Fade Out

by Patrick Tilley

  Below the skin, a dull blue light flickered at irregular intervals, zigzagging through the convoluted pattern of the cortex. Prompted by Page, the group listened to the noise coming from the hull, the first anyone could remember Crusoe making. To Davis, it sounded like the tinkling noise made by Japanese wind chimes.

  Page explained that what they were hearing were stress sounds produced by the hull as Crusoe’s crystalline structure rearranged itself into a new shape.

  While the purpose of the change caused a certain amount of speculation, what mystified everybody was how Crusoe could change his shape at all. Previously, they had imagined that the diamond-hard hull must have been moulded from a liquid silicate, then machined to its final shape. Now, they had to accept that the hull was composed of organic crystals with a controlled growth pattern to match changes in function. It was an incredible, mind-boggling piece of technology – like making a two-seat Italian sports car that could turn itself into a Greyhound bus. It was against all the rules, but there it was, happening right before their eyes.

  The current theory was that Crusoe generated the cutoff zone as protection during transitional phases when he was vulnerable. If so, the fact that he had slapped a seven-mile cutoff zone on them must mean that the facelift he was undergoing was a major event. The big question was, how long was it going to take? Although nearly sixteen hours had elapsed since the force field had appeared, people were still wandering around with a stunned look on their faces suffering from what Gilligan had termed ‘electro-deprivation’. The more serious cases, he maintained, kept vainly turning switches on and off in the hope of finding something that worked.

  The loss of power had put things back to the way they had been on the day of their arrival. Cautious of the mysterious cutoff zone around Crusoe, transport had been abandoned at the embryo gatehouse, and cooking, heat, and light had been provided by compressed gas cylinders. Then slowly, as the limits of the cutoff zone had been defined and later, when the zone disappeared, more and more electrically-powered equipment had been installed on the Ridge until they had become as dependent on it as was the world outside.

  As a consequence, they had found themselves painfully short of emergency lighting, but the evening had been illuminated by a celebration blackout barbecue-and-beer-can special.

  Deprived of the video recording equipment, the research group arranged for one of the photographers to cover Crusoe with the aid of a camera built before the age of the silicon chip and went in search of breakfast. The butane cylinders hadn’t come up from Miles City but the baker’s truck had. The coffee was hot, the bacon had the sweet tang of woodsmoke just as in the best days at summer camp, and all in all there didn’t seem too much wrong with the world.

  Vincent and Neame shoved two tables together for the group to sit around, Davis brought a trayful of steaming coffee cups and Tomkin and Page brought the food.

  ‘Right, gentlemen,’ said Lovell. ‘Arnold will be back on the Ridge in a few hours. Let’s compare notes and see if we can present him with some sort of coherent picture.’

  Wedderkind and Wetherby arrived back on the Ridge just after midday. A light plane hired from the Miles City air-taxi outfit set them down on an improvised airstrip behind Broken Mill, and from there, one of the converted diesels had given them a noisy ride all the way up to the plateau. The first thing Wedderkind did was to take a look at Crusoe.

  When Crusoe bad surfaced, his hull had measured about seventy feet across, curving gently to a height of fifteen feet in the centre, and topped by a shallow dome, which they had found to be the exposed portion of the spherical hatch unit.

  Now, Crusoe’s hull was over twenty feet high, and it seemed to have grown wider, too. The four curving surfaces that made up the hull were now quite clearly defined.

  ‘My God,’ muttered Wedderkind. ‘This is absolutely fantastic. Do we have any idea what the rate of growth is?’

  ‘We’ll have a better idea tonight,’ said Page. ‘We’re taking a series of still pictures at fifteen-minute intervals throughout the day. I think they’ll prove that the growth rate is accelerating.’

  ‘I can give you the dimensional changes so far, Arnold…’ Neame leafed through his notebook. ‘At midday, the overall height was twenty-three feet, base diameter eighty feet. The domed hatch now only measures four feet across – that’s a 60 per cent decrease in size. Except that it’s not shrinking as Page originally thought, the whole spherical hatch unit is retracting into the hull.’

  ‘But the really important thing is the rate of change,’ insisted Page. ‘Assuming growth started yesterday when Crusoe generated the new cutoff zone, he grew four and a half feet taller in the first fifteen hours, and another three and a half feet in the last six.’

  ‘Which means if he continues to grow at the same rate for the next couple of days, we can expect something spectacular,’ said Wedderkind. He pulled out his pocket calculator, punched two digits, then swore quietly as the display failed to light up. He put the inert lump of electronic wizardry away and listened to the tinkling noise coming from Crusoe’s hull. As he peered through the semitranslucent outer skin, a wisp of blue light zigzagged through the darkness below. He laid a hand on the hull. ‘This whole thing is alive with vibrations.’

  ‘The whole Ridge is,’ said Neame. ‘Didn’t it wake any of you up last night?’

  ‘The trailer was rattling a bit this morning,’ admitted Brecetti.

  ‘I don’t just mean that. There were two definite tremors last night – at three o’clock, then at five. Did nobody feel it? A small double shock. Ba-boomm…’

  Just as the others were about to shake their heads, the ground shuddered under their feet. Ba-boomm…

  “Just like that,’ said Neame.

  Wedderkind backed several yards away from the hull and took a long look at Crusoe. ‘You know, ever since we failed to dig up this character, I’ve always assumed that there was as much of him under the ground as there was above it, but he may have been growing downward even longer than he’s been growing up.’ He turned to Wetherby. ‘Do you remember how the remaining charges, in those two rings Max drilled, exploded when Crusoe surfaced? It puzzled me at the time. Your joke about him putting down roots may turn out to be true after all.’

  ‘If it is,’ said Wetherby, ‘I don’t know whether being right is going to provide much consolation.’

  They began to walk back across the plateau to Rockville. When they were halfway across, Allbright, flanked by two of his aides, rode up on his palomino. He dismounted to greet Wedderkind and walked along with him and the others. Apparently he’d ridden down to the highway to make some calls over the unaffected base camp phone.

  ‘Just how big is the cutout zone?’ asked Wedderkind.

  ‘We estimate it has a radius of about three and a half miles,’ said Lovell.

  ‘Although the edge of the zone is still well clear of the highway, I decided to stop using helicopters,’ said Allbright. ‘We could land on the highway, but the airstrip at Broken Mill provides an extra margin of safety.’

  Wedderkind smiled. ‘A wise move.’

  ‘It’s very much an after-the-event precaution,’ said Allbright. ‘We were fortunate there was no flight activity in the area when Crusoe laid the new cutoff zone on us. That’s the real danger with this thing, there’s no warning when it’s coming. The other problem is – just how much bigger is it going to get?’

  ‘General, there’s no way I can answer that. I’m trying to work out why he needs this much protection. He’s already blacked out a pretty colossal area. Speaking for myself, I certainly don’t anticipate it getting any bigger.’

  ‘Good,’ said Allbright. ‘I’m counting on that.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Could we meet in the command hut at two? There are one or two points I think we ought to discuss.’

  ‘All right, General,’ said Wedderkind. ‘I’ll see you there.’

  Allbright remounted, gave them an informal salute and wheeled away followed by
his two senior cadets.

  ‘Fortunately we’re still the only people in the cutout zone,’ said Lovell. ‘So things aren’t as difficult as they might have been.’

  ‘Are the problems the same?’ asked Wedderkind.

  ‘Yes,’ said Neame. ‘We’re back to square one.’

  ‘What happened to the generator trucks?’

  ‘They went up like fireworks,’ said Neame.

  ‘But there is one interesting anomaly,’ said Brecetti. This time, the surging phenomena affect currents only above two hundred and fifty microvolts.’

  ‘Crusoe must have wanted to spare us at least one headache,’ said Neame. ‘Remember the dizziness and nausea that affected people around the crater when we first arrived?’

  Brecetti, Collis, and Wetherby went back with Wedderkind to his trailer. Wedderkind had brought a small, folding, camper’s gas stove back with him. He made some of his good coffee and handed it around.

  ‘I didn’t like to say anything in front of Allbright, but did nothing strike you about that figure of nearly seven miles for the diameter of the new cutout zone?’ asked Brecetti.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Wedderkind. ‘Apart from the fact that the metric equivalent is eleven kilometres. Unless you’re attaching a mystical significance to the number seven.’

  ‘There’s nothing mystical about it. The maximum diameter of the original cutout zone was established at a little over twelve hundred yards. That’s about point-six-nine of a mile. Does that ring a bell?’

  ‘No. Not a tinkle.’

  ‘Point-six-nine miles is one hundredth of one degree of arc –’

  ‘Ah, of course,’ said Wetherby. ‘Degrees of longitude…’

  ‘Yes – measured at the equator. The new cutout zone is ten times as big as the old one.’

  ‘And you think that if there’s any further enlargement, it will multiply by ten again?’ asked Wedderkind.

  ‘Yes, to sixty-nine miles. But it’s a big “if”.’

  ‘Then six hundred and ninety, six thousand nine hundred, and so on,’ suggested Wetherby.

  ‘Yes,’ said Brecetti. ‘It’s just a theoretical progression, but all you’d need is one more step and – ’

  ‘And the whole world would be covered…’ Wedderkind exchanged glances with Wetherby.

  ‘It’d be an interesting situation,’ said Brecetti.

  ‘But why, Phil?’ asked Collis. ‘I can see some reason for Crusoe protecting himself by a seven-mile cutoff zone during takeoff. It could be regarded as a critical manoeuvre. But what would be the point of depriving the whole world of electricity? It would be catastrophic.’

  ‘That’s true, but we could adapt – eventually.’

  ‘Some of us might,’ said Wedderkind. ‘Industry would collapse, water wouldn’t reach the cities, sewage would flood into the streets, food supplies would run out – ’

  ‘And within a week, there’d be total chaos,’ said Brecetti. ‘I’m not anticipating anything on that scale. I was merely pointing out the dimensional relationship between the old and new cutoff zone and what appears to be the unit of measurement.’

  ‘Yes, thanks, I see that…’ Wedderkind patted Brecetti on the shoulder. Brecetti didn’t know, of course, that York’s computer had come up with the possible locations of five other craft. If they all acted together, each producing a cutoff zone six thousand nine hundred miles in diameter, they could switch off most of the world. Permanently. To Wedderkind, that made a whole lot more sense than a formation takeoff.

  As he sipped from his cup, the hot coffee steamed up his glasses. Wedderkind took them off and dried the lenses with his handkerchief. He squinted at Wetherby with small, naked eyes that looked curiously vulnerable. Wetherby got the message and nodded.

  Wedderkind replaced his glasses and tapped the bridge into place on his nose. ‘Al and I got some information from George York in Baltimore last night that we’d like to share with you. I’m not sure what to make of it. The important thing is to decide what we are going to do about it.’

  Wedderkind told Brecetti and Collis about the possibility that there could be five more landing sites and the changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. It took them both a few minutes to get used to the idea.

  ‘So far, I’ve remained steadfastly optimistic,’ said Wedderkind. ‘But whichever way you look at it, one is a visit but six…’

  ‘Sounds more like a lynch party,’ said Brecetti.

  ‘The point is, we can’t keep this to ourselves much longer,’ said Wedderkind. ‘In fact, I’m going to have to tell Bob. We’re going to have to confess to the Russians that we double-crossed them – and that we know they double-crossed us too.’

  ‘We could always pretend we just found Crusoe,’ said Collis.

  Wedderkind smiled. ‘You’re learning fast, Ray.’ The smile was replaced by a frown. ‘I wonder what Allbright wants to talk about?’

  ‘I think he wants to move everybody off the Ridge and down to the base camp,’ said Brecetti. ‘He’s concerned about these continuing earth tremors.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Collis. ‘They’re not violent, but if Crusoe keeps on growing… why take the risk? Especially now that we’re completely cut off up here.’

  ‘Yes, I can see the problems,’ said Wedderkind. ‘But whatever the risks, I think it’s vital for some of us to remain here for as long as possible.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Collis.

  ‘Because once we move off the Ridge, we might not be allowed back.’

  Brecetti nodded soberly. ‘Neame told me he’d heard that there was a rumour going around among the Air Force technicians that the project was going to be terminated.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Wedderkind. ‘That three-week fade-out really rocked everybody back in Washington. Up here on the Ridge, we’ve been concerned with the purely scientific view. Even so, I don’t have to remind you of the wider implications. And the dangers – on all kinds of levels. Bob has done his best on our behalf, but Fraser has been cutting the ground away from under him. I know Bob. He never tries to defend an untenable position. This new fade-out has put the pressure back on again. He may well have recommended termination.’

  ‘Without telling you?’ Collis looked surprised.

  ‘Why tell me first when he can tell me afterward and blame someone else for the decision?’ said Wedderkind. ‘I don’t mind. After all, I’ve been holding out on him.’

  ‘I thought you were friends,’ said Collis.

  ‘We are,’ said Wedderkind. ‘I didn’t want him to worry.’

  ‘But Arnold, even if they send us all home, they still have to get rid of Crusoe. What are they going to try to do, blow him up?’ asked Wetherby.

  ‘I imagine they’ll try.’

  ‘And are you going to stand by and let them?’

  It was Brecetti who replied for Wedderkind. ‘What’s the alternative, Alan – link arms around the hull and sing “We shall not be moved”?’

  ‘No, but Arnold has access to the President,’ said Wetherby. ‘He could go to see him and explain what we’ve discovered, and urge him to postpone any decision to end the project.’

  ‘Al,’ said Wedderkind. ‘You know what the reaction to Crusoe has been. What do you think they’re going to say when I tell them there could be five more? Bob is going to go bananas. Up to now I’ve steadfastly believed Crusoe’s presence to be essentially harmless. I still do. But supposing the cutoff zone does spread? Should we just stand by and let it happen, or should we warn people, and at least give them the chance to try to stop it?’

  ‘What could they do?’ asked Wetherby.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Brecetti. ‘And there’s nowhere anyone can go to avoid it. In any case there’s no need to alarm people unnecessarily. Let’s wait to see if the cutout zone gets any bigger. There’ll still be plenty of time to warn Washington.’

  ‘What do you think, Ray?’

  ‘I think it’s madness to hold back on this information. I think you ou
ght to tell Connors that there could be more than one landing site and where you think they are – and also pass on Phil’s gloomiest prediction. Regardless of what Connors or Fraser or both of them together are plotting behind our back.’

  ‘Al?’

  Wetherby grimaced thoughtfully. ‘I think I agree with Ray. Since I can’t see any advantage in concealing the information, honesty would seem to be the best policy. I also think it might be time for our group to get ready to head for the hills. The journey may turn out to be totally unnecessary, but it will be a useful exercise.’

  ‘If only to prove how pathetically impractical the whole idea is,’ said Collis.

  ‘Don’t agree,’ said Wetherby. ‘Noah’s Ark. Lot and his daughters warned to flee the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Admirable biblical precedents. And historically, we have the example of the early monasteries acting as centres of knowledge during the Dark Ages.’

  ‘But surely, if we’re contemplating the possibility of dislocation on – well, let’s just say a continental scale – wouldn’t it be better for all of us to try to work together instead of hiving ourselves off into selfish little splinter survival groups?’

  ‘Now that is impractical, Ray,’ said Wetherby. ‘Faced with a prolonged breakdown of the type Phil has theorized, it would be impossible to maintain the present structure of society and the same geographical groupings. Without twentieth-century communications we’d have to revert to decentralized authority. And without electrical power, we’d find ourselves back in an America of the 1870s with bizarre outcroppings of twentieth-century gas, diesel, and chemical technology. Pioneer railroad America before the days of the telegraph, with modern diesels pounding the tracks at one hundred miles an hour. Diesel cars and trucks, light aircraft like the German planes of the late thirties – maybe even simple jets. All with primitive cockpit instruments operated by air and hydraulic pressure. Communication with the ground would have to be done by waggling the wings. And if the six magnetic sub-poles York has discovered ever become a permanent feature, then compass navigation will become a real tour de force…’