by Earl
[2] NOTE—Super-radio and television operated by speeded up etheric vibrations which travelled at a million times the speed of light, thus eliminating the time drag that would accompany radio communication between planets with ordinary vibrations of the speed of light.
[3] Note—Many of the moons of the planets carried distinct races of rational beings, especially those of Saturn and Jupiter.
THE TIME CONTRACTOR
The contraction of time would release energy!”
THE contraction of time would release energy!”
This statement, delivered in measured tones by “Doc” Rowe, marked the beginning of his attempt to win the Nobel Energy Prize. In 1938 the Nobel prize committee issued the bulletin that startled the world. It read:
The Nobel Prize Institute, founded in 1901 for the advancement of science and betterment of mankind, hereby announces a new prize, separate and apart from its usual list. This prize, to the amount of one million dollars, will be awarded to the first person to discover a source of energy different from any in use to-day. Mankind’s main source of power to-day is from coal. The day will come when there is no more coal. Oil, wood, vegetable fuels, can never supply man fully. Nor can electrical energy from chemical interaction, except at prohibitive expense. Wind power and water power, although coming more and more into use, are likewise not the answer to the problem.
Some inexhaustible source of energy must be found that will last through the ages. It must be cheap to produce; it must run on something that will last as long or longer, than mankind.
The prize of one million dollars is being offered as a stimulus to efforts in that direction, that have gone on perhaps halfheartedly. Any person, or group of persons, of any race, color or creed, may compete for this prize.
There are no rules or restrictions. The results will speak for themselves. The only stipulation is that the discovery that wins the prize must be turned over to the committee, for release to the world on a no-profit basis.
This prize is being offered indefinitely, for the next hundred years if need be.
That was the message that was sent to every government of earth in 1938. It was printed and reprinted and broadcast and talked about till it is doubtful very many persons in the world had not heard about it.
The seed bore no direct fruit for ten years. Many brilliant minds wrestled valiantly with the problem, only to retire to less spectacular, but more productive pursuits in the field of science. Thousands of plans were submitted to the committee in the first few years. Most of them were rejected at a glance—brain storms rather than brain children. Some few showed promise, but proved abortive.
AT ANY RATE, Doc Rowe finally announced his intention of making a try for it, with those enigmatical words: “The contraction of time would release energy!”
“Huh?”
We said it together, Alvira and I, and looked up from our work, startled. We were his assistants at that time, and afraid of him for his quick temper. Yet we liked him for the kindliness beneath his bristly, volatile temperament.
Doc Rowe repeated his statement and searched our faces for signs of comprehension. There were none, I’m sure. His bushy black brows drew together to a perfect V. Alvira and I winced before he even spoke.
“Fools!” he barked. “Time is a function of motion, isn’t it? The relativity formula shows that with increasing velocity, the time factor expands, enlarges, becomes boundless. A second becomes a century. Energy is also a function of motion, you’ll agree. Thus, increasing velocity means increasing energy and expanding time. So, my little nitwits, contracting time means decreasing energy. To state it objectively, when you contract time, you decrease the energy factor. But energy is never destroyed, is it, Alvira?”
“N-no, sir.”
“Therefore——” he probed.
I saw that Alvira was stuck. She had always been a little more awed by him than I, and could not keep her wits with his fierce little eyes upon her.
I spoke up for her: “Therefore, when we contract time, we release energy.”
“Ah, good boy,” grunted Doc Rowe, shifting his gimlet eyes to me. “But tell me, Bob, isn’t that a ridiculous thought? To take time, something intangible, invisible, incomprehensible, and contract it—squeeze it together like a sponge?”
“From a purely mathematical standpoint,” I answered, not knowing around which side of me he was getting, “it is not at all ridiculous. In any formula, any single factor may be taken and altered, thus altering the other factors.”
“Tail swinging the dog,” mused Doc Rowe. He was still frowning. “Now, Bob, how can we actually contract time?”
It was several seconds before I ventured an answer. “Perhaps some force field, some electromagnetic projection into the fourth dimensional space-time continuum would——”
“Bah!”
He glared at me and wilted. “What are you?” he went on scathingly. “A man of science or a yogi? How can we contract time?”
“Sir, I—I——”
“We can’t!” roared Doc Rowe. “Do you hear—we can’t! If things were that easy, science would be a game. But if we can’t take time and contract it to get our energy out of the time-mass-energy system, we can at least decrease velocity. That, my babes, is our focal point of attack. I am going to give the Nobel committee a new source of energy—from the contraction of time. But not for the million dollars. Oh, no. That is an insult to science, a slap in the face to research! I’ll give them their new energy. Then I’ll take the million and throw it back in their faces!”
He glanced at his watch. “Now get out, you two. Be here promptly tomorrow.”
We thankfully tossed off our lab coats and made for the door.
On the way to the bus, Alvira said, “Thanks for pinch-hitting for me, Bob, when I was stuck.” She said this a bit stiffly. I had only known her three months, since she had won her way into Doc Rowe’s laboratory. In that time she had displayed amazing brilliance. Even to old Doc, who was skeptical of feminine intellect. To-day was the first time she had been completely at a loss.
“Glad to help out,” I said. I’m afraid I said it patronizingly.
“Oh, I would have had the answer in another second,” she fired back, “if the old bear hadn’t been so impatient. You don’t think——”
I laughed, and that was a mistake. She froze up and I walked along with an iceberg. The bus whirled up and she got on. I watched her a bit glumly. At the last she looked out of the window at me—and gave me a disarming smile. Talk about your million-dollar prize!
DOC ROWE was in a sly mood the next day. “Have you found a way to contract time?” he greeted us—or me. “Too bad time isn’t like a rubber band, that one could stretch and then release to normal.”
I put on my lab coat thoughtfully. “Look here, Doc”—you could call him “Doc” when he was in a good humor—“there’s a fundamental fallacy in your theory of reducing time and gaining released energy. When you reduce time, you automatically reduce velocity, and that uses energy. Newton’s first law—bodies at rest or in motion require energy to accelerate or decelerate them.”
“Isn’t he the bright one, though?” chortled Doc Rowe, smirking at Alvira. “Found the hole that will cost a million dollars.”
He turned away to shuffle with a bundle of spectrograph charts, as though having dismissed the idea entirely. But I knew that sly twinkle was still in his eye. Over his shoulder, he said casually, “By the way, Bob, here’s something to tickle the brain. What is perfect inertia? When you have the answer, come to me.”
Perfect inertia! What did he mean? Inertia was a state—the state of bodies either in motion or at rest. Inertia was the antithesis of motion change. Inertia was fundamental. How could there be different inertias, and one more perfect than the rest? It was a direct challenge.
Every now and then Doc Rowe would give me a sidelong glance of suppressed amusement. He would keep that up all day unless I came up with something logical. Alvira had been th
inking, too. Under cover of rustling paper, she said, “Inertia is always relative—in any equation! Perfect inertia would be absolute inertia, which doesn’t exist any more than absolute space!”
FIVE MINUTES LATER I had convinced myself of that, too. I almost ran to Doc Rowe at his desk in the far corner. He twisted around with a grinning leer. “Have you discovered perfect inertia?”
“Yes. That is, it’s——”
“Wait, wait!” broke in Doc Rowe. “Don’t tangle yourself up in a long-winded tirade. Let me ask you some questions. When you increase the speed of an object, you use energy. When you decrease the speed, energy is again expended. Why?”
“Because inertia is relative.”
He nodded and went on: “When a planet warps space, it exerts a power of attraction, so called, which is energy. To unwarp space, what would you do?”
“Destroy the planet, which again uses energy. Inertia—the state of being always the same—is relative there, too.”
“Good lad,” beamed Doc Rowe. “Thus?”
“Thus, to generalize, any system of balanced energies is in a state of inertia. To go in either direction one must use energy. When the new balance is reached, we again have inertia, at a lower or higher state. Inertia, then, is purely relative.”
“Think of that!” sang Doc Rowe. “One more question: What is absolute space?”
“A myth. It is supposedly that which carries a light beam at its standard velocity. Yet because the appreciable speed of our earth fails to affect in the slightest the speed of light—the Michelson-Morley ether-drift experiment is the authority—there can be no absolute space that you can pin down as such. Space is relative to the point of observance.”
Doc Rowe’s bright little eyes gleamed with tiny devils. Any moment the ax would fall. First he called Alvira over—to watch the execution. Then he ran a fine hand through his shock of gray hair. Finally, he pounced on the mouse—me.
“Space is relative, you say, Bob. It is not fixed. It goes along with the observer. And it goes along with two different observers at two different speeds, so that a ray of light passing from one to the other has the same velocity to each! Now note. Space is relative to the point of observance, but it happens to be relative to two separate observers, and to both the light speed is the same! Therefore, space itself, relative to itself, is absolute! A light ray measured by that standard must have different speeds to different observers. Yet it hasn’t, because the time intervals balance the equation by also changing.”
I felt the cold blade on my neck.
“Now,” he went on, “you just stated that any system of balanced energies is in a state of inertia. You can go either way, by using energy. Like a reversible reaction in chemistry. But suppose one reaches the state of inertia in absolute space! What have we then? Eh?”
Alvira and I glanced at one another helplessly. Doc Rowe was asking us to picture a space relative to any observer, yet absolute to itself. Moving in all its parts, yet rigidly fixed. And in this paradoxical system, we were to find the nugget of absolute rest—perfect inertia!
“I ask you to picture a house,” Doc said wearily, “and you think of a boat. Man attempts to measure the infinite with the foot rule of his mind, and imparts its own whirling motion to it. Listen carefully, my changelings. Two bodies revolve about one another in space. If their periods of revolution are equal to their periods of rotation, they are relatively motionless. To outside observation they are moving, circling. To themselves, they are not. Likewise can space be moving to any observer, yet be motionless—absolute—to itself!”
That thought struck oil. It hit me, and something of dawning comprehension must have peeped out of my face. “Doc!” I cried. “Could there be a space time without—time?”
“Splendid!” said Doc Rowe. “Amazing! That was a bull’s-eye. But let’s see if you realize fully the consequences of that blasphemous conception. Space time without time is what?”
“Absolute space,” I said readily.
“Why?”
I hesitated just a bit. “Because velocity is a function of time, and without time there is no velocity—no motion. That is, we say it takes ten minutes for a body to move from here to there. If the ten minutes is made a zero factor, the body has not moved at all. Therefore, if time, and with it velocity, cancel out, the space containing the body is absolute—contains no motion.”
It was a weak sort of rhetoric, but Doc Rowe let it pass, “And the other factors in the equation—energy, mass?” he whispered.
I had not thought of that. It took a full minute to explore this angle. Then I spluttered, “Why, energy would be zero. Mass would be zero. Everything would cancel out! You would have just—space!”
“Ali-a-a!” It was a triumphant ululation from Doc Rowe. “Think of it, Bob and Alvira. In the beginning there was just space—the void, eternal, timeless. Then something—call it the Hand of Creation—put in its finger, stirred it violently. A universe sprang into being! Motion gave rise to time; time gave birth to energy; energy sired mass. Or, if you wish, the Hand of Creation dangled a clock into absolute space. Time instantly fathered motion, motion mass, mass energy. The result was the universe!”
WE WENT BACK to our work, all three of us, as though exhausted by our mental flight into infinity. Our tabulation of the spectrograms seemed trivial. It was not till an hour later that I thought to ask, “But, Doc, what has that to do with winning the Nobel energy prize?”
“Eh?” He came out of a profound study. “I shall throw the million right back in their faces!” he said irrelevantly. And that was all he was good for that day.
“What say,” I asked Alvira, on the way to the bus, “that we take observations this evening?”
“Observations!”
“Yes, of the moon! Out in the laboratory of the open sky.”
“Well, in the cause of science, all right!”
Later in the evening she said, “Just think, if the Hand of Creation hadn’t stirred things up there in the beginning, the moon wouldn’t be there!”
She laughed. “There wouldn’t be any universe, any earth, any Rushmore College, any Doc Rowe, any anything. There wouldn’t even be us!”
“I question that,” I returned. “You were especially created, apart from the mediocre universe.”
“That isn’t very scientific.” She smiled.
“No, but it’s poetic.”
“And I hate poetry!”
And so, all through the evening, my equations canceled out to zero—absolute zero. Like Doc Rowe’s absolute space without motion, it was an absolute zero without emotion.
AT THE END of the week we had our spectrograms completely tabulated. Doc Rowe was in a particularly stormy mood.
“We are now going to start our search for energy for the Nobel committee—and for that million I’m going to throw into their faces,” he said. “Where, Alvira, did I say was going to be our point of attack?”
“Velocity, sir.”
“And what is velocity?”
“A function of time.”
“Why must we start with velocity?”
“Because velocity is something tangible, which we can alter; whereas time is abstract.”
I was holding my breath at this machine-gun attack by Doc Rowe. He went right on, voice staccato: “How is it that time, which is abstract, can have as a function a tangible factor such as velocity?”
Alvira went a little pale. “Time is—is beyond our physical scope,” she floundered. “Beyond our—our senses—our percep-——”
“Bah!”
Doc Rowe pinned her with a fierce glance. I could see her thought fall into a whirlpool and scatter to the winds. She turned to me appealingly. My expression must have been one of secret amusement at this proud, intelligent girl who spurned my attentions, but begged my help when foundering before Doc Rowe’s corrosive attacks.
As she sensed my triumph, her expression changed. Something stiffened her spine with an almost audible snap, and s
he whirled on Doc Rowe. “Time,” she spat out, “is a condition of relative space. In that sense, it is a fourth dimension, beyond our three-dimensional grasp. Velocity, on the other hand, is the functional extension of time into the physical world of three dimensions, and is thereby available to our manipulations.”
“Very well,” Doc growled. “Now, Bob, what is it we wish to do with velocity?”
“Reduce it to zero in absolute space, with release of all positive energy.”
“How much energy will it take to produce this absolute motionlessness?”
“Frankly, sir,” I stated with conviction, “that is a fundamental obstacle in this project. Energy used will equal energy gained. Relative inertia——”
Doc Rowe’s arms flung out; his head jerked; his mane of hair flew upward, as if he were exploding—and he was.
“Relative inertia be twice damned!” he screamed. “Imbecile! Did I talk to the wall yesterday? Absolute inertia! Have you forgotten? Everything in the universe is in motion in absolute space. Everything—save for one thing. That one thing is in, or can achieve, the state of absolute motionlessness—absolute inertia!”
His blazing little eyes searched our faces, then became a little mad at what must have been absoluteness of another kind—absolute incomprehension.
“You do not understand!” he groaned. “You cannot even guess! I will give you one more chance. Look, my little white elephants, I am simply asking what conceivable thing will have this perfect inertia. What substance, when formed, will immediately fix itself in inertialess space, because there is no known power capable of giving it momentum. I have all but named it!”
I felt Alvira stir at my side. Both of us cried the word at the same time and looked at each other startled.
“Inertron, of course!” barked Doc Rowe. “Inertron, the cores of atoms packed together like sardines, is the substance that will automatically reduce its velocity to zero in absolute space. Its zero velocity, with respect to space time, eliminates time in the equations. Thus time is contracted to nothingness, and every bit of the positive, not relative, momentum it had at the time of formation is released. It is that energy of momentum which we will collect as pure gain.”