Fire in the Heavens (1958)

by George O. Smith

  OPERATION WORLD’S END

  Jeff Benson and Lucille Roman stood worlds apart in their approach to science. Jeff, an instrument engineer, was interested only in its purest aspects. Lucille, a rocket manufacturer, thought only of its profit-making potential.

  It was a one-in-a-million chance that their worlds would ever collide. But when the sun threatened to go nova—to incinerate the Earth in one devastating explosion—these two found themselves in a highly combustible partnership.

  Only Jeff could possibly avert the coming catastrophe, and he could do it only with Lucille’s co-operation. Upon the success of their emotion-charged alliance hung more than the future of science. The very fate of Earth depended on their working—or dying—together!

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Jeff Benson

  What he knew about abstract science posed a very specific threat—the end of the world!

  Lucille Roman

  Suddenly it was not a matter of sky-high profits; it was seeing her profits—and everything else—blown sky high.

  Charles Horne

  He knew that nowhere on Earth could he master Miss Roman—so it had to be elsewhere.

  Doctor Phelps

  He went from savior to scapegoat in a single burst of panic.

  Jerry Woods

  The power of his pen was one of life and death over billions.

  Doctor Lassen

  As a scientist, he knew that from little sunspots mighty conflagrations grow.

  FIRE IN THE HEAVENS

  by

  GEORGE O. SMITH

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

  Copyright ©, 1958, by Thomas Bouregy & Co.

  An Ace Book, by arrangement with Thomas Bouregy & Co. All Rights Reserved

  To Lester and Ewie

  CHAPTER I

  There was a rustle like that of a wind through autumn leaves as Lucille Roman swept into the lawyer’s anteroom, where the group of hopeful bidders for the physical properties of the Hotchkiss Laboratories were waiting. The fact that the bidders were male and that Lucille was unquestionably one of the most decorative young women in her hemisphere accounted for some of the stir.

  But to Jeff Benson, occupying one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs along a side wall, the rustle seemed to hold more than the normal masculine reaction to the presence of a lovely and provocative specimen of femininity. There was an undercurrent of anger, of savage resentment, in the whispers that cross-meshed the atmosphere.

  “We might as well all go home,” a thickset, well-dressed man in the chair to his right muttered.

  “What’s that?” said Jeff. “Why?”

  “That’s Lucille Roman,” said the man, eyeing her as if he had vivisection in mind.

  “I’ve seen her picture,” said Jeff. “Who hasn’t? What do you suppose she’s doing here. It seems hardly the-sort of place a wealthy playgirl—”

  “Playgirl, my foot!” The man interrupted savagely, his full, smooth-shaven face growing red. “She’s here to bid on the Hotchkiss Lab with the rest of us. And if she wants it she’ll get it.”

  “What do you suppose Lucille Roman wants with it?” said Jeff thoughtfully. Perhaps the ablest builder of precision scientific instruments in America, he had come to the auction not so much because he hoped to be able to buy the place as because he wished access to its instruments, and hoped to make a connection with the winning bidder.

  “Shes probably got some gigolo on the string who wants to tinker with test tubes,” the man on his right said viciously.

  “Hey!” said Jeff, surprised. “Isn’t that a bit rough on Miss Roman?” His eyes turned to study the assured serenity of her profile. If she was at all aware of the intense feeling her appearance had aroused—and she could scarcely not have noticed it—she was not allowing it to ruffle her poise.

  “Do you know her?” the man asked Jeff.

  “No,” Jeff told him. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  “Well,” said the man, his voice still low, “she’s the roughest, toughest girl in a business deal since David Harum retired. She gets what she wants and heaven help the poor sucker who gets in her way.”

  He turned away as the man on his other side plucked his elbow. There was a short whispered conversation. Then’ he turned back to Jeff.

  “Would you care to toss in with us?” he asked. “We’re going to pool our interests. Well run up the price to the limit to make her pay for it.”

  “But—” began Jeff.

  “Don’t worry,” interrupted the man. “If she’s here shell buy it. But just in case, we’ll have enough to cover if she doesn’t bite.”

  “I thought the conditions of the auction specifically forbade combines,” said Jeff, frowning. He was a good-looking young man in a quietly intelligent way. He found himself disliking the conspiracy forming around him. .Surely a dozen men should not gang up in violation of specified conditions against one woman.

  “Lucille Roman is a whole combine in herself,” the man said persuasively. “It may be cheating, but, if you knew la Roman better, you’d be right with us. Take my word for it.” He had a bluff air of sincerity which carried conviction.

  The door to an inner office opened then and an elderly man with a high-blood-pressure complexion appeared, clad in striped trousers and cutaway and carrying a small stack

  of cards, and envelopes, which he passed out to the bidders assembled in the room.

  “As the representative of the trustees of the Hotchkiss Estate,” he said in an expensively cultured voice, “I am free to announce that the first sealed bid is in favor of Lucille Roman at forty-five thousand dollars. This will be the second bid. Please write your name and your offering price for the Laboratory on the card. Then seal it in the envelope.”

  Jeff Benson took his envelope and card and poised his ball-point pen thoughtfully. Then he scribbled, No bid. J. Benson, on the card, stuffed it quickly inside the envelope as instructed and handed it to the man in the cutaway coat.

  The latter did not leave the room. He opened the envelopes and removed the cards, glancing at them quickly and shuffling them so the the highest figure offered was held on top. Finally he finished and looked at the man beside Jeff.

  “Charles Horne,” he said, “has offered one hundred thousand dollars for the laboratory and all of its physical assets.”

  There was a quick gasp from the others in the room, a gasp composed partly of surprise, partly of suspense.

  Horne took a deep breath.

  “It’s going to work,” he muttered to Jeff. “She’ll go to one and a quarter. And it isn’t worth sixty thousand.” He chuckled to himself.

  “May I ask the status of the rest of the bids?” Lucille Roman inquired in a clear contralto.

  “It’s highly irregular, Miss Roman,” said the lawyer. “However, I feel that I am betraying nothing when I state that your bid was second high.”

  “Thank you,” she replied coolly, as though a hundred thousand dollars were a mere bagatelle. Jeff, who seldom had one per cent of that amount in ready cash at one time, found himself admiring her quiet incisiveness.

  The attorney in the cutaway coat said, “There will be a third and final bid immediately. Are there any questions?”

  Jeff suddenly found himself on his feet, blurting, “Just

  what was meant by the specific disbarment of combines?”

  “It meant,” said the attorney, “that each man should bid by and for, and solely by and for, the interest he represents. A group could bid at the initial offering but was not further to combine or pool interests once bidding began. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly,” said Jeff. “I should li
ke to state now that I am not acquainted with Miss Roman, but I hate to see her—”

  “Shut up, you idiot!” snapped Horne from the side of his mouth.

  “—taken for a financial ride in this affair,” said Jeff, not lowering his voice, and looking down at Horne with a faint smile. To his surprise Horne merely shrugged and smiled back.

  “It will get you nothing,” he said clearly.

  Jeff glanced around the room and saw, somewhat to his surprise, that without exception the other men were regarding him with either open hostility or contempt. Doggedly, however, he set himself to finish what he had begun. It was not in his nature to quit any course of action upon which he had once set out.

  “Mr. Horne,” he said, “and some of his—er—colleagues have just combined to run up their bid almost twice what the Hotchkiss Laboratories are worth. I was invited to join them.”

  “Is this true?” the attorney demanded of Horne. Horne nodded ruefully.

  “It might have worked, too, if our idealistic young friend” —he regarded Jeff with bright shoe-button eyes—“had not chosen to throw a spoke into the machinery.” He shook his head a trifle sadly, and added to Jeff, “You’ll get nothing out of it—you’ll see.”

  The attorney looked as black as his cutaway coat. “This, if I may say so, is a shocking disclosure, Mr. Horne, if not technically an illegal one. I see no reason to prolong matters further. Since Mr. Horne and his associates have violated the agreed-upon terms of this auction, I hereby, and in order to prevent further chicanery, call the auction closed—as it lies within my power to do,

  “Only the first bids shall be valid, which means that the title and properties of the Hotchkiss Laboratories will shortly be transferred to Miss Lucille Roman.”

  “Thank you,” said Lucille Roman, calmly ignoring her competitors. The attorney hesitated, then walked over to where Jeff Benson was sitting.

  “I believe that the man who saw justice done deserves thanks,” he said, extending his hand. “Everyone likes a good loser. What is your name again?”

  “Jeff Benson.”

  The attorney nodded, then said, “I am very glad to meet you. And, although we all like Miss Roman very much, I’m almost sorry your—er—bid was not high enough to win. You’re the sort of young man this firm likes to do business with.”

  “I withdrew my bid on the second round when I learned what was happening,” said Jeff with a grin. “As a matter of fact I never expected to win. So you see Miss Roman isn’t taking anything from me. And, I’m sorry to say, I’m not a particularly good loser. It’s just that I believe in playing by the rules.”

  “But Mister Benson, your action puzzles me. Why did you enter the bidding at all if you didn’t expect to win?” “What I really want is a job. I need a bigger laboratory than the one I possess at present, to continue certain experiments I’ve been working on for some time. I’d like a chance to continue these experiments in the greater facilities of the Hotchkiss Laboratories.”

  “That doesn’t seem unreasonable,” said the attorney. He turned to Miss Roman. “Is any such arrangement possible?” “Hardly—at the present time/’ she said as she tugged at her long black gloves. “I take it that the deal is all but closed.”

  “Oh, quite,” said the attorney, visibly nettled. “The rest is mere formality. But, Miss Roman, couldn’t you—”

  “Then I’ll be going,” she said serenely. She flicked a casual glance in Jeff’s direction. “Thank you, Mister—er, Bunzen, was it?”

  “Benson—Jeff Benson.” His answering glance was as cool as hers, although he was inwardly seething.

  “My apologies. I must leave. But thank you again for your interest in abstract justice. It is very rare.” Her voice was patronizing.

  “But, Miss Roman,” said the attorney, patently disturbed. “Surely, you’ll—”

  She swung to face him squarely. “Let’s understand each other right now,” she said, looking coldly from Jeff to the attorney. “Mister—er—Benson stated that he liked to see rules followed. He saw to it himself and undoubtedly has derived full satisfaction from so doing. Secondly, I don’t know him from Adam’s off ox and have no warrant to suppose anything but that he staged his charming little scene to call himself to my attention.

  “I can assume either of two motives for his doing such a thing and I care for neither of them. He wanted justice, he got it, and he should be very happy. If he wishes a job with any of my enterprises he is free to apply through the regular channels to my personnel director. Good day, gentlemen.”

  With that she turned on one spiked heel and left the room.

  Jeff blinked. The attorney looked shocked and helpless and flustered. He stuttered as he tried to apologize. But Jeff managed to smile.

  “It’s too bad,” he said, “but it’s hardly your fault.” And he followed Lucille Roman from the room.

  As Jeff Benson let himself into his laboratory he felt a slight twinge of envy. His own place in a large barnlike garage was a far cry from the gleaming tables and the polished instruments he knew were in the Hotchkiss Laboratories, and he could have used them all. He looked at the thin walls and shrugged. How much energy escaped through them he could only estimate, and that estimate was far beyond his control.

  At one end of the laboratory stood a large tank. It was coated with a furry substance and several pipes led from it. One was a lead-pipe, the rest were temperature-control pipes to stabilize the contents at exactly—or so he had planned—one hundred degrees absolute. He knew it varied, and he cursed the crudity of his equipment.

  It should have been in a double tank with a vacuum between and with circulating vanes and a thermo-control that would stabilize the thousand kiloliters of liquid methane at the one hundred degrees absolute and maintain it there within one tenth of a degree. But what can one do in an old rattletrap garage, and with a very limited sum of money?

  Ten high-precision flow-gauges dotted the pipe that led the methane out of the tank to another chamber. One such flow-gauge would have sufficed, but Jeff Benson read all ten gauges and averaged them. Still it was not good enough.

  He had the same trouble with the oxygen supply.

  With a grim smile Jeff Benson opened a valve and pressed a button. A muted roar came. The methane was oxidizing in a chamber that would—nominally—collect the energy released. This energy could be measured within certain limits of accuracy and the conversion factor could be calculated.

  If you knew the precise amount of fuel—if you knew the precise initial temperature of fuel, oxygen and the caloric chamber—if you released the chemical energy locked in the fuel by combining it with the oxygen—and if you could measure precisely the amount of energy thus released—then you could match the easily calculated energy locked in the fuel against the energy you had measured, and you would prove the Universal Law of the Conservation of Energy.

  Or if the figures did not match, you could disprove it!

  It was five years now since Jeff Benson first had reason to believe that there was an error in the law—infinitesimally minute but none the less a flaw. It was a flaw that had no tricks in it; it seemed to exist whether applied to atomic energy, chemical energy, electrical energy or sheer mechanical energy. It was a flaw in the law of the conservation of energy, and that law includes the conversion of energy into matter, and vice versa.

  For five long arduous years Jeff Benson had been literally burning his money in various manners. His experiments were rough, far too rough. All too often his experimental error exceeded by many times the amount of the flaw.

  Sometimes his measurements gave him more energy than his calculations—sometimes his measurements gave him less. A fraction of a per cent of error here, plus or minus another and another, all added up to a large experimental error.

  Yet Jeff persisted because, after five years of experimentation, he found that there was a slight trend toward the minus side. The majority of his answers added up to less energy rather than more.

&
nbsp; Statistically it was crude proof that every time potential energy was released as kinetic energy a minute percentage was lost.

  Lost—but to what, and—where?

  Jeff did not know. Let him measure the quantity accurately first. Let him prove that the same thing happened in electrical devices, in steam engines, in the atomic piles, in the fall of a stone of known weight from a known height. Let him prove this beyond argument and only then present it to the world of science as proof that another of the so-called immutable laws had been repealed.

  That would be time to ask the question of where and to what it went.

  Let him once prove his point and Jeff Benson would never again have to choose between a loaf of bread and a gallon of methane, or build a thermo-control and wish he had at hand a precision instrument of highest accuracy. Then he could have as complete a laboratory as Lucille Roman had purchased.

  What did Lucille Roman want with such a lab anyway?

  “Employment office”—“melodrama”—“right triumphant” . . . to the devil with Lucille Roman!

  CHAPTER II

  Months passed as the data piled up slowly, bit by bit. Each experiment added to the overall average; but no real advance was made in Jeff Bensons main problem—the elimination of experimental error. It was a problem in absolute measurement.

  To determine exactly what percentage of a large heap of sand lies in a thimbleful, one must know precisely the quantity in both the large heap and the minute thimbleful. And both measurements must be of an accuracy far exceeding the expected result. Jeff Benson often felt that he was building watches with a pile driver, or trying to engrave his initials on the head of a pin with a garden spade.

  While Jeff was struggling over a problem in his crude laboratory, Lucille Roman watched progress in the shining place she had acquired. The metal sign over the door now read Raman Enterprises, instead of Hotchkiss Laboratories. Where a driver could formerly go all the way to the main portal before being stopped, Lucille Roman had a guard planted at the gate in the stainless steel, electrically charged fence that surrounded the grounds.