activity. The Van Allen belt must be soaking the stuff up like a sponge, and with those reports of fluctuations in the solar constant we got today from M.I.T., it looks…”
Denis Soderman stopped listening. He was adept at shutting out the older man’s ruminative voice, but this time it was more than a mere defense mechanism against the effects of unbridled pedantry. Something had happened to the aircraft. Seated far back from the machine’s center of gravity, Soderman had experienced a subtle, queasy corkscrewing motion. It had lasted perhaps half a second, but Soderman was a talented amateur pilot and had found something disturbing in the idea of a hundred-ton aircraft flicking its tail like a salmon. Emulating his electronic charges, he spread the network of his senses as wide as possible. For a few seconds he picked up nothing but the normal sensations of flight, then it happened again — a momentary lift and twist which made his stomach contract in alarm.
“They’re having trouble up front,” he said. “I don’t like the way this old bus is flying.”
Cosgrove looked up from his perforated streamers. “I didn’t feel anything.” His voice registered disapproval of Soderman’s lack of concentration on the job at hand.
“Listen, doctor. I’m way out on a limb here in the tail and I can
He broke off as the aircraft suddenly lurched sideways, shuddered, righted itself and became ominously quiet as all four engines cut out at the same time. Soderman, who had been lifted out of his seat and smashed against his instrument arrays, struggled to his feet and ran forward past Dr. Cosgrove. There was a noticeable slope in the gangway, showing that the aircraft was now flying in a pronounced nose-down attitude. A gray-faced second officer collided with him in the doorway to the flight deck.
“Get up to the tail and get your backs against the lavatory bulkhead! We’re going down!” The officer made no attempt to keep the panic out of his voice.
“Going down?” Soderman shouted. “Going down where? There isn’t a field within three hundred miles.”
“Are you telling
Even in a crisis the airman was jealous of his superiority over ordinary mortals, resentful at having to discuss the affairs of his aerial domain with an outsider.
“We’re doing everything we can to restart the engines, but Captain Isaacs isn’t optimistic. It looks as though he’ll have to try setting us down on the snow. Now will you go aft?”
“But it’s
“That’s our problem, mister.” The officer pushed Soderman up the swaying gangway and turned back to the flight deck. Soderman’s mouth was dry as he moved aft, following the stumbling figure of Dr. Cosgrove.
They reached the conical tail-section and sat on the floor, backs braced against the cool metal of a major bulkhead. This far from the center of gravity each control movement made by the pilot was felt as a great, wild swing which gave Soderman the conviction the final catastrophe had arrived. With no sound from the engines to mask it, the passage of the fuselage through the air was loud, variable, menacing — the gleeful voice of a sky which could feel an enemy’s strength bleeding away.
Soderman tried to reconcile himself to the thought of dying within a matter of minutes, knowing that no combination of luck, pilot’s skill and structural integrity could enable the aircraft to survive contact with the earth. In daylight, or even in moonlight, it might have worked, but in pitch blackness there could be only one outcome to this rushing descent.
He clenched his teeth and vowed to go out with at least as much dignity as Dr. Cosgrove seemed to have mustered — but, when the impact came, he screamed. His voice was lost in a prolonged metallic thunderclap, then the plane was airborne again in a crazy, slewing leap, culminating in another incredible blast of sound which was compounded by the clattering of moveable objects bounding the length of the fuselage. The nightmare seemed to last for an eternity, during which all the interior lights were extinguished, but it ended abruptly, and Soderman discovered he was still breathing — miraculously, impossibly alive.
A few minutes later he was standing at an emergency door peering into the night sky at the glowing face of his savior.
Striated curtains of red and green light shimmered and danced from horizon to horizon, illuminating the snowscape below with an eerie, theatrical brilliance. It was an auroral display of supernatural intensity.
“This illustrates what I was saying about the Van Allen belt being overloaded,” Dr. Cosgrove commented emotionlessly behind Soderman. “The solar corpuscular stream is washing the upper atmosphere with charged particles which are draining into the magnetic poles. Their display, to which it seems we owe our lives, is only one facet of…”
But Soderman had stopped listening — he was too busy with the pleasurable business of simply being alive.
Dr. Fergus B. Raphael sat quietly at the wheel of his car, staring across the oil-dappled concrete of the university parking lot.
He was seriously contemplating driving away towards the ocean and never being heard of in academic circles again. There had been a time when he had tackled his work with supreme enthusiasm, undeterred by the realization that — in the very nature of things — he would never achieve the rewards which were possible for workers in other fields. But the years had taken their toll, the years of living on the wrong side of the scientific tracks, and now he was tired.
He put aside the daily pretense that he was free to drive away from his obsession, and got out of the car. The sky was overcast and chestnut leaves were scuttling noisily before a cold, searching wind. Raphael turned up his coat collar and walked towards the unremarkable architecture of the university. It looked like being yet another very ordinary day.
Half an hour later he had set up the first experiment of the morning. The volunteer was Joe Washburn, a young Negro student who had shown flashes of promise in a previous series of tests.
Raphael raised a microphone to his lips. “All set, Joe?”
Washburn nodded and waved to Raphael through the window of his soundproof booth. Raphael moved a switch and checked with his assistant, Jean Ard, who was sitting in a similar booth at the opposite side of the laboratory. She gave him an exaggeratedly cheerful wave, which Raphael took as an indication that she too was feeling depressed. He started the recording machine, then leaned back in his chair, unwrapping a cigar, and watched the visual monitors with dutiful eyes.
Not for the first time, he thought:
Jean Ard keyed in her first symbol and a triangle appeared on her monitor. Her face was impassive behind the thick glass of the booth and Raphael wondered if she always tried to concentrate and project, or if she ever just sat there, pushed buttons and thought about her evening date. A few minutes later Washburn’s monitor lit up — a triangle. Raphael ignited his cigar and waited, wondering how soon be could break off and go for coffee. A square appeared on Jean’s monitor, followed by a square on Washburn’s. She tried a triangle again, and Washburn matched ber. Then a circle and a star, and Washburn registered a circle and a star. In spite of himself, Raphael’s pulse began to quicken and he felt a recurrence of the old nervous fever which might have made him a chronic gambler had be not found a way to sublimate it in research. He watched closely as Jean continued keying in at random the five abstract symbols they used in the telepathy experiments. Eight minutes later she had gone through a complete test sample of fifty projections.
And Joe Washburn’s score was exactly fifty.
Raphael stubbed out his cigar with a shaking hand. He felt deathly cold as he raised the microphone, but he kept his voice as flat as possible to avoid injecting even the minutest disturbance into the experiment.
“That was all right for a warm-up, Jean and Joe. Let’s run through another set.” They both nodded. He moved a switch and spoke to Jean only. “I’d like you to use both the abstract and the related symbols this time.”
He hunched over the console and watched the monitors with the eyes of a man playing Russian roulette. The addition of the five meaningful symbols — tree, automobile, dog, chair, man — brought the range up to ten, and made a freak run of success that much more difficult.
Washburn made one mistake in the next series of fifty, and no errors at all in the following three sets. Raphael decided to introduce the demons of emotion and self-consciousness.
“Listen, you two,” he said thickly. “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you’ve been scoring virtually one hundred percent since this experiment started, and I don’t have to tell you what that means. Now let’s keep blasting away at this thing till we see how far it’s going to go.”
