The war had ended, radar was king, and the Soviet sound ray weapons were shown to be camera tricks and propaganda. The Leathershed fraternity had been beaming sound around the English countryside for over a decade with mixed results, and now an England in debt could no longer afford what was increasingly looking like an outside chance.
The saving grace, some said, was that the ministry gave the project time to disband. The pilots left first, quickly followed by the ground crew, taken in the dead of night in dark, slug-like, Eastern Bloc sedans .
“Heroes of the cold war” the family telegrams said.
The Machines were disassembled in great haste and hidden in plain sight; who would suspect ammeter dials and banks of switches? Twisted and warped creations of spare parts were carried very carefully by fearful perspiring militia and placed in the same unmarked cars. The tech crew went its separate ways, going home for the holidays. It was all over by Christmas.
The Machines had resisted being taken apart. Components clung together for no apparent reason and fell off test benches back into place, only to be separated again. Voltaic cells began to gurgle, jokes were made about hauntings and ghosts in the Machine. New waveforms emerged to be shaped through the envelope of time.
A new crew were sworn in and began to de-code the language left behind.
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