Amazing Stories, January, 1934

  The Atom Smasher

  by P. Schuyler Miller

  HE student huddled back into his glaciers whipped his straggling hair and sparse corner of the hot, stuffy auditorium,

  beard, and brought a mist of tears to his

  T breathing heavily from his mad scurry piercing blue eyes. His lean, bronzed face up the stairs. He was late. Paper No. 10 was

  seemed to twitch with some deep-seated

  very nearly finished.

  emotion, as the shadow of the idly spinning

  He stared at the tall young man who

  rotor-blades swept over it, slower, slower,

  was speaking, drawling softly in the way of

  stopping. His face was grim and haggard in

  the South. He stared at the diagrams chalked

  the shadow.

  on the blackboard. Something tremendously

  Down from the sheer, green wall of the

  important was happening down there. That

  glacier toppled a pillar of foam, wreathed with man, only a few years older than he, had made

  shifting, ghostly rainbows, phantoms of the

  a tool to shatter atoms!

  drifting mist. Beside it, squat and gray,

  “It’s really quite simple,” he was huddled the power-house, with its tall steel saying. Some startled, incredulous savant had

  towers on the ledge behind it. Before it, at its hurled a question at him. “It’s like a bucket

  foot, a thread of crystal leapt from the

  conveyor. The silk belts simply pick up the

  churning froth of the whirlpool and danced out charge and dump it on the spheres. The charge

  over the valley floor, out into the sunny

  builds up until leakage—brush discharge—

  meadow, then back into the shadow of the

  begins. With two oppositely charged spheres

  cliffs that narrowed and hemmed it in, and

  like this, two feet in diameter, we got a million sent it pent and raging down the gorge to the

  and a half volts. We expect to make bigger

  sea.

  ones—to give ten million, twenty million,

  At the foot of the slope, beside the

  whatever we need. The only thing that limits

  little stream, two ebon towers rose from

  you is the size of your spheres. We hope to be terraced bases, five hundred feet into the

  able to get at the atomic nucleus that way.”0

  Alaskan sunlight. Sleek and glossy the two

  Simple! There in the sultry lecture-

  huge insulators loomed at the center of the

  room the student crouched in his seat, staring little upland valley, topping the low cliffs,

  into the hot dark. He knew nothing of Paper

  thrusting high their mighty twin spheres of

  No. 11, or the supplementary papers that burnished metal, linked by a crystal shaft.

  followed. He was still sitting there when Dwarfed by the stature of the towers and everyone had left. He was dreaming—great

  spheres, two big motors pressed against the

  dreams.

  bases, like frightened chicks huddled at the

  * * * * * *

  feet of some human giant. Like a flat gray

  The tall old man threw a long leg over

  toad, a little, rude laboratory crouched under the side of his autogyro and slid to the ground.

  the lee of the cliffs, facing the aurora. And, He steadied himself against its wing, stood

  above and beyond, the mountains loomed

  there looking out over his little mountain along the horizon, like peering deities, staring valley. The chill wind from the melting down into the snowy bowl as at a jewel of

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  2

  silver and emerald.

  of quartz, glowing faintly green in the half-

  The old man turned from the great

  dark. He set it carefully in its little clip at the thing in the valley and fumbled in the cockpit focus of the electron stream, stood there

  of his battered plane. It was a queer thing he staring at it, remembering. His life was in that drew out, a little, ugly cube of dull metal—

  little crystal capsule, and the life of Robert lead—with a little round stoppered aperture in Van de Graf, who eighty years before had

  its side. He seemed very old and tired as he

  stood in a little college lecture-room and

  stood there beside the hut, pressing his little startled the world of physics with a tool to

  box against his heart. His life was in that box.

  smash the atom. Eighty years—years of

  In the squat stone hut it was hot and

  growing poverty, while the malignant rays

  dark. One small bulb was lighted over his

  from his tubes ate at his vitals, while the world instrument-board, his master controls. His forgot. For Robert Van de Graf had failed, and delicate, withered fingers danced over the he—he the nameless student of that long-gone dials and keys, tugging at connections, tapping day—would vindicate his memory! The old

  at tubes, searching for the flaw that must not man stumbled toward the hatch that opened

  exist.

  the way down into the blackness.

  It did not. Taking up his leaden box, he

  Far above the snowy bowl of the

  went out again into the night. The shadow of

  mountains a lone aviator caught the last light the western range was creeping about the base

  of the sinking sun on his glistening wings. He of the two great towers, but the mighty stared down through the growing dark at the spheres that crowned them burned bravely in

  wilderness beneath—rolling snow-dunes and

  the rays of the sinking summer sun. Under the

  knife-edged scimitars of ice, black, jutting

  cliffs it was dark, and there was a stir of

  snags of rock, treacherous crevasses—sheer

  stealthy life among the fallen boulders. The

  hell to the airman who should fall into its

  little, timid creatures of the night were darting clutches. There was a tiny fleck of soft, cold forth. They had no fear of the tall old man, or green in it, there in the shadow of the western of his strange towers.

  peaks. He peered down through his night-

  Slowly and painfully the old man crept

  glasses and swooped low over the valley.

  up the long ladder. He climbed out on the

  The reflected sunlight from the eastern

  floor of the big room, stood for a moment at

  peaks cast a pale white lustre over the little the edge of the shaft, catching his breath.

  valley, the old man’s refuge. There was a

  Deep within him, the dull, brutal gnawing had

  waterfall, a stream, a queer-shaped thing

  started again, but he ignored it, beat it back as beside it. There was an old-type autogyro, and he had for so many months, stalked across the

  a tiny human form toiling up the long slope to metal floor to the steel block at the end of the a flat, gray hut. It disappeared, and from the crystal tube. Here were his instruments, valley rose a dull, soft mutter of motors, rising cunningly shielded. Here were controls, to a steady drone, audible even above the rush duplicates of those in the stone hut. Here a

  of the wind past the sleek curves of the

  quarter of a billion volts of hurtling energy

  circling plane.

  would smash into the trembling atoms of a

  On and on droned the motors of the

  gram of radium, would free the fires that old man, building up the charge. Now two soft would free the world!

  purple disks were taking form against the dark He fumbled with the heavy door of the

  oval of the shadowed valley, furry with

  vault, pulled it open. From his cube of lead he electric leakage. They cast a dim glow over

  tumbled out a tiny capsule, a little sealed tube the little valley, showing two vague shafts

  The Atom Smasher

  3

  rising into the night, two stepped squares of

  beside the open vault. Far below the motors

  glossy black, the shifting glimmer of the droned their song, piling up the charge, up and stream. Hovering like a great, noiseless eagle up and up. ...

  above the snows, the aviator circled and

  Something, some voice from nowhere,

  watched and waited.

  whispered to the circling flyer. His stubby

  The glow from the distant peaks faded.

  craft split the starry heavens, zooming up into The valley was dark save for the glow of the

  the frosty night, up and up and up, until the

  great spheres and the spot of dull yellow that valley was a speck against the starlit snows,

  marked the door of the stone hut. Then of a

  then the wraith of a memory, and then was

  sudden the two disks winked out and between

  gone.

  them sprang a thin shaft of vivid, violet flame, Out of the heart of the snows hurtled a

  spreading into a fan of flickering electric fires, pillar of seething flame, star-white, blinding, then gathering suddenly into a dazzling blue-leaping out into Space! Out of the little upland white ball where the

second disc had been. On

  valley burst an awful, beating wave of

  its heels came the crash of shattered glass and thunderous sound, seizing the little fleeing

  tearing metal, and a blinding glare of white

  plane and throwing it mile on shrieking mile

  flame burst from the door of the little hut,

  into the gaping skies, until its pilot gasped in driving before it a blinded, stumbling thing

  the thinning air and with the fierce strength of that staggered off into the dark. A second

  speeding life threw his controls into a

  burst of flame revealed the old man, his screaming dive toward the burning snows!

  ancient hands groping in eternal blackness,

  That sight seared itself forever into his

  tottering down the hill to the towering shaft of memory. The bowl of the circling ranges was

  the mighty machine. Then only flickering alive with leaping, cavorting shadows, crimson shadows scuttled among the rocks

  capering in fiendish glee about the flaming

  around the burning hut.

  shaft that hurled itself three thousand feet into Blind, agonized, the gaunt old man

  the night! Out of the heavens came the wild

  dragged his tortured body up the last endless

  winds of the world, battling, clashing, tearing yards of ladder, beside the softly whirring

  the air to tattered shreds and flinging them

  silken belt, glimmering ever so faintly with a into Space! Out of the holocaust at the

  soft light that he could never see. He toppled valley’s heart stabbed the cruel rays of chaos, forward on the steel floor of the great room

  battering at molecule and atom, crushing

  within the sphere and began to inch his way

  them, shattering them, bursting their crowded

  over its cold, harsh surface toward the nuclei and freeing raw, new-born hydrogen looming casque of steel. His hands came up,

  that in an instant flamed into fierce crimson

  fumbled among the heavy cables, seized and

  fire, burning in great leaping tongues from

  tore one loose with a sputter of fat, hot sparks every crag and every ice-spire of all that great that shook his frail frame cruelly. He clutched hollow in the hills, sending huge lurid plumes at the disc before the great steel door, the disc and streamers of destruction up from the

  that had failed to slip aside at his bidding, so flaming peaks, freeing such a hell as earth had that a quarter of a billion volts crashed never known! Out of the darkening heavens through writhing conduits into the wrecked

  rushed the curtains of the aurora, cackling

  control-board of the little stone laboratory.

  wildly with unearthly glee, and out of the

  Stiffly it slid down, revealing the glowing

  splitting skies burst the mutter and mad

  mite of radium within. Sick and faint, the old laughter of the storm.

  man sank face down upon the cold steel floor,

  A week later, native hunters found a

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  4

  raving human beast who had seen Judgment.

  nearer, the glow of the flaming pool waned

  In a month they returned to the outposts of the and died, until, when at last they stood at the white men, telling of a land of burning lip of the little valley that had been, only the mountains where the old gods battled and the

  dull red glow of heaving molten rock

  rivers blazed. Six months, and out of the south remained for them to see.

  came an army of ‘seekers’ for the actual truth.

  They never dared to try what he had

  The peaks no longer burned. They tried. They never even knew his name. But a climbed their outer flanks, stood on their great gateway had been cut through the crumbling summits, riddled by the gutting mountains in that desolate land, and on either rays. Far away, at the heart of a desert waste side of its broad approach towers an ebon

  of dead, gray dust, a pool of white fire still shaft, topped with a golden ball. Men stare at blazed in the night. Day after day, week after them, and look out across the gray domain of

  week, they were smothered by the ash of

  death, and they shudder and turn away as they

  atoms, that rose in great dense clouds about

  remember the man who smashed the atom.

  them. And as they crept nearer and ever

 

 

  Monte Herridge, The Atom Smasher by P

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