Tillie Part 1

Tillie.

by Roger Phillips Graham.

[Sidenote: She was just a blob of metal, but she had emotions like any woman. She, too, wanted ROMANCE, and wasn't coy about running after her "guy"]

"There you are!" Judson Taylor, the eccentric physics prof, pulled a metallic object out of his pocket and laid it on the table between us.

The object was a solid chunk of some kind of metal, judging from its bright silver color, about the size and shape of a pocket knife.

I looked at it stupidly and said, "_Where_ are we?"

I am Bill Halley. Some of the adolescent undergraduate brats at this one-horse college have nicknamed me "Comet" and it burns me up every time some pimply-faced baby waves his arm at me and says, "Hiya, Comet."

But I smile and don't let them know I don't like it, because if they knew there would be no living with them. Jud is head of the physics department and I am one of the three profs under him. When I first came here last fall he looked at my papers, said "BILL HALLEY?" and since then has treated me with the respect he reserves only for the G.o.ds of Physics. Probably a.s.sumed I was a direct descendant of the Halley who got his name plastered all over Halley's Comet.

Anyway, between cla.s.ses this morning he had excitedly asked me to meet him at the Campus Lunch during the noon hour and he would show me his latest discovery--and here we were, wherever that was. I picked up the hunk of metal and turned it over in the palm of my hand, sipping my coffee from a cup held in my other hand, and tried to figure out why he was so excited.

There was a peculiar warmth to the stuff. Maybe it was radioactive. But no, it was too light to be one of the heavy elements. I tossed it back to the table top and then nearly rose to the ceiling. The stuff hadn't bounced with a metallic sound at all, but had settled slowly, coming to rest with no sign of a b.u.mp.

I picked it up again and looked at Jud, puzzled.

He grinned and said, "Watch this." Then he looked at the lump of metal in a peculiar manner like he might be trying mental telepathy out on it, and suddenly the stuff weighed a ton. It forced my hand down so fast that it bruised as it struck the table. As suddenly the stuff became light again and Judson Taylor had hold of my hand, rubbing it.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Bill. I am not too good at controlling it yet."

"What the h.e.l.l IS that stuff?" I ground out.

"I don't know, exactly," he replied. "Mallory, the biochemist, made it and brought it to me. He said he got a lot of chemicals spilled. One of them was a rare enzyme that he didn't want to lose, so he mopped up the mess and put it in a large flask and added some alcohol, getting ready to recover this valuable enzyme. Suddenly this stuff started to form on the sides of the flask, just like silver in the mirror coating process.

But all the chemicals were pure hydro-carbons with no silver or other metal present. According to Mallory this stuff is some unknown hydro-carbon. I've been playing with it for two days now."

Judson Taylor put the stuff back in his pocket and rose.

"Let's go over to my lab. I want to show you some things I've found out about it."

I gulped down the rest of my coffee and followed him. We crossed the campus of good old Puget U to the antique building which housed the physics department. We climbed the creaking stairs to the third floor which was devoted mostly to Jud's own private research and was filled with apparatus that he had acc.u.mulated during the thirty years he had been kingpin of this department.

Jud crossed over to a bench on which there was a balance and some other stuff and placed the hunk of mystery on one tray of the balance. On the other tray he placed a ten-gram weight. The balance swayed a little and then came to rest on the zero mark, showing the stuff weighed exactly ten grams. Then he placed another ten-gram weight on the tray and the balance came to rest on the zero mark, showing the stuff weighed exactly twenty grams!

"Now watch," he said. He placed the silver chunk on the same side as the two ten-gram weights, leaving the tray it had been in absolutely empty.

The balance fluctuated a little and again came to rest on the zero mark, showing a minus twenty grams!

By that time I had stopped believing what my eyes told me.

"That's quite a trick," I said skeptically. "How do you work it?" And I stooped to look under the table, hoping to see a setup of magnets hidden there that would help restore my belief in my sanity.

"I don't work it," Jud exclaimed irritably. "It acts that way itself."

I forgot my one o'clock cla.s.s entirely. Jud and I played around with that hunk of metallic hydro-carbon most of the afternoon, arguing back and forth about what caused it to do the things it did. I found out that if I thought of beefsteak rare while I looked at it, it would weigh exactly ten pounds, and if I thought of a chicken with its neck being wrung the stuff would float up to the ceiling. I tried all sorts of thoughts on it and got some of the craziest results. But whatever I thought, when I thought of the same thing again I got the same results.

But my results were different than Jud's! When he thought of a chicken with its neck being wrung the stuff didn't float up to the ceiling but instead made the floor creak and groan. Finally we took it over to the feed company and put it on their car scales. Then when Jud thought of a chicken with its neck being wrung, we found that the stuff weighed twelve thousand four hundred and eighty pounds! And it was no bigger than a pocket knife!

As we stood there and looked at the feed scales in utter amazement I said, "Look, Jud, we've got something here. I've got an idea. Suppose we rig up a strong resting place for this stuff in my car. Then when I think of the right thing it will push the car forward at any speed I want to go. We'll have to be careful or it will wreck us, but--maybe after we know what we are doing we can build a s.p.a.ce ship!"

Well, to cut a long story short, two days later Mallory, the biochemist, Jud Taylor, and I were speeding along the state highway with the needle hovering around eighty-five, the engine out of gear and dead, and a crazy bit of silver stuff encased in a special frame in the dashboard with reinforcing bars down to the cha.s.sis holding it steady.

It took two of us to drive the car, though, because one of us had to drive and the other concentrate on the stuff.

Jud had named the stuff "tellepan" before he showed it to me that noon, but I pointed out that tellepan sounded too much like j.a.panese for turtle, so he renamed it "tellecarbon." Mallory had been wracking his brains trying to figure the chemical composition of the stuff, but all he had found out was that the stuff could not absorb any heat whatever, nor emit any, it had any weight you wanted to give it, and when left alone a.s.sumed any weight it seemed to fancy at the moment. Moreover, no reagent could touch it. Even aqua regia and hydrofluoric acid couldn't touch it. It could be manipulated like putty and molded into any shape with a little persuasion; it always remained the same bright silver color, and it seemed to be the connecting link between gravity and thought.

Mallory even got some more bottles of the chemicals he had spilled and spilled them over again, cleaning them up and putting some alcohol in the mess like he had done the first time, but no more tellecarbon appeared. We finally had to face the facts. Tellecarbon was some complex hydro-carbon because all of its basic const.i.tuents were hydro-carbons.

We had the only bit of it in existence and no more could be made.

After we had driven for a couple of hours, Jud changed his thought to something else and we came to a halt on the highway. No one was in sight so we decided to try our second experiment. For that I had to do the thinking because none of Jud's thoughts seemed to work in the attempts we had made in the laboratory. I brought to my mind's eye the image of a chicken with its neck being wrung. Then made it two of them. The car rose slowly off the ground. Then Jud thought his thoughts that made it move forward. By regulating the number of dying chickens in my thoughts I could cause the car to rise or sink at will.

Soon we were quite high, or at least Mallory said we were. I looked out of the window to see and the car started to hurtle to the ground. It scared me so much that I almost couldn't calm my mind enough to think of chickens, but finally made it just in time. By a supreme effort of will I managed to get the car down safely on the highway again. Then I gave in to my emotions and shook like a leaf.

We had had enough for the day, so we covered up the tellecarbon and started the motor, getting back to the U at dusk.

When we alighted from the car in front of the boarding house in which Mallory and I stayed, we were still a little shaky over our narrow escape. We stood on the sidewalk by the car for a moment trying to decide whether to go up to my room, to Mallory's or down the street a block to Jud's house. We compromised on Pokey's Malt Shop at the corner and finally settled with a sigh of relief in a booth way at the back.

With a round of black coffee in front of us we settled down to business.

Nothing less than a s.p.a.ce ship would do. Here in our hands, or rather out in my car, we had the secret of untold power. With that little hunk of tellecarbon and a certain amount of concentration on it we could travel to Mars and back like nothing flat. During summer vacation for the last two years Mallory and I had worked in the shipyards and gained practical experience in welding, boilermaking and sheetmetal work. The two of us could build a small s.p.a.ce ship by ourselves. All that would be necessary would be to make it airtight, with enough insulation to keep our heat from radiating into s.p.a.ce. The rest of the problem involved only ordering stuff from catalogues. Carbon dioxide absorbers, tanks of oxygen, food, various instruments, and so on. That would be Jud's work.

Just as we were finishing our coffees, Lahoma Rice, the secretary in the Dean's office, came in and discovered us. Mallory and I had been more or less competing for her affections for some time. It was the only thing that had ever come between us in our years at college together and the years since then. We both tried to keep it on a friendly basis, but underneath it had become pretty serious.

When we saw her coming Jud whispered quickly, "Keep quiet about all this in front of her. We don't want anybody to know about our amazing discovery at this early date."

Coming over, she slid into the booth beside Jud and flashed a smile at me and Mallory.

"Well, what's all the hush-hush about?"

"Oh, nothing," answered Mallory, looking completely unconcerned.

"Ha, ha. That's right. Absolutely nothing at all," I echoed, to make it more convincing. But somehow it didn't sound quite as convincing as I had intended. Even I noticed that at once, and a secret dangled before the nose of a woman. It awoke in her an undefeatable urge. Before we could rally our forces she was in on the secret and determined to go with us when we went to Mars.

"But Lahoma," Mallory desperately pleaded, "you don't need to come along. I'll be all right."

"I wasn't thinking of you," Lahoma retorted icily, and although she did not look at me as she said that, my heart quickened its tempo at the hidden inference in her words.

So it was settled. The four of us were to go as soon as school let out the next summer. During the winter Mallory and I would build the s.p.a.ce ship in the old boat house down on the beach just a few blocks from the campus.

It was really fun that winter, working late into the night putting the s.p.a.ce ship together. Our crowning achievement was retractible wings for steering the ship in atmosphere. In s.p.a.ce, of course, steering would have to be done by small steering rockets. The main drive force, though, would be the missing link, as we had been calling it all winter.