"Lenny," he said carefully, "are you sure you didn't jigger up those
drawings to make 'em look prettier?"
Lenny Poe gave the colonel a look of disgust. "Positive. Rafe checked 'em
over every inch of the way as I was drawing them, and he rechecked again
last night--or this morning--on those photostats Davenport gave us. That's
when he said there was something wrong with the translations.
"But he couldn't make it clear just what was wrong, eh?"
Lenny shrugged. "How anybody could make any sense out of that gobbledegook
is beyond me."
The colonel blew out a cloud of cigar smoke and looked thoughtfully at the
ceiling. As long as the diagrams were just designs on paper, Lenny Poe
could pick them up fine. Which meant that everything was jim-dandy as long
as the wiring diagrams were labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet. The labels
were just more squiggles to be copied as a part of the design.
But if the labels were in English, Lenny's mind would try to "make sense"
out of them, and since scientific concepts did _not_ "make sense" to him,
the labels came out as pure nonsense. In one of his drawings, a lead wire
had been labeled "simply ground to powder," and if the original drawing
hadn't been handy to check with, it might have taken quite a bit of
thought to realize that what was meant was "to power supply ground."
Another time, a GE 2N 188A transistor had come out labeled GEZNISSA. There
were others--much worse.
Russian characters, on the other hand, didn't have to make any sense to
Lenny, so his mind didn't try to force them into a preconceived mold.
* * * * *
Lenny unzipped the leather portfolio he had brought with him--a
specially-made carrier that looked somewhat like an oversized brief case.
"Maybe these'll help," he said.
"We managed to get two good sketches of the gadget--at least, as much of
it as that Russian lady scientist has put together so far. I kind of like
the rather abstract effect you get from all those wires snaking in and
around, with that green glass tube in the center. Pretty, isn't it?"
[Illustration]
"Very," said the colonel without conviction. "I wonder if it will help
Davenport any?" He looked at the pictures for several seconds more, then,
suddenly, his eyes narrowed. "Lenny--this piece of green glass--the
thing's shaped like the letter Q."
"Yeah, sort of. Why?"
"You said it was a tube, but you didn't make it look hollow when you drew
it."
"It isn't; it's solid. Does a tube have to be hollow? Yeah, I guess it
does, doesn't it? Well, then, it isn't a tube."
Colonel Spaulding picked up the phone and dialed a number.
"Colonel Spaulding here," he said after a moment. "Let me speak to Dr.
Davenport." And, after a wait: "This is Colonel Spaulding, doctor. I think
we may have something for you."
"Good morning, colonel. I'm glad to hear that. What is it?"
"The Q-shaped gadget--the one that you said was supposed to be painted
emerald green. Are you _sure_ that's the right translation of the
Russian?"
"Well ... uh--" Davenport hesitated. "I can't be sure on my own say-so, of
course. _I_ don't understand Russian. But I assure you that Mr. Berensky
is perfectly reliable."
"Oh, I have no doubt of that," Colonel Spaulding said easily. "But, tell
me, does Mr. Berensky know how to read a circuit diagram?"
"He does," Davenport said, somewhat testily. "Of course, he wasn't shown
the diagram itself. We had the Russian labels copied, and he translated
from a list."
"I had a sneaking suspicion that was it," said Spaulding. "Tell me,
doctor, what does L-E-A-D spell?"
"Lead," said the doctor promptly, pronouncing it _leed_. Then, after a
pause, he said: "Or lead," this time pronouncing it _led_. "It would
depend on the context."
"Suppose it was on a circuit diagram," the colonel prompted.
"Then it would probably be _leed_. What's all this leading up to,
colonel?"
"Bear with me. Suppose you had a cable coming from a storage battery, and
you wanted to make sure that the cable was reasonably resistant to
corrosion, so you order it made out of the metal, lead. It would be a _led
leed_, wouldn't it?"
"Um-m-m ... I suppose so."
"You might get pretty confused if you didn't have a circuit diagram in
front of you to tell you what the label was talking about, mightn't you?"
"I see what you mean," the scientist said slowly. "But we can't show those
circuit diagrams to Berensky. The Secretary of Defense himself has
classified them as Class Triple-A Ultra-Hyper Top Secret. That puts them
just below the Burn-The-Contents-Before-Reading class, and Berensky
doesn't have that kind of clearance."
"Then get somebody else," Colonel Spaulding said tiredly. "All you need is
a man who can understand technical Russian and has a top-level secrecy
clearance. If we haven't got at least one man in these United States with
such simple qualifications as those, them we might as well give the
country over to the Reds or back to the Redskins, since our culture is
irreprievably doomed." And he lowered the phone gently to its cradle.
"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 _jehad_, 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 to 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."
[Illustration]
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-defeating
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
Will be better not to wait until I have to ask him twice!'_"
The theory behind the heat projector was simply an extension of the laser
theory, plus a few refinements. Inside a ring made of the proper material,
the light, acted upon by exterior magnetic fields, tended to move in a
circle, so that the photon cascade effect was all in one direction instead
of bouncing back and forth between a pair of mirrors. That light could be
bent around corners by making it travel through a glass rod was well
known, and the Malekrinova Q-tube took advantage of that effect.
In a way, the principle was similar to that of the cyclotron, except that
instead of spinning ions around in a circle to increase their velocity a
beam of coherent light was circulated to increase its intensity.
Then, at the proper moment, a beam of intense coherent light shot out of
the tangent that formed the tail of the Q-tube. If the material of the Q
was properly constructed and contained atoms that fluoresced strongly in
the infra red, you had a heat beam that delivered plenty of power. And,
since the radiation was linear and "in step," the Q-tube didn't heat up
much at all. The cascade effect took most of the energy out as radiation.
"_Then a Royal Proclamation was dispatched throughout the nation,
Most imperatively calling to appear before the King.
Under penalties most cruel, every man who sold a jewel
Or who bought and bartered precious stones, and all that sort of
thing._"
But knowing all that didn't help Raphael Poe or the United States of
America one whit if the information couldn't be gotten out of Russia and
into Colonel Spaulding's hands. Lenny had told him of the trouble the
colonel was having with Dr. Davenport.
If he could only communicate with Lenny! But if he did, Dr. Malekrinova
would pick up every bit of it, and that would be the end of that. No, he
had to figure out some way to get himself and the information both out of
the country.
Meanwhile, he had to keep thinking of an animated necktie. And he had to
keep singing.
"_Thereupon, the jewelers' nether joints all quaked and knocked
together,
As they packed their Saratogas in lugubrious despair.
It was ever their misfortune to be pillaged by extortion,
And they thought they smelled a rodent on the sultry desert air._"
Lenny Poe shoved open the door of Colonel Spaulding's outer office with a
violence that startled Sergeant Nugget.
"Is Spaulding in?" he barked.
"I think he's expecting you," she said. There was no time to buzz the
colonel; Poe was already opening the door.
"Rafe's in trouble!" Lenny said hurriedly, slamming the door behind him.
"Where have you been?" snapped the colonel.
"Never mind that! Rafe's in trouble, I said! We've gotta figure a way to
get him out of it!"
Colonel Spaulding dropped all thought of bawling out Poe. "What'd he say?
What's the trouble?"
"All he's doing is broadcasting that necktie--like an animated cartoon in
technicolor. And he's singing."
"Singing? Singing what?"
"_As they faced the Great Propylon, with an apprehensive smile on,
Sculptured there in heiroglyphics six feet wide and nine feet high
Was the threat of King Rameses to chop every man to pieces
Who, when shown the Royal diamond, would dare refuse to buy._"