# Astounding Science Fiction/Volume 44/Number 05/Not to Be Opened—

Appears in Astounding Science Fiction, vol. 44, no. 5
​NOT TO BE OPENED—
BY ROGER FLINT YOUNG
Illustrated by Ward
When Jim Tredel was a boy he was towheaded and already large framed. People said he would grow up to be big, like his father, and blond, and probably not bad looking. He did grow big, like his father, and not bad looking. Not good looking, just not bad looking. He fooled them on the blond business, he kept on looking like a towhead.
When Jim Tredel was six years old there had been a game, a quite wonderful, only partly understood, game which his father began to play with him. In later years Jim ran across the quotation, "Underlying oneness—" that seemed to help express all his father tried to teach him in that game.
Big Tom Tredel was a machinist. He worked in a machine shop when he was ten years old. He worked there all his life, the last forty-five years as its owner. He was in the same shop when he was past seventy. With no schooling at all he learned to read and write while he worked. He learned all the math and common sense he ever had reason to need, at the shop or away from it.
On his own, he learned a philosophy that was his own. It began to form in the first few weeks he worked, grew with the years.
"There is no such thing as a part," he would explain, over and over, to his son, Jim. It was Jim Tredel, not James, just as the father was Tom, not Thomas—a full and legal name.
"There is no such thing as a piece. There is no such thing as something that doesn't belong to something else. There is nothing, except as it fits into something else, as it's part of the whole.
"The arm of a chair now, for instance. That arm is meant to fit the back of a chair, and the seat of the chair. It is also meant to fit the forearm of the man who sits in it. A person who's never seen one before, but is trained to know relationships, should be able to reason ​out what that chair arm is, and what a chair looks like.
"The arm goes with other parts to make a chair. But that chair isn't complete in itself. It's designed to hold a man who sits. It's no good unless it does that. The four legs of the chair are made to come to the same plane, so it will rest evenly on the floor. And the floor is another component, meeting the walls of the house, which are built to reach the foundations.
"The foundations lead to the street, and that street connects with other streets, so that one house is connected to all the other houses in the world. And if there's an ocean in between, they're still connected."
Tom Tredel had a hundred different ways of saying the same thing, so that the boy must understand. And, with it all, they played the game.
For a while it had been jigsaw puzzles, and the boy had seen the interconnection of the pieces, and how each piece fitted others, and yet others.
Then he had the same building toys to play with that other children had, but he learned to play with them a little differently. It was not what could be constructed with them that mattered, it was the way the units went together that was important. Then the realization that the whole was not really the whole, because it had become a part of the table, the floor, or whatever it rested upon, and thus was attached to the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the Universe.
Tom Tredel could take a machined part in his big, rough hands, or a piece of sheet metal that had been fashioned with a purpose, study it briefly, turning it to observe unseen attachments, and seem to see the continuations of it that were not there to be seen. From a part he could visualize the assembly of which it must be component, and then describe the connecting assemblies until he had joined it finally and without question to Earth. Only then was he satisfied, and only then did it become an orderly component of an orderly Universe.
Jim learned. At first it was a game, and fun. Later on, it was not a game, and not so much fun. Yet, he continued to learn, because at the same time he discovered it was not, actually, a game, he was old enough to know it was expected of him. Tom Tredel saw that his son did what was expected of him.
Still, it was not the trade of machinist that Tom Tredel wanted Jim to learn. Jim picked it up, the way he was taught—working in the shop to earn allowance money.
could do the work men ought to be doing. The important man was one who made things by which the world moved, and advanced. A machinist, now—
What he saw for Jim was electronics. At the time it was radio, but Tom Tredel saw how electronics would mean other things than radio. Noncommunications electronics and radio would some day be the field his descendants should be in. Perhaps the big opportunities wouldn't come in Jim's lifetime, but Jim could raise his boy in that field, too. He could pass on just a little more knowledge than a boy would get who was born to be a doctor, lawyer, dentist, or machinist.
Jim would get the education he needed for electronics, and all the help money and planning could provide. He'd also understand the philosophy of Tom Tredel, and he'd know something of the relationships of parts to the whole.
Jim showed the proper interest in electronics. He was led cleverly, yet wisely, along the path that would make him choose it as his life's work.
He had been an apt pupil. He could take a part, in fingers that were longer, hands that were as strong, yet softer, than his father's had been, and visualize its place in the all.
​Because of his father's choice of electronics, he had the opportunity to step onto a road—
The three-year chase was over. The trap was sprung.
In the darkness, dark as he had never before known it, Jim Tredel managed a grin, now that his fear was gone. That blinding, instinctive fear had been replaced, slowly, by the certainty of death, close at hand. Fear could no longer be used as a stimulus that might aid escape, and had given way to resignation.
It had been fear, though. Or more—shocking, numbing terror. Then he realized that for three years his mind had been preparing him, slowly, for a climax that must terrify him. Hardly any move he had made, hardly any discovery that had come to him in those three years, but now seemed almost designed to prepare him to be afraid, when at last there should be something to fear.
Why bother, now, to decide his mistake? The immediate error, of course, had been stepping into the hall. It had looked like all the others he'd traversed so carefully, moving slowly, ever alert for an alarm system. It was ten feet wide, ten feet high, like the others, and appeared to be about a hundred feet long.
Jim Tredel had stepped into it, cautiously, going forward slowly. He was three steps on his way when the darkness came, suddenly, without sound.
At first he thought the lights were gone. Then he realized that, behind him, where the opening had been, was now a wall. In front of him, where the passage seemed so clear, there was another wall. That was when he knew the fear, when he realized the trap was sprung, and he was in it.
He lit a match, after a few minutes, when he was sure his hand was steady. Ten feet wide, and ten feet high, this hall had been. Now its length was also ten feet. Each of the six sides was of metal, smooth, polished, with neither break nor opening, with no glint of light from outside, nor breath of air. Lightproof, air-tight, and, if it mattered, probably soundproofed as well.
Even in a melodrama it would have been perfect. From this time on, anything could happen. A wall could advance to squeeze the life from him. Water could be let in to drown him. Heat or cold could be used to—
Whatever the method, one of those, dozen of others, his lack of future could be assured by his captors without ever letting him out of the trap, until they were sure he would be no further trouble to them. They would not even hear his screams. He was quite certain he would scream, protesting the removal of a life he had come to enjoy.
They would take that life, surely. That had been plain from the start. Almost three years before, he had known that, if he ever slipped— And he had slipped, badly.
Perhaps it had been merely walking ​walking into the hall. Perhaps it was coming here at all. Or coming alone. Or—
It didn't matter. It was much too late to consider what he should have done. Still, he should have let someone know, left some word that would guide others. Instead, his three years of work would be wasted, even as his life would be.
He could feel calm about it, then. He had bet his life, and lost.
Tredel had been out of the army six weeks, married to Edith for five of them, when he went back to the plant. It looked good to see that sign, over the new buildings: Tredel & Morton, Electronics.
And to see Morton again. Bruce Morton, middle-aged, balding, always serious, always nervous, always grateful to Jim Tredel for taking him in as partner when the company started. It was Morton who kept the business going, expanding it tremendously, while Tredel was in the army.
Morton showed him through the new plant, briefly, and then displayed the current line of products.
There was the fourteen tube hifidelity amplifier, the portable PA system, the new motor control, the intercom unit, the phonodoor, the—
That was what caught Tredel's attention. He picked up the small metal stamping, turning it over in his hand, curiously.
Morton bobbed his head at it, hurried to explain. "You know, Jim, during the war we got a lot of new machinery. Used some of it to do subcontract work. When it wasn't tied up with our own production, that is.
"We've been keeping on, to some extent. We don't have enough work of our own to keep the machines busy. This way we can keep the man power employed. There's money in it, too."
Tredel continued to stare at the stamping. His mind was working as it always did, always must, with detail parts, the way his father had taught him. He tried to visualize the assembly, not liking what he saw. Not liking it at all. Not understanding, thoroughly, but knowing he did not like it. There was menace, there, and something—some strangeness.
"What's it for?" He tried to ask it casually.
"Some toy manufacturer ... Triesting Company."
"Guess they converted over to war, too?"
"No ... or, yes, they did. Not armaments, though. They dropped toys to make some sort of special heating equipment for the Navy. Now they're back to toys exclusive."
Tredel hesitated. Then: "This is part of a toy?"
Morton bobbed his head. "Sure. That's all they make—toys. Now, here's our new television tuner—"
Tredel replaced the stamping reluctantly and followed Morton. His mind was still on Triesting. "Toys. Exclusive."
Yet, that stamping was part of no toy. Not the kind of toys children ​played with, anyhow. The kind grown-ups used when they wanted to kill other grown-ups. Not the kind of weapon he'd ever seen, or heard of. But, somehow, the assembly he visualized wasn't designed by any kind of grown-ups he'd ever heard of, either.
He and Edith would be having children, some day, and—
From the time he picked up that stamping until he found himself in a ten-foot room was just a little over three years.
Edith left him at the end of the first year.
Not just like that. Not just like that at all. She didn't get up one day, surprised him, said she'd had enough and later walked out.
There had been almost a year of things she had to take. Of disappearances on his part, of unexplained trips, of secrecies she couldn't understand. There were long periods, when he was at home, of moodiness and thought, and inattention to her. She really had been forced to imagine almost everything, at one time or another, and he never had an excuse to offer, just asking her to trust him.
She had trusted him. Trusted him more than she should have, much longer than he had a right to expect. Then—Well, she had been right, it was just no life for a married woman. If he ever—Well, she gave him enough hope. If it hadn't become such an obsession with him, he could have stopped his pursuit any time in the next two years, gone to her and asked to start over. He would never have had to explain the past. But he hadn't been able to stop.
From the very first he had somehow sensed that there would be no evidence. That is, nothing concrete he could seize upon to give him an immediate, clear-cut answer. Even then he had known he was working with intangibles. He would have to lean heavily upon half-seen suspicions, upon intuitions that were only vague feelings. That would be all he would have to go on. Another man would have had less.
Triesting did manufacture toys. Nothing but toys. A certain number of people reported for work each day, put in a certain number of hours, and returned the next day for more. As a result, there was a certain flow of finished toys from the factory.
The first real blow came when he found one of their toys used the stamping which he held in question. He almost gave up, then. Did give up, telling himself he was strictly a fool. He went back to his own business, to living his own life. Yet, it kept nagging at his mind. Time after time he tried to put the thoughts away. One should never be a fool more than once over the same subject.
Then he went out and bought one of their Mystery Ray Pistols. He took it apart, studied it, redesigned it to his own satisfaction. He made ​parts for his redesign, assembled them, and tried the toy.
It worked just a little better than the product Triesting was making. Worked better and would be cheaper to produce. And it didn't make use of the stamping made by Tredel & Morton.
In fact, it was what Triesting Company would have designed and manufactured unless they were determined to make use of that stamping, whether it added expense or not.
Which didn't make sense.
He took it easy. Think it over for a while, be sure. His mind worked on it, always came up with the same answer.
"Bruce!"
Morton looked up.
"That stamping we're making for Triesting—"
Morton nodded.
"Do we ever get rejections?"
Morton looked surprised. "Funny you should bring that up, Jim. Matter of fact, when we ... I, that is ... signed the contract, it called for very rigid specifications.
"We magnarayed the first batch, as a matter of routine, and found that fifty percent of the parts wouldn't meet spec. Since they were only for toys, I had them delivered anyhow. I wasn't trying to pull anything. But I didn't want to take a loss on the parts. I thought I'd see how their receiving department inspection compared to ' our own inspection."
He paused. Then: "There was no squawk on the first batch. I figured their requirements weren't so stiff as they made out to begin with. Very often they aren't, of course, when there's no stress involved. Since then we've been shipping them full production, and they've been accepting and paying."
"Hm-m-m. Are we still inspecting?"
"Sure. Under the circumstances we haven't made any effort to better the product. The records show that about fifty percent still wouldn't meet their original spec."
That didn't mean much one way or another, Tredel realized. Lots of little companies, since the war, Were still specifying quality that had gone with war contracts. It didn't mean anything in a lot of instances, except that it gave them a convenient way to break a contract if they wanted to.
Still, it stayed in his mind.
Two weeks later he went to San Francisco on business. There wasn't too much hurry, so he went by car, taking Edith with him, so that it was, in part, a pleasure trip. It would do her good, after the neglect he had been showing her.
He managed to squeeze yet another purpose out of it. Across the country, in towns picked at random, at toy stores selected thoroughly by chance, he bought Mystery Ray Pistols.
When they returned he had sixtyeight of the toy pistols. He disassembled them, removed the ​stampings and took them down to the plant.
The purple dye code on them was first. He checked against the book and found sixty-eight stampings were from sixteen different lots to leave Tredel & Morton.
Then he had them magnarayed. Sixty-eight of them failed to meet specifications.
It meant, with very little shadow of doubt, that the receiving department at Triesting Company was making the inspections. Only rejected parts were going into Mystery Ray Pistols.
The stampings that met spec? Where were they going?
Tredel considered getting into the toy factory to find out. Then thought made it seem that would not be the best way. Working in a factory, in some small section of it, he would have less opportunity to discover many things than would someone on the outside.
Perhaps what happened to the stampings inside the plant wasn't too important. It was where they went from there that mattered. Who did their shipping?
It took a week to check, make sure. All of their out-going freight was handled by Higgenson Rapid Transit, a well known trucking firm.
It took a month to trace down, to come to the conclusion that if anything were to be learned it would be something not obvious. All the shipments from Triesting went to the dock at Higgenson to be routed according to destination. So far as it was possible to check, without arousing suspicion, all shipments were aboveboard. They went to toy stores, to jobbers and distributors throughout the country, to factories in England, to representatives around the world.
I've spent, in cash outlay, about a thousand dollars, Tredel thought, summing it up, and I've yet to eliminate a negative. It's not that I've got to find something positive, but—
He saw it, then, as having the makings of a really long-range project. To come, eventually, close to the positive, he must eliminate the things that couldn't be.
So far, he had eliminated nothing. It wasn't a question of starting over. It was more that he went back to the beginning and chose a parallel line to check.
Tredel & Morton made a stamping that was in question. Who made the other parts of the assembly that he had visualized?
He built up the assembly, carefully, on paper, deciding how it must look in order to use the stamping. He did it again and again, checking his reasoning carefully, as though Big Tom Tredel were looking over his shoulder.
No. That was the way it had to be. Had to be.
He chose, finally, a part that would be the most unusual in shape. That would be the one to work on.
Then he thought about that part. Just thought about it for days. He guessed, discarded, guessed again. And discarded.
​There would be few legitimate uses for such a part. An airplane perhaps. But the normal use of the part didn't have to be legitimate. As the stamping had turned up in a child's toy, the connecting part could turn up anywhere. An airplane? Throughout the country the number of plane parts used by manufacturers in current production, the number carried as spares for older models, would run into the millions. Impossible to trace down such usage—in a pin-ball machine perhaps; or a lock on a trunk; or even in another toy.
There was always the chance that such a part did not even exist. He could be wrong, wildly wrong. Even if he were right, in theory, the part might not be quite as he imagined it. While he might see it as it had to be, someone else might not have designed quite so logically. The Mystery Ray Pistol, for instance.
No, that didn't follow. The Mystery Ray Pistol was definitely a distortion. Someone had gone out of his way to design and make use of a part that had no business in the assembly.
Then he found the part, in his own plant, where it should never have been.
And, it was just as he had visualized it, just as he had sketched it. Just as he knew it must be. It was in production, on subcontract, under his very nose.
It was strictly an accident, his finding it, Morton had picked up a rivet-making machine, at a bargain price, and they were making their own rivets. They still used rivets and bolts where other companies used spot welding. It gave the repair man a better chance to make repairs the way they should be made.
Tredel had gone out to the little shed where the machine was installed. The operator was in the corner, reading, when he entered. The man looked up, grinned a little sheepishly, then waved his hand at the machinery. He didn't try to talk. The rivet maker was going, with its loud, rapid phut-ti-phut-phut-ti-phut as it took the long wire from the drum, punched it into rivets, then ejected them into a stock cart. Tredel understood the gesture of the operator: "Takes care of itself, Boss. I just put on the wire and take away the rivets."
Well, that was all right. The place was clean and neat, rivets were being made, so there was nothing to complain about. Besides, the operator was reading a correspondence course in electronics. That was all right.
Tredel found the part in the trash barrel, bent a little out of shape. He picked it out quickly. There was no possibility of error. This was what he was looking for. Excited, eager, realizing his heart was pumping to the phut-ti-phut of the rivet maker, he signaled the operator to follow him out of the shed. In the quiet of the open air he held out the part.
"Yes sir?"
​"I was wondering—do we make this?"
The operator glanced briefly at the part, then back at Tredel.
"Not any more. Used to. We had a punch press in here before the rivet maker. That part's a dilly. Took five operations just in the punch press."
"Not any more, though?"
"No sir. Maybe. I'm not sure. They took the punch press over to Building 7. I think all the parts like that were finished three months ago. Had that one on my desk as a paper weight. Tossed it out this morning."
They were still making the parts in Building 7, on a lot basis. They made one thousand of them on the first working day of each month.
"We've got it down good, Mr. Tredel," the aproned punch press operator told him, "but still they keep coming up the first of every month. I'd like to go ahead and make them all up sometime. Then they could deliver to the contractor when he calls for them. Save a lot of set-up time." The operator hesitated, feeling as though he had talked of things that were not his to talk about. "Course, I know how it is: Contract cancellation comes along, and we'd be stuck with a bunch of them. Still, I get sick of them. First job every month.
Tredel nodded as though he'd been listening, headed back to his office, part in his pocket.
Even in his own organization it took him three days to discover what the part was, and who ordered it. He realized then, concretely, the difficulty he would have working in some other company trying to discover something.
Of course, he could have asked. Morton would have known right away. Tredel felt the time was still there to be cautious.
The way he had to find out made it slow. Show an interest in what the company was making for other people. Then get into the order and blueprint files without seeming overanxious.
He went three-quarters of the way through the files before he found what he wanted. At that, he almost missed it.
The order was in an envelope, with a glassine front, and the blueprint was tucked inside the envelope. From the description on the order he didn't recognize the part: End-Record Rack Size AB.
No, that couldn't be it. He went four envelopes further, then went back to the blueprint for the record rack end and pulled it out. That was it.
It was a detail print, but in the upper left-hand corner there was a small drawing of the assembly, showing the way the end fitted. Not the best design for the end, by a long shot, and it called for the use of a connecting detail that could have been eliminated, but logical enough.
Structurally the end was rather meaningless, but the peculiar curve ​of it extended through the record rack, so that in the assembly it became integral. The end seemed designed to carry out the curve of the rack. Someone would have to be twisting his thoughts the way Tredel was shaping his to imagine that the record rack might have been designed to agree with the end.
Tredel checked the spec. Nothing bad here. It 'called for tolerances that were a cinch to meet, though they were exacting. Once the tools were made accurately, they couldn't miss. Hardness specified was natural for the grade of aluminum used. Holes were to be located and drilled on assembly. No finish.
Then he was guessing again. Production of Triesting stampings were five hundred a month. Approximately half were used in Mystery Ray Pistols, leaving two hundred and fifty unaccounted for. Therefore, two hundred and fifty of the record rack ends should be unaccounted for, leaving seven hundred and fifty to go into record racks.
Providing there were such record racks, and he rather imagined—
There were, all right. Tosdal Specialties made record racks and book ends and ash trays and other low-cost home furnishing extras. They had a small shop, employed seven people including the owner, and had two salesmen on the road working on commission. It took two weeks of maneuvering to determine that each month they, manufactured seven hundred and fifty record racks. Their deliveries were all made through Higgenson Rapid Transit.
He had a few things to stop and think about. Assuming: Someone was acquiring parts for an assembly, and didn't want it known, then there were certain things they should do.
Some of those things were being taken care of very well. That was the use of the components for normal purposes. Strained usages, perhaps, but under most circumstances good enough so as to arouse no suspicions. The use of one trucking company was not, possibly, a mistake, since it was a popular trucking line and most of its business was probably legitimate. It did not seem a mistake to have more than one component of such an assembly manufactured by one company. Of course, it should be good enough. Had been good enough until Tredel chanced on it. Still—
He investigated a little further, carefully, and now through Morton. All it seemed to be was routine curiosity about their cutsomers.
"We inherited Tosdal Specialties," Morton explained. "They were having their work done by Marcus Sheet Metal. We took Marcus over, lock stock and barrel. They got into a few things out of their line, and got in too deep. It was a good chance to pick up equipment and business, so I bought them out.
"We took over most of their accounts, too. Tosdal didn't care, so long as he got the same work at the ​same price. Most of Marcus' other customers felt the same way."
That was better. It was an accident, then, that more than one component was in the same plant. An accident that couldn't be very well foreseen. Faced with the necessity of getting a new subcontractor, or—
That implied direct knowledge. On whose part? Did Tosdal know? Did Triesting? If each handled only one component, there were seven components to the assembly—That meant perhaps a maximum of seven different companies similar to Tosdal and Triesting doing the cover-up—for one assembly.
One town. Temple City. Two Companies. Triesting. Tosdal. Temple. Triesting. Tosdal. T T T. That couldn't mean anything, of course.
Could it?
Suppose he took the telephone book and found five more companies beginning with the letter T?
He went through the classified book three times before he had what he wanted. It took a month, working at home and at the office. His list had to be made carefully. Better to include too many than exclude one. If he had been doing such a list earlier, he would have left out a specialties company. What he wanted was anyone registered as a possibility to do assembly work. Leave out fabrications for the moment. Risky, but leave them out for the moment, and assume the pattern would carry through.
He was left with the names of seventy-three companies beginning with the letter T.
Now what? It seemed obvious. There were several ways. Direct observation. Employment of an agency. Cautious telephone calls. A phony questionnaire.
No, he wasn't ready to go to an agency. Too much danger of a leak. Too much chance of a leak on telephone calls, or questionnaire. Only surely secret way was the long way—observation.
He marked a city map carefully, to show the location of all the companies on his list, then he started driving.
​He had to assume exclusive use, such as employed by Tosdal and Triesting. It wasn't certain, but possible.
By the end of the week, by driving and looking, he cut the list down to twenty-seven. In two days more there were only eleven left on the list. He knocked seven more off in the two days of closer observation.
Which left four companies starting with T who used Higgenson Rapid Transit. Others he had seen using Higgenson, but all the others had at least one other truck from a rival company taking out deliveries. These four were the exclusives.
Thornton Manufacturing. Temple City Products. Top-Notch Corporation. Thompson Electric. Four where there should have been five.
It wasn't hard to get hold of catalogues and bulletins from the firms. He hesitated to approach them directly, and finally did his shopping through retail outlets. In a week he had four more parts to his assembly. And each one was as he had known it must be.
There was still one part missing. He could make it himself, he knew, but Tredel preferred to find out where it came from, to have a part that was actually made to go on the assembly.
Back to the classified index, back to his driving. And three weeks later he still had only the six parts.
In the fourth week he found the seventh part. Under his own nose again. In his own factory. In an intercommunication unit he had designed himself.
Only it wasn't quite the way he had designed it, before the war. There were several changes. Basically it was the same unit, but the changes had been made to conform and allow the use of a new part.
Morton! Tredel had to think, then. Really think. That wasn't possible. Or was it? How much did he know about the man, really? Outside of the fact that they'd been friends for a long time, now, and Morton had proven himself trustworthy enough—or had he? How much did you ever know, really, about a friend, or anyone besides yourself? Even yourself?
He couldn't go to Morton. No, he couldn't go to Morton whether the man was innocent or guilty.
Still, he found out what he wanted to know.
They'd had a large order for intercom units during the war. The customer had the recpiired priority to make materials and assembly time available. He'd insisted on a couple of changes, which had been made. It called for several new parts, which, since they didn't have the facilities, they'd subcontracted to Young Brothers. They'd switched the whole design, then, thinking it simpler to make all the intercoms the same, and there was little cost difference.
The customer was still on the books, still taking intercoms and spares. Tredel wasn't surprised to find that the spares on his suspect ​part amounted to two-hundred-andfifty a month.
It seemed ridiculous at first. A customer ordered fifty intercoms a month, and two-hundred-and-fifty spares on a part that was under no strain, had practically no chance of breaking, no need to be replaced. How could he expect to go unsuspected?
Yet, why not? Who was there to question it? Certainly Morton never had. Almost every company gets enough screwy orders so that sooner or later they stop worrying about what the customer is going to do. As long as they order and pay, that's enough.
Still, this was one he could trace down. Wilson Watkins Company, Los Angeles. The T didn't follow there. It was only then that he realized—Tredel & Morton. Their intercoms had been picked because their company name started with T.
It was something more of a shock, to remember, seconds later, that all their outgoing freight was handled by Higgenson. Morton said they offered special rates, so—
In Los Angeles, Tredel found the Wilson Watkins Company listed, in the classified book, as manufacturers of intercommunication and sound equipment. Manufacturers.
He tried a few radio stores first, found his intercoms on sale. There had been a slight change in them. Now the Tredel & Morton nameplate was gone, replaced by a new one: Wilson Watkins.
He went to them directly, then, and talked to Watkins. Watkins was big, bluff, red-faced and bald. He used tissues to wipe continuously at a steady stream of sweat-moisture from his face. He coughed, agonizingly, when Tredel lighted a cigarette, and looked grateful when it was immediately put out.
"Sure, we take your intercoms, change the nameplate, and sell them out here. We've never had quite the market to go into the manufacturing ourselves. We want to carry them, so we use yours. We don't like to turn down orders for them, you see, because it might mean business for items we do manufacture."
Tredel nodded. "That's understandable. I was wondering how you happened to start ordering from us. We never do much business out here, you know."
"I know. You've got a mighty good name, though. Best there is in your line. We don't try to match it, of course. I mean our stuff is all right, but not high quality like yours. Just general utility.
"Well, during the war we got an order for intercoms. We couldn't handle it and told the customer that. We hated to turn them down, because we were doing a lot of their work, and wanted to keep them happy. They needed the intercoms for a Navy job, and could get all the priorities. Well, they said they wanted to get them locally, someone who could give them help if they ran into trouble, and—"
Watkins hesitated abruptly, ​flushed deeper, and mopped at his wet face, gasping a little for breath.
"Some kick-back arrangement?" Tredel suggested.
Watkins grinned uncomfortably. "We had some discounting arrangements worked out, you understand. Not kick-back. Bonus-sort-of for increased business. It all fitted together so that the customer wanted it to be my company billing them for the goods.
"The way it worked out, they said they could get the intercom from a firm back East. It turned out to be Tredel & Morton. One of their men made all the arrangements with you people, representing me, and getting the priorities. I started getting deliveries, changed the plates, and turned them over to my customer.
"After a while they had all they needed, but I was still getting them from you. Rather than trying to get them to take as many as they had said they wanted, I tried putting them on the market, and found I could handle all you sent. So I just let it ride that way. There's a little profit in them."
Tredel nodded.
"Seems to me you use a lot of spares."
"Spares! No, we don't use any. All the spares are for the original customer. They're probably still selling them to the Navy." Watkins grinned. "There's nothing likely to go wrong with your units that a new tube won't fix. We don't touch the boxes marked SPARES. Just reroute them to Industrial Finance."
Tredel waited until he was away from here to really let his surprise sink in. Industrial Finance! They specialized in long- and short-term loans, any amount, any amount, to business firms, factories, wholesalers, chain stores.
They were big. Too big, had too much money. That was his first thought.
Then: Who could do it better, without comment or suspicion? Suppose they wanted something from a manufacturer. The manufacturer had borrowed money from them, was borrowing money, hoped to borrow, or might some day have to borrow. "One of your clients needs such and such? Sure, we'll take care of it. O.K. We'll deliver to you. No, glad to do it." No questions, no suspicions. It would be assumed that Industrial Finance was acting as middleman in a perfectly legitimate deal. Or acting as credit backing for some company that didn't have the cash to put on the line.
They were big. Orders would come down from the top, be lost in the maze of legitimate orders, never be questioned, accepted as a part of the routine. It would take someone—one man, perhaps—at the top—
It was no surprise to find Higgenson Rapid Transit was owned by Industrial Finance.
Many things would be unsurprising now. Tredel was quite sure that if he checked with the Navy he'd ​find that they had secured, during the war, a number of Wilson Watkins intercommunications.
Back at home he assembled the components for what he had come to think of as the T assembly.
Then he drove out to the country, well away from traffic, and where the woods were thick and owned by Hydraulic Reserve.
He connected the flashlight cell, then pointed the assembly at the woods.
It took about a thousandth of a second, he imagined. There was a clear path through the standing timber. A path thirty feet wide, two miles long. There were great holes in the earth where the roots of trees had been, but no blade of grass nor living matter showed in that thirtyfoot width. There was no dust in the air where the trees had been—only the air, clear and very still.
The story was in the paper, three days later. It was written as an oddity, as though the rewrite man didn't expect any reader to take it seriously. A mysterious slash in the forest, forty miles from Temple City, and a few guesses as to what could have caused it.
Someone, Tredel thought, would know what had caused it, and would only want to know who.
That was what came of being a fool, he told himself. If he had to test the thing, he should have taken it further away. Got deeper in the woods, even. Pointed it toward the ground.
Too late for that. Too late, even, to wonder how the assembly worked. He could smile grimly over that. He had taken a component of it, imagined the whole assembly before he knew that such existed, and still he did not know why nor how it worked. He had connected it to an electric cell because that was the logical thing to do. Then he had pointed it, and expected something to happen. There was no trigger to press, no mechanism—just the desire that it should operate. He wondered: How much time?
How fast would they move, what would they do? How long would it take to narrow the field down to him?
He started, a dozen times in the next few weeks, to go to Washington. Turn the story and the weapon over to someone in the government. Get some strength on his side.
Yet, he didn't. He would see it through himself. By seeing it through, at that time, meant only waiting until they caught up with him. They were bound to, of course. A really efficient organization should have had him before. Put half a dozen factors together and there would be only one person it could be—Jim Tredel. Wait and see what they would do, though. Then it would be time enough—he really didn't think there would be time enough though, to scream for help.
Edith left him on the fourteenth, three days after their first wedding anniversary.
Tredel couldn't blame her, not ​even in that first moment, when the first sense of loss and hurt came. He'd had his chance.
There was nothing tearful, about it, nothing of a scene. He'd come home from the office. When he entered the front door of the house, he knew she was gone. Not out : Gone. There was a note, very brief, very much to the point : "I'm leaving. You can find me if you ever want to." His name had not been at the beginning, nor here at the end.
There was that moment when he was determined to go after her. Yes, he could find her. Find her and make amends and—
Yes. And tell her what he was up against? Have her around when trouble came? Just as well to have her out of the way.
Still, he surprised Morton. Tredel buckled down to work at the office during the next two months. He knew Morton watched him often, wondering, surprised, but pleased.
For the first time since his return from the army fie seemed to take an actual, intelligent interest in the business. He went over sales and sales territories. He talked to the salesmen and got their ideas on products. He made a survey of what they were manufacturing and how they were manufacturing it. He took their fourteen-tube hi-fidelity amplifier over the jumps, adding a compressor and expander circuit, three output channels instead of two. Then he went to work on a new type phono pickup.
And all the tittle he was waiting for something to happen: Either at the office or at home. The T assembly was on his living room table, left there as something of a challenge. Every evening when he returned from the office, it was there. It was still there every morning when he got up.
In two months he revised his former estimates of what he might be facing. From a superefficient organization that took care of all the threads, they had become—what?
He didn't know. There was too much he didn't know. How could they have missed the path in the forest, with its obvious implications?
Unless, the ramifications were so tremendous that they could not keep up with everything.
Or, suppose there was more than one organization?
That didn't add. Somehow, they had missed. They shouldn't have missed. Whatever they were after, the very methods of their operations showed they couldn't afford to miss.
So, at the end of the second month, he went back to his pursuit.
There was no convenient, accidental starting point this time. That one assembly, and its Ts, and Higgenson, and Industrial Finance were traced. The problem then was to trace through Industrial Finance, to see where that would lead him. Or, to assume there were more assemblies, as there must be, more things being made in secret. Try to get one, trail it, see if it also led to Industrial Finance.
Could he expect the system to be ​consistent? Suppose he took another manufacturing city. Well, for convenience and possibilities—take Warfield. Companies starting with W. Companies that were served by Higgenson Rapid Transit. Would they be that consistent? If he could get on a trail, would it lead the same way?
He had to consider that it might lead some place else. That there might be something else as big as Industrial Finance involved. That both trails might join and lead some place else.
It took a year for him to pick up the W assembly, trace it, very slowly, very carefully, knowing he was on unsurer ground this time, to Industrial Finance, and have the trail stop there, cold.
Still, he had another assembly now. This time it wasn't a weapon. Not exactly. It was a small hand projector that could be pointed at an electric apparatus, and the projector would damp it, stop it cold.
It would stop anything depending on electricity for magnetism, direct power or ignition.
He drove his car "into the country, parked it on the side of the road. Then he walked down the road for half a mile. When the way was clear of traffic he turned on the projector for a brief fraction of a second.
When Tredel got back to the car he found the engine dead. He had to he towed back to the city. The car's battery would never again deliver power. The spark plug and ignition points were ruined, the generator useless, all wiring that had carried electricity at the time the projector was turned on was brittle.
He had to assume the same would happen to an airplane, a tank, a battleship—within, of course, the limits of the scope of the projector. He rather imagined that its scope was not too limited.
So the path led to, if not through, Industrial Finance.
He'd hoped there could be a way around. Fie could foresee difficulties attempting to investigate a company whose business depended upon accurate investigations of its own.
Obvious ideas occurred to him first, to be rejected as swiftly as they came. They could only serve to take time and trouble and money, and to direct suspicion to himself. There was no certainty of any returns.
He saw, after a while, that the workings of Industrial Finance could be very secondary, not in the main line at all. Obviously the corporation itself, as a corporation, was not the ultimate consumer.
He should be able to find where the products went, after they left Industrial Finance. Merely more tracing.
Tredel established as fact that items in which he had an interest, or might have an interest, were invoiced to Industrial Finance, and delivered to various warehouses by Higgenson Rapid Transit.
The warehouses were obviously ​under the control of the finance company. However, they were not the sole users of any of them. Dozens of other companies used the same, warehouses. It seemed reasonable that it should be to their interest that these other companies, have no connection with them:
It was some time, much effort wasted, before he could be sure that there was a negative answer to a question to which he had been sure the answer would be affirmative. At last he was sure that Higgenson Rapid Transit took only normal merchandise from the warehouses. They delivered the items he was interested in, but they did not take them away. If anyone did, it was another trucking company.
He found, eventually, that the trucking exclusive ended with the items going into storage. Going out, they were taken by the first trucking company that someone happened to call. It took much checking and following before he could be sure of any one destination.
The Menton Institute was a nonprofit corporation operated for and by the blind. It was quite well known, and employed Only the blind in various skilled and nonskilled capacities. So far as Tredel knew they made no products directly for public consumption, but handled a good deal of work for other companies. It had been started by Thomas Menton as a place where the blind could work, earning a living solely through their own productive efforts. The workers were well paid, worked regular hours, and went to their own homes at the end of the shift.
The Institute drew on Industrial Finance warehouses for a good percentage of their work. There was no question of that, once he had narrowed the T and W assemblies down to them. Trucks left the warehouses with boxes of parts, delivered them to the Menton Institute. Other trucks made pickups, and delivered some place else, not back to the same warehouses.
Tradel didn't try to get into the Institute. It could be assumed that there would be nothing to see in what would be shown him. He could be reasonably sure of the innocence of the Institute itself, but someone would have taken precautions.
He established a position from which he could watch without being seen. Day after day he watched the loading of the trucks from the dock, waiting for a pattern to form.
He could rule out, almost at once, certain of the boxes that left as being probably for legitimate concerns. Then the pattern for which he watched became obvious.
Shipments were made of cartons that seemed to be of uniform size, in cardboard cartons that were of a different shade of yellowish-brown than the usual cartons. These, he saw, were, in addition, all color coded. There were two shipments a day. The first truck took cartons color-coded brown-black-green-red. The second truck took cartons color-coded blue-red-black-orange. He ​wondered if there were Braille codes on the cartons corresponding to the colors.
These were the ones he wanted.
He followed the trucks—to another warehouse.
Different, this time, though. The warehouse belonged to a furniture moving and storage company. Tredel didn't like that. He didn't approve of their way of handling this. Surely that would be suspicious to anyone.
There was a small bar-and-grill around the corner from the warehouse. Tredel was there at noon, eating a sandwich and drinking beer.
When a burly man wearing a Tiger Moving & Storage apron came in and sat beside him, it wasn't hard to get a conversation going. "Sure, there's a job at Tiger. Plenty of them—Hamburger, Bob."
"I don't want to get into moving heavy stuff," Tredel explained. "My back."
The burly man nodded sympathetically, yet eying the bigness of Tredel's body. "Yeah, if you gotta had back, you gotta watch it all right. Other jobs, though. We do a lot of packing and wrapping. Specialize in it. Plenty of small, too. Sure, that's a big business with us, now. We can do it cheaper than most places can do it themselves. So they give us the business. We pack and wrap. Sometimes address and deliver, too.
"Just about everything. Machinery and electrical stuff and clothes and parts of airplanes. Sometimes whole airplanes—knocked down, of course.
"A lot of stuff, we don't know what it is. We get a lot of stuff that just comes in with color-coding on the cartons. All that stuff gets export-packed. Tropics. Sort of tin foil with cloth backing around the carton. Then Kraft paper. Then a layer of goo. Then wax paper. Then more goo. Then—O, different kinds of goo. Some of it for water-proofing. Some for whatchamacallit fungus protection. Some for other stuff, I guess.
"Then it gets an outside wrapping, and then big numbers are stenciled on it to be like the color-coding. If green-black-red-blue is on the carton we got, then we stencil 5026 on the outside. Then its on its way to South America, or wherever the stuff goes."
That was enough. Tredel didn't lead any further. Thanks, he'd have to go to the employment office and see about a wrapping job.
It wasn't hard to spot the boxes going out. They were all the same size, and had the big numbers stenciled on the sides and ends. Just the numbers were all he could see at the distance.
Higgenson was in the picture. Their trucks made all the pickups. Tredel would have wagered, then, that Higgenson knew as little as Tredel & Morton, or any of the rest.
The trucks picked the boxes up from Tiger, hauled them two-hundred-and-thirty miles, and deposited ​them in a seaport warehouse, next to the docks.
The warehouse was fenced, along with the docks, and he'd need a good reason to get in. It didn't matter, though. American steamers of the Pennington Line used those docks. Wherever they were going, the boxes were going. They were leaving the country and—
It hit him in the face like a hard slap. Why leaving the country? That would be the natural assumption. That would be the end of the trail. For himself, or for any Higgenson driver, or anyone who got to wondering. The stuff was leaving the country, and that was the end of it. Must be all right, then.
He watched for a week to be sure. Goods were taken from other warehouses and loaded onto ships. This one warehouse had things go in, nothing ever came out. It was not only the one truck a day from Tiger that was delivering. There were a dozen trucks a day. Of course, a truck didn't hold much in comparison to a large warehouse. Still, with everything going in and nothing coming out—
He watched for three weeks. Nothing ever did come out.
Tredel didn't see any choice, then. It was over the fence at two in the ​morning. The guard would be down at the corner having doughnuts and coffee.
He had a pistol in his pocket when he went over the fence. A pistol, a small flashlight, cigarettes and matches, a wallet with money in it but no identification.
There was barbed wire at the top. Tredel ripped his clothes, tore a gash in his arm. Then he was moving cautiously, yet swiftly, across the yard, dimly lit, toward the warehouse.
He'd never seen the big door that led to the docks closed. They were always slid all the way back, leaving the ramps and dock and conveyor belt clearly visible, easily accessible.
He went that way, because that way was in, and in fast. He made a half-jump, half-roll, that took him from the bottom of the descending ramp to the top of the dock. He kept rolling, until he was far back, beyond the dark shadows and in the blackness.
Then he lay there, breathing hard, heart pounding from the exertion but not quieting down. Pumping and breathing to the strain of listening, waiting, and trying to be calm, quiet.
Five minutes, then ten. There was nothing. Nothing except himself in the blackness of the dock. Even then he was telling himself he was a fool. This was too far to have gone on his own. Long before this he should have brought others in, left it to them. This was no place for him. He'd go back, get help.
When he was quiet, he went ahead.
He'd watched the unloading, seen how the place worked. Trucks backed up to the dock, unloaded their cargo. There was an endless belt at the middle of the dock, disappearing into a six-foot square hole in the wall that separated the dock from the rest of the warehouse.
He heard it running now. It always ran, day and night, whether trucks were unloading or not.
Tredel had expected another way into the warehouse. Known there must be one on the dock, out of sight from his watching point. There had to be doors, perhaps at the end of the dock, so that he could get in without going the same way the endless belt did.
There weren't.
He got on the belt, because that was the only way. Just got on the belt and let it carry him, for sure, where he wanted to go. He crouched on it, kneeling, pistol drawn now, feeling little sense of movement, little vibration to the belt as he was carried into the warehouse, into the darkness, away from the light.
Tredel was prepared for almost anything, without having any idea as to what he might expect. He had thought, that, eventually he would get into where the lights were probably burning, and there would be men to handle the boxes—and him.
He seemed to be in a tunnel. Absolute blackness, but he could sense the walls and ceiling, close to him, ​stretching behind and before him, hemming him in without recourse, taking him deeper into—he didn't know what.
Then, there was light ahead. He shifted his position on the belt, first to one side, then the other. About six feet between walls, the belt taking up the entire width of the tunnel. He would have to wait, prepared, until he came to the light. Then he would start walking backwards, trying to remain in one place so he could look into the light and see what was there before he himself went in. There was no room to get off the belt. Fie had to stay on. It must have been moving much faster than he thought. It was almost, for the moment, as though he had dozed. There was no time to prepare. Suddenly, so suddenly it hurt his eyes, he was out of the black tunnel, in the light.
He was a pigeon on the belt, he knew that. He was off in one quick motion, not pausing to see where he would fall.
It was eight feet from the surface of the belt to the hard, smooth floor on which he landed, and the breath left him in a grunt. He wasn't stiff, his muscles let go, his joints took some of the strain, then folded, so that he was almost in a ball. Fie rolled like that, then straightened out so he rolled sideways and lost his momentum.
It was luck, wild luck, impossible luck. The warehouse was empty.
Warehouse!
Twenty, thirty, forty warehouses such as he was looking for could he put inside this place. He stared upwards at the ceiling, hundreds of feet above him, then looked to the far walls, a thousand or more feet from him.
Then he rolled again, so that he was under the belt. Small protection—
The belt was going only one way. It was coming into the—room? What was it? The belt was coming in, but there was no return. An endless belt going one way only.
There was a lot to think about, now. Now that it was too late even to begin to think. There was no use starting with the obvious fact that he was in too deep.
What, Tredel wondered, had he thought he was up against?
He knew it was something big. The biggest thing in the country outside of the government itself. Blit he hadn't thought too much, after all, for he had been against only one phase at a time. There had been no sign of counteraction. It was as though he had been against the vari ous segments of an intricate machine, but one that was blind, letting him inspect it at his will, with no powers against him.
There had always been the feeling of menace, but menace without form or shape.
Now—
It couldn't be a secret movement. One with enough followers to support this, would have enough believers to man their own factories. ​Their own people could be turning out such weapons as they wanted, without going through the twists and turns for production that he had encountered.
A foreign power—He'd ruled that out time after time. Another country could produce weapons in its own workshops, with far more secrecy than could be obtained here.
The Federal government itself—That was ridiculous.
Actually, his mind was going over the same old tracks again, playing with ideas for which it had no solution. One always had to come back to the cost, the staggering, fantastic cost of production. Under this system the costs were a thousand times what normal production costs would be.
Usually, he played with the ideas, then told himself he would wait and see. Eventually he would find out. Now, it was different. Now he must give up the speculation. There was no telling himself that sooner or later he would know. Now, that he was at the end of the trail, he might never know.
He couldn't hide under the belt forever. Actually, it was practically no protection. Merely a six-foot wide strip that was eight feet high, stretching a thousand feet or more to disappear into the wall on the far side.
It struck him—there were no supports for the belt. It seemed to be self-supporting throughout its length. The place itself was light, without any sign of a light source, like the early dawn, but brighter. And except for the belt, the light, and himself, the place was empty.
He followed the belt, after awhile, walking beneath it, feeling that that was the only thing to do. He couldn't go back, and there seemed no way out except where the belt went.
He should have stayed on it. For he walked the length—or was it the width?—of the room and he saw no sign of a door opening except for the belt passageway.
The belt had dropped so that here it was about five feet above the floor, instead of eight. He could get back on, be carried where it went. Or wait.
He went back twenty feet, so there would be time to get in position on the belt before he hit the opening in the wall. Then he went to one side, turned, ran easily, and jumped. His hands caught the edge of the belt, his arms contracted, and the momentum of his body was maintained. He was on the surface of the belt again. He reached the center just as he came to the opening in the wall. Twenty feet hadn't been too much. The belt was moving more swiftly than he had thought. Much more swiftly.
He was in a tunnel again. Perhaps it was imagination, but he thought the belt was moving even faster, now. At one point he felt a slight jolt beneath him, and started in alarm. But it was over before he could have taken action. It could have been where one belt ended and ​another began, their ends so close together that he hardly felt it as he was transferred from one conveyor to the next.
There was another, similar jolt, this time throwing him forward, so that he thought another transfer had been made, with the new belt moving slower, much slower, than the last. Moving fast, and then transferred, wouldn't there—No, it wouldn't matter. The boxes were loaded as they were taken from the trucks, with quite a bit of time distance between them.
He left the belt when he came again to a light area. This time the belt was only a few inches above the floor, traveling very slowly. It was merely a question of stepping off, pistol in hand, swinging his head as he did so, to take in all possible dangers.
The room, this time, was small—perhaps fifty feet square and thirty feet high. Again there was light, with no sign of the source, and the room was empty. The belt went into the far wall, still without supports. He wondered now, briefly, for the first time about the composition of the belt. Not leather, nor metal—It didn't matter.
There was a doorway, here, to the side of the beltway, in the far wall. A perfectly normal doorway, without a door.
Tredel approached it cautiously, slowly, prepared again for anything. Then he could look in and see the hallway, ten feet wide, ten feet high, stretching hundreds of feet into the distance.
He was watching for light-traps, alarm rays, visible or invisible, whose beams he might break. Apparently there were none, so he stepped into the hall.
He knew that if he were building it himself, he could put in a dozen alarms that could not be detected. The smooth metal walls that seemed without opening could contain an alarm every inch of the way. So it didn't really matter. He could avoid one alarm, and, in so doing, set off a dozen which he didn't suspect. Still he watched.
The hall led to another small room, and there was the belt again, going its endless way. And there was another door, and another hall, and beyond that another room, another door, another hall—
Then he was in the trap. On six sides he was closed in by smooth metal walls, each ten feet from its facing side. Each without break or seam or crack or flaw, tie had a pocket handkerchief, a wallet with money in it, a pistol, cigarettes and matches. It was for the first time, there in the darkness of the trap, that he thought of his small flashlight. It was gone, probably lost on the dock, or even fallen when he was getting over the fence.
He lit a match to make sure of the hopelessness of his position. He held the last match long enough to get a cigarette going.
Then he settled down to smoke, and think, and wait and wonder.
​He regained consciousness swiftly, almost as though there had been no lapse of time. Things had become different, so there must have been an interval. Still, he had no memory. He had been smoking a cigarette—
He was sitting upright in a chair, and caution told him to make no sudden move. He was in—it seemed more of an office than anything else. Two walls were almost unseen because of the scores of filing cabinets backed against them. One wall was covered with panels on which were dozens of small screens, reminding him of the faces of cathode-ray tubes used for television.
Tredel realized there was a picture on each tube, some of them vaguely familiar. There was the warehouse, and there the first big room the belt had brought him to. There what looked like the hallway—
"It wasn't too much trouble keeping up with you, Mr. Tredel."
He twisted in the chair, so that he could see the desk, and the man sitting behind it.
He was a small man, with a long, lean face, graying hair, and eyes that seemed almost lidless, beady and staring. On the desk Tredel saw his pistol, and, close to it, the man's small hand.
Tredel didn't answer for a moment. Then: "No, I guess not." "My name is Del," the man behind the desk said. His voice was flat and even, the words unaccented. "Del has no meaning to you so far as nationality goes. My face, my body, are essentially North American."
Tredel nodded, feeling stupid, yet with nothing to say.
"I owe you some sort of an explanation," Del continued. "After all, you have expended an amazing amount of time and energy and money to reach me. It is only just that you know what you have come to learn."
"You'll kill me, though." Tredel was just a little pleased with himself about the way he put it into words. Not dispose, or get rid of—Kill.
Del shook his head and seemed to smile, yet without moving his lips. "No, I can't do that. If it were anyone else—almost anyone else, that is, I'm afraid I would have to kill." At the use of the word he seemed, again, to smile without smiling, as though daring Tredel to take the word back, strip it to its basic meaning, and then apply it personally.
"However, with you, that's not possible. You, along with some twenty or thirty other men I could name, I must consider as unkillable."
Tredel listened, trying to make sense of what Del was saying, telling himself that Del must be making sense, it was just that he wasn't following.
"That doesn't matter for the moment," Del went on. "The important thing is that you are here. I've been fairly certain that eventually you would get here. That's why you made the first part of the ​trip from the warehouse and lived.
"We're about twelve hundred miles from the warehouse now. No, you didn't come that far by belt, of course. The conveyor goes into the warehouse, hits a Transmatter—a matter projector—that reassembles inside the tunnel leading to the first cave.
"I see you are willing to accept the idea of the Transmatter. You should—Never mind, however. In the first tunnel there are usually rays in operation to kill all living matter on the belt. It was shut off so that you might come through safely. I was, and am, of the opinion that you must live.
"We're in what once was a series of natural caverns. They've been made over and enlarged rather effectively, as you can see. You only saw the first of the series. Beyond this, where the belt goes, are the storage caverns."
Del pointed to the viewers on the wall. Tredel looked to see that a full score of the scenes were of huge caverns, perhaps larger than the first one in which he had found himself. In each cavern were tremendous stacks of cartons, similar to those he had seen enter the warehouse. He turned back to Del.
"I can't understand—Why?"
"I imagine, Mr. Tredel, that almost every possible solution has occurred to you, and been rejected, except the true one. These are weapons for the future."
"Future!"
"Yes. They will not be used for more than a thousand years, but will sit here, waiting."
Tredel's first mental move was one of absolute negation. "That assumes ... assumes—"
"Yes. It assumes several things, possibly. One that I am making impossible plans for the future, on the strength of a warped mentality. Or that I might know, actually, what will happen in the future. Or, that I am from the future."
Tredel eyed Del without speaking. There were certain rules his father had given him for solving the problem of a whole. He was trying to remove them from the mechanical class, make them apply to less tangible, less concrete realities.
"Not time travel, Mr. Tredel. Not time travel. Not as you might think of it. I was born in the future, raised in the future, and I guess I died in the future. Yet I am here doing the work of the future. But the I is only my ego. It is a body and brain horn to this time that I am controlling.
"That was a secret we had for some time and—
"I'll tell the story a different way. I'm rather anxious to get your acceptance of myself. I want as little doubt in your mind as possible before—
"You must understand that the Earth of a thousand years from now is very different from the world of today, Mr. Tredel. There are no longer nations and governments. There is one government over all— ​a dictator ruling everything. Ruling all of the ten million peoples of Earth.
"It's a hard government, and a cruel one. There is no freedom of action, no freedom of thought, no freedom of education. There is no freedom. It is a place to be born, to live a dull, restricted working life, and die.
"You would call the movement an Underground. There are a lot of us in it. Its purpose is to bring the world back to the glories of the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth centuries.
"It was ... is ... will be a very secret movement, of necessity, lest the Dictatorship uncover some phase of it. Let us use the past tense referring to my part in it. We worked secretly to build an organization that could overthrow the Dictator and return the people, after a time, of course, to their own rule.
"My part in the Underground was not a great one. I was born into it as my parents were members. Then, I was trained for one purpose—to be sent back to the past to do the job I am doing.
"You must understand: We do not have time travel, nor anything approaching it. We had one thing only, and that was a theory worked out by the mathematicians of the Underground: That a human ego could be sent back, to any time in the past, to occupy a human body pf that period, and control it.
"Only a theory, yet it was on that we based all our hopes, did all our planning. It could not even be tested. To use it at all meant consumption of a staggering amount of power—power which we could not produce ourselves, and which we would have to steal, at the proper moment, from the public circuits.
"It could be done only once. One run of the ego-translator would use all available power, stolen from forty thousand main beams, and would darken, momentarily, an entire continent. Our own power lines would stand only a fraction of a second. One person could be sent back—The experiment could never be repeated, for after that once all the beams would be so arranged as to shut off automatically on sudden overloads. The Dictator would be unlikely to know what we had done, yet suspicions would be aroused.
"We couldn't build weapons in our own time. We knew what weapons we wanted, but it was impossible to assemble the machinery, to get either power or tools or material. We had to go into the past to build our weapons. Once built, they could not be transported. They would have to be protected against Time, and then hidden so they would be ready for use when we needed them.
the future. We were planning that far ahead, for the moment when there would be the greatest chance of victory.
"So I was sent back to build these weapons. They had to be built secretly, of course, stored secretly and safely. The site was selected. These caverns were known to exist, from ancient records. It would be necessary to rework them slightly, fill them with our weapons, and seal them against possible discovery.
"My ego ... consciousness ... that came to this age was equipped with all required knowledge. I was educated solely to do this job. Therefore, it has been done."
It was almost impossible not to believe, Tredel found. It explained as nothing else would. Still—
"You came back? Alone, and—"
Del nodded. "The direction has been mine, though the work has been done by others, of course. To rebuild the caverns as they now are I had knowledge of machinery to do the work. It was only required to have it built to my specifications, and, operated under my instructions—"
"And the operators of the machines?"
"They were hired, did their work, received their pay, and then forgot. None was harmed, but none remembers."
"But why this time? Surely fifty years from now, or a hundred you could have things built with less ​effort. Production methods will improve."
"Yes, production methods. But a few years from now will be too late for our purposes. The. world is drawing together, even now, becoming organized. Governments will become more centralized, and it will be harder to do things without their knowledge. We don't care about secrecy at this moment. If a thousand, or a million people of today knew what I was doing, it wouldn't matter. What does matter is that there must be no record for the future telling what I have done. It must be a secret, not from the present, but from the future, and only the present can leave records that will tell it to the future. These years now are the last offering permanent secrecy. Therefore this is the time,"
Tredel shook his head. "You couldn't bring money back with you, yet all this has cost—a lot," he finished weakly.
"I could bring knowledge. I've been in this time now for more than thirty years. It is only in the last five that I've started to store weapons. Before that, everything was preparation.
"I brought knowledge of what the stock market would do. Of what goods would be scarce in certain years. Of what wars there would be. Of rationing. Knowledge, sure knowledge, was the only thing required to get capital. After that it was simple. Now, under hundreds of names I control thousands of businesses. Each, indirectly and without knowledge, is contributing to the project in some way. I control everything by remote control, with my own knowledge, and with these filing cabinets."
"It's big—too big, for one man to control."
"Yes. I've had to use short cuts. Hundred of them, and many I didn't like. I brought knowledge with me of business machines that would aid, but many of them could not be built in this time. They are just too advanced for present techniques.
"So I've had to use too many short cuts. For the Life Destructor, the weapon that originally aroused your curiosity, I assigned the letter T. All parts of it were manufactured in a city beginning with T, and companies using it in normal production all started with T. It was so with all other weapons. It wasn't a good way, but it cut down my work, made it easier to remember. I don't have the control over this brain that I should have."
"You could have a staff helping you. If you can make people forget what you wish them to—"
"I could hire them and use them, then make them forget afterward. That's true. But what could I do while they were actually working for me? What would protect me against their sabotage, innocent or intentional? There would be suspicions, an utter lack of morale among them, countless errors. Attempts, no doubt, to attack me. It wouldn't work."
Tredel could see that it wouldn't. ​"Yet, you would let me live. Even—"
"I can make you forget," Del reminded him. "You will forget everything vital. There's the chance that, some day perhaps under hypnosis, it might come back to you. I think it will, but that's a chance I must take."
"You said you would kill most people."
"Yes. My education of this period went into broad aspects, and specific points such as stock market quotations for certain years. Individuals didn't matter. Still, there were certain things I remembered. When presidents and kings and scientists and people of note would die—history records you as the inventor of the Transmatter in the year 1962—"
"History!"
"Yes. 1962. An important date to be remembered because of the Transmatter. It was one much cruder than that which connects my tunnel to the warehouse. Still, it worked, and it changed civilization more than any one invention ever had. Therefore you were alive in 1962. If I kill you"—Del shrugged—"I don't know, frankly, what would happen. I have no intention of trying to find out. I was warned, specifically, to take no action that would conflict in any way with history as I knew it. We couldn't chance introducing a possible paradox into time-history. We've too much dependent upon this project.
"You see, I couldn't kill you. You must live. Even at the risk of some day remembering. I think that chance is rather strong, in view of the fact that you are to invent—or will it be discover?—the Transmatter. However—"
Tredel's thoughts swung abruptly away, back to the future. "How many are there in your Underground?"
"Approximately a hundred thousand people."
A hundred thousand revolutionists against a world of ten billion! That would mean only one person out of every hundred thousand belonged to the Underground. No wonder they would need such a store of weapons and supplies. One hundred thousand to one!
Tredel's mind worked with the picture, now seen as a whole. He tried to fit the pieces into one certain pattern, so he might be sure.
Then he stood up slowly, stretched, and walked toward the desk. He moved casually, yet not too casually. He stopped when he reached the desk and faced Del. He opened his lips, as though about to speak.
It had to be fast. Even as his fist shot out, moving across the width of the desk, his body was bending forward so his arm would have the range it needed.
Del only half-understood the action. He moved forward slightly to get the pistol, instead of throwing himself back. Tredel's fist caught him on the side of the head, threw him back, overbalancing the chair, ​sending him with a crash to the floor.
Tredel had the pistol in his hand, then, and stood, watchfully, waiting for Del to make some movement, watching for some sign that help had been called, or that there might be automatic defenses.
Del lay motionless.
There was a light, strong chain in the desk. Tredel passed it around Del, securing his arms, wondering if the chain had been meant for himself.
Then he stared down. He thought he saw movement. The blow wasn't hard enough to knock Del out, really.
"No use playing, Del. I saw you move.
"You know, I'm sorry on several counts. I wanted to believe in you. If I could have, if you could have trusted in me, I might have helped you. As it is—what can I do?
"Obviously, the weapons you've gathered will have to be destroyed. I can't introduce them to this day and age."
Tredel looked at the screens showing the huge stacks of supplies already gathered.
"I guess that can be done. The boxes can be ripped open, then the caves flooded with water. That should take care of them. That, and Time. Your friends in the Underground will get an awful shock, of course.
"Then I'll have to shut off production, break up your control of companies." He glanced toward the files. "All the information I need should be there. I guess the companies could be given to the employees with the compliments of whatever name you've used in each case. I'll close up your project, Del, once and for all."
He thought of the matter projector—Transmatter. Since history had him as the inventor—or discoverer—perhaps he could—No, that wouldn't be good. Destroy it, then work it out on his own, and come up with the crude form history would tell about.
"I wanted to believe in you, Del. I guess you had a right to succeed, taking the, gamble you did, doing what you've done—but I can't see letting a hundred thousand people take over ten billion. Sounds too much like a dictatorship movement of your own.
"If the Dictator is all you say, you had a simpler way out. You didn't have to come back in time and take over a body, build all these weapons. You could have operated in your own time, taken over the body and brain of the Dictator. That would be the easy way to straighten things out. That's what you would have done if the majority of the people would have supported your cause."
He stared at Del, looking for some sign of life, then shrugged and turned to the viewers, studying them, wondering what first step he would take to ruin those vast stacks of supplies showing on the screens, how to shut off the flow of those still ​being stacked in place.
He twisted suddenly, looking back at Del, staring at him, searching for the movement that had caused him to turn. He went closer.
Del seemed without life. Tredel sensed the inner struggle of the man, felt the sheer strength of the ego that had come back in time, fought now for control of a body. Tredel stretched his arm forward, touched a finger to the floor close to Del's head, realized for the first time that blood was there, had formed a small pool under the neck arch.
"Tredel . . . Tredel." The voice was weak, coming from lips that scarcely moved, while the rest of Del's face kept the stillness of death. Tredel knew Del had lost the battle to control the body, but was still, somehow, hanging on. He bent lower, listened for another sound from the lips, watched the lips so he might he helped to hear.
"Tredel . . . ask Plato, Caesar, Archimedes—Follow them?"
It took a moment. Then Tredel leaned forward.
"Del!"
Tredel's body was tingling with the shock as his mind sent out the surprise impulses. Ask those two thousand years dead for help—What could even the wise man of 1750 know of the problems of 1950? He would think in terms of men and horses and ships with oars and sails. In terms of a lamp for light and the horizon as a day's journey—
Still, with the training his father had given him—Only extensions were needed, he could make the interpolations—The present manufacturing net work could be used—Tredel breathed easier.
"Tredel—"
How could this body still be made to speak? Tredel felt as though the words were forming in his mind, and was uncertain of lip movements.
"Tredel—You're right. It would be simpler to take over . . . mind of Dictator. Understand . . . Dictator isn't human."
"I'm—This body . . . dead. Your fight now. Weapons for Guards . . . useless against Dictator. Only one thing—"
A cough, almost mental, ending in a tired, submitting sigh as even mental consciousness left. Tredel continued to kneel after knowing Del could give him no further word.
He could work to make the weapons for others to use against something not human. An organism, perhaps, a machine, a growth, a wave pattern—
Animal, vegetable or mineral?
THE END.