Bagley, Desmond - Running Blind

by Running Blind

  He laughed hugely. 'I've been here five years - I might be here another ten, but I don't think so. The big bastard is overdue already.' He thumped me on the arm. 'Could blow up tomorrow - then we don't go to Keflavik.'

  'I won't lose any sleep over it,' I said drily.

  He called across the laboratory, 'Elin, in your honour I'll take the day off.' He took three big strides, picked her up and hugged her until she squealed for mercy.

  I didn't pay much attention to that because my eyes were attracted to the headline of a newspaper which lay on the bench. It was the morning newspaper from Reykjavik and the headline on the front page blared: GUN BATTLE AT GEYSIR.

  I read the story rapidly. Apparently a war had broken out at Geysir to judge from this account, and everything short of light artillery had been brought into play by persons unknown. There were a few eye-witness reports, all highly inaccurate, and it seemed that a Russian tourist, one Igor Volkov, was now in hospital after having come too close to Strokkur. Mr Volkov had no bullet wounds. The Soviet Ambassador had complained to the Icelandic Minister of Foreign Affairs about this unprovoked assault on a Soviet citizen.

  I opened the paper to .see if there was a leading article on the subject and, of course, there was. In frigid and austere tones the leader writer inquired of the Soviet Ambassador the reason why the aforesaid Soviet citizen, Igor Volkov, was armed to the teeth at the time, since there was no record of his having declared any weapons to the Customs authorities when he entered the country.

  I grimaced. Between us, Kennikin and I were in a fair way to putting a crimp into Icelandic-Soviet relations.

  Chapter III

  We left Vik rather late the next morning and I wasn't in a good mood because I had a thick head. Valtyr had proved to be a giant among drinkers and, since I was suffering from lack of sleep, my efforts to keep up with him had been disastrous. He put me to bed, laughing boisterously, and woke up himself as fresh as a daisy while I had a taste in my mouth as though I had been drinking the formalin from his specimen jars.

  My mood wasn't improved when I telephoned London to speak to Taggart only to find he was absent from his office. The bland official voice declined to tell me where he was but offered to pass on a message, an invitation which I, in my turn, declined to accept. The curious actions of Case had led me to wonder who in the Department was trustworthy, and I wouldn't speak to anyone but Taggart.

  Valtyr's boat was anchored in a creek, a short distance from the open beach, and we went out to it in a dinghy. He looked curiously at the two long, sackcloth-covered parcels I took aboard but made no comment, while I hoped they did not look too much like what they actually were. I wasn't going to leave the rifles behind because I had an idea I might need them.

  The boat was about twenty-five feet overall, with a tiny cabin which had sitting headroom and a skimpy wooden canopy to protect the man at the wheel from the elements. 1 had checked the map to find the sea distance from Vik to Keflavik and the boat seemed none too large. I said, 'How long will it take?'

  'About twenty hours,' said Valtyr, and added cheerfully, 'If the bastard engine keeps going. If not, it takes forever. You get seasick?'

  'I don't know,' I said. 'I've never had the chance to find out.'

  'You have the chance now.' He bellowed with laughter.

  We left the creek and the boat lifted alarmingly to the ocean swells and a fresh breeze streamed Elin's hair. 'It's clearer today,' said Valtyr. He pointed over the bows. 'You can see Vestmannaeyjar.'

  I looked towards the group of islands and played the part which Elin had assigned me. 'Where is Surtsey from here?'

  'About twenty kilometres to the south-west of Heimaey - the big island. You won't see much of it yet.'

  We plunged on, the little boat dipping into the deep swells and occasionally burying her bows in the water and shaking free a shower of spray when she came up. I'm not any kind of a seaman and it didn't look too safe to me, but Valtyr took it calmly enough, and so did Elin. The engine, which appeared to be a toy diesel about big enough to go with a Meccano set, chugged away, aided by a crack from Valtyr's boot when it faltered, which it did too often for my liking. I could see why he was pleased at the prospect of having a new one.

  It took six hours to get to Surtsey, and Valtyr circled the island, staying close to shore, while I asked the appropriate questions. He said, 'I can't land you, you know.'

  Surtsey, which came up thunderously and in flames from the bottom of the sea, is strictly for scientists interested in finding out how life gains hold in a sterile environment. Naturally they don't want tourists clumping about and bringing in seeds on their boots. 'That's all right,' I said. 'I didn't expect to go ashore.'

  Suddenly he chuckled. 'Remember the Fishing War?'

  I nodded. The so-called Fishing War was a dispute between Iceland and Britain about off-shore fishing limits, and there was a lot of bad blood between the two fishing fleets. Eventually it had been settled, with the Icelanders making their main point of a twelve-mile limit.

  Valtyr laughed, and said, 'Surtsey came up and pushed our fishing limit thirty kilometres farther south. An English skipper I met told me it was a dirty trick - as though we'd done it deliberately. So I told him what a geologist told me: in a million years our fishing limit will be pushed as far south as Scotland.' He laughed uproariously.

  When we left Surtsey I abandoned my pretended interest and went below to lie down. I was in need of sleep and my stomach had started to do flip-flops so that I was thankful to stretch out, and I fell asleep as though someone had hit me on the head.

  Chapter IV

  My sleep was long and deep because when I was awakened by Elin she said, 'We're nearly there.'

  I yawned. 'Where?'

  'Valtyr is putting us ashore at Keflavik.'

  I sat up and nearly cracked my head on a beam. Overhead a jet plane whined and when I went aft into the open I saw that the shore was quite close and a plane was just dipping in to land. I stretched, and said, 'What time is it?'

  'Eight o'clock,' said Valtyr. 'You slept well.'

  'I needed it after a session with you,' I said, and he grinned.

  We tied up at eight-thirty, Elin jumped ashore and I handed her the wrapped rifles. 'Thanks for the ride, Valtyr.'

  He waved away my thanks. 'Any time. Maybe I can arrange to take you ashore on Surtsey - it's interesting. How long are you staying?'

  'For the rest of the summer,' I said. 'But I don't know where I'll be.'

  'Keep in touch,' he said.

  We stood on the dockside and watched him leave, and then Elin said, 'What are we doing here?'

  'I want to see Lee Nordlinger. It's a bit chancy, but I want to know what this gadget is. Will Bjarni be here, do you think?'

  'I doubt it,' said Elin. 'He usually flies out of Reyjkavik Airport.'

  'After breakfast I want you to go to the Icelandair office at the airport here,' I said. 'Find out where Bjarni is, and stay there until I come.' I rubbed my cheek and felt unshaven bristles. 'And stay off the public concourse.

  Kennikin is sure to have Keflavik Airport staked out and I . . . i don't want you seen.

  'Breakfast first,' she said. 'I know a good cafe here.'

  When I walked into Nordlinger's office and dumped the rifles in a corner he looked at me with some astonishment, noting the sagging of my pockets under the weight of the rifle ammunition, my bristly chin and general uncouthness. His eyes flicked towards the corner. 'Pretty heavy for fishing tackle,' he commented. 'You look beat, Alan.'

  'I've been travelling in rough country,' I said, and sat down. 'I'd like to borrow a razor, and I'd like you to look at something.'

  He slid open a drawer of his desk and drew out a battery-powered shaver which he pushed across to me. 'The washroom's two doors along the corridor,' he said. 'What do you want me to look at?'

  I hesitated. I couldn't very well ask Nordlinger to keep his mouth shut no matter what he found. That would be asking him to betray th
e basic tenets of his profession, which he certainly wouldn't do. I decided to plunge and take a chance, so I dug the metal box from my pocket, took off the tape which held the lid on, and shook out the gadget. I laid it before him. 'What's that, Lee?'

  He looked at it for a long time without touching it, then he said, 'What do you want to know about it?'

  'Practically everything,' I said. 'But to begin with - what nationality is it?'

  He picked it up and turned it around. If anyone could tell me anything about it, it was Commander Lee Nordlinger. He was an electronics officer at Keflavik Base and ran the radar and radio systems, both ground-based and airborne. From what I'd heard he was damned good at his job.

  'It's almost certainly American,' he said. He poked his finger at it. 'I recognize some of the components - these resistors, for instance, are standard and are of American manufacture.' He turned it around again. 'And the input is standard American voltage and at fifty cycles.'

  'All right,' I said. 'Now - what is it?'

  'That I can't tell you right now. For God's sake, you bring in a lump of miscellaneous circuitry and expect me to identify it at first crack of the whip. I may be good but I'm not that good.'

  'Then can you tell me what it's not?' I asked patiently.

  'It's no teenager's transistor radio, that's for sure,' he said, and frowned. 'Come to that, it's like nothing I've ever seen before.' He tapped the odd-shaped piece of metal in the middle of the assembly. 'I've never seen one of these, for example.'

  'Can you run a test on it?'

  'Sure.' He uncoiled his lean length from behind the desk. 'Let's run a current through it and see if it plays "The Star-spangled Banner."'

  'Can I come along?'

  'Why not?' said Nordlinger lightly. 'Let's go to the shop.' As we walked along the corridor he said, 'Where did you get it?'

  'It was given to me,' I said uncommunicatively.

  He gave me a speculative glance but said no more. We went through swing doors at the end of the corridor and into a large room which had long benches loaded with electronic gear. Lee signalled to a petty officer who came over. 'Hi, Chief; I have something here I want to run a few tests on. Have you a test bench free?'

  'Sure, Commander.' The petty officer looked about the room. 'Take number five; I guess we won't be using that for a while.'

  I looked at the test bench; it was full of knobs and dials and screens which meant less than nothing. Nordlinger sat down. 'Pull up a chair and we'll see what happens.' He attached clips to the terminals on the gadget then paused. 'We already know certain things about it. It isn't part of an airplane; they don't use such a heavy voltage. And it probably isn't from a ship for roughly the same reason. So that leaves ground-based equipment. It's designed to plug into the normal electricity system on the North American continent - it could have been built in Canada. A lot of Canadian firms use American manufactured components.'

  I jogged him along. 'Could it come from a TV set?'

  'Not from any TV I've seen.' He snapped switches. 'A hundred ten volts - fifty cycles. Now, there's no amperage given so we have to be careful. We'll start real low.' He twisted a knob delicately and a fine needle on a dial barely quivered against the pin.

  He looked down at the gadget. 'There's a current going through now but not enough to give a fly a heart attack.' He paused, and looked up. 'To begin with, this thing is crazy; an alternating current with these components isn't standard. Now, let's see - first we have what seems to be three amplification stages, and that makes very little sense.'

  He took a probe attached to a lead. 'If we touch the probe here we should get a sine wave on the oscilloscope . . .'He looked up. '. . . which we do. Now we see what happens at this lead going into this funny-shaped metal ginkus.'

  He gently jabbed the probe and the green trace on the oscilloscope jumped and settled into a new configuration. 'A square wave,' said Nordlinger. 'This circuit up to here is functioning as a chopper - which is pretty damn funny in itself for reasons I won't go into right now. Now let's see what happens at the lead going out of the ginkus and into this mess of boards.'

  He touched down the probe and the oscilloscope trace jumped again before it settled down. Nordlinger whistled. 'Just look at that spaghetti, will you?' The green line was twisted into a fantastic waveform which jumped rhythmically and changed form with each jump. 'You'd need a hell of a lot of Fourier analysis to sort that out,' said Nordlinger. 'But whatever else it is, it's pulsed by this metal dohickey.'

  'What do you make of it?'

  'Not a damn thing,' he said. 'Now I'm going to try the output stage; on past form this should fairly tie knots into that oscilloscope - maybe it'll blow up.' He lowered the probe and we looked expectantly at the screen.

  I said, 'What are you waiting for?'

  'I'm waiting for nothing.' Nordlinger looked at the screen blankly. 'There's no output.'

  'Is that bad?'

  He looked at me oddly. In a gentle voice he said, 'It's impossible.'

  I said, 'Maybe there's something broken in there.'

  'You don't get it,' said Nordlinger. 'A circuit is just what it says - a circle. You break the circle anywhere you get no current flow anywhere.' He applied the probe again. 'Here there's a current of a pulsed and extremely complex form.' Again the screen jumped into life. 'And here, in the same circuit, what do we get?'

  I looked at the blank screen. 'Nothing?'

  'Nothing,' he said firmly. He hesitated. 'Or, to put it more precisely, nothing that can show on this test rig.' He tapped the gadget. 'Mind if I take this thing away for a while?'

  'Why?'

  'I'd like to put it through some rather more rigorous tests. We have another shop.' He cleared his throat and appeared to be a little embarrassed. 'Uh . . . you won't be allowed in there.'

  'Oh secret stuff.' That would be in one of the areas to which Fleet's pass would give access. 'All right, Lee; you put the gadget through its paces and I'll go and shave. I'll wait for you in your office.'

  'Wait a minute,' he said. 'Where did you get it, Alan?'

  I said, 'You tell me what it does and I'll tell you where it came from.'

  He grinned. 'It's a deal.'

  I left him disconnecting the gadget from the test rig and went back to his office where I picked up the electric shaver. Fifteen minutes later I felt a lot better after having 1 got rid of the hair. I waited in Nordlinger's office for a long time - over an hour and a half- before he came back.

  He came in carrying the gadget as thought it was a stick of dynamite and laid it gently on his desk. 'I'll have to ask you where you got this,' he said briefly.

  'Not until you tell me what it does,' I said.

  He sat behind his desk and looked at the complex of metal and plastic with something like loathing in his eyes. 'It does nothing,' he said flatly. 'Absolutely nothing.'

  'Come off it,' I said. 'It must do something.' 'Nothing!' he repeated. 'There is no measurable output.' He leaned forward and said softly, 'Alan, out there I have instruments that can measure any damn part of the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves of such low frequency you wouldn't believe possible right up to cosmic radiation - and there's nothing coming out of this contraption.'

  'As I said before - maybe something has broken.'

  'That cat won't jump; I tested everything.' He pushed at it and it moved sideways on the desk. 'There are three things I don't like about this. Firstly, there are components in here that are not remotely like anything I've seen before, components of which I don't even understand the function. I'm supposed to be pretty good at my job, and that, in itself, is enough to disturb me. Secondly, it's obviously incomplete - it's just part of a bigger complex - and yet I doubt if I would understand it even if I had everything. Thirdly - and this is the serious one - it shouldn't work.'

  'But it isn't working,' I said.

  He waved his hand distractedly. 'Perhaps I put it wrong. There should be an output of some kind. Good Christ, you can't keep pus
hing electricity into a machine - juice that gets used up - without getting something out. That's impossible.'

  I said, 'Maybe it's coming out in the form of heat.'

  He shook his head sadly. 'I got mad and went to extreme measures. I pushed a thousand watts of current through it in the end. If the energy output was in heat then the goddamn thing would have glowed like an electric heater. But no - it stayed as cool as ever.'

  'A bloody sight cooler than you're behaving,' I said.

  He threw up his hands in exasperation. 'Alan, if you were a mathematician and one day you came across an equation in which two and two made five without giving a nonsensical result then you'd feel exactly as I do. It's as though a physicist were confronted by a perpetual motion machine which works.'

  'Hold on,' I said. 'A perpetual motion machine gets something for nothing - energy usually. This is the other way round.'

  'It makes no difference,' he said. 'Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.' As I opened my mouth he said quickly, 'And don't start talking about atomic energy. Matter can be regarded as frozen, concentrated energy.' He looked at the gadget with grim eyes. 'This thing is destroying energy.'

  Destroying energy*. I rolled the concept around my cerebrum to see what I could make of it. The answer came up fast - nothing much. I said, 'Let's not go overboard. Let's see what we have. You put an input into it and you get out . . .'

  'Nothing,' said Nordlinger.

  'Nothing you can measure,' I corrected. 'You may have some good instrumentation here, Lee, but I don't think you've got the whole works. I'll bet that there's some genius somewhere who not only knows what's coming out of there but has an equally involved gadget that can measure it.'

  'Then I'd like to know what it is,' he said. 'Because it's right outside my experience.'

  I said, 'Lee, you're a technician, not a scientist. You'll admit that?'

  'Sure; I'm an engineer from way back.'

  'That's why you have a crew-cut - but this was designed by a long-hair.' I grinned. 'Or an egghead.'

  'I'd still like to know where you got it.'