known—and since Martian and Tellurian science complemented each other, so that one
filled in the gaps of the other, it wasn’t long until fleets of space-freighters were bringing
in air and water from Venus, which had plenty of both to spare.
“Having done all he could for the Martians and having learned most of the stuff
he wanted to know, Roeser came back to Tellus and organized Inter-Planetary, with
scientists and engineers on all three planets, and%set to work to improve the whole
system, for the vessels they used then were dangerous — regular mankillers, in fact. At
about this same time Roeser and the Inter-Planetary Corporation, with their really
effective atomic bombs, had a big part in the unification of the world into one nation, so
that wars could no longer interfere with progress.
“With this introduction I can get down to fundamentals. Molecules are particles of
the first order, and vibrations of the first order include sound, light, heat, electricity,
radio, and so on. Second order, atoms—extremely short vibrations, such as hard X-
rays. Third order, electrons, protons, and so on, with their accompanying Millikan, or
Cosmic Rays. Fourth order, sub-electrons and sub-protons. These, in the material
aspect, are supposed to be the particles of the fourth order, and in the energy aspect
they are known as Roeser’s Rays. That is, these fourth-order rays and particles seem to
partake of the nature of both energy and matter. Following me?”
“Right behind you,” she assured him. She had been listening intently, her wide-
spaced brown eyes fastened upon his face.
“Since these Roeser’s Rays, or particles or rays of the fourth order, seem to be
both matter and energy, and since the rays can be converted into what is supposed to
be the particles, they have been thought to be the things from which both electrons and
protons were built. Therefore, everybody except Norman Brandon has supposed them
the ultimate units of creation, so that it would be useless to try to go any further . . .”
“Why, we were taught that they are the ultimate units!” she protested.
“I know you were—but we really don’t know anything, except what we have
learned empirically, even about our driving forces. What is called the fourth-order
particle is absolutely unknown, since nobody has been able to detect it, to say nothing
of determining its velocity or other properties. It has been assumed to have the velocity
of light only because that hypothesis does not conflict with observational data. I’m going
to give you the generally-accepted idea, since we have nothing definite to offer in its
place, but I warn you that that idea is very probably wrong. There’s a lot of deep stuff
down there that hasn’t been dug up yet. In fact, Brandon thinks that the product of
conversion isn’t what we think it is, at all—that the actual fundamental unit and the
primary mechanism of the transformation lie somewhere below the fourth order, and
possibly even below the level of the ether—but we haven’t been able to find a point of
attack yet that will let us get in anywhere. However, I’m getting ‘way ahead of our
subject. To get back to it, energy can be converted into something that acts like matter
through Roeser’s Rays, and that is the empirical fact underlying the drive of our space-
ships, as well as that of almost all other vehicles on all three planets. Power is
generated by the great waterfalls of Tellus and Venus — water’s mighty scarce on Mars,
of course, so most of our plants there use atomics—and is transmitted on tight beams
by means of powerful fields of force to the receptors, wherever they may be. The
individual transmitting fields and receptors are simply matched-frequency units, each
matching the electrical characteristics of some particular and unique beam of force. This
beam is composed of Roeser’s Rays, in their energy aspect. It took a long time to work
out this tight-beam transmission of power, but it was fairly simple after they got it.”
He took out a voluminous notebook, at the sight of which Nadia smiled.
“A computer might forget to dress, but you’d never catch one without a full
magazine pencil and a lot of blank paper,” he grinned in reply and went on, writing as he
talked.
“For any given frequency, , and phase angle, theta, you integrate, between
limits zero and pi over two, sine theta d. . .”
“Hold it — I’m sinking!” Nadia exclaimed. “I don’t integrate at all unless it is
absolutely necessary. As long as you stick to general science I’m right on your heels,
but please lay off of integrations and all that—most especially lay off of those terrible
electrical integrals. I always did think that they were the most poisonous kind known. I
want only a general idea—that’s all that I can understand, anyway.”
“Sure. I forgot—guess I was getting in deeper than is necessary, especially since
this whole thing of beam transmission is pretty crude yet and is bound to change a lot
before long. There is so much loss that when we get more than a few hundred million
kilometers away from a power-plant we lose reception entirely. But to get going again,
the receptors receive the beam and from them the power is sent to the accumulators,
where it is stored. These accumulators are an outgrowth of the storage battery. The
theory of the accumulator is . . .”
“Lay off of the theory, please!” the listener interrupted. “I understand perfectly
without it. Energy is stored in the accumulators—you put it in and take it out. That’s all
that is necessary.”
“I’d like to give you some of the theory—but, after all, it wouldn’t add much to
your understanding of the working of things, and it might mix you up, as some of it is
pretty deep stuff. Then, too, it would take a lot of time, and the rest of your friends would
squawk if I kept you here indefinitely. From the accumulators, then, the power is fed to
the converters, each of which is backed by a projector. The converters simply change
the aspect of the rays, from the energy aspect to the material aspect. As soon as this is
done, the highly-charged particles — or whatever they are — thus formed are repelled
by the terrific stationary force maintained in the projector backing the converter. Each
particle departs with a velocity supposed to be that of light, and the recoil upon the
projector drives the vessel, or car, or whatever it is attached to. Still with me?”
“Struggling a little, but my nose is still above the surface. These particles, being
so infinitesimally small that they cannot even be detected, go right through any
substance without any effect—they are not even harmful.”
“Exactly. Now we are in position to go ahead with the lights, detectors, and so on.
The energy aspect of the rays you can best understand as simply a vibration in the
ether— an extremely short one. While not rigidly scientific, that is close enough for you
and me. Nobody knows what the stuff really is, and it cannot be explained nor
demonstrated by any model or concept in three-dimensional space. Its physical-
mathematical interpretation, the only way in which it can be grasped at all, requires
sixteen co-ordinates in four dimensions, and I don’t suppose you’d care to go into that?”
“I’ll say I wouldn’t!” she exclaimed, feelingly.
“Well, anyway, by the use of suitable fields of force it can be used as a carrier
wave. Most of this stuff of the fields of force—how to carry the modulation up and down
through all the frequency changes necessary—was figured out by the Martians ages
ago. Used as a pure carrier wave, with a sender and a receiver at each end, it isn’t so
bad— that’s why our communicator and radio systems work as well as they do. They
are pretty good, really, but the ultralight vision system is something else again. Sending
the heterodyned wave through steel is easy, but breaking it up, so as to view an object
and return the impulses, was an awful job and one that isn’t half done yet. We see
things, after a fashion and at a distance of a few kilometers, by sending an almost
parallel wave from a twin-projector to disintegrate and double back the viewing wave.
That’s the way the lookout plates and lenses work, all over the ship— from the master-
screens in the control room to the plates of the staterooms and lifeboats and the
viewing-areas of the promenades. But the whole system is a make-shift, and . . .”
“Just a minute!” exclaimed the girl. “I and everybody else have been thinking that
everything is absolutely perfect; and yet every single thing you have talked about, you
have ended up by describing as ‘unknown’, ‘rudimentary’, ‘temporary’, or a ‘makeshift’.
You speak as though the entire system were a poor thing that will have to do until