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I

Dr Martin Nagle studied the paint on the ceiling of the outer anteroom of the Office of National Research. After ten minutes he was fairly certain which corner had been painted first, the direction of advance across the ceiling, and approximately how long it had taken.

It was a new building and a new paint job, but these facts were evident in the brush marks and brush hairs left in the paint. On the whole, the job was something of an indication of how things were in general, he thought somewhat sadly.

He studied the rug. Specifications should have been higher. The manufacturer undoubtedly operated on the principle of ‘don’t throw away seconds; you can always sell them to the Government.’

His watch showed twenty-five minutes spent in the study of the anteroom. It was all he was going to give it. He picked up his briefcase and top coat and moved towards the door.

He almost collided with a grey-suited figure, then backed away in pleasant recognition.

‘Berk!’

The face of Dr Kenneth Berkeley lighted as he gripped Martin Nagle’s free hand and clapped him on the shoulder.

‘What are you doing out here in this waiting room. Mart?’

‘I got invited to some conference with all the top dogs and high brass, but the boys in blue wouldn’t let me in. I was just on the way back to California. But you’re one of the last I expected to meet here. What are you doing, Berk?’

‘I work on ONR. I’m on this conference myself. They sent me out to look for you. Everybody else has arrived.’

‘I saw the parade from here. Dykstra of MIT, Collins of Harvard, and Mellon from Cal Tech. A high-powered bunch.’

‘It is. And they’re all waiting on you! Come on. We’ll talk later.’

Mart jerked a thumb towards the office opening off the anteroom. ‘The boys in there seem to have doubts as to whether I can be trusted not to pass things on to the Comrades. I can’t wait around. It’ll probably take six weeks to clear me. I thought all that would have been taken care of. Evidently it wasn’t. Give my regards to everybody, and tell Keyes I’m sorry I hadn’t been cleared for classified projects. I guess he didn’t know it.’

‘No, wait – this is absolutely silly,’ said Berk. ‘We’ve got to have you in there. Sit down and we’ll have this thing cleared in five minutes!’

Mart sat down again. He had never worked on any classified projects. The fingerprinting and sleuthing into the past of his colleagues had always seemed distasteful to him. He knew Berk didn’t have a chance now. He’d seen more than one good man twiddle his thumbs for six months to a year while his dark past was unearthed.

Rising voices from the inner office of the FBI agent became audible. Mart caught snatches of Berk’s baritone roar. ‘Utterly ridiculous … top-drawer physicist… electro fields … got to have this man–‘

After the FBI office there were still the offices of Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence to hurdle. It was a fantastic triple barrier they had woven about this conference. On coming in he had chuckled at this further evidence of frantic bureaucrats to button up the secrets of nature which lay visible to the whole world.

In a moment Berk came striding out, red-faced and indignant. ‘You stay right there, Mart,’ he said furiously. ‘I’m going to get Keyes on this thing, and we’ll find out who’s got a right to get into this place besides the janitor!’

‘Look, Berk – I don’t mind. I don’t think you ought to bother Keyes with this–‘

‘I’ll be right back. This thing has gone too far.’

Mart felt rather foolish. It was not his fault he couldn’t get by the security officers, but that failure induced a faint sense of guilt.

Berk returned within minutes. With him were two men in uniform, a brigadier general, and a naval captain. With them was Dr Keyes, Director of ONR. Martin knew him only by reputation – which was very top-drawer indeed. Keyes approached with a direct friendly smile and offered his hand.

‘I’m very sorry, Dr Nagle, regarding this delay. I had no idea that you would be stopped at the security desk. I issued instructions in plenty of time for the conference that everyone invited be properly cleared. Somehow this formality was overlooked in your case. But I am sure that we shall be able to make satisfactory emergency arrangements within a few moments. If you will wait here while I confer with all these gentlemen–‘

They closed the door of the inner office, but Mart could not help straining his ears at the rumble of sounds that filtered through. He caught a phrase in a voice that belonged to one of the security officers: ‘… Demanded these triple security screens yourself–‘

And another from Keyes: ‘… The one man who may be able to crack this thing for us–‘

Mart had come reluctantly. His wife had protested, and the two children had set up a tremendous wail that it might mean no summer vacation at all.

He rather wished he had heeded their protests. The moment a man became involved in something so classified it required triple passes from the Army, Navy, and FBI he could say good-bye to freedom. He wondered how Keyes had become involved in such a circuitous business. Keyes had done monumental work on electromagnetic radiation.

And he wondered, too, what Kenneth Berkeley was doing here. It was way out of his field. Berk was a top psychologist in the mechanics of learning, and experimental training procedures.

It looked to Mart as if both of them were wasting their time in security clearance wrangles.

He was not particularly intrigued by the possible magnitude of the problem under consideration. A man sitting by a mountain stream under an open summer sky had the most ponderous problems of nature before him if he chose to consider them. None couched in hush-hush terms behind closed lab doors could have any greater import.

At last the door opened. Mart arose. Dr Keyes led the procession out of the room. All of the men were a little more strained in their expressions than when they went in, but Keyes took Mart’s arm.

‘It’s all right. You have full clearance now. Your papers will be issued and ready when you come out. But let’s get to the conference at once. We’ve kept the others waiting.’

As Mart stepped inside the conference room he caught his breath involuntarily. Besides the brilliant array of his colleagues in fields closely allied to his own, there was a display of gold-splashed uniforms of all military services. He had quick recognition of several lieutenant generals, vice admirals, and at least one member of the JCS.

Berk ushered him to a seat in the front row. He felt doubly guilty that these men had been kept waiting, although it was no direct fault of his.

At the front of the room a projection screen was unrolled on the wall. A sixteen mm. projector was set up near the rear. On a table on the far side a tarpaulin covered some kind of irregular object.

Keyes stepped to the front of the room and cleared his throat briefly.

‘We will dispense with the formality of introducing each of you gentlemen. Many of you are acquainted, professionally or personally, and I trust that all will be before this project is many hours old.

‘The top classification nature of the material we are about to discuss has been emphasized to you by the triple filter of security officers who have passed upon your admission to this room. That which is discussed here you will properly regard as worthy of protection with your own life, if such an extreme consideration should be forced upon you at some future time.’

The military members of the audience remained immobile, but Martin Nagle observed an uneasy shifting among his fellow scientists. All of them were to some degree uncomfortable in the presence of the military assumption that you could lock up the secrets of nature when they lay all about like shells upon the seashore.

But Keyes wasn’t a military man. Mart felt his muscles become a little more rigid as the significance of this penetrated.

‘Ten days ago,’ said Keyes very slowly, ‘we were approached by a young man, an inventor of sorts, who claimed to have produced a remarkable and revolutionary invention.

‘His name was Leon Dunning. He had an unusual regard for his own abilities, and expected, apparently, that everyone else would have the same regard on sight. This trait led him to a rather unpleasant presentation of himself. He would talk with no one but the Director of the Office, and made such a nuisance that it became a question of seeing him or calling the police.

‘His case was drawn to my attention, and I finally chose to see him. He had some rather startling claims. He claimed to have solved the problem of producing an anti-gravity machine.’

Martin Nagle felt a sudden sinking sensation within him – and an impulse to laugh. For this he had cancelled the kids’ summer vacation! Maybe it wasn’t too late to get back–

He glanced at his colleagues. Dykstra was bending over and rubbing his forehead to hide the smile that appeared on his lips. Lee and Norcross gave each other smiles of pitying indulgence. Berkeley, Mart noted, was almost the only scientist who did not move or smile. But, of course, Berk was a psychologist,

‘I see that some of you gentlemen are amused,’ continued Keyes. ‘So was I. I wondered what was the best means of getting rid of this obnoxious crackpot who had forced his way into my office. Again, it was a question of listening until the ridiculousness of his claims became self-evident, or having him thrown out. I listened.

‘I tried to draw him out regarding the theories upon which his device operated, but he refused to discuss this in detail. He insisted such discussion could be held only after a demonstration of his device.

‘With a free Saturday afternoon that week, I agreed to watch. Dunning insisted that certain military personnel also be invited and that films and tape recording equipment be available. Having gone as far as I had, I agreed also to this and rounded up some of the gentlemen who are with us this afternoon.

‘He wanted no other kind of publicity, and so we arranged to meet at the small private airfield at the Dover club. That was just one week ago today. He demonstrated.

‘A small pack was attached to his shoulders by straps. I assisted him in putting it on. It weighed perhaps thirty-five or forty pounds. It had no visible means of propulsion such as propeller or jets, and no connection to an external power source. Seeing it, I felt extremely ridiculous for having invited my military guests to such a futile performance.

‘We stood in a circle about ten feet in diameter around him. When the pack was fastened, he gave us a kind of pitying smile, it seemed, and pressed a switch at his belt.

‘Instantly, he rose straight up into the air in a smoothly accelerated climb. We spread apart to watch him. At about five hundred feet, he came to a stop and hung motionless for a moment. Then he dropped back down to the centre of the circle.’

Keyes paused. ‘I see a variety of expressions on your faces. I presume some of you consider us who observed it as victims of hallucinations or out and out liars. We agreed afterwards that it was very fortunate that Dunning insisted on motion pictures of the demonstration. These we have for your inspection. If you will, please–‘

He signalled to his assistants. The shades were drawn and the projector at the rear started with a whirr. Mart found himself leaning forward, his hand clutching the desk arm of the chair. This was something he didn’t even want to believe, he thought!

On the screen there appeared a scene of the encircling men. In the centre, Dunning appeared to be in his late twenties. Mart could detect at once the type that Keyes had described -a snotty young jerk who knew he was good and figured others better catch on to that real fast. Mart knew the type. You run into them in senior engineering classes in every school in the country.

He watched the circle back from Dunning. There was a clear shot of the alleged inventor standing with the weird pack on his back. He fumbled a moment with the key switch at his belt, then rose abruptly from the ground.

Mart stared. The picture panned up jerkily as the operator evidently retreated for a longer range view. He watched closely for any sign of emanation from the pack. He had to remind himself of the foolishness of looking for such. There was certainly no type of jet that could operate this way.

But anti-gravity – Mart caught a feeling that was a cross between a prickle and a chill moving slowly along the upper length of his spine.

The motion on the screen came to a halt. Then slowly Dunning lowered himself to the middle of the circle once more.

The screen went dark, and lights flashed on in the room. Mart jerked, as if waking from a hypnotic spell.

‘We paused at this point,’ said Keyes. ‘Dunning became more talkative and discussed somewhat the basic theories of his machine. For this we used the tape recorder he had insisted on us bringing along.

‘Unfortunately, the record is so poor due to high noise level and distortion that it is next to unintelligible, but we will play it for you in a moment.

‘Following the discussion, he agreed to make another demonstration showing an additional factor, horizontal flight control. We’ll have the movie of this, now.’

He touched the light button. The scene appeared once more. This time the circle opened at one side and Dunning rose in a rather steep arc and levelled off. Against the background, he seemed about as high as the roof of the hangar beyond. For about a hundred feet he drifted slowly, then accelerated his pace. Mart felt a wholly irrational impulse to laugh. It was Buck Rogers in full attack.

Abruptly the screen flared. A puff of light exploded from the pack on Dunning’s back. For a terrible moment he seemed suspended in an attitude of violent agony. Then he plunged like a dropped stone.

The camera lost him for an instant, but it caught the full impact of his body on the field. During the fall, he turned over. The pack was beneath him as he crashed. His body bounced and rolled a short way and lay still.

Keyes moved to the light switch, and signalled for the raising of the shades. Someone rose to do this. No one else moved. The room seemed caught in a suspension of time.

‘There you have it, gentlemen,’ said Keyes in a quiet voice. ‘You will begin to understand why you were called here today. Dunning had it – anti-gravity. Of that we are absolutely sure. And Dunning is dead.’

He drew a corner of the canvas from the table by the far wall. ‘The remains of the device are here for your examination. So far, we see only burned and bloody wreckage in it. Under your Supervision it will be carefully photographed and dismantled.’

He dropped the cover and returned to the centre of the platform. ‘We went immediately to Dunning’s house with a crew of investigators from ONR assisted by security officers of the services.

‘Dunning’s quite evident paranoia was carried out in an utter lack of notes. He must have lived in constant fear that his work would be stolen. His laboratory was excellent for a private worker. What his income was we don’t know as yet.

‘He also had an astonishing library – astonishing in that it covered almost every occult field as well. This, too, remains somewhat of a mystery.

‘We investigated his college background. He appears to have had difficulty in getting along at any one college, and attended at least four. His curriculum was as varied as his library. He studied courses in electrical engineering, comparative religion, advanced astronomy, Latin, the theory of groups, general semantics and advanced comparative anatomy.

‘We managed to contact about twenty of his instructors and fellow students. Their uniform opinions describe him as paranoid. He was utterly without intimates of any kind. If he communicated his theories to anyone, we do not know about it.

‘So the only record we have of the expressions of the man who first devised an anti-gravity machine is this poor-quality tape.’

He nodded again to the operator at the rear of the room. The latter turned on the recorder whose output was fed to a speaker on the table in front.

At once the room was rilled with a hissing, roaring garble. The sound of planes taking off – the everyday noise of the airport. Beneath the racket was the dead man’s voice, a thin, rather high-pitched sound carrying through the background noise a tone of condescension and impatient tolerance.

Mart listened with ears strained to make sense of the garble. His eyes caught Berk’s and reflected his despair of ever getting anything out of the mess. Keyes signalled the operator.

‘I see that you are impatient with this recording, gentlemen. Perhaps there is no purpose in playing it in this conference. But each of you will be given a copy. In the privacy of your own laboratories you will have opportunity to make what you can of it. It is worth your study simply because, as far as we know, it contains the only clues we possess.’

Mart raised a hand impatiently. ‘Dr Keyes, you and the others at the demonstration heard the original discussion. Can’t you give us more than is on the tape?’

Keyes smiled rather bitterly. ‘I wish that we could, Dr Nagle. Unfortunately, at the time it seemed that the semantic noise in Dunning’s explanation was as high as the engineering noise on the tape. We have, however, filled in to the best of our recollection on the written transcript, which we will give you.

‘This transcript gives what has been pieced together by phonetic experts who have analysed the tape. Observers’ additions are in parentheses. These were added only if all observers agreed independently, and may or may not be accurate. Is there any other question?’

There were, they all knew, but for the moment the impact seemed to have stifled the response of the whole audience.

Keyes took a step forward. ‘I wonder if there is any one of you who underestimates the seriousness of this problem now. Is there anyone who does not understand that this secret must be regained at all cost?

‘We know that within the field of present knowledge there lies the knowledge necessary to conquer gravity – to take us beyond the Earth, to the stars, if we wish to go.

‘We know that if one young American could do it, some young Russian could also. We have to duplicate that work of Dunning’s.

‘The full facilities of ONR are at your disposal. Access to Dunning’s laboratory and library and the remains of his machine will be granted, of course. Each of you has been selected, out of all whom we might have called, because we believed you possess some special qualification for the task. You cannot fail.

‘We will meet again this evening, gentlemen. I trust you understand now the necessity for absolute security on this project.’