"Well," said Forrest standing up and stretching, "I think this has gone far enough, Turner." He picked up a package of cigarettes from the table, put one in his mouth, and then felt for a match. He lifted the fountain-pen-sized blaster from his belt and triggered it.
The tiny beam lit his cigarette and he drew in a lungful of smoke. He blew out the smoke in a large cloud that hid his actions momentarily. Under the cover of the smoke he turned the cap on the little gadget, pointed it at Turner, and pressed the button.
THE tiny beam seared the air and drilled a tiny hole in the broad green muzzle-crystal of Turner's blaster. It heated to dull-red almost instantly, and Turner hurled the weapon from him with a shock of unexpected pain. The weapon charred the floor as it landed.
Following the beam as fast as he could Jim Forrest threw his Sunday punch while Turner was still reacting from the burn-shock. The flying fist caught Turner on the jaw and the guardsman went down like a pole-axed steer. He came to as Forrest was snapping the Guardsman's own handcuffs on him.
"I'm no murderer," he told Turner. "I calculate it to be sixty hours to Mars at one gravity. I'll set the autopilot that way. I'll set the warning-radio also. I'll lock you in the living-suite below, where you will have all the comforts of a celibate home excepting the means with which to get out. In sixty hours your velocity will be zero with respect to Mars and the warning radio will hurl out your own personal distress call."
"You're ... !" blazed Turner.
"Yes, I know," smiled Forrest. "A criminal. Well, kidnaping a Guardsman is merely adding to my long and checkered career. But you see, Turner, I want that crystal. You can also add theft of an official Guard-ship to my roster of criminal acts. So, lead the way to the living-suite below."
"I'll ... ."
"Oh. Turner, I might suggest that when you come looking for me you be very careful. I'll be driving a Guardship, you know, and if someone takes a shot at me I'll be psychologically forced to defend myself as a mere matter of survival. Guardships are pretty well-armed, or need I tell you?"
Turner blazed with anger. "Okay," he snarled. "Lock me in. But you can't lick the whole system! We'll get you cold! And if in the meantime you intercept Miss Haynes, remember that you are interfering with an official deputy."
"Then," smiled Forrest quite cheerfully, "I'm actually helping you to prove that Ellen Haynes is no criminal, aren't I?"
Turner fumed and continued to fume as Jim Forrest welded the living-suite door shut with his pen-beam.
Twenty minutes later, Turner felt the ship turn and accelerate towards Mars. He felt a slight shook a moment later and knew that Jim Forrest had just cast off in his Guard-ship. He cursed roundly and then, sensibly, he sat down and relaxed.
He concluded sensibly there was little to be gained by spending sixty hours in self-villification.
He'd failed temporarily but Forrest couldn't lick the whole solar system. .
. .
Using Turner's matter-synchronized detector, Jim Forrest tracked the tiny space tender down in a matter of less than two hours. The tender, of course, was helpless when the Guardship tractor beam fastened onto it, and it was drawn easily into the tender-lock and anchored.
The door opened and Ellen Haynes emerged, furious.
"Before you say anything," said Jim, "tell me whether you were really going to headquarters or were just making off with the crystal again."
"What difference does it make now?" she asked bitterly.
"No difference to me," said Forrest idly. "I'm just trying to estimate your character."
"I'm not taken in," she snapped. "With certain individuals you might stir their interest enough to make them look at it askance. But with the Solar Lab, who've already ignored the thing for years, they'd continue. So ... ."
"So you think you're going to work on it yourself?"
"I most certainly am," she said with conviction.
He laughed shortly.
"You think not?" she demanded. "Either alone or with you, since you've been after it and seem to have both me and the zonium at the same time right now."
"Ellen," he said slowly, "I intend to destroy that crystal!"
SHE grabbed for the box and shielded it with her body but Jim shook his head. "Not here," he said. "There's nothing here that would destroy it."
"Your blaster?"
"Wouldn't touch it."
"I--a blaster wouldn't touch it?" asked Ellen Haynes in amazement.
"Wouldn't touch it," he said firmly and convincingly.
Ellen's eyes opened wide. "Armor!" she breathed. And in that one instant the whole mighty idea came, flooding her mind and making her almost reel in dizziness at the flood of jumbled ideas.
Guardships plated with zonium for protection; personal armor because zonium was light in weight; zonium-lined blaster barrels to keep the things from falling apart after a hundred or so shots and perhaps even super-projectors protected by zonium liners.
The big projectors used on the Guardships were none too efficient because they etched themselves into uselessness after a hundred or less of the gigantic blasts. Half of a Guardship's bulk was filled with spare blaster replacements.
"Armor," he nodded, with a look of horror.
"What's wrong with that?" she demanded sharply.
"That's the point. There's apparently nothing wrong with it," he said, "
except that there's no real reason for it. Who or what will attack a Guardship? There is no common enemy loose in the Solar System and we know that there are no extra-solar races capable of any massed attack on Sol's family--so far, anyway. There is an occasional, wild-eyed pirate but he is usually tracked down within a few weeks after he takes his first victim.
With zonium armor there could be piracy because a pirate could then laugh at the heavily-armed Guardships."
"But it sounds good," she interrupted.
"And you know darn well that the Guard would immediately plate their ships with zonium!"
"Certainly. And my income from that... Why, I'd be unmentionably wealthy!"
She positively glowed for a moment with the idea. Then she turned to him and said, "But if a blaster wouldn't touch it, how do you hope to destroy it? Toss it into the sun?"
Jim Forrest paled. He walked over to her and pushed her aside. He took the zonium crystal from the box and hefted it while Ellen looked on in fear that he would destroy it then and there.
"Ellen Haynes," he said solemnly, "this much zonium if hurled into the sun would create a nova!"
"But it is so small."
"Yes, but zonium is a strange metal," he said. "The mass-energy relation is carefully disregarded by zonium. In normal matter, energy equals the mass times the square of the speed of light in centimeters per second.
"
"But its mass is not considerable."
"Zonium is a temporal metal," said Forrest. "When it is under the influence of a magnetic field passing through the magnetic axis--an electrical current through the electrical axis --and a beam of light through the optical axis its mass increases according to some exponential function of the energy levels of the radiation that is passing through it.
"Throw it into the sun where the radiation-energy output is some four million tons of energy per second and zonium increases its apparent mass by a factor of the cube--one exponential power for each axis accepting and passing radiation--of the mass of the zonium times the factorial expansion of the energy passing through it. It would be much like hurling Jupiter into the sun."
He handed her the crystal. "Ellen Haynes," he said dramatically, "you hold in your hand the agent of Sol's destruction!"
She looked at it with fascinated horror and gingerly replaced it in the packing.
"So develop it. Plate your ships with it. Line the millions of blasters with it. Line your power converters with it. Use zonium in the units that give each dwelling light and power. Load every sportsman's crate with it and have everybody tossing cubes of the stuff around. Interesting stuff--ki
ds will be playing with it. Then calculate your chances of keeping a bit of it out of the sun."
Ellen Haynes shuddered. About once each year some spacecraft didn't return, usually a small, privately-owned job that was trying to cut the perihelion too thin. The mortality was rather high on the drones that rode the inner flame-area of Sol's domain with automatic recorders. Yet, with good supervision, zonium would be safe.
"How," she asked drily, "do you hope to destroy it?"
"I don't know," he said. "But it must be destroyed."
CHAPTER IV
Biggest Meddler
ELLEN nodded slowly. Her dream of untold wealth dimmed somewhat.
Yet she knew that supervision of the zonium metal would insure its safety. It had been so with the original fission of uranium and plutonium.
What had been made before could be made again. She would let Jim Forrest destroy it and then set about getting it rebuilt again in the government laboratory. What could any one man do to stop the development of any single phase of science?
The thing to do now was to agree with him, learn from Jim Forrest all the math and reasoning behind the stuff. Just how did he know--he alone of all the worlds of Sol and their teeming billions--that zonium would react that way. Especially when he had not worked with it.
But Ellen knew that before she could interest the laboratory in zonium, she must have scientific and mathematical basis for her predictions. With that, not only could she interest them but she would be forgiven for her original theft. She would go along for now and learn as much as she could about zonium.
"Tell me," she said interestedly, "how do you know all this about zonium?"
"Know matrix-math?" he asked.
"A little."
"I'll bet I lose you along the way," he said. "But we've a week of hard travel between here and Ganymede in which I can prove to you--and also teach you how to handle matrix-math--that everything I've said is true."
Jim Forrest locked the crystal in the cabinet, and found paper and pencils. He started to talk and he wrote equations as he spoke, explaining each step as he went along. Ellen Haynes nodded. It was thick, and she would require the whole week even to catch up to the theories of Jim Forrest....
Captain Turner, imprisoned in Jim Forrest's personal cruiser, spent a full twenty-hour period wondering. He had been resigned at first, but the idea of sitting there was against his grain.
The welded door was a mean problem. How does one breach a solid aluminum door when the thinner panels are three-sixteenths sheet aluminum-magnesium alloy and the edgings and crossbars that hold the panels are one-inch stock?
He undid the floor thumbscrews that held the chair down against maneuverings in space and hefted it. It too was aluminum alloy. He swung it at the door and dented the panel, but broke the legs of the chair. Had the seat been heavy and solid that would have done nicely, he thought.
But the chair-bottom itself was a mere frame upon which was woven a plastic-rope in the standard pattern of a cane-bottomed chair. The metal of the chair was brittle and he broke it after three swings that put but a few minute scars on the panel of the door.
The floor-lamp was little better--aluminum-zinc-magnesium die-castings.
Not only were the parts light and brittle, they were positively friable.
He tried the drawers in the dresser and they added to the pile of broken metal. The bed was no good at all--just a welded-down shelf on top of which was a thick airfoam mattress.
The kitchen quarters produced a couple of sharp knives, which he employed to some advantage, but their very-long blades left Turner with too little leverage until he broke them off short. Cutting three-sixteenths aluminum alloy panel was no job for a knife.
HE SAT down to think after that. Brute force was useless--brainwork might produce an answer.
Aluminum is soluble in certain reagents--and he was in what amounted to a three-room apartment. What common reagents did exist in the average apartment? A few ounces of vinegar--three percent acetic acid. A pound of salt--sodium chloride. Aluminum is soluble in a solution of sodium hydroxide. Electrolysis of water containing sodium chloride produced chorine and sodium, which reacted with the water and produced sodium hydroxide.
It looked like a long process. He was not a chemist, and therefore he was not too certain of any effect. There was no reaction that he knew of that would attack that door. Perhaps a chemist would know and no doubt he would be laughed at by the chemists of the Guard when he told of his futile attempts.
He went into the kitchen again. The drainage from the sink went into the converter far below him in the ship. He had no chance of getting to that at all. There was a small ventilator in every room but he was neither an eel nor a cat and removing them, if he could, would give him no chance. The air was forced out through a larger duct by an electric fan but even so it was too small for him.
The electric fan?
The electric fan!
He tackled the fastenings with a dinner-knife and succeeded in removing the small fan. He hitched it to longer leads from the floor lamp. He removed the blade and saw the swiftly-rotating shaft--it could be used as a drill.
It was blunt and polished, instead of sharp, but none the less a drill in embryonic form. To sharpen it ... .
He pawed through the bathroom cabinet and returned with a small nail-file. There was a corundum sharpening-stone in the kitchen. He filed and he honed and the end of the fan-motor shaft took on a wide, flat point.
He set it against the door and tried to drill.
It was slow work but he made progress. He drilled through and then set the drill near the first hole and continued. Slowly and inexorably Captain Turner of the Space Guard added to his line of holes. He forgot eating, ignored sleep. And as the hours passed Jack Turner came closer to freedom by the minute.
At last he had a rough oval of holes in the bottom panel of the door.
Then, taking a heavy iron frying pan, Turner hammered at one side of the oval where the holes were almost tangent. He broke through, turning the slight end outward.
He hammered until he could set one end of the iron handle through, and then he pried. The webbing between the holes tore until he had an opening that prevented the use of the utensil at all.
He pried with knives, with fragments of the shattered chair, with his bare hands. He finally took the motor itself, which was of steel and heavy though small, and he swung it on its wire leads. He hurled it again and again at the oval. The ship rang with the blows, but each crash saw the oval leaning outward just a fraction more.
And then, lying on his back, Jack Turner kicked the oval outward with his heels. He was free!
Thirty hours instead of sixty--Turner raced to the control room and set the ship on course toward Ganymede. He crammed on the power until he could hardly stand to slow the course for Mars that he was on--almost at turnover where his velocity was highest--and he added a vector that would curve him through space toward Jove. Then, utterly weary, Jack Turner found his bunk and went to sleep... .
"You seem to know quite a bit about zonium," said Ellen.
Forrest smiled. "I've had little to do but think about it."
"But why the interest?" she asked him.
"Just think of me as an infernal meddler," he said.
Ellen bit her lip in disbelief.
"Well, I am," he said with a laugh. "I'm the biggest meddler of all time.
Now, let's get to work. We've a week."
ELLEN HAYNES nodded. She did not know what to make of Jim Forrest. Here on cold Ganymede he had a comfortable brick building that was built along the lines of a good sized mansion. Though the cold and the winds beat at the outside with an ammoniac odor, inside of the building it was warm and pleasantly filled with the smell of a Terran garden.
Jim Forrest, she knew, was wealthy. But the word 'wealth' had a world of meanings. After Ellen had seen the building and had seen shown the inside--part of it anyway--the was beginning to understand just how wealthy
the man must be.
She had wondered about her relations with this strange man until he showed her a small suite of rooms that he said were to be hers. That in itself was comforting but it posed a greater question as to his character. For the apartment was not devoid of the signs of human occupancy--feminine occupancy--also young feminine occupancy.
There were the collections of scents and cosmetics and silks that are unmistakably those of a young, desirable woman. The apartment was more luxurious than any that Ellen Haynes had ever known and, though she felt distaste at the idea of using another woman's things, she found them all cleaned and properly pressed. The cosmetics were enigmatic--some of them looked used and some of them had their original labels and seals intact. The used-appearing ones, on the other hand, bore the stamp of the immaculate. They were unmarred, neither smudges nor fingermarks.
The clothing was a passable fit for Ellen Haynes--not perfect, as were her own clothes, but passable.
Ellen wondered. She wondered even more as he led her into what would have been the grand ballroom of the mansion-design and found it to be fitted as a physical laboratory. She looked around at the vastness and shuddered slightly at the unpeopled silence of the great house.
"Doesn't the lack of company get you down?" she asked.
"Seldom does," he smiled. "Besides, it is seldom this unpopulated. I've seen the day when the place was positively bulging with people. I hope to return to that happy state soon."
"But that suite you gave me ..."
"That's been used, but not recently."
"By whom?" she persisted.
"By several persons," he said noncommittally. He smiled inwardly, knowing what she wondered about. He let her go on thinking mostly because it made no difference and it kept her from brooding on the matter of her father's discovery of Zonium and the things that it implied.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I'm going to make a few tests," he said. "This rock has got to be destroyed. Not just thrown away or buried, but completely destroyed.
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