The Machine That Floats, Joe Gibson [top e book reader .txt] 📗

were cruising along peacefully at 40,000 feet. Morrow felt as if he were molded into the snug rear cockpit, an integral part of the tons of sleek, deadly metal that was the old F-94 jet-fighter. But he'd experienced that feeling so often it no longer mattered, then.

Before him was the familiar maze of instrument dials and signal lights and switches crammed around a glowing, green-blotched radar scope. Around him was the clear, transparent canopy, with the round crash-helmet of Smitty's head poking up from the front cockpit ahead of him. Below, off the edge of the razor-thin wing, was the criss-crossed gray surface of the Arctic ice-pack. The sky was an intense blue-black sprinkled with the hard, bright sparks of stars.

There were faint, rhythmic sounds around him. Familiar sounds. The warm, dry air blowing through his flight suit, circulating over his body. The air pushing into his face-mask. The rolling motion of the seat-cushions, massaging his backside with mechanical dispassion.

Then the flat, metallic voice in his earphones. "Forty-three degrees left. Contact in five minutes!"

"Roger!" Smitty's voice answered.

The ship tilted gently. Centrifugal force pressed Morrow against his seat. The world turned slowly beneath them. Forty-three degrees.

Two minutes later, a bright spark appeared on his radar scope. "Air spotted!" he spoke into his mike. "Two degrees right!"

"Over to you!" the metallic voice from ground radar answered. And the jet shifted slightly. Two degrees.

"Contact in two minutes," Morrow chanted. "One-thirty ... One ... Thirty—"

"Contact!" Smitty's voice cracked.

The F-94 whipped over into a turn. The force of two gravities shoved Morrow down in his seat.

For a brief moment—a breathless, eternal moment, all of two seconds—another F-94 exactly like theirs appeared directly before them. Long enough for red lights to glow and camera guns to record a direct hit. The practice mission was completed—almost.

Then Smitty snap-rolled the ship, missing the other ship almost by inches. The g's piled up, cramming Morrow down in his seat, pulling at his facial muscles. Then his vision cleared and he straightened up, bruised and somewhat battered.

It was the old bomber-interceptor game. That other F-94 could have been an enemy bomber, plowing toward American cities with a load of atomic death—

Smitty turned his head and looked back. His eyes crinkled into a smile under the green glaze of his goggles.

Smitty. Captain Daniel Purcell Smith, then—or "D.P." Smith, which were also the initials for "Displaced Person." A cool, thoughtful, and smart jet-fighter pilot in those days, and a darned good guy. They had taken Seattle apart at the seams on their one furlough, preferring the devilment of their own companionship to going home to Mom's apple pie.

Morrow's telegram had made sense, all right. The words scramble and May Day were fighter-lingo; scramble meant let's go! we've a fight on our hands, and May Day meant I'm in trouble!

He was in trouble, certainly. The mechanism he'd developed was, in itself, plenty of trouble.

And it was a special kind of trouble—the kind in which the only person he could dare trust had to be someone like Smitty. The Air Force camaraderie which existed between them had never quite faded out. Even after they'd been mustered back into civilian status, after Morrow had signed a government engineering contract and Smitty had gone on to commercial flying, they had kept in touch with each other. Diverging interests hadn't pulled them apart; the old school ties, the old trustworthiness was still there. An odd letter every few months or so, a postcard at Christmas....

He was fortunate to know a man like Smitty, Morrow knew. He couldn't have carried out his plan alone.

He reached home, stored his motor-bike in the garage, and walked into the living room. He snapped on the light and stood there for a moment, gazing across the room at his littered writing desk. If he were going to carry out his plan, there was one thing he'd have to do himself. People weren't going to like it. Good engineers were scarce.

He walked across the room, sat down at the desk, and crammed a sheet of Western Electronics stationery into his portable typewriter. He paused, lighted a cigarette, and then grimly proceeded to write his letter of resignation.

"It's a mechanism that floats in the Earth's field of gravity," Morrow began—

They were seated in a secluded booth in the modernistic restaurant at the Newark Airport. Through the wall-length observation window, they could look down on the airfield; a giant stratoliner was rolling up before the building, the bright spot-lights glistening off the silvery arcs of its six big turbo-props. White-uniformed linemen were pushing the steps up to the side of its fat hull as the door slid open and a pert stewardess poked her head out. Beyond the gleaming sky-monster, in the pitch darkness of early morning, the runway lights twinkled in rows and patterns of red, yellow, blue and green sparks.

Morrow spoke quietly and succinctly, pausing only for a sip of coffee or a pull on his cigarette, and gave a concise briefing of his discovery and its implications. The dishes of an early breakfast had been cleared away, so no waitress bothered them and the few other patrons in the restaurant were out of ear-shot.

Across from him, ex-Captain D.P. Smith sprawled laconically on the cushioned seat, listening. The expression on his lean, brown face was thoughtful, intent. He sipped his coffee and flicked the ashes of his cigarette into the saucer.

He was a small, slender man dressed in a conservative, pin-stripe business suit. There was nothing dare-devil about his attitude, nor were his movements deft or quick. He was slow, cautious; his attitude was a reserved calmness.

It was immediately noticeable. His carefully groomed black hair and his small, black mustache gave his features a mischievous look. There was something satanic about his small stature, his long hands, and his lean, handsome appearance. One would expect a bright, hand-painted tie and a roving, speculative eye. His utter calmness and reserve seemed incongruous.

Only the faint, white scar along his jawline might have indicated a devil-may-care experience. Morrow had mentioned it, remembering that Smitty had written about the crash last year—he was making a pass over a field, spreading bug-killer spray over a farmer's potato crop, when a sudden down-draft caught his plane and he couldn't pull up in time to avoid the neighboring orchard. He'd crashed through the apple trees, snapping them like kindling. The plane was completely demolished.

When I woke up, he'd written, they had me spread out on a silver tray with an apple in my mouth!

Crop-dusting was a hard, dangerous job. The pilots did most of their flying before dawn or in early afternoon, when the air was calm; but they had to fly at other times, too, to make enough to meet expenses. They'd take off in small, worn-out planes, loaded beyond safety flight limits with bug-killer, and fly to some farmer's fields. Then they'd make passes back and forth over the fields, flying below-treetop, leap-frogging barbed-wire fences, zooming under telephone lines, and dodging trees and farm buildings, their eyes stinging as the spray billowed back into the cockpit.

The pay they received was small, mostly because there were so many skilled pilots looking for work and so few civilian flying jobs. Smitty could easily reenlist in the Air Force, of course, but they wouldn't give him a flying job; at thirty-two, he was too old for military flying. They took the eighteen-year-olds for that. And Smitty wouldn't reenlist to sit behind a desk.

So he dusted crops. It was no job for a dare-devil, either. A pilot had to know his limitations, the limitations of his plane, and what he was doing every second.

"—And that's the situation," Morrow concluded. "If the mechanism isn't destroyed, it'll plunge the world into atomic war. If it is destroyed, it'll be lost to mankind for the next several hundred years—until somebody else stumbles across it."

"In short," Smitty resumed, "if we got it now, we have atomic war. If we don't have it for the next few centuries, we will have atomic war."

"I'm afraid so," Morrow affirmed. "Unless they manage to develop a world civilization and government without it."

Smitty shook his head. "They need something like this gravity machine to pull people closer together, to get them to know more about one another. Otherwise, any world government scheme is likely to be a fizz—unless it's established by force!"

"That'd amount to world dictatorship."

Smitty shrugged. "All right, so we've got this thing. If we keep it, we get atomic war. If we don't, maybe our grand-children get atomic war. That it?"

Morrow nodded.

"So you must have some plan up your sleeve!" Smitty grinned at him, shrewdly. "You wouldn't drag me all the way up here just to listen to a hard-luck story."

Morrow's eyes narrowed. "Smitty, the only reason this would cause an atomic war now is because the world situation is so tense—"

"True!"

"—But the world situation isn't always going to be this way! Sooner or later, something will happen to change it. Something's bound to change it! This is a modern, fast-moving world—things happen fast!"

"So?" Smitty raised his brows, querulously.

"Well, it's bound to change within our lifetime! And when it does, we may have an opportunity to reveal this discovery. All we have to do is wait, keep it secret, test it and develop it, and turn it loose when the time is ripe!"

"Un-huh," Smitty grunted. "And who's going to pay for it?"

"I've got seven thousand in the bank—"

"And I've got three!" Smitty frowned scornfully. "How far do you think we'd get on ten thousand bucks, chum?"

"As far as we'll need to get," Morrow retorted. "We aren't trying to finance a mass-production scheme, remember. This is strictly experimental work."

"What would the retail cost amount to on that mechanism you built?" he asked dubiously.

Morrow scratched his jaw, reflectively. "Retail cost it'd run to around three hundred dollars."

"So we make a bunch of those mechanisms. Now, what do we test 'em for?"

"For their use as a means of air transportation," Morrow answered. "Primarily, that is—there are probably a good many other possibilities."

"So how do we test 'em?" Smitty persisted. "How do you test any flight mechanism? You take it up in a plane, turn it on, and see how it works! So for thorough tests, including high-altitude performance, we'll need a plane with a pressurized cabin, big enough to hold our test equipment and the mechanisms. At the present market rates, you won't buy a plane like that for much less than fifteen thousand dollars!"

Morrow was shaking his head, patiently. "We can't do it that way," he said. "But we can afford the cheap plastic materials they're using in small private planes, now, and build a ship especially for the mechanisms. Then we can test it for low-altitude performance and, if it works, gradually extend our tests on up to eight or ten thousand feet—"

"And if the mechanisms fail, we crash! That'd be sheer suicide—"

"Not necessarily. If they work at low altitude, they'll be dependable in saving us from a crash. And we can install a main and auxiliary system of mechanisms, so if one fails we can cut in another."

Smitty paused, thinking it over. He gave a slow, grudging nod. "It might work, at that. It just might. But you realize what sort of predicament this will put us in, don't you?"

"Such as what?" Morrow prompted cautiously.

"Such as supposing somebody finds out about it," Smitty replied. "Most people have a pretty strong feeling about patriotism these days. We have something that qualifies as a good secret weapon. They aren't going to like the way we neglect to inform the government about it."

"Uh huh. Men have been lynched for less," Morrow agreed. "We'll just have to see to it that nobody does find out about it. We can start out small, in almost any place that's relatively isolated—a deserted farm-house would do, I suppose—and build our ship. Then we'd have to make our flights at night, until we're fairly sure of the ship. After that, we could set out to find a permanent base—one hidden off somewhere in the desert or mountains, where nobody will notice us. Then we'll fly our equipment out there and set up shop."

"What about power? If we set up near a power line, there'll be the company linemen coming around."

"I think a gas-engine generator will suffice," Morrow refuted. "We can haul gas to our deserted farm-house by car, then fly it out to our shop at night."

"What if somebody asks questions when we buy or lease this land, 'way off in the middle of nowhere?"

Morrow grinned. "If it's 'off in the middle of nowhere,' why should we buy it? Nobody'll know we're there!" He finished the last of his coffee and shoved his cup aside. "You've been flying over the Southwest for quite some time, Smitty. I'm hoping you can find the sort of isolated spot we'll need."

"There are places in that desert country where no