Where I Wasn't Going Part 8

In his mind he pictured the tiny gyroscopes all brought into alignment by the interplay of magnetic forces; and around each proton the tiny, planetary electrons.

Yet it was very well to think of the proton nucleus of the hydrogen atom as a simple top, he reminded himself; but they were more complex than that. Each orbiting electron must also contribute something to the effect.

At that point, Mike remembered, the electron itself would be spinning, a lighter-weight gyroscope, much as Earth has a lighter weight than the Sun. The electron, too, had a magnetic field; more powerful than the proton's field because of its higher rate of spin, despite its lighter ma.s.s. The electron could also be lined up.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Mike remembered having read of another effect. The electron's resonance. Electron para-magnetic resonance.

It, too, could be controlled by radio frequencies in a magnetic field--but the frequencies were different, far up in the microwave region; about three centimeters as Mike recalled--and he went back to his supply cabinet to get another piece of equipment, a spare klystron that actually belonged to the radar department but that was "stored"

in his shop.

At these frequencies, the three centimeter band of the electromagnetic spectrum, energy does not flow on wires as it does in the lower frequency regions. Here plumbing is required. But Mike, amongst other things, was an expert RF plumber.

Even experts take time to set up klystrons, and it was three hours later before Mike was ready with the additional piece of haywire equipment which carefully piped RF energy into the plastic block.

This refinement by itself had been done before; but some of the others that Mike applied during his investigation probably hadn't--at least not to any such tortured piece of plastic as now existed between the pole faces of the device.

To have produced the complete alignment of both the protons and the electrons within a ma.s.s might have been attempted before. To have applied an electrostatic field in addition to this had perhaps been attempted before. To have done all three, at the same time to the same piece of plastic, and then to have added the additional tortures that Mike thought up as he went along, was perhaps a chance combination, repeatable once in a million tries, one of those experimental accidents that sometimes provide more insight into the nature of matter than all of the careful research devised by multi-million-dollar-powered teams of cla.s.sical researchers.

When the contraption was in full operation, he simply sat on his heels and watched, studying out in his mind the circuits and their effects.

The interruption of the magnetic resonance by the electrostatic field--by the DC--with the RF plumbing--twisted by--each time the concept came towards the surface, it sank back as he tried to pull it into consciousness.

Churkling to itself, the device continued applying its alternate fields and warps and strains.

"It's a Confusor out of Confusion by Is.h.i.+e, who is probably as great a creator of Confusion as you could ask," Mike told himself, forgetting his own part in the matter, watching intently, waiting for the concept to come clear in his mind.

Presently he went over to his console, to his pads of paper and pencils, and began sketching rapidly, drawing the interlocking and repulsing fields, the alignments, mathing out the stresses--in an attempt to visualize just what it was that the Confusor would now be doing....

In the Confusor itself, a tiny chunk of plastic, four by four inches square and one-half inch thick, resting in the middle of the machine between the carefully aligned pole-faces of the magnet, was subjected to the c.u.mulatively devised stresses, a weird distortion of its own stresses and of the inertia that was its existence.

Each proton and electron within the plastic felt an urge to be where it wasn't--felt a pseudo-memory, imposed by the outside stresses, of having been traveling at a high velocity towards the north star, on which the machine chanced to be oriented; felt the new inertia of that velocity....

Each proton and electron fitted itself more snugly against the north pole face and pushed with the entire force of its newly-imposed inertial pattern.

Forty pounds to the square inch six hundred forty pounds over the surface of the block, the plastic did its best to a.s.sume the motion that the warped laws of its existence said that it already had.

It was only one times ten to the minus five of a gravity that the four by four by half inch piece of carefully machined plastic presented to the sixty-four million pound ma.s.s of s.p.a.ce Lab One.

But the force was presented almost exactly along the north-south axis of the hub of the s.h.i.+p, and in s.p.a.ce a thrust is c.u.mulative and momentum derives per second per second.

The Confusor churkled quietly as the piece of plastic exerted its tiny ma.s.s in a six hundred forty pound attempt to take off towards the north star. And, since the piece itself was rigidly mounted to its frame, and the frame to the s.h.i.+p, the giant bulk of five million cubic feet of water, thirty-two million pounds of ma.s.s; and the matching ma.s.s-bulk of the s.h.i.+p itself, responded to the full mosquito-sized strength of the six hundred forty pound thrust, and was moved--a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a centimeter in the first second; a fraction of a fraction in the second; a fraction....

On the bridge, the com officer had completed transmitting the captain's detailed report of the evacuation to the hub-s.h.i.+eld area caused by the solar flare.

On another line, under Bessie's ministrations, the computer was feeding the data obtained by the incomplete equipment in the observatory in its automatic operation.

The captain himself was finis.h.i.+ng a plastic-bottle of coffee, while he wrote up his log.

It was exactly nine minutes since the Confusor had come into full operation.

The fractions of fractions of centimeters had added on the square of the number of seconds; and the sixty-four million pounds of ma.s.s of s.p.a.ce Lab One has moved over thirteen meters.

Trailing the wheel ten miles off, was the atomic pile, directly attached to its anchor tube.

Tightening, each with a whanging snap too tiny to be remarked within the ma.s.s of the s.h.i.+p, were the cables that attached the various items of the dump to their anchor finger.

But still free on the loose one hundred meter cable that attached it to its anchor, and which had had fifteen meters of slack when the s.h.i.+p first began its infinitesimal movement, was Project Hot Rod.

Nine minutes and twenty-three seconds. The velocity of the wheel with its increasing ma.s.s of trailing items, was five point four six centimeters per second. The nearly four million pound ma.s.s of Hot Rod was slowly being left behind.

The cable tautened the final fraction of a centimeter. Its tug was not fast, but was unfortunately applied very close to the center of gravity of the entire device, since most of Hot Rod's weight was concentrated in and around the control room.

Five point four six centimeters per second. Four million pounds of ma.s.s.

If the shock had been direct, it would have equaled two point eight million ergs of energy, created by the fractional movement of the mighty ma.s.s of the s.h.i.+p against Hot Rod.

But the shock was transmitted through the short end of a long lever.

The motion at the beam director mirror, a full diameter out from the eight thousand foot diameter balloon that was Hot Rod, was multiplied nearly sixteen thousand times. Hot Rod rolled on its center of gravity, and its beam-director mirror swung in a huge arc. Sixteen thousand centimeters per centimeter of original motion. Eight hundred and seventy-three meters in the first second, before the tracking servos took over and began to fight back.

Hot Rod fought at the end of its tether like a mighty jellyfish hooked on the end of a line.

Gradually the swings decreased. Four hundred meters; two hundred meters; one hundred meters; fifty meters; twenty-five meters--and it had come back to a nearly stable focus on the sun.

But the beam director had also been displaced, and vibrated.

Internally, the communications beam to Thule Base had been interrupted; and the fail-safe had not failed-safely.

The mighty beam had lashed out. The vibrations of the directing mirror began placing gigantic spots and sweeps of unresistible energy across the ice cap of Greenland, in an ever-diminis.h.i.+ng Lissajous pattern.

By the time the servos refocused the communications beam on Thule, there was no Thule; only a burnt-out crater where it had been.

Slowly, but surely, the giant balloon settled itself to the task of burning a hole through the Greenland ice cap at a spot eighty miles north of that now-burnt-out Thule Base that had originally been planned as a test of its accuracy; and to the simple task of holding that focus in spite of the now steady, though infinitesimal acceleration under which it joined the procession headed by Lab One.

Now that the waves of action and reaction from the shock energy of its sudden start had subsided, Hot Rod's accuracy was proving great indeed; and its beam focus was proving as small as had been predicted.

But the instruments that would have measured those facts no longer existed.

In the engineering control center of s.p.a.ce Lab One, the Confusor churkled quietly and continued to pit its mosquito might against its now nearly seventy-eight million pound antagonist, as the protons and electrons of the plastic that was center to its forces did their inertial best to occupy that position in s.p.a.ce towards the north star in which the warped fields around them forced them to belong--the mosquito strained its six hundred forty pound thrust against its giant in the per second per second acceleration that was effective only in the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a centimeter in the first second, but that compounded its fractions per second.

On the quiet bridge, the captain looked up as the Com Officer said, "Thule Base, sir," and switched on his mike.