Six feet away, outside, one wouldn’t be able to see the lighted window at all. It was an uncanny kind of blackness. And what was going on down below there on Forty-second Street, only a block and a half from the center of the universe?
Criminals taking over Forty-second Street! Spaceship runs to Mars, war with Arcturus. What mad universe was he in?
CHAPTER VI
The Sewing Machines Rampant
WELL, WHEREVER, WHATEVER it was, he was here and he was stuck with it and he was going to be in continuous danger until he learned the ropes well enough so that he wouldn’t risk making a break every time he did or said anything.
Breaks weren’t safe in a spot where you could get yourself shot on sight as a spy on no provocation at all, where you could get yourself killed by being foolish enough to try to walk from Grand Central Station to Times Square after dark.
Resolutely, he picked up the pocket edition of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History. He was too tired to sit up any longer. He’d lie on the bed to read and, if he went to sleep—well, he’d finish reading in the morning and find out as much about things as he could before going out to face them.
He picked up the Wells book and started to read, skimming lightly through the early chapters. There was no difference in them. They even had the same pictures. He’d happened to reread the book recently and was familiar with it. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Roman Empire, Charlemagne, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Columbus and America, the American Revolution, Civil War, the Industrial Revolution … Into Space.
That was the chapter heading, nine-tenths of the way through. He quit skimming and leafing over pages and started to read.
Nineteen hundred and three. An American scientist at Harvard had discovered the spacewarp drive. Accidentally! Working on, of all things, his wife’s sewing machine, which had been broken and discarded. He was trying to change it around so the treadle would run a tiny home-made generator to give him a high-frequency low-voltage current that he wanted to use in some class experiments in physics.
He’d finished his connections—fortunately he remembered afterwards just what they’d been and where he’d made his mistake—and he’d worked the treadle a few times when his foot stamped unexpectedly on the floor and he nearly fell forward out of his chair. The sewing machine, treadle and generator and all, just wasn’t there any more.
The professor, Wells humorously pointed out, had been sober at the time but he quickly remedied that. After he sobered up he borrowed his wife’s new sewing machine, and lost that. He didn’t know where they were going.
He rigged up a third one and this time he got witnesses, including the president and the dean of the university. He didn’t tell them what they were going to witness. He just told them to watch the sewing machine. They did and then the sewing machine wasn’t there to watch.
They didn’t know what they had, but they knew they had something new. They relieved Professor Yarley (that was his name) of his teaching duties and gave him a grant to finance his experiments. He lost a few more sewing machines and then quit using sewing machines and began to get the thing down to the essential minima.
He found he could use a clockwork motor—connected that particular way—to the generator. The treadle wasn’t necessary. He didn’t have to use a bobbin but the shuttle was necessary and had to be of ferrous metal. And an electric motor running the generator canceled something out; it wouldn’t work.
Foot-power through a treadle, hand power, clockwork or his son’s toy steam engine. He got it down to a comparatively simple layout of stuff mounted on a box—boxes were cheaper than sewing machines—he’d wind a spring, release the lever and—well—it went somewhere.
Then one day there was a news story that something at first thought to be a meteor had struck the side of a tall building in Chicago. Upon subsequent examination it proved to be what was left of a wooden box and some oddly assorted clockwork and electrical apparatus.
Yarley took the next train to Chicago and identified his handiwork. He knew then that the thing moved through space and he had something to work on. Nobody had timed the striking of the object against the Chicago building to an exact second but, as nearly as he could get it timed, Yarley decided that the object had traveled from Harvard to Chicago in just about nothing flat.
The university gave him some assistants then and he began experimenting in earnest, sending out the things in considerable numbers, with identifying serial numbers on them and with an accurate record kept of variations in number of windings, the exact amount of power applied, the direction in which it had been facing and all such data. Also, he publicized what he was doing and got people watching for them all over the world.
Two were reported. By comparison with his records he learned some important things. First, that the machine traveled in the exact direction of the axle of the generator part—second, that there was a relationship between the number of windings and the distance it traveled.
Now he could really go to work. By 1904 he had determined that the distance the machine traveled was proportionate to the cube of the number of turns or fractional turns on the generator and that the duration of the trip was actually and exactly nothing flat. By cutting the generators down to toy size he could send a machine for a comparatively short measured distance—a few miles—and make it land in a particular field outside of town.
It might have revolutionized transportation in general, except that the machines were always damaged seriously, internally and externally, when they landed. Generally there was barely enough of them left for identification, not always that much. And it wasn’t going to make much of a weapon; explosives sent never arrived. They must have exploded enroute, somewhere in the warp.
In three years of experimentation, they got it worked out to a nice formula and even began to understand the principles back of it as well as to be able to predict the results. They determined that the reason the things were destroyed was their sudden materialization, at the end of the journey, in air.
Air is pretty solid stuff. You can’t displace a quantity of it in nothing fiat without damaging whatever does the displacing—not only damaging it as an object, but damaging its very molecular structure.
Obviously, the only practical place to which an object could be sent was into space, open space. And, since the distance increased as the cube of the windings, it wouldn’t take a very large machine to reach the moon, or even the planets.
Even interstellar travel would not take a really monstrous one, especially as the thing could be done in several hops, each taking no longer in time than it took the pilot to press a button.
Furthermore, since time was a zero factor, no trajectories need be calculated. Simply aim directly at a visible planet or the moon, adjust the distance factor, and there you were, materializing in space a safe distance from the planet and ready to descend and land.
How to land took them a few years to work out—the science of aerodynamics hadn’t been solved yet and, anyway, there wasn’t supposed to be any air on the Moon, the first and most obvious objective. But in 1910 the first man landed on the Moon and returned safely. The habitable planets were all reached within the next year.
The next chapter was The Interplanetary War but Keith Winton couldn’t read it. It was three-thirty in the morning. He’d had a long day and things had happened to him. He simply couldn’t hold his eyes open. He reached out and turned out the light and was asleep almost before his head dropped back on the pillow.