A second delegation of citizens went to the Aldarians about now. Hackett didn't know of it at the time. He was in Washington, feverishly showing what he'd found out, demanding a sinter-field generator and listening to other feverish men trying to fit something they'd discovered into something somebody else had found out. They were shunted into the red brick Smithsonian lecture hall as a place for them to argue together.
Hackett pulled down a sinter-field generator. He had a substitute part corresponding to a part from a power receiver. He switched the substitute for the original part and the sinter-field generator became a power receiver. He switched another substitute into the Aldarian hearing aid and it became a sinter-field generator.
His demonstration was conclusive and started a tumultuous interchange of enthusiastic views and deductions.
"Doctor Thale," said Hackett pugnaciously, "is responsible for this particular development. She is convinced that the Greks are not our superiors in intelligence. She believes that at some time in the past they had a lucky break. A couple of hundred years ago we discovered the principle of the dynamo and the motor. Modern human civilization depends absolutely upon that principle. The Greks found something else. And their civilization depends on this! They found a way to put power into the air and they found a way to get it out again. And in getting it out, they found it could take innumerable forms. One was standard electric current. One herds fish. One is a sinter field." He stopped and said deliberately, "One may be—must be—unidirectional thrust. A space drive."
A unidirectional thrust would push a ship through emptiness. Babblings came from everywhere. Now research had a purpose and a program. It was to make as many metal instrument parts as possible with different shapes at their pointed ends, and see what they produced. Nobody could guess, but everybody wanted to find out.
Hackett was leaving the room, almost fighting his way through men who wanted to buttonhole him, when the FBI man of the lift-off site came to his rescue. He got Hackett outside.
"I've got a job for you," he said cordially. "Want to hear the details?"
"I've got plenty to do," Hackett told him. "What's the job?"
"Civilian adviser," said the FBI man blandly, "to an exercise of ski troops. We know where something from the moon landed and stayed a couple of days and then lifted off again. Since what we thought were power-broadcasting stations aren't—as you discovered— maybe the real ones are up in the arctic, where this thing landed for awhile."
Hackett said, "I'm getting a little bit fed up with being ordered around."
"Ordered?" said the FBI man. "This is no order— this is an opportunity! Don't you want to take a look at a real power-broadcasting unit?"
Hackett said hungrily, "I was planning to try—I'll have to—Naturally!"
He might have to argue with Lucy. She attempted sometimes, now, to act in a proprietary fashion. She wouldn't want him to go into danger, but everybody was in danger. If the Greks came back, very many people would zestfully submit to them in the expectation of working only one day a week and retiring at forty, and so on. When they didn't get into that blissful state, they'd want to revolt. Considering the nature of human beings, a very great many of them would need to be killed before the balance were as subjugated as the Aldarians. And they weren't too much subdued to dream of disaster to their masters.
So Hackett undertook to go with a fast-moving small expedition into the arctic on the same day a second delegation went to the Aldarians to plead for their intercession with the Greks. The people of Earth begged them to return, on any terms they chose. They'd left gifts on Earth, and the rulers of Earth withheld them and oppressed the poor, and there was no one that humanity could turn to but the Greks—the benign, the generous, the infinitely admirable and altruistic Greks! Let the Greks come back. Let them establish that paradisiacal state of things they meant humanity to enjoy. Unless they returned, their benefactions would be useless.
The Aldarians to whom this second petition was presented read it carefully. They replied in writing that they had not yet been able to reach the Greks on their homeward way. Communication with a ship traveling faster than light was a tricky business, but they would continue to try. When they made contact with the Greks, they would tell humanity what the reply was.
Hackett knew nothing of this. He was busy.
In three hours he was in a jet plane lifting off for Fairbanks, Alaska. There he'd take a plane—a slower plane—to a bush pilots' airstrip in Baffin Land. There were heavy-duty helicopters already heading to meet the expedition there. The expedition would be volunteers with some arctic training, and the copters would fly them as low as they dared toward the northwest and as near the shores of Morrow Island as a flying craft would dare. The thing from the moon had landed there. Its landing place could be spotted certainly within a ten-mile area, and probably within one. What would happen when the small party got there might well determine the fate of the human race. If it was successful, the chances were good. If it failed, we humans would be no worse off. We couldn't be much worse off! It was up to Hackett, to the twenty troopers with arctic training, and to two Eskimos and their dog teams carrying supplies.
Hackett landed at Fairbanks, took off again with some very competent young soldiers in troop carrier planes, flew north through dusky twilight and into night that became complete as the sun slid sidewise down below the horizon, and landed at a completely inadequate airstrip on Baffin Land. There were huge helicopters waiting for them.
They flew through blackness at the time the Aldari-ans politely reported that they had made good contact with the swiftly traveling Grek ship, incredible billions of miles away and going farther. The Greks would give the human plea for their return the most indulgent consideration. They would let humanity know what they'd decided shortly. Meanwhile they went on away from Earth.
A clamour arose, demanding that the Greks be persuaded to come back at any cost, under any considerations. While the Greks were here, marvelous things happened. Everybody inherited a million dollars, everybody was going to be rich. When they left everything went wrong, there was no work, there was no food.
Paraders displayed banners inscribed GREKS COME HOME! and requested the Aldarians to notify the Greks of this public and unanimous demand for their return.
We who did not protest this attitude, and especially those of us who took part in those futile demonstrations, are not pleased with ourselves now. But considering the information we had, it was reasonable. Considering how we'd have reacted if we'd known what Hackett and some hundreds of other secretive persons knew, it was reasonable for us to be kept in ignorance. The fact that men are rational animals doesn't mean they can't be stupid on occasion. We were. We tell about it to keep other generations from being stupid in the same fashion.
Unfortunately it's only too likely that they'll simply behave like idiots about something else.
Anyhow, while most of the world paraded and demonstrated and expressed the most passionate possible desire for the return of the Greks, Hackett and his entirely inadequate army moved through the arctic night. The Northern Lights flickered overhead, and sometimes they were overbright for people who did not want to be seen though the throbbing of the copters could be heard for many miles.
Eventually they landed and took up their journey on foot. Then when the copters were gone, they were in a world of frozen silence. Sometimes pack ice somewhere growled for no reason except to break the stillness. Sometimes when the lights were brightest it seemed that the faintest of hissing, whispering noises came down from where the aurora played. But they went on at the best speed possible.