Birds had been seen to fly low over the enclosure and to vanish in what looked like electric-arc flame. In some cases they'd exploded in mid-air, ten feet or more aboveground. And Hackett had worked out a possible defense against what he thought this might be, but it hadn't been tested. It couldn't be and he refused to estimate his chances.
But there had to be some breakthrough if there was ever to be any hope of defense against a Grek ship a quarter-mile long and with nobody-knew-what resources of devastation and destruction in its hull.
There came the time when he was to make his practically hopeless attempt to find information that could mean nothing when it was discovered. It was a night with thick clouds. Far away below the horizon there was a city which sent a faint yellowish-white glow into the sky. An irresolute small wind blew in puffs and lesser motions. There was the smell of growing things.
Hackett approached the electrified fence, trailing a cable behind him. The fence itself was, naturally, electrified. It had been secretly tested earlier with an electronic volt meter, which draws no current. No instrument within the squat concrete structure would report the measurement. Hackett now verified it again. The reading went back along the cable he trailed, to where sweating, uneasy men watched it affect dials and instruments. The equipment would either work or not. If it didn't work . . .
He climbed the fence. Nothing happened. He received no shock. He went down the other side. Nothing happened. The equipment he'd designed functioned as it should. The electrified fence had four thousand volts of ninety-cycle current in it. Hackett's body had been charged with four thousand volts of ninety-cycle current, exactly one hundred eighty degrees out of phase. When the fence was charged to so many volts, Hackett was similarly charged. When it was charged plus, so was he. When it was charged minus, he was similarly charged to the same potential. At all times he was charged identically with the fence. There was no potential difference between the two electrified objects, man and fence. He descended to the ground and moved toward the power-broadcast building.
The operation of his protective device made a sort of anticlimax. It was deep dark night. The air was warm, and soft night breezes blew irregularly. There were sounds of night insects, though not nearby. Far, far away a plane went grumbling across the sky. Frogs in some pond or other shouted senselessly without pause or rhythm. There was no sound which was not a natural one, no movement save Hackett's in all the world.
A faint light glowed. It was very, very faint, but it told him of high-voltage tension about him. He stood still and the distant apparatus and his special costume adjusted to it. He went on.
He heard tiny noises, more or less like leaves tapping upon each other, but not rustlings; snappings. Then Hackett saw tiny twinklings in the air. The wind had changed and now blew toward him. He heard a droning sound and a loud snap. Another. And another.
There were sparkings in the air around him. They moved and surrounded him. And suddenly he realized what they were.
They were midges; gnats, mosquitos, tiny flying beetles and sometimes larger ones, and moths of infinitesimal wingspread. They were the night creatures which flutter and hum in the twenty or thirty feet of air just above the ground level. When an air current moves, they move with it, carried by breezes as the ocean's plankton drift where the sea's currents take them.
But about Hackett the tiny creatures were exploding in minute electrical snappings. A spark and a snap meant a gnat vanished. A hissing and crackling noise meant something large dying in mid-air and scorched to nothingness by an invisible electric field. The very air was deadly. But Hackett's carefully designed costume and the countervailing energies sent him along the cable were an answer to this intended form of murder. He wasn't insulated from the fields of force about him. Instead, he was supplied with counter-potential from the other end of his cable.
He approached the building. Three separate times the infinitely tiny light warned him to move slowly. Each time he was supplied with an electric charge equal to and identical with the outside potential.
He reached the squat building. There was an iron door. He opened it and found the scatter of an infra-red beam, slightly dissipated by dust particles in the air. He neutralized its power to give warning and went on, with infinite care and using techniques which were improvements on those of the most highly gifted criminals of the time.
Perhaps—perhaps—his crackman's work was less than perfect. But this installation had been in operation for months and there had never been an attempt to enter it. Every moment of every day and every night it had been under test by the midges and microscopic creatures of the air. The Aldarians had come to have complete, unthinking confidence in the protection against intrusion. There was no reason for them to look for intrusion now.
There was no movement inside the building. He opened doors—doors are inevitable inventions, like wheels and screws and hammers—and they did not report his passage through them.
Then he came to a semispherical room all of sixty feet across and thirty high. There was a faint droning sound in it coming from a huge and apparently infinitely complex mass of metal, cables, cones and other shapes of dully glistening metal. Hackett pressed a button and tiny TV cameras began to send back fine-grain pictures of everything he saw. Hackett himself looked with more desperate attention and urgency than he'd ever looked at anything before. He saw this— that; he saw familiar irrationalities . . .
His lips formed furious curses. He saw, and it did no good. It was useless. He'd learned nothing.
And then he heard a noise. An Aldarian opened a door and came into the great open space which was almost filled with monstrous motionless machinery emitting a faint droning sound and nothing else.
Hackett froze to stillness. Aldarians were familiar sights. They'd been seen often enough on television. They were furry, with pointed ears, but they carried themselves erect and nobody had ever thought of them as apelike. This Aldarian crossed the floor as if to look at something in the mass of motionless, droning machinery. Hackett remained as still as the machinery itself. He was armed and could kill. But the return through the outside force-fields would have to be slow and cautious, and with many pauses while his protective apparatus adjusted to changing electric fields. Discovery would mean he couldn't possibly get back.
The Aldarian walked toward the huge machine. Then he checked. He almost stumbled upon nothing whatever. And Hackett knew that the Aldarian had seen him. He stood rigid for an instant, then went on and examined the huge device, turned and walked neither slowly nor hastily back to the door through which he'd entered. In turning, his eyes passed over Hackett and showed no faintest sign of having seen him. But they had. He went out of the door and closed it behind him.
Hackett waited, weapon in hand, raging because this adventure was meaningless and his death would mean no more. Because the Greks were liars.
But nothing happened. And nothing happened.
Nothing happened at all.
10
Hackett told it later to Lucy, back at the village of Traylor. He was somehow resentful.
"He saw me!" he said bitterly. "There's no doubt about it. But—he spared me, he pretended not to see me. Why?"
Lucy had listened very carefully, but she'd grown pale during his recital. Now she asked, "What do you think?"