“Artificial radioactives.”
“All right. Let’s set up a list of them, both those that have been made up
to now, and those that might possibly be made in the future. Call that our group-or
rather, field, if you want to be pedantic about definitions. There are a limited
number of operations that can be performed on each member of the group, and on the
members taken in combination. Set it up.”
Erickson did so, using the curious curlicues of the calculus of statement.
Harper nodded. “All right-expand it.”
Erickson looked up after a few moments, and asked, “Cal, have you any idea
how many terms there are in the expansion?”
“No. . . hundreds, maybe thousands, I suppose.”
“You’re conservative. It reaches four figures without considering possible
new radioactives. We couldn’t finish such a research in a century. He chucked his
pencil down and looked morose.
Cal Harper looked at him curiously, but with sympathy. “Gus,” he said
gently, “the job isn’t getting you, too, is it?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“I never saw you so willing to give up anything before. Naturally you and I
will never finish any such job, but at the very worst we will have eliminated a lot
of wrong answers for somebody else. Look at Edison-sixty years of experimenting,
twenty hours a day, yet he never found out the one thing he was most interested in
knowing. I guess if he could take it, we can.”
Erickson pulled out of his funk to some extent. “I suppose so,” he agreed.
“Anyhow, maybe we could work out some techniques for carrying a lot of experiments
simultaneously.”
Harper slapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the ol’ fight. Besides, we may
not need to finish the research, or anything like it, to find a satisfactory fuel.
The way I see it, there are probably a dozen, maybe a hundred, right answers. We may
run across one of them any day. Anyhow, since you’re willing to give me a hand with
it in your off watch time, I’m game to peck away at it till hell freezes.”
Lentz puttered around the plant and the administration center for several
days, until he was known to everyone by sight He made himself pleasant and asked
Page 25
questions. He was soon regarded as a harmless nuisance, to be tolerated because he
was a friend of the superintendent. He even poked his nose into the commercial power
end of the plant, and had the radiation-to-electric-power sequence explained to him
in detail. This alone would have been sufficient to disarm any suspicion that he
might be a psychiatrist, for the staff psychiatrists paid no attention to the
hard-bitten technicians of the power-conversion unit. There was no need to; mental
instability on their part could not affect the pile, nor were they subject to the
strain of social responsibility. Theirs was simply a job personally dangerous, a
type of strain strong men have been inured to since the jungle.
In due course he got around to the unit of the radiation laboratory set
aside for Calvin Harper’s use. He rang the bell and waited. Harper answered the
door, his antiradiation helmet shoved back from his face like some grotesque
sunbonnet. “What is it?” he asked. “Oh-it’s you, Doctor Lentz. Did you want to see
me?”
“Why, yes, and no,” the older man answered, “I was just looking around the
experimental station and wondered what you do in here. Will I be in the way?”
“Not at all. Come in. Gus!”
Erickson got up from where he had been fussing over the power leads to their
trigger a modified betatron rather than a resonant accelerator. “Hello.”
“Gus, this is Doctor Lentz-Gus Erickson.”
“We’ve met,” said Erickson, pulling off his gauntlet to shake hands. He had
had a couple of drinks with Lentz in town and considered him a “nice old duck.”
“You’re just between shows, but stick around and we’ll start another run-not that
there is much to see.”
While Erickson continued with the set-up, Harper conducted Lentz around the
laboratory, explaining the line of research they were conducting, as happy as a
father showing off twins. The psychiatrist listened with one ear and made