"Can't do that forever," said Arch. "Not under the circumstances."
"I realize that, Dr. Arch." Sagdahl clenched his jaw. "But this is
unprecedented. As an American citizen, you'll want to--"
"Certainly we'll cooperate," said Elizabeth brightly. "But what shall I
tell the AP man? That we're not supposed to say anything to anyone?"
"No! That won't do, not now. But--are all the technical details of this
public?"
"Why, yes," said Arch. "Anybody can make capacitite."
"If you issued a denial--"
"Too late, I'm afraid. Somebody's bound to try it anyway."
Sagdahl looked grim. "You can be held incommunicado," he said. "This is
a very serious matter."
"Yes," said Elizabeth. "The AP man will think so too, if he can't get a
story."
"Well--"
"Oh, dear! My Russell Wright coffee cup!"
* * * * *
Nothing happened overnight. That was the hardest thing to believe.
By all the rules, life should have been suddenly and dramatically
transformed; but instead, there were only minor changes, day by day,
small incidents. Meanwhile you ate, slept, worked, paid bills, made
love and conversation, as you had always done.
The FBI held its hand as yet, but some quiet men checked into the
town's one hotel, and there was usually one of them hanging around
Arch's house, watching. Elizabeth would occasionally invite him in for
a snack--she grew quite fond of them.
The newspapers ran feature articles, and for a while the house was
overrun with reporters--then that too faded away. Editorials appeared,
pointing out that capacitite had licked one of the Soviet Union's major
problems, fuel; and a syndicated columnist practically called for
Arch's immediate execution. He found some of his neighbors treating him
coldly. The situation distressed him, too. "I never thought--" he began.
"Exactly," rumbled Culquhoun. "People like you are one reason science
is coming to be considered a Frankenstein. Dammit, man, the researcher
has to have a social conscience like the rest of us."
Arch smiled wearily. "But I do," he said. "I gave considerable thought
to the social effects. I just imagined that they'd be good. That's been
the case with every major innovation, in the long run."
"You've committed a crime," said Culquhoun. "Idealism. It doesn't fit
the world we inhabit."
Arch flushed angrily. "What was I supposed to do?" he snapped. "Burn
my results and forget them? If the human race is too stupid to use the
obvious advantages, that's its own fault."
"You're making a common error, dear," said Elizabeth. "You speak of
the human race. There isn't any. There are only individual people and
groups of people, with their own conflicting interests."
For a while, there was a big campaign to play down the effects of
capacitite. It wasn't important. It meant nothing, as our eminent
columnist has so lucidly shown. Then the attempt switched: capacitite
was dangerous. So-and-so had been electrocuted working with it. There
was cumulative poisoning... Such propaganda didn't work, not when some
millions of people were seeing for themselves.
Petroleum stock began sagging. It didn't nosedive--the SEC and a
valiantly buying clique saw to that--but it slipped down day by day.
Arch happened to drop in at Hinkel's garage. The old man looked up from
a car on which he was laboring and smiled. "Hello, there," he said.
"Haven't seen you in a long time."
"I--well--" Arch looked guiltily at the oil-stained floor. "I'm
afraid--your business--"
"Oh, don't worry about me. I've got more business than I can handle.
Everybody in town seems to want his car converted over to your type of
engine. That young Bob is turning out the stuff like a printing press
gone berserk."
Arch couldn't quite meet his eyes. "But--aren't your gasoline sales
dropping?"
"To be sure. But cars still need lubrication and--Look, you know the
old watermill down by Ronson's farm? I'm buying that, putting in a
generator and a high-voltage transformer and rectifier. I'll be selling
packaged power. A lot easier than running a gas pump, at my age."
"Won't the power company be competing?"
"Eventually. Right now, they're still waiting for orders from higher
up, I guess. Some people can charge their capacitors right at home, but
most would rather not buy the special equipment. They'll come to me,
and by the time the power outfit gets wise to itself, I'll 've come in
on the ground floor."
"Thanks," said Arch, a little shakily. "It makes me feel a lot better."
If only everybody had that Yankee adaptability, he thought as he walked
home. But he saw now, as he wished he had seen earlier, that society
had gone too far. With rare exceptions, progress was no longer a matter
of individual re-adjustments. It was a huge and clumsy economic system
which had to make the transformation... a jerry-built system whose
workings no one understood, even today.
He wanted to call up Gilmer and make what terms he could, but it was
too late. The snowball was rolling.
He sighed his way into an armchair and picked up the paper.
Item: the bill before Congress to make capacitite a government monopoly
like uranium, and to enforce all security restrictions on it, had been
sent back to committee and would probably not pass. A few senators had
had the nerve to point out that security was pointless when everybody
could already make the stuff.
Item: the government was setting up a special laboratory to study
the military applications. Arch could think of several for himself.
Besides simplifying logistics, it could go into cheap and horrible
weapons. A bomb loaded with several thousand coulombs, set to discharge
instantaneously on striking--
Item: a well-known labor leader had denounced the innovation as a case
of business blundering which was going to take bread from the working
man. A corporation spokesman declared that it was all a leftist trick
designed to cripple the private enterprise system.
Item: _Pravda_ announced that Soviet scientists had discovered
capacitite ten years ago and that full-scale production had long been
under way for peaceful purposes only, such as making the Red Army still
more invincible.
Item: two more men in America electrocuted due to incautious
experiments. Nevertheless, capacitite was being manufactured in
thousands of homes and workshops. Bills in various state legislatures
to ban vehicles so powered were meeting indignant opposition everywhere
save in Texas.
Arch reflected wryly that he wasn't getting paid for any of this. All
he'd gotten out of it so far was trouble. Trouble with the authorities,
with crank letters, with his own conscience. There were, to be
sure, some royalties from Bob Culquhoun, who was becoming quite an
entrepreneur and hiring adults to take over when school opened in fall.