Long Ago, Far Away

CHAPTER 10

Soames made his long-distance call on a Monday, when war seemed likely to come perhaps within hours. All day Monday the tension continued. Traffic jams became the normal thing outside the larger cities, which would be logical targets for long-range missiles. Every means of travel away from the great population centers was loaded far beyond capacity.

On Tuesday afternoon national guard troops had been called out in ten states to keep traffic moving.

At Calumet Lake, however, there was no notable change. Soames and Fran still went fishing. In the boat Fran sometimes shut his eyes and pressed the end of one of the tiny sensory-perception communicators he had made. He turned it on for no longer than a second at a time. If he made contact with one of the other children he was prepared to speak swiftly—so they could hear his voice as he did—to assure them that he was safe and to ask for news of Zani and Mal and Hod, and Gail. He could do it very quickly indeed. Soames had insisted on only instants of communicator-use.

"Maybe those gadgets can be directionally spotted," he said. "Security wants you, Fran. If there's a way to get a directional fix on you, they'll find it! So, make it short!"

On Thursday morning all broadcasts broke off to report that the DEW line of radars across Canada had reported objects in the air moving across the North Pole toward the United States. America clenched its fists and waited for missiles to strike or be blasted by counter-missiles, as fate or chance might determine. Twenty minutes later a correction came. The radar-detected objects had not been missiles, but aircraft flying in formation. They'd changed course and returned to their bases. They were probably foreign fighter-planes patrolling far beyond their usual range.

Soames had held his breath with the rest of the country. He was just beginning to breathe freely again when Fran came running from the week-end-shack. His eyes shone.

"I got—" he swallowed—"Zani. I said"—he swallowed again, "we will come." He added: "Our language."

Soames looked at him sharply.

"Maybe you do read minds. Was anybody listening in? Anybody else beside Zani?"

"Two men," said Fran. "Two. They talked. Fast. English."

"One man would be a monitor," said Soames grimly. "Two means a directional fix. Let's go!"

By that night they were hundreds of miles from Calumet Lake.

The highways were crowded with the people who'd evacuated the cities. The high population of remote places was a protection for Soames and Fran. He worried, though, about Gail, her situation, and that of the three other children, was far from enviable. In the present increasing confusion and tension they were hardly likely to have any improvement in their state.

"I think," Soames told Fran reflectively, "that at night, and with the kind of disorganization that seems to be increasing, you can get away with talking to the kids again. Nobody'll try a parachute drop in these mountains in the darkness." They were then a hundred miles south of Denver. "They couldn't get organized before daybreak, and I doubt that they could block the highways. See if you can make contact, eh? And find out how they're getting along?"

Fran nodded. He moved so that the heat of their fire would not fall on him, to tell that he camped out-of-doors. He found a place to lie down in comfort, so that there would be no distracting sensation. He closed his eyes. Soames saw him press the end of his tiny communicator and release it quickly. After an instant's pause he pressed it again. He held the communicator on for several seconds, half a minute. He released it and sat up.

"You try," he said in a puzzled fashion. "You try!"

Soames closed his eyes. He pressed the little pin-head button at the end of the instrument which was hardly larger than a match-stick. He felt the sensations of another body. That other body opened its eyes. Soames saw who it was, Gail's face was reflected in a mirror. She was pale. Her expression was drawn and harried. But she smiled at her reflection, because she knew Soames would see what she saw.

He spoke, so she'd hear his voice as he did.

"Gail!"

He felt a hand—which was her hand—spill something on a levelled surface before her. It smoothed the spilled stuff. It was face-powder, spread on a dressing-table top. A finger wrote. She looked down at what was written there.

"Help Fran," he read. "You Must!"

He felt her hand swiftly smoothing the message away. Rage swept over him. Instantly he knew what had happened. Fran's escape from Calumet Lake had proved that he knew that his communications were intercepted and directionally analyzed. Therefore the other children were no longer a means by which he might be trapped. So their communicators had been taken away from them for the second time, and now they were watched with an unceasing closeness. Every glance, every word, every gesture was noted.

"This has to be quick," said Soames coldly, for her to hear. "I would help him, but he'd want to get in touch with his people."

Gail opened her eyes again. Her image in the mirror nodded.

"And if he did," said Soames as coldly as before, "they'd come here and conquer us. And I'd rather that we killed each other off than that the most kindly-disposed of conquerors enslaved us."

He felt her hand again smoothing the spilled face-powder. She wrote in it. He knew what she had written before she dropped her eyes to it. He couldn't believe it. She'd written three words, no, two words and a numeral. Soames felt an almost physical shock. He was incredulous. If this was true ...

Then he felt a hand closed firmly on Gail's shoulder. Captain Moggs spoke, authoritative and stern and reproachful:

"Gail! How could you! You have one of those horrible telepathic things too! This is a very grave matter, Gail!"

Then the contact was broken. Captain Moggs had snatched away Gail's communicator.

Raging, Soames took Fran and left that spot which was undoubtedly pin-pointed by now. As they sped away he tried to consider the meaning of the two words and the numeral which was completely unbelievable at first thought.

Shortly after sunrise he bought a two-day-old newspaper. It was the latest he could find for sale. He rode a certain distance and stopped where the highway made an especially dramatic turn and there was a turn-out for tourists to park in while they admired the view. He stopped there and deliberately read the news affecting war and peace and the children and therefore Gail. At the end he folded the newspaper painstakingly and with careful self-control tore it to bits. Then he said angrily:

"Fran, a question it never occurred to me to ask you before."

He posed the question. Fran could have answered it with two English words and a numeral, and the same words and numeral that Gail had used. But he didn't have the words. Especially, he did not have the number. Fran's way of writing numbers was as complex as the system used in ancient Rome, and Soames had no key. It took a long time to grasp the quantity Fran had in mind. Then Soames had to make sure he had it right.

Then, abruptly, he knew that it was true. He knew why it was true. It increased his anger over the situation and the treatment of Gail and the children.

"According to this paper," he said icily, "my fellow-countrymen have decided to pay a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, and to sell you down the river. They suggest an international UN committee to receive custody of you children. That committee could then set to work on you to find out where you came from, why, and when you are likely to be searched for. Now, you know and so do I that part of what they found out they wouldn't accept. Time-travel is impossible. So when you children told them where you come from they wouldn't believe it. They'd try to pry back behind what they'd consider a lie. They'd use different techniques of inquiry. They'd use inhibition-releasing drugs. They'd ..."

Fran's expression did not change. Yet it was not passive.

"Which will not happen," said Soames in sudden fury, "except over my dead body! Gail feels the same way. So let's go! We've got to plan a really king-size monkey-wrench to throw into these works!"

He stepped on the motorbike pedal. He swung on down the winding mountain road for the lowlands. He went into a relatively small town. He bought a pup-tent, pliers, a small camp-stove; a camp-lantern; food; blankets; matches.

They went back into the foothills and settled down to the strangest scientific conference in history. The scene of the conference was a remote and strictly improvised encampment by the side of a briskly-flowing trout-stream. They fished. They talked. They drew diagrams at each other.

Fran's English had improved remarkably, but this was a highly technical discussion. It was two days before Soames had the information he needed firmly in his mind. He made a working drawing of what had to be built. He realized that the drawing itself was a simplification of a much more sophisticated original device. It was adapted to be made out of locally available materials. It was what Fran had made and tried at Navajo Dam.

"Which," said Soames, frowning, "proved not to work. You didn't realize the local resources. This thing works, obviously, because a terrifically strong electric field is cut off abruptly and collapses instantly. The original apparatus—the one I burnt—no doubt had a very fine gimmick to break a heavy current flow without making an arc. The trouble at Navajo Dam was that it did arc—and how! That was a mess!"

He paused, considering. Since Soames was not looking at him, Fran regarded him with infinite respect.

"The problem," said Soames, thinking hard, "is a glorified job of turning off an electric light without making a spark at the switch. That's all. It doesn't matter how long the current flows. The thing is that it must stop instantly. So we turn the whole business inside out.

"Instead of making a terrific steady current and cutting it off, I'm going to start with it not flowing and use a strobe-light pack. Every amateur photographer has one. They give a current of eight hundred amperes and twenty-five hundred volts for the forty-thousandth of a second. The juice doesn't flow long enough to burn anything out. It cuts itself off. There's nothing to maintain an arc.

"The really tricky part," he said uncomfortably, "may be the stealing of a helicopter. But I guess I can manage it."

He left Fran fishing and went down to the nearest town again to buy eccentric items of equipment. Copper foil. Strobe-light packs, two of them. He could use foil instead of large-area heat-dissipating units, because the current would flow so briefly. He would get a terrific current, of course. Two strobe-light packs in series would give him four million watts of power for part of the wink of an eyelid.

When he got back to the camp, Soames called to Fran. "We've got to get to work. I don't think we've got much time. I had hopes of a castaway-gadget coming up, but it hasn't."

He began to assemble the device which would substitute for the larger, heavier, much more massive apparatus he'd destroyed on the Antarctic ice-sheet. The work went swiftly. Soames had re-designed the outfit, and a man can always build a thing of his own design more easily than something from another man's drawings.

Before sunset the thing was done. Fran was very respectful. This apparatus was less than a quarter the size of the one his own people had prepared for the same purpose. And it was self-powered, too; it was independent of outside power-supply.

"I'd like to talk to your people about this," said Soames grimly. "I do think things can be transposed in space, and this should work that way as well as in time. But starting at one end has me stymied."

He abandoned the pup-tent and equipment.

"Either we won't need them," he said, "or we won't be able to use them."

The battered, ancient motorcycle took them into the night. Soames had studied road-maps and he and Fran had discussed in detail the route to Navajo Dam—using stilts to cross electrified fences—from the hidden missile base. Soames was sure that with Fran's help he could find the pseudo-village where Gail and the children remained. It would call for a helicopter. But before that there was a highly necessary operation which would also go best with a helicopter to help. So when they left that pup-tent camp they headed toward a very minor, local airfield where Soames had once landed. It had hangars for half a dozen cheap private planes and for two helicopters used mostly for crop-dusting.

At the airfield Soames laid the motorcycle beside the edge of the clear area, and left Fran with it, to wait. He moved quietly through the darkness toward close-up buildings with no lights anywhere except in one room reserved for a watchman.

Fran waited, breathing fast. He heard night-insects and nothing else. It seemed a horribly long time—before he heard the grinding noise of a motor being cranked. It caught immediately. There was a terrific roaring tumult inside a building. The large door of a hangar tilted and went upward, and a door opened from the watchman's lighted room and he came shouting outside.

The roaring of motors changed. The door of the hangar was quite open. A bellowing thing came moving out, whirling huge black vanes against the sky. It boomed more loudly still, and lifted, and then drifted with seeming clumsiness across the level airfield while the night watchman shouted after it.

Fran turned on the motorcycle headlight as he'd been told, and picked up the apparatus Soames had made to use strobe-light packs in. The 'copter swept toward him, six feet above-ground. It came down and Fran swarmed up into its cabin. Then the motors really thundered and the 'copter climbed for the sky.

Soames drove without lights and headed southward.

A transcontinental highway appeared below. It was plainly marked by the headlights of more than usually heavy traffic on it. He followed that highway.

Fran rode in a sort of stilly rapture. Soames said:

"Not worried, Fran?"

Fran shook his head. Then, boy-like, he turned on the transistor radio to show his nonchalance. A voice spoke. He'd have shifted to music but Soames caught a word or two.

"Hold it!" he commanded. "Put it so I can hear!"

Fran raised the volume and held the small radio so Soames could hear it above the motor-noise.

What he heard, at this moment, was the official United States broadcast announcing the ending of all real menace of atomic attack. By a fortunate freak of fate, somebody in authority realized that it was more important to get the news out than to make a professionalized production of it. So a tired but confident voice said very simply that American technicians seemed to have solved the problem of defense attack by atomic bombs and guided missiles. There had been, the voice said steadily, recent marked improvements in electric induction furnaces. The basic principle of an induction furnace was the evolution of heat in the material it was desired to melt, instead of merely in a container for the stuff that was to be melted. Within the past four days induction furnaces of a new type had proved able to induce heat in chosen objects up to miles. It had been expected to smelt metal ore in the veins in which it was found, and to make mines yield their product as metal without digging up and puttering with useless rock. But now this apparatus had been combined with radar.

When a radar detected a missile or an enemy plane, the broadcast said carefully, an induction furnace of the new type was turned upon the plane or missile. The effect was exactly that of enclosing the missile in a burning blast-furnace. It melted. The most careful tests assured America, then, that any city protected by radar-controlled remote-induction furnaces was safe against atomic attack and its dread destruction.

And at the time of this broadcast, every major center of population in the United States was already protected by the new defense-system. The cities which had been most vulnerable were now the safest places in the nation. And it was found, added the contented voice, that atomic bombs were not detonated by the induction fields. The induced currents seemed to freeze firing mechanisms. It appeared impossible to design a detonating device which would blow up a bomb before it melted.

The broadcast ended in a matter-of-fact statement that plans for the defense-system had been given to all the allies of the United States, that London was already protected and Paris would be within hours, and that within days the nations which were not allies would be assisted to establish defenses, so that atomic war need not be feared in the future.

Soames listened with an odd expression on his face.

"That," he said, "started out as a gadget for a castaway to stop arrows that savages were sniping at him with. I'm very pleased."

There was no more for him to say. The pleasure he felt, of course, would be the only reward he was likely to get. At the moment he was bent upon an enterprise his fellow-Americans would have regarded with horror.

Far, far below and surrounded by the blackness of tree-covered ground in starlight, there was an irregular shape of brightness. It was miles long. It reflected the stars. It was the flood-control reservoir behind the Polder Dam. There was no power-plant here. This reservoir merely took the place of some hundreds of thousands of acres of timbered-off forest which once had controlled floods more effectively.

Without a word, Soames slanted the 'copter down. Presently it hovered delicately over the dam's crest and at its very center. It touched. The rotor ceased to whirl. The motor stopped. There was a great silence.

Fran scrambled down. Soames swung after him. Together, they set up the device which was a time-transposition unit, with its complicated small antenna aimed out at the waters of the reservoir.

"I've gambled," said Soames, "that we understand each other. Now you pull the string."

There was a cord which would discharge the strobe-packs through the apparatus itself. The discharge would cease with absolute abruptness. The packs would then recharge themselves from the special batteries included in the device.

Fran pulled the cord.

There was no noise except a small and inadequate "snap." It seemed that nothing happened. But there was suddenly a hole in the surface of the reservoir. It was a large hole.

Something came up out of it. It glittered in ghostly fashion in the starlight. It rose up and up and up. It was a cylinder with a rounded top and a diameter of fifty feet or so. It rose and rose, very deliberately. Then a rounded lower end appeared. It floated in the air.

Fran jerked the cord again. Another hole in the lake. Another round metal thing rising slowly, one would even say peacefully into the starlight. Fran, grinning happily, jerked the cord again and yet again....

There were eight gigantic shining cylinders in the air when he stopped and stood back, his eyes shining. A vast metal thing floated ponderously near. A port opened and a voice called down in the language the children used among themselves. Fran spoke back, remembering to turn on his sensory communicator.

Fran talked briskly as if to himself. But it was standard sensory-communication practice. After a long time he turned to Soames.

"My people say—" a pause—"thank you—" another pause, "and ask for Zani and Mal and Hod."

"Tell them to make a column of themselves and float right here, going up to ten thousand feet or so. Radars will pick them out. Planes will come in the night to see what they are. They'll guess. I doubt very much that they'll attack. Tell your people simply to keep them worried until we come back."

Fran zestfully swarmed back into the helicopter. Soames told him:

"Turn off your communicator. You'll be listened in on. But maybe the monitoring men are having their hair stand on end from the welter of communications from the ships!"

Fran wriggled with excitement as the 'copter rose once more.

Soames had an odd feeling that all this could not be true. But it was, down to the last least detail which had made it thinkable for him to defy all his fellow-men to keep faith with four children whose lives and errand he'd interfered with. The matter had been a very natural oversight, at first.

Of course Soames had assumed that the children's civilization had been one of very millions of people. A small city cannot establish or maintain a great technological civilization. He had been right. He'd assumed, even, that Fran's people were able to travel between planets. Again he'd been right. But the thing he hadn't thought of was that the development of transposition in time—and transposition in space would come later—wouldn't occur to anybody unless there was absolutely no other possible solution to the problem the Old Race faced. They wouldn't have tried to solve it until the Fifth Planet burst and the doom of the world they lived on was self-evident. They wouldn't have worked at it until they realized that Venus and Mercury were due to be shattered after Earth, just as Mars was bombarded before it.

So the struggle to escape through time was begun in the fifty-ninth minute of the last hour. Cities struggled to build time-ships and get a pioneer vessel through to future time. Asteroids plunged down upon them, wiping them out. Cities struggled on, passing to each other—to the thinning number of those who remained—such solutions to such problems as they developed. But there were fewer and fewer.... The city from which the children came had fallen in ruins from earth-shocks, and only a fraction of its population continued frantically to labor on....

But Soames hadn't thought of this. It was Gail who found it out from the children with her. And she'd told Soames that he must help Fran at any cost, and told the reason in two words and a number. Speaking of Fran's people, she'd told Soames,

"Only 2,000 left."

It was true. It checked with the number of ships that came through to modernity. Only two thousand people remained of Fran's race. They could not conquer two billions of humankind. They could not rule them. They could only take refuge among them, and share what knowledge they could with them.

Fran leaned happily against Soames' shoulder. The 'copter swung away from a broad wide valley.

Fran pointed. Two valleys came together here. He, who had come away from the missile base on foot, was an authority on how to get back to it in a helicopter.

The 'copter flew on.

Fran said:

"There!"

And there were small lights, the color of kerosene lamps. But they were not lamps, but electric lights. Soames sent the 'copter sweeping toward the remarkably convincing Rocky Mountain village. The ship barely cleared an electrified fence, the last of three. But if there were sentries who might have fired on it, they had already heard of the arrival of a fleet of alien spaceships. Nothing so human as a helicopter could be an enemy when an invading fleet from who-knows-where was just reported....

The 'copter settled to ground with a whistling noise. Soames cut off the motors. Then Fran was calling joyously, and Zani squealed from a window, and Hod came tumbling out of a window and Mal popped out of nowhere and came running. There were shouts in the village. Then Gail was coming, also.

"Pile aboard!" commanded Soames. "Your families are here, kids, and they're waiting for you. And, Gail, there's going to be the most thoroughly scared gang at the UN and elsewhere that you ever saw, now that what they think's a space-fleet is actually here! We've been decent to the kids, and they think they haven't, so we'll hold out for authority to argue...."

A door slammed. Fran said happily:

"Let's go!"

Motors boomed. The helicopter lifted. It rushed over the village, bellowing. Tree-branches thrashed violently in the down draught. It swept splendidly away down a valley leading to another valley and under a precipitous cliff and down more valleys. There was a place where eight silvery spacecraft floated composedly above the Earth, with the few survivors of a great civilization peering out, waiting for dawn so they could see a new world, a fresh world healed of all scars, waiting....

Soames pulled Gail to him. "I've got to make friends with these people, Gail!" His voice trembled with excitement. "You see? They've got a wonderful science, but we've got to get to work on it! They need a modern viewpoint! That time-transposing system they've used to save their lives, it's bound to work as a space-transposer too! I've got to work it out with their engineers! We've got to get enough power together to send some sort of miniature transposer out to Centaurus and Aldebaran, and then have regular interstellar transposition routes and a spate of worlds for everybody to move to who feels like it.... Taking what these people have, and adding our stuff to it ... we'll really go places!"

They swept over the reflecting waters which were the reservoir behind the Polder Dam. Fran spoke aloud, for someone somewhere else to hear. He spoke again. He was using his own, home-made sensory communicator. Then he suddenly touched Soames' arm.

"My people say—" pause "you talk for them." He grinned. "Let's go!"

And the 'copter touched solidity and a great silvery cylinder touched very delicately close by, and the children ran, squealing, to be with people they'd feared they would never see again. And Soames and Gail walked a little bit diffidently toward the same opened, lowered door. There were some rather nice people waiting for them. They'd raised fine children. They needed Soames and Gail to help them make friends.

Somehow it did not occur to Soames that he was the occasion, if not the cause, that on this one day and within hours, the danger of atomic war on Earth was ended, and the human race was headed for the stars instead of annihilation. But it was true. The people of the Old Race, of course, would not try to rule Earth. They were too few. They wouldn't want to go to another planet and be alone. Again they were too few. They were the last survivors of a very magnificent civilization, but they could not maintain it unless they shared it with the people of Earth of now. They could only join the sprawling younger branch of the human race as citizens.

But humans, now, had a new destiny. With Gail close beside him, Soames waited for the greetings of the children and their parents to end. He looked at Gail. Her eyes were shining.

Soames felt very good. It was a perfect solution to the troubles of Earth, both past and future.

The stars were waiting.

THE END