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

"As one gets used to it," he continued unmindfully, "it fades to its proper insignificance. Then a man can truly visualize the worth of feminine companionship—the slippers, the evening paper, the scratching of one's back—"

Gwyn was laughing. The tension was going out of her shapely, young body. Her gaze was mirthful, speculative—especially when her glance slid over to Morrow.

"One finds," Foster went on, "that the prime essence of—of—"

He broke off with a violent sneeze.

Morrow finished his coffee, set his cup aside, and rose. "We'd better take off," he said flatly. He turned and faced them.

Smitty and Foster were looking at him with a silent reproof. Gwyn's eyes were on the floor. She set her cup aside, untouched.

Morrow returned their look without expression. Something danced and giggled and rolled, hugging its sides with laughter, inside him, but he kept it off his face.

"Gwyn!" he said. His tone was sharp, insistent.

She stood up uncertainly. "I'd—I'd better be getting home, too," she said.

"Right." He nodded. "We've got to get off before sunrise catches us—we'll be safe over the Pennsylvania brush country."

"All right." She moved toward him, toward the bulk-head door at his back.

He reached out and touched her shoulder, stopping her before him. "When we get back, I'll write you," he said gruffly. "Meanwhile, you can be straightening out your affairs here, and—in a couple of weeks or so—"

She looked at him, then. Eyes wide open and shining, lips parted.

"Well, don't just stand there!" Smitty bellowed indignantly. "Go on and kiss her!"

It was hardly a month later when Morrow stood in the doorway of the sawmill-workshop, his arm around Gwyn, and said, "We need a good mechanical engineer! Can't get anywhere without him—"

And a small, gray-haired man sat up in bed, a few nights later, and stared at the two strange creatures standing before him. Their heads were dark, featureless globes. Their bodies were covered with a bright, shimmering skin. He noted vaguely that the female of the species was stacked quite well.

"Can't do anything without a good structural engineer!" the little man snapped angrily, a few months later, as they were standing around a littered workbench.

A slender, middle-aged woman stepped off the bus and walked up the quiet, dark street toward her home. Then she froze, a scream stuck in her throat, as several weird creatures swarming out of the shadows....

A Northern Airlines pilot glanced out at the port wing of the giant, humming stratoliner. His mouth fell open, then he grabbed his co-pilot's shoulder and pointed out toward the wingtip.

Two sleek, fish-like little ships were flying perfect formation with the big plane, their black silhouettes outlined sharply in the warm summer moonlight.

An Air Force pilot rode his powerful, deadly jet-fighter across the desert country, thinking of the wife and children waiting for him in Los Angeles. Suddenly, he tensed, staring over the side. Far below, a black shape was outlined against the gray earth.

Quickly, the pilot radioed his flight h.q. and fired his guns, blasting their muzzle-covers away. Then he peeled over into a dive and went screaming downward. The black shape appeared on his sights, his thumb pressed the fire-button—no time to set up for auto-fire—

And then, the black shape was gone!

The wind stopped screaming around the little ship as Smitty cut its gravitors back in, halting its helpless plunge. He pointed its needle-nose up the black maw of a deep canyon and glanced upward, grinning as he thought what must be going through that jet jockey's mind. Which way'd he go?

Just let 'em try following a "spaceship" through one of these twisting canyons! At a jet-fighter's thousand-mile-an-hour combat speed, just let 'em try!

But, as Morrow discovered, a heliocopter could follow anywhere. It wasn't when he and Gwyn drove into Stockton to get married, but later, when they were playing follow-the-leader in silvery wonderland of clouds under a full moon. He and Gwyn wore gravitor-units strapped to their backs, with the harness incorporated into a swim-suit attire, without helmets or any other garments. It was a warm summer night filled with cool breeze that caressed their skin as they circled and skimmed over and around the bright masses of cloud.

A civilian pilot riding his little ram-jet heliocopter southward toward 'Frisco saw them gliding around the clouds at approximately the same moment Morrow caught sight of him. The 'copter gave chase. Morrow and Gwyn parted, trying to confuse the pilot, but the 'copter swung on its whirling blades and went after Gwyn. Its speed was greater than hers and it was rapidly overtaking her—the pilot jockeying it into position so its blades would strike her. Apparently, the pilot had a morbid sense of humor.

Seeing this, Morrow swung back, intercepted the chase, and swooped low under the 'copter, trying to unnerve the pilot. But the pilot merely waved at him and laughed, shouting something about "Gonna get one of you, anyway!" that Morrow barely heard.

He circled and dived at the 'copter again, fumbling at his belt. This time, he pulled up to the side of the 'copter's teardrop cabin, stopping himself by slamming both feet against the cabin. Startled, the pilot jerked the controls and the 'copter dipped its blades at Morrow. He had just enough time before cutting his gravitor and plunging free to fire his flash-bulb pistol directly into the pilot's face.

Checking his fall several hundred feet below, he looked up and saw the 'copter wallowing precariously on auto-controls, its pilot pressing his hands over his eyes. Gwyn came swooping downward, her dark hair billowing out behind her, and called anxiously to Morrow—when he fell, she'd thought the 'copter blades had struck him.

They lost themselves in the starry blackness before the pilot regained his sight.

That spring season, the newspapers broke out in a rash of headlines and front-page stories about ships from outer space and life on other worlds, quoting eye-witness reports and authoritative comments. By summer, the latest best-seller book was a loosely-written volume entitled THE MONSTERS ARE AMONG US!

Those fortunate members of a certain group of thirty-seven men and women broke into grins every time they heard the book mentioned. This group had laid out a collective sum of slightly over a hundred thousand dollars for the construction of a small vacation resort in the Nevada desert.

It was a rather special resort. The buildings were built cheaply, yet were designed by certain talented engineers so that their structures were considerably stronger than those of conventional buildings using costlier materials—a not too difficult feat, considering the outmoded building codes which governed most construction—and were surprisingly sleek and ultra-modern, as well.

The members of this group usually continued their work in plants and laboratories outside. Each year, when their vacation-time came up, they would rush off to a little radio repair shop in Stockton and have a quiet talk in the back room with its youthful proprietor. That night, they would drive up into the mountains to an old, abandoned sawmill, where a strange ship would drop out of the darkness to greet them....

It was a deep, twisting canyon east of the Kawich Range. Sand-stone cliffs towered up nearly three hundred feet on each side and a spring-fed stream trickled along the boulder-strewn floor, curling around clumps of stunted pine trees and dense brush. The wind sometimes tore through the canyon with a deep, mournful whistle.

Farther up, the canyon widened out. A pile of giant boulders formed an island in the middle of the floor and cliff-dwellers had built their dwellings in a large cave half-way up on one wall. Those dwellings were now occupied and joined by slender spans to the three sleek towers rising up from the island. At the foot of the island, a flat space had been cleared and long, low sheds built around it.

In the middle tower overlooking the clearing, which was now occupied by a slender, black ship. Morrow sat before the observation wall of his living room and gazed downward. He wore a simple pair of trunks on his tanned body, and socks and sneakers on his feet.

The man sitting in the chair next to him was tall, broad-shouldered, and husky. There was a two-day growth of beard on the lean face and the soiled white trousers and shirt looked as though they had been slept in. The man's eyes were cautious and tense when he glanced over his shoulder.

Smitty was standing behind his chair. Smitty wore the same casual attire that Morrow did, with the addition of a cartridge belt and holstered pistol about his thighs. The brown hand resting on the pistol-butt—it was a Colt .45 revolver—gave their visitor silent confirmation to the fact that he was, essentially, their prisoner.

"So it took you just six months to find us, did it?" Morrow asked musingly. "Too bad about the shipping records on those plastic construction materials—you must have traced down the shipments from every company in the country before you found that."

"We traced nearly all of them," the visitor conceded. "In fact, this one would've escaped our notice if you'd used any half-reasonable company in Stockton to cover up your use of the materials."

Morrow took cigarettes and matches from the pocket of his trunks and proceeded to light up, calmly. It was nearing sunset and the canyon was already plunged into a blue twilight, in which the lights in the towers and on the small landing field below glowed softly, in soothing pastel colors.

The visitor sat unmoved through the silence. He had been caught inside the old sawmill and flown to the hidden base the night before. His credentials said he was an agent of the United States Bureau of Internal Security, that his name was David Lyle. Morrow glanced at him, speculatively.

"I've told you all I dare about our group, here," he said. "I've told you some of the things we've done—"

"Without explaining them," Lyle interjected wryly.

Morrow smiled. "You wouldn't grasp the technical end of it if I had told you. It's as if I were the first man to invent the wheel and had gathered a few others about me who were now developing the propellor, the fly-wheel, gear-ratios and the piston engine. We can generate enough electrical power in this canyon site to light a large metropolitan city, and we're now working on a means of using broadcast power and perhaps harnessing atomic energy. We already suspect some of the chemical and medical possibilities inherent in gravitor-field conditions—"

"And you have the answer to interplanetary travel at your fingertips!" Lyle muttered dourly.

"Yes, but without the financial means to do it," Morrow agreed. "Interplanetary travel won't be important for another hundred years anyway—if it is at all—since it will take that long for the world's population to reach any dangerous numbers."

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Mankind is due to reach the stage of population where he can no longer feed himself on Earth," Morrow explained. "He simply won't be able to raise enough food on this one planet to feed such numbers. Either that, or there'll be three or four atomic wars in the next few generations—if there's one, there'll be several wars—and population will cease to be a problem.

"There's been some talk of birth-control as the only logical answer to this overpopulation. It may be used, but I doubt its logic. You'll have to tell some people they simply can't have children, and on a world-wide scale you're going to have many cases where they disregard authority and have children anyway. Then, to make your authority stick, you'll have to take those unauthorized children away from their parents and kill them. You'll need a world dictatorship to do that.

"The only answer that's really logical is when this world gets too small to support mankind, go out and settle a couple more. That's where interplanetary travel becomes important, and not before. The astronomers claim there is very little likelihood of any native species of intelligent beings living on either Mars or Venus. I only hope they're right!

"But that isn't answering our present problem, is it?" Morrow grinned reflectively. "We could kill you, Mr. Lyle, but that would gain us nothing. There would be other agents following you. Also, it doesn't sit well with our attitude."

"Just what is your 'attitude' as you call it?" Lyle demanded.

Morrow glanced at him through narrowed eyes and replied, "Just what would your attitude be if you were in our position, Mr. Lyle?"

Later, as Morrow sat alone, Gwyn came out of the kitchen and joined him, perching herself on the arm of his chair.

"It'll work out all right, Bill," she murmured soothingly, running her fingers through his hair. "Don't worry about it."

Morrow shook his head. "We've got to let him go, Gwyn. We can't hold him."

"Then let's just face it," she replied, using her practical feminine approach. "The government is going to learn about our project. What can they do about it? Can they throw us into prison and confiscate all we have here? What'll they do with it? Without