Several minutes later Bohegian, a dark, somber-looking man in his late fifties, entered the apartment. With a sigh, he seated himself facing Tito Cravelli. 'How about a beer ?' Cravelli asked him. 'You look tired.'
'Fine.' Bohegian nodded. 'I am tired. I just left TD; I came directly here. We're all on emergency double-shift. Frankly, I was lucky to get away at all; I told them I had a migraine headache and had to leave. So the company guards finally let me out.'
'What's up ?' Cravelli said, getting the beer from the refrigerator in the kitchen.
"The thing they hauled back here,' Earl Bohegian said. 'What I mentioned in my written report.
The artifact they've been going over it, and it's apparently the damnedest junk you ever heard of.
It's a vehicle of some kind; I finally managed to find that out by hanging around in the executives' washroom, drinking "Coke", and listening to stray colloquies. It's made out of wood, but it's not primitive. It's the turbine, though, that's really throwing the engineers on Level One.'
Gratefully, he accepted the beer and gulped at it. "It works by compressing gases. I'm not an engineer - you know that - so I can't help you out on technical details. But anyhow, by compressing gases it manages to freeze a trapped chamber of water. So help me, Cravelli, the rumor going around TD is that the damn thing is run by ...' He laughed. 'Excuse-me, but it's funny. It runs by expansion of the ice. The water freezes, expands as ice, and drives a piston upward with enormous force, then the ice is melted - all this happens extremely fast - and the gases expand again, which gives another thrust to the piston, driving it back down in the cylinder again. Ice! Did you ever hear of such a sources of power ?
'It's funnier than steam, is it ?' Cravelli said.
Laughing until tears filled his eyes, Bohegian nodded. 'Yes, a lot funnier than steam. Because it's so darn cumbersome. And so utterly ineffective. You should see it. It's incredibly complicated, especially in view of the meager thrust it ultimately manages to deliver. The vehicle coasts forward on runners, not wheels, and finally gets tip into the air, but just for a very few moments.
Then it glides back down. It's a kind of wooden rocketship with a sail. That's what they're building on the other side of the defective 'scuttler. That's their technology. What kind of a civilization is that ?' He finished his beer, set the glass down. "The story going around TD is that one of the better engineers got into it, cranked it up, literally, and manage to fly around the lab for fifteen or sixteen seconds, at a height of about four feet, approximately waist level.'
'Your report,' Cravelli said, once more getting it out, 'says that the stellar charts made by TD's astro-physicists prove that the planet, beyond any reasonable doubt, is Earth ?'
Earl Bohegian became serious, then. 'Yes, and right here in the present. There's been no timetravel at all, not even so much as a fraction of a second. Don't ask me to explain it; they can't explain it, and they're supposed to know about these things. I know what the old man believes, though. According to him - and evidently he hatched this out on his own - it's an Earth that started out like ours and then split off and took a different course; at least its evolution did, its development at the level of human society. Say, ten thousand years back. Maybe even further, even as far back as the Pleistocene Period. The flowers and plants seem to be identical with ours, anyhow. And the continental configurations show no deviation from ours. All the land masses are congruent with ours, so the split-off can't be too long ago. For instance San Francisco Bay.
And the Gulf of Mexico. They don't differ from ours, and I understand they formed as they are now in quasi-historical tunes.'
'How great is the population, do they think ?'
'Not great, certainly not like ours. By the number of lights on the dark side they assume that it lies in the millions - at most. And certainly not in the billions. For instance, whole areas don't appear to be inhabited at all, at least if you accept the lights as an index.'
'Maybe there's a war on,' Cravelli said, 'and they're blacked out.'
'But as the light side moves,' Bohegian said, 'there's little indication of cities, only what appear to be roads and some sort of small, town-like structures ... they'll know more about that in a day or so. The whole business is bizarre, to say the least. Because of the total lack of radio signals, TD
is beginning to speculate that, although they have developed a turbine of sorts, they for some reason haven't ran onto electricity. And the use of wood, laminated and then coated with asbestos paint; it's possible - although virtually incredible -that they don't work with metal. At least not in industry.'
'What language do they speak ?'
'TD doesn't even pretend to know. They're in the process of hauling a number of linguistic decoders over from the linguistics department, so when they finally manage to nab one of the citizens over there, they'll be able to converse with him or her. That should happen any time. In fact it may already have occurred after I left TD and came here. I tell you, this is going to be the apologia pro sua vita of every sociologist, ethnologist, and anthropologist in the world. They're going to be migrating from here to there in droves. And I don't blame them. God knows what they'll find. Is it actually possible that a culture could develop a turbine-powered, airborne craft and not have, say, a written language ? Because, according to the scuttlebutt at TD, there were no letters, signs or figures anywhere on the craft, and they certainly scrutinized it thoroughly for that.'
Half to himself, Cravelli said, "I frankly don't care what they have and have not developed. As long as there's room on their planet for immigration. Mass immigration, in terms of millions of people.'
They each had a second beer, he and Earl Bohegian, and then Bohegian departed.
You're lucky, Jim Briskin, Cravelli thought as he shut the door after Bohegian. You took a chance when you made that speech, but evidently you're going to be able to swing it after all.
Unless you balk at sharing this alter-Earth with its natives ... or unless they happen to possess some mechanism by which they can halt us.
God, I'd like to go there, Cravelli realized. See this civilization with my own eyes. Before we smear it up, as we inevitably will. What an experience it would be! They may have developed into areas which we've never even imagined. Scientifically, philosophically, even technically, in terms of machinery and industrial techniques, sources of power, medicines - in fact in every area, from contraceptive devices to visions of God. From books and cathedrals, if any, to children's toys.
We'll probably initiate events, he reflected, by murdering a few of them, just to be on the safe side. Too bad this isn't in the hands of the government; it's damn bad luck that so far it's entirely the personal property of a private business corporation. Of course, when Jim is elected, all that will change. But Schwarz. He won't do anything; he'll just sit. And TD will be permitted to go ahead in any way it chooses.
To himself Sal Heim said: I've got to arrange a meeting between Leon Turpin, head of Terran
Development, and Jim Briskin. Jim had to be photographed over there in that new world - not just talking about it, but actually standing on it.
And the way to make the contact, Heim realized, is through Frank Woodbine, because Jim and
Frank are old-time friends. I'll get hold of Woodbine and fix it all up, and that will be that. We'll have Jim over there and maybe Frank with him, and what a boost to our campaign that'll be.
We've just got to have it, that's all.
'Get on the vidphone,' he instructed his wife Pat. 'Start them searching down Frank Woodbine; you know, the deep space explorer, the hero.'
'I know,' Pat said. She lifted the receiver and asked for information.
'A hero is a good thing to have around,' Sal said meditatively as he waited. 'It always was my hope to get Jim involved with Woodbine during this campaign. Now I think we've got the exact tie-in we want.' He felt pleased with himself; he had a good idea, and he knew it. All his professional instincts told him that he was onto something, a two-birds-with-one-stone item.