"I remember you asking about the residue," said Tully.
"Yes," said Kokintz. "I wanted to analyze it and I was afraid if I left it, it might be thrown away by Mrs. Plummer when she did the cleaning.
"When I came to develop the plates I found that they were spoiled as if by a light leak. I examined the camera and could find no light leak. Then I examined the plates more thoroughly. And then I came to suspect that this was not a light leak at all but the effect of radioactive particles on the silver emulsion on the photographic plates.
"But where had these radioactive particles come from? I tested everything I had on at the time, my pencils, pieces of paper, a yo-yo I had in my pocket. I was to mend the sting for a boy," he added in an aside to Gloriana. "Everything. They all tested negative. And then I found that the radioactive particles were contained in the white residue which I had obtained from the Pinot Grand Fenwick."
"You mean Pinot Grand Fenwick is radioactive?" asked Tully.
"Not all of it," said Kokintz, "only the Premier Grand Cru. That is what perhaps accounts for its excellence. It contains a radioactive clement which I have called Pinotium 64. It has not been isolated before in any other substance.
"I will not delay you with the details of how I isolated Pinotium 64 from the whitish powder which I distilled from the wine. These particulars, which are so fascinating for the scientist, are without any great interest for the layman. What I brought you here to tell you is something of the nature of Pinotium 64, for it is a remarkable element and in a properly contrived appliance can provide an almost unlimited source of power."
Neither Tully nor Gloriana made any comment on this statement, delivered in a matter-of-fact manner by Kokintz. So when he had made it, he tamped the tobacco in the bowl of his big Oompaul and spent a little while searching for matches with which to relight it, for it had gone out.
"You are aware," continued Kokintz, "that all matter is made up of atoms and that each atom is like a little universe with nuclear particles which move and gyrate around each other in a manner not unlike the planets of our solar system. The glue which holds these atomic particles in the nucleus we loosely call nuclear energy. In the nuclear bomb, some of this energy—a very tiny portion—is released by the dislodging of some of the nuclear particles and the result is a gigantic explosion.
"Science has known for years that if a controlled release of this nuclear energy could be achieved, the world would have a revolutionary power source. Furthermore, science has known for a long time that atoms contain stores of this energy, but so far we have been able to tap only the energy of uranium and heavy hydrogen. And quadium, of course, which was the element I myself isolated and out of which came the quadium bomb."
He went earnestly on, giving a lecture in nuclear physics which eminent physicists would have been glad to listen to, but which was largely lost on Gloriana and her consort. From it they gathered only that Pinotium 64 contained a number of atomic particles which had the surprising quality of being able to change their charge from negative to positive and back again. Thus, when a positively charged particle of Pinotium 64 came into contact with a positively charged particle from another atomic nucleus, the Pinotium particle immediately (and with great politeness) switched its charge to negative. Far from being repelled, then, by the other positive particle, it was attracted to it, crashed into it, and in dislodging it from the nucleus, released a considerable amount of nuclear energy. If, on the other hand, the Pinotium particle were negative, and came into contact with another negative particle, it immediately took on a positive charge resulting again in a tremendous collision and release of energy.
Tully, who had some memories of World War II, came to the conclusion that the Pinotium particles were like Chase-me-Charlie bombs, which ran down their targets on their own volition; and much as he had revered the wine of his native country before, he now held it in even greater awe, and was uneasy about whether, in view of the characteristics which Kokintz had revealed, it might not one day be regarded as a heinous offense to drink a glass of Pinot Grand Fenwick. He kept the thought to himself, however.
"I have called these particular particles Janus particles," said Dr. Kokintz. "They are named after that god of the Romans who faced in two directions at the same time, and who therefore carried a contradiction within himself. It is a contradiction which is the essence of science, which must constantly look backward in order to see dearly forward."
"I understand about changing from positive to negative," said Tully. "But I don't understand why this characteristic makes the Janus particles in Pinotium Sixty-four so important."
"Ah," said Dr. Kokintz, "that is the critical point. With nuclear fission to date we have used neutrons, which bombard the atomic nucleus and are not repulsed by a positive charge. Sometimes they split an atomic nucleus and release energy. Sometimes they are embedded in it without an energy release.
"To get a chain reaction, each such neutron has to release another to continue the bombardment. But the problem of control has always been before us and although it is theoretically possible to obtain a steady release of energy, as a practical matter, the use to date has been largely as an explosive.
"Again, using neutrons, it has been necessary to bombard elements at the lower end of the atomic scale where the particles of the nucleus are not very tightly bound together.
"The tightly bound nuclei in the middle and upper end of the atomic scale we have not been able to split. But the Janus particle, because of its ability to change its charge, can attract any atomic nucleus. It is no longer necessary to stick to uranium or hydrogen or quadium. I used plain iron filings in the little experiment you just witnessed—two or three iron filings and so small a portion of Pinotium Sixty-four it would not have covered the head of a pin. You saw the result"
"You mean that Pinotium Sixty-four can release atomic energy from any substance?" asked Tully.
"Theoretically yes," replied Kokintz. "In practice I have tried only iron filings, chalk and carbon and a piece of rubber tire.”
"Why doesn't it set up a chain reaction and produce an explosion?" asked Gloriana.
"Because the release of the Janus particles from Pinotium Sixty-four is very slow." said Kokintz. "A particle is released, attacks an atomic nucleus and releases some of the energy by displacing some of the particles in the nucleus. Then there is a tiny interval. And then another Janus particle goes to work. There couldn't be a chain reaction because any neutrons released cannot themselves release energy in the substances used, as would be the case with uranium.
"It would be possible to produce an explosion only by using enormous quantifies of Pinotium Sixty-four and having it bombard some loosely knit atomic nucleus like uranium." He smiled, and seemed very happy. "It is a pleasure to produce an atomic reaction that cannot destroy the world," he said. "A great pleasure indeed."
Tully Bascomb had a mind which, though by no means brilliant, was certainly practical. He had been close to out of his depth during much of the previous discussion, and he was beginning to arrive only laboriously at a conclusion which would have leapt, brilliant and complete, into the mind of a man like the Count of Mountjoy. He recalled the bottle which had soared upward with sufficient thrust to support his weight. He put that against the background of the astonishing United States loan of $50,000,000 and a prospect presented itself to him so daring that he hesitated to entertain it.
"Dr. Kokintz," he said cautiously, "am I to understand from you that Pinotium Sixty-four provides us with the key to a tremendous source of power?"
"Yes," said Kokintz, "that is so."
"How much power?" Tully asked.
Kokintz shrugged. "An unlimited power."
"As a practical matter," said Tully, "does Pinotium Sixty-four provide us with a source of sufficient power to take a manned rocket to the moon—and back?"
"Certainly," said Kokintz. He reached in his jacket and pulled out one of his colored pencils. Then he found an envelope and made a ca
lculation on the back of it. "For a rocket of two hundred tons," he said, "all that would be needed would be a hundred pounds of iron Slings and a hogshead of wine."
Tully and Gloriana stared at him as if thunderstruck, incapable of saying a word about the tremendously impossible prospect that now lay before them.
CHAPTER IX
Out in the lonely waters of Ascension Island, in late June of that year, the USS Quest was keeping a rendezvous with history. The Quest had been commissioned as a destroyer but she was a destroyer with a difference. The difference consisted in the scrapping of all her armament to be replaced by extensive radar equipment, telemetry equipment and other elaborate devices for tracking space capsules on their re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.
The Quest was a floating brain, specializing in mathematics by electronics, and was the first ship of her kind to sail the waters of the world. Resting on the surface of one ocean of liquid, she probed into and explored another ocean of air, thrusting her invisible feelers up and around and about into the earth's atmosphere, feeling for her prey which was, as has been said, space capsules making a re-entry.
So sensitive was her equipment that she could pick up several thousand miles away a returning capsule whose telemetry system had failed so that the capsule was not emitting any signal from which its course could be predicted. There was on the USS Quest a cunning piece of apparatus called, in keeping with the American penchant for nicknames, "Hot-foot."
Hotfoot was so sensitive to heat changes that it could accurately detect the dramatic rise in temperature of the outer metal of a space capsule as it hit the earth's atmosphere. This information was fed by Hotfoot into an electronic brain which immediately calculated the capsule's position and course, and Hotfoot alone had been responsible for the recovery of many capsules whose own signaling systems had failed and which would otherwise have been lost in the oceans of the world.
The present mission of Quest was to pinpoint a very important space capsule. Launched without fanfare from Cape Canaveral in a Saturn rocket fueled with liquid hydrogen, this capsule had been orbited fifty times around the earth. The term capsule, though the one in common use, was hardly adequate to describe the present device, which was actually the pilot model of a space platform which would one day—perhaps in so short a time as two years—be put into orbit around the moon as a tremendously important step toward a lunar landing by the United States.
Plainly then it was of the utmost importance that this particular capsule be recovered with the greatest dispatch. The plan was to bring the capsule down in the ocean off Ascension Island and the USS Quest was but part of a fleet of ships cruising the area while above flew an armada of planes patrolling the atmosphere to aid in the recovery.
Aboard the Quest were Senator John Ridgeway of the Senate Atomic Energy Commission, and Dr. Fritz Meidel, the top atomic physicist responsible for the present project. Dr. Meidel (part of the war booty the United States had obtained following the defeat of Nazi Germany) was at pains to explain to the Senator the talents of the apparatus known as Hotfoot. To give the Senator a practical demonstration, arrangements had been made for one of the planes, invisible some miles above the earth, to drop a few objects down on the ocean.
"You understand, of course, Senator," said Dr. Meidel, "that whatever is dropped from the plane for Hotfoot to locate, will come down only under the force of gravity. The temperature change in this object then will be extremely slight. And yet this device will be able to record it, and locate the object."
"What causes this temperature change anyway?" asked the Senator.
"Collision with the particles of which the atmosphere is composed," replied Dr. Meidel. "Any object moving through the air at speed, comes into collision with the molecules of oxygen, hydrogen and so on, and these hitting against it produce a temperature change which is related to the speed of the object."
Anxious to make things as plain as possible to the Senator and conscious that what he had said smacked slightly of the lecture hall, Dr. Meidel added, "It's the same thing as beating on a piece of iron with a hammer. If you beat on a piece of iron with a hammer for a while, you will find that the iron gets a little hotter."
"That so?" said the Senator. "Can't say I ever tried it."
They were in the control room of Hotfoot, before them a glass screen about the size of that of a large television set. The operator, busy with some dials and switches, said suddenly, "Here's something now, sir. Sixty thousand feet, course a hundred and sixty. It will hit the water four thousand yards to the southwest of us." He gestured to the screen on which a few droplets of light indicated the course of whatever had been jettisoned by a plane overhead for the Senator's edification.
"Could we pick it up when it hits?" asked the Senator. "I'd like to take something home to the kid as a souvenir."
"I'm afraid not, Senator," said Dr. Meidel. "It would have sunk by the time we got there."
"What do you suppose it is?" asked the Senator.
"Probably a small sandbag," replied the scientist.
"Here's another, sir," said the operator. He was a bright young man, had heard the Senator's remark about a souvenir and he was in luck. "It's going to land much nearer to us. About a hundred feet off our port bow. If you step outside right away you may see it when it hits the water."
The Senator rushed outside followed by Dr. Meidel. They looked up into the sky and saw a tiny flash hurtling toward them as swift as a kingfisher. It plummeted suddenly into the ocean, the impact marked by a sharp flick of white spume spouting up from the lovely blue. A few seconds later something could be seen floating in the water where the object had struck.
"It didn't sink," cried the Senator. "'That's near enough to pick up, isn't it?" he demanded. "My kid would sure like to get it."
Dr. Meidel nodded and spoke to one of the ship's officers, and without any delay a boat was launched and made for the spot. The boat returned, the cox'n carrying the object which had been picked out of the sea. He was about to give it to Dr. Meidel but the doctor was at that moment called into the Hotfoot control room and the Senator grabbed the object and held it up in some surprise.
"Well, what do you know?" he said. "A wine bottle." He looked from the bottle up in the air and then, turning to one of the ship's officers, said with mock severity, "Aren't there some kind of regulations about taking intoxicating drinks up in United States airplanes?"
"I'm sure the bottle was empty, sir," said the officer to whom the question was addressed.
"It's empty now anyway," said the Senator. "Look, it's got a kind of thing in the end for pouring." He looked the bottle over, "Pinot Grand Fenwick—Premier Grand Cru," he read aloud from the label. "Never heard of it," he announced, "but I guess Butchie will be glad to have it." The others smiled and the Senator went down to his quarters with the bottle.
Meanwhile Grand Fenwick went seriously into the project of sending a rocket to the moon. The tiny country had, in one dramatic breakthrough, actually leapt ahead of both the United States and the Soviet Union. These two giants were still bedeviled by the problem of developing an ideal rocket fuel. Using iron filings and wine—both extremely cheap ingredients, though one shrinks at the use of the word "cheap" in connection with so noble a vintage as Pinot Grand Fenwick—the little Duchy had discovered an atomic fuel which, not requiring oxygen in any form for combustion, was the perfect answer for travel in the voids of space.
Grand Fenwick was further not handicapped by a desire to amass a huge quantity of scientific data during the lunar trip. There was to be no study of radiation in outer space, of the incidence of meteorites (some of them no bigger than a grain of dust) or of exterior temperatures compared with interior temperatures of the rocket, nor of all the other facets of space travel with which both the United States and the Soviet Union were concerned.
In short the Duchy aimed at no more than getting to the moon, landing on it, and getting back again, and this enormously reduced the amount of work necessary i
n designing the rocket while at the same time cutting down on the payload of instruments and providing larger and more comfortable quarters for the Grand Fenwick astronauts.
To be sure, there was a Political problem in Grand Fenwick which lay in Mountjoy s attempt to use the money on bathtubs rather than on rockets. But when Tully Bascomb announced to a meeting of the Council of Freemen that in Pinotium 64, Grand Fenwick had the fuel needed to send a rocket to the moon, Mountjoy hadn't got a chance. What had previously been a fantastic proposal, was now well within the reach of the country. Excitement over the project rose to fever pitch among the people and remained at that level. Nothing else was talked about and all the men of the Duchy volunteered their services to help in whatever manner they could.
Mountjoy made one gallant but impossible stand. "Are we," he demanded of the Council, "to allow our great wine to be converted into a kind of gasoline for fueling space vehicles? For that is the prospect which now lies before you. Pinot Grand Fenwick has been revered by connoisseurs of wine for five hundred years. It is the superior wine of the world, without question.
"You are all aware that the great Queen Isabella of Spain gave a bottle to Columbus when he set out on his first voyage of discovery, telling him that if at any point in his venture he should lose heart, one sip would restore his courage.
"You are aware that when Columbus faced a mutiny among his men, he opened that bottle of Pinot Grand Fenwick and, giving a little to each member of his crew, staved off a mutiny which would have resulted in the failure of that expedition which opened the whole of the New World to Europe.
"Such has been the stature of Pinot Grand Fenwick through the years. Gentlemen, are you now going to turn this noble product into a kind of superior petrol—available, one presumes, at gasoline pumps throughout the world wherever anyone wishes to take off in a rocket?"
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