It was two weeks before Dr. Robert Arcot and his old friend Arthur
Morey, president of Transcontinental Airways, were invited to see what
their sons had been working on.
The demonstration was to take place in the radiation labs in the
basements of the Transcontinental building. Arcot, Wade, Morey, and
Fuller had brought the equipment in from the country place in Vermont
and set it up in one of the heavily-lined, vault-like chambers that were
used for radiation experiments.
The two older men were seated before a huge eighty-inch
three-dimensional television screen several floors above the level where
the actual demonstration was going on.
"There can't be anyone in the room, because of radiation burns,"
explained Arcot, junior. "We could have surrounded the thing with relux,
but then you couldn't have seen what's going on.
"I'm not going to explain anything beforehand; like magic, they'll be
more astounding before the explanation is given."
He touched a switch. The cameras began to operate, and the screen sprang
into life.
The screen showed a heavy table on which was mounted a small projector
that looked something like a searchlight with several heavy cables
running into it. In the path of the projector was a large lux metal
crucible surrounded by a ring of relux, and a series of points of relux
aimed into the crucible. These points and the ring were grounded. Inside
the crucible was a small ingot of coronium, the strong, hard, Venerian
metal which melted at twenty-five hundred degrees centigrade and boiled
at better than four thousand. The crucible was entirely enclosed in a
large lux metal case which was lined, on the side away from the
projector, with roughened relux.
Arcot moved a switch on the control panel. Far below them, a heavy relay
slammed home, and suddenly a solid beam of brilliant bluish light shot
out from the projector, a beam so brilliant that the entire screen was
lit by the intense glow, and the spectators thought that they could
almost feel the heat.
It passed through the lux metal case and through the coronium bar, only
to be cut off by the relux liner, which, since it was rough, absorbed
over ninety-nine percent of the rays that struck it.
The coronium bar glowed red, orange, yellow, and white in quick
succession, then suddenly slumped into a molten mass in the bottom of
the crucible.
The crucible was filled now with a mass of molten metal that glowed
intensely white and seethed furiously. The slowly rising vapors told of
the rapid boiling, and their settling showed that their temperature was
too high to permit them to remain hot--the heat radiated away too fast.
For perhaps ten seconds this went on, then suddenly a new factor was
added to the performance. There was a sudden crashing arc and a blaze of
blue flame that swept in a cyclonic twisting motion inside the crucible.
The blaze of the arc, the intense brilliance of the incandescent metal,
and the weird light of the beam of radiation shifted in a fantastic play
of colors. It made a strange and impressive scene.
Suddenly the relay sounded again; the beam of radiance disappeared as
quickly as it had come. In an instant, the blue violet glare of the
relux plate had subsided to an angry red. The violent arcing had
stopped, and the metal was cooling rapidly. A heavy purplish vapor in
the crucible condensed on the walls into black, flakey crystals.
The elder Arcot was watching the scene in the screen curiously. "I
wonder--" he said slowly. "As a physicist, I should say it was
impossible, but if it did happen, I should imagine these would be the
results." He turned to look at Arcot junior. "Well, go on with your
exhibition, son."
"I want to know your ideas when we're through, though, Dad," said the
younger man. "The next on the program is a little more interesting,
perhaps. At least it demonstrates a more commercial aspect of the
thing."
The younger Morey was operating the controls of the handling robots. On
the screen, a machine rolled in on caterpillar treads, picked up the lux
case and its contents, and carried them off.
A minute later, it reappeared with a large electromagnet and a relux
plate, to which were attached a huge pair of silver busbars. The relux
plate was set in a stand directly in front of the projector, and the
big electromagnet was set up directly behind the relux plate. The magnet
leads were connected, and a coil, in the form of two toruses
intersecting at right angles enclosed in a form-fitting relux case, had
been connected to the heavy terminals of the relux plate. An ammeter and
a heavy coil of coronium wire were connected in series with the coil,
and a kilovoltmeter was connected across the terminals of the relux
plate.
As soon as the connections were completed, the robot backed swiftly out
of the room, and Arcot turned on the magnet and the ray projector.
Instantly, there was a sharp deflection of the kilovoltmeter.
"I haven't yet closed the switch leading into the coil," he explained,
"so there's no current." The ammeter needle hadn't moved.
Despite the fact that the voltmeter seemed to be shorted out by the
relux plate, the needle pointed steadily at twenty-two. Arcot changed
the current through the magnet, and the reading dropped to twenty.
The rays had been on at very low power, the air only slightly ionized,
but as Arcot turned a rheostat, the intensity increased, and the air in
the path of the beam shone with an intense blue. The relux plate,
subject now to eddy currents, since there was no other path for the
energy to take, began to heat up rapidly.
"I'm going to close the switch into the coil now," said Arcot. "Watch
the meters."
A relay snapped, and instantly the ammeter jumped to read 4500 amperes.
The voltmeter gave a slight kick, then remained steady. The heavy
coronium spring grew warm and began to glow dully, while the ammeter
dropped slightly because of the increased resistance. The relux plate
cooled slightly, and the voltmeter remained steady.
"The coil you see is storing the energy that is flowing into it," Arcot
explained. "Notice that the coronium resistor is increasing its
resistance, but otherwise there is little increase in the back E.M.F.
The energy is coming from the rays which strike the polarized relux
plate to give the current."
He paused a moment to make slight adjustments in the controls, then
turned his attention back to the screen.
The kilovoltmeter still read twenty.
"Forty-five hundred amperes at twenty thousand volts," the elder Arcot
said softly. "Where is it going?"
"Take a look at the space within the right angle of the torus coils,"
said Arcot junior. "It's getting dark in there despite the powerful
light shed by the ionized air."
Indeed, the space within the twin coils was rapidly growing dark; it was
darkening the image of the things behind it, oddly blurring their
outlines. In a moment, the images were completely wiped out, and the
region within the coils was filled with a strangely solid blackness.
"According to the instruments," young Arcot said, "we have stored
fifteen thousand kilowatt hours of energy in that coil and there seems
to be no limit to how much power we can get into it. Just from the power
it contains, that coil is worth about forty dollars right now, figured
at a quarter of a cent per kilowatt hour.
"I haven't been using anywhere near the power I can get out of this
apparatus, either. Watch." He threw another switch which shorted around
the coronium resistor and the ammeter, allowing the current to run into
the coil directly from the plate.
"I don't have a direct reading on this," he explained, "but an indirect
reading from the magnetic field in that room shows a current of nearly a
_hundred million amperes!_"
The younger Morey had been watching a panel of meters on the other side
of the screen. Suddenly, he shouted: "Cut it, Arcot! The conductors are
setting up a secondary field in the plate and causing trouble."
Instantly, Arcot's hand went to a switch. A relay slammed open, and the
ray projector died.
The power coil still held its field of enigmatic blackness.
"Watch this," Arcot instructed. Under his expert manipulation, a small
robot handler rolled into the room. It had a pair of pliers clutched in
one claw. The spectators watched the screen in fascination as the robot
drew back its arm and hurled the pliers at the black field with all its
might. The pliers struck the blackness and rebounded as if they had hit
a rubber wall. Arcot caused the little machine to pick up the pliers and
repeat the process.
Arcot grinned. "I've cut off the power to the coil. Unlike the ordinary
induction coil, it isn't necessary to keep supplying power to the thing;
it's a static condition.
"You can see for yourself how much energy it holds. It's a handy little
gadget, isn't it?" He shut off the rest of the instruments and the
television screen, then turned to his father.
"The demonstration is over. Got any theories, Dad?"
The elder Dr. Arcot frowned in thought. "The only thing I can think of
that would produce an effect like that is a stream of positrons--or
contraterrene nuclei. That would explain not only the heating, but the
electrical display.
"As far as the coil goes, that's easy to understand. Any energy storage
device stores energy in the strain in space; here you can actually see
the strain in space." Then he smiled at his son. "I see my ex-laboratory
assistant has come a long way. You've achieved controlled, usable atomic
energy through total annihilation of mass. Right?"