The Past Through Tomorrow Read online

  He should not have entrusted so much authority to Van Kleeck without knowing more about him. He still should know more about him— He touched the emergency-stop button, and brought the car to a dizzying halt. “Relay station! See if you can raise my office.”

  Dolores’ face looked out from the screen. “You’re still there—good!” he told her. “I was afraid you’d gone home.”

  “I came back, Mr. Gaines.”

  “Good girl. Get me Van Kleeck’s personal file jacket. I want to see his classification record.”

  She was back with it in exceptionally short order and read from it the symbols and percentages. He nodded repeatedly as the data checked his hunches—masked introvert—inferiority complex. It checked.

  “‘Comment of the Board:’” she read, “‘In spite of the potential instability shown by maxima A and D on the consolidated profile curve, the Board is convinced that this officer is, nevertheless, fitted for duty. He has an exceptionally fine record, and is especially adept in handling men. He is, therefore, recommended for retention and promotion.”’

  “That’s all, Dolores. Thanks.”

  “Yes, Mr. Gaines.”

  “I’m off for a showdown. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  “But Mr. Gaines—” Back in Fresno, Dolores stared wide-eyed at an empty screen.

  “Take me to Mr. Van Kleeck!”

  The man addressed took his gun out of Gaines’ ribs—reluctantly, Gaines thought—and indicated that the Chief Engineer should precede him up the stairs. Gaines climbed out of the car, and complied.

  Van Kleeck had set himself up in the sector control room proper, rather than the administrative office. With him were half a dozen men, all armed.

  “Good evening, Director Van Kleeck.” The little man swelled visibly at Gaines’ acknowledgment of his assumed rank.

  “We don’t go in much around here for titles,” he said, with ostentatious casualness. “Just call me Van. Sit down, Gaines.”

  Gaines did so. It was necessary to get those other men out. He looked at them with an expression of bored amusement. “Can’t you handle one unarmed man by yourself, Van? Or don’t the functionalists trust each other?”

  Van Kleeck’s face showed his annoyance, but Gaines’ smile was undaunted. Finally the smaller man picked up a pistol from his desk, and motioned toward the door. “Get out, you guys.”

  “But Van—”

  “Get out, I said!”

  When they were alone, Van Kleeck picked up the electric push button which Gaines had seen in the visor screen, and pointed his pistol at his former chief. “O.K.,” he growled, “try any funny stuff, and off it goes! What’s your proposition?”

  Gaines’ irritating smile grew broader. Van Kleeck scowled. “What’s so damn funny?” he said.

  Gaines granted him an answer. “You are, Van—honest, this is rich. You start a functionalist revolution, and the only function you can think of to perform is to blow up the road that justifies your title. Tell me,” he went on, “what is it you are so scared of?”

  “I am not afraid!”

  “Not afraid? You? Sitting there, ready to commit hara-kiri with that toy push button, and you tell me that you aren’t afraid. If your buddies knew how near you are to throwing away what they’ve fought for, they’d shoot you in a second. You’re afraid of them, too, aren’t you?”

  Van Kleeck thrust the push button away from him, and stood up. “I am not afraid!” he screamed, and came around the desk toward Gaines.

  Gaines sat where he was, and laughed. “But you are! You’re afraid of me, this minute. You’re afraid I’ll have you on the carpet for the way you do your job. You’re afraid the cadets won’t salute you. You’re afraid they are laughing behind your back. You’re afraid of using the wrong fork at dinner. You’re afraid people are looking at you—and you are afraid that they won’t notice you.”

  “I am not!” he protested. “You— You dirty, stuckup snob! Just because you went to a high-hat school you think you’re better than anybody.” He choked, and became incoherent, fighting to keep back tears of rage. “You, and your nasty little cadets—”

  Gaines eyed him cautiously. The weakness in the man’s character was evident now—he wondered why he had not seen it before. He recalled how ungracious Van Kleeck had been one time when he had offered to help him with an intricate piece of figuring.

  The problem now was to play on his weakness, to keep him so preoccupied that he would not remember the peril-laden push button. He must be caused to center the venom of his twisted outlook on Gaines, to the exclusion of every other thought.

  But he must not goad him too carelessly, or a shot from across the room might put an end to Gaines, and to any chance of avoiding a bloody, wasteful struggle for control of the road.

  Gaines chuckled. “Van,” he said, “you are a pathetic little shrimp. That was a dead give-away. I understand you perfectly; you’re a third-rater, Van, and all your life you’ve been afraid that someone would see through you, and send you back to the foot of the class. Director—pfui! If you are the best the functionalists can offer, we can afford to ignore them—they’ll fold up from their own rotten inefficiency.” He swung around in his chair, deliberately turning his back on Van Kleeck and his gun.

  Van Kleeck advanced on his tormentor, halted a few feet away, and shouted: “You—I’ll show you—I’ll put a bullet in you; that’s what I’ll do!”

  Gaines swung back around, got up, and walked steadily toward him. “Put that popgun down before you hurt yourself.”

  Van Kleeck retreated a step. “Don’t you come near me!” he screamed. “Don’t you come near me—or I’ll shoot you—see if I don’t!”

  This is it, thought Gaines, and dived.

  The pistol Went off alongside his ear. Well, that one didn’t get him. They were on the floor. Van Kleeck was hard to hold, for a little man. Where was the gun? There! He had it. He broke away.

  Van Kleeck did not get up. He lay sprawled on the floor, tears streaming out of his closed eyes, blubbering like a frustrated child.

  Gaines looked at him with something like compassion in his eyes, and hit him carefully behind the ear with the butt of the pistol. He walked over to the door, and listened for a moment, then locked it cautiously.

  The cord from the push button led to the control board. He examined the hookup, and disconnected it carefully. That done, he turned to the televisor at the control desk, and called Fresno.

  “Okay, Dave,” he said, “let ‘em attack now—and for the love of Pete, hurry!” Then he cleared the screen, not wishing his watch officer to see how he was shaking.

  Back in Fresno the next morning Gaines paced around the Main Control Room with a fair degree of contentment in his heart. The roads were rolling—before long they would be up to speed again. It had been a long night. Every engineer, every available cadet, had been needed to make the inch-by-inch inspection of Sacramento Sector which he had required. Then they had to cross-connect around two wrecked subsector control boards. But the roads were rolling—he could feel their rhythm up through the floor.

  He stopped beside a haggard, stubbly-bearded man. “Why don’t you go home, Dave?” he asked. “McPherson can carry on from here.”

  “How about yourself, Chief? You don’t look like a June bride.”

  “Oh, I’ll catch a nap in my office after a bit. I called my wife, and told her I couldn’t make it. She’s coming down here to meet me.”

  “Was she sore?”

  “Not very. You know how women are.” He turned back to the instrument board, and watched the clicking ‘busy-bodies’ assembling the data from six sectors. San Diego Circle, Angeles Sector, Bakersfield Sector, Fresno Sector, Stockton—Stockton? Stockton! Good grief!—Blekinsop! He had left a cabinet minister of Australia cooling his heels in the Stockton office all night long!

  He started for the door, while calling over his shoulder, “Dave, will you order a car for me? Make it a fast one!” He was across the hal
l, and had his head inside his private office before Davidson could acknowledge the order.

  “Dolores!”

  “Yes, Mr. Gaines.”

  “Call my wife, and tell her I had to go to Stockton. If she’s already left home, just have her wait here. And Dolores—”

  “Yes, Mr. Gaines?”

  “Calm her down.”

  She bit her lip, but her face was impassive. “Yes, Mr. Gaines.”

  “That’s a good girl.” He was out and started down the stairway. When he reached road level, the sight of the rolling strips warmed him inside and made him feel almost cheerful.

  He strode briskly away toward a door marked ACCESS DOWN, whistling softly to himself. He opened the door, and the rumbling, roaring rhythm from ‘down inside’ seemed to pick up the tune even as it drowned out the sound of his whistling.

  “Hie! Hie! Hee!

  The rotor men are we—

  Check off the sectors loud and strong! One! Two! Three!

  Anywhere you go

  You are bound to know

  That your roadways are rolling along!“

  Blowups Happen

  “PUT DOWN that wrench!”

  The man addressed turned slowly around and faced the speaker. His expression was hidden by a grotesque helmet, part of a heavy, lead-and-cadmium armor which shielded his entire body, but the tone of voice in which he answered showed nervous exasperation.

  “What the hell’s eating on you, doc?” He made no move to replace the tool in question.

  They faced each other like two helmeted, arrayed fencers, watching for an opening. The first speaker’s voice came from behind his mask a shade higher in key and more peremptory in tone. “You heard me, Harper. Put down that wrench at once, and come away from that ‘trigger’. Erickson!”

  A third armored figure came from the far end of the control room. “What ‘cha want, doc?”

  “Harper is relieved from watch. You take over as engineer-of-the-watch. Send for the standby engineer.”

  “Very well.” His voice and manner were phlegmatic, as he accepted the situation without comment. The atomic engineer whom he had just relieved glanced from one to the other, then carefully replaced the wrench in its rack.

  “Just as you say, Doctor Silard—but send for your relief, too. I shall demand an immediate hearing!” Harper swept indignantly out, his lead-sheathed boots clumping on the floorplates.

  Doctor Silard waited unhappily for the ensuing twenty minutes until his own relief arrived. Perhaps he had been hasty. Maybe he was wrong in thinking that Harper had at last broken under the strain of tending the most dangerous machine in the world—the atomic breeder plant. But if he had made a mistake, it had to be on the safe side-slips must not happen in this business; not when a slip might result in atomic detonation of nearly ten tons of uranium-238, U-235, and plutonium.

  He tried to visualize what that would mean, and failed. He had been told that uranium was potentially twenty million times as explosive as T.N.T. The figure was meaningless that way. He thought of the pile instead as a hundred million tons of high explosive, or as a thousand Hiroshimas. It still did not mean anything. He had once seen an A-bomb dropped, when he had been serving as a temperament analyst for the Air Forces. He could not imagine the explosion of a thousand such bombs; his brain balked.

  Perhaps these atomic engineers could. Perhaps, with their greater mathematical ability and closer comprehension of what actually went on inside the nuclear fission chamber, they had some vivid glimpse of the mind-shattering horror locked up beyond that shield. If so, no wonder they tended to blow up—

  He sighed. Erickson looked away from the controls of the linear resonant accelerator on which he had been making some adjustment. “What’s the trouble, doc?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry I had to relieve Harper.”

  Silard could feel the shrewd glance of the big Scandinavian. “Not getting the jitters yourself, are you, doc? Sometimes you squirrel-sleuths blow up, too—”

  “Me? I don’t think so. I’m scared of that thing in there—I’d be crazy if I weren’t.”

  “So am I,” Erickson told him soberly, and went back to his work at the controls of the accelerator. The accelerator proper lay beyond another shielding barrier; its snout disappeared in the final shield between it and the pile and fed a steady stream of terrifically speeded up sub-atomic bullets to the beryllium target located within the pile itself. The tortured beryllium yielded up neutrons, which shot out in all directions through the uranium mass. Some of these neutrons struck uranium atoms squarely on their nuclei and split them in two. The fragments were new elements, barium, xenon, rubidium—depending on the proportions in which each atom split. The new elements were usually unstable isotopes and broke down into a dozen more elements by radioactive disintegration in a progressive reaction.

  But these second transmutations were comparatively safe; it was the original splitting of the uranium nucleus, with the release of the awe-inspiring energy that bound it together—an incredible two hundred million electron-volts—that was important—and perilous.

  For, while uranium was used to breed other fuels by bombarding it with neutrons, the splitting itself gives up more neutrons which in turn may land in other uranium nuclei and split them. If conditions are favorable to a progressively increasing reaction of this sort, it may get out of hand, build up in an unmeasurable fraction of a micro-second into a complete atomic explosion—an explosion which would dwarf an atom bomb to pop-gun size; an explosion so far beyond all human experience as to be as completely incomprehensible as the idea of personal death. It could be feared, but not understood.

  But a self-perpetuating sequence of nuclear splitting, just under the level of complete explosion, was necessary to the operation of the breeder plant. To split the first uranium nucleus by bombarding it with neutrons from the beryllium target took more power than the death of the atom gave up. In order that the breeder pile continue to operate it was imperative that each atom split by a neutron from the beryllium target should cause the splitting of many more.

  It was equally imperative that this chain of reactions should always tend to dampen, to die out. It must not build up, or the uranium mass would explode within a time interval too short to be measured by any means whatsoever.

  Nor would there be anyone left to measure it.

  The atomic engineer on duty at the pile could control this reaction by means of the “trigger”, a term the engineers used to include the linear resonant accelerator, the beryllium target, the cadmium damping rods, and adjacent controls, instrument board, and power sources. That is to say he could vary the bombardment on the beryllium target to increase or decrease the level of operation of the plant, he could change the “effective mass” of the pile with the cadmium dampers, and he could tell from his instruments that the internal reaction was dampened—or, rather, that it had been dampened the split second before. He could not possibly know what was actually happening now within the pile—sub-atomic speeds are too great and the time intervals too small. He was like the bird that flew backward; he could see where he had been, but he never knew where he was going.

  Nevertheless, it was his responsibility, and his alone, not only to maintain the pile at a high efficiency, but to see that the reaction never passed the critical point and progressed into mass explosion.

  But that was impossible. He could not be sure; he could never be sure.

  He could bring to the job all of the skill and learning of the finest technical education, and use it to reduce the hazard to the lowest mathematical probability, but the blind laws of chance which appear to rule in subatomic action might turn up a royal flush against him and defeat his most skillful play.

  And each atomic engineer knew it, knew that he gambled not only with his own life, but with the lives of countless others, perhaps with the lives of every human being on the planet. Nobody knew quite what such an explosion would do. A conservative estimate assumed that, in addition to des
troying the plant and its personnel completely, it would tear a chunk out of the populous and heavily traveled Los Angeles-Oklahoma Road-City a hundred miles to the north.

  The official, optimistic viewpoint on which the plant had been authorized by the Atomic Energy Commission was based on mathematics which predicted that such a mass of uranium would itself be disrupted on a molar scale, and thereby limit the area of destruction, before progressive and accelerated atomic explosion could infect the entire mass.

  The atomic engineers, by and large, did not place faith in the official theory. They judged theoretical mathematical prediction for what it was worth—precisely nothing, until confirmed by experiment.

  But even from the official viewpoint, each atomic engineer while on watch carried not only his own life in his hands, but the lives of many others—how many, it was better not to think about. No pilot, no general, no surgeon ever carried such a daily, inescapable, ever present weight of responsibility for the lives of others as these men carried every time they went on watch, every time they touched a vernier screw, or read a dial.

  They were selected not alone for their intelligence and technical training, but quite as much for their characters and sense of social responsibility. Sensitive men were needed—men who could fully appreciate the importance of the charge entrusted to them; no other sort would do. But the burden of responsibility was too great to be borne indefinitely by a sensitive man.

  It was, of necessity, a psychologically unstable condition. Insanity was an occupational disease.

  Doctor Cummings appeared, still buckling the straps of the armor worn to guard against stray radiation. “What’s up?” he asked Silard.

  “I had to relieve Harper.”

  “So I guessed. I met him coming up. He was sore as hell—just glared at me.”

  “I know. He wants an immediate hearing. That’s why I had to send for you.”