The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Lester Del Rey

  She looked down at him, grinning easily. Her arm came up to toss her hair back, leaving a smudge on her forehead to match one on her nose. She wasn’t exactly pretty; her face had too much honest intelligence for that. But the smile seemed to illumine her gray eyes, and even the metal shavings in her brown hair couldn’t hide the red highlights.

  “One more bolt, Vic,” she told him. “Pheooh! I’m melting… So what happened to your wife?”

  He shrugged. “Married a 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. Funny, they gave up the idea of going to the moon the same day she got the divorce.”

  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 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 worldwide government. Most races, apparently, developed space travel thousands of years 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 two students had analyzed the results, checked the math again, and come up with an answer they didn’t believe. But when they built two such machines, carefully made as nearly identical as possible, their wild idea had proved true; when the machines were turned on, anything in them simply changed places—even though the machines were miles apart.

  One of the students gave the secret away, and DuQuesne was forced to give a public demonstration. Before the eyes of a number of world-famous scientists and half a hundred reporters, a full ton of coal changed places with a ton of bricks in no visible time. Then, while the reporters were dutifully taking down DuQuesne’s explanation of electron waves that covered the universe and identity shifts, something new was added. Before their eyes, in the machine beside them, a round ball appeared, suspended in midair. It had turned around twice, disappeared for a few seconds, and popped back, darting down to shut off the machines.

  For a week, the papers had been filled with the attempts to move the sphere from the machine, crack it open, or at least distract it long enough to cut the machines on again. By the end of that time, it was obvious that more than Earth science was involved. Poor DuQuesne was going crazy with a combination of frustration and crackpot publicity.

  Vic’s mind had been filled with Martians then, and he’d managed to be on the outskirts of the crowd that was present when the sphere came to life, rose up, cut on the machine, and disappeared again. He’d been staring at where it had been when the Envoy had appeared. After that, he’d barely had time to notice that the Envoy seemed to be a normal human before the police had begun chasing the crowd away.

  The weeks that followed had been filled with the garbled hints that were enough to drive all science fiction fans delirious, though most of the world seemed to regard it as akin to the old flying saucer scare. The Envoy saw the President and the Cabinet. The Envoy met with the United Nations. The Envoy was admittedly a robot! India walked out; India came back. Congress protested secret treaties. General Autos held a secret meeting with United Analine. The Envoy would address the world in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese.

  There were hundreds of books on that period now, and most schoolboys knew the speech by heart. The Galactic Council had detected the matter transmittal radiation. By Galactic Law, Earth had thus earned the rights to provisional status in the Council through discovery of the basic principle. The Council would now send Betzian engineers to build transports to six planets scattered over the galaxy, chosen as roughly comparable to Earth’s culture. The transmitters used for such purposes would be owned by the Galactic Council, as a nonprofit business, to be manned by Earth people who would be trained at a school set up under DuQuesne.

  In return, nothing was demanded. And no further knowledge would be forthcoming. Primitive though we were by the standards of most worlds, we had earned our place on the Council—but we could swim up the rest of the way by ourselves.

  Surprisingly, the first reaction had been one of wild enthusiasm. It wasn’t until later that the troubles began. Vic had barely made his way into the first engineering class out of a hundred thousand applicants. Now, twelve years after graduation…

  Pat’s voice cut in on 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, the crew was on standby. Pat lifted an eyebrow at the grizzled, cadaverous head operator. “Okay, Amos. Plathgol standing by?”

  Amos pulled his six-foot-two up from his slump and indicated the yellow standby light. Inside the twin poles of the huge transmitter that was tuned 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—the advanced worlds could do it safely—but it involved the danger of something materializing to occupy the same space as something else—even air molecules; when space cracked open under that strain, the results were catastrophic.

  Amos whistled into the transport-wave interworld phone in the code that was universal between worlds where many races could not vocalize, 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 chuckled in satisfaction. “Tsiuna. Good eating. 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 and 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’s the Dirac meter read, Vic?”

  “On the button.” The 7 percent power loss was gone now, after a week of hard work 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 I 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 one Ecthinbal operator that the Betz II boys installed us wrong. When I got sympathy instead of indignation, 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 won’t be a one-night stand,” he told her. “And in my business, it’s no life for a wife.”

  But he stopped to look at the building, admiring it for th
e 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 knew their stuff, even if they did look like big slugs with tentacles and with 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 rotated thirty degrees clockwise from the entrance portal through the next shield. Those shields were of inerted 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 of 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 one of her three arms. “The hotel found it had to decorate my room,” she whistled in Galactic Code. Many of the other races could not vocalize, but the whistling Code could be used by all, either naturally or with simple artificial devices. “No other room—and all the hotels say they’re full up. Plathgolians stink, I guess. So I’ll go home when the transmitter is fixed.”

  “With your trade studies half done? 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. “What 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 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 sick of Teleport.”

  “But we’re geared to Teleport now. The old factories are torn down, the new ones are useless to us without interstellar supplies. We can’t get by without the catalysts from Ecthinbal, the cancer-preventative from Plathgol. 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 Hades 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, but they weren’t the same familiar ones. Now Plathgol was willing to deliver a perfect Earth automobile, semi-assembled and just advanced enough to bypass Earth patent laws, for half a ton of sugar. The Earth auto industry was gone. And the motorists were mad because Plathgol wasn’t permitted to supply the improved, ever-powered models they made for themselves.

  Banks had crashed, industries had folded, men had been out of work. The government had cushioned the shock, and Teleport had been accepted while it was still bringing new wonders. Now there was a higher standard of living than ever, but not for the groups who had controlled the monopolies. And too many remembered the wrenching and changing they’d had forced on them.

  Also, it hadn’t proved easy to accept the idea of races superior to Man. What was the use of making discoveries when others already knew the answers? A feeling of inferiority had turned to resentment, and misunderstandings between races had bred contempt here. Ptheela was kicked out of her hotel room—and a group had tried to poison the “hideous” Betz II engineers last year.

  In an off-election year, politics could drop to the lowest level.

  “Maybe we can get jobs on Plathgol,” he suggested bitterly.

  Ptheela whistled doubtfully. “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 a million years of history behind her to develop peace 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 lunar vacuum 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 his goodwill testimony might be useful sometime. “Leave it on, Amos—I want to watch this. Douglas has some idea that space 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 he watched, a big 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 big capsule popped, crashing inward and scattering glass shards in a thousand directions. Pressure glass! It should have carried a standard code warning for cold sterilization and no supersonics. Vic started toward the transmitter building.

  Pat’s cry brought him back. There were sudden 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 screams cut off, half formed. Death was inevitable to anything caught in the edge of the field.

  A big shard of glass had hit the control wiring, forcing together and shorting two bus bars, holding them lordlier together by its weight. It was wedged in firmly and 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 in that installation,” 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.

  Ptheela nodded as she kept pace with him. “I think the tariff won’t matter much now,” she whistled.

  II

  Vic’s action in charging out had been pure instinct to get where the trouble lay. His legs churned over the ground, while a wind at his back made the going easier.

  Then his brain clicked over, and he dug his heels into the ground, trying to stop. Pat crashed into him, but Ptheela’s arms lashed out, keeping him from falling. As he turned to face them, the wi
nd struck at his face, whipping up grit and dust from the dry ground. Getting to the transmitter building would be easy—but with the wind already rising, they’d never be able to fight their way back.

  It had already reached this far, losing its force with the distance, but still carrying a wallop. It was beginning to form a pattern, marked by the clouds of dust and debris it was picking up. The arrangement of the shields and entrances in the building formed a perfect suction device to set the air circling around it counterclockwise, twisting into a tornado that funneled down to the portals. Men and women near the building were struggling frantically away from the center of the fury. As he watched, a woman was picked up bodily, whirled around, and gulped down one of the yawning entrances. The wind covered her cries.

  Vic motioned Pat and Ptheela and began moving back, fast. Killing himself would do no good. He found one of the little hauling tractors and pulled them onto it with him, heading back until they were out of the worst of the rising wind. Then he swung to face Ptheela.

  “All right, now what? Galactic rules be damned, this is an emergency, and I need help!”

  The shaggy Plathgolian made an awkward gesture with all three arms, and a slit opened in her chest. “Unprecedented.” The word came out in English surprisingly, and Pat’s look mirrored his; they weren’t supposed to be able to talk. “You’re right. If I speak, I shall be banished by our council from Plathgol for breaking security. But we can communicate more fully this way, so ask. I may know more—we’ve had the Teleport longer—but remember that your strange race has a higher ingenuity quotient.”

  “Thanks.” Vic knew what the five husbands back on her home planet meant to her; they were not only a mark of status, but a chance to have stronger and more capable offspring. But he’d worry about that after he could stop worrying about his own world. “What happens next?”

  She dropped back to the faster, if less precise, Galactic Code for that. As he knew, the accidental turning on of the transmitter had keyed in the one on Ecthinbal automatically to receive, but not to transmit; the air was moving between Earth and Ecthinbal in one-way traffic. The receiving circuit, which would have keyed in the Ecthinbal transmit circuit had not been shorted. Continuous transmittal had never been used, to her knowledge; there was no certainty about what would happen. Once started, no outside force could stop a transmitter; the send and stop controls were synchronous, both tapped from a single crystal, and only that proper complex wave form could cut it off. It now existed as a space-strain, and the Plathgolians believed that this would spread, since the outer edges transmitted before matter could reach the center, setting up an unbalanced resonance that would make the field grow larger and larger. Eventually, it might spread far beyond the whole building. And, of course, since the metal used by the Betz II engineers could not be cut or damaged, there was no way of tunneling in.