Man Who Sold the Moon / Orphans of the Sky Read online

  He continued to read. “ ‘These crystals have the property of flexing when electric charges are applied to them, and, vice versa, show an electric charge when flexed. The period of flexure is an inherent quality of the crystal, depending on its geometrical proportions. Hooked into a radio transmitting circuit, such a crystal requires the circuit to operate at one, and only one, frequency, that of the crystal.’ That’s it, kid, that’s it! Now if we can find a crystal that can be cut to vibrate at the frequency of visible light, we’ve got it—a way to turn electrical energy into light without heat losses!”

  Mary Lou cluck-clucked admiringly. “Mama’s good boy. Mama knew he could do it, if he would only try.”

  Nearly six months later Douglas invited his father up to the laboratory to see the results. He ushered the mild, silver-haired old gentleman into the sanctum sanctorum and waved to Mary Lou to draw the shades. Then he pointed to the ceiling.

  “There it is, Dad—cold light—at a bare fraction of the cost of ordinary lighting.”

  The elder man looked up and saw, suspended from the ceiling, a grey screen, about the size and shape of the top of a card table. Then Mary Lou threw a switch. The screen glowed brilliantly, but not dazzlingly, and exhibited a mother-of-pearl iridescence. The room was illuminated by strong white light without noticeable glare.

  The young scientist grinned at his father, as pleased as a puppy who expects a pat. “How do you like it, Dad? One hundred candle power—that’d take a hundred watts with ordinary bulbs, and we’re doing it with two watts—half an ampere at four volts.”

  The old man blinked absentmindedly at the display. “Very nice, son, very nice indeed. I’m pleased that you have perfected it.”

  “Look, Dad—do you know what that screen up there is made out of? Common, ordinary clay. It’s a form of aluminum silicate; cheap and easy to make from any clay, or ore, that contains aluminum. I can use bauxite, or cryolite, or most anything. You can gather up the raw materials with a steam shovel in any state in the union.”

  “Is your process all finished, son, and ready to be patented?”

  “Why, yes, I think so, Dad.”

  “Then let’s go into your office, and sit down. I’ve something I must discuss with you. Ask your young lady to come, too.”

  Young Douglas did as he was told, his mood subdued by his father’s solemn manner. When they were seated, he spoke up.

  “What’s the trouble, Dad? Can I help?”

  “I wish you could, Archie, but I’m afraid not. I’m going to have to ask you to close your laboratory.”

  The younger man took it without flinching. “Yes, Dad?”

  “You know I’ve always been proud of your work, and since your mother passed on my major purpose has been to supply you with the money and equipment you needed for your work.”

  “You’ve been very generous, Dad.”

  “I wanted to do it. But now a time has come when the factory won’t support your research any longer. In fact, I may have to close the doors of the plant.”

  “As bad as that, Dad? I thought that orders had picked up this last quarter.”

  “We do have plenty of orders, but the business isn’t making a profit on them. Do you remember I mentioned something to you about the public utilities bill that passed at the last session of the legislature?”

  “I remember it vaguely, but I thought the governor vetoed it.”

  “He did, but they passed it over his veto. It was as bold a case of corruption as this state has ever seen—the power lobbyists had both houses bought, body and soul.” The old man’s voice trembled with impotent anger.

  “And just how does it affect us, Dad?”

  “This bill pretended to equalize power rates according to circumstances. What it actually did was to permit the commission to discriminate among consumers as they saw fit. You know what that commission is—I’ve always been on the wrong side of the fence politically. Now they are forcing me to the wall with power rates that prevent me from competing.”

  “But good heavens, Dad—they can’t do that. Get an injunction!”

  “In this state, son?” His white eyebrows raised.

  “No, I guess not.” He got to his feet and started walking the floor. “There must be something we can do.”

  His father shook his head. “The thing that really makes me bitter is that they can do this with power that actually belongs to the people. The federal government’s program has made plenty of cheap power possible—the country should be rich from it—but these local pirates have gotten hold of it, and use it as a club to intimidate free citizens.”

  After the old gentleman had left, Mary Lou slipped over and laid a hand on Douglas’s shoulder and looked down into his face.

  “You poor boy!”

  His face showed the upset he had concealed from his father. “Cripes, Mary Lou. Just when we were going good. But I mind it most for Dad.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And not a thing I can do about it. It’s politics, and those pot-bellied racketeers own this state.”

  She looked disappointed and faintly scornful. “Why, Archie Douglas, you great big panty-waist! You aren’t going to let those mugs get away with this without a fight, are you?”

  He looked up at her dully. “No, of course not. I’ll fight. But I know when I’m licked. This is way out of my field.”

  She flounced across the room. “I’m surprised at you. You’ve invented one of the greatest things since the dynamo, and you talk about being licked.”

  “Your invention, you mean.”

  “Nuts! Who worked out the special forms? Who blended them to get the whole spectrum? And besides, you aren’t out of your field. What’s the problem? Power! They’re squeezing you for power. You’re a physicist. Dope out some way to get power without buying from them.”

  “What would you like? Atomic power?”

  “Be practical. You aren’t the Atomic Energy Commission.”

  “I might stick a windmill on the roof.”

  “That’s better, but still not good. Now get busy with that knot in the end of your spinal cord. I’ll start some coffee. This is going to be another all-night job.”

  He grinned at her. “O.K., Carrie Nation. I’m coming.”

  She smiled happily at him. “That’s the way to talk.”

  He rose and went over to her, slipped an arm about her waist and kissed her. She relaxed to his embrace, but when their lips parted, she pushed him away.

  As the first light of dawn turned their faces pale and sickly, they were rigging two cold light screens face to face. Archie adjusted them until they were an inch apart.

  “There now—practically all the light from the first screen should strike the second. Turn the power on the first screen, Sex Appeal.”

  She threw the switch. The first screen glowed with light, and shed its radiance on the second.

  “Now to see if our beautiful theory is correct.” He fastened a voltmeter across the terminals of the second screen and pressed the little black button in the base of the voltmeter. The needle sprang over two volts.

  She glanced anxiously over his shoulder. “How about it, guy?”

  “It works! There’s no doubt about it. These screens work both ways. Put juice in ’em; out comes light. Put light in ’em; out comes electricity.”

  “What’s the power loss, Archie?”

  “Just a moment.” He hooked in an ammeter, read it, and picked up his slide rule. “Let me see—Loss is about thirty percent. Most of that would be the leakage of light around the edges of the screens.”

  “The Sun’s coming up, Archie. Let’s take screen number two up on the roof, and try it out in the sunlight.”

  Some minutes later they had the second screen and the electrical measuring instruments on the roof. Archie propped the screen up against a sky-light so that it faced the rising Sun, fastened the voltmeter across its terminals and took a reading. The needle sprang at once to two volts.

  Mary
Lou jumped up and down. “It works!”

  “Had to work,” commented Archie. “If the light from another screen will make it pour out juice, then sunlight is bound to. Hook in the ammeter. Let’s see how much power we get.”

  The ammeter showed 18.7 amperes.

  Mary Lou worked out the result on the slide rule. “Eighteen-point-seven times two gives thirty-seven-point-four watts or about five-hundredths of a horsepower. That doesn’t seem like very much. I had hoped for more.”

  “That’s as it should be, kid. We are using only the visible light rays. As a light source the Sun is about fifteen percent efficient; the other eighty-five percent are infrared and ultra-violet. Gimme that slip-stick.” She passed him the slide rule. “The Sun pours out about a horsepower and a half, or one and one-eighth kilowatts on every square yard of surface on the Earth that is faced directly towards the Sun. Atmospheric absorption cuts that down about a third, even at high noon over the Sahara desert. That would give one horsepower per square yard. With the Sun just rising we might not get more than one-third horsepower per square yard here. At fifteen-percent efficiency, that would be about five-hundredths of one horsepower. It checks—Q.E.D.—what are you looking so glum about?”

  “Well—I had hoped that we could get enough sunpower off the roof to run the factory, but if it takes twenty square yards to get one horsepower, it won’t be enough.”

  “Cheer up, Baby Face. We doped out a screen that would vibrate only in the band of visible light; I guess we can dope out another that will be atonic—one that will vibrate to any wave length. Then it will soak up any radiant energy that hits it, and give it up again as electrical power. With this roof surface we can get maybe a thousand horsepower at high noon. Then we’ll have to set up banks of storage batteries so that we can store power for cloudy days and night shifts.”

  She blinked her big blue eyes at him. “Archie, does your head ever ache?”

  Twenty minutes later he was back at his desk, deep in the preliminary calculations, while Mary Lou threw together a scratch breakfast.

  He looked up. “Never mind the creative cookery, Dr. Martin.”

  She turned around and brandished the skillet at him. “To hear is to obey, my Lord. However, Archie, you are an over-educated Neanderthal, with no feeling for the higher things of life.”

  “I won’t argue the point. But take a gander at this. I’ve got the answer—a screen that vibrates all down the scale.”

  “No foolin’, Archie?”

  “No foolin’, kid. It was already implied in our earlier experiments, but we were so busy trying to build a screen that wouldn’t vibrate at random, we missed it. I ran into something else, too.”

  “Tell mamma!”

  “We can build screens to radiate in the infrared just as easily as cold light screens. Get it? Heating units of any convenient size or shape, economical and with no high wattage or extreme temperatures to make ’em fire hazards or dangerous to children. As I see it, we can design these screens to, one—” he ticked the points off on his fingers— “take power from the Sun at nearly one-hundred-percent efficiency; two, deliver it as cold light; or three, as heat; or four, as electrical power. We can bank ’em in series to get any required voltage; we can bank in parallel to get any required current, and the power is absolutely free, except for the installation costs.”

  She stood and watched him in silence for several seconds before speaking. “All that from trying to make a cheaper light. Come eat your breakfast, Steinmetz. You men can’t do your work on mush.”

  They ate in silence, each busy with new thoughts. Finally Douglas spoke. “Mary Lou, do you realize just how big a thing this is?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “It’s enormous. Look, the power that can be tapped is incredible. The Sun pours over two hundred and thirty trillion horsepower onto the Earth all the time and we use almost none of it.”

  “As much as that, Archie?”

  “I didn’t believe my own figures when I worked it out, so I looked it up in Richardson’s Astronomy. Why, we could recover more than twenty thousand horsepower in any city block. Do you know what that means? Free power! Riches for everybody! It’s the greatest thing since the steam engine.” He stopped suddenly, noticing her glum face. “What’s the matter, kid, am I wrong someplace?”

  She fiddled with her fork before replying. “No, Archie—you’re not wrong. I’ve been thinking about it, too. Decentralized cities, labor-saving machinery for everybody, luxuries—it’s all possible, but I’ve a feeling that we’re staring right into a mess of trouble. Did you ever hear of ‘Breakages Ltd.’?”

  “What is it, a salvage concern?”

  “Not by a long sight. You ought to read something besides the ‘Proceedings of the American Society of Physical Engineers.’ George Bernard Shaw, for instance. It’s from the preface of Back to Methuselah, and is a sardonic way of describing the combined power of corporate industry to resist any change that might threaten their dividends. You threaten the whole industrial set-up, son, and you’re in danger right where you’re sitting. What do you think happened to atomic power?”

  He pushed back his chair. “Oh, surely not. You’re just tired and jumpy. Industry welcomes invention. Why, all the big corporations have their research departments, with some of the best minds in the country working in them. And they are in atomics up to their necks.”

  “Sure—and any bright young inventor can get a job with them. And then he’s a kept man—the inventions belong to the corporation, and only those that fit into the pattern of the powers-that-be ever see light. The rest are shelved. Do you really think that they’d let a freelance like you upset investments of billions of dollars?”

  He frowned, then relaxed and laughed. “Oh, forget it, kid, it’s not that serious.”

  “That’s what you think. Did you ever hear of celanese voile? Probably not. It’s a synthetic dress material used in place of chiffon. But it wore better and was washable, and it only cost about forty cents a yard, while chiffon costs four times as much. You can’t buy it any more.

  “And take razor blades. My brother bought one about five years ago that never had to be resharpened. He’s still using it, but if he ever loses it, he’ll have to go back to the old kind. They took ’em off the market.

  “Did you ever hear of guys who had found a better, cheaper fuel than gasoline? One showed up about four years ago and proved his claims—but he drowned a couple of weeks later in a swimming accident. I don’t say that he was murdered, but it’s damn funny that they never found his formula.

  “And that reminds me—I once saw a clipping from the Los Angeles Daily News. A man bought a heavy standard-make car in San Diego, filled her up and drove her to Los Angeles. He only used two gallons. Then he drove to Agua Caliente and back to San Diego, and only used three gallons. About a week later the sales company found him and bribed him to make an exchange. By mistake they had let him have a car that wasn’t to be sold—one with a trick carburetor.

  “Do you know any big heavy cars that get seventy miles to the gallon? You’re not likely to—not while ‘Breakages Ltd.’ rules the roost. But the story is absolutely kosher—you can look it up in the files.

  “And of course, everybody knows that automobiles aren’t built to wear; they’re build to wear out, so you will buy a new one. They build ’em just as bad as the market will stand. Steamships take a worse beating than a car, and they last thirty years or more.”

  Douglas laughed it off. “Cut out the gloom, Sweetie Pie. You’ve got a persecution complex. Let’s talk about something more cheerful—you and me, for instance. You make pretty good coffee. How about us taking out a license to live together?”

  She ignored him.

  “Well, why not. I’m young and healthy. You could do worse.”

  “Archie, did I ever tell you about the native chief that got a yen for me down in South America?”

  “I don’t think so. What about him?”

/>   “He wanted me to marry him. He even offered to kill off his seventeen current wives and have them served up for the bridal feast.”

  “What’s that got to do with my proposition?”

  “I should have taken him up. A girl can’t afford to turn down a good offer these days.”

  Archie walked up and down the laboratory, smoking furiously. Mary Lou perched on a workbench and watched him with troubled eyes. When he stopped to light another cigarette from the butt of the last, she bid for attention.

  “Well, Master Mind, how does it look to you now?”

  He finished lighting his cigarette, burned himself, cursed in a monotone, then replied, “Oh, you were right, Cassandra. We’re in more trouble than I ever knew existed. First, when we build an electric runabout that gets its power from the Sun, while it’s parked at the curb, somebody pours kerosene over it and burns it up. I didn’t mind that so much—it was just a side issue. But when I refuse to sell out to them, they slap all those phony law suits on us, and tie us up like a kid with the colic.”

  “They haven’t a legal leg to stand on.”

  “I know that, but they’ve got unlimited money and we haven’t. They can run these suits out for months—maybe years—only we can’t last that long.”

  “What’s our next move? Do you keep this appointment?”

  “I don’t want to. They’ll try to buy me off again, and probably threaten me, in a refined way. I’d tell ’em to go jump, if it wasn’t for Dad. Somebody’s broken into his house twice now, and he’s too old to stand that sort of thing.”

  “I suppose all this labor trouble in the plant worries him, too.”

  “Of course it does. And since it dates from the time we started manufacturing the screens on a commercial scale, I’m sure it’s part of the frame-up. Dad never had any labor trouble before. He always ran a union shop and treated his men like members of his own family. I don’t blame him for being nervous. I’m getting tired of being followed everywhere I go, myself. It makes me jumpy.”