"Well?" he said sharply.
"We will try the fluorescent screen. I will extinguish the lights"—and again the lights were dark. Bohn placed the rod of lead above the square; at once a pallid blue-white glow spread over the surface. The scratches Bohn had made were outlined in white fire, and the square shone like a little window opening on a cloudy night sky. The cold white flame rippled as he moved the rod above it.
The voice of their host sounded: "Try your diamond, Mr. Hoffman." Hoffman slipped a ring from his finger, and held it toward the glowing square. As it approached the wire, the gem began to glow in its setting; it glistened with an icy blue fire far brighter than the square. Hoffman withdrew it, but it continued to flame with undiminished brilliance. The lights flashed on, catching the two engineers blinking down at the glowing diamond.
"It will fluoresce for some time to come," said Edmond. "At least you may be assured that the gem is genuine; imitations will not react." He paused. "Is there anything further?"
"We are convinced," said Bohn shortly. "Will you explain your methods?"
“In part." Edmond drew a cigarette from a box beside him, and passed them to the engineers. Hoff-man accepted one, but Bohn shook his head and drew out his pipe. Their host exhaled a long plume of smoke.
"Obviously," he continued, "the simplest way to break up an atom is through sympathetic vibration. The same principle as breaking a glass goblet by playing a violin above it at the proper pitch."
"That's an old idea," said Hoffman, "but it never worked."
"No; because no one has been able to produce a vibration of great enough frequency. The electrons of most substances have revolution periods measurable in millionths of a second.
"However, certain rays are known that have frequencies of this order; I refer to the so-called cosmic rays."
"Bah!" said Bohn. "I suppose you produce cosmic rays!"
"No," said Edmond, staring coldly at him.
"To continue: It has also been observed that lead exposed to the weather for a long period of years becomes mildly radioactive. All the fools now occupying chairs of research have attributed this to sunlight. Of course, they are wrong; it is due to the cosmic rays.
"Therefore, I have designed this reflector"—he tapped the bowl—"which brings the cosmic rays which enter this room to a focus, intensifying their effect a thousandfold. That is what starts the disintegration of the lead; once begun, the process is self-continuous." He paused again. "Do you wish to ask any questions?"
Yes," said both men at once. Hoffman fell silent, and Bohn spoke, apparently somewhat subdued.
"I have always understood that cosmic rays have unparalleled penetrative power, passing far into the deepest mines, and that even gold is very transparent to them. It is generally believed that nothing will reflect them."
"Almost nothing, Mr. Bohn. My reflector will."
"But what material do you use?"
"Did you ever hear of neutronium, Mr. Bohn?"
"Neutronium!" both men spoke.
"That," said Hoffman, "is the stuff that's left after all the electrons are driven off. Neutronium is solid protons, and weighs about one ton to the cubic inch."
"But that stuff is simply hypothetical," objected Bohn.
"Not quite hypothetical, Mr. Bohn. It occurs in the dwarf stars, for instance, and in other places."
"Where, for example?"
"In this room, Mr. Bohn. I have caused an infinitesimal layer of it to be created on the reflecting side of this wooden bowl, a deposit inconceivably thin—perhaps only two or three protons deep. Nevertheless, it is sufficient. Doubtless you noticed the weight."
"Yes." He stared at the black concavity on the table. “By what means do you perform this?"
“By means I shall not reveal, because it is dangerous.”
"Dangerous! You needn't be solicitous of our safety!"
"I am not, but of my own. The process is economically dangerous."
"Bah! That's what people thought about every practical advance, from steam engines, on"
"Yes," said Edmond, "and I know of none that has not been perverted to destruction." For the first time in the interview he smiled, and the men flushed angrily. "Would you place hand grenades in the paws of all the apes in the zoo, Mr. Bohn? Neither shall I." He crushed out his cigarette in an ash tray with an air of closing the subject, and turned to Hoffman.
"You wished to ask a question, Mr. Hoffman."
The other leaned forward, peering at Edmond through his eye-glasses.
"Will this process disintegrate other elements besides lead, Mr. Hall?"
"A few, but the process is infinitely slower."
"Why is that?"
"There are several reasons. Primarily, because lead is itself more or less unstable in structure. Then, neutronium in this very thin deposit reflects the particular ray that affects lead in greater degree; in other words, my reflector has a sort of cosmic color. Again, the lead radiations form the greater portion of– the cosmic rays themselves, for a reason I have not bothered to ascertain; they too are leaden-hued. That is of course why leaden roofs and gutters are activated after long exposure to weather, while zinc or iron or copper ones are not."
"I see," said Hoffman slowly. "Say, how long have you been working on this, Mr. Hall?”
"About six weeks," said Edmond coldly, ignoring the look of amazement on the faces of his guests. He continued: "I think we have covered sufficient ground here. You may send for these four reflectors; they will treat enough lead for your present capacity. Should increased production necessitate any addition, I will supply them. You may install these in any part of your plant; the cosmic rays are but slightly diffused by passing through the building. The technique of the actual handling of the filament I will leave to you, but be sure to safeguard your workers with lead-foil lined gloves against radium burns."
He rose, and the others followed.
"I'll take this one with me, if you don't mind," said Bohn, lifting the wooden bowl from the table with some effort. The three passed into the hall. "Homo!" called Edmond sharply, and from somewhere in the darkness of the hall the monkey scampered, leaping to his shoulder, and crouching there. As they were descending the stairs, Hoffman noticed their host glance backward at the lighted rectangle of laboratory door; instantly the lights went out. The engineer made no comment, but drew a deep breath when the front door had closed upon them. He followed Bohn, who staggered ahead under the weight he bore, and helped him slide the bowl to the floor of their car.
"What d'you think of it, Carl?" said Hoffman, as the car moved.
"Don't know."
"D'you believe that stuff about cosmic rays and neutronium?"
"We'll damn soon find out when I get to the lab. I got some lead there that I know isn't doctored." They were silent for several blocks.
"Say, Carl, did you see him put out the lights?" "Trick. He did it with his feet."
"But he put 'em out from the hall when we were going."
"Switch in the hall."
But Hoffman, less solid in outlook, more mystical than Bohn, remained unconvinced. The curious Edmond had impressed him deeply, and he found his character far less repulsive at this second meeting. There was a sort of fascination about the man.
"Do you thing he knows as much as he says he does?"
"If he does, he's the devil."
"Yes, I thought that too, Carl."
The car drew up before the Stoddard plant, and the two scrambled out.
"Lend me a hand, Mac, and I'll damn soon find out what this thing is."
But Bohn never did. He blunted innumerable knives on the black surface, and dented it very easily with a chisel, but never managed to collect enough of the stuff to analyze. The deposit was far too thin, a tenuous coating of something heavy that nothing could dislodge.
CHAPTER V
THE SEED OF POWER
SEVERAL weeks later Edmond sold his Stoddard at a fourteen point profit, and unemotionally watched it cli
mb to more than forty. Then he set about securing his radium; part of it he was able to obtain from a domestic producer, and the remainder from Europe. He owned finally ten grams of a salty white crystalline powder—the sulphide of radium—and he had paid about fifty thousand dollars for this somewhat less than a spoonful. He had, however, a constant source of niton, in minute quantities it is true, but invariable and practically eternal. Nor was it an unwise purchase from any standpoint, for the radium was readily salable at any time.
He turned his energies again to the more complete solution of the mystery of matter. Niton, the gaseous emanation evolved by radium from its own decay, is in itself decaying, its own atoms bursting, consuming themselves in the long series of disintegrating elements whose end-product is lead. But niton is infinitely more active than its parent radium, and from its exploding atoms Edmond hoped to produce an in-tense beam of rays of the cosmic order by throwing these atoms into inconceivably rapid oscillation. To this end he enclosed the evanescent gas in a little globular bulb, on one hemisphere of which he caused to form an infinitely thin deposit of neutronium which was to serve both as a shield and a reflector for the beam. At opposite points on the globe's equator—the juncture of the black and clear hemispheres, he placed the slender platinum electrodes that were to admit to the gas an interrupted current of infinitesimal period; it remained now to produce an interrupter, a circuit-breaker, capable of breaking his current into bursts whose period compared to the almost instantaneous periods of revolving electrons.
Edmond resumed his consideration of the atom disrupter. He had now, in his niton tube, an oscillator capable of responding to the stimulus of such an electric stress as he contemplated; it remained for him to produce an alternator of sufficient frequency. He wanted now an alternating electric current of such short period that the already active niton atoms should be wrenched and strained so violently that the gamma radiations increase their hardness to the vastly higher scale of the cosmic rays. Out of their torture he wished to wrest those mysterious impulses that signal the birth-throes of atoms.
What agent could he use? Certainly no mechanical device could attain the nearly infinite frequency he required; even the discharge of a condenser fell far short. He discarded likewise the agency of chemistry; ions could not vibrate with violence sufficient to destroy themselves. His search limited itself of necessity to the more subtle field that lay within the atom; only electrons possessed the colossal, fluent velocity he needed. For many hours he sat toying with the problem, and the solution eluded him; finally he wearied of the glare of light in his laboratory and descended to the floor below. Evening was falling, unseen in the black-windowed room he quitted; its dusk was al-ready in the hall and the library, though a low sun still gilded the living-room wall. Homo skipped frantically about his cage in the library; his chattering was a summons to Edmond, who released the exuberant creature, permitting it to scamper to his shoulder. He seated himself in his usual chair before the fireplace and gave himself to his thoughts. These were not sombre; the spur of obstacles, strange to his experience, gave a piquancy to the problem.
"It has long been suspected," he reflected, "that the laws of the conservation of energy and of mass are the same law; this means in effect that translation of matter to energy is possible, and conversely, one must be able to create matter out of pure energy. And of course, the relation becomes more obvious when it is realized that energy itself has mass; light, the purest form of energy known, obeys the laws of mechanics as docilely as a baseball tossed into the air."
Then he reverted to the immediate problem of his interrupter. By degrees, even this yielded to the inhuman ingenuity of his twin minds. By the time Magda announced dinner, he had a tentative solution, and before the end of his after-dinner cigarette, he had evolved a mechanism that might, he believed, serve his purpose. He returned to his laboratory in the evening and set about the business of constructing the device.
He took two tiny pillars of his A-lead, and caused the two electron beams to interfere; along the combined stream he passed his current. Thus he had an interrupter whose period was measurable in millionths of a second; by adjusting the relative positions of his A-lead pillars, he could reduce it to billionths. His current traversed a stream of electrons that flowed in little instantaneous bursts, whose frequency he con-trolled. Thus Edmond constructed his atom disrupter, and only when it was complete did he pause to reflect, and question himself why.
"For what reason, to what purpose, do I create a device that, though it will release limitless energy for society s service, can also unleash power enough to tumble' the earth out of its orbit? I neither love man enough to grant him the power of the gods, nor hate him so bitterly as to place in his hands his—and my own—destruction."
And he answered himself; "My only impulse in this creation has been the escape of boredom. I labor to no end at all; thus again I am faced by that which blocks all efforts everywhere—futility."
Nevertheless, he was avidly curious to watch the release of that power which was all but legendary, which had always glowed just beyond the horizon of physics like a never rising sun. The declaration of futility was a rational thing as yet; for this time he had no real sense nor feeling of it, but rather a resurgence of strong pride in his achievement. He felt indeed a species of elation very foreign to his somber nature; he alone held the key to the twin doors of salvation and destruction, his the decision. "I am the only being in this part of the universe who holds such a key; by virtue of it I rule or destroy as I will."
Then to watch the atom-blaster perform. He selected a tiny speck of potassium to disrupt—a piece smaller by far than the head of an average pin. This element he chose because of its comparative rarity; he did not wish to adjust his radiations to calcium or iron or aluminum and find stray beams disintegrating the walls of his house with perhaps enough accidental violence to blast into dust all that hundred mile city whose nucleus is Chicago. This tiny speck, still moist with oil, he placed on a square of tile at the estimated focus of his niton tube. He sat for a moment making his calculations, building in his mental view a potassium atom, selecting a key electron whose period he must determine. Then he adjusted the twin pillars of his interrupter with incredible delicacy, and thereafter stood with his hand on the switch of the motor generator surveying the various parts of the device. In a moment he dropped the switch and removed the speck of potassium from the tile; it had occurred to him that the tile itself might contain potassium salts, and certainly the allied sodium; a slight error in the setting of his interrupter would blast the sister element into a terrific volcano of destruction. It was the nearest to error he had ever come throughout his life.
He tipped the bit of metal to a leaden disc, stepped back to the far corner of the room, and threw the switch. The generator hummed; the tube of niton glowed with its characteristic violet; now through the clear half of the bulb he believed a stream of cosmic rays was pouring—not the diffuse and mild rays that flowed out of space, but an intense beam like that of a search-light. Yet the potassium remained unaltered.
He cut the switch, and again adjusted his interrupter, at a guess to a slightly lower frequency. Again he set the generator spinning.
Instantly it came. Where the speck of metal had rested hovered a two foot roaring sphere of brilliant violet light, whose heat singed his eyebrows, whose terrible flames were imfaceable. Reverberations pounded his ear-drums, and great lightning-like discharges leaped from his clothing. The room reeled in a crescendo of crashes; the terrific flaming ball that hovered above the table seemed to his half-blinded gaze to expand like a trap-door into Hell. A second two seconds—it flared—then with a dying crackle of sparks it dissipated, darkened, dropped into nothingness. A strong odor of ozone swept the room and Edmond dropped his blistered hands from his eyes, to gaze dazzled at the aftermath of wreckage. A pool of molten lead lay on the table, about whose edge the wood flamed. He quickly smothered the conflagration with the contents of a flower pot, and
examined the rest of the room's equipment. Surprisingly, the dam-age was less than he had anticipated. His niton tube was in splinters and his interrupter in fragments; no matter—they could be replaced— should he ever de-sire.
He realized that he never would. The experiment was finished—completed—his interest in it had vanished. Let the earth-wrecker lie destroyed and unrecorded, let men suck the little driblets of energy they had always used. The spray from this ocean he had tapped; he wished neither to rule nor to destroy.
He called Magda to clean up the debris and went downstairs to the library. He summoned Homo to his knees and sat for a long time surveying the cold hearth.
CHAPTER VI
FRIENDSHIP AND HUMOR
AFTER the experiment of the atom-breaker and its culmination, that sense of futility which Edmond had reasoned but not felt appeared in reality. He grew weary of knowledge, since it led nowhere but only seemed to point a way, like a will-o'-the-wisp across a swamp. He perceived that all knowledge was useless, since all generalities were false. If no Absolutes existed, science itself must consist of merely relative truths. The pursuit of science was no more than the grubbing out of an infinity of little facts whose sum total was zero. All effort, he thought, was bounded by that one impenetrable spell that was called futility. His twin minds dissociated; he permitted them to trace out each its own ratiocinations.
"Every effort is foredoomed to be in vain," he reflected, "but living is only to struggle against this doom. Life is that which fights futility, and is to this extent free."
"Every effort is foredoomed," said his other self, taking this same point of departure, "and rational living is to recognize this doom and cease to struggle against it. This is to be really free."
Then his being merged into a unity, promulgating the conclusion he derived from these divergent courses of reason.
"Only one thing is certain; that truth is a subjective idea void of reality, and is wholly relative to the point of view."
For some time Edmond abandoned his laboratory, pursuing knowledge of a different sort. Thrust into a world peopled by human beings, he now devoted his time to a survey of their society, and an analysis of their functioning. He had of course, long since realized that he was somehow a being apart from these, one whose appearance, whose very mind, was alien to them. He wished, therefore, to acquire a viewpoint to enable him to understand those among whom he moved, or if they proved too utterly foreign, to at least appreciate wherein lay the differences. To Edmond who saw all things from two viewpoints, the world was a highly complex organization quite incomprehensible to beings of single minds.
The Lost Master - The Collected Works Page 115