‘Sure, Commander.’ The petty officer looked about the room. ‘Take number
five; I guess we won’t be using that for a while.’
I looked at the test bench; it was ful of knobs and dials and screens
which meant less than nothing. Nordlinger sat down. ‘Pull up a chair and
we’l see what happens.’ He attached clips to the terminals on the
gadget then paused. ‘We already know certain things about it. It isn’t
part of an airplane; they don’t use such a heavy voltage. And it
probably isn’t from a ship for roughly the same reason. So that leaves
ground-based equipment. It’s designed to plug into the normal
electricity system on the North American continent – it could have been
built in Canada. A lot of Canadian firms use American manufactured
components.’
I jogged him along. ‘Could it come from a TV set?’
‘Not from any TV I’ve seen.’ He snapped switches. ‘A hundred ten volts –
fifty cycles. Now, there’s no amperage given so we have to be careful.
We’l start real low.’ He twisted a knob delicately and a fine needle on
a dial barely quivered against the pin.
He looked down at the gadget. ‘There’s a current going through now but
not enough to give a fly a heart attack.’ He paused, and looked up. ‘To
begin with, this thing is crazy; an alternating current with these
components isn’t standard. Now, let’s see – first we have what seems to
be three amplification stages, and that makes very little sense.’
He took a probe attached to a lead. ‘If we touch the probe here we
should get a sine wave on the oscil oscope . . .’He looked up. ‘. . .
which we do. Now we see what happens at this lead going into this
funny-shaped metal ginkus.’
He gently jabbed the probe and the green trace on the oscil oscope
jumped and settled into a new configuration. ‘A square wave,’ said
Nordlinger. ‘This circuit up to here is functioning as a chopper – which
is pretty damn funny in itself for reasons I won’t go into right now.
Now let’s see what happens at the lead going /out/ of the ginkus and
into this mess of boards.’
He touched down the probe and the oscil oscope trace jumped again before
it settled down. Nordlinger whistled. ‘Just look at that spaghetti, wil
you?’ The green line was twisted into a fantastic waveform which jumped
rhythmical y and changed form with each jump. ‘You’d need a hel 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 oscil oscope – maybe
it’l 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 al owed 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’l go and shave. I’l wait for you in your office.’
‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Where did you get it, Alan?’
I said, ‘You tel me what it does and I’l tel 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 1 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 thought it was a stick of dynamite and
laid it gently on his desk. ‘I’l have to ask you where you got this,’
he said briefly.
‘Not until you tel 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 usual y. 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’l bet that there’s some genius somewhere who not only knows what’s
coming out of there but has an equal y 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’l 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 stil like to know where you got it.’
‘You’d better be more interested in where it’s going. Have you got a
safe – a real y 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