Hopper sneered and jerked his thumb toward the door. Narcissus walked forward, cat-footed. “Shall I break their heads, chief?” he inquired gently. “I like blood. It’s a primary color.”
Commander Wall put down his coffee cup and rose, his voice sounding crisp and metallic. “All right, officers. Let Mr. Gallegher go.”
“Don’t do it,” Hopper insisted. “Who are you anyway? A space captain!”
Wall’s weathered cheeks darkened. He brought out a badge in a small leather case. “Commander Wall,” he said. “Administrative Space Commission. You”—he pointed to Narcissus—“I’m deputizing you as a government agent, pro tern. If these officers don’t release Mr. Gallegher in five seconds, go on and break their heads.”
But that was unnecessary. The Space Commission was big. It had the government behind it, and local officials were, by comparison, small potatoes. The officers hastily released Gallegher and tried to look as though they’d never touched him.
Hopper seemed ready to explode. “By what right do you interfere with justice, Commander?” he demanded.
“Right of priority. The government needs a device Mr. Gallegher has made for us. He deserves a hearing, at least.”
“He does not!”
Wall eyed Hopper coldly. “I think he said, a few moments ago, that he had fulfilled your commission also.”
“With that?” The big shot pointed to the machine. “Does that look like a stereoscopic screen?”
Gallegher said, “Get me an ultraviolet, Narcissus. Fluorescent.” He went to the device, praying that his guess was right. But it had to be. There was no other possible answer. Extract nitrogen from dirt or rock, extract all gaseous content, and you have inert matter.
Gallegher touched the switch. The machine started to sing “St. James Infirmary.” Commander Wall looked startled and slightly less sympathetic. Hopper snorted. Smeith ran to the window and ecstatically watched the long tentacles cut dirt, swirling madly in the moonlit pit below.
“The lamp, Narcissus.”
It was already hooded up on an extension cord. Gallegher moved it slowly about the machine. Presently he had reached the grooved wheel at the extreme end, farthest from the window.
Something fluoresced.
It fluoresced blue — emerging from the little valve in the metal cylinder, winding about the grooved wheel, and piling in coils on the laboratory floor. Gallegher touched the switch; as the machine stopped, the valve snapped shut, cutting off the blue, cryptic thing that emerged from the cylinder. Gallegher picked up the coil. As he moved the light away, it vanished. He brought the lamp closer — it reappeared.
“Here you are, commander,” he said. “Try it.”
Wall squinted at the fluorescence. “Tensile strength?”
“Plenty,” Gallegher said. “It has to be. Nonorganic, mineral content of solid earth, compacted and compressed into wire. Sure it’s got tensile strength. Only you couldn’t support a ton weight with it.”
Wall nodded. “Of course not. It would cut through steel like a thread through butter. Fine, Mr. Gallegher. We’ll have to make tests—”
“Go ahead. It’ll stand up. You can run this wire around corners all you want, from one end of a spaceship to another, and it’ll never snap under stress. It’s too thin. It won’t — it can’t — be strained unevenly, because it’s too thin. A wire cable couldn’t do it. You needed flexibility that wouldn’t cancel tensile strength. The only possible answer was a thin, tough wire.”
The commander grinned. That was enough.
“We’ll have the routine test,” he said. “Need any money now, though? We’ll advance anything you need, within reason — say up to ten thousand.”
Hopper pushed forward. “I never ordered wire, Gallegher. So you haven’t fulfilled my commission.”
Gallegher didn’t answer. He was adjusting his lamp. The wire changed from blue to yellow fluorescence, and then to red.
“This is your screen, wise guy,” Gallegher said, “See the pretty colors?”
“Naturally I see them! I’m not blind. But—”
“Different colors, depending on how many angstroms I use. Thus. Red. Blue. Red again. Yellow. And when I turn off the lamp—”
The wire Wall still held became invisible.
Hopper closed his mouth with a snap. He leaned forward, cocking his head to one side.
Gallegher said, “The wire’s got the same refractive index as air. I made it that way, on purpose.” He had the grace to blush slightly. Oh, well — he could buy Gallegher Plus a drink later.
“On purpose?”
“You wanted a stereoscope screen which could be viewed from any angle without optical distortion. And in color — that goes without saying, these days. Well, here it is.”
Hopper breathed hard.
Gallegher beamed at him. “Take a box frame and string each square with this wire. Make a mesh screen. Do that on all four sides. String enough wires inside of the box. You have, in effect, an invisible cube, made of wire. All right. Use ultraviolet to project your film or your television, and you have patterns of fluorescence, depending on the angstrom strength patterns. In other words — a picture. A colored picture. A three-dimensional picture, because it’s projected onto an invisible cube. And, finally, one that can be viewed from any angle without distortion because it does more than give an optical illusion of stereoscopic vision — it’s actually a threedimensional picture. Catch?”
Hopper said feebly, “Yes. I understand. You…why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Gallegher changed the subject in haste. “I’d like some police protection, Commander Wall. A crook named Max Cuff has been trying to get his hooks on this machine. His thugs kidnapped me this afternoon, and—”
“Interfering with government business, eh?” Wall said grimly. “I know these jackpot politicians. Max Cuff won’t trouble you any more — if I may use the visor?”
Smeith beamed at the prospect of Cuff getting it in the neck. Gallegher caught his eye. There was a pleasant, jovial gleam in it, and somehow it reminded Gallegher to offer his guests drinks. Even the commander accepted this time, turning from his finished visor call to take the glass Narcissus handed him.
“Your laboratory will be under guard,” he told Gallegher. “So you’ll have no further trouble.”
He drank, stood up, and shook Gallegher’s hand. “I must make my report. Good luck, and many thanks. We’ll call you tomorrow.”
He went out, after the two officers. Hopper, gulping his cocktail, said, “I ought to apologize. But it’s all water under the bridge, eh, old man?”
“Yeah,” Gallegher said. “You owe me some money.”
“Trench will mail you the check. And…uh…a—” His voice died away.
“Something?”
“N-nothing,” Hopper said, putting down his glass and turning green. “A little fresh air…urp!”
The door slammed behind him, Gallegher and Smeith eyed each other curiously.
“Odd,” Smeith said.
“A visitation from heaven, maybe,” Gallegher surmised. “The mills of the gods—”
“I see Hopper’s gone,” Narcissus said, appearing with fresh drinks.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I thought he would. I gave him a Mickey Finn,” the robot explained. “He never looked at me once. I’m not exactly vain but a man so insensitive to beauty deserves a lesson. Now don’t disturb me. I’m going into the kitchen and practice dancing, and you can get your own liquor out of the organ. You may come and watch if you like.”
Narcissus spun out of the lab, his innards racing. Gallegher sighed.
“That’s the way it goes,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, I dunno. Everything. I get, for example, orders for three entirely different things, and I get drunk and make a gadget that answers all three problems. My subconscious does things the easy way. Unfortunately, it’s the hard way for me — after I sober up,”