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

almost more than Morrow had hoped for. He could play it through, now. "This is a Martian friend of mine," he said, hooking his thumb toward Smitty. "I can't stay long. Somebody might see our spaceship and get curious."

"Your—spaceship?" Foster queried falteringly.

"We landed it out in back."

The room was silent for a moment. Foster sat dumbfounded, staring at them. A flicker of a gleam began to show itself in his eyes. "Am I to understand," he said gently, "that you have landed a spaceship in my back yard?"

"No," Morrow corrected. "In the alley."

"Hmmm—it'd better be in the alley. My wife would slaughter us both if you'd trampled her gardenias." Foster fell back in his chair. He tried to relax; he even grinned, somewhat shakily. "Now what's the idea, Bill? Why'd you come tippy-toe in here like this? Out with it!"

"Take too long to explain," Morrow replied, shaking his head. "Somebody's liable to see that spaceship any minute, now." He forced a broad, innocent grin across his face. "You want to come have a look at it?"

"Ye-e-es!" Foster agreed sarcastically, rising from his chair. "I suppose I should take a look at it—"

Morrow led him out the front door and around the house. "Don't want to awaken your wife," he explained, clamping down his helmet.

"No-o-o-o!" Foster conceded. "I wouldn't advise that!" They proceeded on across the back yard, through the clinging, wet fingers of the mist.

Then Foster saw the ship.

After that, it wasn't too hard to persuade him to enter it. Then it was simple to switch on the gravitors and rise into the dark sky. Morrow had him planted in the flight engineer's seat, enthusiastically demanding explanations in full, as Smitty piloted them swiftly homeward.

Foster was sold!

They held a conference in the sawmill-workshop that lasted all the next day and well into the next night. Then Foster went home to tell his wife he'd had a hurry-up call from the aircraft plant and gone there to work on some secret research; they drove him back to Sacramento in the truck, and let him off near his house.

Then they returned to the workshop and went to work.

The following weekend, Foster drove up in his own car to see them. He climbed out of his car wearing lace-boots and hunting clothes. Reaching into the back seat, he brought out a shotgun and a stack of newspapers, then Morrow came up to greet him and they strode into the workshop.

"You fellows have really been hitting the ball!" Foster exclaimed, as he stopped and gazed at the small, needle-nosed ship sitting beside the larger ship.

Morrow nodded. They had worked night and day to construct the second, smaller ship—a little two-passenger job with sweptback fins and a canopy-covered cockpit in its sharp nose. It rested neatly on its long A-fins, poised to hurtle into the sky. Its color scheme—dark blue-black on top, light gray on its belly—stood out in sharp contrast to the solid, shimmering black of the giant ship behind it.

It had been Foster's idea. He'd pointed out to them that they needed a smaller experimental model, easier to dismantle and rebuild, for the development of their air-jet chamber.

"Have you given it a test-flight yet?" Foster asked.

"Ran it out last night," Smitty replied, coming around the two ships to meet them. He set a plumber's blowtorch on the workbench and wiped his hands on a rag. "It hit seventy miles an hour, then worked up to seventy-four after a five-hour run."

Foster shook his head in puzzlement. "That's something I just can't account for. A jet-pod ought to be just as efficient as its design, and nothing should alter its basic performance other than a change in atmospheric conditions."

"There was no atmospheric change," Morrow said. "Same altitude, same barometric pressure, same thermal conditions. I'm beginning to think the problem isn't only in the jet-pod design."

"That makes two of us!" Foster agreed. "The design I gave you should've worked better than any seventy miles an hour, if your propulsion unit develops that focus of 'false gravity' and squeezes the air out, forming a low-pressure center, as you said it did."

"We've checked that, too," Morrow said, frowning thoughtfully. "I'm beginning to think it's something to do with the gravitors' field of influence. Come over here—I want to show you something!"

He led the jet engineer over to where he and Smitty had rigged a gravitor mechanism and a sling-load of sandbags with rope attached, just as they'd used in weight-testing the gravitors. He switched on the gravitor, adjusted its setting, and let it lift the load of sandbags into the air. Then he pointed to the rope dangling down beneath it.

"See that twist in the rope, just under the sandbags?" he said. "That much of the rope is in the influence of the gravitor's field, which is cancelling out the pull of the Earth's gravity. Now then, if it can influence that three-foot length of rope, what influence might it have on the air around it—and on the slipstream of air flowing over our ships, which is supposed to enter the air-vents and be blasted out the jets for propulsion of the ships?"

"It could be scrambling our intake flow," Foster acknowledged pensively. "But would that condition alter in time?"

Morrow shook his head. "I don't think it does—or that it would unless the gravitor's batteries were almost burned out. Then the field's influence might lessen a bit. Otherwise, no."

"Then why is it that the jets' efficiency increases with time?" Foster asked. "How'd you get seventy miles an hour on the big ship, then ninety? And five hours' running built up the little ship's speed an additional four miles per hour, didn't it?"

Smitty nodded. "It gets gradually better—but not much. If we knew how it happened and what it was doing to the air-flow, maybe we could design jet-pods with the right shape to use that air-flow and get good performance."

Foster turned and peered sharply at Morrow. "Bill, doesn't that gravitor's field work by conductivity of some sort through the surrounding material?"

"Uh?" Morrow started. "Yes, it—wait! You mean the ship's plastic hull?"

"Right. And what about the polarization of that plastic?"

Morrow pursed his lips, contemplatively. "Like all materials on Earth, it's polarized—if you want to use that word—to the gravitational and magnetic fields of Earth. I see what you're driving at, though—the gravitors establish a field in which the Earth's gravity and magnetism are cancelled out, or bent back upon themselves. The mechanism of the gravitors, the hull they support, everything within their field of influence is placed on a basis of its own gravity, mass-attraction, magnetism, what-have-you."

"And that's gradually changing the polarization of those materials," Foster concluded. "And the gravitors' field, working through the material, is also affected. There's a gradual change in its influence on other surrounding matter—and on the slipstream flowing over the ship!"

"We'd need a wind-tunnel to test that, wouldn't we?" Smitty asked dejectedly.

"Yep," Foster agreed. "And wind-tunnels cost money. The only other way to test it would be to make a cross-country flight, and I wouldn't advise that."

"What about a cross-country night flight?" Morrow wondered.

Foster gave him a strange look. "You two haven't been reading the newspapers lately, have you?"

Morrow and Smitty exchanged glances of mingled surprise and guilt. "We've been rather busy out here," Morrow protested lamely.

"I suspected you were," Foster said, a trace of grim humor in his voice. He walked over to the drafting table in the corner, where he'd left his shotgun and bundle of newspapers. "Pull that thing down and come over here," he told them. "I've something to show you, now!"

Morrow cranked the gravitor-sling down on the hand winch and Smitty shut it off; then they went over to where Foster was spreading newspapers on the drafting table, checking and circling columns of newsprint with a blue crayon pencil. Morrow stepped to his side and stared down at the papers. The words fairly leaped up to strike him in the eye.

MYSTERY SHIP NEAR SACRAMENTO

BLACK SPACESHIP SEEN

MARTIANS PREFER CALIFORNIA!

TWO CARS LEAVE H'WAY AS ROCKET SWOOPS

BLACK ROCKET SHIP; 'NOT OURS,' SAY AIR FORCE

There were more than a dozen news stories about it—not front-page, black-headlines stories, but two-column stories beginning on page two or three and continued in the newspaper center-section. None of it was spectacular enough to merit big headlines.

However, it had obviously been given a thorough coverage by the press. A railroad worker walking to work the Saturday morning of their trip to Sacramento had seen "a black, torpedo-shaped ship flying through the mist at low altitude, making a deep, rumbling noise." A police patrol car on the highway had seen it "flying low through the clouds, as if it were having mechanical difficulty of some sort." Two cars had left the highway and skidded into a ditch as both drivers saw "a black ship without wings swoop directly over" with a sound "like one long, continuous A-bomb explosion!"

Some said the ship was just a solid black shape, without lights or any noticeable features except the absence of any wings; some said "a long, blue flame" came from the tail of the ship. Some said "bright red, green, and blue lights were swarming around it" and some claimed there were "big windows in the sides, with something moving around inside."

Officials of the Air Force, both in California and in Washington, professed to have no knowledge about the ship. But one fact was added: both official groups said they were deeply interested in the reports for "reasons of security," that a thorough investigation would be made, and that radar surveillance along the West Coast would be intensified.

And one, final news story was headed: SEARCH FOR DOWNED 'SPACESHIP' FAILS. There had been strong belief, it said, that the mysterious black ship had been in trouble and was making a forced landing when it was sighted.

"There it is," Foster said with a tone of finality. "These are all the stories in the local papers. It's been played up from coast-to-coast, however—both in the newspapers and news telecasts. And the defense forces along the Coast are just waiting for you to pop out again so they can pounce on you."

"Along the Coast," Smitty echoed pensively. "It's significant that they haven't turned their attention to the interior—back as far as the Sierras, here—"

"Probably think it's some sort of new Russian reconnaissance aircraft," Morrow interjected. "They undoubtedly have a nice, little reception committee waiting out over the ocean."

Smitty nodded. "Any cross-country we plan to do had best be plotted due east, across the desert."

"There's the atomic project area, that way," Foster protested. "They certainly must have increased their air defenses around that."

"At low altitude, we can get around it," Smitty said.

Foster's features went slack. "Look here! You're not seriously thinking of—"

"If we had a wind-tunnel, no!" Smitty retorted wryly. "We could stick the little ship in it, let it run for a few days, watch the hull polarize itself to the gravitors' field, and note how the air-flow around the ship was affected. Then we could rip out the jet chamber and design a new one that'd work in the affected air-flow."

"If we had a wind-tunnel," Morrow emphasized.

"Right!" Smitty turned back toward the ships. "So," he concluded, "we take the big ship! We head out over the desert and keep going, watching how the ship performs and what the air-flow does to her. We'll have to install a few barometric pressure-point indicators around her hull—"

"But we'd have to fly several days steady to get that hull completely polarized," Morrow said. "We can't just restrict ourselves to night flying."

Smitty winced. Then he rubbed his chin, scowling. "If we have to, Bill, we can go east to Utah, then south through Arizona to Mexico, then east again—flying across the Border at night, without lights, won't be too much trouble; and once in Mexico we won't have to worry about radar. We can go out over the Gulf of Mexico, if we want to, and then turn north and fly up the Mississippi and Ohio valleys as far as Pennsylvania. There's a lot of brush country in the neighboring mountain areas—there'd be little danger of getting seen through there. So long as we don't have to land anywhere, we're safe!"

"In other words, it'd be a cross-country endurance flight," Morrow surmised.

"But suppose the ship fails on you?" Foster demanded tersely. "Suppose you're forced down?"

"We're visitors from outer space!" Smitty replied, grinning.

Foster wasn't amused. "Let's not be foolish about this," he argued. "We've got something here that we can't let loose! The world isn't ready for it—"

"But we've got to have it perfected when the world is ready," Morrow said firmly. "Once the tension wears out and the world situation changes, we've got to act! If we aren't ready, the world will go right ahead and get mixed up in some other squabble. Then we'd have to wait again."

Smitty laid a hand on