"I'd like to," Hale evaded. "You know how it is. I'm pretty busy these days. I'll try to make it."
The Burkes looked hurt. "Thanks," said Burke, with unconvincing heartiness. "It was real nice of you to drop in." Significantly, he didn't mention seeing them again.
"You'll get straightened out soon," said Hale despairingly. "The first chance we get, we'll drop in again. It'll be soon."
Everybody shook hands and grinned frantically, and finally the Hales escaped and fled.
Hale was too depressed to speak. Gloria was silent for a while; then she said: "I know they're your friends, Billie-willie; but aren't they rather ... common?"
"Don't call me Billie-willie!" he snapped. But it wasn't merely irritation. His new self-confidence had been smashed. He remembered Sisyphus and his boulder.
SITTING in the office, trying to avoid the sight of Gloria, he thought as courageously as he dared. He got nowhere, because he couldn't bring himself to attack the fundamental issue. That he should cause suffering he expected, for that was Lucifer's partner's function. But that he could also cause happiness had been the counterweight to his unpleasant role. More than he knew, he had depended on the existence of that power.
He wondered uneasily why the Burkes weren't happy, despite his having given them everything to make them so. They tried to convince themselves that they were, but they were obviously miserable. From the fact that he tried to find arguments based on the premise that their unhappiness was either his fault or theirs, he should have guessed that the answer was buried deep in the roots of his basic philosophy. Digging it out would require tearing up the foundation of his character. What that would lead to, if he ever tried it, even Johnson's facile imagination might have had trouble foreseeing. The ruler of the Western Hemisphere would find his acceptance of the philosophy of Hell fatally shaken. When Lucifer's partner loses faith in the rationalization that permits him to cause suffering — hell literally breaks loose.
Chapter XXI
HALE DID GET some kick out of Johnson's next letter. Everybody likes to be appreciated, and the letter started off with a string of good, mouth-filling compliments on Hale's splendid success, the speed with which he was grasping the essentials of Johnson's methods, et cetera. The letter went on:
Now that you have won your spurs, as one might say, in our somewhat unusual business, I have another task for you. You are no doubt familiar with the work of Fermi and Hahn in the disintegration of the uranium atom. In the ordinary type of atomic disintegration, by which it has been possible to transmute elements for several years, the products are a new element of slightly lower atomic weight, and a few hydrogen and helium ions. The energy released, while large in terms of electron-volts, is much too small to keep the reaction going by itself; it is, therefore, necessary to continue to supply the target with a much greater amount of power from outside than can ever be gotten back in the form of atomic energy.
However, Fermi and Hahn discovered that uranium, under neutron bombardment, splits into barium, masurium, and several other elements such as iodine and caesium, with the release of enormous atomic energy of the order of 200,000,000 electron-volts. This discovery has aroused the hope that a self-sustaining, controllable atomic-disintegration reaction may be worked out at last.
I need hardly remind you of the effect of such a discovery on the technique of war. If the energy of ten pounds of uranium oxide could be released all at once, it could easily wipe a large city off the face of the globe. When the significance of these impending discoveries seeps down to the level of the average man in all countries, he will be made more apprehensive and unhappy than ever by the knowledge that, if a hostile government effects an atomic explosion anywhere in his neighborhood, he will have virtually no chance of escape. This will be much worse than the present threat of an air raid, which, while it can do great damage and kill thousands of people, cannot destroy more than a small fraction of a modern metropolis at one time, simply because of quantitative considerations.
As I say, the general impression among informed persons is that the discovery of such an atomic reaction is not far off. It is in fact nearer than they think. I have been observing the work of a Professor A. G. Dixon of Edinburgh, Scotland, and he appears to have the solution, though it has not yet been published, and will not be soon. I have had his figures checked by the most competent mathematicians of Europe, and they agree as to their correctness.
Professor Dixon has discovered that controllable atomic power cannot be obtained from uranium or any of its compounds — the reaction dies out too quickly to be self-sustaining. But it can be obtained from thorium, which is another heavy radioactive element.
In line with my policies, it is obviously undesirable that these facts become known immediately, as that would settle the question one way or the other. While it is still unsettled, we can keep the world's governments in a constant state of fear regarding the possible effects of atomic energy, and none of them will dare take any overt action in the absence of precise knowledge of the effects of this scientific advance.
We must, therefore, divert the attention of the world's physicists from thorium and keep it concentrated on uranium, with which so many of them have been working since the Fermi-Hahn discovery. When they have finally discovered that they are up a blind alley, we can afford to let the truth become known.
I shall, therefore, take steps to prevent the publication of Dixon's work, and to divert this scientist from his present line of research. You will do what you can to renew the interest of American physicists in uranium. It has been flagging lately, since Columbia University's investment in a cubic foot of uranium oxide for research produced much interesting data but nothing tangible in the way of controlled, self-sustaining atomic power. To save you time, I might mention that the country's outstanding uranium enthusiast is Dr. L.R. Kammeyer, the head of the Physics Department at the Southwestern Institute of Technology.
THIS TIME Hale didn't sit around and mope. He knew next to nothing about atomic physics, but he plunged into the subject with as much energy as could be expected of a man of purely nontechnical background. In the course of his reading he learned a little about science and a good deal about scientists. Kammeyer was a dogmatic enthusiast; his institute was looking for a new endowment for a physics laboratory.
Hale reached into the Southwestern Tech envelope in the files and came up with a bunch of papers. One fell out and spun to the floor, as if inviting his attention. He picked it up; it was several sheets clipped together. Inside the blank cover page was a sheet of diagrams and four pages of small type, headed "United States Patent Office." Below this phrase, in bold-face type, he read:
1,995,001 VACUUM TUBE
Willis N. Apostle, Los Angeles, Calif., assignor to
Southwestern Institute of Technology, Los Angeles, Calif.
Application May 17, 1933,
Serial No. 671,497 12 Claims (Cl. 41-126)
Hale had never before seen a United States patent copy, but the document proclaimed its nature clearly enough. He got hold of Janos, the patent expert of Johnson and Hale's legal staff. This worthy read the document through and whistled.
"Say," he said, "that's funny. This first claim dominates every frequency-modulated radio receiving set on the market, and I never heard of the patent before, though I know the art pretty well. I don't think the institute has been getting any royalties from the radio manufacturers, though I can find out. If they haven't, it probably means that this patent was taken out back before people took frequency-modulation very seriously. So the institute found no market for their rights, and forgot about the thing. But now that all the broadcasters have switched over to frequency modulation ... jeepers, think of all the infringements there have been in the last couple of years! The patent only has a couple of more years to run, and we can't sue for infringements that took place over six years ago, on account of the statute of limitations. But we've still got the radio manufacturers by the short hair, if we want to call the institute's attention to their position, and if that first claim isn't anticipated by the prior art."