Tales of the Flying Mountains (3 page)

“Shouldn't we maybe try foah an international agreement to suspend the whole futile scramble? Won't you confess that NASA has outlived its usefulness?”

Stanhope leaned back and waited, still smiling.

Harleman gathered in his wits. The ancient intimidated him. And so did the others, especially the liberals, like intensely staring Thomasson of Massachusetts. Their purpose in starving his agency was not to save money but to release it for welfare expenditures. That suited Harleman fine—if he could get a decent post disbursing part of that money. He wouldn't, if he made too much trouble now. On the other hand, they would feel there was something wrong about an administrator who did not put up a spirited fight for the bureau he already headed. Scylla and Charybdis.…

He bought a few seconds by stubbing out his cigarette, and several more by talking while he marshalled his thoughts:

“Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of this committee, I wish to express my appreciation of your foresight as well as your graciousness in offering me this opportunity to contribute to the illumination of those polymorphously reticulated interrelationships, sociological and humanistic as well as technological and economic, which determine the forwarding of a nonalienated and viable infrastructure. This is probably not the appropriate body before which to disseminate multigraphic and quantitative scientific and engineering presentations. Rather, it would appear evident to my perception of the situation that the aegis of this distinguished group is superimposed on the intricacy of era-characteristic fields of inquiry falling more under the rubric of basic philosophical justifications, while simultaneously concerning ourselves not to lose sight of the over-all necessity for action-oriented orchestration of innovative inputs.”

Three or four representatives shifted in their chairs and glanced at their watches. Stanhope let his eyelids droop.

“In short,” Harleman finished, gauging his moment, “we are about to start off on a whole new tack.”

“Tacking in
space?
” Thomasson muttered.

“No one disputes that NASA has exhausted certain possibilities.” For just an instant the buried dream flickered in Harleman, that he had known in the eerie rising of Sputnik One before dawn, and in man's first landing on the moon. He could not but add, quietly: “No basic reason for that, gentlemen. If we'd had more vision, if we'd worked only a little harder, we could have succeeded with the tools we had. We could have built larger and better Earth-orbital stations; supplied them from a colonized, really colonized moon; developed the nuclear-powered reaction drive to its true limits; built our giant ships in space and kept them there, so they needn't contaminate this planet and needn't fight their way up through its gravity well. We could have gone to the ends of the Solar System. By now, perhaps, we might already be thinking about the stars. Maybe then our young people wouldn't be playing at gangsterism and political radicalism. They'd have had better things to do.”

Bitterness tinged his words, for he remembered how he had become estranged from his only son. But he saw he was losing them and sprang back in haste:

“Well, never mind. We confront an existing situation. We need a whole new approach. And I think we've found one.”

Stanhope opened his eyes wide. “Indeed?” he murmured. “Might Ah ask what?”

“I'm delighted to explain. Have you heard of gyrogravitics?”

Stanhope shook his knaggy head. Carter of Virginia said, slowly, “Has to do with atomic theory, doesn't it.”

“That's right,” Harleman answered. “I don't claim to follow the mathematics myself, but I've had scientists give me a lay explanation. It grew out of the effort to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics. Those two branches of physics, both indispensable, were at odds on certain fundamental questions. Is nature or is nature not deterministic—describable by differential equations? Well, you may have read how Einstein once declared he couldn't believe that God plays dice with the world, while Heisenberg thought cause-and-effect was nothing but the statistics of large numbers, and Bohr suggested in his complementarity principle that both views might be true. Later, building on the work of such as Dyson and Feinberg—” Harleman saw them drifting away again.
Damn! I spent too much time with Emett last night. That jargon of his soaked into my skin
.

“Well, the point is, gentlemen,” he said, “in the newest theory, matter and energy are described by their properties from the equations, equations like those of a rotating force-field. Including gravitation.”

Carter jerked to an upright sitting position. “Wait a minute!” he exclaimed. “You aren't leading up to antigravity, are you? I happen to know what the Air Force has been doing in that line for the past fifty years. It's no secret they've drawn absolute blanks. Antigravity belongs with witches on broomsticks. I could reach Mars easier by … by astral projection.”

“Not antigravity, sir,” Harleman told him. “Gyrogravitics.”

“A change of labels doesn't——”

“Please sir. I've had some most interesting discussions with a Mr. Quentin Emett. Some of you may have heard of him: an independent investigator——”

“Means he hasn't got his Ph.D.,” Thomasson said grimly.

“Well, yes, he does happen to lack a union card,” Harleman replied, and saw a bit of approval in Stanhope. “The academic establishment doesn't like him. However, the academic establishment—” He shrugged and smiled at Stanhope.
Huge tax subsidies. Left-wing professors. Unruly students
. “Frankly, he probably wouldn't have gotten my ear if he weren't a close relative of Senator Lamphier. But I need hardly assure you, gentlemen, the senator is no nepotist.”
He's the most majestic nepotist on Capitol Hill, as you know better than I. But you also know you're well advised to stay on the good side of him
. “He satisfied himself as to Mr. Emett's qualifications before sending him to me. In the course of talks occupying almost a year, I have likewise satisfied myself.

“Mr. Emett's ideas are unorthodox, true. He proposes to develop a generator which, by means of nuclear resonance rotations, will create fields that we can call gravitational, or antigravitational, or pseudogravitational, or whatever we like. I think ‘gyrogravitic' is probably the best word, though if we can get this work authorized, the R and D effort should have a more suitable name such as, for example, Project Dyna-Thrust.”

Carter sneered. “And you'll make your spaceships weightless and float them right off Earth, eh?”

“No, sir.” Emett had carefully rehearsed Harleman. “Conservation of energy and momentum are not violated. In effect, a gyrogravitic drive should react against the entire mass of the ambient universe. You'll still need power to rise, or accelerate, or maneuver in any other way. But it'll be minimum power; you won't be throwing energy out in exhaust gases. The power plant can be minimal too; since you can hover free, or nearly free, you don't need a huge motor to raise you as fast as possible. Any energy source will do—fuel cells, batteries, nuclear reactors, I suppose even steam engines—though no doubt as a side benefit we'll get small, portable fusion plants. A ship like this would be almost one hundred percent efficient, silent, unpolluting, economical to build, capable of going anywhere. The capability would derive in part from interior gyrogravitic fields. These would provide weight though the ship be in free fall, cushion against pressure when it accelerates, ward off solar-storm particles, meteoroids, and similar hazards.” Harleman ratcheted up his enthusiasm. “In short, gyrogravitlcs can give us the whole Solar System.”

“So can sorcery,” Carter grumbled, “if only we can discover how to make it work.”

Harleman talked nominally to them all, actually to Stanhope: “My belief is, the United States can't write off its huge investment in NASA, and in any case, positively not overnight. Research must go on. One advantage of Mr. Emett's proposal is its modest cost. If we establish Project Dyna-Thrust, it should be feasible to discontinue various other activities and thus reduce the total budget—without feeling that we have broken faith with our predecessors or abandoned the Endless Frontier of Science.”

More quasi-telepathy:
Give NASA this crank undertaking for two or three years. It'll provide the necessary excuse and cover for phasing out most of everything else. Let's not shock the voters and endanger both our careers by letting the end come too abruptly, too rudely
.

“Well, now, Mr. Carter,” Stanhope said, “we might just go a little further into this. Mr. Harleman's testimony has barely begun, and already it sounds interestin'. Yes, mighty interestin', I must say. Ri-ight?”

Of course, Emett was not altogether alone in his hopes. Enough reputable physicists conceded some theoretical possibility of success—though no useful probability, understand, for at least the next five hundred years—that the idea could safely be described as “worth study.” Enough personnel were willing to join in the effort that it could be organized. These tended to be far-out specialists who were skeptical of a space drive but who welcomed the chance to do basic research with expensive equipment; and graduate students desperate for thesis material; and engineers who didn't have what it took to hold down any top-flight job, but who would work with plodding competence wherever they were paid.

Harleman felt rather proud when he had finished rounding up that crew. It hadn't been easy. Therefore he was doubly hurt when Emett protested: “B-b-b-but I don't want that many!”

“I beg your pardon?” Harleman wondered if his ears were failing him. These damned D.C. summers—and so few occasions for running down to the breezes of the Cape.…

“A, uh, a small team,” Emett tried to explain. “Selected, uh, by myself. We, well, what we need is merely the, the, the use of different facilities—computer time, for instance, and, uh, access to the Astroelectronics Lab, and … well, these other people running around, they'll, they'll take up my time finding work for them!”

“I see.” Harleman stroked his cheek and looked across his desk at the little man who jittered in a visitor's chair. “I'm afraid you don't see, though. It surprises me, when your original suggestion—that this project would keep NASA going a while—that was such a shrewd thought, I'm surprised you don't realize that in government there is no such thing as having too many people working under you.”

“There is! There is! Gyrogravitics is, uh, at the s-s-stage nuclear physics was in … in 1930.… They couldn't have used a, a gigatron and the whole huge outfit which serves one—not then.”

“Oh, yes, they could, Mr. Emett. Not directly, perhaps; but as means for getting more funds for the work they really wanted to do. Think. Government employees are also voters, and closer knit than average. Prestige and influence are proportional to numbers.” Harleman sighed. “I guess I'd better take charge till I can locate a suitable subadministrator for you. But you understand this means you'll have to accept a lower title and salary.”

“I d-don't care. Just let me do my job.” Apparently nature had designed Quentin Emett for precisely one thing. All else, like eating, was incidental.

It did not cross Harleman's mind till later that similar remarks had been made about such folk as Oberth and Von Braun. He was too preoccupied with phone calls, memos, interviews, conferences, and tables of organization. For a while, press and TV were after him, too. But Dyna-Thrust was not an especially good story: only a few men puttering around with abstruse calculations and unspectacular experiments. After the Christmas battles between the People's Union for Righteous Excellence and the Friends Upholding Closer Kinship had run their bloody course through the streets of various cities, the media never did get back to NASA.… Whenever he could steal a few hours, Harleman was angling for a new post in another agency, against the day when this one would be dismantled.

Thus he paid scant attention to Dyna-Thrust's progress reports. They were dull, difficult reading; and in truth, the whole thing was nothing but a sideshow. Other projects, like Stormwind, Aldebaran, and Paul Bunyan, survived yet and were larger, splashier, and costlier. Indeed, sufficiently many new ones were being proposed that the public relations office had trouble thinking up names for them. A giant establishment, like a giant redwood, dies slowly, and may keep on growing and branching in some degree to the very end.

Harleman knew that Emett's gang were discovering things. He hoped those things would justify enlarging their division next year. Other than that, he was too busy to care.

Until the day when the CIA man came.

That was in February. Snow lay dingy along Washington's streets. Cars moved through slush with soft, sloppy noises. The air was raw and wet, the trees leafless, the low gray sky might never have held any stars. Harleman shivered at the prospect of venturing out, and considered an excuse for eating dinner downtown. The Kreemi-Rich Hour would be on. He decided that what with Martha's latest medical bill the bank account couldn't well stand it, and returned from the window to his desk. Once more he was looking over data for preparing a budget request. As he would the following year, he thought, and the following year, and the following year.… Eight to go before he retired.… He welcomed the time of Alfred Wheatley's appointment.

“Come in, come in. Sit down. Cigarette? What can I do for you?”

He had expected some routine matter. The CIA had inquired of him before. It had never involved anything sinister, no espionage or subversion or drama, nothing but help in keeping track of details like the state of the art in other countries. He supposed the CIA had to produce reasons for its own appropriations.

Wheatley was different from its previous representatives. In physical appearance he could have been a lawyer or accountant or petty commissioner. But his eyes burned. He spoke in a high, taut voice.