'… so you see when you’re producing so much material from a factory ship that size you have to maximize the optimum output both in terms of real numbers and as a viable proportion of total units produced. With the high rates of production attainable using light atoms and dust to build up or break down to basic molecules which then go to construct artefacts, naturally you have a certain proportion that fail to meet the quite perfect standards we set.
'All such material is dumped onto the surface of a nearby star or, in the case of high heat-resistance articles, dumped somewhere inside it. The material cannot be recycled economically because as a rule even the shoddy goods that we produce are very difficult to break up, and the Transmuters are tuned only to accept matter in comparatively small quanta. In this case there seems to have been rather a serious leak. The new machinery we’ve just installed has made a mistake in the relevant coordinates, and… well, you know the rest.'
'You mean all this stuff is RUBBISH?' said Cesare from the bathroom.
'Yes, I’m afraid so. There shouldn’t be any more after a little while. I’ve already contacted the factory ship. Please accept our sincere apologies.'
'Wait a minute,' Fosse said as the alien turned to go. 'Have these things been arriving just anywhere? I mean is it a random thing?'
'Yes. The Transporter got that right, at least. They’ve been distributed fairly evenly over the globe. Most of them have sunk in the oceans of course, and quite a few are still undiscovered in rain forests and deserts and in the Antarctic and so on, but we’ll locate those through their coverings and get rid of them once we get another new machine on-line.' It held up three paws as Fosse started to speak again. 'I know,' it said, 'you’d like to keep the things, but I’m afraid that isn’t possible. We do have a responsibility, after all. Now you must excuse me. Goodbye.'
The alien disappeared out of the window and went straight up into the sky, narrowly missing a passing S.S.T.
Suddenly the alarm started sounding. Five armed guards rushed into the room and began restraining Fosse. Cesare succeeded in stopping them before Fosse had anything worse than severe bruising and a broken jaw. He shooed the guards out and closed the door.
'You realize what this means?' he said to Fosse. 'I’ll tell you what it means; we’re using junk; that’s what it means!'
'It’sh worsh than that, shir,' Fosse said. 'That shing shaid the Gi — rubbish wash appearing all over the surfashe of the Earth; that meansh the bigg — ow! — the bi'er the country the more of thoshe thingsh they’re going to get; and rubbish or not they can probably all be ushed.'
'So?'
'Do you know what country hash the greatesht land-area in the whole world, shir?'
Cesare nodded confidently. 'The good old U.S. of A.'
'No, shir,' Fosse said shaking his head slowly.
Cesare looked into Fosse’s eyes. His own eyes gradually widened and his upper lip trembled. 'Not… '
'Yesh!'
'Hot-damn!'
The Gifts kept appearing for two more weeks, which they guessed was the time it took for the Alien’s message to get to the factory ship, and/or the time it took for the rubbish to get from the ship to Earth.
They kept testing the equipment but if there was anything wrong with it they couldn’t find out what it was. The aliens must be really fussy.
The very last Gift to arrive, as far as they knew, was the most interesting of all. The New Technology Project was racing ahead, budget vastly increased now that it was known the Communists probably had the same stuff. The spy satellites hadn’t spotted anything, but then they’d managed to keep pretty tight security themselves, so that didn’t prove anything.
They were near Alamogordo, where the last, very large Gift had appeared. They had had to construct a special building around it to do the business with the covering. Cesare looked up at it.
'OK. But what does it do?'
'It’s a matter transmission machine,' said one scientist.
'No, it isn’t,' said another. 'Whatever it is it isn’t that; it doesn’t leave an original behind. I think it uses continua to—'
'Rubbish. It’s a true matter transmission machine, Mr Borges. We can’t hope to recreate this with our own technology, but we can certainly use it; shifting commodities, urgently needed drugs, disaster aid… '
'There’s nothing wrong with it?'
'Wrong with it? Why, this is the most perfect piece of machinery in existence on the planet. We’ve already shifted two hundred brand-new Cadillacs from here to Tampa and back again just as a trial. It did it without a murmur and right on target.'
'Good.'
'Now, as I was saying… we could use this thing to vastly step up the productive capacity of certain key industries, and make possible the rapid deployment of emergency supplies in a disaster/crisis situation—'
Good, thought Cesare. We can use it to bomb the Ruskies.
'What?' roared Matriapoll when he got back and they told him. 'You told it to junk itself and it disappeared up its own asshole!'
'It was an honest mistake,' said Matriapoll’s foreman.
'They’ll use it! They’ll infest every nearby planet and system they can lay their coordinates on!'
'It’ll probably malfunction totally sooner or later; don’t worry about it. By the way, where’s your other Mate? I only see one.'
'Don’t talk to me about it,' Matriapoll said huffily. 'The idiot took a Flyer for a joy-ride and collided with an S.S.T.'
'You’re sure this is going to work sir?'
'Sure it’ll work,' Cesare said. They were sitting with a whole load of I.M.C.C. people and military and political types in the underground command-post under the matter transmitter. 'We tested it by sending the same number of dummy warheads right round the world and back here. They were all bang-on. It’ll be a clean sweep. Nothing can go wrong.'
The Transporter, unduly sensitive to, amongst other things, radiation, became somewhat mixed up however, and, to cut a short story shorter, it blitzed the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America, messed the Atlantic up a bit, and bombed Mauritania, Portugal and Ireland. After that it jammed and never worked again.
Fosse thought that Mr Borges was taking it very well, considering (there was talk of a law suit). Cesare was on the phone, trying to trace somebody.
'Anybody I know, sir?'
Cesare looked up from the telephone, his eyes reflecting the embarrassing red splotches spread over the giant world map on the far side of the room. 'You remember Feldman? Professor Feldman?'
'No, sir; I don’t think I’ve ever met the person.'
'Doesn’t matter; he’s dead. But I’m getting hold of his number two in Chicago; he’s all right. I’ve heard what it’s like in the East. It sounds terrible: famine, plague, cannibalism, anarchy, flooding, drought; the works. There’s fantastic scope for a pet project of mine I’ve been nursing along for a few years now. Called the Alternative Resources Project. It’s perfect for this situation. We’re ideally placed to take advantage of this. It’s a peach, believe me. We could clean up.'
Piece
Hi kid. Well, there I was about to do some reading but instead I’m writing to you. I’ll explain later, but first a little story (bear with me — this is partly to take my mind off things, including the book I was starting to read, but also to set up the first of a couple of coincidences. Anyway.)
It was… 1975, I think; have to check my diaries to be sure. I’d finished at Uni that spring and gone off hitchhiking through Europe over the summer. Paris, Bergen, Berlin, Venice, Rabat and Madrid defined the limits of this whirlwind tour. Three months later I was on my way home, and after staying with Aunt Jess in Crawley, I’d used the last of my money to buy a bus ticket from London to Glasgow (hitching out of London was notoriously awful). Night bus, and it took ages, staying off the motorways would you believe. This was in the days before videos and minibars and hostesses and even toilets on buses. The old coach groaned and whined through the rain-smeared darkness, stopping at breeze block and Formica transport cafes; cold islands of fluorescence in the night.