“Point seven four,” I said. “If you weigh—umm, a hundred twenty pounds on Earth, you weigh about eighty-nine pounds here. And on you, it looks good.”
She laughed, “Thank you, Professor—Oh, that’s right; you’re not a professor now. You’re now my boss, and I must call you Mr. Rand.”
“Unless you’re willing to make it Phil, Michaelina?”
“If you’d call me Mike; I detest Michaelina, almost as much as Ike hates Ichabod.”
“How is Ike?”
“Fine. Has a student-instructor job at Poly, but he doesn’t like it much.” She looked ahead at the village. “Why so many small buildings instead of a few bigger ones?”
“Because the average life of a structure of any kind on Placet is about three weeks. And you never know when one is going to fall down—with someone inside. It’s our biggest problem. All we can do is make them small and light, except the foundations, which we make as strong as possible. Thus far, nobody has been hurt seriously in the collapse of a building, for that reason, but—Did you feel that?”
“The vibration? What was it, an earthquake?”
“No,” I said. “It was a flight of birds.”
“What?”
I had to laugh at the expression on her face. I said, “Placet is a crazy place. A minute ago, you said you felt as though you were walking on air. Well, in a way, you are doing just exactly that. Placet is one of the rare objects in the Universe that is composed of both ordinary and heavy matter. Matter with a collapsed molecular structure, so heavy you couldn’t lift a pebble of it. Placet has a core of that stuff; that’s why this tiny planet, which has an area about twice the size of Manhattan Island, has a gravity three-quarters that of Earth. There is life—animal life, not intelligent—living on the core. There are birds, whose molecular structure is like that of the planet’s core, so dense that ordinary matter is as tenuous to them as air is to us. They actually fly through it, as birds on Earth fly through the air. From their standpoint we’re walking on top of Placet’s atmosphere.”
“And the vibration of their flight under the surface makes the houses collapse?”
“Yes, and worse—they fly right through the foundations, no matter what we make them of. Any matter we can work with is just so much gas to them. They fly through iron or steel as easily as through sand or loam. I’ve just got a shipment of some specially tough stuff from Earth—the special alloy steel you heard me ask Reagan about—but I haven’t much hope of it doing any good.”
“But aren’t those birds dangerous? I mean, aside from making the buildings fall down. Couldn’t one get up enough momentum flying to carry it out of the ground and into the air a little way? And wouldn’t it go right through anyone who happened to be there?”
“It would,” I said, “but it doesn’t. I mean, they never fly closer to the surface than a few inches. Some sense stems to tell them when they’re nearing the top of their ‘atmosphere.’ Something analogous to the supersonics a bat uses. You know, of course, how a bat can fly in utter darkness and never fly into a solid object.”
“Like radar, yes.”
“Like radar, yes, except a bat uses sound waves instead of radio waves. And the widgie birds must use something that works on the same principle, in reverse; turns them back a few inches before they approach what to them would be the equivalent of a vacuum. Being heavy-matter, they could no more exist or fly in air than a bird could exist or fly in a vacuum.”
While we were having a cocktail apiece in the village, Michaelina mentioned her brother again. She said, “Ike doesn’t like teaching at all, Phil. Is there any chance at all that you could get him a job here on Placet?”
I said, “I’ve been badgering Earth Center for another administrative assistant. The work is increasing plenty since we’ve got more of the surface under cultivation. Reagan really needs help. I’ll—”
Her whole face was alight with eagerness. And I remembered. I was through. I’d resigned, and Earth Center would pay as much attention to any recommendation of mine as though I were a widgie bird. I finished weakly, “I’ll—I’ll see if I can do anything about it.”
She said, “Thanks—Phil.” My hand was on the table beside my glass, and for a second she put hers over it. All right, it’s a hackneyed metaphor to say it felt as though a high-voltage current went through me. But it did, and it was a mental shock as well as a physical one, because I realized then and there that I was head over heels. I’d fallen harder than any of Placet’s buildings ever had. The thump left me breathless. I wasn’t watching Michaelina’s face, but from the way she pressed her hand harder against mine for a millisecond and then jerked it away as though from a flame, she must have felt a little of that current, too.
I stood up a little shakily and suggested that we walk back to headquarters. Because the situation was completely impossible, now. Now that Center had accepted my resignation and I was without visible or invisible means of support. In a psychotic moment, I’d cooked my own goose. I wasn’t even sure I could get a teaching job. Earth Center is the most powerful organization in the Universe and has a finger in every pie. If they blacklisted me—
Walking back, I let Michaelina do most of the talking; I had some heavy thinking to do. I wanted to tell her the truth—and I didn’t want to.
Between monosyllabic answers, I fought it out with myself. And, finally lost. Or won. I’d not tell her—until just before the next coming of the Ark. I’d pretend everything was O.K. and normal for that long, give myself that much chance to see if Michaelina would fall for me. That much of a break I’d give myself. A chance, for four days.
And then—well, if by then she’d come to feel about me the way I did about her, I’d tell her what a fool I’d been and tell her I’d like to—No, I wouldn’t let her return to Earth with me, even if she wanted to, until I saw light ahead through a foggy future. All I could tell her was that if and when I had a chance of working my way up again to a decent job—and after all I was still only thirty-one and might be able to—
That sort of thing.
Reagan was waiting in my office, looking as mad as a wet hornet. He said, “Those saps at Earth Center shipping department gummed things again. Those crates of special steel—aren’t.”
“Aren’t what?”
“Aren’t anything. They’re empty crates. Something went wrong with the crating machine and they never knew it.”
“Are you sure that’s what those crates were supposed to contain?”
“Sure I’m sure. Everything else on the order came, and the ladings specified the steel for those particular crates.” He ran a hand through his tousled hair. It made him look more like an Airedale than he usually does.
I grinned at him. “Maybe it’s invisible steel.”
“Invisible, weightless and intangible. Can I word the message to Center telling them about it?”
“Go as far as you like,” I told him, “Wait here a minute, though. I’ll show Mike where her quarters are and then I want to talk to you a minute.”
I took Michaelina to the best available sleeping cabin of the cluster around headquarters. She thanked me again for trying to get Ike a job here, and I felt lower than a widgie bird’s grave when I went back to my office.
“Yeah, Chief?” Reagan said.
“About that message to Earth,” I told him. “I mean the one I sent this morning. I don’t want you to say anything about it to Michaelina.”
He chuckled. “Want to tell her yourself, huh? O.K. I’ll keep my yap shut.” I said, a bit wryly, “Maybe I was foolish sending it.”
“Huh?” he said. “I’m sure glad you did. Swell idea.”