_Simon's new source of power
promised a new era for Mankind. But
what happens to world economy when_
any_one can manufacture it in the
kitchen oven?... Here's_ one _answer!_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It did not come out of some government laboratory employing a thousand
bright young technicians whose lives had been checked back to the crib;
it was the work of one man and one woman. This is not the reversal of
history you might think, for the truth is that all the really basic
advances have been made by one or a few men, from the first to steal
fire out of a volcano to E=mc^2. Later, the bright young technicians
get hold of it, and we have transoceanic airplanes and nuclear bombs;
but the idea is always born in loneliness.
Simon Arch was thirty-two years old. He came from upstate
Massachusetts, the son of a small-town doctor, and his childhood and
adolescence were normal enough aside from tinkering with mathematics
and explosive mixtures. In spite of shyness and an overly large
vocabulary, he was popular, especially since he was a good basketball
player. After high school, he spent a couple of tedious years in the
tail-end of World War II clerking for the Army, somehow never getting
overseas; weak eyes may have had something to do with that. In his
spare time he read a great deal, and after the war he entered M.I.T.
with a major in physics. Everybody and his dog was studying physics
then, but Arch was better than average, and went on through a series of
graduate assistantships to a Ph.D. He married one of his students and
patented an electronic valve. Its value was limited to certain special
applications, but the royalties provided a small independent income and
he realized his ambition: to work for himself.
He and Elizabeth built a house in Westfield, which lies some fifty
miles north of Boston and has a small college--otherwise it is only a
shopping center for the local farmers. The house had a walled garden
and a separate laboratory building. Equipment for the lab was expensive
enough to make the Arches postpone children; indeed, after its
requirements were met, they had little enough to live on, but they made
sarcastic remarks about the installment-buying rat race and kept out of
it. Besides, they had hopes for their latest project: there might be
real money in that.
Colin Culquhoun, professor of physics at Westfield, was Arch's closest
friend--a huge, red-haired, boisterous man with radical opinions on
politics which were always good for an argument. Arch, tall and slim
and dark, with horn-rimmed glasses over black eyes and a boyishly
smooth face, labelled himself a reactionary.
"Dielectrics, eh?" rumbled Culquhoun one sunny May afternoon. "So
that's your latest kick, laddie. What about it?"
"I have some ideas on the theory of dielectric polarization," said
Arch. "It's still not too well understood, you know."
"Yeh?" Culquhoun turned as Elizabeth brought in a tray of dewed
glasses. "Thank'ee kindly." One hairy hand engulfed a goblet and he
drank noisily. "Ahhhh! Your taste in beer is as good as your taste in
politics is moldy. Go on."
Arch looked at the floor. "Maybe I shouldn't," he said, feeling his
old nervousness rise within him. "You see, I'm operating purely on a
hunch. I've got the math pretty well whipped into shape, but it all
rests on an unproven postulate about the nature of the electric field.
I've tried to fit it in with both relativity and quantum mechanics
and--well, like I said, it's all just a notion of mine which demands
experimental proof before I can even think about publishing."
"What sort of proof?"
"It's this way. By far the best dielectric found to date is a mixture
of barium and strontium titanates. Under optimum conditions, the
dielectric constant goes up to 11,600, though the loss rate is still
pretty high. There's a partial explanation for this on the basis of
crystal theory, the dipole moment increases under an electric field....
Well, you know all that. My notion involves an assumption about the
nature of the crystalline ionic bond; I threw in a correction for
relativistic and quantum effects which _looks_ kosher but really hasn't
much evidence to back it up. So--uh--"
Elizabeth sat down and crossed trim legs. She was a tall and rather
spectacular blonde, her features so regular as to look almost cold till
you got to know her. "Our idea suggests it should be possible to fit a
crystalline system into an organic grid in such a way that a material
can be made with just about any desired values of dielectricity and
resistivity," she said. "Constants up in the millions if you want.
Physically and chemically stable. The problem is to find the conditions
which will produce such an unorthodox linkage. We've been cooking
batches of stuff for weeks now."