'So the only record we have of the expressions of the man who first devised an anti-gravity machine is this poor-quality tape.'
He nodded again to the operator at the rear of the room. The latter turned on the recorder whose output was fed to a speaker on the table in front.
At once the room was rilled with a hissing, roaring garble. The sound of planes taking off — the everyday noise of the airport. Beneath the racket was the dead man's voice, a thin, rather high-pitched sound carrying through the background noise a tone of condescension and impatient tolerance.
Mart listened with ears strained to make sense of the garble. His eyes caught Berk's and reflected his despair of ever getting anything out of the mess. Keyes signalled the operator.
'I see that you are impatient with this recording, gentlemen. Perhaps there is no purpose in playing it in this conference. But each of you will be given a copy. In the privacy of your own laboratories you will have opportunity to make what you can of it. It is worth your study simply because, as far as we know, it contains the only clues we possess.'
Mart raised a hand impatiently. 'Dr Keyes, you and the others at the demonstration heard the original discussion. Can't you give us more than is on the tape?'
Keyes smiled rather bitterly. 'I wish that we could, Dr Nagle. Unfortunately, at the time it seemed that the semantic noise in Dunning's explanation was as high as the engineering noise on the tape. We have, however, filled in to the best of our recollection on the written transcript, which we will give you.
'This transcript gives what has been pieced together by phonetic experts who have analysed the tape. Observers' additions are in parentheses. These were added only if all observers agreed independently, and may or may not be accurate. Is there any other question?'
There were, they all knew, but for the moment the impact seemed to have stifled the response of the whole audience.
Keyes took a step forward. 'I wonder if there is any one of you who underestimates the seriousness of this problem now. Is there anyone who does not understand that this secret must be regained at all cost?
'We know that within the field of present knowledge there lies the knowledge necessary to conquer gravity — to take us beyond the Earth, to the stars, if we wish to go.
'We know that if one young American could do it, some young Russian could also. We have to duplicate that work of Dunning's.
'The full facilities of ONR are at your disposal. Access to Dunning's laboratory and library and the remains of his machine will be granted, of course. Each of you has been selected, out of all whom we might have called, because we believed you possess some special qualification for the task. You cannot fail.
'We will meet again this evening, gentlemen. I trust you understand now the necessity for absolute security on this project.'
II
A long time afterwards, Martin Nagle recalled that he must have been in a partial stupor when he left that conference room. He felt a vague and unpleasant sensation about his head as if it had been beaten repeatedly with a pillow.
He and Kenneth Berkeley went out together. They paused only long enough to make polite greetings to his fellow physicists whom he had not seen for a long time. But he was in a hurry to leave. To get rid of that feeling in his head.
In front of the ONR building he stopped with his hands in his pockets and looked over the unpleasant grey of the city's buildings. He could close his eyes and still see a man rising straight up into the air — soaring at an angle — dropping like a plummet.
All at once he realized he hadn't even stopped to examine the remains of the instrument under the tarpaulin. He turned suddenly on Berkeley.
'The psychology of this thing — is that where you're in on it, Berk?'
His companion nodded. 'Keyes called me in when he wanted an investigation into Dunning's past. I'm staying, I guess.'
'You know it's impossible, don't you?' said Mart. 'Utterly and completely impossible! There's nothing in our basic science to explain this thing, let alone duplicate it.'
'Impossible? Meaning what?'
'Meaning that I've got to… that every one of us has got to shift gears, back up, retrace who knows how far — twenty years of learning — five hundred years of science? Where did we go off the track? Why was it left to a screwball like Dunning to hit it right?'
'He was an odd character,' mused Berk. 'Astrology, mysticism, levitation. There's quite a bit in the tape about levitation. That's not so far removed from the concept of anti-gravity at that, is it?'
Mart made a rough noise in his throat. 'I expect to hear any moment that his first successful flight was aboard a broomstick.'
'Well, there's quite a bit of lore about broomsticks — also magic carpets and such. Makes you wonder how it all got started.'
The shock was slow in wearing down. Martin returned to the hotel after the evening conference, which was spent mostly in examination of the wreckage.
It was as Keyes had said, hopeless. But there was an indefinable something about gazing upon the remains of what had been the realization of an impossible dream. Mart felt a kind of frantic yearning to reach out and touch that mass and convert it back to the instrument it had once been by sheer force of will. As if believing it possible would make it so.
And wasn't there some essence of truth in this, he thought? Dunning had believed it could be done and had done it. Reputable men in science didn't believe such things possible-
Now, in his hotel room, Mart sat on the edge of the bed looking out of the window and across the night lights of the city. There were certain things you had to accept as impossible. The foundation of science was built upon the concept of the impossible as well as the possible.
Perpetual motion.
The alchemist's dream — as the alchemist dreamed it, anyway.
Anti-gravity-
All man's experience in attempting to master nature showed these things could not be done. You had to set yourself some limitations. You had to let your work be bounded by certain Great Impossibles or you could spend a lifetime trying to solve the secret of invisibility or of walking through a brick wall.
Or trying to build a magic carpet.
He stood up and walked to the window. There had been growing all afternoon a sense of faint panic. And now he identified it. Where could you draw the line? It had to be drawn. He was sure of that.
It had been drawn once before, quite definitely. In the 1890s they had closed the books. Great minds believed then that science had encompassed the universe. All that was not known belonged to the Great Impossibles.
Then had come radium, the Roentgen tube, relativity, cosmic rays.
The line vanished. Where was it now? A few hours ago he would have said he could define it with fair accuracy. Tonight he did not know.
He went to bed. After an hour he got up and called Kenneth Berkeley. The clock said almost midnight. It didn't matter.
'Berk,' he said into the phone. 'Mart. I've just been thinking. The whole crowd will be going through Dunning's lab and his library. What's the chance of you getting me out there first thing in the morning? Just the two of us. I'd like to beat the crowd.'
'I think I can arrange it,' said Berk. 'Keyes wants each of you to work as you wish. I'll tell you more about that tomorrow. I'll call you as early as I can.'
It rained during the night, and when Berk called for Mart in his car, the city was dismal with fog, lessening even further the reality surrounding them.
'Keyes wasn't much in favour of this,' said Berk as they drove away from the hotel. 'It's liable to make some of the others mad, but frankly, I'm sure he's convinced that you're the member of the class mostly likely to succeed.'
Mart grunted. 'Least likely, I'd say. I'm not sure that I'm convinced yet that Dunning didn't have some terrific joker in here somewhere.'