The Second Randall Garrett Megapack Page 36

  “There’s no such word as ‘irreprievably’,” Lenny pointed out.

  “There is now,” said Colonel Spaulding.

  * * * *

  Raphael Poe moseyed through the streets of Moscow in an apparently aimless manner. The expression on his face was that of a reasonably happy moron.

  His aimless manner was only apparent. Actually, he was heading toward the Lenin Soviet People’s Higher Research Laboratories. Dr. Sonya Borisovna Malekrinova would be working late this evening, and he wanted to get as close as possible in order to pick up as much information as he could.

  Rafe had a great deal of admiration for that woman, he admitted to himself. She was, granted, as plain as an unsalted matzoh. No. That was an understatement. If it were possible to die of the uglies, Sonya Borisovna would have been dangerously ill.

  Her disposition did nothing to alleviate that drawback. She fancied herself as cold, hard, analytical, and ruthless; actually she was waspish, arrogant, overbearing, and treacherous. What she considered in herself to be scientific detachment was really an isolation born of fear and distrust of the entire human race.

  To her, Communism was a religion; “Das Kapital” and “The Communist Manifesto” were holy writ enshrining the dogmata of Marxism-Leninism, and the conflict with the West was a jihad, a holy war in which God, in His manifestation as Dialectic Materialism, would naturally win out in the end.

  All of which goes to show that a scientific bent, in itself, does not necessarily keep one from being a bigot.

  Rafe’s admiration for the woman stemmed solely from the fact that, in spite of all the powerful drawbacks that existed in her mind, she was still capable of being a brilliant, if somewhat erratic scientist.

  There was a more relaxed air in Moscow these days. The per capita production of the Soviet Union still did not come up to that of the United States, but the recent advances in technology did allow a feeling of accomplishment, and the hard drive for superiority was softened a trifle. It was no longer considered the height of indolence and unpatriotic time-wasting to sit on a bench and feed pigeons. Nor was food so scarce and costly that throwing away a few bread crumbs could be considered sabotage.

  So Rafe Poe found himself a quiet corner near the Lenin Soviet People’s Laboratories, took out a small bag of dried breadcrumbs, and was soon surrounded by pigeons.

  Dr. Malekrinova was carefully calibrating and balancing the electronic circuits that energized and activated and controlled the output of the newly-installed beam generator—a ring of specially-made greenish glass that had a small cylinder of the same glass projecting out at a tangent. Her assistant, Alexis, a man of small scientific ability but a gifted mechanic, worked stolidly with her. It was not an easy job for Alexis; Sonya Borisovna was by no means an easy woman to work with. There was, as there should have been, a fifty-fifty division in all things—a proper state of affairs in a People’s Republic. Alexis Andreyevich did half the physical work, got all the blame when things went wrong, and none of the credit when things went right. Sonya Borisovna got the remaining fifty percent.

  Sonya Borisovna Malekrinova had been pushing herself too hard, and she knew it. But, she told herself, for the glory of the Soviet peoples, the work must go on.

  After spending two hours taking down instrument readings, she took the results to her office and began to correlate them.

  Have to replace that 140-9.0 micromicrofarad frequency control on stage two with something more sensitive, she thought. And the field modulation coils require closer adjustment.

  She took off her glasses and rubbed at her tired eyes while she thought. Perhaps the 25 microfarad, 12 volt electrolytic condenser could be used to feed the pigeons, substituting a breadcrumb capacitor in the sidewalk circuit.

  She opened her eyes suddenly and stared at the blank wall in front of her. “Pigeons?” she said wonderingly. “Breadcrumb capacitor? Am I losing my mind? What kind of nonsense is that?”

  She looked back down at her notes, then replaced her glasses so that she could read them. Determined not to let her mind wander in that erratic fashion again, she returned her attention to the work at hand.

  She found herself wondering if it might not be better to chuck the whole job and get out while the getting was good. The old gal, she thought, is actually tapping my mind! She’s picking up everything!

  Sonya Borisovna sat bolt upright in her chair, staring at the blank wall again. “Why am I thinking such nonsense?” she said aloud. “And why should I be thinking in English?” When her words registered on her ears, she realized that she was actually speaking in English. She was thoroughly acquainted with the language, of course, but it was not normal for her to think in it unless she happened to be conversing with someone in that tongue.

  The first whisper of a suspicion began to take form in the mind of Dr. Sonya Borisovna Malekrinova.

  Half a block away, Raphael Poe emptied the last of his breadcrumbs on the sidewalk and began walking away. He kept his mind as blank as possible, while his brow broke out in a cold sweat.

  * * * *

  That,” said Colonel Julius Spaulding scathingly, “is as pretty a mess as I’ve seen in years.”

  “It’s a breadboard circuit, I’ll admit,” Dr. Davenport said defensively, “but it’s built according to the schematics you gave us.”

  “Doctor,” said the colonel, “during the war the British dropped our group a radio transmitter. It was the only way to get the stuff into Africa quickly. The parachute failed to open. The transmitter fell two thousand feet, hit the side of a mountain, and tumbled down another eight hundred feet. When we found it, four days later, its wiring was in better shape than that thing is in now.”

  “It’s quite sufficient to test the operation of the device,” Davenport said coldly.

  Spaulding had to admit to himself that it probably was. The thing was a slapdash affair—the colonel had a strong feeling that Davenport had assigned the wiring job to an apprentice and gave him half an hour to do the job—but the soldering jobs looked tight enough, and the components didn’t look as though they’d all been pulled out of the salvage bin. What irritated Colonel Spaulding was Davenport’s notion that the whole thing was a waste of time, energy, money, and materials, and, therefore, there was no point in doing a decent job of testing it at all.

  He was glad that Davenport didn’t know how the information about the device had been transported to the United States. As it was, he considered the drawings a hoax on the part of the Russians; if he had been told that they had been sent telepathically, he would probably have gone into fits of acute exasperation over such idiocy.

  The trouble with Davenport was that, since the device didn’t make any sense to him, he didn’t believe it would function at all.

  “Oh, it will do something, all right,” he’d said once, “but it won’t be anything that needs all that apparatus. Look here—” He had pointed toward the schematic. “Where do you think all that energy is going? All you’re going to get is a little light, a lot of heat, and a couple of burned out coils. I could do the same job cheaper with a dozen 250 watt light bulbs.”

  To be perfectly honest with himself, Spaulding had to admit that he wasn’t absolutely positive that the device would do anything in particular, either. His own knowledge of electronic circuitry was limited to ham radio experience, and even that was many years out of date. He couldn’t be absolutely sure that the specifications for the gadget hadn’t been garbled in transmission.

  The Q-shaped gizmo, for instance. It had taken the better part of a week for Raphael Poe to transmit the information essential to the construction of that enigmatic bit of glass.

  Rafe had had to sit quietly in the privacy of his own room and print out the specifications in Russian, then sit and look at the paper while Lenny copied the “design.” Then each paper had to be carefully destroyed, which wasn’t easy to do. You don’t go around burning papers in a crowded Russian tenement unless you want the people in the next room t
o wonder what you’re up to.

  Then the drawings Lenny had made had had to be translated into English and the piece carefully made to specifications.

  Now here it was, all hooked up and, presumably, ready for action. Colonel Spaulding fervently hoped there would be some action; he didn’t like the smug look on Dr. Amadeus Davenport’s face.

  * * * *

  The device was hooked up on a testing-room circuit and controlled from outside. The operation could be watched through a heavy pane of bulletproof glass. “With all that power going into it,” Davenport said, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt by spatters of molten metal when those field coils blow.”

  They went outside to the control console, and Dr. Davenport flipped the energizing switch. After the device had warmed up on low power, Davenport began turning knobs slowly, increasing the power flow. In the testing room, the device just sat there, doing nothing visible, but the meters on the control console showed that something was going on. A greenish glow came from the housing that surrounded the Q-shaped gadget.

  “Where the Russians made their mistake in trying to fool anyone with that thing was in their design of that laser component,” said Dr. Davenport. “Or, I should say, the thing that is supposed to look like a laser component.”

  “Laser?” said Colonel Spaulding uncomprehendingly.

  “It means ‘light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation’,” Davenport explained. “Essentially, a laser consists of a gas-filled tube or a solid ruby bar with parallel mirrors at both ends. By exciting the atoms from outside, light is generated within the tube, and some of it begins to bounce back and forth between the mirrors at the ends. This tends to have a cascade effect on the atoms which have picked up the energy from outside, so that more and more of the light generated inside the tube tends to be parallel to the length of the tube. One of the mirrors is only partially silvered, and eventually the light bouncing back and forth becomes powerful enough to flash through the half-silvered end, giving a coherent beam of light.”

  “Maybe that’s what this is supposed to be,” said the colonel.

  Davenport chuckled dryly. “Not a chance. Not with an essentially circular tube that isn’t even silvered.”

  Lenny Poe, the colonel noticed, wasn’t the only person around who didn’t care whether the thing he referred to as a “tube” was hollow or not.

  “Is it doing anything?” Colonel Spaulding asked anxiously, trying to read the meters over Davenport’s shoulder.

  “It’s heating up,” Davenport said dryly.

  Spaulding looked back at the apparatus. A wisp of smoke was rising slowly from a big coil.

  A relay clicked minutely.

  WHAP!

  For a confused second, everything seemed to happen at once.

  But it didn’t; there was a definite order to it.

  First, a spot on the ceramic tile wall of the room became suddenly red, orange, white hot. Then there was a little crater of incandescent fury, as though a small volcano had erupted in the wall. Following that, there was a sputtering and crackling from the innards of the device itself, and a cloud of smoke arose suddenly, obscuring things in the room. Finally, there was the crash of circuit-breakers as they reacted to the overload from the short circuit.

  There was silence for a moment, then the hiss of the automatic fire extinguishers in the testing room as they poured a cloud of carbon dioxide snow on the smoldering apparatus.

  “There,” said Davenport with utter satisfaction. “What did I tell you?”

  “You didn’t tell me this thing was a heat-ray projector,” said Colonel Spaulding.

  “What are you talking about?” Dr. Davenport said disdainfully.

  “Develop the film in those automatic cameras,” Spaulding said, “and I’ll show you what I’m talking about!”

  As far as Colonel Spaulding was concerned, the film showed clearly what had happened. A beam of energy had leaped from the “tail” of the Q-tube, hit the ceramic tile of the wall, and burned its way through in half a second or so. The hole in the wall, surrounded by fused ceramic, was mute evidence of the occurrence of what Spaulding had seen.

  But Dr. Davenport pooh-poohed the whole thing. Evidence to the contrary, he was quite certain that no such thing had happened. A piece of hot glass from a broken vacuum tube had done it, he insisted.

  A piece of hot glass had burned its way through half an inch of tile? And a wall?

  Davenport muttered something about the destructive effects of shaped charges. He was more willing to believe that something as wildly improbable as that had happened than admit that the device had done what Colonel Spaulding was quite certain it had done.

  Within three hours, Davenport had three possible explanations of what had happened, each of which required at least four unlikely things to happen coincidentally.

  Colonel Spaulding stalked back to his office in a state of angry disgust. Just because the thing was foreign to Davenport’s notions, he had effectively tied his own hands—and Colonel Spaulding’s, too.

  “Where’s Lenny Poe?” he asked the WAC sergeant. “I want to talk to him.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, sir. Lieutenant Fesner called in half an hour ago. Mr. Poe has eluded them again.”

  Colonel Spaulding gazed silently at the ceiling for a long moment. Then: “Sergeant Nugget, take a letter. To the President of the United States, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

  “Dear Sir. Consider this my resignation. I have had so much experience with jackasses lately that I have decided to change my name to Hackenbush and become a veterinarian. Yours truly, et cetera. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the sergeant.

  “Burn it. When Fumblefingers Fesner and his boys find Lenny Poe again, I want to know immediately.”

  He stalked on into his office.

  * * * *

  Raphael Poe was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Establishing a close rapport with another mind can be a distinct disadvantage at times. A spy is supposed to get information without giving any; a swapping of information is not at all to his advantage.

  It was impossible to keep his mind a perfect blank. What he had to do was keep his strongest surface thoughts entirely on innocuous things. The trouble with that was that it made it extremely difficult to think about some way to get out of the jam he was in. Thinking on two levels at once, while not impossible, required a nicety of control that made wire-walking over Niagara look easy.

  The thing to do was to make the surface thoughts automatically repetitive. A song.

  “In a hall of strange description (Antiquarian Egyptian),

  Figuring his monthly balance sheet, a troubled monarch sat

  With a frown upon his forehead, hurling interjections horrid

  At the state of his finances, for his pocketbook was flat.”

  Simultaneously, he kept a picture in his mind’s eye. It had to be something vivid that would be easy to concentrate on. The first thing that came to mind was the brilliant necktie that the President had used in his test several months before. He conjured it up in all its chartreuse glory, then he animated it. Mauve satyrs danced with rose-pink nymphs and chased them over the yellow-green landscape.

  “Not a solitary single copper cent had he to jingle

  In his pocket, and his architects had gone off on a strike,

  Leaving pyramids unfinished, for their wages had diminished,

  And their credit vanished likewise, in a way they didn’t like.”

  Rafe could tell that Dr. Malekrinova’s mind was trying to reject the alien ideas that were coming into her mind. She wasn’t consciously trying to pick up Rafe’s thoughts. But the rejection was ineffective because of its fascination. The old business about the horse’s tail. If you see a white horse, you’ll soon get rich if you can keep from thinking about the horse’s tail until it’s out of sight. The first thought that comes to mind is: “I mustn’t think about the horse’s tail.” A self-defea
ting proposition.

  If Sonya Borisovna had been certain that she was receiving the thoughts telepathically, she might have been able to reject them. But her mind rejected the idea of telepathy instead, so she was susceptible to the thoughts because she thought they were her own.

  The cavorting of the nymphs and satyrs became somewhat obscene, but Rafe didn’t bother to correct it. He had more to worry about than offending the rather prim mind of Dr. Malekrinova.

  “It was harder for His Royal Highness than for sons of toil,

  For the horny-handed workmen only ate three figs per day,

  While the King liked sweet potatoes, puddings, pies, and canned tomatoes,

  Boneless ham, and Bluepoint oysters cooked some prehistoric way.”

  What to do now? Should he try to get out of Russia? Was there any quick way out?

  He had all the information he needed on the heat-beam projector that Dr. Malekrinova was building. The theory behind it was perfectly clear; all it needed was further experimentation. If it worked out according to theory, it would be an almost perfect defense against even the fastest intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  “As he growled, the Royal grumbler spied a bit of broken tumbler

  In a long undusted corner just behind the chamber door.

  When his hungry optics spied it, he stood silently and eyed it,

  Then he smote his thigh with ecstasy and danced about the floor.”

  Maybe he should try to make a run for the American Embassy. No. No one there knew him, and they probably couldn’t get him out of the country, anyway. Besides, it would take him too long to explain the situation to them.

  “‘By the wit Osiris gave me! This same bit of glass shall save me!

  I shall sell it as a diamond at some stupendous price!

  And whoe’er I ask to take it will find, for his own sweet sake, it