The Machine That Floats by Joe Gibson (read aloud .txt) 📖

Foster's shoulder. "You can get a few days off from the plant, can't you?"

"What? Well, yes," Foster stammered. "Of course! But—"

They took off at noon on a cloudy winter day.

They spent the afternoon dividing their attention between the test-flight instruments and the surrounding sky. They hadn't the money to afford elaborate recording mechanisms to graph every moment of the flight onto neat tape-spools; they had to rely on the human eye, the questionably analytical human mind, and the servo-mechanism of a human hand wielding a pencil on a loose-leaf notebook. And they constantly expected to see a razor-winged jet fighter hurtling down from the stratosphere above them, its cannon sparkling the bright flame-color of death.

They didn't talk much that afternoon.

They took turns at the controls and eating until each had consumed his dinner, then gathered tensely in the control pit as the ship bored rumblingly into the black night. Ahead of them was the Mexican Border. Below them and around them, almost scraping the ship's belly, as low as they were, was the jumbled, boulder-strewn Arizona desert bathed in frosty white moonlight. Above were the cold, twinkling stars, the black heavens—and who could tell what radar-equipped night fighter poised above them, ready to peel off and plummet downward, guns blazing—

Then the Border was behind them. They took turns at the controls and instruments again, catching a few winks of sleep between turns. Morning dawned, and they approached the Gulf of Mexico.

Morrow checked their supplies—food and water for the trip, parts and materials stowed in the spacious cargo deck for repairs on the ship if necessary—and they took turns at breakfast. Then he and Foster sat down to an argument about the scientific implications of the gravitors. Foster was of the opinion that Einstein's theory no longer was valid, that Milne's work came closer to the truth but was still vague. Morrow thought differently, and they argued together amicably.

Noon passed, and they were over the green expanse of the Gulf. Smitty called their attention to the short-wave radio. The newscasts were quite interesting.

A professional hunter in Nevada, hired to exterminate a mountain lion which had been slaughtering a rancher's cattle, was surprised when a ship that looked "like a big, black whale" thundered over his head and plunged down behind a nearby ridge. The hunter rode hastily around the ridge, expecting to find the wreck, but the ship had vanished completely "as if the ground up and swallered it!"

A Greyhound bus proceeding across Arizona nearly swerved off the road when "a long, black torpedo at least a hundred feet long" came across the sky "so fast the air thunder-clapped behind it" and left "a trail of blue fire" behind it. Passengers on the bus verified the driver's story, with some minor variations.

Two farmers standing in a field in northern Nebraska saw a flight of six "fish-shaped" objects go over, each having a shadow "big as a barn" on the snow.

A noted banker in Chicago created an uproar when he reported seeing "a giant, black shape" rise from the waters of Lake Michigan as he was driving home in the afternoon.

An amateur astronomer in Alabama reported sighting a "strange ship" rising upward from the Earth's atmosphere "on a pillar of rocket fire." The ship had mysteriously disappeared "as soon as it left the atmosphere," the middle-aged hobbyist stated.

A Swedish Air Force jet-pilot claimed he had sighted, given chase, fired at, and seen his tracers bounce harmlessly off a "black, fish-like craft" flying at 40,000 feet above the Baltic Sea.

The news commentators added, in significant tones, that no airline pilots had yet reported seeing such craft. One added somewhat caustically that due to previous experiences the pilots probably wouldn't report anything to the authorities even if they did see anything, since the authorities persisted in treating such reports and the pilots who made them with painful ridicule; the commentator then launched into a condemnation of the current Administration.

"It would seem," Smitty observed from all this, "that we are quite famous!"

"'Notorious' is the word, I believe," Foster countered drily. "If this keeps up, some congressman is likely to introduce a bill providing that the government produce some Martians with black spaceships. The voters will demand it."

"It's good disguise for us, anyway," Morrow mused.

"Uh huh!" Foster grunted in reproof. "Unless we're found out, that is. If the public discovers that we've hoodwinked 'em and there aren't any Martian immigrants at all, they'll probably howl for our blood! I think this is going to develop into a scare-issue, Bill. I'm afraid people will want it, as an excuse to work off some of their nervous tension."

"Fine!" Smitty said grimly. "If anybody's trying to catch us, a general scare-issue will have 'em looking all over the place. We're already supposed to be in Nebraska, in Lake Michigan, in the Baltic Sea, and somewhere out in space!"

"Invisible, too!" Morrow laughed.

They passed over Louisiana in the early morning and proceeded northward up the Mississippi valley. Indicated air-speed was two hundred and thirty-eight miles per hour. Dawn was blanketed in a pouring rain. They turned off up the Ohio valley and reached the Allegheny Plateau in West Virginia, flying by instruments, topographical maps, and radio omni-range navigation.

And once they almost blundered straight into a big, six-engined commercial stratoliner. The stratoliner pulled up almost at the last minute.

By mid-afternoon, they were approaching Pennsylvania. The drizzling rain had changed to snow and sleet. Then they were forced down. The ship's air-speed fell off with an alarming suddenness. Then the entire tail structure took on a heavy load of ice.

They settled tail-down into a clearing on a densely wooded slope. The ship wallowed deep into the soft, slushy snow.

The three men got together over the table in the forward lounge. Foster kept running his hands through his hair, nervously. "We're stuck," he said. "We're stuck here for the winter unless we can rebuild the tail assembly. That jet chamber has to be changed."

It was obvious, after they had diagrammed the readings from their various flight-test instruments. The ship's hull had become completely polarized to the gravitors' field; the field influenced the air flowing over the hull, so much so that a simple air-scoop couldn't pick up air to blow through the propulsion unit and out the tail-jets. The air intake had to be designed to work on the disturbed air-flow.

"It's a little like those 'space-warps' in science-fiction yarns," Foster explained. "There's a warp of the gravitational and magnetic fields around the ship. The air-flow entering that warp bends and twists to follow it."

"We ought to redesign the entire hull to comply with that warped air-flow," Smitty suggested absently.

"The hull doesn't matter so much," Foster contradicted. "We could design it in any shape, though a sharp nose and thin guide-fins are still effective. You just happened to hit the right answer when you placed the control-surfaces forward on the nose of the ship."

"Talking isn't going to get us out of here," Morrow remarked grimly. "Let's get to work on that tail assembly."

"I got news for you!" Smitty muttered. "If we rebuild the tail with our power-tools, it'll use up the juice in our batteries. We won't have enough to get home."

"We must get our batteries recharged, then," Morrow said. "Will we have enough juice left to get out of here when we're finished?"

Smitty nodded. "And then we'll be up a creek. Where do we get our batteries recharged?"

"Couldn't one of us venture into a town around here and buy a few batteries?" Foster suggested. "Without wearing our Martian costumes, of course."

"Our Martian costumes as you call 'em are at least warm!" Smitty retorted. "It's a little cold to go wandering around out there in our coveralls."

"Wouldn't pay to risk it, anyway," Morrow said. "Suppose someone has seen our ship flying around here? Suppose they make a report that brings in the authorities and—"

"But who'd think a man in coveralls just stepped off a spaceship?" Foster persisted.

"Uh huh. You have a point, there. But if the authorities were investigating, they'd check railroad and truck shipments of any plastic or metal aircraft construction materials into this region, and where they were delivered. They'd check local machine shops, auto-parts shops, aviation parts dealers—and they'd check garages! If one of us walks up to a garage, buys a battery, and walks away carrying it on his shoulder, don't you think the garage mechanic is going to remember him, what he looked like, how tall he was, what he weighed? How often does anyone without a car buy an auto battery and carry it away on his shoulder?"

"We might 'borrow' somebody's car," Smitty mused, grinning.

"We might be caught ten minutes afterward, too," Foster objected. "The police are quite efficient at catching car thieves."

"Then we need a car," Morrow concluded. "Smitty, can we lift out of here once we've rebuilt our jets?"

"We could travel a few hundred miles," Smitty conceded. "Not that it would get us anywhere."

Morrow grinned crookedly. "Would it get us to Westerton, New Jersey?"

It would. And the next night, it did.

The three men crouching in the control pit of the sleek, black ship looked red-eyed and haggard from fatigue and lack of sleep. They had stripped off their shoes and socks to let them dry near the ship's heater, and their damp, mud-stained coveralls were drying on their bodies. Foster had developed a wracking cough and his nose was running.

The air-speed indicator registered three hundred and sixty-eight miles per hour. Smitty stared at it, glumly. "Let's just hope it doesn't fade out on us again," he muttered.

The test of the ship's performance had been the whole purpose of their long, cross-country trip, Morrow thought wordlessly. They had made every preparation they could think of for the trip. Each had a special suit with helmet and gravitor-tank—and one additional feature: a one-man propulsion unit. They'd developed that in the workshop when they ran one of the suit's gravitors until its field had completely polarized the suit; then, when the suit was suspended high over a small wood fire, the smoke from the fire had risen up into the suit's gravitor field and twisted and swirled around to conform to the warp of that field. Knowing those twists and swirls, Foster had designed a small jet unit with air intake slots and jet-pipes which utilized the air-flow through the gravitor field.

Of course, there was one fault in this jet unit: it was designed to use the air-flow around a gravitor standing still. With the gravitor in motion, that air-flow was altered somewhat. But when Smitty had floated up in his suit with that little jet unit built into its tank, he had managed to fly around the sawmill yard at a good fifteen miles per hour. The air drag against his legs, since the gravitor made him weightless, was considerable—it flattened him out in horizontal flight and, by swinging his legs from one side to the other, he was quite capable of controlling the direction of his flight. The lift or descent of the gravitor sufficed for climbing or diving maneuvers. He'd looked like a human fish swimming in the sky.

For the ships, of course, such a jet unit wouldn't do. The ships needed jets which would work while in motion, at speeds exceeding a hundred miles an hour. Thus, they'd had to fly the ship until its gravitors completely polarized its hull. Then they had to determine the air-flow over that hull at flying speeds with flow and pressure indicators mounted on the hull. Then they had to rebuild the tail-jets to conform with their findings.

A flight half-way across the continent and back to their workshop would have served for that. But then, they had to be sure that there was no further change in the air-flow or polarization or gravitor field. For that reason, they had decided on this trip all the way across the country. It would give them a complete, thorough test of the ship.

They had even gone so far as to arm themselves for defense, in case they were forced down anywhere and someone tried to get rough with them. In a strictly legal sense, the streamlined plastic pistols they carried were not lethal weapons.

Technically, those pistols were ray-guns. They fired a beam of light.

That light came from a standard photographer's flash-bulb. It was focused into a tight, narrow beam by the pistol's barrel reflector. It wouldn't penetrate the human skin; it wouldn't even raise a blister. It was almost physically harmless. But directed at a person's face at a distance of no more than twenty feet, it would leave them totally blind for about three minutes. A simple flash-bulb delivered a nice, bright flash.

A person suddenly struck blind wasn't likely to be in any condition or mood to cause trouble.

All other preparations for the trip had been as completely thorough, as carefully planned. Yet they had made one slight error. They had forgotten to include extra batteries