The Wind Between the Worlds Read Free Page A

worked from Rangoon to Nairobi—but always with men. Pat Trevor was the first of the few women superintendents he’d met. And while he had no illusions of masculine supremacy, he’d have felt a lot better working in shorts or nothing right now.
    Besides, a figure like Pat’s couldn’t be forgotten, even though denim coveralls were hardly supposed to be flattering. Cloth stretched tight across shapely hips had never helped a man concentrate on his work.
    She looked down at him, grinning easily. Her arm came up to toss her hair back, leaving a smudge on her forehead to match one on her nose. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but the smile seemed to illumine her gray eyes, and even the metal shavings in her brown hair couldn’t hide the red highlights.
    “One more bolt, Vic,” she told him. “Pheooh, I’m melting… So what happened to your wife?”
    He shrugged. “Married her lawyer right after the divorce. Last I knew, they were doing fine. Why not? It wasn’t her fault. Between hopping all over the world and spending my spare time trying to get on the moon rocket they were building, I wasn’t much of a husband.”
    Unconsciously, his lips twisted. He’d grown up before DuQuesne discovered the matter transmitter, when reaching the other planets of the Solar System had been the dream of most boys. Somehow, that no longer seemed important to people, now that the world was linked through Teleport Interstellar with races all across the Galaxy.
    M an had always been a topsyturvy race. He’d discovered gunpowder before chemistry, and battled his way up to the atom bomb in a scant few thousand years of civilization, before he had a worldwide government. Other races, apparently, developed space travel long before the matter-transmitter, and long after they’d achieved a genuine science of sociology.
    DuQuesne had started it by investigating some obscure extensions of Dirac’s esoteric mathematics. To check up on his work, he’d built a machine, only to find that it produced results beyond his expectations; matter in it simply seemed to disappear, releasing energy that was much less than it should have been, but still enough to destroy the machine.
    DuQuesne and his students had rechecked their math against the results and come up with an answer they didn’t believe. This time they built two machines and experimented with them until they worked together. When the machines were operating, anything within the small fields they generated simply changed places. At first it was just across a few yards, then miles—then half around the world. Matter was transmitted almost instantaneously from one machine to the other no matter how far apart they were.
    Such a secret couldn’t be kept, of course. DuQuesne gave a demonstration to fellow scientists at which a few reporters were present. They garbled DuQuesne’s explanation of electron waves covering the entire universe that were capable of identity shifts, but the accounts of the actual experiment were convincing enough. It meant incredibly fast shipping anywhere on the globe at an impossibly low cost.
    The second public demonstration played to a full house of newsmen and cold-headed businessmen. It worked properly—a hundred pounds of bricks on one machine changed place with a hundred pounds of coal on another. But then…
    Before their eyes, the coal disappeared and a round ball came into existence, suspended in midair. It turned around as if seeking something, an eyelike lens focused on the crowd. Then it darted down and knocked the power plug loose. Nothing could budge it, and no tricks to turn on power again worked.
    Even to the businessmen, it was obvious that this object, whatever it was, had not been made on Earth. DuQuesne himself suggested that somewhere some other race must have matter transmittal, and that this was apparently some kind of observer. Man, unable to reach even his own moon yet, had apparently made contact with intelligence from some other world,