George O. Smith

“ She came forward into his arms and held him close. "Peter," she breathed, "once you told me that the job of any man involved in any of the sciences was at least ninety-eight percent frustration. So many things that never work. So the job of a scientist's wife must be to smooth over those frustrations. To keep him in action. To keep him getting up every morning with determination to go out and tackle the job that licked him yesterday. And the man's response must be that when he is happy, his wife can share his success. ”

“ Forsyth held up a hand to stem Peter's tongue. "The difficulty may lie in the lack of a co-ordinated effort," said Forsyth.
"Co-ordinated effort? What do you mean?"
"The contract you signed to produce a matter transmitter also stipulated that you were to be given free reign. You have hired no one else to help, possibly in fear that someone might steal your ideas. Mr. Higgins believes that this device should, at this point, be turned over to a complete laboratory staff for study and eventual development." ”

“ Peter went on less angrily, "This is no way to act. I've done my job honestly and to the best of my ability, and therefore if I meet with a setback, due to some factor that I couldn't foresee, then—"
"The point you name is the point we are trying to make," interrupted Forsyth smoothly. "We wonder whether the 'best of your ability' is of a caliber high enough to conquer the rather difficult task you set for yourself." ”

“ Higgins growled at the paper and went into a whispered consultation with Barnett. Peter sauntered to his equipment and scanned the meters and flow gauges casually. The humming machine had changed in pitch. It sounded now like a machine laboring over a huge, basso-resonant emptiness.
"Whatever you've done to earn this check," snapped Higgins, "will have to be proved a development made by you subsequent to the service of that termination notice. That is going to be tough. Men like you have been known to arrange a flat and dismal failure just to discourage a financier. ”

“ We are not blaming you. Industry, science, and the very foundation of civilization itself needs a proper proportion of thinkers, dreamers, and men whose sights are set intolerably high. These are the men who, like Einstein, propose abstract concepts, the practical use of which is obscure. Sometimes for years and years. I am certain that James Clerk Maxwell, for instance, had nothing financial in mind when he proposed the mathematics that are the cornerstone of radio and communications. Such may be the case with you, Mansfield."
Peter grunted. ”

“ Peter laughed. "This is the easy part," he assured her. "The gamma from my bombarder is absorbed in the production of the half-pair; the resulting radiation can be sent in a tight beam by means of a parabolic reflector, coated with one of the semi-conducting elements, through which a rather high current is being passed. Otherwise the radiation is so hard that it just goes through anything. When the tight beam hits a second parabolic reflector of similar construction, the hard gamma is focussed to an atomic point and the nucleus re-forms. ”

“ Not a man who wines and dines me with one eye on my bankbook, or one of my social contemporaries whose family finances obviate his avarice but whose family finances also take all ambition away from him. ”

“ But at this moment, Peter Mansfield was too busy with his own thoughts to compare himself with Norma and wonder how a man who was strapped to buy a good dinner could run in the company of a girl who thought nothing of going around loaded high enough to endow a college library wing, in cool cash. ”

“ There we win, because we can send men across space, if we can't transmit a gold watch or a vacuum tube. This is the Mansfield Mass Transmitter. No steps to drop, no mass-ratio to worry about, no fuel tanks to carry. Follow?"
A thousand miles to the East and five hundred miles in the sky, a blow-torch flame wickered and died as the last traces of fuel was sucked out of the tanks, hurled into the mass transmitter, and delivered to the combustion chamber of a reaction motor, already mixed and reacting. Peter shut off the equipment as the pumps clattered on a diet of air. ”

“ He looked into the abstract often, and at one period he tried to reconcile the rather high-altitude suggestion that the positron, the positive electron, was equivalent to the usual electron traveling backwards in time. All the math available said that there was no way of telling one concept from the other; that the effects of a positron would be the same as the effect of an electron in reversed timefield. This completely abstract concept also covered the negatron and the anti-neutron.
Peter abandoned the concept of nuclear time fields and picked up the meson theory. ”

“ Peter shook his head ruefully. He even essayed a sickly grin. "Sure," he said with a bitter laugh, "think up a use for a contraption that eats coal and delivers lampblack divided so fine it oxidizes in air. Water becomes a cloud of steam that condenses all over the place. I've made nascent oxygen, hydrogen, and the like, but this is hardly a problem these days, and the commercial companies have methods that do not involve a super betatron that delivers enough gamma to disintegrate atoms. ”

“ He said dumbly, "You'd go wandering around with a half a million dollars in cash in a handbag?"
"Why, er, why not? It's mine, isn't it?"
Perhaps it might not have been more than ten or fifteen minutes earlier that Peter Mansfield might have been impressed. He might have been forced to compare himself with the background of a girl who took a half-million-worth of dollars in greenbacks—even fifty-cent dollars—and stuffed them in a handbag. Peter had never seen a thousand dollar bill; Norma had a wad of them, a batch of ten-thousands, and two of the very rare fifty G type. ”

“ Just explain once more how pair production makes a matter transmitter possible."
Peter said, "Not very long after pair production was found to be a fact in cloud chamber photographs, the nuclear physicists began to compute the energies that might be needed for pair production of nuclear particles. If pair production took place between the lighter particles, it should take place among the heavier particles providing the gamma radiation was energetic enough. Sure enough, when they built the super-accelerators, they found that they could produce proton pairs and neutron pairs. ”

“ For the first demonstration, I will convert the cube into its radiation equivalent, send the radiation down the length of the laboratory, and reassemble it at the receiving equipment down there. Once this has been done, I have a number of other objects to transmit, in increasing complexity. For instance, there is a pair of pliers to show that alloy steels can be faithfully reproduced, and also that a moving joint can be maintained. We have a cheap alarm clock to show that the energy coiled in the mainspring can be transmitted without much loss, if any. ”

“ Pair production takes place when a gamma radiation of the right energy passes close to a nucleus. The gamma radiation then changes into an electron and a positron. Conversely, when an electron and a positron collide, they produce a quantum of gamma radiation. ”

“ Reduced an atom to radiation and then caused the radiation to reduce back into the original atom. Mansfield just did it with a pound of matter instead of a millimicrogram in a cloud chamber."
"But Mr. Higgins," said Peter hopefully, "doesn't the fact that I did transmit matter prove that the project is feasible? All I have to do now is to discover the way of transmitting whatever field of force or basic energy is required to maintain the original form of the object. Whatever binding energy holds the atoms together, one to the next, to create the whole object." ”

“ Norma came over, pushed him into his chair, and parked herself in his lap. "Maybe you're not," she said softly. "Father always grades people in terms of money. He forgets that his money can buy most anything but brains, and those he feels that he can hire."
Peter grunted. ”

“ Somehow he could not grasp the notion that anything could be rough to a person who had money, either potential or actual, at the fingertips. Rough to Peter Mansfield meant the constant search for a factor that he could not fathom.
"Pappy is a smooth, sharp operator," said Norma. "He's been manipulating strings, people, and corporations so long that he does it naturally. ”

“ You seem to think my sense of value is determined by the number of dollars available. It isn't. I—"
"You'll have precious little money once your father puts a close rein on the cashbox," said Peter harshly.
"I can circumvent father," said Norma angrily. "My problem is circumventing that warped thing you call your pride. Peter, I can bring to you a good deal more than the temporal finances you need to make this project a success; and in turn you can give me what I've been seeking."
"What—?"
"I want a man," she cried. "Not any man. ”

“ He wondered how he had managed to cover the couple of hundred feet from the bookshelf in the laboratory to the studio couch in the back room, and then he came a bit more alive and remembered Norma. Had she—?
"Awake, Peter?" she called from the doorway.
He fumbled for an answer, not only to her question because he was not sure, but also to the more important question that he posed for his own mind.
"Ah—er—"
"You're a sleepyhead. A hell of a fine lover you are." Norma laughed. "I come to give you a half-million bucks, and all I ask is that you pay attention to me. What do you do? ”

“ Ferrous oxide, caused by exposing the pyrophoric powder of iron to the oxygen of the atmosphere," said the man, whose sometime engineering education had not been entirely lost in his later preoccupation with financial and administrative duties.
"Do go on," sneered Higgins.
"Well, from this demonstration I would say that Mr. Mansfield most definitely did demonstrate the transmission of matter, or an equivalent of the art," said Harrison firmly. "There was no iron here at the beginning of the demonstration, there is now." ”

“ I'll attest to the fact that Peter did plead with Forsyth to extend the contract. I'll announce to the world that you've even accused my husband of being a kept man!"
"Then," snapped Higgins. "Explain how you came by this check?"
Peter eyed his equipment once more. The vast tanks were running out; only a few hundred gallons were left in each.
"Sure," he said easily. "I don't mind. The Mansfield Matter Transmitter couldn't send a housebrick across a yard of distance, but it isn't a full failure. Hydrazine and Nitric Acid is the propellant for rockets. The stuff reacts upon contact. ”

“ The blue bombardment hit the metal cube and there hazed out in all directions an aura of pale ionization. From the centrix of this aureole there fanned out a spreading cone of blue that faded to invisibility as the spread reached the surface of the large parabolic reflector.
"The matter transmitter seems to be working perfectly," said Peter with a careful reading of his meters.
Walter Higgins snorted. He waved his cigar toward the far end of the laboratory. "How is your matter receiver doing?" ”

“ They even got a couple of sodium nuclei from the first attempts.
"Somewhere in here they discovered that each atom had its own resonant frequency, and that if you bombarded the nucleus with that resonant frequency the result would be half a pair's worth of resulting gamma."
"That's where I always get lost. First you bombard your junk with gamma, and cause it to break up into more gamma, which doesn't seem quite right." ”

“ Peter nodded. "The big problem," he said slowly, "was the development of a scanning device. In order to reconstruct any object faithfully, the reformed atom must reassemble in exactly the same relative position. No one could ever do it mechanically. But a magnetic field can bend the radiation if the field is strong and localized. ”