Invaders from the Infinite - John W. Campbell (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📗

fell to work on his dials, watching the ball of fire. It seemed far more brilliant in the air now. It moved, and headed toward a great slab of steel off to one side of the laboratory. It shifted about until it was directly over the center of the great slab. The slab rested on a scale of some sort, and as the ball of fire touched it, the scale showed a sudden increase in load. The ball sank into the slab of steel, and the scale showed a steady, enormous load. Evidently the little ball was pressing its way through as though it were a solid body. In a moment it was through the steel slab, and out on the other side.

“It will pass through any body with equal ease. It seems to answer only these controls, and these it answers perfectly, and without difficulty.

“One other thing we can do with it. I can increase its rate of energy discharge.”

The Talsonian turned a fourth dial, well off to one side, and the brilliance of the spot increased enormously. The heat was unbearable. Almost at once he shut it off.

“That is the principle we use in making it a weapon. Watch the actual operation.”

The ball of fire shot toward an open window, out the window, and vanished in the sky above. The Talsonian stopped the rotation of the dials. “It is motionless now, but scarcely visible. I will now release all the energy.” He twirled the fourth dial, and instantly there was a flash of light, and a moment later a terrific concussion.

“It is gone.” He left the controls, and went over to his apparatus. He set a heavy silver bladed switch, and placed a new tube in the apparatus. A second switch arced a bit as he drove it home. “Your generator is recharging the accumulators.”

Stel Felso Theu took the backplate of the control cabinet off, and the terrestrians looked at the control with interest.

“Got it, Morey?” asked Arcot after a time.

“Think so. Want to try making it up? We can do so out of spare junk about the ship, I think. We won’t need the tube if what I believe of it is true.”

Arcot turned to the Talsonian. “We wish you to accompany us to the ship. We have apparatus there which we wish to set up.”

Back to the ship they went. There Arcot, Morey and Wade worked rapidly.

It was about three-quarters of an hour later when Arcot and his friends called the others to the laboratory. They had a maze of apparatus on the power bench, and the shining relux conductors ran all over the ship apparently. One huge bar ran into the power room itself, and plugged into the huge power-coil power supply.

They were still working at it, but looked up as the others entered. “Guess it will work,” said Arcot with a grin.

There were four dials, and three huge switches. Arcot set all four dials, and threw one of the switches. Then he started slowly turning the fourth dial. In the center of the room a dim, shining mist a foot in diameter began to appear. It condensed, solidified without shrinking, a solid ball of matter a foot in diameter. It seemed black, but was a perfectly reflective surface⁠—and luminous!

“Then⁠—then you had already known of this thing? Then why did you not tell me when I tried to show it?” demanded the Talsonian.

Arcot was sending the globe, now perfectly non-luminous, about the room. It flattened out suddenly, and was a disc. He tossed a small weight on it, and it remained fixed, but began to radiate slightly. Arcot readjusted his dials, and it ceased radiating, held perfectly motionless. The sphere returned, and the weight dropped to the floor. Arcot maneuvered it about for a moment more. Then he placed his friends behind a screen of relux, and increased the radiation of the globe tremendously. The heat became intense, and he stopped the radiation.

“No, Stel Felso Theu, we do not have this on our world,” Arcot said.

“You do not have it! You look at my apparatus fifteen minutes, and then work for an hour⁠—and you have apparatus far more effective than ours, which required years of development!” exclaimed the Talsonian.

“Ah, but it was not wholly new to me. This ship is driven by curving space into peculiar coordinates. Even so, we didn’t do such a hot job, did we, Morey?”

“No, we should have⁠—”

“What⁠—it was not a good job?” interrupted the Talsonian. “You succeeded in creating it in air⁠—in making it stop radiating, in making a ball a foot in diameter, made it change to a disc, made it carry a load⁠—what do you want?”

“We want the full possibilities, the only thing that can save us in this war,” Morey said.

“What you learned how to do was the reverse of the process we learned. How you did it is a wonder⁠—but you did. Very well⁠—matter is energy⁠—does your physics know that?” asked Arcot.

“It does; matter contains vast energy,” replied the Talsonian.

“Matter has mass, and energy because of that! Mass is energy. Energy in any known form is a field of force in space. So matter is ordinarily a combination of magnetic, electrostatic and gravitational fields. Your apparatus combined the three, and put them together. The result was⁠—matter!

“You created matter. We can destroy it but we cannot create it.

“What we ordinarily call matter is just a marker, a sign that there are those energy-fields. Each bit is surrounded by a gravitational field. The bit is just the marker of that gravitational field.

“But that seems to be wrong. This artificial matter of yours seems also a sort of knot, for you make all three fields, combine them, and have the matter, but not, very apparently, like normal matter. Normal matter also holds the fields that make it. The artificial matter is surrounded by the right fields, but it is evidently not able to hold the fields, as normal matter does. That was why your matter continually disintegrated to ordinary