Element 79 (18 page)

My wild notion that Carruthers might have got himself well and truly wed, that he might have settled down in a nine-to-five job, turned out to be quite wrong. The big tortoise-shell spectacles he had sported at our previous meeting were gone, replaced by plain steel rims. His lank black hair was medium-long this time. He had a lugubrious look about him, as if he had just been rehearsing the part of Quince in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Come in,” he wheezed.

“What’s the idea, living in these parts?” I asked as I slipped off my overcoat. For answer, he broke into a whistling, croaking laugh. “Better take a look, in there.”

The door to which Gussie pointed was closed. I was pretty sure I would find animals “in there,” and so it proved. Although the room was darkened by a drawn curtain, there was sufficient light for me to see three creatures crouched around a television set. They were intently watching the second half of a game of Rugby League football. There was a cat with a big rust-red patch on the top of its head. There was a poodle, which cocked an eye at me for a fleeting second as I went in, and there was a furry animal sprawled in a big armchair. As I went in, I had the odd impression of the animal lifting a paw, as if by way of greeting. Then I realized it was a small brown bear.

I had known Gussie long enough now, I had seen enough of his work, to realize that any comment in words would be ridiculous and superfluous. I had long ago learned the right procedure, to do exactly the same thing as the animals themselves were doing. Since I have always been partial to rugby, I was able to settle down quite naturally to watch the game in company with this amazing trio. Every so often I found myself catching the bright, alert eyes of the bear. I soon realized that, whereas I was mainly interested in the run of the ball, the animals were mainly interested in the tackling, qua tackling. Once, when a player was brought down particularly heavily, there was a muffled yap from the poodle, instantly answered by a grunt from the bear.

After perhaps twenty minutes, I was startled by a really loud bark from the dog, there being nothing at all in the game to warrant such an outburst. Evidently the dog wanted to attract the attention of the engrossed bear, for when the bear looked up quizzically, the dog pointed a dramatic paw toward a clock standing a couple of yards to the left of the television set. Immediately the bear lumbered from its chair to the set. It fumbled with the controls. There was a click, and to my astonishment we were on another channel. A wrestling bout had just begun.

The bear rolled back to its chair. It stretched itself, resting lazily on the base of its spine, arms raised with the claws cupped behind the head. One of the wrestlers spun the other violently. There was a loud thwack as the unfortunate fellow cracked his head on a ring post. At this, the cat let out the strangest animal noise I had ever heard. Then it settled down into a deep, powerful purr.

I had seen and heard enough. As I quitted the room the bear waved me out, much in the style of royalty and visiting heads of state. I found Gussie placidly drinking tea in what was evidently the main sitting room of the house. To my frenzied requests to be told exactly what it meant, Gussie responded with his usual asthmatic laugh. Instead of answering my questions, he asked some of his own. “I want your advice, professionally, as a lawyer. There’s nothing illegal in the animals watching television, is there? Or in the bear switching the programs?”

“How could there be?”

“The situation’s a bit complicated. Here, take a look at this.”

Carruthers handed me a typewritten list. It covered a week of television programs. If this represented viewing by the animals, the set must have been switched on more or less continuously. The programs were all of one type, sports, Westerns, suspense plays, films of violence.

“What they love,” said Gussie by way of explanation, “is the sight of humans bashing themselves to pieces. Really, of course, it’s more or less the usual popular taste, only a bit more so.”

I noticed the name of a well-known rating firm on the letterhead.

“What’s this heading here? I mean, what’s all this to do with the T.V. ratings?”

Gussie fizzed and crackled like a soda siphon. “That’s exactly the point. This house here is one of the odd few hundreds used in compiling the weekly ratings. That’s why I asked if there was anything wrong in Bingo doing the switching.”

“You don’t mean viewing by those animals is going into the ratings?”

“Not only here, but in three other houses I’ve bought. I’ve got a team of chaps in each of them. Bears take quite naturally to the switching business.”

“There’ll be merry hell to pay if it comes out. Can’t you see what the papers will make of it?”

“Very clearly, indeed.”

The point hit me at last. Gussie could hardly have come on four houses by chance, all of which just happened to be hooked up to the T.V. rating-system. As far as I could see, there wasn’t anything illegal in what he’d done, so long as he didn’t make any threats or demands. As if he read my thoughts, he pushed a slip of paper under my nose. It was a check for fifty thousand pounds.

“Unsolicited,” he wheezed, “came out of the blue. From somebody in the advertising game, I suppose. Hush money. The problem is, do I put myself in the wrong if I cash it?”

Before I could form an opinion on this tricky question, there came a tinkling of breaking glass. “Another one gone,” Gussie muttered. “I haven’t been able to teach Bingo to use the vertical or horizontal holds. Whenever anything goes wrong, or the program goes off for a minute, he hammers away at the thing. It’s always the tube that goes.”

“It must be a costly business.”

“Averages about a dozen a week. I always keep a spare set ready. Be a good fellow and give me a hand with it. They’ll get pretty shirty if we don’t move smartly.”

We lifted what seemed like a brand-new set from out of a cupboard. Each gripping an end of it, we edged our way to the television snuggery. From inside, I was now aware of a strident uproar, compounded from the bark of a dog, the grunt of a bear, and the shrill moan of a red-headed cat. It was the uproar of animals suddenly denied their intellectual pabulum.

The cosmic powers, the inner powers, you understand, like a good lotus-eater when they see one. They had some rare beauties on their hands now. Yet the inner powers do not like breaking the natural order of things too flagrantly, although they’re not above slipping in what mathematicians are pleased to call a perturbation. This time they were willing to interfere to the extent of slipping in a chip of rock the size of a pea.

Some four and a half billion years ago the inner planets were formed by condensation in a gas cloud that quitted the Sun for dynamical reasons. The gas was pushed further and further away. As it moved outward, solid and liquid particles were formed, common refractory materials first, then less common, less refractory materials. Innermost were common metals and rock, composed mainly of elements 8, 12, 14, and 26—iron, that is to say, and the oxides of magnesium and silicon.

Element 79 is almost as refractory as iron, but it was present in the gas in very much smaller quantity. The vapor pressure was much much lower than the vapor pressure of iron. So element 79 didn’t condense until the gases moved considerably further away from the Sun. Whereas the ordinary metals and the rock were precipitated mainly in the region of Venus and Earth, element 79 did not condense until the gases reached the region between Mars and Jupiter. In fact, element 79 was precipitated in the asteroidal belt. A thermodynamic calculation will show how very sensitive the condensation process was to distance from the Sun. (
Nota bene:
Because of the very small vapor pressure, the temperature had to be rather low, about 750K, compared to 1500K for iron. This meant that the well-known exponential factor involving the binding energy of the atoms into the solid crystal lattice was a very large number, the factor of the form
exp(−Q/kT)
. This, in turn, meant the condensation was very temperature-sensitive, and hence sensitive to distance from the Sun.)

The significance of these technicalities is that condensation of element 79 was a quite critical process. Scarcely any of it condensed before the gases reached a certain distance, actually 2.257… A.U., then all of it suddenly dropped out of the vapor into solid objects, which were of almost pure element 79. The objects were mostly about one or two tenths of a kilometer in radius and there were about a thousand of them. It was on these objects that the cosmic powers, the inner powers, concentrated their attention for a brief instant.

What they intended was to bring one of the objects close to Mars at exactly the right place and time. It was natural to choose the particular object that came nearest to fulfilling their requirements in the ordinary way of things. Then a calculation was performed in the following way. All the particles in the asteroidal belt were numbered. There were many millions of them. Then quantities
I(r/s/t/…)
were worked out for all combinations of values of
r, s, t, …
. The meaning of these quantities was quite simple. For instance, by
I(r/s/t)
is meant the impulse that had to be given to the
r
th asteroidal particle in order for it to hit the
s
th particle, which in turn would hit the
t
th particle, which in turn would hit the required object in exactly the right way to bring it near to Mars at the right time and place. By
I(r/s/t/u)
is similarly meant the impulse that had to be given to the
r
th particle in order for it to hit the
s
th particle, in order for it to hit the
t
th particle, in order for it to hit the
u
th particle, which would then hit the required object in exactly the required way. Similarly, too, for still more complicated combinations, like
I(r/s/t/u/u)
. In this game of cosmic billiards the calculations were kept going until an impulse was obtained that could be achieved by placing the prescribed chip of rock the size of a pea at a precisely defined spot at a precisely defined time. It will be clear that the calculations had to be done not only for all combinations of the asteroidal particles but for different moments of time. This was why the sheer volume of the calculations was far beyond human capability.

The fateful chip of rock was slipped into position. A meteorite a foot in diameter hit it a glancing blow. The resulting modification in the orbit of the meteorite was quite minute. Yet by the end of the year it was sufficient to change the position of the meteorite by more than fifty miles, sufficient to cause it to hit, slap-bang, another meteorite, this time about ten yards in diameter. The same pattern was repeated for a whole chain of particles until at last a rather large one plugged its way into the object composed of essentially pure element 79.

The perihelion distance of the object—its closest distance to the Sun, that is to say—was now almost exactly the same as the mean radius of the orbit of Mars. In the ordinary way of things, a close approach between the object and Mars was to be expected sooner or later. The approach came sooner, because the calculations had been exactly performed. The approach was close, the object almost shaved the surface of Mars. It approached Mars more or less along the line of the motion of Mars about the Sun, and its speed of approach relative to the planet was a little less than 2.3 kilometers per second.

The object accelerated as it came in, due to the gravitational pull of the planet. It had some 5.5 kilometers per second at its nearest point. It tore its way through the thin atmosphere of Mars. The scouring effect of the atmospheric gases did no harm. In fact, quite the reverse. The dirt deposited on the surface of the object throughout the eons was simply removed. It now had a rich, warm, yellow color.

As seen by an observer sited on Mars, the object would have appeared to recede with almost exactly the same speed as it had come, 2.3 kilometers per second. However, the direction of recession was quite different from that of the approach; it was switched by almost a right angle. Whereas the object had come in along the direction of orbital motion, it now went out along a line drawn from the Sun to Mars. The orbit around the Sun was changed again, of course. Instead of going back to the original position in the asteroidal belt, the object simply oscillated about the orbit of Mars itself. In fact. Mars and the object had very similar orbits, which meant that a further encounter between them was inevitable.

A second very close approach occurred some three years later. The second approach was rather like a mirror-image version of the first approach. Once more the direction of motion of the object was switched essentially through a right angle—this as seen from Mars again. The approach was along the line from Mars to the Sun, the recession was in a direction
opposite
to the orbital motion of Mars about the Sun. The switch involved points of very real subtlety. It involved the object sweeping around the
morning
side of the planet—if it had swept around the
evening
side the object would have gone more or less back to the asteroidal belt. Now it lost still more angular momentum, so the new orbit had to dip well inside that of Mars.

In fact, the new orbit dipped as far in as the Earth. Encounters with the Earth were now to be expected. In the ordinary way of things it might have needed a hundred thousand years or more before an actual collision occurred. Here there was a precisely calculated situation, however. Inexorably, under the exact law of gravitation, the object followed a trajectory aimed at the Earth. It was incredibly accurate shooting. The Earth was a bull’s-eye target, occupying only one-millionth part of the total target area.

As the object came in close, it looked for a while as if the encounter was going to be a near miss. But at the last moment the Earth’s gravitational field caused the object to come in a little closer. It plunged into the atmosphere and hit the terrestrial surface at nearly a grazing angle on the night side. It was as if a bullet had just nicked the very edge of the bull’s-eye. Yet there was no mistake here, no small error of calculation. It had to be just that way, for the following reason.