Wine of the Dreamers (16 page)

Bard made his thoughts as clear as he could by mentally thinking each word, mentally underlining each syllable. “How do we know you
are
friendly?”

“You can’t know. There’s no way of proving it to you. All I can say is that our ancestors of twelve thousand years ago are mutual. I told you about the Plan. The Plan is failing because the people in my world have forgotten the original purpose. One world—Marith—lives in barbaric savagery. Another—Ormazd—has found the key to the search for happiness on their planet. We are inbred and decadent. Your project is hope for mankind.”

“What are your motives?”

There was a silence in his mind. “If I am to be honest with you, Bard Lane, I must mention boredom, the desire for change, the wish to do important things. And now there is another reason.”

“What?”

Their sympathetic emotional structure had been so carefully interleafed that Bard Lane was disconcerted to feel the hot blush on his cheeks and neck. “I want to be able to meet Sharan face to face. I want to touch her hand with mine, not with the hand of someone whom I could inhabit.”

The thought broke hurriedly to other matters. “I have wondered if there is any way that I can give you technical
help. I do not understand the formulas behind the operation of your ship. All I know is that propulsion is dependent on alternating frames of temporal reference. That is the same formula that was used for our ships long, long ago. As I told you, six of them stand outside our world. I have discovered micro-book operation manuals, but they are beyond me. I could memorize wiring charts and control panels and then, using your hand, draw them for you.”

“There are problems we haven’t licked yet. You could try to do that.”

“What should I look for?”

“The manner in which astrogation charts were coordinated with the time jump. Our astronomers and mathematical physicists believe, at this point, that once the jump is made, it will take weeks to make observations and reorient the ship. They are working on some method which will extend the time jump as a hypothetical line through space from the starting point to the new time frame. Then the coordinates of that hypothetical line, using opposed star clusters for reference points, would eliminate starting from scratch on orientation in the new position. Can you follow that?”

“Yes. I will see if I can find out how it was done in the past.”

The guard stepped closer and took a startlingly firm grasp of Bard Lane’s arm just above the elbow. His expression was respectful, but his grasp was like iron.

“Sir, you have been talking aloud to yourself.”

The alien prescience slid off to a spectator’s cubicle within Bard’s mind.

Bard smiled up at the guard. “Glad you’re alert, Robinson. I’m doing some practice dictation on an important letter I have to write after lunch.”

Robinson looked uncertain. Bard put his napkin beside his plate. “I’ll be glad to go along to Dr. Inly’s office, Robinson, but—–”

“I think maybe you better, sir. The order was pretty strict.”

Heads turned as they walked out of the mess hall, the bruising grip still punishing Bard’s arm. He heard the buzz of conversation as the door swung shut behind them. The sunlight was a blow from a fist of gilt. They went down the street toward Sharan’s office.

And the alarm sirens began to shrill.

Bard ripped away from Robinson’s grasp and lifted his long legs into a hard run toward the communications center seventy yards away. The sirens died into a moan as he burst through the door. The man at the master switchboard, gray-pale with strain, glanced at Bard, cut in a wall baffle onto the circuit and said, “From the ship, sir. Go ahead. It’ll be picked up.”

“Who is this?” Bard demanded.

The answering voice was metallic. “Shellwand. On the ship. We’ve just found a guard on G level, near the shielding, laid out cold, sir. We’re trying to get everyone out of the ship, sir.”

“Who did it?”

“We won’t know, sir, until we—– It’s beginning to tremble, sir! The whole—–”

The diaphragm in the baffle began to pick up resonance and bray. The man at the master board cut it off. They all heard it then. Once heard, it could never be forgotten. Bard Lane had heard it many times.

It was like the low roll of muted thunder behind distant hills, combined with a thousand roaring male voices, singing a sustained note in discord.

It was the song of men who try to reach the stars. It was the resonating fury of fission, held just short of instantaneous detonation. At Hiroshima it had been one thunderous whip-crack of fate that brought a new age to man. Now the whip-crack was harnessed, controlled, directed, guided.

Bard Lane turned and dived from the room. His shoulder caught the flimsy door and knocked it spinning from the torn hinges. He did not feel the pain. He ran out into an open space and stood with his feet planted, fists clenched, shoulders back, staring toward the Beatty One.

The thunder noise grew louder. Blue-white flame licked out around the fins. Heat cracked against his face and he turned his eyes from the unbearable glare. As the vast sound grew even greater the Beatty One nuzzled upwards at the camouflage tent. It rose with painful slowness, with the ponderousness of some unthinkable prehistoric beast. It ripped up through the tent, slowly gaining speed, profiling the tent to its ogive nose, tearing the tent from the towers, slipping through it, igniting it with the fierce tail flame. Now the blue-white unbearable flame was twice as tall as the ship had been. It reached from tail to earth, as though the Beatty One balanced on it.

The base of one tower, softened by heat-lick, settled and the tower leaned slowly toward the north, not gathering speed in the fall, just slowly bending over to lie gently against the ground. The steel of the elevator frame was puddled at the base, but stood miraculously erect. A tiny figure toppled from the elevator platform, crisping to blackness before it neared the ground.

The white gouting stern of the Beatty One was now thrice as high as the towers still standing. The thunder was lifting up through octave after octave as the speed of the Beatty One increased. A great flap of burning fabric fluttered down. The rest of the fabric slid off and the silvery length of the ship, a mirror in the sun, was revealed. Even with the despair that filled his heart, the horror and the great shock of failure, Bard Lane felt and recognized the strong sense of awe at the sheer beauty of the ship.

A tiny figure toppled from the high open port. The ship had moved just enough off the perpendicular so that the toy figure came down, not spinning, motionless in the sun-hot air, toward the street of the village. It hit in the dust, bursting work clothes, rebounding eighteen inches before lying still, a jellied, grotesque thing. The hard roar changed to shrillness and the Beatty One winked high in the sun. High and higher. Vapor trail. And higher. Then slowly canting over, as he knew it would do without the 20 Mohs stability plates which had not yet been installed in the A-six jet flow. It made a bright white line against
the impossible blue of the sky, an arc, a parabola, as neat as any inscribed on graph paper. A line up to a peak and a line down. The shrillness was a scream that tore at the inner ear. A line down to the earth. He saw the flare and guessed the distance at fifteen to twenty miles, due south. The scream still continued after the explosion flare had filled half the sky, then stopped abruptly. The air pushed hard against them, then the earth shook as though a truck were going by. At last came the gutteral crack-boom of the explosion. And silence. Brown cloud lifting in mushroom shape toward the blue sky. A bit of the vapor trail was still high in the sky, wavering off in the prevailing wind.

Bard Lane took two steps to the curbing, sat down and held his face in his hands. Nearby, a wooden building crackled as the flames bit into it. The project fire engines screamed to a stop, sirens ridiculous in comparison to the memory of the scream of the dying Beatty One—a mosquito trying to outshout an eagle. Somebody rested a steady hand on Bard Lane’s shoulder. He looked up and saw the stolid, seamed face of Adamson. Tears had cut channels in the dust on his cheeks.

“Nick, I … I …”

Adamson’s voice was gruff. “I’ll take an emergency crew down and see what she did when she hit. If we’re lucky, she’ll be five miles from the village. Better go get on the radio, Bard, and give the word. Then I think you ought to make an announcement over the PA.” Adamson walked solidly away.

He walked to his office. The guard had voluntarily given up his assignment. The project personnel stood in the street. Not large groups. Two or three or four. Low voices. Long silences. They glanced quickly at him and then away. He went through the outer office. Bess Reilly sat at her desk. She sat with her forehead against the top of her typewriter. Her bony shoulders shook but she made no sound.

After he advised Sachson and Washington by coded
radio, he obtained a clear circuit over the PA for every amplifier in the area.

He spoke slowly. “This is Lane. We don’t know what happened. We may never know who or what was responsible. You will be wondering about your jobs. I doubt very much whether we will be given a second chance. By the day after tomorrow we’ll have the checks ready for termination pay for most of you. Certain clerical, stock record, and lab employees will be retained for a time. A list of those who will be needed will be posted on the bulletin board tomorrow afternoon. One thing. Don’t ever feel that because of what just happened, all of what we have done is wasted. We learned things. If we’re not given a chance to use them, someone else will, sooner or later. They will learn from the mistakes we made. All employees will please proceed immediately to the time clocks and remove their time cards. Turn them in to Mr. Nolan. Mr. Nolan, after there has been time for all cards to be picked up, send someone to gather up the unclaimed ones. That’s the only way, I’m afraid, that we’ll ever learn who made the … first and last trip on the Beatty One. Dr. Inly, please report to my office. Benton, rope off the takeoff area, and advise me when the count is down to a one hour safety period. Those of you who lost personal possessions in the barracks fire, prepare the standard claim form. You can get forms and instructions from Miss Mees in the Accounting Office. Brainard, start your labor crews to work torch-cutting, for scrap, the tower that fell outside the radiation area. The club will be closed tonight. And … I don’t know how to say this properly, but I want to thank every single individual for … devotion and loyalty beyond anything I ever experienced before. Thank you.”

He released the switch and looked up. Sharan Inly was standing in the doorway. She walked to his desk. “You wanted to see me.”

He grinned in a very tired way. “Thanks, Sharan.”

“For what?”

“For being bright enough not to start commiserating
with me, telling me how sorry you are and how it wasn’t my fault and all that.”

She sat down, hung one denimed leg over the arm of the chair. “There isn’t anything to say. Our good pal who calls himself Raul got to one of the group and fixed us. On the other side of the world somebody feels very, very good, I imagine.”

“What are you going to do, Sharan?”

“They’ll find another slot to put me in. Maybe I’ll be back in the Pentagon, testing the Oedipus complexes of quartermaster second lieutenants. Something frightfully thrilling along that line. But now I have a hobby.”

“Hobby?”

“Finding out how they worked that long-range hypnosis. There are a few people I can trust not to think I’ve lost my mind when I give them the story.”

“But you won’t be taking off immediately, I’m afraid. There’ll be an investigation. We’ll have the star parts. You and I and Adamson and Leeber and Kornal and a few of the others. Stick around, Dr. Inly. See the big three-ring circus. Hear the tigers howl for meat. Pay your money and see the seven wonders of the world.”

A storm front was moving in from the north. The day was unexpectedly and unusually muggy. Extra chairs had been brought into General Sachson’s conference room. Two bored girls sat at a small table near the windows, supplementing the recording devices with the aid of two stenotype machines. They had covered several yards of the white tape with the staggered letters. The door was closed against the reporters and photographers who waited in the corridor.

Bard Lane sat at the witness table. His armpits were sodden and he had a dry, stained taste in his mouth.

Senator Leedry was a dry wisp of a man, tiny and withered, but with a plump and arrogant little paunch. He smiled as he spoke. His baritone voice was alternately scalpel, cutting torch, and caress.

“I appreciate, Dr. Lane, your attempts to explain technical
data in a manner that we poor laymen can understand. Believe me, we
appreciate
it. But I guess we’re not as bright as you imagine. At least, I’m not. Now, if it isn’t too much trouble, would you explain once again to us, your
theory
about the accident.”

“The A-six uses what they call, in Army slang, ‘soft’ radiation. The shielding also acts as an inhibitor. When actuated, the pellets are fed down to the CM chamber for combustion. The CM chamber utilizes the principles of the old shaped charge to achieve thrust. The controls had not been installed for the A-six drive. There is no possibility of an accidental transfer of pellets to the drive chamber.”

The Secretary of War, Logan Brightling, cleared his throat to interrupt. Cartoons depicted him perfectly as a hairless Kodiak bear wearing a wing collar. “Why was the Beatty One equipped with the hot stuff for the A-six drive before the controls were installed?”

“In spite of the inhibitors, the pellets generate appreciable heat. The Beatty One had an efficient method of utilizing this heat for self-contained power. To use that power for the necessary welding and structural work was more efficient than attempting to bring outside power to the ship. You could say that once we had the internal power source working, the Beatty One was helping to build herself. To continue, I have explained that I do not feel that it could have been an accident. The wall chart shows a schematic cross section.” Bard Lane walked over to the chart. “A man could enter here. It is the normal inspection procedure to check the shielding at regular intervals and take a careful count of all escaping radiation to determine whether or not it is well within safety limits. From this passage a man can work his way completely around the shielding and the drive chamber. At this point is a port that can only be used when the storage section contains no pellets. Beyond the port the radiation will kill a man in approximately twelve minutes. Once through that port it would take a person not more than three minutes to manually dislodge the pellets from their niches in
the conveyor and drop them down onto the plate above the drive chamber. In a few minutes more the person could clamber down there, activate the motor on the plate and let the pellets drop into the drive chamber itself. Without the required inhibition, the CM would be instantaneously achieved and the ship would take off. Inspection of the area where the Beatty One stood has shown us that there is more residual radiation than would normally be expected. Thus we assume that the drive chamber was fed with more pellets than would normally have been carried there at one time by the conveyor, and thus we can assume that it was not an accidental actuation of the conveyor itself.”