"Yes, that did the trick!" Dalgren exclaimed. "Keep going!"
Thrax moved the rod slowly back and forth several times, and the contrivance walked its way jerkily across the slab. As it approached the edge, however, its motion became stiffer and slower, and Thrax had to push harder on the rod to keep it moving. "It's starting to jam," he said. "I can feel it."
"Hmm." Dalgren stooped to peer at the horizontal guides. "Ahah, yes, I think I can see why. The main guide is expanding and starting to jam." He sighed and sat down on a stool. "I'm not sure how we get around it. It may need an additional compensating liner."
Every problem solved seemed to introduce a new complication. They had adjusted the device for correct operation early in the morning, but as the world shrank from east to west under Gralth's kneading, the mechanism's dimensions had changed. Automatically, Thrax began mentally composing a prayer to Gralth. Then he checked himself, remembering that those were old methods that had to be set aside firmly if the new ones were ever to be understood. At the same time, he felt an inner twinge of discomfort at such defiance of all his years of conditioning.
As if echoing his doubts, a voice spoke accusingly from the doorway. "Sorcerers! Blasphemy! These things belong to a higher realm. They are not
meant
to be meddled with here in the world of Waroth. That is why the powers are failing. Just as you are abandoning faith, so are the gods abandoning us."
It was Keyalo, a foster son of Dalgren and Thrax's aunt, Yonel. He was a couple of years older than Thrax and had resented Thrax's intrusion into the household ever since Thrax's own family had been lost when Vandros, the underworld god whose blood ran as rivers of light, punished the Dertelians by consuming five villages in a lake of fire.
"No one can be sure of that, Keyalo," Dalgren replied. His voice was curt. Keyalo had never expressed gratitude for being taken in, and there was little liking between the two of them either way. The fact that he had come down to the basement at all indicated that he was out to cause trouble.
"The priests
know
!" Keyalo retorted. "The gods are putting us to a test. And we shall all be judged by the failures of those who deny them, such as
you.
"
"Appeasing the gods, angering the gods . . ." Dalgren shook his head. "I'm beginning to suspect that it's all in the mind. The world runs according to its own rules, and what we think they influence is all our imagination. When has anyone ever—"
Without warning, Keyalo stepped forward and shot out an arm in the manner of a Master casting a firebolt, pointing at the mechanism on the slab. The tip of his finger swelled and glowed faintly for an instant—most people could achieve that—and then returned to normal without discharging. Keyalo stared at it in anger and surprised disappointment.
Perhaps he had thought that a concentrated moment of belief and will would induce a god to favor him.
Keyalo's problem was that he was lazy. He hung around the disciples and the Masters, and sometimes attended the ceremonies, and even a few of the lessons, occasionally; but he could never have mustered the concentration and discipline to enter one of the orders and train into an adept. Probably that was why he was so jealous of Thrax, whom he knew had the potential. But in Keyalo's eyes Thrax not only abused his ability but, what was worse, misdirected it upon heresy.
"We are busy," Dalgren said in a tight voice. "Your words are wasted here, Keyalo. Leave us alone."
"It is those like you who are bringing destruction on all of us," Keyalo hissed. Then, white-faced with rage, he turned and left the room.
Dalgren took the rods and walked the device back across the slab in silence while the mood cleared. "They say there are devices in Hyperia that propel themselves," he murmured absently. "Imagine, Thrax, a chariot without a
drodhz
. What form of propulsion could move it, I wonder?"
"They say there are devices that fly, too," Thrax pointed out, his voice registering the obvious impossibility of such a notion. "The stories become exaggerated with telling and retelling."
Dalgren's expression remained serious. "But why not?" he asked. "It simply involves the same way of looking at things: Instead of jumping to the conclusion that
it can't work because
, try saying,
it could work, if . . .
You've only got to open your eyes to see that the world is filled with animals that propel themselves and creatures that fly. If we can make other objects do whatever they do, then why shouldn't they behave in the same way?"
Thrax nodded, but his expression remained unconvinced. "Maybe I'll believe it when I've seen a
drodhz
less carriage," he said. "You know, Uncle, it wouldn't surprise me if you start talking about spinning objects next."
Dalgren let go the rods and straightened up. "Spinning objects?" he repeated. "Now you are getting fanciful. I couldn't even imagine how to begin."
Thrax stared out at the patch of sky visible through the top of the basement window. "It's the same seers who tell of them," he pointed out.
"Ah yes. But if it's true, it's something that can only exist in Hyperia. Our animals prove that at least the
concepts
of objects propelling themselves and objects flying are possible in Waroth. The precedents exist. But we don't have a precedent for what you're talking about. If it's possible at all, space itself must be different from what we know in this world. And quite beyond my ability to contemplate."
Thrax continued to stare up at the window. "Another universe, beyond our wildest imaginings," he said distantly.
"I think I know how to compensate for the daily contraction, now," Dalgren muttered, returning his attention to the mechanism.
"Where objects spin . . ." Thrax went on dreamily, more to himself.
"Then we'll have to think about getting it to turn corners."
"And inhabited by strange beings."
"We'd need two more slides at the top."
"What kind of beings could they be? . . ."
Dr. Victor Hunt closed the starter circuit, and the turbine hybrid engine of the GM Husky groundmobile standing in the driveway outside the garage kicked into life. As Hunt eased the throttle valve open with a screwdriver, the pitch rose, then settled at a smooth, satisfying whine. He held the position steady and cocked an inquiring eye at his neighbor, Jerry Santello, who was on the far side of the opened hood, tapping at buttons and watching the screen of a portable test unit connected to the vehicle's drive processor.
"It's looking better, Vic. Try it a few revs higher . . . Now gun it a few times . . . Yup, I think we've cracked it."
"How about the burn on idle?" Hunt ran the turbine down to a murmur while Jerry inspected the panel; then Hunt speeded it back up a little and repeated the process several times.
"Good," Jerry pronounced. "I reckon that's it. It had to be the equalizer. Shut it down now, and let's have that beer."
"That sounds like one of the better ideas I've heard today." Hunt turned the valve fully back, operated a cutout, and the engine died.
Jerry unplugged the test lead, which rewound itself into the case. He closed the lid, gathered together the tools they had been using, and returned them to their box. "How is it with you English guys? Is it right, you drink it warm? Am I supposed to put it in the cooker or something?"
"Oh, don't believe everything they tell you, Jerry."
Jerry looked relieved. "So it's okay normal?"
"Sure."
"Hang on there while I get a couple from inside. We can sit out here and take in the sun."
"Even better."
While Jerry's swarthy, mustached form, clad in beach shorts and a navy sweatshirt, flip-flopped its way eupeptically up the shallow, curving steps flanking the rockery by the side of the apartment, Hunt walked around the front of the Husky to toss a few more items into the toolbox. Then he sat down on a grassy hump below the wall separating Jerry's driveway from his own and fished a pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket.
Around him, the other apartment units of Redfern Canyons clustered in comfortable, leafy seclusion on terraced slopes divided by steep ravines climbing from a central valley. The main valley contained a common access road running alongside a creek that widened at intervals into pools fringed by rocky shelves and overhangs. Although the name was more than a little forced in the middle of Maryland less than a dozen miles north of the center of Washington, D.C., and the artificiality of the pseudo-Californian contouring went without saying, on the whole it had all been pleasingly accomplished. The effect worked. After the months that he had spent inside the cramped, miniature metal cities of the UN Space Arm's long-range mission ships and at its bases down on the ice fields beneath the methane haze of Ganymede, Hunt wasn't complaining.
He lit a cigarette and exhaled, smiling faintly to himself as the vista of Redfern Canyons brought to mind the two directors from an Italian urban development corporation who had approached him several days previously. Could the Ganymean "gravitic" technology—which enabled gravitational fields to be generated, manipulated, and switched on and off at will as readily as familiar electrical and magnetic effects—be somehow engineered into a piece of mountainous terrain, they had wanted to know, in such a way as to render it gravitationally flat? The idea was to create high-income habitats, or even entire townships, in places that would offer all the visual aesthetics of the Dolomites, and yet be as easy to walk around as Constitution Gardens. Ingenious, Hunt had conceded.
And typical of human adaptability.
It was hardly a year since mankind had made the first contact with intelligent aliens and brought them back to Earth; and as if that weren't enough, the discovery of an interstellar alien culture, and Earth's opening what promised to become a permanent relationship with it, had followed less than half as long since, with all the promise which that portended of unimaginable gains to human knowledge and the greatest single upheaval ever to occur in the history of the race. The whole edifice of science could crash and have to be rebuilt afresh; every philosophic insight might be demolished to its foundations—but people only became seriously affected when they thought they saw a way of making a buck or two. The human alacrity for getting back to business-as-usual would never cease to amaze him, Hunt thought. Ganymeans had often marveled at the same thing.
Jerry came ambling back down from the house with a six-pack of Coors, a large bag of potato chips, and a tub of onion-flavored dip. He perched himself on one of the rocks lining the foot of the bank that Hunt was sprawled on and passed him a can. "I thought you guys were supposed to drink it warm," he said again.
"English beer is heavier," Hunt said. "If it's too cold you lose the taste. It's better at room temperature, that's all—which in a pub means cellar temperature, usually a bit less than the bar. Nobody actually warms it."
"Oh."
"And the lighter lager stuff, which is closer to yours, they prefer chilled, just like you do. So we're not really so alien, after all."
"That's nice to know, anyhow. We've had enough aliens showing up around here recently." Jerry flipped open his own can and tilted his head back to take a swig; then he wiped his mustache with the back of a hand. "Hell, what am I telling you for? You must get tired of people asking about them."
"Sometimes, Jerry. It depends on the people."
"There's a couple I know across in Silver Spring—old friends—with this kid who's about five. Last time I was over there, he wanted to know what planet Australians come from."
"What planet?"
Jerry nodded. "Yeah, see: Austr-alians. It was the way he heard it. He figured they had to be from someplace else."
"Oh, I get it." Hunt grinned. "Smart kid."
"I never thought about it that way in over thirty years."
"Kids don't have the ruts yet that adults have carved into their minds. They're born logical. Crooked thinking has to be taught."
"It doesn't work that way in your area, though—science? That right?" Jerry said.
"Oh, don't believe that myth. If anything, it's worse. You always have to wait for a generation of entrenched authority to die off before anything new happens. It's not like revolutions in your business. At least in politics you can get rid of the obstructions yourself and move things along."
"But at least you always know you've got a job," Jerry pointed out.
"There is that side to it, I suppose," Hunt agreed.
Although still officially an employee of the CIA at Langley, Jerry had been on extended leave for three months. With the residual Soviet-Western rivalry transforming into economic competition, and the global development of nuclear technology spelling an end to the dependence of advanced nations on oil-rich, medieval dictator-states and sheikhdoms, the world had been on its way to resolving the twentieth century's legacy of political absurdities even before the first Ganymean contact. That had shaken things up enough, even though it involved only a single shipload of time-stranded aliens. But after the meeting with the Thuriens, immediately following that event, nobody knew what the next ten years would hold in store. Few doubted, however, that there was little in the realm of human affairs that would stand unaffected.
"Although, I don't know . . . with all those new worlds out there, you never know what we might find," Hunt said. "It's your line of business that the Ganymeans can't compete in, not mine. I wouldn't think of turning my badge in just yet if I were you."
Jerry seemed unconvinced as he took another draft, but there was nothing to make an issue over. "Let's hope you're right," he replied. After a pause he went on. "So I guess it's all keeping you pretty busy over at Goddard, eh? I hear you coming and going at all hours of the day and night."
"We're up to our ears there," Hunt agreed. He snorted lightly. "And the funny thing is that at the beginning of the last century it was the scientists who were talking about handing their badges in—half of them, anyway—because they didn't think there was anything worthwhile left to discover. So maybe you can take some heart from that."