'One obvious answer suggests itself, my friend. If your Primate Primeval existed at a time when certain regions were highly radioactive, certain individuals would wander into them and die. Radioactive radiation is deadly in excess, of course. Radioactivity and fossils, there you are.'
'Why not other creatures,' demanded Raph. 'Only Primate Primeval occurs in excess, and he was intelligent. He would not be trapped by dangerous radiation.'
'Perhaps he was not intelligent. That is, after all, only your theory and not a proven fact.'
'Certainly, then, he was more intelligent than his small-brained contemporaries.'
'Perhaps not even that. You romanticize too much.'
'Perhaps I do.' Raph spoke in half a whisper. 'It seems to me that I can conjure up visions of a great civilization of a million years back - or more. A great power; a great intelligence - that has vanished completely, except for the tiny whispers of ossified bones which retain that huge cavity in which a brain once existed, and a bony five-fingered hand curving into slender signs of manipulative skill - with an opposing thumb. They must have been intelligent.'
Then, what killed them?' Lernin shrugged: 'Several million species of living things have survived.'
Raph looked up, half in anger: 'I cannot accompany your group, Lernin, on a Voluntary basis. To go to the other world would be useful, yes, if I could engage in my own studies. For your purposes, it can be only a Community Job to me. I cannot give my heart to it.'
But Lernin's jaw was set: 'That arrangement would not be fair. There are many of us, my friend, who are sacrificing our own interests. If we all placed them first and investigated the other world in terms of our own particular provincialisms only, our great purpose would be destroyed. My friend, there is not one of our men that we can spare. We must all work as if our lives depended on our instant solution of the Eekah problem, which, believe me, it does.'
Raph's jaws twisted in distaste. 'On your side, you have a vague apprehension of these weak, stupid little creatures. On my side I have a definite problem of great intellectual attraction to myself. And between the two I can see no connection -no possible connection at all.'
'Nor can I. But listen to me a moment. A small group of our most trusted men returned last week from a visit to the other world. It was not official, as ours will be. It made no contacts. It was a frank piece of espionage, which I am telling you about now. I ask your discretion on the matter.'
'Naturally.'
'Our men possessed themselves of Eekah event-sheets.'
'Pardon me?'
'It is a created name to describe the objects. Printed records are issued daily in the various centers of Eekah population of events and occurrences of the day, and what passes for literary efforts as well.'
Raph was momentarily interested: 'It strikes me as an excellent idea.'
'Yes, in its essence. The Eekah notion of interesting events, however, appears to consist entirely of antisocial events. However, leave that be. My point is that the existence of the Americas is well-known there these days - and it is universally spoken of as a "new land of opportunity." The various divisions of Eekahs eye it with a universal desire. The Eekahs are many, they are crowded, their economy is irrational. They want new land, and that is what this is to them - new and empty land.'
'Not empty,' pointed out Raph, mildly.
'Empty to them,' insisted Lernin terribly. 'That is the vast danger. Lands occupied by Gurrows are to them empty and they mean to take it, all the more so since they have often enough striven to take the lands of one another.'
Raph shrugged: 'Even so, they -'
'Yes. They are weak and stupid. You said that, and so they are. But only singly. They will unite for a purpose. To be sure, they will fall apart when the purpose is done - but momentarily they will join and become strong, which we perhaps cannot do, witness yourself. And their weapons of war have been keened in the fire of conflict. Their flying machines, for instance, are superb war weapons.'
'But we have duplicated it -'
'In quantity? We have also duplicated their chemical explosives, but only in the laboratory, and their firing tubes and armored vehicles, but only in experimental plants. And yet there is more - something developed within the last five years, for our own Eekahs know nothing about it.'
'And what is that?'
'We don't know. Their event-sheets speak of it - the names applied to it mean nothing to us - but the context implies the terror of it, even on the part of these kill-mad Eekahs. There seems no evidence that it has been used, or that all the Eekah groups have it - but it is used as a supreme threat. It will perhaps be clearer to you when all the evidence is presented once our voyage is under way.'
'But what is it? You talk of it as if it were a bogey.'
'Why, they talk of it as if it were a bogey. And what could be a bogey to an Eekah? That is the most frightening aspect of it. So far, we know only that it involves the bombardment of an element they call plutonium - of which we have never heard and of which our own Eekahs have never heard either - by objects called neutrons, which our Eekahs say are subatomic particles without charge, which seems to us completely ridiculous.'
'And that is all?'
'All. Will you suspend judgment till we show you the sheets?'
Raph nodded reluctantly: 'Very well.'
Raph's leaden thoughts revolved in their worn groove as he stood there alone.
Eekahs and Primate Primeval. A living creature of erratic habits and a dead creature that must have aspired to heights. A sordid present of explosives and neutron bombardments and a glorious, mysterious past -
No connection! No connection!
By June 1947 I had already been working on my Ph.D. research with near-total concentration (I was no longer working in the candy store; my younger brother, Stanley, had taken over) for nearly a year. I was in the home stretch and beginning to think forward to writing my Ph.D. dissertation. I rather dreaded that, since the obligatory style of dissertations is turgid in the extreme, and I had by now spent nine years trying to write well and was afraid I simply might not be able to write badly enough to qualify for my degree.
The experiments I was doing at the time required me, periodically, to dissolve a compound called catechol in water. The catechol existed in fine, feathery, fluffy needles that dissolved very readily in water. In fact, when I sprinkled catechol into the beaker of water, the individual needles dissolved as soon as they struck the water surface. Idly, it occurred to me that if the catechol were any more soluble than it was, it would dissolve before it struck the water surface.
Naturally, I thought at once that this notion might be the basis for an amusing story. It occurred to me, however, that instead of writing an actual story based on the idea, I might write up a fake research paper on the subject and get a little practice in turgid writing.
I did the job on June 8, 1947, even giving it the kind of long-winded title that research papers so often have - 'The Endo-chronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline' - and added tables, graphs and fake references to non-existent journals.
I was not at all sure that Thiotimoline' (no use trying to quote the entire name every time) was publishable. Astounding, however, ran serious articles on scientific subjects of particular interest to science fiction readers and I thought it just possible Campbell might be interested in a gag article that would be on the borders of science fiction.
I brought it in to him on the tenth, and he took it almost at once.
The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline [6]
The correlation of the structure of organic molecules with their various properties, physical and chemical, has in recent years afforded much insight into the mechanism of organic reactions, notably in the theories of resonance and mesomer-ism as developed in the last decade. The solubilities of organic compounds in various solvents has become of particular interest in this connection through the recent discovery of the endochronic nature of thiotimoline.
It has been long known that the solubility of organic compounds in polar solvents such as water is enhanced by the presence upon the hydrocarbon nucleus of hydrophilic - i.e., water-loving - groups, such as the hydroxy (-OH), amino (-NH2), or sulfonic acid (SO3H) groups. Where the physical characteristics of two given compounds - particularly the degree of subdivision of the material - are equal, then the time of solution - expressed in seconds per gram of material per milli-liter of solvent - decreases with the number of hydrophilic groups present. Catechol, for instance, with two hydroxy groups on the benzene nucleus, dissolves considerably more quickly than does phenol, with only one hydroxy group on the nucleus. Feinschreiber and Hravlek in their studies on the problem have contended that with increasing hydrophilism, the time of solution approaches zero. That this analysis is not entirely correct was shown when it was discovered that the compound thiotimoline will dissolve in water - in the proportions of 1 gm./ml. - in minus 1.12 seconds. That is, it will dissolve before the water is added.