"Too bad," said Gerrold. "You know, though, we've already had a good deal of luck with our medical program. Maybe in another few years we'll put the doctors out of business."
"Huh?" Holloway stopped dead.
"Sure. Look, if a Wobbly—that's our pet name for the Wojcek machine—if it's sensitive enough to shift individual nucleons around and get atomic energy out of plain old water, why can't it kill bacteria selectively? Or remove cancers, or shunt calcium right out of your hardening arteries? We're having trouble—biological systems are so much more complicated than even the atomic nucleus—and we're handicapped by having only one or two biologists who can operate the gizmo. But it looks promising."
They emerged in the parking lot. Gerrold stared coldly at the sardine-packed vehicles. "Take us an hour just to get out of town," he snorted, "and it's getting to be as much as your life is worth to venture on a highway. All that petroleum, metal, irreplaceable natural resources, used up—I look forward to seeing the automobile join the buggy in the museums."
Holloway had sometimes cherished similar thoughts, but it shocked him to hear them spoken in the open air. Maybe Wojcek and his gang really were subversive.
Gerrold had cursed his way through the city and was on US 69, bound north between rolling green fields, before he resumed conversation. "Why, did you enroll, Dan?" he asked.
"I was interested," said Holloway.
"Let's see. You were with—"
Holloway named the corporation truthfully enough. His resignation was on file there too, just in case anyone got nosy. "Electronics engineer," he added. "This new field of yours seemed right in my line."
"Wasn't your outfit working on it too?"
* * * *
Holloway hesitated, remembered that the Wobbly circuits were no secret and that Gerrold was probably not naive, and nodded. "Of course. But we couldn't get anywhere."
"It takes training. We can't just write an operating manual; we have to develop the skills, grind them right into your brain." Gerrold stared ahead of him and added casually: "Ever wondered why we don't take students affiliated with any organization? We did accept those men from the Bureau of Standards—three graduated out of twenty—but that was only to prove we weren't faking and to get the necessary licenses. Otherwise we insist on our pupils being free of all ties."
"Why? Well … you don't want competition, I suppose."
"Nonsense! We're not looking for an anti-trust suit. After you graduate, you're free to go where you want. There are already small Wobbly companies springing up all over the world. In time, we hope to see other schools established, independent ones, though an instructor in the technique needs more training than a simple operator. No, Dan, there are two good reasons."
Holloway waited while Gerrold maneuvered profanely past a truck. "Yes?"
"Imprimis: I know Steve Wojcek has been called a radical, but actually he's one of the last believers in private enterprise—which a big corporation, subsidized, government-contracted, protected by tariffs and fair trade laws and sheer bigness from all genuine competition, up to its nose in politics, a royal share of its stock owned by labor unions … ain't. Consider this damn hunk of machinery I'm driving. You know as well as I do it could be made for half the price and twice as efficient—front-wheel drive, turbine engine, unitized aluminum body, all the knowledge we have right now and aren't using. Not that the manufacturers are villains; it's only that they've gotten too fat between the ears to do anything but imitate each other. The old man would hate to see that happen to the Wobbly. It's the biggest technological breakthrough since atomic energy, maybe since fire and the wheel, and he doesn't want its development slowed down just to suit people who have a vested interest in wasting our natural resources. Which people include business, labor, and government."
Holloway took out a cigarette and puffed hard. He had never taken much interest in politics; Gerrold sounded radical. "But how about the, uh, transition?" he asked. "You could throw ten million men out of work."
"Why should they work when, strictly speaking, it's waste motion? Let's cut down to a four-hour day for the same wages as now. It'll be possible once this thing is properly developed, and then everybody can have a job plus more time to be human. But the question is not political or economic, Dan, or it shouldn't be. It's a matter of the survival of civilization. We can't go on the way we are, more people and fewer resources every day. If the Wobbly can save fuel, metal, soil, water, then it's got to be introduced as fast as humanly possible."
Holloway smoked in silence for a while. Then: "What's your second reason?"
"Well, that's a more immediately practical one. Not everybody can learn to operate these dofunnies. We flunk out about 25 percent as it is; the blasted things just won't perform for them. We've found that most of the failures are people with a basic feeling of insecurity. Down underneath, they're afraid of the Wobbly, afraid of the revolution it can bring about. And since it's bound to change the outfit they're tied in with— You see? It's the insecure person who makes a fetish of conformity and puts himself in a nice safe job where someone else can do his worrying for him. You can't embark on a wholly new adventure without self-confidence." Gerrold grinned. "As far as we're concerned, any of our graduates can go work for the big corporations, but so far none of them have done so. They're that kind of people."
Holloway smiled rather harshly. "That may let me out," he said.
"It may," admitted Gerrold. "As a highly trained man, you're a poor risk for us. For some reason, professional scientists and technicians seldom learn the trick of operating a Wobbly. Our best bet is the intelligent but untrained person. But we'll never understand the effect, never develop all its potentialities, without genuine scientists, so we keep trying. Every so often we succeed. I hope you'll be one of our successes."
* * * *
Holloway had read the laboriously compiled dossier on Steven Wojcek, and gone back to the newspaper accounts of his failures. That was a decade ago, just after the Short War and the Red Army revolution which put men who understood war and therefore desired peace into the Kremlin. It had been too close a brush with annihilation; the world went on an emotional jag, and any sensational news unrelated to an episode best forgotten received a big play.
Wojcek had been only semi-respectable at the time. It was felt that a professor of psychology should stick to putting rats through mazes and not dabble in mathematical biophysics. But in view of the shortage of academic personnel, it could be tolerated. Then there had been some trouble—kind not specified. And he had faded into obscurity, doing routine personnel tests for a small company and tinkering in his spare time. Until two years ago he came up with his new machine and it worked.
Holloway had expected a wild-haired figure with thick accent and gleaming eyes. Wojcek was a small man who spoke plain Midwestern English; his grizzled hair was crew cut, his eyes brown and gentle, only his rumpled suit fitted the stereotype. He shook hands in his cluttered office and took beer from a cooler.
"Sit down, Mr. Holloway, sit down," he said. "I'm mighty glad to have you with us. I hope you'll see fit to join me in research when you've graduated, we do need engineers in the worst way. We can't pay so good yet, but I think you'd enjoy it."
"There's the matter of my graduating first," said Holloway.
Wojcek tilted a beer bottle to his lips. "Aaah! Carlsberg, notice; best on this planet. If I weren't a law-abiding citizen, I'd smuggle it in; but then, I hope to see these silly tariffs abolished someday. You know, it takes as much to be a connoisseur of beer as of wine, and it's a lot cheaper … Well, I assume you'll pass. Otherwise we've lost our money." The school was free, paid for out of the company's profits; in a business sense, it justified itself by the fact that most graduates so far stayed with the outfit, but Holloway doubted if Wojcek cared much about the financial angle.
"Well, at least I'm interested," said the engineer. "I've read all the technical papers a hundred times, and I still can't figure out how the, uh, Wo
bbly works."
"Neither can we." Wojcek grinned. "There's a theoretical physicist at Harvard who's developing a pretty good explanation. You'll hear about it in the lectures. Get this straight, though. It is not magic. It's a physical effect, obeying the conservation laws like anything else. We're not getting something for nothing."
Holloway asked bluntly: "How did you find it in the course of … psychological research?"
"Pure accident." Wojcek's smile turned wry.
After that they chatted of inconsequentials. Holloway admitted to being married, wife and two kids in New York—suburbanite, not yet promoted to the exurbs. Wojcek said it was a pity the school didn't have room for families, but they took a two-week Christmas vacation and he could go home then. The average student needed a year to become proficient.
Holloway gnawed an inward tension. He couldn't tell Wojcek, he hadn't even told his wife. She thought he had quit his job to try something new. It was the first time he had had secrets from her, and what annoyed him most was that she had been glad he was quitting.
But you didn't countermand a vice president's suggestions.
III
THE school occupied a dozen long prefabs, dormitories, lecture halls, labs, a mess room. Holloway's quarters were small but private. His fellow students were a mixed lot, some of them from the other side of the planet, but except for a Navy man who had ideas about applying the Wojcek Effect to space rockets, they were nothing unusual. Unless … well, you had to admit an abnormal level of curiosity and venturesome daydreaming.
They mingled socially after hours, or went in to Des Moines for amusement. Instruction was individualized, no more than ten people to a class. Gerrold gave the half-dozen rookies their first lectures.
He had a Wobbly on the table beside him. "You've seen these things in action," he said, "and read about them, but I'll recapitulate. Now watch those big meters on the wall behind me." He twiddled the controls and rose slowly into the air. Needles swung across figures of wattage and amperage. "You see, the energy to move me comes from the building's electrical system, though the machine isn't plugged in. Somehow the Wobbly draws power. Speaking more precisely, it applies the potential difference to the atoms of my body, so the circuit acts as if it had a motor of corresponding power hooked into it." He descended and turned the dials again. "However, for small jobs it doesn't need to use current." A paperweight rose and soared about the hall while the meters remained quiescent. "Note that I could do the same thing by carrying that object around in my hand. Biometric tests have shown that at this setting, the energy is supplied by my own body. I can feel a slight chill in myself. Naturally, under those conditions it can't do any more work than my metabolism is able to supply."
He returned the paperweight and leaned across the table. "That's the way we do it. Nothing mysterious, except that we don't know how a potential difference at Point A is made to do work at Point B. As you get more skilled, you'll become able to affect individual nucleons. Any atom with positive binding energy can be transmuted, and the mass loss can be made to do work. All the energy, mind you; no radiation hazards. You'll also be able to scan objects thousands of miles away and move them. As a simple example, you'll be able to jiggle electrons in a vacuum tube so they operate a speaker and your voice comes out—without any radio waves in between. The efficiency of such a system is obvious.
"It's clear, too, that airplanes which don't need moving parts are nearly a hundred percent efficient, and we could supply the power by transmuting dirt. Also, the plane would be accident proof. No mechanical failures. As for the human element, each ship would have two operators on the ground, spelling each other, and since those operators could scan matter through any kind of weather—or, as far as that goes, produce smooth clear air in the vicinity of the plane—there'd be no more collisions. This is only experimental, we don't have a CAA license yet, but it'll suggest to you what can be done. Any questions?"
There were plenty.
* * * *
Holloway's first assignment was to tear down and rebuild a Wobbly—over and over, till he knew its circuits by heart.
Gerrold stopped at his workbench after three days of this. "You're learning fast," he remarked.
Holloway felt a tightness in his throat. It wouldn't do to admit how often he had been through this in the corporation laboratories. "Well, I'm used to such things," he said lamely.
Gerrold sat down on the bench, swinging his legs. "What do you think makes 'em tick?" he asked.
"I'll be damned if I know. Apparently the circuits are just a … a controller, some kind of electronic valve. But by all the theories of physics there's nothing they could control."
"We need new theories." Gerrold offered a cigarette. "Later on you'll study this notion they're developing at Harvard. Not many of our students get to it, they don't have the math, but I think you should. Essentially, though, it involves the concept of a kind of, uh, hyperspace, through which forces can be applied orthogonally to all vectors in this universe. In our space it's ten inches or a million miles between Point A and Point B, but if you can shunt energy through hyperspace it's no distance at all. Theoretically, in a system of hyperspatial axes, any point in our universe is contiguous to any other point."
Holloway frowned. "But look, Mr. Gerrold—"
"Plain Tom is good enough for me."
"Okay. Tom. Look, you can't use word magic. 'Energy' is not a single stuff, not a genie out of a lamp. Suppose you disintegrate atoms; somehow, gamma ray quanta and kinetic energy of particles have to be transformed to mechanical work."
"Just so. Well, according to this theory—which, mind you, is still very nebulous—according to it, since hyperspatial forces are at right angles to all axes in this universe, the energy we shunt into hyperspace reappears as a difference of gravitational potential. Suppose I want to lift that wrench … like so." Gerrold clicked over the dials on an assembled Wobbly, and the tool rose. "Our measurements show that it accelerates. It falls up, you see, because a warped-space effect has made our 'down' into its 'up.' Now we'll stop it." He turned a switch and the wrench halted and hung where it was, six feet off the ground. "What I'm doing now, if the theory is right, is to maintain a warp such that all other forces are counteracted. Actually, it isn't perfect, the wrench still has a tendency to drift on air currents, but it's close enough." Suddenly he brought the object clashing to the floor. "Here, let's see you pick it up."
Holloway started. "Me? But I—"
"You know the gadget inside out. Your own body cells will furnish the little bit of energy you'll need. Go on."
Holloway shrugged. Let's see, now—the controls were bewilderingly complex. It took a dozen of them to lift that one piece of steel, though a single cut-off switch would let it fall again. Cautiously, he set the dials as instructed and turned the positioning vernier.
The wrench did not stir.
"It takes speed," said Gerrold. "You have to set the knobs one after the other, click, click, click, and have the current exactly right all the time—or nothing happens. Try again."
Holloway set his teeth. A dim purposeless anger was rising in him. He had done this a thousand times before, back in New York, and drawn blank. For the one thousand and second try, then … His fingers danced over the control board.
"Cut," said Gerrold. "I think you have the potential in the J circuit off by a millivolt or so."
"How can you tell?" snapped Holloway. "It isn't calibrated that fine."
"A guy gets the feeling of it. Once more, if you will."
Holloway glowered at the Wobbly. Elsewhere in the lab, his fellow recruits were putting down their tools and staring. It would be a hell of a note to flunk out today, under all their eyes—no, he wouldn't, usually it took several hundred rehearsals to get anywhere, but why pick on him? How the devil did Gerrold know the voltage had to be right? Maybe the frequency was more important. Maybe you succeeded or failed because of your own built-in metabolism. There were people who couldn't work at f
illing stations because they just naturally picked up too much static electricity. Gerrold was being too bloody smug about an effect that no one really understood.
All right—heave!
The wrench wobbled up an inch or two, turned over, and fell.
"By God, you've got it!" Gerrold pounded his back. Holloway stared with small comprehension. He felt cold. "Go on, try again, quick!"
This time the infernal object did not move. Once more, then. It was worse than adjusting your own hi-fi set. Blasted inanimate objects … click, click, click … they'd get their comeuppance. Damon had not said so, but Holloway could guess what the corporation had in mind. Get one of their own men trained to operate a Wobbly—fake a few accidents—adroit publicity, stirring up the ancient human fear of the unknown—and the government would have to declare the Wojcek Effect unsafe. Licenses would be rescinded, research and development would proceed at the turtle pace which suited the big-money boys—and big-labor boys, too, everybody big wanted to keep the status quo because maybe a new world would turn out to be bigger than himself … click, click, click.
Nobody was more surprised than Holloway when he lifted the wrench to the ceiling. It should have stayed there, pressed against the roof, for it was still in the machine's focus and he didn't touch a dial setting. But as he gaped upward, it fell and came within an inch of braining Gerrold. Wobblies were tricky beasts.
The instructor didn't seem to mind. Holloway learned that a rookie's first success required him to stand a round of drinks the next time everyone was in Des Moines.
* * * *
Snow came whooping over the plains, and Holloway took his turn clearing the driveway. Using a Wobbly beat using a shovel. By that time he was skilled enough to handle ordinary-sized objects with no more conscious effort or concentration than it took to drive a car. He was progressing at twice the average rate. After Christmas he would start the more delicate and exacting operations, including nuclear transmutation. He worried about that—maybe he'd blow up half a county—till Gerrold told him that an experienced operator would be standing by to damp any reaction that showed signs of running wild.
The High Ones and Other Stories Page 10
