Fire in the Heavens (1958)

by George O. Smith

  A would-be entrant had to satisfy first the guard, then pass a few other barriers before he finally got inside the main offices. The top of the fence needed no danger signs— four-inch insulators gave plenty of warning.

  Inside there was progress—progress, and bafflement, as well.

  Doctor Phelps looked up from the eyepiece as Lucille entered but she waved him back, saying, “Finish it, Doc. It may be important.”

  She sat down and lit a cigarette, casting a glance over the table beside Phelps. There were several pages of paper filled with tabulations and a number of filled-in notations. A couple of volumes of the International Critical Tables were laid atop one another at the far side of the table and the M.I.T. Spectrograph Wavelength Table was spread open to a middle page. A log-log slide rule was cocked edgewise in the gutter of the book to keep the place.

  Phelps turned the knurled knob of the wavelength spectrometer and made another notation on the pages of notes, then turned to Lucille.

  If Charles Horne had really believed his own snide remarks about keeping a gigolo he was dead wrong. Doctor Phelps was a man of slightly over fifty. His head was completely devoid of hair save for his eyebrows and eyelashes and his forehead was furrowed horizontally, a result of deep thinking or squinting into instruments or frowning, though his expression was amiable enough.

  His face was marked with a deep-set pair of caliper lines that enclosed his mouth, an indication of much smiling during the course of a lifetime. His hands were bony and his fingers were long. They looked as though they should have a bit of tremor but they were rock-steady. Louis Phelps was obviously no gigolo. He had another business and he was quite capable at it.

  “What were you doing?” asked Lucille as he left the spectrometer.

  “Trying to figure out what it is,” he told her, a frown lining his forehead.

  “Got any ideas?” asked the girl indolently. She looked out of the window above the spectrograph, where a long thin lancet of brilliance was searing vertically. The window was of a heavy dark glass but the lancet burned through the glass with an eye-blinding whiteness. It was about a quarter of an inch in diameter and fully four feet high to where it tapered to a needle point and died.

  Considering that the flame was fully a hundred feet distant from the little room that housed the pair of them and that it cut through a heavy dark window-glass, the flame must have been intolerable to the naked eye—if not to the naked flesh itself.

  Doctor Phelps shrugged and shook his head. “Hydrogen, mostly, or I should say roaring protons. Nitrogen, carbon and oxygen—the latter not too plentiful but neither is it too scarce. Helium—or at least helium after the high-energy alpha particle collects its set of electrons in the upper part of the jet. Of course we know that the jet hurls alpha, beta and gamma in one of the tightest cones known to man right down to its axis.”

  There was a one-inch circle marked on the underside of the roof a hundred feet above the floor. Ninety-eight per cent of the radiation from that coruscant jet was encircled by the one-inch mark. And the radiation that fell outside of a ten-inch circle centered on the axis of the jet was negligible.

  “Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen,” repeated Lucille. “That might just be tom-up air.”

  “I thought of that, but the quantitative spectrograph doesn’t give anything like the correct proportions. Frankly, the velocity of that jet is such that one might think we’ve tapped the sun itself!”

  ‘The sun?”

  Doctor Phelps shook his head. “Nope,” he said with a smile. T don’t know too much about solar physics, but Russell’s investigations show that the sun consists mostly of hydrogen and with a large percentage of the conglomeration known as Russell’s Mixture.”

  Doctor Phelps opened a book and riffled through it until he came to a tabulation. “Russell’s Mixture,” he said. “Hydrogen we have in plenty—or as I said, high-energy protons. Oxygen we have too, but in nothing like the proportions found in the solar mixture. The rest are metals, a half dozen of them. We have none of them in anything but the barest trace. No, Miss Roman, I give up.”

  “Well, whatever it is, we’ve got it,” she said. “And we can use it.”

  “But I’d like to know what it is.”

  “Someday we’ll find out. Life, Doctor Phelps, is composed of two kinds of people. One kind spends its time trying to find out what makes things tick. The other kind just enjoys the tick for the sake of ticking, and to heck with the motives.”

  “Could be,” he said, looking sidewise at her. “And which am I?”

  “Up to not-so-long ago you were one of the kind that tries to find out why. I’ve been doing my best to move you into the other pigeonhole. You’ll find life more interesting once you learn that it is more important to use your discoveries, instead of handing them to someone else to use while you continue working on new ones.”

  “Now, Doctor Phelps, I’d prefer that you forget the problem of what it is and where it comes from and bend your efforts toward the fabrication of eight of these things large enough to handle a couple of hundred tons of spacecraft.” “Spacecraft?”

  “Spacecraft.”

  “You intend to navigate—”

  “I do not. I intend only to prove that such a thing is possible, practical and profitable.”

  “But the chances of finding anything of intrinsic value on any of the other planets is very small.”

  “Correct.”

  “Then why-?”

  Lucille Roman smiled. “I wasn’t out of three-cornered pants when they were tinkering with rockets. They still have to do more than tinker. I intend to do it!”

  “But—”

  “Why do you suppose they want space travel?”

  “Since there cannot be much of value on the other planets or the chance is too low to risk all the money needed, I’d say that about the only point space travel will have is in its value to pure science.”

  “Not entirely. Remember, Doctor Phelps, we are still all bound together on this little ball of mud, which is peopled with a lot of different ideologies that seem to be mutually and hopelessly incompatible.”

  “And so you intend to make migration possible?”

  “Pfui!” snorted the girl. “No one could make a living on the moon. Mars is out of line for too many reasons to catalogue in one sitting, and Venus has a fine atmosphere of poisonous ammonia. The rest are still more remote. Migration!” She snorted again.

  “Then what—?”

  “The nation that controls the moon and space travel controls the destiny of humanity, Doctor Phelps.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “And once I prove that my system works, I can sell or lease the principle to the government for a very great deal of money. That, Doctor Phelps, is what I had in mind when I bought this lab.”

  Phelps nodded. He knew she had something planned at the time but could not fathom why Lucille Roman should turn to science and provide him with a laboratory.

  “So,” she said, “you set to work designing eight of these jets of much larger size. Enough to lift and manipulate a couple of hundred tons of spacecraft.”

  “But the spacecraft—”

  “You’ll have to design that, too. Hire a group, get them to work-”

  Phelps took one more look through the spectrometer, then shook his head slowly. Tm a bit dubious/’ he said.

  “Why?”

  “Mother always told me that you couldn’t get something for nothing,” he told her with a half-grin. “We seem to be getting it.”

  Lucille nodded vehemently. “Them as has gets,” she said.

  “But this isn’t right, somehow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is a direct violation of the Universal Law of the Conservation of Energy.”

  Lucille stood up and laughed. “And who’ll arrest me for a violation of that law?”

  “But all this force must come from somewhere.”

  Lucille’s features became set. “And if someone
can’t keep his power locked in—that’s tough. We’ve tapped it—we’ll use it!”

  Doctor Phelps turned a dial and the intolerable jet behind the dark glass leaped upward. Nine, ten, twenty feet it lanced, still no more than a quarter of an inch in diameter at its base. Fifty feet it speared and the muted roar of sheer energy penetrated the heavy concrete wall and the floor shook from the strain.

  The one-inch circle on the underside of the roof glowed, then burst into white incandescence, running upward in the color until it too could be seen through the heavy glass. Then it melted out of the roof and droplets seared downward into the needle-like atomic flame.

  The lance sputtered in great gouts and leaped upward through the hole in the roof as the substance of the metal added its energy to the all-consuming flame. It put a brief searing spire of brightness into the daytime sky above the laboratory and then subsided.

  Doctor Phelps turned the power down and the lance became a tiny pencil of coruscant light again.

  “No one,” he said with an air of finality, “could lose that amount of power without kicking up a fuss to find out where it was going. And no man is going to tell me that we can violate the law of conservation of energy.”

  “To heck with it,” Lucille shrugged. “We’ve got things to do with this free juice besides wondering where it came from. Forget it.”

  Phelps nodded sadly. He took one last look at the spectrometer and then left, following the girl slowly. Somewhere, sometime, someone must be able to explain this inexplicable thing. But it would not be any man working for Lucille Roman.

  “Aluminum,” she said decisively. “We’ll make it of aluminum.”

  Hannegan shook his head. He was business manager for Lucille Roman, but there were too many facets of the girl’s personality and ambitions to please him—or for him to keep track of.

  “That will cost us a fortune.”

  “ Horne has an aluminum interest. Get it from him.”

  “You mean the man who tried to do you out of the Hotchkiss Lab?”

  “Sure.”

  “You mean the bird that—and we should buy—?” he spluttered.

  Lucille looked at him with scorn.

  “Look, Miss Roman, I still do not understand.”

  “ Horne has a lot of interests. He’s also a sucker for a bare shoulder. Furthermore, after trying to do me out of the Hotchkiss Lab, he’ll do anything to gloss it over. He’d also like to get a handful of sticky fingers into Roman Enterprises one way or another.”

  “So? You have a plan.” It was a statement, not a question. Hannegan knew that much about Lucille Roman.

  “ Horne’s a punk. He’s one of those men that must handle everything himself.”

  “So?”

  “So while he’s dizzy from basking in the glory of my admiration”—Lucille Roman smiled enticingly—“Charley Horne will wake up to find that someone has been manipulating the market. By the time he discovers that my shoulder is very cold he’ll discover that he has lost his aluminum interest—as well as his head! Damn him!”

  Her blue eyes blazing, Lucille Roman arose and swept out of the office.

  CHAPTER III

  Jeff Benson’s door had hardly closed behind the delivery men before he attacked the packing case with a claw hammer. He worked deftly and quickly for a few minutes, removing the boards that had been nailed across the top of the case. He stacked them neatly after removing the protruding nails as a safety measure.

  Then, with the tender air of a woman lifting her firstborn from its downy crib, Jeff Benson lifted the instrument from its nest in the wooden crate and set it on the bench somewhat apart from the crude lumber of the packing case.

  It was a beauty. The cabinet was fine-grained walnut, carefully Stained and varnished and rubbed to perfection. The panel was of aluminum, coated with a hard-baked black wrinkle enamel. The panel markings, switch positions, operating nomenclature and name of the instrument and its manufacturer were engraved in the aluminum through the black paint. It was a very tidy job.

  White-brass dials were engine-engraved and their calibrations filled with black or red for clarity and identification. The several meters were identical in case. Their different identifications and notations were lithographed and while their numbers and functions were all different, the lettering and printing were all in the same style.

  It was a far cry from Jeff Benson’s own hand-manufactured instruments. And Benson was proud to add this finely-tooled bit of commercial equipment to his own laboratory.

  He was about to step forward to turn a dial after gloating over the gadget from afar when the doorbell rang.

  “Nuts!” he said, turning toward the door instead of approaching the instrument.

  Opening the door, he stepped back with a slight puzzlement. “Yes?”

  “You are Jeff Benson?”

  I am.

  “May I introduce myself. I am Norman Hannegan.”

  “How do you do?” said Jeff politely, not knowing what else to say.

  “You’ve made some instruments for the Bureau of Standards?”

  “Some,” admitted Jeff.

  Hannegan smiled. “I know Tompkins—the fact is we went to Cambridge together. I’ve a job of work, young man—for you. Are you interested?”

  Jeff nodded. “I am,” he said.

  “Tompkins recommended you,” said Hannegan. “I called him and asked him for the name of the best instrument maker in the country. He said your stuff wasn’t as fancy looking nor as high priced as several but that it was better than the rest.

  “We’d prefer a small concern in this deal, Mister Benson. It’s a bit on the hush-hush side, and a private business should be able to keep it under wraps better than a large outfit.”

  “I think Mister Tompkins is overrating me,” said Jeff. “My stuff is pretty crude.”

  “But it works. That’s the important thing. And may I be the judge of its efficiency? Let’s see some of it/’

  “Sure,” nodded Jeff. ‘This way.”

  Hannegan looked first at the new instrument “You didn’t make that?”

  “The averaging thermocouple? No.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s an averaging thermocouple. I have to measure the heat-rise in a large mass of metal and machinery. Several masses, in fact.” Jeff grinned. “This thing—well, you install thermocouples in just about every place you can shove one and connect them to the various terminals on the back of this integrating machine.

  “It takes the temperature of each thermocouple and averages them all out, giving the normal temperature rise, just as if the large masses of metal and machinery were all a single block of metal—one unit. Follow?”

  “Vaguely. I’m a business manager, not a scientist. It’s a nice looking device, though. Rather impressive.”

  Jeff grinned, “I can hardly wait to get at it.”

  “Need it bad, huh?”

  “I could have used it last month. But I’ll use it next week, you bet.”

  Hannegan scratched his head. “You’re going to use it next week—but can’t wait to get at it now. Want to try it out first?”

  “Of course. First I’ll have to check the calibration and standardize it. Then I’ll have to check the integration and standardize that. Then I’ll have to check the correlation so that I can be reasonably certain that it is giving me the right answers.”

  Hannegan shook his head. “Seems to me that a gadget as neat looking as that should be right on the button.”

  “Oh, they are, for all practical purposes. But I’m hunting for something rather impractical.”

  “Even so, isn’t that thing about as good as you could get?”

  “It’s as good as I could get,” admitted Jeff. “But I’ve never yet seen a standard instrument that couldn’t be touched up here and there to a greater accuracy.”

  Hannegan smiled and nodded. “You’re the man we want/’ he said with a laugh. “When the best isn’t accurate enough —well, Mis
ter Benson, I represent an interest that intends to build spacecraft The designers of this craft have have already specified certain instruments. If you’re interested, we’d like to negotiate with you for their construction.”

  “I’d like a crack at it. A private interest?”

  “Yes, but no questions at the present time. It is legal and profitable. On Tompkins’ recommendation we are willing to take your word that you will disclose this to no one, whether you take the contract or not.”

  “Okay,” Jeff nodded.

  “Therefore I am going to leave a few separate specifications with you for your inspection. I’ll call again the day after tomorrow, and by then you’ll have been able to look them over and give me a rough idea as to whether you can handle it.”

  Jeff raised his eyebrows. “You’ll understand my interest —and also understand my reticence. I prefer to know Whom

  I’m working for.”

  Hannegan smiled. “You will, believe me—but only if you decide to work for us. As soon as you decide that you can handle these things, a formal contract will be drawn. You can have your own lawyer present with our blessing. If you decide against it, we’ll go our separate ways without telling you our identity.”

  “But-”

  “One more thing. For your trouble in looking over these specifications, if you decide against it, we will offer you a consulting fee. The latter will help to ensure your silence as well as pay for your time, which is no doubt valuable.

  “We want fairness, Mister Benson. But we don’t want other people to know what we are doing—or that it is being done—until we are ready to announce it. If you decide to join us you’ll be one of the family, so to speak, and we can then trust you fully. Understand?”

  Jeff nodded. ‘I’ll take it under those conditions.”

  “Good. You’ll find everything in your favor. We pay well for value received.”

  With Hannegan gone, Jeff ignored his pet equipment in order to look over the specifications for the instruments needed for the spacecraft. This was a sheer matter of groceries, rent, cigarettes and fodder for his chosen work, the latter being no small consumer of what-it-takes.