I Spy

by John Russell Fearn, Vargo Statten

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Television experimenter Curtis Drew sets out to combine the X-ray with television to aid surgery. However, he discovers instead 'pure' television-invisible 'Z-rays' which have the potential to receive and record any situation-anywhere. Nothing is private any more. The secrets of the warlords, the immoralities of the masses, the hidden crimes all be lie exposed before the merciless, penetrating power of the invisible Z-ray. The invention could benefit humanity, yet to Drew it opens up more lucrative possibilities. He becomes a scientific 'Peeping Tom' and blackmailer, but when murder results, Scotland Yard becomes interested...

Release date: March 31, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 246

Sample

Just as in the first half of the twentieth century there existed many thousands of “ham” radio engineers who spent most of their spare time transmitting amateur radio programmes and discussing various radio topics with each other, sometimes at opposite ends of the world, so in the second half of the twentieth century there sprang up a new order of fanatics. In the main these young men and women were concerned with the transmission of monochrome and colour television, and indeed, towards the end of 1970 they were sending each other endless scenes in three dimensions which did not in any way interfere with the normal television bands.

Curtis Drew however, a brilliant television engineer, was not by any means satisfied with the simple exchange of the three-dimensional projections across intervening miles. He wanted a great deal more — preferably something that would finally turn him in a great deal of money. As yet he was only young — thirty — and he felt that with the undoubted skill he possessed something worthwhile should be made to arise from this constant spare-time devotion to an extremely absorbing hobby.

Curtis Drew was not alone in his belief. By his side there constantly worked his sister Christine, and his friend since schooldays, Dick Englefield. All three of them were more or less as “crazy” as each other, but all three had this one singleness of purpose — that they ought to be able to eventually rake in some kind of financial return for the expenditure of energy and cash which their absorbing hobby demanded.

It was Christine who finally developed a quite logical idea. Her normal occupation was on the clerical side of one of the city’s biggest hospitals. In this capacity she had been enabled to see many of the private reports submitted by surgeons and others of the medical fraternity for recording purposes, and she had not been slow to appreciate that even in these days of 1970 there were many barriers in the way of supreme surgical achievement. And it was from this that her idea had undoubtedly stemmed.

“Why,” she asked her brother, when the idea had fully matured, “do you not convert television processes to the more important field of surgery? By that I mean devise some process by which surgeons may be enabled to see clearly inside a human body. See exactly what is wrong with it, and therefore know what needs doing to repair it. I know there are X-rays and those kinds of devices, but nowadays even those are very antiquated. It seems to me there ought to be some process by which a surgeon should be able to see an interior organ, and have it reflected with perfect clarity on to some kind of screen, whereby he can assess in absolute detail just what is needed to put it right. In much the same fashion as an engineer is enabled to study the insides of metals and the strains and stresses that they will take, all by scientific equipment. By that means bridges and other engineering constructions are absolutely safe — but no such thing seems to exist to help the surgeon.”

There was no gainsaying the fact that the idea was an extremely good one and Curtis Drew was not slow either in seeing the financial possibilities that might accrue from such an invention, if only he could perfect it. Immediately he went to work to study all the processes of television, both on the transmission and the dimensional side, and from it there emerged in 1971 what he was pleased to call his Z-ray. Up to this point he had not explained either to his sister or Dick Englefield what he was trying to do. They had merely continued with their ordinary television transmissions and left Curtis to his own devices. But finally there came the day when, with proud triumph in his voice, Curtis announced that he had perfected his extraordinary invention.

“I don’t see why you couldn’t have told us something about it,” Christine objected, on the evening which he had set apart for his demonstration. “After all, we’re in this up to the neck as much as you are.”

“To a certain extent, Chris,” Curtis corrected. “This is entirely my own invention when you’ve said and done all—so I’m afraid I don’t see quite eye to eye with the ‘all of us’ angle.”

Christine gave Dick Englefield a glance. Dick was big, burly—good-humoured to a degree—and for that matter Christine too was a girl of extremely equable temperament, except when dealing with her brother. She knew better than anybody else his immense, over-riding ambition and she also knew that if he ever did get his hands on a source of extreme power there would be no stopping him. She and Curtis Drew were both dark and extremely intelligent, but whereas Christine had a definitely womanly sweetness about her, there was in Curtis a brusqueness of style and an acidity of tongue which made of him by no means an easy man to understand.

“The one-for-all and all-for-one technique applies only to the television department,” he said after a moment or two. “This stunt, if it works, is entirely mine. Now I’d better give you an outline of what I’ve been doing all these weeks. Later on, if I can, I’ll try and give you a demonstration.”

“Why do you say ‘if you can’?” Dick Englefield asked, in surprise. “Haven’t you worked on the thing long enough to know whether it operates or not?”

“I’m perfectly sure that it will operate, but so far I have been concerned mainly with the mechanics and haven’t yet experimented on a living creature to see if it functions in the way I believe it should do. To get back to the point, however—the basis of my Z-ray came into being when I was studying, quite by chance, a drawing of a lunar eclipse. You are both aware that during a lunar eclipse there are two shadows, the false shadow and the true—better known in technical language as the penumbra and umbra. The penumbra is the false shadow cast by the moon and the umbra is the real shadow of the eclipse itself. In other words the penumbra is the area of diffusion which exists outside the true shadow cone.”

“I quite fail to see,” Christine remarked, “how the penumbra-umbra lunar shadow could give you the basis of your idea. It isn’t even related to radiative transmission in any way.”

“As to that,” Curtis answered, “it depends what kind of a mind you’ve got and how far you can visualise the ultimate outcome of a scientific basis. Now for the sake of our little illustration, let us imagine that the umbra, or true shadow, is the Z-ray which my apparatus will send forth. Clear, so far?”

Christine and Dick Englefield both nodded together.

“Very well. This Z-ray beam is what one might call an exciter radiation. When it strikes an object, even if that object be within another object, it energises the light photons which it — the Z-ray — carries with it on its journey to the object in question. That is based on the principle of a luminous object, shining by reason of the fact that during the daylight hours it has absorbed a great quantity of light photons, which it re-radiates in the darkness. So this Z-ray strikes our object and immediately our object is lighted up. Your immediate reply to that will be that lighting up an object inside another object is of no use at all because it cannot be seen — and my reply would be, how right you are!

“I very soon appreciated this fact when I devised the Z-ray. It immediately became obvious that something more was needed. It was then that I hit upon the idea of an electronic reflecting beam. This beam acts on the principle of a mirror reflecting a light. For instance, if you reflect a light from a mirror it strikes the point required and is then reflected back again at exactly the same angle as it is transmitted. Forming, in other words, a V-shaped design.

“This electronic beam, then, operates at the same time as the Z-ray and travels to the same object. This electronic beam also has another property by which it limits the extent to which the Z-ray can travel, thereby making it capable of being focussed at any particular point, be it near or far. What happens is — the electronic beam decides what the objective is to be — or at least I decide it for it — and when it reaches that objective it forms an invisible barrier in the ether, which, of course, exists everywhere and is the transmitter of all radiations. That means that when the Z-ray strikes this barrier in the ether—which is also the pre-determined objective—it cannot go any further; it must illuminate that one particular point that the electronic beam has in focus.

“Now it is obviously logical that the reflection from the electronic beam must go somewhere. You cannot stop a thing dead or have it absorbed or re-dissipated. Just as in the case of a mirror you cannot reflect a light and not expect it to go anywhere. It is immediately re-distributed in various light waves from the original source. So it is with this electronic beam. When it strikes the objective it is immediately reflected back again at exactly the same angle at which it was projected, forming again a perfect V-shape in absolutely straight lines. So then our whole construction looks rather like an electronic beam being a ‘V’, that is transmission point, point of incidence, and point of reception — the transmission and reception points forming the two top points of the V, and the objective forming the base of the V, whilst the Z-ray goes straight down the centre and strikes the bottom point of the V …”

“I think,” Christine said, pondering, “that I begin to grasp what you mean. You transmit the electronic and Z-rays simultaneously and when the objective is reached it is energised into being illuminated, and the reflecting electronic beam directs the image up the ‘reflection’ path — or in other words the opposite arm of the V, back to the receiving point. Is that what you mean?”

“That’s it,” Curtis assented, nodding. With that he turned aside to the apparatus nearby and proceeded to indicate it. With interest Christine and Dick Englefield studied the equipment. They had of course seen it in the process of construction during the past weeks, but this was the first time that they had had the opportunity of seeing it in its finished state.

Altogether it comprised three separate sets of equipment. On the left stood the complicated receiving apparatus, and two feet away from it in the centre was the transmitter for the Z-ray, whilst two feet further away on the right was the transmitter for the electronic beam. The transmitter and receiver for the electronic beam were turned slightly inwards on their universal mountings, whilst the Z-ray transmitter faced exactly frontwards. All three were supported on heavily greased double rails which made them capable of being pushed closer together or spread wider apart, by which means it was assumed that Curtis would be able to maintain full control over them as he examined whatever objective he had in mind.

“Pretty cumbersome stuff,” was Dick Englefield’s comment after a while, and Curtis gave him a glance.

“No more cumbersome than the X-ray equipment used in modern laboratories and hospitals. The main factor in the basis of this apparatus is, that the nearer the objective, the sharper the inward convergence of the transmitter and receiver for the electronic beam. However, as near as I have been able to work it out in mathematics, it should be possible to get a correct convergence on an object three feet away, and if what I believe of this apparatus is true it should mean that an exact picture of anything internal will be reflected up the electronic beam to the screen which you see on the receiver there. Incidentally, as in television or radio, the image picked up is entirely electronic and the necessary transformers rebuild it back into its original material form, if I may call it such.”

“There’s one point I don’t quite get,” Christine remarked, as she went round the back of the equipment and pondered its infinite complication, “and that is how you control this Z-ray so that it can go through one solid and yet stop it short at another one. Surely for that kind of work it must have many of the properties of the X-ray?”

“Definitely it has,” Curtis assented. “As to why it can pass through one solid and yet be stopped by another. I thought I had made it clear when I said that the electronic beam is the means by which the Z. . .