The Past Through Tomorrow (124 page)

“What would you like? Atomic power?”

“Be practical. You aren’t the Atomic Energy Commission.”

“I might stick a windmill on the roof.”

“That’s better, but still not good. Now get busy with that knot in the end of your spinal cord. I’ll start some coffee. This is going to be another all-night job.”

He grinned at her. “O.K., Carrie Nation. I’m coming.”

She smiled happily at him. “That’s the way to talk.”

He rose and went over to her, slipped an arm about her waist and kissed her. She relaxed to his embrace, but when their lips parted, she pushed him away. “Archie, you remind me of the Al G. Barnes Circus: ‘Every Act an Animal Act.’”

As the first light of dawn turned their faces pale and sickly, they were rigging two cold light-screens face to face. Archie adjusted them until they were an inch apart.

“There now—practically all the light from the first screen should strike the second. Turn the power on the first screen, Sex Appeal.”

She threw the switch. The first screen glowed with light, and shed its radiance on the second.

“Now to see if our beautiful theory is correct.” He fastened a voltmeter across the terminals of the second screen and pressed the little black button in the base of the voltmeter. The needle sprang over to two volts.

She glanced anxiously over his shoulder. “How about it, guy?”

“It works! There’s no doubt about it. These screens work both ways. Put juice in ’em; out comes light. Put light in ’em; out comes electricity.”

“What’s the power loss, Archie?”

“Just a moment.” He hooked in an ammeter, read it, and picked up his slide rule. “Let me see—loss is about thirty percent. Most of that would be the leakage of light around the edges of the screens.”

“The sun’s coming up, Archie. Let’s take screen number two up on the roof and try it out in the sunlight.”

Some minutes later they had the second screen and the electrical measuring instruments on the roof. Archie propped the screen up against a skylight so that it faced the rising sun, fastened the voltmeter across its terminals and took a reading. The needle sprang at once to two volts.

Mary Lou jumped up and down. “It works!”

“Had to work,” commented Archie. “If the light from another screen will make it pour out juice, then sunlight is bound to. Hook in the ammeter. Let’s see how much power we get.”

The ammeter showed 18.7 amperes.

Mary Lou worked out the result on the slide rule. “Eighteen-point-seven times two gives thirty-seven-point-four watts or about five hundredths of a horsepower. That doesn’t seem like very much. I had hoped for more.”

“That’s as it should be, kid. We are using only the visible light rays. As a light source the sun is about fifteen percent efficient; the other eighty-five percent are infrared and ultra-violet. Gimme that slip-stick.” She passed him the slide rule. “The sun pours out about a horsepower and a half, or one and one eighth kilowatts on every square yard of surface on the earth that is faced directly towards the sun. Atmospheric absorption cuts that down about a third, even at high noon over the Sahara desert. That would give one horsepower per square yard. With the sun just rising we might not get more than one-third horsepower per square yard here. At fifteen percent efficiency that would be about five hundredths of a horsepower. It checks—QED—What are you looking so glum about?”

“Well, I had hoped that we could get enough sunpower off the roof to run the factory; but if it takes twenty square yards to get one horsepower, it won’t be enough.”

“Cheer up, Baby Face. We doped out a screen that would vibrate only in the band of visible light; I guess we can dope out another that will be atonic—one that will vibrate to any wave length. Then it will soak up any radiant energy that hits it, and give it up again as electrical power. With this roof surface we can get maybe a thousand horsepower at high noon. Then we’ll have to set up banks of storage batteries so that we can store power for cloudy days and nightshifts.”

She blinked her big blue eyes at him. “Archie, does your head ever ache?”

Twenty minutes later he was back at his desk, deep in the preliminary calculations, while Mary Lou threw together a scratch breakfast. She interrupted his study to ask:

“Where’d’ja hide that bottle, Lug?”

He looked up and replied, “It’s immoral for little girls to drink in broad daylight.”

“Come out of the gutter, chum. I want to turn these hotcakes into
crêpes Suzette
, using corn liquor instead of brandy.”

“Never mind the creative cookery, Dr. Martin. I’ll take mine straight. I need my health to finish this job.”

She turned around and brandished the skillet at him. “To hear is to obey, my Lord. However, Archie, you are an over-educated Neanderthal, with no feeling for the higher things of life.”

“I won’t argue the point, Blonde Stuff—but take a gander at this. I’ve got the answer—a screen that vibrates all down the scale.”

“No foolin’, Archie?”

“No foolin’, kid. It was already implied in our earlier experiments, but we were so busy trying to build a screen that wouldn’t vibrate at random, we missed it. I ran into something else, too.”

“Tell mama!”

“We can build screens to radiate in the infra-red just as easily as cold light-screens. Get it? Heating units of any convenient size or shape, economical and with no high wattage or extreme temperatures to make ’em fire hazards or dangerous to children. As I see it, we can design these screens to, one”—he ticked the points off on his fingers—“take power from the sun at nearly one hundred percent efficiency; two, deliver it as cold light; or three, as heat; or four, as electrical power. We can bank ’em in series to get any required voltage; we can bank in parallel to get any required current, and the power is absolutely free, except for the installation costs.”

She stood and watched him in silence for several seconds before speaking. “All that from trying to make a cheaper light. Come eat your breakfast, Steinmetz. You men can’t do your work on mush.”

They ate in silence, each busy with new thoughts. Finally Douglas spoke. “Mary Lou, do you realize just how big a thing this is?”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“It’s enormous. Look, the power that can be tapped is incredible. The sun pours over two hundred and thirty trillion horsepower onto the earth all the time and we use almost none of it.”

“As much as that, Archie?”

“I didn’t believe my own figures when I worked it out, so I looked it up in Richardson’s
Astronomy
. Why, we could recover more than twenty thousand horsepower in any city block. Do you know what that means? Free power! Riches for everybody! It’s the greatest thing since the steam engine.” He stopped suddenly, noticing her glum face. “What’s the matter, kid? Am I wrong someplace?”

She fiddled with her fork before replying. “No, Archie—you’re not wrong. I’ve been thinking about it, too. Decentralized cities, labor-saving machinery for everybody, luxuries—it’s all possible, but I’ve a feeling that we’re staring right into a mess of trouble. Did you ever hear of Breakages Ltd.?”

“What is it, a salvage concern?”

“Not by a hell of a sight. You ought to read something besides the
Proceedings of the American Society of Physical Engineers
. George Bernard Shaw, for instance. It’s from the preface of
Back to Methuselah
, and is a sardonic way of describing the combined power of corporate industry to resist any change that might threaten their dividends. You threaten the whole industrial set-up, son, and you’re in danger right where you’re sitting. What do you think happened to atomic power?”

He pushed back his chair. “Oh, surely not. You’re just tired and jumpy. Industry welcomes invention. Why, all the big corporations have their research departments with some of the best minds in the country working in them. And they are in atomics up to their necks.”

“Sure—and any bright young inventor can get a job with them. And then he’s a kept man—the inventions belong to the corporation, and only those that fit into the pattern of the powers-that-be ever see light. The rest are shelved. Do you really think that they’d let a free lance like you upset investments of billions of dollars?”

He frowned, then relaxed and laughed. “Oh, forget it, kid, it’s not that serious.”

“That’s what you think. Did you ever hear of celanese voile? Probably not. It’s a synthetic dress material used in place of chiffon. But it wore better and was washable, and it only cost about forty cents a yard, while chiffon costs four times as much. You can’t buy it any more.

“And take razor blades. My brother bought one about five years ago that never had to be re-sharpened. He’s still using it, but if he ever loses it hell have to go back to the old kind. They took ’em off the market.

“Did you ever hear of guys who had found a better, cheaper fuel than gasoline? One showed up about four years ago and proved his claims—but he drowned a couple of weeks later in a swimming accident. I don’t say that he was murdered, but it’s damn funny that they never found his formula.

“And that reminds me—I once saw a clipping from the
Los Angeles Daily News
. A man bought a heavy standard-make car in San Diego, filled her up and drove her to Los Angeles. He only used two gallons. Then he drove to Agua Caliente and back to San Diego, and only used three gallons. About a week later the sales company found him and bribed him to make an exchange. By mistake they had let him have a car that wasn’t to be sold—one with a trick carburetor.

“Do you know any big heavy cars that get seventy miles to the gallon? You’re not likely to—not while ‘Breakages Ltd.’ rules the roost. But the story is absolutely kosher—you can look it up in the files.

“And of course, everybody knows that automobiles aren’t built to wear, they’re built to wear out, so you will buy a new one. They build ’em just as bad as the market will stand. Steamships take a worse beating than a car, and
they
last thirty years or more.”

Douglas laughed it off. “Cut out the gloom, Sweetie Pie. You’ve got a persecution complex. Let’s talk about something more cheerful—you and me, for instance. You make pretty good coffee. How about us taking out a license to live together?”

She ignored him.

“Well, why not. I’m young and healthy. You could do worse.”

“Archie, did I ever tell you about the native chief that got a yen for me down in South America?”

“I don’t think so. What about him?”

“He wanted me to marry him. He even offered to kill off his seventeen current wives and have them served up for the bridal feast.”

“What’s that got to do with my proposition?”

“I should have taken him up. A girl can’t afford to turn down a good offer these days.”

Archie walked up and down the laboratory, smoking furiously. Mary Lou perched on a workbench and watched him with troubled eyes. When he stopped to light another cigarette from the butt of the last, she bid for attention.

“Well, Master Mind, how does it look to you now?”

He finished lighting his cigarette, burned himself, cursed in a monotone, then replied, “Oh, you were right, Cassandra. We’re in more trouble than I ever knew existed. First when we build an electric runabout that gets its power from the sun while it’s parked at the curb, somebody pours kerosene over it and burns it up. I didn’t mind that so much—it was just a side issue. But when I refuse to sell out to them, they slap all those phoney law-suits on us, and tie us up like a kid with the colic.”

“They haven’t a legal leg to stand on.”

“I know that, but they’ve got unlimited money and we haven’t. They can run these suits out for months—maybe years—only we can’t last that long.”

“What’s our next move? Do you keep this appointment?”

“I don’t want to. They’ll try to buy me off again, and probably threaten me, in a refined way. I’d tell ’em to go to hell if it wasn’t for Dad. Somebody’s broken into his house twice now, and he’s too old to stand that sort of thing.”

“I suppose all this labor trouble in the plant worries him, too.”

“Of course it does. And since it dates from the time we started manufacturing the screens on a commercial scale, I’m sure it’s part of the frame-up. Dad never had any labor trouble before. He always ran a union shop and treated his men like members of his own family. I don’t blame him for being nervous. I’m getting tired of being followed everywhere I go, myself. It makes me jumpy.”

Mary Lou puffed out a cloud of smoke. “I’ve been tailed the past couple of weeks.”

“The hell you have! Mary Lou, that tears it. I’m going to settle this thing today.”

“Going to sell out?”

“No.” He walked over to his desk, opened a side drawer, took out a .38 automatic, and slipped it in his pocket.

Mary Lou jumped down from the bench and ran to him. She put her hands on his shoulders, and looked up at him, fear in her face. “Archie!”

He answered gently. “Yes, kid.”

“Archie, don’t do anything rash. If anything happened to you, you know damn well I couldn’t get along with a normal man.”

He patted her hair. “Those are the best words I’ve heard in weeks, kid.”

Douglas returned about one
P.M.
Mary Lou met him at the elevator. “Well?”

“Same old song-and-dance. Nothing done in spite of my brave promises.”

“Did they threaten you?”

“Not exactly. They asked me how much life insurance I carried.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing. I reached for my handkerchief and let them see that I was carrying a gun. I thought it might cause them to revise any immediate plans they might have in mind. After that the interview sort of fizzled out and I left. Mary’s little lamb followed me home, as usual.”

“Same plug-ugly that shadowed you yesterday?”

“Him, or his twin. He couldn’t be a twin, though, come to think about it. They’d have both died of fright at birth.”

“True enough. Have you had lunch?”

“Not yet. Let’s ease down to the shop lunch room and take on some groceries. We can do our worrying later.”

The lunch room was deserted. They talked very little. Mary Lou’s blue eyes stared vacantly over his head. At the second cup of coffee she reached out and touched him.