The Wind Between the Worlds (3 page)

And the Betz II engineers came on schedule. Man was linked to the stars, though his own planets were still outside his reach. It was a paradox that soon grew stale, but what, actually, would be the point in flying to Mars or Venus when we were in instant touch with the farthest parts of the Galaxy?

There were major wrenches to the economy as our heavy industries suddenly found that other planets could beat them at their work. Plathgol could deliver a perfect Earth automobile, semi-assembled and advanced enough to avoid our patent laws, for twenty pounds of sugar. The heavy industries folded, while we were still experimenting with the business of finding what we had to offer and what we could receive from other worlds. Banks had crashed, men had been out of work. The governments had cushioned the shock, and the new wonders helped to still the voices that suddenly rose up against traffic with alien worlds. But it had been a bitter period, with many lasting scars.

Now a measure of stability had been reached, with a higher standard of living than ever. But the hatreds were pretty deep on the part of those who had been hurt, and others who simply hated newness and change. Vic had done well enough, somehow making his way into the first engineering class out of a hundred thousand applicants. And twelve years had gone by…

Pat’s voice suddenly cut into his thoughts. “All tightened up here, Vic. Wipe the scowl off and let’s go down to check.”

She collected her tools, wrapped her legs around a smooth pole, and went sliding down. He yanked the fan and followed her. Below was the crew. Pat lifted an eyebrow at the grizzled, cadaverous head operator. “Okay, Amos. Plathgol standing by?”

A
mos pulled his six-feet-two up from his slump and indicated the yellow stand-by light. Inside the twin poles of the huge transmitter that was tuned to one on Plathgol, a big, twelve-foot diameter plastic cylinder held a single rabbit. Matter transmitting was always a two-way affair, requiring that the same volume be exchanged. And between the worlds, where different atmospheres and pressures were involved, all sending was done in the big capsules. One-way handling was possible, of course, but involved the danger of something materializing to occupy the same space as something else—even air molecules. It wasn’t done except as rigidly controlled experiments.

Amos whistled into the transport-wave interworld phone in the code that was universal between worlds, got an answering whistle, and pressed a lever. The rabbit was gone, and the new capsule was faintly pink, with something resembling a giant worm inside.

Amos clucked in satisfaction. “
Tsiuna.
Good eating, only real good we ever got from these things. I got friends on Plathgol that like rabbit. Want some of this, Pat?”

Vic felt his stomach jerk at the colors that crawled over the
tsiuna.
The hot antiseptic spray was running over the capsule, to be followed by supersonics and ultraviolets to complete sterilization. Amos waited a moment, then pulled out the creature. Pat hefted it.

“Big one. Bring it over to my place and I’ll fry it for you and Vic. How does the Dirac meter read, Vic?”

“On the button.” The seven percent power loss was gone now, after a week of hard work in locating it. “Guess you were right—the reflector was off angle. Should have tried it first, but it never happened before. How’d you figure it out?”

S
he indicated the interworld phone. “I started out in anthropology. Vic. Got interested in other races, and then found I couldn’t talk to the teleport engineers without being one, so I got sidetracked to this job. But I still talk a lot on anything Galactic policy won’t forbid. When everything else failed, I complained to the Ecthinbal operator that the Betz II boys installed us wrong. I got sympathy instead of indignation, so I figured it
could
happen. Simple, wasn’t it?”

He snorted, and waited while she gave orders to start business. Then, as the loading cars began to hum, she fell behind him, moving out toward the office. “I suppose you’ll be leaving tonight, Vic. I’ll miss you. You’re the only troubleshooter I’ve met who did more than make passes.”

“When I make passes at your kind of girl, it will be legal. And in my business, it’s no life for a wife.”

But he stopped to look at the building, admiring it for the last time. It was the standard Betz II design, but designed to handle the farm crops around, and bigger than any earlier models on Earth. The Betz II engineers made Earth engineering look childish, even if they did look like big slugs with tentacles and had no sense of sight.

The transmitters were in the circular center, surrounded by a shield ‘wall, a wide hall all around, another shield, a circular hall again, and finally the big outside shield. The two opposite entranceways spiraled through the three shields, each rotating thirty degrees clockwise from the entrance portal through the next shield. Those shields were of inert matter that could be damaged by nothing less violent than a hydrogen bomb directly on them—they refused to soften at less than ten million degrees Kelvin. How the Betzians managed to form them in the first place, nobody knew.

Beyond the transmitter building, however, the usual offices and local transmitters across Earth had not yet been built. That would be strictly Earth construction, and would have to wait for an off season. They were using the nearest building, an abandoned store a quarter mile away, as a temporary office.

Pat threw the door open and then stopped suddenly. “Ptheela!”

A
Plathgolian native sat on a chair, with a bundle of personal belongings around her, her three arms making little marks on something that looked like a used pancake. The Plathgolians had been meat-eating plants once. They still smelled high to Earth noses, and their constantly shedding skin resembled shaggy bark, while their heads were vaguely flowerlike.

Ptheela wriggled her arms. “The hotel found regretfully that it had to decorate my room,” she whistled in Galactic Code. “No other room and all other hotels say they’re full. Plathgolians stink, I guess. So I’ll go home when the transmitter is fixed.”

“With your trade studies half done?” Pat protested. “Don’t be silly, Ptheela. I’ve got a room for you in my apartment. How are the studies, anyhow?”

For answer, the plant woman passed over a newspaper, folded to one item. “Trade? Your House of Representatives just passed a tariff on all traffic through Teleport.”

Pat scanned the news, scowling. “Damn them. A tariff! They can’t tax interstellar traffic. The Galactic Council won’t stand for it; we’re still accepted only on approval. The “Senate will never okay it!”

Ptheela whistled doubtfully, and Vic nodded. “They will. I’ve been expecting this. A lot of people are afraid of Teleport.”

“But we’re geared to it now. The old factories are torn down, the new ones are useless for us. We can’t get by without the catalysts from Ecthinbal, the cancer-preventative from Plathgol, all the rest. And who’ll buy all our sugar? We’re producing fifty times what we need, just because most planets don’t have plants that separate the levo from the dextro forms. All hell will pop!”

Ptheela wiggled her arms again. “You came too early. Your culture is unbalanced. All physics, no sociology. All eat well, little think well.”

All emotion, little reason, Vic added to himself. It had been the same when the industrial revolution came along. Old crafts were uprooted and some people were hurt. There were more jobs now, but they weren’t the familiar ones. And the motorists who gloated at first over cheap Plathgol cars complained when Plathgol wasn’t permitted to supply the improved, ever-powered models they made for themselves.

Hardest of all had been the idea of accepting the existence of superior races. A feeling of inferiority had crept in, turned to resentment, and then through misunderstanding of other races to an outright hatred of them. Ptheela had been kicked out of her hotel room; but it was only a minor incident in a world full of growing bitterness against the aliens.

“Maybe we can get jobs on Plathgol,” Vic suggested harshly.

Ptheela whistled. “Pat could, if she had three husbands—engineers must meet minimum standards. You could be a husband, maybe.”

Vic kept forgetting that Plathgol was backward enough to have taboos and odd customs, even though Galactically higher than Earth, having had nearly ten thousand years of history behind her to develop progress and amity.

T
he televisor connecting them with the transmitter building buzzed, and Amos’ dour face came on. “Screwball delivery with top priority, Pat. Professor named Douglas wants to ship a capsule of Heaviside layer air for a capsule of Ecthinbal deep-space vacuum. Common sense says we don’t make much shipping vacuums by the pound!”

“Public service, no charge,” Vic suggested, and Pat nodded. Douglas was top man at Caltech, and, a plug from him might be useful sometime. “Leave it on, Amos—I want to watch this. Douglas has some idea that space fluctuates, somehow, and he can figure out where Ecthinbal is from a sample. Then he can figure how fast an exchange force works, whether it’s instantaneous or not. We’ve got the biggest Earth transmitters, ‘so he uses us.”

As they watched, a massive capsule was put in place by loading machines, and the light changed from yellow to red. A slightly greenish capsule replaced the other. Amos signaled the disinfection crew and hot spray hit it, to be followed by the ultrasonics. Something crackled suddenly, and Amos made a wild lunge across the screen.

The capsule popped, crashing inward and scattering glass in a thousand directions. Pressure-glass; it should have carried a standard Code warning for cold sterilization and no supersonics. Vic leaped toward the transmitter building.

Pat’s cry brought him back. There were shrieks coming from the televisor. Men in the building were clinging frantically to anything they could hold, but men and bundles ready for loading were being picked up violently and sucked toward the transmitter. As Vic watched, a man hit the edge of the field and seemed to be sliced into nothingness, his scream cut off, half-formed.

A big chunk of glass had hit the control, shorting two bus-bars, holding them together by its weight. The transmitter was locked into continuous transmit. And air, with a pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch, was running in and being shipped to Ecthinbal, where the pressure was barely an ounce per square inch! With that difference, pressure on a single square foot of surface could lift over a ton. The poor devils in the transmitter building didn’t have a chance.

He snapped off the televisor as Pat turned away, gagging. “When was the accumulator charged?”

“It wasn’t an accumulator,” she told him weakly. “The whole plant uses an electron-pulse atomotor, good for twenty years of continuous operation.”

Vic swore and made for the door, with Pat and Ptheela after him. The transmitter opening took up about two hundred square feet, which meant somewhere between fifty and five hundred thousand cubic feet of air a second were being lost. Maybe worse.

Ptheela nodded as she kept pace with him. “I think the tariff won’t matter much now,” she stated.

V
ic’s action in charging out had been pure instinct to get where the trouble lay. His legs churned over the ground, while a wind at his back made the going easier.

Then his brain clicked over, and he dug his heels into the ground, trying to stop. Pat crashed into him, but Ptheela’s arms lashed out, keeping him from falling. As he turned to face them, the wind struck at his face, whipping up grit and dust from the dry ground. Getting to the transmitter building would be easy—but with the wind already rising, they’d never be able to fight their way back.

It had already reached this far, losing its force with distance, but still carrying a wallop. It was beginning to form a pattern, marked by the clouds of dust and debris it was picking up. The arrangement of the shields and entrances in the building formed a perfect suction device to set the air circling around it counter-clockwise, twisting into a tornado that funneled down to the portals. Men and women near the building were struggling frantically away from the center of the fury. As he watched, a woman was picked up bodily, whirled around, and gulped down one of the yawning entrances. The wind strangled her cries.

Vic motioned Pat and Ptheela and began moving back, fast. Killing himself would do no good. He found one of the little hauling tractors and pulled them onto it with him, heading back until they were out of the worst of the rising wind. Then he swung to face Ptheela.

“Galactic rules be damned, this is an emergency, and we need help! What now?”

The shaggy Plathgolian made an awkward gesture with all three arms, and a slit opened in her chest. “Unprecedented.” The word came out in English, surprisingly, and Pat’s look mirrored his; Plathgolians weren’t supposed to be able to talk. “You’re right. If I speak, I shall be banished by the Council from Plathgol. Ask, nevertheless. I may know more—we’ve had the teleport longer—but remember that your strange race has a higher ingenuity quotient.”

“Thanks.” Vic knew what the seven husbands back on her home planet meant to her, if she were exiled, but he’d worry about that after he could stop worrying about the world. “What happens next?”

She dropped back to the faster Galactic Code for that. As he knew, the accidental turning on of the transmitter had keyed in the one on Ecthinbal automatically to receive, but not to transmit; the air was moving between Earth and Ecthinbal in one-way traffic. The receiving circuit, which would have keyed in the Ecthinbal transmit circuit had not been shorted. Continuous transmittal had never been used, to her knowledge; there was no certainty about what would happen. Once started, no outside force could stop a transmitter; the send and stop controls were synchronous, both tapped from a single crystal, and only that proper complex waveform could cut it off. It now existed as a space-strain, and the Plathgolians believed that this would spread, since the outer edges transmitted before matter could reach the center, setting up an unbalanced resonance that would make the force field grow larger and larger. Eventually, it might spread far beyond the whole building.