The box from japan, p.16
The Box from Japan, page 16
“None, I—I guess,” Halsey said dazedly. And added, with a short laugh: “At least none, Mr. Braisted—other than the original question that I brought here with me—the meaning of those three Japanese hieroglyphics!”
His original quest: the meaning of those three Japanese letters. He did not know, even as he spoke, that his very visit here this afternoon was, after all, to bring, in a quite unexpected manner, an answer to that very question. Nor did he know that at that very second his problem—and likewise himself!—was being discussed over a Chicago telephone wire. For one man, on one end of the connection, seated stiffly half-forward in a chair and holding a standard portable hand-instrument to his lips, was saying to another, who at that moment stood facing a wall-instrument in a triple-glassed telephone booth in a drug store on Chicago’s great West Side:
“I know, sair. I know! But he saiz he has it som’w’ere elze—an’ not on Towair Co’rt w’ere he leeves. There eez notteeng can be done, so I theenk, but wait—wait—till tomorro’ morneeng.”
To which comment the other man, wedged uncomfortably in the narrow confines of the soundproof booth, his eye on his expensive car parked out in front at the curbing, its motor purring away, was angrily replying:
“Vait? Vait It iss alvays dancherous as—as hell to vait—mid annyding. If I t’ought, by Gott, he voot haf it on his bremises tonide, I voot send der Strangler, unt Big Nose, unt Gorilla, unt—unt a dozen picked men—unt catch id before annyding goes wrong. I—”
“Ah, sair, but you—you are wrong. That eez not necessary. He doze not dream notteeng—he doze not soospect notteeng. He ask’ me, joos lik’ a child, w’at mean the Shap’nese characters on the box.” The speaker paused. “Sair, you mus’ be patient. You leav’ to me—and I weel walk off weeth it in the morneeng—and he weel know notteeng.”
“Vell—all ride. I dry to sid batient, then. Only I vass t’inking dot I coot send my men chust de same—unt de fool police voot chust t’ink it vass some of our gahngsters—schweinhünde vot dey are, dose gahngsters!—trying to stdeal someding vot iss mixed up in—in dot silly racket from alcyhol unt beer unt—unt dope! Ach! Unt by gahngster stuff th’ police are not inderesded, see? Unt de reborters vootn’t be making no shtink aboud-d id, either. But, all ride. I take your advice. Unt I dry unt sid batient. But how id iss you shpeak so gott-dam’ plain? Iss—iss the Infant someblace oud-d?”
“Yes, sair. The Eenfant eez not here.”
“Oh—so? Es gehts mir ein licht auf! Vere iss the Infant?”
“The Eenfant eez away yet, ver’ moch long while now. We both leav’ same time theez morneeng—and I am long while back already. The Eenfant has try though, sair, I guess, to call on theez tallaphone, but the tallaphone, sair, was accidental’ off its dial, an’ no could answer. For the Eenfant, you see, has sen’ note. By a—a leetle ragsamuffin w’at joos’ hav’ go ’way. You lik’ I should read note?”
“Yes. Read id oud loud.”
“Well, sair, the note it saiz—” Here the speaker read off with manifestly considerable difficulty, as one trying to interpret not only handwriting, but words written as well in a tongue that was none too familiar to him: “Went—firs’—to—Mon—roe—Street. Then—from—there—to—to—to Bosh—yes—Bosh Borse. I—am—now—wait—eeng in lonch—yes—lonch-room—near Clark an’ Cheecago Av’noo—so I can get all—all eenflamation—no, eenformation—in Bosh—yes—Bosh Borse. I—weel—com’—back—so soon—so soon as—I—’ave it.” The speaker paused helplessly. “Me, of course, I do not know joos’ w’at mean all theez Mon-roe Street an’ Bosh Borse matter. I—wait, sair! I theenk—I theenk the Eenfant eez comeeng in. For som’body, sair, eez fombleeng at—at the door. Now a key eez turneeng in the lock. Wait!” There was a pause of several seconds. “Sair—it eez! Yes. Eet eez. An’ lookeeng ver’ moch hot an’ tired!”
“So? Vell I know id’s getting so hot like hell in this booth. I am dr-ripping bersbiration! So I get oud-d, unt cool off! Unt so long as you are confident dot dis fellow Halzey don’d suspect nodding, I chust dry unt be batient in der meantime. But I—I hold you resbonsible if goes annyding wrong. Remember! Unt I see you tonide. Gootpy.”
With which the speaker hung up. Even as Halsey continued his conversation with Braisted, and even as the hands of the big Marconi clock moved slowly on to the second when the two men in Hall 457 were to be treated to an unusual and fascinating experience.
CHAPTER XIV
“2.2”
“No,” Halsey repeated at length. “I guess I have no questions, Mr. Braisted. After all you’ve just told me, I feel like—like an electrical engineer myself now. I feel, indeed, as though I might get a job without any trouble as fourth assistant-assistant at the Nippiginic River beam station itself!”
“Then you’d be working with Indians—under an Indian. Yes, that’s a fact. The resident engineer and chief operator up there is George White-Otter, a native Canadian Indian of the Cree tribe out of the Algonkian stock. He’s a graduate in electrical engineering of Montreal Tech, and has specialled in high-frequency theory in the Université Technicale at Paris. The two or three porters who wipe off transformers and mop the floors of the station are full-blooded Canadian Indians. Crees—with perhaps a Chippewa or so. I don’t think you’d be very happy chattering in Chippewa and Cree all day long. And when the big snows lined you in all winter—man, you’d be hungry for your own kind.”
“I guess you’re right—even if one of the tribe—my superior, you says—was highly educated.” Halsey paused. “Have you any theory as to why this synchro=half-phase-length—or what the devil you did call it—‘buckles’ up the ether?”
“No more so,” said Braisted helplessly, “than I have as to why tempered steel develops an abnormally high tensile strength—molecular locking, we call it—when subjected to electric pulsations whose intensity and frequency change oppositely according to Van Noorden’s Law. That’s what I had reference to about thirty minutes back when I spoke of the steel used in the modern scanner—the steel which nearly disrupted the battleship ratio—but didn’t! I had in mind Professor Dietrich Van Noorden of the University of Antwerp, and his discovery, which five—or was it maybe six?—years ago could have made international complications if he hadn’t been quite an ethical old Dutch professor of mathematical molecular dynamics. You were probably just perhaps in your freshman year at college, Mr. Halsey, when Van Noorden announced his discovery—and you were probably wrestling too much with freshman algebra to be very warm to newspaper descriptions garbling up the higher forms of math. Perhaps you were plotting to make the football team. Perhaps you—or do you remember the announcement of the Van Noorden Law?”
Halsey wrinkled up his brow: “I don’t believe I do. It sounds vaguely familiar to me as though I might have heard of it once—somehow or somewhere—but I don’t recall any newspaper announcement of it. Five—six years ago—you say? About the only story that loomed up big in the headlines then, and that still stays prominently in my recollection today, is the Great Panama Earthquake which tumbled about a half a mountain into the Canal, split two or three dams, put a half dozen locks out of commission, partly wrecked the Gatun electric plant that normally operated the whole canal, and gave the English ditch at Nicaragua 24 hours’ a day work handling the trans-Isthmian ship traffic.”
Braisted smiled. “Remember that, do you? Well, I also! I was in Formosa when it happened, and just done with a big electric installation job there. I hopped a fast liner for Panama the very next day, so as to get in on the big money I knew would be available. And believe me, there was work a-plenty, too, if you were any kind of a specialist. The U.S. Army engineers estimated, the day after the quake, that there would be 4 months’ work to repair the damage. A week later the estimate was raised to 7 months. Actually, it turned out ultimately that it was a 9-months’ job. Shovels, blasters, caisson men, cement mixers—$10 a day apiece, and ‘keep.’ Electrical pseudo-experts like myself—$20 a day and ‘keep’! I was most of the time on the reconstruction of the emergency electrical plant at Miraflores. What a mess! That caught the shock as badly as the main Gatun plant. The earth-fault, curiously, lay practically along the very length of the Canal, almost in a straight line between Miraflores and the Gatun locks, which straight line, if you look at it on a map, just dodges the big Pedro Miguel lock, but runs right through Culebra Cut. Which was bad enough!” Braisted paused a second, shaking his head in apparent recollection of the great cataclysm. “But, destructive as that ‘fault’ was, Mr. Halsey,” he added with a half-smile, “it knocked a very convenient $5600 or so into my hat, I know that! A mighty good thing, too, that the British canal had been completed a month before. By a then new system of partially directive wireless power transmission—the so-called Teranelli method—which isn’t worth a whoop for ordinary practical use, they were able to radio us enough electrical energy 24 hours a day from their own power plant at Ococuina so that, with the bare 33⅓ percent of it that we were able to convert back into juice, we were able to get enough current to at least start things going all along the line, and they were able at the same time to keep the world’s wheat, shoes, and rubber dolls moving without any delay—or without much delay, anyway—while we dug, blasted, shifted lock gates on mighty cranes, poured concrete, re-wired switchboards, and Lord knows what else. What a mess! What a mess! I hate to think of it today!”
Braisted paused again for a second.
“Well, that places the Van Noorden Law chronologically now. For it was announced to the world while I was still working on the Panama job. 1937—midsummer—somewhere. And that Van Noorden Law is what we were talking about a minute ago. Professor Van Noorden had worked the law out, at first purely along theory, later by demonstration, that if a piece of steel were subjected to an alternating current whose frequency of alternation was reduced slowly—and once only—from maximum to zero in direct accordance with the rate of shortening of the length of the radius vector of a hyperbolic—or reciprocal—spiral, as the radius vector went from the 0 degrees position to 360 degrees, and the intensity of the current was, during the same cycle of time, likewise slowly raised—but again, once only—from zero to its maximum voltage, in direct accordance with the rate of increase of the length of the radius-vector of a parabolic spiral as this radius vector traveled from 0 degrees to 360 degrees, then the molecules of the steel must lock shut into a new molecular configuration. Whether they do—or whether they don’t—we know that steel thus electrically or pulsationally acted upon becomes—certainly for about 3 months—at least 2.2 times as strong tensilely, with corresponding elasticity instead of brittleness, than it was before, even when tempered.”
“And why did that make international complications?”
Braisted laughed. “It didn’t. It merely could have—under circumstances other than the existence of an ethical old Dutch professor. It could have affected the battleship ratio, you see. But as I say, Professor Van Noorden was the true scientist type, and announced his discovery in a dozen languages on the same day. Within a week, of course, every navy in the world was connecting each of its ships to a ‘mother’-electrical ship consisting at nothing but a giant A.C. generator with interference transformers, mounted on a flatboat so that it could be affixed to a ‘subject’-ship by electric cables fore and aft, and so that an alternating current could be sent through the entire surface armor of any vessel—rivets included!—from bow to stern, or from stern to bow, if you so prefer it, modulated according to Van Noorden’s Law. The permeability of every ship, dreadnought or cruiser, destroyer or submarine, to missiles, was cut exactly in half—more, in fact—it was diminished inversely by 2.2, simply because permeability diminishes in inverse ratio as the tensile strength and coefficient of elasticity of surface armor increases. Every navy in the world, we might say, became multiplied, in strength at least, by 2.2. But all the navies together—and all in the same week! Therefore the naval ratio arrived at at the last Geneva World Arms Conference remained exactly as it was—which was, I think, a very good thing.”
“And now all war-ships visit their ‘mama’-ship every 90 days?”
“Their ‘mama’-ship visits them,” said Braisted, “and gives them their skin treatment! She keeps their skin in tone, as it were. But mama—and her flock of assistant mamas all over the world—has brought on further complications, for now that battleship armor is increased in resistance by 2.2, the caliber of all guns has been raised appreciably. It’s dog show teeth ever to dog, I guess.”
“And even your scanner has to visit an electrical ‘mama’?”
“Yes,” said Braisted, “for it’s this super-molecularly locked steel that keeps the scanner in the transmitting and receiving cameras from flying to pieces. The enormous necessary speeds of the new scanners, required by the territory their tiny holes have to cover, and which was theoretically possible at least on the modern Alexanderson bearings of pyramidally placed chrome steel balls, was nevertheless practically limited to a safe point well within the point where the scanner itself might fly into a thousand pieces from centrifugal force. The highest speed desirable—the one now attained—is made possible only by the molecularly super-locked steel. That means therefore that each scanner must be electrically treated every 2 months, for safety. If used a great deal, every one month. But there is an advantage in using this super-steel—or shall I say instead the high speed it permits. For the high speeds last used before this present one was made possible created an earpiercing whine from the scanner—no, literally a scream, that actually racked a hearer’s nervous system. But now, the scream is still there, we might say, but it is inaudible because the pitch of it is higher than the highest note of audibility—24,000 vibrations in air per second—which the human ear can record or receive.”
Halsey was quite unable to restrain himself from directing a frank look of admiration at this remarkably well-informed engineer. And he put his inward sentiments directly into words. “Mr. Braisted, pardon my personal comment, but I don’t wonder Uncle pays you $200 a week, and glad, I guess, to do it. You’ve certainly got your entire field by the ear! Optics, molecular-dynamics, radio-engineering, mechanics—and even acoustics. What is there that you don’t know about this game?”
“A number of things,” said Braisted very modestly. “But I thank you for your good words, just the same. Really, I think that—”
But his own words were interrupted by the loud clang of a gong on the side wall. Halsey glanced automatically at his wrist watch. It was 17 minutes of 2. Which meant that, in 2 minutes from now, he would see both Ion-Screen Color Television and the Zell Process in operation together. He looked questioningly at Braisted.
CHAPTER XV
When the Relays Clicked
At the sound of the gong Braisted gazed back of him instantly toward that huge white-faced clock whose long red hand stood ever fixed at 17 minutes of the XII mark. “By George, Mr. Halsey,” he ejaculated, “we’ve—we’ve got to get in position. That red hand was set so as to make my warning gong strike exactly at 17 minutes of the next hour—and that moment has arrived. 17 minutes to 2, exactly, as you can see. I think I told you that Nippiginic River starts in its pulsator at 15 minutes to 2, in reality for the 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. connection with the Paris one on the Paris Bourse business. And this fellow White-Otter—yes, we slip him a little monetary present by mail ever so often!—is giving us the financial edge there, see? Yes, the heavy starting charge in actuality will be tacked onto the Paris Bourse. And we’ll get our fifteen minutes on the beam at only $5 a minute. But what I’m trying to convey is that the second White-Otter’s mercury-vapor tube in front of his pulsator glows, as he revolves the big moving base of the meshwork around by electro-mechanical gears so that its pointer mark lines up exactly with the London mark on its fixed setting scale, he’ll close both of his wire circuits to us here with a single switch. That is, of course, if fifteen minutes of 2 is at hand. That closing will operate that big relay up there on the switchboard—yes, the instrument with all the fingers and levers—which automatically throws in every circuit here involved in the projecting system, and turns off the ceiling lights as well. Nearly the same thing happens at London. When the London pulsator on the Clarendon Square Hotel roof, fixed in position, fortunately, shows that it’s pulsing in exact dephased-half step with the Nippiginic River station, the operator then will throw in his switch closing all the wire circuits to the Regent Theatre; and the 5-watt oscillator—and the whole Regent Theatre projecting apparatus, gadget, camera, all, will be automatically thrown into circuit by a relay on its board. We don’t take any chances here, you see, of hand operating and thus overlooking some switch vital to the whole. Synchronizing? Oh, the machines will synchronize themselves automatically after the first trains of modulated ether waves start crossing from that oscillator. But come. One minute’s gone already. We must get up front.”
With the two pairs of Hextite spectacles dangling from his fingers, Braisted led the way with brisk celerity to the front end of the hall, Halsey eagerly following. Pointing to the deadish-white stonelike screen, which showed none of its alleged microscopic cross-rulings designed to reflect polarized waves only as such, the engineer spoke again.
