The Past Through Tomorrow (12 page)

When Erickson came off watch he inquired around and found that Harper had left for town. Accordingly, he dispensed with dinner at the base, shifted into “drinkin’ clothes”, and allowed himself to be dispatched via tube to Paradise.

Paradise, Arizona, was a hard little boom town, which owed its existence to the breeder plant. It was dedicated exclusively to the serious business of detaching the personnel of the plant from their inordinate salaries. In this worthy project they received much cooperation from the plant personnel themselves, each of whom was receiving from twice to ten times as much money each pay day as he had ever received in any other job, and none of whom was certain of living long enough to justify saving for old age. Besides, the company carried a sinking fund in Manhattan for their dependents; why be stingy?

It was claimed, with some truth, that any entertainment or luxury obtainable in New York City could be purchased in Paradise. The local chamber of commerce had appropriated the slogan of Reno, Nevada, “Biggest Little City in the World.” The Reno boosters retaliated by claiming that, while any town that close to the atomic breeder plant undeniably brought thoughts of death and the hereafter, Hell’s Gates would be a more appropriate name.

Erickson started making the rounds. There were twenty-seven places licensed to sell liquor in the six blocks of the main street of Paradise. He expected to find Harper in one of them, and, knowing the man’s habits and tastes, he expected to find him in the first two or three he tried.

He was not mistaken. He found Harper sitting alone at a table in the rear of deLancey’s Sans Souci Bar. DeLancey’s was a favorite of both of them. There was an old-fashioned comfort about its chrome-plated bar and red leather furniture that appealed to them more than did the spectacular fittings of the up-to-the-minute places. DeLancey was conservative; he stuck to indirect lighting and soft music; his hostesses were required to be fully clothed, even in the evening.

The fifth of Scotch in front of Harper was about two-thirds full. Erickson shoved three fingers in front of Harper’s face and demanded, “Count!”

“Three,” announced Harper. “Sit down, Gus.”

“That’s correct,” Erickson agreed, sliding his big frame into a low-slung chair. “You’ll do—for now. What was the outcome?”

“Have a drink. Not,” he went on, “that this Scotch is any good. I think Lance has taken to watering it. I surrendered, horse and foot.”

“Lance wouldn’t do that—stick to that theory and you’ll sink in the sidewalk up to your knees. How come you capitulated? I thought you planned to beat ’em about the head and shoulders, at least.”

“I did,” mourned Harper, ‘Taut, cripes, Gus, the chief is right. If a brain mechanic says you’re punchy, he has got to back him up, and take you off the watch list. The chief can’t afford to take a chance.”

“Yeah, the chief’s all right, but I can’t learn to love our dear psychiatrists. Tell you what—let’s find us one, and see if he can feel pain. I’ll hold him while you slug ’im.”

“Oh, forget it, Gus. Have a drink.”

“A pious thought—but not Scotch. I’m going to have a martini; we ought to eat pretty soon.”

“I’ll have one, too.”

“Do you good.” Erickson lifted his blond head and bellowed, “Israfel!”

A large, black person appeared at his elbow. “Mistuh Erickson! Yes, suh!”

“Izzy, fetch two martinis. Make mine with Italian.” He turned back to Harper. “What are you going to do now, Cal?”

“Radiation laboratory.”

“Well, that’s not so bad. I’d like to have a go at the matter of rocket fuels myself. I’ve got some ideas.”

Harper looked mildly amused. “You mean atomic fuel for interplanetary flight? That problem’s pretty well exhausted. No, son, the ionosphere is the ceiling until we think up something better than rockets. Of course, you
could
mount a pile in a ship, and figure out some jury rig to convert some of its output into push, but where does that get you? You would still have a terrible mass-ratio because of the shielding and I’m betting you couldn’t convert one percent into thrust. That’s disregarding the question of getting the company to lend you a power pile for anything that doesn’t pay dividends.”

Erickson looked balky. “I don’t concede that you’ve covered all the alternatives. What have we got? The early rocket boys went right ahead trying to build better rockets, serene in the belief that, by the time they could build rockets good enough to fly to the moon, a fuel would be perfected that would do the trick. And they did build ships that were good enough—you could take any ship that makes the Antipodes run, and refit it for the moon—
if
you had a fuel that was adequate. But they haven’t got it.

“And why not? Because we let ’em down, that’s why. Because they’re still depending on molecular energy, on chemical reactions, with atomic power sitting right here in our laps. It’s not their fault—old D. D. Harriman had Rockets Consolidated underwrite the whole first issue of Antarctic Pitchblende, and took a big slice of it himself, in the expectation that we would produce something usable in the way of a concentrated rocket fuel. Did we do it? Like hell! The company went hog-wild for immediate commercial exploitation, and there’s no atomic rocket fuel yet.”

“But you haven’t stated it properly,” Harper objected. “There are just two forms of atomic power available, radioactivity and atomic disintegration. The first is too slow; the energy is there, but you can’t wait years for it to come out—not in a rocket ship. The second we can only manage in a large power plant. There you are—stymied.”

“We haven’t really tried,” Erickson answered. “The power is there; we ought to give ’em a decent fuel.”

“What would you call a ‘decent fuel’?”

Erickson ticked it off. “A small enough critical mass so that all, or almost all, the energy could be taken up as heat by the reaction mass—I’d like the reaction mass to be ordinary water. Shielding that would have to be no more than a lead and cadmium jacket. And the whole thing controllable to a fine point.”

Harper laughed. “Ask for Angel’s wings and be done with it. You couldn’t store such fuel in a rocket; it would set itself off before it reached the jet chamber.”

Erickson’s Scandinavian stubbornness was just gathering for another try at the argument when the waiter arrived with the drinks. He set them down with a triumphant flourish. “There you are, suh!”

“Want to roll for them, Izzy?” Harper inquired.

“Don’ mind if I do.”

The Negro produced a leather dice cup and Harper rolled. He selected his combinations with care and managed to get four aces and jack in three rolls. Israfel took the cup. He rolled in the grand manner with a backwards twist to his wrist. His score finished at five kings, and he courteously accepted the price of six drinks. Harper stirred the engraved cubes with his forefinger.

“Izzy,” he asked, “are these the same dice I rolled with?”

“Why, Mistuh Harper!” The black’s expression was pained.

“Skip it,” Harper conceded. “I should know better than to gamble with you. I haven’t won a roll from you in six weeks. What did you start to say, Gus?”

“I was just going to say that there ought to be a better way to get energy out of—”

But they were joined again, this time by something very seductive in an evening gown that appeared to have been sprayed on her lush figure. She was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty. “You boys lonely?” she asked as she flowed into a chair.

“Nice of you to ask, but we’re not,” Erickson denied with patient politeness. He jerked a thumb at a solitary figure seated across the room. “Go talk to Hannigan; he’s not busy.”

She followed his gesture with her eyes, and answered with faint scorn, “Him? He’s no use. He’s been like that for three weeks—hasn’t spoken to a soul. If you ask me, I’d say that he was cracking up.”

“That so?” he observed noncommittally. “Here—” He fished out a five-dollar bill and handed it to her. “Buy yourself a drink. Maybe we’ll look you up later.”

“Thanks, boys.” The money disappeared under her clothing, and she stood up. “Just ask for Edith.”

“Hannigan does look bad,” Harper considered, noting the brooding stare and apathetic attitude, “and he has been awfully stand-offish lately, for him. Do you suppose we’re obliged to report him?”

“Don’t let it worry you,” advised Erickson, “there’s a spotter on the job now. Look.” Harper followed his companion’s eyes and recognized Dr. Mott of the psychological staff. He was leaning against the far end of the bar and nursing a tall glass, which gave him protective coloration. But his stance was such that his field of vision included not only Hannigan, but Erickson and Harper as well.

“Yeah, and he’s studying us as well,” Harper added. “Damn it to hell, why does it make my back hair rise just to lay eyes on one of them?”

The question was rhetorical, Erickson ignored it. “Let’s get out of here,” he suggested, “and have dinner somewhere else.”

“O.K.”

DeLancey himself waited on them as they left. “Going so soon, gentlemen?” he asked, in a voice that implied that their departure would leave him no reason to stay open. “Beautiful lobster thermidor tonight. If you do not like it, you need not pay.” He smiled brightly.

“No sea food, Lance,” Harper told him, “not tonight. Tell me—why do you stick around here when you know that the pile is bound to get you in the long run? Aren’t you afraid of it?”

The tavernkeeper’s eyebrows shot up. “Afraid of the pile? But it is my friend!”

“Makes you money, eh?”

“Oh, I do not mean that.” He leaned toward them confidentially. “Five years ago I come here to make some money quickly for my family before my cancer of the stomach, it kills me. At the clinic, with the wonderful new radiants you gentlemen make with the aid of the Big Bomb, I am cured—I live again. No, I am not afraid of the pile; it is my good friend.”

“Suppose it blows up?”

“When the good Lord needs me, he will take me.” He crossed himself quickly.

As they turned away, Erickson commented in a low voice to Harper, “There’s your answer, Cal—if all us engineers had his faith, the job wouldn’t get us down.”

Harper was unconvinced. “I don’t know,” he mused. “I don’t think it’s faith; I think it’s lack of imagination—and knowledge.”

Notwithstanding King’s confidence, Lentz did not show up until the next day. The superintendent was subconsciously a little surprised at his visitor’s appearance. He had pictured a master psychologist as wearing flowing hair, an imperial, and having piercing black eyes. But this man was not overly tall, was heavy in his framework, and fat—almost gross. He might have been a butcher. Little, piggy, faded-blue eyes peered merrily out from beneath shaggy blond brows. There was no hair anywhere else on the enormous skull, and the ape-like jaw was smooth and pink. He was dressed in mussed pajamas of unbleached linen. A long cigaret holder jutted permanently from one corner of a wide mouth, widened still more by a smile which suggested unmalicious amusement at the worst that life, or men, could do. He had gusto.

King found him remarkably easy to talk to.

At Lentz’ suggestion the Superintendent went first into the history of atomic power plants, how the fission of the uranium atom by Dr. Otto Hahn in December, 1938, had opened up the way to atomic power. The door was opened just a crack; the process to be self perpetuating and commercially usable required an enormously greater knowledge than there was available in the entire civilized world at that time.

In 1938 the amount of separated uranium-235 in the world was not the mass of the head of a pin. Plutonium was unheard of. Atomic power was abstruse theory and a single, esoteric laboratory experiment. World War II, the Manhattan Project, and Hiroshima changed that; by late 1945 prophets were rushing into print with predictions of atomic power, cheap, almost free atomic power, for everyone in a year or two.

It did not work out that way. The Manhattan Project had been run with the single-minded purpose of making weapons; the engineering of atomic power was still in the future.

The far future, so it seemed. The uranium piles used to make the atom bomb were literally no good for commercial power; they were designed to throw away power as a useless byproduct, nor could the design of a pile, once in operation, be changed. A design—on paper—for an economic, commercial power pile could be made, but it had two serious hitches. The first was that such a pile would give off energy with such fury, if operated at a commercially satisfactory level, that there was no known way of accepting that energy and putting it to work.

This problem was solved first. A modification of the Douglas-Martin power screens, originally designed to turn the radiant energy of the sun (a natural atomic power pile itself) directly into electrical power, was used to receive the radiant fury of uranium fission and carry it away as electrical current.

The second hitch seemed to be no hitch at all. An “enriched” pile—one in which U-235 or plutonium had been added to natural uranium—was a quite satisfactory source of commercial power. We knew how to get U-235 and plutonium; that was the primary accomplishment of the Manhattan Project.

Or did we know how? Hanford produced plutonium; Oak Ridge extracted U-235, true—but the Hanford piles used more U-235 than they produced plutonium and Oak Ridge produced nothing but merely separated out the 7/10 of one percent of U-235 in natural uranium and “threw away” the 99%-plus of the energy which was still locked in the discarded U-238. Commercially ridiculous, economically fantastic!

But there was another way to breed plutonium, by means of a high-energy, unmoderated pile of natural uranium somewhat enriched. At a million electron volts or more U-238 will fission; at somewhat lower energies it turns to plutonium. Such a pile supplies its own “fire” and produces more “fuel” than it uses; it could breed fuel for many other power piles of the usual moderated sort.

But an unmoderated power pile is almost by definition an atom bomb.

The very name “pile” comes from the pile of graphite bricks and uranium slugs set up in a squash court at the University of Chicago at the very beginning of the Manhattan Project. Such a pile, moderated by graphite or heavy water
cannot
explode.