You’re right about catalogue and technical writers in general but the guy that cooked this one up was a genius.
“Yet I still can’t quite force myself to the conclusion that I was supposed to put this thing together, that I was deliberately led into it.”
“Couldn’t it be some sort of Trojan Horse gadget?”
“I don’t see how it could be. What could it do? As a radiation weapon it wouldn’t have a very wide range—I hope.”
Joe turned toward the door. “Maybe it’s just as well that you broke that tube.”
The pile of components whose places in the assembly still were to be determined was astonishingly small, Cal thought, as he left the lab shortly after midnight.
Many of the circuits were complete and had been tested, with a response that might or might not be adequate for their design. At least nothing blew up.
The following afternoon, Joe called again “We’ve lost our connection.
I just got a TWX from Continental. They want to know what the devil we’re talking about in our letter of yesterday—the one asking for a replacement.”
There was only a long silence.
“Cal—you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here. Get hold of Oceanic Tube Company for me. Ask them to send one of their best engineers down here—Jerry Lanier if he’s in the plant now. We’ll see if they can rebuild the tube for us.”
“That is going to cost money.”
“I’ll pay it out of my own pocket if I have to. This thing is almost finished.”
Why had they cut their connection, Cal wondered? Had they discovered that their contact had been a mistake? And what would happen if he did finish the interocitor? He wondered if there would be anyone to communicate with even if he did complete it.
It was so close to completion now that he was beginning to suer from the customary engineer’s jitters that come when a harebrained scheme is finally about to be tested. Only this was about a thousand times worse because he didn’t even know that he would recognize the correct operation of the interocitor if he saw it.
It was ninety-eight-percent complete and he still could detect no coherency in the thing. It seemed to turn completely in upon itself.
True, there was a massive source of radiation but it seemed to be entirely dissipated within the instrument. There was no part that could conceivably act as an antenna to radiate or collect radiation and so provide means of communication.
Cal went over his circuit deductions again and again but the more he tracked down the available clues, the more certain it seemed that he had built correctly. There was no ambiguity whatever in the cleverly buried clues.
Jerry Lanier finally showed up. Cal gave him only the broken catherimine tube and allowed him to see none of the rest of the equipment.
Jerry scowled at the tube. “Since when did they put squirrel cages in glass envelopes? What is this thing?”
“Top hush-hush,” said Cal. “All I want to know is can you duplicate it?”
“Sure. Where did you get it?”
“Military secret.”
“It looks simple enough. We could probably duplicate it in three weeks or so.”
“Look, Jerry, I want that bottle in three days.”
“Cal, you know we can’t—“ “Oceanic isn’t the only tube maker in the business. This might turn out to be pretty hot stuff.”
“All right, you horse trader. Guarantee it by air express in five days.”
“Good enough.”
For two straight nights Cal didn’t go home. He grabbed a half hour’s snooze on a lab bench in the early morning. And on the second day he was almost caught by the first lab technician who arrived.
But the interocitor was finished.
The realization seemed more like a dream than reality but every one of the nearly five thousand parts had at last been incorporated into the assembly behind the panels—except the broken tube.
He knew it was right. With a nearly obsessive conviction he felt sure that he had constructed the interocitor just as the unknown engineers had designed it.
He locked the screen room and left word with Joe to call him if Jerry sent the tube, then went home to sleep the clock around.
When he finally went back to the lab a dozen production problems on the airline transmitter had turned up and for once he was thankful for them.
They helped reduce the tension of waiting to find out what the assembly of alien parts would do when he finally turned on the power to the whole unit.
He was still working on the job of breaking down one of the transmitter sub-assemblies when quitting time came. It was only because Nell Joy, the receptionist in the front hall, was waiting for her boy friend that he received the package at all.
She called him at twenty after five.
“Mr. Meacham? I didn’t know whether you’d still be here or not.
There’s a special-delivery boy here with a package for you. It looks important. Do you want it tonight?”
“I’ll say I do!”
He was out by her desk, signing for the package, almost before she had hung up. He tore off the wrappings on the way back to the lab.
CHAPTER IV
Contact!
THERE IT WAS!
As beautiful a job of duplication as he could have wished for. Cal could have sworn there was no visual difference between it and the original. But the electrical test would tell the story.
In the lab he put the duplicate tube in the tester he’d devised and checked the albion. That was the critical factor.
He frowned as the meter indicated ten percent deviation, but two of the originals had tolerances that great. It would do.
His hand didn’t seem quite steady as he put the tube in its socket. He stood back a moment, viewing the completed instrument.
Then he plunged the master switch on the power panel.
He watched anxiously the flickering hands of two-score meters as he advanced along the panels, energizing the circuits one by one.
Intricate adjustments on the panel controls brought the meter readings into line with the catalogue specifications which he had practically memorized by now—but which were written by the meters for safety.
Then, slowly, the grayish screen of the cubical viewing tube brightened.
Waves of polychrome hue washed over it. It seemed as if an image were trying to form but it remained out of focus, only a wash of color.
“Turn up the intensifier knob,” a masculine voice said suddenly. “That will clear your screen.”
To Cal it was like words coming suddenly at midnight in a ghost-ridden house. The sound had come out of the utter unknown into which the interocitor reached—but it was human.
He stepped back to the panel and adjusted the knob. The shapeless color flowed to solid lines, congealed to an image. And Cal stared.
He didn’t know what he had expected. But the prosaic colorimage of the man who watched him from the plate was too ordinary after the weeks-long effort expended on the interocitor.
Yet there was something of the unknown in the man’s eyes too
something akin to the unknown of the interocitor. Cal drew slowly nearer the plate, his eyes unable to leave that face, his breath hard and fast.
“Who are you?” he said almost inaudibly. “What have I built?”
For a moment the man made no answer as if he hadn’t heard. His image was stately and he appeared of uncertain late middle age. He was of large proportions and ruggedly attractive of feature. But it was his eyes that held Cal with such intense force-eyes which seemed to hold an awareness of responsibility to all the people in the world.
“Who are you?” Cal repeated softly.
“We’d about given you up,” the man said at last. “But you’ve passed.
And rather well too.”
“Who are you? What is this—this interocitor I’ve constructed?”
“The interocitor is simply an instrument of communication.
Const
ructing it was a good deal more. You’ll follow my meaning in a moment. Your first question is more difficult to answer but that is my purpose.
“I am the employment representative of a group—a certain group who are urgently in need of men, expert technologists. We have a good many stringent requirements for prospective employees. So we require them to take an aptitude test to measure some of those qualifications we desire.
“You have passed that test!”
For a moment Cal stared uncomprehendingly. “What do you mean? This makes no sense. I have made no application to work with your—your employers.”
A faint trace of a smile crossed the man’s face. “No. No one does that. We pick our own applicants and test them, quite without their awareness they are being tested. You are to be congratulated on your showing.”
“What makes you think I’d be interested in working for your employers?
I don’t even know who they are, let alone what work they require done.”
“You would not have come this far unless you were interested in the job we have to offer.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You have seen the type of technology in our possession. No matter who or what we are, having come this far you would pursue us to the ends of the Earth to find out how we came by that technology and to learn its mastery for yourself. Is it not so?”
The arrogant truth of the man’s statement was like a physical blow that rocked Cal back on his heels. There was no uncertainty in the man’s voice.
He -new what Cal was going to do more surely than Cal had known himself up to this moment.
“You seem pretty certain of that.” Cal found it hard to keep an impulsive hostility out of his voice.
“I am. We pick our applicants quite carefully. We make offers only to those we are certain will accept. Now, since you are about to join us, I will relieve your mind of some unnecessary tensions.
“It has undoubtedly occurred to you, as to all thinking people of your day, that the scientists have done a particularly abominable job of dispensing the tools they have devised. Like careless and indifferent workmen they have tossed the products of their craft to gibbering apes and baboons. The results have been disastrous to say the least.
“Not all scientists, however, have been quite so indifferent. There are a group of us who have formed an organization for the purpoSe of obtaining better and more conservative distribution of these tools. We call ourselves, somewhat dramatically perhaps, but none the less truthfully, Peace Engineers. Our motives are sure to encompass whatever implications you can honestly make of the term.
“But we need men—technicians, men of imagination, men of good will, men of superb engineering abilities—and our method has to be somewhat less than direct. Hence, our approach to you. It involved simply an interception of mail in a manner you would not yet understand.
“You passed your aptitude test and so were more successful than some of your fellow engineers in this community.”
Cal thought instantly of Edmunds and the toothless gears and the tumbling barrel compound.
“Those other things—“ he said. “They would have led to the same solution?”
“Yes. In a somewhat different way, of course. But that is all the information I can give you at this time. The next consideration is your coming here.”
“Where? Where are you? How do I come?”
The readiness with which his mind accepted the fact of his going shocked and chilled him. Was there no other alternative that he should consider?
For what reasons should he ally himself with this unknown band who called themselves Peace Engineers? He fought for rational reasons why he should not.
There were few that he could muster up. None, actually. He was alone, without family or obligations. He had no particular professional ties to prevent him from leaving.
As for any potential personal threat that might lie in alliance with the Peace Engineers—well, he wasn’t much afraid of anything that could happen to him personally.
But in reality none of these factors had any influence. There was only one thing that concerned him. He had to know more about that fantastic technology they possessed.
And they had known that was the one factor capable of drawing him.
The interviewer paused as if sensing what was in Cal’s mind. “You will learn the answers to all your questions in proper order,” he said.
“Can you be ready tomorrow?”
“I’m ready now,” Cal said.
“Tomorrow will be soon enough. Our plane will land on your airfield exactly at noon. It will remain fifteen minutes. lt will take off without you if you are not in it by that time. You will know it by its color. A black ship with a single horizontal orange stripe, an Army BT-13 type.
“That is all for now. Congratulations and good luck to you. I’ll be looking forward to seeing you personally.
“Stand back now. When I cut off, the interocitor will be destroyed.
Stand back!”
Cal backed sharply to the far side of the room. He saw the man’s head nod, his face smiling a pleasant good-by, then the image vanished from the screen.
Almost instantly there came the hiss of burning insulation, the crack of heat-shattered glass. From the framework of the interocitor rose a blooming bubble of smoke that slowly filled the room as wires melted and insulation became molten and ran.
Cal burst from the screen room and grasped a nearby fire extinguisher, which he played intO the blinding smoke pouring from the room. He emptied that one and ran for another.
Slowly the heat and smoke dispelled. He moved back into the room and knew then that the interocitor could never be analyzed or duplicated from that ruin. Its destruction had been thorough.
It was useless trying to sleep that night. He sat in the park until after midnight when a suspicious cop chased him off. After that he simply walked the streets until dawn, trying to fathom the implications of what he’d seen and heard.
Peace Engineers What did the term mean? It could imply a thousand things, a secret group with dictatorial ambitions in possession of a powerful technology—a bunch of crackpots with strange access to genius—or it could be what the term literally implied.
But there was no guarantee that their purposes were altruistic. With his past knowledge of human nature he was more inclined to credit the possibility that he was being led into some Sax Rohmer melodrama.
At dawn he turned toward his apartment. There he cleaned up and had breakfast and left the rent and a note instructing the landlord to dispose of his belongings as he wished. He went to the plant in midmorning and resigned amidst a storm of protests from Billingsworth and a forty-percent salary increase offer.
That done, it was nearly noon and he went up to see Joe Wilson .
“I wondered what happened to you this morning,” said Joe. “I tried to call you for a couple of hours.”
“I slept late,” said Cal. “I just came in to resign.”
“Resign?” Joe Wilson stared incredulously. “What for? What about the interocitor?”
“it blew up in my face. The whole thing’s gone.”
“I hoped you would make it,” Joe said a little sadly. “I wonder if we will ever find out where that stuff came from.”
“Sure,” said Cal carelessly. “It was just some shipping mixup. We’ll find out about it someday.”
“Cal—“ Joe Wilson was looking directly into his face. “You found out, didn’t you?”
Cal hesitated a moment. He had been put under no bond of secrecy.
What could it matter? He understood something of the fascination the problem held for a frustrated engineer turned into a technical purchasing agent.
“Yes,” he said. “I found out.”
Joe smiled wryly. “I was hoping you would. Can you tell me about it?”
“There’s nothing to tell. I don’t know where they are. All I know is that I talked to someone. They offered me a job.”
Th
ere it was. He saw it coming in low and fast, a black and orange ship.
Wing flaps down, it slowed and touched the runway. Already it was like the symbol of a vast and important future that had swept him up.
Already the familiar surroundings of Ryberg’s were something out of a dim and unimportant past.
“I wish we could have learned more about the interocitor,” said Joe.
Cal’s eyes were still straining toward the ship as it taxied around on the field. Then he shook hands solemnly with Joe. “You and me both,” he said.
“Believe me—“ Joe Wilson stood by the window and as Cal went out toward the ship he knew he’d been correct in that glimpse he’d got of the cockpit canopy silhouetted against the sky.
The ship was pilotless.
Another whispering clue to a mighty, alien technology.
He knew Cal must have seen it too but Cal’s steps were steady as he walked toward it.
THIS ISLAND EARTH Universal-International 1955
86 minutes. Produced by William Alland; directed by Joseph Newman;
screenplay by Franklin Coen and Edward G. O’Callaghan; director of
photography, Clifford Stine, A.S.C.; art directors, Alexander Golitzen
and Richard H. Riedel; special effects by Clifford Stine and
THE COSMIC FRAME
by Paul W. Fairman filmed as
INVASION OF THE SAUCERMEN
(American-International, 1957 )
The year is 1957. Danny and The Juniors are singing “At the Hop” over countless jalopy radios, drive-in movies remain the most popular form of youth-oriented entertainment, and the successful orbiting of Russia’s Sputnik satellite sparks new interest in the mysteries of outer space. What better opportunity to bring together two of the most currently viable elements at the box office: science fiction and teenagers.
Invasion of the Saucermen and its notorious co-feature l Was a Teenage Werewolf were the vanguard in a tidal wave of “hip” horror movies that made millions for quick-buck production studios such as Allied Artists and American-International. Yet for all their shoddiness, many of the features allowed burgeoning talent to develop into the top stars of today. TV’s Michael Landon got his first big break in the aforementioned wolfman flick, Steve McQueen showed promise in The Blob, Jack Nicholson triumphed in The Terror, and actor-comedian Frank Gorshin brought his inimitable comic touch to Saucermen.
They Came From Outer Space Page 26