by Anthology
It was the captain's turn to nod mutely.
"There's your miracle," said Lieutenant McGuire softly.
"Miracle is right," agreed Captain Blake; "nothing less! But it is no miracle of ours, and I am betting it doesn't mean any good to us. Some other country has got the jump on us."
To the pilot he ordered: "Say nothing of this--not a word--get that? Let me have a written report: full details, but concise as possible."
He went back to the radio room, and the operator there received the same instructions.
"What are you going to do?" the lieutenant questioned.
Captain Blake was reaching for a head-set. "Listen in," he said briefly; "try to link up that impossible ship with those messages, then report at once to the colonel and whoever he calls in. I'll want you along, Mac, to swear I am sober."
* * * * *
He had a head-set adjusted, and McGuire took up the other. Again the room was still, and again from the far reaches of space the dark night sent to them its quavering call.
The weird shrillness cried less loudly now, and the men listened in strained silence to the go and come of that variable shriek. Musical at times as it leaped from one clear note to another, again it would merge into discordant blendings of half-tones that sent shivers of nervous reaction up the listeners' spines.
"Listen," said McGuire abruptly. "Check me on this. There are two of them, one loud and one faint--right?"
"Right," said Captain Blake.
"Now notice the time intervals--there! The faint one stops, and the big boy cuts in immediately. No waiting; he answers quickly. He does it every time."
"Well?" the captain asked.
"Listen when he stops and see how long before the faint one answers. Call the loud one the ship and the faint one the station.... There! The ship is through!"
There was pause; some seconds elapsed before the answer that whispered so faintly in their ears came out of the night.
"You are right, sir," the operator said in corroboration of McGuire's remark. "There is that wait every time."
"The ship answers at once," said McGuire; "the station only after a wait."
"Meaning--?" inquired the captain.
"Meaning, as I take it, that there is time required for the message to go from the ship to the station and for them to reply."
"An appreciable time like that," Captain Blake exclaimed, "--with radio! Why, a few seconds, even, would carry it around the world a score of times!"
Lieutenant McGuire hesitated a moment. "It happens every time," he reminded the captain: "it is no coincidence. And if that other station is out in space--another ship perhaps, relaying the messages to yet others between here and--Venus, let us say...."
* * * * *
He left the thought unfinished. Captain Blake was staring at him as one who beholds a fellow-man suddenly insane. But the look in his eyes changed slowly, and his lips that had been opened in remonstrance came gradually in a firm, straight line.
"Crazy!" he said, but it was apparent that he was speaking as much to himself as to McGuire. "Plumb, raving crazy!... Yet that ship did go straight up out of sight--an acceleration in the upper air beyond anything we know. It might be--" And he, too, stopped at the actual voicing of the wild surmise. He shook his head sharply as if to rid it of intruding, unwelcome thoughts.
"Forget that!" he told McGuire, and repeated it in a less commanding tone. "Forget it, Mac: we've got to render a report to sane men, you and I. What we know will be hard enough for them to believe without any wild guesses.
"That new craft is real. It has got it all over us for size and speed and potential offensive action. Who made it? Who mans it? Red Russia? Japan? That's what the brass hats will be wondering; that's what they will want to find out.
"Not a word!" he repeated to the radio man. "You will keep mum on this."
He took McGuire with him as he left to seek out his colonel. But it was a disturbed and shaken man, instead of the cool, methodical Captain Blake of ordinary days, who went in search of his commanding officer. And he clung to McGuire for corroboration of his impossible story.
* * * * *
There was a group of officers to whom Blake made his full report. Colonel Boynton had heard but little when he halted his subordinate curtly and reached for a phone. And his words over that instrument brought a quick conference of officers and a quiet man whom McGuire did not recognize. The "brass hats," as Blake had foreseen, were avid for details.
The pilot of the incoming plane was there, too, and the radio man. Their stories were told in a disconcerting silence, broken only by some officer's abrupt and skeptical question on one point and another.
"Now, for heaven's sake, shut up about Venus," McGuire had been told. But he did not need Captain Blake's warning to hold himself strictly to what he had seen and let the others draw their own conclusions.
Lieutenant McGuire was the last one to speak. There was silence in the office of Colonel Boynton as he finished, a silence that almost echoed from the grim walls. And the faces of the men who gathered there were carefully masked from any expression that might betray their thoughts.
It was the quiet man in civilian attire who spoke first. He sat beside another whose insignia proclaimed him of general's rank, but he addressed himself to Colonel Boynton.
"I am very glad," he said quietly, "very glad. Colonel, that my unofficial visit came at just this time. I should like to ask some few questions."
Colonel Boynton shifted the responsibility with a gesture almost of relief. "It is in your hands. Mr. Secretary," he said. "You and General Clinton have dropped in opportunely. There is something here that will tax all our minds."
The man in civilian clothes nodded assent. He turned to Captain Blake.
"Captain," he said, "you saw this at first hand. You have told us what you saw. I should like greatly to know what you think. Will you give us your opinion, your impressions?"
* * * * *
The captain arose smartly, but his words came with less ease.
"My opinion," he stated, "will be of little value, but it is based upon these facts. I have seen to-night, sir, a new type of aircraft, with speed, climb and ceiling beyond anything we are capable of. I can only regard it as a menace. It may or may not have been armed, but it had the size to permit the armament of a cruiser; it had power to carry that weight. It hung stationary in the air, so it is independent of wing-lift, yet it turned and shot upward like a feather in a gale. That spells maneuverability.
"That combination, sir, can mean only that we are out-flown, out-maneuvered and out-fought in the air. It means that the planes in our hangars are obsolete, our armament so much old iron.
"The menace is potential at present. Whether it is an actual threat or not is another matter. Who mans that ship--what country's insignia she carries--is something on which I can have no opinion. The power is there: who wields it I wish we knew."
The questioner nodded at the conclusion of Blake's words, and he exchanged quiet, grave glances with the general beside him. Then--
"I think we all would wish to know that, Captain Blake," he observed. And to the colonel: "You may be able to answer that soon. It would be my idea that this craft should be--ah--drawn out, if we can do it. We would not attack it, of course, until its mission is proved definitely unfriendly, but you will resist any offensive from them.
"And now," he added, "let us thank these officers for their able reports and excuse them. We have much to discuss...."
* * * * *
Captain Blake took McGuire's arm as they went out into the night. And he drew him away where they walked for silent minutes by themselves. The eyes of Lieutenant McGuire roamed upward to the scudding clouds and the glimpse of far, lonely stars; he stumbled occasionally as he walked. But for Captain Blake there was thought only of matters nearby.
"The old fox!" he exclaimed. "Didn't he 'sic us on' neatly? If we mix it with that stranger there will be no censure from the Secretary of War."<
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"I assumed that was who it was," said McGuire. "Well, they have something to think about, that bunch; something to study over.... Perhaps more than they know.
"And that's their job," he concluded after a silence. "I'm going to bed; but I would like a leave of absence to-morrow if that's O. K."
"Sure," said Captain Blake, "though I should think you would like to stick around. Perhaps we will see something. What's on your mind, Mac?"
"A little drive to the top of Mount Lawson," said Lieutenant McGuire. "I want to talk to a bird named Sykes."
CHAPTER II
Lieutenant McGuire, U. S. A., was not given as a usual thing to vain conjectures, nor did his imagination carry him beyond the practical boundaries of accepted facts. Yet his mind, as he drove for hours through the orange-scented hills of California, reverted time and again to one persistent thought. And it was with him still, even when he was consciously concentrating on the hairpin turns of Mount Lawson's narrow road.
There was a picture there, printed indelibly in his mind--a picture of a monstrous craft, a liner of the air, that swung its glowing lights in a swift arc and, like a projectile from some huge gun, shot up and up and still up until it vanished in a jet-black sky. Its altitude when it passed from sight he could not even guess, but the sense of ever-increasing speed, of power that mocked at gravitation's puny force, had struck deep into his mind. And McGuire saw plainly this mystery ship going on and on far into the empty night where man had never been.
No lagging in that swift flight that he had seen; an acceleration that threw the ship faster and yet faster, regardless of the thin air and the lessened buoyancy in an ocean of atmosphere that held man-made machines so close to Earth. That constant acceleration, hour after hour, day after day--the speed would be almost unlimited; inconceivable!
He stopped his car where the mountain road held straight for a hundred feet, and he looked out over the coastal plain spread like a toy world far below.
"Now, how about it?" he asked himself. "Blake thinks I am making a fool of myself. Perhaps I am. I wonder. It's a long time since I fell for any fairy stories. But this thing has got me. A sort of hunch, I guess."
* * * * *
The sun was shining now from a vault of clear blue. It was lighting a world of reality, of houses where people lived their commonplace lives, tiny houses squared off in blocks a mile below. There was smoke here and there from factories; it spread in a haze, and it meant boilers and engines and sound practical machinery of a practical world to the watching man.
What had all this to do with Venus? he asked himself. This was the world he knew. It was real; space was impenetrable; there were no men or beings of any sort that could travel through space. Blake was right: he was on a fool's errand. They couldn't tell him anything up here at the observatory; they would laugh at him as he deserved....
Wondering vaguely if there was a place to turn around, he looked ahead and then up; his eyes passed from the gash of roadway on the mountainside to the deep blue beyond. And within the man some driving, insistent, mental force etched strongly before his eyes that picture and its problem unanswered. There was the ship--he saw it in memory--and it went up and still up; and he knew as surely as if he had guided the craft that the meteor-like flight could be endless.
Lieutenant McGuire could not reason it out--such power was beyond his imagining--but suddenly he dared to believe, and he knew it was true.
"Earthbound!" he said in contempt of his own human kind, and he looked again at the map spread below. "Ants! Mites! That's what we are--swarming across the surface of the globe. And we think we're so damn clever if we lift ourselves up a few miles from the surface!
"Guess I'll see Sykes," he muttered aloud. "He and his kind at least dare to look out into space; take their eyes off the world; be impractical!"
He swung the car slowly around the curve ahead, eased noiselessly into second gear and went on with the climb.
* * * * *
There were domed observatories where he stopped: rounded structures that gleamed silvery in the air; and offices, laboratories: it was a place of busy men. And Professor Sykes, he found, was busy. But he spared a few minutes to answer courteously the questions of this slim young fellow in the khaki uniform of the air service.
"What can I do for you?" asked Professor Sykes.
"No dreamer, this man," thought McGuire as he looked at the short, stocky figure of the scientist. Clear eyes glanced sharply from under shaggy brows; there were papers in his hand scrawled over with strange mathematical symbols.
"You can answer some fool questions," said Lieutenant McGuire abruptly, "if you don't mind."
The scientist smiled broadly. "We're used to that," he told the young officer; "you can't think of any worse ones than those we have heard. Have a chair."
McGuire drew a clipping from his pocket--it was the newspaper account he had read--and he handed it to Professor Sykes.
"I came to see you about this," he began.
The lips of Professor Sykes lost their genial curve; they straightened to a hard line. "Nothing for publication," he said curtly. "As usual they enlarged upon the report and made assumptions and inferences not warranted by facts."
"But you did see that flash?"
"By visual observation I saw a bright area formed on the terminator--yes! We have no photographic corroboration."
"I am wondering what it meant."
"That is your privilege--and mine," said the scientist coldly.
"But it said there," McGuire persisted, "that it might have been a signal of some sort."
"I did not say so: that is an inference only. I have told you, Lieutenant"--he glanced at the card in his hand--"--Lieutenant McGuire--all that I know. We deal in facts up here, and we leave the brilliant theorizing to the journalists."
* * * * *
The young officer felt distinctly disconcerted. He did not know exactly what he had expected from this man--what corroboration of his wild surmises--but he was getting nowhere, he admitted. And he resented the cold aloofness of the scientist before him.
"I am not trying to pin you down on anything," he said, and his tone carried a hint of the nervous strain that had been his. "I am trying to learn something."
"Just what?" the other inquired.
"Could that flash have been a signal?"
"You may think so if you wish: I have told you all that I know. And now," he added, and rose from his chair, "I must ask to be excused; I have work to do."
McGuire came slowly to his feet. He had learned nothing; perhaps there was nothing to be learned. A fool's errand! Blake was right. But the inner urge for some definite knowledge drove him on. His eyes were serious and his face drawn to a scowl of earnestness as he turned once more to the waiting man.
"Professor Sykes," he demanded, "just one more question. Could that have been the flash of a--a rocket? Like the proposed experiments in Germany. Could it have meant in any way the launching of a projectile--a ship--to travel Earthward through space?"
* * * * *
Professor Sykes knew what it was to be harassed by the curious mob, to avoid traps set by ingenious reporters, but he knew, too, when he was meeting with honest bewilderment and a longing for knowledge. His fists were placed firmly on the hips of his stocky figure as he stood looking at the persistent questioner, and his eyes passed from the intent face to the snug khaki coat and the spread wings that proclaimed the wearer's work. A ship out of space--a projectile--this young man had said.
"Lieutenant," he suggested quietly--and again the smile had returned to his lips as he spoke--"sit down. I'm not as busy as I pretend to be. Now tell me: what in the devil have you got in your mind?"
And McGuire told him. "Like some of your dope," he said, "this is not for publication. But I have not been instructed to hush it up, and I know you will keep it to yourself."
He told the clear-eyed, listening man of the previous night's events. Of the radio's weird call and the mystery ship.
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"Hallucination," suggested the scientist. "You saw the stars very clearly, and they suggested a ship."
"Tell that to Jim Burgess," said McGuire: "he was the pilot of that plane." And the scientist nodded as if the answer were what he expected.
He asked again about the ship's flight. And he, too, bore down heavily upon the matter of acceleration in the thin upper air. He rose to lay a friendly hand on McGuire's shoulder.
"We can't know what it means," he said, "but we can form our own theories, you and I--and anything is possible.
"It is getting late," he added, "and you have had a long drive. Come over and eat; spend the night here. Perhaps you would like to have a look at our equipment--see Venus for yourself. I will be observing her through the sixty-inch refractor to-night. Would you care to?"
"Would I?" McGuire demanded with enthusiasm. "Say, that will be great!"
* * * * *
The sun was dropping toward the horizon when the two men again came out into the cool mountain air.
"Just time for a quick look around," suggested Professor Sykes, "if you are interested."
He took the lieutenant first to an enormous dome that bulged high above the ground, and admitted him to the dark interior. They climbed a stairway and came out into a room that held a skeleton frame of steel. "This is the big boy," said Professor Sykes, "the one hundred-inch reflector."
There were other workers there, one a man standing upon a raised platform beside the steel frame, who arranged big holders for photographic plates. The slotted ceiling opened as McGuire watched, and the whole structure swung slowly around. It was still, and the towering steel frame began to swing noiselessly when a man at a desk touched various controls. McGuire looked about him in bewilderment.
"Quite a shop," he admitted; "but where is the telescope?"