CHAPTER IV
Biggest Meddler
Ellen nodded slowly. Her dream of untold wealth dimmed somewhat. Yet she knew that supervision of the zonium metal would insure its safety. It had been so with the original fission of uranium and plutonium.
What had been made before could be made again. She would let Jim Forrest destroy it and then set about getting it rebuilt again in the government laboratory. What could any one man do to stop the development of any single phase of science?
The thing to do now was to agree with him, learn from Jim Forrest all the math and reasoning behind the stuff. Just how did he know—he alone of all the worlds of Sol and their teeming billions—that zonium would react that way. Especially when he had not worked with it.
But Ellen knew that before she could interest the laboratory in zonium, she must have scientific and mathematical basis for her predictions. With that, not only could she interest them but she would be forgiven for her original theft. She would go along for now and learn as much as she could about zonium.
"Tell me," she said interestedly, "how do you know all this about zonium?"
"Know matrix-math?" he asked.
"A little."
"I'll bet I lose you along the way," he said. "But we've a week of hard travel between here and Ganymede in which I can prove to you—and also teach you how to handle matrix-math—that everything I've said is true."
Jim Forrest locked the crystal in the cabinet, and found paper and pencils. He started to talk and he wrote equations as he spoke, explaining each step as he went along. Ellen Haynes nodded. It was thick, and she would require the whole week even to catch up to the theories of Jim Forrest....
Captain Turner, imprisoned in Jim Forrest's personal cruiser, spent a full twenty-hour period wondering. He had been resigned at first, but the idea of sitting there was against his grain.
The welded door was a mean problem. How does one breach a solid aluminum door when the thinner panels are three-sixteenths sheet aluminum-magnesium alloy and the edgings and crossbars that hold the panels are one-inch stock?
He undid the floor thumbscrews that held the chair down against maneuverings in space and hefted it. It too was aluminum alloy. He swung it at the door and dented the panel, but broke the legs of the chair. Had the seat been heavy and solid that would have done nicely, he thought.
But the chair-bottom itself was a mere frame upon which was woven a plastic-rope in the standard pattern of a cane-bottomed chair. The metal of the chair was brittle and he broke it after three swings that put but a few minute scars on the panel of the door.
The floor lamp was little better—aluminum-zinc-magnesium die-castings. Not only were the parts light and brittle, they were positively friable.
He tried the drawers in the dresser and they added to the pile of broken metal. The bed was no good at all—just a welded-down shelf on top of which was a thick airfoam mattress.
The kitchen quarters produced a couple of sharp knives, which he employed to some advantage, but their very-long blades left Turner with too little leverage until he broke them off short. Cutting three-sixteenths aluminum alloy panel was no job for a knife.
He sat down to think after that. Brute force was useless—brainwork might produce an answer.
Aluminum is soluble in certain reagents—and he was in what amounted to a three-room apartment. What common reagents did exist in the average apartment? A few ounces of vinegar—three percent acetic acid. A pound of salt—sodium chloride. Aluminum is soluble in a solution of sodium hydroxide. Electrolysis of water containing sodium chloride produced chlorine and sodium, which reacted with the water and produced sodium hydroxide.
It looked like a long process. He was not a chemist, and therefore he was not too certain of any effect. There was no reaction that he knew of that would attack that door. Perhaps a chemist would know and no doubt he would be laughed at by the chemists of the Guard when he told of his futile attempts.
He went into the kitchen again. The drainage from the sink went into the converter far below him in the ship. He had no chance of getting to that at all. There was a small ventilator in every room but he was neither an eel nor a cat and removing them, if he could, would give him no chance. The air was forced out through a larger duct by an electric fan but even so it was too small for him.
The electric fan?
The electric fan!
He tackled the fastenings with a dinner-knife and succeeded in removing the small fan. He hitched it to longer leads from the floor lamp. He removed the blade and saw the swiftly-rotating shaft—it could be used as a drill.
It was blunt and polished, instead of sharp, but none the less a drill in embryonic form. To sharpen it....
He pawed through the bathroom cabinet and returned with a small nail-file. There was a corundum sharpening-stone in the kitchen. He filed and he honed and the end of the fan-motor shaft took on a wide, flat point. He set it against the door and tried to drill.
It was slow work but he made progress. He drilled through and then set the drill near the first hole and continued. Slowly and inexorably Captain Turner of the Space Guard added to his line of holes. He forgot eating, ignored sleep. And as the hours passed Jack Turner came closer to freedom by the minute.
At last he had a rough oval of holes in the bottom panel of the door. Then, taking a heavy iron frying pan, Turner hammered at one side of the oval where the holes were almost tangent. He broke through, turning the slight end outward.
He hammered until he could set one end of the iron handle through, and then he pried. The webbing between the holes tore until he had an opening that prevented the use of the utensil at all.
He pried with knives, with fragments of the shattered chair, with his bare hands. He finally took the motor itself, which was of steel and heavy though small, and he swung it on its wire leads. He hurled it again and again at the oval. The ship rang with the blows, but each crash saw the oval leaning outward just a fraction more.
And then, lying on his back, Jack Turner kicked the oval outward with his heels.
He was free!
Thirty hours instead of sixty—Turner raced to the control room and set the ship on course toward Ganymede. He crammed on the power until he could hardly stand to slow the course for Mars that he was on—almost at turnover where his velocity was highest—and he added a vector that would curve him through space toward Jove. Then, utterly weary, Jack Turner found his bunk and went to sleep....
"You seem to know quite a bit about zonium," said Ellen.
Forrest smiled. "I've had little to do but think about it."
"But why the interest?" she asked him.
"Just think of me as an infernal meddler," he said.
Ellen bit her lip in disbelief.
"Well, I am," he said with a laugh. "I'm the biggest meddler of all time. Now, let's get to work. We've a week."
Ellen Haynes nodded. She did not know what to make of Jim Forrest. Here on cold Ganymede he had a comfortable brick building that was built along the lines of a good sized mansion. Though the cold and the winds beat at the outside with an ammoniac odor, inside of the building it was warm and pleasantly filled with the smell of a Terran garden.
Jim Forrest, she knew, was wealthy. But the word 'wealth' had a world of meanings. After Ellen had seen the building and had been shown the inside—part of it anyway—she was beginning to understand just how wealthy the man must be.
She had wondered about her relations with this strange man until he showed her a small suite of rooms that he said were to be hers. That in itself was comforting but it posed a greater question as to his character. For the apartment was not devoid of the signs of human occupancy—feminine occupancy—also young feminine occupancy.
There were the collections of scents and cosmetics and silks that are unmistakably those of a young, desirable woman. The apartment was more luxurious than any that Ellen Haynes had ever known and, though she felt distaste at the idea of using another woman's things, she found them all cleaned and properly pressed. The cosmetics were enigmatic—some of them looked used and some of them had their original labels and seals intact. The used-appearing ones, on the other hand, bore the stamp of the immaculate. They were unmarred, neither smudges nor fingermarks.
The clothing was a passable fit for Ellen Haynes—not perfect, as were her own clothes, but passable.
Ellen wondered. She wondered even more as he led her into what would have been the grand ballroom of the mansion-design and found it to be fitted as a physical laboratory. She looked around at the vastness and shuddered slightly at the unpeopled silence of the great house.
"Doesn't the lack of company get you down?" she asked.
"Seldom does," he smiled. "Besides, it is seldom this unpopulated. I've seen the day when the place was positively bulging with people. I hope to return to that happy state soon."
"But that suite you gave me...."
"That's been used, but not recently."
"By whom?" she persisted.
"By several persons," he said noncommittally. He smiled inwardly, knowing what she wondered about. He let her go on thinking mostly because it made no difference and it kept her from brooding on the matter of her father's discovery of Zonium and the things that it implied.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I'm going to make a few tests," he said. "This rock has got to be destroyed. Not just thrown away or buried, but completely destroyed. Disintegrated."
"In what way?" she asked.
"I'm going to try bombarding it with neutrons," he said. "The easiest way, of course, is to transmute it."
"Where will you get a neutron-supply?" she asked.
"I haven't got a uranium pile," he said unhappily. "But I have got a healthy cyclotron here. We bombard beryllium with deuterons and place the zonium in the resulting output. You see, that is one of the Be9 (dn) B10 reactions, yielding a goodly spread of neutrons with energies from zero to nine million electron volts. I'd try other particles, but the neutron transmutation is always best."
He recalled Turner briefly and smiled. They had a sixty hour start on the Guardsman at least and the vectors of travel made it almost certain that they had a full week before Turner could get away and come after them in a new ship.
He did not believe that Turner could break out and he thought that if he did, the Guardsman would repair to Mars anyway to get himself a new Guardship. There was little sense in a Guardsman trying to fight an armed Guardship in Jim Forrest's unarmed sports cruiser.