Part 1

When the Atoms Failed

By John W. Campbell, Jr.

_Our new author, who is a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows marvelous ability at combining science with romance, evolving a piece of fiction of real scientific and literary value. A careful perusal of this story should give the reader not only keen enjoyment, but a considerable amount of instruction, because most of our readers will want to confirm their views of cosmic topics, of atoms, of energy--atomic and material--and the other subjects that blend so well in the text of this tale. A great deal of interesting material may be found on these subjects in recent text books._

Illustrated by WESSO

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Author's Foreword

When the events of which I am to tell took place all the world was interested solely in their final outcome, but when that last awful day was ended, and time enough had passed to give our world a chance to find a way to apply and use the awful forces it had had forced upon it, or, indeed, had even found how to control their immense energies, men began to wonder about the true story of the Invasion.

I had always been a writer, first newspaper work, then a book or two. Perhaps because of this the world expected that an account would soon be presented. But had those millions seen that awful battle, seen those mighty wrecks on the hot sands, even then might they understand my dread of telling of that titanic conflict--a conflict in which the weaker was a million times more powerful than any force man had previously seen! It still burns in my memory, that awful scene in its desolate setting--the vast rolling desert below, seared, blasted, fused in great streaks where the intense, stabbing heat rays had cut it, mighty craters blasted in its surface where the terrific explosions of the shells had heaved thousands of tons of sand into great mounds, and those ghastly wrecks that lay crushed and broken on the hot sands below, bathed in the ruddy light of the sun of sunset, now slowly sinking behind the distant purple hills, as the last of the Invaders crashed on the packed sands below.

Two men of all Earth's billions saw that scene--but those two will never forget--as Stephen Waterson and I can testify.

Ten years have passed, ten years of stupendous change, readjustment, and cosmic conquest. Ten years in which a world has been added to man's domain, yet still sharp and clear in my memory is the picture of those shapeless masses, those lumps of glowing metal, that lay on the sands beneath us, the sole vestiges of the mighty ships of Mars.

Never have I wanted to think long on that scene of titanic destruction, destruction such as man never before knew, but friends have convinced me that it is my duty as one who lived in closest contact with the facts, and one of the two men who saw that last struggle, to tell the story as it unrolled itself before me.

Brief it is. The entire event, for all its consequences, lasted but two days--days that changed the history of a Universe!

But in this march of mighty events, I was but a spectator, and as a spectator I shall tell it. And I shall try to depict for you the character of the greatest man of all the System's history--Stephen Waterson.

Waterson Laboratories May, 1957

David Gale.

* * * * *

It was late afternoon in May, 1947, and the temperature had climbed to unbelievable heights during the day. It seemed impossible to work with that merciless sun beating down on the roof. It is odd that a temperature of 95 in May should seem far higher than a similar temperature in July. On the top floors of the great apartments it was stifling. The great disadvantage of roof landings for planes had always been the tendency of the roofs to absorb heat in summer, yet on the top-most floors of those apartments people were living, and in one of those apartments a man was trying to work. Heat was a great trouble, but he found thoughts of hunger in the not too distant future an even greater inspiration to work. The manuscript he was correcting was lengthy, but this was the final revision, which was some comfort. Still the low buzz of the telephone annunciator was a relief. It was so much easier to talk. He took up the telephone.

"Gale speaking."

"Hello Dave, this is Steve. I hear you are having a bit of hot weather in New York today. I have a suggestion for you--I'm coming to pick you up in an hour and a half, and if you will be ready on your roof then, in a camp suit, and with camp clothes for about a month packed, I can guarantee you some fun, providing, of course, that you're still the man I knew. But I can't guarantee to return you! Meet me on your roof in an hour and a half."

"Well, I'll--now what's up? So he isn't sure I'll get back--and he calls that a 'suggestion'! Anyhow it sounds interesting and I'll have to hurry. I wish he'd get into the habit of warning a fellow when he is going to start one of his expeditions! And I may not come back--I wonder where on Earth he's going now--and where he was then. The only reason he gives me an hour and a half is because it will take him that long to get here. He would drop in on me without any notice otherwise. In that case he must be about three hundred miles from here. But where?"

* * * * *

An hour and a half later he was on the roof, watching the darting planes, there were a good many, but by far the larger part of the world's business and pleasure was on the ground in those days. Still the crimson and gray special of Waterson's ought to be easily visible. He was late--unusual for Steve. Gale hadn't seen him in more than a year--probably been working on one of his eternal experiments, he decided.

Still he searched the skies in vain. Only the regular planes, and one dirigible--tiny in the distance--it seemed to be coming toward him--and it certainly was coming rapidly--it couldn't be a dirigible--no gas bag could go that fast--then he saw the crimson and the gray band around it--it was Steve.

And now as it darted down and landed gracefully on the roof beside him, he saw that the machine was but thirty-five feet long, and ten or so in diameter. Suddenly a small round hatchway opened in its curved, windowless side of polished metal, and a moment later Stephen Waterson forced his way out. The door was certainly small, and forcing that six-foot-two body in and out through it must have been a feat worthy of a magician. Gale noticed that he would just about fit it, but the giant Waterson must have intended to use it very infrequently to make it that size.

"Hello, Dave--how do you like my new boat? But get in, we're going. There, your bag's in already."

"Good Lord, Steve, what is this? I gather you invented it. Certainly I never saw nor heard of it before," said Gale.

"Well Dave, I suppose you might say I invented it, but the truth is that a machine invented it--or at least discovered the principles on which it is based."

"A machine! A machine invented it? What do you mean? A machine can't think, can it?"

"I'm not so sure they can't, Dave, but get in--I'll tell you later. I promised Wright I would be back in three hours, and I've lost ten minutes already. Also, this machine weighs three thousand tons--so I don't want to leave it on this roof longer than is absolutely necessary."

"But, Steve--let me look at it. Man, it is beautiful. What is that metal?"

"Try the inside, Dave--there!"

Dave Gale was rather good sized--five feet ten, and weighing over one hundred and sixty pounds, but Waterson was in perfect physical condition, two hundred and ten pounds of solid muscle, and Gale had been popped into the hatch like a bag of meal, so quickly was it done.

Now he turned to look at the tiny room in which he found himself. It was evidently the pilot room, and around the front of the room there ran a clear window, curved to fit the curve of the ship's walls, and about three feet high, the center coming at about the level of the eye of a person sitting in either of the two deeply cushioned chairs directly facing it. The chairs were evidently an integral part of the machine, and from the heavy straps attached to them it was obvious that the passengers were expected to need some support. The arms of each chair were fully two feet broad, and many small instruments and controls were arranged on their polished black surfaces. Waterson had seated himself in the right hand chair and strapped himself in. Gale hastened to secure himself in the left chair.

"Take it easy Dave, and be prepared for a shock when we start."

"I'm ready Steve, let's go!"

Waterson moved his right hand a bit, and a tiny red bulb showed on his left instrument panel; many of his instruments began to give readings and several on Gale's board did so also. Another movement, and there was a muffled hum of an air blower. Then Waterson looked at Gale and turned a small vernier dial--Gale had been watching intently--but suddenly the look left his face--and was replaced by a look of astonished pain. The entire car had suddenly jerked a bit, then that peculiarly unpleasant sensation connected most intimately with a rapid elevator or helicopter starting from rest had made itself unpleasantly pronounced. Gale's pained and somewhat sick expression caused Waterson's smile to broaden.

"Whew--Steve--what is this--why don't you warn a fellow of what's coming!"

"I did warn you, Dave," answered Waterson, "and if you will look out, I think you will understand this."

* * * * *

The car was rising, at first slowly, but ever faster and faster, from the roof, not as a helicopter rises, not as a dirigible rises, but more as a heavy body falls, with high acceleration ever faster and faster. Soon it was rising quite rapidly, straight up. Then another tiny red bulb flashed into life on Waterson's switchboard, and the ship suddenly tilted at an angle of thirty degrees. Then it shot forward, and continually accelerated an already great speed, till New York lay far behind, and then the sky became dark and black, and now the stars were looking in at them, not the winking, blue stars of Earth, but the blazing, steady stars of infinite space, and they were of every color, dull reds, greenish, and blue. And now as they shot on across the face of Earth far below, Gale watched in rapture the magnificent view before him, seeking the old friends of Earth--Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and the other familiar, gleaming points. Then he turned his gaze toward the Sun, and cried out in astonishment, for the giant sphere was a hard, electric blue, like some monster electric arc, and for millions of miles there swept from it a great hazy, glowing cloud, the zodiacal light, almost invisible from Earth, but here blazing out in indescribable beauty.

"We're in space! But, Steve, look at the sun! What makes it look blue? The glass of the window isn't blue, is it?" said Gale excitedly.

"We're in space all right--but it isn't glass you're looking through; it is fused quartz. Glass that thick would crack in a moment under the stress of temperature change it has to undergo. The sun looks blue because, for the first time in your life, you are seeing it without having more than half its light screened off. The atmosphere won't pass blue light completely and it cuts off the ultra-violet transmission very shortly after we leave the visible region of the spectrum. The reason the sun has always looked yellow is that you could never see that blue portion of its spectrum. Remember, a thing gets bluer and bluer as it gets hotter. First we have red hot, bright red, yellow, white, then the electric arc is so hot that it gives blue light. But the sun is nearly two thousand degrees centigrade hotter than the electric arc. Naturally it is blue. Also, I'll bet you haven't found Mars, have you?"

"No, Steve, I haven't. Where is it?"

"Right over there. See it?"

"But that can't be Mars. It's green, green as the Earth."

"But it is Mars. The reason Mars looks red from Earth is that the light that reaches us from Mars has had to go through both its own atmosphere and through ours, and by the time it reaches us, it is reddened, just as a distant plane beacon is. You know how a light in the distance looks red. That is what makes Mars look red."

"Mars is green. Then it is possible that the life on Mars may be the same as that of Earth!"

"Right, Dave. It probably is. Remember that the chlorophyll that gives the planets their color is also the material that can convert sunlight energy into fixed energy of starches and sugars for the plant, and probably the same material is serving in that capacity all over the universe, for carbon is the only element of the more than a hundred that there are that can possibly permit life's infinitely complicated processes to progress."

"But I thought there were only ninety-two elements."

* * * * *

"There are ninety-two different types of atoms, but if you have half a dozen men all doing exactly the same thing, can you call them 'a man'? They have found more than six different kinds of lead, two different kinds of chlorine, several different kinds of argon, and many of the other elements are really averages of several kinds of atoms, all of which do exactly the same thing, but have different weights. They are called isotopes. We say the atomic weight of chlorine is 35.457, but really there is no atom that has that weight. They have weights of 35 and 37, and are jumbled together so that the average is 35.457. Really there are over a hundred different kinds of atoms. In my work on this ship I found it made quite a difference which kind of chlorine atom I had."

"Well, how does this machine work, and what do you mean by saying that a machine invented it?"

"Dave, you know that for a number of years the greatest advances in physics have been made along the lines of mathematical work in atomic structure. Einstein was the greatest of the mathematicians, and so the greatest of the atomicists. Now as you well know, I never was too good at mathematics but I did love atomic structure, and I had some ideas, but I needed someone to work out the mathematics of the theory for me.

"You remember that back in 1929 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology they had a machine they called the integraph, an electrical machine that could do calculus too complex for Einstein himself to work out, and problems it would take Einstein months to solve, the machine could solve in a few minutes. It could actually do mathematics beyond the scope of the human brain. The calculus is a wonderful tool with which man can dig out knowledge, but he has to keep making his shovel bigger and bigger to dig deeper and deeper into the field of science. Toward the end of this decade, things got so the tail was wagging the dog to a considerable extent, the shovel was bigger than the man--we couldn't handle the tool. When that happened in the world once before they made a still bigger shovel, and hitched it to an electric motor. All the integraph did was to hitch the calculus to an electric motor--and then things began to happen.

"I developed that machine further in my laboratory, and carried it far beyond the original plans. I can do with it a type of mathematics that was never before possible, and that mathematics, on that machine, has done something no man ever did. It has found the secret of the atom, and released for us atomic energy. But that wasn't all, the machine kept working at those great long equations, reducing the number of variables, changing, differentiating, integrating, and then I saw where it was leading! I was scared when I saw what those equations meant. I was afraid that the machine had made an error, I was deathly afraid to test that last equation, the equation which the machine was absolutely unable to change. _It had been working with the equations of matter, and now it had reached the ultimate, definitive equation of all matter!_ This final equation gave explicit instructions to the understanding; it told just how to _completely destroy matter_! It told how to release such terrific energy, I was afraid to try it. The equations of atomic energy I had tested and found good, I had succeeded in releasing the energy of atoms.

"But the energy of matter has been known for many years; simple arithmetic can calculate the energy in one gram of matter. One gram is the equivalent of about ten drops of water and that much matter contains 900,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs of energy, all this in ten drops of water! Mass is just as truly a measure of energy as ergs, as foot-pounds or as kilo-watt hours. You might buy your electricity by the pound. If you had five hundred million dollars or so, you could buy a pound. You have heard of atomic energy, of how terrifically powerful it is. It is just about one million times as great as the energy of coal. But that titanic energy is as little compared to the energy of matter itself, as the strength of an ant is compared to my strength. Material energy is ten thousand million times as great as the energy of coal. Perhaps now you can see why I was afraid to try out those equations. One gram of matter could explode as violently as seven thousand tons of dynamite!

"But the machine was right. I succeeded in releasing that awful energy. I happened to release it as a heat ray, and the apparatus had been pointed in the direction of an open window luckily. Beyond that was just sand. The window was volatilized instantly, and the sand was melted to a great mass of fused quartz. It is there, and will be there for centuries, a two-mile streak of melted sand fifty feet broad! It makes a wonderful road of six foot thick glass! The machine showed me a thousand ways to apply it. I am driving this ship by means of an interesting bit of apparatus that the calculating machine designed. You remember Einstein's general relativity theory said that mass, gravity, bent space; but as it didn't fall in, as it would if attracted and not resisting, it must be that it is elastic. The field theory that he brought out back in 1929 showed that gravity and electrostatic fields were at least similar. I found, with the aid of my machine, that they were very closely related. I charge the walls of my ship strongly negative, then I have a piece of apparatus here that will distort that electrostatic field so it cuts off gravity--and the ship has no weight. The propulsion is simple also. I told you that space was elastic. I have a projector, or series of projectors all around the ship which will throw a beam of a ray which tends to bend space toward it. The space resists, and since the mountain won't come to Mahomet, Mahomet goes to the mountain--and the ship sails along nicely.

"The only theoretical limit to my speed is, of course, the velocity of light. At that speed any body would have infinite mass, and as you can't produce an infinite force, you certainly can't go any faster, and you can't go that fast in fact. If I accelerated one of the little five gram bullets I use in that machine gun to the speed of an alpha particle such as radium shoots off, not a very high speed in space, it would require as much energy to get it up to that speed, 10,000 miles a second, as five thousand fast freights, each a thousand tons apiece, would require to get up a speed of a mile a minute. You see that there is no possibility of getting up any speed like that even with material energy--it is too expensive even with that cheap energy--for it costs just as much to slow down again!

"The interesting thing about this energy is that scientists have known about it for a good many years, and while hundreds of people told about atomic energy, no one outside of the scientists ever spoke of the far greater energy of matter. The scientists said that the sun used that energy to maintain its heat--forty million degrees on the interior of the sun. They said man could never duplicate that temperature nor that pressure that prevails at the interior of the sun. They therefore said that man would never be able to release that energy. But the sun had to raise thousands of tons of water, and blow that vapor many miles, and do a lot of other complicated things before there was any lightning. Man would never be able to reproduce those conditions, and he would never be able to make lightning. Besides, if he did, what good would his electricity do him; it would be so wild, and so useless.

"But man discovered other ways of releasing his energies and converting it into electricity in a way that did not exist in nature. Manifestly it is possible to do the same with the energy of matter, and I have done it.

"The object of this trip, Dave, is exploration. I am going to the other planets, and I want you to come along. I believe I am prepared for any trouble we may meet there. That machine gun shoots bullets loaded with a bit of matter that will explode on impact. There is only a dust grain of it there, but it is as violent as ten tons of dynamite. If I exploded the entire shell, remember I would get the equivalent of thirty-five thousand tons of dynamite--which is manifestly unsafe. There are also a series of projectors around the car that project heat rays. These rays are capable of volatilizing anything that will absorb them. The projectors of all the rays have a separate generator unit directly connected. The unit is built right into the projector, but controlled from here. They are small, but tremendously more powerful than any power plant the Earth has ever seen before--each one can far outdo the great million and a half horse power station in San Francisco. They can develop in the neighborhood of fifty million horsepower each!"

"Lord, Steve, I'm no scientist, and when you speak glibly of power sources millions, billions of times more powerful than coal, I'm not only lost, I'm scared. And you have a couple dozen of those fifty-million-horse-power-generators around this ship. What would happen if they got short-circuited or something?"