McEvoy threw the test switch, sending power through the new circuit segment. The aluminum test block suddenly vanished from the transmitter plate and reappeared on the receiver plate thirty feet away.
Hank had been reading dials and didn’t notice what had happened at first. McEvoy, who had been watching, simply didn’t comprehend until Hank looked up and said, “John, did you move the test block?”
“Did I what? Of course not!”
“Then who did?”
“Look, I didn’t go near—”
Hank stared at the block on the receiver plate as if it were bewitched. Then he grabbed the intercom, punched the button for the generator room. “Abe? This is Merry in 408. Did we just pull a whale of a lot of power up here?”
“Not a flicker,” the engineer reported. “Why?”
“Never mind. I’ll tell you later.” Hank slammed down the intercom and walked over to the test block. It looked the same as before. He lifted it gingerly, carried it back to the transmitter plate as if he were walking on eggs. He set it on the plate, then stepped back. “Flip that switch again,” he told McEvoy.
Again the block vanished, to reappear across the room. This time McEvoy saw it.
“Hank! This crazy thing is working!”
“It can’t be working. It isn’t even put together yet. Get me that block again!”
They tried it again. And again. And yet again. It was impossible, but McEvoy was perfectly right. The crazy thing was working.
They had an operating transmatter on their hands that couldn’t possibly be operating.
—3—
John McEvoy, the Chief of Research and Development of Telcom Laboratories, Inc., held the eight-inch aluminum block in his hands and stared at it. He looked up at the transmitter plate of the uncompleted transmatter, then glanced down the room to the receiver plate.
Finally he looked up at Merry. “Okay, Hank,” he said at last. “This block went from Point A to Point B. How?”
“I don’t have the vaguest idea,” Hank Merry said.
“It didn’t just fly,” McEvoy said.
“No.”
“Then your machine must have sent it.”
Merry sighed. “John, it’s impossible. The transmatter isn’t even built yet. Some of the circuits are ready, yes. The Hunyadi plates are mostly hooked up, and both transmitter and receiver are partly wired, but this thing is built on theory. Even if it were completely put together, there’s nothing but theoretical math and physics that says it would actually work.
And I don’t see any possible way that block could have been shifted thirty feet across the room with this gadget only half-built.”
“But you saw it happen,” John McEvoy said.
“Yes.” Hank reached for the synchronized photos they had taken of the test block on half a dozen runs. “What’s more, either that block is in two places at the same time—which even I can’t swallow—or it was transferred completely and instantaneously, as far as I can measure.”
“And we’re back to the first question again,” McEvoy said. “How?”
“I don’t know how,” Hank replied.
“Then we’re going to have to find out,” McEvoy said, “and find out right soon. Because we haven’t got even a day to lose.”
Hank Merry looked up at his chief. “What happened in Washington today?”
McEvoy shook his head wearily. “We got the final word from the Joint Conference: get a working transmatter or go back to rocket ships, whole hog. They had everybody down there today, communications and aeronautics people from all over the world, together with the Joint Chiefs and the Space Exploration committee and the Conference treasurer. We practically had to keep him out of a fist fight, before we quit.”
“I didn’t know it was so tight,” Merry said.
“It’s tight. Critically tight, now.” McEvoy spread his hands. “Half the heavy construction on this continent is bogged down in priority fights. There is one-tenth enough steel to fill current demands, and the supply gets shorter every month. Oil reserves are dangerously low; if those new wells down in Brazil don’t prove out, we’ve hit rock bottom. And radioactive fuels are just as tight. There isn’t any place to turn any more, and the treasurer laid it on the line today.”
“What do you mean?”
“Either somebody brings in a practical, operating transmatter in a few weeks, or the money goes to interplanetary cargo craft, and if it wrecks the economy of the world, it wrecks it. That’s all.”
It wasn’t a new story to Hank Merry, nor to anyone else, for that matter. The warning signs had been up for over a century: the irreplaceable coal and oil and iron reserves on Earth were being devoured by an ever-growing population, and sooner or later they would be gone. Exhausted. Back in the 1960’s scientists were still hoping that atomic power and synthetic building materials might take up the slack for a while, but they had not counted on the overwhelming surge of industrial development in Asia, Africa and South America after the Great Cold War ended with the establishment of the International Joint Conference.
Nobody, really, had realized what was happening until the 1990’s, when the rate of growth was already uncontrollable; by then oil and steel reserves were dwindling to the vanishing point, radioactive ores were almost unobtainable, and the situation had become desperate.
Even then, solar system exploration had raised hope. At first that hope had seemed well-founded. After the first manned Moon-landing in 1966, other exploratory teams had landed on Venus, Mars, and the larger Asteroids, and found these places rich with promise.
Three-quarters of the surface of Mars was a crust of high-grade iron ore. There were unthinkable oil reserves on Venus, laid down in the eons when that planet had been a lush, hot, rain forest. Coal was there, too; and vast deposits of radioactives were found on the Moon. Enough resources to supply Earth’s needs for thousands of years.
And no way in the world to bring those resources home to Earth. Atomic engines could raise a few tons of iron ore into orbit from Mars and bring it home to Earth. A few barrels of oil could be lugged back from Venus, a few carloads of uranium from the Moon, but all at staggering cost, and still only a drop in a very empty bucket. Bound and limited by inexorable gravity, there was no way to bring home the bacon in sufficient quantity to help.
The resources were there; but the cost of obtaining them was so great that all the money on Earth could not foot the bill.
Of course, there were plans. Bigger and better ships could be built. There were dreams of great orbiting barges sweeping back and forth from Earth to Mars. Smaller craft could carry payloads down to surface with only perhaps 25 per cent loss into the ocean and a 10
per cent mortality rate for the men running the ferries. But even these dream-ships would cost more at once than all the wars in Earth’s history.
The one alternative, of course, was an operating transmatter, if one could be developed in time. The idea of a device to transmit solid matter from one place to another like TV
signals was hardly new. Theoretically, it could work: direct shipments of ore, oil, even living human beings, from one point in space to another—even across interplanetary distances—by means of direct transmission from a sending device at one end to a receiving device at the other. Short waves could easily be transmitted from a sending station to a far-distant receiver. Light itself, with its curious wave-qualities, traveled through space at 186,000 miles per second. And scientists had long known that all the matter on Earth was ultimately composed of wavicles. Why couldn’t solid matter be broken down into its wave components, transmitted to some distant receiver, and there be recomposed into its original form? Indeed, it had already been done with hydrogen atoms, but an exotic laboratory experiment was not enough. What was needed was a transmitter on Mars that could ship uncounted tons of raw iron ore, and a receiver on Earth capable of recomposing it.