The Wind Between the Worlds
Lester del Rey








About the Story: Del Rey wrote the original (and much longer) version of this novella many years earlier, was unable to place it and only hauled it from the trunk when Horace Gold in mid-1950 solicited something for his new magazine. THE WIND BETWEEN THE WORLDS is at least in conception a standard ASTOUNDING problem-solving story (interstellar matter transmitter is sabotaged; Earth and alien ports are in danger, resourceful engineer-protagonist figures out the solution) with a standard STARTLING STORIES subplot (engineer and his pretty female assistant are deeply attracted but he’s too dedicated to his job to get fresh). The premise however is ingenious - alien cultures intervene and as a result of this Earth is given the means for interstellar trade before the planet has even achieved space travel. Teleportation as an instrument of routine commerce (and profit) was a fairly original concept at the time this story was published. Del Rey’s altered culture is lived-in, letting the story act as a letter from the future. Gold wanted the story significantly cut and del Rey of course complied; in THE EARLY DEL REY he used the original version and appended some notes on the nature of Horace’s intervention.

About the Author: Lester del Rey (1915-1993) was born Leonard Knapp (but this became known only long after his death), somewhere in the Midwest and after a spotty, abbreviated education and itinerant existence headed to New York where he became almost immediately a significant constituent of ASTOUNDING and John Campbell’s celebrated GOLDEN AGE. Del Rey sold his first story to John Campbell in the first months of Campbell’s editorship and over the next several years he sold him many more, including his female-android story HELEN O’LOY (1938), perhaps the first true science fiction romance and NERVES (1942, novelized in 1956), a brilliant novella of atomic pile disruption, amazingly prescient of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Del Rey’s apostosaic and profoundly controversial short novel FOR I AM A JEALOUS PEOPLE (1956), positing a malevolent Deity, is also very well known. Del Rey worked (at the same time as Damon Knight and James Blish) in the Scott Meredith Fee Department in the late 1940’s, edited science fiction magazines in the early 50’s, published some noted juveniles (THE RUNAWAY ROBOT) in the mid-fifties and eventually became the founding editor of Del Rey Books, a fantasy & science fiction imprint under the aegis of Ballantine. In collaboration with his third wife, Judy-Lynn, del Rey’s imprint became the most successful fantasy & science fiction publisher in history. The two of them nurtured fantasy writers like Stephen Donaldson, Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks to bestselling status. In 1991, del Rey was named a Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died only a few months after his retirement from Ballantine.

About The Galaxy Project: Horace Gold led GALAXY magazine from its first issue dated October 1950 to science fiction’s most admired, widely circulated and influential magazine throughout its initial decade. Its legendary importance came from publication of full length novels, novellas and novelettes. GALAXY published nearly every giant in the science fiction field.

The Galaxy Project is a selection of the best of GALAXY with new forewords by some of today’s best science fiction writers. The initial selections in alphabetical order include work by Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn (Phillip Klass) and Kurt Vonnegut with new Forewords by Paul di Filippo, David Drake, John Lutz, Barry Malzberg and Robert Silverberg. The Galaxy Project is committed to publishing new work in the spirit GALAXY magazine and its founding editor Horace Gold.






Lester del Rey

THE WIND BETWEEN THE WORLDS















IN A GLASS BRIGHTLY: The Wind Between the Worlds by Lester del Rey


The novella Nerves by Lester del Rey appeared in the September 1942, issue of Astounding. It was a triumph, universally praised to a degree that not even Robert Heinlein’s work was afforded. According to Campbell, every reader who ranked the stories in that issue chose Nerves as the best, a unanimity which del Rey claims he saw equaled only once.

Nerves wasn’t merely successful in its own day. In the early 1970s, the membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America voted it as one of the ten best novelettes and novellas in the field.

John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, probably wasn’t surprised that del Rey had written a masterpiece, since he had been a strong supporter of del Rey since receiving his first story in 1937. Campbell sent del Rey encouraging letters and requests for more stories, and he frequently paid him the bonus the editor reserved for stories which he particularly liked.

Many other people must have been surprised, however—including, I think, del Rey himself, though he doesn’t explicitly say that. His production of fiction slacked off a great deal following the success of Nerves. After World War II ended, he took a job as an agent and stopped writing science fiction.

Despite Campbell’s enthusiasm for him, del Rey had been a journeyman writer who had gotten everything right one time. The fact that many people (almost certainly including Campbell himself) asked del Rey to duplicate Nerves was both irritating and frustrating.

Then in 1949 something changed: Horace Gold asked del Rey to write a science fiction suspense story like Nerves for the new magazine he planned, Galaxy. Del Rey agreed to try after seven years of refusing such requests.

It would be easy to say that the difference was that Gold was offering three cents a word, a pay rate never before seen in the science fiction field. Campbell had raised Astounding’s pay to two cents/word a few years earlier, which was twice (or more) the rate of any fantasy or science fiction magazine since the failure of the Clayton chain in 1933. The Magazine of Fantasy (after the first issue, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) had just appeared and matched Astounding’s rate, but Gold was offering half again as much as the best.

I am inclined to doubt that money alone changed del Rey’s mind. Campbell had, after all, doubled his rate after Nerves was published without enticing del Rey to try to repeat his success.

The high word rate was only part of the new magazine. Galaxy was going to be really different, new, exciting; in Gold’s mind, it was going to read like a general news magazine of the next century and compete for sales not with existing science fiction magazines but with Time and Look on the newsstands of the present.

Gold was selling the future, not only to readers but to the authors he wanted for his new magazine. Lester del Rey was one of the authors Gold recruited, and he bought Gold’s vision.

Del Rey went to work. On his description, it appears that the only editorial requirements were that the story have the effect of Nerves—that is, that it be a fast-paced science fiction suspense story—and that it be 15,000 words. Unlike John Campbell’s frequent behavior, Gold didn’t suggest a particular theme or development for the author to follow.

The (short) length was a problem, however. Nerves had been 30,000 words, and even so del Rey felt that he could have used more room. (In 1956 he expanded the novella to book-length.) Still, he proceeded.

Del Rey had created a written formula and charts on how to develop suspense in a story before he plotted Nerves. He had lost those materials during a move, however. On his telling it, he did not first reread the earlier novella and break it down into elements to build up into the new framework. Instead he played with ideas on paper until he found one which he thought would work. The differences between the structures of the two stories are significant and support his description.

Nerves involves a disaster at a plant making nuclear isotopes. The precise cause of the trouble remains uncertain at the end of the story, but it is certainly natural: impurities of some sort caused a reactor to run out of control. The description of the plant and the processes appear to be modeled on those of an oil refinery, and the description of nuclear materials is very similar to that in Twelve Eighty-Seven, a novel by John Taine (pseudonym of Dr Eric Temple Bell) which had been serialized in Astounding in 1935.

The viewpoint character of Nerves is an older man, an MD, who (though an important figure) is entirely an observer of the efforts to control the disaster (his duty is to mitigate the harm caused to individuals). Love interest is provided by a young medical assistant (who later turns out to have technical training) and his devoted wife.

Instead of that real-world-of-the-future setting, del Rey built his new story—The Wind Between the Worlds—on an explicitly fictional premise: aliens have arrived on Earth and set up a matter transmitter system. The system links Earth with other planets whose intelligent life forms have reached a stage of civilization only slightly more advanced than ours. The transmitter sites are built of material which human science cannot affect.

On its face, this change is detrimental. Nerves got much of its power from the grimy industrial setting with which most readers would have been familiar, at least from stories and newsreels. Wind’s processes are magic, and the facility is built of Unobtainium.

Although del Rey does not say so, there is a very good reason why he might have made the choice he did. By creating a wholly fictional technological background for Wind, del Rey avoided the danger of being overtaken by events.

Nerves describes the growing horror and panic of a reactor failure in a fashion which present-day familiarity with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima makes even more chilling than a reader in 1942 would have found it. The science, however, is complete nonsense. Del Rey wrote Nerves while nuclear reactors were top secret. The petroleum cracking-plant model cannot even be revised to work in light of greater knowledge, while the descriptions of isotopes, radiation burns, and similar matters have little connection with what a modern reader understands from the words.

Del Rey’s second major change from Nerves was in choosing a classic hero as the viewpoint character of Wind: a young male troubleshooter who happens to be working on the site when the crisis occurs. He immediately takes charge of local efforts to contain the crisis and is soon promoted (by the aliens behind the scenes) to complete control of the system.

The hero is aided by the female site manager, who has specialized expertise. She acts as the hero’s chief subordinate as well as providing love interest. Their physical relationship, while not particularly important to the story, is of considerable historical interest.

1) The hero and heroine have sex (though the viewpoint quickly cuts away).

2) The heroine is the aggressor.

3) The heroine explicitly has begun the scene as a virgin.

For the most part, Wind could have appeared in Astounding; indeed, Wind is in many fashions a more typical Astounding story than Nerves was. Campbell would never have permitted this sexual element, however—nor would any of the slick fiction magazines in 1951. Philip Jose Farmer’s The Lovers, involving a sexual relationship between a human and an alien, appeared the next year to great controversy, but in some ways Wind is (for its time) the more surprising.

The final major difference is that the crisis in Wind is the result of sabotage rather than accident as was the case in Nerves. It is not clear whether this change was del Rey’s own idea or whether it was one suggested by Gold and accepted by the author.

Herbert L Gold was a brilliant and successful editor, but he could be a difficult editor as well. According to A J Budrys, Gold literally rejected a story because he didn’t think Budrys looked like he could have written it. He was also probably the most intrusive editor in the science fiction field.

By 1959, Isaac Asimov had become so angry at Gold’s editing that he was only willing to submit a story to Galaxy under the condition that Gold would either accept or reject it as written. The animus against Gold’s methods became so general that in February 1960, Gold publically extended Asimov’s terms to all professionals: he would henceforward accept or reject any story by a professional without meddling.

This was an astounding concession in a field in which it was a given that an editor edits. I can explain it only in connection with the fact that Gold soon thereafter gave up the editorship completely as a result of PTSD from his service in the Philippines.

In the case of Wind, however, Gold did not himself do the rewriting. Del Rey says that he submitted a rough draft to Gold, who responded with many editorial directions. The bulk of these changes improved the story in del Rey’s opinion, but Gold insisted that a member of the hero’s team be one of the saboteurs. When del Rey reprinted the story in a collection of his own, he eliminated that editorial change.

The element of sabotage fits Wind’s background emphasis on hostility to aliens and anger at the economic disruption caused by matter transmission. That said, the cause of the crisis is wildly improbable as a means of intentional sabotage (a bottle has to shatter so that a large piece flies into exactly the right spot to hold a switch open) but it is the sort of thing that could happen through sheer bad luck.

My opinion is that Gold requested the cause of the crisis be changed from an accident to sabotage, and that del Rey agreed with him. Another reader may come to the opposite conclusion on the basis of the same (lack of) evidence.

Wind gains structurally by one change forced by having only half the available wordage compared to Nerves. Del Rey reduced the length by writing a very straightforward story. Nerves has a subplot which, though well handled, turns out to be completely extraneous to the real problem and its solution. By sticking instead to his core theme, del Rey keeps the focus of Wind on the situation which threatens life not only on Earth but also on the planet at the other end of the linked matter transmitters.

Del Rey’s one dissatisfaction with Nerves was that it wasn’t the cover story of the issue in which it appeared (that honor went to a—minor—novelette by Anthony Boucher). The Wind Between the Worlds did have the cover (of the March 1951 Galaxy). The artist, Don Sibley, isn’t a name to conjure with in the field of science fiction illustration today. When I read the issue in 1961, however, my fifteen-year-old self found the painting evocative of the cosmic immensity of the threat which the story describes.

Gold and del Rey set out to create a science fiction suspense story as effective as Nerves. Did they succeed? In the short term, no: The Wind Between the Worlds did not cause the sensation that the earlier story had. In the longer term, however, Wind holds up better than Nerves on close reading. Modern readers (or rereaders, like me) will find not only enjoyment but craftsmanship and thought-provoking questions.

In sum, The Wind Between the Worlds is a deliberate reflection of its greater predecessor; but in some ways, the reflection is better than the original image.






    

—David Drake









I


It was hot in the dome of the Bennington matter transmitter building. The metal shielding walls seemed to catch the rays of the sun and bring them to a focus there. Even the fan that was plugged in nearby didn’t help much. Vic Peters shook his head, flipping the mop of yellow hair out of his eyes. He twisted about, so the fan could reach fresh territory, and cursed under his breath.

Heat he could take. As a roving troubleshooter for Teleport Interstellar, he’d worked from Rangoon to Nairobi—but always with men. Pat Trevor was the first of the few women superintendents he’d met. And while he had no illusions of masculine supremacy, he’d have felt a lot better working in shorts or nothing right now.

Besides, a figure like Pat’s couldn’t be forgotten, even though denim coveralls were hardly supposed to be flattering. Cloth stretched tight across shapely hips had never helped a man concentrate on his work.

She looked down at him, grinning easily. Her arm came up to toss her hair back, leaving a smudge on her forehead to match one on her nose. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but the smile seemed to illumine her gray eyes, and even the metal shavings in her brown hair couldn’t hide the red highlights.

“One more bolt, Vic,” she told him. “Pheooh, I’m melting… So what happened to your wife?”

He shrugged. “Married her lawyer right after the divorce. Last I knew, they were doing fine. Why not? It wasn’t her fault. Between hopping all over the world and spending my spare time trying to get on the moon rocket they were building, I wasn’t much of a husband.”

Unconsciously, his lips twisted. He’d grown up before DuQuesne discovered the matter transmitter, when reaching the other planets of the Solar System had been the dream of most boys. Somehow, that no longer seemed important to people, now that the world was linked through Teleport Interstellar with races all across the Galaxy.

Man had always been a topsyturvy race. He’d discovered gunpowder before chemistry, and battled his way up to the atom bomb in a scant few thousand years of civilization, before he had a worldwide government. Other races, apparently, developed space travel long before the matter-transmitter, and long after they’d achieved a genuine science of sociology.

DuQuesne had started it by investigating some obscure extensions of Dirac’s esoteric mathematics. To check up on his work, he’d built a machine, only to find that it produced results beyond his expectations; matter in it simply seemed to disappear, releasing energy that was much less than it should have been, but still enough to destroy the machine.

DuQuesne and his students had rechecked their math against the results and come up with an answer they didn’t believe. This time they built two machines and experimented with them until they worked together. When the machines were operating, anything within the small fields they generated simply changed places. At first it was just across a few yards, then miles—then half around the world. Matter was transmitted almost instantaneously from one machine to the other no matter how far apart they were.

Such a secret couldn’t be kept, of course. DuQuesne gave a demonstration to fellow scientists at which a few reporters were present. They garbled DuQuesne’s explanation of electron waves covering the entire universe that were capable of identity shifts, but the accounts of the actual experiment were convincing enough. It meant incredibly fast shipping anywhere on the globe at an impossibly low cost.

The second public demonstration played to a full house of newsmen and cold-headed businessmen. It worked properly—a hundred pounds of bricks on one machine changed place with a hundred pounds of coal on another. But then…

Before their eyes, the coal disappeared and a round ball came into existence, suspended in midair. It turned around as if seeking something, an eyelike lens focused on the crowd. Then it darted down and knocked the power plug loose. Nothing could budge it, and no tricks to turn on power again worked.

Even to the businessmen, it was obvious that this object, whatever it was, had not been made on Earth. DuQuesne himself suggested that somewhere some other race must have matter transmittal, and that this was apparently some kind of observer. Man, unable to reach even his own moon yet, had apparently made contact with intelligence from some other world, perhaps some solar system, since there was no theoretical limit to the distance covered by matter transmittal.

It was a week of wild attempts to crack open the “observer” and of futile attempts to learn some-thing about it. Vic’s mind had been filled with Martians, and he had tried to join the thousands who flocked to DuQuesne’s laboratory to see the thing. But his father had been stubborn—no fare for such nonsense. And Vic had had to ‘wait until’ the papers sprang the final surprise, a week later.

The ball had suddenly moved aside and made no effort to stop the machine from operating. When power was turned on, it had disappeared, and this time the Envoy had appeared. There was nothing outlandish about him—he seemed simply a normal man, step-ping out of the crude machine.

In normal English, he had addressed the crowd with the casual statement that he was a robot, designed deliberately to serve as an ambassador to Earth from the Galactic Council. He was simply to be the observer and voice of the Council, which was made up of all worlds having the matter transmitter. They had detected the transmitter radiation, and, by Galactic Law, Earth had automatically earned provisional status. He was here to help set up transmitter arrangements. Engineers from Betz would build transports to six planets of culture similar to Earth’s, to be owned by the Council, as a non-profit business, but manned by Earthmen as quickly as they could be trained.

In return, nothing was demanded, and nothing more was offered. We were a primitive world by their standards, but we would have to work out our own advancement, since they would give no extra knowledge.

He smiled pleasantly to the shocked crowd and moved off with DuQuesne to await results. There were enough, too, from a startled and doubting world. The months that followed were a chaos of news and half-news. The nations were suspicious. There was never something for nothing. The Envoy met the President and Cabinet; he met the United Nations. India walked out; India walked back quickly when plans went ahead blithely without her. Congress proposed tariffs and protested secret treaties. The Envoy met Congress, and somehow overcame enough opposition to get a bare majority.

And the Betz II engineers came on schedule. Man was linked to the stars, though his own planets were still outside his reach. It was a paradox that soon grew stale, but what, actually, would be the point in flying to Mars or Venus when we were in instant touch with the farthest parts of the Galaxy?

There were major wrenches to the economy as our heavy industries suddenly found that other planets could beat them at their work. Plathgol could deliver a perfect Earth automobile, semi-assembled and advanced enough to avoid our patent laws, for twenty pounds of sugar. The heavy industries folded, while we were still experimenting with the business of finding what we had to offer and what we could receive from other worlds. Banks had crashed, men had been out of work. The governments had cushioned the shock, and the new wonders helped to still the voices that suddenly rose up against traffic with alien worlds. But it had been a bitter period, with many lasting scars.

Now a measure of stability had been reached, with a higher standard of living than ever. But the hatreds were pretty deep on the part of those who had been hurt, and others who simply hated newness and change. Vic had done well enough, somehow making his way into the first engineering class out of a hundred thousand applicants. And twelve years had gone by…

Pat’s voice suddenly cut into his thoughts. “All tightened up here, Vic. Wipe the scowl off and let’s go down to check.”

She collected her tools, wrapped her legs around a smooth pole, and went sliding down. He yanked the fan and followed her. Below was the crew. Pat lifted an eyebrow at the grizzled, cadaverous head operator. “Okay, Amos. Plathgol standing by?”

Amos pulled his six-feet-two up from his slump and indicated the yellow stand-by light. Inside the twin poles of the huge transmitter that was tuned to one on Plathgol, a big, twelve-foot diameter plastic cylinder held a single rabbit. Matter transmitting was always a two-way affair, requiring that the same volume be exchanged. And between the worlds, where different atmospheres and pressures were involved, all sending was done in the big capsules. One-way handling was possible, of course, but involved the danger of something materializing to occupy the same space as something else—even air molecules. It wasn’t done except as rigidly controlled experiments.

Amos whistled into the transport-wave interworld phone in the code that was universal between worlds, got an answering whistle, and pressed a lever. The rabbit was gone, and the new capsule was faintly pink, with something resembling a giant worm inside.

Amos clucked in satisfaction. “Tsiuna. Good eating, only real good we ever got from these things. I got friends on Plathgol that like rabbit. Want some of this, Pat?”

Vic felt his stomach jerk at the colors that crawled over the tsiuna. The hot antiseptic spray was running over the capsule, to be followed by supersonics and ultraviolets to complete sterilization. Amos waited a moment, then pulled out the creature. Pat hefted it.

“Big one. Bring it over to my place and I’ll fry it for you and Vic. How does the Dirac meter read, Vic?”

“On the button.” The seven percent power loss was gone now, after a week of hard work in locating it. “Guess you were right—the reflector was off angle. Should have tried it first, but it never happened before. How’d you figure it out?”

She indicated the interworld phone. “I started out in anthropology. Vic. Got interested in other races, and then found I couldn’t talk to the teleport engineers without being one, so I got sidetracked to this job. But I still talk a lot on anything Galactic policy won’t forbid. When everything else failed, I complained to the Ecthinbal operator that the Betz II boys installed us wrong. I got sympathy instead of indignation, so I figured it could happen. Simple, wasn’t it?”

He snorted, and waited while she gave orders to start business. Then, as the loading cars began to hum, she fell behind him, moving out toward the office. “I suppose you’ll be leaving tonight, Vic. I’ll miss you. You’re the only troubleshooter I’ve met who did more than make passes.”

“When I make passes at your kind of girl, it will be legal. And in my business, it’s no life for a wife.”

But he stopped to look at the building, admiring it for the last time. It was the standard Betz II design, but designed to handle the farm crops around, and bigger than any earlier models on Earth. The Betz II engineers made Earth engineering look childish, even if they did look like big slugs with tentacles and had no sense of sight.

The transmitters were in the circular center, surrounded by a shield ‘wall, a wide hall all around, another shield, a circular hall again, and finally the big outside shield. The two opposite entranceways spiraled through the three shields, each rotating thirty degrees clockwise from the entrance portal through the next shield. Those shields were of inert matter that could be damaged by nothing less violent than a hydrogen bomb directly on them—they refused to soften at less than ten million degrees Kelvin. How the Betzians managed to form them in the first place, nobody knew.

Beyond the transmitter building, however, the usual offices and local transmitters across Earth had not yet been built. That would be strictly Earth construction, and would have to wait for an off season. They were using the nearest building, an abandoned store a quarter mile away, as a temporary office.

Pat threw the door open and then stopped suddenly. “Ptheela!”

A Plathgolian native sat on a chair, with a bundle of personal belongings around her, her three arms making little marks on something that looked like a used pancake. The Plathgolians had been meat-eating plants once. They still smelled high to Earth noses, and their constantly shedding skin resembled shaggy bark, while their heads were vaguely flowerlike.

Ptheela wriggled her arms. “The hotel found regretfully that it had to decorate my room,” she whistled in Galactic Code. “No other room and all other hotels say they’re full. Plathgolians stink, I guess. So I’ll go home when the transmitter is fixed.”

“With your trade studies half done?” Pat protested. “Don’t be silly, Ptheela. I’ve got a room for you in my apartment. How are the studies, anyhow?”

For answer, the plant woman passed over a newspaper, folded to one item. “Trade? Your House of Representatives just passed a tariff on all traffic through Teleport.”

Pat scanned the news, scowling. “Damn them. A tariff! They can’t tax interstellar traffic. The Galactic Council won’t stand for it; we’re still accepted only on approval. The “Senate will never okay it!”

Ptheela whistled doubtfully, and Vic nodded. “They will. I’ve been expecting this. A lot of people are afraid of Teleport.”

“But we’re geared to it now. The old factories are torn down, the new ones are useless for us. We can’t get by without the catalysts from Ecthinbal, the cancer-preventative from Plathgol, all the rest. And who’ll buy all our sugar? We’re producing fifty times what we need, just because most planets don’t have plants that separate the levo from the dextro forms. All hell will pop!”

Ptheela wiggled her arms again. “You came too early. Your culture is unbalanced. All physics, no sociology. All eat well, little think well.”

All emotion, little reason, Vic added to himself. It had been the same when the industrial revolution came along. Old crafts were uprooted and some people were hurt. There were more jobs now, but they weren’t the familiar ones. And the motorists who gloated at first over cheap Plathgol cars complained when Plathgol wasn’t permitted to supply the improved, ever-powered models they made for themselves.

Hardest of all had been the idea of accepting the existence of superior races. A feeling of inferiority had crept in, turned to resentment, and then through misunderstanding of other races to an outright hatred of them. Ptheela had been kicked out of her hotel room; but it was only a minor incident in a world full of growing bitterness against the aliens.

“Maybe we can get jobs on Plathgol,” Vic suggested harshly.

Ptheela whistled. “Pat could, if she had three husbands—engineers must meet minimum standards. You could be a husband, maybe.”

Vic kept forgetting that Plathgol was backward enough to have taboos and odd customs, even though Galactically higher than Earth, having had nearly ten thousand years of history behind her to develop progress and amity.

The televisor connecting them with the transmitter building buzzed, and Amos’ dour face came on. “Screwball delivery with top priority, Pat. Professor named Douglas wants to ship a capsule of Heaviside layer air for a capsule of Ecthinbal deep-space vacuum. Common sense says we don’t make much shipping vacuums by the pound!”

“Public service, no charge,” Vic suggested, and Pat nodded. Douglas was top man at Caltech, and, a plug from him might be useful sometime. “Leave it on, Amos—I want to watch this. Douglas has some idea that space fluctuates, somehow, and he can figure out where Ecthinbal is from a sample. Then he can figure how fast an exchange force works, whether it’s instantaneous or not. We’ve got the biggest Earth transmitters, ‘so he uses us.”

As they watched, a massive capsule was put in place by loading machines, and the light changed from yellow to red. A slightly greenish capsule replaced the other. Amos signaled the disinfection crew and hot spray hit it, to be followed by the ultrasonics. Something crackled suddenly, and Amos made a wild lunge across the screen.

The capsule popped, crashing inward and scattering glass in a thousand directions. Pressure-glass; it should have carried a standard Code warning for cold sterilization and no supersonics. Vic leaped toward the transmitter building.

Pat’s cry brought him back. There were shrieks coming from the televisor. Men in the building were clinging frantically to anything they could hold, but men and bundles ready for loading were being picked up violently and sucked toward the transmitter. As Vic watched, a man hit the edge of the field and seemed to be sliced into nothingness, his scream cut off, half-formed.

A big chunk of glass had hit the control, shorting two bus-bars, holding them together by its weight. The transmitter was locked into continuous transmit. And air, with a pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch, was running in and being shipped to Ecthinbal, where the pressure was barely an ounce per square inch! With that difference, pressure on a single square foot of surface could lift over a ton. The poor devils in the transmitter building didn’t have a chance.

He snapped off the televisor as Pat turned away, gagging. “When was the accumulator charged?”

“It wasn’t an accumulator,” she told him weakly. “The whole plant uses an electron-pulse atomotor, good for twenty years of continuous operation.”

Vic swore and made for the door, with Pat and Ptheela after him. The transmitter opening took up about two hundred square feet, which meant somewhere between fifty and five hundred thousand cubic feet of air a second were being lost. Maybe worse.

Ptheela nodded as she kept pace with him. “I think the tariff won’t matter much now,” she stated.




II


Vic’s action in charging out had been pure instinct to get where the trouble lay. His legs churned over the ground, while a wind at his back made the going easier.

Then his brain clicked over, and he dug his heels into the ground, trying to stop. Pat crashed into him, but Ptheela’s arms lashed out, keeping him from falling. As he turned to face them, the wind struck at his face, whipping up grit and dust from the dry ground. Getting to the transmitter building would be easy—but with the wind already rising, they’d never be able to fight their way back.

It had already reached this far, losing its force with distance, but still carrying a wallop. It was beginning to form a pattern, marked by the clouds of dust and debris it was picking up. The arrangement of the shields and entrances in the building formed a perfect suction device to set the air circling around it counter-clockwise, twisting into a tornado that funneled down to the portals. Men and women near the building were struggling frantically away from the center of the fury. As he watched, a woman was picked up bodily, whirled around, and gulped down one of the yawning entrances. The wind strangled her cries.

Vic motioned Pat and Ptheela and began moving back, fast. Killing himself would do no good. He found one of the little hauling tractors and pulled them onto it with him, heading back until they were out of the worst of the rising wind. Then he swung to face Ptheela.

“Galactic rules be damned, this is an emergency, and we need help! What now?”

The shaggy Plathgolian made an awkward gesture with all three arms, and a slit opened in her chest. “Unprecedented.” The word came out in English, surprisingly, and Pat’s look mirrored his; Plathgolians weren’t supposed to be able to talk. “You’re right. If I speak, I shall be banished by the Council from Plathgol. Ask, nevertheless. I may know more—we’ve had the teleport longer—but remember that your strange race has a higher ingenuity quotient.”

“Thanks.” Vic knew what the seven husbands back on her home planet meant to her, if she were exiled, but he’d worry about that after he could stop worrying about the world. “What happens next?”

She dropped back to the faster Galactic Code for that. As he knew, the accidental turning on of the transmitter had keyed in the one on Ecthinbal automatically to receive, but not to transmit; the air was moving between Earth and Ecthinbal in one-way traffic. The receiving circuit, which would have keyed in the Ecthinbal transmit circuit had not been shorted. Continuous transmittal had never been used, to her knowledge; there was no certainty about what would happen. Once started, no outside force could stop a transmitter; the send and stop controls were synchronous, both tapped from a single crystal, and only that proper complex waveform could cut it off. It now existed as a space-strain, and the Plathgolians believed that this would spread, since the outer edges transmitted before matter could reach the center, setting up an unbalanced resonance that would make the force field grow larger and larger. Eventually, it might spread far beyond the whole building.

And, of course, since the metal used by the Betz II engineers could not be cut or damaged, there was no way of tunneling in.

“What about Ecthinbal?” Pat asked.

Ptheela spread her arms. “The same, in reverse. The air rushes in, builds up pressure to break the capsule, and then rushes out—in a balanced stream, fortunately, so there’s no danger of crowding two units of matter in one unit of space.”

“Then I guess we’d better call the Galactic Envoy,” Vic decided. “All he’s ever done is to sit in an office and look smug. Now—”

“He won’t come. He is simply an observer. Galactic Law says you must solve your own problem or die.”

“Yeah.” Vic looked at the cloud of dust being whirled into the transmitter building. “And all I need is something that weighs a couple tons per square foot—with a good crane attached.”

Pat looked up suddenly. “How about one of the small atom-powered army tanks, the streamlined ones? Flavin could probably get you one.”

Vic stamped down on the pedal, swinging the little tractor around sharply toward the office. The wind was stronger there, but still buck-able. He clicked the televisor on, noticing that the dust seemed to disappear just beyond the normal field of the transmitter. It must already be starting to spread out.

“How about it?” he asked Ptheela. “If it spreads, won’t it start etching into the transmitter and the station?”

“No. Betz II construction. Everything they built in has some way of grounding out the effect. We don’t know how it works, but the field won’t touch anything put m by the Betzians.”

“What about the hunk of glass that’s causing the trouble?”

For a moment she looked as if she were trying to appear hopeful. Then the flowerlike head seemed to will. “It’s inside the casing, protected from the field.”

Pat had been working on the private wire to Chicago, used for emergencies. She was obviously having trouble getting put through to Flavin. The man was a sore spot in Teleport Interstellar, one of the few political appointees. Nominally, he was a go-between for the President and the Teleport group, but actually he was simply a job-holder, Finally Pat had him on the screen.

He was jovial enough, as usual, with a red spot on each cheek which indicated too many drinks for lunch. A bottle stood on the desk in front of him. But his voice was clean enough. “Hi, Pat. What’s up?”

Pat disregarded the frown Vic threw her, and began outlining the situation. The panic in her voice didn’t require much feigning. Flavin blustered at first, then pressed the hold button for long minutes. Finally, his face reappeared.

“Peters, you’ll have full authority, of course. I’ll get a couple tanks for you, somehow, but I have to work indirectly.” Then he shrugged and looked rueful. “I always knew this sinecure would end. I’ve got some slips here that make it look as if you had a national disaster.”

His hand reached for the bottle, just as his eyes met Vic’s accusing look. He shook his head, grinned sourly, put the bottle away in a drawer, untouched. “I’m not a fool entirely, Peters. I can do a little more than chase girls and drink. Probably be no use to you, but the only reason I drink is I’m bored, and I’m not bored now. I’ll be out shortly.”

Flavin apparently had influence. The tanks arrived just before he did. They were heavy, squat affairs, super-armored to stand up under a fairly close atomic bomb hit, but small enough to plunge through the portals of the transmitter building. Flavin came up as Vic and Pat were studying them. His suit was designed to hide most of his waistline, but the fat of his jowls shook as he hurried up, and there was sweat on his forehead, trickling down from under his toupee.

“Two, eh? Figured that’s what I’d get if I asked for a dozen. Think you can get in—and what’ll you do then?”

Vic shrugged. He’d been wondering the same thing. “If we could somehow ram the huge piece of glass and crack it where it was wedged into the wiring inside the shielding, it might release the shorted wires. That should effect an automatic cut-off. That’s why I’m going with the driver. I can extemporize if we get in.”

“Right,” Pat agreed quickly. She hitched up her coveralls and headed for the other tank. “And that’s why I’m going with the other.”

“Pat!” Vic swung toward her. But it wasn’t a time for stupid chivalry. The man or woman who could do the job should do it. He gave her a hand into the compact little tank. “Good luck, then. We’ll need it.”

He climbed into his own vehicle, crowding past the driver and wriggling into the tiny observer’s seat. The driver glanced back, reached for the controls. The motor hummed quietly under them, making itself felt by the vibration of the metal around them. They began moving forward, advancing in low gear. The driver didn’t like it as he stared through his telescreen, and Vic liked it even less from the direct view through the gun slit. Beside them, the other tank got into motion, roughly paralleling them.

At first it wasn’t too bad. They headed toward the north portal, going cautiously, and the tank seemed snug and secure. Beside him, Vic saw a tree suddenly come up by its roots and head toward the transmitter. It struck the front of the tank, but the machine pushed it brutally aside.

Then the going got rough. The driver swore at the controls, finding the machine hard to handle. It wanted to drift, and he set up a fixed correction, only to revise it a moment later. The tank began to list and pitch. The force of the wind increased geometrically as they cut the distance. At fifty feet, the driver’s wrists were white from fighting to overcome each tilt of the wind.

Vic swallowed, wondering at the nerve of the man driving, until he saw blood running from a bitten lip. His own stomach was pitching wildly.

“Try another ten feet?” the driver asked.

“Have to.”

They crawled by inches now. Every tiny bump threatened to let the force of the wind pitch them over. They had to work by feel. Vic wiped his forehead and wiped it again before he noticed that the palm of his hand was as damp as his brow.

He wondered about Pat and looked for her. There was no sight of the other machine. Thank God, she’d turned back. But there was bitterness in his relief; he’d figured Pat was one human he could count on completely. Then he looked at the driver’s wider screen, and sick shock hit him.

The other tank had turned turtle and was rolling over and over, straight toward the portal! As he looked, a freak accident bounced it up and it landed on its treads. The driver must have been conscious; only consummate skill accounted for the juggling that kept it upright then. But its forward momentum was still too strong, and it lurched for the portal.

Vic jerked against his driver’s car, pointing frantically. “Hit it!”

The driver tensed, but nodded. Though the shriek of the insane wind was too strong for even the sound of the motor, the tank leaped forward, pushing Vic down in his webbed and padded seat. The chances they were taking now were pure gamble, but the driver moved more smoothly with a definite goal. The man let the wind help him pick up speed, jockeying sidewise toward the other tank. They almost rolled over as they swung, bucking and rocking frantically, but the treads hit the ground firmly again. They were drifting across the wind now, straight toward the nose of the other tank.

Vic strained forward; the shock of hitting the tank knocked his head against the gun slit. He hardly felt it as he stared out. The two tanks struggled, forcing against each other, while the portal gaped almost straight ahead.

“Hit the west edge and we have a chance,” Vic yelled in the driver’s ear. The man nodded weakly, and his foot pressed down harder on the throttle. Against each other, the two tanks showed little tendency to turn over, but they seemed to be lifted off the ground half the time.

Inch by slow inch, they were making it. Pat’s tank was well beyond the portal, but Vic’s driver was sweating it out, barely on the edge. He bumped an inch forward, reversed with no care for gears, and hitched forward and back again. They seemed to make little progress, but finally Vic could see the edge move past, and they were out of the direct gale into the portal.

A new screen had lighted beside the driver, and Pat’s face was in it, along with the other driver. The scouring of the wind made speech impossible over the speakers, but the man motioned. Vic shook his head, indicated a spiral counter-clockwise and outward, to avoid bucking against the wind, with the two tanks supporting each other.

They passed the south portal somehow, though there were moments when it seemed they must be swung in, and managed to gain ten feet outward on the turn. The next time around, they had doubled that. It began to be smoother going. The battered tanks lumbered up to their starting point and a little beyond.

Vic crawled out of the seat, surprised to find his legs stiff and weak; the ground seemed to reel under him. It was some comfort to see that the driver was in no better shape. The man leaned against the tank, letting the raw wind dry the perspiration on his uniform. “Bro-ther! Miracles! You’re nervy, guy, but I wouldn’t go in there again with the angel Michael.”

Vic looked at the wind maelstrom. Nobody else would go in there, either. Getting, within ten feet of the portal was begging for death, even in the tank—and it would get worse. Then he spotted Pat opening the tank hatch and stumbled over to help her out. She was bruised and more shaky than he, but the webbing over the seat had saved her from broken bones. He lifted her out in his arms, surprised at how light she was. His mind flicked over the picture of her tank twisting over, and his arms tightened around her. She seemed to snuggle into them, seeking comfort.

Her eyes came up, just as he looked down at her. There was no other way than kissing her to show his relief. “You scared hell out of me, Pat.”

“Me, too,” She was regaining some color, and wriggled to be put down. “Do you know how I feel about what you did in there?”

Flavin cut off any answer Vic could have made, waddling up with his handkerchief out, mopping his face. He stared at them, gulped, shook his head. “Lazarus twins,” he growled. “Better get in the car—there’s a drink in the right door pocket.”

Vic looked at Pat and she nodded. They could use it. They found the car and chauffeur waiting farther back. Vic poured her a small jigger, and took one for himself before putting the bottle back. But the moment’s relaxation over cigarets was better than the drink.

While Flavin was talking to the tank drivers, a small roll of bills changed hands, bringing grins to their faces. Political opportunist or not, he knew the right thing to do at the right time. Now he came back and climbed in beside them.

“I’ve had the office moved back to Bennington. The intercity teleport manager offered us space.” The locally owned world branches of intercity teleport were independent of Teleport Interstellar, but usually granted courtesy exchanges with the latter. “They’ll be evacuating the city next, if I know the Governor. Just got a cease and desist order—came while you were trying to commit suicide. We’re to stop transmitting at once!”

He grunted at Vic’s grimace, and motioned the chauffeur on, just as a radiophone call reached them. Vic shook his head at the driver and looked out to see Ptheela ploughing along against the wind, calling to them. The plant woman’s skin was peeling worse than ever.

Flavin followed Vic’s eyes. “You going to let that ride with us? The way Plathies stink? Damned plants, you can’t trust ’em. Probably mixed up in this trouble. I heard…”

“Plathgol rates higher in civilization than we do,” Pat stated flatly.

“Yeah. Ten thousand years stealing culture we had to scratch up for ourselves in a thousand. So the Galactic Council tells us we’ve got to rub our noses to a superior race. Superior plants! Nuts!”

Vic opened the door and reached for Pat’s hand. Flavin frowned, fidgeted, then reached out to pull them back. “Okay, okay. I told you that you were in charge here. If you want to ride with stinking Plathies—well, you’re running things. But don’t blame me if people start throwing mud.” He had the grace to redden faintly as Ptheela came up finally, and changed the subject hastily. “Why can’t we just snap a big hunk of metal over the entrances and seal them up?”

“Too late,” Ptheela answered, sliding down beside Pat, her English drawing a surprised start from Flavin. “I was inspecting the tanks; they’re field-etched where they touched. That means the field is already outside the building, though it will spread more slowly without the metal to resonate it. Anyhow, you couldn’t get metal plates up.”

“How long will the air last?” Pat asked.

Vic shrugged. “A month at breathing level, maybe. Fortunately the field doesn’t spread downward much, with the Betzian design, so it won’t start working on the Earth itself. Flavin, how about getting the experts here? I need help.”

“Already sent for them,” Flavin grunted. They were heading toward the main part of Bennington now, ten miles from the station. His face was gray and he no longer seemed to notice the somewhat pervasive odor of Ptheela.

They drew up to a converted warehouse finally, and he got out, starting up the steps just as the excited cries of a newsboy reached his ears. He flipped a coin and spread the extra before them.

It was all over the front page, with alarming statements from the scientists first interviewed and soothing statements from later ones. No Teleport Interstellar man had spoken, but an interview with one of the local teleport engineers had given the basic facts, along with some surprisingly keen guesses as to what would happen next.

But above everything was the black headline:

BOMB TRANSMITTER, SAYS PAN-ASIA

The ultimatum issued by Pan-Asia was filled with high-sounding phrases and noble justification, but its basic message was clear enough. Unless the loss of air—air that belonged to everyone—was stopped and all future transmitting of all types halted, together with all dealings with “alien anti-terrestrials,” Pan-Asia would be forced to bomb the transmitters, together with all other resistance.

“Maybe…” Flavin began doubtfully, but Vic cut him off. His faith in mankind’s right to its accidental niche in the Galactic Council wasn’t increasing much.

“No dice. The field is a space-strain that is permanent, unless canceled by the right wave-form. The canceling crystal is in the transmitter. Destroy that and the field never can be stopped. It’ll keep growing until the whole Earth is gone. Flavin, you’d better get those experts here, fast!”




III


Vic sat in the car the next morning, watching the black cloud that swirled around the station, reaching well beyond the old office. His eyes were red, his face was gray with fatigue, and his lanky body was slumped onto the seat. Pat looked almost as tired, though she had gotten some sleep. Now she took the empty coffee cup and thermos from him. She ran a hand through his hair, straightening it, then pulled his head down to her shoulder and began rubbing the back of his neck gently.

Ptheela purred approvingly from the other side, and Pat snorted. “Get your mind off romance, Ptheela! Vic’s practically out on his feet. If he weren’t so darned stubborn, this should make him go to sleep.”

“Romance!” Ptheela chewed the idea and spat it out. “All spring budding and no seed. A female should have pride from strong husbands and proven seeding.”

Vic let them argue. At the moment, Pat’s attention was soothing, but only superficially. His head went on fighting for some usable angle and finding none. He’d swiped all the knowledge he could from Ptheela, without an answer. Plathgol was more advanced than Earth, but far below the Betz II engineers, who were mere servants of the Council.

No wonder man had resented the traffic with other worlds. For centuries he had been the center of his universe. Now, like the Tasmanians, he found himself only an isolated valley of savages in a universe that was united in a culture far beyond his understanding. He’d never even conquered his own planets; all he’d done was to build better ways of killing himself.

Now he was reacting typically enough, in urgent need of some race even lower, to put him on middle ground, at least. He was substituting hatred for his lost confidence in himself.

Why learn more about matter transmitting when other races knew the answers and were too selfish to share them? Vic grumbled, remembering the experts. He’d wasted hours with them, to find that they were useless. The names that had been towers of strength had proved no more than men as baffled as he was. With even the limited knowledge he’d pried from Ptheela, he was far ahead of them—and still further behind the needs of the problem.

The gun Flavin had insisted he wear was uncomfortable, and he pulled himself up, staring at the crew of men who were working as close to the center of wind as they could get. He hadn’t been able to convince them that tunneling was hopeless. All they needed was a one-millimeter hole through the flooring, up which blasting powder could be forced to knock aside the glass fragment. They refused to accept the fact that the Betz II shielding could resist the best diamond drills under full power for centuries. He shrugged. At least it helped the general morale to see something being done; he’d given in finally and let them have their way.

“We might as well go back,” he decided. He’d hoped that the morning air and sight of the station might clear his head, but the weight of responsibility had ruined that. It was ridiculous, but he was still in charge.

Flavin reached back and cut on the little television set. With no real understanding, he was trying to learn tolerance of Ptheela, but he felt more comfortable in front, beside the chauffeur.

Pat caught her breath, and Vic looked at the screen, where a newscast was showing a crowd in Denver tearing down one of the Earth-designed intercity teleports. Men were striking back at the menace blindly. A man stood up from his seat in Congress to demand an end to alien intercourse; Vic remembered the fortune in interstellar trading of levo-rotary crystals that had bought the man’s seat and the transmitter-brought drugs that had saved him from death by cancer.

There were riots in California, the crackpot Knights of Terra were recruiting madly, and murder was on the increase. Rain had fallen in Nevada. There were severe weather disturbances throughout the country, caused by the unprecedented and disastrously severe low over Bennington. People were complaining of the air, already claiming they could feel it growing thinner, though that was sheer hysterical nonsense. Also, the Galactic Envoy was missing.

The editorial of the Bennington Times came on last, pointing a finger at Vic for changing the circuits, but blaming it on the aliens who hoarded their knowledge so callously. There was just enough truth in the charge to be dangerous. Bennington was close enough to the transmitter to explain the undertones of lynch law that permeated the editorial.

“I’ll put a stop to that,” Flavin told Vic angrily. “I’ve got enough pull to make them pull a complete retraction. But it won’t undo all the harm.”

Vic felt the automatic, and it seemed less of a nuisance now. “I notice no news on Pan-Asia’s ultimatum.”

“Yeah. I hear the story was killed by Presidential emergency powers, and Pan-Asia has agreed to a three-day stay—no more. My information isn’t the best, but I gather we’ll bomb it ourselves if it isn’t cleared up by then.”

Vic climbed out at the local station office, with the others trailing. In the waiting room, a vaguely catlike male from Sardax waited, clutching a few broken ornaments and a thin sheaf of Galactic credits. One of his four arms was obviously broken and yellow blood oozed from a score of wounds.

But he only shrugged at Vic’s whistled questions, and his answer in Code was unperturbed. “No matter. In a few moments I ship to Chicago, then home. My attackers smelled strongly of hate, but I escaped.” His whistle caught at a signal from the routing office, and he hurried off, with a final sentence. “They will survive, I am told.”

Remembering the talons on the Sardaxan’s hands, Vic grinned wryly. They were a peaceful race, but pragmatic enough to see no advantage in being killed.

Vic threw open the door to his little office and the four went in. It wasn’t until he started toward his desk that he noticed his visitor.

The Galactic Envoy might have been the robot he claimed, but there was no sign of it. He was dressed casually in expensive tweeds, lounging gracefully in a chair, with a touch of a smile on his face. Now he got up, holding out a hand to Vic.

“I heard you were running things. Haven’t seen you since I helped pick you for the first year class, but I keep informed. Thought I’d drop by to tell you the Council has given official approval to your full authority over the Earth Branch of Teleport Interstellar, and I’ve filed the information with the U. N. and your President.”

Vic lifted his head. “Why me?”

“You’ve learned all the theory Earth has, you’ve had more practical experience with more stations than anyone else, and you’ve undoubtedly picked Ptheela’s brains dry by now. You’re the obvious man.”

“I’d a lot rather see one of your high and mighty Galactic experts take over!”

The Envoy shook his head gently. “We’ve found that the race causing the trouble usually is the race best fitted to solve it. The same ingenuity that maneuvered the sabotage—it was sabotage, by the way—will help you solve it, perhaps. The Council may not care much for your grab first rule in economics and politics, but it never doubted that you represent one of the most ingenious races we have met. You see, there really are no inferior races.”

“Sabotage?” Pat looked sick. “Who’d be that stupid and vicious?”

The Envoy smiled faintly. “Who’d give the Knights of Terra money for a recruiting drive? I can’t play much part in things here—I’ve got limited abilities, a touch of telepathy, a little more knowledge than you, and a certain in-built skill at handling political situations. Your own government is busy examining the ramifications of the plot now. It had to be an inside job, as you call it.”

“Earth for Earth, and down with the transmitters,” Vic summed it up.

The Envoy nodded. “They forget that the transmitters can’t be removed without Council workers. And when the Council revokes approval, it destroys all equipment and most books, while seeing that three generations are brought up without knowledge. You’d revert to semi-savagery and have to make a fresh start up. Well, I’m lucky—your President Wilkes is sympathetic, and your F. B. I. has been cooperative so far. If you solve things, the sabotage shouldn’t prove too much of a problem. Good luck.”

Flavin had been eying him, and his dislike flared up as the Envoy left. “A hell of a lot of nerve for guys who claim they don’t interfere!”

“It happened to us twice,” Ptheela observed. “We were better for it eventually. The Council’s rules are from half a billion years of experience, with tremendous knowledge. We must submit.”

“Not without a fight!”

“Without a fight,” Vic said bluntly. “We’re babes in arms to them. Anyhow, who cares? Congressional babble won’t save us if we lose our atmosphere. But they can’t see it.”

The old idea—something would turn up. Maybe they couldn’t cut off the transmitter from outside, and had no way of getting past the wind to the inside. But something would turn up.

He’d heard rumors of the Army taking over, and almost wished they would. As it stood, he had full responsibility and nothing more. Flavin and the Council had turned things over to him, but the local cop on the beat had more power. It would be a relief to have someone around to shout even stupid orders, and get some of the weight off Vic’s shoulders.

Sabotage! It couldn’t even be an accident; the cockeyed race to which he belonged had to try to commit suicide and then expect him to save it.

He shook his head, vaguely conscious of someone banging on the door, and reached for the knob. “Amos!”

The sour face never changed expression as the corpselike figure of the man slouched in. Amos was dead—he’d been in the transmitter. They all realized it at once. But Amos shook off their remarks. “Nothing surprising, just common sense. When I saw the capsule start cracking, I jumped into a capsule headed for Plathgol, set the delay, and tripped the switch. Saw some glass shooting at me, but I was in Plathgol before it hit. Went out and got me a mess of tsiuna—they cook fair to middling, seeing they never tried it before they met us. Then I showed ’em my pass, came through Chicago, here, and home. I figured the old woman would be worried. Nobody told me about the mess till I saw the papers. Common sense to report to you, so here I am.”

“How much did you see of the explosion?” Pat asked.

“Not much. Just saw it was cracking—trick glass, no temperature tolerance. Looked like Earth capsule color.”

It didn’t matter. It added to Vic’s disgust to believe it was sabotage, but didn’t change the picture otherwise. The Council wouldn’t reverse its decision. They treated a race as a unit, making no exception for the behavior of a few individuals, whether good or bad.

Another knock on the door cut off his vicious circle of hopelessness. “Old home week here, evidently. Come in!”

The man who entered was the rare example of a fat man in the pink of physical condition, with no sign of softness. He shoved his bulk through the doorway as if he expected the two stars on his shoulders to light the way and awe all beholders. “Who is Victor Peters?”

Vic wiggled a finger at himself, and the general came over. He drew out an envelope and dropped it on the desk, showing clearly that acting as a messenger was far beneath his dignity. “An official communication from the President of the United States,” he said mechanically, and turned to make his exit back to the intercity transmitters.

It was a plain envelope, without benefit of wax seals or ribbons. Vic ripped it open, looked at the signature and the simple letterhead, and checked the signature again. He read it aloud to the others.

“To Mr.—damn it, officially I’ve got a doctor’s degree—to Mr. Victor Peters, nominally—Hah!—in charge of the Bennington Branch of Teleport Interstellar—I guess they didn’t tell him it’s nominally in charge of all Earth branches. Umm. You are hereby instructed to remove all personnel from a radius of five miles minimum of your Teleport Branch not later than noon, August 21, unless matters shall be satisfactorily culminated prior to that time. Signed, Homer Wilkes, President of the United States of America.”

“Bombs!” Pat shuddered, while Vic let the message fall to the floor, kicking it toward the waste-basket. “The fools! The damned fools! Couldn’t they tell him what would happen? Couldn’t they make him see that it’ll only make turning off the transmitter impossible forever?”

Flavin shrugged, dropping unaware onto the couch beside Ptheela. “Maybe he had no choice. Either he does it or some other power does it.”

Then he came to his feet, staring at Vic. “My God, that’s tomorrow noon!”




IV


Vic looked at the clock later, and was surprised to see that it was already well into the afternoon. The others had left him, Ptheela last when she found there was no more knowledge she could contribute. He had one of the electronic calculators plugged in beside him, and a table of the so-called Dirac functions propped up on it; when the press had discovered that Dirac had predicted some of the characteristics that made teleportation possible, they’d named practically everything for him.

The wastebasket was filled, the result of pure futility. He shoved the last sheet into it, and sat there, pondering. There had to be a solution!

Man’s whole philosophy was built on that idea.

But it was a philosophy that included sabotage and suicide. What did it matter any—

Vic jerked his head up, shaking it savagely, forcing the fatigue back by sheer will. There was a solution. All he had to do was find it—before the stupidity of war politics in a world connected to a Galaxy-wide union could prevent it.

He pulled the calculator back, just as Flavin came into the room. The man was losing weight, or else fatigue was creating that illusion. He dropped into a chair as Vic looked up.

“The men evacuated from around the station?” Vic asked.

Flavin nodded. “Some of the bright boys finally convinced them that they were just wasting time, anyhow. Besides, the thing is still spreading, and getting too close to them. Vic, the news gets worse all the time. Can you take it?”

“Now what? Don’t tell me they’ve changed it to tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow, hell! In two hours they’re sending over straight blockbusters, radar-controlled all the way. No atomics—yet—but they’re jumping the gun, anyhow. Some nut convinced Wilkes that an ordinary eight-ton job might just shake things enough to fracture the glass that’s holding the short. And Pan-Asia is going completely wild. I’ve been talking to Wilkes. The people are scared silly, and they’re pressuring for quick war.”

Vic nodded reluctantly and reached for the benzedrine he’d hoped to save for the last possible moment, when it might carry him all the way through. What difference did it make? Even if he had an idea, he’d be unable to use it.

“And yet…” He considered it more carefully, trying to figure percentages. There wasn’t a chance in a million, but they had to take even that one chance. It was better than nothing. “It might just work—if they hit the right spot. I know where the glass is, and the layout of the station. But I’ll need authority to direct the bombs. Flavin, can you get me President Wilkes?”

Flavin shrugged, reached for the televisor. He managed to get quite a way up by some form of code, but then it began to be a game of nerves and brass. Along his own lines, he apparently knew his business. In less than fifteen minutes, Vic was talking to the President. For a further few minutes, the screen remained blank. Then another face came on, this time in military uniform, asking quick questions, while Vic pointed out the proper targets.

Finally the officer nodded. “Good enough, Peters. We’ll try it. If you care to watch, you can join the observers. Mr. Flavin already knows where they are. How are the chances?”

“Not good. Worth trying.”

The screen darkened again, and Flavin got up. The thing was a wild gamble, but it was better to jar the building than to melt its almost impregnable walls. Even Betz II metal couldn’t take a series of hydrogen bombs, though nothing else could hurt it. And with that fury, the whole station would go.

They picked up Pat, and moved out to Flavin’s car. Vic knew better than to try to bring Ptheela along. As an alien, she was definitely taboo around military affairs. The storm had reached the city now, and dense clouds were pouring down thick gouts of rain, leaving the day as black as night. The car slogged through it, until Flavin opened the door and motioned them out into a temporary metal shelter.

Things were already started. Remote scanners were watching the guided missiles come down, and eyes were operating in the bombs, working on infra-red that cut through the rain and darkness. It seemed to move slowly on the screen at first, but picked up apparent speed as it approached the transmitter buildings. The shielding grew close, and Pat drew back with an involuntary jerk as it hit and the screen went black. Dead center.

But the remote scanners showed no change. The abrupt break in the air-motion where the transmitter field began, outside the shielding, still showed. Another bomb came down, and others, each spaced so as to hit in time for others to be turned back, if it worked. Even through the impossible tornado of rotating fury, it was super-precision bombing.

The field went on working just the same, far beyond the shielding, pulling an impossible number of cubic feet of air from Earth every second. They stopped watching the screen shown by the bomb-eyes at last, and even the Army gave up.

“Funny,” one observer commented. “No sound, no flash when the bombs hit. I’ve been watching the remote scanners every time instead of the eye, and nothing happens. The bombs just disappear.”

Pat shook herself. “They can’t hit. They go right through the field, before they can hit. Vic, it won’t matter if we do atom-bomb the station. It can’t be reached.”

But he was already ahead of her. “The Ecthindar will love that. They’ve already been dosed with chemical bombs. Now guess what they’ll do.”

“Simple.” It was the observer who got that. “Start feeding atom bombs into their transmitters back to us.”

Then he shouted hoarsely, pointing through a window. From the direction of the station, a dazzle of light had lanced out sharply, and was now fading down. Vic snapped back to the remote scanner, and scowled. The field was still working; there was no sign of damage to the transmitter. If the Ecthindar had somehow snapped a bomb into the station, it must have been retransmitted before full damage.

The Army men stared sickly at the station, but Vic was already moving toward the door. Pat grabbed his arm, and Flavin was with them by the time they reached the waiting car.

“The Bennington office,” Vic told the driver. “Fast! Somebody has to see the Ecthindar in a hurry, if it’ll do any good.”

“I’m going, too, Vic,” Pat announced. He shook his head. “I’m going,” she repeated stubbornly. “Nobody knows much about Ecthinbal or the Ecthindar. You call in Code messages, get routine Code back. We can’t go there without fancy pressure suits, because we can’t breathe their air. And they never leave. But I told you I was interested in races, and I have been trying to chit-chat with them. I know some things. You’ll need me.”

He shook his head again. “It’s enough for one of us to get killed. If I fail, Amos can try, or Flavin. If they both fail—well, suit yourself. It won’t matter whether they kill me there or send through bombs to kill me here. But if one of us can get a chance to explain, it may make some difference. I don’t know. But it may.”

Her eyes were hurt, but she gave in, going with him silently as he stepped into the local Bennington unit and stepped out in Chicago, heading toward the Chicago Interstellar branch. She waited patiently while the controlmen scouted out a pressure suit for him. Then she began helping him fasten it and checking his oxygen equipment. “Come back, Vic,” she said finally.

He chucked a fist under her chin and kissed her quickly, keeping it casual with a sureness he couldn’t feel. “You’re a good kid, Pat. I’ll sure try.”

He pulled the helmet down and clicked it shut before stepping into the capsule and letting the seal snap shut. He could see her swing to the interstellar phone, her lips pursed in whistled code. The sound was muffled, but the lights changed abruptly, and her hand hit the switch.

There was no apparent time involved. He was on Ecthinbal, looking at a faintly greenish atmosphere, noticeable only because of the sudden change, and fifty pounds seemed to have been added to his weight. The transmitter was the usual Betz II design, and everything else was familiar except for the creature standing beside the capsule.

The Ecthindar might have been a creation out of green glass, coated with a soft fur, and blown by a bottlemaker who enjoyed novelty. There were two thin, long legs, multijointed, and something that faintly resembled the pelvis of a skeleton. Above that, two other thin rods ran up, with a double bulb where lungs might have been, and shoulders like the collar pads of a football player, joined together and topped by four hard knobs, each with a single eye and orifice. Double arms ran from each shoulder, almost to the ground.

He expected to hear a tinkle when the creature moved, and was surprised when he did hear it, until he realized the sound was carried through the metal floor, not through the thin air.

The creature swung open the capsule door after some incomprehensible process that probably served to sterilize it. Its Galactic Code whistle came through Vic’s shoes from the floor. “We greet you, Earthman. Our mansions are poor, but they are yours. Our lives are at your disposal.” Then the formal speech ended in a sharp whistle. “Literally, it would seem. We die.”

It didn’t fit with Vic’s expectations, but he tried to take his cue from it. “That’s why I’m here. Do you have some kind of ruler? Umm, good. How do I get to see this ruler?” He had few hopes of getting there, but it never did any harm to try.

The Ecthindar seemed unsurprised. “I shall take you at once. For what other purpose is a ruler but to serve those who wish to see it? But—I trespass on your kindness in the delay. But may I question whether a strange light came forth from your defective transmitter?”

Vic snapped a look at it, and nodded slowly.

“It did.”

Now the ax would fall. He braced himself for it, but the creature ceremoniously elaborated on his nod.

“I was one who believed it might. It is most comforting to know my science was true. When the bombs came through, we held them in a shield, but, in our error, we believed them radioactive. We tried a negative aspect of space to counteract them. Of course, it failed, since they were only chemical. But I had postulated that some might have escaped from receiver to transmitter, being negative. You are kind. And now, if you will honor my shoulder with the touch of your hand, so that my portable unit will transport us both…”

Vic reached out and the scene shifted at once. There was no apparent transmitter, and the trick beat anything he had heard from other planets. Perhaps it was totally unrelated to the teleport machine.

But he had no time to ask.

A door in the little room opened, and another creature came in, this time single from pelvis to shoulders, but otherwise the same. “The ruler has been requested,” it whistled. “That which the ruler is is yours, and that which the ruler has is nothing. May the ruler somehow serve?”

It was either the most cockeyed bit of naïveté or the fanciest run-around Vic had found, but totally unlike anything he’d been prepared for. He gulped, and began whistling out the general situation on Earth.

The Ecthindar interrupted politely. “That we know. And the converse is true—we too are dying. We are a planet of a thin air, and that little is chlorine. Now from a matter transmitter comes a great rush of oxygen, which we consider poison. Our homes around are burned in it, our plant life is dying of it, and we are forced to remain inside and seal ourselves off. Like you, we can do nothing—the wind from your world is beyond our strength.”

“But your science…”

“Is beyond yours, true. But your race is adaptable, and we are too leisurely for that virtue.”

Vic shook his head, though perhaps it made good sense. “But the bombs…”

A series of graceful gestures took place between the two creatures, and the ruler turned back to Vic.

“The ruler had not known, of course. It was not important. We lost a few thousand people whom we love. We understood, however. There is no anger, though it pleases us to see that your courtesy extends across the spaces to us. May your dead pass well.”

That was at least one good break in the situation. Vic felt some of his worry slide aside to make room for the rest. “And I don’t suppose you have any ideas on how we can take care of this…”

There was a shocked moment, with abrupt movements from the two creatures. Then something came up in the ruler’s hands, vibrating sharply. Vic jumped back—and froze in mid-stride, to fall awkwardly onto the floor. A chunk of ice seemed to form in his backbone and creep along his spine, until it touched his brain. Death or paralysis? It was all the same; he had air for only an hour more. The two creatures were fluttering at each other and moving toward him when he abruptly and painlessly blacked out.




V


His first feeling was the familiar, deadening pull of fatigue as his senses began to come back. Then he saw that he was in a tiny room—and that Pat lay stretched out beside him!

He threw himself up to a sitting position, surprised to find that there were no after-effects to whatever the ruler had used. The damned little fool, coming through after him. And now they had her, too.

Her eyes snapped open, and she sat up beside him. “Darn it, I almost fell asleep waiting for you to revive. It’s a good thing I brought extra oxygen flasks. Your hour is about up. How’d you manage to insult them?”

He puzzled over it while she changed his oxygen flask and he did the same for her. “I didn’t. I just asked whether they didn’t know of some way we could take care of this trouble.”

“Which meant to them that you suspected they weren’t giving all the help they could, after their formal offer when you came over. I convinced them it was just that you were still learning Code, whatever you said. They’re nice, Vic. I never really believed other races were better than we are, but I do now—and it doesn’t bother me at all.”

“It’d bother Flavin. He’d have to prove they were sissies or something. How do we get out?”

She pushed the door open, and they stepped back into the room of the ruler, who was waiting for them. It made no reference to the misunderstanding, but inspected Vic, whistled approval of his condition, and plunged straight to business.

“We have found part of a solution, Earthman. We die, but it will be two weeks before our end. First, we shall set up a transmitter in permanent transmit, equipped with a precipitator to remove our chlorine, and key it to another of your transmitters. Whichever one you with. Ecthinbal is heavy, but small, and a balance will be struck between the air going from you and the air returning. The winds between stations may disturb your weather, but not seriously, we hope. That which the ruler is is yours. A lovely passing.”

It touched their shoulders, and they were back briefly in the transmitter, to be almost instantly in the Chicago Branch. Vic was still shaking his head.

“It won’t work. The ruler didn’t allow for the way our gravity falls off faster and our air thins out higher up. We’d end up with maybe four pounds pressure, which isn’t enough. So both planets die—two worlds on my shoulders instead of one. Hell, we couldn’t take that offer from them, anyhow. Pat, how’d you convince them to let me go?”

She had shucked out of the pressure suit and stood combing her hair. “Common sense, as Amos says. I figured engineers consider each other engineers first, and aliens second, so I went to the head engineer instead of the ruler. He fixed it up somehow. I guess I must have sounded pretty desperate, at that, knowing your air would give out after an hour.”

They went through the local intercity teleport to Bennington and on into Vic’s office, where Flavin met them with open relief and a load of questions. Vic let Pat answer, while he mulled over her words. Somewhere, there was an idea—let the rulers alone and go to the engineers. Some obvious solution that the administrators would try and be unable to use? He shoved it around in his floating memory, but it refused to trigger any chain of thought.

Pat was finishing the account of the Ecthindar offer, but Flavin was not impressed. Ptheela came in, and it had to be repeated for her, with much more enthusiastic response.

“So what?” Flavin asked. “They have to die, anyhow. Sure, it’s a shame, but we have our own problems. Hey—wait! Maybe there’s something to it. It’d take some guts and a little risk, but it would work.”

Flavin considered it while Vic sat fidgeting, willing to listen to any scheme. The politician took a cigar out and lit it carefully, his first since the accident; he’d felt that smoking somehow used up air. “Look, if they work their transmitter, we end up with a quarter of what we need. But suppose we had four sources. We connect with several oxygen-atmosphere worlds. Okay, we load our transmitters with atom bombs, and send one capsule to each world. After that, they either open a transmitter to us with air, or we let them have it. They can live—a little poorer, maybe, but still live. And we’re fixed for good. Congress and the President would jump at it.”

“That all?” Vic asked.

Flavin nodded. Vic’s fist caught him in the mouth, spilling him onto the floor. The politician lay there, feeling his jaw and staring up at Vic. Then the anger was gone, and Vic reached down to help him up.

“You’re half a decent guy and half a louse,” Vic told him. “You had that coming, but I should have used it on some of the real lice around. Besides, maybe you have part of an idea.”

“All right, no teeth lost—just the first cigar I’ve enjoyed in days.” Flavin rubbed his jaw, then grinned ruefully. “I should have known how you feel. I just happen to believe in Earth first. What’s this big idea of yours?”

“Getting our air through other planets. Our air. It’s a routing job. If we can set up a chain so the air going out of one transmitter in a station is balanced by air coming from another in the same station, there’d be a terrific draft. But most of it would be confined in the station, and there wouldn’t be the outside whirlwind to keep us from getting near. Instead of a mad rush of air in or out of the building, there’d be only eddy currents outside of the inner chamber. We’d keep our air, and maybe have time to figure out some way of getting at that hunk of glass.”

“Won’t work,” Flavin said gloomily. “Suppose Wilkes was asked to route through for another planet. He’d have to turn it down. Too much risk.”

“That’s where Pat gave me the tip. Engineers get used to thinking of each other as engineers instead of competing races—they have to work together. They have the same problems and develop the same working habits. If I were running a station and the idea was put to me, I’d hate to turn it down, and I might not think of the political end. I’ve always wanted to see what happened in continuous transmittal; I’ll be tickled pink to get at the instrument rolls in the station. And a lot of the other engineers will feel the same.”

“We’re already keyed to Plathgol on a second transmitter,” Pat added. “And the Ecthindar indicated they had full operation when it happened, so they’re keyed to five other planets.”

“Bomb-dropping starts in about four hours,” Flavin commented. After that, what?”

“No chance. They’ll go straight through, and the Ecthindar can neutralize them—but one is pretty sure to start blasting here and carry through in full action. Then there’ll be no other transmitter in their station, just a big field on permanent receive.”

The two engineers at the Chicago Branch were busy shooting dice when the four came through the intercity transmitter. There was no one else in the place, and no sign of activity. Word of the proposed bombing had leaked out, and the engineers had figured that answering bombs would come blasting back through Earth teleports. They knew what they’d have done, and didn’t know of the Ecthindar philosophy. The engineers had passed the word to other employees, and only these two were left, finishing a feud of long standing in the time left.

“Know anything about routing?” Vic asked. When they indicated no knowledge, he chased them out on his Teleport Inter-stellar authority and took over. He had no need of more engineers, and they were cynical enough about the eventual chances there to leave gladly. Vic had never had any use for Chicago’s manager and the brash young crew he’d built up; word shouldn’t have gone beyond the top level. If it leaked out to the general public, there’d be a panic for miles around.

But Chicago’s routing setup was the best in the country; he needed it. Now how did he go about getting a staff trained to use it?

“Know how to find things here?” Flavin asked Pat. He accepted her nod, and looked surprised at Ptheela’s equally quick assent. Then he grinned at Vic and began shucking off his coat. “Okay, you see before you one of the best traffic managers that ever helped pull a two-bit railroad out of the red, before I got better offers in politics. I’m good. You get me the dope, Vic can haggle on the transmitter phones, and I’ll route it.”

He was good. Vic watched him take over with surprise, and a sudden growing liking for the man. Flavin had probably been a lot more of a man, before he’d been shoved into politics. Maybe he’d have done less of drinking and picking up prejudices if he’d been working where he knew he was doing a good job. Certainly he had adapted well enough to the present situation, and he looked happier now as he took over.

Flavin’s mind seemed to soak up all routing data at once, from a single look at the complicated blocks of transmitter groups and key-ins. He jumped from step to step without apparent thought, and he had to have information only once before engraving it on his mind. It was a tough nut, since the stations housed six transmitters each, keyed to six planets—but in highly varied combinations: every world had its own group of tie-ins with planets, also. Routing was the most complicated job in the whole problem.

Plathgol was handled by Ptheela, who was still in good standing until the Council would learn of her breaking the law by talking to Vic. There was no trouble there. But trouble soon developed. Ecthinbal had been keyed to only two other planets, it turned out. Vromatchk was completely cold on the idea, and flatly refused. Ee, the other planet, seemed difficult.

It surprised him, because it didn’t fit with Pat’s theories of engineers at all. He scowled at the phone, then whistled again. “Your zeal is commendable. Now put an engineer on!”

The answering whistle carried a fumbling uncertainty of obvious surprise. “I—how did you know? I gave all the right answers.”

“Sure. Right off the Engineer Rule Sheet posted over the transmitter. No real engineer worries that much about them; he has more things to think of. Put the engineer on.”

The answer was still obstinate. “My father’s asleep. He’s tired. Call later.”

The connection went dead at once. Vic called Ecthinbal while clambering into the big pressure suit. He threw the delay switch and climbed into the right capsule. A moment later, an Ecthindar was moving the capsule on a delicate-looking machine to another transmitter. Something that looked like a small tyrannosaurus with about twenty tentacles instead of forelegs was staring in at him a second later, and he knew he was on Ee.

“Take me to the engineer!” he ordered. “At once!”

The great ridges of horn over the eyes came down in a surprisingly human scowl, but the stubbornness was less certain in person. The creature turned and led Vic out to a huge shack outside. In answer to a whooping cry, a head the size of a medium-sized freight car came out of the door, to be followed by a titanic body. The full-grown adult was covered with a thick coat of copy hair.

“Where from?” the Ee engineer whistled. “Wait—I saw a picture once. Earth. Come in. I hear you have quite a problem there.”

Vic nodded. It came as a shock to him that the creature could probably handle the whole station by itself, as it obviously did, and quite efficiently, with that size and all those tentacles. He stated his problem quickly.

The Looech, as it called itself, scratched its stomach with a row of tentacles and pondered. “I’d like to help you. Oh, the empress would have fits, but I could call it an accident. We engineers aren’t really responsible to governments, after all, are we? But it’s the busy season. I’m already behind, since my other engineer got in a duel. That’s why the pup was tending while I slept. You say the field spreads out on continuous transmit?”

“It does, but it wouldn’t much more if there isn’t too long a period.”

“Strange. I’ve thought of continuous transmittal, of course, but I didn’t suspect that. Why, I wonder?”

Vic started to give Ptheela’s explanation of unbalanced resonance between the vacuum of the center and the edges in contact with matter, but dropped it quickly. “I’ll probably know better when I can read the results from the instruments.”

The Looech grumbled to itself. “You suppose you could send me the readings? We’re about on a Galactic level, so it wouldn’t strain the law too much.”

Vic shook his head. “If I can’t complete the chain, there won’t be any readings. I imagine you could install remote cut-offs fairly easily.”

“No trouble, though nobody ever seemed to think they might be needed. I suppose it would be covered under our emergency powers, If we stretch them a little. Oh, blast you, now I won’t sleep for worrying about why the field spreads. When will you begin?”

Vic grinned tightly as they arranged the approximate time and let the Looech carry him back to the capsule. He flashed through Ecthinbal, and climbed out of the Chicago transmitter to find Pat looking worriedly at the capsule, summoned by the untended call announcer.

“You’re right, Pat,” he told her. “Engineers run pretty much to form. Tell Flavin we’ve got Ee.”

But there were a lot of steps to be taken still. He ran into a stumbling block at Norag, and had to wait for a change of shift, before a sympathetic engineer cut the red tape to clear him. And negative decisions here and there kept Flavin jumping to find new routes.

They almost made it, to find a decision had just been reversed on Seloo by some authority who had gotten word of the deal. That meant that other authorities would probably be called in, with more reverses, in time. Once operating, the engineers could laugh at authority, since the remote cut-off could be easily hidden. But time was running out. There were only twenty-seven minutes left before the bombs dropped, and it would take fifteen to countermand their being dropped.

“Give me that,” Flavin ordered, grabbing the phone. “There are times when it takes executives instead of engineers. We’re broken at Seloo. Okay, we don’t know where Seloo ships.” His Galactic Code was halting, but fairly effective. The mechanical chirps from the Seloo operator leaped to sudden haste. A short pause was followed by an argument Vic was too tired to catch, until the final sentence. “Enad to Brjd to Teeni clear.”

“Never heard of Brjd,” he commented.

Flavin managed a ghost of a swagger. “Figured our lists were only partial, and we could stir up another link. Here’s the list. I’ll get Wilkes. Now that we’ve got it, he’ll hold off until we see how it works.”

It was a maze, but the list was complete, from Earth to Ecthinbal, Ee, Petzby, Norag, Szpendrknopalavotschel, Seloo, Enad, Brjd, Teeni, and finally through Plathgol to Earth. Vic whistled the given signal, and the acknowledgments came through. It was in operation. Flavin’s nod indicated Wilkes had confirmed it and held off the bombs.

Nothing was certain, still; it might or might not do the trick. But the tension dropped somewhat. Flavin was completely exhausted. He hadn’t had decent exercise for years, and running from communications to routing had been almost continual. He flopped over on a shipping table. Ptheela bent over him and began massaging him deftly. He grumbled, but gave in, then sighed gratefully.

“Where’d you learn that?”

She managed an Earthly giggle. “Instinct. My ancestors were plants that caught animals for food. We had all manner of ways to entice them—not just odor and looks. I can sense exactly how your body feels in the back of my head. Mm, delicious!”

He struggled at that, his face changing color. Her arms moved slowly, and he relaxed. Finally he reached for a cigar. “I’ll have nightmares, I’ll bet, but it’s worth it. Oh, oh! Trouble!”

The communicators were chirping busily.

“Some of the rulers must be catching on and don’t like it,” Ptheela guessed.

To Vic’s surprise, though, several did like it, and were simply sending along hopes for success. Etchinbal’s message was short, but it tingled along Vic’s nerves: “It is good to have friends.”

Bennington was reporting by normal televisor contact, but while things seemed to be improving, they still couldn’t get near enough to be sure. The field was apparently collapsing as the air was fed inside it, though very slowly.

Ptheela needed no sleep, while Flavin was already snoring. Pat shook her head as Vic started to pull himself up on a table. She led him outside to the back of one of the sheds, where a blanket covered a cot, apparently used by one of the supervisors. She pushed him toward it. As he started to struggle at the idea of using the only soft bed, she dropped onto it herself and pulled him down.

“Don’t be silly, Vic. It’s big enough for both, and it’s better than those tables.”

It felt like pure heaven, narrow though it was. Beside him, Pat stirred restlessly. He rolled over, pulling himself closer to her, off the hard edge of the cot, his arm over and around her.

For a moment, he thought she was protesting, but she merely turned over to face him, settling his arm back. In the half-light, her eyes met his, wide and serious. Her lips trembled briefly under his, then clung firmly. His own responded, reaching for the comfort and end of tension hers could bring.

“I’m glad it’s you, Vic,” she told him softly. Then her eyes closed as he started to answer, and his own words disappeared into a soft fog of sleep.

The harsh rasp of a buzzer woke him, while a light blinked on and off near his head. He shook some of the sleep confusion out of his thoughts, and made out an intercom box. Flavin’s voice came over it harshly and he flipped the switch.

“Vic, where the hell are you? Never mind. Wilkes just woke me up with a call. Vic, it’s helped, but not enough. The field is about even with the building now. It’s stopped shrinking, but we’re still losing air. There’s too much loss at Ecthinbal and at Ee—the engineer there didn’t get the portals capped right, and Ecthinbal can’t do anything. We’re getting about one-third of our air back. And Wilkes can’t hold the pressure for bombing much longer! Get over here.”




VI


“Where’s Ptheela?” Vic asked as he came into the transmitter room. She needed no sleep, and should have taken care of things.

“Gone. Back to Plathgol, I guess,” Flavin said bitterly. “She was flicking out as I woke up. Rats deserting the sinking ship—though I was starting to figure her different. It just shows you can’t trust a plant.”

Vic swept his attention to the communicator panel. The phones were still busy. They were still patient. Even the doubtful ones were now accepting things; but it couldn’t last forever. Even without the risk, the transmitter banks were needed for regular use. Many did not have inexhaustible power sources, either.

A new note cut in over the whistling now, and he turned to the Plathgol phone, wondering whether it was Ptheela and what she wanted. The words were English, but the voice was strange.

“Plathgol calling. This is Thlegaa, Wife of Twelve Husbands, Supreme Plathgol Teleport Engineer, Ruler of the Council of United Plathgol, and hereditary goddess, if you want the whole letterhead. Ptheela just gave me the bad news. Why didn’t you call on us before—or isn’t our air good enough for you?”

“Hell, do you all speak English?” Vic asked, too surprised to care whether he censored his thoughts. “Your air always smelled good to me. Are you serious?”

The chuckle this time wasn’t a mere imitation. Thlegaa had her intonation down exactly. “Sonny, up here we speak whatever our cultural neighbors do. You should hear my French nasals and Vromatchkan rough-breathings. And I’m absolutely serious about the offer. We’re pulling the stops off the transmitter housing. We run a trifle higher pressure than you, so we’ll probably make up the whole loss. But I’m not an absolute ruler, so it might be a good idea to speed things up. You can thank me later. Oh—Ptheela’s just been banned for giving you illegal data. She confessed. When you get your Bennington plant working, she’ll probably be your first load from us. She’s packing up now.”

Flavin’s face held too much relief. Vic hated to disillusion the politician as he babbled happily about always knowing the Plathgolians were swell people. But Vic knew the job was a long way from solved. With Plathgol supplying air, the field would collapse back to the inside of the single transmitter housing, and there should be an even balance of ingoing and outcoming air, which would end the rush of air into the station, and make the circular halls passable, except for eddy currents. But getting into the inner chamber, where the air formed a gale between the two transmitters, was another matter.

Flavin’s chauffeur was asleep at the wheel of the car as they came out of the Bennington local office, yet instinct seemed to rouse him, and the car cut off wildly for the station. Vic had noticed that the cloud around it was gone, and a mass of people was grouped nearby. The wind that had been sucked in and around it to prevent even a tank getting through was gone now, though the atmosphere would probably show signs of it in freak weather reports for weeks after.

Pat had obviously figured out the trouble remaining, and didn’t look too surprised at the gloomy faces of the transmitter crew who were grouped near the north entrance. But she began swearing under her breath, as methodically and levelly as a man. Vic was ripping his shirt off as they drew up.

“This time you stay out,” he told her. “It’s strictly a matter of muscle power against wind resistance, and a man has a woman beat there.”

“Why do you think I was cursing?” she asked. “Take it easy, though.”

The men opened a way for him. He stripped to his briefs, and let them smear him with oil to cut down air resistance a final fraction. Eddy currents caught at him before he went in, but not too strongly. Getting past the first shielding wasn’t too bad. He found the second entrance port through the middle shield, and snapped a chain around his waist.

Then the full picture of what must have happened on Plathgol hit him. Chains wouldn’t have helped when they pulled off the coverings from the entrances, the sudden rush of air must have crushed their lungs and broken their bones, no matter what was done. Imagine volunteering for sure death to help another world! He had to make good on his part.

He got to the inner portal, but the eddies there were too strong to go farther. Even sticking his eyes beyond the edge almost caught him into the blast between the two transmitters. Then he was clawing his way out again.

Amos met him, shaking a gloomy head. “Never make it, Vic. Common sense. I’ve been there three times with no luck. And the way that draft blows, it’d knock even a tractor plumb out of the way before it could reach that hunk of glass.”

Vic nodded. The tanks would take too long to arrive, anyhow, though it would be a good idea to have them called. He yelled to Flavin, who came over on the run, while Vic was making sure that the little regular office building still stood.

“Order the tanks, if we need them,” he suggested. “Get me a rifle, some hard-nosed bullets, an all-angle vise big enough to clamp on a three-inch edge, and two of those midget telesets for use between house and field. Quick!”

Amos stared at him, puzzled, but Flavin’s car was already roaring toward Bennington, with a couple of cops leading the way with open sirens. Flavin was back with everything in twenty minutes, and Vic selected two of the strongest, leanest-looking men to come with him, while Pat went down to set the midget pickup in front of the still-operating televisor between the transmitter chamber and the little office. Vic picked up the receiver and handed the rest of the equipment to the other two.

It was sheer torture fighting back to the inner entrance port, but they made it, and the other two helped to brace him with the chain while he clamped the vise to the edge of the portal, and locked the rifle into it, somehow fighting it into place. In the rather ill-defined picture on the tiny set’s screen, he could see the huge fragment of glass, out of line from either entrance, between two covering uprights. He could just see the rifle barrel also. The picture lost detail in being transmitted to the little office and picked up from the screen for retransmittal back to him, but it would have to do.

The rifle was loaded to capacity with fourteen cartridges. He lined it up as best he could and tightened the vise, before pulling the trigger. The bullet ricocheted from the inner shield and headed toward the glass—but it missed by a good three feet.

He was close on the fifth try, not over four inches off. But clinging to the edge while he pulled the trigger was getting harder, and the wind velocity inside was tossing the bullets off course.

He left the setting, fired four more shots in succession before he had to stop to rest. They were all close, but scattered. That could keep up all day, seemingly.

He pulled himself up again and squeezed the trigger. There was no sound over the roar of the wind—and then there was suddenly a sound, as if the gale in there had stopped to cough.

A blast of air struck, picking all three men up and tossing them against the wall. He’d forgotten the lag before the incoming air could be cut! It could be as fatal as the inrush alone.

But the gale was dying as he hit the wall. His flesh was bruised from the shock, but it wasn’t serious. Plathgol had managed to make their remote control cut out almost to the micro-second of the time when the flow to them had stopped, or the first pressure released—and transmitter waves were supposed to be instantaneous.

He tasted the feeling of triumph as he crawled painfully back. With this transmitter off and the others remote controlled, the whole battle was over. Ecthinbal had keyed out automatically when Earth stopped sending. From now on, every transmitter would have a full set of remote controls, so the trouble could never happen again.

He staggered out, unhooking the chain, while workmen went rushing in. Pat came through the crowd, with a towel and a pair of pants, and began wiping the oil off him while he tried to dress. Her grin was a bit shaky. He knew it must have looked bad when the final counterblast whipped out.

Amos looked up glumly, and Vic grinned at him. “All over, Amos.”

The man nodded, staring at the workmen who were dragging out the great pieces of glass from the building. His voice was strained, unnatural. “Yeah. Common sense solution, Vic.”

Then his eyes swung aside and his face hardened. Vic saw the Envoy shoving through, with two wiry men behind him. The Envoy nodded at Vic, but his words were addressed to Amos. “And it should have been common sense that you’d be caught, Amos. These men are from your F. B. I. They have the men who paid you, and I suppose the glass will prove that it was a normal capsule, simply shocked with superhot spray and overdosed with supersonics. Didn’t you realize that your easy escape to Plathgol was suspicious?”

Pat had come up; her voice was unbelieving. “Amos!”

Amos swung back then. “Yeah, Pat. I’d do it again, and maybe even without the money. You think I like these God damned animals and plants acting so uppity? I liked it good enough before they came. Maybe I didn’t get rid of them, but I sure came close.”

The two men were leading him away as he finished, and Pat stared after him, tears in her eyes.

The Envoy broke in. “He’ll get a regular trial in your country. It looks better for the local governments to handle these things. But I’ll see if he can’t get a lighter sentence than the men who hired him. You did a good job, Vic—you and Pat and Flavin. You proved that Earth can cooperate with other worlds. That is the part that impresses the Council as no other solution could have. Your world and Plathgol have already been accepted officially as full members of the Council now, under Ecthinbal’s tutelage. We’re a little easier about passing information and knowledge to planets that have passed the test. But you’ll hear all that in the announcement over the network tonight. I’ll see you again. I’m sure of that.”

He was gone, barely in time to clear space for Ptheela, as she came trooping up with eight thin, wispy versions of herself in tow. She chuckled. “They promoted me before they banished me, Pat. Meet my eight strong husbands. Now I’ll have the strongest seed on all Earth. Oh, I almost forgot. A present for you and Vic.”

Then she was gone, leading her husbands toward Flavin’s car, while Vic stared down at a particularly ugly tsiuna in Pat’s hands. He twisted his mouth resignedly.

“All right, I’ll learn to eat the stuff,” he told her. “I suppose I’ll have to get used to it. Pat, will you marry me?”

She dropped the tsiuna as she came to him, her lips reaching up for his. It wasn’t until a month later that he found tsiuna tasted better than chicken.




ABOUT GALAXY MAGAZINE


The first issue of Galaxy, dated October 1950, already heralded to the highest standards of the field. The authors it published regularly contributed to the leading magazine Astounding, writing a kind of elegant and humanistic science fiction which although not previously unknown had always been anomalous. Its founding editor, H. L. Gold (1914–1996), was a science fiction writer of some prominence whose editorial background had been in pulp magazines and comic books; however, his ambitions were distinctly literary, and he was deliberately searching for an audience much wider and more eclectic than the perceived audience of science fiction. His goal, he stated, was a magazine whose fiction “Would read like the table of contents of a literary magazine or The Saturday Evening Post of the 21st century, dealing with extrapolation as if it were contemporary.” The magazine, although plagued by distribution difficulties and an Italian-based publisher (World Editions), was an immediate artistic success, and when its ownership was transferred with the issue of August 1951 to its printer Robert M. Guinn, it achieved financial stability for the remainder of the decade.

Galaxy published every notable science fiction writer of its first decade and found in many writers who would become central figures: Robert Sheckley, James E. Gunn, Wyman Guin, and F. L. Wallace, among others. Galaxy revivified older writers such as Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester (whose first novel, The Demolished Man, was commissioned and directed page by page by Gold). John Campbell fought with Astounding and remained an important editor, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (inaugurated a year before Galaxy) held to high standards of literary quality while spreading its contents over two fields, but Galaxy was incontestably the 1950s’ flagship magazine for the acidly satiric, sometimes profoundly comic aspect of its best contributions. Galaxy had a lasting effect not only upon science fiction but upon literature itself. J.G. Ballard stated that he had been deeply affected by Galaxy. Alan Arkin, an actor who became a star after 1960 and won an Oscar in the new millennium, contributed two stories in the mid-fifties.

At this point Gold was succumbing to agoraphobia, physical ills, and overall exhaustion (some of this perhaps attributable to his active service during WWII) against which he had struggled from the outset. (There is creditable evidence that Frederik Pohl was the de facto editor during Gold’s last years.) Gold would return some submissions with notes like: “Garbage,” “Absolute Crap.” Isaac Asimov noted in his memoir “Anthony Boucher wrote rejection slips which read like acceptances. And Horace wrote notes of acceptance which felt like rejections.” Despite this, the magazine retained most of its high standard and also some of its regular contributors (William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Pohl himself). Others could no longer bear Gold’s imperiousness and abusiveness.




ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION NOVELETTES AND NOVELLAS


In the view of James E. Gunn, science fiction as a genre finds its peak in the novella (17,500–40,000 words) and novelette (7,500–17,500 words). Both forms have the length to develop ideas and characters fully but do not suffer from padding or the hortatory aspect present in most modern science fiction novels. The longer story-form has existed since science fictions inception with the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, but Galaxy developed the form to a consistent level of sophistication and efficiency and published more notable stories of sub-novel length than any other magazine during the 50s… and probably in any decade.

The novella and novelette as forms make technical and conceptual demands greater, perhaps even greater than the novel, and Galaxy writers, under founding editor H. L. Gold’s direction, consistently excelled in these lengths. Gold’s most memorable story, “A Matter of Form” (1938) was a long novelette, and he brought practical as well as theoretical lessons to his writers, who he unleashed to develop these ideas. (John Campbell of course, had also done this in the 40s and continued in the 50s to be a directive editor.) It is not inconceivable that many or even most of the contents of the 1950’s Galaxy were based on ideas originated by Gold: golden technology becomes brass and jails its human victims when it runs amok—is certainly one of his most characteristic.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Lester del Rey (1915–1993) was one of the ten or twelve writers most closely associated with John W. Campbell’s “Golden Age” 1940’s Astounding Science Fiction. His most famous story is probably the 1938 robot romance “Helen O’Loy”, his best the 1942 novella “Nerves”, a prescient documentary of catastrophe in a nuclear plant, expanded in the 1950’s to novel length. Del Rey was among the early group of prominent Campbell writers who Horace Gold pursued for Galaxy; “The Wind Between the Worlds” was his second contribution to the magazine. (His first was the time paradox story “It Comes Out Here” which appeared a month earlier, it was a Campbell reject long lost which del Rey reconstructed from memory.)

Del Rey, noted for his humanistic and often sentimental work, published a controversial religious (or anti-religious) novella, “For I Am A Jealous People” in Fred Pohl’s 1956 Star Short Novels and slowly drifted from magazine fiction to juvenile novels (some of them ghosted by Paul Fairman) in the late 50’s. His editorial background (the short-lived Space Science Fiction in 1952 and an earlier term at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency) led him in the mid-seventies to become one of the two founding editors, with his wife Judy-Lynn of Ballantine’s Del Rey Books where he became a powerful editor of some very successful fantasy novels. (Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara was an early discovery.) Judy-Lynn died in 1986 at the age of 43, at the top of her career, Lester slowly drifted into semi- and then full retirement and died a recluse. He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1991.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE eFOREWORD


David Drake, a veteran of the Vietnam Tank Corps, is the author of the Hammers Slammers series which over the last quarter century have become the most successful military science fiction series in the history of the genre; he has also published many bestselling fantasy novels and short stories in Omni, Analog and elsewhere.




ABOUT THE JACKET


COVER IMAGE: “Space-Time In One Easy Lesson” by Ed Emshwiller

Ed Emshwiller (1925–1990) was Galaxy’s dominant artist through the 1950s. His quirky images, perspective, and off-center humor provide perhaps the best realization of the magazine’s iconoclastic, satirical vision. Emshwiller was—matched with Kelly Freas—science fiction’s signature artist through the decade and a half initiated by this color illustration. He and Carol Emshwiller, the celebrated science fiction writer, lived in Long Island during the period of his prominence in science fiction. (Nonstop Press published Emshwiller: Infinity X Two: The Art & Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller, a joint biography and collection of their work in visual and literary medium, in 2007.) In the early 70s, Emshwiller became passionately interested in avant-garde filmmaking, and that passion led him to California, where he spent his last decades deeply involved in the medium of independent film and its community. He abandoned illustration: in Carol’s words “When Ed was through with something he was really through with it.” He died of cancer in 1990. His son, Peter Emshwiller, published a fair amount of science fiction in the 80s and 90s.




Copyright


The Wind Between the Worlds

Copyright © 1951 by World Editions, Inc., renewed 1979 by Lester del Rey

IN A GLASS BRIGHTLY: The Wind Between the Worlds by Lester del Rey

Copyright © 2011 by David Drake

Jacket illustration copyright © 1954 by the Estate of Ed Emshwiller

Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

Special materials copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795321238