The Star Read Free Page A

wrote books and stories about its imminent achievement, would be a pushover. He opened his little black bag and produced the latest pile of sauceriana.
    It was quite a collection. There were some interesting photographs of flying saucers made by an amateur astronomer who lives right beside Greenwich Observatory, and whose busy camera has recorded such a remarkable variety of spaceships, in all shapes and sizes, that one wonders what the professionals next door are doing for their salaries. Then there was a long statement from a gentleman in Texas who had just had a casual chat with the occupants of a saucer making a wayside halt on route to Venus. Language, it seemed, had presented no difficulties: it had taken about ten minutes of arm-waving to get from ‘Me—Man. This—Earth’ to highly esoteric information about the use of the fourth dimension in space travel.
    The masterpiece, however, was an excited letter from a character in South Dakota who had actually been offered a lift in a flying saucer, and had been taken for a spin round the moon. He explained at some length how the saucer travelled by hauling itself along magnetic lines of force, rather like a spider going up its thread.
    It was at this point that Harry Purvis rebelled. He had been listening with a professional pride to tales which even he would never have dared to spin, for he was an expert at detecting the yield point of his audience’s credulity. At the mention of lines of magnetic force, however, his scientific training overcame his frank admiration of these latter-day Munchausens, and he gave a snort of disgust.
    ‘That’s a lot of nonsense,’ he said. ‘I can prove it to you—magnetism’s my speciality.’
    ‘Last week,’ said Drew sweetly, as he filled two glasses of ale at once, ‘you said that crystal structure was your speciality.’
    Harry gave him a superior smile.
    ‘I’m a general specialist,’ he said loftily. ‘To get back to where I was before that interruption, the point I want to make is that there’s no such thing as a line of magnetic force. It’s a mathematical fiction—exactly on a par with lines of longitude or latitude. Now if anyone said they’d invented a machine that worked by pulling itself along parallels of latitude, everybody would know that they were talking drivel. But because few people know much about magnetism, and it sounds rather mysterious, crackpots like this guy in South Dakota can get away with the tripe we’ve just been hearing.’
    There’s one charming characteristic about the ‘White Hart’—we may fight among each other, but we show an impressive solidarity in times of crisis. Everyone felt that something had to be done about our unwelcome visitor: for one thing, he was interfering with the serious business of drinking. Fanaticism of any kind casts a gloom over the most festive assembly, and several of the regulars had shown signs of leaving despite the fact that it was still two hours to closing time.
    So when Harry Purvis followed up his attack by concocting the most outrageous story that even he had ever presented in the ‘White Hart’, no one interrupted him or tried to expose the weak points in his narrative. We knew that Harry was acting for us all—he was fighting fire with fire, as it were. And we knew that he wasn’t expecting us to believe him (if indeed he ever did) so we just sat back and enjoyed ourselves.
    ‘If you want to know how to propel spaceships,’ began Harry, ‘and mark you, I’m not saying anything one way or the other about the existence of flying saucers—then you must forget magnetism. You must go straight to gravity—that’s the basic force of the Universe, after all. But it’s going to be a tricky force to handle, and if you don’t believe me just listen to what happened only last year to a scientist down in Australia. I shouldn’t really tell you this, I suppose, because I’m not sure of its security classification, but if there’s any trouble