The Past Through Tomorrow

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “We’ve met,” said Erickson, pulling off his gauntlet to shake hands. He had had a couple of drinks with Lentz in town and considered him a “nice old duck.”

  “You’re just between shows, but stick around and we’ll start another run—not that there is much to see.”

  While Erickson continued with the set-up, Harper conducted Lentz around the laboratory, explaining the line of research they were conducting, as happy as a father showing off twins. The psychiatrist listened with one ear and made appropriate comments while he studied the young scientist for signs of the instability he had noted to be recorded against him.

  “You see,” Harper explained, oblivious to the interest in himself, “we are testing radioactive materials to see if we can produce disintegration of the sort that takes place in the pile, but in a minute, almost microscopic, mass. If we are successful, we can use the breeder pile to make a safe, convenient, atomic fuel for rockets—or for anything else.” He went on to explain their schedule of experimentation.

  “I see,” Lentz observed politely. “What element are you examining now?”

  Harper told him. “But it’s not a case of examining one element—we’ve finished Isotope II of this element with negative results. Our schedule calls next for running the same test on Isotope V. Like this.” He hauled out a lead capsule, and showed the label to Lentz. He hurried away to the shield around the target of the betatron, left open by Erickson. Lentz saw that he had opened the capsule, and was performing some operation on it with a long pair of tongs in a gingerly manner, having first lowered his helmet. Then he closed and clamped the target shield.

  “Okay, Gus?” he called out. “Ready to roll?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Erickson assured him, coming around from behind the ponderous apparatus, and rejoining them. They crowded behind a thick metal and concrete shield that cut them off from direct sight of the set-up.

  “Will I need to put on armor?” inquired Lentz.

  “No,” Erickson reassured him, “we wear it because we are around the stuff day in and day out. You just stay behind the shield and you’ll be all right.”

  Erickson glanced at Harper, who nodded, and fixed his eyes on a panel of instruments mounted behind the shield. Lentz saw Erickson press a push button at the top of the board, then heard a series of relays click on the far side of the shield. There was a short moment of silence.

  The floor slapped his feet like some incredible bastinado. The concussion that beat on his ears was so intense that it paralyzed the auditory nerve almost before it could be recorded as sound. The air-conducted concussion wave flailed every inch of his body with a single, stinging, numbing blow. As he picked himself up, he found he was trembling uncontrollably and realized, for the first time, that he was getting old.

  Harper was seated on the floor and had commenced to bleed from the nose. Erickson had gotten up, his cheek was cut. He touched a hand to the wound, then stood there, regarding the blood on his fingers with a puzzled expression on his face.

  “Are you hurt?” Lentz inquired inanely. “What happened?”

  Harper cut in. “Gus, we’ve done it! We’ve done it! Isotope Five has turned the trick!”

  Erickson looked still more bemused. “Five?” he said stupidly, “—but that wasn’t Five, that was Isotope II. I put it in myself.”

  “You put it in? I put it in! It was Five, I tell you!”

  They stood staring at each other, still confused by the explosion, and each a little annoyed at the boneheaded stupidity the other displayed in the face of the obvious. Lentz diffidently interceded.

  “Wait a minute, boys,” he suggested, “maybe there’s a reason— Gus, you placed a quantity of the second isotope in the receiver?”

  “Why, yes, certainly. I wasn’t satisfied with the last run, and I wanted to check it.”

  Lentz nodded. “It’s my fault, gentlemen,” he admitted ruefully. “I came in, disturbed your routine, and both of you charged the receiver. I know Harper did, for I saw him do it—with Isotope V. I’m sorry.”

  Understanding broke over Harper’s face, and he slapped the older man on the shoulder. “Don’t be sorry,” he laughed; “you can come around to our lab and help us make mistakes any time you feel in the mood— Can’t he, Gus? This is the answer, Doctor Lentz, this is it!”

  “But,” the psychiatrist pointed out, “you don’t know which isotope blew up.”

  “Nor care,” Harper supplemented. “Maybe it was both, taken together. But we will know—this business is cracked now; we’ll soon have it open.” He gazed happily around at the wreckage.

  In spite of Superintendent King’s anxiety, Lentz refused to be hurried in passing judgment on the situation. Consequently, when he did present himself at King’s office, and announced that he was ready to report, King was pleasantly surprised as well as relieved. “Well, I’m delighted,” he said. “Sit down, doctor, sit down. Have a cigar. What do we do about it?”

  But Lentz stuck to his perennial cigaret, and refused to be hurried. “I must have some information first: how important,” he demanded, “is the power from your plant?”

  King understood the implication at once. “If you are thinking about shutting down the plant for more than a limited period, it can’t be done.”

  “Why not? If the figures supplied me are correct, your power output is less than thirteen percent of the total power used in the country.”

  “Yes, that is true, but we also supply another thirteen percent second hand through the plutonium we breed here—and you haven’t analyzed the items that make up the balance. A lot of it is domestic power which householders get from sunscreens located on their roofs. Another big slice is power for the moving roadways—that’s sunpower again. The portion we provide here directly or indirectly is the main power source for most of the heavy industries—steel, plastics, lithics, all kinds of manufacturing and processing. You might as well cut the heart out of a man—”

  “But the food industry isn’t basically dependent on you?” Lentz persisted.

  “No… Food isn’t basically a power industry—although we do supply a certain percentage of the power used in processing. I see your point, and will go on, and concede that transportation, that is to say, distribution of food, could get along without us. But good heavens, Doctor, you can’t stop atomic power without causing the biggest panic this country has ever seen. It’s the keystone of our whole industrial system.”

  “The country has lived through panics before, and we got past the oil shortage safely.”

  “Yes—because gunpower and atomic power came along to take the place of oil. You don’t realize what this would mean, Doctor. It would be worse than a war; in a system like ours, one thing depends on another. If you cut off the heavy industries all at once, everything else stops, too.”

  “Nevertheless, you had better dump the pile.” The uranium in the pile was molten, its temperature being greater than twenty-four hundred degrees centigrade. The pile could be dumped into a group of small containers, when it was desired to shut it down. The mass into any one container would be too small to maintain progressive atomic disintegration.

  King glanced involuntarily at the glass-enclosed relay mounted on his office wall, by which he, as well as the engineer on duty, could dump the pile, if need be. “But I couldn’t do that… or rather, if I did, the plant wouldn’t stay shut down. The directors would simply replace me with someone who would operate it.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Lentz silently considered the situation for some time, then said, “Superintendent, will you order a car to fly me back to Chicago?”

  “You’re going, doctor?”

  “Yes.” He took the cigaret holder from his face, and, for once, the smile of Olympian detachment was gone completely. His entire manner was sober, even tragic. “Short of shutting down the plant, there is no solution to your problem—none whatsoever!

  “I owe you a full explanation,” he continued, presently. “You are confr
onted here with recurring instances of situational psychoneurosis. Roughly, the symptoms manifest themselves as anxiety neurosis, or some form of hysteria. The partial amnesia of your secretary, Steinke, is a good example of the latter. He might be cured with shock technique, but it would hardly be a kindness, as he has achieved a stable adjustment which puts him beyond the reach of the strain he could not stand.

  “That other young fellow, Harper, whose blowup was the immediate cause of you sending for me, is an anxiety case. When the cause of the anxiety was eliminated from his matrix, he at once regained full sanity. But keep a close watch on his friend, Erickson—

  “However, it is the cause, and prevention, of situational psychoneurosis we are concerned with here, rather than the forms in which it is manifested. In plain language, psychoneurosis situational simply refers to the common fact that, if you put a man in a situation that worries him more than he can stand, in time he blows up, one way or another.

  “That is precisely the situation here. You take sensitive, intelligent young men, impress them with the fact that a single slip on their part, or even some fortuitous circumstance beyond their control, will result in the death of God knows how many other people, and then expect them to remain sane. It’s ridiculous—impossible!”

  “But good heavens, doctor!—there must be some answer— There must!” He got up and paced around the room. Lentz noted, with pity, that King himself was riding the ragged edge of the very condition they were discussing.

  “No,” he said slowly. “No… let me explain. You don’t dare entrust control to less sensitive, less socially conscious men. You might as well turn the controls over to a mindless idiot. And to psychoneurosis situational there are but two cures. The first obtains when the psychosis results from a misevaluation of environment. That cure calls for semantic readjustment. One assists the patient to evaluate correctly his environment. The worry disappears because there never was a real reason for worry in the situation itself, but simply in the wrong meaning the patient’s mind had assigned to it.

  “The second case is when the patient has correctly evaluated the situation, and rightly finds in it cause for extreme worry. His worry is perfectly sane and proper, but he cannot stand up under it indefinitely; it drives him crazy. The only possible cure is to change the situation. I have stayed here long enough to assure myself that such is the condition here. You engineers have correctly evaluated the public danger of this thing, and it will, with dreadful certainty, drive all of you crazy!

  “The only possible solution is to dump the pile—and leave it dumped.”

  King had continued his nervous pacing of the floor, as if the walls of the room itself were the cage of his dilemma. Now he stopped and appealed once more to the psychiatrist. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”

  “Nothing to cure. To alleviate—well, possibly.”

  “How?”

  “Situational psychosis results from adrenalin exhaustion. When a man is placed under a nervous strain, his adrenal glands increase their secretion to help compensate for the strain. If the strain is too great and lasts too long, the adrenals aren’t equal to the task, and he cracks. That is what you have here. Adrenalin therapy might stave off a mental breakdown, but it most assuredly would hasten a physical breakdown. But that would be safer from a viewpoint of public welfare—even though it assumes that physicists are expendable!

  “Another thing occurs to me: If you selected any new watch engineers from the membership of churches that practice the confessional, it would increase the length of their usefulness.”

  King was plainly surprised. “I don’t follow you.”

  “The patient unloads most of his worry on his confessor, who is not himself actually confronted by the situation, and can stand it. That is simply an ameliorative, however. I am convinced that, in this situation, eventual insanity is inevitable. But there is a lot of good sense in the confessional,” he mused. “It fills a basic human need. I think that is why the early psychoanalysts were so surprisingly successful, for all their limited knowledge.” He fell silent for a while, then added, “If you will be so kind as to order a strato-cab for me—”

  “You’ve nothing more to suggest?”

  “No. You had better turn your psychological staff loose on means of alleviation; they’re able men, all of them.”

  King pressed a switch, and spoke briefly to Steinke. Turning back to Lentz, he said, “You’ll wait here until your car is ready?”

  Lentz judged correctly that King desired it, and agreed.

  Presently the tube delivery on King’s desk went “Ping!” The superintendent removed a small white pasteboard, a calling card. He studied it with surprise and passed it over to Lentz. “I can’t imagine why he should be calling on me,” he observed, and added, “Would you like to meet him?”

  Lentz read:

  THOMAS P. HARRINGTON

  Captain (Mathematics)

  United States Navy

  Director,

  U.S. Naval Observatory

  “But I do know him,” he said. “I’d be very pleased to see him.”

  Harrington was a man with something on his mind. He seemed relieved when Steinke had finished ushering him in and had returned to the outer office. He commenced to speak at once, turning to Lentz, who was nearer to him than King. “You’re King? Why, Doctor Lentz! What are you doing here?”

  “Visiting,” answered Lentz, accurately but incompletely, as he shook hands. “This is Superintendent King over here. Superintendent King—Captain Harrington.”

  “How do you do, Captain—it’s a pleasure to have you here.”

  “It’s an honor to be here, sir.”

  “Sit down?”

  “Thanks.” He accepted a chair, and laid a briefcase on a corner of King’s desk. “Superintendent, you are entitled to an explanation as to why I have broken in on you like this—”

  “Glad to have you.” In fact, the routine of formal politeness was an anodyne to King’s frayed nerves.

  “That’s kind of you, but— That secretary chap, the one that brought me in here, would it be too much to ask for you to tell him to forget my name? I know it seems strange—”

  “Not at all.” King was mystified, but willing to grant any reasonable request of a distinguished colleague in science. He summoned Steinke to the interoffice visiphone and gave him his orders.

  Lentz stood up, and indicated that he was about to leave. He caught Harrington’s eye. “I think you want a private palaver, Captain.”

  King looked from Harrington to Lentz, and back to Harrington. The astronomer showed momentary indecision, then protested, “I have no objection at all myself; it’s up to Doctor King. As a matter of fact,” he added, “it might be a very good thing if you did sit in on it.”

  “I don’t know what it is, Captain,” observed King, “that you want to see me about, but Doctor Lentz is already here in a confidential capacity.”

  “Good! Then that’s settled… I’ll get right down to business. Doctor King, you know Destry’s mechanics of infinitesimals?”

  “Naturally.” Lentz cocked a brow at King, who chose to ignore it.

  “Yes, of course. Do you remember theorem six, and the transformation between equations thirteen and fourteen?”

  “I think so, but I’d want to see them.” King got up and went over to a bookcase. Harrington stayed him with a hand.

  “Don’t bother. I have them here.” He hauled out a key, unlocked his briefcase, and drew out a large, much-thumbed, loose-leaf notebook. “Here. You, too, Doctor Lentz. Are you familiar with this development?”

  Lentz nodded. “I’ve had occasion to look into them.”

  “Good—I think it’s agreed that the step between thirteen and fourteen is the key to the whole matter. Now the change from thirteen to fourteen looks perfectly valid—and would be, in some fields. But suppose we expand it to show every possible phase of the matter, every link in the chain of reasoning.”

  He turned a page,
and showed them the same two equations broken down into nine intermediate equations. He placed a finger under an associated group of mathematical symbols. “Do you see that? Do you see what that implies?” He peered anxiously at their faces.

  King studied it, his lips moving. “Yes… I believe I do see. Odd… I never looked at it just that way before—yet I’ve studied those equations until I’ve dreamed about them.” He turned to Lentz. “Do you agree, Doctor?”

  Lentz nodded slowly. “I believe so… Yes, I think I may say so.”

  Harrington should have been pleased; he wasn’t. “I had hoped you could tell me I was wrong,” he said, almost petulantly, “but I’m afraid there is no further doubt about it. Doctor Destry included an assumption valid in molar physics, but for which we have absolutely no assurance in atomic physics. I suppose you realize what this means to you, Doctor King?”

  King’s voice was a dry whisper. “Yes,” he said, “yes… It means that if the Big Bomb out there ever blows up, we must assume that it will all go up all at once, rather than the way Destry predicted… and God help the human race!”

  Captain Harrington cleared his throat to break the silence that followed. “Superintendent,” he said, “I would not have ventured to call had it been simply a matter of disagreement as to interpretation of theoretical predictions—”

  “You have something more to go on?”

  “Yes, and no. Probably you gentlemen think of the Naval Observatory as being exclusively preoccupied with ephmerides and tide tables. In a way you would be right—but we still have some time to devote to research as long as it doesn’t cut into the appropriation. My special interest has always been lunar theory.

  “I don’t mean lunar ballistics,” he continued, “I mean the much more interesting problem of its origin and history, the problem the younger Darwin struggled with, as well as my illustrious predecessor, Captain T. J. J. See. I think that it is obvious that any theory of lunar origin and history must take into account the surface features of the moon—especially the mountains, the craters, that mark its face so prominently.”