The Repair

Part 5 & Epilogue

"Once in the fifties, when atomic energy was in vogue, and aliens were also coming into fashion, there was a similar hypothesis that the Tunguska was an alien's ship with a nuclear engine, so they searched the site for fallout vestiges of uranium and suchlike heavy fission elements, but found nothing unusual, of course. If there was a nuclear source of energy on board, it was a fusion, not a fission, and there was no chance to find pieces of superconductor too, because it had to evaporate in all the volume at the same time, not to mention that it didn't have to consist of any exotic elements and be very bulky. On the other hand, this accident must have hellishly ionized the atmosphere, which explains at last the mystery of two "white nights" reported right after it in Europe. So, what those expeditions should look for are traces of an electromagnetic pulse, if they can still be found or distinguished from other damaging factors."

"Why look for them if you already know everything?" smiled the editor. "But explain to me one thing. You described the energy storage, but what about the engine? How flying saucers are actually flying? Don't tell me you haven't contrived anything better than the good old photon drive."

"No. The paradox is the energy storage and the drive are not that different. There was another discovery, or rather the continuation of the same one. The unknown history has it that everything began in one of the peripheral European countries, still in that period of great rush, when scientists laid hands on cheap superconductors and were avidly experimenting with it in any imaginable way. As did that run-of-the-mill PhD in a laboratory of not too famous university. The discipline in such laboratories is never very strict and it so happened that the PhD's colleague, who was assisting at the experiment or just called in for a small talk at exactly the right time, was smoking. I don't remember what PhD was going to measure and what supposition he wanted to corroborate, but I bet he himself forgot about it then and there. Because he or his friend - the history is silent again on who was the first, and I think we can divide the kudos between them - noticed, that the smoke from his cigarette, or should we call it a pipe to make the story more picturesque, behaved somewhat strange. Getting into the space above the experiment installation, which, naturally, was cooled and cold, the smoke went not down, as it should have been, if somebody cared to think of it at all, but up, like in a chimney. That's how were discovered the gravitomagnetic fields or, speaking simply, antigravitation. However, it can't be called a pure serendipity, like it was with high-temperature superconductivity, because the theory of such fields happened to have been existing for several years before that moment. Nobody just paid attention to it. But the existence of the theory couldn't save the discovery, of course, even in our times when official scientists don't see facts if they do not agree with the theory, because they don't see any theory as well that doesn't agree with the official theory, this time with the holy script of saint Einstein. Such way of making business could not lead to other result that while in parallel world people have already forgot monstrous jet engines, in this world antigravitation was being 'impossible to corroborate or refute' for the next eight years, then I lost the trace of it completely. Can you understand this Jesuitic formula at all, when applied to the nature science?"

"You didn't tell what that PhD's experiment was," said the editor.

"Oh, he just rotated a disc of superconductor in a magnetic field. Thanks for the cookies."

The repairman began to get up from his chair, but was stopped by the editor's question:

"What about scientists? Why don't they protest? Don't they understand?"

"The science is big. Specialists must understand, I think. Though, to make at least some of them justice, or, better to say, giving them the credit of doubt, such operation on the planetary scale was something really unprecedented. Everyone knows that nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest, but to make what was manifest back a secret? - that's a little out of experience and even or imagination. On the other hand, only a fool can think that such technologies can be ever left without the tightest control, and control always means forbidding. It would be the same as to drop a hundred dollar bill on the busy sidewalk and hoping to find it there the next day. Here even the objective bias that must be intrinsic to scientists doesn't look like sufficient exoneration.