Collected Short Fiction, page 211
“I told him I’d come myself, if necessary, and Thorn replied:
“ ‘Your man should be here at ten o’clock this morning. If I am right, he may be back at noon, or it may be a year. If Starbuck is right—he won’t come back.’ ”
“And that’s all?” inquired Rod.
“Except that I first put Garrick on the story. Garrick knows Starbuck. He called him on the phone. And Garrick isn’t going. A suicidal project, he says.
“There’s one story already sizzling, Trent. Starbuck’s younger than Thorn, of course, but every bit as keen. The one man who has added anything to Thorn’s work in intra-atomic dynamics. And they’re close friends, though they’ve locked horns a dozen times before.
“Well, this is the biggest chance you’re apt to have, Trent—an exclusive invite to Thorn’s big show. It’s better than a grand-stand seat at an earthquake. Muff it—and I’ll take you apart.”
Rodney Trent, standing outside the guarded entrance, wasn’t worried about muffing anything. Several years of leg work had taught him that newspapermen can live without worry.
A long car glided in and stopped squarely in front of the gate. There were two passengers. The long-bodied gaunt man, with the round melon of a paunch, the thin nose, the odd lock of dark hair on top of a bare bald head, Rod recognized as Morrison Cross—Thorn’s father-in-law and master of Cross Power, Inc.
The other would be his secretary, perhaps. They walked past the uniformed guard, the chauffeur following, limping under heavy bags.
Rod followed them, eagerly. If old Cross came into it, the story ought to be a peach. Cross was probably the richest man on earth. Cross Power, the sole licensee under Thom’s patents, merchandised atomic power throughout the world, at prices that cut the throat of competition.
OLD CROSS was hard, no doubt of that. He had crushed the coal, oil, and water-power interests without mercy. He kept an iron hand on his own employees. Grimly, he defied the liberals who were always exposing the “power trust,” and urging consumer cooperation, or rate-setting, or government ownership.
Old Cross hadn’t even a decent nod for the man at the gate. But that man, respectfully firm, stopped Rodney.
“Sorry, sir, but the laboratory isn’t open to visitors.”
“But Dr. Thorn sent for me. I’m from the Times.”
“You are? We were expecting Mr. Garrick.”
“I’m in Garrick’s place. My credentials.”
He examined the press card minutely, and nodded.
“Sorry, Mr. Trent. My orders are very strict.” He was thawing a little. “Garrick didn’t want to come?”
“No. But what’s coming off, anyhow? This all seems dam mysterious.”
The guard’s lips tightened.
“I can’t talk, Mr. Trent. You’ll find out inside.” He shook his head. “Garrick has good judgment, if you ask me. Dr. Starbuck told me himself that they’ll never come back.”
In spite of himself, Rod was a little impressed. And his curiosity was being strung to a high pitch indeed.
He walked into an empty room, vast as an airplane hangar. The huge rear doors, opened wide, gave a view of the grounds within the white fence, scattered with trim gray concrete buildings, studded with steel towers. Tall elms, beyond refreshing lawns, screened Thorn’s long, red-tiled residence.
Rod’s mind was on the riddle of the experiment, but a quick inspection of this building gave him no clue. It looked as if planned to hold some machine as bulky as a dirigible—but, if so, that machine was gone.
Down the broad, vacant floor, he walked to join a group of people standing beside a pile of luggage. The hundred, he supposed, about to take part in the experiment. Most of them in overalls or white jackets he took to be employees of Thom’s. Several were apparently visitors.
In the first moment, he sensed the current of anxious puzzled apprehension running among them.
Morrison Cross was standing a little apart, thin hands locked over his paunch, yellowish eyes staring intently down at the intricate gold head of his heavy cane. Rod recognized several of the others: among them the physicist, Edwards, and Weir, the astronomer. A few were obviously college students.
Smiling guilelessly, Rod bore down on the group in search of information.
“Smoke?” he greeted Morrison Cross, offering an expensive cigar. “F wonder when the show begins? I suppose you’re helping finance the experiment, Mr. Cross?”
The yellowish, hard eyes measured him shrewdly. Morrison Cross accepted the cigar, critically sniffed it, put it carefully in his vest pocket.
“Humph, young man,” he said.
Rod drifted on, making a mental note for the expense account, still smiling.
The man who had come in with Morrison Cross was equally communicative. Speaking with an elaborate Oxford accent, he politely refused the cigar. He gave Rod a card printed, “Mr. Cyril Culpepper,” and bearing, below, the minute inscription, “Secretary to Mr. Morrison Cross.”
The astronomer Weir, a bald little man, smiling warmly, seemed glad to talk without recompense in nicotine.
“Something fundamentally new, I’m told,” he said. “The outcome, I gather, of Thom’s splendid work in atomic dynamics.” He admitted, “Yes, I was warned of some physical danger—but where could I have left those spectacles?”
The willowy, platinum-headed girl in the white sports sweater confessed to being Thorn’s secretary. Melanie Dean was the name. Rod rather liked her.
“Yes, I know about the experiment,” she admitted, with a dazzling smile. But she couldn’t think of discussing Thom’s work. Yes, she was aware of danger, but she was always with Dr. Thorn.
Rod approached a couple whom he classified as college students—a thin, pale, stooped young man, with washed-out, near-sighted blue eyes; and a vigorously athletic young woman, taller than he, with a stern simplicity of feature.
“Yes, we are science students under Dr. Edwards,” the young man said, in an anaemic voice. “He got the invitation for Martha Lee and myself.”
“No, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Martha Lee took the next question. “Dr. Edwards didn’t know—but anything Thorn does is sure to be important.
“Yes,” she said, “Dr. Edwards was told that we might never come back.” She looked at the young man with a peculiar pathos in her wide-set, hazel eyes. “We don’t care, do we, Paul?”
Paul’s narrow shoulders made a little defiant shrug.
“No,” he piped stoutly, “we aren’t coming back.”
Rod looked again at the defiant resolution in Paul’s feeble, emasculated body, at Martha Lee’s mannishly robust grimness. Their words assumed a tragic implication.
Then Rod saw Will Starbuck, standing alone just outside the great doors. He knew Starbuck slightly—Garrick had once introduced them.
Lean and. tall, Starbuck was in his early thirties. He wore a quiet brown sack suit. His blond head was bare to the morning sun. His face was clean-featured, tanned, pleasing. The clear fresh youth of a college athlete was matured in him, and accentuated by the purposeful firmness of his long mouth and the startling dynamic vigor of his gray eyes.
He was standing beside the border of lilies that edged the rich carpet of the lawn, looking down at the scarlet blooms. To Rod’s pleasure, he seemed disposed to talk.
“Look at these cannas, Trent,” he said. “Gorgeous things, aren’t they?” He touched one flaming petal with a reverent finger tip. “We should enjoy them well.”
“Can you tell me, Dr. Starbuck, about this experiment——”
The grave eyes stopped him.
“It’s Thorn’s show,” said Starbuck. “Let’s wait for him to make his own ballyhoo.” And he nodded at the red-roofed building. “Thorn will be here in a few minutes, with his apparatus.”
Rod was puzzled. The rest of the people waiting seemed anxious, apprehensive, keyed up. Starbuck, however, was perfectly calm, apparently untroubled—yet he was the very prophet of disaster.
Rod was beginning another question, when Starbuck spoke again of the lilies.
“They’re like scarlet banners against the grass. We must enjoy them, Trent. They’re the last flowers that you and I shall ever see.”
II.
DR. JARVIS THORN at last came stalking across the lawn, carrying in his right hand some small object that flashed in the sun. Two women accompanied him—the two daughters of old Morrison Cross.
Madeline, the elder, had been seven years Thorn’s wife. Her dark hair was drawn smoothly back from a placidly somber face that shone with a quiet loveliness. Her dark eyes were shadowed with some sad and hidden thing.
Ellen Cross, nearly ten years younger, was a vigorous redhead. Athletic, vivacious, she possessed all the vitality her sister lacked. She was not much spoiled, Rod thought, by being the favorite daughter of the world’s richest man.
Jarvis Thorn, himself, was a big man. Tall as Will Starbuck, he was massively heavy. He was a dozen years older than Starbuck. Gray had touched his dark hair; his wide face was finely lined. The hard story of his driven years was written in the tired little sag of his wide shoulders, in the weary dullness of his eyes.
At the moment, however, Rod was interested less in people than in the flashing object in Thorn’s hand. He hardly noted the eager smile that lit Will Starbuck’s face, as he went to meet Ellen Cross. He missed the quick, significant glance of greeting that passed between Madeline and thin, reedy Culpepper, and the radiant smile of welcome bestowed upon Jarvis Thorn by his platinum-haired secretary.
The flashing thing was a little oblong case of white metal, bound at the corners in brown leather. Thom carried it as if it contained something heavy.
A restless anxiety swept the crowd a little toward Thom. Some one called, “Ready, doctor?” And old Morrison Cross, leaning forward on the gold head of his cane, rapped out: “Come, Jarvis. You’ve kept us in the dark long enough. Let’s have it.”
Thorn planted himself heavily just behind the row of flaming cannas, saying, in his deep, weary, scholar’s voice:
“Well, Morrie, I’m ready to tell you now.”
“It had better be something big,” said old Cross, “seeing that it has taken ten years of your time, and thirty millions of my money.”
Thom was moved to a brief retort.
“I’ve made you a hundred times that much, Morrie—and you know it.”
Queerly, then, the heaviness, the weariness, was all swept out of his face, by his consuming interest in the thing he had to say. It seemed to Rod, watching, that years fell from him. A new fire lit his dark, deep-set eyes.
“I have invited each one of you here to take part in an experiment,” he said, and a sudden enthusiasm rang in his words. “Usually I have worked alone. But this thing has such promise that it would be criminal not to share it. I have included among you, therefore, the representatives of many branches of knowledge—even a journalist.
“Each one of you has been warned,” Thorn went on, “that this experiment is dangerous. It may cost the lives of all who take part, perhaps in sudden violence, perhaps slowly, or under some terrible circumstances we cannot yet picture.
“It isn’t too late to withdraw. If any one is doubtful, let him speak.”
He paused, while his eager eyes moved across the hundred people between him and the concrete building. From tall, dour Morrison Cross, at one side of the group, to his bright-eyed daughter Ellen, at the other—no one spoke.
Deliberating a moment, clothing his thought, he looked down at the little metal case still swinging in his hand. Then he began slowly, as if searching for an easy way for his audience, among unfamiliar conceptions.
“Size—I ask you to think of size. ‘ Each of us has grown up from a cell invisibly small. The world shrinks, as we come up from that cell. All about us in space are things larger than we are, and smaller: mountains and grains of sand, suns and atoms.
“Every one of us must have toyed in fancy with the idea of changing his size. Folk lore is crowded with giants and dwarfs. Fairy tales are filled with magic belts and wands that make men larger or smaller.
“ ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is one of a thousand literary versions of the idea. Some are pure fantasy. A few are based upon surprisingly sound scientific conceptions. Most of the latter variety deal with adventures to imaginary worlds upon atoms or electrons. A few deal with voyages in the other direction, to a ‘superuniverse,’ in which suns or perhaps galaxies are atoms.”
“Eh, Jarvis!” rapped out old Morrison Cross. “So you’re taking us to Wonderland—with my thirty millions.”
“I am offering you the most wonderful adventure that men were ever privileged to undertake.”
Thorn was warming to his subject. He plunged on:
“All that I have accomplished was implicit in my first discoveries ten years ago—the discoveries that unlocked the atom, so that Morrie, here, could make his millions.
“Implicit—yet it has taken ten years, and Morrie’s millions, to drag it out, transformed it into proven equations and workable mechanisms.
“Atoms are energy. Men have known that for fifty years. Atoms are electrons and their balancing protons. Electrons and protons are electricity, energy.
“Atoms are breaking up before our eyes. Uranium, radium, lead—and power incredible. Radium will melt its own weight of ice every hour; after sixteen centuries the radium is only half used up, the rest is still active. And the smallest fraction of the radium’s total energy is given off. Most of it stays locked in the lead.
“I can’t claim much credit for my part in it. Brilliant men—and one woman—had opened the way for me. Soddy and Rutherford and Moseley, Planck and Einstein, Bohr and De Broglie and Schrodinger—and Mme. Curie. Step by step—radioactivity, the quantum theory, wave mechanics.
“It just happened that my step was the last. I was the lucky one, the one to reach the door. Or perhaps Morrie, here, was the lucky one; he’s been selling the power of the atom.
“The one-stage converter, you know, that Morrie uses in his power houses, doesn’t transform matter completely into energy. Any of various heavy elements can be broken down, but the end products, besides heat and electrical energy, are always helium gas and some other heavy element lower in the scale.”
Thorn’s big hand made a slow gesture of emphasis.
“Since, I’ve done better. The new four-stage converter breaks down the end products, again and again. It disintegrates uranium, and delivers pure energy with a loss of less than one part in ten thousand. The uranium is used up. Nothing is left.”
Here, already, thought Rod, were headlines. Matter annihilated!
“Now let’s come back to the matter of size,” Thorn went on. “Atoms make up everything—this grass, your body, mine. And atoms, to put it crudely, are made of electricity. Increase the electrical energy, expand the size, of every atom in your body—and you would be larger.”
“Wonderland!” snorted old Morrison Cross, with a scornful gesture of his cane.
“No, Morrie, it isn’t that simple. The electron has a definite mass—the weight, one might put it, of electricity. The positive particle, the proton, is far smaller—and 1,845 times as heavy. When an atom absorbs energy in the ordinary way, in fixed amounts—quanta—the electronic orbits become larger. But the substance merely becomes hotter.
“I had to look for another way. Now the atom is beyond the concepts of a three-dimensional physics. Its representation requires as many dimensions as the electronic orbits have degrees of freedom. And it has been known for years that the mass of an electron increases with its orbital velocity. That seemed proof enough that power could increase the mass of atoms.
“I got nowhere until I attacked the problem through control in another dimension—time. By what amounts, in nontechnical language, to a compression in time, I have been able to increase at will the mass and the extension of atoms—and that without disturbing their structure, or their arrangement in the substance they compose.
“Likewise, by a similar expansion in time, I can decrease both the mass and extension of any substance.”
Jarvis Thorn stopped for a moment, while his burning, deep-shaded eyes studied the response to this statement.
Deepest interest lit every face. Weir, the bald astigmatic little astronomer, was leaning forward oddly, one hand cupped at his ear, his mouth falling open.
THERE WAS no incredulity. Thom’s position was too secure, his past work too brilliantly successful, his present argument too eagerly convincing—to allow of disbelief. Breathless silence urged him to continue.
“Yes,” he went on, almost casually, “I can at will make any object—even a man—larger or smaller. It takes power, but, because of the time control, much less power than theoretical considerations first led me to assume. And, in the new four-stage converter, we have a source of practically limitless power.
“I might add one fact that surprised me. The atoms of our world are normally in a state of equilibrium. I had anticipated that vast amounts of power would be required to increase size, and that power would be liberated when size is decreased. But the equilibrium is perfect. The energy required for a similar change in either direction is precisely the same.”
Morrison Cross thumped his cane on the ground.
“You actually mean this, Jarvis? You can make me taller? Or make me as small as a circus dwarf?”
“I can, Morrie,” said Thorn, gravely. “And more.” He spoke to the rest. “I’ve called all of you here, to go with me upon a voyage of exploration—in size.”
“A voyage!” It was the slender young student, Paul, boyishly eager. “Where’s the ship?”
Thorn held up the metal case in his hands. His listeners surged forward in breathless anticipation. He lifted a broad hand to halt them.
“If you please,” he called. “There’s one thing more to be discussed, before we go further. Dr. William Starbuck, here, you all know for a very able man, distinguished for his recent work in the physics of the atom. I may say that he carried on in one direction from the results of my first discoveries, while I took another.
