The Unending Night, page 2
Kristy looked prettily puzzled. “And what does that mean?” she asked.
“It means more than a hundred million times the energy produced by all the coal in the world; and it means, if the Rilke reactors are successful, we will have liberated enough energy to last mankind fifteen thousand million years.”
Kristy’s eyes were shining now. “And your brother—your brother, Lance, is the man who is doing all that for us?”
Lee was silent for a moment. He thought of telling her that the theoretical work had been his and Lance had only translated it into engineering reality, but it sounded like boasting and his whole being revolted against that.
“Yes,” he said, “Lance and those who work with him will be responsible if the reactors are a success.”
“They will be. I know they will be,” Kristy enthused. “Power for all mankind for a thousand million years. Oh, Lee, I’ve got to meet Lance; I’ve just got to meet him! He’s the kind of man I wrote about—the kind of man I’ve dreamed of all my life!”
The next afternoon they went sailing, and Lee was never to forget what happened, or its effect on their future relationship.
Nor would he ever forget how she looked that day. She had reminded him of nothing so much as a Viking maiden, her honey-gold hair whipping about her face and her long, tanned lets stretched out in front of her.
The weather had been beautiful when they set out, but as they sailed, a wind came up and the calm water became choppy.
“Looks like we might be in for a blow,” Lee said, glancing at the gathering clouds apprehensively.
Kristy laughed into the rising wind. “I hope so. I like a storm. It’s so damn boring sailing when the water is as smooth as a mirror. I like something—anything—that fights back.”
“A storm fights back?”
“Yes, and that’s a lot more than I can say for most people.”
“But a storm is a force of nature,” Lee protested. “it isn’t a personal adversary. Not unless you think of yourself as a force of nature, too.”
“Maybe I do,” the girl said, laughing, “and maybe I am.”
Her arrogant tone and the defiant tossing of her head reminded Lee of the fang-and-claw philosophy of her novels. Did she really believe in her supermen who refused to abide by the mundane laws and values of the society in which they lived? Did she honestly think “The superior ones” should be guided by only their own rebellious souls and inflated egos? He rejected the thought as quickly as it came. No, her novels weren’t Kristy. They were the products of her imagination, but not the woman herself. The real Kristy was this beautiful Viking girl who could look bravely into the teeth of a gathering storm and laugh at it.
“It’s going to hit us,” she said exultantly as their tiny craft ran before the squall. “And I think it’ll give us a real run for our money.”
Lee glanced back over his shoulder and suddenly became aware of the queasiness of his stomach. He fought it down and tried not to think about it. Of all people, Kristy Konrad was the last one he wanted to get seasick in front of.
The storm hit them. The boat shuddered and the sails whipped full, and it shot forward like a hunted thing.
“We’ll have to reef in.” Kristy said after a few minutes of wild plunging, a following sea and a heavy wind driving them toward the shoreline which had disappeared in the rain. “We’ll have to reef in or we won’t have a mast.”
“I’ll go,” Lee said, getting to his feet and hauling himself forward while the deck dropped from under his feet and the wind tore at his clothing. His stomach heaved and churned, and by the time he got his hands on the first line, he knew he was fighting a losing battle with his seasickness. His mouth filled with the salt taste he knew presaged vomiting and he felt the color drain from his face.
“What’s the matter?” Kristy yelled over the noise of the storm.
“I…guess…I’m a little sick,” he gasped, and as thought the words were a trigger, the contents of his stomach surged upward so fast he barely had time to get his head over the side.
“Be careful!” Kristy screamed as a wave hit the sloop and almost flung him overboard. He was hanging onto a line with only one hand, and the boiling sea was staring into his face only inches away. He was so sick and weak that he thought for a moment he couldn’t hold on, but then if flashed through his mind that this was a ridiculous time to die, with his work only just begun. Somehow strength flowed back into his rubbery arms and he pulled himself back on board.
“Come on back and take the tiller!” Kristy shouted “I’ll get the sail in!”
On his hands and knees, he crawled back and took the helm while she went about the business of reefing in the sails with brisk efficiency.
Then she was back beside him, taking over the tiller and staring excitedly into the teeth of the gale.
“It’s magnificent! Isn’t it magnificent?” she cried, her blue eyes fixed on the horizon.
Lee looked at the turbulent sea around them and shook his head. “Magnificent, perhaps … but also terrifying.
Nothing more was said, but he felt that his seasickness and now his words had downgraded him in her estimation. He was sure of it a little later when they came in sight of land and he said, “I think we’re going to make it.”
Her eyes were cool as she looked at him. “Those who are good enough always make it, Lee. The fit survive; the unfit die. Good sailors make harbor, the poor ones end up on the rocks. That’s Nature’s way and it’s good. It keeps the deserving at the top where they belong.”
He had heard similar talk from Lance, and knew with a sinking heart that these two would have much in common if they ever met.
He did his best during the next few weeks to keep that from happening. He felt guilty about it, but he still tried to keep them apart. As certainly as he knew he was in love with Kristy, Lee knew that once she met Lance her small interest in him would disappear.
So he maneuvered and finagled to put off their meeting, and in the meantime, courted Kristy as energetically as he knew how. He took her to the theater, to baseball games, and again and again they went swimming and water skiing.
Kristy did everything well. She flew a plane as well as she sailed a boat, and her water skiing was superb. Her splendid young athletic body was as well developed as her mind, and she was everything Lee had ever dreamed of in a woman. Kristy, however was looking for a man who could match the flamboyant heroes of her novels. Lee didn’t fill the bill and he knew it, and so finally, after six weeks, he gave in and arranged for her to meet Lance.
The meeting took place in the Satellite Room of the New Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. Kristy was wearing a shimmering ice-blue evening gown that matched her eyes and set off her blond hair with its sprinkling of Martian glow stones. Lee had never seen her look more lovely as he and Lance escorted her into the slowly revolving room, a hundred stories above the teeming Loop.
“This is one of the most beautiful places in the world,” Kristy said after they were seated and looking out across Lake Michigan with its speeding flitter boats. “I always come her when I’m in Chicago.”
“It’s a perfect setting for the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Lance said, his eyes catching and holding Kristy’s.
Lee sighed and played with his drink, wondering idly if Lance’s compliment hadn’t struck closer to the truth than he knew. Kristy had insisted on meeting Lance her, and it wasn’t beyond reason that maybe she had done so because she knew what a perfect background it made for her striking beauty.
“Lance, I’ve been wanting to meet you for so long that now I hardly know what to say.”
Lance laughed his mellow, low-pitched laugh. “They tell me the wisest thing a woman can do when she meets a new man is to say as little as possible. That way he has a chance to talk about himself until he is convince she is brilliant.”
Lee smiled bleakly and Kristy laughed. Then she leaned across the table and placed her hand on his. “I’m afraid I’m not that wise,” she said, “because I want to talk about myself as well as you. Do you realize how much you resemble Rick Gregory, the hero in my novel Grasp Tomorrow? Why, it’s almost as though I had precognition—writing about a man I had never met.”
Lee watched Lance smile modestly and wave his hand in a deprecating gesture. “Well…while I must admit Rick is one of my favorite fictional characters, I can hardly claim to—”
“But you are, Lance! You are Rick!” Kristy said, her voice intense. “I must have known—somehow, I must have known!”
“Personally, I’ve always preferred Ransom Copeland in A Man—” Lee began, but was cut off by a wave of Kristy’s hand that was almost a dismissal.
He shrugged and shut up. He had been about to lie anyway. He couldn’t stand either of Kristy’s books, and especially not the heroes. He had reread them since he had fallen in love with Kristy, trying to understand her better. He had read with a concentration he had never brought to anything but his work before, but still he failed. And looking at his brother and Kristy gazing into each other’s eyes, he knew it couldn’t matter less to them whether he liked or understood her books. They were too busy discovering each other.
“Of course, I don’t know much about thermonuclear reactors,” Kristy said. “I’m a complete idiot where nuclear physics is concerned. You’ll have to start at the beginning and fill me in.”
Now that’s a lie, Lee thought. He had spent quite a bit of time in the last six weeks explaining that very subject to Kristy, and she had seemed to absorb an amazing amount of it.
“Well, we’re starting about even then,” Lance said, “because I don’t know much about literature.”
“Oh, but you must,” Kristy said, her face aglow. “You’re right out of a novel—my novel.”
Lee took a large swallow of his drink. That Kristy should equate Lance with Rick Gregory was profoundly disturbing to him. Gregory was an arrogant, self-centered young man, a financial wizard who had built a great industrial empire by climbing roughshod over friends and acquaintances. Throughout the book he had believed implicitly that everything he did was right and justified because he was one of the outstanding, superior beings, who has no need for, nor could be expected to obey, the mundane laws that govern ordinary citizens.
If Lance were really like that, if Kristy were interpreting him correctly—no, it couldn’t be. Lee refused to believe it. Lance was no more like Rick Gregory than Kristy was like the vicious philosophy expressed in her writings.
Lee finished his drink and got slowly to his feet. The other two didn’t even notice, they were so engrossed in each other. He listened to their animated conversation and knew there was no room for him at the table. There never is any room for a third person when two people are falling in love.
They hadn’t known when he left them, and in the three years since then had been aware of him only occasionally.
That’s the way he had known it would happen, and it had, Lee thought, as he stared at the back of Kristy’s golden head while she listened with rapt attention to Lance.
Lee stood up abruptly. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said to Freeman, and started for the door.
“Wait a minute, I’ll go with you.”
Lee strode out into the corridor with the smaller man at his heels. They walked along quietly for a few minutes and then Freeman stopped and turned to face him. “Something’s bugging you, boy. Want to tell me about it?”
Lee sighed. “I don’t know, Stan. I don’t know whether I should tell anyone—or even if I want to.”
“Is it something between you and Lance? I know there’s a clash of personalities, but—”
“No, it’s not that. It’s much more serious than that.”
“Then what is it?”
Lee hesitated for a few seconds longer and then said, “It’s the reactors, Stan. I’m worried about them. And I’m even more worried about Lance’s reaction to some of the problems that have been arising concerning them.”
“Such as?”
“Well…I’ve been down below all last night and most of today, checking and rechecking every gauge and piece of equipment with Bill Mason. I don’t like the look of things, and as Project Engineer, Bill is worried, too, but neither of us has been able to get through to Lance.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Lance and I have always had our differences, but they’ve always come from our opposite ways of approaching things. Whatever else, I’ve always trusted his scientific judgment—and known it was as sound as mine.”
“And now you don’t?”
“Let’s say, I’m not sure,” Lee said. “After Bill and I finished checking things, we talked to Franz Jurgens. He’s had more experience with reactors of all types than any man I know, and he agreed with me that we’re in for trouble.”
Stan blinked his large eyes behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Trouble? Real trouble?”
“I’m afraid so, Stan—more and bigger trouble than I want to think about. That’s why I went to Lance at once with out findings.”
“And what did he say?”
“He laughed at us. He said we’re running scared like a bunch of old women. He wouldn’t even check it out himself. That’s what I mean about how he’s changed. He doesn’t even seem to want to know. His sound scientific judgment is slipping. Now that I think of it, it has been for months.”
Chapter three
STAN STARED UP AT LEE. “I don’t like the sound of that. It could be bad, damn bad.”
“It could be worse than bad,” Lee said. “It could be catastrophic.”
“What is it about the reactors, Lee? What is it that’s wrong?”
“For the last year, I’ve become more and more concerned that we’ve made serious mistakes in the magnetic field that prevents the plasma from melting the heat exchange systems. If that should happen, I’m sure we’d have a runaway chain reaction or thermonuclear explosion that might blow half this state off the map.”
Freeman whistled softly, his big eyes getting even bigger. “And what do you propose to do about it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t convince Lance. He says I’m just trying to wreck his baby. I’d like to talk to the Board, but—”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Well, if it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one who’s worried.”
“Who else?”
“Me, for one—and then there’s Miranda.”
“Oh? You’ve been discussing it with her?”
“No, not really, but she keeps asking me when I think the Marsport Monster will go into operation and what will happen when it does.”
Lee nodded. “I’ve been wondering that myself. Do you suppose she’s still in her lab?”
“She was an hour ago, and she had pages and pages of data on the relay satellites to feed into her computer. I doubt if she’s anywhere near finished yet.”
“I think I’ll go talk to her,” Lee said.
“Good idea,” Freeman approved. “Let me know what you decide. I haven’t been sleeping too well lately, just thinking about things.”
He took off toward his own section, leaving Lee to catch a seat on a moving glideway which carried him through a long, brightly lighted tunnel to the astronomical division.
Lights were still on behind the door which bore the inscription. “Dr. Miranda Vernon, Director, Astro-Physical Dept.” Lee knocked and went in. The outer office was deserted, but he found Miranda in the inner one, seated behind a big desk piled high with papers.
Dr. Vernon didn’t look like a Nobel Prize winner. She was a tiny woman with carroty red hair, a small turned up nose, and one of those beautiful complexions the damp climate of the British Isles sometimes produces.
Lee had always stood somewhat in awe of her, partly because of her intellectual achievements and partly because of her English reserve.
Now, however, her face was lit up with a dazzling smile. “Why, Lee, how nice to see you,” she said. “I’m about to give this up for the night. Wouldn’t it be fun to take a copter into Radip City and have a drink and dinner?”
Lee’s mind was on other things. “There’s something I want to talk to you about. Stan Freeman and I were talking just now and—”
“Excellent chemist, Stan,” Miranda said, stretching her arms up over her head.
“Yes, he is,” Lee agreed, noting absently how well she filled out the front of her laboratory smock. “He tells me you’ve been entertaining doubts about the Rilke reactors.”
Miranda’s gray-green eyes looked into his. “Please don’t take it personally, Lee.”
“Of course not. I have doubts myself. That’s what I want to discuss with you.”
“Oh. For a moment there, I thought you had come to what’s your American term?—to read me out for attacking your brainchild.”
Lee smiled. “Hardly. My brother might, but not me. Now tell me what you’re worried about.”
“Well, as you know, I’m an astronomer and hardly qualified to talk nuclear physics. Why don’t you tell me first and then maybe I can see whether mine are real.”
“Okay,” Lee said, picking a pencil up off her desk and rolling it between his palms. “Where shall I start? You do know, don’t you, that in an ordinary atomic plant only a very small amount of the uranium used undergoes chain reaction before the resulting heat destroys the critical mass by melting or explosion?”
At her nod, he went on. “And once the critical mass has been destroyed, the process comes to an end and nothing very terrifying happens. Right?”
Again she nodded and he continued. “That’s the way it has been until now. There have been atomic accidents but never an atomic explosion at a reactor—because there’s always been a good safety margin.”
“And now there isn’t?”
“Let me explain. People who work with atomic energy of any kind have two main concepts of safety. One is that of ‘always safe mass.’ The other is ‘always safe geometry.’ That’s the way we avoid critical mass, which is a characteristic of all nuclear fuels. Atomic fuels reaching critical mass become the equivalent of a bomb.”
