O’Neil had scratched his head and replied, “I’ll try anyway. I went down to the Denver Library last night. Marge was working in the darkroom, and I didn’t feel like sitting around by myself. Besides, I didn’t want to clean up the fractionating tower and that pile of plastic in the garage just so she could get the car in. Well, at the library I dug out all they had on unified field theory and picked up some of the progress reports from the MIT labs on the satellite. Boy, they’re doing a lot of stuff on gravity up there! Took the whole pile home and read to four in the morning. Had to sleep on the couch; Marge didn’t like me staying up that late, but she’s the early bird in the family.
“Henry, those MIT reports were downright interesting! Judging from them and a lot of other things going on up there, I think we’re missing the boat. We got some funny notions about physics and engineering down here on account of we’ve always got a gravity field around us and a layer of air that stays pretty well inside a small range of temperature and pressure. You’d be surprised at what happens to a lot of chemical reactions at minus two-seventy-C under no pressure. Even the Earth’s magnetic field sets up one whopping circulating current on the cold side of the satellite because the steel’s a superconductor at them low temperatures. But they’re learning something about gravity, on account of there ain’t none up there. They’ve plotted what they call isogravs, lines of equal-g, and riding parallel to them seems to do funny things. I’m boning on the stuff, Henry, because I’m pretty sure I can build me a gadget that will give antigravity or something like it.”
Enright had sighed and thought to himself that O’Neil wouldn’t be the first one to be fooled by I he notion of antigravity. After all, O’Neil had said what many other men had said, and antigravity was still a science-fiction pipe dream. So he’d told him, “Bill, you’re a smart guy with lots on the ball. You may think you’ve got a good idea, but let me put you wise to something. A lot of people have thought that antigravity was the answer to all our space travel problems ever since H. G. Wells dreamed up his Cavorite. And there have been a lot of electronic nightmares designed—flat plates, weird coils, odd electrodes, and the like. But every one of those antigravity devices were like the perpetual motion machines. The inventors had overlooked a couple of basic physical laws at the outset. The gadgets looked good until an engineer or physicist got hold of them and pointed out where they violated a physical law. And when the inventors tried them anyway, they didn’t work. Why? Because the antigravity concept is not a realistic one in the first place.
“Secondly, there are certain basic physical laws which govern the working of the universe. A new law never causes an old one to become invalid; it may merely extend the limits over which the old law applies. But the new law never breaks an old one. If you’re going to keep your feet on the ground, you’ve got to face the reality of this. We’d like things to be different, all of us. But they aren’t.
“Bill, this is the first time you’ve come into my office without your flaps down and flying straight. Well, come back on the ground. The rocket motor is the only propulsion system that’ll get us to Mars. There are lots of problems, I’ll grant you, but we’re making headway. Let’s keep working on them, eh?”
O’Neil had looked quietly at him and said, “Henry, that’s the same kind of answer I’ve gotten out of a lot of high-powered science-johnnies before. I didn’t think you were that kind. So this ain’t new to me. I’ve had everybody from farming experts to mining engineers to electronic scientists tell me something was impossible. Take my automatic valve for the control of ignition mixture ratio. Evans thought it was a joke, but it worked. Put us in business here, didn’t it? And how about your injector design, and your theories of combustion and flame fronts? Nobody thought they’d work, but they did, and then everyone ran around saying they knew it all the time, didn’t they?”
“Sure, Bill, but those people were sitting back at their desks and in their labs while we were having burn-outs, hard starts, and rough combustion when the mixture ratios went sour. We were building rocket motors; they were building personal empires. We licked our problems and delivered the goods, even if we did have to fight them all the way and listen to them chuckle as they collected their bets on how far out in the desert the chamber would land. But we were fighting people, not the universe. And we never broke a physical law, even when we applied new ones. Bill, you can’t turn against What Is.”
O’Neil had looked pensive and replied, “Sometimes, you gotta… if you’re gonna reach What Can Be. You’ll see I don’t discourage easy, Henry. If I can’t break physical laws, maybe I can find a way to use other ones.”
So Bill O’Neil had gone to work in his garage shop. He had never spoken much to Henry Enright about what he was doing. He showed up bright and early every morning, as usual, full of driving energy. He kept it up all day. He was, as usual, also a sympathetic and understanding slave driver with his testing crews. This puzzled Enright, who had noticed lights burning late at night and far into the morning hours around O’Neil’s house. Sometimes, on week ends, the lights burned all night. O’Neil never asked for advice, nor discussed what he was doing in his off-hours. The man’s constitution seemed fantastic to Enright. And when he asked O’Neil about the garage gadgeteering, Bill had always been noncommunicative. He merely shrugged his shoulders and grinned.
Then had come the day when O’Neil gave his thirty-day notice. Enright had been shocked. “Why, Bill? Great Scott, it’s been eight years! We’re a team! What’s the matter? I can’t believe you’re unhappy here.”
“Well, Henry, I’ve got some hot irons in the fire—and I’ve sort of lost interest in rockets. I liked working with you fine. We did a lot together. In fact, eight years is the longest I’ve ever held one job. But I’ve got a notion to strike out on my own now. I’ve got a couple bankers putting up the cash for me to set up and develop my gadget.”
This wouldn’t be the first time unknowing financiers had been taken by a likely looking gadget they didn’t understand, Enright knew. And it was a hundred-to-one anyway that, providing it did work, O’Neil would be taken to the cleaners by the money boys. “You mean you finally got an antigravity gadget to work?” he’d asked with tongue in cheek.
“Naw, not yet, Henry. I got all the groundwork done and the plans laid out. The patents are being held up until I can show that it works, and I need more equipment and money to do that. If it don’t, work, I’ve got some more ideas that will.”
In three years, Bill O’Neil’s ideas had changed the course of history and put Henry Enright out of a job. But Enright didn’t realize that at the time.
He’d read about the O’Neil Drive when it was first announced by the new Western Space Craft Associates, Inc. He didn’t understand it exactly. In fact, nobody seemed to understand much about it. The theorists were busy regrouping their ideas and concepts of Maxwell’s electromagnetic laws and Einsteinian physics. There were those mathematicians, mostly nondimensional analysts, who took the attitude of having known it all the time.
However, most of the experts and authorities seemed to agree on one point. They could not understand how Bill O’Neil had done it. There was a great tendency among them to feel that O’Neil had stumbled onto it by blind luck. After all, he had had no formal training in the elements of high math, theoretical physics, nuclear and sub-nuclear physics, spatiophysics, electromagnetics, and unified field theory. Yet he had founded the new science of gravities and had put it to practical use.