Fire in the Heavens (1958)

by George O. Smith

  “Good!” cried Horne cheerfully. He flagged a waiter and ordered a full round of drinks. “We’ll drink to friendship,” he said.

  Her eyes flirted briefly over the rim of her glass as she raised it to them.

  Jeff became inwardly uneasy after that. He was attracted to Lucille, yet he could not quite understand her attitude of that day at the auction. For his efforts in her behalf she had given him a chilly thanks—this in return for having saved her more money than he would probably ever see in his life.

  She had apparently looked down upon him at that time and he did not quite accept her bald statements about his job-seeking and its innuendoes.

  And now she was accepting him as an equal—at least for the duration of this luncheon. Bothered by her inexplicable attitude Jeff would not permit his interest to deepen, even though Lucille’s dress and manner proclaimed her to be feminine, socially interested and possibly promising more.

  But Jeff knew that here was competition he could never’ hope to beat. He was, he admitted with a grim smile, possibly one of the best-fed starving geniuses in the world but he was by no means financially capable of handling this kind of life.

  Twenty-five dollars’ worth of dinner for luncheon was a bit on the steep side and Jeff inferred that not too many minutes would pass before Charles Horne would nod his head to the long-stemmed beauty with shoulder-tray and buy Lucille ten dollars’ worth of orchids or gardenias.

  Through quiet eyes he watched them. Horne was regaling Lucille with a story and the girl was responding with dancing eyes and an appreciative smile.

  She obviously thought very well of a man who could meet her on her own level and give her a run for her money in her own chosen line.

  Jeff would have liked to join this byplay but he knew that a lengthy discussion of the problems of measuring physical factors would be meaningless to them. He could build a better meter, which they would be able to buy with their pocket money. He could never compete with either of them for a financial empire. Or begin to afford the social life they seemed to enjoy.

  Lucille finished her sandwich and coffee before Jeff broke in. “I’ve got to run along,” he said.

  “Don’t go,” said Horne.

  “No, don’t.”

  “I’ve got some specifications to look at,” he smiled. “One more of these and I’ll not be able to see ‘em straight.”

  Horne nodded.

  “Business is business,” he said heavily. “If you must you must.”

  Lucille looked unhappy. But she nodded. “If you must,” she echoed.

  “I must,” said Jeff. “Even though I hate to break up this party.”

  “Its not broken,” said Horne. “If Lucille is through we can drop you off at your laboratory.”

  Lucille Roman looked up with a smile. “We will,” she said, “as soon as I powder my nose.”

  Lucille Roman went to the ladies’ room and found a telephone. “Hannegan,” she said as soon as the connection was made. Her voice was hard. “Hannegan, Benson is out!” “As you say. But why?”

  “I’ve just had lunch with Mister Jeff Benson.”

  “Lunch? At the Saddle Club? He can’t afford—”

  “I just had lunch with Jeff Benson and Charles Horne. They had their heads together like the pair of conniving thieves they are, and from now on Jeff Benson shall have not one microscopic idea of what Tm doing. I gather that their little incident at the auction was just a game, Hannegan. Get another instrument maker.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” said Hannegan. “He certainly had his tracks covered well.”

  “Too well,” she snapped. “They’re a smoother pair of connivers than I first believed.”

  Hannegan snorted. “Maybe we’d better jolt the agency a bit, huh?”

  “Jolt those flat-foots hard. If they couldn’t uncover that tie-in they’re not what I want.”

  “Okay, then. They’ll be jolted hard. And I’ll turn to Forester for the gadgets. Forester and Company are a trifle more expensive and somewhat less efficient, I’m told.”

  “But they may be safer. I’ve got to go. I’m about to make my gamble against an aluminum plant.”

  “That may be risky.”

  Lucille laughed. “If Horne can get what he wants before I get what I want, I lose,” she said. Then her voice became soft again. “He won’t win,” she said.

  Lucille hung up and faced the mirror. Very deliberately she took lipstick and shaded her lower lip delicately until it had a full and sensuous appearance.

  A few minutes later she was sitting in Horne’s car between Horne and Jeff Benson. Her shoulder pressed gently against Horne’s arm as he drove the powerful sports coup£ toward Jeff Benson’s laboratory.

  CHAPTER V

  Jeff had had one too many cocktails for absolutely clear thinking and so he ignored the pages of specifications when he returned. In an hour he knew he would be up to it and, to clear his head, he went to work on the averaging thermocouple. He had the front panel off and was probing inside when the doorbell rang once more. He went to the door with a pair of pliers in one hand and blinked at Hannegan.

  “I though you said tomorrow,” he frowned, puzzled.

  “I did,” said Hannegan quietly. “But suddenly we’ve had to revise our plans.”

  “Come in. What’s cooking?”

  “I hate to disappoint you, Mister Benson, but we’ve decided to let the contract to another company.”

  “Well! May I ask why?”

  “Of course. Haste has become necessary. We shall be forced to take an inferior product in favor of getting it faster. We’d prefer not, of course, but that’s the way it stands.”

  “I might be able to forget my own personal project for a bit,” suggested Jeff.

  “But I’d believed that important ”

  “I’ve been at work on it for years. Another few months would not—”

  “Months would not be good enough, Mister Benson. Our schedule demands three weeks’ delivery.”

  “I doubt if I could promise that, though I’ve not had much chance to find out what is needed.”

  Hannegan shook his head. “We’re sorry.”

  “So am I. But I’ll not starve, and even though I could bypass my pet for a few months I’d prefer not to.”

  “Just what kind of project is it that has been going on for years?”

  Jeff smiled. “I’m certain that it is entirely impractical,

  I doubt that much could be done with it other than to advance the store of man’s knowledge a half-step.”

  “That’s a commendable attitude.”

  “Frankly,” said Jeff, “I’ve reason to suspect a flaw in the law of conservation of energy.”

  “That’s over my head. I was taught that matter and energy could neither be created nor destroyed. I was a schoolboy when they fissioned the atom and I’ve been uncertain of the law ever since.”

  Jeff Benson laughed. “If you remember that matter is one form of energy the law comes out the same,” he told Hannegan. “Or did. I have reason to think that every time energy—or matter—is converted from one state to another there is an infinitesimal loss—a percentage of proportions so small that it hardly makes any difference.”

  “You mean that for every kilowatt of energy coming out of a hydroelectric plant you lose some of the estimated original potential?”

  Jeff nodded. “Crudely, that’s it. An infinitesimal percentage of the available energy in a ton of coal is lost when it is burned. Some of the energy put into the water doesn’t get there. Then when the thermal energy of the stream turns the turbine its potential capability is diminished by a similar minute bit.

  “The true calculated efficiency of the generator is untrue by a small portion. And finally, when the electricity is used to create light, for instance, an ultra-microscopic bit of the potential capability of the lamp to produce light is lost.” “But where does it go?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest notion.”

&nb
sp; “Small, isn’t it?”

  “So small as to be inconsiderable. That’s what makes it tough.”

  “I follow that. What you need is something that puts out a terrific gob of energy.”

  “From what I know there isn’t anything on earth that puts out enough energy to make the lost portion worth thinking about. I imagine that the amount of lost energy expended in a nuclear explosion might be enough to run a wristwatch for a few seconds.”

  “Phew! Too small to think of.”

  “Exactly! And that’s why I often wish we could get closer to the sun.”

  “Lots of power there, eh?”

  “Four million mass-tons of energy per second. We’d get enough to run the earth’s needs easily.”

  “Why don’t you try?”

  Benson shook his head sadly. “I don’t know where it goes in the first place,” he said. “Then I don’t know why or how it disappears. And not knowing—to be very honest— whether or not my theory is true, I’m completely at a loss as to how to start finding out. About the only thing I can do is to continue to work on and on until I can figure the best way to attack the problem. Then I may be able to do something practical about it.”

  “The energy must go somewhere, though.”

  “True. But where? Or is it just lost—a bit of cosmic friction?”

  Hannegan shook his head. “I know all too little of these things. It seems as though it should go somewhere. At least the fraction from the sun s loss should be detectable.”

  “Maybe not with our present techniques,” said Jell.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe we don’t know what to look for. I’ll explain it this way—in the early days of radio we used crystal detectors. Actually those were rectifiers, rectifying the radio frequencies. Now, let’s suppose that there’s a perfect torrent of radio power permeating our universe—a constant, unvarying radio field. But no one has recognized it as such.

  “A man putting a bit of phosphor-bronze wire against a little galena crystal would note at once an electric potential. But—and this is the point—he’d identify the potential not as an indication of the unknown radio field, but naturally as a physical property of matter—in this instance, a property of the phosphor-bronze and the galena.

  “We’d have minute batteries made of galena and wire and possibly we might never know radio, since any small radio energy we could produce would be only peanuts compared to the solar furnace or whatever source was making the high radiomagnetic field,”

  “What’s needed, then?”

  Jeff Benson shook his head. “I’d really hate to see it,” he said.

  “But why?”

  “The chances of a steady-state proposition being detected and correctly identified are remote. We’d know a lot about gravity if we could—modulate it. The only way we could seek this unknown wealth of power would be to get some indication of its true nature, and that hasn’t been available as yet. We must be able to generate something that we can measure, you see. Or at least correlate any variations to our observations.”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  Jeff Benson reached in his desk and took out a small H-shaped bit of glass tubing with mercury and wires and liquid in it. “This is a Standard Weston Cell,” he told Hannegan. “Its voltage is a constant and it remains constant.

  “Now if we were to assume momentarily that the contact potential in any battery was due to the solar loss that fills space, instead of being due to the nature of the beast as we know it, then the potentials would be constant just so long as the sun were constant.

  “We’d probably never know the truth until the sun became unstable—at which point we could see that the variations in solar power and brightness correlated exactly with the variations in voltage coming from the standard cell.”

  “That’s reasonable.”

  “Very,” smiled Jeff drily. “But I’d not ask Sol to become a nova for the purpose of proving a theory. I’d rather be an ignorant human being than an intelligent puff of incandescent gas.”

  “That sounds rough,” grunted Hannegan.

  “It’s what is needed,” said Jeff, “to furnish positive proof for my theory. And, in that case, I’d prefer not to be around. Or,” he added with a grin, “since I couldn’t go anywhere to get out of it, let’s reverse that prayer. Frankly, I’d rather the nova weren’t around. Well—”

  “Well, Mister Benson, I’ve taken up a lot of your time, and I’ve got to get back to my office. Goodbye. And remember, if we find we still need you, you’ll hear from us at once.”

  Hannegan left Jeff to his laboratory, and roared back to Roman Lab, his foot heavy on the Jag’s throttle. He swore impatiently when told that Lucille had not yet returned. Since she had finally made contact with Horne, he realized that she was more than likely to be gone for hours.

  Hannegan fumed quietly and strode up and down his office, trying to remember the details of Jeff Benson’s theories and cursing his own lack of scientific ken because, as the hours wore on, the details became more and more confused and obscure.

  He smoked cigars one after the other, tried to dictate some of the details to his secretary, and at last gave up when she read back his dictation. It seemed a meaningless mish-mash, devoid of continuity or common sense. At seven-thirty, with no word from Lucille, he slapped his almost useless notes in his brief case, jammed on his battered hat, and flung himself into the Jaguar. In a few moments he was at Lucille’s apartment and discovered that she was not there, nor had she left a message. Muttering, he went back to his car to wait, smoking furiously and throwing away one cigar before he’d half finished, then at once lighting another. He only hoped someone would try to object to his parking in the no-parking area before the main door.

  Shortly after eleven, Lucille and Horne drew up just behind Hannegan’s car which still blocked the walk from the curb to ornate entrance. Lucille didn’t need Charles Horne’s muttering about “some fool driver who ought to be pinched for parking there,” to recognize Hannegan’s car and its owner, and to realize at once that her business manager was the bearer of important news. Apprehensive and annoyed, she bit her lip, staring at Hannegan’s back in the sports car ahead.

  She would have preferred to strike while the iron was hot, or to use fisherman’s language more to the point, would have preferred to set the hook deep on the first strike. But now she leaned flirtatiously against Horne and brushed his .cheek with the side of her head. She looked up at him, smiling.

  “No,” she chuckled, “you can’t come upstairs, Charles. Not tonight.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Luncheon,” she said. “But not an all-afternoon luncheon.”

  “I’ll make you a bet.”

  “I won’t take it. But it’s been fun, Charles. Thanks, really.”

  “You don’t have to go up right away.”

  She patted his cheek. “I do,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s after eleven o’clock. And I’m under a terrible spell. After midnight I—I turn into a pumpkin!”

  “Oh gourd!” he groaned.

  Lucille pinched her nose delicately between finger and thumb. “After a pun like that,” she said, “I’m afraid to be seen with you. Good-night, Charles.” She leaned forward quickly and brushed her lips against his. He reached for her but she swirled away like a ballet dancer, laughed brightly and waved back at him as she headed to the door.

  Hannegan waited until Horne’s car was around the comer and then hot-footed into the large apartment building. The door of Lucille’s suite was open and Lucille was waiting in the living room for him.

  “What is it?” she asked without preamble.

  “That young man is too smart,” he snapped.

  “He took the bait like a hungry trout.”

  “Not Horne. Benson.”

  “Benson? What makes you think so?”

  “He tried to pump me.”

  “Naturally.”

&n
bsp; “You don’t understand, Miss Roman. I expected a certain amount of pumping. I expect it every time we open contract negotiations here or there. But this was not personal pumping. He didn’t seem interested in my business affiliations.”

  “Then what? What are you driving at?’

  “It’s far too complex for me to explain in a breath. But —and blast it all, my knowledge of science is topped by any schoolboy—was there anything in those specs that might hint at what Phelps is working on?”

  “Not that I know of. Why?’

  Hannegan smiled in self-satisfaction. “I don’t know a lot about science, Miss Roman. But I do know how to handle people. When Benson started to talk about his work, he skirted a few things that might have been right out of Phelp’s lab.

  “So I clammed up and tried to find out just how much he knew. The trouble is that I must have done a good job of it—so good a job that I can’t recall the scientific details of it all.”

  “Give me the high points.”

  “His main talk was about some cockeyed flaw in the law of conservation of energy. Something about getting power from the sun, if he could figure out a way to do it.”

  “Phelps is certain that we’re not tapping the sun.”

  ‘Well, Benson thinks it can be done. Now where did he get that idea?”

  “I’ll get Phelps here. Wait.” Lucille went to the telephone and called the physicist. Then, while Phelps was on the way, she showered and dressed in a housecoat, mixed a drink for herself and Hannegan and smoked a cigarette. Hannegan tried three times to recap the conversation, but each time Lucille held up her hand.

  “I’m no abstract physicist either,” she said. “Get yourself organized, Hannegan, and save it all for Phelps. Maybe he can make some sense out of you. I assure you that I can’t!”

  Phelps came about twelve-thirty.

  “What do you know about Jeff Benson?” Lucille asked him.

  “A bright young man. Thirty-four or so, single, good natured and, so far as I have ever been able to tell, honest as they come.”