‘The damn thing started going at 82.8, boss. It almost caught me.’
‘It did, did it?’ growled Prosser. ‘Within limits of error, isn’t it? How’s the generator? Hey, Stoddard!’
The technician addressed replied from his station at the generator, ‘Tube 5 died. It’ll take two days to replace.’
Prosser turned in satisfaction and said, ‘It worked. Went exactly as presumed. Problem solved, gentlemen. Trouble over. Let’s get back to my office. I want to eat. And then I want to sleep.’
He did not refer to the subject again until once more behind the desk in his office, and then he spoke between huge bites of a liver-and-onion sandwich.
He addressed Birnam, ‘Remember the work on space strain last June. It flopped, but we kept at it. Finch got a lead last week and I developed it. Everything fell into place. Slick as goose grease. Never saw anything like it.’
‘Go ahead,’ said Birnam, calmly. He knew Prosser sufficiently well to avoid showing impatience.
‘You saw what happened. When a field tops 83.42 millimeters, it becomes unstable. Space won’t stand the strain. It buckles and the field blows. Boom!’
Birnam’s mouth dropped open and the arms of Orloff’s chair creaked under sudden pressure. Silence for a while, and then Birnam said unsteadily, ‘You mean force fields stronger than that are impossible?’
‘They’re possible. You can create them. But the denser they are, the more unstable they are. If I had turned on the two-hundred-and-fifty-millimeter field, it would have lasted one tenth of a second. Then, blooie! Would have blown up the Station! And myself! Technician would have done it. Scientist is warned by theory. Works carefully, the way I did. No harm done.’
Orloff tucked his monocle into his vest pocket and said tremulously, ‘But if a force field is the same thing as interatomic forces, why is it that steel has such a strong interatomic binding force without bucking space? There’s a flaw there.’
Prosser eyed him in annoyance. ‘No flaw. Critical strength depends on number of generators. In steel, each atom is a force-field generator. That means about three hundred billion trillion generators for every ounce of matter. If we could use that many – As it is, one hundred generators would be the practical limit. That only raises the critical point to ninety-seven or thereabout.’
He got to his feet and continued with sudden fervor, ‘No. Problem’s over, I tell you. Absolutely impossible to create a force field capable of holding Earth’s atmosphere for more than a hundredth of a second. Jovian atmosphere entirely out of question. Cold figures say that; backed by experiment. Space won’t stand it!
‘Let the Jovians do their damnedest. They can’t get out! That’s final! That’s final! That’s final!’
Orloff said, ‘Mr Secretary, can I send a spacegram anywhere in the Station? I want to tell Earth that I’m returning by the next ship and that the Jovian problem is liquidated – entirely and for good.’
Birnam said nothing, but the relief of his face as he shook hands with the colonial commissioner, transfigured the gaunt homeliness of it unbelievably.
And Dr Prosser repeated, with a birdlike jerk of his head, ‘That’s final!’
Hal Tuttle looked up as Captain Everett of the spaceship Transparent, newest ship of the Comet Space Lines, entered his private observation room in the nose of the ship.
The captain said, ‘A spacegram has just reached me from the home offices at Tucson. We’re to pick up Colonial Commissioner Orloff at Jovopolis, Ganymede, and take him back to Earth.’
‘Good. We haven’t sighted any ships?’
‘No, no! We’re way off the regular space lanes. The first the System will know of us will be the landing of the Transparent on Ganymede. It will be the greatest thing in space travel since the first trip to the Moon.’ His voice softened suddenly, ‘What’s wrong, Hal? This is your triumph, after all.’
Hal Tuttle looked up and out into the blackness of space. ‘I suppose it is. Ten years of work, Sam. I lost an arm and an eye in that first explosion, but I don’t regret them. It’s the reaction that’s got me. The problem is solved; my lifework is finished.’
‘So is every steel-hulled ship in the System.’
Tuttle smiled. ‘Yes. It’s hard to realize, isn’t it?’ He gestured outward. ‘You see the stars? Part of the time, there’s nothing between them and us. It gives me a queazy feeling.’ His voice brooded, ‘Nine years I worked for nothing. I wasn’t a theoretician, and never really knew where I was headed – just tried everything. I tried a little too hard and space wouldn’t stand it. I paid an arm and an eye and started fresh.’
Captain Everett balled his fist and pounded the hull – the hull through which the stars shone unobstructed. There was the muffled thud of flesh striking an unyielding surface – but no response whatever from the invisible wall.
Tuttle nodded, ‘It’s solid enough, now – though it flicks on and off ‘eight hundred thousand times a second. I got the idea from the stroboscopic lamp. You know them – they flash on and off so rapidly that it gives all the impression of steady illumination.
‘And so it is with the hull. It’s not on long enough to buckle space. It’s not off long enough to allow appreciable leakage of the atmosphere. And the net effect is a strength better than steel.’
He paused and added slowly, ‘And there’s no telling how far we can go. Speed up the intermission effect. Have the field flick off and on millions of times per second-billions of times. You can get fields strong enough to hold an atomic explosion. My lifework!’
Captain Everett pounded the other’s shoulder. ‘Snap out of it, man. Think of the landing on Ganymede. The devil! It will be great publicity.
Think of Orloff’s face, for instance, when he finds he is to be the first passenger in history ever to travel in a spaceship with a force-field hull. How do you suppose he’ll feel?’
Hal Tuttle shrugged. ‘I imagine he’ll be rather pleased.’
The Hazing
The Campus of Arcturus University, on Arcturus’ second planet, Eron, is a dull place during mid-year vacations and, moreover, a hot one, so that Myron Tubal, sophomore, found life boring and uncomfortable. For the fifth time that day, he looked in at the Undergraduate Lounge in a desperate attempt at locating an acquaintance, and was at last gratified to behold Bill Sefan, a green-skinned youngster from Vega’s fifth planet.
Sefan, like Tubal, had fl nked Biosociology and was staying through vacation to study for a make-up exam. Things like that weave strong ., bonds between sophomore and sophomore.
Tubal grunted a greeting, dropped his huge hairless body – he was a native of the Arcturian System itself – into the largest chair and said:
‘Have you seen the new freshmen yet?’
‘Already! It’s six weeks before the fall semester starts!’
Tubal yawned. ‘These are a special breed of frosh. They’re the very first batch from the Solarian System – ten of them.’
‘Solarian System? You mean that new system that joined the Galactic Federation three – four years ago?’
‘That’s the one. Their world capital is called Earth, I think.’
