Десмонд Бэгли - Running Blind

He touched down the probe and the oscilloscope trace jumped again before it settled down. Nordlinger whistled. ‘Just look at that spaghetti, will you?’ The green line was twisted into a fantastic waveform which jumped rhythmically and changed form with each jump. ‘You’d need a hell of a lot of Fourier analysis to sort that out,’ said Nordlinger. ‘But whatever else it is, it’s pulsed by this metal dohickey.’

‘What do you make of it?’

‘Not a damn thing,’ he said. ‘Now I’m going to try the output stage; on past form this should fairly tie knots into that oscilloscope — maybe it’ll blow up.’ He lowered the probe and we looked expectantly at the screen.

I said, ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘I’m waiting for nothing.’ Nordlinger looked at the screen blankly.

‘There’s no output.’

‘Is that bad?’

He looked at me oddly. In a gentle voice he said, ‘It’s impossible.’

I said, ‘Maybe there’s something broken in there.’

‘You don’t get it,’ said Nordlinger. ‘A circuit is just what it says — a circle. You break the circle anywhere you get no current flow anywhere.’ He applied the probe again. ‘Here there’s a current of a pulsed and extremely complex form.’ Again the screen jumped into life. ‘And here, in the same circuit, what do we get?’

I looked at the blank screen. ‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ he said firmly. He hesitated. ‘Or, to put it more precisely, nothing that can show on this test rig.’ He tapped the gadget. ‘Mind if I take this thing away for a while?’

‘Why?’

‘I’d like to put it through some rather more rigorous tests. We have another shop.’ He cleared his throat and appeared to be a little embarrassed. ‘Uh... you won’t be allowed in there.’

‘Oh — secret stuff.’ That would be in one of the areas to which Fleet’s pass would give access. ‘All right, Lee; you put the gadget through its paces and I’ll go and shave. I’ll wait for you in your office.’

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Where did you get it, Alan?’

I said, ‘You tell me what it does and I’ll tell you where it came from.’

He grinned. ‘It’s a deal.’

I left him disconnecting the gadget from the test rig and went back to his office where I picked up the electric shaver. Fifteen minutes later I felt a lot better after having got rid of the hair. I waited in Nordlinger’s office for a long time — over an hour and a half — before he came back.

He came in carrying the gadget as though it was a stick of dynamite and laid it gently on his desk. ‘I’ll have to ask you where you got this,’ he said briefly.

‘Not until you tell me what it does,’ I said.

He sat behind his desk and looked at the complex of metal and plastic with something like loathing in his eyes. ‘It does nothing,’ he said flatly. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘It must do something .’

‘Nothing!’ he repeated. ‘There is no measurable output.’ He leaned forward and said softly, ‘Alan, out there I have instruments that can measure any damn part of the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves of such low frequency you wouldn’t believe possible right up to cosmic radiation — and there’s nothing coming out of this contraption.’

‘As I said before — maybe something has broken.’

‘That cat won’t jump; I tested everything.’ He pushed at it and it moved sideways on the desk. ‘There are three things I don’t like about this. Firstly, there are components in here that are not remotely like anything I’ve seen before, components of which I don’t even understand the function. I’m supposed to be pretty good at my job, and that, in itself, is enough to disturb me. Secondly, it’s obviously incomplete — it’s just part of a bigger complex — and yet I doubt if I would understand it even if I had everything. Thirdly — and this is the serious one — it shouldn’t work.’

‘But it isn’t working,’ I said.

He waved his hand distractedly. ‘Perhaps I put it wrong. There should be an output of some kind. Good Christ, you can’t keep pushing electricity into a machine — juice that gets used up — without getting something out. That’s impossible.’

I said, ‘Maybe it’s coming out in the form of heat.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘I got mad and went to extreme measures. I pushed a thousand watts of current through it in the end. If the energy output was in heat then the goddamn thing would have glowed like an electric heater. But no — it stayed as cool as ever.’

‘A bloody sight cooler than you’re behaving,’ I said.

He threw up his hands in exasperation. ‘Alan, if you were a mathematician and one day you came across an equation in which two and two made five without giving a nonsensical result then you’d feel exactly as I do. It’s as though a physicist were confronted by a perpetual motion machine which works.’

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘A perpetual motion machine gets something for nothing — energy usually. This is the other way round.’

‘It makes no difference,’ he said. ‘Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.’ As I opened my mouth he said quickly, ‘And don’t start talking about atomic energy. Matter can be regarded as frozen, concentrated energy.’ He looked at the gadget with grim eyes. ‘This thing is destroying energy.’

Destroying energy! I rolled the concept around my cerebrum to see what I could make of it. The answer came up fast — nothing much. I said, ‘Let’s not go overboard. Let’s see what we have. You put an input into it and you get out...’

‘Nothing,’ said Nordlinger.

‘Nothing you can measure,’ I corrected. ‘You may have some good instrumentation here, Lee, but I don’t think you’ve got the whole works. I’ll bet that there’s some genius somewhere who not only knows what’s coming out of there but has an equally involved gadget that can measure it.’

‘Then I’d like to know what it is,’ he said. ‘Because it’s right outside my experience.’

I said, ‘Lee, you’re a technician, not a scientist. You’ll admit that?’

‘Sure; I’m an engineer from way back.’

‘That’s why you have a crew-cut — but this was designed by a long-hair.’ I grinned. ‘Or an egghead.’

‘I’d still like to know where you got it.’

‘You’d better be more interested in where it’s going. Have you got a safe — a really secure one?’

‘Sure.’ He did a double-take. ‘You want me to keep this?’

‘For forty-eight hours,’ I said. ‘If I don’t claim it in that time you’d better give it to your superior officer together with all your forebodings, and let him take care of it.’

Nordlinger looked at me with a cold eye.’ I don’t know but what I shouldn’t give it to him right now. Forty-eight hours might mean my neck.’

‘You part with it now and it will be my neck,’ I said grimly.

He picked up the gadget. ‘This is American and it doesn’t belong here at Keflavik. I’d like to know where it does belong.’

‘You’re right about it not belonging here,’ I said. ‘But I’m betting it’s Russian — and they want it back.’

‘For God’s sake!’ he said. ‘It’s full of American components.’

‘Maybe the Russians learned a lesson from Macnamara on cost-effectiveness. Maybe they’re shopping in the best market. I don’t give two bloody hoots if the components were made in the Congo — I still want you to hold on to it.’

He laid the gadget on his desk again very carefully. ‘Okay — but I’ll split the difference; I’ll give you twenty-four hours. And even then you don’t get it back without a full explanation.’