“Hey, didn’t you tell me that stuff was non-radioactive?”
“What stuff?” said Tracy automatically, before he remembered.
“That stuff you called plutonium-186,” said Hallam.
“Oh. Well it was stable.”
“About as stable as your mental state. If you call this non-radioactive, you belong in a plumber’s shop.”
Tracy frowned. “Okay, Doc. Pass it over and let’s try.” And then he said, “Beats me! It is radioactive. Not much, but it is. I don’t see how I could have missed that.”
“And how far can I trust your crap about plutonium-186?”
The matter had Hallam by the throat now. The mystery had become so exasperating as to be a personal affront. Whoever had switched bottles, or switched contents, must either have switched again or have devised a metal for the specific purpose of making a fool of him. In either case, he was ready to pull the world apart to solve the matter if he had to—and if he could.
He had his stubbornness, and an intensity that could not easily be brushed aside, and he went straight to G. C. Kantrowitsch, who was then in the final year of his own rather remarkable career. Kantrowitsch’s aid was difficult to enlist but, once enlisted, it quickly caught fire.
Two days later, in fact, he was storming into Hallam’s office in a blaze of excitement. “Have you been handling this thing with your hands?”
“Not much,” said Hallam.
“Well, don’t. If you’ve got any more, don’t. It’s emitting positrons.”
“Oh?”
“The most energetic positrons I’ve ever seen.… And your figures on its radioactivity are too low.”
“Too low?”
“Distinctly. And what bothers me is that every measurement I take is just a trifle higher than the one before.”
6 (continued)
Bronowski came across an apple in the capacious pocket of his jacket and bit into it. “Okay, you’ve seen Hallam and been kicked out as expected. What next?”
“I haven’t quite decided. But whatever it is, it’s going to dump him on his fat behind. I saw him once before, you know; years ago, when I first came here; when I thought he was a great man. A great man—He’s the greatest villain in the history of science. He’s rewritten the history of the Pump, you know, rewritten it here—” Lamont tapped his temple. “He believes his own fantasy and fights for it with a diseased fury. He’s a pygmy with only one talent, the ability to convince others he’s a giant.”
Lamont looked up at Bronowski’s wide and placid face, wreathed now in amusement, and forced a laugh. “Oh, well, that doesn’t do any good, and I’ve told it all to you before anyway.”
“Many times,” agreed Bronowski.
“But it just gravels me to have the whole world—”
2
Peter Lamont had been two years old when Hallam had picked up his altered tungsten for the first time. When he was twenty-five, he joined Pump Station One with the print on his own doctoral dissertation still fresh and accepted a simultaneous appointment on the Physics faculty of the university.
It was a remarkably satisfactory achievement for the young man. Pump Station One was lacking in the glisten of the later stations but it was the granddaddy of them all, of the entire chain that girdled the planet now even though the entire technology was only a couple of decades old. No major technological advance had ever caught hold so rapidly and so entirely and why not? It meant free energy without limit and without problems. It was the Santa Claus and the Aladdin’s lamp of the whole world.
Lamont had taken the job in order to deal with problems of the highest theoretical abstraction and yet he found himself interested in the amazing story of the development of the Electron Pump. It had never been written up in its entirety by someone who truly understood the theoretical principles (in so far as they could be understood) and who had some ability in translating the complexities for the general public. To be sure, Hallam himself had written a number of articles for the popular media, but these did not represent a connected, reasoned history—something Lamont yearned to supply.
He used Hallam’s articles to begin with, other reminiscences in published form—the official documents so to speak—carrying them through to Hallam’s world-shaking remark, the Great Insight, as it was often called (invariably with capital letters).
Afterward, of course, when Lamont had experienced his disillusionment, he began digging deeper, and the question arose in his mind as to whether Hallam’s great remark had really been Hallam’s. It had been advanced at the seminar which marked