The Splitting Atoms
The storm had given way to a fine drizzle of rain by morning. Rick
stared out the window at the drenched land and considered the angles he
had been turning over in his mind.
The dry-ice theory wasn't conclusive, he knew, but it was a strong
indication. It didn't explain the Blue Ghost himself, but it could
explain the mist.
Dry ice is simply solid carbon dioxide, which is a gas at normal
temperatures. It becomes a solid at low temperatures, and because it is
harmless, inexpensive, and clean, it is widely used to keep things cold,
as in the case of ice-cream route men who have no means of
refrigeration.
When the temperature is raised, dry ice passes directly from the solid
to the gaseous state. When dropped into water it seems to boil, as the
comparative warmth of the water turns it to gas, and it creates a fine
white mist.
Rick was reasonably sure the Blue Ghost appeared in a carbon-dioxide
cloud, and he was beginning to have an inkling of how this was
accomplished--in principle, if not in specific terms. There were, after
all, he reasoned, only a few ways of creating a visible image. He was
going through the list of possibilities, eliminating them one by one.
If the Frostola man was connected with the ghostly appearances, it was
only necessary to keep track of that tall individual. This was Rick's
plan, necessarily postponed because of the storm.
"Wish we had a radio," he said. "I'd like to get a weather report."
Scotty grinned sympathetically. He knew that Rick was impatient when
there was detecting to be done.
"We really should have a battery radio," Dr. Miller said. "Power here is
not very dependable in stormy weather. I think I'll get one, although
that won't help now."
"What we need is a radio that doesn't depend on power," Jan Miller said.
"Then it would always be ready."
Rick stared at the girl, not really seeing her. A radio without power.
He remembered a long talk with Dr. John Gordon of the Spindrift staff
about the principles of radio. Dr. Gordon had sketched a circuit that
needed no power, and then had told Rick of how American ingenuity had
produced what soldiers called a "foxhole radio."
"I saw an old transformer in the woodshed," he said suddenly. "May I
have it, Dr. Miller?" At the scientist's nod, he addressed Jan. "I'll
bet you can find me a cardboard tube. Then, if I can have an old razor
blade and permission to take the receiver off the telephone for a while,
I can make a radio!"
The scientist, the girls, and Scotty looked at him with disbelief. "He's
gone off his rocker at last," Scotty muttered. "How can anyone make a
radio out of junk?"
"I'll need a pencil stub, a few screws, and a piece of board," Rick
added. "A safety pin would help, too."
"Rick Brant, you're being silly," Barby said firmly. "This is no time
for practical jokes!"
Dr. Miller held up his hand. "Peace, Barbara. Rick isn't joking. I
believe I see what he has in mind. Rick, I've never heard of this, but I
assume the oxide on the razor blade is to act as a rectifier?"
"That's right, sir. John Gordon told me about it."
The scientist rose. "Then it will work. Come on, gang. Let's build a
radio out of junk."
With many hands to help, the work went quickly. Under Dr. Miller's
direction, Scotty took the transformer out of its case and the girls
went to work unwinding the quantities of wire from its coils.
Rick found a razor blade and anchored it to a rectangular piece of
plywood he found in the woodshed. It was a double-edged blade, and one
small screw from Dr. Miller's junk box served to hold it. He wrapped a
short piece of insulated wire, one of the transformer's connecting
leads, under the screw before he tightened it. He sharpened the lead
pencil with his jackknife, uncoiled the safety pin, and pushed the sharp
end into the exposed lead at the upper end of the pencil, which was a
stub only two inches long.
The safety pin also was screwed to the board, the screw going through
the space in the pin's head. It was placed in such a position that the
sharp end of the lead pencil rested on the razor blade. Another short
piece of insulated wire was wrapped around the screw before it was
tightened. Rick bared the copper end of the wire in order to make a good
contact.
Jan found a cardboard roll that had once held paper towels. Rick cut off
about six inches of it and proceeded to wind it with wire from the
transformer. He wound evenly and tightly, until the roll was full of
wire. Then he stabbed a small hole in each end of the roll and pulled
the wires through to hold the coil in position. The roll--now a
coil--was tacked to the board with thumbtacks.
Dr. Miller, meanwhile, had taken the receiver from the telephone. Scotty
strung yards of wire around the room and handed the loose end to Rick.
That was the antenna. Then Scotty scraped a bright place on a water pipe
with his knife and twisted a length of wire tightly around it. That was
the ground.
Rick and Dr. Miller made connections. Rick gestured to the haywire
apparatus with some pride. "Behold. Where there was junk is now a
radio."
Jan Miller said, "I don't believe it!"
Rick had to laugh. "I'm not sure I do, either. But let's try." He sat
down at the table and held the receiver to his ear. With the other hand
he began the laborious job of locating a sensitive spot on the razor
blade.
Dr. Gordon had told him that only an occasional spot on a blade will
work. Some blades have no such spots. Others have many.
Rick was beginning to think that he had one of the no-spot kind, or that
the whole idea was wrong, when he heard what he thought was a voice. He
hastily concentrated on the spot, and in a few seconds music flooded
into the earphone. He had caught a disk jockey in the process of
introducing a record. For a long moment he listened, then held out the
earphone with a broad grin. "Anyone care to listen?"
Everyone did. They took turns, with each application of the phone to an
ear accompanied by expressions of astonishment.
Barby looked at her brother with new respect. "It's just fantastic! How
on earth does it work?"
Dr. Miller chuckled. "I'm sure you don't want a full course in
electronics, Barby. Actually, it's simple enough. The signal from the
radio station is an alternating current that sets up a corresponding
current in the antenna wire. This current goes through the coil and is
rectified--that is, it's turned into pulsating direct current--by the
razor blade. The receiver then converts it into audible sound."
Barby sighed. "I'll just have to take your word for it. But it's a
miracle!"
"It may seem like one, but it's really the same kind of circuit you find
in a crystal set," Rick explained. "The razor blade acts like the
crystal. That's all."
The young people took turns listening to the station, located in a town
nearby. Within the hour there was a weather report promising clearing
skies before the end of the day. Later, in a roundup of local
announcements, they heard that the annual Sons of the Old Dominion
feast, postponed because of the storm, would be held the next night.
"That means we start keeping an eye on the ice-cream man tomorrow
afternoon," Rick said.
Scotty nodded. "First, we'd better make a survey of the terrain. He has
to approach by the road, but there are a million places he could go once
he got into the mine area."
Rick looked out the window. "The rain has stopped. Maybe we can
reconnoiter this afternoon."
Fortunately, the Miller farm was well equipped with boots and overshoes.
The boys borrowed footgear suitable for any mud left by the rain and
started out after lunch.
The picnic area was washed clean of footprints and it was clear no one
had visited the area since the rain. They made their way to the top of
the hill above the mine and surveyed the cornfield that had been planted
on the hilltop field. The corn was not high. The plants came only to
their knees. Either it was a second planting or a poor crop. Rick
guessed that the second reason was probably the correct one, because the
field hadn't been cultivated recently.
"This isn't Miller land," he mused. "Wonder who is farming it?"
"It must be Hilleboe's property," Scotty returned. "Maybe he rents it to
some local farmer."
They walked to the downstream edge of the cornfield to where the woods
resumed. Rick had a feeling that they were wasting time. The ghost
couldn't be produced from such a distance by any means he had ever heard
of. The apparition had to be created right in the vicinity of the mine.
He spoke his thoughts aloud, and added, "Let's go back."
"Just a minute." Scotty pointed to a pile of brush. "Aren't those more
bags?"
They were, and of the same brand as those the boys had located on the
stream bank. Scotty picked one up and tested it between his fingers.
"Mighty curious. Water cures Portland cement. Turns it hard. These bags
aren't hard, even though some powder is still in them."
Rick examined the bags, his brows creased with bewilderment. "They must
have held something besides cement. But what? Fertilizer for the
cornfield, maybe? And why two caches?"
"If it were fertilizer, the bags near the mine could have been for the
field across the creek where the plane is," Scotty suggested. "These
could have been for this field. But I don't think it was fertilizer.
Isn't fertilizer soluble in water?"
Rick wasn't sure. "We can take the bag along," he said. "Maybe the
microscope will tell us something, or maybe Dr. Miller will know."
He had a feeling that the bags meant something. They had been hidden,
and only the erosion of rain had uncovered them, first at the creek
embankment and now here. The Frostola man had almost certainly taken the
others. Why? Unless they had something to do with the mystery? The bags
were worthless, of themselves.
They finished the survey of the area. It was clear that whoever produced
the ghost would have to enter by the road from town, because there was
no other road on the side of the hill in which the mine was located. To
be sure, the area could be reached by walking a considerable distance,
but Rick couldn't see a man with equipment doing much walking through
cornfields or woods filled with underbrush. He was certain the ghost had
to be produced by equipment of some kind, probably electric
powered--which meant batteries.
The problem was, where did the ghost producer operate? If dry ice was
used to produce the mist, how did it get into the pool? He had no
answers to these vital questions, nor did Scotty.
The dark-haired boy looked at him quizzically as they trudged back to
the farmhouse. "Did it ever occur to you that it's impossible for anyone
to produce the ghost? There is no place within sight of the pool where
anyone could hide, except in a tree, and a man with equipment wouldn't
go undetected by a gang at the picnic grounds."
"It did occur to me," Rick admitted. "But doesn't that put us back where
we started? Either the ghost is a genuine spook, or it's man-made. We're
not making many miles an hour in proving it's man-made, I admit. But if
it isn't, where does that leave us?"
Rick remembered the chase through the woods, ending with a bath in the
quarry. If they had been chasing a real ghost, and the ghost had led
them into danger deliberately, that meant ... He wasn't sure what it
meant except that it gave him goose pimples to think about it.
The electricity and telephone service had been restored by the time the
boys got back. Dr. Miller told them that he had phoned the tenant farmer
and arranged for the man to do a little inquiring in the town.
Rick displayed the bag. "Got a specimen," he told the group. He
explained their interest in the bag and asked Dr. Miller if he could
identify the contents.
The scientist examined the grayish powder from the bag. "It could be any
one of a hundred things," he said. "Let's see what we can find out about
it."
The farmhouse wasn't equipped for any kind of chemical analysis, but the
scientist did what was possible. He tried to dissolve the powder in
water, and failed. He tried vinegar, as the only acid available, and
failed. He tried ammonia, and failed.
Finally he said, "Well, it isn't cement, and it isn't fertilizer. It's
an inorganic substance. I suggest the microscope, Rick. It will at least
give us a clue to its structure, if not its identity."
Rick spread a small amount on a slide, switched on the substage light,
and put the slide on the stage. He focused, using his highest-power lens
combination which gave a magnification of three hundred times.
The powder was clearly crystalline, a mineral of some kind. Rick
couldn't identify it. He turned the eyepiece over to Dr. Miller. The
scientist had no better luck.
Barby asked, "Could it be an explosive?"
"No, Barby. This is powdered rock of some kind," Dr. Miller answered,
his eye at the instrument. "But why anyone should use powdered rock and
then hide the bags certainly escapes me. I can't imagine what the powder
is for. It isn't a powdered limestone, which might be used on the
fields. The crystal structure is wrong for that."
"Wish we had a geologist with us," Rick said. "This calls for an
expert." He stared helplessly at the microscope. There was only one more
test that could be made, and he saw no use in making it.
[Illustration: _"This calls for an expert," Rick said discouragingly_]
Included in the microscopy set Barby had given him was a gadget called a
spinthariscope, like a cone of black plastic with the sharp end of the
cone sliced off. In the wide end of the cone, inset so it wouldn't touch
the eye, was a lens. The small end was composed of a disk of special
chemical that fluoresced when struck by an atomic particle.
The little instrument used a principle dating back to the early history
of atomic energy, when scientists were exploring the nature of the
strange force the Curies had discovered in radium and polonium.
It was only his training in thoroughness of investigation that led Rick
to use the instrument. Since it was necessary for the eye to become
adapted to the darkness before using the instrument, he took it into a
closet and shut the door. As the pupils of his eyes dilated he worked by
touch, spreading a bit of powder on the end containing the special
sulfide screen.
He applied his eye to the lens, more as a matter of form than in the
expectation of seeing anything. For an instant he saw nothing, then, as
his eye adjusted, he let out a wild yell. There were hundreds of
scintillations, each caused by a nuclear particle or photon striking the
screen.
The sample was radioactive!