The hydrogen, germ, and nerve gas horrors that followed were not truly political. The true meaning was more that of beggars fighting over a crust of bread.
The author of Gulliver’s Travels sardonically proposed that Irish babies be fattened for English tables; other students urged less drastic ways of curbing population none of which made the slightest difference. Life, all life, has the twin drives to survive and to reproduce. Intelligence is an aimless by-product except as it serves these basic drives.
But intelligence can be made to serve the mindless demands of life. Our Galaxy contains in excess of one hundred thousand Earth-type planets, each as warm and motherly to men as sweet Terra. Ortega’s torch ships could reach the stars. Mankind could colonize, even as the hungry millions of Europe had crossed the Atlantic and raised more babies in the New World.
Some did . . . hundreds of thousands. But the entire race, working as a team, cannot build and launch a hundred ships a day, each fit for a thousand colonists, and keep it up day after day, year after year, time without end. Even with the hands and the will (which the race never had) there is not that much steel, aluminum, and uranium in Earth’s crust. There is not one hundredth of the necessary amount.
But intelligence can find solutions where there are none. Psychologists once locked an ape in a room, for which they had arranged only four ways of escaping. Then they spied on him to see which of the four he would find.
The ape escaped a fifth way.
Dr. Jesse Evelyn Ramsbotham had not been trying to solve the baby problem; he had been trying to build a time machine. He had two reasons: first, because time machines are an impossibility; second, because his hands would sweat and he would stammer whenever in the presence of a nubile female. He was not aware that the first reason was compensation for the second, in fact he was not aware of the second reason it was a subject his conscious mind avoided.
It is useless to speculate as to the course of history had Jesse Evelyn Ramsbotham’s parents had the good sense to name their son Bill instead of loading him with two girlish names. He might have become an All American halfback and ended up selling bonds and adding his quota of babies to a sum already disastrous. Instead he became a mathematical physicist.
Progress in physics is achieved by denying the obvious and accepting the impossible. Any nineteenth century physicist could have given unassailable reasons why atom bombs were impossible if his reason were not affronted at the question; any twentieth century physicist could explain why time travel was incompatible with the real world of spacetime. But Ramsbotham began fiddling with the three greatest Einsteinian equations, the two relativity equations for distance and duration and the massconversion equation; each contained the velocity of light. “Velocity” is first derivative, the differential of distance with respect to time; he converted those equations into differential equations, then played games with them. He would feed the results to the Rakitiac computer, remote successor to Univac, Eniac and Maniac. While he was doing these things his hands never sweated nor did he stammer, except when he was forced to deal with the young lady who was chief programmer for the giant computer.
His first model produced a time stasis or low entropy field no bigger than a football but a lighted cigarette placed inside with full power setting was still burning a week later. Ramsbotham picked up the cigarette, resumed smoking and thought about it.
Next he tried a day old chick, with colleagues to witness. Three months later the chick was unaged and no hungrier than chicks usually are. He reversed the phase relation and cut in power for the shortest time he could manage with his bread-boarded hookup.
In less than a second the newly hatched chick was long dead, starved and decayed.
He was aware that he had simply changed the slope of a curve, but he was convinced that he was on the track of true time travel. He never did find it, although once he thought that he had, he repeated by request his demonstration with a chick for some of his colleagues; that night two of them picked the lock on his lab, let the little thing out and replaced it with an egg. Ramsbotham might have been permanently convinced that he had found time travel and then spent the rest of his life in a blind alley had they not cracked the egg and showed him that it was hardboiled.