Fade Out

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘Why?’ Max jabbed his stake towards Crusoe. ‘Hasn’t that son of a bitch caused us enough problems?’

  ‘It has, but for the moment, the heat’s off.’

  ‘Then why not fix them both for good while we can get at them?’

  ‘Max, we can’t risk any drastic action until we know exactly what we’re dealing with – or at least have a better idea of the problems than we have now.’

  ‘Who needs it?’ said Max. ‘It cost me a lot of my friends to learn one thing during the war in ’Nam. Never give the enemy time to dig in. This guy’s had enough time to start pouring concrete.’

  ‘We’re keeping a close eye on everything, Max, believe me. I’m just as aware of the dangers as you are. That’s what my job is – to see this thing doesn’t get off the rails.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ Max nodded wisely. ‘I just hope you’re still around if and when we have to start shovelling up this pile of shit.’

  ‘I’ll be around,’ said Connors. ‘In the meantime, let’s leave it to the scientists.’

  ‘Scientists?’ Max snorted. ‘Those guys don’t even know which end of a test tube to fart into.’ He stuck the stake into the ground in front of Connors and stomped off.

  There is no way to win this one, thought Connors. This time, he was really the meat in the sandwich. The President had Fraser breathing fire down the back of his neck in Washington, while on Crow Ridge, Allbright was playing the local heavy. And now Max. There would be plenty of people in the country who would share Max’s view.

  Ranged against them was Wedderkind and the forces of reason – but not necessarily common sense. They were committed to keeping this project alive. Just how far would they go to achieve that objective?

  In crossing up the Russians and hiding the truth from the rest of the world, the White House had laid itself wide open to a little discreet blackmail from the scientific community on Crow Ridge. They were sealed off from the outside world, but what about their friends who had kept the press happy with the idea that new, inexplicable solar flares had been the cause of the fade-out? What kind of a deal had Wedderkind done with them?

  Connors thought back to his first meeting with the research group at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, and the feeling he had had that the group had known Crusoe was due to arrive. He dismissed the idea yet again, as simple nonscientific paranoia. People were always dreaming of mad scientists plotting to take over the world. They overlooked the fact that most of them were so bad at management that they would never be able to get it together.

  That was why God, in his infinite wisdom, had made some men politicians.

  The field lab consisted of two facing pairs of prefabricated units linked to a fifth, central unit that ran transversely between them. The four units each housed part of the research group – physics, chemistry, biology, and systems engineering. The central unit was common ground, with various shared facilities, a canteen conference area and a corner for the inevitable paperwork.

  Friday was manhandled from the shovel of Aaron’s earthmover on to a wooden pallet where he was brushed clean, then a fork-lift truck lifted the pallet through the double doors of the central unit on to a wheeled metal base. Friday’s legs were still pulled in tight against his body, and his eyestalks and feelers were fully retracted.

  Milsom, who was one of the people pushing the low trolley, had one hand on one of Friday’s legs. The black crystal surface felt very cold. When they got Friday to the centre of the room, they saw a thin film of condensation misting his shiny surface.

  ‘Look, he’s sweating again. Just like when we first had him surrounded.’ Milsom patted one of Friday’s sloping side panels. ‘Don’t worry, baby, this isn’t going to hurt.’

  ‘Much,’ added Neame.

  Spencer felt a cold draught and shivered. ‘What happened to the air conditioning?’

  Wedderkind, Brecetti, Lovell and the others all became aware of the cold. They didn’t need a thermometer to tell them something they could see with their own eyes. Friday was reducing his body temperature.

  The thin film of condensation began to turn into creeping patterns of frost over Friday’s black body. Wedderkind turned to Milsom. ‘Now you know he wasn’t sweating, and he wasn’t frightened.’

  ‘Shit…’ said Milsom. ‘He’s a walking deep freeze.’

  Brecetti blew into his hands and rubbed them together.

  ‘How about rustling up some fast heat?’ suggested Spencer.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Wedderkind. ‘Can you get that organized?’

  Page, who had gone to get a thermometer from the chemistry unit, said, ‘You’d better hurry. The room temperature is minus two degrees centigrade already.’

  They left Friday in possession of the central unit and gathered outside the entrance where it was twenty degrees plus – a sunny, sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

  ‘Of course the one thing we won’t have on the Ridge is a cold suit,’ said Wedderkind. ‘That would be asking too much.’ He buttonholed Milsom. ‘Go over to operations, and see if they can get some flown in fast.’

  Connors drove up to the field lab in a jeep. ‘What are you all doing out here?’

  ‘Take a look inside,’ said Wedderkind.

  Connors give them all a puzzled glance, pushed open one of the doors to the lab, and gasped as the block of ice-cold air hit him. His lungs felt full of icy needles.

  Friday sat on the wooden pallet, his legs still folded in close to his body. Both were now entirely covered in a layer of glittering white frost. He looked like a wedding cake designed by Salvador Dali.

  Connors shut the door hurriedly and stepped back outside. He beat his arms across his chest and shivered.

  ‘We can’t get near him,’ said Wedderkind.

  ‘Isn’t there anything you can do to stop it?’

  ‘We’re rustling up some gas heating units, and I’ve sent Milsom to try and organize delivery of some cold suits.’

  ‘Look,’ said Page. ‘The windows in the side units are misting over.’

  Wedderkind tried the handles of the entrance doors, then jerked his hand away as he felt the flesh begin to stick to the metal. The lock was beginning to ice up. Connors cleared a circle of condensation and peered through the panel in the door. Everything inside the central unit was now covered with frost.

  Spencer and a cadet came running back with a cylindrical gas turboheater on a wheeled frame. Behind him were six more cadets with another heater and two fat drums of butane.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Spencer breathlessly. Page pointed to the windows. The insides were now an opaque white, and frost was beginning to form on the outside of the glass.

  ‘Shit,’ hissed Spencer. ‘Aren’t those units double glazed?’

  Wedderkind took Connors’ arm and moved him farther away from the field lab. ‘I don’t think it would be advisable to go in there until we get the cold suits.’

  ‘What’s the temperature in there now?’ asked Connors.

  ‘We left all the thermometers inside,’ said Page. ‘Along with everything else.’

  ‘Okay, let’s light these two blowers and shove ’em through the door,’ said Spencer.

  Brecetti shook his head. ‘Complete waste of time. If I had a slide rule I could prove it quickly, but just take my word for it, the number of thermal units those two can put out won’t make any difference. If you had fifty perhaps…’

  ‘Well, we could at least try,’ insisted Spencer.

  ‘Okay,’ said Connors. ‘Go ahead. There’s nothing else we can do.’

  They connected up the two turboblowers to the butane drums and lit the ring of gas jets.

  ‘Don’t touch the door with your bare hands!’ said Wedderkind.

  Spencer took the proffered handkerchief, wrapped it round his right hand, and put his own on the left, then grabbed hold of the two handles of the entrance doors. They were frozen solid. He put his shoulder to the door and heaved.

  ‘Can someone lend me a hand t
o get a little more weight on here?’

  ‘Let me try, sir.’ It was one of the cadets. TURNER. The danger hit Wedderkind a fraction too late. As he opened his mouth to cry ‘Stop!’ Turner hurled himself shoulder first at the doors, burst them open and went crashing through to hit a wall of air at minus triple figures centigrade.

  Spencer recoiled as the white cloud of cold air rolled outward. They saw Turner spin round with his mouth open, then fall with outstretched arms against the partially open doors, slamming them shut.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ yelled Spencer. ‘Help me get him out.’

  Connors grabbed his driver’s arm. ‘Get the medics!’ The cadet leaped into the jeep and roared away.

  Wedderkind ran across to the entrance door as four of the cadets who’d brought the heaters got their shoulders to it. ‘Get back! It’s no good! You’ll have to leave him in there!’

  One of the cadets grabbed his arms with polite firmness. ‘Would you mind standing aside, sir?’

  The cadets put their shoulders to the doors and got them partly open Another white cloud of cold air swirled around them.

  ‘Don’t breathe in!’ cried Wedderkind.

  Connors, Spencer, and Page passed the two turboblowers up to the cadets by the doorway to pour in what heat they could, while Shanklin dragged Turner out. Spencer kicked both doors shut.

  Wedderkind knelt over Turner. The moisture on his skin had formed into tiny crystals of ice, and his lips were blue. His friends crowded around him. Spencer loosed a stream of remorseful obscenities. Wedderkind stood up.

  ‘Is he going to be all right, sir?’

  Wedderkind shook his head.

  ‘That’s crazy – he has to be.’ One of the cadets began to knead Turner’s chest. He looked up. ‘Doesn’t anybody know what to do?’

  Connors took Wedderkind aside. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘His lungs froze solid. That’s what happened. Stopped his circulation, like that.’ Wedderkind snapped his fingers.

  A jeep screeched to a halt behind them and the emergency medical team piled out. The young doctor tried to revive Turner’s heart with an injection of digitalis, pounding it with his fist, artificial respiration, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was all quite useless. Turner had died as he stepped through the door. The medics pulled a stretcher from the back of the jeep, put Turner on it, and covered him with a blanket.

  Wedderkind pointed to Shanklin, the cadet who had gone in to pull out Turner.

  ‘You’d better take this young man with you. He’s going to need some fast treatment for frostbite.’

  ‘Right,’ said the young doctor. Shanklin was ushered aboard the jeep. Turner’s body was loaded on the back.

  Wedderkind watched them drive away. ‘It’s all my fault. I saw it happening and just didn’t shout fast enough.’

  ‘No, it’s mine,’ said Spencer. ‘If I’d tried harder to open the door – ’

  ‘It might have been you under that blanket,’ said Connors.

  The outside walls of the field lab units were now covered with an opaque layer of white frost like that on the windows.

  There was a series of sliding noises from inside the lab, a clatter of things falling, glass smashing. Spencer picked up Turner’s hard hat and smashed one of the windows in the door to the central unit. Cold white air spilled out through the hole. Spencer edged up to the window. The inside of the central unit was a complete shambles.

  As his body temperature had plunged past zero, Friday had turned himself into a supermagnet, exerting a colossal force that had dragged everything metallic towards him. They broke the windows in the four wings of the field lab and found the same chaos. Everything was covered with frost. Expensive and fragile equipment stuck out bizarrely from the walls in the corner of the room where each one joined the central unit. The force of the attraction had even sheared tools from the benches where they had iced up.

  ‘Everything’s in a dreadful mess,’ said Page. ‘It’ll take weeks to build it all up again.’

  ‘And demagnetize everything,’ said Lovell.

  ‘Oh, dear, yes, of course,’ said Page.

  There were more crashing noises as other bits of equipment broke free from the thin grip of ice and flew across the room towards Friday.

  ‘At least we know how these two generate their magnetic fields,’ said Wedderkind.

  ‘Great,’ said Connors. ‘But what do we do now?’

  ‘I think we ought to let him out before he does any more damage.’

  They got Aaron to knock both ends of the central unit with the shovel of his earthmover. The intense cold inside rolled out chilling the outside air into small white clouds that drifted around the watching research group. They could now see clear through the shattered central unit. Friday was wedged in by a pile of miscellaneous metal objects – racks, chairs, filing cabinets.

  Pushing out his folded legs, Friday calmly created enough room in the middle of the frozen junkheap to stretch them. He had obviously switched off the current which had turned him into a supermagnet. Climbing over the mess, he walked out of the far end of the hut and up on to the plateau. From there, he headed up on to the crest of the Ridge and wandered about in his usual aimless fashion until his white frosted shape thawed out completely.

  Back at the field lab the research group began the task of putting the place in order, with the help of a cadet work detail. It was a messy job. All the paper work became soggy as it thawed out and had to be either thrown away or carefully dried. Everything else had to be wiped down. Every item of equipment that contained ferromagnetic or diamagnetic elements was found to be strongly magnetized, and any two objects placed less than three feet apart promptly slid together.

  Connors and Wedderkind drove down to the base camp medical unit to see how Shanklin was. They found him heavily bandaged and under treatment for severe frostbite. His hands, face, and feet were badly swollen. Surgery was inevitable.

  The news had already been broken to Allbright when they went to see him in the operations hut.

  ‘I’m sorry about that boy Turner,’ said Connors. ‘And Shanklin – hell, that’s just dreadful. They told us he’s going to lose all his fingers and most of his face.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the other cadets involved,’ said Allbright. ‘It seems that the accident was as much, if not more, due to their zeal as to anyone else’s misjudgement.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ insisted Connors, ‘it was my misjudgement.’

  ‘No, I’m more to blame than you are,’ said Wedderkind. ‘I knew exactly what the dangers were. I just didn’t react quickly enough.’

  ‘None of us want to cause the death of any of the people on this project,’ said Allbright. ‘Especially these young men whose lives are full of promise. But if you fail to act decisively, you fail the men under your command. You’ve just lost your first soldier, Mr Connors. Believe me, losing the second is no easier.’

  Max joined Connors and Wedderkind at their supper table. He hadn’t been asked, but then Max was like that. He unloaded his supper, dropped the tray against the leg of the table, and made a mess of the ashtray with his cigar stub.

  ‘Didn’t go too well today, huh?’ Max filled his big, square jaw with food.

  ‘Not too well,’ said Connors.

  ‘We’re having problems immobilizing him,’ said Wedderkind.

  ‘You’re also having problems getting near him,’ said Max.

  ‘That’s partly due to our limitations,’ said Wedderkind. ‘The human body only functions efficiently within a very limited temperature range. From about minus ten degrees to plus forty degrees centigrade. We can survive in temperatures in excess of that fifty-degree range, but we have to insulate ourselves.’

  ‘If we’d had the cold suits you might have been okay then.’

  ‘We could have got near Friday,’ said Wedderkind. ‘But when he turned on the magnetic field, we couldn’t put a screwdriver near him without losing control of it.’

  �
��Yeah, I saw the mess,’ said Max. ‘What’s the plan now? You gonna try the big trip?’

  ‘The space suits are on their way,’ said Connors. ‘We still need to be able to keep Friday out of the way while we get in and out.’

  ‘I could drop the blade of a bulldozer on him,’ offered Max. ‘Pin him to the ground.’

  ‘Max, until we know whether this thing is alive or not, we’re trying not to damage him.’

  ‘He’s already killed one guy.’

  ‘Friday didn’t kill him, the cold air did.’

  Max eyed Connors and chewed another mouthful slowly. ‘Your father must have been a lawyer,’ he said.

  Saturday/September 15

  CROW RIDGE/MONTANA

  It took two days of intensive work to straighten out the field lab, but most of the magnetized equipment had to be replaced. While work was still in progress, the two space suits that Spencer had ordered arrived from Cape Canaveral, Florida, along with a brace of NASA technicians.

  Spencer dressed up in one of the suits and was then loaded with the bulky backpack that contained the life-support systems. The suit and pack had been designed for optimum performance in zero-gravity or lunar-g conditions where everything weighed one-sixth of its weight on Earth. Spencer found it was a lot to carry around. It was clear that if anything went wrong while one or more of them was inside Crusoe, they wouldn’t be able to get out in a hurry.

  Davis, the biologist, and Tomkin, the zoologist, were satisfied that Friday was continuing to explore every corner of his immediate environment, and was keeping them all under close observation. Collis, the language scientist, who, in many people’s view, was totally superfluous to requirements, had got together with Alan Wetherby. For several days now, they had been running through the videotapes of Friday trying to spot any sequence of limb or antenna movements that could be even remotely construed as a signal. In conjunction with the videotapes, they were also studying the recordings of Friday’s rapid clicking noises, made with the help of a long-range cannon mike.

  Collis, who had carried out analytical studies in connection with the Navy’s dolphin research program, was well aware of the enormity of the task facing them. The chances of communicating with Friday – establishing what was known as ‘interspecies interlock’ – were virtually nil.