Lament had taken the job in order to deal with problems of the highest theoretical abstraction and yet he found himself interested in the amazing story of the development of the Electron Pump. It had never been written up in its entirety by someone who truly understood the theoretical principles (in so far as they could be understood) and who had some ability in translating the complexities for the general public. To be sure, Hallam himself had written a number of articles for the popular media, but these did not represent a connected, reasoned history — something Lament yearned to supply.
He used Hallam’s articles to begin with, other reminiscences in published form—-the official documents so to speak—carrying them through to Hallam’s world-shaking remark, the Great Insight, as it was often called (invariably with capital letters).
Afterward, of course, when Lament had experienced his disillusionment, he began digging deeper, and the question arose in his mind as to whether Hallam’s great remark had really been Hallam’s. It had been advanced at the seminar which marked the true beginning of the Electron Pump and yet, as it turned out, it was extraordinarily difficult to get the details of that seminar and quite impossible to get the voice recordings.
Eventually, Lamont began to suspect that the dimness of the footprints left on the sands of time by that seminar was not entirely accidental. Putting several items ingeniously together, it began to seem that there was a reasonable chance that John F. X. McFarland had said something very nearly like the crucial statement Hallam had made—and had done so before Hallam.
He went to see McFarland, who was featured not at all in the official accounts, and who was now doing upper-atmosphere research, with particular reference to the Solar wind. It was not a top-echelon job, but it had its perquisites, and it had more than a little to do with Pump effects. McFarland had clearly avoided suffering the fate of oblivion that had overtaken Denison.
He was polite enough to Lament and willing to talk on any subject except the events of that seminar. That he simply didn’t remember.
Lamont insisted, quoted the evidence he had gathered.
McFarland took out a pipe, filled it, inspected its contents thoroughly, and said, with a queer intentness. “I don’t choose to remember, because it doesn’t matter; it really doesn’t. Suppose I laid claim to having said something. No one would believe it. I would look like an idiot and a megalomaniac one.”
“And Hallam would see to it that you were retired?”
“I’m not saying that, but I don’t see that it would do me any good. What’s the difference, anyway?”
“A matter of historical truth!” said Lamont.
“Oh, bull. The historical truth is that Hallam never let go. He drove everyone into investigating, whether they wanted to or not. Without him, that tungsten would eventually have exploded with I don’t know how many casualties. There might never have been another sample, and we might never have had the Pump. Hallam deserves the credit for it, even if he doesn’t deserve the credit, and if that doesn’t make sense, I can’t help it, because history doesn’t make sense.”
Lament wasn’t satisfied with that, but he had to make it do, for McFarland would simply say no more.
Historical truth!
One piece of historical truth that seemed beyond question was that it was the radioactivity that pulled “Hallam’s tungsten” (this is what it was called as a matter of historical custom) into the big time. It didn’t matter whether it was or was not tungsten; whether it had or had not been tampered with; even whether it was or was not an impossible isotope. Everything was swallowed up in the amazement of something, anything, which showed a constantly increasing intensity of radioactivity under circumstances that ruled out the existence of any type of radioactive breakdown, in any number of steps, then known.
After a while, Kantrowitsch muttered, “We’d better spread it out. If we keep it in sizable lumps it will vaporize or explode or both and contaminate half the city.”
So it was powdered and scattered, and mixed with ordinary tungsten at first and then, when the tungsten grew radioactive in its turn, it was mixed with graphite, which had a lower cross-section to the radiation.
Less than two months after Hallam had noticed the change in the bottle’s contents, Kantrowitsch, in a communication to the editor of Nuclear Reviews, with Hallam’s name appended as co-author, announced the existence of plutonium-186. Tracy’s original determination was thus vindicated but his name was not mentioned, either then or later. With that Hallam’s tungsten began to take on an epic scale and Denison began to note the changes that ended by making him a non-person.
The existence of plutonium-186 was bad enough. To have been stable at the start and to display a curiously increasing radioactivity was much worse.
A seminar to handle the problem was organized. Kantrowitsch was in the chair, which was an interesting historical note, for it was the last time in the history of the Electron Pump that a major meeting was held in connection with it that was chaired by anyone but Hallam. As a matter of fact, Kantrowitsch died five months later and the only personality with sufficient prestige to keep Hallam in the shade was removed.
The meeting was extraordinarily fruitless until Hallam announced his Great Insight, but in the version as reconstructed by Lamont, the real turning point came during the luncheon break. At that time, McFarland, who is not credited with any remarks in the official records, although he was listed as an attendee, said “You know, what we need is a little bit of fantasy here. Suppose—”
He was speaking to Diderick van Klemens, and Van Klemens reported it sketchily in a kind of personal shorthand in his own notes. Long before Lamont had succeeded in tracking that down, Van Klemens was dead, and though his notes convinced Lamont himself, he had to admit they would not make a convincing story without further corroboration. What’s more, there was no way of proving that Hallam had overheard the remark. Lamont would have been willing to bet a fortune that Hallam was within earshot, but that willingness was not satisfactory proof either.
And then, suppose Lamont could prove it. It might hurt Hallam’s egregious pride, but it couldn’t really shake his position. It would be argued that to McFarland, the remark was only fantasy. It was Hallam who accepted it as something more. It was Hallam who was willing to stand up in front of the group and say it officially and risk the derision that might be his. McFarland would surely never have dreamed of placing himself on official record with his “little bit of fantasy.”
Lamont might have counter-argued that McFarland was a well-known nuclear physicist with a reputation to lose, while Hallam was a young radiochemist who could say anything he pleased in nuclear physics and, as an outsider, get away with it.
In any case, this is what Hallam said, according to the official transcript:
“Gentlemen, we are getting nowhere. I am therefore going to make a suggestion, not because it necessarily makes sense, but because it represents less nonsense than anything else I’ve heard.... We are faced with a substance, plutonium-186, that cannot exist at all, let alone as an even momentarily stable substance, if the natural laws of the Universe have any validity at all. It follows, then, that since it does indubitably exist and did exist as a stable substance to begin with, it must have existed, at least to begin with, in a place or at a time or under circumstances where the natural laws of the Universe were other than they are. To put it bluntly, the substance we are studying did not originate in our Universe at all, but in another—an alternate Universe—a parallel Universe. Call it what you want.
“Once here—and I don’t pretend to know how it got across—it was stable still and I suggest that this was because it carried the laws of its own Universe with it. The fact that it slowly became radioactive and then ever more radioactive may mean that the laws of our own Universe slowly soaked into its substance, if you know what I mean.