James Blish - Tomb Tapper

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/James%20Blish%20-%20Tomb%20Tapper.txt

Tomb Tapper

THE DISTANT glare of the atomic explosion had already faded

from the sky as McDonough's car whirred away from the

blacked-out town of Port Jervis and turned north. He was

making fifty m.p.h. on U.S. Route 209 using no lights but

his parkers, and if a deer should bolt across the road ahead

of him he would never see it until the impact. 'It was hard

enough to see the road.

But he was thinking, not for the first time, of the old joke

about the man who tapped train wheels.

He had been doing it, so the story ran, for thirty years. On

every working day be would go up and down both sides of

every locomotive that pulled into the yards and hit the

wheels with a hammer; first the drivers, then the trucks. Each

time, he would cock his head, as though listening for some-

thing in the sound. On the day of his retirement, he was

given a magnificent dinner, as befitted a man with long senior-

ity in the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmenand somebody

stopped to ask him what he had been tapping for all those

years.

He had cocked his head as though listening for something,

but evidently nothing came. "I don't know," he said.

That's me, McDonough thought. I tap tombs, not trains.

But what am I listening for?

The speedometer said he was close to the turnoff for the

airport, and he pulled the dimmers on. There it was. There

was at first nothing to be seen, as the headlights swept along

the dirt road, but a wall of darkness deep as all night,

faintly edged at the east by the low domed hills of the

Neversink valley. Then another pair of lights snapped on

behind him, on the main highway, and came jolting after

McDonough's car, clear and sharp in the dust clouds he had

raised.

He swung the car to a stop beside the airport fence and

killed the lights; the other car followed. In the renewed black-

ness the faint traces of dawn on the hills were wiped out, as

though the whole universe had been set back an hour. Then

the yellow eye of a flashlight opened in the window of the

other car and stared into his face.

He opened the door. "Martinson?" he said tentatively.

"Right here," the adjutant's voice said. The flashlight's

oval spoor swung to the ground. "Anybody else with you?"

"No. You?"

"No. Go ahead and get your equipment out. Ill open up

the shack."

The oval spot of light bobbed across the parking area and

came to uneasy rest on the combination padlock which held

the door of the operations shack secure. McDonough flipped

the dome light of his car on long enough to locate the

canvas sling which held the components of his electro-

encephalograph, and eased the sling out onto the sand.

He had just slammed the car door and taken up the

burden when little chinks of light sprang into being in the

blind windows of the shack. At the same time, cars came

droning out onto the field from the opposite side, four of

them, each with its wide-spaced unblinking slits of paired

parking lights, and ranked themselves on either side of the

landing strip. It would be dawn before long, but if the planes

were ready to go before dawn, the cars could light the strip

with their brights.

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We're fast, McDonough thought, with brief pride. Even the

Air Force thinks the Civil Air Patrol is just a bunch of

amateurs, but we can put a mission in the air ahead of any

other CAP squadron in this county. We can scramble.

He was getting his night vision back now, and a quick

glance showed him that the windsock was flowing straight

out above the black, silent hangar against the pearly false

dawn. Aloft, the stars were paling without any cloud-dimming,

or even much twinkling. The wind was steady north up the

valley; ideal flying weather.

Small lumpy figures were running across the field from the

parked cars toward the shack. The squadron was scrambling.

"Mac!" Martinson shouted from inside the shack. "Where

are you? Get your junk in here and get started!"

McDonough slipped inside the door, and swung his BEG

components onto the chart table. Light was pouring into the

briefing room from the tiny office, dazzling after the long

darkness. In the briefing room the radio biinked a tiny red

eye, but the squadron's communications officer hadn't yet

arrived to answer it. In the office, Martinson's voice rumbled

softly, urgently, and the phone gave him back thin un-

intelligible noises, like an unteachable parakeet.

Then, suddenly, the adjutant appeared at the office door

and peered at McDonough. "What are you waiting for?" he

said. "Get that mind reader of yours into the Cub on the

double."

"What's wrong with the Aeronca? It's faster."

"Water in the gas; she ices up. We'll have to drain the

tank. This is a hell of a time to argue." Martinson jerked

open the squealing door which opened into the hangar, his

hand groping for the light switch. McDonough followed him,

supporting his sling with both hands, his elbows together.

Nothing is quite so concentratedly heavy as an electronics

chassis with a transformer mounted on it, and four of them

make a back-wrenching load.

The adjutant was already hauling the servicing platform

across the concrete floor to the cowling of the Piper Cub.

"Get your stuff set," he said. "I'll fuel her up and check the

oil."

"All right. Doesn't look like she needs much gas."

"Don't you ever stop talkin'? Let's move."

McDonough lowered his load to the cold floor beside the

plane's cabin, feeling a brief flash of resentment. In daily

life Martinson was a job printer who couldn't, and didn't,

give orders to anybody, not even his wife. Well, those were

usually the boys who let rank go to their heads, even in a

volunteer outfit. He got to work.

Voices sounded from the shack, and then Andy Persons,

the commanding officer, came bounding over the sill, followed

by two sleepy-eyed cadets. "What's up?" he shouted. "That

you, Martinson?"

"It's me. One of you cadets, pass me up that can. Andy,

get the doors open, hey? "There's a Russki bomber down north

of us, somewhere near Howells. Part of a flight that was

making a run on Schenectady."

"Did they get it?"

"No, they overshot, way overtook out Kingston instead.

Stewart Field hit them just as they turned to regroup, and

knocked this baby down on the first pass. We're supposed

The rest of the adjutant's reply was lost in a growing,

echoing roar, as though they were all standing underneath a

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vast trestle over which all the railroad trains in the world

were crossing at once. The sixty-four-foot organ reeds of jets

were being blown in the night zenith above the fieldanother

hunting pack, come from Stewart Field to avenge the hydro-

gen agony that had been Kingston.

His head still inside the plane's greenhouse, McDonough

listened transfixed. Like most CAP officers, he was too old to

be a jet pilot, his reflexes too slow, his eyesight too far over

the line, his belly muscles too soft to take the five-gravity

turns; but now and then he thought about what it might be

like to ride one of those flying blowtorches, cruising at six

hundred miles an hour before a thin black wake of kerosene

fumes, or being followed along the ground at top speed by

the double wave-front of the "supersonic bang." It was a

noble notion, almost as fine as that of piloting the one-man

Niagara of power that was a rocket fighter.

The noise grew until it seemed certain that the invisible

Jets were going to bullet directly through the hangar, and

then dimmed gradually.

"The usual orders?" Persons shouted up from under the

declining roar. "Find the plane, pump the live survivors, pick

the corpses' brains? Who else is up?"

"Nobody," Martinson said, coming down from the ladder

and hauling it clear of the plane. "Middletown squadron's

deactivated; Montgomery hasn't got a plane; Newburgh hasn't

got a field."

"Warwick has Group's L-16"

"They snapped the undercarriage off it last week," Martin-

son said with gloomy satisfaction. "It's our baby, as usual.

Mac, you got your ghoul-tools all set in there?"

"In a minute," McDonough said. He was already wearing

the Walter goggles, pushed back up on his helmet, and the

detector, amplifier, and power pack of the EEG were secure

in their frames on the platform behind the Cub's rear seat.

The "hair net"the flexible network of electrodes which he

would jam on the head of any dead man whose head had

survived the bomber crashwas connected to them and hung

in its clips under the seat, the leads strung to avoid fouling

the plane's exposed control cables. Nothing remained to do

now but to secure the frequency analyzer, which was the

heaviest of the units and had to be bolted down just forward

of the rear joystick so that its weight would not shift in

flight. If the apparatus didn't have to be collimated after

every flight, it could be left in the planebut it did, and

that was that.

"O.K.," he said, pulling his head out of the greenhouse.

He was trembling slightly. These tomb-tapping expeditions

were hard on the nerves. No matter how much training in the

art of reading a dead mind you may have had, the actual

experience is different, and cannot be duplicated from the

long-stored corpses of the laboratory. The newly dead brain

is an inferno, almost by definition.

"Good," Persons said. "Martinson, you'll pilot. Mac, keep

on the air; we're going to refuel the Airoknocker and get it

up by ten o'clock if we can. In any case we'll feed you any

spottings we get from the Air Force as fast as they come in.

Martinson, refuel at Montgomery if you have to; don't waste

time coming back here. Got it?"

"Roger," Martinson said, scrambling into the front seat and

buckling his safety belt. McDonough put his foot hastily into

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the stirrup and swung into the back seat.

"Cadets!" Persons said. "Pull chocks! Roll 'eri"

Characteristically, Persons himself did the heavy work of

lifting and swinging the tail. The Cub bumped off the apron

and out on the grass into the brightening morning.

"Switch off!" the cadet at the nose called. "Gasi Brakes!"

"Switch off, brakes," Martinson called back. "Mac, where

to? Got any ideas?"

While McDonough thought about it, the cadet pulled the

prop backwards through four turns. "Brakes! Contact!"

"Let's try up around the Otisville tunnel. If they were

knocked down over Howells, they stood a good chance to

wind up on the side of that mountain."

Martinson nodded and reached a gloved hand over his

head. "Contact!" he shouted, and turned the switch. The cadet

swung the prop, and the engine barked and roared; at

McDonough's left, the duplicate throttle slid forward slightly

as the pilot "caught" the engine. McDonough buttoned up the

cabin, and then the plane began to roll toward the far, dim

edge of the grassy field.

The sky got brighter. They were off again, to tap on another

man's tomb, and ask of the dim voice inside it what memories

it had left unspoken when it had died.

The Civil Air Patrol is, and has been since 1941, an auxiliary

of the United States Air Force, active in coastal patrol and in

air-sea rescue work. By 1954when its ranks totaled more

than eighty thousand men and women, about fifteen thousand

of them licensed pilotsthe Air Force had nerved itself up

to designating CAP as its Air Intelligence arm, with the job

of locating downed enemy planes and radioing back infor-

mation of military importance.

Aerial search is primarily the task of planes which can fly

low and slow. Air Intelligence requires speed, since the kind

of tactical information an enemy wreck may offer can grow

cold .within a few hours. The CAP'S planes, most of them

single-engine, private-flying models, had already been proven

ideal aerial search instruments; the CAP'S radio net, with its

more than seventy-five hundred fixed, mobile and airborne

stations, was more than fast enough to get information to

wherever it was needed while it was still hot.

But the expected enemy, after all, was Russia; and how

many civilians, even those who know how to fly, navigate, or

operate a radio transmitter, could ask anyone an intelligent

question in Russian, let alone understand the answer?

It was the astonishingly rapid development of electrical

methods for probing the brain which provided the answer

in particular the development, in the late fifties, of flicker-

stimulus aimed at the visual memory. Abruptly, EEG tech-

nicians no longer needed to use language at all to probe the

brain for visual images, and read them; they did not even

need to know how their apparatus worked, let alone the brain.

A few moments of flicker into the subject's eyes, on a fre-

quency chosen from a table, and the images would come

swarming into the operator's toposcope gogglesthe fre-

quency chosen without the slightest basic knowledge of electro-

physiology, as a woman choosing an ingredient from a

cookbook is ignorant ofand indifferent tothe chemistry

involved in the choice.

It was that engineering discovery which put tomb-tappers

into the back seats of the CAP'S putt-putts when the war

finally beganfor the images in the toposcope goggles did not

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stop when the brain died.

The world at dawn, as McDonough saw it from three

thousand feet, was a world of long sculptured shadows, almost

as motionless and three-dimensional as a lunar landscape near

the daylight terminator. The air was very quiet, and the Cub

droned as gently through the blue haze as any bee, gaining

altitude above the field in a series of wide climbing turns. At

the last turn the plane wheeled south over a farm owned by

someone Martinson knew, a man already turning his acres

from the seat of his tractor, and Martinson waggled the plane's

wings at him and got back a wave like the quivering of an

insect's antenna. It was all deceptively normal.

Then the horizon dipped below the Cub's nose again and

Martinson was climbing out of the valley. A lake passed below

them, spotted with islands, and with the brown barracks of

Camp Cejwin, once a children's summer camp but now full

of sleeping soldiers. Martinson continued south, skirting Port

Jervis, until McDonough was able to pick up the main line of

the Erie Railroad, going northeast toward OtisviUe and

Howells. The mountain through which the Otisville tunnel ran

was already visible as a smoky hulk to the far left of the

dawn.

McDonough turned on the radio, which responded with

a rhythmical sputtering; the Cub's engine was not adequately

shielded. In the background, the C.O.'s voice was calling

them: "Huguenot to L-4. Huguenot to L-4."

"L-4 here. We read you, Andy. We're heading toward

Otisville. Smooth as glass up here. Nothing to report yet."

"We read you weak but clear. We're dumping the gas in

the Airoknocker crackle ground. We'll follow as fast as pos-

sible. No new AF spottings yet. If crackle, call us right away.

Over."

"L-4 to Huguenot. Lost the last sentence, Andy. Cylinder

static. Lost the last sentence. Please read it back."

"All right, Mac. If you see the bomber, crackle right away.

Got it? If you see crackle, call us right away. Got it? Over."

"Got it, Andy. L-4 to Huguenot, over and out."

"Over and out."

The railroad embankment below them went around a wide

arc and separated deceptively into two. One of the lines had

been pulled up years back, but the marks of the long-ago

stacked and burned ties still striped the gravel bed, and it

would have been impossible for a stranger to tell from the

air whether or not there were any rails running over those

marks; terrain from the air can be deceptive unless you know

what it is supposed to look like, rather than what it does look

like. Martinson, however, knew as well as McDonough which

of the two rail spurs was the discontinued one, and banked

the Cub in a gentle climbing turn toward the mountain.

The rectangular acres wheeled slowly and solemnly below

them, brindled with tiny cows as motionless as toys. After

a while the deceptive spur line turned sharply east into a

woolly green woods and never came out again. The mountain

got larger, the morning ground haze rising up its nearer side,

as though the whole forest were smoldering sullenly there.

Martinson turned his head and leaned it back to look out

of the corner of one eye at the back seat, but McDonough

shook his head. There was no chance at all that the crashed

bomber could be on this side of that heavy-shouldered mass

of rock.

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James Blish - Tomb Tapper

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