the true beginning of the Electron Pump and yet, as it turned out, it was extraordinarily difficult to get the details of that seminar and quite impossible to get the voice recordings.
Eventually, Lamont began to suspect that the dimness of the footprints left on the sands of time by that seminar was not entirely accidental. Putting several items ingeniously together, it began to seem that there was a reasonable chance that John F. X. McFarland had said something very nearly like the crucial statement Hallam had made—and had done so before Hallam.
He went to see McFarland, who was featured not at all in the official accounts, and who was now doing upper-atmosphere research, with particular reference to the Solar wind. It was not a top-echelon job, but it had its perquisites, and it had more than a little to do with Pump effects. McFarland had clearly avoided suffering the fate of oblivion that had overtaken Denison.
He was polite enough to Lamont and willing to talk on any subject except the events of that seminar. That he simply didn’t remember.
Lamont insisted, quoted the evidence he had gathered.
McFarland took out a pipe, filled it, inspected its contents thoroughly, and said, with a queer intentness. “I don’t choose to remember, because it doesn’t matter; it really doesn’t. Suppose I laid claim to having said something. No one would believe it. I would look like an idiot, and a megalomaniac one.”
“And Hallam would see to it that you were retired?”
“I’m not saying that, but I don’t see that it would do me any good. What’s the difference, anyway?”
“A matter of historical truth!” said Lamont.
“Oh, bull. The historical truth is that Hallam never let go. He drove everyone into investigating, whether they wanted to or not. Without him, that tungsten would eventually have exploded with I don’t know how many casualties. There might never have been another sample, and we might never have had the Pump. Hallam deserves the credit for it, even if he doesn’t deserve the credit, and if that doesn’t make sense, I can’t help it, because history doesn’t make sense.”
Lamont wasn’t satisfied with that, but he had to make it do, for McFarland would simply say no more.
Historical truth!
One piece of historical truth that seemed beyond question was that it was the radioactivity that pulled “Hallam’s tungsten” (this is what it was called as a matter of historical custom) into the big time. It didn’t matter whether it was or was not tungsten; whether it had or had not been tampered with; even whether it was or was not an impossible isotope. Everything was swallowed up in the amazement of something, anything, which showed a constantly increasing intensity of radioactivity under circumstances that ruled out the existence of any type of radioactive breakdown, in any number of steps, then known.
After a while, Kantrowitsch muttered, “We’d better spread it out. If we keep it in sizable lumps it will vaporize or explode or both and contaminate half the city.”
So it was powdered and scattered, and mixed with ordinary tungsten at first and then, when the tungsten grew radioactive in its turn, it was mixed with graphite, which had a lower cross-section to the radiation.
Less than two months after Hallam had noticed the change in the bottle’s contents, Kantrowitsch, in a communication to the editor of Nuclear Reviews, with Hallam’s name appended as coauthor, announced the existence of plutonium-186. Tracy’s original determination was thus vindicated but his name was not mentioned, either then or later. With that Hallam’s-tungsten began to take on an epic scale and Denison began to note the changes that ended by making him a non-person.
The existence of plutonium-186 was bad enough. To have been stable at the start and to display a curiously increasing radioactivity was much worse.
A seminar to handle the problem was organized. Kantrowitsch was in the chair, which was an interesting historical note, for it was the last time in the history of the Electron Pump that a major meeting was held in connection with it that was chaired by anyone but Hallam. As a matter of fact, Kantrowitsch died five months later and the only personality with sufficient prestige to keep Hallam in the shade was removed.
The meeting was extraordinarily fruitless until Hallam announced his Great Insight, but in the version as reconstructed by Lamont, the real turning point came during the luncheon break. At that time, McFarland, who is not credited with any remarks in the official records, although he was listed as an