Part 5

Positive identification could be important. Morrow kicked himself mentally for not making a local call to Foster's home while he was in Sacramento. Suppose Foster had moved in the past two years? Suppose there was some sort of slip-up that aroused someone's suspicions just enough to start the authorities on an investigation--

Even the _slightest_ mistake might finish them!

And the call had to be made. Their plan was set for tonight, Saturday night, because Foster was most likely to be home from work--research engineers often worked late hours on weekdays--and because he'd probably have the next day off. They had to get Foster out for that one day, and it had to be done right. But they had to be certain that Foster was home when they went after him.

The receiver continued its rattling noise in his ear as Morrow waited, fidgeting impatiently, and the seconds crawled past.

The rattling ended with a faint click.

"_Hello?_"

Morrow exhaled a shuddery sigh of relief. He recognized Foster's characteristic deep, muffled tones almost at once. "Hi, Bob. This is Bill Morrow--"

"_Morrow? Well, hi yourself! Where you calling from?_"

"I'm on the highway," Morrow said. "I'm on my way north and wondered if I might drop in as I pass through Sacramento--I ought to be there in a few hours. You going to be home?"

"_Ye-e-es. C'mon around, by all means! You still have my home address, haven't you?_"

"Sure thing. How've you been?"

"_So-so, between drawing curves on flight-test characteristics and pounding out stories. You written anything lately?_"

"I've been a little too busy to give it much thought," Morrow answered truthfully.

"_Uh huh! Well--say, you going to be in 'Frisco for next year's science-fiction convention?_"

Morrow grinned. "'Sa little too early to say, yet. I'll see you in a few hours, then, huh?"

"_Right-o! We'll have the beer on ice!_"

* * * * *

Morrow drove back to the sawmill workshop and helped Smitty perform a final inspection of the ship and equipment. Their plan was worked out thoroughly. The ship would fly to and from their target at low altitude, and at its maximum speed. The forecast weather conditions would aid in hiding them, but it would also hinder their flight--much of it would have to be done on instruments, and Smitty spent considerable time studying topographical sector-maps and radio omni-range vectors.

Their personal gear consisted of two special suits which would serve to conceal their identity as well as aid them in an emergency. The suits, patterned out of shimmering fabrilastex material, fit with skin-tight snugness over their long winter underwear and socks. The foot-soles of the suits were of springy foam-rubber, heat-welded to the fabrilastex just as the seams in the material were heat-welded to a perfect fit. A sturdy harness fitted into the inside of the suits to grip their legs, thighs, and chests, suspending them in bail-outs from the sturdy plastic tanks on the back of their suits. Each tank enclosed a gravitor unit. A lightweight, transparent blue dome helmet fitted over their heads and clamped onto fasteners on their shoulders. There were small air-vents around the bottom of the helmets and in the fantastic-looking knob attachments in their tops.

They pulled on their suits in the workshop and stared at each other, grinning. "All you need," Smitty taunted, "is a flashlight ray-gun in each hand!"

"You look pretty monstrous yourself, blue-face!" Morrow retorted.

"_You_ look _sexy_, old boy!"

"_Down_, Rover! Better climb on the ship's radio and check the weather reports again--"

"Wilco!"

Morrow walked to the end of the workshop and swung open the big doors. Then he went back and crawled into the ship, swinging the thick "air-lock" door into its grooves behind him. As he climbed into the control pit, Smitty reported that the weather was just as lousy as they wanted it to be: clear, cold, and windy at high altitudes, with some low cumulus and a five-hundred-foot thick blanket of fog hugging the ground and creeping in and out of the valleys. There were several scattered thunder-showers and by morning there would be solid rain in the mountains.

Morrow switched on the gravitor units at the flight engineer's panel, then moved up and strapped himself into the co-pilot's seat. "It's your bus, Junior," he said. "Let me know when we reach my stop."

"Passengers move to the rear, please," Smitty retorted, and eased the ship cautiously out of the workshop. They swung northward and set off, flying just a few hundred feet above the mountain slopes. The moon was a cold, white gash in the black heavens, and the dark mantle of the treetops swept past below.

Unfastening his helmet, Morrow swung it back and relaxed, lighting a cigarette....

* * * * *

They had to use every precaution in going after Foster. In the first place, they had to consider that he might be violently opposed to their project--that, in fact, he might go straight to the authorities with it. The only safeguard against that was simply to prevent Foster from knowing where their project was located. Without that information, he would probably find it difficult to make the authorities believe him. A mere story about mechanisms that control gravity, without any basis of fact to support it, would sound rather far-fetched.

For that matter, it would have been difficult merely to visit Foster and convince him they did have such mechanisms! The only quick answer was to show him, to prove it to him. Then he would listen to them.

There was a good chance that he'd approve of their project and help them with it--otherwise, Morrow wouldn't have thought of him. And he was a man who could help them. Robert Foster was a jet engineer, employed as a flight-test analyst at an aircraft corporation's experimental plant near Sacramento. Morrow had met him, however, because Foster had written many stories for the science-fiction magazines, mostly on the galactic empire theme. They had met at a private science-fiction club in New York and spent most of a long night in a bar, along with several other writers and magazine editors, discussing subjects of vast scope and consuming beverages in vast quantity. Foster had proved himself a kindred soul of fertile imagination, if not of superior intellect, and so into the wee, small hours.

In short, Foster had impressed him as a man to be trusted when the going got rough.

Whether or not that impression had been correct, Morrow didn't know. Tonight would certainly put it to the test. They could only ask for his help, and that was all. If he refused, he refused. They couldn't use threats or coercion or any suggestion of violence--that would gain them nothing.

Foster _had_ to agree! There was no one else! Without his help, they were stymied....

The weather thickened as they turned west, coming down off the slopes of the Sierras. Silvery masses of cloud drifted by in the moonlight and a thin, gray haze obscured the ground. They cruised along, their tail-jets rumbling, descending slowly to pass beneath a long row of clouds ahead. Raindrops began streaking the transparent blister which pinged at their impact; then it began a steady, ringing sound as the downpour increased. The world was turned into a gray, trickling wetness, faintly reflecting the green glow of the luminous instrument dials. The lights of a town appeared off to the left, wavering sparks in the wet gloom. Smitty swore under his breath.

They emerged from the shower to find themselves over an endless mass of cottony white, completely hiding the ground. "Now we gotta go down through that stuff!" Smitty muttered, and pushed the nose down.

The ground became dimly visible through the mist at a height of seventy feet. "Airspeed's a hundred and ten; headwind was reported at twenty miles." Smitty chanted glumly.

Morrow said nothing for a moment, knowing Smitty meant that if they were flying any faster their dim, wavering view of the ground would mean nothing. Then he started and looked up. "A hundred and ten? In a twenty-mile wind? That's ninety miles an hour!"

Smitty stared at his instruments and nodded slowly. "We're doing better than we did," he agreed. "Either that, or this wind has twisted its tail. We'll check it again."

They flew onward through the swirling, dark mist. The dark blurs of trees flashed past below, and houses, roads, and telephone lines. Dim, shadowy objects, hardly recognizable. And there were moments when the mist closed in completely, hiding everything. Morrow felt a cold sweat forming on his face. The jets made a deep, mournful rumbling sound in the ship's tail. A highway swept past below, with car headlights revealed as moving blobs of yellow in the darkness.

"This is the block," Morrow said, finally. "Swing across it and come down in that alleyway in its center. I'll tell you where to land then."

Below them were the familiar rooftops of the houses, rising darkly out of a thin ground mist. Smitty brought the ship over them, cutting the jets, and let it coast to a stop over the narrow, vague band of the alleyway. Slowly, they drifted downward.

Morrow consulted the street-map on his lap again. "Up a little further," he directed.

The jets gave a brief, rumbling sigh and they glided forward.

"Here--ground her!"

Gravel rasped against the ship's belly. They unfastened their belts and scrambled down into the ship.

"What time is it?" Smitty whispered, as Morrow swung open the door.

Morrow glanced at his wrist-watch. "Three-ten a.m.," he said half-humorously. He wondered if Foster was still waiting up for him. "Fasten your helmet down, and let's go!"

They dropped down from the ship and went over to the low, white fence behind Foster's house. Passing through the gate, they strode across the yard. The mist-shine glimmered faintly off their bodies. Their blue-tinted helmets were grotesque globes of darkness, like the heads of nightmare creatures.

Light glowed from a window in the side of the house. "Somebody's up!" Morrow observed softly.

"Do we go 'round and ring the front doorbell?" Smitty wondered. "Or do we just walk in?"

Morrow shrugged. "It won't make much difference. Let's try the back door--if it's locked, well go around."

They reached the door and he tested its knob, careful not to make any noise. It yielded readily.

They entered.

The faint light filtering down the short hallway was enough to guide them across the dark kitchen. Then they had to pass the dark doorways of what were probably two bedrooms, on either side of the hall. They reached the lighted doorway near the front, and stood looking into the living room.

Robert Foster was seated in a comfortable chair next to the television set. A single reading lamp was burning--the pipe clutched in Foster's teeth was out--and he seemed deeply engrossed in a good book.

Morrow reached up and snapped the fasteners on his helmet.

Foster lifted his gaze with the utmost casualness and studied the two figures in the doorway. He looked quite happy and contented, dressed in an old pair of slacks and loafers and a turtle-neck sweater. His dark, touselled hair showed evidence of his hand running through it--a habitual gesture of his, Morrow remembered.

Slowly, a stunned expression crept across his face.

Morrow swung his helmet back onto his gravitor tank. "Hello, Bob," he said.

Foster slipped a marker into his book, closed it, and laid it carefully aside. "Morrow?" he said. "So you finally made it! I might've known you'd be coming by way of Jupiter--but why the get-up, friend? And who's your partner?" There was just the slightest quaver in his voice.

It was almost more than Morrow had hoped for. He could play it through, now. "This is a Martian friend of mine," he said, hooking his thumb toward Smitty. "I can't stay long. Somebody might see our spaceship and get curious."

"Your--spaceship?" Foster queried falteringly.

"We landed it out in back."

The room was silent for a moment. Foster sat dumbfounded, staring at them. A flicker of a gleam began to show itself in his eyes. "Am I to understand," he said gently, "that you have landed a spaceship in my back yard?"

"No," Morrow corrected. "In the alley."

"Hmmm--it'd better be in the alley. My wife would slaughter us both if you'd trampled her gardenias." Foster fell back in his chair. He tried to relax; he even grinned, somewhat shakily. "Now what's the idea, Bill? Why'd you come tippy-toe in here like this? Out with it!"

"Take too long to explain," Morrow replied, shaking his head. "Somebody's liable to see that spaceship any minute, now." He forced a broad, innocent grin across his face. "You want to come have a look at it?"

"Ye-e-es!" Foster agreed sarcastically, rising from his chair. "I suppose I _should_ take a look at it--"

Morrow led him out the front door and around the house. "Don't want to awaken your wife," he explained, clamping down his helmet.

"No-o-o-o!" Foster conceded. "I wouldn't advise that!" They proceeded on across the back yard, through the clinging, wet fingers of the mist.

Then Foster saw the ship.

After that, it wasn't too hard to persuade him to enter it. Then it was simple to switch on the gravitors and rise into the dark sky. Morrow had him planted in the flight engineer's seat, enthusiastically demanding explanations in full, as Smitty piloted them swiftly homeward.

Foster was sold!

* * * * *

They held a conference in the sawmill-workshop that lasted all the next day and well into the next night. Then Foster went home to tell his wife he'd had a hurry-up call from the aircraft plant and gone there to work on some secret research; they drove him back to Sacramento in the truck, and let him off near his house.

Then they returned to the workshop and went to work.

The following weekend, Foster drove up in his own car to see them. He climbed out of his car wearing lace-boots and hunting clothes. Reaching into the back seat, he brought out a shotgun and a stack of newspapers, then Morrow came up to greet him and they strode into the workshop.

"You fellows have really been hitting the ball!" Foster exclaimed, as he stopped and gazed at the small, needle-nosed ship sitting beside the larger ship.

Morrow nodded. They had worked night and day to construct the second, smaller ship--a little two-passenger job with sweptback fins and a canopy-covered cockpit in its sharp nose. It rested neatly on its long A-fins, poised to hurtle into the sky. Its color scheme--dark blue-black on top, light gray on its belly--stood out in sharp contrast to the solid, shimmering black of the giant ship behind it.

It had been Foster's idea. He'd pointed out to them that they needed a smaller experimental model, easier to dismantle and rebuild, for the development of their air-jet chamber.

"Have you given it a test-flight yet?" Foster asked.

"Ran it out last night," Smitty replied, coming around the two ships to meet them. He set a plumber's blowtorch on the workbench and wiped his hands on a rag. "It hit seventy miles an hour, then worked up to seventy-four after a five-hour run."

Foster shook his head in puzzlement. "That's something I just can't account for. A jet-pod ought to be just as efficient as its design, and nothing should alter its basic performance other than a change in atmospheric conditions."

"There was no atmospheric change," Morrow said. "Same altitude, same barometric pressure, same thermal conditions. I'm beginning to think the problem isn't only in the jet-pod design."

"That makes two of us!" Foster agreed. "The design I gave you should've worked better than any seventy miles an hour, if your propulsion unit develops that focus of 'false gravity' and squeezes the air out, forming a low-pressure center, as you said it did."

"We've checked that, too," Morrow said, frowning thoughtfully. "I'm beginning to think it's something to do with the gravitors' field of influence. Come over here--I want to show you something!"

He led the jet engineer over to where he and Smitty had rigged a gravitor mechanism and a sling-load of sandbags with rope attached, just as they'd used in weight-testing the gravitors. He switched on the gravitor, adjusted its setting, and let it lift the load of sandbags into the air. Then he pointed to the rope dangling down beneath it.

"See that twist in the rope, just under the sandbags?" he said. "That much of the rope is in the influence of the gravitor's field, which is cancelling out the pull of the Earth's gravity. Now then, if it can influence that three-foot length of rope, what influence might it have on the air around it--and on the slipstream of air flowing over our ships, which is supposed to enter the air-vents and be blasted out the jets for propulsion of the ships?"

"It could be scrambling our intake flow," Foster acknowledged pensively. "But would that condition alter in time?"

Morrow shook his head. "I don't think it does--or that it would unless the gravitor's batteries were almost burned out. Then the field's influence might lessen a bit. Otherwise, no."

"Then why is it that the jets' efficiency increases with time?" Foster asked. "How'd you get seventy miles an hour on the big ship, then ninety? And five hours' running built up the little ship's speed an additional four miles per hour, didn't it?"

Smitty nodded. "It gets gradually better--but not much. If we knew how it happened and what it was doing to the air-flow, maybe we could design jet-pods with the right shape to use that air-flow and get good performance."

Foster turned and peered sharply at Morrow. "Bill, doesn't that gravitor's field work by conductivity of some sort through the surrounding material?"

"Uh?" Morrow started. "Yes, it--wait! You mean the ship's plastic hull?"

"Right. And what about the polarization of that plastic?"

Morrow pursed his lips, contemplatively. "Like all materials on Earth, it's polarized--if you want to use that word--to the gravitational and magnetic fields of Earth. I see what you're driving at, though--the gravitors establish a field in which the Earth's gravity and magnetism are cancelled out, or bent back upon themselves. The mechanism of the gravitors, the hull they support, everything within their field of influence is placed on a basis of its own gravity, mass-attraction, magnetism, what-have-you."

"And that's gradually changing the polarization of those materials," Foster concluded. "And the gravitors' field, working through the material, is also affected. There's a gradual change in its influence on other surrounding matter--and on the slipstream flowing over the ship!"

"We'd need a wind-tunnel to test that, wouldn't we?" Smitty asked dejectedly.

"Yep," Foster agreed. "And wind-tunnels cost money. The only other way to test it would be to make a cross-country flight, and I wouldn't advise that."

"What about a cross-country night flight?" Morrow wondered.

Foster gave him a strange look. "You two haven't been reading the newspapers lately, have you?"

* * * * *

Morrow and Smitty exchanged glances of mingled surprise and guilt. "We've been rather busy out here," Morrow protested lamely.

"I suspected you were," Foster said, a trace of grim humor in his voice. He walked over to the drafting table in the corner, where he'd left his shotgun and bundle of newspapers. "Pull that thing down and come over here," he told them. "I've something to show _you_, now!"

Morrow cranked the gravitor-sling down on the hand winch and Smitty shut it off; then they went over to where Foster was spreading newspapers on the drafting table, checking and circling columns of newsprint with a blue crayon pencil. Morrow stepped to his side and stared down at the papers. The words fairly leaped up to strike him in the eye.

MYSTERY SHIP NEAR SACRAMENTO

BLACK SPACESHIP SEEN

MARTIANS PREFER CALIFORNIA!

TWO CARS LEAVE H'WAY AS ROCKET SWOOPS

BLACK ROCKET SHIP; 'NOT OURS,' SAY AIR FORCE

There were more than a dozen news stories about it--not front-page, black-headlines stories, but two-column stories beginning on page two or three and continued in the newspaper center-section. None of it was spectacular enough to merit big headlines.

However, it had obviously been given a thorough coverage by the press. A railroad worker walking to work the Saturday morning of their trip to Sacramento had seen "a black, torpedo-shaped ship flying through the mist at low altitude, making a deep, rumbling noise." A police patrol car on the highway had seen it "flying low through the clouds, as if it were having mechanical difficulty of some sort." Two cars had left the highway and skidded into a ditch as both drivers saw "a black ship without wings swoop directly over" with a sound "like one long, continuous A-bomb explosion!"

Some said the ship was just a solid black shape, without lights or any noticeable features except the absence of any wings; some said "a long, blue flame" came from the tail of the ship. Some said "bright red, green, and blue lights were swarming around it" and some claimed there were "big windows in the sides, with something moving around inside."

Officials of the Air Force, both in California and in Washington, professed to have no knowledge about the ship. But one fact was added: both official groups said they were deeply interested in the reports for "reasons of security," that a thorough investigation would be made, and that radar surveillance along the West Coast would be intensified.

And one, final news story was headed: SEARCH FOR DOWNED 'SPACESHIP' FAILS. There had been strong belief, it said, that the mysterious black ship had been in trouble and was making a forced landing when it was sighted.

"There it is," Foster said with a tone of finality. "These are all the stories in the local papers. It's been played up from coast-to-coast, however--both in the newspapers and news telecasts. And the defense forces along the Coast are just waiting for you to pop out again so they can pounce on you."

"Along the Coast," Smitty echoed pensively. "It's significant that they haven't turned their attention to the interior--back as far as the Sierras, here--"

"Probably think it's some sort of new Russian reconnaissance aircraft," Morrow interjected. "They undoubtedly have a nice, little reception committee waiting out over the ocean."

Smitty nodded. "Any cross-country we plan to do had best be plotted due east, across the desert."

"There's the atomic project area, that way," Foster protested. "They certainly must have increased their air defenses around that."

"At low altitude, we can get around it," Smitty said.

Foster's features went slack. "Look here! You're not seriously thinking of--"

"If we had a wind-tunnel, no!" Smitty retorted wryly. "We could stick the little ship in it, let it run for a few days, watch the hull polarize itself to the gravitors' field, and note how the air-flow around the ship was affected. Then we could rip out the jet chamber and design a new one that'd work in the affected air-flow."

"_If_ we had a wind-tunnel," Morrow emphasized.

"Right!" Smitty turned back toward the ships. "So," he concluded, "we take the big ship! We head out over the desert and keep going, watching how the ship performs and what the air-flow does to her. We'll have to install a few barometric pressure-point indicators around her hull--"

"But we'd have to fly several days steady to get that hull completely polarized," Morrow said. "We can't just restrict ourselves to night flying."