That's right--a Cooling gun.
But let it be said that because I was once a war scientist, my
inventiveness must therefore tend toward weapons and I should be
strongly tempted to reach for the nearest one available. The term war
scientist has been used so much, and has grown so commonplace, that it
has become universally accepted as the label for anyone who spent as
little as six weeks in the old AEC. I was in it for six years, and I
voluntarily walked out.
The official policies and inter-agency politics of that era seem of
little consequence now, when we have three permanent space satellites
circling the Earth and one of them is Russian. We're no longer in a
weapons race; both sides have reached the Ultimate Weapon in that
contest. Nobody's hiding or betraying classified secrets any more.
There's all that silicon-rich basalt waiting to be cheaply processed
out on the Moon, if we can only get there....
Back in '69, the official news releases were still boasting how much
bigger was each new toy we rolled out of the workshop, how much
more terrible destruction it would wreak than the last one. That was
hogwash dished out by our PR boys (and, on the other side, by the Reds'
Propaganda Ministry) simply because people didn't know any better.
Actually, our toys that made the biggest bang were the worst flops as
weapons.
You don't conquer an enemy by exterminating him. A hundred million
corpses are no problem--just use bulldozers and they're out of the way.
But a hundred million living, breathing, freezing, starving, filthy and
ragged human beings can raise one hell of an uproar. And they usually
do. Some of us felt that we wouldn't need to knock off even a third of
Russia's major cities. Much less, in fact.
Dr. Charles Whitney made the mistake of saying so. And they canned him.
The scuttlebutt was that Doc's conscience backfired. I know better; I
saw the explosion. It was his patience, not his conscience.
Anyway, I turned in my resignation two weeks later. I walked out, kept
my mouth shut and settled down to a small college professorship. I
mention these events now simply because I believe it was there that the
development of the Cooling gun actually started.
* * * * *
I had begun to see what devastating weapons could never achieve. They
_had_ deterred warfare, at least up to that August of 1969, by their
threat of utter destruction--and perhaps Whitney deserved to get
canned--but they offered no guarantee for the future. And they couldn't
liberate a conquered nation or protect people from a dictator's secret
police.
It was time we had something better. (We did, of course, but only a
small part of the AEC was in on the development of atomic rockets.)
Until we did, I could sense that we were simply going through the
motions.
But it all began to go places fast with that cold research we were
dabbling in, last semester. In fact, it was my fault that General
Atomics tossed that little problem into our Cold Lab here at Webster
Tech--my own past service in the AEC, my rather unusual background
combining nuclear physics and biochemistry, and the post-grad crew I've
managed to accumulate under my professorial wing.
The whole deal was shoveled obligingly into my Christmas stocking and
the rest of the faculty obligingly left me to play with it--providing I
continued to conduct my regular classes, of course.
Perhaps it's just as well I kept my hand in, though, because that line
of research got rapidly nowhere. We found that materials which have
their temperatures reduced to near-absolute zero are just plain cold.
Bring them into room temperature and strange things happen sometimes
that isn't just them trying to warm up. It isn't friction-loss and it
isn't radiation damage and it isn't entropy.
It shows.
There's a band of radiant energy somewhere between ultrasonics and
radiant heat that hits fast and goes deep, and comes out just as
fast, and it gets triggered off by whatever this is that happens with
near-absolute zero objects subjected to room temperature. But the whole
thing is so negligible that for most practical purposes it can be
ignored.
Finding _that_ out cost General Atomics thirty thousand dollars,
but our kids in the Cold Lab had a ball rigging the Mad Scientist's
super-disintegrator gizmo that reproduced the phenomenon.
Then, that night--it's nearly four months ago now--I was alone in the
lab, just switched off the lights, about to close up and go home. And I
stumbled over the corner of the thing. Scrambling up, somehow I put my
foot into it. And reaching out to grasp its frame, to steady myself, my
hand hit the switch. It went on and I went out.
It was still on--I thought--when I regained consciousness, spraddled
out on the concrete floor. I pulled the switch open and jerked the cord
out of the wall socket.
* * * * *
When I got home, there wasn't a bruise or a bump on my noggin. Nor the
faintest sign of a burn anywhere on my foot or leg or even on the sole
of my shoe.
That was a Tuesday night.
The next day, the lab remained closed. But that night, I went in,
switched the lights on and studied the machine. It showed absolutely
no sign of damage, no burned insulation, nothing. I stuck my hand into
it and closed the switch. It came on with its usual quiet hum. Nothing
happened.
It was almost a week before I heard that the janitor was still
wondering who'd blown all the campus fuses on Tuesday night. Then I
remembered that I hadn't switched the lights back on when I regained
consciousness.
I had been blinded when I switched them off, had stumbled over the
machine, fallen, all the rest of it. But I'd come to with night vision,
naturally. I saw well enough then by the moonlight streaming in the lab
windows. All the lights--the machine, too--could have been off, with
the fuses blown, without my noticing it. I had assumed the machine was
on because its switch was closed, had opened the switch and jerked out
the cord plug.
What happened had therefore required a tremendous spurt of juice in
the circuits, or else a heck of a lot less juice than we carry in our
lab outlets. So I took home the prints on the rig and began making
changes. Which led to more changes. Which resulted in some rather
complicated mathematics to which we scientific chaps resort when the
kind we teach in colleges just won't work out right. I got it: a very
low power-input. And I got more.
The thing is a sort of invisible ray. It can only be emitted,
or broadcast, as a narrow beam from the muzzle-coils of a very
fancy-looking electronic rig. Low power is a must; more juice not only
heats up the rig and smokes insulation, but it won't shoot the beam.
I tested it on the black tulips (Biochemical Research Project 187)
which I got to close up by the clock, not by the Sun, last year
(Project 187-A) and their blossoms closed each time the beam touched
them. The purple mushrooms which fluff their tops in radioactivity
showed no effects.
It works on a simple "A" battery. But there's a transistor hookup that
behaves like no transistor. Its molecular structure vibrates, which it
shouldn't, and emits a sharp, keening note in the vicinity of E flat. A
rather bulky muffler would be required, I'm afraid, to get rid of that
noise.
But the oddest thing, technically, is that invisible ray-beam. It
hasn't any of the effects of electric shock. I'll not go into the
electro-neurological aspects of that--nobody could understand it
except, just possibly, a neurologist--but the simple fact is that this
ray puts a victim to sleep instantly _and it doesn't do anything else_!
No blockages or convulsions of nerve ganglia, not even a temporary
catharsis of "mild" shock! Apparently it gallops up the "white
matter" of the nervous system quite harmlessly, then smacks the "gray
matter"--the brain, the spinal column--a good wallop. Painlessly.
In short, the victim just flops over and snores up a half-hour or so,
and then awakens as if from a short nap, though perhaps with some
puzzlement. There is no injury whatsoever.
* * * * *
Naturally I wanted to find out how the Cooling Effect worked and
why--though I may never learn _what_ it is. Hypnosis? Artificially
induced, instantaneous sleep? (Victims can be handled without
awakening.) Of course, I was curious. I'd have gone through it step by
step for my own satisfaction, even if somebody else had already done it
before.
Nobody had--and it wasn't easy. During the rest of the term, even
through final exams, I devoted every spare moment to the Cooling
Effect. Even so, it took another two months' hot sweat--the summer
vacation's practically gone now--to get those final diagrams onto my
drawing board.
But once I did, there it was, at least its basic circuits and
components. All I needed was to juggle them around, coax them into a
slim, tubular case, put a carved butt on it containing the "A" battery
and give it a push-button trigger. With that data, any good bench-hand
in an electrical repair shop could have done the job. I fashioned it
out of plastic and odds and ends in my basement laboratory.
A glance in the telephone Red Book gave me the number of a local
breeding farm and a call soon brought a pair of fat, inquisitive
guinea pigs in a small, wire-screened carrying cage. Beyond the patio
wall, my house sides directly on open pasturage, and beyond that,
lower in the valley, the alfalfa field begins. With a brisk pacing off
of a base-line and some rough, splay-thumbed triangulation, I soon
determined my new weapon's effectiveness from point-blank range to a
thousand yards--on guinea pigs, that is.
At nine hundred yards, it still knocked them over for the count. At a
thousand yards, it had no effect whatever, so far as I could determine
through field glasses. The animals gave no sign that they even noticed
it. That, plus the nature of the mechanism, indicates its application
is definitely limited. Whether you make it small enough to fit a lady's
purse or as big as an atomic cannon, its maximum effective range will
still remain 900 yards. And not just on guinea pigs.
I already knew from my own experience what it does to a man at close
range. Blowing the fuses on the whole campus had been the real danger
there, however. Had it been the slightest bit different, even to the
position of my foot in that big machine, I should certainly have been
electrocuted that night.
That was the first time it almost killed me.
* * * * *
The Cooling Effect is worthless as an anesthetic for surgery. While the
sleeping guinea pigs don't awaken when I pick them up out of their
cage and handle them, even pulling their legs, they do struggle. They
resist, like sleeping animals, not wanting to be disturbed. Still, I
pinched them and bounced them and they invariably slept through an
approximate half-hour. It's shock, and it isn't. It's sleep, and it
isn't.
But I certainly knew it was a weapon. A new weapon. And man alive,
_what_ a weapon!
I turned the guinea pigs loose in the patio, let them scamper, then
tumbled them both with a quick sweep of the beam.
* * * * *
One man in ambush could knock over a whole company of marching troops!
The guns could be mounted on tripods with a rotating mechanism that
kept them sweeping the area constantly. Anyone who approached within
900 yards would go down--then wake up, climb back to their feet, and go
down again every half-hour. Man or animal. The guns could be strung out
to cover a whole sector, then wired to a single main switch--and one
lone observer could stop an infantry advance.
But they wouldn't stop guided missiles or even mortar fire. Nor would
they deflect through peepholes on a tank or pillbox. There isn't
quite that much "scatter" from the beam reflecting off a hard surface.
However, there is some--I fired through the wire-screen openings of the
cage and had the beam glance directly off the back wall, often knocking
the guinea pigs down without hitting them directly. It went through
a handkerchief easily, even when folded thick. A thin glass tumbler,
however, stopped it.
You could take cover from it almost anywhere--if you knew when you
were going to be shot at. You could wear a light plastic armor--if
the joints were sealed and you kept it hooked to about a fifty-pound
air-condition unit. No problem at all if you ride a motor scooter.
It wouldn't stop an invading army, but it could certainly raise the
devil with the occupation. Almost anyone could make the gun. Given the
components of a pocket radio, a few pieces of copper wire, a few sticks
of chewing gum and a penknife, I could whittle one out of wood or put
it into a plastic toy water-pistol.
But what the Armed Forces _don't_ want right now is a new secret
weapon! They have their manned satellite now, keeping its vigil over
the arsenals of Earth, their big atomic missiles ready to jump off
against preset targets--but with the frightful unknown of deep space
chilling their backsides.
And, too, I can imagine trying to sell those Generals on something that
won't even stop a tank.
I'm afraid I forgot to shut off the kitchen monitor that night. The
servos dished out the dinner menu I'd dialed before noon, then whisked
it away when it got cold. I noticed it when the waste processor's
stuttering hum went on a bit longer than usual.
* * * * *