The Quy Effect

by Arthur Sellings

  “And that doesn’t have to be a First Law of Motion or a General Theory of Relativity, anything as big as that. The first man who decided to weigh things changed science more than either of them. If the Greeks had weighed things, simple things like something before and after it was burned, we’d have had all the science we’ve got today two thousand years earlier. Or would we? That was their way of approaching the universe, that you only had to observe and deduce and you could find all the answers. They did pretty well, too, just doing that. And that’s what your talent, or your gift, boils down to. The gift, if somebody develops it, is only the outward sign, pressured and distorted, of the world view inside. A man’s personal coming-to-terms. What he decides he wants, what he needs—often for his own sanity’s sake.”

  “Point taken. But I don’t want French, for instance. And when—if and when—I pass O-Levels I won’t have to. Trouble is, you’ve got to take it.”

  “I know, son, it’s easy for me to talk. At your stage it’s all compulsions. But nothing’s wasted. I remember learning Russian once because there was some stuff that hadn’t been translated that I needed desperately—or thought I did. Language is the root of this world view business. Every language has got concepts, words, that can’t be expressed properly in others. The language itself is a world view agreed on by a tribe. Ach, but I’m blathering on, boy. And I didn’t get you here to talk about language. I just thought you’d like to know that I’ve sorted out that other matter.”

  “You mean—the explosion?”

  The old man nodded. “At least, I’m ninety-nine percent sure, and that’s good enough for me. I was never one of your hundred percent merchants. But let s have a cup of tea first. The old mouth’s dry. I’d just brewed up when you came.”

  Alan gulped. “I—I’m not thirsty, thank you, AQ.”

  “Nonsense, boy. Don’t think I’ve got to the stage of ignoring the social graces completely. Five o’clock tea, and all that. Now, where did I put that other cup?” He rummaged among the clutter on the bench. “Ah, here it is.”

  It looked suspiciously grimy.

  “No, really, AQ.” Alan made a last attempt. But the old man seemed not to hear him. He poured a murky liquid from a blackened can that was standing on a tripod over a Bunsen burner. “It’s already milked and sugared.”

  The boy took it, but when his grandfather turned to get his own and sit down, he put it down on the bare boards between his feet.

  “Now,” said Adolphe Quy, settling himself, “Are you ready?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Right, then.” He paused eloquently. “The Meissner Effect.”

  “You mean—the insulating effect of a superconductor on a magnetic field?”

  The old man’s mouth fell open. “You mean—you knew all along? Why the hell didn’t you say so that day in the hospital?”

  “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t know then. I’ve been reading up on the subject since.”

  “Have you?” The old man grunted. “You needn’t sound so apologetic. I knew all about the Meissner Effect, anyway. I just didn’t connect it with what happened. Gawd, there I was, lying in a hospital bed, with nothing else to do but think it out. And it was right under my nose. And I’ll prove it to you. You could have reasoned it out if you’d known of the Meissner Effect then. Reason! Human blindness, makes a mockery of the word. Let me give you a brief and simple catechism just to show you. Ready? Right.

  “What is the Meissner Effect?”

  The boy looked puzzled. “You mean you want me to define it some other way?”

  “Of course not! This is a catechism. I ask the questions, you answer ’em. Right, we’ll start again. What is the Meissner Effect?”

  “The—the insulating effect of a superconductor on a magnetic field.”

  “And what class of substances exhibit magnetic properties?”

  “Class? Why, metals.”

  “And what class of substances did Kamerlingh Onnes find exhibited the phenomenon of superconductivity?”

  “Metals, again.”

  “And what substance was I experimenting on when the explosion happened?”

  “I’m not quite sure, AQ. Something like DNA, you said. Organic, anyway.”

  “Good. Metallic?”

  “No-o. Not from what you said.”

  “Right, then. Now we’re coming to the crux of it. Might we expect to find the Meissner Effect associated with these non-metallic superconductors?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Come on, a grandson of mine can do better than that. Have a guess.”

  “Well—maybe. Kind of.”

  “Kind of! What a gloriously unscientific word. But all right. Kind of what?”

  “Why—a kind of Meissner Effect.”

  “Exactly. Now then, just put those facts together in two parallel chains. Metal—magnetism—metal—superC—Meissner Effect. Non-metal—question mark—non-metal—superC—X Effect. X Effect being what I recently came out of hospital, from getting a sideswipe of, and apart from that scrap of knowledge we can’t go much forrarder in substitution. But what was the other blank in that second chain?”

  “Wait a minute. An equivalent of magnetism?”

  “I’m asking the questions. How many more times do I have to tell you? You’re giving the answers.”

  “All right—the equivalent of magnetism.”

  “And what is magnetism? Basically, that is. What kind of thing is it?”

  “A force.”

  “All right. Now, what kind of force do we know of that resembles magnetism, but which affects other elements than metals… every other—”

  “Stop, grand-dad. Let me finish it.” The boy’s eyes were wide now. And the old man’s were bright.

  “Gravity,” the boy breathed.

  “Gravity. The enemy. I was talking just now about weighing things. For that one job it was a precious ally, the Earth’s gravity a yardstick. But in every other aspect it’s been the enemy. Weighting our feet, an interference factor in everything man’s ever tried.”

  The boy leaped to his feet.

  “Cavorite!”

  He laughed almost hysterically and went prancing round the dingy room, as if some minor power of antigravity had been generated by just discussing it, lifting his feet over and around the battered trunks, the scattered pullovers, the bits of machinery, in their path.

  He stopped suddenly as he realized that his grandfather wasn’t joining in, but just sitting looking at him with a pained expression on his face.

  “What did I say?” the boy asked falteringly.

  “Cavorite.”

  “Well? You know, H. G. Wells’s substance in The First Men In the Moon.”

  “I know, all right,” the old man said testily. Then his voice and his manner softened. “Sorry, son. It wasn’t your fault. The word brought back an unpleasant memory, that’s all.”

  “Why? It was a pretty good book. I know it seems old-fashioned these days, now we’ve got rockets and bases on the moon, but—”

  “It’s not the book. It was your father. It must have been about ’54 or ’55. Not long before he married your mother. He had just got his Ph.D. and he came to see me. I was laid up at the time, so I hadn’t been doing much active work. But I’d been reading the more, and thinking. And I’d come to the conclusion that there were two problems next on the agenda for man to lick. One was synthesizing life cells, the other was antigravity. It was only a few years then since man had learned to tap energy at will—atomic energy. It seemed to me somehow wrong that he hadn’t learned yet to transform energy directly into motion, without having to push against something. Which is not only the crudest way of getting about—it’s what a kid does the first time he climbs out of his cradle—but the only way man had found.

  “I’ve got to confess that I didn’t have any clear ideas on the subject myself then. I saw it as a matter of somehow being able to apply energy to iron out the wrinkle in space-time which is what gravity is. But
here comes my lad, all bright and shining from college with his Ph.D. under his belt, and I ask him what’s new in the physics world, seeing if I could get any hint of something I could link this antigravity chain of thought on to. But all he could talk about was quantum physics. So I came out with it and said, ‘How about antigravity?’ He just looked at me for a couple of seconds, and then said, ‘What, Cavorite, you mean?’ ”

  The boy looked puzzled. “But why should that be anything to—”

  “Take umbrage at? Because I knew what he meant, and he knew that I knew. Find yourself a plate of material that happens to be anti-gravitic and you’ve got a perpetual motion machine. And perpetual motion is one of the phrases that’s anathema to the hidebound, blinkered scientist. It’s the ‘perpetual’ that sticks in their gizzard, and they swallow ‘infinity’ and ‘zero’ as glibly as you like. Your father was right of course. A perpetual motion machine is one that generates as much energy as is fed into it, despite what it uses and loses. And an antigravity screen, just like that, would generate a whole sight more energy—as much as you liked. Interpose the screen, up you’d go; take it away, down you come with all the energy of your fall. Just like a perpetual spring. I give your father credit; his mind was fresh enough—then—to see what inherent antigravity would mean. I just didn’t like the way he regarded me—as some old idiot in search of some mythological philosopher’s stone. The incorrigible in pursuit of the impossible, as I overheard him referring to me at a party once.”

  He broke off, looking apologetic. “I’m an old bastard, son, carrying on like this to you about your father. You ought to dot me on the nose.”

  The boy grinned.

  “But let’s get back to this special Meissner Effect,” the old man said.

  “Not the special Meissner Effect. Why not the ordinary Quy Effect.”

  “The Quy Effect! Why not, indeed? The Quy Effect. Sounds good.”

  “Are you sure you’re right, though, AQ? I mean, have you got any confirming evidence?”

  “A bit. All very simple and mundane, but it adds up to conducing proof in my book. First, let’s get a clear picture of what happened. I had a workbench about ten feet long. On that I had, bolted, a pretty heavy testbed, a hundredweight or two. In that were two heavy terminals. Between them was clamped my strip of test material. The terminals were connected, via a transformer and a hefty impedance, to a generator. I fed a couple of hundred volts through the strip. It held, it registered zero impedance itself. And then I stepped the voltage up, a few more hundred. It still held. Then I really went mad and shoved fifty thousand through it. And then—

  “Now just what happened? The energy I fed into that strip created a Meiss—a Quy Effect—screening off the strip from Earth’s gravity. And everything above it. You can rule out the minor attractions of other objects around, although that may have had some effect on what happened to me. I was one of the objects around. Now, since the Earth’s going round the sun at a speed of something like twenty miles a second, not to mention its speed of rotation, sidereal drift and a few other factors, and you’ll realize that a body suddenly removed from that influence is going to move—in a roughly upward direction—bloody fast.

  “And so did my test strip—testbed and all. And this is where the difference between Cavorite and this comes in, resolving any paradoxes like perpetual motion machines. You’ve got to feed energy in to get it out. It was the electrical energy which—”

  “Hold on,” Alan said. “You said yourself that there wasn’t enough electrical energy to have caused the explosion.”

  “I know. But it wasn’t just the electrical energy. It was the whole force of null-gravity for a split second, the whole gravitational force of the Earth being harnessed, not fought against. Like tacking against the wind.”

  “But—isn’t that back to the perpetual motion machine again?”

  “It depends upon how big or how small you regard your machine. The universe is a perpetual motion machine for all we know as yet. Most paradoxes have only got any meaning because they set limits about a situation. Like Achilles and the hare. Achilles has got a hundred yards start, but the hare can run twice as fast. Yet the hare will never catch up because by the time he has covered the hundred yards, Achilles has covered fifty. When the hare has caught up the fifty, Achilles is still twenty-five ahead. And so on. Of course, the hare does catch up, precisely at the two hundred yard mark. You’ve just set the limits smaller and smaller. All you’re saying is that the hare won’t catch up within a certain time.

  “The gravitational force of a body is there, inherent either in it or the distorted space about it. Any engine man has ever made has extracted energy from something. If you had told a medieval philosopher that you could apply a small amount of energy to a lump of matter—under the right conditions—and get enough out to demolish a city, he would have thought you crazy. Yet he knew of the chemical energy inherent in wood or oil. He just hadn’t heard of atomics.

  “But where were we? Yes, with my little strip suddenly taking off. The bolts anchoring the testbed to the bench must have been tougher than the ones holding the bench to the floor, because it didn’t stop to get rid of the bench. Now, as soon as dammit after it took off, it lost contact with its power source. Even so, it had obviously got such a hell of a momentum that it just went on traveling. For a split second it had been insulated from a body moving at twenty miles a second, plus various other components which we won’t bother with, considering that escape velocity—the speed necessary for a body to escape Earth’s gravitational pull—is only seven.

  “There’s no knowing what happened to it finally. It may have gone into orbit. I’ll have to check to see if any unidentified satellite has turned up lately. They keep a pretty close watch these days. It may have gone on and be on its way to Sirius by now. Most likely it burned itself up in a few seconds in the atmosphere, like a meteorite in reverse.

  “But before it did that, or whatever it did, it shifted itself and a whole lot of atmosphere out of the way, causing an implosion. Note that, an implosion. By all that’s probable I should have been crushed to death. But you get some highly random effects near the center of any blast. So much happens so quickly. Tangential forces, layer effects. I got caught in between a few of those, evidently, and went into a parabolic curve over the marshes. It’s the things that can’t move quickly that take the full force.

  “Anyway, there’s not much left from that night, but the little that is points to no other direction but. That strip was a vivid blue color, but I couldn’t find a trace of blue about, although I did find traces of copper from other apparatus in the place. The area under the bench was untouched. The concrete wasn’t cracked.”

  “But if there had been such a terrific upward force, wouldn’t there have been an equally massive reaction? Wouldn’t that have cracked the floor?”

  “That’s the point. If it had been an ordinary force, yes—enough to have made a sizable hole in it. But this force is reactionless. This is movement without reaction against a material object. Newton’s Third Law of Motion up the spout, in fact.

  “Final point in favor came when I went for a drink in a pub nearby. I was just leaving when I noticed there was all new glass in the windows. It used to be that old-fashioned pub glass, all curlicues and the name of the brewers in fat letters, and now it was modern translucent. Luckily the barman didn’t know me, because when I remarked on it, he said that they’d had to have it done after some nut had blown up one of the factories down the road, hadn’t I heard about it, and wasn’t it a funny thing that the windows had blown out, not in? Before I caught the train back I carried out a spot check at a few houses. Told ’em I was a borough public safety officer, whatever that might be. Everybody’s windows blew out, not in. One old dear talked about a whooshing noise a split second before the bang. Want any more confirming details?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Good, because I haven’t got any more confirming detail
s. But I’ve got enough. There’s only one thing needed to do now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “To duplicate the experiment. With proper precautions of course, against what we—you—have provisionally called the Quy Effect. Against? What am I raving about. To harness it.”

  He got to his feet and started to pace the room.

  “So plans must be laid. I’d be flogging a dead horse trying to get Hypertronics interested again. But somehow I must get another sample of the compound.”

  “You mean—that one little strip was all you had?”

  “It was all trial stuff, son. No sense in making up big batches until I hit on the right specification. It would have been hellishly expensive. It’s not like knocking up plastics, or making a simple alloy. You’ve got to stitch each atom onto a molecule, just like a blasted court dressmaker stitching the sequins onto a ballroom gown. And it comes just as expensive. You need a firm with computers, cat-cracking furnaces, a squad of highly skilled technicians. I’ve got the right specification now, but even so I reckon it’ll cost about ten thousand to make just one strip the size of the one that made the bang.”

  The boy looked suddenly sad.

  “But that means to build an antigrav ship would take millions of pounds for the stuff alone. Wouldn’t it? Won’t you have to have the whole ship screened with it?”

  “Here we are—back with blasted Cavorite! How do you see it—as the skin round a sausage? Anyway, who’s talking about spaceships? And forget the cost. It’s like a prototype car or plane. It costs a lot at first because you, have to make the chemical equivalent of jigs and templates. Afterwards you can tool up a specialist plant and mass produce. The materials are cheap enough.

  “But that’s not the immediate concern. We want ten thousand quid now—or work to that value. You can bet your life Hypertronics has put the black in for me at the firm that made the other batches. That doesn’t leave a very wide field to choose from. But somewhere we’ll get it done. Mm-mm, ten thousand quid. Right. We move into action.”