It was his last observation flight.
Dr. Ames called for him to appear the next morning. Another man was with the Director when Harry entered the office.
"Mr. Wiseman," said Dr. Ames, "I want you to meet Steve Martin. This is Harry Wisemen, the engineer I mentioned to you, Steve. Harry has just finished a stint of observation patrol with Declaux."
Harry shook hands with the stranger. Steve Martin was quiet, hard, and purposeful. He had an air of knowing something that was better not known.
"Mr. Martin is Operations Manager," said Ames. "He takes care of everything from ordering thumbtacks to -- Well, Steve will show you. I'm putting you directly under his wing. He doesn't have the time for many of our newcomers. But he saw your record and asked if he might take over your indoctrination."
Harry glanced at the expressionless face of the Operations Manager. He wondered what Steve Martin had seen in his record that moved him to such a request.
"Mr. Smith recommended Mr. Wiseman very highly," said Ames.
"We'll see," said Steve Martin, finally. He turned. "If that's all, Dr. Ames, we've got an urgent module exchange to handle this morning."
"That's all," said Ames. "I'll see you again in a few days," he said to Harry.
The largest building in the compound, and the one closest to the bare, sandy plain which comprised most of the area had been identified to Harry as the Operations Center. Harry had been warned away from it, but now he rode toward it with Steve Martin.
The building was a square, white block that reminded Harry of a Federal Reserve Bank, weirdly misplaced from a Middle-size American town to the African jungle. A guard house stood inside a fenced entrance like that of some secret defense plant. Steve Martin parked the jeep beside a row of a dozen others. Harry slipped on the special badge Martin had given him.
The guard waved them through without delay.
The building seemed utterly silent. Harry glimpsed the great central section, which was filled with banks of equipment that looked like computing, recording, indicating, and control panels. A couple of operators broke the long emptiness of the aisles.
Steve Martin led the way quickly to an elevator opening off the corridor. Inside, he punched a 10 button. But the elevator did not rise. It dropped swiftly, and Harry watched the indicator. Ten levels. A hundred feet or more beneath the surface. He speculated on the magnitude of engineering and construction responsible for this place.
At the tenth level the door opened silently and Harry followed Steve Martin into the gallery that spread out before them. The aisle was forty feet wide, banked on either side with massive panels twelve high. The brightly-lit ceiling was another five or six feet above the panels. And the gallery stretched for what seemed an immense distance straight ahead. Harry estimated it was several hundred feet long.
"This is what we call the Main Helix Section," said Steve. "None of that will mean anything to you now. Later you'll learn something about the functions here. I brought you along just to give you the feel of the place and show you something of our activities. We maintain this equipment mainly by replacement of modules. One went out of commission last night, and we're in the process of replacement now. Here comes the new one."
From their left, almost silently, a ponderous black module slid forward.
Harry noticed then that small tracks were buried in the floor, and the great mass was rolling on a low dolly whose wheels followed the tracks. A silent motor drove the dolly. It was controlled by crewmen who walked beside it.
That mass seemed to Harry like a chunk of polished black marble. A dozen feet high, it was twenty feet wide and thirty deep.
"We don't have to replace one of these very often, but when we do it's a major operation. Let's go down to the receptacle. You can give us a hand with the reconnections."
They mounted a small personnel car and drove a quarter of a mile down the gallery to the space that gaped like an empty tooth socket with ten thousand hanging nerves and blood vessels waiting to be reconnected.
The module that had been removed was waiting on its dolly beyond the cavity.
"I'm going to assign you to the concentric connector crew. That's our most difficult operation, but you should be able to make yourself useful with your BMEWS experience. Here's the foreman, Howard Maxon. He'll give you a little instruction while the module is moving up."
Harry shook hands with the foreman, a ruddy-faced craftsman whose whole life was his skill in fitting metal objects together in pleasing and satisfying patterns.
Howard took him over to one of the massive connectors. It looked like a giant collapsible cup with thirty or forty concentric rings pushed back from one another. The whole conductor was nearly four feet in diameter. The foreman explained how the rings had to be fitted one by one onto a mating connector on the module so that they were concentric within five ten-thousandths of an inch.
"It really isn't as bad as it looks. Steve likes to make out like it's a real tough job, but all it takes is a little skill. You'll see."
Harry felt he'd see that he was nothing but in the way. He could not possibly be of any help on such an unfamiliar precision job. And as he obtained glimpses of other portions of the work, he got the feeling that the connection of the concentric conductor was the simples operation of all.
For one thing, the massive block itself had to be placed with a precision of three thousandths of an inch. Howard said it weighed a hundred and twenty-five tons.
"What's in it?" said Harry.
"That's what we'd all give ten years of our lives to know," said Howard.
Eighteen hours later the module was in place, and the crew was on the edge of exhausted collapse. The twenty-five-man crew had worked with only moments for breaks. There was a fierce dedication in their work that Harry just could not understand. Any technical crew he had ever known would have demanded double time for loss of lunch breaks, and double that after twelve hours. This crew worked as if it were the personal responsibility of each man to get the job done -- and his life almost depended on it.
Harry mentioned it to Steve.
"Yeah, these guys take their work seriously," said the Operations Manager. "All we have to do now is deliver the defective module and we're through."
"Deliver it where?" said Harry.
"The repair shop," said Steve.
At a mile an hour, the great block moved down the gallery and turned the corner in the direction from which Harry had seen the first module appear. He followed beside Steve Martin and a half dozen other crew members who remained to attend the final operation.
The dolly moved past another section of smaller control panels of unknown purpose and deceptive simplicity. Harry sensed an immense complexity here that was beyond his understanding.
Beyond, a vertical door raised to permit the passage of the module. A vault that must have been fifty feet in height opened beyond. A hemispherical wall scaled it at one end. The other opened to the endless depths of a vast tube that seemed to disappear into some vague and eternal night.
The module moved out to the center of the cavern, and the door was lowered. Harry saw now that it was at least ten feet thick, but when it was closed there was a semi-transparency that formed a window in the great, movable wall.
Steve Martin stepped to the controls, inspected a number of meters and satisfied himself with their readings. Then, in quick succession, he pressed a number of controls.
A gradual blaze of golden light built up in the window of the great door. There was no outward sign, yet Harry felt as if the very space in the room was slowly being twisted by crushing forces. It hurt in some depths of his being that he had never been aware of.
The golden light burst into brilliance like that of an exploding sun. There was no sound. Just the great flame. Then the twisting was gone.
The other crewmen saluted Steve and moved off. "That does it," one of them said.
Steve Martin nodded. He remained unmoving by the panel. He pressed a button, and the thick door moved up.
Beyond, the cavern was empty. "Now you know," said Steve.
Harry squinted into the emptiness and looked back at Steve. "Know what?" he said. "What am I supposed to know? I saw a big black box disintegrate in flames. A hundred and twenty-five tons of big black box -- "
Steve shook his head. "No. Think now. Did you see anything disintegrate? Did you see any ash?"
"Then what did I see? Where is the module?"
"Alpha Centauri."
"Alpha -- "
"That's what we say among ourselves. Actually, we don't know where it went. It's just out there somewhere."
Harry shook his head, bewildered. "I don't understand what you're trying to tell me."
"This is a railroad station!" Steve Martin spread his arms wildly, as if the tension of the past hours was being released in a sort of idiocy. "You and I and Dr. Ames and sweet Nancy Harris and all that gang you saw here today -- we're railroaders. We run trains!"
Harry backed off before Steve's idiotic outburst. The the Operations Manager laughed. "I'm not off my rocker. I'm telling you the truth. We operate a rail line. The Alpha Centauri line -- freight, passengers, chickens, dogs -- what have you."
He slapped the bewildered Harry on the shoulder in the gesture of a tavern drunk. "See Ames in the morning. He'll give you the whole story. Tell him I said you pass okay. I didn't tell you, did I -- you did a real nice job today. You're going to fit in with the boys real well. Come on -- I'm tired. Let's get the hell out of here."
Without giving Harry a chance to reply, he led the way back to the elevator and out of the building. On the way back to the barracks he was quiet and stolid and said nothing. Harry remained silent, trying to understand the significance -- if any -- of what he had heard.
In the night, before he went to sleep, he looked out over the compound. The blue glow weaved and swirled like an aurora.
VI
Dr. Ames's secretary called again before Harry had finished shaving. Ames wanted to see him right away.
He was pacing slowly between his desk and the broad window overlooking the bare expanse of the compound. He nodded and kept up his pacing as Harry approached.
"Martin says you did very well," Dr. Ames said. "There's no reason why you can't become a first-class maintenance engineer."
Harry remained standing, staring at the moving figure of the scientist.
"Sit down," said Ames. "Steve told me he gave you a somewhat incoherent hint of our work here."
"He said something about railroading. It didn't make much sense. He said something about Alpha Centauri, too."
Ames sat on the other side of the desk and leaned across it. "Does that make any more sense?"
"I doubt it."
"It could -- couldn't it?"
"You tell me," said Harry.
"Nearly sixty years ago," Ames said reminiscently, "my father was a physicist with the Bureau of Standards. It was long before the days of flying saucers and such, but in any age there are wonderful lights and mysterious presences. My father was approached by one such.
"It wasn't merely wonderful and mysterious. It was an Emissary from another planet of another galaxy. He wasn't here on conquest or trying to collect specimens or any other weird or stupid thing. He simply wanted to set up a transportation station and asked if my father would be willng to get some people together to help them.
"I needn't go into what it took for my father to convince some of his fellow scientist that he wasn't on opium -- the LSD of his generation. He succeeded. The Emissary helped him succeed by presenting himself to the group and explaining his wishes in very plain English.
"Once they were convinced, the group fell over themselves in their anxiety to be of service to this representative of an incredible culture that was beyond any dreams of their day. They had visions of traveling to the worlds spoken of by the Emissary. But he quickly squelched any such ideas. He said he couldn't allow that. He just needed some help in setting up and maintaining the station, and would they give it."
"They leaped at the opportunity. They devoted the rest of their lives to it. And this is it.
"The people represented by the Emissary set up the station pretty much as you see it now. It was on the site of a mining concession, a dummy structure to camouflage the real operation. And our people settled down to operate the station."
"But what is it?" Harry exclaimed. "What kind of transportation is this? What do you have to do?"
"We would call it a matter transmitter," said Ames. "Matter is converted to energy forms far outside any spectrum with which we are familiar, and literally transported through space -- between far distant galaxies. We aren't sure where it originates or where it terminates."
"Don't you ever see what's transported?"
"This is a relay station," said Ames. "Much like a communications repeater station. It receives the transmitted energy from somewhere else a hundred or a thousand light-years beyond. We have never been told where."
"What is your function?"
"Actually, we have few duties. We don't understand how the process or the equipment works, of course. And it is either self-programmed or functionally controlled by signals from central control stations. We do have important duties in replacing failed modules, as you saw today. We also, of course, provide general protective and custodial service for the station."
"Such as running off the Addabas when they get too close."
Ames nodded. "That -- among other things."
"It's in a poor location."
"But one that can't be moved. When it was first established, this was the most remote corner of the Earth."
Harry settled heavily into his chair. It was hard to believe Ames's bewildering story, but he had no reason not to believe it.
"Consider the implications," Dr. Ames said. "They have a federation of hundreds, maybe thousands of races that live in harmony with one another. They have a technology that's light-years ahead of us. We've got to have a piece of that. We've got to make them let us into the club!"
Harry shook his head. "It doesn't make sense that they would come to us for assistance in running their railroad. They wouldn't need us if what you say is true. They'd either set up an automatic station or they'd just put in some of their own people. They would have a station somewhere in space, rather than needing a planet to put it on."
"You don't understand. This isn't of great importance to them. It's just a little branch-line railroad running out into the sticks. The main center of their civilization is so far away that you can't comprehend it. This is just a rural milk run to them. And for the most part, their station is automatic. We don't know how it works. We don't know how to run it or repair it. All we know is what they've taught us: to make a few mechanical adjustments and replace modules when indications of trouble appear."
"They could still get along without you. It doesn't make sense."
"Yes, they could. But they'd have to put in a lot more automatic equipment. This little branch line isn't worth it. They can hire the local natives to do a little footwork and save a big expense. As far as reliability goes, the equipment if foolproof. If there are indications of malfunction that we can't handle, they just shut it down."
"Has that ever happened?"
"No. The station has never broken down that far."
"So you sweep the floor of the station and empty the ash trays for these alien characters. What do you get out of it?"
Dr. Ames had been facing the window. Now he turned in astonishment to face Harry. "What do we get out of it? Can you imagine what it's like to be in contact with a super-civilization whose science is so far ahead of ours it makes us feel like children learning to crawl? Their need to have a transporter station in this galaxy provides us this one tenuous thread of contact.
"Fortunately, we were the most adaptable to their needs. We have an association with a science so far beyond ours that we cannot comprehend the magnitude of this great unknown."
Subway to the Stars Page 3