Amazing Vignettes Page 15

  “. . . Disarm and sweep for more at once,” flashed back the receptor. “All patrols are out. This is a general plot. Follow through as per orders.”

  Jerry came in a few minutes later, a fused mass of mechanism in his hand.

  “The trigger’s out he said. “She’s Its harmless as a new born baby.”

  “Brain Central wants us to sweep for more.”

  There’s not much more to say. We went through carefully circling the planet for more “mines.” We raked up seven and other patrols took in another ten. A thorough radar sweep caught them all and the secret mine-layer was caught a few hours later as it went about its nefarious work. It was a Pan-Asian job naturally, though they denied it completely.

  Things would come to a terrific head shortly I knew. The inherent dangers were too great. Try as we might sooner or later there’d have to be an atomic battle.

  “Say Mike?” Jerry asked when the immediate excitement died down. “What were the local coordinates of that first baby we nabbed?”

  “Just a minute,” I replied, “I’ve got them right here. Oh-oh! That one was floating right over Greater Los Angeles!”

  Jerry gave a grim sigh. “Thank God,” was all he said . . .

  The Atomic Rainmaker

  L.A. Burt

  “KEEP IT simple, Doctor,” the reporter said, wiping the sweat from his dripping forehead, “but just what is the principle behind artificial rainmaking?”

  Dr. Grayson smiled. He looked completely cool and collected despite the arid Texan atmosphere.

  “The best way I can put it,” he answered, “is to say that artificial rainmaking goes back to the principle of the Wilson Cloud Chamber!”

  The reporter looked more mystified than ever. “Start talking, Doc,” he said, “start talking . . .”

  Dr. Grayson actually put it better than he knew. Artificial rainmaking is a variant of the Wilson Cloud Chamber, but even rainmaking bows to this unique and versatile instrument whose virtues have been so over shadowed in the popular mind by the ubiquitous “Geiger-Mueller Counter” and Uranium fission.

  The Wilson Cloud Chamber (it’s usually capitalized) is a simple, fantastically effective and amazing instrument for showing atoms in action. It’s as old as radioactivity almost and it has provided many of the answers to the atomic physicists’ problems. It is so easy to make and operate that it is at present being embodied in a toy scientific set, but in no ways is this gadget inferior to its bigger laboratory brother.

  The Cloud Chamber, named after the famous British physicist Wilson, is a device for making the tracks of atoms visible. Radioactive materials which throw off atomic particles can be studied in detail with this versatile and efficient tool, and you don’t have to have a fifty inch cyclotron handy to demonstrate the technique.

  All that a Cloud Chamber is, is a glass vessel, a cylinder or a jar (the more elaborate ones are of brass with glass surface plates) whose volume can be abruptly expanded. The simplest form of the Cloud Chamber uses a conical flask with a rubber bulb at the end. The ratio of expansion may range from about seven to one, to four to one.

  A small amount of a mixture of alcohol and water is placed in the bulb. Naturally after a little while, the vapor-air mixture above the surface is saturated with water vapor after having attained equilibrium. If the bulb is now squeezed, the air is compressed, heated somewhat and capable of absorbing more moisture. This it does.

  If the bulb is suddenly released, there is a cooling effect, and the atmosphere above the liquid is “super-saturated” with moisture, meaning it carries more than it should at that new temperature. Now, here is where the key operation comes in. If the air above the liquid (supersaturated air, that is) contains no tiny particles of dust or dirt, or no tiny ionized or charged electrical particles, nothing will happen, for liquid to condense out of saturated or supersaturated air, requires nuclei of condensation in the form of dirt or dust.

  Now imagine a small amount of radioactive material in the chamber. Alpha particles (helium nuclei) are being given off. They travel rapidly through the chamber and since they are charged they cause water molecules to condense in clusters in their path. Clearly, an exact track of the particle may be seen! This is true of other atomic particles as well.

  Thus with a Wilson Cloud Chamber and a camera, it is possible to record and observe the disintegration atoms. Possible even fission might be disclosed under those conditions. The Wilson Cloud Chamber has no peer when it comes to examining atomic events.

  The relationship between rain-making and the Cloud Chamber is obvious. When scientists “seed” the atmosphere with particles of salt or iodine, they are just supplying condensation nuclei, much as the atomic particles in a Cloud Chamber. The air is a vast Wilson Cloud Chamber in effect.

  The simplicity and effectiveness of the Cloud Chamber makes it a part of every scientific laboratory, but that very fact should make it as familiar to the average person interested in science, as the motor of his automobile.

  The Ultimate Solvent

  Lynn Standish

  SOMEONE near the wall switched out the light. The laboratory darkened and a dozen pairs of eyes centered on the man standing near the weird apparatus on the bench. There was a pungent odor in the odor—but not the usual laboratory stench.

  The technician spoke quietly, his voice extraordinarily calm—as if undercharged with excitement, the intellectual excitement that conies with great discoveries.

  “. . . the jet of fluorine, elemental fluorine, directly on this piece of wood,” he was saying. “Now watch!”

  From the orifice of the thin flexible tube a yellowish gas issued, barely discernible in the darkened laboratory. It struck the board laying on the bench. There was a puff of flame and spontaneously the wood broke into fire and light! The chemist turned a valve and shut of the stream. With sand he extinguished the burning wood.

  “Let’s see what it does to water!” He played another stream of hellish virulent fluorine against the surface of a water-filled beaker. A violet-yellow gently singing flame stood above the water as the potent element tore the water into its component hydrogen and oxygen!

  “Gentlemen,” the chemist said quietly, a little smile of triumph on his face, “mark my words. You’re going to see and hear a lot of this stuff. Fluorine is here to stay!”

  And he was so right. For from the laboratory elemental fluorine formerly a plaything, dangerous and fearful, is emerging into a full blown industrial agent, capable of transforming, in more than a modest way, a host of processes as well as ways of living.

  Henri Moissan the French chemist of artificial diamond fame first released the elemental form of fluorine, and found it to be a yellowish gas of dreadful power. After several near-tragic explosions he gave up working with it and the element remained a closely cloistered member of the halogen gamily showing little promise, unlike its brothers iodine, chlorine and bromine who later came to full stature.

  But the Second World War came and with it, the atomic bomb. The diffusion process for the separation of uranium called for large quantities of a gas as bad as its mother, uranium hexafluoride. Study and work with this monster showed the technicians how lo tame fluorine as well as produce it electrolytically in quantity.

  At first it seemed of moderate importance. Then chemists all over discovered that its tremendous corrosive properties, its ability to combine with anything, its astounding success in replacing hydrogen from many compounds, was a sure-fire bet for providing a large number of extremely useful compounds. For fluorine compounds are tough. Freon gas of refrigerator fame, fluorinated lubricating oils, fluorinated paints, fluorinated turbine oils—all of these things will soon become common.

  As an example, oil, ordinary lubricating oil can be rebuilt about the fluorine molecule but what comes out is a miracle. Eventually these oils will be sealed into car motors, gear boxes and turbines, to remain there for the life of the machine. They do not deteriorate!

  Insecticides of enormous virul
ence, pharmaceuticals of great effect, industrial chemicals of extreme usefulness, are some of the things which are beginning to be felt in the newly burgeoning industry. Automobile and marine paints and finishes which simply cannot be worn out are on their way to the market. And the list has just been scratched.

  Fluorine is a war-born baby whose arrival may be compared with such little known entities as magnesium and titanium. Both of the latter are catering to increasing industrial appetites. How do these things concern us oh the future, you ask? The answer is simple: look around at anything, your car, your refrigerator, your television set—they had a beginning once, too!

  Easy Does It . . .

  Lynn Standish

  “THE PUSH-BUTTON age is a long A way off,” I said in a half-amused tone to Professor Graybar as we sat together over our coffee cups between classes. “I got a charge from an authentic add I saw the other day. It was by a manufacturer of automatic calculating machines and it said, ‘. . . our machines are so simple, any B.S. in mathematics can learn to operate one . . .’ !”

  Professor Graybar waved his hand airily, and laughed.

  “Don’t let that bother you,” he said. “That’s usually the way it is with a novelty.”

  “What do you mean a ‘novelty’,” I asked. “Calculating machines are old stuff.”

  “No, No. I don’t mean novel in the sense of newness, rather in the sense of application. Here, let me give you an example. Look at the first radio equipment, television equipment or the early automobiles. You had to be a technician to operate them. But look at them now. Anybody can manipulate their simplified controls. That’s the way it always is with new gadgetry. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “Well,” I conceded, “you’ve got something there. I hadn’t thought of it in that way.”

  “Consider something quite close to us,” he went on. “Girls in offices use today computing and billing machines whose complexities could drive an electronics or telephone engineer off his rocker. But so what? They needn’t know anything about the insides, for the controls have been simplified to sheer child’s play. You know that.

  “The same is true for the gadgets and machines of the future. I don’t care how complicated they become. They’ll be designed around the capabilities of the average man. Mark my words on that score. In fact, there are groups of engineers right now whose function is to design equipment—any kind of equipment—in terms of control by humans. In other words they are tailoring the machines to the men and not vice versa! Knobs and buttons and handwheels and levers are constructed so as to best fit the human hand and arm position and sense of grasp. In addition these engineers evolve types of scales and dials which can be read most easily. You’d be surprised at what a difference there is between a well-designed dial and a poorly done one even though both are equally good from a recording and quality standpoint.”

  “I’ll admit there are angles there I hadn’t considered,” I agreed. “I like the idea of fitting the man to the mechanism.”

  “It had to come,” Professor Graybar said. “The pilot of a jet or rocket ship, as common examples, must react with incredible accuracy, and celerity. Reading the wrong dial by accident, being two-tenths of a second slow in turning a control handle or pushing a button—presto! no pilot! The engineers have gotten their hands in this sort of thing. And from critical operations like this, the art of making machines for men has branched into a lot of fields.”

  “I’ll make a mental note of this,” I said as I arose, “next time I get in the car. I hope they make the future helicopters easy to handle!”

  Satanic Satellite

  Cal Webb

  THE PANASIAN officer lifted his head from the cross-hatched radar-plate and breathed a sigh of relief. He turned to his subordinate.

  “Ah,” he said, “and that one is Toledo! You know, Suvanoff, I am almost sorry we had to destroy that place. In my youth I visited it with a commercial mission. Oh well, those are the fortunes, of war. Precision armaments.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “We will have to observe the effect in eleven minutes.”

  “That was number four, sir,” Suvanoff said regretfully. “You won’t receive any more for ten days.”

  The officer shrugged. “Ten days?—ten years. What docs it matter? They are utterly helpless. The Northamericans cannot stop us from picking off their cities as we choose. By the time they get around to constructing a war-rocket we will have destroyed them with atomic bombs—the fools!”

  The two men were observing the effects of atomic bombing from the Panasian satellite, a hundred foot metal shell six thousand miles above the Earth’s surface. In these last few days since the first atomic bombs had been delivered to them, they had destroyed Chicago, and half of New York. That bad taken three bombs. The fourth was on its way to Toledo this minute.

  The Panasians chatted aimlessly for the next ton minutes both conscious however of the internal tension within them. The seven crew member? too were expectantly waiting for the annihilation flash signifying the disappearance of another Northamerican city.

  “Almost, Captain Chi’en,” said Suvanoff. “We have a minute and a half to wait.” Both men bent eagerly toward the visi-port, eyes straining against the grid lines. On the sphere beneath them, utterly helpless and unconscious of the fact that it was to be the next victim, lay the helpless city.

  Then it happened. Captain Chi’en gasped at the sight even though he had seen it three times before. There was an incredibly brilliant pin-point of flaring light which winked out as fast as it arose. A ’scope would have shown more, would have shown the mushrooming cloud, the twisting rising trail of ghastly vapors from the stricken city. But to the observers in the satellite the monstrous assault appeared merely as the winking of light less impressive in a way than the turning of a wall-switch. But beneath the Panasian satellite gaped the crater that had been Toledo . . .

  The iron hand of acceleration lessened its grip of John Fleming and he breathed more freely. He shook his head and stared closely at the guide lines. Thank God, he thought, that the jury-rigged rocket was free. Right now, thousands of miles beneath, men were working like fiends to build and send more into space, but at this very moment, his was the first—the first answer to the devastating Panasian satellite. Behind him, John thought of the bleeding scars that laced Northamerica. Save for this sudden spurt in Panasian technology, the war might have ended. But the Panasians had gotten the satellite into space and had used it as a weapon. Savagely Fleming thought of the inertia that caused this debacle among Northamericans.

  But he was going to stop it. He had to. There was only one answer. Destroy the satellite! And the rocket he now bestrode was essentially nothing but a vast torpedo. Crammed with chemical explosive—the danger of an atomic misfire could not be chanced—it would shatter the satellite into a million fragments. All he had to do was get it there!

  John’s hands moved with assurance as soon as the radar pinpointed the satellite. In a few minutes it would be optically clear. He made the minute motor corrections and the rocket responded rapidly. It was crude—but it would do the job.

  There it was! He caught the twinkle of flickering light as a sunbeam bounced off the polished aluminum shell. There it lay! A thousand meters away it glared like the pupil of an ominous eye.

  Fleming set the rocket on guide. It wasn’t necessary for him to suicide it. Northamericans didn’t die like that. He checked the sights once more, made sure his suit was tight and that he had his signal and hand rockets. Then he stepped through the easily opened port and with a slight flare of the hand rocket freed himself from the empty projectile. As he braked his velocity with the hand rocket the desperate thought occurred: should I have taken the chance that it miss? Anxiously he waited. Its proximity fused nose could not fail, dare not fail! Why had he risked it? Why hadn’t he suicided it?

  But all the worry was needless. Fleming saw the satellite erupt into a blast of mushrooming fragments surrounded by a halo of flame. One moment its
proud gleaming aluminum spheroidal shape rested there so challengingly—then it was gone in a flash of light.

  Fleming breathed a sigh of relief. The menace was gone for the time being. Now all he had to do was wait. The rockets would soon be up and they carried some presents for the Panasians below, small objects whose containers carried a dose of the same treatment for the Panasian hordes beneath. As best he could, Fleming settled himself in his metallic suit and waited. Northamerican rockets were on their way . . .

  1951

  Landing on Loki

  Carter T. Wainwright

  THE LUNA Scopes tagged this JL baby,” Mark said to Fenner. “Mass, density and diameter cheek to three places. Even the albido agrees. The astronomers are better than I thought.”

  “Hell,” grunted Fenner, “I’m not worried about the niceties of astronomy, Mark. What about fuel supply? They checked that pretty close too.”

  “It’ll get us away,” Mark replied. “The surface gravity of Loki is low enough and I’ll conserve all I can in the landing. This is a cinch. Think of the glory, Fen; we’ll be the first.”

  “Glory? I wonder. Pluto itself is strewn with pioneers. Let’s just hope that Loki doesn’t act the same way.”

  “We’ll make it, Fen. We’ll make it.” The ellipsoid that was their ship was decelerating rapidly as it approached the outermost planet of the Solar System. Little Loki, located a hundred years before, in nineteen fifty-one, was about to get its first visit from Man.

  Humans had spread the tentacles of their living over the entire System, slowly and gradually. The long six billion mile haul to Loki had been taboo until now. And only a small increase in fuel efficiency had done it. Hut still only two humans could be accomodated Mark and Fenner both had long experience in the Jovian run. Hence their chance for this exploratory jump.