TAKEOVER BID

John Baxter

There may be many unknown factors involved in preventing Man from surviving in space, despite all today’s knowledge of space medicine. Australian author John Baxter suggests one such possibility the medics may have overlooked and incidentally paints a fascinating mind picture of his native country in the near future.

* * * *

To set out on a journey at evening is an experience that has always pleased me. There is a sense of stealing a march on your fellows, of having broken the tyranny of the clock and struck out on your own. So when it became evident on that cold winter’s afternoon that I would have to go to Crosswind headquarters I bitched a little—it was expected —but inwardly I rather looked forward to the rush trip. Even with priority it wasn’t possible to get a seat on any westbound jet and I knew I would have to drive the two thousand miles, but as I eased the car out of the office tube and into the main traffic flow I felt more at ease than I had all week.

Lying back as the autopilot threaded me through the river of cars I had time to look around for the first time that day. There was a sunset over the city, one of those huge violet and orange affairs that one gets in Australia when the air is cold and clear. They’re a good crowd-pleaser and the weather-control boys turn them on regularly, but I’ve never liked them. They have the look of scars and wounds, and their colours are livid rather than vivid. It’s hardly the sort of thing one mentions in family therapy, but I’ve always looked on sunsets as a kind of omen, a forecast of trouble to come. In this case my instincts were right.

It took an hour to get out of the city proper and into the mountains, so night had fallen by the time I hit the main highway and set out to chase the sun. Behind me the city of Greater Sydney sprawled in a net of lights across the dark encroachment of the harbour. Along the foreshores, among the canyons of the city streets, out in the suburbs that covered the whole coastal plain people were getting ready to eat, turning on their 3V sets, settling down for a quiet evening, while I scurried off into the interior on a task that would affect every one of them in some way or other. Seven million people in Sydney, another twenty-eight million in the rest of Australia, and unwittingly I held the fate of them all in my hands.

Now that I was locked on to the highway I began, as usual, to feel bored. Outside the dome the luminescent ribbon of roadway unwound at a steady two hundred miles per hour. A few cars flicked by going in the opposite direction and, looking back, I could see others following me at varying distances. Beyond the limits of the road there were probably houses, certainly farms, but if there were people anywhere around me I was unaware of them. The clear bubble of the car isolated me completely. There was not even any real contact with the road. The air cushion kept the car suspended a few inches above the surface and the connection between the magnetized strip on which I was locked and the steering apparatus was electric and invisible.

Forced in on myself I became more acutely aware of my sensations. Comfort, certainly; the car was custom built. Warmth; the heater was perfect. But hunger—this was one problem that the car would not solve for me. 1 poked around in the various recesses, but except for a few scraps of chocolate already turning white with age there seemed to be nothing in the car that was even remotely edible. I picked up the phone and punched the office number. Seconds later the pert face of the night receptionist floated on to the screen.

“Civil Aviation. Can I help you?” She looked closer. “Oh, Mr. Fraser.”

“Has Miss Freeman left yet?”

“I’m not sure. Wait, I’ll try your office.”

There was a blip and the screen cleared to show Ilona Freeman’s face. She smiled.

“Hi, Bill. What did you forget?”

“Food?”

“Try your case.”

I opened my satchel. Inside, along with the papers, were three thin plastic packs.

“Remind me to raise your salary,” I said.

“I’ll remember that.”

“Anything come in since I left?”

“Only that he’s continuing to improve. He hasn’t woken yet—or he hadn’t at seven anyway.”

“Right. See you Thursday.’

I cut off, took out one of the plastic packs and tore off the sealer strip. Steam and savoury odours puffed out. I folded the sides down and they locked into the shape of a shallow dish. Chicken Cacciatore with new potatoes and green peas. One of the others would hold lemon gelati; Ilona knew my tastes well enough. But I was puzzled by the third. I looked inside. Packed into the small space was the oddest assortment of fruits I had ever seen—or not seen; most of them were completely unknown to me. Long purple things like peas, something that might have been a banana if it hadn’t been pastel pink, berries in green, blue, white and magenta. The pack, like all the others, was marked “Export Only”. Apparently the Assistant Director of Civil Aviation had made the unofficial V.I.P. list. Australia’s export trade in food was its biggest money-spinner and the bureau guarded it jealously. It gave me an obscure satisfaction to know that the food I was despatching was to stay in the country rather than be sold to some well-to-do gourmand in Italy or France.

As I tucked into dinner the amusing side of the situation made me smile. Australia selling food to Europe? In the fifties the idea of Australia exporting anything but the most basic raw materials—wool, wheat, steel—would have been ridiculous. Nobody had bargained for the immense expansion that would follow the opening up of Australia to Asian immigrants and the impetus this would give to the development of the inland desert. Up to 1970 settlement was in most cases confined to a narrow strip of coastline seldom more than one hundred miles wide. Now, in 1994, there were market gardens in the far west where once a farmer had been lucky to graze two sheep to the acre, and they were well on the way to planting wheat where Lake Eyre had once turned a white mirror of dried salt to the sun.

The increased productivity had had its effect on the national character too. For decades Australia had lived on its muscles, trying to make up for its economic deficiencies by victories on other fronts. Australian sportsmen, artists and writers were world-famous. It was fashionable in Europe and America to admire Australia, to fly in and spend a few weeks on air-conditioned safari into the desert, but like all fashions this was shallow. Beneath the veneer was a contempt. Australia had the status of a football scholar, a nation that had nothing but brute strength and native cunning to pit against the wealth and sophistication of its older fellows. So, when it suddenly fell heir to wealth its first impulse was to strive with other countries for the goals that mattered; the cure for cancer, longevity, space. And so it had happened that in 1993 an Australian scientist had stumbled on the force field and, almost by accident, given mankind the stars.

Or at least so it had seemed at first. Out in the desert, somewhere north of Capricorn, a research station had been set up and the first cautious experiments made. A generator encapsulated itself in a force field that made an enclosure better, stronger than the finest natural materials in existence. Such a bubble, stressed in a certain way, tended to disappear. After a few experiments radio telescopes on the U.S. space station reported that there were odd objects receding from the earth at incredible speeds. More bubbles were sent out and tracked. Apparently such a field, being a perfect reflector, supplied nothing for the forces of space to hold on to. Like an orange seed squeezed between thumb and finger it stored up the energy applied to it and then suddenly skidded out from between the two opposing forces at a speed that was dangerously close to that of light

After three months they managed to find a way to make the acceleration gradual and to track and retrieve the force field bubbles. One was brought back. A rat was sent out and retrieved, then a chimpanzee. All survived ground tests. Then they sent a man. On June 7, 1994, Colonel Peter Chart, R.A.A.F., had set off along the track taken by other bubbles. And had returned. Or at least his body had. His mind seemed somehow to have been lost among the empty reaches of space. He had been taken from the bubble completely catatonic and had remained that way for three weeks. Then, on July 2—yesterday—he had quietly risen from his bed, killed a guard and run off into the desert. Nobody knew why, nobody knew how—but it was my responsibility as leader of the project to find out.

I would have worried about it all night, but the almost imperceptible hum of the motor lulled me into a doze. Occasionally I would wake when a car went by on the other lane, but by the time I had turned my head it was nothing but a glow disappearing in the distance behind me. Once—it must have been around 3 a.m., I suppose—I woke again and watched rather muzzily as a string of automatic ore-carriers roared past, their huge hoppers piled with chunks of rock torn from the mines of the Pilbara, farther north. The rust stains on those jagged nuggets were like dried blood—another omen, if I had cared to consider it such.

When I woke the sun was well up and my destination close. All around from horizon to horizon there was only desert. Sand, rocks and stunted spinifex. It was a desolate place, but that was why we had chosen it. A particular rock formation flashed past, reminding me to switch to manual control. A few minutes later I slowed down and turned off the highway where a sign saying maxwell downs experimental cattle breeding station pointed up a rough track. The surface was loose and as I switched the air cushion to maximum lift a cloud of red dust rose in the air. Nobody could be unaware that I was coming.

I nosed along the track as fast as the surface allowed until it petered out at an old artesian well some ten miles from the highway. The mill turned desultorily in the hot breeze and a wheezing old pump brought up from the underground lakes a trickle of water as brackish and un-drinkable as blood. There was no sound save the clanking of the pump and the splash of water. I waited. A few moments later the old concrete slab on which the pump-house had once rested tilted slowly and opened a dark cavern in the earth. I guided the car down the ramp and into the headquarters of Operation Crosswind.

All the project H.Q. was underground, though a few offices, my own included, had windows on to the desert, an executive amenity that we seldom used. At the bottom of the shaft I got out of the car and as the garager trundled it off looked up at the square of blue-white sky above. The heat was intense and enervating. My skin prickled and contracted under its dryness, and I was glad when the walkway carried me down into the air-conditioned part of the project.

Col Talura was waiting for me at the other end. Col— for Colemara. His grandfather had fought with Nemarluk in the Kimberleys and smeared his body with the kidney fat of many white men. Col was a fully initiated member of the Arunta. I had seen his scars. He was also one of the first aborigines to hold a Ph.D. and a B.Sc. Perhaps this contrast was the reason I had chosen him as my right-hand man. His combination of sophistication and allegiance to the old tribal ways made him a person worth studying. It interested me to see how he would react to this, his first crisis. However, there was no time for character analysis at the moment.

We shook hands sketchily.

“Sorry I couldn’t meet you,” he said. “I just got back from the hospital this minute.”

“How is he?”

“Damned if I know. Physically he’s in poor shape but no danger. Mentally ... well, the doctor can tell you better than I can. Want to go to the hospital?”

We stepped on to another walkway. Col took a folio of papers from under his arm.

“You’d better look through these,” he said. “They’re the search team’s reports.”

I leafed through the papers. Maps marked with search patterns and in one spot a triumphal cross marking where Chart had been found. It was a good twenty miles from the base, I noticed. Records of radio messages, various reports —and a few photographs. The first showed a plain littered with wind-smoothed rocks. “Gibber country” the natives call it.

“This where they found him?” I asked.

Col nodded. “Bad country,” he said. “Almost impossible to search.”

I went through the other photographs. A shot of a car, abandoned. Only a service jeep; nothing but a power unit, a seat and a hemispherical dome. The dome was folded back. I looked at the next photograph. It was a shock.

“My God!”

Col didn’t turn. He knew what I was looking at.

“A mess, isn’t he? Third degree burns, exposure, thirst— nasty.”

“He’s naked.”

“That’s how we found him. It’s not unusual. People lost in the desert often get delirious and throw off their clothes. I don’t know how he survived. It hasn’t been below a hundred degrees over here for weeks.”

The walkway ended at the door of the hospital. The doctor was waiting there to meet us.

“How is he?” I asked.

“A mess. But he should pull through.”

“Can I see him?”

“If you like. But he can’t talk. We’ve got him in a skin tank.”

We walked down a corridor and he led us into the room where Chart was. The whole chamber was bathed in blue luminescence. On the walls, ripples of light flowed endlessly in the blueness. The room contained only the tank, a long coffin-like plastic cylinder connected to quietly humming machinery. In it a man floated. This was neither the Peter Chart I had known six months ago nor the seared animal of the photograph, but another composite half-formed creature. The skin over his whole body was soft and pink like that of a child. Every line and wrinkle had been smoothed out. Above the mask the man’s eyes were closed in sleep.

I turned to the doctor. There was no real need to whisper, but I had the feeling that to talk loudly in here would somehow disturb the delicate balance in which Chart was held.

“Are you taking brain readings?” I asked.

He moved to a small machine connected to the side of the tank near Chart’s head. A wire connected it to two electrodes taped to his forehead. The doctor cranked the recorder on the side and a slip of paper slid up from the interior of the machine. He handed it to me.

“This is the complete record since he came in.”

I examined the graph on the sheet. Something about it was odd but I wasn’t sure what. Then I realized. There was an unnatural evenness about the pattern. Catatonics have an especially complicated brain pattern. Physically they are motionless but subconsciously their brains remain active, endlessly considering the problem that has forced them to shut down their bodies in protest. Yet Chart’s mind was just as inactive as his body. There was nothing on the graph but the mumble of a brain carrying on natural functions. Only in one place was there a variation. The graph suddenly leaped almost off the scale and for a quarter of an inch or so moved crazily about before settling down again. This must have been the period of Chart’s escape, flight and recapture. I didn’t mention it until we were outside in the corridor again.

Then I said, “How did it happen?”

The doctor scratched his ear nervously.

“It’s my fault,” he said, “though I must say I think anybody would have done the same thing in the circumstances. After he’d been in a coma for a few days and all the usual tests had been made, we left him under minimum security; a nurse to see to the feeding and such, and a guard just in case something happened. On the night he escaped the girl went out as usual about 2 a.m. to refill the nutrient bottle. Chart hadn’t changed at all during the day. As you can see from the graph he was completely unconscious right up to then. Yet suddenly he leapt out of coma into instant life, strangled the guard with his bare hands, sneaked out of the hospital and stole a car. Medically, it’s impossible—but he did it.”

“Is there any possible explanation that might cover the situation?” Col asked. “It doesn’t matter how far-fetched it is, just so long as it fits.”

The doctor looked more confused.

“I wish it was that easy. As far as I can see, we’ve tried everything that might logically have caused this particular situation, and none of them fit. Human beings aren’t as complex as you might think. Of course, you sometimes get bizarre symptoms for fairly simple diseases, but as a rule the cause and effect are fairly easy to link up. But this ... I mean, the symptoms and the possible causes aren’t even of the same order!”

I chewed this over.

“So what it amounts to,” I said, “is that Chart is suffering from some unknown mental aberration presumably caused by his experiences on the flight.”

“Well, no,” he said uneasily. “That’s the odd thing. No matter how basic the trauma is, we could have detected it. We tested Chart for all expected troubles. The isolation, the silence, the recirculated air—none of them could possibly have affected him. His mind was incapable of reacting to any of them in this particular way. If you like, he was immune to neurosis. There are things he could have reacted to, of course, but none of them occurred during the flight. We’ve got a complete brain-wave record of the whole period. Nothing happened to him in the bubble.”

“If it’s not mental, then how about physical? Some new virus...”

“No, that’s impossible too. The field would keep out everything that might conceivably have affected him. He was completely insulated. Anyway, the infection effects would have registered in the brain pattern.”

So it wasn’t physical and it wasn’t mental—or at least not physical or mental in the sense that we were used to. We were at a dead end. There was only one thing to do— test. We began next day.

It isn’t hard to set up a force field. It needs a few thousand watts of power and something to perch your projector on, otherwise you find a quantity of floor included in the field. Once the field is formed it’s impervious to anything from gamma rays to a punch from a human fist. Nothing hitting the field can penetrate it, not even subatomic particles. This is what makes it particularly good for space flight. The radiation hazard ceases to exist. For tests, we had set up the usual projector complex, a framework rather like an old-fashioned automobile chassis, on top of a shaft. In the centre, directly over the shaft, was the projector, in front of it the pilot’s seat and console, and behind the air-recirculating equipment. The only new feature was a two-way T.V. link, the cable of which ran down the support shaft. Ordinarily the shaft was retracted by the pilot before launching, allowing the field to complete itself, but in this case we needed some type of observing mechanism. The seal was tight. But for the link the test pilot was just as Chart had been.

After the field had been turned on and the link tested there was nothing to do but wait. For the first few days I spent most of my time in the control bay watching the image of Tevis, the test pilot, on the monitor screen, but soon the strain began to tell and I forced myself away from the project. Cal Talura felt the same way, and so we spent a few days on the surface hunting small game and generally puttering about in the desert. On one of these trips, hunting farther south than I had ever been before, I was surprised to see the brown surface of the Nullabor give way without warning to an area of dead black that stretched as far as I could see. It was a huge and static shadow mantling the brown earth, a great ink blot on creation. Col saw my surprise.

“Woomera.” he explained, pointing to the south.

I looked through the binoculars and saw the distant glint of metal. Another Common Europe rocket, no doubt, on its way to Station I or perhaps farther out.

“What’s all this, then?” I asked, indicating the blackness.

Col’s face betrayed his resentment.

“Security,” he explained. “They cleared the whole area for fifty miles around and sprayed it with a metallic solution. It gives Woomera a sort of radar mirror, a neutral surface that shows up anything that moves on it. Their scopes can pick up anything that walks out on to that area. And there’s no cover. They ground up the rocks and cleared every bit of vegetation.”

“Well, it’s their land,” I said, swinging the copter around to avoid the area.

Col’s reaction was unexpected. “Why? We were here first, weren’t we?”

Whether he meant Australians in general or his own people in particular I didn’t know, though I suspected the latter.

“There’s the treaty ...”

Col consigned the treaty and the men who had made it to eternal damnation in a few Arunta phrases and I let the matter drop, making, however, a mental note to keep an eye on Col’s oversensitive nationalism. In our business it didn’t pay to be careless of politics.

* * * *

The whole question of Woomera came to a head some days later. Early in the morning Col stormed into my office and dropped a pea-sized object on to the desk. I squinted at it, a tiny pearl of intertwined wires around a central red crystal.

“Where was this planted?” I asked.

“It wasn’t, luckily. We’d just finished a fresh wall sealer job in the main lounge when one of the boys hit the wrong button and knocked off a patch. This was in the wet plastic.”

“Why did the main lounge need a new plas job?”

Col scowled. “I’m way ahead of you. The old wall was discoloured by fumes, the fumes came from a coffee machine that was slightly miswired, a man named Bronski did the wiring...”

“And he went A.W.O.L. some weeks ago. These boys are experts.”

I looked at the tiny bug again. Naturally there were no markings but the thing had E.L.D.O. written all over it. We had, I thought, effectively prevented the Russians and the Chinese from penetrating Crosswind, but there was something particularly irksome about being spied on by our own allies.

Col voiced my conclusion. “Woomera?” he asked.

I was about to say “Where else?” when the desk plate lit up.

“A Colonel Thompson to see you.”

“Thompson?”

“From Woomera.”

Col and I exchanged glances.

“Tell him to wait,” I said, “and give me the latest Woomera staff list.”

The plate cleared and a string of names began to move across it.

European Launcher/Development Organization

Head. General Sir Gordon Glenwright.

Deputy. General Sir Stuart Millar.

Thompson’s name appeared half-way through the first twenty names.

Colonel Sanchez Thompson, 2/ic Security.

“A minor V.I.P.,” Col said. “What does he want?”

“There’s one way to find out.” I told the secretary to let him in.

It cannot be said too often that appearances are deceptive. This is especially true in intelligence work. The public image of the spy is a very complete and detailed one, so much so that one is almost obliged to pattern real spies along the complete opposite of the popular idea. Sanchez Thompson seemed almost to go too far. He was so obviously not a spy that he could hardly have been anything else. He stuttered. He bit his fingernails. He dressed without style or taste. I had never thought that the mass-produced British army officer’s uniform could look badly cut, but on him it seemed almost scarecrowish. However, his eyes missed nothing, and when he had something important to say he never stuttered. I wasted no time with amenities. Almost before he had sat down I pushed the bug across the desk towards him.

“Yours, I think.”

He picked it up unsmilingly and held it as I had earlier between thumb and forefinger.

“A beautiful piece of work,” he said.

“And very useful.”

“They fill in the gaps—the sort of thing we can’t get in ... other ways.”

“Meaning spies?” Col snapped. I was surprised at his tone. Apparently his emotions ran closer to the surface than I had guessed.

Thompson pursed his lips and glanced at me. I said nothing. He looked back to Col.

“Meaning spies.” he agreed.

Col’s palm slammed down on the desk-top.

“Well, you damned little peeping tom. What business is it of yours what we do here? Why don’t you keep your nose out of our business and get back where you came from. We don’t want you.”

Thompson wilted under the tirade. He was a diplomat. Verbal slanging wasn’t in his line.

“We have an agreement...” he said weakly.

“An agreement thirty-five years old! An agreement that you’ve abused ever since you got it. Just like the Americans up north. You’re nothing but...”

I held up my, hand. “Col...”

“Interfering little ...”

“Col!”

He lapsed into sullen silence.

“You’re probably interested in the tests we’re running. Colonel,” I said. “Would you care to see the set-up?”

Col seemed hardly to believe his ears. We left him sitting in the office, motionless. I suppose he thought I was selling him and the whole project down the river, but the pattern wasn’t hard to see. There was little about Crosswind that E.L.D.O. didn’t know. Thompson’s casual visit proved that. I wondered what errand he had come on.

“I suppose you have something to tell me,” I said as we moved towards the test area.

He reached into his pocket and handed me a sheet of paper. I glanced through it. It was a legal opinion signed by one of the most eminent international jurists; even I knew his name, though the law was a closed book to me. Briefly it suggested that, should the situation ever come to a head, it seemed likely that E.L.D.O. could take over Crosswind under its agreement with the Australian government, as any experimental work in connection with spaceflight in this country should be done under E.L.D.O. auspices.

“Experimental work,” I said. “But what if we can make this thing work? You would be shut out then, wouldn’t you?”

“Indeed we would, Mr. Fraser—if it worked.”

So it seemed that, unless I was very lucky, I would be working for Common Europe before very long, taking my orders from Paris. And Washington, of course. Col had been right there. The difference in greed between the Europeans and the Americans was tiny. Both had approached the situation in the same way back in the fifties. With E.L.D.O., the European consortium set up in 1960 to try and break the American domination of space research, it had been “Let us use your outback for test firings and we’ll give you prestige.” With the U.S., it had been “Give us an area to build a military base and we’ll give you protection.” In the troubled days of the mid-century Australia had desperately wanted prestige and protection, but more, it had wanted the feeling of “belonging”, of being a “power”. The politicians had handed out land by the thousand square miles to the Americans at Northwest Cape and given the Europeans almost complete control of Woomera. A few decades later they saw their mistake, but it was too late to back out then.

I passed Thompson through the guard, and we walked together towards the huge globe that filled the bay. Caught and thrown back by the perfect reflective power of the field, our images, bent and elongated, looked back at us like wry caricatures.

“It’s a fascinating thing,” Thompson said. “I look forward to working on it.”

I ignored the remark and walked over to where a group of technicians were clustered around the T.V. monitor. Tevis, the test pilot, was talking, reeling off a string of figures to one of the controllers. He looked drawn but healthy. There was no sign of any ill effects, nor of the symptoms Chart had exhibited. I checked my watch. He had been in the field seven hours longer than Chart.

“How is he?” I asked the doctor.

“Seems perfectly well. The brain-wave pattern is normal.”

I thought about it for a moment. Then I said, “Right— turn it off.”

There was a descending whine as the generators cut out. The field shimmered and then faded slowly into invisibility. From the top of the shaft Tevis looked down, blinking in the bright light of the bay.

There was nothing else to be done at the test site so we caught the walkway that led back to the office. On the way I asked the inevitable question.

“How much time do we have?”

Thompson shrugged. “It’s not up to me, Mr. Fraser. If I could take your acceptance back with me...”

“No chance. I’ll have to take this up with my superiors in Sydney and Canberra.”

“There won’t be any need,” Thompson said. “We’ve already arranged that. You should get confirmation in a few hours.”

My first impulse was to hit him and wipe that self-satisfied look from his face but the urge passed. There was nothing to be gained from violence.

“Well,” I said, “it seems you’ve thought of everything. What are your orders ... sir.”

The E.L.D.O. man looked embarrassed for the second time that day.

“You’re taking the wrong attitude, Mr. Fraser. There’s nothing personal in this. We’ve both been in this game for a long time. It’s a business, nothing more. Can we afford to have feelings?”

I wasn’t in the mood for a discussion of ethics, or for that matter any sort of discussion.

“What about tomorrow?” I said.

“If you like,” Thompson said. “And I hope you can look at things a little clearer then.”

When I got back to the office Col was still there. My surprise must have been obvious because he smiled.

“I gather you expected me to be gone.” he said.

I sat down heavily. “Well, you must admit it was a fair assumption.”

“You don’t give me credit for much intelligence, do you? Would you have run away?”

“No, but...” I stopped.

Col jumped on my words.

“But you’re not an abo ? I thought that was it!”

Coming so close on the conversation with Thompson his remark took me off guard. I tried to retrieve the situation.

“Next you’ll tell me I’m prejudiced. You know me better than that, Col.”

“Aren’t you prejudiced, Bill?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“It’s not as ridiculous as you think,” Col said. “Why did you pick me for this job? Not because of my qualifications —there were plenty of white men with the same degrees. Not because I needed it—there’s no shortage of work these days. No—you chose me because I’m black—an aboriginal —an abo. You give it away every time you look at me.”

Abruptly I turned my chair to face the window and, for some reason that even now I find hard to fathom, hit the button to clear it for the first time in years. The afternoon sunlight streamed in off the desert, blindingly clear. But it was not only the sun that made my face burn.

“Why bring all this up now?” I said.

“It has to be discussed some time.”

I thought about it for a moment. Then I said, “I don’t deny the fact that you weren’t white influenced me, but it wasn’t a matter of prejudice.”

“Don’t fool yourself, Bill. It was. You were being charitable. Pity is just as much prejudice as hate, you know. You’re always talking about the old days when Australia was a country to be patronized. Don’t you see you’re patronizing me?”

Just then, I wanted nothing more than to have that conversation end as quickly as possible.

“Well, you won’t have to put up with it much longer,” I said. “Crosswind is finished. Tomorrow E.L.D.O. moves in.”

Col was surprisingly calm.

“I gathered that,” he said.

“It had to come. We were lucky to get away with it this long.”

“Did it have to come?” Col said. “Or do you mean you’re glad it came?”

I heard the door close, but I didn’t turn around. I was still there, looking out over the desert, when night began to close in.

* * * *

For the next few hours I went through the motions of cleaning up the office. The whole thing had seemed very easy when Thompson and I had discussed it—just a simple matter of transferring power from one person to another. But Col had disturbed me. Part of his outburst had been sheer bad temper, no doubt, but that still left a considerable residue of fact. He was right about a number of things. My hiring him for the job had been partly influenced by the fact that he was an aboriginal. At the time I had rationalized it as an interest in his particular attitude to the work, but it was becoming clear that there was more to it than that. I was seeing my motives become more and more obvious as the evasions covering them were drained away. It was less than edifying.

As for giving up Crosswind, I had to admit that the takeover by E.L.D.O. had seemed to lift a weight from my shoulders. For the past two years I had worked hard on the project, and worked well too, I thought. There had been little time to think about the imponderables such as loyalty. Did I care about the project? Or was it just the interest in a job to be done? I decided to sleep on it. No doubt I would have woken in the morning with the whole thing carefully rationalized in my mind and the depths of character Col had revealed all covered up again, but things were destined to be different.

About 3 a.m. I woke to the supremely irritating screech of the bonephone I always wore when on call. The tiny alarm wedged against my mastoid bone jabbed me awake in a second. I ripped the thing off and groped for the communicator switch. It was Col.

“Chart’s gone again.” he said. “Out into the desert.”

“Gone? I thought he was still in the tank.”

“He was, but he broke out and rigged up a booby trap with the fluid and some of the wiring. When the guards came in they got a shock that knocked them unconscious.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Two hours maybe.”

Still half asleep I struggled into my clothes and stumbled along the corridors to the main garage. All the doors of the big hangar were open and the damp chill of the desert night made the air freezing. Breathing it was like inhaling icy water. Streams of vapour puffed from the nostrils and every conversation was marked by the white fog. Col had already organized search parties and the bay was full of the sound of motors as the two-man cars revved up and climbed the ramps into the starless night. I could see their searchlights patching the desert all around. I watched as Col sent out the last parties.

“Want to go?” he asked.

I shook my head. With my meagre knowledge of the desert there was little I could do.

“Well, one of the crews is short a man,” Col said. “I was thinking...”

“You go,” I said. “I wouldn’t be much use to you.”

A minute later the last ship slid up the ramp and left me alone in the hangar.

Someone had spread an ordnance map on the floor. I walked over and looked down at it. It was incomprehensible to me, but that was probably my drowsiness. I wondered where Chart was; where a man could go in the desert. What could he hope to find among the rocks and sand? There were no towns, no oases, no wells. Most of the map mirrored this aridity. It was brown, plain and unrelieved—except, I noticed, for a web of thin black lines that covered it like the work of an industrious spider. Out of curiosity I checked the key—odd to think that if the map had faced the other way I wouldn’t have bothered— and saw that they were magnetic field lines graphed during the last I.G.Y. by a team of trivia-minded Belgians. The lines wandered in delicate curves over the desert, almost always singly but sometimes running parallel and occasionally congregating into huge knots marking areas of particular magnetic density. There were two knots like that in our vicinity. On one of them somebody had scrawled an X in blue pencil. It came to me I had seen this map before. The X marked the spot where Chart had been found the first time.

And if that knot of lines coincided with the place he had run to the first time...

Outside it was still dark, but a false dawn lighted the east with a pale glow. Luckily there were still cars available. I climbed into one and set out to the west, my shadow racing before me like a long finger.

It took me less than half an hour to reach the place I had marked on the map; the second knot of magnetic lines, almost identical with the one on which Chart had been found last time. The sun was well up by the time I killed the power and settled quietly on to the top of a low hill that seemed almost a marker. I got out. There was no movement, no sound, and for the first time it occurred to me to wonder if my hunch was wrong. The fear was shortlived. Walking to the top of the rise I looked down its far side to see a single car standing abandoned. I looked out beyond it to the plain. About a quarter of a mile away a figure was moving slowly and deliberately in the slanting dawn light. I could see his shadow, gaunt and elongated as was mine, rippling on the rocks. I set out after him.

It took only a few minutes to reach Chart. He was not walking away from me or from the car. He seemed not to be aware of where he was going. Rather his path followed the lines of force I had seen on the map. For a while he walked slowly in a straight line. Then he stopped, turned, walked back, then turned again. I drew close, but he took no notice of me. Soon I was beside him, but still he said nothing, merely walking purposefully towards the rising sun. He was naked from the tank, his skin unnaturally pink and shining. All the lines were smoothed out. He was wet, new-born, a creature with whom I had no common ground. I looked into his eyes and saw that they had ceased to have any life. They were lenses, objects for seeing. Any life in Peter Chart had retreated deep inside him into the dim red centres of his being. His life was governed by his need and his hunger. 

Hunger. This was the thing we had never even considered. All our calculations had been based on an overdose, an encroachment of some kind, either of some new germ or an unknown stimulus. In a way, we had outsmarted ourselves—we had never looked for the thing that was not there, the omission that should have been obvious. The force field was proof against radiation. In fact, that was one of its big advantages. It reflected every kind of radiation—light, heat, gamma, even types not yet discovered. A man inside a force field was cut off from all this. For the first time in his life, for the first time in the life of his entire species, he was insulated.

Since the first cell formed in the ocean man has had a flood of atomic particles flowing through him every second of his existence. Suddenly, for one man, it stops. How could we know what effect it had? Chart had collapsed completely, reduced from an intelligent man to a mindless addict of a drug he didn’t recognize by a need he never knew he had. He came back to earth with only one thought in his mind—to find the thing his journey had deprived him of. The place where radiation caught in the earth’s gravitational field spouted up again into space provided the greatest concentration near where he landed, so he went there. Nothing could be allowed to stand in his way. He had only one thought—to feed.

“I don’t see how the test failed then,” Col said. “Tevis was perfectly all right when we took him out.”

I had wondered about that too, until I remembered the T.V. link. “There was some leakage along the metal stand, of course, but the T.V. camera must have given him enough direct radiation to live on. But we’d better keep him under observation.”

Col and I faced each other over the desk. We were both thinking the same thing.

“Can we lick it?” Col asked.

“I don’t see how.”

“Are you going to try?”

I thought about it for a moment, then I reached for the phone.

“Get me Woomera. Colonel Thompson.”

A few seconds later Thompson’s face came on to the screen. He wasn’t trying to hide his self-satisfaction.

“Mr. Fraser! As a matter of fact I was just leaving to come over.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’m rejecting the orders you gave yesterday. All my guards have been ordered to shoot on sight anybody approaching the perimeter. Good morning.”

I cut the connection, though not too quickly to miss the very satisfying expression of complete amazement on Thompson’s face.

Col’s expression was almost as dazed.

“Can we pull it off?” he asked.

“We can try. It’ll take them a few hours to find out that I’m not joking and a bit longer to see whether I’m insane or not. After that they’ll have to go through channels and I think I can guarantee that will take a long time.”

Outside, the sun was up. For the first time since I had come to the desert, I realized that here was the real Australia. The sand, the rock, the sun—this was the country to which I owed my loyalty, just as it was to Col Talura’s ideas that I owed my allegiance, not to the old myths on which I had been brought up. There was no unpleasantness in the country or the ideas that I had not put there. Given time, I thought it would not be hard to learn a devotion to both. The least I could do was to try.