The Daleth Effect

Baxter was dead, she had been told about that, dead aboard the ship. There was a new man at the embassy who had been trying to contact her, she had his name written down somewhere.

She could give this booklet to them and they would leave her alone. Everything would be settled once and for all and there would be no trouble.

Martha dropped the booklet into her purse and snapped it shut. It made no bulge at all. She slid the bureau drawer shut, looked around the room once more, then left.

When she rejoined the others some of them were already getting ready to leave. She glanced about the reception hall, seeking a familiar face. She found him, standing against the far wall, looking out of the large window.

“Herr Skou,” she said, and he turned about sharply.

“Ahh, Mrs. Hansen. I saw you, but I have not had a chance to talk to you. Everything, everything…”

He had a haunted look on his face, and she wondered if he, somehow, blamed himself for what had happened.

“Here,” she said, opening her purse and handing him the booklet. “I found this with my husband’s things. I didn’t think that you wanted it lying around.”

“Good God, no!” he said when he saw the title. “Thank you, most kind, helpful. People never think. Doesn’t help my work, I tell you. Numbered copy, we thought it was on board the Holger Danske. I never realized.” He drew himself up and made a short, formal bow.

“Thank you, Frau Hansen. I don’t think you realize how helpful you have been.”

She smiled. “But I do know, Herr Skou. My husband and many others died to preserve what is in that book. Could I do less? And it is the other way around. Until now, I don’t think I realized how helpful you, everyone, has been to me.”

And then it was time to return to Earth.

25

Rungsted Kyst

The brakes in the Sprite were locked hard as it turned into the driveway, the tires squealing as it slid to a bucking stop. Ove Rasmussen jumped over the car door without opening it and ran up the front steps to push hard on the doorbell. Even as the chimes were sounding over and over again inside, he tried the handle. The door was unlocked and he threw it open.

“Martha—where are you?” he shouted. “Are you here?”

He closed the door and listened. There was only the ticking of a clock. Then he heard the muffled sobbing from the living room. She was sprawled on the couch, her shoulders shaking with the hopeless, uncontrolled crying. The newspaper lay on the floor beside her.

“Ulla called me, I was at the lab all night,” he said. “You sounded so bad on the phone that she was getting hysterical herself. I came at once. What happened… ?”

Then he saw the front page of the newspaper and knew the answer. He bent and picked it up and looked at the photograph that almost filled the front page. It showed an egg-shaped vehicle about the size of a small car that was floating a few meters above a crowd of gaping people. A smiling girl waved from the little cockpit, and on the front, between the headlights, the word Honda could plainly be seen. The craft had no obvious means of propulsion. The headline read JAPANESE REVEAL GRAVITY SCOOTER, and underneath, CLAIM NEW PRINCIPLE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE TRANSPORTATION.

Martha was sitting up now, dabbing at her eyes with a sodden handkerchief. Her face was red and puffy, her hair in a tangle.

“I had a sleeping pill,” she said, almost choking on the words. “Twelve hours. I didn’t hear the radio, anything. While I was getting my breakfast ready I brought in the paper. And there…” Her voice broke and she could only point. Ove nodded wearily and dropped into the armchair.

“Is it true?” she asked. “The Japanese have the Daleth drive?”

He nodded again. Her fingers flew to her face, her nails sank into the flesh and she shrieked the words.

“Wasted! All killed for nothing! The Japs already knew about the Paleth effect—they stole it. Nils, all of them, they died for nothing!”

“Easy,” Ove said, and leaned forward to hold her shoulders, feeling her body shake as she cried in agony. “Tears can’t bring him back, or any of the others.”

“All that security… no good… the secret leaked out…”

“Security killed them all,” Ove said, and his voice was as bleak as a winter midnight. “A stupid, stupid waste.”

The bitterness of his words did what sympathy could not do; it reached Martha, shocked her. “What are you talking about?” she said, rubbing the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Just that.” Ove looked at the newspaper with black hatred, then ground it with his foot. “We had no eternal secret, just a lead on the others. Arnie and I tried to tell security that, but they would never listen. Apparently only Nils and his top officers knew about the destruction charges in the ship. If Arnie or I had known we would have made a public stink and would have refused to fly in her. It is all a criminal waste, criminal stupidity.”

“What does this mean?” She was frightened of his words.

“Just that. Only politicians and security agents believe in Secrets with a captial S. And maybe the people who read the spy novels about those imaginary stolen secrets. But mother nature has no secrets. Everything is right out where you can see it. Sometimes the answer is complex, or you have to know the right place to look before you find it. Arnie knew that, and that is one of the reasons he brought his discovery to Denmark. It could be developed faster here because we have the heavy industrial machinery to build the Daleth ships. But it was only a matter of time before everyone else caught up. Once they knew that there was a Daleth effect they would know just what they were looking for. We had two things in our favor. A number of physicists around the world knew that Arnie was doing gravity research. He corresponded with them and they read about his work in the journals. What they did not know was that his basic approach was wrong. He discovered that fact but never had time to publish results. The real discovery of the Daleth effect came about through the telemetry records of the solar flare. Those data readouts were distributed to the cooperating countries, and it was only a matter of time before the connection was tracked down. We had that time, almost two years of it, and it gave us the lead that we needed.”

“Then the killings, the spies…”

“All waste. The secret of security is to never let the right hand know what the left hand is doing. A secret agency tries to steal the secret while other secret laboratories try to develop it. And once these agencies get rolling they are very hard to stop. It would be ironic if it were not so tragic. I have finally heard the entire story myself—I was up all night with the security people getting briefed on the whole story. Do you know how many countries already had a lead to the nature of the Daleth effect when the ship was blown up? Til tell you. Five. The Japanese thought they were first and tried to apply for international patents. Their applications were turned down by four countries because earlier patent applications had been filed in these countries and held under government security. Germany and India were two of these countries.”

“And the other two?” She gasped the words as though she already knew.

“America and the Soviet Union.”

“NO!”

“I’m sorry. It hurts me as much to say it as it does for you to hear it. Your husband, Arnie, my friends and colleagues died in that explosion. Wasted. Because the countries that caused it already knew the answer. But since the information was top secret they could not tell other agencies or men in the field. But I no more hold them to blame than I do our own security, who wired the explosives into the ship in the first place. Nor do I blame any other country involved in the mess. It is just institutionalized paranoia. All security men are the same, drawn to the work by their own insecurities and fears. They may be sincere patriots, but their