Harry Harrison - The Daleth Effect

Skou took the back roads into Helsingor, then skirted the harbor to the Helsingor Skibsvaerft. The guard at the gate waved him through and he drove into the shipyard. There were the skeletons of two ships on the ways. Riveting machines hammered, and there was the sudden bite of actinic light as the welders bent to their work. The truck went around to the rear of the offices, out of sight of the rest of the yard.

“We have arrived,” Skou announced, throwing wide the back door.

They climbed down and followed Skou into the building and up a flight of stairs. A uniformed policeman saluted them as they came up and opened the door for them. There was the smell of fresh-brewed coffee inside, mixed with rich cigar smoke. Two men were seated with their backs to the door, looking out of the large window that faced onto the shipyard. They stood and turned around when the others entered, Arnie Klein and a tall middle-aged man dressed in a rusty black suit and vest with an old-fashioned gold watch chain across the front. Arnie made the introductions.

“This is Herr Leif Holm, the shipyard manager.” Coffee was produced, which they accepted, and thick, long Jutland cigars, which they refused, although Holm lit one himself and produced an immense cloud of blue smoke that hung below the ceiling.

“There you see it, gentlemen,” Holm said, aiming the cigar, like some deadly weapon, out of the window. “On the central ways. Denmark’s hope and future.”

A rain squall swept across the harbor, first clouding the battlements of Kronborg Slot, Hamlet’s castle, then the squat shape of the Swedish Halsingborg ferry. It threw a misty curtain over the red ribs and plates of the ships under construction before vanishing inland. Watery sunlight took its place. They followed Holm’s directions, looking at the squat, almost ugly ship that was nearing completion. It was oddly shaped, like an inner tube that had been stretched into an oblong. Bow, stern, and sides were fat and rounded; the superstructure, now being assembled on the deck in prefabricated units, was low and streamlined.

“That’s the new hovercraft, isn’t it?” Nils asked. “Vik-ingepuden. Being built for the Esbjerg-to-London run. Supposed to be the biggest in the world.” He wondered to himself what the raft had to do with Denmark’s hope and future.

“You are correct,” Holm said. “Plenty of articles in the papers, publicity, bigger than the British Channel ferries. What they do not mention is that we have been working on her around the clock and that some major changes have been incorporated in her design. And when she is launched she will be christened Galathea, and will sail uncharted seas just like her namesake. If she does not plumb the deepest of the ocean deeps, perhaps she will have a better head for heights.” He laid his finger alongside his nose and winked broadly. “You don’t mean… ?”

“I do indeed. The Moon, the planets, the stars—who knows? I understand that the professors here have been preparing her motive power, while we of the shipbuilding industry have not been idle. Major changes have been made in her plans. Internal bracing, hull, airtight hatches, airlocks—I will not bore you with the details. Suffice to say that in a few short weeks the first true spaceship will be launched. Galathea.”

They looked at her now with a new and eager interest. The rounded hull, impossible in any normal ocean vessel, was the ideal shape for a pressure hull. The lack of clearly marked bow and stern of no importance in space. This rusty, ugly torus was the shape of the future.

“There is another bit of information that you gentlemen should know. All of the operations of the program have been transferred to a new ministry, which will be made public after Galathea is launched. The Ministry of Space. I have the honor of being the acting minister, for the time being. It is therefore my pleasurable duty to ask Captain Hansen if he will request a transfer from the Air Force to the Space Force, with equivalent rank, of course, and no loss in benefits or seniority. If he does, his first assignment will be as commanding officer of this magnificent vessel. What do you say, Captain?”

“Of course,” Nils said, “of course!” without an instant’s hesitation. He did not take his eyes off the ship even when he accepted his friends’ congratulations.

Martha had not been exactly truthful with Nils when she had left him off at the station in Birkerod. She was not going shopping for dresses today but, instead, was keeping an appointment in Copenhagen. It was a small white lie, not telling him about this, one of the very few she had ever told him since they had been married. Seven years, it must be some sort of record. And the foolish part was that there was no reason why she shouldn’t tell Nils. It wasn’t very important at all.

Guilt, that’s all, she thought, stopping for the light, then turning south on Kongevej. Just my own irrational feelings of guilt. Clouds were banking up ahead and the first drops of rain splattered on the windshield. Where would the modern world be without Freud to supply a reason for everything? She had been majoring in psychology at Columbia when she had met Nils for the first time. Visiting her parents here in Copenhagen where her father had been stationed. Dr. Charles W. Greene, epidemiologist, big man with the World Health Organization. Welcoming his daughter for her summer vacation, long-limbed, undergraduate, tweed skirts. Parties and friends. A wonderful summer. And Nils Hansen. Big as a mountain and handsome as Apollo in his SAS uniform. An almost elemental force. Laughing and fun; she had been in bed with him almost before she knew he had been making a pass. There was no time to think or even realize what had happened. The funny part was, in a way, that they had been married afterward. His proposal had come as a real surprise. She liked him well enough, he was practically the first man she had ever been to bed with, because other college students hardly counted. At first it had been a httle strange, even thinking about marrying someone other than an American, another country and another language. But in so many ways Denmark seemed like the States and her parents were there, Nils and all her friends spoke English. And it had been fun, sort of instant jet set, and they had been married.

Even though she had never been completely sure why he had ever picked her. He could have had any girl that he wanted to crook his finger at—he still had to beat them off at parties. And he had chosen her. Romantic love she told herself, whenever she was feeling upswing, something right out of the Ladies’ Home Journal. But when the rain set in for weeks at a time and she was alone she had to go see friends, or buy a hat or something, to get away from the depression. Then she would worry that he had married her because it was that time of life when Danish men got married. And she had been handy. And an American wife has some prestige in Denmark.

The truth was probably somewhere in between these—or took in parts of both. As she grew up she had discovered that nothing was ever as simple as you hoped it might be. Now she was a long-married woman, a homemaker and on the pill, a little bored at times, though not unhappy.

Yet she was still an American citizen—and that, perhaps, was where the guilt came in. If she loved Nils, as she was sure she did, why had she never taken the step of becoming a Danish citizen? In all truth she never thought much about it, and whenever her thoughts came near the subject she slithered them away in another direction. It would be easy enough to do. She was driving mechanically and realized suddenly that the rain had gotten heavier, that it was covering the glass, and she slowed and turned on the wipers.