The Unorthodox Engineers Page 12

‘I know what did it,’ said van Noon. ‘Our universe reacted with theirs violently. Their laws of physics must have been very different! It was our tunnel that punctured the protective barrier, and I broke the last seal by accident. Once the reaction started, nothing could stop it.’

  ‘So it was antimatter!’ said Courtney.

  ‘I think it was another universe, a parallel dimension. Another membrane interacting with ours. It’s possible it was an antimatter universe, I suppose. I’d give anything to know how they managed to connect the two!’

  Courtney whistled. ‘What was that you said about the laws of physics?’

  Fritz heaved a sigh. ‘It’s been suggested that other membranes in the multiverse would almost certainly have physics different from ours. Maybe only slightly—but maybe drastically different. Theirs must have been very odd for them to achieve what we’ve seen here! The Dark was some sort of barrier, a shield if you like, between their world and ours.’

  ‘So who were they, and what happened?’

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe they were scientists, or explorers—they could even have been refugees from God-knows-what. When the two universes came into contact, the bridge between was destroyed.’

  ‘The doorway slammed shut! Courtney muttered.

  ‘Yes, quite,’ agreed Fritz. ‘As to what happened to them… who knows. We could have learnt an awful lot from them, if only there had been a means of contact.’

  ‘Had they been inclined to teach,’ said Courtney, ‘but in two hundred years they never attempted even to make any contact. I think that they were so far ahead of us that we were merely as ants to them.’

  Van Noon sat up painfully. ‘I’m not sure that two hundred years passed for them—laws of physics, remember?’ He looked around. By the way, what happened to Jacko?’

  ‘He’s a little bruised and dazed, but nothing serious. Apparently the implosive blast shot him out of the pipe like a cork out of a bottle. He swears you did it on purpose.’

  Fritz rubbed his hands over his eyes. ‘Do you suppose we’ll ever know why they were here?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Courtney. ‘And even if they’d tried to tell us, we may not have been capable of understanding. Try explaining the uses and construction of a starship to an ant…’

  Getaway from Getawehi

  One

  ‘Colonel Nash has just checked out of the spaceport, sir. Says he’ll be with you in about half an hour. He’s bringing a Commander Brumas with him.’

  ‘Coming to see me?’ Colonel Belling cast a thoughtful glance at the wall clock. ‘He didn’t happen to say what he wanted?’

  ‘No, sir.’ The Port Liaison Officer was apologetic. ‘But he was in one hell of a hurry. The Navy virtually commandeered the field to give the ship priority clearance to land. Looks like some sort of emergency. It’s not often they risk landing a heavy cruiser at a metropolitan spaceport.’

  ‘A heavy cruiser?’

  ‘Navy craft. The Labship Tycho Brahe, no less.’

  Was it in trouble?’

  ‘Not apparently. But I think Colonel Nash was. When . the Port Marshal went out to meet him off the tender the Colonel shouted ‘Get away!’, or something like that, and ran up the walkway like he was jet assisted.’

  Thanks for calling.’ Belling cut the connection to the spaceport and turned back to the wall clock speculatively. Then he picked up the handset again.

  ‘Duty room… Is Lieutenant Van Noon still in the depot?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But he’s due to check out in a few minutes on twenty-one days’ leave.’

  ‘Stop him. He’s not to leave without my personal authority. Put him under arrest if necessary, but don’t let him go.’

  ‘Understood, Colonel. What’s the charge this time?’

  ‘No charge. Just hold him until I send for him. I have a feeling that Colonel Nash isn’t the only one who’s going to be in trouble.’

  ‘Glad to see you, Ivan!’ Belling held out his hand. ‘You know, I haven’t seen you since you went to Tazoo.’

  ‘Tazoo?’ Nash mopped his perspiring brow. ‘I wish to hell I was still on Tazoo.’

  ‘Oh? I gathered it was a bit of a hell-hole.’

  ‘The galaxy’s worst—or so. I thought at the time. But that was before I came across Getawehi.’

  ‘Getawehi? What’s wrong with Getawehi?’

  ‘That’s just the problem,’ said Nash, with a look of resignation. ‘I’m damned if I know what’s wrong with Getawehi. I can’t even talk about it without sounding irrational. That’s why I asked Commander Brumas along. He’s handling the Navy’s side of the Getawehi project and a saner man you couldn’t wish to meet. He doesn’t find it easy to talk about Getawehi either. For that reason he’s come armed with a video record which shows some of his peculiar problems. I think he’d better state his case first.’

  ‘You have me intrigued,’ said Belling. ‘The entire resources of the General Engineering Reserve are at your service. If you can broadly define your problem, I’ll call up one of our specialists who may be able to assist.’

  ‘Forget your specialists,’ said Nash heavily. ‘Get that nutter Van Noon up here. This is the type of outwards-facing-interior problem that only he knows how to handle.’

  ‘You know,’ said Belling, ‘I had the feeling this was going to be one of those days as soon as I heard you were coming.’ He reached for the handset again.

  ‘Duty room… Is Van Noon available?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Under close arrest. He had to be restrained from leaving. Do you wish to enter a charge sheet?’

  ‘No, no. Just get him up here fast. And while you’re at it, drop a noose over Sergeant Hine .and the rest of the UE squad. I have a feeling we may be lucky enough to be rid of the whole damn lot by morning.’

  ‘You sent for me, sir?’ Lieutenant Fritz Van Noon entered the office cautiously.

  ‘Yes, Fritz.’ Colonel Belling motioned Van Noon towards a chair. ‘Sorry to have to cancel your leave, but something very important has come up. Colonel Nash you already know, but I want you to meet Commander Brumas, currently heading the Navy’s Space-Engineering Research team. He has an emergency on his hands.’ He turned to his visitor. ‘Commander, this is Fritz Van Noon, who runs our Unorthodox Engineering group.’

  Despite his obvious agitation, the naval officer relaxed somewhat at Fritz’s entry. He had evidently found Colonel Belling’s approach to his problems no more comforting than those of his own Service authorities.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Commander?’ asked Van Noon.

  ‘Getawehi.’ Brumas said it with the air of a man who has repeated a story so many times that he is sure that by now the whole world must be familiar with its details.

  ‘Getawehi? Sounds like an insect repellent.’

  ‘No such luck. It’s a planet and one of the most Godlost territories in space. We’ve a twenty-man construction team trapped down there, and we can’t lift them off.’

  ‘And you think the Engineering Reserve might be able to help you?’ Van Noon shot a quick look at Colonel Belling—who was apparently finding some innocent amusement in the ceiling to judge from the expression on his face and the elevation of his eyeballs.

  ‘Not the Engineering Reserve,’ corrected Brumas sharply. ‘Specifically the Unorthodox Engineers. The other kind we already have, but after exposure to Getawehi problems they tend to go down with nervous breakdowns like they were infectious. No, this is a far-out situation, and it’s going to take some intensely screwball ideas to solve it.’

  ‘Then you’re on to the right person,’ said Belling maliciously.

  ‘Exactly what’s so special about Getawehi?’ asked Fritz.

  Brumas sat forward in his chair. ‘Let me give you the background first. There’s a big joint-service science project called Ixion on at the moment. The Navy’s part was to land and assemble an equipment project on Getawehi. Superficially it seemed a simple job. It proved to be the biggest balls-up in Naval history. Not only have we
been unable to complete the assignment, but we’ve also lost most of our equipment and left our construction team stranded on Getawehi. If we can do nothing else, we have at least to find a way to get the team off.’

  ‘I don’t quite see what the UE group can do that Space Rescue can’t.’

  No—but then you haven’t been to Getawehi. The whole planet’s a rotten cosmological joke. Everything about Getawehi is sideways-up. From its orbital velocity and apparent mass it has no business even being in its present orbit around its primary, Geta. And not content with being a complete mathematical absurdity, its own rotation is subject to such peculiar perturbations and variations that its progress can only be described as lolloping. It doesn’t even have a stable period of rotation.’

  ‘You must appreciate I’m supposed to be on leave,’ said Van Noon warily.

  Brumas was unswerving. ‘But it’s only when you take a closer look at Getawehi that the real peculiarities of the planet begin to emerge. Take, for instance, the dance of the drunken lander.’

  Van Noon looked appealingly towards Colonel Belling, but the latter avoided meeting his eyes and busied himself with loading the video projector.

  The screen brightened to show a stereo close-up of the planet’s surface, a view obviously taken from a spacecraft in a precarious synchronous orbit. Under the cameras the terrain of Getawehi was nothing remarkable. On the screen an ashen-grey soil, spotted with wisps of heather-purple fern and tall grasses, gave way reluctantly to the edge of a grey, rock-strewn steppe—a typical patch of ecological poverty in the cosmological scheme.

  ‘This is the spot,’ said Brumas, ‘where the first team made touchdown. The prognosis was favourable. Getawehi has a breathable atmosphere at tolerable pressure, no predatory animals above the size of a mouse, and temperatures well within the range of working suits.’

  ‘I’ve still got twenty-one days due to me,’ said Van Noon plaintively.

  Brumas ignored the interruption. ‘I’m replaying the recording at ten times its actual speed, so that the effect will appear exaggerated. What you will see is only one example of the kind of tricks that Getawehi has up its sleeve. In a few moments you will see the landing of the ferry. At this playback speed the actual transit time will appear quite brief, but we are mainly interested in what happened after it landed.’

  The actual moment of touchdown was obscured by a swiftly-subsiding dustcloud, which cleared to show the egg-shaped lander standing firmly on its tripod legs but leaning at a decided angle from the vertical.

  For the first time, Van Noon began to take an active interest.

  ‘Odd!’ he said.

  ‘It gets more odd the farther it goes,’ Brumas assured him. ‘As a matter of interest, it’s the only ship we’ve been able to put down without it toppling. Not that that did very much good.’

  From the vantage point of the camera almost vertically overhead in space, the legs of the lander could be seen to be firm, but the angle at which the nose-cone faced the sky changed direction and deviated in angle in the most alarming way.

  ‘At this point we assumed,’ said Brumas, ‘that what we were observing was the failure of one or more shock-absorbers on the legs, and a hunting pneumatic servo trying to compensate. But it isn’t true.’

  ‘No,’ said Van Noon. ‘I didn’t think it would be.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘The lander’s centre of gravity. Even with a weighted base—which you haven’t got on a ferry—you couldn’t lean it at that angle to the vertical without it falling over.’

  ‘Very good!’ approved Brumas. ‘So what’s your reaction to that little paradox?’

  ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘I can seriously…?’

  ‘I was being serious. If the lander hasn’t toppled it can only be because its centre of gravity hasn’t been greatly displaced by the angle at which it’s leaning. There’s only one set of conditions where that would be possible.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That the gravitational attraction of Getawehi is not perpendicular to the surface of the planet. On Getawehi, “up” is not only angled from the geocentric vertical, but it’s even subject to short-period changes of direction.’

  ‘This boy’s brilliant!’ said Brumas, glancing at Belling. ‘Now, Fritz, leaving aside the fact that gravity variations on that scale are a physical impossibility, let’s see how you do on the next bit.’

  ‘You mean there’s more?’

  ‘I haven’t started yet. This is only by way of introduction. You name the impossible, and Getawehi has it.’

  The nose-cone of the lander swung to encompass three hundred degrees of arc in as many seconds, then the whole space vehicle gave a skip and a stagger, spun completely about on one landing leg, then reestablished itself about a ship’s diameter away from its original position.

  ‘Ingenious!’ said Fritz Van Noon.

  ‘Isn’t it? I thought you’d be intrigued. But the worst is yet to come.’

  Having found its legs, so to speak, the lander adopted a fairly rapid series of gyratory steps while miraculously remaining approximately vertical. Its path was increasingly haloed by a ring of escaping crewmen, like frenzied ants encircling a honeypot. Each step the ship took was preceded by the curious hop-skip motion with which it had preluded its new mode of transport. Its continuing drunken dance through the fern banks soon carried it out on to the edge of the steppe. There it abruptly disappeared from view except for an unmoving brown stain.

  Brumas swore and stopped the projector. ‘Sorry about that! I’ll give you that last sequence again at true speed.’

  ‘It might help,’ said Van Noon morosely. ‘An inebriated lander I could learn to live with, but I know from bitter experience that the abrupt removal of several million credits of Government money invariably needs a good explanation.’

  After a brief interval the lander re-appeared, moving now at its actual speed and engaged in the last of its strides through the fern and out on to the plain. The extreme angle of its tilt was clearly visible, and its last swivel-round was remarkably controlled considering the vehicle’s four-hundred-ton Terran deadweight.

  As the landing carriage touched the plain’s edge, one leg folded beneath its burden. The lander tipped sideways and began to fall. But more than falling, the whole ship appeared to dissolve as it toppled, the debris melting like candlewax dropped on a hot stove. There was a brief flare, scarcely visible in Geta’s strong sunlight, then there was nothing left of the vessel save for a large area of brown metallic stain on the sand-ash and a few chunky ceramic components which survived the remarkable fate of the rest of the ship.

  For a long time Van Noon was silent. Then finally he spoke.

  ‘That was quite some trick,’ he said. ‘How’s it done?’

  ‘I’ll go into that later,’ said Brumas. ‘Right now the point at issue is that we’ve a job to do on Getawehi—a job we started but can’t finish. We’ve three supply ships orbiting the planet which we daren’t instruct to make planetfall for obvious reasons. And we’ve a twenty-man construction team stranded on Getawehi which we can’t lift off. We’ve had a hundred per cent mortality rate on transfer ferries attempting touchdown, and we can’t even communicate with the ground force except by line-of-sight laser channel, due to radio interference.’

  ‘All of which adds up to one heck of a problem,’ said Van Noon.

  ‘Precisely!’ Brumas and Colonel Nash exchanged glances. ‘But as I said, this is only the introduction. Colonel Nash is the one who has the real problems.’

  Two

  The thunder of fusing hydrogen died as the Labship Tycho Brahe, having cleared the necessary seventeen thousand astronomical units, transmuted easily into its hyperspace analogue and fled through the weird corridors of the dimensionless continua. Aboard, it was time for relaxation. Geta lay far out on the edge of the local spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Indeed, Geta and its single planet hovered right on the border of the vast ocean of i
nterstellar space. The farther galaxies hung like incredibly distant islands in an ocean of darkness, with Andromeda dominating.

  A five-day trip. And as the vibration of the planetary drive faded from the fabric of the ship, Van Noon forsook the computer and traced his second in command to the radio room.

  ‘Colonel Nash wants to see us, Jacko. At last we’re going to get a briefing on Project Ixion.’

  Jacko Hine was not impressed. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Fritz, I’d rather get off here and start walking home. The more I learn about Getawehi the crazier it all becomes.’

  ‘Why? What’s the matter now?’

  ‘I’ve been checking the recordings to see why Brumas thought it necessary to use a laser channel to communicate with the ground force. I found the answer. In addition to an enormous magnetic field, Getawehi has an output of radio mush which exceeds that from Terra by about nineteen hundred to one.’

  Van Noon stopped abruptly. ‘Synchrotron emission or static?’

  Jacko dropped the memory chips on the table. ‘Neither. Modulated carrier waves. There’s no doubt of it. Long waves, short waves, vhf, uhf, and damn nigh into the X-ray band. You name it, and Getawehi has it. And some of those transmitters pack a punch which would make a Terran megacast station look like a spark transmitter.’

  Van Noon began to look rather grey. ‘But there can’t be any such transmitters on Getawehi. Hell, Jacko, it’s uninhabited. There’s no life form on Getawehi with an intelligence much above a jack-rabbit. So who’s doing the broadcasting—ants?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. But I can say that the radio output from the surface, mainly broadband carriers modulated by random noise, constitutes an almost perfect radio blanket.’

  ‘But it’s damn ridiculous! Radio galaxies I have heard of, but what the heck am I supposed to make of a radio planet? It can’t be a case of synchrotron emission, because you don’t get that sort of electron energy on a habitable planet. Anyway, it wouldn’t give you a modulated carrier. But what’s left? Nothing much less than an array of conventional transmitting equipments—which is impossible—and even if it weren’t, you’d still need power to get that sort of output. You can’t get that by rubbing two blades of grass together.’