Fade Out

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘Right,’ said Wedderkind. ‘But don’t spread it around. This is one thing I’d like to be wrong about.’

  Saturday/September 1-2

  CROW RIDGE/MONTANA

  Early in the morning they began to examine Crusoe in detail. The visible portion of the hull consisted of a smooth, circular dome about seventy-five feet across by about fifteen feet high. On top of this, exactly in the centre, was a small shallow dome about ten feet across. For those whose minds inclined that way, the overall shape suggested a female breast. Now that it had cooled to match the surrounding air temperature, the colour of the hull was an intense black. Its surface had the smooth polished lustre of a gemstone.

  There were no hatches, joints or panel lines, no rivets or fastenings, no markings. Just a smooth, dark dome which, when more closely examined, proved to be made of a semitranslucent material.

  Just visible, some two feet below and parallel to the surface of the hull, was a second layer moulded in a convoluted pattern similar to that of the human brain. The discovery of this second mysterious layer, which they christened ‘the cortex’, caused mixed feelings among the research group. Its form was disturbingly familiar – and all the more ominous for being so.

  In fact, Crusoe’s whole appearance roused the same contradictory feelings. He was as sleek and precise as a Buckminster Fuller dome, yet at the same time he was as creepy as one of those Gothic piles in a Hammer horror movie.

  Connors had breakfast with Allbright and Wedderkind in the command hut.

  ‘What I want to get clear, Arnold,’ said Connors, ‘is the plan from here on in.’

  ‘It’s fairly straightforward. We have to test the soil and hull for contamination, make exhaustive tests for alien micro-organisms, and we also want to try to find out what Crusoe is made of. That will entail various chemical tests to reveal composition, spectrographic analysis, Rockwell hardness test – the standard procedure.’

  ‘And how long will that take?’

  Wedderkind shrugged. ‘That’s hard to say. The top priority task is to give the hull a clean bill of health. We’ll be using the streamlined quarantine and decontamination techniques developed by NASA. So, if we’re lucky, we should get a thumbs up-thumbs down signal by the end of the day. Or tomorrow at the latest. Detailed analysis of any micro-organisms we find will take longer, but my guess is you should be able to lay hands on him within forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Yes – well, I’ll watch you do it first,’ said Connors.

  ‘Now that our operations are no longer restricted by the cutout zone,’ said Allbright, ‘I would like to recommend the installation of TV cameras to give us total coverage of Crusoe.’

  ‘Yes. Good idea.’

  ‘I suggest five – one hung below a balloon moored at five hundred feet directly over the crater, and four mounted on thirty-foot masts north, south, east, and west of the crater. Remote-controlled, zoom lenses, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree traverse, ninety degrees of vertical sweep. The whole system controlled from a monitor hut.’

  ‘That sounds fine,’ said Connors. ‘Any comments, Arnold?’

  ‘Could we have a duplicate set of screens in the research hut?’

  ‘I’ll get that put in,’ said Allbright. ‘Now that we no longer have any electrical problems, we’re planning to install a comprehensive video communications facility throughout Rockville.’

  Connors smiled at Allbright’s use of the research group’s nickname for the Crow Ridge encampment. ‘I see you finally got the word.’

  Allbright smiled back. ‘I always get the word, Mr Connors.’

  Wedderkind looked at Connors. ‘What are you planning to do?’

  ‘I thought I’d take the film of Crusoe back to Washington,’ said Connors.’

  ‘Today?’ asked Allbright.

  ‘Yes. It doesn’t look as if there’s going to be much action here.’

  ‘I don’t think it is going to be possible for you to do that.’ Allbright’s voice was quiet but firm.

  ‘Oh,’ said Connors. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because until Crusoe gets a clean bill of health, no one is allowed to leave Crow Ridge.’

  Connors stared at Allbright.

  ‘That order came straight from the President, Mr Connors.’

  Connors looked at Wedderkind. ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘No, but in a way it makes sense.’

  ‘What way? Crusoe’s been exposed to the air for nearly eighteen hours. If he was covered with alien spores, they’d all be airborne by now and halfway to Idaho. It’s ludicrous. Look at the trouble we went to to sterilize the Lunar Module. You keep telling me Crusoe is the product of an advanced society – ’

  ‘True – ’

  ‘So it’s hardly likely that he’s come here to spread the Black Death.’

  ‘No,’ said Wedderkind. ‘But if he had, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to carry it to Washington.’

  Connors sighed. ‘No, I suppose not.’ Suddenly finding himself trapped on the Ridge was a sharp reminder of the risk they were all running. The difference was that he and Allbright knew about CAMPFIRE. Arnold and the others didn’t.

  Dressed in protective clothing that masked them from head to foot, Page, Armenez, and Davis took scrapings of the dust and soil particles on Crusoe’s hull and carried out exhaustive tests for alien micro-organisms in the sterile section of the field laboratory. They also made some direct tests on the hull. Since Crusoe had been intermittently baked in molten rock during the previous three weeks, they had little hope of improving on the negative results of the first soil tests from the crater. The work went on all day and through the night, and by breakfast time on Sunday morning, Page reported, with obvious disappointment, that Crusoe was clean – on the outside.

  Working in groups, the scientists and engineers examined every square inch of the hull. They discovered that the small, shallow dome on top of the hull appeared to be part of a large black crystal sphere contained within the hull, and embedded in the underlying cortex. Neame, one of the engineers, and not easily overawed, was already referring to it as ‘sliced cabbage’. It was an apt, if scornful, analogy. The discovery of the sphere focussed their attention on the area where the small dome – the exposed part of the sphere – entered the hull. There was no joint visible, even under microscopic examination. The two planes of black crystal appeared to be fused together, forming one continuous layer. There seemed to be no way for anything to come out – and no way for them to get in.

  ‘Maybe the access points are on the underside of the hull,’ suggested Spencer. He was another one of the ex-NASA systems engineers. ‘If we dig away all this earth around it, and expose the whole gazoo, we’ll have a better idea where we’re at.’

  It seemed a simple enough proposition.

  The first part of the operation went smoothly. Bulldozers, driven by Max Nilsson’s Texas roughnecks, cleared away the raised rim of the crater and levelled a ten-yard strip around Crusoe’s hull, revealing a few more feet of it in the process. Wedderkind and Brecetti exchanged looks, but, amazingly, no one else commented on the disparity between Crusoe’s present size and the original crater. Five twenty-man squads of cadets spread out around the edge of the hull and prepared to dig, under the supervision of the fourteen-man research group. As the cadet on Wetherby’s left swung his shovel into the earth, it bounced back up over the surprised digger’s shoulder and nearly brained the man next to him. Someone else took a firmer grip on his own shovel, but as he tried to dig, the shovel twisted sideways in his hand.

  ‘Hey, look at this!’ yelled another of the cadets. Connors, Wedderkind, and the other people on his side of the hull looked in his direction. The cadet stood holding the shovel loosely by the handle. The metal blade rested against an invisible surface about eighteen inches above the ground, at the rim of the hull.

  Brecetti walked towards him. ‘Let go of the handle!’

  The cadet let go. The handle of the shovel fell to the ground, but the bla
de remained in the air, held up by a powerful magnetic field that ran around the edge of the exposed portion of the hull.

  Wedderkind swore quietly under his breath, then looked around and spotted Max Nilsson. ‘Max! Could you bring back one of the bulldozers?’

  Max brought it back personally. Wedderkind climbed up to the door of the cab and explained what he wanted to do. Max lined up the bulldozer at a tangent to Crusoe, lowered its big blade, and rolled forward, scooping out a long trough of earth. It looked like the irresistible answer right up until the moment the blade hit the invisible barrier, and the ten-ton machine careened off to the right like a bumper-car at an amusement park.

  Wedderkind asked Max to try again. Max backed off and lowered his blade on to a new line that would just shave the rim of the hull.

  ‘Take it nice and slow!’ yelled Spencer. ‘As you start to get that deflection to the right, give it full throttle and steer hard over to the left.’ Now that he’d stuck his neck out suggesting they dig Crusoe up, Spencer was anxious to see his idea work.

  Max nodded, sat back in his cab, got a good grip on the track levers, and moved forward. The blade started to gouge out another strip of soil. When it got within six feet of the rim, the magnetic field began to force the bulldozer off to the right. Max whacked full power on to the right-hand track and slowed down on the left. The bulldozer bored back into line, but the force of the magnetic field held back the blade. Unable to move forward, but with full power on the right-hand track, the bulldozer pivoted slowly around on the blade leaving Max facing the way he came. Wedderkind waved to him to back off and kill the motor.

  ‘How about trying wooden shovels?’ said Milsom, another engineer and a friend of Spencer. It wasn’t an unreasonable suggestion, but at the time everyone thought he was trying to be funny.

  Max’s suggestion to use a high-pressure hose got a better reception. They would need to cut lines for drainage. Then a controlled, continuous blast of water would wash away the loose soil and shale around Crusoe.

  Everyone suddenly felt optimistic. Sluice mining, as it was called, had been used successfully in several commercial operations for a number of years, and during the Yom Kippur War the Egyptians had used it to punch a hole through the Israeli defences on the Suez Canal. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t work on Crusoe.

  The immediate problem was an adequate supply of water. Max’s crew had begun sinking a trial borehole down by Bodell’s shack, but until that was completed, every drop on Crow Ridge had to be brought in by tanker. Max suggested that one tanker load and a high-pressure pump would be enough to test out the technique. If the results looked promising, they could always pipe in a special supply.

  By the end of the afternoon, after a lot of swearing down the base camp telephone, Max had fifty thousand gallons of water up on the plateau. He helped manhandle the high-pressure pump into place, supervised the linkup of the heavy metal hose, and pressed the button on the electric-starter motor. The disappearance of the cutout zone had put an end to their electromechanical problems, but Crusoe had perversely created others. The high-pressure jet blasted the earth away from a five-yard section of Crusoe’s hull for all of eighteen seconds, then suddenly exploded into steam. This time Max not only threw his hard hat down, he drop-kicked it over Crusoe. The earth around Crusoe continued to smoulder for two or three hours after Max finally ran out of water or, as Connors put it more uncharitably, steam.

  Although the motive remained a mystery, the message was clear. Crusoe was trying to tell them that he wasn’t ready to expose himself. They talked about it over supper that night.

  ‘I just don’t get it,’ said Milsom, the wooden-shovel man. ‘He reads the circle we put around him, analyses the differential in the charges down the boreholes, comes back to the centre, and partially surfaces at his original entry point. He’s shown himself. Why doesn’t he want to be dug up?’

  ‘Perhaps he likes it here,’ said Wetherby jocularly. ‘He may have decided to put down roots.’

  Wedderkind banged his hand on the table, his eyes glowing behind his thick-lensed glasses like lights on a pinball machine. ‘That’s it! Of course! Why not…? Alan, what a marvellous idea!’

  ‘What marvellous idea?’ asked Wetherby. He seemed unable to grasp the fact that he might have inadvertently uttered a remark of cosmic significance with a mouth half full of food.

  ‘That’s why we can’t see any doors or joints yet,’ said Wedderkind excitedly. ‘He’s growing!

  The significance of this idea and its possible consequences took a few seconds to digest. Some of the group found it hard to swallow.

  ‘Are you seriously trying to tell us that Crusoe is some kind of mechanized turnip?’ asked Spencer.

  ‘Listen,’ said Wedderkind. ‘I don’t know whether any of you have noticed, but Phil and I are pretty sure that the maximum diameter of his hull is bigger than the diameter of the original crater.’

  ‘Maybe, but until you dig him up, you don’t know what his dimensions are.’ It was Roger Neame, one of the engineers, being practical again.

  ‘And in that demonstration you gave me with the sugar bowl, you got a creep-back as the steel ball went under,’ said Connors. ‘If Crusoe vibrated himself into the ground, the soil could also have vibrated back round him.’

  ‘I know that; said Wedderkind. ‘That’s why I didn’t mention it before. But now that we’ve had this show of resistance from Crusoe, something like this might just be possible. After all, we’re already at work ourselves on biochemical relays that will enable us to create computers with the input-output potential of the human brain. If you link that to the new breakthroughs in the field of organic metals, it’s possible to envisage the creation of a machine-consciousness – self-awareness in an object we previously classified as inanimate. It’s equally conceivable that Crusoe could be the seed state of – well, some thing. But hardly a mechanized turnip.’ He pointed at Neame. ‘Roger, here, is already labelling Crusoe’s second layer “sliced-cabbage”. Personally, I think that that kind of descriptive downgrading tends to lull us into a false sense of complacency. I think we have to consider the possibility that Crusoe could be the embryo of a machine that grows.’

  ‘Into what?’ asked Connors.

  They all looked at each other, but nobody rushed in with an answer to his question.

  Monday/September 3

  THE WHITE HOUSE/WASHINGTON DC

  At 4:25 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, the last interference cleared from the radar microwavelengths. At 6 A.M., the first radio newscasts made it official. The fade-out was over. The second, more prolonged burst of interference had lasted just over three weeks. The networks served up a 7 A.M. breakfast special of news, views, boffo fun, and music that gave viewers a chance to break in their eyeballs before they went to work.

  From then on, throughout the day, local TV and radio stations came back on the air with taped material that had been frozen in the pipeline. TV actors went back thankfully into rehearsal, and agents blew the dust off their contracts and started reserving tables in expensive restaurants.

  Domestic and international airline traffic had been the hardest-hit sector of the economy, but plans had already been drawn up for a phased resumption of normal services, and the airlines’ bankers had begun to breathe again.

  It was also business as usual for the worldwide US radar network and the planes, guns, and ships of the Air Force, Army, and Navy. A huge backlog of coded radio messages from embassies and overseas bases began flooding into the State Department and Pentagon, and reactivated bugs began broadcasting the nation’s indiscretions.

  Connors and Wedderkind had flown back to Washington overnight with a videotape version of Crusoe’s film debut. They screened it for the President after his morning session with the White House Domestic Chief of Staff, then ran it through again an hour later when they were joined by Fraser, Samuels, the three Joint Chiefs of Staff, and McKenna.

  Curiously, the reaction to the tapes
was muted, and most of the questions were unanswerable. Apparently, it was the effect of the fade-out that had preoccupied the President, Fraser, and the others. Now that it had disappeared, everyone seemed quite content to let Wedderkind’s team get on with the job of taking Crusoe apart. They were certainly curious about what it was, but they were more concerned about what it might do next.

  For Wedderkind, the meeting was a total anticlimax. After attending the live show, he found that watching Crusoe repeat his performance on a twenty-one-inch TV screen somehow reduced the event to the scale and importance of a daytime soap opera. Worse still, his own impromptu foray had become an embarrassing diversion. He left Connors to replay the tapes and answer any further questions.

  As Wedderkind made his exit, the President said, ‘Try and stay out of the front line, Arnold.’

  At 10:30 A.M. the President led the way into the Cabinet Room where they were joined by the Secretary of State for a meeting of the National Security Council. The Secretary of State didn’t know about Crusoe, and no mention of him or the project was made at the meeting. Various departmental reports on the impact of the fade-out were reviewed and it was decided that a new set of national contingency plans was needed to cover any repeat of the recent emergency. A memorandum was addressed to the Hudson Institute think tank asking it to produce a series of economic, defence, and political scenarios based on the possible effects of a prolonged period of radar and radio fade-out. The request was marked ‘URGENT’.

  Everyone at the meeting was painfully conscious of the fact that, if the fade-out could be switched off, it could also be switched on again. Next time, it might not last three weeks, but three months. Any further time projections did not bear thinking about.

  FORD GEOPHYSICAL INSTITUTE/BALTIMORE/MARYLAND

  Since the beginning of the Crusoe Project, Professor George York, one of the senior geophysicists at the Institute, had been secretly processing data for Wedderkind. As a result of some careful programming over the previous five years, York, a close friend of Wedderkind since their college days, had managed to gain almost sole control of the Institute’s largest computer.