The Micro Men

by John Russell Fearn, Vargo Statten

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

Synopsis

An intense human quietness was upon the laboratory. Annexed though it was to the rambling reaches of the Research Council Building, wherein experimental analyses from atomic power to weed-killer were taking place twenty-four hours a day, no external sounds penetrated the proofed, heavily-insulated walls...

Release date: September 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 100

Sample

AN INTENSE human quietness was upon the laboratory. Annexed though it was to the rambling reaches of the Research Council Building, wherein experimental analyses from atomic power to weed-killer were taking place twenty-four hours a day, no external sounds penetrated the proofed, heavily-insulated walls.

It was early evening. Outside, the dull London November drizzle had closed the day prematurely. Inside the laboratory Ward Benson, research scientist sat motionless before an instrument panel, his eyes studying the complicated meters and the needles flickering thereon.

“It’s it!” he declared presently, triumph giving a tautness to his voice. “I do believe we’ve got it, Fay!”

Fay Denham, his assistant, did not speak. A trim brunette in a laboratory smock, she was first and foremost a scientist, and because of it she knew when to hold her counsel. This was a moment too intense for comment.

Her dark eyes remained directed, like Ward’s, towards the dials and meters.

“A year … No, two years.” Ward corrected himself. “We have been searching that long, Fay. Now we’ve got it—And it should mean eternal life!”

It was an intriguing statement, but he had used it so often that it had become meaningless for that very reason. It certainly did not evoke any words from Fay Denham. Impassively she watched Ward’s fingers gently turn a calibrated knob.

“Definitely above the length of cosmic waves,” he continued. “Higher, shorter wavelength than anything ever known, but—until now—exceedingly diffused. You know, Fay, Jeans was not far wrong when he said that cosmic waves might not be the final radiations out of space. That there might be others in higher actives. There are—and we’ve got them! One of them, anyhow. Right here.”

The panelled instrument before which Ward Benson was seated had tall, slender tubes glowing along its top. Linked to it were softly humming transformers and massive power-packs. The apparatus itself was complicated in the extreme, especially where it finally branched out into a filigree of varicoloured cables ending in an object like an enlarging camera.

Only one man understood the intracies—Ward Benson himself. It had taken him five years to conceive the Immortality Machine, as he rather grandiloquently called it, and two more years to build it. In essence it was a supersensitive radiation detector for snaring a wavelength—which mathematics said must exist—far shorter than cosmic waves.

Now it had been done, the only evidence of the new radiation being on the meters and the plate of the oscillograph where the wavelength betrayed its peak-and-valley line in a blurring, dithering streak of light.

At length Ward switched off and sat back in his chair. His grey eyes looked at the girl seated beside him. Ward Benson was thirty-three, with more than his share of scientific brilliance and, what was more, the necessary determination to work out his problems. A superb brain was behind the big, broad-templed forehead and crowning mop of untidy black hair.

“Funny,” he said, half smiling as he mused. “Now we have run smack into success we take it as calmly as though we’d just received a call on the visiphone. Maybe the fight we’ve had has taken all the glamour out of it. Remember? All those months of theories on paper while we were building the apparatus and cross-checking our mathematics.”

“I remember,” Fan Denham said. She got to her feet, a small-statured girl with sharply intelligent features. “Anyway, it isn’t glamorous, Ward. If anything I’d say it is dangerous.”

“Dangerous!” Ward rose too and gazed down on her from his six feet odd of height. “Dangerous! Great heavens, what a thing for a scientist to say!”

“At the moment I’m afraid I’m speaking as a woman, and a pretty far-seeing one, I trust, not as a dispassionate dispenser of facts and figures. And I still say it is dangerous!” There was genuine, troubled earnestness in Fay Denham’s face. “Immortality! I don’t think it will work out, Ward—at least not yet. We don’t understand enough about the basic processes of life, of give and take if you like, to be given such a tremendous gift. I’m pretty sure it will come unstuck somewhere.”

Ward considered for a moment; then with a smile he put an arm about the girl’s shoulders.

“Oh, come now Fay, I’m surprised at you!” he chided. “If we can achieve immortality we shan’t need to understand the basic processes of life. The first thing to do, though, is to make sure we are not talking through our hats. Let’s get busy on a test.” He stirred actively. “Now, let’s see …”

From the filing cabinet nearby he took out a fat dossier. In scientific jargon it recorded the reactions, reflexes, and general physical condition of “George,” the research laboratory’s chief experimental white rabbit.

At the moment “George” was in his cage beside the wall, chewing a piece of lettuce leaf dispassionately and not in the least interested in the two humans who were tolerably certain they had discovered life everlasting.

“Anabolism and ketabolism are normal,” Ward said, musing, setting the file down again on the bench. “ ‘George’ builds up and breaks down his bodily cells at a steady radio, ketabolism being the greater, thereby producing a final complete breakdown in cells which ends in death. Unfortunately for every living cellular organism that is just what always does happen—the eternal breakdown which undoes all the good work of anabolism. However, unless our calculations are completely cockeyed this new radiation we’ve discovered and concentrated should just about balance anabolism and ketabolism equally, thereby making build-up keep steady pace with breakdown. The answer to that will be an end of senility. No age. Just—immortality.”

“As if I didn’t know,” Fay murmured; then going over to the wire-fronted cage she lifted “George” out reverently and placed him on the laboratory table. As Ward waved a hand she picked the rabbit up again and put him directly beneath the focusing mechanism of the Immortality Machine—the extended part of the apparatus which looked like an enlarging camera.

“Whether this radiation will kill George or not, I don’t know,” Ward murmured, half to himself, as once again he settled before the main switches. “What it should do is balance his anabolism and ketabolism and make him eternal—a point we can only start proving by testing his reactions after a night’s interval. Anyway, here goes.”

Feeling vaguely uneasy at the realisation of the immense source of power he had tapped, Ward switched the radiation on again. Though nothing was visible, both he and the girl knew exactly what was happening. The basis of the equipment was simple. As a radio receiver picks up the expanding broadcasting waves of a station, so this supersensitive receiver picked up radiation existing above the range of cosmic waves.

The instrument might even have infinity for its reach: Ward was by no means sure yet. He simply knew that, on paper anyway, the wavelength he had tapped and concentrated—and the existence of which was autographed by the oscillograph—ought to be exactly right for balancing the breakdown and build-up of cells.

“George” snuggled motionless on the plastic-x plate beneath the projector-nozzle of the instrument. Silent, a yard away, Fay stood with her arms folded and a look of profound interest on her face. The deep pervading hum of the apparatus was such a concomitant of the laboratory that she hardly noticed it. Ward studied the oscillograph reading and the meters. Then both he and Fay gave a start of surprise.

“George” was becoming smaller!

“Ward!” The girl swung to him. “Switch off quickly! There must be something wrong——”

She dived towards “George” and Ward hurtled out of his chair on top of her. He knocked her flying backwards from the apparatus. Then he began helping her to her feet again.

“Sorry,” he apologised breathlessly. “I just had to stop you. It might have got you the same way as ‘George’ if you’d touched him—Great heavens!” he broke off in amazement, and he and Fay were just in time to see the imperturbable “George” decrease to a tiny, inch-long rabbit, then to a mere puff of fur, a blur of white, and——

Gone!

A transient sensation of strain passed through the air of the laboratory, and vanished.

His face harsh with worry, Ward went over to the equipment and switched it off. Then he moved to the plastic plate and studied it. The plate itself, entirely non-metallic and non-magnetic, had failed to come under the influence of the radiation. But what about poor “George”?

“He became—microcosmic!” Fay cried abruptly, stealing forward as though murder had been committed. “He must have gone into an inter-atomic universe, or somewhere. Ward, what on earth did happen?”

“By-product,” Ward muttered obscurely, thinking.

“What in the world do you mean?—by product?”

He gestured impatiently. “I mean that every discovery, scientific or otherwise, has a by-product, or an offshoot if you prefer. It can only mean that the radiation we’ve found is not the right one. There must be others. It isn’t immortality after all: it’s shrinkage. Atomic shrinkage, that is: the narrowing of the electronic orbits.”

Ward glanced at the clock and noted the time. Then he looked at the self-controlling device on the apparatus.

“ ‘George’,” he said, “took exactly four minutes to go beyond the vanishing point, and he was organic. Now let’s see what else we can do …”

Completely dispassionate again, purely a scientist on the hunt for a vital factor, he picked up a chrome block about four inches square and put it on the plastic-x plate. Again he switched on the instrument.

In silence he and Fay watched the block shrink. It seemed to take longer than “George” had done, but at last it became a blur of grey, flashed briefly in the light of the ceiling globes and finally disappeared.

“Seven minutes,” Ward said, and switched off.

“I don’t see what the timing proves,” Fay remarked, baffled.

Ward glanced at her. “It proves, Fay, that organic substances shrink faster than inorganic. I know it is a side issue, but there’s such a wide atomic difference between organic and inorganic substances that I prefer to be sure. This business has got to be weighed up carefully. As a by-product alone this power to shrink objects beyond the vanishing point may prove mighty useful.”

Ward became silent, threw himself in the chair before the apparatus, and scowled. Presently he dug out his pipe and filled it from a bulging pouch.

“In the search for immortality we’ve stumbled on something,” he said, drawing flame through the tobacco. “Matter, of course, is always linked with radiation of some sort. When it builds up or breaks down it gives off energy: when its atoms are exploded it releases energy with terrific force. It can be either controlled or destroyed by electricity—so perhaps a radiation which can force it to shrink is not so very remarkable. It’s just that nobody ever happened on it before … Clearly, the electronic orbits of the atoms contracted and . . .