an answer; let’s figure out how to find it. In the first place the three
natural radioactive series are out, aren’t they?”
“Yes — at least we had agreed that all that ground had been fully covered
before.”
“O. K.; we have to assume that previous investigators have done what their
notes show they have done — otherwise we might as well not believe
anything, and start checking on everybody from Archimedes to date. Maybe
that is indicated, but Methuselah himself couldn’t carry out such an
assignment. What have we got left?”
“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 bomb 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 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
mercury-steam-turbogenerator 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 bomb, nor were they
subject to the man-killing 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 anti-radiation helmet shoved back from his face like a
grotesque sunbonnet. “What is it?” he asked. “Oh — it’s you, Dr. 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 cyclotron rather than a resonant accelerator.