Fade Out

by Patrick Tilley

  By a stroke of good fortune, one of Wedderkind’s sisters-in-law was married to a professor at the adjacent Johns Hopkins University. In case there were any prying eyes, Wedderkind drove up with his wife Lillian, parked outside her sister’s house, walked through the yard, out of the back gate, and into York’s car.

  From the major airports of the world, York had collected the times that the fade-out ended and radar contact was restored. The ‘switch-on’ times for airports inside the North American continent showed a ripple effect spreading out from Montana. Thus Chicago’s radar had come back on a few fractions of a second before Washington’s, Seattle’s before San Francisco’s.

  York had got no information from Russia or Eastern Europe, but even so, the figures didn’t fit into the expected pattern. Hawaii had its radar restored before Washington and so did Karachi and Beirut. At Capetown the times almost coincided. Yet there was no doubt that within the US a wave effect had rippled outward at a speed of nearly one hundred thousand miles an hour.

  ‘There’s only one way these timings would make sense,’ said York. ‘This ripple effect would have to be spreading out simultaneously from more than one point.’

  More than one point… Wedderkind considered the implications. That must mean that Crusoe was only part of the orbiting spacecraft. It must have split up like the multiple warheads of an intercontinental ballistic missile. But why had there been no reports from the rest of the world of incandescent fireballs?

  ‘Take the times for Teheran, Karachi, and Calcutta. The times are almost the same. If we stick to this wave theory it would have to be spreading outwards from somewhere inside Russia.’

  ‘That’s an interesting thought,’ said Wedderkind. Could this be the reason why the Russians had suddenly clammed up?

  ‘The trouble is these times are not accurate enough to provide a basis for any meaningful calculations,’ said York. ‘I haven’t really got global cover.’

  ‘Still it’s given us a lead, George, you’ve been storing up data on the Earth’s magnetic field – ’

  ‘Yes, for the last two years.’ York’s computer was being used to prepare maps of the Earth’s field.

  ‘Al Wetherby came up with an idea. Could you contact the stations and get their latest readings?’

  York’s eyebrows shot up. ‘What, from all two hundred and fifty?’

  ‘If we wait till the data filters through the IGY network it could take a year. I told you that we picked up strong directional variations in the Earth’s field around Crow Ridge. I’d like to see what shifts there have been on a worldwide basis. Can you do it?’

  ‘I’ll try, ‘said York. ‘But only because you’ve got a kind face.’

  ‘How soon can you get the information?’

  ‘All I can say is that it’s going to take some time. Our work has really been slowed since we lost contact with our research satellites. It’s put us back to the Stone Age days of the fifties.’

  ‘I know it will be difficult, George. Just do the best you can.’

  Wedderkind went back to Washington with his brain in overdrive. He decided not to say anything to anyone until he had more information. Especially Bob. He tended to get frustrated when confronted by anything other than hard facts.

  About thirty minutes after Wedderkind arrived home, NASA Director Chris Matson telephoned with some new information.

  Cargill and his Jodrell Bank team had been busy checking the orbits of some of the American satellites. All the orbits had begun to decay – a sure sign that the satellites had been hit by a heavy burst of radiation. The second bit of news was that Arkhip Karamatov and his Russian space team at NASA had been abruptly summoned back to Russia. Before leaving, Karamatov had told Matson that the Russians had launched two sows on Saturday the fourth of August and a large solar observatory satellite on the fifth. Both had failed to transmit or respond to ground signals. The time of entry into orbit coincided exactly with the two ten-second and one thirty-second bursts of fade-out experienced that weekend. It was a clear indication that Crusoe had not been in a mood to welcome curious visitors. Karamatov also confirmed what NASA had suspected: there had been no contact with the cosmonauts aboard Salyut-7 and the Mir space-station since the initial twenty-minute fade-out on August 3rd and they were now presumed to be dead or in the process of dying from a lethal shot of cosmic radiation.

  Finally, Matson passed on the news that the Air Force’s NORAD/SPACETRACK centre had organized a rapid radar scan of outer space and had found no trace of any other unexpected objects in Earth orbit. If Crusoe was linked to a command module, then the craft, as Wedderkind had suggested, must be in orbit around one of the other planets – or even around the sun itself. If nothing was found, it could mean the Earth was Crusoe’s final destination.

  Thursday/September 6

  CROW RIDGE/MONTANA

  During the early part of the week, more tests were carried out on Crusoe’s hull to find out what he was made of. There were no reactions to acid tests, the hardest cutting tool melted within seconds without even scratching the surface, and the searing flame of a thermic lance left the hull unscorched. The black crystal absorbed the intense heat like desert sand devouring rain.

  An attempt to scan Crusoe’s internal structure by means of sound waves, X-rays and a laser beam also ended in failure. The black crystal hull absorbed all three without producing even the ghost of an echo. The results set off some lively argument between members of the research group. They could see and feel Crusoe; yet, if they were to believe their instruments, there was nothing there – just a mysterious hole in the facade of the physical universe. The group took the instruments apart and checked every component.

  Another puzzling discovery was that the spectrographs of Crusoe’s superhard hull revealed several diamondlike characteristics.

  ‘Have you any idea how much that adds up to?’ asked Milsom. He was having coffee in the canteen with Spencer and Tomkin, the zoologist. ‘A rare black diamond one hundred feet across and maybe fifty feet deep? That must be about twenty-two zillion carats. You know, if we just sat here and quietly cut him up, everybody on Crow Ridge could be a millionaire. MRDC could even end up with a quotation on Wall Street.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Spencer. ‘It’s probably a synthetic silicate, but about a thousand times tougher than our best.’

  ‘No romance. That’s your trouble. No imagination…’ Milsom sipped his coffee. A thought struck him. ‘Jeez – I wonder if you can buy shares in this outfit?’

  Spencer shook his head resignedly and turned to Tomkin. ‘This ding-a-ling didn’t really work for NASA, he’s a survivor from Laugh-In.’

  Having attempted to analyse the composition of the hull, the scientists turned it over to the systems engineers for a second, microscopic inspection. Milsom, who had moments of lucidity between laughs, was convinced that the ten-foot-wide dome was the thing to watch, despite the fact that an earlier examination had revealed no separation between the dome and the hull. Now, there was an incredibly fine joint. So fine, in fact, that it was only visible under a powerful lens.

  Milsom called Neame and Gilligan over to check his findings.

  ‘That’s a good fit.’ Gilligan handed the jeweller’s eyepiece back to Milsom.

  ‘Even so, I don’t know how we missed it before. We didn’t go over the whole hull, but I did check around the dome. It was the obvious place to look.’

  Spencer squatted down beside them and ran his palm over the dome.

  ‘What do you think, Chris?’

  ‘I think we ought to put some sighting marks on it,’ said Milsom. ‘A cross on the dome, and matching register marks on the hull.’

  Neame drove away and came back with several reels of masking tape, newspaper, and white cellulose spray paint.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Milsom.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Neame. He had a mania for neatness.

  Milsom sat back and watched as Neame stuck down arrow-straight strips of
masking tape and newspaper and sprayed matching white bars on to the dome and hull. When the paint was dry, Neame let Milsom help him strip off the paper and masking tape.

  Spencer got the monitor hut to make a videotape record of the sighting marks using the overhead camera in the balloon. The tape was looped, so they could run it continuously and intercut later recordings for instant comparison on the same screen. If the markings appeared to ‘jump’ it would mean that the dome had moved in relation to the hull.

  The three of them went over to the canteen for a cup of coffee.

  ‘Which way do you think it’s going to go?’ asked Neame.

  ‘I can see only two possibilities,’ said Milsom. ‘The dome could be the top of a cylinder that rises vertically out of the hull, or it’s part of a sphere – in which case it will have to rotate like the ball turret on those old B-17s. My money is on the sphere.’

  ‘What do you think that is, the accommodation section?’ asked Spencer.

  ‘It’s either that or just the way in,’ said Milsom. ‘Let’s sketch it out.’ He reached for a paper napkin and clicked up the point of his ball pen. He drew two lemon shapes which he labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’, then added a circle to each and arrows to show direction of rotation.

  ‘Since Crusoe won’t let us dig him up, we have to assume that Arnold’s guess at his shape is correct. It doesn’t actually affect our problem with the hatch. Take A – the dot in the middle is the axis of rotation. There could be a hole right through the sphere giving you access to both sides of the craft. To open, the sphere rotates through ninety degrees.

  ‘In B, there is only one way into the sphere – and it rotates through one hundred and eighty degrees to open. The sphere could also rotate on more than one axis, which would give you access to and from several points within the hull.’

  ‘Yes, that’s good,’ said Spencer.

  ‘Except that I don’t know what we’re all getting excited about,’ said Milsom. ‘If that dome does move, it can only be because something inside is going to come out.’

  ‘Or someone,’ added Spencer.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Neame. ‘Crusoe might open up to let us in.’

  Milsom exchanged a glance with Spencer. ‘You mean like those plants that catch flies?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be a trap. It could be a self-opening birthday present.’

  ‘That’s a pretty wild idea, Rog. When did you dream that up?’ asked Spencer.

  Neame shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It just occurred to me.’

  Connors and Wedderkind arrived back on the Ridge in time for a late supper. Spencer told them about the progress on the hatch, but didn’t pass on Neame’s theory.

  Friday/September 7

  CROW RIDGE/MONTANA

  Neame popped into the monitor hut on his way to breakfast and ran the looped master against the first reel of the morning. The dome was rotating, on an axis roughly 30 degrees to their horizontal sighting marks.

  Neame called up the canteen, got Milsom on the phone, told him the news and ruined everybody’s breakfast. Within about three minutes, practically the whole research group, both scientists and engineers, were crowded into the monitor hut. Wedderkind still had some shaving cream on his face.

  ‘We’d better get some more marks on that dome,’ said Spencer.

  Milsom turned to Neame. ‘What did you do with the paint?’

  ‘Everything’s still in the back of the jeep.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Wedderkind wiped some more of his Old Spice foam away. ‘I’ll go and tell Bob. We’ll be in the operations room.’

  ‘That’s in the command hut…?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll be with Allbright. But first I’m going to have some breakfast. It looks like it could be quite a day.’

  Within thirty minutes, the second set of sighting marks had moved towards the top right-hand corner of the TV screen and had been swallowed up as the dome continued to rotate into the hull. There was now no doubt that the dome formed part of a large sphere turning on an axis deep within Crusoe’s hull.

  Milsom toyed with the idea of asking if anyone was good at reading crystal balls, then decided it might not go down too well.

  A circle started to appear in the left-hand bottom corner of their screens. As it rose clear of the hull they saw that it was a shallow circular well cut into the surface of the sphere, rather like a screw countersunk below the surface of a piece of wood. It was the first sign of anything remotely resembling a hatch. When the circle reached the centre of the screen, it stopped moving.

  Spencer telephoned Wedderkind, who was now sitting in front of the bank of TV monitors in the command hut’s operations room.

  ‘This is looking good. Is it okay to go and check it out?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wedderkind. ‘But not all at once.’

  Spencer drove out with Milsom, Neame, and Gilligan and padded up on to the hull. They’d taken to wearing rubber-soled basketball shoes when walking about on Crusoe in case he had another bout of magnetism.

  To avoid confusion, it was agreed to retain the word ‘dome’ to describe the exposed portion of the black crystal sphere above the line of the hull. The circular well, which had come to rest in the top dead centre of the dome, had an external diameter of six feet, a depth of twelve inches, and an internal diameter of five feet. Like most of Crusoe’s quoted measurements, these were only close approximations. The sides of the well tapered inward, and the bottom of the well had a convex surface like a magnifying glass.

  Spencer and the others each checked the bottom rim of the well to see if it was part of, or fitted to, the sloping sides. If there was a joint, it was too fine to see, even with the hefty magnification of a jeweller’s eyepiece.

  They sprayed a new set of sighting marks on the dome and the bottom of the circular well, so that any movement would show up on the monitor screens. As they were gathering up their gear, something at the rim of the dome caught Gilligan’s eye.

  ‘Hey, look at this.’ He knelt down to examine it and beckoned to the others.

  Spencer, Neame, and Milsom bent over to take a look at what he had found. Gilligan carefully picked up several thin, shredded, white fragments and sniffed them.

  ‘It’s that white cellulose paint.’

  The fragments were curled into tiny rolls.

  ‘Do you think the surface rejected it?’ asked Neame.

  ‘No,’ said Spencer. ‘I think I know what happened. The tolerance between the dome and the hull is so fine, the paint was scraped off as the dome turned over.’

  ‘Now that’s what I call microtolerance,’ said Milsom. ‘That was a thin coat of spray.’

  ‘We could work to that,’ said Neame.

  ‘On a sphere nearly fifteen feet across?’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Spencer. ‘We’re spoiling everybody’s view.’

  Connors sat watching the bank of TV screens in the operations room of the command hut. Allbright was on his right, Wedderkind on his left. On the big centre screen they saw the four engineers get back into the jeep and drive away from Crusoe.

  Wedderkind hit the mike button. ‘Neal, can you give us an overhead close-up on the dome, please?’

  Neal Zabrodski was the Air Force Master Sergeant in charge of the monitor team.

  ‘Coming up on main screen,’ said Zabrodski.

  The dome expanded rapidly to fill the twenty-one-inch screen. Connors sat up in his chair. The bottom of the circular well had already begun to move – at right angles to the axis of rotation of the dome. There was a second sphere fitting snugly inside the first, just like those sets of intricately-carved hollow ivory balls the Chinese delight in producing.

  ‘Arnold, it is a hatch. We’re in business.’

  Wedderkind kept his finger on the mike button. ‘Neal, is Dan there?’

  ‘Yes, he’s sitting on my shoulder.’

  Spencer’s voice came over the loudspeaker.
‘What is it, Arnold?’

  ‘Dan, I know you’ve just got back, but we’re going to need some more sighting marks on that hatch.’

  ‘No problem. We’re on our way.’ ‘Okay, but be careful.’

  The curved surface continued to move towards the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Milsom and Neame added as many marks as they could, then as a darker shape appeared at the edge of the circle, they scuttled off the hull.

  The dark curved shape continued to move across the circular hole in the dome like the moon eclipsing the sun. The second inner sphere was hollow. The dark shape was another circular hatch exactly the same size as that in the dome. When both hatches were in line, the inner sphere stopped rotating.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Wedderkind. ‘As you can all see, we have two hollow spheres fitting one inside the other, and rotating at right angles to one another. This is a real Swiss-watch job. We’ll call the circular aperture in the dome the outer hatch, and its matchmate in the second sphere the inner hatch. Okay, Neal – can you take us in closer?’

  The overhead camera zoomed in for a tight close-up. Connors and the others found themselves looking into a dark well, containing an eight-sided box with sloping sides. It appeared to be attached to the sides of the well by a series of angular struts. The box appeared to be made of the same translucent black crystalline material as the rest of Crusoe, but without the underlying brain-coral pattern. The top of the box was faceted like a gemstone with eight sloping panels butted together round another octagon containing four, insect-like, compound eyes.

  Spencer’s voice came through again. ‘I think there’s some upward movement on that box.’

  Wedderkind leaned forward and spoke into the mike, ‘Neal, can we get a close-up of that with one of the ground cameras?’

  Connors looked down at his calendar watch. ‘Friday…’