“Boys,” he said, “this is where the study of matter should begin. Up to now its nature has been obscured by always being in a state of heat. For the first time I have an opportunity to study it in a state of rest.”
It was soon after this that he discharged the million volts into the planet. For some hours he built up an accumulation from the ship’s generator, then let it all rip in a millisecond. Hours later, it hadn’t dropped one volt. The planet was full of electricity, zipping round in a world where all materials were super-conductive and there was zero resistance.
Jack’s imagination was caught by it. “What do you think of that!” he said. “It’ll still be here in a million years!”
Personally, I began to look forward to the hour when we would take off. You do begin to feel the deadness of the place, as the guest at my party said. If you think the Moon is lifeless, you should go to Celenthenis.
By the third day I was making definite plans for the future. “What are you going to do when Janet and I are married?” I asked Jack once when the professor was in the storeroom. “You can stay with us if you like. We’ll probably buy a big house, what with the money we’ll make on this trip and all.”
He made evasive gestures with his hands. “Maybe. You never can tell how things will work out, though.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked, watching him closely.
“Nothing.”
“Anyway,” I said, “you’re welcome.” Perhaps it was overgenerous of me, but I was feeling expansive and forgetful of past difficulties. I sat down to read while he paced aimlessly about.
Suddenly he said: “Come on, the prof wants us to take some more readings off the voltmeter. Let’s go outside.”
“Just one of us can do that.”
“Yeah, but—come on, it’ll do you good to go outside for a while.”
I stood up and we went to the lock, got into our space-suits and cycled ourselves outside.
Briefly I gazed around me at the circle of light. When you’re aware of how empty, airless and cold everything is outside your suit you can hear every tiny sound of its working, the air system especially. Then we walked over to read the voltmeter which Juker had left in contact with the ground to keep a check on the superconducting discharge.
It still read exactly what it had read hours before. Something like one million volts.
“Well, that’s that,” I said in satisfaction.
“Bob,” Jack said nervously. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
“What?”
“Well, it’s about me and Janet.”
An icy feeling passed through my stomach. “What do you mean, you and Janet?”
“She’s not going to marry you. She and I—we sort of got together.”
I didn’t take it in for a minute. Then it trickled through and thoughts whirled round in my head.
I didn’t answer, but I looked at him.
“Honest, I didn’t mean to,” he said quickly. “It just happened, that’s all. It was on the trip to San Francisco. There was nothing we could do about it.”
He was avoiding my gaze. “You don’t mean,” I said in a whisper, “you two are married—and didn’t tell me?”
“Well, no, not exactly, but as good as.”
He edged away as fury began to mount in me. “It just happened—”
“Happened, hell!” I snarled. “You mean you saw a chance and pushed it for all you were worth; I’ll bet you really worked on it!” He looked wretched, like he always does when he’s caught out.
“But this time,” I said, my breath coming short, “this time—”
As I spoke, I saw how clever Jack had been. When he confesses, he has to do it from a distance, or at least be able to stay out of the way for a while. But where could he go on board our ship?
So he had inveigled me outside. He knew that as long as he can slow things down, it will go easier for him. Angry as I was, I knew it, too. There comes a point when you just haven’t got the heart any more.
But whatever I might have known intellectually, I was still incensed. “This time,” I said, “I’m going to kill you.”
Jack turned and ran, lumbering away in his spacesuit. Standard technique. I put all my strength into lumbering along after him. I knew I wasn’t going to kill him, but I was determined I was going to drag him back inside that ship and turn brother Jack into a blood pudding.
There was no pretence about that. He must have felt it too, because his flight became desperate. At first he lumbered erratically, making little random turns to try to take advantage of the broken ground, but I gained on him. Suddenly he made straight for the perimeter of the light circle.
I saw his stratagem. He would skulk out in the dark for a while, where I couldn’t find him. When he deemed he had been away long enough for me to cool down, he would return.
Nearing the edge of the circle, Jack’s movements became more purposeful. He reached the shallow crevice I had noticed earlier, and started to clamber down it. Once he had climbed up the other side, he would be safe.
With that move, Jack made his mistake.
The ground beneath us was alive with a million volts. Since electricity takes the shortest route it showed no inclination to flow through us provided we walked over the top of it. You may have observed on Earth that birds alight on naked power cables with no ill effects.
Climbing part-way down one wall of the crevice, Jack reached across to touch the opposite wall, intending to haul himself up the other side. That made him a bridge.
A million volts flashed instantly through him.
Though I saw the flash, nothing came over the intercom. I kept running, but when I looked down into the crevice there was not much to see.
Automatically I glanced at the meter on my way back to the ship. The voltage had depreciated noticeably.
Taking into account the way Jack had behaved all his life, I suppose an end like that was destined to overtake him eventually. Still, I was his brother, and I felt unhappy about it.
There was more to come yet.
When I broke the news to Juker I decided not to tell him the part about Janet. It’s not nice to disclose a thing like that about a man’s daughter.
I felt sadly, strangely miserable because of the death of my brother. Loneliness assailed me. I felt that I was right back where I started, but without even his company.
Juker noticed. He was very sympathetic.
“You mustn’t let it overpower you,” he advised kindly. “What’s gone is gone. There’s still plenty ahead in the future.”
Bleakly, I nodded. Juker didn’t know about the other edge of the sword.
Celenthenis oppressed me more and more.
Both Juker and I continued our work. By now we had amassed a formidable number of graphs, charts and measurements about no-temperature materials. Results were everything we had hoped.
For some time Juker had been thinking about the problem of transferring Celenthenis material to Earth, and he decided it could be done. Assembling the refrigerating apparatus in the storeroom, he put on a suit and went outside.
A few minutes later he was back with a chunk of dull, greenish rock wrapped in a jacket of hydrogen ice. “I chipped it off one of those big slabs,” he explained. “We can give it a really detailed study in here.”
Carrying it into the storeroom, he slipped the hydrogen jacket into the quadruple-hulled container he had prepared. Carefully he poked electrode probes through the ice, an awkward job, because of the clutter of refrigerators. A number of oscilloscopes started wiggling the moment he made contact.
“This rock has an electric charge on it, like the rest of the planet,” Juker told me. “This is to see if it’s been modified in any way since I pumped it into the ground.”