The Man Who Rocked the Earth Part 8

"You're an incorrigible!" he sighed despairingly.

"Well, you're a star gazer, aren't you?" inquired Hooker, relighting his pipe. "Some one told me so--I forget who. You must have a lot of interesting problems. They tell me that new planet of yours is full of uranium."

Thornton laughed. "You mustn't believe all that you read in the papers.

What are you working at particularly?"

"Oh, radium and thermic induction mostly," answered Hooker. "And when I want a rest I take a crack at the fourth dimension--s.p.a.cial curvature's my hobby. But I'm always working at radio stuff. That's where the big things are going to be pulled off, you know."

"Yes, of course," answered Thornton. He wondered if Hooker ever saw a paper, how long since he had been out of the house. "By the way, did you know Berlin had been taken?" he asked.

"Berlin--in Germany, you mean?"

"Yes, by the Russians."

"No! Has it?" inquired Hooker with politeness. "Oh, I think some one did mention it."

Thornton fumbled for a cigarette and Bennie handed him a match. They seemed to have extraordinarily little to say for men who hadn't seen each other for twenty-six years.

"I suppose," went on the astronomer, "you think it's deuced funny my dropping in casually this way after all this time, but the fact is I came on purpose. I want to get some information from you straight."

"Go ahead!" said Bennie. "What's it about?"

"Well, in a word," answered Thornton, "the earth's nearly a quarter of an hour behind time."

Hooker received this announcement with a polite interest but no astonishment.

"That's a how-de-do!" he remarked. "What's done it?"

"That's what I want you to tell _me_," said Thornton sternly. "What _could_ do it?"

Hooker unlaced his legs and strolled over to the mantel.

"Have a cracker?" he asked, helping himself. Then he picked up a piece of wood and began whittling. "I suppose there's the devil to pay?" he suggested. "Things upset and so on? Atmospheric changes? When did it happen?"

"About three weeks ago. Then there's this Sahara business."

"What Sahara business?"

"Haven't you heard?"

"No," answered Hooker rather impatiently. "I haven't heard anything. I haven't any time to read the papers; I'm too busy. My thermic inductor transformers melted last week and I'm all in the air. What was it?"

"Oh, never mind now," said Thornton hurriedly, perceiving that Hooker's ignorance was an added a.s.set. He'd get his science pure, uncontaminated by disturbing questions of fact. "How about the earth's losing that quarter of an hour?"

"Of course she's off her orbit," remarked Hooker in a detached way. "And you want to know what's done it? Don't blame you. I suppose you've gone into the possibilities of stellar attraction."

"Discount that!" ordered Thornton. "What I want to know is whether it could happen from the inside?"

"Why not?" inquired Hooker. "A general shift in the ma.s.s would do it. So would the mere application of force at the proper point."

"It never happened before."

"Of course not. Neither had seedless oranges until Burbank came along,"

said Hooker.

"Do you regard it as possible by any human agency?" inquired Thornton.

"Why not?" repeated Hooker. "All you need is the energy. And it's lying all round if you could only get at it. That's just what I'm working at now. Radium, uranium, thorium, actinium--all the radioactive elements--are, as everybody knows, continually disintegrating, discharging the enormous energy that is imprisoned in their molecules.

It may take generations, epochs, centuries, for them to get rid of it and transform themselves into other substances, but they will inevitably do so eventually. They're doing with more or less of a rush what all the elements are doing at their leisure. A single ounce of uranium contains about the same amount of energy that could be produced by the combustion of ten tons of coal--but it won't let the energy go. Instead it holds on to it, and the energy leaks slowly, almost imperceptibly, away, like water from a big reservoir tapped only by a tiny pipe. 'Atomic energy'

Rutherford calls it. Every element, every substance, has its ready to be touched off and put to use. The chap who can find out how to release that energy all at once will revolutionize the civilized world. It will be like the discovery that water could be turned into steam and made to work for us--multiplied a million times. If, instead of that energy just oozing away and the uranium disintegrating infinitesimally each year, it could be exploded at a given moment you could drive an ocean liner with a handful of it. You could make the old globe stagger round and turn upside down! Mankind could just lay off and take a holiday. But _how_?"

Bennie enthusiastically waved his pipe at Thornton.

"How! That's the question. Everybody's known about the possibilities, for Soddy wrote a book about it; but n.o.body's ever suggested where the key could be found to unlock that treasure-house of energy. Some chap made up a novel once and pretended it was done, but he didn't say _how_.

But"--and he lowered his voice pa.s.sionately--"I'm working at it, and--and--I've nearly--nearly got it."

Thornton, infected by his friend's excitement, leaned forward in his chair.

"Yes--nearly. If only my transformers hadn't melted! You see I got the idea from Savaroff, who noticed that the activity of radium and other elements wasn't constant, but varied with the degree of solar activity, reaching its maximum at the periods when the sun spots were most numerous. In other words, he's shown that the breakdown of the atoms of radium and the other radioactive elements isn't spontaneous, as Soddy and others had thought, but is due to the action of certain extremely penetrating rays given out by the sun. These particular rays are the result of the enormous temperature of the solar atmosphere, and their effect upon radioactive substances is a.n.a.logous to that of the detonating cap upon dynamite. No one has been able to produce these rays in the laboratory, although Hempel has suspected sometimes that traces of them appeared in the radiations from powerful electric sparks.

Everything came to a halt until Hiros.h.i.to discovered thermic induction, and we were able to elevate temperature almost indefinitely through a process similar to the induction of high electric potentials by means of transformers and the Ruhmkorff coil.

"Hiros.h.i.to wasn't looking for a detonating ray and didn't have time to bother with it, but I started a series of experiments with that end in view. I got close--I am close, but the trouble has been to control the forces set in motion, for the rapid rise in temperature has always destroyed the apparatus."

Thornton whistled. "And when you succeed?" he asked in a whisper.

Hooker's face was transfigured.

"When I succeed I shall control the world," he cried, and his voice trembled. "But the d.a.m.n thing either melts or explodes," he added with a tinge of indignation.

"You know about Hiros.h.i.to's experiments, of course; he used a quartz bulb containing a mixture of neon gas and the vapour of mercury, placed at the centre of a coil of silver wire carrying a big oscillatory current. This induced a ring discharge in the bulb, and the temperature of the vapour mixture rose until the bulb melted. He calculated that the temperature of that part of the vapour which carried the current was over 6,000. You see, the ring discharge is not in contact with the wall of the bulb, and can consequently be much hotter. It's like this." Here Bennie drew with a burnt match on the back of an envelope a diagram of something which resembled a doughnut in a chianti flask.

Thornton scratched his head. "Yes," he said, "but that's an old principle, isn't it? Why does Hiro--what's his name--call it--thermic induction?"

"Oriental imagination, probably," replied Bennie. "Hiros.h.i.to observed that a sudden increase in the temperature of the discharge occurred at the moment when the silver coil of his transformer became white hot, which he explained by some mysterious inductive action of the heat vibrations. I don't follow him at all. His theory's probably all wrong, but he delivered the goods. He gave me the right tip, even if I have got him lashed to the mast now. I use a tungsten spiral in a nitrogen atmosphere in my transformer and replace the quartz bulb with a capsule of zircorundum."

"A capsule of what?" asked Thornton, whose chemistry was mid-Victorian.

"Zircorundum," said Bennie, groping around in a drawer of his work table. "It's an absolute nonconductor of heat. Look here, just stick your finger in that." He held out to Thornton what appeared to be a small test tube of black gla.s.s. Thornton, with a slight moral hesitation, did as he was told, and Bennie, whistling, picked up the oxyacetylene blowpipe, regarding it somewhat as a dog fancier might gaze at an exceptionally fine pup. "Hold up your finger," said he to the astronomer. "That's right--like that!"

Thrusting the blowpipe forward, he allowed the hissing blue-white flame to wrap itself round the outer wall of the tube--a flame which Thornton knew could melt its way through a block of steel--but the astronomer felt no sensation of heat, although he not unnaturally expected the member to be incinerated.

"Queer, eh?" said Bennie. "Absolute insulation! Beats the thermos bottle, and requires no vacuum. It isn't quite what I want though, because the disintegrating rays which the ring discharge gives out break down the zirconium, which isn't an end-product of radioactivity. The pressure in the capsule rises, due to the liberation of helium, and it blows up, and the landlady or the police come up and bother me."

Thornton was scrutinizing Bennie's rough diagram. "This ring discharge,"

he meditated; "I wonder if it isn't something like a sunspot. You know the spots are electron vortices with strong magnetic fields. I'll bet you the Savaroff disintegrating rays come from the spots and not from the whole surface of the sun!"

"My word," said Bennie, with a grin of delight, "you occasionally have an illuminating idea, even if you are a musty astronomer. I always thought you were a sort of calculating machine, who slept on a logarithm table. I owe you two drinks for that suggestion, and to scare a thirst into you I'll show you an experiment that no living human being has ever seen before. I can't make very powerful disintegrating rays yet, but I can break down uranium, which is the easiest of all. Later on I'll be able to disintegrate anything, if I have luck--that is, anything except end-products. Then you'll see things fly. But, for the present, just this." He picked up a thin plate of white metal. "This is the metal we're going to attack, uranium--the parent of radium--and the whole radioactive series, ending with the end-product lead."