The Daleth Effect

25

The brakes in the Sprite were locked hard as it turned into the driveway, the tires squealing as it slid to a bucking stop. Ove Rasmussen jumped over the car door without opening it and ran up the front steps to push hard on the doorbell. Even as the chimes were sounding over and over again inside, he tried the handle. The door was unlocked and he threw it open.

“Martha—where are you?” he shouted. “Are you here?”

He closed the door and listened. There was only the ticking of a clock. Then he heard the muffled sobbing from the living room. She was sprawled on the couch, her shoulders shaking with the hopeless, uncontrolled crying. The newspaper lay on the floor beside her.

“Ulla called me, I was at the lab all night,” he said. “You sounded so bad on the phone that she was getting hysterical herself. I came at once. What happened… ?”

Then he saw the front page of the newspaper and knew the answer. He bent and picked it up and looked at the photograph that almost filled the front page. It showed an egg-shaped vehicle about the size of a small car that was floating a few meters above a crowd of gaping people. A smiling girl waved from the little cockpit, and on the front, between the headlights, the word Honda could plainly be seen. The craft had no obvious means of propulsion. The headline read JAPANESE REVEAL GRAVITY SCOOTER, and underneath, CLAIM NEW PRINCIPLE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE TRANSPORTATION.

Martha was sitting up now, dabbing at her eyes with a sodden handkerchief. Her face was red and puffy, her hair in a tangle.

“I had a sleeping pill,” she said, almost choking on the words. “Twelve hours. I didn’t hear the radio, anything. While I was getting my breakfast ready I brought in the paper. And there…” Her voice broke and she could only point. Ove nodded wearily and dropped into the armchair.

“Is it true?” she asked. “The Japanese have the Daleth drive?”

He nodded again. Her fingers flew to her face, her nails sank into the flesh and she shrieked the words.

“Wasted! All killed for nothing! The Japs already knew about the Paleth effect—they stole it. Nils, all of them, they died for nothing!”

“Easy,” Ove said, and leaned forward to hold her shoulders, feeling her body shake as she cried in agony. “Tears can’t bring him back, or any of the others.”

“All that security… no good… the secret leaked out…”

“Security killed them all,” Ove said, and his voice was as bleak as a winter midnight. “A stupid, stupid waste.”

The bitterness of his words did what sympathy could not do; it reached Martha, shocked her. “What are you talking about?” she said, rubbing the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Just that.” Ove looked at the newspaper with black hatred, then ground it with his foot. “We had no eternal secret, just a lead on the others. Arnie and I tried to tell security that, but they would never listen. Apparently only Nils and his top officers knew about the destruction charges in the ship. If Arnie or I had known we would have made a public stink and would have refused to fly in her. It is all a criminal waste, criminal stupidity.”

“What does this mean?” She was frightened of his words.

“Just that. Only politicians and security agents believe in Secrets with a captial S. And maybe the people who read the spy novels about those imaginary stolen secrets. But mother nature has no secrets. Everything is right out where you can see it. Sometimes the answer is complex, or you have to know the right place to look before you find it. Arnie knew that, and that is one of the reasons he brought his discovery to Denmark. It could be developed faster here because we have the heavy industrial machinery to build the Daleth ships. But it was only a matter of time before everyone else caught up. Once they knew that there was a Daleth effect they would know just what they were looking for. We had two things in our favor. A number of physicists around the world knew that Arnie was doing gravity research. He corresponded with them and they read about his work in the journals. What they did not know was that his basic approach was wrong. He discovered that fact but never had time to publish results. The real discovery of the Daleth effect came about through the telemetry records of the solar flare. Those data readouts were distributed to the cooperating countries, and it was only a matter of time before the connection was tracked down. We had that time, almost two years of it, and it gave us the lead that we needed.”

“Then the killings, the spies…”

“All waste. The secret of security is to never let the right hand know what the left hand is doing. A secret agency tries to steal the secret while other secret laboratories try to develop it. And once these agencies get rolling they are very hard to stop. It would be ironic if it were not so tragic. I have finally heard the entire story myself—I was up all night with the security people getting briefed on the whole story. Do you know how many countries already had a lead to the nature of the Daleth effect when the ship was blown up? Til tell you. Five. The Japanese thought they were first and tried to apply for international patents. Their applications were turned down by four countries because earlier patent applications had been filed in these countries and held under government security. Germany and India were two of these countries.”

“And the other two?” She gasped the words as though she already knew.

“America and the Soviet Union.”

“NO!”

“I’m sorry. It hurts me as much to say it as it does for you to hear it. Your husband, Arnie, my friends and colleagues died in that explosion. Wasted. Because the countries that caused it already knew the answer. But since the information was top secret they could not tell other agencies or men in the field. But I no more hold them to blame than I do our own security, who wired the explosives into the ship in the first place. Nor do I blame any other country involved in the mess. It is just institutionalized paranoia. All security men are the same, drawn to the work by their own insecurities and fears. They may be sincere patriots, but their sickness is what makes them demonstrate^Xheir patriotism in this manner. This kind of person will never understand that when it is steamboat time you build steamboats, airplane time you build airplanes.”

“I don’t understand you.” She wanted to cry now but she could not; she was beyond tears.

“The story always repeats itself. As soon as the Japanese even heard about American radar during World War II they went to work on it. They developed the magnetron and other vital parts almost as soon as the Americans did. Only internal squabbling and the lack of production facilities kept them from making it operational. It was radar time. And now… now it is Daleth time.”

Then there was a long silence. A cloud passed over the sun outside and the room darkened. Finally Martha spoke: she had to ask the question.

“Was it all a waste? Their deaths. A complete waste?”

“No.” Ove hesitated and tried to smile, but he could not do it. “At least I hope that it is not a complete waste. Men from a lot of countries died in that explosion. The shock of this could drive some sense into people’s heads, and maybe even into politicians’ heads. They might use this discovery for the mutual good of all mankind. Do the right thing just this once. Without bickering. Without turning it into one more fantastically destructive weapon. Used correctly the Daleth effect could make the world a paradise. The Japanese even went us one better—they’ve eliminated the separate power source. They looked into the energy conservation and found out that they could use the Daleth effect to power itself. So we now all live in the suburbs of the same world city. That fact will take some getting used to. But the world, all of us, must get together and face that fact. Any person or country who tries to use this power for harm or for war will have to be stopped—instantly—for the greater good of all.

“Look at it that way and the deaths are not a waste. If we can learn something from their sacrifice it might all have been worthwhile.”

“Can we?” Martha asked. “Can we really? Make the kind of world we all say that we want but never seem able to attain?”

“We are going to have to,” he said, leaning forward and taking her hands. “Or we will certainly die trying.”

She laughed. Without humor.

“One world or none. I seem to have heard that before.”

The cloud passed and the sun came out again, but inside the house, in the room where the two people sat, there was a darkness that would not lift.