The Mightiest Machine

by John W. Campbell

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

Synopsis

A million light-years from Earth, one solitary spaceship floats through a vast swarm of enemies. The ship was an experimental vessel from Earth that utilised a revolutionary new concept in space mechanics, developed by the near-superman Aarn Munro. The enemy vessels were wholly unknown to Mankind, for the new drive had taken the Terran vessel into an unmapped void, where not even the telescopes of Earth had ever penetrated before...

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 213

Sample

“I SUPPOSE,” SAID Don Carlisle with a look of disapproval, “that this, too, is the ‘latest and greatest achievement of interplanetary transportation engineers.’ They turn out a new latest and greatest about once every six months—as fast as they build new ships in other words.”

“You should talk!” Russ Spencer laughed. “One of the features of that ship is the new Carlisle air rectifiers, guaranteed to maintain exactly the right temperature, ion, oxygen, and ozone content as well as humidity control. But, anyway,” he went on, turning to his friend, “I wish you could have made this discovery just two years earlier. It was the dream of dad’s life to build the first meteor-proof ship in the Spencer Rocketship Yards. You physicists were mighty slow about that. You’ve done the miracle now—I hope—but I wish you could have done it sooner.”

Big Aarn Munro smiled his slow smile. “I wish I could have, Russ. But remember, physics is like a chain—you can’t add the last link till all the earlier ones are in place. You don’t know, perhaps, how much depends on that one discovery of the magnetic atmosphere. I couldn’t have done it two years before, because then the necessary background hadn’t been developed. Now, the magnetic atmosphere development of mine will serve as background for other developments. While you engineers have been working on this ship, I have, despite Carlisle’s contemptuous references, been trying to prepare for another latest and greatest.’ ”

They had reached now, the base of the huge metal ways that supported the newly completed Procyon, the Spencer Rocket Co.’s latest product. Nearly seven hundred feet long, two hundred and fifty in diameter, a huge, squat cylinder, it loomed gigantic. The outer hull of aluberyl gleamed with faint iridescent color in the light of the few great lamps scattered about the huge construction shed.

The hum and rattle of saws and welders was subdued here, all the work was being done inside now, and fleets of heavy freight planes were dropping gently into place on the helicopters, bearing loads of furnishings. Lights glowed in some of the ports now, and six huge, twisting cables snaked off across the littered yards to the main power board. The distant rhythm of the great power plant outside echoed faintly even here.

“She taking off on time, Russ?” asked Aarn, looking up at her.

“She should.” The engineer nodded. “Barrett said he was sure of his end. Trial run tomorrow starting at 13:57:30 o’clock. Just to Luna City and back. And let’s hope, Aarn, that your idea is right.” A note of real earnestness had entered Spencer’s voice now. “Aside from the fact that she means nearly ten million credits investment, which no one will insure on this trip, there will necessarily be seventy-three men aboard. And I’m taking your word for it and testing her in the worst of the Leonids.”

Aarn nodded silently. Then he spoke again: “Physics says they will be safe from anything short of a ton. And meteors weighing even a hundred pounds are mighty rare.”

“But it takes only one,” Spencer reminded him, “and that one would mean near ruin to me. My grandfather and my father have built up this business. I’ve had mighty little to do with it—only the last two years since dad died—but I don’t want to see the tradition die. My grandfather built the first rocket to reach the Moon back in 1983. Dad built the first rocket to reach Mars back in 2036. Your father rode the first rocket to reach the surface of Jupiter. And mine built it. But naturally the old Spencer rocket had plenty of competition. The Deutsche Rakete people being the worst—or best. They’ll be on my neck if I lose this. But the little ships worked and, despite what they say about the big field not holding, I’m trusting your figures.”

“I’m going along,” Aarn smiled. “I’ll bet my neck on it, anyway. Physics is generally a pretty safe bet.”

“Uhmm—maybe so,” Carlisle put in. “But you physicists have done a poor job on the subject of the atom. You’ve been promising us atomic energy and transmutation for a century, and you can’t even tell why a chemical combination takes place.”

“I hear,” said Aarn slowly, “that you chemists have a theory that will account for it. And that theory also says that tungsten, in an X-ray tube, should radiate in the ‘pale pink,’ as Morgenthal expressed it.”

“Well—that’s as good as your physics atoms will do. You predict, similarly, that carbon will combine only with electro-negative elements. And X-rays in the ‘pale pink’ are no worse than denying the very useful hydrocarbons. And we chemists have produced rocket fuels for terrestrial rockets, while you physicists haven’t yet produced atomic energy for interplanetary rockets. Oh, you have a sort of bad compromise in the accumulator—”

“The accumulator is a very useful and compact device,” Aarn interrupted, “which holds no less than thirty thousand kilowatt hours per pound—just a wee bit better than you chemists have ever hoped to do. I well remember that we Jovians waited twenty-two long years for release. Chemists made fuels eventually, that would lift a ship from Earth to Phobos—Mars to Jupiter, but couldn’t even begin to lift it back. So a few spirits like dad and mother and the rest of the people there just marooned themselves and waited twenty-two years till physics rescued them. Chemistry got them in, but couldn’t get them out again.”

“Yes; but chemistry made their synthetic foods for them meanwhile.”

“Foul things,” said Aarn with a grimace. “I was nineteen before I tasted food.”

“They seemed to agree with you,” said Spencer with a slight smile.

Aarn Munro stood some five feet seven in height, and, to those who did not know him and his remarkable history, appeared exceedingly fat. He was nearly five feet in circumference, while his arms and legs stuck out at peculiar angles. And they seemed misshapen.

Jupiter, a world of two and a half times the gravity of Earth, required strength in its people, and speed, too. On Earth, Aarn weighed nearly three hundred and fifty pounds. For the first twenty years of his life he had lived on the giant of the system, and had developed such strength as no Terrestrian ever dreamed of. More than once he had proved his ability to lift and walk off with a ton and a half of lead.

“They did, chemically,” Aarn acknowledged. “But I wasn’t sorry to see a ship come in that could get out again.”

“But,” said Spencer, “if it wasn’t for the nice stepladder of satellites, by the way, even Aarn’s vaunted physics couldn’t get a ship loose from old Jove’s grip.”

“That’s true,” returned Aarn, “but it doesn’t enter the question, you see, because the satellites are there. Nine of ’em. So it’s just a case of Jupiter to Five to Europa to Six to Mars. And what better could you ask?”

“I can ask a lot better,” Spencer said, his voice suddenly sharp and annoyed. They had reached the main entrance port of the Procyon, but Spencer stopped where he was, damming up a stream of workmen, to talk. “I can ask for antigravity apparatus. If physics is any good, it ought at least to be able to say ‘Here’s the way to do it, but we can’t just yet because of this or that,’ and then find out how to overcome those difficulties.

“And I could ask for a machine that could generate power. Power from atoms, perhaps. This thing, this big hulking brute, it’s a waste of water that this planet may need some day. Look at Mars—dry as dust. Almost impossible to get rocket water there. If it wasn’t for the photo cells that give them power direct from the Sun, and make it possible to cook water out of gypsum, they couldn’t live. Some day Earth will need water as badly, and this wasting of thousands of tons of water is a crime and a thousand other things.

“Damn it all, Aarn, why don’t you do something? Chemistry is helpless. It’s a job for physics, and you know it, and so does Carlisle, for all his bluffing. Why don’t you do it, though?

“You’ve done a miracle already in making that magnetic atmosphere, and I know it. The way it stops meteors and burns them into gas is a miracle; but not enough, we need more.”

“We do, Russ, and I know it. That magnetic atmosphere was a by-product. It was a first step on the road, just the metal of which the key is made, purely incidental. I haven’t been saying much, but I’ve been doing some extremely interesting work. And—I’m going to tell you a story.

“I saw a machine. It was the mightiest machine that could ever exist. It was an atomic, better, a material engine. It burned matter to energy. Most of the energy was electrical in nature at one stage of the process, but it was converted to heat and light and other forms of energy. And one of those forms of energy was a curious field of force that could tear great holes in tremendous masses of matter, and there appeared coincidentally with that a force that seemed to hurl masses of matter greater than a dozen worlds like Earth, greater than mighty Jupiter, a million miles into space.

“It was a wonderful, pulsing, rhythmic machine, and operated in a wonderful adjustment more delicate than any machine man ever made. Controlling unimaginable billions of billions of horse power, it remained in perfect balance with a variation in its output of less than one per cent. Controlling forces that could have hurled this planet about like a bit of dust, it remained in perfect equilibrium.

“It was a star. Any star. It was the Sun, the mightiest machine man ever observed. A titanic, inconceivable generator handling the power of three millions of tons of destroyed matter every second—and maintaining equilibrium. The explosion of more than three million tons of matter, really, regulated and controlled. Save that occasionally a great rent appears in its surface that could swallow all the planets of the system, and not be filled, or a tongue of flame a quarter of a million miles high and a million miles wide darts out, apparently lifting billions of tons of matter hundreds of thousands of miles against a gravitational force ten times as intense as Jupiter’s—twenty-five times Earth’s.

“But—does it?”

Aarn looked intently at Spencer, and slowly an expression of wonder spread over the engineer’s face.

“Good—Heaven! Antigravity!”

“I only guess that, Russ. I don’t know. But I want to have your help now. I need your influence to have all the spaceliner captains make observations of a particular nature. And I need the observations of the lunar magnetometer and electrometer coördinated with a set of readings taken on Phobos and on Satellite Nine. If you get me those—And I’ve another idea.”

Aarn turned and went on into the Procyon thoughtfully. The workmen who had been patiently waiting for the big boss to get out of the way started streaming through again.

IN THE super-patient tone one uses when patience is nigh exhausted, Spencer spoke to the grinning Carlisle: “No. Spelled n-o. It is a syllable of negation, and refers definitely to the fact that that blistering, cockeyed son of an aberrating corkscrew, Aarn, has given me no tiniest bit of information. I gave him all the information he wanted.

“I then asked him for one tiny spark of hope. ‘Uhh! That isn’t what I hope. That’s not so good. Still—maybe—my theory may be wrong, but it may not. No; I don’t know, Russ. I’ll—’ And then the clogged rocket goes wandering off on a triple-focus ellipsoid orbit. I can’t find out what he was going to do. He’s as noisy as a clam playing hide and seek with his best enemy when he starts thinking. The worst of it is that he won’t tell me anything at all.”

Don Carlisle grinned again in sympathy. “I heard he was making noises like an oyster, so I came over to see. Whose lab is this, anyway?”

Spencer looked at him reproachfully. “Why bring that up? I pay for it, so naturally I can’t get in. Since the Procyon rode out to the Moon and back through the Leonid meteor shower without a dent, the whole shipyard has been so crowded with orders I couldn’t turn round quickly, and he’s grown a head as big as Jupiter itself. Before this gravity stunt he was working on something else. ‘Super-permeable space’ he calls it. Something to do with that ‘magnetic atmosphere’ of his.”

“What,” asked Carlisle, “is a magnetic atmosphere? I asked him once, and he explained something about a field of high permeability that did something or other to meteors so that they were electrified and so the field of special permeability became impermeable, and the magnet makes the meteors stop and blow up, because they are iron. Now I, in my simple, childish mind, always thought a magnet attracted iron. It seems I was wrong.”

Spencer grinned and answered: “It does. Up to a point, that is. What Aarn did was to discover a way of making lines of magnetic force do something—that gives us an isolated north or an isolated south magnetic pole. Also an electric charge. Aarn says that the magnetic lines of force that represent the other pole are turned through ninety degrees in space and become lines of electric force.

“Anyway, he has a single pole magnet, and that proceeds to surround itself with a uniform magnetic field. It does attract iron and nickel and cobalt, of course, but when the metals fall through the magnetic field they have to cut the lines of magnetic force. In doing so they act as electric generators. Electricity is generated in them and heats them. But heat represents energy, and the heat they generate is generated at the expense of their motion.

“The magnetic field is so intense, and their velocity so great at first, that they are heated almost instantaneously to thousands of degrees centigrade and explode into vapor. As vapor they are not dangerous, and nothing larger can get through. Except, of course, the huge things that are too big for the field to handle, but a meteor weighing five hundred pounds is almost as rare as a comet.

“In other words, this magnetic field serves for the space ship just as the Earth’s atmosphere does for the planet. It slows the biggest, and stops and utterly destroys the little ones. It is extremely seldom that a meteor gets through our atmosphere. The magnetic atmosphere is almost equally effective.”

“But why will a plain piece of metal, without windings or anything, generate current?” Carlisle objected.

“Say, Car, use your head. That’s something you do know—eddy currents—why on that basis, why does a generator generate? Each wire is just a simple piece of metal. You’ve used the same principle a thousand times. Each electric power meter uses the thing in the control damper disk, the aluminum disk that rotates between the poles of a pair of permanent magnets. Anyway, that’s not the important part. The big thing is that Aarn succeeded in making the lines of force lie down around the ship like a sheath instead of standing out like hairs on a frightened cat. It—”

“Hello, boss!” said a deep voice immediately above and behind his left ear. “Won’t you come in?”

Spencer rose six inches from his chair in a spasmodic jump and turned on Aarn with a sour face. “You misplaced decimal point, if it weren’t for my memories and loyalty to dear old Mass Tech, I’d amputate you from the pay roll.”

“Would you?” asked Aarn, with a pensive air. When pensive, Aarn’s broad face and huge body succeeded in looking like a cow of subnormal intelligence, ruminating on the possible source of its next meal. He did now. “I’d hate that, Russ. But I think you’d hate it worst. I got my super-permeable space condition. That’s about the poorest name imaginable, so I’ve decided to invent a name. Be it hereinafter referred to by the party of the first part as the ‘transpon’ condition. Anyway, come on in.”

Aarn’s workship was large and divided into two parts, the apparatus room, inhabited by four technical assistants who made up the apparatus Aarn called for, and Munro’s own sanctum.

In Aarn’s inner lab were a series of benches and cabinets and tables. These were all loaded with junked apparatus, unused parts, spare voltmeters, and coils of wire. The floor was reserved for the heavier junk that would have crushed the tables.

Spencer was quite surprised to see that one of the largest benches had actually been entirely cleared, and two sets of apparatus set up on it. Aarn smiled his blank grin again. Spencer knew from sad experience that that smile meant something completely revolutionary that would upset all his calculations and probably cost him, temporarily at least, several million dollars.

“Look,” said Aarn.

He waved his hands toward the new apparatus he had set up on the bench. The apparatus consisted of two main groups. At one end of the bench was a squat control panel, backed by a complex assortment of tubes and a device that closely resembled the magnetic atmosphere apparatus connected with a curious wire cone. There was a standard a foot tall surmounted by a cone of copper bars running lengthwise to form the sides and around, binding the longitudinal bars in position.

The tip of the cone was a block of copper, the size of a golf ball. The mouth of the device was some four inches across and the length over all about ten inches. But the copper bars that formed the sides of the cone were carefully insulated from the block that was at the tip. From this block, a single straight bar of copper projected along the axis of the cone.

Aarn smiled and turned on the apparatus. A low, musical hum rose from the tubes and coils, and slowly a faint blue glow centered about the copper block at the tip of the cone and the pencil of metal that extended up the axis. For five . . .