Читать книгу The New Adam - Stanley G. Weinbaum - Страница 10

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SEVERAL weeks later Edmond sold his Stoddard at a fourteen point profit, and unemotionally watched it climb 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 intense 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 already 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 somber; 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 controlled. 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 unfaceable. 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 damage 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 desire.

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 tune surveying the cold hearth.