Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters

by Philip Strick

  ‘No politics. Registers and votes, but expresses no opinions.’ Joe Brown pursed his lips again, the same purse as before, because it was part of the same words: ‘Has to be hiding something. And what happens if he turns this thing loose on the world?’

  ‘Worse than the bomb, nerve gas, Dederick Plague, you name it.’

  ‘And what if he gets sole control?’

  ‘King of the world.’

  ‘For maybe ten minutes.’ Joe Brown squinted through an imaginary telescopic sight and squeezed an invisible trigger.

  ‘Not if he had the Agency.’

  Joe Brown looked at Red Brown for a long, comprehending moment. Before he had become an Agent, and even for a while when he was in training, he had been very clear in his mind who the Agency worked for. But as time went on that didn’t seem to matter any more; agents worked for the Agency, and nobody in or out of the Agency or the Government or anywhere else would dream of asking who the Agency worked for. So if the Agency decided to work for the king of the world, well, why not? Only one man. It’s very easy to take care of one man. The Agency had long known how things should be, and with sole control of a thing like this the Agency could make them be that way. For everybody, everywhere.

  Red Brown made a swift complex gesture which Joe Brown understood. They both took out their concealed recorders and wiped that last sentence from the tape. They put their recorders away again and looked at each other with new and shining eyes. If the two of them should come by sole possession of the Mellow Effect, then their superior, a Mr Brown, and his superior, who was head of the whole Agency, had a surprise coming.

  Red Brown removed a bunch of keys from his belt and selected one, with which he unlocked a compartment, or drawer, in his desk, or console, and withdrew a heavy steel box, like a safety deposit. Flicking a glance at his colleague to be sure he was out of visual range, he turned a combination knob with great care and attention, this way, that, around again and back, and then depressed a handle. The lid of the box rose, and from it he took two photocopies of the Mellow Memo. ‘We shall now,’ he said for the record, ‘read the Mellow Memo.’

  And so shall you.

  THE MELLOW MEMO

  Ever since the dawn of history, mankind has found himself face to face with basic truths that, through inattention, preconception, or sheer stupidity, he cannot see, or does not recognize, or does not understand. There have been times when he has done very well indeed with complex things—for example, the Mayan calendar stones and the navigation of the Polynesians—while blindly overlooking the fact that complex things are built of simple things, and that the simplest things are, by their nature, all around us, waiting to be observed.

  Mankind has been terribly tardy in his discovery of the obvious. Two clear illustrations should suffice:

  You can, for a few pennies, at any toy store or fairgrounds, pick up a pinwheel. Now, I have not been able to discover just when this device was invented, where, or by whom, but as far as I know there are no really early examples of it. An even simpler device can be whittled by an eight-year-old from a piece of pine: a two-bladed propeller. Mounted on a shaft, or pin, it will spin freely in the wind. This would seem to be the kind of discovery which could have been made five hundred years ago, a thousand—even five thousand, when Egyptian artisans were turning out far more complex designs and devices. To put the propeller on a fixed shaft, to spin the shaft and create a wind, to immerse the thing in water and envision pumps and propulsion—these seem to be obvious, self-describing steps to take, and yet for thousands of years, nobody took them. Now imagine if you can—and you can’t—what the history of civilization would be, where we would now be technologically, had there been propellers and pumps a thousand years ago—or three, or five! All for the lack of one whittling child, one curious primitive whose eye was caught by a twisted leaf spinning on a spiderweb.

  One more example; and this time we will start with modern materials and look back. If you drill a one-sixteenth-inch hole in a sheet of tin, and place a drop of water on the hole, it will suspend itself there. Gravity will pull it downward, while surface tension will draw it upward into a dome shape. Viewed from the edge of the piece of tin, the drop of water is in the shape of a lens—and it is a lens. If you look down through it, with the eye close to the drop, at something held under it and well illuminated, you will find that the liquid lens has a focal length of about half an inch and a power of about fifty diameters. (And, if by any chance you want a microscope for nothing, drill your hole in the centre of the bottom of a soup can, then cut three sides of a square—right, left, top—in the side of the can and bend the tab thus forward inward to forty-five degrees to let the light in and reflect it upwards. Cut a slip of glass and fix it so it rests inside the can and under the hole. Mount your subject—a fly’s foot, a horsehair, whatever you like—on the glass, put a drop of water in the hole, and you will see your subject magnified fifty times. A drop of glycerin, by the way, is not quite as clear but works almost as well and does not evaporate.)

  Microscopes and their self-evident siblings, telescopes, did not appear until the eighteenth century. Why not? Were there not countless thousands of shepherds who on countless dewy mornings were in the presence of early sunlight and drops of water captured on cobwebs or in punctured leaves; why did not just one of them look, just once, through a dewdrop at the whorls of his own thumb? And why, seemingly, did the marvellous artisans of glass in Tyre and Florence and ancient Babylon never think to look through their blown and moulded bowls and vases instead of at them ? Can you imagine what this world would be if the burning glass, the microscope, the eyeglasses, the telescope had been invented three thousand years earlier?

  Perhaps by now you share with me a kind of awe at human blindness, human stupidity. Let me then add to that another species of blindness: the conviction that all such simple things have now been observed and used, and all their principles understood. This is far from so. There are in nature numberless observations yet to be made, and many of them might still be found by an illiterate shepherd; but in addition to these, our own technology has produced a whole new spectrum of phenomena, just waiting for that one observant eye, that one undeluded mind which sees things placed right in front of its nose—not once, not rarely, but over and over and over again, shouting to be discovered and developed.

  There is one such phenomenon screaming at you today and every day from at least three places in your house—your bathroom, your kitchen, and, if you have a bank account, your pocket.

  Two out of five times, on the average, when you tear off a sheet of toilet tissue, a paper towel, or a cheque from your chequebook, it will tear across the sheet and not along the perforated line. The same is true of note pads, postage stamps, carbon-and-second-sheet tablets, and virtually every other substance or device made to be torn along perforations.

  To the writer’s present knowledge, no exhaustive study has ever been made of this phenomenon. I here propose one.

  We begin with the experimentally demonstrable fact that in a large percentage of cases, the paper will tear elsewhere than on the perforation line. In all such cases the conclusion is obvious: that the perforation line is stronger than the non-perforated parts.

  Let us next consider what perforation is—that is to say, what is done when a substance is perforated. Purely and simply: material is removed.

  Now if, in these special cases, the substance becomes stronger when a small part of it is removed, it would seem logical to assume that if still more were removed, the substance would be stronger still. And carried to its logical conclusion, it would seem reasonable to hypothesize that by removing more and more material, the resulting substance would become stronger and stronger until at last we would produce a substance composed of nothing at all—which would be indestructible I

  If conventional thinking makes it difficult for you to grasp this simple sequence, or if, on grasping it, you find you cannot accept it, please permit me to remind you of the remark o
nce uttered by a Corsican gentleman by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘To find out if something is impossible—try it. ’ I have done just that, and results so far are most promising. Until I have completed more development work, I prefer not to go into my methods nor describe the materials tested — except to say that I am no longer working with paper. I am convinced, however, that the theory is sound and the end result will be achieved.

  A final word—which surely is not needed, for like everything else about this process, each step dictates and describes the next—will briefly suggest the advantages of this new substance, which I shall conveniently call, with a capital letter, Nothing:

  The original material, to be perforated, is not expensive and will always be in plentiful supply. Processing, although requiring a rather high degree of precision in the placement of the holes, is easily adaptable to automatic machinery which, once established, will require very little maintenance. And the most significant—one might almost say, pleasant—thing about this processing is that by its very nature (the removal of material) it allows for the retrieval of very nearly 100 per cent of the original substance. This salvage may be refabricated into sheets which can then be processed, by repeated perforations, into more Nothing, so that the initial material may be used over and over again to produce unlimited quantities of Nothing.

  Simple portable devices can be designed which will fabricate Nothing into sheets, rods, tubing, beams or machine parts of any degree of flexibility, elasticity, malleability, or rigidity. Once in its final form, Nothing is indestructible. Its permeability, conductivity, and chemical reactivity to acids and bases all are zero. It can be made in thin sheets as a wrapping, so that perishables can be packed in Nothing, displayed most attractively on shelves made of Nothing. Whole buildings, homes, factories, schools can be built of it. Since, even in tight rolls, it weighs nothing, unlimited quantities of it can be shipped for virtually nothing, and it stows so efficiently that as yet I have not been able to devise a method of calculating how much of it could be put into a given volume—say a single truck or airplane, which could certainly carry enough Nothing to build, pave, and equip an entire city.

  Since Nothing (if desired) is impermeable and indestructible, it would seem quite feasible to throw up temporary or permanent domes over houses, cities, or entire geographical areas. To shield aircraft, however, is another matter: getting an airflow through the invisible barrier of Nothing and over the wings of an airplane presents certain problems. On the other hand, orbiting devices would not be subject to these.

  To sum up: the logical steps leading to the production of Nothing seem quite within the ‘state of the art’, and the benefits accruing to humanity from it would seem to justify proceeding with it.

  There was a certain amount of awe in Miss Prince’s voice as it emerged from the little black box saying ‘A Mr Brown is here and would like to see you.’

  Henry Mellow frowned a sort of ‘Oh, dear’ kind of frown and then said, ‘Send him in.’

  He came in, black suit, black shoes, black tie, and in his eyes, nothing. Henry Mellow did not rise, but he was pleasant enough as he gestured, ‘Sit down, Mr Brown.’ There was only one chair to sit in, and it was well placed, so Mr Brown sat. He identified himself with something leathery that opened and shut like a snapping turtle with a mouthful of medals. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘You’re Henry Mellow.’ Mr Brown didn’t ask, he told.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You wrote a memo about Noth— about some new substance to build things with.’

  ‘Oh that, yes. You mean Nothing.’

  ‘That depends,’ said Mr Brown humourlessly. ‘You’ve gone ahead with research and development.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘That’s what we’d like to know.’

  ‘We?’

  Mr Brown’s hand dipped in and out of his black jacket and made the snapping turtle thing again.

  ‘Oh,’ said Henry Mellow. ‘Well, suppose we just call it an intellectual exercise—an entertainment. We’ll send it out to a magazine, say, as fiction.’

  ‘We can’t allow that.’

  ‘Really not?’

  ‘We live in a real world, Mr Mellow, where things happen that maybe people like you don’t understand. Now I don’t know whether or not there’s any merit in your idea or how far you’ve gone with it, but I’m here to advise you to stop it here and now.’

  ‘Oh? Why, Mr Brown?’

  ‘Do you know how many large corporations would be affected by such a thing—if there was such a thing? Construction, mining, hauling, prefabrication—everything. Not that we take it seriously, you understand, but we know something about you and we have to take it seriously anyway.’

  ‘Well, I appreciate the advice, but I think I’ll send it out anyway.’

  ‘Then,’ continued Mr Brown as if he had not spoken, and acquiring, suddenly, a pulpit resonance, ‘Then . . . there’s the military.’

  ‘The military.’

  ‘Defence, Mr Mellow. We can’t allow just anybody to get their hands on plans to put impenetrable domes over cities—suppose somebody overseas got them built first?’

  ‘Do you think if a lot of people read it in a magazine someone overseas would do it first?’

  ‘That’s the way we have to think.’ He leaned closer. ‘Look, Mr Mellow—have you thought maybe you’ve got a gold mine for yourself here? You don’t want to turn it over to the whole world.’

  ‘Mr Brown, I don’t want a gold mine for myself. I don’t much want any kind of mines for anybody. I don’t want people cutting down more forests or digging more holes in the ground to take out what they can’t put back, not when there are better ways. And I don’t want to get paid for not using a better way if I find one. I just want people to be able to have what they want without raping a planet for it, and I want them to be able to protect themselves if they have to, and to get comfortable real quick and real cheap even if it means some fat cats have to get comfortable along with them. Not thin, Mr Brown—just comfortable.’

  ‘I thought it was going to be something like this,’ said Mr Brown. His hand dipped in and out of the black jacket again, but this time it was holding a very small object like a stretched-out toy pistol. ‘You can come along with me willingly or I’ll have to use this.’

  ‘I guess you’d better use it, then,’ said Henry Mellow regretfully.

  ‘It’s nice,’ said Mr Brown. ‘It won’t even leave a mark.’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t,’ said Henry Mellow as the little weapon went off with a short, explosive hiss. The little needle it threw disintegrated in mid air.

  Mr Brown turned grey. He raised the weapon again. ‘Don’t bother, Mr Brown,’ said Henry Mellow. ‘There’s a sheet of just plain Nothing between us, and it’s impenetrable.’

  Still holding his weapon, Mr Brown rose and backed away—and brought up sharply against some Nothing behind him. He turned and patted it wildly and then ran to the side, where he struck an invisible barrier that sat him down on the rug. He looked as if he was going to cry.

  ‘Sit in the chair,’ said Henry Mellow, not unkindly. ‘Please. There. That’s better. Now then: listen to me.’ And something, at that moment, seemed to happen to Henry Mellow: to Mr Brown he looked bigger, wider, and, somehow realer than he had been before. It was as if the business he was in had for a long time kept him from seeing people as real, and now, suddenly, he could again.

  Henry Mellow said, ‘I’ve had a lot longer to think this out than you have, and besides, I don’t think the way you do. I guess I don’t think the way anybody does. So I’ve been told. But for what it’s worth, here it is: If I tried to keep this thing and control it myself, I wouldn’t live ten minutes. (What’s the matter, Mr Brown? Somebody else say that? I wouldn’t doubt it.) Or I could just file it away and forget it; matter of fact, I tried that and I just couldn’t forget it, because there’s a lot of people dying now, and more could die in the future, for lack of it. I even thought
of printing it up, in detail, and scattering it from a plane. But then, you know what I wrote about how many shepherds didn’t look into how many dewdrops; that could happen again—probably would, and it’s not a thing I could do thousands of times. So I’ve decided to do what I said—publish it in a magazine. But not in detail. I don’t want anyone to think they stole it, and I don’t want anyone to make a lot out of it and then come looking for me, either to eliminate me (that could happen) or to share it, because I don’t want to share it with one person or two or a company—I want to share it with everybody, all the good that comes of it, all the bad. You don’t understand that, do you, Mr Brown?

  ‘You’re going to meet a doctor friend of mine in a minute who will give you something that will help you forget. It’s quite harmless, but you won’t remember any of this. So before you go, I just want to tell you one thing: there’s another Mr Brown downstairs. Mr Brown X, he said you called him, and all he wanted was the process—not for himself, not for the Agency, but for his people; he said they really know how to get along with Nothing.’ He smiled. ‘And I don’t want you to feel too badly about this, but your Agency’s not as fast on its feet as you think it is. Last week I had a man with some sort of Middle European accent and a man who spoke Ukrainian and two orientals and a fellow with a beard from Cuba. Just thought I’d tell you . . .

  ‘So good-bye, Mr Brown. You’ll forget all about this talk, but maybe when you write a cheque and tear it in two getting it out of the book, or when you rip off a paper towel or a stamp and the perforations hold, something will tell you to stop a minute and think it through.’ He smiled and touched a second button on his intercom.

  ‘Stand by, Doc.’

  ‘Ready,’ said the intercom.

  Henry Mellow moved something under the edge of his desk and the visitor’s chair dropped through the floor. In a moment it reappeared, empty. Henry Mellow touched another control, and the sheets of Nothing slid up and away, to await the next one.

  So when it happens, don’t just say Damn and forget it. Stop a minute and think it through. Somebody’s going to change the face of the earth and it could be you.