The Man Who Rocked the Earth

  X

  All day the International Assembly of Scientists, officially known asConference No. 2, had been sitting, but not progressing, in the largelecture hall of the Smithsonian Institution, which probably had neverbefore seen so motley a gathering. Each nation had sent threerepresentatives, two professional scientists, and a lay delegate, thelatter some writer or thinker renowned in his own country for his wideknowledge and powers of ratiocination. They had come together upon theappointed day, although the delegates from the remoter countries had notyet arrived, and the Committee on Credentials had already reported.Germany had sent Gasgabelaus, Leybach, and Wilhelm Lamszus;France--Sortell, Amand, and Buona Varilla; Great Britain--Sir WilliamCrookes, Sir Francis Soddy, and Mr. H. G. Wells, celebrated for his "TheWar of the Worlds" and The "World Set Free," and hence supposedly justthe man to unravel a scientific mystery such as that which confrontedthis galaxy of immortals.

  The Committee on Data, of which Thornton was a member, having beenactively at work for nearly two weeks through wireless communicationwith all the observatories--seismic, meteorological, astronomical, andotherwise--throughout the world, had reduced its findings to print, andthis matter, translated into French, German, and Italian, had alreadybeen distributed among those present. Included in its pages was Quinn'sletter to the State Department.

  The roll having been called, the president of the National Academy ofSciences made a short speech in which he outlined briefly the purposefor which the committee had been summoned and commented to some extentupon the character of the phenomena it was required to analyze.

  And then began an unending series of discussions and explanations inFrench, German, Dutch, Russian, and Italian, by goggle-eyed,bushy-whiskered, long-haired men who looked like anarchists orsociologists and apparently had never before had an unrestrictedopportunity to air their views on anything.

  Thornton, listening to this hodgepodge of technicalities, was dismayedand distrustful. These men spoke a language evidently familiar to them,which he, although a professional scientist, found a meaningless jargon.The whole thing seemed unreal, had a purely theoretic or literaryquality about it that made him question even their premises. In thetainted air of the council room, listening to these little pot-bellied_Professoren_ from Amsterdam and Muenich, doubt assailed him, doubt eventhat the earth had changed its orbit, doubt even of his own establishedformulae and tables. Weren't they all just talking through their hats?Wasn't it merely a game in which an elaborate system of equivalents gavea semblance of actuality to what in fact was nothing but mind-play? EvenWells, whose literary style he admired as one of the beauties as well asone of the wonders of the world, had been a disappointment. He hadseemed singularly halting and unconvincing.

  "I wish I knew a practical man--I wish Bennie Hooker were here!"muttered Thornton to himself. He had not seen his classmate Hooker fortwenty-six years; but that was one thing about Hooker: you knew he'd beexactly the same--only more so--as he was when you last saw him. Inthose years Bennie had become the Lawson Professor of Applied Physics atHarvard. Thornton had read his papers on induced radiation, thermicequilibrium, and had one of Bennie's famous Gem Home Cookers in his ownlittle bachelor apartment. Hooker would know. And if he didn't he'd tellyou so, without befogging the atmosphere with a lot of things he _did_know, but that wouldn't help you in the least. Thornton clutched at thethought of him like a falling aeronaut at a dangling rope. He'd be wortha thousand of these dreaming lecturers, these beer-drinking visionaries!But where could he be found? It was August, vacation time. Still, hemight be in Cambridge giving a summer course or something.

  At that moment Professor Gasgabelaus, the temporary chairman, a hugeman, the periphery of whose abdomen rivalled the circumference of the"working terrestrial globe" at the other end of the platform, poundedperspiringly with his gavel and announced that the conference wouldadjourn until the following Monday morning. It was Friday afternoon, sohe had sixty hours in which to connect with Bennie, if Bennie could bediscovered. A telegram of inquiry brought no response, and he took themidnight train to Boston, reaching Cambridge about two o'clock thefollowing afternoon.

  The air trembled with heat. Only by dodging from the shadow of one bigelm to another did he manage to reach the Appian Way--the street givenin the university catalogue as Bennie's habitat--alive. As he swung openthe little wicket gate he realized with an odd feeling that it was thesame house where Hooker had lived when a student, twenty-five yearsbefore.

  "Board" was printed on a yellow, fly-blown card in the corner of thewindow beside the door.

  Up there over the porch was the room Bennie had inhabited from '85 to'89. He recalled vividly the night he, Thornton, had put his footthrough the lower pane. They had filled up the hole with an old golfstocking. His eyes searched curiously for the pane. There it was, stillbroken and still stuffed--it couldn't be!--with some colourless materialstrangely resembling disintegrating worsted. The sun smote him in theback of his neck and drove him to seek the relief of the porch. Had heever left Cambridge? Wasn't it a dream about his becoming an astronomerand working at the Naval Observatory? And all this stuff about the earthgoing on the loose? If he opened the door wouldn't he find Bennie with atowel round his head cramming for the "exams"? For a moment he reallyimagined that he was an undergraduate. Then as he fanned himself withhis straw hat he caught, on the silk band across the interior, thewords: "Smith's Famous Headwear, Washington, D.C." No, he was really anastronomer.

  He shuddered in spite of the heat as he pulled the bell knob. Whatghosts would its jangle summon? The bell, however, gave no sound; infact the knob came off in his hand, followed by a foot or so of copperwire. He laughed, gazing at it blankly. No one had ever used the bell inthe old days. They had simply kicked open the door and halloed: "O-o-h,Bennie Hooker!"

  Thornton laid the knob on the piazza and inspected the front of thehouse. The windows were thick with dust, the "yard" scraggly with weeds.A piece of string held the latch of the gate together. Thenautomatically, and without intending to do so at all, Thornton turnedthe handle of the front door, assisting it coincidentally with a gentlekick from his right toe, and found himself in the narrow cabbage-scentedhallway. The old, familiar, battered black-walnut hatrack of his studentdays leaned drunkenly against the wall--Thornton knew one of its backlegs was missing--and on the imitation marble slab was a telegramaddressed to "Professor Benjamin Hooker." And also, instinctively,Thornton lifted up his adult voice and yelled:

  "O-o-h, ye-ay! Bennie Hooker!"

  The volume of his own sound startled him. Instantly he saw theridiculousness of it--he, the senior astronomer at the NavalObservatory, yelling like that----

  "O-o-h, ye-ay!" came in smothered tones from above.

  Thornton bounded up the stairs, two, three steps at a time, and poundedon the old door over the porch.

  "Go away!" came back the voice of Bennie Hooker. "Don't want any lunch!"

  Thornton continued to bang on the door while Professor Hooker wrathfullybesought the intruder to depart before he took active measures. Therewas the cracking of glass.

  "Oh, damn!" came from inside.

  Thornton rattled the knob and kicked. Somebody haltingly crossed theroom, the key turned, and Prof. Bennie Hooker opened the door.

  "Well?" he demanded, scowling over his thick spectacles.

  "Hello, Bennie!" said Thornton, holding out his hand.

  "Hello, Buck!" returned Hooker. "Come in. I thought it was thatconfounded Ethiopian."

  As far as Thornton could see, it was the same old room, only now crammedwith books and pamphlets and crowded with tables of instruments. Hooker,clad in sneakers, white ducks, and an undershirt, was smoking a small"T. D." pipe.

  "Where on earth did you come from?" he inquired good-naturedly.

  "Washington," answered Thornton, and something told him that this wasthe real thing--the "goods"--that his journey would be repaid.

  Hooker waved the "T. D." in a general sort of way toward somebroken-down horsehair a
rmchairs and an empty crate.

  "Sit down, won't you?" he said, as if he had seen his guest only the daybefore. He looked vaguely about for something that Thornton might smoke,then seated himself on a cluttered bench holding a number of retorts,beside which flamed an oxyacetylene blowpipe. He was a wizened littlechap, with scrawny neck and protruding Adam's apple. His long hair gaveno evidence of the use of the comb, and his hands were the hands ofEsau. He had an alertness that suggested a robin, but at the same timegave the impression that he looked through things rather than at them.On the mantel was a saucer containing the fast oxidizing cores ofseveral apples and a half-eaten box of oatmeal biscuits.

  "My Lord! This is an untidy hole! No more order than when you were anundergrad!" exclaimed Thornton, looking about him in amused horror.

  "Order?" returned Bennie indignantly. "Everything's in perfect order!This chair is filled with the letters I _have_ already answered; thischair with the letters I've _not_ answered; and this chair with theletters I shall _never_ answer!"

  Thornton took a seat on the crate, laughing. It was the same old Bennie!

  "You're an incorrigible!" he sighed despairingly.

  "Well, you're a star gazer, aren't you?" inquired Hooker, relighting hispipe. "Some one told me so--I forget who. You must have a lot ofinteresting problems. They tell me that new planet of yours is full ofuranium."

  Thornton laughed. "You mustn't believe all that you read in the papers.What are you working at particularly?"

  "Oh, radium and thermic induction mostly," answered Hooker. "And when Iwant a rest I take a crack at the fourth dimension--spacial curvature'smy hobby. But I'm always working at radio stuff. That's where the bigthings are going to be pulled off, you know."

  "Yes, of course," answered Thornton. He wondered if Hooker ever saw apaper, how long since he had been out of the house. "By the way, did youknow Berlin had been taken?" he asked.

  "Berlin--in Germany, you mean?"

  "Yes, by the Russians."

  "No! Has it?" inquired Hooker with politeness. "Oh, I think some one didmention it."

  Thornton fumbled for a cigarette and Bennie handed him a match. Theyseemed to have extraordinarily little to say for men who hadn't seeneach other for twenty-six years.

  "I suppose," went on the astronomer, "you think it's deuced funny mydropping in casually this way after all this time, but the fact is Icame on purpose. I want to get some information from you straight."

  "Go ahead!" said Bennie. "What's it about?"

  "Well, in a word," answered Thornton, "the earth's nearly a quarter ofan hour behind time."

  Hooker received this announcement with a polite interest but noastonishment.

  "That's a how-de-do!" he remarked. "What's done it?"

  "That's what I want you to tell _me_," said Thornton sternly. "What_could_ do it?"

  Hooker unlaced his legs and strolled over to the mantel.

  "Have a cracker?" he asked, helping himself. Then he picked up a pieceof wood and began whittling. "I suppose there's the devil to pay?" hesuggested. "Things upset and so on? Atmospheric changes? When did ithappen?"

  "About three weeks ago. Then there's this Sahara business."

  "What Sahara business?"

  "Haven't you heard?"

  "No," answered Hooker rather impatiently. "I haven't heard anything. Ihaven't any time to read the papers; I'm too busy. My thermic inductortransformers melted last week and I'm all in the air. What was it?"

  "Oh, never mind now," said Thornton hurriedly, perceiving that Hooker'signorance was an added asset. He'd get his science pure, uncontaminatedby disturbing questions of fact. "How about the earth's losing thatquarter of an hour?"

  "Of course she's off her orbit," remarked Hooker in a detached way. "Andyou want to know what's done it? Don't blame you. I suppose you've goneinto the possibilities of stellar attraction."

  "Discount that!" ordered Thornton. "What I want to know is whether itcould happen from the inside?"

  "Why not?" inquired Hooker. "A general shift in the mass would do it. Sowould the mere application of force at the proper point."

  "It never happened before."

  "Of course not. Neither had seedless oranges until Burbank came along,"said Hooker.

  "Do you regard it as possible by any human agency?" inquired Thornton.

  "Why not?" repeated Hooker. "All you need is the energy. And it's lyingall round if you could only get at it. That's just what I'm working atnow. Radium, uranium, thorium, actinium--all the radioactiveelements--are, as everybody knows, continually disintegrating,discharging the enormous energy that is imprisoned in their molecules.It may take generations, epochs, centuries, for them to get rid of itand transform themselves into other substances, but they will inevitablydo so eventually. They're doing with more or less of a rush what all theelements are doing at their leisure. A single ounce of uranium containsabout the same amount of energy that could be produced by the combustionof ten tons of coal--but it won't let the energy go. Instead it holds onto it, and the energy leaks slowly, almost imperceptibly, away, likewater from a big reservoir tapped only by a tiny pipe. 'Atomic energy'Rutherford calls it. Every element, every substance, has its ready to betouched off and put to use. The chap who can find out how to releasethat energy all at once will revolutionize the civilized world. It willbe like the discovery that water could be turned into steam and made towork for us--multiplied a million times. If, instead of that energy justoozing away and the uranium disintegrating infinitesimally each year, itcould be exploded at a given moment you could drive an ocean liner witha handful of it. You could make the old globe stagger round and turnupside down! Mankind could just lay off and take a holiday. But _how_?"

  Bennie enthusiastically waved his pipe at Thornton.

  "How! That's the question. Everybody's known about the possibilities,for Soddy wrote a book about it; but nobody's ever suggested where thekey could be found to unlock that treasure-house of energy. Some chapmade up a novel once and pretended it was done, but he didn't say _how_.But"--and he lowered his voice passionately--"I'm working at it,and--and--I've nearly--nearly got it."

  Thornton, infected by his friend's excitement, leaned forward in hischair.

  "Yes--nearly. If only my transformers hadn't melted! You see I got theidea from Savaroff, who noticed that the activity of radium and otherelements wasn't constant, but varied with the degree of solar activity,reaching its maximum at the periods when the sun spots were mostnumerous. In other words, he's shown that the breakdown of the atoms ofradium and the other radioactive elements isn't spontaneous, as Soddyand others had thought, but is due to the action of certain extremelypenetrating rays given out by the sun. These particular rays are theresult of the enormous temperature of the solar atmosphere, and theireffect upon radioactive substances is analogous to that of thedetonating cap upon dynamite. No one has been able to produce these raysin the laboratory, although Hempel has suspected sometimes that tracesof them appeared in the radiations from powerful electric sparks.Everything came to a halt until Hiroshito discovered thermic induction,and we were able to elevate temperature almost indefinitely through aprocess similar to the induction of high electric potentials by means oftransformers and the Ruhmkorff coil.

  "Hiroshito wasn't looking for a detonating ray and didn't have time tobother with it, but I started a series of experiments with that end inview. I got close--I am close, but the trouble has been to control theforces set in motion, for the rapid rise in temperature has alwaysdestroyed the apparatus."

  Thornton whistled. "And when you succeed?" he asked in a whisper.

  Hooker's face was transfigured.

  "When I succeed I shall control the world," he cried, and his voicetrembled. "But the damn thing either melts or explodes," he added with atinge of indignation.

  "You know about Hiroshito's experiments, of course; he used a quartzbulb containing a mixture of neon gas and the vapour of mercury, placedat the centre of a coil of silver wire carrying a big oscillator
ycurrent. This induced a ring discharge in the bulb, and the temperatureof the vapour mixture rose until the bulb melted. He calculated that thetemperature of that part of the vapour which carried the current wasover 6,000 deg.. You see, the ring discharge is not in contact with the wallof the bulb, and can consequently be much hotter. It's like this." HereBennie drew with a burnt match on the back of an envelope a diagram ofsomething which resembled a doughnut in a chianti flask.

  Thornton scratched his head. "Yes," he said, "but that's an oldprinciple, isn't it? Why does Hiro--what's his name--call it--thermicinduction?"

  "Oriental imagination, probably," replied Bennie. "Hiroshito observedthat a sudden increase in the temperature of the discharge occurred atthe moment when the silver coil of his transformer became white hot,which he explained by some mysterious inductive action of the heatvibrations. I don't follow him at all. His theory's probably all wrong,but he delivered the goods. He gave me the right tip, even if I have gothim lashed to the mast now. I use a tungsten spiral in a nitrogenatmosphere in my transformer and replace the quartz bulb with a capsuleof zircorundum."

  "A capsule of what?" asked Thornton, whose chemistry was mid-Victorian.

  "Zircorundum," said Bennie, groping around in a drawer of his worktable. "It's an absolute nonconductor of heat. Look here, just stickyour finger in that." He held out to Thornton what appeared to be asmall test tube of black glass. Thornton, with a slight moralhesitation, did as he was told, and Bennie, whistling, picked up theoxyacetylene blowpipe, regarding it somewhat as a dog fancier might gazeat an exceptionally fine pup. "Hold up your finger," said he to theastronomer. "That's right--like that!"

  Thrusting the blowpipe forward, he allowed the hissing blue-white flameto wrap itself round the outer wall of the tube--a flame which Thorntonknew could melt its way through a block of steel--but the astronomerfelt no sensation of heat, although he not unnaturally expected themember to be incinerated.

  "Queer, eh?" said Bennie. "Absolute insulation! Beats the thermosbottle, and requires no vacuum. It isn't quite what I want though,because the disintegrating rays which the ring discharge gives out breakdown the zirconium, which isn't an end-product of radioactivity. Thepressure in the capsule rises, due to the liberation of helium, and itblows up, and the landlady or the police come up and bother me."

  Thornton was scrutinizing Bennie's rough diagram. "This ring discharge,"he meditated; "I wonder if it isn't something like a sunspot. You knowthe spots are electron vortices with strong magnetic fields. I'll betyou the Savaroff disintegrating rays come from the spots and not fromthe whole surface of the sun!"

  "My word," said Bennie, with a grin of delight, "you occasionally havean illuminating idea, even if you are a musty astronomer. I alwaysthought you were a sort of calculating machine, who slept on a logarithmtable. I owe you two drinks for that suggestion, and to scare a thirstinto you I'll show you an experiment that no living human being has everseen before. I can't make very powerful disintegrating rays yet, but Ican break down uranium, which is the easiest of all. Later on I'll beable to disintegrate anything, if I have luck--that is, anything exceptend-products. Then you'll see things fly. But, for the present, justthis." He picked up a thin plate of white metal. "This is the metalwe're going to attack, uranium--the parent of radium--and the wholeradioactive series, ending with the end-product lead."

  He hung the plate by two fine wires fastened to its corners, andadjusted a coil of wire opposite its centre, while within the coil heslipped a small black capsule.

  "This is the best we can do now," he said. "The capsule is made ofzircorundum, and we shall get only a trace of the disintegrating raysbefore it blows up. But you'll see 'em, or, rather, you'll see thelavender phosphorescence of the air through which they pass."

  He arranged a thick slab of plate glass between Thornton and the thermictransformer, and stepping to the wall closed a switch. An oscillatoryspark discharge started off with a roar in a closed box, and the coil ofwire became white hot.

  "Watch the plate!" shouted Bennie.

  And Thornton watched.

  For ten or fifteen seconds nothing happened, and then a faint beam ofpale lavender light shot out from the capsule, and the metal plate swungaway from the incandescent coil as if blown by a gentle breeze.

  Almost instantly there was a loud report and a blinding flash of yellowlight so brilliant that for the next instant or two to Thornton's eyesthe room seemed dark. Slowly the afternoon light regained its normalquality. Bennie relit his pipe unconcernedly.

  "That's the germ of the idea," he said between puffs. "That capsulecontains a mixture of vapours that give out disintegrating rays when thetemperature is raised by thermic induction above six thousand. Most of'em are stopped by the zirconium atoms in the capsule, which break downand liberate helium; and the temperature rises in the capsule until itexplodes, as you saw just now, with a flash of yellow helium light. Therays that get out strike the uranium plate and cause the surface layerof molecules to disintegrate, their products being driven off by theatomic explosions with a velocity about equal to that of light, and it'sthe recoil that deflects and swings the plate. The amount of uraniumdecomposed in this experiment couldn't be detected by the most delicatebalance--small mass, but enormous velocity. See?"

  "Yes, I understand," answered Thornton. "It's the old, 'momentum equalsmass times velocity,' business we had in mechanics."

  "Of course this is only a toy experiment," Bennie continued. "It is whatthe dancing pithballs of Franklin's time were to the multipolar,high-frequency dynamo. But if we could control this force and handle iton a large scale we could do anything with it--destroy the world, drivea car against gravity off into space, shift the axis of the earthperhaps!"

  It came to Thornton as he sat there, cigarette in hand, that poor BennieHooker was going to receive the disappointment of his life. Within thenext five minutes his dreams would be dashed to earth, for he wouldlearn that another had stepped down to the pool of discovery before him.For how many years, he wondered, had Bennie toiled to produce hismysterious ray that should break down the atom and release the store ofenergy that the genii of Nature had concealed there. And now Thorntonmust tell him that all his efforts had gone for nothing!

  "And you believe that any one who could generate a ray such as youdescribe could control the motion of the earth?" he asked.

  "Of course, certainly," answered Hooker. "He could either disintegratesuch huge quantities of matter that the mass of the earth would beshifted and its polar axis be changed, or if radioactivesubstances--pitchblende, for example--lay exposed upon the earth'ssurface he could cause them to discharge their helium and other productsat such an enormous velocity that the recoil or reaction wouldaccelerate or retard the motion of the globe. It would be quitefeasible, quite simple--all one would need would be the disintegratingray."

  And then Thornton told Hooker of the flight of the giant Ring machinefrom the north and the destruction of the Mountains of Atlas through theapparent instrumentality of a ray of lavender light. Hooker's faceturned slightly pale and his unshaven mouth tightened. Then a smile ofexaltation illuminated his features.

  "He's done it!" he cried joyously. "He's done it on an engineeringscale. We pure-science dreamers turn up our noses at the engineers, butI tell you the improvements in the apparatus part of the game come whenthere is a big commercial demand for a thing and the engineering chapstake hold of it. But _who_ is he and _where_ is he? I must get to him. Idon't suppose I can teach him much, but I've got a magnificentexperiment that we can try together."

  He turned to a littered writing-table and poked among the papers thatlay there.

  "You see," he explained excitedly, "if there is anything in the quantumtheory----Oh! but you don't care about that. The point is where _is_ thechap?"

  And so Thornton had to begin at the beginning and tell Hooker all aboutthe mysterious messages and the phenomena that accompanied them. Heenlarged upon Pax's benignant intentions and the great problemspresented by the pr
oposed interference of the United States Governmentin Continental affairs, but Bennie swept them aside. The great thing, tohis mind, was to find and get into communication with Pax.

  "Ah! How he must feel! The greatest achievement of all time!" criedHooker radiantly. "How ecstatically happy! Earth blossoming like therose! Well-watered valleys where deserts were before. War abolished,poverty, disease! Who can it be? Curie? No; she's bottled in Paris.Posky, Langham, Varanelli--it can't be any one of those fellows. Itbeats me! Some Hindoo or Jap maybe, but never Hiroshito! Now we must getto him right away. So much to talk over." He walked round the room,blundering into things, dizzy with the thought that his great dream hadcome true. Suddenly he swept everything off the table on to the floorand kicked his heels in the air.

  "Hooray!" he shouted, dancing round the room like a freshman. "Hooray!Now I can take a holiday. And come to think of it, I'm as hungry as abrontosaurus!"

  That night Thornton returned to Washington and was at the White House bynine o'clock the following day.

  "It's all straight," he told the President. "The honestest man in theUnited States has said so."