Fade Out (27 page)

‘What marvellous idea?' asked Wetherby. He seemed unable to grasp the fact that he might have inadvertently uttered a remark of cosmic significance with a mouth half full of food.

‘That's why we can't see any doors or joints yet,' said Wedderkind excitedly.
‘He's growing!

The significance of this idea and its possible consequences took a few seconds to digest. Some of the group found it hard to swallow.

‘Are you seriously trying to tell us that Crusoe is some kind of mechanized turnip?' asked Spencer.

‘Listen,' said Wedderkind. ‘I don't know whether any of you have noticed, but Phil and I are pretty sure that
the maximum diameter of his hull is bigger than the diameter of the original crater.'

‘Maybe, but until you dig him up, you don't know what his dimensions are.' It was Roger Neame, one of the engineers, being practical again.

‘And in that demonstration you gave me with the sugar bowl, you got a creep-back as the steel ball went under,' said Connors. ‘If Crusoe vibrated himself into the ground, the soil could also have vibrated back round him.'

‘I know that; said Wedderkind. ‘That's why I didn't mention it before. But now that we've had this show of resistance from Crusoe, something like this might
just
be possible. After all, we're already at work ourselves on biochemical relays that will enable us to create computers with the input-output potential of the human brain. If you link that to the new breakthroughs in the field of organic metals, it's possible to envisage the creation of a machine-consciousness – self-awareness in an object we previously classified as inanimate. It's equally conceivable that Crusoe could be the seed state of – well, some
thing.
But hardly a mechanized turnip.' He pointed at Neame. ‘Roger, here, is already labelling Crusoe's second layer “sliced-cabbage”. Personally, I think that that kind of descriptive downgrading tends to lull us into a false sense of complacency. I think we have to consider the possibility that Crusoe could be the embryo of a machine that grows.'

‘Into what?' asked Connors.

They all looked at each other, but nobody rushed in with an answer to his question.

At 4:25 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, the last interference cleared from the radar microwavelengths. At 6 A.M., the first radio newscasts made it official. The fade-out was over. The second, more prolonged burst of interference had lasted just over three weeks. The networks served up a 7 A.M. breakfast special of news, views, boffo fun, and music that gave viewers a chance to break in their eyeballs before they went to work.

From then on, throughout the day, local TV and radio stations came back on the air with taped material that had been frozen in the pipeline. TV actors went back thankfully into rehearsal, and agents blew the dust off their contracts and started reserving tables in expensive restaurants.

Domestic and international airline traffic had been the hardest-hit sector of the economy, but plans had already been drawn up for a phased resumption of normal services, and the airlines' bankers had begun to breathe again.

It was also business as usual for the worldwide US radar network and the planes, guns, and ships of the Air Force, Army, and Navy. A huge backlog of coded radio messages from embassies and overseas bases began flooding into the State Department and Pentagon, and reactivated bugs began broadcasting the nation's indiscretions.

Connors and Wedderkind had flown back to Washington overnight with a videotape version of Crusoe's film
debut. They screened it for the President after his morning session with the White House Domestic Chief of Staff, then ran it through again an hour later when they were joined by Fraser, Samuels, the three Joint Chiefs of Staff, and McKenna.

Curiously, the reaction to the tapes was muted, and most of the questions were unanswerable. Apparently, it was the effect of the fade-out that had preoccupied the President, Fraser, and the others. Now that it had disappeared, everyone seemed quite content to let Wedderkind's team get on with the job of taking Crusoe apart. They were certainly curious about what it was, but they were more concerned about what it might do next.

For Wedderkind, the meeting was a total anticlimax. After attending the live show, he found that watching Crusoe repeat his performance on a twenty-one-inch TV screen somehow reduced the event to the scale and importance of a daytime soap opera. Worse still, his own impromptu foray had become an embarrassing diversion. He left Connors to replay the tapes and answer any further questions.

As Wedderkind made his exit, the President said, ‘Try and stay out of the front line, Arnold.'

At 10:30 A.M. the President led the way into the Cabinet Room where they were joined by the Secretary of State for a meeting of the National Security Council. The Secretary of State didn't know about Crusoe, and no mention of him or the project was made at the meeting. Various departmental reports on the impact of the fade-out were reviewed and it was decided that a new set of national contingency plans was needed to cover any repeat of the recent emergency. A memorandum was addressed to the Hudson Institute think tank asking it to produce a series of economic, defence, and political scenarios based on the possible effects of a prolonged
period of radar and radio fade-out. The request was marked ‘URGENT'.

Everyone at the meeting was painfully conscious of the fact that, if the fade-out could be switched off, it could also be switched on again. Next time, it might not last three weeks, but three
months.
Any further time projections did not bear thinking about.

Since the beginning of the Crusoe Project, Professor George York, one of the senior geophysicists at the Institute, had been secretly processing data for Wedderkind. As a result of some careful programming over the previous five years, York, a close friend of Wedderkind since their college days, had managed to gain almost sole control of the Institute's largest computer.

By a stroke of good fortune, one of Wedderkind's sisters-in-law was married to a professor at the adjacent Johns Hopkins University. In case there were any prying eyes, Wedderkind drove up with his wife Lillian, parked outside her sister's house, walked through the yard, out of the back gate, and into York's car.

From the major airports of the world, York had collected the times that the fade-out ended and radar contact was restored. The ‘switch-on' times for airports inside the North American continent showed a ripple effect spreading out from Montana. Thus Chicago's radar had come back on a few fractions of a second before Washington's, Seattle's before San Francisco's.

York had got no information from Russia or Eastern Europe, but even so, the figures didn't fit into the expected pattern. Hawaii had its radar restored before Washington and so did Karachi and Beirut. At Capetown the times almost coincided. Yet there was no doubt that
within the US a wave effect had rippled outward at a speed of nearly one hundred thousand miles an hour.

‘There's only one way these timings would make sense,' said York. ‘This ripple effect would have to be spreading out simultaneously from more than one point.'

More than one point… Wedderkind considered the implications. That must mean that Crusoe was only
part
of the orbiting spacecraft. It must have split up like the multiple warheads of an intercontinental ballistic missile. But why had there been no reports from the rest of the world of incandescent fireballs?

‘Take the times for Teheran, Karachi, and Calcutta. The times are almost the same. If we stick to this wave theory it would have to be spreading outwards from somewhere inside Russia.'

‘That's an interesting thought,' said Wedderkind. Could this be the reason why the Russians had suddenly clammed up?

‘The trouble is these times are not accurate enough to provide a basis for any meaningful calculations,' said York. ‘I haven't really got global cover.'

‘Still it's given us a lead, George, you've been storing up data on the Earth's magnetic field – '

‘Yes, for the last two years.' York's computer was being used to prepare maps of the Earth's field.

‘Al Wetherby came up with an idea. Could you contact the stations and get their latest readings?'

York's eyebrows shot up. ‘What, from all two hundred and fifty?'

‘If we wait till the data filters through the IGY network it could take a year. I told you that we picked up strong directional variations in the Earth's field around Crow Ridge. I'd like to see what shifts there have been on a worldwide basis. Can you do it?'

‘I'll try, ‘said York. ‘But only because you've got a kind face.'

‘How soon can you get the information?'

‘All I can say is that it's going to take some time. Our work has really been slowed since we lost contact with our research satellites. It's put us back to the Stone Age days of the fifties.'

‘I know it will be difficult, George. Just do the best you can.'

Wedderkind went back to Washington with his brain in overdrive. He decided not to say anything to anyone until he had more information. Especially Bob. He tended to get frustrated when confronted by anything other than hard facts.

About thirty minutes after Wedderkind arrived home, NASA Director Chris Matson telephoned with some new information.

Cargill and his Jodrell Bank team had been busy checking the orbits of some of the American satellites. All the orbits had begun to decay – a sure sign that the satellites had been hit by a heavy burst of radiation. The second bit of news was that Arkhip Karamatov and his Russian space team at NASA had been abruptly summoned back to Russia. Before leaving, Karamatov had told Matson that the Russians had launched two sows on Saturday the fourth of August and a large solar observatory satellite on the fifth. Both had failed to transmit or respond to ground signals. The time of entry into orbit coincided exactly with the two ten-second and one thirty-second bursts of fade-out experienced that weekend. It was a clear indication that Crusoe had not been in a mood to welcome curious visitors. Karamatov also confirmed what NASA had suspected: there had been no contact with the cosmonauts aboard
Salyut-7
and
the
Mir
space-station since the initial twenty-minute fade-out on August 3rd and they were now presumed to be dead or in the process of dying from a lethal shot of cosmic radiation.

Finally, Matson passed on the news that the Air Force's NORAD/SPACETRACK centre had organized a rapid radar scan of outer space and had found no trace of any other unexpected objects in Earth orbit. If Crusoe
was
linked to a command module, then the craft, as Wedderkind had suggested, must be in orbit around one of the other planets – or even around the sun itself. If nothing was found, it
could
mean the Earth was Crusoe's final destination.

During the early part of the week, more tests were carried out on Crusoe's hull to find out what he was made of. There were no reactions to acid tests, the hardest cutting tool melted within seconds without even scratching the surface, and the searing flame of a thermic lance left the hull unscorched. The black crystal absorbed the intense heat like desert sand devouring rain.

An attempt to scan Crusoe's internal structure by means of sound waves, X-rays and a laser beam also ended in failure. The black crystal hull absorbed all three without producing even the ghost of an echo. The results set off some lively argument between members of the research group. They could see and feel Crusoe; yet, if they were to believe their instruments, there was nothing there – just a mysterious hole in the facade of the physical
universe. The group took the instruments apart and checked every component.

Another puzzling discovery was that the spectrographs of Crusoe's superhard hull revealed several diamondlike characteristics.

‘Have you any idea how much that adds up to?' asked Milsom. He was having coffee in the canteen with Spencer and Tomkin, the zoologist. ‘A rare black diamond one hundred feet across and maybe fifty feet deep? That must be about twenty-two zillion carats. You know, if we just sat here and quietly cut him up, everybody on Crow Ridge could be a millionaire. MRDC could even end up with a quotation on Wall Street.'

‘Forget it,' said Spencer. ‘It's probably a synthetic silicate, but about a thousand times tougher than our best.'

‘No romance. That's your trouble. No imagination…' Milsom sipped his coffee. A thought struck him. ‘Jeez – I wonder if you
can
buy shares in this outfit?'

Spencer shook his head resignedly and turned to Tomkin. ‘This ding-a-ling didn't really work for NASA, he's a survivor from
Laugh-In.'

Having attempted to analyse the composition of the hull, the scientists turned it over to the systems engineers for a second, microscopic inspection. Milsom, who had moments of lucidity between laughs, was convinced that the ten-foot-wide dome was the thing to watch, despite the fact that an earlier examination had revealed no separation between the dome and the hull. Now, there was an incredibly fine joint. So fine, in fact, that it was only visible under a powerful lens.

Milsom called Neame and Gilligan over to check his findings.

‘That's a good fit.' Gilligan handed the jeweller's eyepiece back to Milsom.

‘Even so, I don't know how we missed it before. We didn't go over the whole hull, but I did check around the dome. It was the obvious place to look.'

Spencer squatted down beside them and ran his palm over the dome.

‘What do you think, Chris?'

‘I think we ought to put some sighting marks on it,' said Milsom. ‘A cross on the dome, and matching register marks on the hull.'