and thickness could only be altered within limits. So in the future, they had apparently found a material with a nearly infinite dielectric constant! He tried to explain how impossible that was, but Mike lost track of some of that. Anyhow, they now knew that this dielectric was a thin smear of a lacquer-like substance, the same as their insulation, and would stand up under a voltage that exceeded anything imaginable for such a thin substance—several million volts.
"Naturally, it's completely self-healing when cut or punctured," he added. "It seals a cut instantly, or you'd get a short through the air around your condenser. I am informed it's composed of helium, lithium, argon, fluorine, bismuth and carbon. I have no idea of how they managed to make a compound out of inert gases.
And I have even less idea of how they polymerized the stuff. We don't know why it works, how it is made, nor how to duplicate its properties. It is completely outside all our knowledge."
Other accounts began to come in, of equally impossible things. Copper could not be alloyed with nitrogen— without forming a
compound—but it had been handled that way. No alloy of simple tungsten and boron could stand up under a temperature of over 6000 degrees Centigrade, without pitting. Bolts that held their nuts on by magnetostriction couldn't have those nuts removed by a tool that was nothing but vinyl acetate.
Mike listened, trying to picture it all. The trouble was that men were only barbarians. Columbus had known that iron would sink, and had built his ships of wood. But if he'd been given a metal ship, his time couldn't have cast the plates for more such ships. DaVinci had conceived the helicopter, but it took centuries to develop the steels and alloys, with their heat treatments and other processing; he had had no power adequate in his time, and he couldn't have understood the ignition system of an engine if he'd found one. Men of the old stone age couldn't make rifles.
The chemists were the last, with their glum report on nonmetals that were completely pure but behaved like metals, paints that carried heat one way much better than the other, but couldn't be analyzed at all, and a host of other things.
There was only one weakly cheerful note. The head chemist of DuPont stood up, and he seemed almost too modest as he announced it. The trick glue that served to weld metals together could not only be duplicated already, but could be made in tanker lots at a reasonable figure. It was much simpler than they had thought. And it could be made to glue anything.
The glue formed an open-ended chain molecule, and it would glue any element which was not attached at the end. The sample had contained all elements except iron, so it had worked on iron only. But he could provide one which contained only nitrogen, and which would glue all metals, although it didn't harm plants or animal substances. It was probably the greatest stride in a thousand years of sticking things together. Spread the glue, add the polymerizing fluid, and wait five minutes.
The assistant to the Secretary of Defense nodded. "A remarkable piece of work, doctor—it'll probably win you top honors in the field for the year. But since we're equipped to weld and rivet, and not to pressurize joints for five minutes, I suspect it won't help production for quite some time. Mr. Dane, what do you think?"
Mike grinned sourly. "It'd slow us up now. But you might spread a batch of it over the enemy by plane, and follow with the polymerizer. That might glue him down for a few days."
A few smiled, but nobody laughed.
Custer summed it up. "A gun would do Pithecanthropus no good. He couldn't use it without bullets—arrows wouldn't work. And if he knew about bullets, he still couldn't build a forge to melt his lead. Marconi couldn't have found out a thing about radar—and couldn't have built modern tubes if he'd had full instructions. Show Faraday twenty kilowatts going into an antenna and apparently nothing coming out, and he'd have given up physics to teach Latin the rest of his life!
"In the last fifty years, science has quintupled itself. In the next hundred, we can't imagine what it will be. Maybe they tailor the electron rings to make that transformer work, but I can't examine such things, and couldn't duplicate it in any event. Probably the men who designed it couldn't build one with our crude equipment. Unto him that hath, unto him shall be given. And we're still have-notsl"
He paused, watching their faces. Then he grimaced. "We don't even gain theoretical knowledge from it. We might think it proves the future is invariable, since getting this has made no change in our science. But it proves nothing.
We can't change ourselves-but a man from that future might decide to come back and take over the world with some of their heavy armament that history shows doesn't exist now. In that case, the future might be changed—or he might be unable to do it. ... Our report, except perhaps for the metal glue, is—perfect failure, with a recommendation that nothing be done about it!"
There were no dissenters. Words spilled across the table, but they all boiled down to the same things as Custer had said.
Mike and Custer caught a plane back together. Mike was wondering whether they hadn't changed the future, after all. Pan-Asia was rumored to be past the Rhine, and the Alliance was behind schedule, in many ways because of this useless effort. The language in the handbook for the Enigma had been English—but would English even be used in the future toward which they headed now?
What kind of a world could exist that would make such a concentration of destruction as the Enigma a mass-production affair? What could the men be like, and the scientists who would lose such things on the world, or the fighting men who knew the stupidity of war and still could not stop it?
Or had they thought that such weapons would stop it? Every improvement made in killing power had brought with it the idea that war would grow too horrible, and peace would come. Yet each move had only made the horror worse. It was a vicious cycle that could only be broken by an explosion —and one which apparently lay far in the future.
He shrugged it off, and turned to Custer, who had remained in the assembly chamber longer than he had. "What happens to the Enigma?"
"We seal it up, and give it to a museum when the fracas is over."
Lock it up in a museum—and taunt and mock the men who would waste their lives trying to understand it, when they might do better never knowing it existed. Mike thought of Faraday turning to Latin after "watching electricity flow into an antenna and vanish; if that had happened, the world would have been poorer in every way. The country that kept such a thing would always be under its insidious influence. He finished Custer's quotation in his head: "And from him that hath not, from him shall be taken away, even that which he seemeth to have!"
He started for the Dane buildings, where work was just going on toward restoring normal production. Then he shrugged. He was still as useless as he had been since his father had had him brought back at the start of this. Custer was the actual supervisor here, and Custer knew what orders they had from the government. He wanted a drink, someone to talk to about nothing. He swung toward Molly's new little apartment, half a mile beyond the field. He ought to propose, he supposed—or renew the old proposal of years before. He thought of her work —and the fact that she could never live a wholly normal life when wrapped up in it. But it didn't really matter. Molly was just Molly, no matter what turned up—the only woman he'd ever really liked.
He wasn't surprised when she didn't answer. She hadn't expected him back for at least two more days. But there would still be a drink in the place, and a chance to sleep until she returned. He pulled the key out of his pocket, and went in. There were two letters shoved through the slot in the door, and he picked them up and put them on the little table by the sofa.
Then he stopped. The table was littered, as if Molly had been doing some last minute hasty work before leaving. A cloth was thrown over it, but he saw enough to make him toss it back.
Iron insulation surrounded plastic "wires," and fed out from a square box to a little motor affair. A battery was disconnected, but he slipped it into place and held down the switch. Without coils or commutator, the motor began to turn.
Magnetic current! Somehow one of the little transformers from the ship must be hidden in that box, with its strange wires running out. And Molly had found how to make it work. Scientists with world-wide reputations had been stripped every night before they left the laboratory to make sure they would have nothing that could be picked up by the enemy. But Molly had this!
He remembered the atomic athodyd and the robots, which Pan-Asia now definitely had. And he remembered that no screening had ever found the man who was responsible. And Captain Dane was sick as he gathered up the apparatus and mashed it into a shapeless mess on the rug. Captain Dane went grimly to the phone to report the spy. ...
And Michael Dane put it back on the cradle without using it. Molly was still . . . Molly. And his mind had already rationalized his actions. Let the Pan-Asians have the scraps. They couldn't solve anything from what was left, and there'd be no more chance to steal parts of the ship. Let her go, knowing she'd been discovered by him, fleeing without knowledge of when the Alliance would pick her up. Or let her wonde
r about the damage, but still stay on to do her dirty work. A known spy was safer than anything else.
He threw his key down on the little pile of junk, and went out of the room to find a bar and get drunk. He had a lot to forget. The Enigma had cost him his father. It had probably ruined all chances of winning the war. And now it had taken Molly.
He had never found the bar. He had gone on walking, while his foot ached, and after he forgot about it. He had walked until it was dark, and the idea had come up from the darkness and grown clear in his mind. Then he had taken a cab and come back to the field. In the main hangar office, he found the single star that had finally come for him—an iron star, to show that he was only a producer of materials instead of a real military general, but still one which gave him authority enough.
He snapped it onto the collar of his hastily donned flight clothes, and opened the door to the ruins that had been the laboratory, now deserted except for the six guards and the hulk of the Enigma.
He dismissed the men, giving them formal notes, and waited for them to leave. Then he switched the lights off and headed for the machine, again reassembled and ready for flight—or for plaguing men through the decades to come.
In the gloom, there was a sudden cough, and he swung to see Enright at the doorway, his face almost glowing under the light of a single bulb still on. Mike grimaced, but it didn't matter. Enright seemed to have some odd attachment to the machine, and the guards had complained about his hanging around. Now he stood there, licking his lips and staring at the Enigma.
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