Beyond Control Read online

  “Plenty high,” the technician with the loop said. “Between forty-five and fifty thousand. Seems to be rising a little, too.”

  “Between—” Meister stepped quickly to the instrument. Sure enough, the black needle was wavering, so rapidly as to be only a fan-shaped blur between the two figures. “This is ridiculous! Is that instrument reliable?”

  “I just took the underwriters’ seal off it,” the technician said. “Did you figure this much ozone could be fixed out without any alteration?”

  “Yes, I had presupposed the equivalent of UV bombardment. This changes things. No wonder there is light leaking through that screen! Sergeant—”

  “Yes sir?” the policeman mumbled through his mask. “How much of the area below can you clear?”

  “As much as you need.”

  “Good.” Meister reached into his jacket pocket and produced the map of the city the pilot had given him. “We are here, yes? Make a cordon, then, from here to here.” His soft pencil scrawled a black line around four buildings. “Then get as much fire-fighting equipment outside the line as you can muster.”

  “You’re expecting a bad fire?”

  “No, a good one. But hurry!”

  The cop scratched his head in puzzlement, but he went below. Meister smiled. Members of the Screen Team were the Mister Bigs in this city now. Twenty hours ago nobody’d ever heard of the Screen Team.

  The technician, working with nervous quickness, was tying an Oscilloscope into the loop circuit. Meister nodded approvingly. If there was a pulse to this phenomenon, it would be just as well to know its form. He snapped his fingers.

  “What’s wrong, Doctor?”

  “My memory. I have put my head on backwards when I got up this morning, I think. We will have to photograph the waveform; it will be too complex to analyze here.”

  “How do you know?” the technician asked.

  “By that radio tone,” Meister said. “You Americans work by sight. There are almost no resonance electronics men in this country. But in Germany we worked as much by ear as by eye. Where you convert a wave into a visible pattern, we turned it into an audible one. We had a saying that resonance engineers were disappointed musicians.” The face of the tube suddenly produced a green wiggle. It was the kind of wiggle a crazy man might make. The technician looked at it in dismay. “That,” he said, “doesn’t exist. I won’t work in a science where it could exist!”

  Meister grinned. “That is what I meant. The radio sound was a fundamental B-flat, but with hundreds of harmonics and overtones. You don’t have it all in the field yet.”

  “I don’t?” He looked. “So I don’t! But when I reduce it that much, you can’t see the shape of the modulations.”

  “We will have to photograph it by sections.”

  Bringing over the camera, the other man set it up. They worked rapidly, oppressed by the unnatural pearly glimmer, the masks, the stink of ozone which crept in at the sides of the treated cloth, the electrical prickling, above all by the silent terror of any trapped animal.

  While they worked, the cop came back and stood by silently, watching. The gas mask gave no indication of his expression, but Meister could feel the pressure of faith radiating from the man. Doubtless these bits of equipment were meaningless to him—but bits of equipment like these had put up The Box, beyond the powers of policemen or presidents to take it down again. Men who knew about such things were as good as gods now.

  Unless they failed.

  “That does it,” the technician said.

  The cop stepped forward. “I’ve got the area you marked roped off,” he said diffidently. “We’ve searched the apartments and there’s nobody in them. If there’s any fire here, we’ll be able to control it.”

  “Excellent!” Meister said. “Remember that this gas will feed the flames, however. You will need every possible man.”

  “Yes sir. Anything else?”

  “Just get out of the district yourself.”

  Meister climbed into the plane and stood by the open hatch, looking at his wrist watch. He gave the cop ten minutes to leave the tenement and get out to the fire lines. Then he struck a match and pitched it out onto the roof.

  “Up!” he shouted.

  The rotors roared. The pitch on the roof began to smolder. A tongue of flame shot up. In three seconds the whole side of the roof nearest the gray screen was blazing.

  The helicopter lurched and clawed for altitude.

  Behind the plane arose a brilliant and terrifying yellow glare. Meister didn’t bother to watch it. He squatted with his back to the fire and waved pieces of paper over the neck of a bottle.

  The ammonia fumes were invisible and couldn’t be smelled through the mask, but on the dry-plates wiggly lines were appearing. Meister studied them, nibbling gently at his lower lip. With luck, the lines would answer one question at least: they would tell what The Box was. With luck, they might even tell how it was produced.

  They would not tell where it came from.

  The motion of the ’copter changed suddenly, and Meister’s stomach stirred uneasily under his belt. He stowed the plates and looked up. The foreshortened spire of the Empire State Building pointed up at him through the transparent deck; another ’copter hovered at its tip. The television antennas were hidden now in what seemed to be a globe of some dark substance.

  Meister picked up the radio-phone. “Schafer?” he called—this to the Empire State Building.

  “No, this is Talliafero,” came back an answer. “Schafer’s back at the labs. We’re about ready to leave. Need any help?”

  “I don’t think so,” Meister said. “Is that foil you have around the tower mast?”

  “Yes, but it’s only a precaution. The whole tower’s radiating. The foil radiates, too, now that we’ve got it up. See you later.”

  The other ’copter stirred and swooped away.

  Meister twisted the dial up into the short-wave region. The humming surged in; he valved down the volume and listened intently. The sound was different somehow. After a moment his mind placed it. The fundamental B-flat was still there, but some of the overtones were gone; that meant that hundreds of them, which the little amplifier could not reproduce, were also gone. He was listening on an FM set; his little table set at the apartment was AM. So the wave was modulated along both axes, and probably pulse-modulated as well. But why should it simplify as one approached its source?

  Resonance, of course. The upper harmonics were echoes. Yet a simple primary tone in a well-known frequency range couldn’t produce The Box by itself. It was the harmonics that made the difference, and the harmonics couldn’t appear without the existence of some chamber like The Box. Along this line of reasoning, The Box was a precondition of its own existence. Meister felt his head swimming.

  “Hey,” the pilot said. “It’s started to snow!”

  Meister turned off the set and looked out. “All right, let’s go home now.”

  Despite its depleted staff, the Screen Team was quiet with the intense hush of concentration that was its equivalent of roaring activity. Frank Schafer’s door was closed, but Meister didn’t bother to knock. He was on the edge of an idea and there was no time to be lost in formalities.

  There were a number of uniformed men in the office with Frank. There was also a big man in expensive clothes, and a smaller man who looked as if he needed sleep. The smaller man had dark circles under his eyes, but despite his haggardness Meister knew him. The mayor. The big man did not look familiar—nor pleasant.

  As for the high brass, nothing in a uniform looked pleasant to Meister. He pushed forward and put the dry-plates down on Schafer’s desk. “The resonance products,” he said. “If we can duplicate the fundamental in the lab—”

  There came a roar from the big man. “Dr. Schafer, is this the man we’ve been waiting for?”

  Schafer made a tired gesture. “Jake, this is Roland Dean,” he said. “You know the mayor, I think. These others are security officers. They seem to thin
k you made The Box.”

  Meister stiffened. “I? That’s idiotic!”

  “Any noncitizen is automatically under suspicion,” one of the Army men said. “However, Dr. Schafer exaggerates. We just want to ask a few questions.”

  The mayor coughed. He was obviously tired, and the taint of ozone did not make breathing very comfortable. “I’m afraid there’s more to it than that, Dr. Meister,” he added. “Mr. Dean here has insisted upon an arrest. I’d like to say for myself that I think it all quite stupid.”

  “Thank you,” Meister said. “What is Mr. Dean’s interest in this?”

  “Mr. Dean,” Schafer growled, “is the owner of that block of tenements you’re burning out up north. The fire’s spreading, by the way. When I told him I didn’t know why you lit it, he blew his top.”

  “Why not?” Dean said, glaring at Meister. “I fail to see why this emergency should be made an excuse for irresponsible destruction of property. Have you any reason for burning my buildings, Meister?”

  “Are you having any trouble with breathing, Mr. Dean?” Meister asked.

  “Certainly! Who isn’t? Do you think you can make it easier for us by filling The Box with smoke?”

  Meister nodded. “I gather that you have no knowledge of elementary chemistry, Mr. Dean. The Box is rapidly converting our oxygen into an unbreathable form. A good hot fire will consume some of it, but it will also break up the ozone molecules. The ratio is about two atoms of oxygen consumed for every one set free—out of three which in the form of ozone could not have been breathed at all.”

  Schafer sighed gustily. “I should have guessed. A neat scheme, Jake. But what about the ratio between reduction of ozone and over-all oxygen consumption?”

  “Large enough to maintain five of the six days’ grace with which we started. Had we let the ozone-fixing process continue unabated, we should not have lasted forty hours longer.”

  “Mumbo jumbo!” Dean said stonily, turning to Schafer. “A halfway measure. The problem is to get us out of this mess, not to stretch our sufferings out by three days by invading property rights. This man is a German, probably a Nazi! By your own admission, he’s the only man in your whole section who’s seemed to know what to do. And nothing he’s done so far has shown any result, except to destroy some of my buildings!”

  “Dr. Meister, just what has been accomplished thus far?” a colonel of Intelligence said.

  “Only a few tentative observations,” Meister said. “We have most of the secondary phenomena charted.”

  “Charts!” Dean snorted.

  “Can you offer any assurance that The Box will be down in time?” the colonel asked.

  “That,” Meister said, “would be very foolish of me. The possibility exists, that is all. Certainly it will take time—we have barely scratched the surface.”

  “In that case, I’m afraid you’ll have to consider yourself under arrest—”

  “See here, Colonel!” Schafer surged to his feet, his face flushed. “Don’t you know that he’s the only man in The Box who can crack it? That fire was good common sense. If you arrest my men for not doing anything, we’ll never get anything done!”

  “I am not exactly stupid, Dr. Schafer,” the colonel said harshly. “I have no interest in Mr. Dean’s tenements, and if the mayor is forced to jail Dr. Meister we will spring him at once. All I’m interested in is the chance that Dr. Meister may be maintaining The Box instead of trying to crack it.”

  “Explain, please,” Meister said mildly.

  Pulling himself up to military straightness, the colonel cleared his throat and said:

  “You’re inside The Box. If you put it up, you have a way out of it, and know where the generator is. You may go where you please, but from now on we’ll have a guard with you—Satisfied, Dr. Schafer?”

  “It doesn’t satisfy me!” Dean rumbled. “What about my property? Are you going to let this madman burn buildings with a guard to help?”

  The colonel looked at the landlord. “Mr. Dean,” he said quietly, “you seem to think The Box was created to annoy you personally. The Army hasn’t the technical knowledge to destroy it, but it has sense enough to realize that more than just New York is under attack here. The enemy, whoever he may be, thinks his screen uncrackable, otherwise he wouldn’t have given us this chance to work on it by boxing in one city alone. If The Box is not down in, say, eight days, he’ll know that New York failed and died—and every city in the country will be bombed to slag the next morning.”

  Schafer sat down again, looking surly. “Why?” he asked the army man. “Why would they waste the bombs when they could just box in the cities?”

  “Inefficient. America’s too big to occupy except slowly, piecemeal. They’d have no reason to care if large parts of it were uninhabitable for a while. The important thing is to knock us out as a military force, as a power in world affairs.”

  “If they boxed in all the cities at once—”

  The colonel shook his head. “We have rocket emplacements of our own, and they aren’t in large cities. Neither Box nor bomb would catch more than a few of them. No. They have to know that The Box is uncrackable, so they can screen their own cities against our bombs until our whole country is knocked out. With The Box, that would take more than a week, and their cities would suffer along with ours. With bombs, a day would be enough. So they’ve allowed us this test. If New York comes out of this, there’ll be no attack, at least until they’ve gotten a better screen. The Box seems good enough so far!”

  “Politics,” Schafer said, shaking his head disgustedly. “It’s much too devious for me! Doesn’t The Box constitute an attack?”

  “Certainly—but who’s doing the attacking?” the colonel demanded. “We can guess, but we don’t know. And I doubt very much that the enemy has left any traces.” Meister stiffened suddenly, a thrill of astonishment shooting up his backbone. Schafer stared at him.

  “Traces!” Meister said “Of course! That is what has been stopping us all along. Naturally there would be no traces. We have been wasting time looking for them. Frank, the generator is not in the Empire State Building. It is not even in The Box!”

  “But Jake, it’s got to be,” Schafer said. “It’s physically impossible for it to be outside!”

  “A trick,” Dean rumbled.

  Meister waved his hands excitedly. “No, no! This is the reasoning which has made our work so fruitless. Observe. As the colonel says, the enemy would not dare leave traces. Now, workmanship is traceable, particularly if the device is revolutionary , as this one is. Find that generator and you know at once which country has made it You observe the principle, and you say to yourself, ‘Ah, yes, there were reports, rumors, whispers of shadows of rumors of such a principle, but I discounted them as fantasy’: they came out of ‘Country X’. Do you follow?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But no country would leave such a fingerprint where it could be found. This we can count upon. Whereas we know as yet next to nothing about the physics of The Box. Therefore, if it is physically impossible for the generator to be outside The Box, this does not mean that we must continue to search for it inside. It means that we must find a physical principle which makes it possible to be outside!”

  Frank Schafer threw up his hands. “Revise basic physics in a week! Well, let’s try. I suppose Meister’s allowed lab work. Colonel?”

  “Certainly, as long as my guards aren’t barred from the laboratory”

  Thirty hours later the snow stopped falling, leaving a layer a little over three inches deep. The battling mobs were no longer on the streets. Hopeless masses were jammed body to body in railroad stations and subways. The advancing ozone had driven the people in upon themselves, and into the houses and basements where rooms could be sealed against the searing stench.

  Thousands had already died along the periphery. The New Jersey and Brooklyn shores were charnel heaps of those who had fought to get back across the river to Manhattan and cleaner air. The tenem
ents along the West Side of the island still blazed—twenty linear blocks of them—but the fire had failed to jump Ninth Avenue and was dying for want of fuel. Elsewhere it was very cold. The city was dying.

  Over it, The Box was invisible. It was the third night.

  In the big lab at the Team office, Meister, Schafer, and the two technicians suddenly disappeared under a little Box of their own, leaving behind four frantic soldiers. Meister sighed gustily and looked at the black screen a few feet from his head.

  “Now we know,” he said. “Frank, you can turn on the light now.”

  The desk lamp clicked on. In the shaded glow Meister saw that tears were trickling down Schafer’s cheeks.

  “No, no, don’t weep yet, the job is not quite done!” Meister cried. “But see—so simple, so beautiful!” He gestured at the lump of metal in the exact center of the Boxed area. “Here we are—four men, a bit of metallic trash, an empty desk, a lamp, a cup of foil. Where is the screen generator? Outside!”

  Schafer swallowed. “But it isn’t,” he said hoarsely. “Oh, you were right, Jake—the key projector is outside. But it doesn’t generate the screen; it just excites the iron there, and that does the job.” He looked at the scattered graphs on the desk top. “I’d never have dreamed such a jam of fields were possible! Look at those waves—catching each other, heterodyning, slowing each other up as the tension increases. No wonder the whole structure of space gives way when they finally get in phase!”

  One of the technicians looked nervously at the little Box and cleared his throat. “I still don’t see why it should leak light, oxygen, and so forth, even the little that it does. The jam has to be radiated away, and the screen should be the subspatial equivalent of a perfect radiator, a black body. But it’s gray.”

  “No, it’s black,” Schafer said. “But it isn’t turned on all the time. If it were, the catalyst radiation couldn’t get through. It’s a perfect electromagnetic push-me-pull-you. The apparatus outside projects the catalyst fields in. The lump of iron—in this case the Empire State Building—is excited and throws off the screen fields. The screen goes up. The screen cuts off the catalyst radiation. The screen goes down. In comes the primary beam again. And so on. The kicker is that without the off-again-on-again, you wouldn’t get anything—the screen couldn’t exist because the intermittence supplies some of the necessary harmonics.”