Fade Out (47 page)

‘Arnold, I know what the difficulties have been. The point is, where do we go from here?'

‘We keep trying, of course. The alternative is unthinkable. In fact, there is no alternative.'

‘But what about the fade-out?'

‘The fade-out, the fade-out… My God, is that the only thing people can think about?' said Wedderkind heatedly. ‘There is still some radio communication possible. All right, so there is some temporary inconvenience. Look on the bright side – at least it's impossible to start
World War Three, we're spared the daily drivel being pumped out on TV, and a few hundred people who might have been killed in aeroplanes will – '

‘– get the chance to die in automobile accidents,' said Connors. ‘Okay, I'm convinced. What do you want me to do, Arnold?'

‘Stall them. We need more time to find out what Crusoe is up to. You can flimflam Fraser.'

‘Yes, sure. Did you turn up anything of interest in Baltimore?'

‘Nothing conclusive,' said Wedderkind. ‘We're still working on the data. But it looks interesting.'

‘In what way?'

‘Well, there are indications of some large directional variations in the Earth's magnetic field. It confirms our hunch that Crusoe could be using the Earth's field as a source of power.'

‘To generate the cutoff zone and the fade-out?'

‘Yes. The trouble is, since we don't know how the Earth's field is generated, there's little chance of being able to cut off his power supply.'

No, thought Connors. But if you can't get at the flashlight battery, you can always try removing the bulb. ‘What do you want me to say, Arnold?'

‘As little as possible.'

‘There's no point in hiding anything.'

‘I'm not trying to hide anything,' said Wedderkind. ‘In any case, Allbright will probably have semaphored the news to Fraser. Just put the best possible construction on it, that's all. Don't let Fraser stampede the Old Man.'

‘Into what?'

‘Into trying to destroy Crusoe. For God's sake, Bob, I'm not
that
naive. I know how Mel Fraser's mind works. He's not going to come up with any
constructive
suggestions.'

‘Okay, Arnold,' said Connors. ‘I'll do my best to hold the line. But watch your step.'

‘I'll call you as soon as I've assessed the situation on the Ridge.'

‘Fine. If I'm not in the office, leave a message with Greg.'

‘Okay.' Wedderkind hung up.

Connors went back under the shower. It had all worked out rather well. The meeting Wedderkind would miss had been cancelled anyway. All the decisions had been made the night before. While Wedderkind was winging his way westward, Connors would be heading eastward, with Mel Fraser, aboard Air Force One. To Moscow. With a message from the President of the United States and copies of the pictures the Air Force had taken of the second spacecraft in Kazakhstan.

The dawn examination of the hull by the research group revealed some startling changes.There was no longer any visible line separating the sinking dome and the hull. The two shapes now flowed together to form one continuous surface. The shadowy pressure patches that had once activated the hatch were no longer visible on Crusoe's black crystal skin, and the hull had grown four and a half feet taller overnight.

Below the skin, a dull blue light flickered at irregular intervals, zigzagging through the convoluted pattern of the cortex. Prompted by Page, the group listened to the noise coming from the hull, the first anyone could remember Crusoe making. To Davis, it sounded like the tinkling noise made by Japanese wind chimes.

Page explained that what they were hearing were
stress sounds produced by the hull as Crusoe's crystalline structure rearranged itself into a new shape.

While the purpose of the change caused a certain amount of speculation, what mystified everybody was how Crusoe could change his shape at all. Previously, they had imagined that the diamond-hard hull must have been moulded from a liquid silicate, then machined to its final shape. Now, they had to accept that the hull was composed of organic crystals with a controlled growth pattern to match changes in function. It was an incredible, mind-boggling piece of technology – like making a two-seat Italian sports car that could turn itself into a Greyhound bus. It was against all the rules, but there it was, happening right before their eyes.

The current theory was that Crusoe generated the cutoff zone as protection during transitional phases when he was vulnerable. If so, the fact that he had slapped a seven-mile cutoff zone on them must mean that the facelift he was undergoing was a major event. The big question was, how long was it going to take? Although nearly sixteen hours had elapsed since the force field had appeared, people were still wandering around with a stunned look on their faces suffering from what Gilligan had termed ‘electro-deprivation'. The more serious cases, he maintained, kept vainly turning switches on and off in the hope of finding something that worked.

The loss of power had put things back to the way they had been on the day of their arrival. Cautious of the mysterious cutoff zone around Crusoe, transport had been abandoned at the embryo gatehouse, and cooking, heat, and light had been provided by compressed gas cylinders. Then slowly, as the limits of the cutoff zone had been defined and later, when the zone disappeared, more and more electrically-powered equipment had been
installed on the Ridge until they had become as dependent on it as was the world outside.

As a consequence, they had found themselves painfully short of emergency lighting, but the evening had been illuminated by a celebration blackout barbecue-and-beer-can special.

Deprived of the video recording equipment, the research group arranged for one of the photographers to cover Crusoe with the aid of a camera built before the age of the silicon chip and went in search of breakfast. The butane cylinders hadn't come up from Miles City but the baker's truck had. The coffee was hot, the bacon had the sweet tang of woodsmoke just as in the best days at summer camp, and all in all there didn't seem too much wrong with the world.

Vincent and Neame shoved two tables together for the group to sit around, Davis brought a trayful of steaming coffee cups and Tomkin and Page brought the food.

‘Right, gentlemen,' said Lovell. ‘Arnold will be back on the Ridge in a few hours. Let's compare notes and see if we can present him with some sort of coherent picture.'

Wedderkind and Wetherby arrived back on the Ridge just after midday. A light plane hired from the Miles City air-taxi outfit set them down on an improvised airstrip behind Broken Mill, and from there, one of the converted diesels had given them a noisy ride all the way up to the plateau. The first thing Wedderkind did was to take a look at Crusoe.

When Crusoe bad surfaced, his hull had measured about seventy feet across, curving gently to a height of fifteen feet in the centre, and topped by a shallow dome, which they had found to be the exposed portion of the spherical hatch unit.

Now, Crusoe's hull was over twenty feet high, and it
seemed to have grown wider, too. The four curving surfaces that made up the hull were now quite clearly defined.

‘My God,' muttered Wedderkind. ‘This is absolutely fantastic. Do we have any idea what the rate of growth is?'

‘We'll have a better idea tonight,' said Page. ‘We're taking a series of still pictures at fifteen-minute intervals throughout the day. I think they'll prove that the growth rate is accelerating.'

‘I can give you the dimensional changes so far, Arnold…' Neame leafed through his notebook. ‘At midday, the overall height was twenty-three feet, base diameter eighty feet. The domed hatch now only measures four feet across – that's a 60 per cent decrease in size. Except that it's not shrinking as Page originally thought, the whole spherical hatch unit is retracting into the hull.'

‘But the really important thing is the
rate
of change,' insisted Page. ‘Assuming growth started yesterday when Crusoe generated the new cutoff zone, he grew four and a half feet taller in the first fifteen hours, and another three and a half feet in the last
six.
'

‘Which means if he continues to grow at the same rate for the next couple of days, we can expect something spectacular,' said Wedderkind. He pulled out his pocket calculator, punched two digits, then swore quietly as the display failed to light up. He put the inert lump of electronic wizardry away and listened to the tinkling noise coming from Crusoe's hull. As he peered through the semitranslucent outer skin, a wisp of blue light zigzagged through the darkness below. He laid a hand on the hull. ‘This whole thing is alive with vibrations.'

‘The whole Ridge is,' said Neame. ‘Didn't it wake any of you up last night?'

‘The trailer was rattling a bit this morning,' admitted Brecetti.

‘I don't just mean that. There were two definite tremors last night – at three o'clock, then at five. Did nobody feel it? A small double shock. Ba-boomm…'

Just as the others were about to shake their heads, the ground shuddered under their feet. Ba-boomm…

“Just like that,' said Neame.

Wedderkind backed several yards away from the hull and took a long look at Crusoe. ‘You know, ever since we failed to dig up this character, I've always assumed that there was as much of him under the ground as there was above it, but he may have been growing downward even longer than he's been growing up.' He turned to Wetherby. ‘Do you remember how the remaining charges, in those two rings Max drilled, exploded when Crusoe surfaced? It puzzled me at the time. Your joke about him putting down roots may turn out to be true after all.'

‘If it is,' said Wetherby, ‘I don't know whether being right is going to provide much consolation.'

They began to walk back across the plateau to Rockville. When they were halfway across, Allbright, flanked by two of his aides, rode up on his palomino. He dismounted to greet Wedderkind and walked along with him and the others. Apparently he'd ridden down to the highway to make some calls over the unaffected base camp phone.

‘Just how big is the cutout zone?' asked Wedderkind.

‘We estimate it has a radius of about three and a half miles,' said Lovell.

‘Although the edge of the zone is still well clear of the highway, I decided to stop using helicopters,' said Allbright. ‘We could land on the highway, but the airstrip at Broken Mill provides an extra margin of safety.'

Wedderkind smiled. ‘A wise move.'

‘It's very much an after-the-event precaution,' said Allbright. ‘We were fortunate there was no flight activity in the area when Crusoe laid the new cutoff zone on us. That's the real danger with this thing, there's no warning when it's coming. The other problem is – just how much bigger is it going to get?'

‘General, there's no way I can answer that. I'm trying to work out why he needs this much protection. He's already blacked out a pretty colossal area. Speaking for myself, I certainly don't anticipate it getting any bigger.'

‘Good,' said Allbright. ‘I'm counting on that.' He looked at his watch. ‘Could we meet in the command hut at two? There are one or two points I think we ought to discuss.'

‘All right, General,' said Wedderkind. ‘I'll see you there.'

Allbright remounted, gave them an informal salute and wheeled away followed by his two senior cadets.

‘Fortunately we're still the only people in the cutout zone,' said Lovell. ‘So things aren't as difficult as they might have been.'

‘Are the problems the same?' asked Wedderkind.

‘Yes,' said Neame. ‘We're back to square one.'

‘What happened to the generator trucks?'

‘They went up like fireworks,' said Neame.

‘But there is one interesting anomaly,' said Brecetti. This time, the surging phenomena affect currents only above two hundred and fifty microvolts.'

‘Crusoe must have wanted to spare us at least one headache,' said Neame. ‘Remember the dizziness and nausea that affected people around the crater when we first arrived?'

Brecetti, Collis, and Wetherby went back with Wedderkind to his trailer. Wedderkind had brought a small,
folding, camper's gas stove back with him. He made some of his good coffee and handed it around.

‘I didn't like to say anything in front of Allbright, but did nothing strike you about that figure of nearly seven miles for the diameter of the new cutout zone?' asked Brecetti.

‘Nothing,' said Wedderkind. ‘Apart from the fact that the metric equivalent is eleven kilometres. Unless you're attaching a mystical significance to the number seven.'

‘There's nothing mystical about it. The maximum diameter of the
original
cutout zone was established at a little over twelve hundred yards. That's about point-six-nine of a mile. Does that ring a bell?'

‘No. Not a tinkle.'

‘Point-six-nine miles is one hundredth of one degree of arc –'

‘Ah, of course,' said Wetherby. ‘Degrees of longitude…'

‘Yes – measured at the equator. The new cutout zone is ten times as big as the old one.'

‘And you think that if there's any further enlargement, it will multiply by ten again?' asked Wedderkind.

‘Yes, to sixty-nine miles. But it's a big “if”.'

‘Then six hundred and ninety, six thousand nine hundred, and so on,' suggested Wetherby.

‘Yes,' said Brecetti. ‘It's just a theoretical progression, but all you'd need is one more step and – '

‘And the whole world would be covered…' Wedderkind exchanged glances with Wetherby.

‘It'd be an interesting situation,' said Brecetti.

‘But why, Phil?' asked Collis. ‘I can see some reason for Crusoe protecting himself by a seven-mile cutoff zone during takeoff. It could be regarded as a critical manoeuvre. But what would be the point of depriving the whole world of electricity? It would be catastrophic.'