The Ultimate Weapon
Page 4
IV
There was a glint of humor in Buck Kendall's eyes as he passed the sheetover to McLaurin. Commander McLaurin looked down the columns withtwinkling 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 bythe well-known designer of IP stations, Colonel Richard Murray."Commander McLaurin looked up at Kendall with a broad grin. "And youactually got Interplanetary Life to give you a mortgage on thestructure?"
"Why not? It'll cut cost fifty-eight millions, with its twelve-foottungsten-beryllium walls and the heavy defense weapons against thoseterrible pirates. You know we must defend our property."
"With the thing you're setting up out there on Luna, you could morereadily wipe out the IP than anything else I know of. Any new defenseideas?"
"Plenty. Did you get any further appropriations from the IPAppropriations Board?"
McLaurin looked sour. "No. The dear taxpayers might object, and thosethickheaded, clogged rockets on the Board can't see your data on theStranger. They gave me just ten millions, and that only because youdemonstrated you could shoot every living thing out of the latest IPcruiser with that neutron gun of yours. By the way, they may kick when Idon't install more than a few of those."
"Let 'em. You can stall for a few months. You'll need that money morefor other purposes. You've installed that paraffin lining?"
"Yes--I got a report on that of 'finished' last week. How have you madeout?"
Buck Kendall's face fell. "Not so hot. Devin's been the biggest help--hedid 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 dutytomorrow evening, can't you drop around to the lab? We're going to tryout a new system for releasing atomic energy."
"Isn't that a pretty faint hope? We've been trying to get it for threecenturies now, and haven't yet. What chance at it within a year orso?--which is the time you allow yourself before the Stranger returns."
"It is, I'll admit that. But there's another factor, not to beforgotten. The data we got from correlating those 'misreadings' from thevarious IP posts mean a lot. We are working on an entirely differenttrail now. You come on out, and you can see our new apparatus. They areworking on tremendous voltages, and hoping to smash the thing by abrutal bombardment of terrific voltage. We're trying, thanks to theresults of those instruments, to get results with small, terrificallyintense fields."
"How do you know that's their general system?"
"They left traces on the records of the post instruments. These recordsshow such intensities as we never got. They have atomic energy,necessarily, and they might have had material energy, actual destructionof matter, but apparently, from the field readings it's the former. Tobe able to make those tremendous hops, light-years in length, theyneeded a real store of energy. They have accumulators, of course, but Idon't think they could store enough power by the system they use to doit."
"Well, how's your trick 'bank' out on Luna, despite its twelve-footwalls, going to stand an atomic explosion?"
"More protective devices to come is our only hope. I'm working on threetrails: atomic energy, some type of magnetic shield that will stop anymoving material particle, and their faster-than-light thing. Also, thatfortress--I mean, of course, bank--is going to have a lot of lead-linedrooms."
"I wish I could use the remaining money the Board gave me to lead-line alot of those IP ships," said McLaurin wistfully. "Can't you make agamma-ray bomb of some sort?"
"Not without their atomic energy release. With it, of course, it's easyto 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 itall 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 someway to keep him off of the Arms Petition Board. He might just as wellstay home and let 'em vote his ticket uniformly 'nay.'" Buck Kendallleft 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 milliondollars, roughly. One doesn't sell properties of that magnitude, oneborrows against them. But to all intents and purposes, Buck Kendallowned two half-completed ship's hulls in the Baldwin Spaceship Yards, agreat deal of massive metal work on its way to Luna, and contracts forsome very extensive work on a "bank." Beyond that, about eleven millionwas left.
A large portion of the money had been invested in a laboratory, the likeof which the world had never seen. It was devoted exclusively tophysics, and principally the physics of destruction. Dr. Paul Devin wasthe Director, Cole was in charge of the technical work, and Buck Kendallwas free to do all the work he thought needed doing.
Returned to his laboratory, he looked sourly at the bench on which sevenmechanicians were working. The ninth successive experiment on therelease of atomic energy had failed. The tenth was in process ofconstruction. A heavy pure tungsten dome, three feet in diameter, threeinches thick, was being lowered over a clear insulum dome, a footsmaller. Inside, the real apparatus was arranged around the little poolof mercury. From it, two massive tungsten-copper alloy conductors ledthrough the insulum housing, and outside. These, so Kendall had hoped,would surge with the power of broken atoms, but he was beginning tobelieve rather bitterly, they would never do so.
Buck went on to his offices, and the main calculator room. There wereten 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." Hebrought over a sheaf of graphs, with explanatory tables attached.Rapidly Buck ran through them with him. Most of them were graphs offunctions of light, considered as a wave in these experiments.
"H-m-m-m--not very encouraging. Looks like you've got the field--but itjust snaps shut on itself and won't work. The lack of volume makes itbreak down, if you establish it, and makes it impossible to establish inthe first place without the energy of matter. Not so hot. That'scertainly 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 onlymagnetic; but electric. Somehow it transforms electric fields cyclicallyinto magnetic fields and back again. Now what we want to do is totransform an electric into a magnetic field and have it stay there.That's the first step. The second thing, is to have the lines ofmagnetic force you develop, lie down like a sheath around the ship,instead of standing out like the hairs on an angry cat, the way theywant to. That means turning them ninety degrees, and turning an electricinto a magnetic field means turning the space-strain ninety degrees.Light evidently forms a magnetic field whose lines of force reach alongits 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 otherwords, 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 chanceto close in, then repeat the process--the way light does."
"That wouldn't make such a good magnetic shield. Every time that fieldstarted pulsing out through the walls of the ship it would generateheat. We want a permanent field that will stay on the job out there. Iwonder if you couldn't make a conductor device that would open thatfield out--some special type of oscillating field that would keep itopen."
"H-m-m-m--that's an angle I might try. Any suggesti
ons?"
Kendall had suggestions, and rapidly he outlined a development thatappeared from some of the earlier mathematics on light, and might bewhat they wanted.
* * * * *
Kendall, however, had problems of his own to work on. The question ofatomic energy he was leaving alone, till the present experiment eithersucceeded, or, as he rather suspected, failed as had its predecessors.His present problem was to develop more fully some interesting lines ofresearch he had run across in investigating mathematically the trick ofturning electric to magnetic fields and then turning them back again. Itmight be that along this line he would find the answer to the speedgreater 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--tillhe ran it into the ground with a pair of equations that ended with theexpression: dx.dv=h/(4[pi]m). Then Kendall looked at them for a longmoment, then he sighed gently and threw them into a file cabinet.Heisenberg's Uncertainty. He'd reduced the thing to a form that simplytold him it was beyond the limits of certainty and he ran it into thenormal, natural uncertainty inevitable in Nature.
Anyway he had real work to do now. The machine was about ready for hisattention. The mechanicians had finished putting it in shape fordemonstration and trial. He himself would have to test it over the restof the afternoon and arrange for power and so forth.
By evening, when Commander McLaurin called around with some of the otherinvestors in Kendall's "bank" on Luna, the thing was already started,warming up. The fields were being fed and the various scientists of thegroup were watching with interest. Power was flowing in already at arate of nearly one hundred thousand horsepower per minute, thanks to aspecial line given them by New York Power (a Kendall property). At teno'clock they were beginning to expect the reaction to start. By thistime the fields weren't gaining in intensity very rapidly, a maximumintensity had been reached that should, they felt, break the atoms soon.
At eleven-thirty, through the little view window, Buck Kendall sawsomething that made him cry out in amazement. The mercury metal in thereceiver, behind its layers of screening was beginning to glow, with adull reddish light, and little solidifications were appearing in it!Eagerly the men looked, as the solidifications spread slowly, likecrystals growing in an evaporating solution.
Twelve o'clock came and went, and one o'clock and two o'clock. Still theslow crystallization went on. Buck Kendall was casting furtive glancesat the kilowatt-hour meter. It stood at a figure that representedtwenty-seven thousand dollars' worth of power. Long since the power ratehad been increased to the maximum available, as the power plant's normalload reduced as the morning hours came. Surely, this time somethingwould start, but Buck had two worries. If all the enormous amount ofenergy 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 mercuryskittering around on the sharp, needle-like crystals of the dull redmetal 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--watchingthe meters on the board. At nearly eighty thousand volts the power hadbeen fed into it.
The power continued to flow, and a growing halo of intense violet lightappeared suddenly on those red, needle-like crystals, a swiftlyexpanding halo--
Without a sound, without the slightest disturbance, the halo vanished,and softly, gently, the needle-like crystals relapsed, melted away, anda dull pool of metallic mercury rested in the receiver.
At eighty thousand volts, power was flowing in--
And it didn't even sparkle.