Alternating Currents (20 page)

~ * ~

The process of change was complete and the K-meson field died away.

Marin, still white-faced and trembling with the reaction, whispered, ‘Jom, Jom, it’s a whole new world!’

And it was. A world we had never known; a world where there were millions, even billions of people, a world that had never passed through the grinder of nuclear war.

A stubby power launch came dodging towards us through the clutter of smaller craft and a voice bellowed at us over a loud-hailer: ‘You there! You in the barge with green markings! Heave to and show your registration and mooring permit!’

He meant us. It would be quite a shock to him, I reflected wryly, when he saw what passed for our ‘papers’. Would he believe us ? Would anyone in this world take our word for what we had done? Undoubtedly not. But they would learn, they would have to believe, once they had a chance to look around our workdeck. The wonders we could bring to them! For without Einstein, there would have been no nuclear piles; without the breeder reactors, no heavy elements in the high hundreds to decay into the power metal that fed our machine and released the K-mesons.

A smaller, faster vessel beat the launch to our side. It was a rickety, patched-up dinghy with a limping outboard motor pushing it along, but it was light and it moved. Oddly, it made no great noise. I saw the outboard motor was driven from an electric battery.

From the dinghy, an eager voice called: ‘Cigarettes ? Candy ? Where you fellows from ?’

The three who crewed the dinghy were in their early teens; they wore ragged trousers and nothing else. They clamoured up at us for tobacco, money, anything. Lee answered them, and perhaps I would have, too, but Marin drew me aside.

‘Jom, I don’t like this!’ he said tensely. ‘I - I feel as though I’m strangling!’ He was breathing hard, in fact, and I knew what he meant. There was something about all those teeming hordes of people, the hundreds of big and little boats bobbing about, the swollen buildings on Manhattan and Staten Islands - I felt oppressed, too, as though I were stifling under a mound of crawling, twitching human beings.

But I told Marin curtly to shut up and advanced to meet the delegation from the power launch.

It was an occasion for some ceremony, I thought. I said: ‘Welcome to our ship, friend from a world of peace and plenty.’

The man in the prow of the launch paused with one knee over the side and stared at me. Then he shook his leg towards our boarding ladder.

‘Registration papers,’ he said. ‘What kind of a tub is this, anyway ?’

‘It’s a power barge used for scientific purposes,’ I told him. ‘We come from a different world. We -’

He said impatiently, ‘What kind of power ? Electric ? Don’t try to kid me, fellow; you’d never cross the Atlantic with electric power.’

I shook my head. ‘The engines are gasoline, of course. But the-’

‘Gasoline!’
The man’s look was suddenly intent. He wore a rather shabby blue uniform. I don’t think he made a move, but at that exact moment I realized he had a gun in a side holster. ‘Let’s see the registration papers,’ he repeated. ‘Quick!’

‘We don’t have any.’ I was getting exasperated. ‘We don’t come from your time at all - that is, it’s the same time, but a different probability line. Don’t you understand? We ...’

There was something about his expression. I stopped suddenly and thought for a second. Then I said, ‘Look, I’m sorry if I’m confusing. Take my word for it, this is something important and I can’t explain it to you. Can you put me in touch with a physicist ?’

‘A what?’

‘A physicist, preferably one with a speciality in nucleonics. Or any scientist, for that matter.’

He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘You don’t have a mooring permit, do you ?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I see.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, and clambered back down the side. I looked rather sternly around at my crew, fully aware that I had made a mess of our first contact with the world we had sired. But they were not acting very critical.

Marin still looked scared. Lee was at the rail on the other side of the barge; he was pitching coins into the water, and the youths from the dinghy - in fact, people from half a dozen little boats, and not all of them youths - were diving after them, with a good deal of squabbling.

The man in the blue uniform was back in a moment with another man, this one in a brown uniform, equally shabby.

‘- case for the Feds, not us,’ Blue Uniform was saying as they approached. ‘Possession of gasoline, no papers, claims they came from abroad.’

Brown Uniform nodded and said crisply to me, ’You’ll have to come with us.’

Blue Uniform asked sharply, ‘Where ?’

‘New York City Hall, of course. This is a New York police launch and -’

‘And
a two-state harbour patrol, mac! Don’t forget it! We’ll take him to Jersey City. None of your crummy slum families are going to settle on
this
barge. We need housing space as much as you do!’

‘What about the gasoline?’ Brown Uniform yelled. ‘New York’s got a sixty per cent quota drag! We’re entitled to every drop that comes into the harbour until it’s made up and you can take -’

Blue Uniform suddenly shrugged. ‘Forget it,’ he said in a different tone. ‘We could have worked something out. Well, never mind, mac. Here come the Feds, so we’re both out of luck.’

~ * ~

The Feds were as shabbily uniformed as the others, but they wore sharp-visored caps, and they took us neither to New York nor to New Jersey, but to the floating colossus beyond the Narrows, which turned out to be a sort of moored hulk doubling as a fort and administrative headquarters. It wasn’t an unpleasant trip, except that the water was sludge-grey in colour and stank as it sprayed over the wales. Since we weren’t going very fast, not much sprayed, which was a blessing.

I said gratefully to the officer in charge of the boat, ‘Thanks for getting rid of those two. They didn’t seem able to understand what I was trying to say. If you can put me in touch with some sort of scientist, I’m sure I can explain things to him. You see, we’ve been doing research in parachronon penetration. Very important research. It is no exaggeration to say that every man alive today owes his life to us! Do you understand ? It’s as if-’

He interrupted me. ’How much gasoline have you got ?’

It was a clear waste of time to talk to this one, so I merely sat in silence until we arrived at the floating headquarters. They had refused to allow me to leave either Lee or Marin on the barge and I was feeling nervous about what the boarding party might be doing to our reactor. When I said something to Lee, though, he reassured me.

‘Not enough power in it now to hurt a kitten,’ he said positively. ‘We drained it dry on the bolt.’

‘Suppose they recharge the reactor ?’ I argued.

‘With what ? We stockpiled all the reserve fuel. We couldn’t keep it in close proximity to the reactor, after all. No, don’t worry, Jom; they might mess up the instruments a little, but there won’t be any nuclear explosions, believe me. Relax. Look around and enjoy yourself. This is it, Jom, the world we’ve dreamed of! It isn’t an atomic wreck any more. It’s free, unspoiled, untainted.’

I looked at him sharply, but there was no hint of mockery in his voice or his eyes. And, getting a grip on myself, I began to see that he was right. True, things were not exactly as I had always dreamed them in this new world. I hadn’t quite counted on the hordes of people, certainly more even than the history books told of, or the evident shortage of resources and raw materials. But there were no ray scars on New York City in this world and if Target One had never been blasted, surely the rest of the world escaped!

I followed Lee’s advice: I relaxed.

Until they did as I asked and, after irritable wrangling, put me in touch with a scientist whose speciality was nucleonics.

~ * ~

‘So!’ he hissed, eyes angry through the thick glasses, the silver insignia of rank on his collar glittering and dancing as he swallowed. ‘So you admit you have classified material on your barge!’

I said wearily, ‘I tell you there’s nothing classified about it.’

He stared at me. ‘Nothing classified about an atomic
reactor
?’ he demanded. Only he spaced it out, each word with an angry emphasis of its own: Nothing. Classified. About. An. Atomic.
Reactor?

‘Of course not! Not where we come from, I mean. I -’

‘Enough!’ he cut me off. ‘I mention to you two names: One is “V. S. Kretchwood”. And the other -’ He looked at me shrewdly through the glasses - ‘is “Brazil”. Am I correct?’

‘About what ?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Don’t try to make a fool out of me! You come from Brazil and your reactor is based on Kretchwood’s First Law. Don’t try to deny it!’

I swallowed my anger and tried to placate him. ‘I have never been in Brazil in my life. I know where it is, yes. There is - there was, that is - a large population there, more than fifteen thousand. But this Kretchwood you talk of is absolutely new to me. Our reactor is based on Einstein’s equation, but I know you never heard of Einstein. That’s the whole point!’ And I went through the whole explanation again.

He passed his hand over his forehead. ‘Almost, I begin to believe you. Silly of me, I know, but -’

‘No, it isn’t silly! It’s the absolute truth,’ I insisted. ‘I can prove it to you; just examine our workdeck. You who know nothing of atomic energy will find it hard to understand, but -’

‘We do.’

- ‘but matter and energy are the same - You
what?’

‘We do know about atomic energy,’ he said. ‘That’s Kretchwood’s First Law: “E is greater than e-sub-n plus e-sub-o”.’ He scribbled it on a pad of paper: E>e
_n
+e
_o
. ‘That is, the total energy of an atom is more than the aggregate energy of its nuclear and orbital particles, which means that, by transmutation, energy can be released. V. S. Kretchwood, 1903-1986, if I remember correctly.’

I stared blankly. They knew about binding energy; they knew about fission and fusion; they knew . . .

‘But you
shouldn’t,’
I said. ‘I mean we’ve killed a man - No, excuse me; I’m a little upset. What you’re saying is that you are aware of the military and civilian implications of atomic energy.’

‘There’s a thorium pile going right under your feet,’ he said.

‘Uranium 235 -’

‘Would be better, of course,’ he nodded. ‘The problem of separation is being worked on.’

‘And you propose to make a bomb along the lines of the old Manhattan District?’

‘We call it Task Forty-four.’

Lee and Marin and I exchanged glances. ‘So there will be atomic warfare, after all,’ I said dully. ‘But isn’t all this top secret ?’

‘Of course,’ said the angry little man with stars on his collar.

‘And yet you trust us ?’

‘Where you’re going, it makes no difference. We have special - reserve areas, let’s say, for persons in improper possession of information about atomic energy. You won’t spread anything you’ve learned.’

‘But there’s nothing improper about it! You said you believed us!’

He leaned forward sharply. ‘I do,’ he said in thick, hate-filled tones. ‘I believe it’s your doing that the world didn’t have an atomic war two hundred years ago. And while you’re in the reserve areas, bear this in mind:
I
hope you rot there !’

~ * ~

Sing a dirge for one hundred and fifty thousand children of atomic cataclysm. We killed a man from the past and wiped them out, all of them, with their shattered, festering planet.

And for nothing.

It isn’t bad here, in the reserve area, though it is a little crowded. Ours - they call it the Mojave Resettlement Project - is the worst of the lot, because there just isn’t
anything
in the way of natural resources here. The soil gets fertile enough, with the Los Angeles sludge piped in, but the only water that comes in is right along with the sludge. All the solids come out in the settling tanks and we kill the salts with ion exchange. The smell and the taste stay right in the water, though.

But we wouldn’t complain, if it were going to stay this way. We wouldn’t complain about the taste of the water, or the restrictions on our freedom, or the congested state of the world. Fourteen billion people!

They say that a century or so ago, there was a big campaign for birth control, back when there were only about five billion. But anyone can second-guess that: some segments of the population responded to the campaign and most did not. The only result of the effort was that the generations following were even less susceptible to such a campaign.

But, as I say, we wouldn’t complain, if we couldn’t see on the horizon the flat silhouette of Task Forty-four’s new group of breeder piles. I give us about a year more, that’s all.

Marin has the bunk above mine. I don’t sleep much, and all through the night, I hear him tossing and turning and muttering to himself. And if I listen closely, I can hear the words that are always the same:

‘Poor Dr Einstein,’ he says thickly, and then goes back to sleep.

Poor Dr Einstein!