'Yeah! I hadda do an interview with Eisenstein once,' said the Mirror man. 'He said I had a brain for that stuff.'
'Kind of him,' observed Jack. 'Now I've been trying to carry the idea of organization a bit further. Not only molecules but atoms have poles, and they point helter-skelter in every direction, too. Suppose I got them all to point in one direction. What would happen then?'
'You could walk through walls?' hazarded the Mirror man.
Jack grinned. 'Not so fast! Let's think it over first. An atom is a miniature solar system. That means it's practically flat. But with such flatnesses pointing in every direction - well, an enlarged picture of any sort of matter would be just about like a dozen packs of cards being poured from one basket to another and back again. They'd be fluttering every which way. You couldn't swing a stick through those falling cards without hitting a lot of them.'
'Not unless you were pretty good,' conceded the Mirror man.
'But if you had the same number of cards falling, only in a neat and orderly fashion, every one parallel, so they'd stack up all face down in the bottom basket. It's a standard card trick to spring a pack of cards from one hand to the other like that. You could swing a stick through that bunch.'
'You might knock one of 'em away,' said the Mirror man cautiously, 'but you wouldn't mess up the whole works. They wouldn't block up the whole distance between the baskets.'
'Just so!' said Jack approvingly. 'Professor Eisenstein was right. You do have a head for this stuff. Now the object of my experiments has been to arrange the atoms in a solid object like the second bunch of cards. They're flat. And it turns out that when they're arranged that way, all parallel, they block so small a proportion of the space they ordinarily close up, that they will pass right through ordinary matter with only the slightest of resistance. And that resistance comes from just such accidental collisions as you suggested.'
There was a stirring at the door. The snow-white hair and bushy, sandy whiskers of Professor Eisenstein came into the room. He beamed at Jack and the reporters. He spoke separately to Gail Kennedy, bending over her hand. The girl looked at him queerly. She was here because she intended to marry Jack and wanted to share in this triumph.
Her father and half the higher-ups of American Electric came in after the professor. Gail's face stiffened when her father's eyes fell upon her. He did not approve of Jack Hill.
'Ach, my young friend!' said Professor Eisenstein blandly.
A flash bulb flared as he shook hands with Jack. A news photographer changed plates in his camera and abstractly envisioned the caption. It would be 'Eisenstein Congratulates Youthful American Scientist', if this demonstration came out all right, and 'Eisenstein Condoles' if it didn't.
'You go on with your explanation,' said Eisenstein cordially. 'I sit at your feet and listen. Presently I make an announcement which will surprise eferybody.'
He sat down benignly. Gail looked at him, at her father, and back to Eisenstein. A moment later she appeared to be puzzled and uneasy. Her eyes remained on Eisenstein.
'I had just explained to these gentlemen,' said Jack, 'the object of my experimenting, the co-ordination of atom poles and what might be expected to result. I think all of you are familiar with the reasoning, since there's been a good deal of controversy about it. It was suggested that any co-ordinated matter would collapse into something like neutronium. Fortunately, it doesn't.'
He flung a switch and vacuum tubes glowed. A curious, ghostly light appeared above the white-painted sheet of metal on the table.
"The field of force,' he explained, 'which arranges the atoms in any substance so that they all point the same way.'
He switched off the tubes. The light died. He picked up the block of brass that was on the table. He placed it where the light had been.
'I am going to co-ordinate all the atom poles in this piece of brass,' he observed. 'Around the shop, here, the men say that a thing treated in this way is dematerialized. Watch!'
He flung the switch again and as the eerie white light flared on, the solid mass of brass seemed to glow of itself. Its surfaces ceased to reflect a brazen colour. They emitted the ghostly hue of the field light. Then it seemed that the block glowed within. The light seemed to come from inside the block as well as from its outer edge.
The whole thing took place in only the part of a second. A swift, smooth, soundless glowing of the block, which began at the outside and seemed to move inward - and cease. Then there was nothing visible at all but the queer glow itself.
Jack turned off the field. The light vanished. But the metal block did not spring back into view. Instead of a solid cube of polished brass there was the tenuous, misty outline of a cube. It looked unsubstantial, fragile. It looked like the ghost of a block of metal.
'It's still there,' said Jack, 'but you're looking past the edges of the atoms, so it's very nearly transparent. It's just as solid, in its way, as it ever was. It weighs as much. It conducts electricity just as well. But it's in a state that isn't usual in nature, just as megnetism isn't usual. The poles of its atoms all point the same way. Now look!'
He swept his hand through the misty block. He lighted a match and held it in the middle of the phantom. It burned, where Jack had claimed there was solid brass. A sceptical silence hung among the reporters.
Then the Mirror man said: 'That's a good trick, but if it wasn't phony -'
'What?'
'If that brass were still there, an' it would pass through anything else, it'd slide right through that sheet metal an' drop through the floor!'
'Radioactivity,' said Jack. 'The only exception. When coordinated matter is bombarded by radioactive particles, some of the atoms are knocked halfway back to normal. This paint has thorium oxide in it and it's slightly radioactive. Come here a moment.'
The Mirror man went sceptically forward. He suddenly reached out and passed his hands through the phantom block.
'It's a phony!' he said firmly. You're trying' to put somethin' over on us!'
'Put on these gloves,' said Jack. 'They've been painted with more of the same radioactive paint.'
The Mirror man incredulously obeyed. He reached again for the phantom block. And he gasped. Because his hands, encased in these gloves, touched something which was not only solid., but heavy. He picked it up, held it high; and his face was a study in stupefaction and unwilling belief. He staggered over to the nearest of his confreres.
'By cripesl' he said dazedly. 'It is real, even if you can't see it! Put y'hands on it!'
The other reporter, who was seated at the table, put his hands right through the object he could very dimly see. And to the Mirror man the brass block was solid. It was heavy. He gasped again and his hold relaxed. The phantom slipped from his fingers.
'Look out!'
The man gasped for the third time as the phantom object dropped. And it looked so utterly unsubstantial that the eye denied its weight. It should have floated down like gossamer, or so it seemed. But it did fall with the forthrightness of something very heavy indeed.
The man who had just put his hand through it now instinctively held them out to catch it. He cupped them, in anticipation of something very fragile and light. The phantom struck his hands. It went through them, and he could not feel it. It reached his knees and penetrated them. It dropped to the floor and through it, and did not as much as stir the cloth of the seated man's trousers.