The Crack in Space (1966) Page 10

  ‘It’s losing ground,’ Stanley said. ‘We’re leaving it behind. Want to turn around and approach it?’

  ‘What’s it seem to be?’ Turpin asked apprehensively. ‘We better not get too close; it may shoot us down.’ He cringed from the idea of an emergency crash: he was well aware of the brittleness of his bones. Any sort of unsafe landing would end his life. And he did not want it ended, just now. This was the worst possible time.

  ‘I’ll swing back that way,’ Woodbine said, returning to the controls. A moment later the ‘hopper had reversed its direction.

  And, at last, Turpin could perceive the other object in the sky. It was clearly not a bird; no wings flapped, and anyhow it was too large. He knew, saw with his own eyes, that it was an artificial construct, a man-made vehicle.

  The vehicle was hurrying off as rapidly as possible.

  Woodbine said, ‘It won’t be long; it’s very slow. You know what it looks like? A boat, a goddam boat. It’s got a hull and sails. It’s a flying boat.’ He laughed tautly. ‘It’s absurd!’

  Yes, Turpin thought. It does look grotesque. It’s a wonder it can stay up. And now, sure enough, the boat-shaped airborne vehicle was dipping down in increasingly narrowing spirals, its sails hanging limply. The vehicle held one single person who, they could now see, was working frantically with the controls of his craft. Was he trying to land it or keep it in the air? Turpin did not know, but in any case the vehicle was about to land - or crash.

  It landed. In an open pasture, away from trees.

  As the ‘hopper began to descend after it, the figure within leaped from the vehicle and scampered off to disappear into the closest stand of trees.

  ‘We frightened him,’ Woodbine said, as he brought the ‘hopper expertly down beside the parked, abandoned craft. ‘But anyhow we get to examine his ship; that ought to tell us a lot, practically everything we want to know.’ Immediately he slammed the cabin hatch back and scrambled out, to drop to the ground. Without waiting for Stanley or Turpin, he sprinted toward the parked alien vehicle.

  As he, too, clambered out of the ‘hopper Don Stanley murmured, ‘It looks like it’s made out of wood.’ He dropped to the ground and walked over to stand beside Woodbine.

  I’d better stay here, Leon Turpin decided. Too risky for me to try to get out; I might break a leg. And anyhow it’s their job to inspect this flying machine. That’s what I hired them for.

  ‘It’s wood, all right,’ Stanley said, his voice filtering to Leon Turpin, mixing with the rushing of wind through the nearby trees. ‘And a cloth sail; I guess it’s canvas.’

  ‘But what makes it go?’ Woodbine said, walking all around it. ‘Is it just a glider? No power supply?’

  ‘That was certainly a timid individual in it,’ Stanley said.

  ‘How do you think a jet-hopper would look to the innocent eye?’ Woodbine said severely. ‘Pretty horrible. But he had the courage to follow us for a time.’ He had climbed up on the vehicle and was peering inside. ‘It’s laminated wood,’ he said suddenly. ‘Very thin layers. Looks to be extremely strong.’ He banged on the hull with his fist.

  Stanley, examining the rear of the craft, straightened up and said, ‘It has a power supply. Looks like a turbine of some kind. Or possibly a compressor. Take a look at it.’

  Together, as Leon Turpin watched, Frank Woodbine and Stanley studied the machinery which propelled the craft.

  ‘What is it?’ Turpin yelled. His voice, in the open like this, sounded feeble.

  Neither man paid any attention to him. He felt agitated and peeved, and he shifted about irritably, wishing they’d come back.

  ‘Apparently,’ Woodbine said, ‘the turbine or whatever it is gives it an initial thrust which launches it. Then it glides for a while. Then the operator starts up the turbine once more and it receives an additional thrust. Thrust, coast, thrust, coast and so on. Odd damn way to get from one place to another. My god, it may have to land at the end of each glide. Could that be? It doesn’t seem likely.’

  Stanley said, ‘Like a flying squirrel.’ He turned to Woodbine. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘The turbine is made out of wood, too.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ Woodbine said. ‘It’d incinerate.’

  ‘You can scrape the paint off,’ Stanley said. He had a pocket knife open and was working with it. ‘I’d guess this is asbestos paint; anyhow it’s heat resistant. And underneath it, more laminated wood. I wonder what the fuel is.’ He left the turbine, began walking all around the craft. ‘I smell oil,’ he said. ‘I guess it could burn oil. The late twentieth century turbines and diesel engines all burned low-grade oil, so that’s not too impossible.’

  ‘Did you notice anything peculiar about the man piloting this ship?’ Woodbine said.

  ‘No,’ Stanley said. ‘We were too far off. I could just barely make him out.’

  Woodbine said, thoughtfully, ‘He was hunched. I noticed it when he ran. He loped along decidedly bent over.’

  NINE

  Late at night, Tito Cravelli sat in his conapt, before a genuine fire, sipping Scotch and milk and reading over the written report which his contact at Terran Development had a little earlier in the evening submitted to him.

  Softly, his tape deck played one of the cloud chamber pieces by the great mid-twentieth century composer, Harry Parch. The instrument, called by Parch ‘the spoils of war’, consisted of cloud chambers, a rasper, a modernized musical saw, and artillery shell casings suspended so as to resonate, each at a different frequency. And, as a ground bass accompanying the spoils of war instrument, one of Parch’s hollow bamboo marimba-like inventions tapped out an intricate rhythm. It was a piece very popular these days with the public.

  But Cravelli was not listening. His attention was fixed on the report of TD’s activities.

  The old man, Leon Turpin himself, had crossed over via the defective Jiffi-scuttler, along with various company personnel and media people. Turpin had managed to shake the reporters off and had made a sortie by jet-hopper. Something had been found on that sortie and had been carefully brought back to TD; it was now in their labs being examined. Cravelli’s contact did not know precisely what it was.

  However, one fact was clear. The object brought back was an artifact. It was manmade.

  Apparently Jim Briskin went off half-cocked, Cravelli said to himself. We’re going to emigrate - compel the bibs to emigrate - into a region already occupied. Too bad Jim didn’t think of that. Too bad I didn’t think of it, for that matter.

  We were fooled, it appeared, by the initial visual impression of the place. It seemed deserted, seemed susceptible to immigration.

  Well, it can’t be helped now, he realized. Jim made his speech; we’re committed. We’ll have to go on, hoping that we can still pull it off anyhow. But damn it, he thought. If only we had waited one more day!

  Maybe we can kill them off, he thought. Maybe they’ll catch some plague from us, die like flies.

  He hated himself for having such thoughts. But there it was, clear in his mind. We need the room so badly, he realized. We’ve got to have it, no matter what. No matter how we have to go about it.

  But will Jim agree? He’s so damn soft-hearted.

  He’s got to agree, Cravelli said to himself. Or it’s the end - politically, for us, and in every way for the bibs.

  While he was rereading the rather meager report, his door number was all at once tapped out; someone stood at the entrance to the conapt building, wanting permission to enter and visit him. Cravelli put the report away and crossed the room to the audio-video circuit which connected his apt with the front door.

  ‘Who is it?’ he said, guardedly. As always, he was somewhat wary of nocturnal visitors.

  ‘It’s me … Earl,’ the speaker informed him. There was no video image, however; the man was standing deliberately out of range. ‘Are you alone?’

  Instantly Cravelli said, ‘Entirely.’ He pressed the release button; fifteen stories below him the door automatically
opened to admit Earl Bohegian, his contact at TD. ‘You’ll have to get by the doorman,’ Cravelli told him. ‘The key word for the building today is “potato.” ‘

  Several minutes later Bohegian, a dark, somber-looking man in his late fifties, entered the apartment. With a sigh, he seated himself facing Tito Cravelli. ‘How about a beer?’ Cravelli asked him. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘Fine.’ Bohegian nodded. ‘I am tired. I just left TD; I came directly here. We’re all on emergency double-shift. Frankly, I was lucky to get away at all; I told them I had a migraine headache and had to leave. So the company guards finally let me out.’

  ‘What’s up?’ Cravelli said, getting the beer from the refrigerator in the kitchen.

  ‘The thing they hauled back here,’ Carl Bohegian said. ‘What I mentioned in my written report. The artifact: they’ve been going over it, and it’s apparently the damnedest junk you ever heard of. It’s a vehicle of some kind; I finally managed to find that out by hanging around in the executives’ washroom, drinking “Coke”, and listening to stray colloquies. It’s made out of wood, but it’s not primitive. It’s the turbine, though, that’s really throwing the engineers on Level One.’ Gratefully, he accepted the beer and gulped at it. ‘It works by compressing gases. I’m not an engineer - you know that - so I can’t help you out on technical details. But anyhow, by compressing gases it manages to freeze a trapped chamber of water. So help me, Cravelli, the rumor going around TD is that the damn thing is run by …’ He laughed. ‘Excuse me, but it’s funny. It runs by expansion of the ice. The water freezes, expands as ice, and drives a piston upward with enormous force, then the ice is melted - all this happens extremely fast - and the gases expand again, which gives another thrust to the piston, driving it back down in the cylinder again. Ice! Did you ever hear of such a source of power?

  ‘It’s funnier than steam, is it?’ Cravelli said.

  Laughing until tears filled his eyes, Bohegian nodded. ‘Yes, a lot funnier than steam. Because it’s so darn cumbersome. And so utterly ineffective. You should see it. It’s incredibly complicated, especially in view of the meager thrust it ultimately manages to deliver. The vehicle coasts forward on runners, not wheels, and finally gets up into the air, but just for a very few moments. Then it glides back down. It’s a kind of wooden rocketship with a sail. That’s what they’re building on the other side of the defective ‘scuttler. That’s their technology. What kind of a civilization is that?’ He finished his beer, set the glass down. ‘The story going around TD is that one of the better engineers got into it, cranked it up, literally, and managed to fly around the lab for fifteen or sixteen seconds, at a height of about four feet, approximately waist level.’

  ‘Your report,’ Cravelli said, once more getting it out, ‘says that the stellar charts made by TD’s astro-physicists prove that the planet, beyond any reasonable doubt, is Earth?’

  Earl Bohegian became serious, then. ‘Yes, and right here in the present. There’s been no time-travel at all, not even so much as a fraction of a second. Don’t ask me to explain it; they can’t explain it, and they’re supposed to know about these things. I know what the old man believes, though. According to him - and evidently he hatched this out on his own - it’s an Earth that started out like ours and then split off and took a different course; at least its evolution did, its development at the level of human society. Say, ten thousand years back. Maybe even further, even as far back as the Pleistocene Period. The flowers and plants seem to be identical with ours, anyhow. And the continental configurations show no deviation from ours. All the land masses are congruent with ours, so the split-off can’t be too long ago. For instance San Francisco Bay. And the Gulf of Mexico. They don’t differ from ours, and I understand they formed as they are now in quasi-historical times.’

  ‘How great is the population, do they think?’

  ‘Not great, certainly not like ours. By the number of lights on the dark side they assume that it lies in the millions - at most. And certainly not in the billions. For instance, whole areas don’t appear to be inhabited at all, at least if you accept the lights as an index.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a war on,’ Cravelli said, ‘and they’re blacked out.’

  ‘But as the light side moves,’ Bohegian said, ‘there’s little indication of cities, only what appear to be roads and some sort of small, town-like structures … they’ll know more about that in a day or so. The whole business is bizarre, to say the least. Because of the total lack of radio signals, TD is beginning to speculate that, although they have developed a turbine of sorts, they for some reason haven’t run onto electricity. And the use of wood, laminated and then coated with asbestos paint; it’s possible - although virtually incredible - that they don’t work with metal. At least not in industry.’

  ‘What language do they speak?’

  ‘TD doesn’t even pretend to know. They’re in the process of hauling a number of linguistic decoders over from the linguistics department, so when they finally manage to nab one of the citizens over there, they’ll be able to converse with him or her. That should happen any time. In fact it may already have occurred after I left TD and came here. I tell you, this is going to be the apologia pro sua vita of every sociologist, ethnologist, and anthropologist in the world. They’re going to be migrating from here to there in droves. And I don’t blame them. God knows what they’ll find. Is it actually possible that a culture could develop a turbine-powered, airborne craft and not have, say, a written language? Because, according to the scuttlebutt at TD, there were no letters, signs or figures anywhere on the craft, and they certainly scrutinized it thoroughly for that.’

  Half to himself, Cravelli said, ‘I frankly don’t care what they have and have not developed. As long as there’s room on their planet for immigration. Mass immigration, in terms of millions of people.’

  They each had a second beer, he and Earl Bohegian, and then Bohegian departed.

  You’re lucky, Jim Briskin, Cravelli thought as he shut the door after Bohegian. You took a chance when you made that speech, but evidently you’re going to be able to swing it after all. Unless you balk at sharing this alter-Earth with its natives … or unless they happen to possess some mechanism by which they can halt us.

  God, I’d like to go there, Cravelli realized. See this civilization with my own eyes. Before we smear it up, as we inevitably will. What an experience it would be! They may have developed into areas which we’ve never even imagined. Scientifically, philosophically, even technically, in terms of machinery and industrial techniques, sources of power, medicines - in fact in every area, from contraceptive devices to visions of God. From books and cathedrals, if any, to children’s toys.

  We’ll probably initiate events, he reflected, by murdering a few of them, just to be on the safe side. Too bad this isn’t in the hands of the government; it’s damn bad luck that so far it’s entirely the personal property of a private business corporation. Of course, when Jim is elected, all that will change. But Schwarz. He won’t do anything; he’ll just sit. And TD will be permitted to go ahead in any way it chooses.

  To himself Sal Heim said: I’ve got to arrange a meeting between Leon Turpin, head of Terran Development, and Jim Briskin. Jim had to be photographed over there in that new world - not just talking about it, but actually standing on it.

  And the way to make the contact, Heim realized, is through Frank Woodbine, because Jim and Frank are old-time friends. I’ll get hold of Woodbine and fix it all up, and that will be that. We’ll have Jim over there and maybe Frank with him, and what a boost to our campaign that’ll be. We’ve just got to have it, that’s all.

  ‘Get on the vidphone,’ he instructed his wife Pat. ‘Start them searching down Frank Woodbine; you know, the deep space explorer, the hero.’

  ‘I know,’ Pat said. She lifted the receiver and asked for information.

  ‘A hero is a good thing to have around,’ Sal said meditatively as he waited. ‘It always was my hope to get Ji
m involved with Woodbine during this campaign. Now I think we’ve got the exact tie-in we want.’ He felt pleased with himself; he had a good idea, and he knew it. All his professional instincts told him that he was onto something, a two-birds-with-one-stone item.

  On TV he had seen the media’s excursion across into the other world. Along with the rest of the nation, he had witnessed scenes of blissful trees and grass and clear sky, and he had reacted vigorously. This was it, all right. As soon as he had viewed it for himself, he had realized how profound Jim’s insight had been. A new epoch in human history had begun, and his candidate had called the shots right from the start. Now, if they could just get Jim over there along with Woodbine, this one last essential act …

  ‘I have him,’ Pat said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘Here.’ She held the vidphone receiver toward him. ‘He knows who you are. Because of Jim, he accepted the call.’

  ‘Mr Woodbine,’ Sal said, seating himself at the vidphone. ‘It’s darn nice of you to take a minute or so off from your busy schedule to hear me out. Jim Briskin would like very much to visit this other world. Can you arrange it with Turpin at TD?’ He explained, then, why it was vital, just in case Woodbine was ignorant of Jim’s Chicago speech. But Woodbine was not ignorant of it; he understood immediately what the situation was.

  ‘I think,’ Woodbine said thoughtfully, ‘that you’d better have Jim drop by my conapt. Tonight, if possible. I want to discuss with him the material we’ve uncovered on the far side. Before he goes across, he should know about it. I’m sure TD won’t mind; they’re going to release it to the media sometime tomorrow anyhow.’

  ‘Fine,’ Sal said, immensely pleased. ‘I’ll have him shoot right over to your place.’ He thanked Woodbine profusely and then rang off.

  Now let’s see if I can light the proper fire under Jim, he said to himself as he dialed. Get him to do this. What if he won’t?

  ‘Maybe I can help,’ Pat said, from behind him. ‘I can usually persuade Jim when it’s genuinely in his interest. And this certainly is, beyond a doubt.’