Long Ago, Far Away

CHAPTER 3

The world's affairs went on as usual. There were the customary number of international crises. The current diplomacy preferred blackmail by threat of atomic war.

Naturally, even Antarctica could be used to create turmoil. The population of the continent was confined to the staffs of research-bases established during the International Geophysical Year. In theory the bases were an object-lesson in co-operation for a constructive purpose, which splendid spirit of mutual trust and confidence must spread through the world and some day lead to an era of blissful and unsuspicious peacefulness.

But that time was not yet.

There'd been an outburst of static of an unprecedented kind.

It had covered the globe on all wave-lengths, everywhere of absolute maximum volume. It had used millions of times as much power as any signal ever heard before. No atom bomb could have made it. Science and governments, together, raised three very urgent questions. Who did it? How did they do it? And, why did they do it?

Each major nation suspected the others. Scientific progress had become the most urgent need of every nation, and was expected to be the end of all of them.

At Gissell Bay, however, the two 'copters came droning in, and settled down, and Gail and Soames and Captain Moggs got out, and instantly picked up a boy or a girl and hurried to get them out of the bitter cold.

The staff reacted immediately to the children. They tried to be reassuring. They tried to find a language the children could understand. They failed. Then when the children spoke slowly and carefully, they searched at least for familiar root-sounds. They found nothing. But certainly the children felt themselves surrounded by people who wished them well.

The base photographer developed and printed Soames' pictures. The design of the ship was clear and the children before it gave it scale. The interior pictures were not so good, wrongly focused. Still, there was plenty to substantiate Soames' report.

Aside from the pictures there were the things the children had selected to be brought. There was a cooking-pot. Its substance conducted heat in one direction only. Heat could enter its outside surface, but not leave it. Heat could leave its inside surface, but not enter it. Consequently, when the lid was on, the outer surface absorbed heat from the air around it and the inner surface released it, and the contents of the pot boiled merrily without fuel, while the outside became coated with frost.

Some of the physicists went about in a state of shock, trying to figure out how it happened. Others, starry-eyed, pointed out that if the cooking-pot had been a pipe, it could be submerged under a running river, yield live steam by cooling off the water that flowed past it, and that water would regain normal river temperature in the course of a few miles of sunlit flow. In such a case, what price coal and petroleum? In fact, what price atomic power?

The small tripod went up outside the base's main building. Instantly the spinner began to turn, the wind ceased. In minutes the air ceased to be biting. In tens of minutes it was warm. Meteorologists, refusing to believe their senses, explored the boundaries of the calm area. They came back, frost-bitten, swearing that there was a drop of eighty degrees beyond the calm area, and a rise of temperature beyond the cold belt. The tripod-spinner was a different application of the principle of the cooking-pot. Somehow the spinning thing made an area that heat could enter but not leave, and wind could not blow through. If the device could be reversed, deserts would become temperate zones. As it was, the Arctic and Antarctic could be made to bloom. The gadget was an out-of-doors heat-pump.

There was the box with the plastic sheet in it. One of the boys, very composed, operated it. On request, he opened it up. There was nothing in the case but a few curiously shaped bits of metal. The thing was too simple to be comprehensible when one did not know the principle by which it worked.

The same trouble showed up with every device examined.

These were important matters. Captain Moggs visibly grew in her own estimation. She commandeered a supply plane and took off immediately for Washington with the news of the event she'd witnessed, prints of Soames' photographs, and samples of the children's possessions which could be carried on her person.

Back at the base the most urgent problem was communication with the children. So Gail began gently to teach the taller girl some few English words. Very shortly she greeted Soames anxiously when he came to see how the process went.

"Her name," said Gail, "is Zani. The other girl—the one with blue eyes—is Mal, and the boy in the brown tunic is Fran and the one in the green is Hod. She understands that there's a language to be learned. She's writing down words in some sort of writing of her own. She was bewildered when I handed her a ball-point pen, but she understood as soon as I demonstrated. They must write with something else.

"But—what happens next? What's going to happen to the children? They've no friends, no family, nobody to care what happens to them! They're in a terrible fix, Brad!"

"For which I'm responsible," said Soames grimly, "and about which I'm already jittering."

"I'm responsible too!" said Gail quickly. "I helped! What are you worrying about?"

"They burned up their ship," said Soames more grimly still. "Why?"

She shook her head, watching his expression.

"They treated us like harmless savages in the beginning," he said. "Then I destroyed their only hope of getting in touch with their families and friends. So one of the boys destroyed their ship. But the others knew, and got ready for it by bringing some possessions out of it. Why?"

"I'm not sure ..." said Gail.

"If we'd captured their ship intact," Soames told her, "we'd have studied it. Either we'd have come to understand it, so we could build one too, or if we couldn't—being savages—we'd have given up entirely. In either case the children wouldn't matter to us. They'd simply have been castaways. As it is, they've got us where they want us. I suspect they've got some trinkets to trade with us, as we might offer beads to bushmen. Let them or help them signal to their families, they'll say, and their parents will make us all rich."

Gail considered. Then she shook her head.

"It won't work. We've got newspapers and news broadcasts. People will be too scared to allow it."

"Scared of four children?" demanded Soames.

"You don't realize what newspapers are," Gail said with a trace of wryness. "They don't live by printing news. They print 'true' stories, serials. 'True' crime stories, to be continued tomorrow. 'True' international-crisis suspense stories, for the next thrilling chapter read tomorrow's paper or tune in to this station! That's what's printed and broadcast, Brad. It's what people want and insist on. Don't you realize how the children will be served up in the news? 'Creatures From Space in Antarctica! Earth Helpless!'" She grimaced. "There won't be any demand for human-interest stories by Gail Haynes, telling about four nicely-raised children who need to be helped to get back to their parents. The public wouldn't like that so much.

"You'll see," Gail continued, "I'm very much afraid, Brad, that presently you and I will be the only people in the world who don't think the children had better be killed, for safety. You did the right thing for us, in not letting them signal to their families. But you don't need to worry about too much sympathy for the children!"

"And I got them into it," said Soames, morosely.

"We did," insisted Gail. "And we did right. But I'm going to do what I can to keep it from being worse for them than I can help. If you'll join me—"

"Naturally!" said Soames.

He went moodily away. He was unaware of Gail's expression as she looked after him. She turned slowly to the girl with her.

He found the other three children. They were the center of an agitated group of staff-members, trying to communicate by words and gestures, while the children tried not to show disturbance at their vehemence. A cosmic-particle specialist told Soames the trouble. Among the children's possessions there was a coil of thread-fine copper wire. Somebody had snipped off a bit of it for test, and discovered that the wire was superconductive. A superconductor is a material which has no electrical resistance whatever. In current Earth science tin and mercury and a few alloys could be made into superconductors by being cooled below 18° Kelvin, or four hundred odd degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Above that temperature, superconductivity did not exist. But the children's wire was a superconductor at room temperature. A thread the size of a cobweb could carry all the current turned out by Niagara without heating up. A heavy-duty dynamo could be replaced by a superconductive dynamo that would almost fit in one's pocket. A thousand-horse-power motor would need to be hardly larger than the shaft it would turn. It would mean ...

"Let 'em alone!" snapped Soames. "They couldn't tell you how it was made, even if they could talk English! Give them a chance to learn how to talk! They've had a bad time anyhow."

He took the boys and the other girl away. He led them to his own quarters. He whistled for his dog, Rex, and showed the children how to play with him. They began to relax and enjoy the fun heretofore unknown to them.

Soames left his quarters and held his head. There was much to worry about. For example, Captain Moggs in Washington, there to pass on information perfectly calculated to bring about confusion. And at the base itself a completely natural routine event took place to make the confusion twice confounded.

The director of the Gissell Bay base made his normal, regular, short-wave report to the scientific organization which controlled and co-ordinated the base's activities and kept it supplied and equipped. The Gissell Bay director was an eminent scientist. He talked comfortably to an even more eminent scientist in the capital of the United States. Naturally, the static scream was mentioned in Washington. As naturally, the discovery of a crashed spaceship came up. It was important. It should be reported. It was. The Gissell Bay director went into details about the children and about the gadgets they'd selected to be salvaged when they destroyed their ship. A complete account preceded Captain Moggs to Washington, but not to the military. She was in charge of that angle.

The eminent scientist in Washington naturally discussed the report with other scientists who would naturally be as much concerned as himself. Later in the morning, one of those scientists received a reporter. The reporter asked various routine questions. In all innocence, the scientist who had been told by the scientist who had been told by the director at Gissell Bay, told the reporter.

And therefore, as Captain Moggs rode toward the Pentagon she did not notice the headlines, but they had already been seen in the Pentagon.

"Spaceship Lands in Antarctica!

Alien Life Forms Aboard

Scientists Alarmed."

No newspaper would spoil a good story by underplaying it. Wire services wasted no time. There were other similar headlines all over the United States.

It should be added that the first editions of the first newspapers to print the story did mention that the invaders were in appearance like human children, but somehow it did not sound plausible. Also, other sorts of descriptions were more exciting. The description of children as invaders was classed as a guess. Then as a bad guess. Then as something so preposterous that it wasn't worth relating. Anyhow the point of the story was that a ship from off the Earth had landed, with intelligent beings in it, equipped with marvellous devices. And marvellous devices would naturally—in the state of the world at that time—be weapons. So rewrite men expanded the news service dispatches by the sound business-like rule that the public is entitled to get what it wants. The public likes to be scared.

A lieutenant-general greeted Captain Moggs at the Pentagon.

"This business is true?" he demanded. "A spaceship from off Earth has landed? It had a crew? The crew's still alive? Hell and damnation! What weapons have they got?"

Captain Moggs stammered but managed to give answers. They did not give an impression of a properly complete investigation of the landing of an alien spaceship. In particular, her statement that the crew of the ship was human children simply did not register.

"Hah!" said the lieutenant-general, bitterly. "Nothing to go on! You, Captain whatever-your-name-is, you were there when the ship was found, you say. Very well. Keep your mouth shut. Get a plane and go back."

He addressed his men, "Bring up all their stuff, the stuff they brought from their ship. Get the stray unburned parts of their ship. Get our guided missile men set to work on them and find out how the drive worked. They ought to come up with something! Round up some special-weapons men to investigate those fragments too. See what they've got! Work from these pictures until we've got the samples." He swung back to Captain Moggs. "You go back and bring those aliens and everything that can be brought! Bring everything! And in the meantime," he looked around his office, "a lid goes on this! Top secret—top-top secret! The newspapers have to be choked off. Deny everything!"

He waved his hand. She left the office.

Her plane was barely south of Virginia when a spokesman for the Pentagon assured a news conference that the Defense Department had no information about an alleged non-terrestrial spaceship landing in Antarctica. The newspaper reporters pulled newspapers from their pockets. The Pentagon had been denying things right and left, in obedience to orders. Now the newspapers printed reproductions of United Nations records, showing that at the request of the Defense Department four United Nations passports had been issued. The records said that the passports were for Jane and John Doe, and Ruth and Richard Roe, who obviously could not enter the United States without proper documents. The UN information on those persons was: birthplace, unknown; nationality, unknown; age, unknown; description, not given; race, unknown; occupation, unknown. And all the newspapers carried headlines about "SPACESHIP CREW US-BOUND." Or:

"Take Us To Your President"—Aliens

Spaceship Crew Demands Top-Level Conference.

Ultimatum Hinted At

It was not, of course, exclusively an American affair. The London Times pointed out the remarkable amount of detailed speculation in the air, as compared with the minute amount of admitted facts. But elsewhere: Pravda insisted that the aliens had refused to enter into discussions with America after learning of its capitalistic social system and tyrannical government. Ce Soir claimed exclusive private information that the crew of the spaceship—which was twelve hundred metres long—were winged monsters of repellant aspect. The official newspaper in Bucharest, to the contrary, said that they were intelligent reptiles. In Cairo it was believed and printed that the spacecraft was manned by creatures of protean structure, remarkably resembling legendary djinns.

There were other descriptions, all attributing monstrous qualities and brutally aggressive actions to the aliens.

And at Gissell Bay the staff became rather fond of four young people whose names were Zani, Fran, Hod and Mal, because they had been very well brought up by their parents and were thoroughly nice children.

They were tense, and they were desperately anxious and uneasy. But they displayed a resolute courage that made moderately decent people like them very much. Most of the research-staff wanted very badly to ask them questions, but that was impossible, so they studied the rather fuzzy photographs of the inside of the ship—the base photographer had run off several sets of extra prints—and poked helplessly at the things the children had brought with them, and racked their brains to imagine how such things work. The spinning thing atop the tripod made it quite pleasant to be out-of-doors around the Gissell Bay base, though there were forty-mile winds and thermometers read ten below zero two hundred yards from the thing Hod had set up. The cooking-pot boiled merrily without fuel, with an increasingly thick layer of frost on its outside. The thing Soames had called a super-radar allowed a penguin rookery to be watched in detail without disturbing the penguins, and Fran obligingly loaned his pocket instrument—the one that cut metal like butter—to the physicists of the staff.

He had to show them how to use it, though. It was a flat metal case about the size of a pocket cigarette lighter. It had two very simple controls, and a highly ingenious gimmick which kept it from turning itself on by accident.

In an oblique fashion, it was a heat-pump. One control turned it on and intensified or diminished its effect. The other controlled the area it worked on. In any material but iron, it made heat flow together toward the center of its projected field. Pointed at a metal bar, the heat from both ends flowed to the center, where the pocket device was aimed. The center became intensely hot. The rest went intensely cold. In seconds a bronze bar turned red-hot along a line a hundredth of an inch thick. Then it melted, a layer the thickness of tissue-paper turned liquid and one could pull the bar apart or slide it sidewise to separate it. But one needed to hold the bar in thick gloves, because liquid air could drip off if one were not careful. And it did not work on iron or steel.

Soames took Fran with Mal and Hod, to the improvised schoolroom where Gail labored to give Zani a minimum vocabulary of English words. Rex went happily along with the others.

Zani greeted the dog rapturously. She got down on the floor with him and tussled with him, her face beaming.

Soames' mouth dropped open. The other children hadn't known there was such a thing as a dog. They'd had to learn to play with Rex. But Zani knew about dogs and how to play with them on sight.

"I suppose," said Gail, not knowing of Soames' astonishment, "Zani will help me teach the other children some words."

But the boy Hod had picked up the ball-point pen Gail had needed to show Zani the use of. He didn't need to be shown. Without a glance at it, he began to write. A moment later he read off, slowly and clumsily and from the completely cryptic marks he'd made, the English words that Gail had taught Zani. Fran and Mal joined him. They painstakingly practiced the pronunciation of words Gail had taught Zani but not them.

It was another development that did not make sense.