The Black Star Passes Part 24

"Let's eliminate the known sources one by one. The usual ones, the ones men have been using for centuries, go out at once. The atomic hydrogen reaction stores more energy per gram than any other chemical reaction known. Such things as the storage battery, the electro-static condenser, the induction coil, or plain heat storage, are worthless to us. The only other method of storing energy we know of is the method used by the Kaxorians in driving their huge planes.

"They use condensed light-energy. This is efficient to the ultimate maximum, something no other method can hope to attain. Yet they need huge reservoirs to store it. The result is still ineffective for our purpose; we want something we can put in a small s.p.a.ce; we want to condense the light still further. That will be the ideal form of energy storage, for then we will be able to release it directly as a heat ray, and so use it with utmost efficiency. I think we can absorb the released energy in the usual cavity radiator."

A queer little smile appeared on Arcot's face. "Remember--what we want is light in a more condensed form, a form that is naturally stable, and that does not need to be held in a bound state, but actually requires urging to bring about the release of energy. For example--"

A shout from Wade interrupted him. "That's really rare! _Whoo_--I have to hand it to you! That takes all the prizes!" He laughed delightedly.

In puzzled wonder Morey and the two older men looked at him, and at Arcot who was grinning broadly now.

"Well, I suppose it must be funny," Morey began, then hesitated. "Oh--I see--say, that _is_ good!" He turned to his father. "I see now what he's been driving at. It's been right here under our noses all the time.

"The light-matter windows we found in the wrecked enemy ships contain enough bound light-energy to run all the planes we could make in the next ten years! We're going to have the enemy supply us with power we can't get in any other way. I can't decide, Arcot, whether you deserve a prize for ingenuity, or whether we should receive b.o.o.by-prizes for our stupidity."

Arcot Senior smiled at first, then looked dubiously at his son.

"There's definitely plenty of the right kind of energy stored there--but as you suggested, the energy will need encouragement to break free. Any ideas?"

"A couple. I don't know how they'll work, of course; but we can try."

Arcot puffed at his pipe, serious now as he thought of the problems ahead.

Wade interposed a question. "How do you suppose they condense that light energy in the first place, and, their sun being dead, whence all the light? Back to the atom, I suppose."

"You know as much as I do, of course, but I'm sure they must break up matter for its energy. As for the condensation problem, I think I have a possible solution of that too--it's the key to the problem of release.

There's a lot we don't know now--but we'll have a bigger store of knowledge before this war is over--if we have anything at all!" he added grimly. "It's possible that man may lose knowledge, life, his planets and sun--but there's still plenty of hope. We're not finished yet."

"How do you think they got their energy loose?" asked

Wade. "Do you think those big blocks of what appeared to be silver were involved in the energy release?"

"Yes, I do. Those blocks were probably designed to carry away the power once it was released. How the release was accomplished, though, I don't know. They couldn't use material apparatus to start their release of material energy; the material of the apparatus might 'catch fire' too.

They had to have the disintegrating matter held apart from all other matter. This was quite impossible, if you are going to get the energy away by any method other than by the use of fields of force. I don't think that is the method. My guess is that a terrific current of electricity would accomplish it if anything would.

"How then are we going to get the current to it? The wires will be subject to the same currents. Whatever they do to the matter involved, the currents will do to the apparatus--except in one case. If that apparatus is made of _some other kind of matter_, then it wouldn't be affected. The solution is obvious. Use some of the light-matter. What will destroy light-matter, won't destroy electricity-matter, and what will destroy electricity-matter, won't disturb light-matter.

"Do you remember the platform of light-metal, clear as crystal? It must have been an insulating platform. What we started as our a.s.sumptions in the case of the light-metal, we can now carry further. We said that electricity-metals carried electricity, so light-metals would carry or conduct light. Now we know that there is no substance which is transparent to light, that will carry electricity by metallic conduction. I mean, of course, that there is no substance transparent to light, and at the same time capable of carrying electricity by electronic transmission. True, we have things like NaCl solutions in ordinary H_{2}O which will carry electricity, but here it's ionic conduction. Even gla.s.s will carry electricity very well when hot; when red hot, gla.s.s will carry enough electricity to melt it very quickly.

But again, gla.s.s is not a solid, but a viscous liquid, and it is again carried by ionic conduction. Iron, copper, sodium, silver, lead--all metals carry the current by means of electron drift through the solid material. In such cases we can see that no transparent substance conducts electricity.

"Similarly, the reverse is true. No substance capable of carrying electricity by metallic conduction is transparent. All are opaque, if in any thickness. Of course, gold is transparent when in leaf form--but when it's that thin it won't conduct very much! The peculiar condition we reach in the case of the invisible ship is different. There the effects are brought about by the high frequency impressed. But you get my point.

"Do you remember those wires that we saw leading to that little box of the reflecting material? So perfectly reflecting it was that we didn't see it. We only saw where it must be; we saw the light it reflected.

That was no doubt light-matter, a non-metal, and as such, non-conductive to light. Like sulphur, an electric non-metal, it reflected the base of which it was formed. Sulphur reflects the base of which it was formed.

Sulphur reflects electricity and--in the crystalline form--pa.s.ses light.

This light-non-metal did the same sort of thing; it reflected light and pa.s.sed electricity. It was a conductor.

"Now we have the things we need, the matter to disintegrate, and the matter to hold the disintegrating material in. We have two different types of matter. The rest is obvious--but decidedly not easy. They have done it, though; and after the war is over, there should be many of their machines drifting about in s.p.a.ce waiting to give up their secrets."

Arcot Senior clapped his son on the back. "A fair foundation on which to start, anyway. But I think it's time now that you got working on your problem; and since I'm officially retired, I'm going downstairs. You know I'm working in my lab on a method to increase the range and power of your projector for the molecular motion field. Young Norris is helping me, and he really has ideas. I'll show you our math later."

The party broke up, the three younger men staying in their own labs, the older men leaving.

IV

The three immediately set to work. At Arcot's suggestion, Wade and Morey attacked the plate of crystal in an attempt to tear off a small piece, on which they might work. Arcot himself went into the televisophone room and put through a second call to the Tychos Observatory, the great observatory that had so recently been established on the frigid surface of the Moon. The huge mirror, twenty feet in diameter, allowed an immense magnification, and stellar observations were greatly facilitated, for no one bothered them, and the "seeing" was always perfect.

However, the great distance was rather a handicap to the ordinary televisophone stations, and all calls put through to the astronomers had to be made through the powerful sending station in St. Louis, where all interplanetary messages were sent and received, while that side of the Earth was facing the station; and from Constantinople, when that city faced the satellite. These stations could bridge the distance readily and clearly.

For several minutes Arcot waited while connections were being made with the Moon; then for many more minutes he talked earnestly with the observer in this distant station, and at last satisfied, he hung up.

He had outlined his ideas concerning the black star, based upon the perturbation of the planets; then he had asked them to investigate the possibilities, and see if they could find any blotting out of stars by a lightless ma.s.s.

Finally he returned to Morey and Wade who had been working on the crystal plate. Wade had an expression of exasperation on his face, and Morey was grinning broadly.

"h.e.l.lo, Arcot--you missed all the fun! You should have seen Wade's struggle with that plate!" The plate, during his absence, had been twisted and bent, showing that it had undergone some terrific stresses.

Now Wade began to make a series of highly forceful comments about the properties of the plate in language that was not exactly scientific. It had value, though, in that it seemed to relieve his pent-up wrath.

"Why, Wade, you don't seem to like that stuff. Maybe the difficulty lies in your treatment, rather than in the material itself. What have you tried?"

"Everything! I took a coronium hack saw that will eat through molybdenum steel like so much cheese, and it just wore its teeth off. I tried some of those diamond rotary saws you have, attached to an electric motor, and it wore out the diamonds. That got my goat, so I tried using a little force. I put it in the tension testing machine, and clamped it--the clamp was good for 10,000,000 pounds--but it began to bend, so I had to quit. Then Morey held it with a molecular beam, and I tried twisting it. Believe me, it gave me real pleasure to see that thing yield under the pressure. But it's not brittle; it merely bends.

"And I can't cut it, or even get some shavings off the darned thing. You said you wanted to make a Jolly balance determination of the specific gravity, but the stuff is so dense you'd need only a tiny sc.r.a.p--and I can't break it loose!" Wade looked at the plate in thorough disgust.

Arcot smiled sympathetically; he could understand his feelings, for the stuff certainly was stubborn. "I'm sorry I didn't warn you fellows about what you'd run into, but I was so anxious to get that call through to the Moon that I forgot to tell you how I expected to make it workable.

Now, Wade, if you'll get another of those diamond-tooth rotary saws, I'll get something that may help. Put the saw on the air motor. Use the one made of coronium."

Wade looked after the rapidly disappearing Arcot with raised eyebrows, then, scratching his head, he turned and did as Arcot had asked.

Arcot returned in about five minutes with a small handling machine, and a huge magnet. It must have weighed nearly half a ton. This he quickly connected to the heavy duty power lines of the lab. Now, running the handling machine into position, he quickly hoisted the bent and twisted plate to the poles of the magnet, with the aid of the derrick. Then backing the handling machine out of the way, he returned briskly to his waiting a.s.sociates.

"Now we'll see what we will see!" With a confident smile Arcot switched on the current of the big magnet. At once a terrific magnetic flux was set up through the light-metal. He took the little compressed-air saw, and applied it to the crystal plate. The smooth hiss of the air deepened to a harsh whine as the load came on it, then the saw made contact with the refractory plate.

Unbelievingly Wade saw the little diamond-edge saw bite its way slowly but steadily into the plate. In a moment it had cut off a little corner of the light-matter, and this fell with a heavy thud to the magnet pole, drawn down by the attraction of the magnet and by gravity.

Shutting off the magnet, Arcot picked up a pair of pliers and gripped the little fragment.

"Whew--light-metal certainly isn't light metal! I'll bet this little sc.r.a.p weights ten pounds! We'll have to reduce it considerably before we can use it. But that shouldn't be too difficult."

By using the magnet and several large diamond faceplates they were able to work the tough material down to a thin sheet; then with a heavy press, they cut some very small fragments, and with these, determined the specific gravity.

"Arcot," Wade asked finally, "just how does the magnet make that stuff tractable? I'm not physicist enough to figure out what takes place inside the material."

"Magnetism worked as it did," Arcot explained, "because in this light-matter every photon is affected by the magnetism, and every photon is given a new motion. That stuff can be made to go with the speed of light, you know. It's the only solid that could be so affected. This stuff should be able, with the aid of a molecular motion beam, which will make all the photons move in parallel paths, to move at the full speed of each photon--186,000 miles a second. The tremendous speed of these individual photons is what makes the material so hard. Their kinetic impulse is rather considerable! It's the kinetic blow that the molecules of a metal give that keeps other metal from penetrating it.

This simply gives such powerful impulse that even diamonds wouldn't cut it.

"You know that an iron saw will cut platinum readily, yet if both are heated to say, 1600 degrees, the iron is a liquid, and the platinum very soft--but now the platinum cuts through the iron!

"Heat probably won't have any effect on this stuff, but the action of the magnet on the individual photons corresponds to the effect of the heat on the individual atoms and molecules. The ma.s.s is softened, and we can work it. At least, that's the way I figure it out.