The rejection came at a bad time. More and more, I was wrapped up in trying to complete my research, in writing my dissertation, and, most of all, in anxiously looking for a job. There wasn’t much time to write, and the rejection had sufficiently disheartened and humiliated me so that I withdrew from writing for nearly a year. This was the third long withdrawal of my writing career, and, to this date, the last.
I did not find a job; my expected Ph.D. degree was no passport to affluence, after all. That was humiliating, too.
I accepted an offer from Professor Robert C. Elderfield to do a year’s postdoctoral research for him for $4,500, working on anti-malarial drugs. I accepted, though not with great enthusiasm, and started work for him on June 2, 1948, the day after I had officially gained my Ph.D.-At least it would give me another year to find a job.
By the next month, I had settled down sufficiently to consider writing a science fiction story, “The Red Queen’s Race.” On July 12 it was finished and I submitted it to Campbell. It was accepted on the sixteenth and once again I was back in business.
The Red Queen’s Race
Here’s a puzzle for you, if you like. Is it a crime to translate a chemistry textbook into Greek?
Or let’s put it another way. If one of the country’s largest atomic power plants is completely ruined in an unauthorized experiment, is an admitted accessory to that act a criminal?
These problems only developed with time, of course. We started with the atomic power plant-drained. I really mean drained. I don’t know exactly how large the fissionable power source was-but in two Hashing microseconds, it had all fissioned.
No explosion. No undue gamma ray density. It was merely that every moving part in the entire structure was fused. The entire main building was mildly hot. The atmosphere for two miles in every direction was gently warm. Just a dead, useless building which later on took a hundred million dollars to replace.
It happened about three in the morning, and they found Elmer Tywood alone in the central source chamber. The findings of twenty-four close-packed hours can be summarized quickly.
1. Elmer Tywood-Ph.D., Sc.D., Fellow of This and Honorary That, one-time youthful participant of the original Manhattan Project, and now full Professor of Nuclear Physics-was no interloper. He had a Class-a Pass-Unlimited. But no record could be found as to his purpose in being there just then. A table on casters contained equipment which had not been made on any recorded requisition. It, too, was a single fused mass-not quite too hot to touch.
2. Elmer Tywood was dead. He lay next to the table; his face congested, nearly black. No radiation effect. No external force of any sort. The doctor said apoplexy.
3. In Elmer Tywood’s office safe were found two puzzling items: i.e. twenty foolscap sheets of apparent mathematics, and a bound folio in a foreign language which turned out to be Greek, the subject matter, on translation, turning out to be chemistry.
The secrecy which poured over the whole mess was something so terrific as to make everything that touched it, dead. It’s the only word that can describe it. Twenty-seven men and women, all told, including the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Science, and two or three others so top-notch that they were completely unknown to the public, entered the power plant during the period of investigation. All who had been in the plant that night, the physicist who had identified Tywood, the doctor who had examined him, were retired into virtual home arrest.
No newspaper ever got the story. No inside dopester got it. A few members of Congress got part of it.
And naturally sol Anyone or any group or any country that could suck all the available energy out of the equivalent of perhaps fifty to a hundred pounds of plutonium without exploding it, had America’s industry and America’s defense so snugly in the palm of the hand that the light and life of one hundred sixty million people could be turned off between yawns.
Was it Tywood? Or Tywood and others? Or just others, through Tywood?
And my job? I was decoy; or front man, if you like. Someone has to hang around the university and ask questions about Tywood. After all, he was missing. It could be amnesia, a hold-up, a kidnapping, a killing, a runaway, insanity, accident-I could busy myself with that for five years and collect black looks, and maybe divert attention. To be sure, it didn’t work out that way.
But don’t think I was in on the whole case at the start. I wasn’t one of the twenty-seven men I mentioned a while back, though my boss was. But I knew a little-enough to get started.
Professor John Keyser was also in Physics. I didn’t get to him right away. There was a good deal of routine to cover first in as conscientious a way as I could. Quite meaningless. Quite necessary. But I was in Keyser’s office now.
Professors’ offices are distinctive. Nobody dusts them except some tired cleaning woman who hobbles in and out at eight in the morning, and the professor never notices the dust anyway. Lots of books without much arrangement. The ones close to the desk are used a lot-lectures are copied out of them. The ones out of reach are wherever a student put them back after borrowing them. Then there are professional journals that look cheap and are darned expensive, which are waiting about and which may some day be read. And plenty of paper on the desk; some of it scribbled on.
Keyser was an elderly man-one of Tywood’s generation. His nose was big and rather red, and he smoked a pipe. He had that easygoing and non-predatory look in his eyes that goes with an academic job-either because that kind of job attracts that kind of man or because that kind of job makes that kind of man.
I said: “What kind of work is Professor Tywood doing?”
“Research physics.”
Answers like that bounce off me. Some years ago they used to get me mad. Now I just said: “We know that, professor. It’s the details I’m after.”
And he twinkled at me tolerantly: “Surely the details can’t help much unless you’re a research physicist yourself. Does it matter-under the circumstances?”
“Maybe not. But he’s gone. If anything’s happened to him in the way of’-I gestured, and deliberately clinched-”foul play, his work may have something to do with it-unless he’s rich and the motive is money.”.
Keyser chuckled dryly: “College professors are never rich. The commodity we peddle is but lightly considered, seeing how large the supply is.”
“
I ignored that, too, because I know my looks are against me. Actually, I finished college with a “very good” translated into Latin so that the college president could understand it, and never played in a football game in my life. But I look rather the reverse.
I said: “Then we’re left with his work to consider.”
“You mean spies? International intrigue?”
“Why not? It’s happened before! After all, he’s a nuclear physicist, isn’t he?”
“He is. But so are others. So am I.”
“Ah, but perhaps he knows something you don’t. “
There was a stiffening to the jaw. When caught off-guard, professors can act just like people. He said, stiffly: “As I recall offhand, Tywood has published papers on the effect of liquid viscosity on the wings of the Rayleigh line, on higher-orbit field equations, and on spin-orbit coupling of two nucleons, but his main work is on quadrupole moments. I am quite competent in these matters.”
“Is he working on quadrupole moments now?” I tried not to bat an eye, and I think I succeeded.
“Yes-in a way.” He almost sneered, “He may be getting to the experimental stage finally. He’s spent most of his life, it seems, working out the mathematical consequences of a special theory of his own.”