The Great Martian War: The Gathering Storm - Snippet #7
Jan 7, 2020 13:19:10 GMT
Quendil and David N.Tanner 07011959 like this
Post by scottwashburn on Jan 7, 2020 13:19:10 GMT
This is a continuation of Chapter 4:
Lindemann came back for lessons for a few more weeks before the weather turned too bad, but he did not encounter Churchill again, which was disappointing. Perhaps the First Lord had finally soloed. His own lessons were proceeding well. He had a natural feel for flying and his instructor was full of compliments for him. Working with the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, he had developed a theory on the causes and remedies for an aircraft caught in a spin and he wanted to test it out. Wildman-Lushington and every other pilot he talked to seemed to feel that a spin was an almost certain death sentence, but he felt otherwise. Still, he needed to become much better at flying before he could try anything so daring.
His normal activities with the Advisory Committee were mostly routine; reading papers and reports from other researchers and distilling them down to summaries which Lord Rayleigh, the president of the committee, and the other ranking members could understand and present to their own boss—who happened to be Prime Minister Asquith.
But he only worked for the Committee part time. His actual employer was the National Physical Laboratory. It had been conceived originally as a way to bring scientific knowledge to bear practically upon everyday industrial and commercial life. But the first Martian invasion had seen it converted almost instantly into the government’s official program to unlock the secrets of the captured Martian technology. It was an effort with the highest possible priority and it drew on all the best minds of the Empire.
As a teenager, he’d dreamed of joining the Laboratory and he’d devoted all his energies to mastering the sciences he’d need to qualify. His German heritage and the strict government policies of the time had barred him from the most direct path there, but a long detour through Berlin had finally led him back to his dream.
It had not turned out quite as he’d hoped.
He told himself that he was doing important work, but it really did not seem that way most of the time. He had a small office in Bushy House, the former abode of William IV, in Teddington, in the western part of London. He, with several assistants, had nearly unlimited access to pieces of Martian equipment. All the treasures he had dreamed about were his to tinker with. It should have been perfect…
He’d had visions of working alongside the giants in British physics, like Rutherford and Crookes, and helping them make the great breakthroughs which would allow them to understand the Martian machines. In his own daydreams, of course, he saw himself as the one to make the breakthroughs. Rutherford and the others would hail him as their worthy successor as Britain’s top physicist, and the rewards and acclaim would follow. A Nobel Prize, a knighthood, perhaps an earldom down the line. Oh yes, a pleasant dream to be sure.
So far, unfortunately, none of it had come true. He hadn’t even met Rutherford face to face and his immediate boss was a man named William Eccles who was only a few years older than himself. Eccles was a pleasant enough fellow, but wasn’t especially well known and didn’t have the influence to have his team assigned to the really interesting projects—the ones which were leading to new devices and weapons which could be actually built and employed.
As a result, Lindemann had been given puzzles to solve which had already passed through the hands of the ‘great men’—who had failed to solve them. For that was the sad fact: even after more than ten years, the vast majority of the Martian technology was still as much of a mystery as it had been on the very first day. Their captured machines had been disassembled, every piece photographed, weighed, measured, converted to mechanical drawings, and cataloged. And while it had been possible to deduce what many of the devices did, it had rarely proved possible to discover how they did it. In most cases it had proved impossible to get the devices to work at all.
There had been a few exceptions, the most notable being the Martians’ primary weapon, the heat ray. Supplied with sufficient power, it was possible to get them to fire. It had proved a simple puzzle—even the Americans had figured it out—but as for how the device worked… no one knew. It had also proved impossible to duplicate the ray weapons. Certain vital components had been created using methods unknown to human science and while it was possible to discern what they were made of, the process by which the alloys were forged continued to defy analysis.
This was also true of the Martians’ marvelous electrical wire. It had the property of conducting current with no resistance whatsoever. This was a remarkable capability with a multitude of applications, but no one had any idea how it was done. Just recently a Dutch physicist had proved that even ordinary materials, like copper, could be made to behave in this fashion, but only at extremely low temperatures. The Martian wire did it at room temperatures. Even though the chemical composition of the wire could be determined, the method of its creation was unknown and all attempts to duplicate it had failed.
So the British had been reduced to using what devices they had captured intact. Twenty of the original heat rays were now emplaced as part of the defenses of London, although trying to power them all at once would have required nearly the entire electrical generating capacity of the entire city, and four more had been mounted on navy warships which had steam turbines large enough to provide the needed power. The rest had been sacrificed to the analysis teams. Tens of thousands of miles of the precious wire had been salvaged, too. The Martians’ power storage devices each held huge quantities of it. The wire had been used on the military’s coil guns and also on miniature radio transmitters, but until the second invasion, there had been no way to acquire more.
That was changing now. Even though the Martians had overrun half the world, they had been beaten now and again and more of their wrecked machines were falling into human hands all the time. There were several facilities in the south of England working full time to process the salvaged equipment.
What this meant for Lindemann was that instead of working with other great physicists and making grand discoveries, he was sitting in his office, or the workshop, day after day trying to make sense of things which made no sense to anyone.
Two month after his meeting with Churchill, shortly after New Years, he started another day as he started almost every other: with a visit to the workshop in hopes of finding inspiration. It was a cold, blustery day and he clutched his work coat around him as he hurried down the gravel path to the large brick structure. He let himself inside and walked down to the particular section where his project was situated, rubbing his hands together to warm them up. The building was heated, but not nearly well enough.
His area had a wood and wire fence around it and inside, an entire Martian tripod machine, rising forty feet high, almost to the building’s rafters. It ought to have been the best prize in the entire world to work on, but after months, Lindemenn was growing to hate it. The thing towered there, mocking him and his inability to unlock its secrets. The machine was almost completely enclosed with scaffolding and many of its exterior plates had been removed, but it was still imposing.
He was surprised to find the gate in the enclosure unlocked and standing open. Two people were inside. He knew they wasn’t his assistants as he’d left them back at the main building so who…?
“Ah, there you are Freddy,” said one of them, spying him.
It was Eccles, of course, no one else around here dared to call him ‘Freddy’.
“Good morning, Bill,” he replied. “You’re up bright and early. What brings you here?”
“I’ve got someone I’d like you to meet,” he said, gesturing to the other person there with him. He was a young man with a long nose, a large forehead and a shock of very dark hair which was already receding. “This is Jimmy Chadwick. He just graduated from Victoria University of Manchester. He’s going to be working with you for a while.”
“Really?” said Lindemann.
“Yes, he’s just started here and I thought you could show him the ropes and get him up to speed.”
“I see. And he’ll be working… with me?” Not for me? He wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.
“Yes, Rutherford isn’t sure exactly where Jimmy will best fit in, so we intend to rotate him around a bit. We’ll start him with you and see what happens. All right?”
“Certainly.”
“Good, good. Well, carry on.” Eccles nodded to both of them and then left.
Lindemann stared at Chadwick and Chadwick stared back. Eventually Chadwick spoke: “I look forward to working with you, Professor.”
“Victoria University, eh?” replied Lindemann.
“Yes, sir. I did my final work under Rutherford, we were developing a means of quantifying the radiation given off from different samples of Radium. The paper is going to be published next year.”
Lindemann flinched. This young pup had worked directly with Rutherford? Lindemann still hadn’t even met the man yet! But that explained what Chadwick was doing here. Some pet of Rutherford’s; he’d have to treat him with kid gloves.
“It’s really something, isn’t it, sir?” said Chadwick leaning back and looking up at the Martian machine.
“Yes, yes it is.”
“Mr. Eccles said that you were working on the control system. Can you tell me about that, sir?”
“Uh, well, yes, I suppose I can. We may as well go up to the cockpit. Follow me—and be careful where you step.”
The cockpit, or control cabin as some called it, was in the machine’s head, all the way at the top. He led Chadwick up a series of ladders from level to level of the scaffolding. “I understand that the Martians don’t use wheels or gears or even fixed pivots at the joints, is that right?” Chadwick asked, pointing to the curious ‘hip’ joint of one of the legs. All the cover panels there had been removed, revealing the mechanism beneath.
“Yes, that’s true, but then that’s true for most living creatures here on earth. The joints are an amazingly intricate series of small metal plates which can slide over each other in different directions, all contained in a sort of elastic sheath. The actual motion is provided by bundles of fibers which can contract just like a muscle when a current is passed through them. Here, watch.” He climbed around onto a different platform to where one of the machine’s arms had been partially disassembled and some power leads had been attached. He flipped a few switches and then slowly tuned the knob on a rheostat. The arm twitched and then gradually rose. He reduced the current and it lowered back down to where it was before. Chadwick was gaping.
“That’s amazing, sir!”
“Just a parlor trick, Mr. Chadwick. No more amazing than using an electric current to make a severed frog’s leg move—and just about as useful.”
“But you can control their machine, sir. From what Mr. Eccles was saying it sounded like you couldn’t, but you can.”
“No, Mr. Chadwick, I cannot control their machines.”
“But…”
“Follow me,” said Lindemann, climbing higher. Up another ladder and then onto the platform surrounding the machine’s head. Here a large section of the machine’s skin had been removed allowing easy access to the control cabin.
“Watch your head,” he cautioned. “The Martians are a lot shorter than we are.” Indeed, the only way to access the control station was to wriggle forward on their bellies. Lindemann sometimes thought that perhaps the reason the senior researchers had given up on this was because it was so uncomfortable. He didn’t have any trouble with it and Chadwick eagerly squirmed in beside him. “Here we are,” he said.
Chadwick looked around, his face growing more puzzled by the second. “But… but where are the controls?”
Lindemann gestured to two small rods extending up from a console in front of them. The rods were about six inches long and an inch thick. They were made of some black substance, but they were covered with hundreds of small gold metal dots. “There they are.”
Chadwick tentatively reached out to touch them. Lightly at first, but then he took a firmer grip and tried to move them. They wouldn’t. “They don’t move?”
“No. They are fixed in place. They aren’t like the wheel of a ship or an automobile, or the control yoke of an aircraft. Controlling the machine doesn’t depend on some physical manipulation of the rods.”
“I… I was expecting switches and levers and dials and gauges and such.”
“Well, there aren’t any. If there were, that would make our job so much simpler. Actually, I take that back, there are some switches down inside the machine, but they are main cut-off switches for the power supply. Probably for maintenance or emergency shut-downs.”
“So how does it work?”
“That is the grand question. Those little gold pads on the rods are made of their resistance-free metal. The standing theory is that somehow the Martian is able to transmit its orders to the machine in a fashion similar to how an animal’s nervous system would function. We have found dead Martians in wrecked machines with their tendrils still wrapped around the rods. We think the pads in the rods functioned like neurons and transmit impulses from the Martian to the machine. Dissection of Martian corpses by some of the top biological scientists has determined that there is a high concentration of what appeared to be neurons in their tentacles. The conclusion is that the machines acted like an extension of the Martians’ own bodies.”
“That’s amazing!” said Chadwick.
“Yes, but also damn frustrating for us. If there were switches and levers and such, we could just try them and see what happens. But here, we don’t even know where to start. We’ve tried sending weak electrical pulses into the pads of the rods, but with no effect. The problem seems more like a biological one than mechanical. How do we simulate Martian brain impulses when we know neither the code nor the language? I’ve tried to familiarize myself with the subject of brain structure and nervous systems, reading the works of the experts, men like Muller, von Helmoltz, and Ramon y Cajal, but I’ve not come up with anything useful.” He didn’t add that Eccles was gently hinting that perhaps it was time to submit a final report and move on to something else. Lindemann would be happy to see the last of this puzzle, but he hated to have to report a failure.
“Yes, yes, I can see how frustrating this must be,” said Chadwick. “Even if you could figure out how to send signals through the control rods, it would probably all be gibberish to the machines at the other end. It would be like an English ship captain shouting commands down the voice pipe to an engine room crewed entirely by Chinese. Even if they could hear him, they wouldn’t know what he wanted.”
“Yes, exactly. Good analogy, that.”
“But if we cannot use their control system, might it be possible to substitute one of our own?”
“We’ve done that with their heat rays, and you saw what I could do with this machine’s arm. But simply switching something on isn’t the same as controlling it.”
“No, that’s true, but what if we…”
Chadwick then spent a half hour suggesting things which had already been tried before. Lindemann explained why his ideas wouldn’t work as patiently as he could, but he was getting rather tired of it when a sudden shout from down below caught their attention.
“Professor Lindemann, are you up there?”
Lindemann, happy for the interruption, wormed his way back out of the cockpit and saw that one of his assistants was on the floor below him. “Yes, what is it?”
“Special delivery for you, Professor. Came by motorcycle courier.” The man hesitated. “Uh, he said he would wait for a reply.”
“All right, I’ll come down.” He made his way down the ladders and took an envelope the man held out.
Lindemann’s eyebrows went up when he spotted the seal of the Admiralty on the envelope. Churchill? Who else did he know there? Who else there knew of him? He quickly opened the envelope and pulled out the contents. It was a single sheet, from the office of the First Lord, inviting him to attend a staff meeting at Admiralty House at two o’clock, two days hence. It was signed by an Edward Marsh, ‘at the direction of’ Churchill. He read it twice, in hopes of squeezing any additional information from the stubborn paper, but that was all there was. He snatched a blank sheet from a workbench and hastily penned a note acknowledging receipt of the message and assuring his eager attendance. He folded it, put it in another envelope, addressed it to the First Lord and gave it to his assistant to run it back to the waiting courier.
Lindemann went to the door of the workshop and watched the man scurry down the path. In the distance there was a motorcycle and rider waiting there. As he looked, his assistant handed the envelope to the rider, who placed it in a satchel and motored off.
“Something interesting, sir?” asked Chadwick, who had come up behind him.
“I hope so, Mr. Chadwick, I surely hope so.”
Lindemann came back for lessons for a few more weeks before the weather turned too bad, but he did not encounter Churchill again, which was disappointing. Perhaps the First Lord had finally soloed. His own lessons were proceeding well. He had a natural feel for flying and his instructor was full of compliments for him. Working with the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, he had developed a theory on the causes and remedies for an aircraft caught in a spin and he wanted to test it out. Wildman-Lushington and every other pilot he talked to seemed to feel that a spin was an almost certain death sentence, but he felt otherwise. Still, he needed to become much better at flying before he could try anything so daring.
His normal activities with the Advisory Committee were mostly routine; reading papers and reports from other researchers and distilling them down to summaries which Lord Rayleigh, the president of the committee, and the other ranking members could understand and present to their own boss—who happened to be Prime Minister Asquith.
But he only worked for the Committee part time. His actual employer was the National Physical Laboratory. It had been conceived originally as a way to bring scientific knowledge to bear practically upon everyday industrial and commercial life. But the first Martian invasion had seen it converted almost instantly into the government’s official program to unlock the secrets of the captured Martian technology. It was an effort with the highest possible priority and it drew on all the best minds of the Empire.
As a teenager, he’d dreamed of joining the Laboratory and he’d devoted all his energies to mastering the sciences he’d need to qualify. His German heritage and the strict government policies of the time had barred him from the most direct path there, but a long detour through Berlin had finally led him back to his dream.
It had not turned out quite as he’d hoped.
He told himself that he was doing important work, but it really did not seem that way most of the time. He had a small office in Bushy House, the former abode of William IV, in Teddington, in the western part of London. He, with several assistants, had nearly unlimited access to pieces of Martian equipment. All the treasures he had dreamed about were his to tinker with. It should have been perfect…
He’d had visions of working alongside the giants in British physics, like Rutherford and Crookes, and helping them make the great breakthroughs which would allow them to understand the Martian machines. In his own daydreams, of course, he saw himself as the one to make the breakthroughs. Rutherford and the others would hail him as their worthy successor as Britain’s top physicist, and the rewards and acclaim would follow. A Nobel Prize, a knighthood, perhaps an earldom down the line. Oh yes, a pleasant dream to be sure.
So far, unfortunately, none of it had come true. He hadn’t even met Rutherford face to face and his immediate boss was a man named William Eccles who was only a few years older than himself. Eccles was a pleasant enough fellow, but wasn’t especially well known and didn’t have the influence to have his team assigned to the really interesting projects—the ones which were leading to new devices and weapons which could be actually built and employed.
As a result, Lindemann had been given puzzles to solve which had already passed through the hands of the ‘great men’—who had failed to solve them. For that was the sad fact: even after more than ten years, the vast majority of the Martian technology was still as much of a mystery as it had been on the very first day. Their captured machines had been disassembled, every piece photographed, weighed, measured, converted to mechanical drawings, and cataloged. And while it had been possible to deduce what many of the devices did, it had rarely proved possible to discover how they did it. In most cases it had proved impossible to get the devices to work at all.
There had been a few exceptions, the most notable being the Martians’ primary weapon, the heat ray. Supplied with sufficient power, it was possible to get them to fire. It had proved a simple puzzle—even the Americans had figured it out—but as for how the device worked… no one knew. It had also proved impossible to duplicate the ray weapons. Certain vital components had been created using methods unknown to human science and while it was possible to discern what they were made of, the process by which the alloys were forged continued to defy analysis.
This was also true of the Martians’ marvelous electrical wire. It had the property of conducting current with no resistance whatsoever. This was a remarkable capability with a multitude of applications, but no one had any idea how it was done. Just recently a Dutch physicist had proved that even ordinary materials, like copper, could be made to behave in this fashion, but only at extremely low temperatures. The Martian wire did it at room temperatures. Even though the chemical composition of the wire could be determined, the method of its creation was unknown and all attempts to duplicate it had failed.
So the British had been reduced to using what devices they had captured intact. Twenty of the original heat rays were now emplaced as part of the defenses of London, although trying to power them all at once would have required nearly the entire electrical generating capacity of the entire city, and four more had been mounted on navy warships which had steam turbines large enough to provide the needed power. The rest had been sacrificed to the analysis teams. Tens of thousands of miles of the precious wire had been salvaged, too. The Martians’ power storage devices each held huge quantities of it. The wire had been used on the military’s coil guns and also on miniature radio transmitters, but until the second invasion, there had been no way to acquire more.
That was changing now. Even though the Martians had overrun half the world, they had been beaten now and again and more of their wrecked machines were falling into human hands all the time. There were several facilities in the south of England working full time to process the salvaged equipment.
What this meant for Lindemann was that instead of working with other great physicists and making grand discoveries, he was sitting in his office, or the workshop, day after day trying to make sense of things which made no sense to anyone.
Two month after his meeting with Churchill, shortly after New Years, he started another day as he started almost every other: with a visit to the workshop in hopes of finding inspiration. It was a cold, blustery day and he clutched his work coat around him as he hurried down the gravel path to the large brick structure. He let himself inside and walked down to the particular section where his project was situated, rubbing his hands together to warm them up. The building was heated, but not nearly well enough.
His area had a wood and wire fence around it and inside, an entire Martian tripod machine, rising forty feet high, almost to the building’s rafters. It ought to have been the best prize in the entire world to work on, but after months, Lindemenn was growing to hate it. The thing towered there, mocking him and his inability to unlock its secrets. The machine was almost completely enclosed with scaffolding and many of its exterior plates had been removed, but it was still imposing.
He was surprised to find the gate in the enclosure unlocked and standing open. Two people were inside. He knew they wasn’t his assistants as he’d left them back at the main building so who…?
“Ah, there you are Freddy,” said one of them, spying him.
It was Eccles, of course, no one else around here dared to call him ‘Freddy’.
“Good morning, Bill,” he replied. “You’re up bright and early. What brings you here?”
“I’ve got someone I’d like you to meet,” he said, gesturing to the other person there with him. He was a young man with a long nose, a large forehead and a shock of very dark hair which was already receding. “This is Jimmy Chadwick. He just graduated from Victoria University of Manchester. He’s going to be working with you for a while.”
“Really?” said Lindemann.
“Yes, he’s just started here and I thought you could show him the ropes and get him up to speed.”
“I see. And he’ll be working… with me?” Not for me? He wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.
“Yes, Rutherford isn’t sure exactly where Jimmy will best fit in, so we intend to rotate him around a bit. We’ll start him with you and see what happens. All right?”
“Certainly.”
“Good, good. Well, carry on.” Eccles nodded to both of them and then left.
Lindemann stared at Chadwick and Chadwick stared back. Eventually Chadwick spoke: “I look forward to working with you, Professor.”
“Victoria University, eh?” replied Lindemann.
“Yes, sir. I did my final work under Rutherford, we were developing a means of quantifying the radiation given off from different samples of Radium. The paper is going to be published next year.”
Lindemann flinched. This young pup had worked directly with Rutherford? Lindemann still hadn’t even met the man yet! But that explained what Chadwick was doing here. Some pet of Rutherford’s; he’d have to treat him with kid gloves.
“It’s really something, isn’t it, sir?” said Chadwick leaning back and looking up at the Martian machine.
“Yes, yes it is.”
“Mr. Eccles said that you were working on the control system. Can you tell me about that, sir?”
“Uh, well, yes, I suppose I can. We may as well go up to the cockpit. Follow me—and be careful where you step.”
The cockpit, or control cabin as some called it, was in the machine’s head, all the way at the top. He led Chadwick up a series of ladders from level to level of the scaffolding. “I understand that the Martians don’t use wheels or gears or even fixed pivots at the joints, is that right?” Chadwick asked, pointing to the curious ‘hip’ joint of one of the legs. All the cover panels there had been removed, revealing the mechanism beneath.
“Yes, that’s true, but then that’s true for most living creatures here on earth. The joints are an amazingly intricate series of small metal plates which can slide over each other in different directions, all contained in a sort of elastic sheath. The actual motion is provided by bundles of fibers which can contract just like a muscle when a current is passed through them. Here, watch.” He climbed around onto a different platform to where one of the machine’s arms had been partially disassembled and some power leads had been attached. He flipped a few switches and then slowly tuned the knob on a rheostat. The arm twitched and then gradually rose. He reduced the current and it lowered back down to where it was before. Chadwick was gaping.
“That’s amazing, sir!”
“Just a parlor trick, Mr. Chadwick. No more amazing than using an electric current to make a severed frog’s leg move—and just about as useful.”
“But you can control their machine, sir. From what Mr. Eccles was saying it sounded like you couldn’t, but you can.”
“No, Mr. Chadwick, I cannot control their machines.”
“But…”
“Follow me,” said Lindemann, climbing higher. Up another ladder and then onto the platform surrounding the machine’s head. Here a large section of the machine’s skin had been removed allowing easy access to the control cabin.
“Watch your head,” he cautioned. “The Martians are a lot shorter than we are.” Indeed, the only way to access the control station was to wriggle forward on their bellies. Lindemann sometimes thought that perhaps the reason the senior researchers had given up on this was because it was so uncomfortable. He didn’t have any trouble with it and Chadwick eagerly squirmed in beside him. “Here we are,” he said.
Chadwick looked around, his face growing more puzzled by the second. “But… but where are the controls?”
Lindemann gestured to two small rods extending up from a console in front of them. The rods were about six inches long and an inch thick. They were made of some black substance, but they were covered with hundreds of small gold metal dots. “There they are.”
Chadwick tentatively reached out to touch them. Lightly at first, but then he took a firmer grip and tried to move them. They wouldn’t. “They don’t move?”
“No. They are fixed in place. They aren’t like the wheel of a ship or an automobile, or the control yoke of an aircraft. Controlling the machine doesn’t depend on some physical manipulation of the rods.”
“I… I was expecting switches and levers and dials and gauges and such.”
“Well, there aren’t any. If there were, that would make our job so much simpler. Actually, I take that back, there are some switches down inside the machine, but they are main cut-off switches for the power supply. Probably for maintenance or emergency shut-downs.”
“So how does it work?”
“That is the grand question. Those little gold pads on the rods are made of their resistance-free metal. The standing theory is that somehow the Martian is able to transmit its orders to the machine in a fashion similar to how an animal’s nervous system would function. We have found dead Martians in wrecked machines with their tendrils still wrapped around the rods. We think the pads in the rods functioned like neurons and transmit impulses from the Martian to the machine. Dissection of Martian corpses by some of the top biological scientists has determined that there is a high concentration of what appeared to be neurons in their tentacles. The conclusion is that the machines acted like an extension of the Martians’ own bodies.”
“That’s amazing!” said Chadwick.
“Yes, but also damn frustrating for us. If there were switches and levers and such, we could just try them and see what happens. But here, we don’t even know where to start. We’ve tried sending weak electrical pulses into the pads of the rods, but with no effect. The problem seems more like a biological one than mechanical. How do we simulate Martian brain impulses when we know neither the code nor the language? I’ve tried to familiarize myself with the subject of brain structure and nervous systems, reading the works of the experts, men like Muller, von Helmoltz, and Ramon y Cajal, but I’ve not come up with anything useful.” He didn’t add that Eccles was gently hinting that perhaps it was time to submit a final report and move on to something else. Lindemann would be happy to see the last of this puzzle, but he hated to have to report a failure.
“Yes, yes, I can see how frustrating this must be,” said Chadwick. “Even if you could figure out how to send signals through the control rods, it would probably all be gibberish to the machines at the other end. It would be like an English ship captain shouting commands down the voice pipe to an engine room crewed entirely by Chinese. Even if they could hear him, they wouldn’t know what he wanted.”
“Yes, exactly. Good analogy, that.”
“But if we cannot use their control system, might it be possible to substitute one of our own?”
“We’ve done that with their heat rays, and you saw what I could do with this machine’s arm. But simply switching something on isn’t the same as controlling it.”
“No, that’s true, but what if we…”
Chadwick then spent a half hour suggesting things which had already been tried before. Lindemann explained why his ideas wouldn’t work as patiently as he could, but he was getting rather tired of it when a sudden shout from down below caught their attention.
“Professor Lindemann, are you up there?”
Lindemann, happy for the interruption, wormed his way back out of the cockpit and saw that one of his assistants was on the floor below him. “Yes, what is it?”
“Special delivery for you, Professor. Came by motorcycle courier.” The man hesitated. “Uh, he said he would wait for a reply.”
“All right, I’ll come down.” He made his way down the ladders and took an envelope the man held out.
Lindemann’s eyebrows went up when he spotted the seal of the Admiralty on the envelope. Churchill? Who else did he know there? Who else there knew of him? He quickly opened the envelope and pulled out the contents. It was a single sheet, from the office of the First Lord, inviting him to attend a staff meeting at Admiralty House at two o’clock, two days hence. It was signed by an Edward Marsh, ‘at the direction of’ Churchill. He read it twice, in hopes of squeezing any additional information from the stubborn paper, but that was all there was. He snatched a blank sheet from a workbench and hastily penned a note acknowledging receipt of the message and assuring his eager attendance. He folded it, put it in another envelope, addressed it to the First Lord and gave it to his assistant to run it back to the waiting courier.
Lindemann went to the door of the workshop and watched the man scurry down the path. In the distance there was a motorcycle and rider waiting there. As he looked, his assistant handed the envelope to the rider, who placed it in a satchel and motored off.
“Something interesting, sir?” asked Chadwick, who had come up behind him.
“I hope so, Mr. Chadwick, I surely hope so.”