then you use the fuel anywhere and anyhow you like, with something like
ninety-two percent recovery of the energy of the bomb. But you could junk
the mercury-steam sequence, if you wanted to.
King's first wild hope of a way out of his dilemma was dashed; he subsided.
"Go ahead. Tell me about it."
"Well ? It's a matter of artificial radioactives. Just before I asked for
that special research allotment, Erickson and I ? Dr. Lentz had a finger in
it, too ? found two isotopes of a radioactive that seemed to be mutually
antagonistic. That is, when we goosed 'em in the presence of each other
they gave up their latent energy all at once ? blew all to hell. The
important point is, we were using just a gnat's whisker of mass of each ?
the reaction didn't require a big mass like the bomb to maintain it."
"I don't see," objected King, "how that could ? "
"Neither do we, quite ? but it works. We've kept it quiet until we were
sure. We checked on what we had, and we found a dozen other fuels. Probably
we'll be able to tailor-make fuels for any desired purpose. But here it
is." Harper handed King a bound sheaf of typewritten notes which he had
been carrying under the arm. "That's your copy. Look it over."
King started to do so. Lentz joined him, after a look that was a silent
request for permission, which Erickson had answered with his only verbal
contribution, "Sure Doc."
As King read, the troubled feeling of an acutely harassed executive left
him. His dominant personality took charge, that of the scientist. He
enjoyed the controlled and cerebral ecstasy of the impersonal seeker for
the elusive truth. The emotions felt in the throbbing thalamus were
permitted only to form a sensuous obbligato for the cold flame of cortical
activity. For the time being, he was sane, more nearly completely sane than
most men ever achieve at any time.
For a long period there was only an occasional grunt, the clatter of turned
pages, a nod of approval. At last he put it down.
"It's the stuff," he said. "You've done it, boys. It's great; I'm proud of
you."
Erickson glowed a bright pink and swallowed. Harper's small, tense figure
gave the ghost of a wriggle, reminiscent of a wire-haired terrier receiving
approval. "That fine, chief. We'd rather hear you say that than get the
Nobel Prize."
"I think you'll probably get it. However ? " the proud light in his eyes
died down ? "I'm not going to take any action in this matter."
"Why not, chief?" Harper's tone was bewildered.
"I'm being retired. My successor will take over in the near future; this is
too big a matter to start just before a change in administration."
"You being retire! Blazes!"
"About the same reason I took you off the bomb ? at least, the Directors
think so."
"But that's nonsense! You were right to take me off the bomb; I was getting
jumpy. But you're another matter ? we all depend on you."
"Thanks, Cal ? but that's how it is; there's nothing to be done about it."
He turned to Lentz. "I think this is the last ironical touch needed to make
the whole thing pure farce," he observed bitterly. "This thing is big,
bigger than we can guess at this stage ? and I have to give it a miss.
"Well," Harper burst out, "I can think of something to do about it!" He
strode over to King's desk and snatched up the manuscript. "Either you
superintend the
exploitation or the company will damn well get along without our
discovery!" Erickson concurred belligerently.
"Wait a minute." Lentz had the floor. "Dr. Harper, have you already
achieved a practical rocket fuel?"
"I said so. We've got it on hand now."
"An escape-speed fuel?" They understood his verbal shorthand-a fuel that
would lift a rocket free of the Earth's gravitational pull.
"Sure. Why, you could take any of the Clipper rockets, refit them a trifle,
and have breakfast on the Moon."
"Very well. Bear with me ? " He obtained a sheet of paper from King and
commenced to write. They watched in mystified impatience. He continued
briskly for some minutes, hesitating only momentarily. Presently he stopped
and spun the paper over to King. "Solve it!" he demanded.
King studied the paper. Lentz had assigned symbols to a great number of
factors, some social, some psychological, some physical, some economical.
He had thrown them together into a structural relationship, using the
symbols of calculus of statement. King understood the paramathematical
operations indicated by the symbols, but he was not as used to them as he
was to the symbols and operations of mathematical physics. He plowed
through the equations, moving his lips slightly in unconscious
subvocalization.
He accepted a pencil from Lentz and completed the solution. It required
several more lines, a few more equations, before the elements canceled out,
or rearranged themselves, into a definite answer.
He stared at this answer while puzzlement gave way to dawning comprehension
and delight.
He looked up. "Erickson! Harper!" he rapped out. "We will take your new
fuel, refit a large rocket, install the bomb in it, and throw it into an
orbit around the Earth, far out in space. There we will use it to make more
fuel, safe fuel, for use on Earth, with the danger from the bomb itself
limited to the operators actually on watch!"
There was no applause. It was not that sort of an idea; their minds were
still struggling with the complex implications.
"But, chief," Harper finally managed, "how about your retirement? We're
still not going to stand for it."
"Don't worry," King assured him "It's all in there, implicit in those
equations, you two, me, Lentz, the Board of Directors ? and just what we
all have to do to accomplish it."
"All except the matter of time," Lentz cautioned.
"Eh?"
"You'll note that elapsed time appears in your answer as an undetermined
unknown."
"Yes . . . yes, of course. That's the chance we have to take. Let's get
busy!"
Chairman Dixon called the Board of Directors to order. "This being a
special meeting, we'll dispense with minutes and reports," he announced.
"As set forth in the call we have agreed to give the retiring
superintendent three hours of our time."
"Mr. Chairman ? "
"Yes, Mr. Thornton?"
"I thought we had settled that matter."
"We have, Mr. Thornton, but in view of Superintendent King's long and
distinguished service, if he asks a hearing, we are honor bound to grant
it. You have the floor, Dr. King."
King got up and stated briefly, "Dr. Lentz will speak for me." He sat down.
Lentz had to wait till coughing, throat clearing and scraping of chairs
subsided. It was evident that the board resented the outsider.
Lentz ran quickly over the main points in the argument which contended that
the bomb presented an intolerable danger anywhere on the face of the Earth.
He moved on at once to the alternative proposal that the bomb should be
located in a rocketship, an artificial moonlet flying in a free orbi
t
around the Earth at a convenient distance ? say, fifteen thousand miles ?
while secondary power stations on Earth burned a safe fuel manufactured by
the bomb.
He announced the discovery of the Harper-Erickson technique and dwelt on
what it meant to them commercially. Each point was presented as
persuasively as possible, with the full power of his engaging personality.
Then he paused and waited for them to blow off steam.
They did. "Visionary ? " "Unproved ? " No essential change in the situation
? " The substance of it was that they were very happy to hear of the new
fuel, but not particularly impressed by it. Perhaps in another twenty
years, after it had been thoroughly tested and proved commercially, and
provided enough uranium had been mined to build another bomb, they might
consider setting up another power station outside the atmosphere. In the
meantime there was no hurry.
Lentz patiently and politely dealt with their objections. He emphasized the
increasing incidence of occupational psychoneurosis among the engineers and
grave danger to everyone near the bomb even under the orthodox theory. He
reminded them of their insurance and indemnity-bond costs, and of the
"squeeze" they paid State politicians.
Then he changed his tone and let them have it directly and brutally.
"Gentlemen," he said, "we believe that we are fighting for our lives ? our
own lives, our families and every life on the globe. If you refuse this
compromise, we will fight as fiercely and with as little regard for fair
play as any cornered animal." With that he made his first move in attack.
It was quite simple. He offered for their inspection the outline of a
propaganda campaign on a national scale, such as any major advertising firm
could carry out as matter of routine. It was complete to the last detail,
television broadcasts, spot plugs, newspaper and magazine coverage and ?
most important ? a supporting whispering campaign and a letters-to-Congress
organization. Every businessman there knew from experience how such things
worked.
But its object was to stir up fear of the bomb and to direct that fear, not
into panic, but into rage against the Board of Directors personally, and
into a demand that the government take action to have the bomb removed to
outer space.
"This is blackmail! We'll stop you!"
"I think not," Lentz replied gently. "You may be able to keep us out of
some of the newspapers, but you can't stop the rest of it. You can't even
keep us off the air ? ask the Federal Communications Commission." It was
true Harrington had handled the political end and had performed his
assignment well; the President was convinced.
Tempers were snapping on all sides; Dixon had to pound for order. "Dr.
Lentz," he said, his own temper under taut control, "you plan to make every
one of us appear a black-hearted scoundrel with no other thought than
personal profit, even at the expense of the lives of others. You know that
is not true; this is a simple difference of opinion as to what is wise."
"I did not say it was true," Lentz admitted blandly, "but you will admit
that I can convince the public that you are deliberate villains. As to it
being a difference of opinion ? you are none of you atomic physicists; you
are not entitled to hold opinions in this matter.
"As a matter of fact," he went on callously, "the only doubt in my mind is
whether or not an enraged public will destroy your precious power plant
before Congress has time to exercise eminent domain and take it away from
you!"
Before they had time to think up arguments in answer and ways of
circumventing him, before their hot indignation had cooled and set as
stubborn resistance, he offered his gambit. He produced another layout for
a propaganda campaign ? an entirely different sort.
This time the Board of Directors was to be built up, not torn down. All of
the same techniques were to be used; behind-the-scenes feature articles
with plenty of human interest would describe the functions of the company,
describe it as a great public trust, administered by patriotic, unselfish
statesmen of the business world. At the proper point in the campaign, the
Harper-Erickson fuel would be announced not as a semiaccidental result of
the initiative of two employees, but as the long-expected end product of
years of systematic research conducted under a fixed policy growing
naturally out of their humane determination to remove forever the menace of
explosion from even the sparsely settled Arizona desert.
No mention was to be made of the danger of complete, planet-embracing
catastrophe.
Lentz discussed it. He dwelt on the appreciation that would be due them
from a grateful world. He invited them to make a noble sacrifice and, with
subtle misdirection, tempted them to think of themselves as heroes. He
deliberately played on one of the most deep-rooted of simian instincts, the
desire for approval from one's kind, deserved or not.
All the while he was playing for time, as he directed his attention from
one hard case, one resistant mind, to another. He soothed and he tickled
and he played on personal foibles. For the benefit of the timorous and the
devoted family men, he again painted a picture of the suffering, death and
destruction that might result from their well-meant reliance on the
unproved and highly questionable predictions of Destry's mathematics. Then
he described in glowing detail a picture of a world free from worry but
granted almost unlimited power, safe power from an invention which was
theirs for this one small concession.
It worked. They did not reverse themselves all at once, but a committee was
appointed to investigate the feasibility of the proposed spaceship power
plant. By sheer brass Lentz suggested names for the committee and Dixon
confirmed his nominations, not because he wished to, particularly, but
because he was caught off guard and could not think of a reason to refuse
without affronting those colleagues.
The impending retirement of King was not mentioned by either side.
Privately, Lentz felt sure that it never would be mentioned.
It worked, but there was left much to do. For the first few days after the
victory in committee, King felt much elated by the prospect of an early
release from the soul-killing worry. He was buoyed up by pleasant demands
of manifold new administrative duties. Harper and Erickson were detached to
Goddard Field to collaborate with the rocket engineers there in design of
firing chambers, nozzles, fuel stowage, fuel metering and the like. A
schedule had to be worked out with the business office to permit as much
power of the bomb as possible to ? be diverted to making atomic fuel, and a
giant combustion chamber for atomic fuel had to be designed and ordered to
replace the bomb itself during the interim between the time it was shut
down on Earth and the later time when sufficient local, smaller plants
could be built to carry the commercial load. He was busy.
When the first activity had died down and they were settled in a
new
routine, pending the shutting down of the bomb and its removal to outer
space, King suffered an emotional reaction. There was, by then, nothing to
do but wait, and tend the bomb, until the crew at Goddard Field smoothed
out the bugs and produced a space-worthy rocketship.
They ran into difficulties, overcame them, and came across more
difficulties. They had never used such high reaction velocities; it took
many trials to find a nozzle shape that would give reasonably high
efficiency. When that was solved, and success seemed in sight, the jets
burned out on a time trial ground test. They were stalemated for weeks over
that hitch.
Back at the power plant Superintendent King could do nothing but chew his
nails and wait. He had not even the release of running over to Goddard
Field to watch the progress of the research, for, urgently as he desired
to, he felt an even stronger, an overpowering compulsion to watch over the
bomb lest it ? heartbreakingly! ? blow up at the last minute.
He took to hanging around the control room. He had to stop that; his unease
communicated itself to his watch engineers; two of them cracked up in a
single day ? one of them on watch.
He must face the fact ? there had been a grave upswing in psychoneurosis
among his engineers since the period of watchful waiting had commenced. At
first, they had tried to keep the essential facts of the plan a close
secret, but it had leaked out, perhaps through some member of the
investigating committee. He admitted to himself now that it had been a
mistake ever to try to keep it secret ? Lentz had advised against it, and
the engineers not actually engaged in the change-over were bound to know
that something was up.
He took all of the engineers into confidence at last, under oath of
secrecy. That had helped for a week or more, a week in which they were all
given a spiritual lift by the knowledge, as he had been. Then it had worn
off, the reaction had set in, and the psychological observers had started
disqualifying engineers for duty almost daily. They were even reporting
each other as mentally unstable with great frequency; he might even be
faced with a shortage of psychiatrists if that kept up, he thought to
himself with bitter amusement. His engineers were already standing four
hours in every sixteen. If one more dropped out, he'd put himself on watch.
That would be a relief, to tell himself the truth.
Somehow, some of the civilians around about and the nontechnical employees
were catching onto the secret. That mustn't go on ? if it spread any
farther there might be a nation-wide panic. But how the hell could he stop
it? He couldn't.
He turned over in bed, rearranged his pillow, and tried once more to get to
sleep. No soap. His head ached, his eyes were balls of pain, and his brain
was a ceaseless grind of useless, repetitive activity, like a disk
recording stuck in one groove.
God! This was unbearable! He wondered if he were cracking up ? if he
already had cracked up. This was worse, many times worse, than the old
routine when he had simply acknowledged the danger and tried to forget it
as much as much as possible. Not that the bomb was any different ? it was
this five-minutes-to-armistice feeling, this waiting for the curtain to go
up, this race against time with nothing to do to help.
He sat up, switched on his bed lamp, and looked at the clock. Three thirty.
Not so good. He got up, went into his bathroom, and dissolved a sleeping
powder in a glass of whiskey and water, half and half. He gulped it down
and went back to bed. Presently he dozed off.
He was running, fleeing down a long corridor. At the end lay safety ? he