Islands of Space Read online

  I

  Three men sat around a table which was littered with graphs, sketches ofmathematical functions, and books of tensor formulae. Beside the tablestood a Munson-Bradley integraph calculator which one of the men wasusing to check some of the equations he had already derived. The resultsthey were getting seemed to indicate something well above and beyondwhat they had expected.

  And anything that surprised the team of Arcot, Wade, and Morey wassurprising indeed.

  The intercom buzzed, interrupting their work.

  Dr. Richard Arcot reached over and lifted the switch. "Arcot speaking."

  The face that flashed on the screen was businesslike and determined."Dr. Arcot, Mr. Fuller is here. My orders are to check with you on allvisitors."

  Arcot nodded. "Send him up. But from now on, I'm not in to anyone but myfather or the Interplanetary Chairman or the elder Mr. Morey. If theycome, don't bother to call, just send 'em up. I will not receive callsfor the next ten hours. Got it?"

  "You won't be bothered, Dr. Arcot."

  Arcot cut the circuit and the image collapsed.

  Less than two minutes later, a light flashed above the door. Arcottouched the release, and the door slid aside. He looked at the manentering and said, with mock coldness:

  "If it isn't the late John Fuller. What did you do--take a plane? Ittook you an hour to get here from Chicago."

  Fuller shook his head sadly. "Most of the time was spent in getting pastyour guards. Getting to the seventy-fourth floor of the TranscontinentalAirways Building is harder than stealing the Taj Mahal." Trying tosuppress a grin, Fuller bowed low. "Besides, I think it would do yourroyal highness good to be kept waiting for a while. You're paid a coupleof million a year to putter around in a lab while honest people work fora living. Then, if you happen to stub your toe over some useful gadget,they increase your pay. They call you scientists and spend the resourcesof two worlds to get you anything you want--and apologize if they don'tget it within twenty-four hours.

  "No doubt about it; it will do your majesties good to wait."

  With a superior smile, he seated himself at the table and shuffledcalmly through the sheets of equations before him.

  Arcot and Wade were laughing, but not Robert Morey. With a sorrowfulexpression, he walked to the window and looked out at the hundreds ofslim, graceful aircars that floated above the city.

  "My friends," said Morey, almost tearfully, "I give you the great Dr.Arcot. These countless machines we see have come from one idea of his.Just an idea, mind you! And who worked it into mathematical form andmade it calculable, and therefore useful? I did!

  "And who worked out the math for the interplanetary ships? I did!Without me they would never have been built!" He turned dramatically, asthough he were playing King Lear. "And what do I get for it?" He pointedan accusing finger at Arcot. "What do I get? _He_ is called 'Earth'smost brilliant physicist', and I, who did all the hard work, am referredto as 'his mathematical assistant'." He shook his head solemnly. "It's ahard world."

  At the table, Wade frowned, then looked at the ceiling. "If you'd makeyour quotations more accurate, they'd be more trustworthy. The news saidthat Arcot was the '_System's_ most brilliant physicist', and that youwere the 'brilliant mathematical assistant who showed great genius indeveloping the mathematics of Dr. Arcot's new theory'." Having deliveredhis speech, Wade began stoking his pipe.

  Fuller tapped his fingers on the table. "Come on, you clowns, knock itoff and tell me why you called a hard-working man away from his draftingtable to come up to this play room of yours. What have you got up yoursleeve this time?"

  "Oh, that's too bad," said Arcot, leaning back comfortably in his chair."We're sorry you're so busy. We were thinking of going out to see whatAntares, Betelguese, or Polaris looked like at close range. And, if wedon't get too bored, we might run over to the giant model nebula inAndromeda, or one of the others. Tough about your being busy; you mighthave helped us by designing the ship and earned your board and passage.Tough." Arcot looked at Fuller sadly.

  Fuller's eyes narrowed. He knew Arcot was kidding, but he also knew howfar Arcot would go when he was kidding--and this sounded like he meantit. Fuller said: "Look, teacher, a man named Einstein said that thevelocity of light was tops over two hundred years ago, and nobody's comeup with any counter evidence yet. Has the Lord instituted a new speedlaw?"

  "Oh, no," said Wade, waving his pipe in a grand gesture of importance."Arcot just decided he didn't like that law and made a new one himself."

  "Now _wait_ a minute!" said Fuller. "The velocity of light is a propertyof space!"

  Arcot's bantering smile was gone. "Now you've got it, Fuller. Thevelocity of light, just as Einstein said, is a property of space. Whathappens if we change space?"

  Fuller blinked. "Change space? How?"

  Arcot pointed toward a glass of water sitting nearby. "Why do thingslook distorted through the water? Because the light rays are bent. Whyare they bent? Because as each wave front moves from air to water, _itslows down_. The electromagnetic and gravitational fields between thoseatoms are strong enough to increase the curvature of the space betweenthem. Now, what happens if we reverse that effect?"

  "Oh," said Fuller softly. "I get it. By changing the curvature of thespace surrounding you, you could get any velocity you wanted. But whatabout acceleration? It would take years to reach those velocities at anyacceleration a man could stand."

  Arcot shook his head. "Take a look at the glass of water again. Whathappens when the light comes _out_ of the water? It speeds up again_instantaneously_. By changing the space around a spaceship, youinstantaneously change the velocity of the ship to a comparable velocityin that space. And since every particle is accelerated at the same rate,you wouldn't feel it, any more than you'd feel the acceleration due togravity in free fall."

  Fuller nodded slowly. Then, suddenly, a light gleamed in his eyes. "Isuppose you've figured out where you're going to get the energy to powera ship like that?"

  "He has," said Morey. "Uncle Arcot isn't the type to forget a littledetail like that."

  "Okay, give," said Fuller.

  Arcot grinned and lit up his own pipe, joining Wade in an attempt tofill the room with impenetrable fog.

  "All right," Arcot began, "we needed two things: a tremendous source ofpower and a way to store it.

  "For the first, ordinary atomic energy wouldn't do. It's notcontrollable enough and uranium isn't something we could carry by theton. So I began working with high-density currents.

  "At the temperature of liquid helium, near absolute zero, lead becomes anearly perfect conductor. Back in nineteen twenty, physicists hadsucceeded in making a current flow for four hours in a closed circuit.It was just a ring of lead, but the resistance was so low that thecurrent kept on flowing. They even managed to get six hundred amperesthrough a piece of lead wire no bigger than a pencil lead.

  "I don't know why they didn't go on from there, but they didn't.Possibly it was because they didn't have the insulation necessary tokeep down the corona effect; in a high-density current, the electronstend to push each other sideways out of the wire.

  "At any rate, I tried it, using _lux_ metal as an insulator around thewire."

  "Hold it!" Fuller interrupted. "What, may I ask, is _lux_ metal?"

  "That was Wade's idea," Arcot grinned. "You remember those twosubstances we found in the Nigran ships during the war?"

  "Sure," said Fuller. "One was transparent and the other was a perfectreflector. You said they were made of light--photons so greatlycondensed that they were held together by their gravitational fields."

  "Right. We called them light-metal. But Wade said that was tooconfusing. With a specific gravity of 103.5, light-metal was certainlynot a light metal! So Wade coined a couple of words. _Lux_ is the Latinfor light, so he named the transparent one _lux_ and the reflecting one_relux_."

  "It sounds peculiar," Fuller observed, "but so does every coined wordwhen you first hear it. Go on with your story."


  Arcot relit his pipe and went on. "I put a current of ten thousand ampsthrough a little piece of lead wire, and that gave me a current densityof 10^{10} amps per square inch.

  "Then I started jacking up the voltage, and modified the thing with adouble-polarity field somewhat similar to the molecular motion fieldexcept that it works on a sub-nucleonic level. As a result, about halfof the lead fed into the chamber became contraterrene lead! The atomsjust turned themselves inside out, so to speak, giving us an atom withpositrons circling a negatively charged nucleus. It even gave theneutrons a reverse spin, converting them into anti-neutrons.

  "Result: total annihilation of matter! When the contraterrene lead atomsmet the terrene lead atoms, mutual annihilation resulted, giving us pureenergy.

  "Some of this power can be bled off to power the mechanism itself; therest is useful energy. We've got all the power we need--power, literallyby the ton."

  Fuller said nothing; he just looked dazed. He was well beginning tobelieve that these three men could do the impossible and do it to order.

  "The second thing," Arcot continued, "was, as I said, a way to store theenergy so that it could be released as rapidly or as slowly as we neededit.

  "That was Morey's baby. He figured it would be possible to use thespace-strain apparatus to store energy. It's an old method; inductioncoils, condensers, and even gravity itself are storing energy bystraining space. But with Morey's apparatus we could store a lot more.

  "A torus-shaped induction coil encloses all its magnetic field withinit; the torus, or 'doughnut' coil, has a perfectly enclosed magneticfield. We built an enclosed coil, using Morey's principle, and expectedto store a few watts of power in it to see how long we could hold it.

  "Unfortunately, we made the mistake of connecting it to the city powerlines, and it cost us a hundred and fifty dollars at a quarter of a centper kilowatt hour. We blew fuses all over the place. After that, we usedthe relux plate generator.

  "At any rate, the gadget can store power and plenty of it, and it canput it out the same way."

  Arcot knocked the ashes out of his pipe and smiled at Fuller. "Those arethe essentials of what we have to offer. We give you the job of figuringout the stresses and strains involved. We want a ship with a cruisingradius of a thousand million light years."

  "Yes, sir! Right away, sir! Do you want a gross or only a dozen?" Fullerasked sarcastically. "You sure believe in big orders! And whence comeththe cold cash for this lovely dream of yours?"

  "That," said Morey darkly, "is where the trouble comes in. We have toconvince Dad. As President of Transcontinental Airways, he's my boss,but the trouble is, he's also my father. When he hears that I want to gogallivanting off all over the Universe with you guys, he is very likelyto turn thumbs down on the whole deal. Besides, Arcot's dad has a lot ofinfluence around here, too, and I have a healthy hunch he won't like theidea, either."

  "I rather fear he won't," agreed Arcot gloomily.

  A silence hung over the room that felt almost as heavy as the pall ofpipe smoke the air conditioners were trying frantically to disperse.

  The elder Mr. Morey had full control of their finances. A ship thatwould cost easily hundreds of millions of dollars was well beyondanything the four men could get by themselves. Their inventions were theproperty of Transcontinental, but even if they had not been, not one ofthe four men would think of selling them to another company.

  Finally, Wade said: "I think we'll stand a much better chance if we showthem a big, spectacular exhibition; something really impressive. We'llpoint out all the advantages and uses of the apparatus. Then we'll showthem complete plans for the ship. They might consent."

  "They might," replied Morey smiling. "It's worth a try, anyway. Andlet's get out of the city to do it. We can go up to my place in Vermont.We can use the lab up there for all we need. We've got everythingworked out, so there's no need to stay here.

  "Besides, I've got a lake up there in which we can indulge in a littleatavism to the fish stage of evolution."

  "Good enough," Arcot agreed, grinning broadly. "And we'll need thatlake, too. Here in the city it's only eighty-five because the aircarsare soaking up heat for their molecular drive, but out in the countryit'll be in the nineties."

  "To the mountains, then! Let's pack up!"