Chapter 4

There was a glint of humor in Buck Kendall’s eyes as he passed the sheet over to McLaurin. Commander McLaurin looked down the columns with twinkling eyes.

“‘Petition to establish the Lunar Mining Bank, ‘“ he read. “What a bank! Officers: President, General James Logan, late of the IP; Vice-president, Colonel Warren Gerardhi, also late of the IP; Staff, consists of 90% ex-IP men, and a few scattered accountants. Designed by the well-known designer of IP stations, Colonel Richard Murray.” Commander McLaurin looked up at Kendall with a broad grin. “And you actually got Interplanetary Life to give you a mortgage on the structure?”

“Why not? It’ll cut cost fifty-eight millions, with its twelve-foot tungsten-beryllium walls and the heavy defense weapons against those terrible pirates. You know we must defend our property.”

“With the thing you’re setting up out there on Luna, you could more readily wipe out the IP than anything else I know of. Any new defense ideas?”

“Plenty. Did you get any further appropriations from the IP Appropriations Board?”

McLaurin looked sour. “No. The dear taxpayers might object, and those thickheaded, clogged rockets on the Board can’t see your data on the Stranger. They gave me just ten millions, and that only because you demonstrated you could shoot every living thing out of the latest IP cruiser with that neutron gun of yours. By the way, they may kick when I don’t install more than a few of those.”

“Let ‘em. You can stall for a few months. You’ll need that money more for other purposes. You’ve installed that paraffin lining?”

“Yes--I got a report on that of ‘finished’ last week. How have you made out?”

Buck Kendall’s face fell. “Not so hot. Devin’s been the biggest help--he did most of the work on that neutron gun really--”

“After,” McLaurin interrupted, “you told him how.”

“--but we’re pretty well stuck now, it seems. You’ll be off duty tomorrow evening, can’t you drop around to the lab? We’re going to try out a new system for releasing atomic energy.”

“Isn’t that a pretty faint hope? We’ve been trying to get it for three centuries now, and haven’t yet. What chance at it within a year or so?--which is the time you allow yourself before the Stranger returns.”

“It is, I’ll admit that. But there’s another factor, not to be forgotten. The data we got from correlating those ‘misreadings’ from the various IP posts mean a lot. We are working on an entirely different trail now. You come on out, and you can see our new apparatus. They are working on tremendous voltages, and hoping to smash the thing by a brutal bombardment of terrific voltage. We’re trying, thanks to the results of those instruments, to get results with small, terrifically intense fields.”

“How do you know that’s their general system?”

“They left traces on the records of the post instruments. These records show such intensities as we never got. They have atomic energy, necessarily, and they might have had material energy, actual destruction of matter, but apparently, from the field readings it’s the former. To be able to make those tremendous hops, light-years in length, they needed a real store of energy. They have accumulators, of course, but I don’t think they could store enough power by the system they use to do it.”

“Well, how’s your trick ‘bank’ out on Luna, despite its twelve-foot walls, going to stand an atomic explosion?”

“More protective devices to come is our only hope. I’m working on three trails: atomic energy, some type of magnetic shield that will stop any moving material particle, and their faster-than-light thing. Also, that fortress--I mean, of course, bank--is going to have a lot of lead-lined rooms.”

“I wish I could use the remaining money the Board gave me to lead-line a lot of those IP ships,” said McLaurin wistfully. “Can’t you make a gamma-ray bomb of some sort?”

“Not without their atomic energy release. With it, of course, it’s easy to flood a region with rays. It’ll be a million times worse than radium ‘C, ‘ which is bad enough.”

“Well, I’ll send through this petition for armaments. They’ll pass it all right, I think. They may get some kicks from old Jacob Ezra Stubbs. Jacob Ezra doesn’t believe in anything war-like. I wish they’d find some way to keep him off of the Arms Petition Board. He might just as well stay home and let ‘em vote his ticket uniformly ‘nay.’” Buck Kendall left with a laugh.

Buck Kendall had his troubles though. When he had reached Earth again, he found that his properties totaled one hundred and three million dollars, roughly. One doesn’t sell properties of that magnitude, one borrows against them. But to all intents and purposes, Buck Kendall owned two half-completed ship’s hulls in the Baldwin Spaceship Yards, a great deal of massive metal work on its way to Luna, and contracts for some very extensive work on a “bank.” Beyond that, about eleven million was left.

A large portion of the money had been invested in a laboratory, the like of which the world had never seen. It was devoted exclusively to physics, and principally the physics of destruction. Dr. Paul Devin was the Director, Cole was in charge of the technical work, and Buck Kendall was free to do all the work he thought needed doing.

Returned to his laboratory, he looked sourly at the bench on which seven mechanicians were working. The ninth successive experiment on the release of atomic energy had failed. The tenth was in process of construction. A heavy pure tungsten dome, three feet in diameter, three inches thick, was being lowered over a clear insulum dome, a foot smaller. Inside, the real apparatus was arranged around the little pool of mercury. From it, two massive tungsten-copper alloy conductors led through the insulum housing, and outside. These, so Kendall had hoped, would surge with the power of broken atoms, but he was beginning to believe rather bitterly, they would never do so.

Buck went on to his offices, and the main calculator room. There were ten calculator tables here, two of them in operation now.

“Hello, Devin. Getting on?”

“No,” said Devin bitterly, “I’m getting off. Look at these results.” He brought over a sheaf of graphs, with explanatory tables attached. Rapidly Buck ran through them with him. Most of them were graphs of functions of light, considered as a wave in these experiments.