The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  “Well, I suppose it must be funny,” Morey began, then hesitated. “Oh—I see—say, that is good!” He turned to his father. “I see now what he’s been driving at. It’s been right here under our noses all the time.

  “The light-matter windows we found in the wrecked enemy ships contain enough bound light-energy to run all the planes we could make in the next ten years! We’re going to have the enemy supply us with power we can’t get in any other way. I can’t decide, Arcot, whether you deserve a prize for ingenuity, or whether we should receive booby-prizes for our stupidity.”

  Arcot Senior smiled at first, then looked dubiously at his son.

  “There’s definitely plenty of the right kind of energy stored there—but as you suggested, the energy will need encouragement to break free. Any ideas?”

  “A couple. I don’t know how they’ll work, of course; but we can try.” Arcot puffed at his pipe, serious now as he thought of the problems ahead.

  Wade interposed a question. “How do you suppose they condense that light energy in the first place, and, their sun being dead, whence all the light? Back to the atom, I suppose.”

  “You know as much as I do, of course, but I’m sure they must break up matter for its energy. As for the condensation problem, I think I have a possible solution of that too—it’s the key to the problem of release. There’s a lot we don’t know now—but we’ll have a bigger store of knowledge before this war is over—if we have anything at all!” he added grimly. “It’s possible that man may lose knowledge, life, his planets and sun—but there’s still plenty of hope. We’re not finished yet.”

  “How do you think they got their energy loose?” asked Wade. “Do you think those big blocks of what appeared to be silver were involved in the energy release?”

  “Yes, I do. Those blocks were probably designed to carry away the power once it was released. How the release was accomplished, though, I don’t know. They couldn’t use material apparatus to start their release of material energy; the material of the apparatus might ‘catch fire’ too. They had to have the disintegrating matter held apart from all other matter. This was quite impossible, if you are going to get the energy away by any method other than by the use of fields of force. I don’t think that is the method. My guess is that a terrific current of electricity would accomplish it if anything would.

  “How then are we going to get the current to it? The wires will be subject to the same currents. Whatever they do to the matter involved, the currents will do to the apparatus—except in one case. If that apparatus is made of some other kind of matter, then it wouldn’t be affected. The solution is obvious. Use some of the light-matter. What will destroy light-matter, won’t destroy electricity-matter, and what will destroy electricity-matter, won’t disturb light-matter.

  “Do you remember the platform of light-metal, clear as crystal? It must have been an insulating platform. What we started as our assumptions in the case of the light-metal, we can now carry further. We said that electricity-metals carried electricity, so light-metals would carry or conduct light. Now we know that there is no substance which is transparent to light, that will carry electricity by metallic conduction. I mean, of course, that there is no substance transparent to light, and at the same time capable of carrying electricity by electronic transmission. True, we have things like NaCl solutions in ordinary H2O which will carry electricity, but here it’s ionic conduction. Even glass will carry electricity very well when hot; when red hot, glass will carry enough electricity to melt it very quickly. But again, glass is not a solid, but a viscous liquid, and it is again carried by ionic conduction. Iron, copper, sodium, silver, lead—all metals carry the current by means of electron drift through the solid material. In such cases we can see that no transparent substance conducts electricity.

  “Similarly, the reverse is true. No substance capable of carrying electricity by metallic conduction is transparent. All are opaque, if in any thickness. Of course, gold is transparent when in leaf form—but when it’s that thin it won’t conduct very much! The peculiar condition we reach in the case of the invisible ship is different. There the effects are brought about by the high frequency impressed. But you get my point.

  “Do you remember those wires that we saw leading to that little box of the reflecting material? So perfectly reflecting it was that we didn’t see it. We only saw where it must be; we saw the light it reflected. That was no doubt light-matter, a non-metal, and as such, non-conductive to light. Like sulphur, an electric non-metal, it reflected the base of which it was formed. Sulphur reflects the base of which it was formed. Sulphur reflects electricity and—in the crystalline form—passes light. This light-non-metal did the same sort of thing; it reflected light and passed electricity. It was a conductor.

  “Now we have the things we need, the matter to disintegrate, and the matter to hold the disintegrating material in. We have two different types of matter. The rest is obvious—but decidedly not easy. They have done it, though; and after the war is over, there should be many of their machines drifting about in space waiting to give up their secrets.”

  Arcot Senior clapped his son on the back. “A fair foundation on which to start, anyway. But I think it’s time now that you got working on your problem; and since I’m officially retired, I’m going downstairs. You know I’m working in my lab on a method to increase the range and power of your projector for the molecular motion field. Young Norris is helping me, and he really has ideas. I’ll show you our math later.”

  The party broke up, the three younger men staying in their own labs, the older men leaving.

  IV

  The three immediately set to work. At Arcot’s suggestion, Wade and Morey attacked the plate of crystal in an attempt to tear off a small piece, on which they might work. Arcot himself went into the televisophone room and put through a second call to the Tychos Observatory, the great observatory that had so recently been established on the frigid surface of the Moon. The huge mirror, twenty feet in diameter, allowed an immense magnification, and stellar observations were greatly facilitated, for no one bothered them, and the “seeing” was always perfect.

  However, the great distance was rather a handicap to the ordinary televisophone stations, and all calls put through to the astronomers had to be made through the powerful sending station in St. Louis, where all interplanetary messages were sent and received, while that side of the Earth was facing the station; and from Constantinople, when that city faced the satellite. These stations could bridge the distance readily and clearly.

  For several minutes Arcot waited while connections were being made with the Moon; then for many more minutes he talked earnestly with the observer in this distant station, and at last satisfied, he hung up.

  He had outlined his ideas concerning the black star, based upon the perturbation of the planets; then he had asked them to investigate the possibilities, and see if they could find any blotting out of stars by a lightless mass.

  Finally he returned to Morey and Wade who had been working on the crystal plate. Wade had an expression of exasperation on his face, and Morey was grinning broadly.

  “Hello, Arcot—you missed all the fun! You should have seen Wade’s struggle with that plate!” The plate, during his absence, had been twisted and bent, showing that it had undergone some terrific stresses. Now Wade began to make a series of highly forceful comments about the properties of the plate in language that was not exactly scientific. It had value, though, in that it seemed to relieve his pent-up wrath.

  “Why, Wade, you don’t seem to like that stuff. Maybe the difficulty lies in your treatment, rather than in the material itself. What have you tried?”

  “Everything! I took a coronium hack saw that will eat through molybdenum steel like so much cheese, and it just wore its teeth off. I tried some of those diamond rotary saws you have, attached to an electric motor, and it wore out the diamonds. That got my goat, so I tried using a little force. I put it in the tension testing machine, an
d clamped it—the clamp was good for 10,000,000 pounds—but it began to bend, so I had to quit. Then Morey held it with a molecular beam, and I tried twisting it. Believe me, it gave me real pleasure to see that thing yield under the pressure. But it’s not brittle; it merely bends.

  “And I can’t cut it, or even get some shavings off the darned thing. You said you wanted to make a Jolly balance determination of the specific gravity, but the stuff is so dense you’d need only a tiny scrap—and I can’t break it loose!” Wade looked at the plate in thorough disgust.

  Arcot smiled sympathetically; he could understand his feelings, for the stuff certainly was stubborn. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you fellows about what you’d run into, but I was so anxious to get that call through to the Moon that I forgot to tell you how I expected to make it workable. Now, Wade, if you’ll get another of those diamond-tooth rotary saws, I’ll get something that may help. Put the saw on the air motor. Use the one made of coronium.”

  Wade looked after the rapidly disappearing Arcot with raised eyebrows, then, scratching his head, he turned and did as Arcot had asked.

  Arcot returned in about five minutes with a small handling machine, and a huge magnet. It must have weighed nearly half a ton. This he quickly connected to the heavy duty power lines of the lab. Now, running the handling machine into position, he quickly hoisted the bent and twisted plate to the poles of the magnet, with the aid of the derrick. Then backing the handling machine out of the way, he returned briskly to his waiting associates.

  “Now we’ll see what we will see!” With a confident smile Arcot switched on the current of the big magnet. At once a terrific magnetic flux was set up through the light-metal. He took the little compressed-air saw, and applied it to the crystal plate. The smooth hiss of the air deepened to a harsh whine as the load came on it, then the saw made contact with the refractory plate.

  Unbelievingly Wade saw the little diamond-edge saw bite its way slowly but steadily into the plate. In a moment it had cut off a little corner of the light-matter, and this fell with a heavy thud to the magnet pole, drawn down by the attraction of the magnet and by gravity.

  Shutting off the magnet, Arcot picked up a pair of pliers and gripped the little fragment.

  “Whew—light-metal certainly isn’t light metal! I’ll bet this little scrap weights ten pounds! We’ll have to reduce it considerably before we can use it. But that shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  By using the magnet and several large diamond faceplates they were able to work the tough material down to a thin sheet; then with a heavy press, they cut some very small fragments, and with these, determined the specific gravity.

  “Arcot,” Wade asked finally, “just how does the magnet make that stuff tractable? I’m not physicist enough to figure out what takes place inside the material.”

  “Magnetism worked as it did,” Arcot explained, “because in this light-matter every photon is affected by the magnetism, and every photon is given a new motion. That stuff can be made to go with the speed of light, you know. It’s the only solid that could be so affected. This stuff should be able, with the aid of a molecular motion beam, which will make all the photons move in parallel paths, to move at the full speed of each photon—186,000 miles a second. The tremendous speed of these individual photons is what makes the material so hard. Their kinetic impulse is rather considerable! It’s the kinetic blow that the molecules of a metal give that keeps other metal from penetrating it. This simply gives such powerful impulse that even diamonds wouldn’t cut it.

  “You know that an iron saw will cut platinum readily, yet if both are heated to say, 1600 degrees, the iron is a liquid, and the platinum very soft—but now the platinum cuts through the iron!

  “Heat probably won’t have any effect on this stuff, but the action of the magnet on the individual photons corresponds to the effect of the heat on the individual atoms and molecules. The mass is softened, and we can work it. At least, that’s the way I figure it out.

  “But now, Wade, I wish you’d see if you can determine the density of the stuff. You’re more used to those determinations and that type of manipulation than we are. When you get through, we may be able to show you some interesting results ourselves!”

  Wade picked up a tiny chip of the light-metal and headed for his own laboratory. Here he set up his Jolly balance, and began to work on the fragment. His results were so amazing that he checked and rechecked his work, but always with the same answer. Finally he returned to the main lab where Arcot and Morey were busy at the construction of a large and complicated electro-static apparatus.

  “What did you find?” called out Arcot, as he saw Wade reenter the room. “Hold your report a second and give us a hand here, will you? I have a laboratory scale apparatus of the type the Kaxorians used in the storage of light. They’ve known, ever since they began working with them, that their machines would release the energy with more than normal violence, if certain changes were made in them. That is, the light condenser, the device that stored the photons so close to each other, would also serve to urge them apart. I’ve made the necessary changes, and now I’m trying to set up the apparatus to work on solid light-matter. It was developed for gaseous material, and it’s a rather tricky thing to change it over. But I think we’ve almost got it.

  “Wade, will you connect that to the high frequency oscillator there—no—through that counterbalanced condenser. We may have to change the oscillator frequency quite a bit, but a variable condenser will do that.

  “Now, what results did you get?”

  Wade shook his head doubtfully. “We all know it’s amazing stuff—and of course, it must be heavy—but still—well, anyway, I got a density of 103.5!”

  “Whewww—103.5! Lord! That’s almost five times as heavy as the heaviest metal hitherto known. There’s about half a cubic foot of the material; that would mean about 4000 pounds for the whole mass, or two tons. No wonder we couldn’t lift the plate!”

  They stopped their work on the Kaxorian apparatus to discuss the amazing results of the density test, but now they fell to again, rapidly assembling the device, for each was a trained experimenter. With all but the final details completed, Arcot stood back and surveyed their handiwork.

  “I think we’ll have enough urge to cause disintegration right here,” he said, “but I want to make sure, and so, before we set up the case over it, I think we may as well put that big magnet in place, and have it there to help in the work of disintegration, if need be.”

  At last the complete apparatus was set up, and the tiny bit of light-matter they were to work on was placed on the table of a powerful Atchinson projector microscope, the field of view being in the exact center of the field of both the magnet and the coil. Carefully, then, step by step, Arcot, Morey and Wade went over their work, checking and rechecking.

  “Well, we’re ready,” said Arcot finally, as he placed the projector screen in position and dimmed the lights in the room. A touch of the switch, and the projection screen was illuminated with the greatly enlarged image of the tiny scrap of light-metal.

  With his hand on the switch, Arcot spoke to the other two. “I won’t say there’s no danger, since we haven’t done this before; and if all the energy should be released at once, it’ll blow the top out of the building. But I’m reasonably sure that it will work safely. Any objections?”

  Wade shook his head, and Morey said: “I can’t see any flaws in our work.”

  Arcot nodded, and unconsciously tensing, he closed the switch. This put the powerful Arcot oscillator tubes into action, and the power was ready for application.

  Slowly he closed the rheostat and put the power into the coil. The little sliver of metal on the slide seemed to throb a bit, and its outline grew hazy; but at last, with full power on, the release was so slow as to be imperceptible.

  “Guess we need the magnet after all; I’ll put it on this time.”

  He opened the coil circuit and closed the magnet circuit at half voltage, then
again he increased the current through the rheostat. This time the plate throbbed quite violently, it took the appearance of a bit of iodine. Dense vapors began pouring from it, and instantly those vapors became a blindingly brilliant flood of light. Arcot had snapped open the switch the moment he saw this display start, and it had had little time to act, for the instant the circuit was opened, it subsided. But even in that brief time, the light aluminum screen had suddenly become limp and slumped down, molten! The room was unbearably hot, and the men were half blinded by the intensity of the light.

  “It works!” yelled Wade. “It works! That sure was hot, too—it’s roasting in here.” He flung open a window. “Let’s have some air.”

  Arcot and Morey gripped hands with a broad grin. That display meant that Earth and Venus would have space ships with which to fight space ships. Reason enough for their joy.

  Though they had made an unusual amount of progress already, there was still a great deal of development work to be done. Fuller was needed, Arcot decided, so he called the elder Morey and requested his services if he could be spared from his present work. He could, and would arrive later that day.

  When Fuller appeared about mid-afternoon, he found the three friends already at work on the development of a more compact apparatus than the makeshift hookup used in making that first release mechanism.

  “And so you can see,” said Arcot as he finished his summary of their work to that point, “we still have quite a job ahead of us. I’m now trying to find some data for you to work on, but I can tell you this: We’ll need a ship that has plenty of strength and plenty of speed. There will be the usual power plant, of course; the generators, the power-tube board, and the electro-magnetic relays for the regular molecular motion controls. Then, in addition, we must have controls for the ray projector, though that must wait a while, for Dad is working on a method of doubling our range.… Oh yes, the driving units will be inside the ship now, for all our power will come from the energy of the light-matter.”