Harper-Erickson fuel would be announced not as a semiaccidental result of
the initiative of two employees, but as the long-expected end product of
years of systematic research conducted under a fixed policy growing
naturally out of their humane determination to remove forever the menace of
explosion from even the sparsely settled Arizona desert.
No mention was to be made of the danger of complete, planet-embracing
catastrophe.
Lentz discussed it. He dwelt on the appreciation that would be due them
from a grateful world. He invited them to make a noble sacrifice and, with
subtle misdirection, tempted them to think of themselves as heroes. He
deliberately played on one of the most deep-rooted of simian instincts, the
desire for approval from one’s kind, deserved or not.
All the while he was playing for time, as he directed his attention from
one hard case, one resistant mind, to another. He soothed and he tickled
and he played on personal foibles. For the benefit of the timorous and the
devoted family men, he again painted a picture of the suffering, death and
destruction that might result from their well-meant reliance on the
unproved and highly questionable predictions of Destry’s mathematics. Then
he described in glowing detail a picture of a world free from worry but
granted almost unlimited power, safe power from an invention which was
theirs for this one small concession.
It worked. They did not reverse themselves all at once, but a committee was
appointed to investigate the feasibility of the proposed spaceship power
plant. By sheer brass Lentz suggested names for the committee and Dixon
confirmed his nominations, not because he wished to, particularly, but
because he was caught off guard and could not think of a reason to refuse
without affronting those colleagues.
The impending retirement of King was not mentioned by either side.
Privately, Lentz felt sure that it never would be mentioned.
It worked, but there was left much to do. For the first few days after the
victory in committee, King felt much elated by the prospect of an early
release from the soul-killing worry. He was buoyed up by pleasant demands
of manifold new administrative duties. Harper and Erickson were detached to
Goddard Field to collaborate with the rocket engineers there in design of
firing chambers, nozzles, fuel stowage, fuel metering and the like. A
schedule had to be worked out with the business office to permit as much
power of the bomb as possible to — be diverted to making atomic fuel, and a
giant combustion chamber for atomic fuel had to be designed and ordered to
replace the bomb itself during the interim between the time it was shut
down on Earth and the later time when sufficient local, smaller plants
could be built to carry the commercial load. He was busy.
When the first activity had died down and they were settled in a new
routine, pending the shutting down of the bomb and its removal to outer
space, King suffered an emotional reaction. There was, by then, nothing to
do but wait, and tend the bomb, until the crew at Goddard Field smoothed
out the bugs and produced a space-worthy rocketship.
They ran into difficulties, overcame them, and came across more
difficulties. They had never used such high reaction velocities; it took
many trials to find a nozzle shape that would give reasonably high
efficiency. When that was solved, and success seemed in sight, the jets
burned out on a time trial ground test. They were stalemated for weeks over
that hitch.
Back at the power plant Superintendent King could do nothing but chew his
nails and wait. He had not even the release of running over to Goddard
Field to watch the progress of the research, for, urgently as he desired
to, he felt an even stronger, an overpowering compulsion to watch over the
bomb lest it — heartbreakingly! — blow up at the last minute.
He took to hanging around the control room. He had to stop that; his unease
communicated itself to his watch engineers; two of them cracked up in a
single day — one of them on watch.
He must face the fact — there had been a grave upswing in psychoneurosis