L sprague de camp, p.11
L Sprague De Camp, page 11
Burke looked at the rug and closed his perpetually dry mouth to swallow. "I don't know. Either it's too nice for some, or it ain't nice enough for others. I mean ... well, I hope you didn't get sore when Ada asked you if you were selling anything, did you?"
"Not at all," said Hale hastily.
Burke nodded gravely. "That's good. You know how it is. Some of your old friends come around to see how you're getting along. I mean they're all right. They're real friendly. Only —" He gestured feebly at the dainty room.
"They don't feel right," Hale supplied.
"That's it. They get kind of scared. Sit on the edge of their seats and get the hell out — sorry, Mrs. Hale — beat it first chance they get. Then there's the other kind —"
"Edgar!" Mrs. Burke protested.
"Well, I can't help it, Molly. They'll feel insulted if I don't tell them how come Ada asked them that. Folks we used to know, and strangers, too, trying to sell us all kinds of stuff. I don't know —"
"Don't listen to him," Mrs. Burke entreated. "He ain't used to having it nice. He keeps mooning around because he ain't ... hasn't got so many useless friends."
Burke slapped his thighs and smiled bravely. "Cut it out, Molly! We're sounding like a couple of funerals. Sure, Mr. Hale, it ain't all fun, but we're having a real fine time for once in our lives. Ain't we, Molly?"
"You bet! Going to the Met — the opera, you know; plays —"
"Them I don't care for so much," Burke said thoughtfully. "I like a good picture myself; don't have to listen so hard and you can see faces. But then there's the summer. One good thing about dough — you don't have to sweat in the city, begging your pardon, Mrs. Hale. We can go to one of these summer resorts. Like Rockaway."
"Oh, you wouldn't want to go there!" Gloria said, speaking for the first time. "It's so cheap and dirty."
The Burkes looked uneasy. Burke said: "Well, maybe you're right. It's Newport we'll probably wind up in."
"Newport!" Gloria exclaimed. "Why, nobody goes there now!"
Mrs. Burke nodded wisely. "I told you so."
Burke stood up and glowered. "That's the whole damn trouble. When you got dough, you got to know where to go and have the right friends —"
"Edgar!"
He subsided, grinning shamefacedly. "Yeah, it's right you are, Molly. But it's kind of tough at first. Your old friends don't come around, and I can't say I blame them. I knew a fella, got himself a big job. Before that we used to be real bosom pals. Then I didn't feel so good, seeing him. He had plenty of dough to spend, and I had to be kind of careful. That's how our old friends are now. The real ones, I mean. The others don't count. They're after what I feel like throwing them. And I ain't the throwing kind, so they stop showing up, too.
"The folks with our kind of dough" — he smiled resignedly —"we go around and say hello, and they don't return the visit. I guess they don't make friends as fast as poor folks, because they got to worry about who's out to trim them.
"But, hell, I'm having a swell time. I don't have to get up at five any more to go to work. Soon as we get to know the ropes we'll get along swell. When I get to feeling kind of low, all I got to do is think about all the things we got to make us happy, and I perk up."
Mrs. Burke asked: "How about some coffee? Ada can bring it in a jiffy."
"No, thanks," said Hale, rising. "We have to be running along."
"How about coming around some night?" Burke offered.
"I'd like to," Hale evaded. "You know how it is. I'm pretty busy these days. I'll try to make it."
The Burkes looked hurt. "Thanks," said Burke, with unconvincing heartiness. "It was real nice of you to drop in." Significantly, he didn't mention seeing them again.
"You'll get straightened out soon," said Hale despairingly. "The first chance we get, we'll drop in again. It'll be soon."
Everybody shook hands and grinned frantically, and finally the Hales escaped and fled.
Hale was too depressed to speak. Gloria was silent for a while; then she said: "I know they're your friends, Billie-willie; but aren't they rather ... common?"
"Don't call me Billie-willie!" he snapped. But it wasn't merely irritation. His new self-confidence had been smashed. He remembered Sisyphus and his boulder.
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SITTING in the office, trying to avoid the sight of Gloria, he thought as courageously as he dared. He got nowhere, because he couldn't bring himself to attack the fundamental issue. That he should cause suffering he expected, for that was Lucifer's partner's function. But that he could also cause happiness had been the counterweight to his unpleasant role. More than he knew, he had depended on the existence of that power.
He wondered uneasily why the Burkes weren't happy, despite his having given them everything to make them so. They tried to convince themselves that they were, but they were obviously miserable. From the fact that he tried to find arguments based on the premise that their unhappiness was either his fault or theirs, he should have guessed that the answer was buried deep in the roots of his basic philosophy. Digging it out would require tearing up the foundation of his character. What that would lead to, if he ever tried it, even Johnson's facile imagination might have had trouble foreseeing. The ruler of the Western Hemisphere would find his acceptance of the philosophy of Hell fatally shaken. When Lucifer's partner loses faith in the rationalization that permits him to cause suffering — hell literally breaks loose.
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Chapter XXI
HALE DID GET some kick out of Johnson's next letter. Everybody likes to be appreciated, and the letter started off with a string of good, mouth-filling compliments on Hale's splendid success, the speed with which he was grasping the essentials of Johnson's methods, et cetera. The letter went on:
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Now that you have won your spurs, as one might say, in our somewhat unusual business, I have another task for you. You are no doubt familiar with the work of Fermi and Hahn in the disintegration of the uranium atom. In the ordinary type of atomic disintegration, by which it has been possible to transmute elements for several years, the products are a new element of slightly lower atomic weight, and a few hydrogen and helium ions. The energy released, while large in terms of electron-volts, is much too small to keep the reaction going by itself; it is, therefore, necessary to continue to supply the target with a much greater amount of power from outside than can ever be gotten back in the form of atomic energy.
However, Fermi and Hahn discovered that uranium, under neutron bombardment, splits into barium, masurium, and several other elements such as iodine and caesium, with the release of enormous atomic energy of the order of 200,000,000 electron-volts. This discovery has aroused the hope that a self-sustaining, controllable atomic-disintegration reaction may be worked out at last.
I need hardly remind you of the effect of such a discovery on the technique of war. If the energy of ten pounds of uranium oxide could be released all at once, it could easily wipe a large city off the face of the globe. When the significance of these impending discoveries seeps down to the level of the average man in all countries, he will be made more apprehensive and unhappy than ever by the knowledge that, if a hostile government effects an atomic explosion anywhere in his neighborhood, he will have virtually no chance of escape. This will be much worse than the present threat of an air raid, which, while it can do great damage and kill thousands of people, cannot destroy more than a small fraction of a modern metropolis at one time, simply because of quantitative considerations.
As I say, the general impression among informed persons is that the discovery of such an atomic reaction is not far off. It is in fact nearer than they think. I have been observing the work of a Professor A. G. Dixon of Edinburgh, Scotland, and he appears to have the solution, though it has not yet been published, and will not be soon. I have had his figures checked by the most competent mathematicians of Europe, and they agree as to their correctness.
Professor Dixon has discovered that controllable atomic power cannot be obtained from uranium or any of its compounds — the reaction dies out too quickly to be self-sustaining. But it can be obtained from thorium, which is another heavy radioactive element.
In line with my policies, it is obviously undesirable that these facts become known immediately, as that would settle the question one way or the other. While it is still unsettled, we can keep the world's governments in a constant state of fear regarding the possible effects of atomic energy, and none of them will dare take any overt action in the absence of precise knowledge of the effects of this scientific advance.
We must, therefore, divert the attention of the world's physicists from thorium and keep it concentrated on uranium, with which so many of them have been working since the Fermi-Hahn discovery. When they have finally discovered that they are up a blind alley, we can afford to let the truth become known.
I shall, therefore, take steps to prevent the publication of Dixon's work, and to divert this scientist from his present line of research. You will do what you can to renew the interest of American physicists in uranium. It has been flagging lately, since Columbia University's investment in a cubic foot of uranium oxide for research produced much interesting data but nothing tangible in the way of controlled, self-sustaining atomic power. To save you time, I might mention that the country's outstanding uranium enthusiast is Dr. L.R. Kammeyer, the head of the Physics Department at the Southwestern Institute of Technology.
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THIS TIME Hale didn't sit around and mope. He knew next to nothing about atomic physics, but he plunged into the subject with as much energy as could be expected of a man of purely nontechnical background. In the course of his reading he learned a little about science and a good deal about scientists. Kammeyer was a dogmatic enthusiast; his institute was looking for a new endowment for a physics laboratory.
Hale reached into the Southwestern Tech envelope in the files and came up with a bunch of papers. One fell out and spun to the floor, as if inviting his attention. He picked it up; it was several sheets clipped together. Inside the blank cover page was a sheet of diagrams and four pages of small type, headed "United States Patent Office." Below this phrase, in bold-face type, he read:
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1,995,001 VACUUM TUBE
Willis N. Apostle, Los Angeles, Calif., assignor to
Southwestern Institute of Technology, Los Angeles, Calif.
Application May 17, 1933,
Serial No. 671,497 12 Claims (Cl. 41-126)
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Hale had never before seen a United States patent copy, but the document proclaimed its nature clearly enough. He got hold of Janos, the patent expert of Johnson and Hale's legal staff. This worthy read the document through and whistled.
"Say," he said, "that's funny. This first claim dominates every frequency-modulated radio receiving set on the market, and I never heard of the patent before, though I know the art pretty well. I don't think the institute has been getting any royalties from the radio manufacturers, though I can find out. If they haven't, it probably means that this patent was taken out back before people took frequency-modulation very seriously. So the institute found no market for their rights, and forgot about the thing. But now that all the broadcasters have switched over to frequency modulation ... jeepers, think of all the infringements there have been in the last couple of years! The patent only has a couple of more years to run, and we can't sue for infringements that took place over six years ago, on account of the statute of limitations. But we've still got the radio manufacturers by the short hair, if we want to call the institute's attention to their position, and if that first claim isn't anticipated by the prior art."
Hale frowned. "The radio companies are pretty tough customers, being hooked up with General Motors and people like that. Are you sure they couldn't string the litigation out indefinitely?"
"Not a chance. They can delay a little, of course, and that might be serious to somebody who didn't have the $10,000 that a normal infringement suit takes. But they can only stall for so long, and then we'll have them. Want me to go ahead with a preliminary investigation?"
"Yeah, sure, go ahead, Mr. Janos. Let me know."
"Oh, of course, Mr. Hale. You don't have to tell me that."
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THE FIRST really hot evening, Gloria enjoyed lolling in a lawn chair on the terrace, and Eugene Banner relaxed completely. But Hale's tortured mind kept turning to the Burkes and why they weren't happy. After all, he asked himself, what did they have before? A monotonous routine: up at five, sweep, scrub, shovel coal, make beds, argue rent out of people as poor as themselves, dispossess tenants with no place to go, make all the repairs in the house — all day and half the night, seven days a week, for just enough to keep them from going hungry.
Did they like that? Impossible! Then what was it? Well, no friends, discomfort in their elegant apartment; and you know how snobbish the well-to-do are: they haven't the easy friendliness of the poor, nor the self-confidence of the very rich, who can afford to make all kinds of friends.
Damn it, was that really the answer? If it was, how about all the people who make small fortunes? There were always plenty of them, rising from nothing. They managed to get by.
"Mighty nice up here," said Banner. "You can almost forget the trouble down below."
"What trouble?" asked Hale inattentively.
"Shaky market, factories closing, unemployment —"
"Oh, that," said Hale gloomily.
Banner sat up. "`Oh, that'? What the hell have you got to worry about that's bigger than the mess this country's in? Where do you come off, saying, `Oh, that'?"
Hale didn't hear him. He thought: maybe it was his fault the Burkes were unhappy; the result of an error like that with his own spell. No, that couldn't be. He had told Johnson he had wanted the Burkes made happy, and Johnson had managed the whole thing.
Banner was shaking his arm. "What the devil's the matter with you, son? You're not the same shrewd, obstinate guy who busted into my office and said he wanted to marry my daughter. Come on, speak up!"
"I don't know what's the matter with him, daddy," Gloria complained. "Only this morning he was so full of life —"
"I'm all right," grumbled Hale. "Just some business worries." He thought, and went on cautiously: "When I got that partnership with Johnson, I bit off a little more than I expected."
It was partly true. The Southwestern Tech deal had gone off with the greatest of ease; the radio manufacturers had given in to the threat of an infringement suit without a struggle. The institute now had enough money to keep its uranium research program going for years. But Hale found his enjoyment of this new triumph somewhat tepid. In an effort to take his mind off the Burkes, he had been thinking about his plan for keeping Bispham and his newspapers afloat. He had found the man to locate and rope his sucker: a Prince Igor Vershinin, who was a customers' man-female customers — for Titus, Farnsworth and Quinn, and who had assured Hale that nothing would be easier, for, of course, an appropriate consideration.
Banner resumed his seat. "That's it, is it? Can't say I blame you, with things the way they are. Say, you're usually pretty well posted. What do you think'll be the outcome?"
"Of what?"
"I mean, which way'll the country jump?"
"How should I know?"
"That's what everybody says. You know, Bill, it's enough to scare anyone out of reaching into his pocket. Isolation's all right — you can make real money at it, selling to both sides — but you got to depend on staying neutral. Get what I mean?"
"Yeah."
"Suppose you're an exporter. Until you know whom you can collect from, you're not going to sell to either side and take a chance of bad debts or embargoes. Or suppose you make automobiles. In case of war your plant'll be converted into an airplane factory, maybe. But if the country stays isolationist, you can go on making cars without changing all your equipment. Like this, though, you don't dare make either cars or airplanes, for fear of being stuck with a fortune in half-processed materials.
"Look here, Bill, I'm not a stubborn guy. I can see both sides. Either isolation or intervention would be a good thing, if we'd only decide on it." His voice rose to an agitated howl. "But for Pete's sake, let's make up our minds! This waiting around's what's putting capital in a panic, throwing people out of work, torturing the whole country!"
Hale squirmed uneasily. "Is it really making you so unhappy?"
"You bet it is! Advertising increases when sales drop. I haven't done so well since '32. But so help me, Bill, I'd cut my business to half of my lowest year if it'd mean getting rid of this ... this suspense!"
Hale thought, Johnson would have assumed a mournful air of sympathy, but gloated inside. Why shouldn't he, Hale, gloat? But the knowledge of his success in making the hemisphere miserable merely depressed him and intensified his unreasonable sense of failure.
