The Wind Between the Worlds - Lester del Rey, ebook, Temp
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Wind Between the Worlds(by Lester del Rey)' IIt 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 seem to help much. Vie Peters shook his head, knocking the mop of yellow hair out of his eyes. He twisted his lanky, angular figure 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 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. Clothstretched tight across a woman's 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; her face had too much honest intelligence for that. 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, Vie," she told him. "Pheooh! I'm melting. . . . So what happened to your wife?"He shrugged. "Married a 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. Funny, they gave up the idea of going to the moon the same day she got the divorce."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 the world was linked through Teleport Interstellar with races all across the galaxy.Man had always been a topsy-turvy 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. Most races, apparently, developed space travel thousands of years 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 two students had analyzed the results, checked the math again, and come up with an answer they didn't believe. But when they built two such machines, carefully made as nearly identical as possible, their wild idea had proved true; when the machines were turned on, anything in them simply changed places?even though the machines were miles apart.One of the students gave the secret away, and DuQuesne was forced to give a public demonstration. Before the eyes of a numberof world-famous scientists and half a hundred reporters, a full ton of coal changed places with a ton of bricks in no visible time. Then, while the reporters were dutifully taking down DuQuesne's explanation of electron waves that covered the universe and identity shifts, something new was added. Before their eyes, in the machine beside them, a round ball appeared, suspended in midair. It had turned around twice, disappeared for a few seconds, and popped back, darting down to shut off the machines.For a week, the papers had been filled with the attempts to move the sphere from the machine, crack it open, or at least distract it long enough to cut the machines on again. By the end of that time, it was obvious that more than Earth science was involved. Poor DuQuesne was going crazy with a combination of frustration and crackpot publicity.Vic's mind had been filled with Martians then, and he'd managed to be on the outskirts of the crowd that was present when the sphere came to life, rose up, cut on the machine, and disappeared again. He'd been staring at where it had been when the Envoy had appeared. After that, he'd barely had time to notice that the Envoy seemed to be a normal human before the police had begun chasing the crowd away.The weeks that followed had been filled with the garbled hints that were enough to drive all science fiction fans delirious, though most of the world seemed to regard it as akin to the old flying saucer scare. The Envoy saw the President and the Cabinet. The Envoy met with the United Nations. The Envoy was admittedly a robot! India walked out; India came back. Congress protested secret treaties. General Autos held a secret meeting with United Analine. The Envoy would address the world in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese.There were hundreds of books on that period now, and most schoolboys knew the speech by heart. The Galactic Council had detected the matter transmittal radiation. By Galactic Law, Earth had thus earned the rights to provisional status in the Council through discovery of the basic principle. The Council would now send Bet-zian engineers to build transports to six planets scattered over the galaxy, chosen as roughly comparable to Earth's culture. The transmitters used for such purposes would be owned by the Galactic Council, as a nonprofit business, to be manned by Earth people who would be trained at a school set up under DuQuesne.In return, nothing was demanded. And no further knowledgewould be forthcoming. Primitive though we were by the standards of most worlds, we had earned our place on the Council?but we could swim up the rest of the way by ourselves.Surprisingly, the first reaction had been one of wild enthusiasm. It wasn't until later that the troubles began. Vie had barely made his way into the first engineering class out of a hundred thousand ap-licants. Now, twelve years after graduation . . .Pat's voice cut in on his thoughts. "All tightened up here, Vie. 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, the crew was on standby. Pat lifted an eyebrow at the grizzled, cadaverous head operator. "Okay, Amos. Plathgol standing by?"Amos pulled his six-foot-two up from his slump and indicated the yellow standby 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?the advance worlds could do it safely?but it involved the danger of something materializing to occupy the same space as something else?even air molecules; when space cracked open under that strain, the results were catastrophic.Amos whistled into the transport-wave interworld phone in the code that was universal between worlds where many races could not vocalize, 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 chuckled in satisfaction. "Tsiuna. Good eating. I got friends on Plathgol that like rabbit. Want some of this, Pat?"Vie 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 and pulled out the creature.Pat hefted it. "Big one. Bring it over to my place and I'll fry it for you and Vie. How's the Dirac meter read, Vie?""On the button." The 7 percent power loss was gone now, after a week of hard work 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, Vie. 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 one Ecthinbal operator that the Betz II boys installed us wrong. When I got sympathy instead of indignation, 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, Vie? 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 won't be a one-night stand," he told her. "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 knew their stuff, even if they did look like big slugs with tentacles and with 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 e...
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]