Adventures in the Far Future
Donald A Wollheim (ed.) Copyright, 1954, by ACE BOOKS, INC. All Rights Reserved
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Wind Between the Worlds by Lester del Rey.
Copyright, 1951, by World Editions, Inc., for Galaxy Science Fiction.
Stardust by Chad Oliver.
Copyright, 1953, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. for Astounding Science Fiction.
Overdrive by Murray Leinster.
Copyright, 1952, by Better Publications, Inc., for Startling Stories.
The Millionth Year by Martin Pearson.
Copyright, 1943, by Columbia Publications, Inc., for Science Fiction Stories.
The Chapter Ends by Poul Anderson.
Copyright, 1953, by Columbia Publications, Inc., for Dynamic Science Fiction.
Printed in U.S.A.
THE WIND BETWEEN THE WORLDS
By Lester del Rey
I
IT WAS hot in the dome of the Bennington matter transmitter building. The metal shielding walls seemed to catch the rays of the sun and bring them to a focus there. Even the fan that was plugged in nearby didn’t help much. Vic Peters shook his head, flipping the mop of yellow hair out of his eyes. He twisted about, so the fan could reach fresh territory, and cursed under his breath.
Heat he could take. As a roving troubleshooter for Teleport Interstellar, he’d worked from Rangoon to Nairobi—but always with men. Pat Trevor was the first of the few women superintendents he’d met. And while he had no illusions of masculine supremacy, he’d have felt a lot better working in shorts or nothing right now.
Besides, a figure like Pat’s couldn’t be forgotten, even though denim coveralls were hardly supposed to be flattering. Cloth stretched tight across shapely hips had never helped a man concentrate on his work.
“One more bolt, Vic,” she told him. “Phew, I’m melting … So what happened to your wife?”
He shrugged. “Married her lawyer right after the divorce. Last I knew, they were doing fine. Why not? It wasn’t her fault. Between hopping all over the world and spending my spare time trying to get on the moon rocket they were building, I wasn’t much of a husband.”
Unconsciously, his lips twisted. He’d grown up before DuQuesne discovered the matter transmitter, when reaching the other planets of the Solar System had been the dream of most boys. Somehow, that no longer seemed important to people, now that the world was linked through Teleport Interstellar with races all across the Galaxy.
Man had always been a topsy-turvy race. He’d discovered gunpowder before chemistry, and battled his way up to the atom bomb in a scant few thousand years of civilization, before he had a world-wide government. Other races, apparently, developed space travel long before the matter-transmitter, and long after they’d achieved a genuine science of sociology.
DuQuesne had started it by investigating some obscure extensions of Dirac’s esoteric mathematics. To check up on his work, he’d built a machine, only to find that it produced results beyond his expectations; matter in it simply seemed to disappear, releasing energy that was much less than it should have been, but still enough to destroy the machine.
DuQuesne and his students had rechecked their math against the results and come up with an answer they didn’t believe. This time they built two machines and experimented with them until they worked together. When the machines were operating, anything within the small fields they generated simply changed places. At first it was just across a few yards, then miles—then half around the world. Matter was transmitted almost instantaneously from one machine to the other no matter how far apart they were.
Such a secret couldn’t be kept, of course. DuQuesne gave a demonstration to fellow scientists at which a few reporters were present. They garbled DuQuesne’s explanation of electron waves covering the entire universe that were capable of identity shifts, but the accounts of the actual experiment were convincing enough. It meant incredibly fast shipping anywhere on the globe at an impossibly low cost.
The second public demonstration played to a full house of newsmen and cold-headed businessmen. It worked properly —a hundred pounds of bricks on one machine changed place with a hundred pounds of coal on another. But then …
Before their eyes, the coal disappeared and a round ball came into existence, suspended in mid-air. It turned around as if seeking something, an eyelike lens focused on the crowd. Then it darted down and knocked the power plug loose.
Nothing could budge it, and no tricks to turn on power again worked.
Even to the businessmen, it was obvious that this object, whatever it was, had not been made on Earth. DuQuesne himself suggested that somewhere some other race must have matter transmittal, and that this was apparently some kind of observer. Man, unable to reach even his own moon yet, had apparently made contact with intelligence from some other world, perhaps some solar system, since there was no theoretical limit to the distance covered by matter transmittal.
It was a week of wild attempts to crack open the “observer” and of futile attempts to learn something about it. Vic’s mind had been filled with Martians, and he had tried to join the thousands who flocked to DuQuesne’s laboratory to see the thing. But his father had been stubborn—no fare for such nonsense. And Vic had had to wait until the papers sprang the final surprise, a week later.
The ball had suddenly moved aside and made no effort to stop the machine from operating. When power was turned on, it had disappeared, and this time the Envoy had appeared. There was nothing outlandish about him—he seemed simply a normal man, stepping out of the crude machine.
In normal English, he had addressed the crowd with the casual statement that he was a robot, designed deliberately to serve as an ambassador to Earth from the Galactic Council. He was simply to be the observer and voice of the Council, which was made up of all worlds having the matter transmitter. They had detected the transmitter radiation, and, by Galactic Law, Earth had automatically earned provisional status. He was here to help set up transmitter arrangements. Engineers from Betz would build transports to six planets of culture similar to Earth’s, to be owned by the Council, as a nonprofit business, but manned by Earthmen as quickly as they could be trained.
In return, nothing was demanded, and nothing more was offered. We were a primitive world by their standards, but we would have to work out our own advancement, since they would give us no extra knowledge.
He smiled pleasantly to the shocked crowd and moved off with DuQuesne to await results. There were enough, too, from a startled and doubting world. The months that followed were a chaos of news and half-news. The nations were suspicious. There was never something for nothing. The Envoy met the President and Cabinet; he met the United Nations. India walked out; India walked back quickly when plans went ahead blithely without her. Congress proposed tariffs and protested secret treaties. The Envoy met Congress, and somehow overcame enough opposition to get a bare majority.
And the Betz II engineers came on schedule. Man was linked to the stars, though his own planets were still outside his reach. It was a paradox that soon grew stale, but what, actually, would be the point in flying to Mars or Venus when we were in instant touch with the farthest parts of the Galaxy?
There were major wrenches to the economy as our heavy industries suddenly found that other planets could beat them at their work. Plathgol could deliver a perfect Earth automobile, semi-assembled and advanced enough to avoid our patent laws, for twenty pounds of sugar. The heavy industries folded, while we were still experimenting with the business of finding what we had to offer and what we could receive from other worlds. Banks had crashed, men had been out of work. The governments had
cushioned the shock, and the new wonders helped to still the voices that suddenly rose up against traffic with alien worlds. But it had been a bitter period, with many lasting scars.
Now a measure of stability had been reached, with a higher standard of living than ever. But the hatreds were pretty deep on the part of those who had been hurt, and others who simply hated newness and change. Vic had done well enough, somehow making his way into the first engineering class out of a hundred thousand applicants. And twelve years had gone by …
Pat’s voice suddenly cut into his thoughts. “All tightened up here, Vic. Wipe the scowl off and let’s go down to check.”
She collected her tools, wrapped her legs around a smooth pole, and went sliding down. He yanked the fan and followed her. Below was the crew. Pat lifted an eyebrow at the grizzled, cadaverous head operator. “Okay, Amos. Plathgol standing by?”
Amos pulled his six-feet-two up from his slump and indicated the yellow stand-by light. Inside the twin poles of the huge transmitter that was turned to one on Plathgol, a big, twelve-foot diameter plastic cylinder held a single rabbit. Matter transmitting was always a two-way affair, requiring that the same volume be exchanged. And between the worlds, where different atmospheres and pressures were involved, all sending was done in the big capsules. One-way handling was possible, of course, but involved the danger of something materializing to occupy the same space as something else-even air molecules. It wasn’t done except as rigidly controlled experiments.
Amos whistled into the transport-wave interworld phone in the code that was universal between worlds, got an answering whistle, and pressed a lever. The rabbit was gone, and the new capsule was faintly pink, with something resembling a giant worm inside.
Amos clucked in satisfaction. “Tsiuna. Good eating, only real good we ever got from these things. I got friends on Plathgol that like rabbit. Want some of this, Pat?”
Vic felt his stomach jerk at the colors that crawled over the tsiuna. The hot antiseptic spray was running over the capsule, to be followed by supersonics and ultraviolets to complete sterilization. Amos waited a moment, then pulled out the creature. Pat hefted it.
“Big one. Bring it over to my place and I’ll fry it for you and Vic. How does the Dirac meter read, Vic?”
“On the button.” The seven per cent power loss was gone now, after a week of hard work in locating it. “Guess you were right—the reflector was off angle. Should have tried it first, but it never happened before. How’d you figure it out?”
She indicated the interworld phone. “I started out in anthropology, Vic. Got interested in other races, and then found 1 couldn’t talk to the teleport engineers without being one, so I got sidetracked to this job. But I still talk a lot on anything Galactic policy won’t forbid. When everything else failed, I complained to the Ecthinbal operator that the Betz II boys installed us wrong. I got sympathy instead of indignation, so I figured it could happen. Simple, wasn’t it?”
He snorted, and waited while she gave orders to start business. Then, as the loading cars began to hum, she fell behind him, moving out toward the office. “I suppose you’ll be leaving tonight, Vic. I’ll miss you. You’re the only troubleshooter I’ve met who did more than make passes.”
“When I make passes at your kind of girl, it will be legal. And in my business, it’s no life for a wife.”
But he stopped to look at the building, admiring it for the last time. It was the standard Betz II design, but designed to handle the farm crops around, and bigger than any earlier models on Earth. The Betz II engineers made Earth engineering look childish, even if they did look like big slugs with tentacles and had no sense of sight.
The transmitters were in the circular center, surrounded by a shield wall, a wide hall all around, another shield, a circular hall again, and finally the big outside shield. The two opposite entranceways spiraled through the three shields, each rotating thirty degrees clockwise from the entrance portal through the next shield. Those shields were of inert matter that could be damaged by nothing less violent than a hydrogen bomb directly on them—they refused to soften at less than ten million degrees Kelvin. How the Betzians managed to form them in the first place, nobody knew.
Beyond the transmitter building, however, the usual offices and local transmitters across Earth had not yet been built. That would be strictly Earth construction, and would have to wait for an off season. They were using the nearest building, an abandoned store a quarter mile away, as a temporary office.
Pat threw the door open and then stopped suddenly. “Ptheela!”
A Plathgolian native sat on a chair, with a bundle of personal belongings around her, her three arms making little marks on something that looked like a used pancake. The Plathgolians had been meat-eating plants once. They still smelled high to Earth noses, and their constantly shedding skin resembled shaggy bark, while their heads were vaguely flowerlike.
Ptheela wriggled her arms. “The hotel found regretfully that it had to decorate my room,” she whistled in Galactic Code. “No other room and all other hotels say they’re full. Plathgolians stink, I guess. So I’ll go home when the transmitter is fixed.”
“With your trade studies half done?” Pat protested. “Don’t be silly, Ptheela. I’ve got a room for you in my apartment. How are the studies, anyhow?”
For answer, the plant woman passed over a newspaper, folded to one item. ‘Trade? Your House of Representatives just passed a tariff on all traffic through Teleport.”
Pat scanned the news, scowling. “Damn them. A tariff! They can’t tax interstellar traffic. The Galactic Council won’t stand for it; we’re still accepted only on approval. The Senate will never okay it!”
Ptheela whistled doubtfully, and Vic nodded. “They will. I’ve been expecting this. A lot of people are afraid of Teleport.”
“But we’re geared to it now. The old factories are torn down, the new ones are useless for us. We can’t get by without the catalysts from Ecthinbal, the cancer-preventative from Plathgol, all the rest. And who’ll buy all our sugar? We’re producing fifty times what we need, just because most planets don’t have plants that separate the levo from the dextro forms. All hell will pop!”
Ptheela wiggled her arms again. “You came too early. Your culture is unbalanced. All physics, no sociology. All eat well, little think well.”
All emotion, little reason, Vic added to himself. It had been the same when the industrial revolution came along. Old crafts were uprooted and some people were hurt. There were more jobs now, but they weren’t the familiar ones. And the motorists who gloated at first over cheap Plathgol cars complained when Plathgol wasn’t permitted to supply the improved, ever-powered models they made for themselves.
Hardest of all had been the idea of accepting the existence of superior races. A feeling of inferiority had crept in, turned to resentment, and then through misunderstanding of other races to an outright hatred of them. Ptheela had been kicked out of her hotel room; but it was only a minor incident in a world full of growing bitterness against the aliens.
“Maybe we can get jobs on Plathgol,” Vic suggested harshly.
Ptheela whistled “Pat could, if she had three husbands-engineers must meet minimum standards. You could be a husband, maybe.”
Vic kept forgetting that Plathgol was backward enough to have taboos and odd customs, even though Galactically higher than Earth, having had nearly ten thousand years of history behind her to develop progress and amity.
The televisor connecting them with the transmitter building buzzed, and Amos’ dour face came on. “Screwball delivery with top priority, Pat Professor named Douglas wants to ship a capsule of Heaviside layer air for a capsule of Ecthinbal deep-space vacuum. Common sense says we don’t make much shipping vacuums by the pound!”
“Public service, no charge,” Vic suggested, and Pat nodded. Douglas was a top man at Caltech, and a plug from him might be useful sometime. “Leave it on, Amos—I want to watch this. Douglas has some idea that sp
ace fluctuates, somehow, and he can figure out where Ecthinbal is from a sample. Then he can figure how fast an exchange force works, whether it’s instantaneous or not. We’ve got the biggest Earth transmitters, so he uses us.”
As they watched, a massive capsule was put in place by loading machines, and the light changed from yellow to red. A slightly greenish capsule replaced the other. Amos signaled the disinfection crew and hot spray hit it, to be followed by the ultrasonics. Something crackled suddenly, and Amos made a wild lunge across the screen.
The capsule popped, crashing inward and scattering glass in a thousand directions. Pressure-glass; it should have carried a standard Code warning for cold sterilization and no supersonics. Vic leaped toward the transmitter building.
Pat’s cry brought him back. There were shrieks coming from the televisor. Men in the building were clinging frantically to anything they could hold, but men and bundles ready for loading were being picked up violently and sucked toward the transmitter. As Vic watched, a man hit the edge of the field and seemed to be sliced into nothingness, his scream cut off, half-formed.
A big chunk of glass had hit the control, shorting two busbars, holding them together by its weight. The transmitter was locked into continuous transmit And air, with a pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch, was running in and being shipped to Ecthinbal, where the pressure was barely an ounce per square inch! With that difference, pressure on a single square foot of surface could lift over a ton. The poor devils in the transmitter building didn’t have a chance.
He snapped off the televisor as Pat turned away, gagging. “When was the accumulator charged?”
“It wasn’t an accumulator,” she told him weakly. “The whole plant uses an electron-pulse atomotor, good for twenty years of continuous operation.”
Vic swore and made for the door, with Pat and Ptheela after him. The transmitter opening took up about two hundred square feet, which meant somewhere between fifty and five hundred thousand cubic feet of air a second were being lost. Maybe worse.
Adventures in the Far Future Page 1