A bad day. He just didn’t know yet how bad.
By nine o’clock the TV session was over and Hank’s aircar was waiting on the building roof. The sky was overcast with the peculiar gray-white you saw when the city’s weather shield was catching a heavy snowfall, and he was re-routed as far south as Atlantic City District because of the low-flying traffic congestion. He stared down at the sprawling East Coast city below as the little aircar finally swung north again toward its destination: the big new Telcom Laboratories building just west of Newark District. Something caught his eye: the high-rising office buildings being erected on the concrete footings that spanned the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey. Great, bare steel girders, half-finished buildings, and not a sign of a work crew or welding flare on any of them. Another bottleneck, Hank thought grimly. No steel. Only a trickle from the mills these days, and that seemed to go to South America or Singapore or some place. Of course, sooner or later there was bound to be steel again, and soon even Manhattan District (still fighting to remain an island in the face of the ever-rising metropolitan congestion) would be indistinguishable from the rest of the tight, sky-scraping city that stretched from Maine to Virginia and from the tip of Long Island to the Alleghenies.
Finally Hank Merry’s aircar set him down on the laboratory roof, only two hours late, and handed him an automatic receipt for his fare, which had already been charged against his bank account. In the big central dispatching room, the green blinking light on the call board showed that McEvoy hadn’t checked in yet…might not be in all day in fact. Probably more conferences down in Washington District, Hank thought gloomily.
The chief seemed to spend most of his time down there these days, walking the tightrope for government funds and trying for the hundredth time to reassure the Joint Conference Committee on Interplanetary Resources that Hank Merry’s transmatter really did have a chance of a breakthrough, if he could just get a prototype model built for testing. Of course, Hank suspected that even McEvoy had his private doubts; Hank’s approach was radical, and so many other attempts in the last ten years had failed. Sometimes Hank himself wondered if his whole approach to matter-transmission didn’t have a hole in it big enough to throw a cat through—one reason that he was working and worrying at the lab from twelve to fifteen hours every day and spending another six hours studying anything and everything that might fill in some of the holes in his knowledge of physics, mathematics and engineering.
Because somebody had to build a practical, working transmatter, and do it soon. There was no question about that.
The elevator let him off in one of the sub-basement rooms where his brain-child—this awkward machine he had been building for the last eighteen months—was under construction. Already its circuits and components filled half a dozen rooms, winding through corridors and covering two full floors of lab space. It reminded Hank of a house he had once seen as a child which contained a huge pipeorgan, with the pipes filling basement and attic, packed into the walls and buried between the floors, so that when you pressed one key of the organ the whole house shook. Aside from his machine, there was a whole warehouse full of giant generators down below, standing ready for the day that the staggering amount of power he knew the finished machine would require in a full-scale test would be demanded.
Such a simple thing, in theory. To take a single cubic centimeter of solid matter at Point A, decompose it into its component sub-atomic wavicles, transmit them like radio waves to a receiver at Point B and there reassemble them in their original order, shape and relationship, atom to atom. If you could do it with a few grams of steel, you could do it with millions of tons of ore from the deserts of Mars, eventually. Such a simple thing, matter-transmission…yet so very elusive when you actually tried to do it.
The whole future economy of an overcrowded and slowly starving Earth hung in the balance while laboratories all over the world labored to find the secret.
In the main workroom a couple of long-faced technicians met Hank Merry at the door with the long-faced tale he had been expecting. Not just one day’s circuitry burned out; the idiots had hooked it up to an activated Hunyadi plate during the test, fusing the delicate sheaves of silver mesh in the plate and cooking five hundred gallons of a very special colloidal protein suspension into baked custard…
Hank Merry sighed and dug in for the day.
—2—
When John McEvoy trooped in some eight hours later, he found his young protégé still working amid a great heap of papers, test-calculations, crumpled-up notes, and reams of circuit diagrams. The ruined Hunyadi plate had been dismantled and its components sent up to the shop for salvage, if salvage was possible. One section of the transmatter circuits looked as if a giant hand had reached in and torn out the wiring on one great swipe.
“More trouble, eh?” McEvoy said, surveying the wreckage.
Hank nodded gloomily.
“What happened?”
“Feedback, overload, and blooey. My fault; I should have called last night. It smelled this morning like somebody had been burning feathers in here.” He waved a hand at the burned-out wiring. “Come on, give me a hand here.”
McEvoy nodded, and together they set to work on the wiring. Hank had noticed the dejected sag of the old man’s shoulders when he came in, the tired lines around his mouth.
John McEvoy looked far older these day than the spry sixty-three he really was; he still had his stubborn jaw and he still beat his fist against his palm when Fate refused to yield to him, but his hair was now snow white—a recent change—and he always, always looked tired.
McEvoy had never been cut out for politics, yet now he was constantly meeting with politicians, committee heads, bureaucrats, underlings, and the thousand other servants, leaders and hangers-on of the International Joint Conference of Nations that served as the main governing body of the world of March 13, 2001. Now, as McEvoy worked with Hank, he seemed to relax, as though getting his hands on wires, transistors and circuit breakers was a joy. He was eager as a boy with a new kampbell kit.
“Down in Washington again today?” Merry asked casually.
McEvoy nodded. “Another Joint Conference meeting, only full dress this time.” He broke off, waved a red-colored wire. “Where does this one go?”
“Right there,” Hank told him.
“Wonder you don’t go crazy every day with a ball of snakes like this to work with,”
McEvoy grumbled. He peered again at Hank’s new diagram, then at the circuitry they were building.
“I know,” Hank said. “And this is only one small part of it. It’ll be two more months before it’s even built, much less ready to test.”
They worked in silence; two hours later, they leaned back to regard their new batch of wires, and grinned at each other. “That should fix this part, anyway,” Hank said. “There’s still a lot more to be built, but we can test-run this circuit.”
“Fine, let’s try it.” McEvoy stood up and yawned. Against the west wall of the lab the transmitter plate with its plastic dome was solidly mounted on stainless-steel pillars, with the eight-inch test block of polished aluminum planted in the center of it. Thirty feet across the room was the receiver plate, similarly mounted. A technician was fiddling with a maze of wires connecting the transmitter to the long row of upright sheets of silver meshwork coated with protein colloid, standing like soldiers at attention. These were the precious Hunyadi plates so critical to Hank’s whole approach to the transmatter. Patiently now, Hank and McEvoy re-checked the newly laid circuits before testing them under power. Much of the circuitry of the machine wasn’t even devised yet, much less built, but at least Hank knew where he was going. Now he took a note pad, nodded to McEvoy and said, “Go ahead, close the circuit.”