Soames continued, "Your ship was transposed from your time into mine. Simultaneously, gram molecular weight for gram molecular weight, something had to be transposed into yours. Since you were to come into my time twenty thousand feet high and there was nothing else handy to be transposed into your time—why—air had to leave here and turn up there. To make up the mass and energy of your ship and you and the other children."
As if to indicate that he listened, Fran said:
"Zani, Mal and Hod."
"Right!" Soames jerked his rod and brought up a fingerling which he silently unhooked and threw back overboard. "Considering the thinness of the air where you came out, maybe half a cubic mile of it had to transpose into your time to let your ship come into this."
He dropped the line overboard again.
"Which means that there was an implosion of anywhere from a quarter to half a cubic mile of vacuum. It made an earth-shock and a concussion wave, and it battered your ship until it went out of control. It would seem to make sense that the tumult and the shouting would appear here, where plain force was operating without much guidance, but not in your time where the machinery and the controls were operating. Your people had to handle more energy there—and consequently acted upon more energy here—than my people could produce with all the engines now on Earth hooked together."
He fished, frowning thoughtfully.
"I suspect," said Soames, after a long interval, "that with machinery and controls at this end as well as the other, instead of at one end only, that time-transposition would be a fairly tranquil process. It would be under accurate control. It'd probably need infinitely less power. A ship would vanish from your time and simultaneously a mass-and-energy equivalent would take its place. And a ship would appear in this time and simultaneously a mass-and-energy equivalent would vanish to appear in your time. But I think it must have been because the whole business was done from one end that the business was so spectacular, with lightning, earthquake, and all the rest. With equipment at both ends, there should be no static, no earth-shock, no concussion, nothing but a very peaceful transfer."
Soames' expression became sardonic.
"Which I am prepared to prevent at any cost," he added. "Yet I've some responsibility to you, Fran. I think I'm getting an idea of a kind of bluff that we might pull off, if we could get the other kids safe away. It would be a bluff, and the biggest in history. But we might just get away with it...."
Fran caught a three-quarter-pound lake-trout. Soames caught one weighing half a pound. They caught two smaller ones before full darkness fell. Then Soames put up his fishing-rod and picked up the oars. He began to row toward the shore.
"I'll show you how to clean and cook the fish," he observed. "I think you'll like the flavor."
He pulled hard on one oar, and swung the boat around, and caught one of the small piles of the wharf. Fran climbed up and Soames handed him the fish.
He followed Fran shoreward toward the rickety little week-end cottage he'd rented. There he showed Fran how fish with scales are cleaned, and then how they can be cooked over an open fire.
After Fran had gone to bed, it occurred to Soames that he hadn't heard the news of the world for four days. On the run, as he and Fran had been, they hadn't seen a newspaper or heard a news broadcast. Now Soames turned on the small radio that went with the fishing cottage, to give advance information on the weather.
News came on immediately. It was all bad.
The United States had shown no signs of having profited by the telepathic powers of Fran and his companions. No spies were seized. A submarine installation that could lob missiles into New York from the edge of the hundred-fathom line was not depth-bombed. There were other failures to act on information obtained through the children. No nation could imagine another allowing spies to operate if it could detect them.
So a raging guess began to spread among the anti-American peoples of the world. The guess was that the broadcast was a lie. Nobody doubted the landing of a spaceship, of course. The static and the earth-shock were evidence, and the Russians had photographs. But the children were too suspiciously like human children. They could be child actors, coached to impersonate aliens who could not be produced. And there was an easy answer to the question of why the true aliens weren't revealed. They could be dead. Earth's atmosphere might be fatal to them. They could have died of some infection against which they had no defense.
The politicians and the rulers of the world suspected the United States of bad faith and trickery. They were not certain. But there were ways of making sure.
When Soames tuned in to the news at Calumet Lake, the United States had been forced to use a veto in the United Nations for the first time. A resolution passed, calling on the United States to turn over "the crew of an extraterrestrial space vessel" to a committee to be appointed by the UN assembly. The United States vetoed it. Ironically, with Fran run away and not found again, the United States could not have complied with the resolution in any case.
But the veto lent plausibility to suspicions. There was intensified distrust. The Nato countries asked to share in technical information obtained from outer space. There wasn't any. They asked to study the devices salvaged by the children. This could have been done, but recent political developments inside Nato made it certain that anything one particular nation learned would immediately be known to Russia. This was to be avoided if possible.
The mess went farther. South America was so deeply suspicious of the colossus of the north that various Latin nations sought engagements by European countries to defend them against aggression by the United States. There had been two great concentrations of military power on Earth. Russia headed one group of nations, and the United States the other. Now it looked like there would soon be three. Russia would head one. A second would be a group detached from the United States. The third would be the United States standing alone.
It was an absolutely perfect set-up for flaming total war to be begun at any instant.
The news Soames picked up on a cheap radio on a Calumet Lake fishing shack was enough to make any man heartsick.
When Fran waked in the morning, an unsmiling Soames greeted him.
"We're going to ride again, Fran. I'm going to make a long-distance call."
They rode two hundred miles before noon, and Soames got silver from a filling-station where he bought gas. At one of the out-of-door phone-booths lately a part of the American scene, he put through a call to New York. He got the tall physicist who'd come West to the hidden missile base.
"This is Soames," he said very distinctly. "I've got a tip for you. Pretend that you want to make something like the gadget that stops winds and warms places. You know the thing."
The tall physicist's voice babbled.
"I know!" said Soames bitterly, "I'm supposed to be dead or a traitor or something. But listen to me! You're a castaway and savages snipe at you. You want to make something like the thing that stops wind, but you want it to stop arrows instead. It's quite a job. Perhaps the only useful thing you've got on this savage world is a way to make magnetic fields with minus self-induction. That's got to stop the arrows. You can assume the arrowheads are metal. Do you follow me?"
A pause. Then a tinny voice, singularly calm and astonished at the same time:
"Why—yes! A very interesting approach! In fact, we've got some very surprising results lately. One of them will fit in beautifully! Yes! Beautifully!"
"If you make it designed for large enough areas," said Soames, "you'll know where to use it, and how. And—" Soames' voice was sardonic indeed, "If you do get it, this is one thing that shouldn't be kept secret! Get it broadcast! Get it everywhere! Give it to the Russians and the Greeks and the Chinese and the French and everybody else! Understand? The more who know about it the better."