Harper looked mildly amused. "You mean atomic fuel for interplanetary flight? That problem's pretty well exhausted. No, son, the ionosphere is the ceiling until we think up something better than rockets. Of course, you could mount a pile in a ship, and figure out some jury rig to convert some of its output into push, but where does that get you? You would still have a terrible mass - ratio because of the shielding and I'm betting you couldn't convert one percent into thrust. That's disregarding the question of getting the company to lend you a power pile for anything that doesn't pay dividends."
Erickson looked balky. "I don't concede that you've covered all the alternatives. What have we got? The early rocket boys went right ahead trying to build better rockets, serene in the belief that, by the time they could build rockets good enough to fly to the moon, a fuel would be perfected that would do the trick. And they did build ships that were good enough - you could take any ship that makes the Antipodes run, and refit it for the moon - if you had a fuel that was adequate. But they haven't got it.
"And why not? Because we let 'em down, that's why. Because they're still depending on molecular energy, on chemical reactions, with atomic power sitting right here in our laps. It's not their fault - old D. D. Harriman had Rockets Consolidated underwrite the whole first issue of Antarctic Pitchblende, and took a big slice of it himself, in the expectation that we would produce something usable in the way of a concentrated rocket fuel. Did we do it? Like hell! The company went hog - wild for immediate commercial exploitation, and there's no atomic rocket fuel yet."
"But you haven't stated it properly," Harper objected. "There are just two forms of atomic power - available, radioactivity and atomic disintegration. The first is too slow; the energy is there, but you can't wait years for it to come out - not in a rocket ship. The second we can only manage in a large power plant. There you are - stymied."
"We haven't really tried," Erickson answered. "The power is there; we ought to give 'em a decent fuel"
"What would you call a 'decent fuel'?"
Erickson ticked it off. "A small enough critical mass so that all, or almost all, the energy could be taken up as heat by the reaction mass - I'd like the reaction mass to be ordinary water. Shielding that would have to be no more than a lead and cadmium jacket. And the whole thing controllable to a fine point."
Harper laughed. "Ask for Angel's wings and be done with it. You couldn't store such fuel in a rocket; it would Set itself off before it reached the jet chamber."
Erickson's Scandinavian stubbornness was just gathering for another try at the argument when the waiter arrived with the drinks. He set them down with a triumphant flourish. "There you are, suh!"
"Want to roll for them, Izzy?" Harper inquired.
"Don' mind if I do."
The Negro produced a leather dice cup and Harper rolled. He selected his combinations with care and managed to get four aces and jack in three rolls. Israfel took the cup. He rolled in the grand manner with a backwards twist to his wrist. His score finished at five kings, and he courteously accepted the price of six drinks. Harper stirred the engraved cubes with his forefinger.
"Izzy," he asked, "are these the same dice I rolled with?"
"Why, Mistuh Harper!" The black's expression was pained.
"Skip it," Harper conceded. "I should know better than to gamble with you. I haven't won a roll from you in six weeks. What did you start to say, Gus?"
"I was just going to say that there ought to be a better way to get energy out of - " But they were joined again, this time by something very seductive in an evening gown that appeared to have been sprayed on her lush figure. She was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty. "You boys lonely?" she asked as she flowed into a chair.
"Nice of you to ask, but we're not," Erickson denied with patient politeness. He jerked a thumb at a solitary figure seated across the room. "Go talk to Hannigan; he's not busy."
She followed his gesture with her eyes, and answered with faint scorn, "Him? He's no use. He's been like that for three weeks - hasn't spoken to a soul. If you ask me, I'd say that he was cracking up."
"That so?" he observed noncommittally. "Here - " He fished out a five - dollar bill and handed it to her. "Buy yourself a drink. Maybe we'll look you up later."
"Thanks, boys." The money disappeared under her clothing, and she stood up. "Just ask for Edith."
"Hannigan does look bad," Harper considered, noting the brooding stare and apathetic attitude, "and he has been awfully stand - offish lately, for him. Do you suppose we're obliged to report him?"
"Don't let it worry you," advised Erickson, "there's a spotter on the job now. Look." Harper followed his companion's eyes and recognized Dr. Mott of the psychological staff. He was leaning against the far end of the bar and nursing a tall glass, which gave him protective coloration. But his stance was such that his field of vision included not only Hannigan, but Erickson and Harper as well.
"Yeah, and he's studying us as well," Harper added.' "Damn it to hell, why does it make my back hair rise just to lay eyes on one of them?"
The question was rhetorical, Erickson ignored it. "Let's get out of here," he suggested, "and have dinner some where else."
"O.K."
DeLancey himself waited on them as they left. "Going so soon, gentlemen?" he asked, in a voice that implied that their departure would leave him no reason to stay open. "Beautiful lobster thermidor tonight. If you do not like it, you need not pay." He smiled brightly.
"No sea food, Lance," Harper told him, "not tonight. Tell me - why do you stick around here when you know that the pile is bound to get you in the long run? Aren't you afraid of it?"
The tavern keeper's eyebrows shot up. "Afraid of this pile? But it is my friend!"
"Makes you money, eh?"
"Oh, I do not mean that." He leaned toward them confidentially. "Five years ago I come here to make some money quickly for my family before my cancer of the stomach, it kills me. At the clinic, with the wonderful new radiants you gentlemen make with the aid of the Big Bomb, I am cured - I live again. No, I am not afraid of the pile; it is my good friend."
"Suppose it blows up?"
"When the good Lord needs me, he will take me." He crossed himself quickly.
As they turned away, Erickson commented in a low voice to Harper. "There's your answer, Cal - if all us engineers had his faith, the job wouldn't get us down."
Harper was unconvinced. "I don't know," be mused. 'I don't think it's faith; I think it's lack of imagination and knowledge."
Notwithstanding King's confidence, Lentz did not show up until the next day. The superintendent was subconsciously a little surprised at his visitor's appearance. He had pictured a master psychologist as wearing flowing hair, an imperial, and having piercing black eyes. But this man was not overly tall, was heavy in his framework, and fat - almost gross. He might have been a butcher. Little, piggy, faded - blue eyes peered merrily out from beneath shaggy blond brows. There was no hair anywhere else on the enormous skull, and the ape - like jaw was smooth and pink. He was dressed in mussed pajamas of unbleached linen. A long cigarette holder jutted permanently from one corner of a wide mouth, widened still more by a smile which suggested unmalicious amusement at the worst that life, or men, could do. He had gusto. King found him remarkably easy to talk to.
At Lentz' suggestion the Superintendent went first into the history of atomic power plants, how the fission of the uranium atom by Dr. Otto Hahn in December, 1938, had opened up the way to atomic power. The door was opened just a crack; the process to be self perpetuating and commercially usable required an enormously greater knowledge than there was available in the entire civilized world at that time.