ATOMIC POWER

Don A. Stuart

The mass of the machine crouched in hulked, latent energy, the massive conductors leading off in gleaming ruddy columns, like the pillars of some mighty temple to an unknown, evil god, pillars fluted, and capped at base and capital with great socket-clamps. Around it huge tubes glowed with a dull bluish light, so that the faces of the half-dozen students looked distorted and ghastly.
A boredly smiling engineer watched them, and the patient professor instructing them, rather bored, not overhopeful himself that he could make these students understand the wonder and the magnitude of the process going on within the great machine.
"The power," he said, really trying intensely to make them understand the grandeur of the thing, "comes, of course, from the release of the energy of atoms. It is frequently referred to as the energy of the atom, but that is an inane viewpoint to take, for in each single second, over fifty-five duodecillion atoms are destroyed. Not truly destroyed; that has not yet been done; but broken up, and the^nergy of the parts absorbed, and carried away by the conductors. The fuel is water—that simplest and cheapest of all substances—hydrogen and oxygen.
"Each atom," he went on, "lasts for only one million-billionth of a second before its energy is released and the parts are discharged. There is a further energy level left in these ultraminute parts that, we believe, is even greater than the energy released in breaking the parts free of each other."
So he explained the thing, and the students looked at the great machine and realized that from the streaming energy released by it came the power which cooked their food and kept them warm, for it was winter just then.
They had seen the plant and the roaring machines which had other duties, such as ventilating the great maze of subsurface tunnels, and were about to leave, when there was a sudden momentary halt in the steady throb of the great pumps. The voices of engineers rang out, cursing and excited for a few seconds. Then all went on as before for a few minutes. A new sound rose in pitch as they listened, more interested. The professor hurried them swiftly into the main power room, speaking excitedly as he did:
"You are fortunate—most fortunate. In the last eleven years, only eight times has such a thing happened. They must start the engines again!"
They hastened into the power room.
"No one knows," the instructor explained swiftly, "why these breaks occur, but once in every year or so something goes wrong, and the generators strike a bit of fuel which simply doesn't break down. No one understands why. Just that the generators stop abruptly and cannot be restarted till they are cleared of the charge contained. Perhaps some single drop of water is the cause of the trouble, a drop in no way different, save that it simply will not break.
"You are most fortunate—"
His voice was drowned by the sudden explosion of titanic discharges rushing into the generator. For scarcely a thousandth of a second it continued, before the process, restarted, backed up and stopped the discharge into it. The generator functioned perfectly.
"Most fortunate," he went on as the sound died. "The drop which caused the trouble has been ejected, the generator cleared, and now it will function for another period of a year or more unhindered, in all probability."
"What happened to the drop of water which would not break?" asked a student. "Was it saved for investigation?"
"No," replied the instructor, shrugging his shoulders. "That was done once or twice. Since then, though we of science would like it, that we might work with these strange drops, it is not done because it is so costly to dismantle and reassemble the generator. It was simply ejected. The drops which have been investigated do become susceptible after a year or two and disappear, but before that time, even high-intensity generators will not touch them, beyond reducing their outmost fringes somewhat."
"Ban" Torrence was a physicist to the core, and, like any good physicist, he was terribly concerned when perfectly sound laws of science began to have exceptions. Just now he was most worried in appearance. "Tad" Albrite, engineer, didn't seem so worried, but he was interested.
"But," objected Tad, "I don't see any vast importance in the defection of a voltmeter. You say the voltage of the cell has increased one one hundredth of a volt in a week, according to that meter. All right, what of it?"
"You yap, the thing is it hasn't increased. I measured it against a potentiometer hook-up. Now a potentiometer is a regular arm-and-pan balance for Metrical voltages, as you ought to know, even if you are a civil engineer. You take a standard "cell, an outside current, and standardize the thing, then substitute your unknown voltage. The system will measure a ten thousandth of a volt if you do it correctly. The point is that a potentiometer uses nothing but electrical balances. It balances a fixed current through a resistance against an electrical potential."
"The galvanometer is a magnetic device using a string, which is what you object to," said Tad.
"And when the potentiometer is balanced, the galvanometer isn't working at all, and therefore doesn't count in the circuit.
"Now by the potentiometer, the voltage of that cell last week was 1.2581. By the potentiometer this week—to-day—it is 1.2580. It has, as is quite normal, fallen one ten-thousandth of a volt. It's been doing that for a period of two months—eight weeks. That's a grand-total drop of .0008 volts. But the voltmeter in the meantime has shown a rise of .0003 volts.
"Now that voltmeter checks with every other one in the place; it's a five-hundred-and-forty-two-dollar standard instrument, and it's so big and massive and sensitive, I move it around on little wheels on a cart, as you see. Don't you see what I'm getting at?"
"The Leeds and Northrup Co. gypped you apparently," decided Tad judiciously.
"They didn't. I've made other tests. In the first place, that company doesn't. In the second place, it is the tiny spring that the voltage-torque is measured against that has weakened, and every single spring I can find has weakened in like amount."
"How could you determine it?"
"Now, Tad, here's the important part of it all," replied Ban very softly. "I naturally tried weighing the standard gram weights, and the springs checked—they checked absolutely right. Until I used not a gram weight but a gram moss."
Tad stared at him blankly. "What the heck's the difference?"
"Weight is the product of mass times the acceleration of gravity. Mass—is just plain mass. Mass can be measured by inertia, and that doesn't depend on gravity. So I set up a very simple little thing, so simple it couldn't go wrong—an inverted pendulum—a little lump of metal on the end of a steel spring, and I measured its period, not with an ordinary clock, but with an electric timer that didn't have a
spring or pendulum in it, and—in the two months the period of that pendulum has increased, because the spring has weakened."
"Why not—they do, you know."
"Because when I measured the strength of that spring against gravity, you see," Ban said very, very softly, "it was just—as—strong—as—ever."
Tad looked at him silently for some seconds. "What in the name of blazes does that indicate?" he asked at last, explosively.
"Gravity has weakened to exactly the same extent the spring has. Every spring I have has weakened. And gravity has weakened."
"Gravity weakened!" gasped Albrite. "You're cockeyed—it's impossible. Why—why the whole solar system would be thrown out of gear—the astronomers would have spotted it."
"Jack Ribly will be here at two forty," replied Torrence quietly. "You know they wouldn't proclaim news like that right off, particularly because the weakening is very slight, and they do have observational errors."
"But, good Heavens, man, it—it couldn't happen."
Ban's face was suddenly drawn and tense. "Do you think for a moment, Tad, that I was quick to accept that? I've checked and counterchecked, and**echecked. And I've found out something. That's why I called you—and Jack Ribly. You're a civil engineer, and, if I'm right, you'll see the things happening soon. And Ribly's an astronomer, and he'll see them.
"You see, whatever it is that's affecting gravity, must be affecting the strength of springs in the same degree. So I tried the compressibility of liquids. Water will compress—damn little, of course, but it will—and it's changed. It compresses more. So I tried gas. That's unchanged. Pressure of gas depends solely on mass, kinetic energy, and not on intermolecular bonds. There aren't any in gas. The molecules are perfectly free to move about. In solids they're bound so tightly they can't even slide. In water they slide, but can't separate. But they have—a little.
"And the bonds are weakening. That's why springs—solids, of course—haven't the old strength. Molecular bonds are infinitesimally weaker. But the weakening is progressive. But electric and magnetic fields are untouched. So voltmeters read high. Interatomic and intra-atomic forces in general are unchanged, but everything bigger than a single molecule is different.
"I've checked it a thousand ways, Tad. I even repeated Millikan's old measurement of the mass of an electron—which measured the mass by gravitative effect on the oil droplets—and the answer was different. Magnets lift more.
"Great Heaven, Tad, the—the universe will fly to pieces!"
"What will happen?" asked Tad, awestruck now.
"Accidents—horrible accidents here on Earth first. That is, so far as we will first detect. The Sun will be retreating. The Moon flying off, too, you see, because centrifugal force is based only on mass and inertia, and it isn't weakened, but we won't notice that at first. But automobiles—they'll weigh less and less, so they won't fall apart. Men won't notice it, because they'll be getting weaker, too.
"But the inertia of the automobile will remain the same. So when they put on the brakes, the weakened material will crack. And the engines will fly to pieces as the undiminished power of the explosions blows them open. Bridges—lighter, but weaker. The wind will be strong, though. Things blowing up in the air. The air getting thinner, as it escapes against the diminishing gravity—"
"Great Heaven!" said Tad softly. Because he believed now.
The bell rang, and Ban went downstairs and opened the door. Jack Ribly was with him when he came back. He looked curiously at their solemn faces, Ban's
dark, seamed face, showing his thirty-five years, but in that ageless way that made him seem eternally thirty-five. Tad Albrite looking younger than his thirty-two.
"What's up, Ban?" asked Ribly.
Swiftly Ban explained the proposition. Ribly's face worked with surprise and belief from the first second.
"Have you fellows spotted it?" Torrence asked at last.
"Yes, 'fraid of it. Didn't announce it."
"So's everybody else. Both spotted it and been afraid. What did you notice it in?"
"Our Moon first, of course. Then Mercury and Phobos and Deimos. And— Heaven help us—I didn't understand at the time, but the companion of Sirius is bluer to-night than it was a year ago!"
"I thought you said it had no intra-atomic effects; spectra are intra-atomic effects," said Albrite.
"Not in this case. Sirius' companion is so dense, the spectrum is pulled back toward the red by the intense gravitational field. The gravitational fields are weakening—even so far away as Sirius."
"Why? Why?" demanded Albrite.
The world asked, too, when it learned; when markets found pound packages of "sugar and butter weighing fifteen ounces. But that was several months later. Before then, the Moon was changed. Earth began to see a smaller Moon, and a different Moon, for as the Moon circled out, the effects were cumulative, and she turned at such a rate that the face which had eternally faced Earth began to turn away, and the unseen face became visible.
And a gold merchant made a small fortune by buying gold in Brazil, using a very accurate type of pneumatic balance, and selling it in the same way in Alaska, where the centrifugal force of the Earth's spin did not cut its weight.
The three men worked together on the problem, and all over Earth other men were seeking some answer, some explanation, and some help. The diminution of weight, starting so slowly, mounted rapidly, cumulative in rate itself.
Ban Torrence did most of the work, using the figures that Ribly brought him, and the apparatus that Albrite designed. 1947 drew to a close, and 1948 began. It was a bitterly cold winter, colder than had been known before for many, many years, despite predictions that it would be a warm one.
It was February when the astronomers definitely announced that, at present rates, the winter would be everlasting, growing neither colder nor warmer, for as the Earth turned its northern hemisphere more toward the Sun, it moved away. But in the southern hemisphere, there would be rapidly increasing cold, as the two effects added, instead of subtracting.
By the last of May and early June, however, the temperature would start falling again. The report ended with that statement. "By late May or early June the temperature will again begin to fall." That was the end, because there was no other prediction. After June the temperature would fall. In February, the warmest day in New York City registered a temperature of only 42°. The coldest was —19.2°.
And still the world asked why.
The sun rose at seven thirty on March 21st. It rose much later on April 21st, for it was falling behind. Earth was no longer circling it. Earth was spiraling about it.
In late March, the three scientists had moved to Northern Mexico and established a laboratory there. It was easier to work, and much work must be done out of doors.
"Have we got anywhere at all?" Albrite demanded when they had settled again and begun a conference on advances.
"Hum-yes," decided Torrence. He glanced quizzically at Ribly. "You wouldn't believe my statement, so I won't make it. But I'll tell you something. This is about the only warm place on Earth—down in the tropics. We're in the northern hemisphere. Tropic of Cancer to the south of us."
"I still," said Albrite softly, "don't see why you didn't make a job of it and move down to the equator while you were at it."
"It's March right now, and the Sun is actually about over the equator, but it's moving north as usual, so that it'll be over the Tropic of Cancer in June—and that'll be the warmest spot on a very, very, chilly Earth. But what's the difference between the polar and equatorial diameter of the Earth?"
"I don't know—there is a difference, at that. Couple of miles, why?"
"Because the diameter of the Earth through the forty-five-degrees point is the same as the mean diameter. The poles are flattened. The equator is bulged. When gravity weakens some more, centrifugal force won't—and the thing is going to be even worse. Also—earthquakes. They'll be starting soon."
"Hmmm—that's true."
"Well, we're here. What'll we do?"
"Work—and work fast," replied Torrence. "Ever stop to think, Tad, that we'll have to use some kind of electrical generating equipment in all probability, and that we haven't time to build new, because this weakening is going on so fast that before we could spend the year so necessary normally, even if we didn't freeze first, to design and build it, it couldn't be built, because all metal would be powder? We have to use standard stuff—and the standard won't be able to stand its own centrifugal force beyond July 30th. So, friend, if we don't find the answer and start in by July to stop it—there—just isn't any use."
"Is there any?" asked Albrite hopelessly. "Trying to do something with the whole solar system!"
"Not," replied Torrence, "with the whole solar system, if my idea is right. And to do anything at all, anyway, we'll have a further little problem to meet, you see. I don't know just yet."
"Then—to work," Ribly sighed. "What must I do? Go on collecting the same old data?"
"With particular emphasis on the new nebular velocities. What's Andromeda now?"
"Minus 12," replied Ribly. "My record so far is minus 22,500. Minus means retreat. The distant constellations are showing some change, too."
.
It was June 10th. New York City was semideserted. Snow ten feet deep, where it wasn't drifted, blocked all the streets. Where it was drifted, which was almost everywhere, it ran forty and fifty feet deep. The few people who still lived in New York, less than five hundred thousand, moved about little; only when a boat was due to sail.
Day and night the crunch-crack-shuff of the icebreakers in the harbor was audible. Because the temperature had begun to drop in late May. It was —32.4 at noon, June 10th. Where the icebreakers opened the water, it steamed.
The oceans were giving up their age-old hoard of heat. Had ice only been heavier, instead of lighter, than water, the temperature would not have fallen so low, for even in the cold of space where Earth was headed now, the stored heat of the oceans would have warmed her for decades.
But ice was forming. The Atlantic was in port now, taking aboard passengers at
five hundred dollars a head for third class, five thousand for a private room. She was a vast liner, another attempt at the "world's greatest."
And New York heard a rumor. The Atlantic was making her last trip—the last trip any ship would make. They were afraid of the waves. They were afraid of the winds. They were most afraid of the ice.
On June 9th there was a blizzard—an antarctic blizzard. The wind howled, and the howl mounted to a shriek. No snow fell, but the powdery stuff rose, thousands of tons of it, swept up by a wind of one-hundred-mile-an'hour velocity, with undiminished force and mass, since its inertia remained. The snow had lost weight. New York was blinded.
At seven a.m. the George Washington Bridge shrieked a new song. The fragments landed nearly a quarter of a mile down the river. At seven thirty, the older bridges failed, the Brooklyn going first. By eight fifteen there were no man-made bridges. But the wind, the snow, had sucked the heat out of the rivers, and the ice had solidified all across them, so there was a single, great ice bridge.
At ten twenty, the old Woolworth Building crashed, and on its heels came the Empire State tower. The fragments of the Empire State's tower fell over most of southeastern Manhattan.
The blizzard had died by the morning of the tenth, but there were no great towers remaining on the sky line of New York. The weakening of materials, and the titanic force of the wind, had seen to that.
And the rumor that the Atlantic would be the last ship to leave New York spread.
The Atlantic was booked by dawn of the 10th, and there were no more ships in New York harbor leaving that day, sailings scheduled the next day would not go. A crowd gathered about the sheltered dock of the Atlantic on the southern side of Manhattan. A wind still raged at forty-five miles an hour from the north.
Slowly the crowd grew, and the low muttering increased. Police and guards kept the lines in check till ten. The Atlantic was to sail at noon. At ten ten, the crowd swarmed up her gangways. Guards were killed, crushed. Men, women, and children started up the gangplanks.
Men, and some women, reached the decks and burst into the cabins. Men found and fought their way to the neighborhood of the boiler and engine rooms. At ten twenty, it was estimated there were two thousand people aboard, at ten forty, seven thousand. At eleven o'clock, at least fifteen thousand people, over a thousand tons of humanity, had got aboard.
It was like no other panic crowding. Many of those fifteen thousand were dead already, many more dying. A woman's body trampled underfoot. A girl held erect by the crowd's pressing, blood slowly oozing from her shoulder, her arm torn completely off, held perhaps in the clenched fingers of her other hand like some monstrous club, dead. A man's dismembered corpse.
For the power of human bodies is supplied by chemical combinations. These were the visible damages, there were shrieks, groans of horrible agony, for the chemical power of muscles remained undiminished, while their tensile strength declined. Literally, people tore themselves apart by the violence of their struggles.
The Atlantic gained no more passengers after eleven.
The officers would not sail. They might have sailed for the moment to end the deaths at the wharf, but they could not, for the ship, already filled to capacity, was overloaded. Further, she swayed slowly to the struggles of her passengers.
Then a hold, hitherto undiscovered, was broken open. Instantly a torrent of people poured in, and another five thousand came aboard the ship. A slow, grinding pressure began, and those who, finding themselves in the heated hallways, had
stopped, satisfied, and blocked the entrance of more thereby, were gradually driven farther.
The captain ordered the ship to sail. The lines were cast off again, and the ship's great screws turned slowly. No human strength could hold her in now, and she broke free of the crowd at the wharf. But in the harbor, free of the crowd, she stopped again at once. The captain ordered that the crowd be forced off onto the ice shelf that they might walk home. Armed men descended toward them from the bridge.
Half a hundred shots rang out from the crowd. Three guns burst, but the captain and his officers died. The engineer died soon, and his staff was forced to obey the orders from the amateur pilot above.
The Atlantic weighed eighty-five thousand tons normally. Her mass remained, and she had more than her normal load aboard her now. The channels had been broken by the icebreakers, but it was wider than the actual channel, of course. And the amateur pilot had no faintest conception of the handling of an eighty-five-thousand-ton ship.
Things were not normal then. There was a forty-five-mile wind, and the ship was loaded abnormally; she was top-heavy. And she struck a great rock. Normally she would have come to instant rest, with a small ten-foot hole in her hull. The amateur pilot had the engines at half speed, and, in desperation, he had thrown them to full speed ahead, as he saw the danger, and tried to cut the wheel as though she were a motor boat.
The Atlantic's metal, weakened by the strange force, ripped open for two hundred and ninety-four feet. She sank in fourteen and a half seconds, and rolled on her side, off the ledge of rock, and into the deep water the amateur had almost succeeded in reaching.
Perhaps two thousand might have been saved from the part still unsubmerged. Ships were starting out after them. But the hull sloped, and some slid, for under that howling wind, ice froze in seconds. They fought, and a total of one hundred and seventy-four were saved.
And rumor had been right. The Atlantic was the last ship to sail from New York, for her wreck blocked the channel, and the wind howled down from the north all that day and all the next so that no well-equipped salvage ship could cut her out of the way, and for that matter it howled all the rest of the days, but that was not important. The ice in the harbor was fourteen feet thick on the morning of the 12th.
London was blocked on the 21st, Baltimore on the 22nd. And the seas of all the world steamed, and the winds, blowing over them, were warmed to some slight extent, so that New York did not have temperatures below -72 until July 3rd, when a northwest gale swept, not from the Atlantic, but all across frozen Canada, and the water in the mains fifty feet below the street froze.
Fire started that day, and ravaged unchecked, till the solid walls of stone and ice it encountered succeeded in damping it, and the wind blew it out again, as it had fanned it before.
Men had learned to be careful by that time, and no one worked even slightly harder than normal. Tens of thousands had died horribly as the automatic muscles of their hearts strained to pump the blood harder—and tore themselves to pieces.
"If," said Tad Albrite desperately, "you don't do something fairly quickly, there won't be any sense in trying. You can't get equipment to do anything in another two weeks."
Ban Torrence looked up bitterly. His eyes were tired and dead. "Will you go
away? It's atomic power. I'm after it. If I get it, I can do something, and I won't need so much equipment. If I don't, I won't need any, anyway."
"Atomic power!" gasped Albrite. His voice trailed off as he said it, trailed off into hopelessness. "They've tried for decades."
Torrence motioned toward a massive piece of apparatus on one side of the laboratory. "Almost!" He sighed. "So shut up and let me work."
Albrite rose to look at the thing. Two feet long, a semicylinder. Ruddy copper bars led from it to huge electrolytic condenser banks and a bank of powerful accumulators. And to a further piece of apparatus. Silently he looked at it, then went to the closet, put on his heavy robes, and stepped out into the cold toward the observatory and Jack Ribly.
It was several hours later when he returned. Ban Torrence was fussing with his apparatus again. He looked up at their entrance.
"Hello! I wish you'd look at these blasted circuits again, Ribly, and you, too, Tad. I swear it ought to work. It almost did for a fraction of a second."
"Have you tried it again?" asked Ribly.
"No. 'Fraid it might blow up this time instead of stopping."
"Who cares? Try it," snapped Ribly.
"What ought it to do?" asked Albrite.
"Release atomic energy—not all of it, just smash the atom to parts and collect the energy of the parts. Enough, though, for what we want."
"Try it. We can't lose much," Albrite said. "What are you going to do with the power if it works? How will it help?"
"It will help. I think—I think that Earth and the solar system—just an atom in a greater universe. But they're releasing atomic energy in that greater universe— and we're the atom! If my theory's right, then I can release atomic energy myself and stop their release of our energy by just slightly upsetting their field, so that it passes by, harmless. Not a terrific amount of energy needed. The field would spread out from this apparatus here—if it would work—at the speed of light.
"In a second, things would be normal on Earth. In four, the Moon would start coming back. In a few minutes, the Sun's old gravity would be returned, the system balanced. Then the thing would spread till all the universe was reestablished.
"I really slightly invert their energy, so that it destroys itself. It would be a spreading sphere of neutralization, self-propagating, feeding on the thing it destroyed. I would have to add no more energy to clear all the universe we know of that force.
"You know—the force is ages old. To that superuniverse, the whole process we've been undergoing for the last months is perhaps a million billionth of a second. The thing has been going on for ages. That is why we have seen distant nebulae rush away—to eternal destruction. The evaporation of their atomic fuel as we felt the first fringes of their power. Now we are in the heart of their release. If I can do this, I suppose they will never know what has happened.
"But I tried the thing, and the blasted thing worked for perhaps a hundredth of a second, just long enough to kick my instruments and show it worked, but not long enough to start that field.
"Shall I try again?"
"I say yes," replied Ribly.
Mutely, Tad Albrite nodded.
Ban Torrence walked over to his controls. Slowly, thoughtfully, he set up the switches. For perhaps thirty seconds of silence he waited with the last switch in his hand.
"If this works we shall be most fortunate—"
His voice was drowned by the sudden titanic discharges rushing into the generator. For scarcely a thousandth of a second it continued before the process, restarted, backed up, and stopped the discharge into it. The generator functioned perfectly.
For an infinitesimal fragment of a second, a strange nausea swept them as the wave of the counterfield drove out, swift as light, into all the universe. Ban Torrence riveted his eyes on the wall clock, the clock that had swung its pendulum with a strange lethargy, as though not interested in keeping up with time. It was ticking suddenly, with a regular, swift stroke.
"Thank Heaven—it works!" said Torrence softly. For a moment his eyes looked toward and through the mass of the machine, crouched in hulked, latent power, the massive conductors leading off in gleaming, ruddy columns. "I wonder," he went on very softly, "if, in some vaster world, they even knew—as this particular atom of fuel simply refused to disintegrate."
Then abruptly the scientist in him rebelled. "But why in blazes didn't it work before? I didn't change the thing in the slightest. The same fuel—water—the same generator. Just took it apart and put it back together again exactly as before. I can't see why."
"Was the water pure?" asked Albrite. "Maybe it wasn't—and when you took it apart the drop which caused the trouble was ejected, the generator cleared,. and now it will function for another period, until another drop which can't be disintegrated hits it."
"Maybe so; somehow I doubt it. That particular drop simply wouldn't break down. I can't understand why. Just that the generator must have stopped abruptly and could not be restarted till cleared of the charge contained.
"Anyway, it's working perfectly now."
Torrence looked at it, and though he might have told those scientists of a greater world why their machines failed occasionally, since he knew much that they did not, he did not understand all that went on within an atomic generator.
Only he knew that he had restored Earth; that even now she, and her satellite, must be circling toward each other, and toward the Sun; that he had found the secret of vast power that would warm the frozen peoples and power their industry as Earth thawed out once more.