The Battle of the Infinite Trilogy

by John W. Campbell

  In that war between two solar systems we learned much and lost much. Yet, in all probability we gained more than we lost, for those two new-old planets will mean tremendous things to us. Already scientists are at work in the vast museums and ancient laboratories that are on them, and every day new things are being discovered. We lost many men, but we saved our worlds, and we learned many invaluable secrets from the invaders. In addition, we have but scratched the surface of a science that is at least a thousand million years old!

  EPILOGUE

  Taj Lamor looked out across the void of space toward a fading point of yellow light. Far in the distance it glowed, and every second moved it many more miles farther from him. They had lost their struggle for life and a new sun, he had thought when he turned back, defeated, from that distant sun. But time had brought new hope.

  They had lost many men in that struggle, and their dwindling resources had been strained to the limit, but now there was hope, for a new spirit had been born in their race. They had fought, and lost, but they had gained a spirit of adventure that had been dormant for millions of years.

  Below him, in the great dim mass that was their city, he knew that many laboratories were in the full swing of active work. Knowledge and its application were being discovered and rediscovered. New uses were being found for old things, and their daily life was changing. It was again a race awake, rejuvenated by a change!

  As the great sea of yellow fire that was that strange sun had faded behind their fleeing ships, leaving their dead planets still circling a dead sun, he had thought their last chance was gone forever. But hope had reawakened with the birth of new ideas, new ways of doing things.

  Tordos Gar had been right! They had lost-but in the losing, they had won!

  Taj Lamor shifted his gaze to a blazing point of light, where a titanic sea of flame was burning with a brilliance and power that, despite the greater distance, made the remote yellow sun seem pale and dim. The blue-white glow told of a monster star, a star far brighter than the one they had just left. It had become the brightest star in their heavens. On their ancient star charts it was listed as a red giant, named Tonsil 239-e, which meant it was of the fifth magnitude and very distant. But in the long ages that had passed since it was classified, it had become a mighty sun-a star in its prime.

  How were they to reach it? It was eight and one half light years away!

  Their search for the force that would swing a world from its orbit had at last been successful. The knowledge had come too late to aid them in their fight for the yellow sun, but they might yet use it-they might even tear their planets from their orbits, and drive them as free bodies across the void. It would take ages to make the trip-but long ages had already passed as their dark planet swung through the void. What difference would it make if they were or were not accompanied by a dead star?

  True, the star that was now their goal was a double star; their planets could not find orbits about it, but they might remedy that-they could tear one star free and hurl it into space, making the remaining sun suitable for their use.

  But they would escape this dead sun.

  ISLANDS OF SPACE

  CHAPTER I

  'Three men sat around a table which was littered with graphs, sketches of mathematical functions, and books of tenser formulae. Beside the table stood a Munson-Bradley Intergraph calculator which one of the men was using to check some of the equations he had already derived. The results they were getting seemed to indicate something well above and beyond what they had expected.

  And anything that surprised the team of Arcot, Wade, and Morey was surprising indeed.

  The intercom buzzed, interrupting their work.

  Dr. Richard Arcot reached over and lifted the switch. “Arcot speaking."

  The face that flashed on the screen was businesslike and determined. “Dr. Arcot, Mr. Fuller is here. My orders are to check with you on all visitors,"

  Arcot nodded. Send him up. But from now on, I'm not in to anyone but my father or the Interplanetary Chairman or the elder Mr. Morey. If they come, don't bother to call, just send ‘em up. I will not receive calls for the next ten hours. Got it?"

  "You won't be bothered, Dr. Arcot."

  Arcot cut the circuit and the image collapsed.

  Less than two minutes later, a light flashed above the door. Arcot touched the release, and the door slid aside. He looked at the man entering and said, with mock coldness:

  "If it isn't the late John Fuller. What did you do-take a plane? It took you an hour to get here from Chicago."

  Fuller shook his head sadly. “Most of the time was spent in getting past your guards. Getting to the seventy-fourth floor of the Transcontinental Airways Building is harder than stealing the Taj Mahal.” Trying to suppress a grin, Fuller bowed low. “Besides, I think it would do your royal highness good to be kept waiting for a while. You're paid a couple of million a year to putter around in a lab while honest people work for a living. Then, if you happen to stub your toe over some useful gadget, they increase your pay. They call you scientists and spend the resources of two| worlds to get you anything you want-and apologize if they! don't get it within twenty-four hours.

  "No doubt about it; it will do your majesties good to wait."

  With a superior smile, he seated himself at the table and shuffled calmly through the sheets of equations before him.

  Arcot and Wade were laughing, but not Robert Morey. With a sorrowful expression, he walked to the window and! looked out at the hundreds of slim, graceful aircars that floated above the city.

  "My friends,” said Morey, almost tearfully, “I give you the great Dr. Arcot. These countless machines we see have come from one idea of his. Just an idea, mind you! And who worked it into mathematical form and made it calculable, and therefore useful? I did!"

  "And who worked out the math for the interplanetary ships? I did! Without me they would never have been built!” He turned dramatically, as though he were playing King Lear. “And what do I get for it?” He pointed an accusing finger at Arcot. “What do I get? He is called ‘Earth's most brilliant physicist', and I, who did all the hard work, am referred to as ‘his mathematical assistant'.” He shook his head solemnly. “It's a hard world."

  At the table, Wade frowned, then looked at the ceiling. “If you'd make your quotations more accurate, they'd be more trustworthy. The news said that Arcot was the ‘System's most brilliant physicist', and that you were the brilliant mathematical assistant who showed great genius in developing the mathematics of Dr. Arcot's new theory'.” Having delivered his speech, Wade began stoking his pipe.

  Fuller tapped his fingers on the table. “Come on, you clowns, knock it off and tell me why you called a hard-working man away from his drafting table to come up to this play room of yours. What have you got up your sleeve this time?"

  "Oh, that's too bad,” said Arcot, leaning back comfortably in his chair. “We're sorry you're so busy. We were thinking of going out to see what Antares, Betelguese, or Polaris looked like at close range. And, if we don't get too bored, we might run over to the giant model nebula in Andromeda, or one of the others. Tough about your being busy; you might have helped us by designing the ship and earned your board and passage. Tough.” Arcot looked at Fuller sadly.

  Fuller's eyes narrowed. He knew Arcot was kidding, but he also knew how far Arcot would go when he was kidding—and this sounded like he meant it. Fuller said: “Look, teacher, a man named Einstein said that the velocity of light was tops over two hundred years ago, and nobody's come up with any counter evidence yet. Has the Lord instituted a new speed law?"

  "Oh, no,” said Wade, waving his pipe in a grand gesture of importance. “Arcot just decided he didn't like that law and made a new one himself."

  "Now wait a minute said Fuller. “The velocity of light is a property of space!"

  Arcot's bantering smile was gone. “Now you've got it, Fuller. The velocity of light, just as Einstein said, is a property of space. What happens if we
change space?"

  Fuller blinked. “Change space? How?"

  Arcot pointed toward a glass of water sitting nearby. “Why do things look distorted through the water? Because the light rays are bent. Why are they bent? Because as each wave front moves from air to water, it slows down. The electromagnetic and gravitational fields between those atoms are strong enough to increase the curvature of the space between them. Now, what happens if we reverse that effect?"

  "Oh,” said Fuller softly. “I get it. By changing the curvature of the space surrounding you, you could get any velocity you wanted. But what about acceleration? It would take years to reach those velocities at any acceleration a man could stand."

  Arcot shook his head. “Take a look at the glass of water again. What happens when the light comes out of the water? It speeds up again instantaneously. By changing the space around a spaceship, you instantaneously change the velocity of the ship to a comparable velocity in that space. And since every particle is accelerated at the same rate, you wouldn't feel it, any more than you'd feel the acceleration due to gravity in free fall."

  Fuller nodded slowly. Then, suddenly, a light gleamed in his eyes. “I suppose you've figured out where you're going to get the energy to power a ship like that?"

  "He has,” said Morey. “Uncle Arcot isn't the type to forget a little detail like that."

  "Okay, give,” said Fuller.

  Arcot grinned and lit up his own pipe, joining Wade in an attempt to fill the room with impenetrable fog.

  "AH right,” Arcot began, “we needed two things: a tremendous source of power and a way to store it.

  "For the first, ordinary atomic energy wouldn't do. It's not controllable enough and uranium isn't something we could carry by the ton. So I began working with high-density currents.

  "At the temperature of liquid helium, near absolute zero, lead becomes a nearly perfect conductor. Back in nineteen twenty, physicists had succeeded in making a current flow for four hours in a closed circuit. It was just a ring of lead, but the resistance was so low that the current kept on flowing. They even managed to get six hundred amperes through a piece of lead wire no bigger than a pencil lead.

  "I don't know why they didn't go on from there, but they didn't. Possibly it was because they didn't have the insulation necessary to keep down the corona effect; in a high-density current, the electrons tend to push each other sideways out of the wire.

  "At any rate,; I tried it, using lux metal as an insulator around the wire."

  "Hold it!” Fuller interrupted. “What, may I ask, is lux metal?"

  "That was Wade's idea,” Arcot grinned. “You remember those two substances we found in the Nigran ships during the war?"

  "Sure,” said Fuller. “One was transparent and the other was a perfect reflector. You said they were made of light-photons so greatly condensed that they were held together by their gravitational fields."

  "Right, We called them light-metal. But Wade said that was too confusing. With a specific gravity of 103.5, light-metal was certainly not a light metal! So Wade coined a couple of words. Lux is the Latin for light, so he named the transparent one lux and the reflecting one relux."

  "It sounds peculiar,” Fuller observed, “but so does every coined word when you first hear it. Go on with your story."

  Arcot relit his pipe and went on. “I put a current of ten thousand amps through a little piece of lead wire, and that gave me a current density of 1010 amps per square inch.

  "Then I started jacking up the voltage, and modified the thing with a double-polarity field somewhat similar to the molecular motion field except that it works on a sub-nucleonic level. As a result, about half of the lead fed into the chamber became contraterrene lead! The atoms just turned themselves inside out, so to speak, giving us an atom with positrons circling a negatively charged nucleus. It even gave the neutrons a reverse spin, converting them into anti-neutrons.

  "Result: total annihilation of matter! When the contraterrene lead atoms met the Terrene lead atoms, mutual annihilation resulted, giving us pure energy.

  "Some of this power can be bled off to power the mechanism itself; the rest is useful energy. We've got all the power we need-power, literally by the ton."

  Fuller said nothing; he just looked dazed. He was well beginning to believe that these three men could do the impossible and do it to order.

  "The second thing,” Arcot continued, “was, as I said, a way to store the energy so that it could be released as rapidly or as slowly as we needed it.

  "That was Morey's baby. He figured it would be possible to use the space-strain apparatus to store energy. It's an old method; induction coils, condensers, and even gravity itself are storing energy by straining space. But with Morey's apparatus we could store a lot more.

  "A torus-shaped induction coil encloses all its magnetic field within it; the torus, or ‘doughnut’ coil, has a perfectly enclosed magnetic field. We built an enclosed coil, using Morey's principle, and expected to store a few watts of power in it to see how long we could hold it.

  "Unfortunately, we made the mistake of connecting it to the city power lines, and it cost us a hundred and fifty dollars at a quarter of a cent per kilowatt hour. We blew fuses all over the place. After that, we used the relux plate generator.

  "At any rate, the gadget can store power and plenty of it, and it can put it out the same way."

  Arcot knocked the ashes out of his pipe and smiled at Fuller. “Those are the essentials of what we have to offer. We give you the job of figuring out the stresses and strains involved. We want a ship with a cruising radius of a thousand million light years."

  "Yes, sir! Right away, sir! Do you want a gross or only a dozen?” Fuller asked sarcastically. “You sure believe in big orders! And whence cometh the cold cash for this lovely dream of yours?"

  "That,” said Morey darkly, “is where the trouble comes in. We have to convince Dad. As President of Transcontinental Airways, he's my boss, but the trouble is, he's also my father. When he hears that I want to go gallivanting off all over the Universe with you guys, he is very likely to turn thumbs down on the whole deal. Besides, Arcot's dad has a lot of influence around here, too, and I have a healthy hunch he won't like the idea, either."

  "I rather fear he won't,” agreed Arcot gloomily.

  A silence hung over the room that felt almost as heavy as the pall of pipe smoke the air conditioners were trying frantically to disperse.

  The elder Mr. Morey had full control of their finances. A ship that would cost easily hundreds of millions of dollars was well beyond anything the four men could get by themselves. Their inventions were the property of Transcontinental, but even if they had not been, not one of the four men would think of selling them to another company.

  Finally, Wade said: “I think we'll stand a much better chance if we show them a big, spectacular exhibition; something really impressive. We'll point out all the advantages and uses of the apparatus. Then well show them complete plans for the ship. They might consent."

  "They might,” replied Morey smiling. “It's worth a try, anyway. And let's get out of the city to do it. We can go up to my place in Vermont. We can use the lab up there for all we need. We've got everything worked out, so there's no need to stay here.

  "Besides, I've got up there in which we can indulge in a little attention to the fish stage of evolution."

  "Good enough,” Arcot agreed, grinning broadly. “And we'll need that lake, too. Here in the city it's only eighty-five because the arrears are soaking up heat for their molecular drive, but out in the country it'll be in the nineties."

  "To the mountains, then! Let's pack up!"

  CHAPTER II

  The many books and papers they had collected were hastily put into the briefcases, and the four men took the elevator to the landing area on the roof.

  "We'll take my car,” Morey said. “The rest of you can just leave yours here. They'll be safe for a few days."

  They all piled in as Morey s
lid into the driver's seat and turned on the power.

  They rose slowly, looking below them at the traffic of the great city. New York had long since abandoned her rivers as trade routes; they had been covered solidly by steel decks which were used as public landing fields and ground car routes. Around them loomed titanic structures of glistening colored tile. The sunlight reflected brilliantly from them, and the contrasting colors of the buildings seemed to blend together into a great, multicolored painting.

  The darting planes, the traffic of commerce down between the great buildings, and the pleasure cars above, combined to give a series of changing, darting shadows that wove a flickering pattern over the city. The long lines of ships coming in from Chicago, London, Buenos Aires and San Francisco, and the constant flow from across the Pole-from Russia, India, and China, were like mighty black serpents that wound their way into the city.

  Morey cut into a Northbound traffic level, moved into the high-speed lane, and eased in on the accelerator. He held to the traffic pattern for two hundred and fifty miles, until he was well past Boston, then he turned at the first break and fired the ship toward their goal in Vermont.

  Less than forty-five minutes since they had left New York, Morey was dropping the car toward the little mountain lake that offered them a place for seclusion. Gently, he let the ship glide smoothly into the shed where the first molecular motion ship had been built. Arcot jumped out, saying:

  "We're here-unload and get going. I think a swim and some sleep is in order before we start work on this ship. We can begin tomorrow.” He looked approvingly at the clear blue water of the little lake.

  Wade climbed out and pushed Arcot to one side. “All right, out of the way, then, little one, and let a man get going.” He headed for the house with the briefcases.