Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  “We can’t. We’ve got to scrape up everything we can lay our hands on and hope for the best. But there’s one thing we do know they’ll have, and that’s force fields. They can’t get out without them. And if they have them, we must, too, and that’s the problem we’re trying to solve here. They will not insure us victory, but without them, we will suffer certain defeat. And now you know why we need money-and more than that. We want Earth itself to get to work. It’s got to start a drive for scientific armaments and subordinate everything to that. You seer

  Orloff was on his feet. “Birnam, I’m with you-a hundred percent with you. You can count on me back in Washington.”

  There was no mistaking his sincerity. Birnam gripped the hand outstretched toward him and wrung it-and at the moment, the door flew open and a little pixie of a man hurtled in.

  The newcomer spoke in rapid jerks, and exclusively to Birnam. “Where’d you come from? Been trying to get in touch with you. Secretary said you weren’t in. Then five minutes later you show up on your own. Can’t understand it.” He busied himself furiously at his desk.

  Birnam grinned. “If you’ll take time out, doc, you might say hello to Colonial Commissioner Orloff...

  Dr. Edward Prosser turned on his toe like a ballet dancer and looked the Earthman up and down twice. “The new un, hey? We getting any money? We ought to. Been working on a shoestring ever since. At that, we might not be needing any. It depends.” He was back at the desk.

  Orloff seemed a trifle disconcerted, but Birnam winked impressively, and he contented himself with a glassy stare through the monocle.

  Prosser pounced upon a black leather booklet in the recesses of a pigeonhole, threw himself into his swivel chair and wheeled about.

  “Glad you came, Birnam,” he said, leafing through the booklet. “Got something to show you. Commissioner Orloff, too.”

  “What were you keeping us waiting for?” demanded Birnam. “Where were you?”

  “Busy! Busy as a pig! No sleep for three nights.” He looked up, and his small puckered face fairly Hushed with delight. “Everything fell into place of a sudden. Like a jig-saw puzzle. Never saw anything like it. Kept us hopping, I tell you.”

  “You’ve gotten the dense force fields you’re after?” asked Orloff in sudden excitement.

  Prosser seemed annoyed. “No, not that. Something else. Come on.” He glared at his watch and jumped out of his seat. “We’ve got half an hour. Let’s go.”

  An electric-motored flivver waited outside and Prosser spoke excitedly as he sped the purring vehicle down the ramps into the depths of the Station.

  “Theory!” he said. “Theory! Damned important, that. You set a technician on a problem. He’ll fool around. Waste lifetimes. Get nowhere. Just putter about at random. A true scientist works with theory. Lets math solve his problems.” He overflowed with self-satisfaction.

  The flivver stopped on a dime before a huge double door and Prosser tumbled out, followed by the other two at a more leisurely pace.

  “Through here! Through here!” he said. He shoved the door open and led them down the corridor and up a narrow flight of stairs onto a wall-hugging passageway that circled a huge three-level room. Orloff recognized the gleaming quartz-and-steel pipe-sprouting ellipsoid two levels below as an atomic generator.

  He adjusted his monocle and watched the scurrying activity below. An earphoned man on a high stool before a control board studded with dials looked up and waved. Prosser waved back and grinned.

  Orloff said, “You create your force fields here?”

  “That’s right! Ever see one?”

  “No.” The commissioner smiled, ruefully. “I don’t even know what one is, except that it can be used as a meteor shield.”

  Prosser said, “It’s very simple. Elementary matter. All matter is composed of atoms. Atoms are held together by interatomic forces. Take away atoms. Leave interatomic forces behind. That’s a force field.”

  Orloff looked blank, and Birnam chuckled deep in his throat and scratched the back of his ear.

  “That explanation reminds me of our Ganymedan method of suspending an egg a mile high in the air. It goes like this. You find a mountain just a mile high and put the egg on top. Then, keeping the egg where it is, you take the mountain away. That’s all.”

  The colonial commissioner threw his head back to laugh, and the irascible Dr. Prosser puckered his lips in a pursed symbol of disapproval.

  “Come, come. No joke, you know. Force fields most important. Got to be ready for the Jovians when they come:’

  A sudden rasping bur from below sent Prosser back from the railing.

  “Get behind screen here,” he babbled. “The twenty-millimeter field is going up. Bad radiation.”

  The bur muted almost into silence, and the three walked out onto the passageway again. There was no apparent change, but Prosser shoved his hand out over the railing and said, “Feel!”

  Orloff extended a cautious finger, gasped, and slapped out with the palm of his hand. It was like pushing against very soft sponge rubber or superresilient steel springs.

  Birnam tried, too. “That’s better than anything we’ve done yet, isn’t it?” He explained to Orloff, “ A twenty-millimeter screen is one that can hold an atmosphere of a pressure of twenty millimeters of mercury against a vacuum without appreciable leakage.”

  The commissioner nodded, “I see! You’ d need a seven-hundred-sixty-millimeter screen to hold Earth’s atmosphere then.”

  “Yes! That would be a unit atmosphere screen. Well, Prosser, is this what got you excited?”

  “This twenty-millimeter screen? Of course not. I can go up to two hundred fifty millimeters using the activated vanadium pentasulphide in the praseodymium breakdown. But it’s not necessary. Technician would do it and blow up the place. Scientist checks on theory and goes slow.” He winked. ‘We’re hardening the field now. Watch!”

  “Shall we get behind the screen?”

  “Not necessary now. Radiation bad only at beginning...

  The burring waxed again, but not as loudly as before. Prosser shouted to the man at the control board, and a spreading wave of the hand was the only reply.

  Then the control man waved a clenched fist and Prosser cried, “We’ve passed fifty millimeters! Feel the field!”

  Orloff extended his hand and poked it curiously. The sponge rubber had hardened! He tried to pinch it between finger and thumb so perfect was the illusion, but here the “rubber.. faded to unresisting air.

  Prosser tch-tched impatiently. “No resistance at right angles to force. Elementary mechanics, that is...

  The control man was gesturing again. “Past seventy,” explained Prosser. “We’re slowing down now. Critical point is 83.42.”

  He hung over the railing and kicked out with his feet at the other two. “Stay away! Dangerous!”

  And then he yelled, “Careful! The generator’s bucking!”

  The bur had risen to a hoarse maximum and the control man worked frantically at his switches. From within the quartz heart of the central atomic generator, the sullen red glow of the bursting atoms had brightened dangerously.

  There was a break in the bur, a reverberant roar, and a blast of air that threw Orloff hard against the wall.

  Prosser dashed up. There was a cut over his eye. “Hurt? No? Good, good! I was expecting something of the sort. Should have warned you. Let’s go down. Where’s Birnam?”

  The tall Ganymedan picked herself up off the floor and brushed at his clothes. “Here I am. What blew up?”

  “Nothing blew up. Something buckled. Come on, down we go.” He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief and led the way downward.

  The control man removed his earphones as he approached and got off his stool. He looked tired, and his dirt-smeared face was greasy with perspiration.

  “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 Hopped, 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 Haw there.”

  Prosser eyed him in annoyance. “No Haw. 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.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Frank Belknap Long

  CONES

  Mercury is the planet nearest to the Sun, and consequently the most dangerous of all to approach. Whether it will be explored about the same time that Jupiter is will probably depend upon the speed with which terrestrial science is able to develop heat-resisting spaceships; for that near to the Sun the radiations will be nearly unbearable.

  On the Sunward planet we meet our first pure-energy life form, a kind of being which will in all likelihood remain forever alien to Earth’s people. Such a life is the only type that could exist where extremes of heat and cold are so enormous and where electrical phenomena must be so incredibly powerful. Since it is the only type that could exist—perhaps it does! In any event, there is no question that its portrait, given here, is uncomfortably vivid—and not illogical.

  ~ * ~

  THEY had never seen such skies. Glory beyond bright glory, wonder beyond wonder, in the black celestial vault above them. Earth the brightest of all the bright stars; Venus a small, watery green moon suspended in the bottomless depths of the sky; Mars a tiny reddish dot. And all the stars of the Galaxy shining in the brilliant whorls and angles of half-familiar constellations.

  It was night on Mercury—cold night in a narrow world of infrequent night and day. Across a thin strip on the surface of the Sun’s nearest neighbor there occurred at forty four-day intervals the familiar alternations of sunlight and darkness which Gibbs Crayley and the other members of the First Mercury Exploring Expedition knew and loved on their home planet. The liberations of the little celestial body, which rotated only once on its axis in its eighty eight-day journey about the Sun, Splashed alternate bands of sunlight and dark over a relatively restricted strip of its metallic crust.

  Where the face of Mercury was forever turned away from the Sun, the temperature was within a few degrees of absolute zero; there oxygen was a fine white snow. On the bright side, continuously under the Sun’s rays, heat blighted and blasted the surface, and no alien shape of protoplasm could live there for long, no matter how well protected by the sciences of man. But on the strip where light and dark alternated, the conditions of climate and tempe
rature were less extreme, and protected human life could exist there, if only for brief periods. Encased in a flexible metallic spacesuit surmounted by a rigid helmet, with fifty-pound weights attached to thighs, and oxygen tanks strapped to shoulders, a man could survive—and explore.

  Gibbs Crayley, scientist-explorer, was leading the first expedition from Earth ever to land on the surface of Mercury. It was an invasion in force, spearheaded by the indomitable will and daring of the one man whose whole life had been directed toward this moment. Crayley was a representative of the small, select tribe of pure scientist-explorers, fanatics whose driving motivations were tempered only by the cautions of science. And now he led the way as he and his small band cautiously ventured out on the surface of the unknown planet.