Читать книгу The Naked Storm - Cyril M. Kornbluth - Страница 6

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It's Longitude 155 degrees, Latitude 83 degrees north. It's the Arctic Ocean, a vast plain of grinding, shifting sheets of ice under a twilight gloom. It's almost the exact middle of the six-month polar night.

There is no sound under the lead-colored sky except the booming and grinding of the ice floes. The usual howling winds of this godforsaken place have dropped to a dead calm. This is noticed by a strange little machine half-buried in a floe.

The machine is a product of the cold--here very cold--war. Of the Edison Effect, noticed and described long ago by Thomas A., who was working at the time on the problem of a practical electric light. Of a Navy-minded senator who wangled a cut in the Air Force budget, forcing generals to decide: "Since we won't have the planes or crews for patrols we'll have to do it some other way, maybe by machine." Of a huge building in New Jersey where a thousand-odd happily quarrelsome men, most of them possible geniuses and a few about whom there is no doubt whatsoever, daily turn out fundamental research and practical solutions to whatever happens to be bothering communications companies. Of a young man with a Ph.D. in mathematics who got the bright idea that finally cracked the power-lead problem; it got him a raise from $115 to $125 a week, a Class C gate pass instead of a D, and a very important note of commendation from Dr. Kelly. He valued most highly the new gate pass; it meant that he could now drop in at odd hours to tinker at his projects if he got any more bright ideas late at night or over the weekend.

The machine looks like a foot-locker and on its side, under a crust of ice, the words are stenciled: "BAROMETRIC TELEMETERING DEVICE, U.S.A.F. M-51. PROPERTY OF U. S. GOVERNMENT. DO NOT TAMPER OR DISTURB." The warning is generous. The machine is booby-trapped with an explosive charge calculated to blow up the machine and any wandering airmen or explorers who might try to pry it open and see what makes it tick.

It cost 32,000 dollars to build the machine and another 20,000-odd dollars in gasoline, salaries and overhead to parachute it to this spot from a B-50. There are hundreds like it dotted over the huge desolate plains of ice which are more or less American property.

All this money was spent so the machine could do what it's doing now. It's noticing the dead calm that has fallen on this latitude and longitude and is beeping this information southward on a tight radio beam to three airmen in a smelly little weather station on Point Anxiety, which rises from the northern coastline of Alaska.