The Machine That Saved The World Part 5

"You got something now. Betsy's a Mahon-modified device. Every receiver that picked up one of those crazy broadcasts broke down before it was through. She takes 'em in her stride--especial with Al and Gus to help her. Wouldn't it be reasonable to guess that Mahon machines are--uh--especial adapted to handle intertemporal communication?"

"Very reasonable!" said Howell dourly. "Very! The broadcast said that the wave-type produced unpredictable surges of current. Ordinary machines do find it difficult to work with whatever type of radiation that can be."

"Betsy chokes off those surges," observed the sergeant. "With Gus and Al to help, she don't have no trouble. We hadn't ought to need to make any six transmitters if we put Mahon-unit machines together for the job!"

"Quite right," agreed Lecky, mildly. "And it is odd--"

"Yeah," said the sergeant. "It's plenty odd my great-great-great-grandkids haven't got sense enough to do it themselves!"

He went to a shelf and brought down a boxed machine,--straight from the top-secret manufactory of Mahon units. It had never been activated. Its standby light did not glow. Sergeant Bellews ripped off the carton and said reflectively:

"You hate to turn off a machine that's got its own ways of working. But a machine that ain't been activated has not got any personality. So you don't mind starting it up to turn it off later."

He opened the adjustment-cover and turned something on. The standby light glowed. Closely observed, it was not a completely steady glow.

There were the faintest possible variations of brightness. But there was no impression of life.

Graves said:

"Why doesn't it flicker like the others?"

"No habits," said the sergeant. "No experience. It's like a newborn baby. It'll get to have personality after it's worked a while. But not now."

He went across the shop again. He moved out a heavy case, and twisted the release, and eased out a communicator of the same type--Mark IV--as Betsy back in the Communications room. Howell went to help him. Graves tried to a.s.sist. Lecky moved other things out of the way. They were highly eminent scientists, and Metech Sergeant Bellews was merely a non-commissioned officer in the armed forces. But he happened to have specialized information they had not. Quite without condescension they accepted his authority in his own field, and therefore his equality. As civilians they had no rank to maintain, and they disagreed with each other--and would disagree with the sergeant--only when they knew why.

Which was one of the reasons why they were eminent scientists.

Sergeant Bellews brought out yet another box. He unrolled cables. He selected machines whose flickering lights seemed to bespeak eagerness to be of use. He coupled them to the newly unboxed machines, whose lights were vaguely steady.

"Training cables," he said over his shoulder. "You get one machine working right, and you hook it with another, and the new machine kinda learns from the old one. Kinda! But it ain't as good as real experience.

Not at first."

Presently the lights of the newly energized machines began to waver in somewhat the manner of the ready-for-operation ones. But they did not give so clear an impression of personality.

"Look!" said Sergeant Bellews abruptly. "I got to check with you. The more I think, the more worried I get."

"You begin to believe the broadcasts come from the future?" demanded Graves. "And it worries you? But they do not speak of Mahon units--"

"I don't care where they come from," said the sergeant. "I'm worryin'

about what they are! The guy in the broadcast--not knowing Mahon units--said we'd have to make half a dozen transmitters so they'd take over one after another as they blew out. You see what that means?"

Lecky said crisply:

"You pointed it out before. There is something in the wave-type which--you would say this, Sergeant!--which machines do not like. Is that the reasoning?"

"Uh-uh!" The sergeant scowled. "Machines work by the golden rule. They try to do unto you what they want you to do unto them. Likes an'

dislikes don't matter. I mean that there's something about that wave-type that machines _can't_ take! It busts them. If it sort of explodes surges of current in 'em--Look! Any running machine is a dynamic system in a object. A jet-plane operating is that. So's a water-spout. So's a communicator. But if you explode surges of heavy current in a dynamic system in a operating machine--things get messed up. The operating habit is busted to h.e.l.l. I'm saying that if this wave-type makes crazy surges of current start up--why--if the surges are strong enough they'll bust not only a communicator but a jet-plane.

Or a water-spout. Anything! See?"

Lecky blinked and suddenly went pale.

"But," said Howell reasonably, "you said that Betsy handled it.

Especially well when linked with other Mahon machines."

"Yeah," said the sergeant.

"I think," observed Graves jerkily, "that you are preparing new machines, without developed--personalities, because you think that if they make this special-type wave they'll be broken."

"Yeah," said the sergeant, again. "The signal Betsy was amplifyin'

coulda been as little as a micro-micro-watt. At its frequency an' type, she'd choke it down if it was more. But even a micro-micro-watt bothered Betsy until she got Al and Gus to help. She was fair screamin' for somebody to come help her hold it. But the three of them done all right."

Howell conceded the point.

"That seems sound reasoning."

"But you don't broadcast with a micro-micro-watt. You use a h.e.l.l of a lot more power than that! The transmitter the guy in the screen said to make was a twenty-kilowatt job. Not too much for a broadcast of sine waves, but a h.e.l.l of a lot to be turned loose, in waves that have Betsy hollerin' at the power she was handlin'!"

"It might break even the Mahon machines in this installation?" demanded Howell.

"You're gettin' warm," said the sergeant.

Graves said:

"You mean it might break all operating communicators in a very large area?"

"You're gettin' hot," said the sergeant grimly.

Lecky wetted his lips.

"I think," he said very carefully, "that you suspect it is a wave-type which will break any dynamic system, in any sort of object a dynamic system can exist in."

"Yeah," said the sergeant. He waited, looking at Lecky.

"And," said Lecky, "not only operating machines are dynamic systems.

Living plants and animals are, too. So are men."

"That's what I'm drivin' at," said Sergeant Bellews.

"So you believe," said Lecky, very pale indeed, "that we have been given the circuit-diagram of a transmitter which will broadcast a wave-type which destroys dynamic systems--life as well as the operation of machines. Persons--in the future or an alien creature in a s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p, or perhaps even the Compubs--are furnis.h.i.+ng us with designs for transmitters of death, to be linked together so that if one fails the others will carry on. And they lure us to destroy ourselves by lying about who they are and what they propose."

"They're lyin'," said the sergeant. "They say they're in the future and they don't know a thing about Mahon units. Else they'd use 'em."

Lecky wetted his lips again.

"And--if they are not in the future, they are trying to get us to destroy ourselves because that would be safer and surer than trying to destroy us by--say--transmitters of death dropped upon us by parachute.