With its volume turned up, it could very probably lift him to any
height above the Earth he desired, with its ability growing weaker only
as it rose out of the Earth's gravity and magnetic field. And it would
keep him suspended, if he desired, until its batteries burned out.
There would be limitations, of course. Perhaps the Earth's gravity and
magnetic fields would be too weak at, say, an altitude of fifty miles
for the mechanism to function. There were probably limits to the mass
and weight it could lift. There would have to be extensive tests--
And a cellar workshop was no place to conduct them!
* * * * *
He straightened up from the workbench and moved forward on the balls of
his feet. He spread his arms wide as he approached the mechanism, like
a basketball player approaching a wary opponent who had the ball. Smoke
from the cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth streamed up
and stung his eye. He wished he had left it back on the workbench.
At first, the little mechanism ignored him. Then, almost instinctively,
it seemed to notice him. It went sliding away from him, toward the wall.
Morrow moved forward, cautiously.
It glided close to the wall, then rebounded gently. It came drifting
back toward him--then hesitated, started off in a tangent--and he
grabbed for it. A faint, tingling shock went up his arm as he clawed at
the shiny metal loops, but that was all. He hung on grimly as it tugged
at his fingertips; then, as its influence swept through him and attuned
his body to it, it snuggled up to him, suddenly friendly.
He snapped it off and felt its inert weight settle down familiarly in
his hands. He carried it back to the workbench, set it down, and threw
a rag over it.
Then he pulled off his coveralls, went upstairs to the kitchenette, and
washed his hands.
There were other factors to consider, of course. Especially the ones he
didn't want to think about--the frightening ones--
He stared down at his hands, feeling the cool water run pleasantly
over them. Strong, supple hands. Well-proportioned, muscular. A
little bit like the rest of him. Not fat or skinny, not soft-muscled
nor, again, as bulgingly muscular as a wrestler. Just firm flesh,
strong and not too much of it, on a strong-boned skeleton frame.
Nerves well-coordinated, reflexes good. But tired. Mentally fatigued,
the psycho-therapists said, from living in a world of raw tensions.
According to them, ninety percent of the American public suffered
mental fatigue. There had been a slew of magazine articles and several
books about it.
The Cold War, the war that wasn't a war. The Russkies.
Morrow turned off the cold-water tap and glanced at his image in the
shaving mirror. A slender face, a good nose, a firm mouth with slightly
too much jaw. Dark hair tumbled in comfortable looseness over a lined
forehead. Gray eyes that mocked him as he mocked himself.
He dried his hands and got a couple of cans of beer out of the
refrigerator. Grabbing a can-opener and a glass, he strolled in through
the small, dark bedroom to the front living room and sprawled himself
out in the deep chair beside the television set. It was a small home,
a comfortable home, and he enjoyed prowling around in it in his socks,
loafers, and shorts. He scratched his left leg and opened a can of beer.
He was, Morrow concluded, the product of an age of terror. East was
Russia and west was the Allied Nations, and in between was a veritable
No Man's Land. Radar blanketed the skies, rocket missiles stood on
their firing-racks, long-range bombers waited to deliver atomic death
and swift jet-fighters waited to do battle with them. The diplomats
called it a balance of power; the military strategists, a balance
of forces, wherein neither side could launch an atomic war without
suffering complete annihilation by the other.
And so, said the statesmen, there would be no atomic war.
The only trouble was, they couldn't convince the people. Too many
self-minded individuals saw the world situation as two sticks of
dynamite rubbing against each other. At any moment, both might explode.
Massive war industry and compulsory military training for their
youngsters didn't make the public feel any more secure.
Nor, of course, did the generals want them to feel secure. The Allied
generals moved their armies in threatening maneuvers near critical
borders to increase the fear of the peoples in communist-dominated
countries; the Russian generals did likewise to increase the fear of
people in the Allied Nations. And the diplomats hurled threats back and
forth in the United Nations' assemblies to achieve the same purpose.
Militarily, the two sides had reached a stalemate. The final weapon was
the people. Each side hoped the people of the other side would rise up
in revolt, thus breaking the deadlock and winning the struggle, but
humanity is notoriously stubborn. It was, nonetheless, rather hard on
the people.
Individual lives were deeply affected, sometimes for better and
sometimes for worse.
Morrow's life had, so far, been for the better. In high school,
certain aptitude tests had placed him in advance physics classes; upon
graduation, at seventeen, he had spent a year in a government-sponsored
engineering school. At eighteen, further tests had placed him in the
Air Force, assigned as radar-operator to the rear cockpit of a sleek,
all-weather jet-fighter. He spent two years patrolling the stratosphere
over the vast, white expanse of the Arctic Ocean. At twenty, he
was reassigned to engineering school and spent four years studying
electronics, during which time he was returned to civilian status. He
was placed at Western Electronics as a production engineer; by the time
he was twenty-seven, he had worked his way up to the Research Division.
His flying experience helped considerably, but it wasn't all. He was
deeply in love with electronics. He had studied Einstein's equations,
for example, and got something out of them that most of the others
missed. No one knew exactly what it was--neither did Morrow--but he
began to have "hunches" that often paid off.
In electronics, that was a priceless faculty. A great deal of it,
especially in the research department, was still pretty much of a
hit-or-miss affair. There still wasn't a man who knew _exactly_ what
electricity was!
Now, at twenty-nine, he had gotten another of those "hunches." It
worked, too! The machine floated!
* * * * *
He gazed thoughtfully out the broad picture window at the stretch of
green lawn, the sidewalks, the trees along the street and the other
little prefab houses of his neighbors. The evening shadows were cool
and deepening as night approached. Warm, yellow light poured from the
windows across the street.
He was comfortable here in his little, company-owned bachelor's home.
Most of the town of Westerton was owned by Western Electronics,
with its huge, sprawling plant buildings on the other side of the
small valley, across the railroad tracks. Like most of the bachelor
engineers, he ate most of his meals over at the company cafeteria. A
cleaning-woman came twice a week to tidy up his little house, though he
was a fairly conscientious housekeeper himself.
And like practically all the engineers, he had a small workshop patched
together in his cellar, built from odds and ends salvaged from the
company's junk-pile of rejected parts, a few pieces scrounged from
the laboratories, and some odd bits made in the machine-shop over the
protests of its foreman. There were nine amateur radio-hams sharing the
wave-bands in Westerton and vicinity, and no office-clerk's housewife
ever had any difficulty getting a recalcitrant dishwasher or electric
iron fixed.
It was here, in his private workshop, that he had developed his
"hunch" to startling reality. Working in his spare time, figuring
out its mathematical components, then working those components into
theoretical diagrams, then designing and building the machine to fit
the diagrams--and it worked!
Also, it was fantastic. It had been a little too fantastic for him to
mention it to any of the others at the labs. His fellow-engineers--some
of whom were considerably older than he was--were a little too staid
for that. They, too, were products of the age; their entire efforts
and, indeed, most of their interests were tied up in the one, basic
problem of making better electronic devices for better weapons for the
Armed Forces. They couldn't be blamed for that, the world situation
being what it was, but it did make them somewhat hide-bound.
The idea of controlling the pull of gravity was a little too fanciful
for them, Morrow feared--or if they had any interest in the idea at
all, it would be in the possible uses of it as a military weapon. That
was the way to get ahead as a scientist, these days!
Morrow shuddered involuntarily.
_There_ was the thing he actually feared!
He drew it into his thoughts, slowly, and analysed it. Item: he had
discovered a means of controlling gravity. Item: he had developed a
mechanism which worked on that principle. Addenda: the mechanism could
lift a human being, quite possibly as much mass as a heavy tank, and it
might even open the way to interplanetary travel.
Quite obviously, it had terrific potentialities as a weapon of war.
And it was his patriotic duty, as a citizen of the United States, to
turn his discovery over to the authorities.
Well, suppose he did? It would come as an even greater shock than was
the development of the atomic bomb--of that, he was sure. It would
become a top-secret project. Gradually, each individual unit of the
entire Armed Forces would be made airborne. The Infantry would take to
the skies, supported by airborne artillery and tanks; the Air Force
and Navy would combine to send giant battleships gliding through
the stratosphere, unhindered by any shore-line and capable of both
artillery fire and aerial bombardment.
How could anything as big as that be kept secret? The answer was, it
couldn't. Such a program would hardly have begun when some Russian
agent handed the entire secret over to his bosses in the Kremlin. Then
Russia would launch the same sort of program.
And world tension was already terrific. Mankind was already teetering
on the brink of atomic war. What psychological effect would this new
threat have on them? What insults would the diplomats think of, then?
What charges and counter-charges would hurl between them? What final
"incident" would spark the entire civilization into a raging holocaust?
Or would the officials in Washington realize that outcome? Would they
order his discovery destroyed, forgotten, and himself assigned to some
well-guarded hunting lodge in the Canadian Northwest where he could be
kept in comfortable isolation, with no one around to pluck the dreadful
secret from his mind?
The present balance of power had at least some promise of averting an
atomic war. His discovery would destroy that balance of power, and do
it suddenly, frighteningly. Someone might get just scared enough to
start shooting. After that, there'd be no turning back. There would be
atomic war.
They probably wouldn't want their balance of power destroyed. At least,
not _that_ way.
Well, then, why shouldn't he save them--and himself--a lot of trouble
and simply destroy the thing himself? Forget about it, forget he'd ever
thought of it?
That wasn't so good, either.
Personally, he was deeply anxious to begin the tests on the mechanism.
There was so little he knew, actually, about what its limitations were,
how they could be surmounted--
But there was more to it than that.
The mechanism did work, and it would lift considerable weight.
Therefore, it would certainly have its uses.
Air travel could be made perfectly safe. That fact prompted a vision
into his mind of everybody flying around in little, teardrop plexiglass
shells, landing on their roofs--and living in homes scattered over a
peaceful countryside. Cities could be smaller, devoted exclusively
to office-buildings and industrial plants, and would suffer less
congestion.
Also, people would become accustomed to travelling greater distances. A
thousand miles might be a comfortable afternoon's ride. This, in turn,
would mean greater travelling and exchange between various nations.
Then, there was the fact that commercial shipping would be
revolutionized. Transporting air cargoes would be cheap and dependable,
even for the heaviest kinds of freight. Thus, factories could be built
near their power or raw material sources. They wouldn't have to be
built near large railroad centers or harbors; commercial shipping would
no longer be a problem. And thus, industrial areas could spread out,
become less congested, have better surroundings for employee-morale and
pay less property taxes.
Also, they would be able to ship their products to more distant
markets. International trade would increase tremendously. The
world-wide competition would shatter unfair national cartels--that
would take time, and many governments would fight it, but eventually
they'd have to accept it or intensive smuggling would undermine their
economy. In times of economic stress, black markets were often a
blessing to backward, underdeveloped areas.
The whole result of it would be that the entire world would be bound
together far more closely. Economic ties would be predominantly
international. The increased flow of travellers between nations
would gradually break down prejudices and differences of custom and
misunderstanding.
And that would create a far stronger basis for tomorrow's world
government. As civilization stood, it needed a world government
desperately. Either that, or atomic energy would destroy it. Either
world government or war.
_So there it is!_ Morrow concluded.
He had a mechanism for controlling the pull of gravity.
Either that mechanism was destroyed and forgotten, or the world's
present balance of power would be destroyed and humanity plunged into
atomic war.
But if the mechanism was destroyed, humanity wouldn't have it for the
future development of world government and civilization. And they
needed it. The present automobiles, trains, and aircraft were all very
streamlined and marvelous when compared to the horse and buggy, but
they were still too limited, too cumbersome and too costly. There had
to be something for the average man, earning the average salary, that
would haul him--and extend his interests--to the far corners of the
world.
The mechanism would do that.
Mankind would need it to develop a sound, productive future.
But if it wasn't destroyed, there would be atomic war. There wouldn't
be any future!
* * * * *
It was after midnight when he rose from his chair, pulled on a pair
of slacks and a sweater, and left the house. He locked the front door
and walked around to the garage. Swinging the door back, he felt his
way into the darkness, touched the familiar surfaces of his little
motor-bike, and rolled it out to the drive-way. Mounting, he kicked the
starter, and the little one-cylinder, 15 horsepower engine exploded
into a throaty chatter.
He rode down the dark, tree-lined streets, the cool air whipping over
his body. Swinging into Railroad Avenue, he pulled over to the curb and
stopped before the lighted windows of the telegraph office. He strode
in, scribbled off a telegram, and paid for it.
The office girl, counting the words, stopped and frowned. She shoved
it back across the counter to him. "Does that make sense?" she asked
dubiously.
Morrow glanced over it again and smiled. It read:
WESTERTON, NEW JERSEY
August 6, 1960
D. P. SMITH
ACME CROP DUSTERS INC.
DENVER, COLORADO