There was a glint of humor in Buck Kendall's eyes as he passed the sheet
over to McLaurin. Commander McLaurin looked down the columns with
twinkling eyes.
"'Petition to establish the Lunar Mining Bank,'" he read. "What a bank!
Officers: President, General James Logan, late of the IP;
Vice-president, Colonel Warren Gerardhi, also late of the IP; Staff,
consists of 90% ex-IP men, and a few scattered accountants. Designed by
the well-known designer of IP stations, Colonel Richard Murray."
Commander McLaurin looked up at Kendall with a broad grin. "And you
actually got Interplanetary Life to give you a mortgage on the
structure?"
"Why not? It'll cut cost fifty-eight millions, with its twelve-foot
tungsten-beryllium walls and the heavy defense weapons against those
terrible pirates. You know we must defend our property."
"With the thing you're setting up out there on Luna, you could more
readily wipe out the IP than anything else I know of. Any new defense
ideas?"
"Plenty. Did you get any further appropriations from the IP
Appropriations Board?"
McLaurin looked sour. "No. The dear taxpayers might object, and those
thickheaded, clogged rockets on the Board can't see your data on the
Stranger. They gave me just ten millions, and that only because you
demonstrated you could shoot every living thing out of the latest IP
cruiser with that neutron gun of yours. By the way, they may kick when I
don't install more than a few of those."
"Let 'em. You can stall for a few months. You'll need that money more
for other purposes. You've installed that paraffin lining?"
"Yes--I got a report on that of 'finished' last week. How have you made
out?"
Buck Kendall's face fell. "Not so hot. Devin's been the biggest help--he
did most of the work on that neutron gun really--"
"After," McLaurin interrupted, "you told him how."
"--but we're pretty well stuck now, it seems. You'll be off duty
tomorrow evening, can't you drop around to the lab? We're going to try
out a new system for releasing atomic energy."
"Isn't that a pretty faint hope? We've been trying to get it for three
centuries now, and haven't yet. What chance at it within a year or
so?--which is the time you allow yourself before the Stranger returns."
"It is, I'll admit that. But there's another factor, not to be
forgotten. The data we got from correlating those 'misreadings' from the
various IP posts mean a lot. We are working on an entirely different
trail now. You come on out, and you can see our new apparatus. They are
working on tremendous voltages, and hoping to smash the thing by a
brutal bombardment of terrific voltage. We're trying, thanks to the
results of those instruments, to get results with small, terrifically
intense fields."
"How do you know that's their general system?"
"They left traces on the records of the post instruments. These records
show such intensities as we never got. They have atomic energy,
necessarily, and they might have had material energy, actual destruction
of matter, but apparently, from the field readings it's the former. To
be able to make those tremendous hops, light-years in length, they
needed a real store of energy. They have accumulators, of course, but I
don't think they could store enough power by the system they use to do
it."
"Well, how's your trick 'bank' out on Luna, despite its twelve-foot
walls, going to stand an atomic explosion?"
"More protective devices to come is our only hope. I'm working on three
trails: atomic energy, some type of magnetic shield that will stop any
moving material particle, and their faster-than-light thing. Also, that
fortress--I mean, of course, bank--is going to have a lot of lead-lined
rooms."
"I wish I could use the remaining money the Board gave me to lead-line a
lot of those IP ships," said McLaurin wistfully. "Can't you make a
gamma-ray bomb of some sort?"
"Not without their atomic energy release. With it, of course, it's easy
to flood a region with rays. It'll be a million times worse than radium
'C,' which is bad enough."
"Well, I'll send through this petition for armaments. They'll pass it
all right, I think. They may get some kicks from old Jacob Ezra Stubbs.
Jacob Ezra doesn't believe in anything war-like. I wish they'd find some
way to keep him off of the Arms Petition Board. He might just as well
stay home and let 'em vote his ticket uniformly 'nay.'" Buck Kendall
left with a laugh.
* * * * *
Buck Kendall had his troubles though. When he had reached Earth again,
he found that his properties totaled one hundred and three million
dollars, roughly. One doesn't sell properties of that magnitude, one
borrows against them. But to all intents and purposes, Buck Kendall
owned two half-completed ship's hulls in the Baldwin Spaceship Yards, a
great deal of massive metal work on its way to Luna, and contracts for
some very extensive work on a "bank." Beyond that, about eleven million
was left.
A large portion of the money had been invested in a laboratory, the like
of which the world had never seen. It was devoted exclusively to
physics, and principally the physics of destruction. Dr. Paul Devin was
the Director, Cole was in charge of the technical work, and Buck Kendall
was free to do all the work he thought needed doing.
Returned to his laboratory, he looked sourly at the bench on which seven
mechanicians were working. The ninth successive experiment on the
release of atomic energy had failed. The tenth was in process of
construction. A heavy pure tungsten dome, three feet in diameter, three
inches thick, was being lowered over a clear insulum dome, a foot
smaller. Inside, the real apparatus was arranged around the little pool
of mercury. From it, two massive tungsten-copper alloy conductors led
through the insulum housing, and outside. These, so Kendall had hoped,
would surge with the power of broken atoms, but he was beginning to
believe rather bitterly, they would never do so.
Buck went on to his offices, and the main calculator room. There were
ten calculator tables here, two of them in operation now.
"Hello, Devin. Getting on?"
"No," said Devin bitterly, "I'm getting off. Look at these results." He
brought over a sheaf of graphs, with explanatory tables attached.
Rapidly Buck ran through them with him. Most of them were graphs of
functions of light, considered as a wave in these experiments.
"H-m-m-m--not very encouraging. Looks like you've got the field--but it
just snaps shut on itself and won't work. The lack of volume makes it
break down, if you establish it, and makes it impossible to establish in
the first place without the energy of matter. Not so hot. That's
certainly cock-eyed somewhere."
"I'm not. The math may be."
"Well"--Kendall grinned--"it amounts to the same thing. The point is,
light doesn't. Let's run over that theory again. Light is not only
magnetic; but electric. Somehow it transforms electric fields cyclically
into magnetic fields and back again. Now what we want to do is to
transform an electric into a magnetic field and have it stay there.
That's the first step. The second thing, is to have the lines of
magnetic force you develop, lie down like a sheath around the ship,
instead of standing out like the hairs on an angry cat, the way they
want to. That means turning them ninety degrees, and turning an electric
into a magnetic field means turning the space-strain ninety degrees.
Light evidently forms a magnetic field whose lines of force reach along
its direction of motion, so that's your starting point."
"Yes, and _that_," growled Devin, "seems to be the finishing point.
Quite definitely and clearly, the graph looped down to zero. In other
words, the field closed in on itself, and destroyed itself."
"Light doesn't vanish."
"I'll make you all the lights you want."
"I simply mean there must be something that will stop it."
"Certainly. Transform it back to electric field before it gets a chance
to close in, then repeat the process--the way light does."
"That wouldn't make such a good magnetic shield. Every time that field
started pulsing out through the walls of the ship it would generate
heat. We want a permanent field that will stay on the job out there. I
wonder if you couldn't make a conductor device that would open that
field out--some special type of oscillating field that would keep it
open."
"H-m-m-m--that's an angle I might try. Any suggestions?"
Kendall had suggestions, and rapidly he outlined a development that
appeared from some of the earlier mathematics on light, and might be
what they wanted.
* * * * *
Kendall, however, had problems of his own to work on. The question of
atomic energy he was leaving alone, till the present experiment either
succeeded, or, as he rather suspected, failed as had its predecessors.
His present problem was to develop more fully some interesting lines of
research he had run across in investigating mathematically the trick of
turning electric to magnetic fields and then turning them back again. It
might be that along this line he would find the answer to the speed
greater than that of light. At any rate, he was interested.
He worked the rest of that day, and most of the next on that line--till
he ran it into the ground with a pair of equations that ended with the
expression: dx.dv=h/(4[pi]m). Then Kendall looked at them for a long
moment, then he sighed gently and threw them into a file cabinet.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty. He'd reduced the thing to a form that simply
told him it was beyond the limits of certainty and he ran it into the
normal, natural uncertainty inevitable in Nature.
Anyway he had real work to do now. The machine was about ready for his
attention. The mechanicians had finished putting it in shape for
demonstration and trial. He himself would have to test it over the rest
of the afternoon and arrange for power and so forth.
By evening, when Commander McLaurin called around with some of the other
investors in Kendall's "bank" on Luna, the thing was already started,
warming up. The fields were being fed and the various scientists of the
group were watching with interest. Power was flowing in already at a
rate of nearly one hundred thousand horsepower per minute, thanks to a
special line given them by New York Power (a Kendall property). At ten
o'clock they were beginning to expect the reaction to start. By this
time the fields weren't gaining in intensity very rapidly, a maximum
intensity had been reached that should, they felt, break the atoms soon.
At eleven-thirty, through the little view window, Buck Kendall saw
something that made him cry out in amazement. The mercury metal in the
receiver, behind its layers of screening was beginning to glow, with a
dull reddish light, and little solidifications were appearing in it!
Eagerly the men looked, as the solidifications spread slowly, like
crystals growing in an evaporating solution.
Twelve o'clock came and went, and one o'clock and two o'clock. Still the
slow crystallization went on. Buck Kendall was casting furtive glances
at the kilowatt-hour meter. It stood at a figure that represented
twenty-seven thousand dollars' worth of power. Long since the power rate
had been increased to the maximum available, as the power plant's normal
load reduced as the morning hours came. Surely, this time something
would start, but Buck had two worries. If all the enormous amount of
energy they had poured in there decided to release itself at once--
And at any rate, Buck saw they'd never dare to let a generator stop,
once it was started!
The men were a tense group around the machine at three-fifteen A.M.
There remained only a tiny, dancing globule of silvery mercury
skittering around on the sharp, needle-like crystals of the dull red
metal that had resulted. Slowly that skittering drop was shrinking--
Three twenty-two and a half A.M. saw the last fraction of it vanish.
Tensely the men stared into the machine--backing off slowly--watching
the meters on the board. At nearly eighty thousand volts the power had
been fed into it.
The power continued to flow, and a growing halo of intense violet light
appeared suddenly on those red, needle-like crystals, a swiftly
expanding halo--
Without a sound, without the slightest disturbance, the halo vanished,
and softly, gently, the needle-like crystals relapsed, melted away, and
a dull pool of metallic mercury rested in the receiver.