Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Read online

  Sure, it would be slow without the facilities of the Intercontinental labs, but it would be better than scuttling the entire project.

  He suddenly glanced at the clock on the wall He’d been sitting there without moving for over an hour. It was lunchtime. He decided to go downtown where he wouldn’t meet anyone he knew, rather than eat in the company cafeteria.

  He chose the Estate, a seafood restaurant three miles from the plant.

  As soon as he walked in he knew why he had chosen the Estate with subconscious deliberation.

  He saw Carl Millen across the room. He had meant to see him. Millen always ate at the same place at the same time.

  Millen spotted Reg almost simultaneously and beckoned to him.

  “Sit down, Reg. You’re the last person I expected to see here. What’s new at your shop?”

  “Not much—except Borge received a report from Carl Millen & Associates, Consulting Engineers.”

  Millen grinned wryly. “Did he blow his top?”

  “Why did you turn in a negative report?”

  “Didn’t you read it? I proved the BW effect is absolutely limited by the free atomic concentration in the dispersion field. That limitation utterly forbids any mass application of the principle.”

  Reg was silent as the waiter brought the menus. They each ordered oysters on the half shell.

  “I remember,” said Reg, when the waiter had gone, “about 1925 a then very prominent aeronautical engineer wrote a learned piece proving absolutely that planes could never reach five hundred miles an hour.”

  Millen laughed. “Yes, and there’s also the gent that proved a steamship could never carry enough fuel to get it across the Atlantic.”

  He stopped and looked seriously at Reg. “But for every one of those classic boners there are thousands of legitimate negative demonstrations that have saved engineering and industry untold millions. You know that as well as I do. This is one of them.”

  “I’ll admit the first, but not the second,” said Reg. “I’ve not read your report. I probably won’t. It’s faulty. It’s got to be. The BW principle can be utilized somehow and I’m going to prove it.”

  “Just how do you propose to do that?” Millen asked, smiling gently. “Something intuitive, no doubt?”

  “All right, have your fun, but come around and see me when you want to go on a quick vacation via the Stone Instantaneous Transfer Co.”

  “Reg, that job I talked about a year ago is still open. I could offer you Assistant Chief of Development. In a year I could let you in on a partnership. It’s worth twenty thousand now, thirty later.”

  “I could work on the BW outside?”

  Millen shook his head. “That’s the only string attached. Our men haven’t time for anything but customers’ projects. Besides, you’d have to get used to the idea of believing in math, not intuition.”

  “I don’t think I’d do you much good.”

  “You could learn, for that kind of money, couldn’t you? What does that cheese factory pay you? About eight or ten?”

  “Seven and a half.”

  “The lousy cheapskates! Three times that ought to be worth shelving your intuition in favor of math.”

  Reg shook his head. “There isn’t that much money in the world. Solving other people’s riddles for a fee is not my idea of living.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re just a frustrated research physicist. In this business you’re in for the money. It’s a cinch there’s no glory.”

  The waiter brought their orders, then.

  His depression continued with Reg that evening. His three boys sensed it when he turned down a ball game. His wife, Janice, sensed it when he didn’t poke his head in the kitchen on the way to his study.

  After dinner, and when the boys were in bed, he told her what had happened that day.

  “I don’t understand why you feel so badly about the cancellation of this particular project,” she said when he finished. “Others have been cancelled, too.”

  “Because it’s one of the greatest phenomena ever discovered. It’s ripe for engineering application, but no one else will believe it. It’s as if they deliberately try to block me in every step. All through the project it’s been that way. Now this—chucking the whole business, when we’ve gone so far! I can’t see through the reasons behind it all. Except that they just don’t want it to succeed. I’ve got that feeling about it, and I can’t rid myself of it. _They want me to fail!“_

  “Who does?”

  “Everyone! In the drafting room. The lab technicians. The model shop.

  It seems as if everybody’s concern with the project is simply to throw monkey wrenches in the gears.”

  “Ob, darling—you’re just wrought up over this thing. Let’s take a vacation. Let the boys go to camp this summer and go off by ourselves somewhere. You’ve got to have a rest.”

  He knew that. He’d known it for a long time, but teleportation was more important than rest. He could take care of the neuroses at his leisure, later. That’s the theory he’d worked on. Now, all he had was a beautiful neurosis. It couldn’t be anything else, he told himself, this absolute conviction that he was being sabotaged in his work, that others were banded against him to prevent the full development of the BW principle.

  “Perhaps in a few weeks,” he said. “There are some more angles about this business that I must follow up. Let’s read tonight. Something fanciful, something beautiful, something faraway — “

  “Coleridge,” Janice laughed.

  They sat by the window overlooking the garden. Their one vice of reading poetry together was something of an anachronism in a world threatened with atomic fires, but it was the single escape that Reg would allow himself from his engineering problems.

  Janice began reading softly. Her voice was like music out of a past more gentle and nearer the ultimate truths than this age.

  “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran — that deep romantic chasm which

  slanted

  Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted — “

  Reg suddenly stiffened and sat erect, his eyes on the distant golden cavern of the sky.

  “That’s it,” he breathed softly. “That’s just how it is — “

  Janice looked up from the book, her face puzzled. “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “The Person from Porlock. Remember how Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan?”

  “No. Who’s the Person from Porlock?”

  “Coleridge wrote this poem just after coming out of a dope dream. He later said that during his sleep he had produced at least two to three hundred lines. While trying to get it on paper he was interrupted by a person from the village of Porlock. When he finally got rid of the visitor, Coleridge could recall no more of his envisioned poem.

  “He was furious because this self-important busybody had interrupted his work and he wrote a poem castigating the Person from Porlock and all other stupid, busy people who hamper the really industrious ones.”

  “And so—?

  “Don’t you see? It’s these Persons from Porlock who have made it impossible for me to complete my work. Borge; Millen; Dickson, the draftsman who bungled the drawings; Hansen, the model shop mechanic who boggled tolerances so badly that nothing would work. These Persons from Porlock—I wonder how many thousands of years of advancement they have cost the world!”

  In the near darkness now, Janice sat staring at Reg’s bitter face. Her eyes were wide and filled with genuine fear, fear of this malign obsession that had overtaken him.

  “The Persons from Porlock,” Reg mused, half aloud. “Wouldn’t it be funny if it turned out that they were deliberately and purposely upsetting the works of other men. Suppose it were their whole object in life — “

  “Reg!

  He was
scarcely able to see Janice in the settling gloom, but he felt her fear. “Don’t worry, Janice, I haven’t gone off my rocker. I was just thinking—Sure, it’s fantastic, but Coleridge was one of the world’s geniuses. Perhaps he glimpsed something of a truth that no one else has guessed.”

  * * * *

  Reg went into Borge’s office early the next morning. The chief engineer frowned as he saw Reg Stone. “I thought you were going to take a few days.”

  “I came in to ask what you are going to do with the equipment that’s been built for my BW project.”

  “We’ll store it with the miscellaneous plumbing for a while, then junk it. Why?”

  “How about doing me a big favor and declaring it junk right away and letting me buy it—as junk?”

  “What do you want the stuff for?”

  “I want to continue the BW experiments on my own. You know, just putter around with it in my shop at home.”

  “Still think it will amount to something, eh?”

  “Yes. That’s why I’d like to buy the stuff, especially the velocitor chamber. It would take me a couple of years to build one of those on my own.”

  “I’d like to do it as a favor to you,” said Borge, “but Bruce, the new manager, has just made a ruling that no parts or equipment may be sold to employees. It was all right during the war when the boys were outfitting their WERS stations on company time and equipment. We were on cost plus then, but too many are trying to refurnish their amateur stations now at our expense. So Bruce cut it all out.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense with such specialized stuff as I’ve had built for the BW. It’s no good for anything else.”

  “Maybe you could talk Bruce out of it. You know him.”

  Yes, he knew Bruce, Reg thought. A production man who, like many of his kind, considered engineers mere necessary evils. It was utterly useless to ask Bruce to make an exception to one of his own regulations.

  Persons from Porlock —Persons from Porlock —The words echoed like a tantalizing refrain in his mind as he went downstairs towards his own lab. He knew he should forget that impossible concept, but the words were like a magic chant explaining all his misfortunes.

  This huge plant and all the technological advances that had come out of it could not exist without Borge and Bruce, and the others like them. Yet, at the same time, these Persons from Porlock constituted the greatest stumbling block to modern scientific development. Every engineer in the world at some time had been stymied by one of them—an unimaginative chief, a stupid factory manager, incompetent draftsmen, mod shop machinists, secretaries, expediters, administrators —As he passed the open door of the company’s technical library he spotted Dickson, his head draftsman on the BW project, sitting inside at a table. He went in.

  Dickson looked up. “Hello, Reg. I wondered where you were this morning. I just heard about them junking the project. It’s a devil of a tough break.”

  “Are you really sorry, Dickson?” said Reg.

  The draftsman looked sharply. “What do you mean? Of course I hate to work on a project and see it canceled. Who wouldn’t?”

  “You know, looking back, it appears as if we hadn’t made each one of about fifty boners, the project would have succeeded. For example, that dimension on the diameter of the focusing cavity in the assembly unit. It’s the only one in the assembly that wouldn’t be obvious to the model shop, and it’s the only one on which you made a mistake in spite of our checking. A seven that looked like a two in your dimensioning. That made the difference between success and failure and lost us nearly four weeks while we looked for the bug in the unit.”

  “Reg, I’ve told you twenty times I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about it now. A hair on my lettering pen made just enough of a boggle of the figure so that those dopes in the model shop misread it. It was a worse two than it was a seven. They should have checked us on it even if we did miss it.”

  “Yeah, I know. It just seemed funny that it was that particular dimension you were drawing when the hair got on your pen.”

  The draftsman looked at Reg as if stunned by the unspoken implication. “If you think I did that on purpose—!”

  “I didn’t say that. Sure it was an accident, but why? Was it because you didn’t want the thing to succeed—subconsciously?”

  “Of course not! It was of no material interest to me, except, of course, as I said before I have the same enthusiasm to see a project on which I work turn out successfully as you do.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so. Just forget I said anything.”

  Reg left Dickson and walked back to the ball. Persons from Porlock—were they consciously malicious or were they mere stupid blunderers? More likely the latter, he thought, yet there must be some subconscious desire to cause failure as was the case with the mysterious accident prones so familiar to insurance companies.

  The more he considered it, the less fantastic the Person from Porlock concept seemed. It was entirely possible that the genius of the poet, Coleridge, had hit upon a class of persons as definite and distinct as accident prones—and a thousand times more deadly.

  There could hardly be any other explanation for the stupid blunder of Dickson in drawing the focusing cavity. He had done far more complex drawings on this project, yet that single dimension, of an extremely critical nature, had been the one to be botched.

  And it meant there were others like him in the model shop because any machinist with half an eye for accuracy would have checked that figure before going ahead and shaping up the part to such critical tolerances.

  He turned into the machine shop where Hansen, the machinist who’d done the job on the cavity, was working.

  “Pretty nice work.” He nodded towards the piece in the lathe.

  “I hope the engineer thinks so,” Hansen growled. “They give me plus five thousands on this thing and no minus. Next they’ll want flea whiskers with zero-zero tolerance.”

  “You’re good. That’s why you get the tough ones.”

  “I wish the guy on the payroll desk would take note.”

  “But you know, there’s something that’s bothered me for several weeks.

  You remember that cavity you made for me with a one two five interior instead of a one seven five?”

  Hansen turned wearily to the engineer. “Reg, I’ve eaten crow a hundred times over for that. I told you it looked like a two. Maybe I need my eyes examined, but it still looks that way.”

  “Did you have any reason for not wanting the cavity to work?”

  “Now, look!” Hansen’s anger suffused red through his face. “I’m paid to turn out screwball gadgets in this shop, not worry about whether they work or not.”

  “Didn’t it occur to you to check that boggled figure?”

  “I told you it looked all right!” Hansen turned angrily back to his lathe and resumed work.

  Reg watched the mechanic for a moment, then left the shop.

  The bunglers seemed to have no personal interest in their botch work, he decided. It must be something entirely subconscious as in the case of accident prones. That didn’t make them any less dangerous, however. Without them on his project he would have been able by now to demonstrate the practicability of BW utilization.

  But, following this line of reasoning, why couldn’t the teleportation equipment be made to work now? According to all this theory the equipment he had built should have been capable of acting as a pilot model for a larger unit and it should have been able to transfer hundred pound masses at least a thousand feet. Yet, it had failed completely.

  Granting that he himself was not a Person from Porlock. But could he grant that?

  Maybe the greatest blunders were his own. His failure to catch Dickson’s mistake early enough, for example!

  That was the one premise he could not admit, however. It led to insolvable dilemma, rendered the problem completely indeterminate. He had to assume that he was not one of the bunglers.

  In that case, why did the equipment fail to w
ork?

  It meant that some of the blunders introduced by the Persons from Porlock still remained in the equipment. Remove them, and it should work!

  He’d have to go over every equation, every design, every specification—point by point—compare them with the actual equipment and dig out the bugs.

  * * * *

  He went into his own lab. He dismissed the assistants and shut the door. He sat down with the voluminous papers which he had produced in the ten months of work on the project. It was hopeless to attempt to go over the entire mass of work in short hours or days. That’s what should be done, but he could cover the most vulnerable points. These lay in the routine, conventional circuits which he had left to his assistants and in whose design the draftsman and model shop had been trusted with too many details.

  The first of these was the amplifier for the BW generator, whose radiation, capable of mass-modulation, carried the broken down components of the materials to be transported. The amplifier held many conventional features, though the wave form handled was radically unconventional.

  It contained two stages of Class A amplification which had to be perfectly symmetrical. Reg had never made certain of the correct operation of these two stages by themselves. Spence, his junior engineer, had reported them operating correctly and Reg had taken his word on so simple a circuit.

  He had no reason now to believe that anything was wrong. It was just one of those items left to a potential Person from Porlock.

  He disconnected the input and output of the amplifier and hooked up a signal generator and a vacuum tube voltmeter. Point by point he checked the circuit. The positive and negative peaks were equal and a scope showed perfect symmetry, but in the second stage they weren’t high enough. He wasn’t getting the required soup. The output of the tube in use should have been more than sufficient to produce it.

  Then he discovered the fault. The bias was wrong and the drive had been cut to preserve symmetry. Spence had simply assumed the flat tops were due to overloading.

  Reg sat in silent contemplation of the alleged engineering and poured on self-recrimination for trusting Spence.