Untitled, p.1
Untitled, page 1
LIVING ISOTOPES
Super Science Stories – May 1940
(1940)
P. Schuyler Miller
The forces that create life can destroy as well—but did they? Or is there at this moment, beneath your feet, a living, inhuman creature the fiber of whose body is silicon rock?
-
BILL BISHOP'S telegram had caught Dunlop on the station platform, on the thin edge of a vacation. There were just seven words: "Making tests tonight. Come if still interested."
That was enough, because Frank Dunlop remembered the night, three years before, when Bill had tried to explain the thing that his mathematics had brought out of the chaos of conflicting theories about the structure of the atom. His voice had been triumphant as he spoke.
"These equations mean life to me, Frank," he had said. "They mean freedom—freedom to go and do and think as I like. They are going to take me out of Corbin and its dinky little small-town minds and make me someone big out where it counts!
"Frank, I know what life is! I can create it. And when I do—you'll see me do it!"
And so, when Dunlop got the telegram, he walked over to the ticket-office, changed his Bangor express to a Corbin local, and in half an hour was rattling along over the rails of Massachusetts' sole remaining narrow-gauge railway.
-
THE train panted into Corbin with a hat-box, just two hours late. Ten minutes walk brought Dunlop to the little campus with its velvet lawns and spreading elms, and in its cluster of dark buildings the single spark of light in the physics laboratory led him on.
The door to the new wing was locked. He braced his feet and rattled it as though he were shaking down walnuts. There was no response. He peered through the glass, then up at the curtained windows from which that thread of light still gleamed. They were too high to reach. He resolved to give it another try.
This time he made the very building quake. He stopped to listen, and down the gloomy corridor sounded the quick click, click of approaching footsteps. The light above the door went on. A girl glared at him through the glass.
She had hair like the color that wells up out of mahogany when the sunlight falls slantingly across it. She had eyes like green, snapping sparks, almost black with anger, and a skin that only a master-photographer like Steichen could reproduce. The rest of her was hidden under the tattered smock that had hung in the corner of the senior lab at Corbin since before the oldest graduate could remember.
She sprung the lock and threw the door open. "If you're Frank Dunlop," she snapped, "you're late. We waited an hour for you!"
"I'm sorry," he apologized. "You might have known the train would be late."
Her red mouth snapped shut, she whirled on her heel and stalked off down the hall toward the rear of the building. As she reached an open door, someone stuck his head out. It was Bill Bishop.
"That you, Frank?" he called. "We've started. Come on in."
The girl brushed past him and disappeared. Dunlop flicked off the lights—college economy was an old story to him—and walked down the corridor to the frame of light that was the door. Bishop thrust out his hand.
"Too bad you were late," he said. "Everything was set up, and when you didn't come, I—we—started."
The door opened on a little landing, halfway up the wall of a room like the den of the well known Mad Scientist of the science fiction yarns. What half of the colossal array of apparatus meant, Dunlop could not guess, but there was a general air of reasonableness about it that distinguished it from some of the imaginings in the magazines. It was an overgrown first cousin to the ingenious accumulations that any first-rate scientific laboratory has hidden away in its holy of holies for the Big Brains of its research staff to play with when they are not being awarded prizes.
-
THE girl stood before a huge switch-board that covered all one end of the room. The size of the bus-bars that came in through the wall to that board made Dunlop whistle. Bishop was drawing enough current to make the General Electric's lightning shop over at Pittsfield look silly. But Bill had him by the elbow and was hustling him down the little iron stair.
"Marge," he shouted above the drone of the transformers. "It's climbing too fast! Slow it down."
Dunlop watched the ammeter needle slide back along its dial as the girl obeyed. Then she turned, smiling. The black flame of anger was gone out of her eyes. "Do your duty, Bill," she said.
He flushed. "This is Dr. Whelan," he explained. "I met her in California, a year ago. Marge, this is Frank Dunlop. He's an old classmate of mine. Insurance salesman or something."
She laughed. "I know. You told me he was coming. Besides, I accused him of it a moment ago, at the door, and he took it like a gentleman." She held out her hand. "Supposing we do our fighting as friends."
"Dr. Whelan!" Frank bowed low, with mock courtesy. "If you'd been teaching physics when I went to college, maybe I'd have given Bill a run for his money. What do you say—can you tell me about all this without using ten-dollar words?"
She laughed again. He liked her laugh. "I think so," she replied. "It's really very simple." She led him across the floor to a small quartz cube, set in the heart of a maze of giant coils. It was sheathed with thick sheet lead and clamped between the poles of the biggest magnet he had ever seen. One face was exposed over an area of less than a square centimeter, and opposite that open space was hung a giant ray tube.
"There it is," she announced. "In that little chunk of crystal are all our hopes for immortality."
He tried to look impressed. It didn't work. "You don't believe me," she accused. "Very well—now you'll have to listen to the whole story. Come back here out of the way. There may be stray radiation that wouldn't do us any good."
She made a fetching picture as she sat on the edge of the laboratory bench, swinging her feet like a schoolgirl. "You know about Dr. Bishop's discovery," she began. "Life is a fundamental property of the universe. It seems to be energy, but it acts more like some queer sort of strain, inherent in the very nature of things, which makes them sensitive to outside forces—makes them what we call alive. Years ago, men like Crile made inanimate chemicals go through all the physical motions of living cells. They could move, eat, reproduce, but they weren't alive. There was something else—the something that we call life—needed to control them and give them will—purpose—intelligence.
"Then there are the viruses—protein molecules like those in meat or eggs—that become deadly living enemies of life or inert crystals, almost at will. Some biologists think they are true living molecules—the smallest living things—creatures on the very borderline between the animate and the inanimate. But Bill's equations went beyond that point. Any molecule—any atom can be alive!
"Bill Bishop broached that idea to some of the masterminds that run the scientific congresses and they laughed at him. They said that even if a complex protein molecule could be alive, it was nonsense to think that a simpler molecule could be, much less an atom. They said life is an accident, the result of some metastable balance in certain compounds, and that apart from that it couldn't exist. So he thumbed his nose at them and proved them wrong! He started where none of them had dared to start—at the beginning."
-
SHE stopped, staring through the maze ^ of apparatus at Bill, bent over his instrument board, intent on his sheets of scribbled figures. Her left fist was clenched, and Frank saw that there was a diamond on the ring finger.
She came out of her reverie with a start.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I was thinking. Tonight we're making a test that will change scientific history, and all because one man discovered a new way to look into the gizzard of an atom.
"It's the atomic nucleus that really counts, you know. The real, fundamental properties of matter—of the world and everything in it—depend on the way in which the nuclei of some ninety-two different atoms are put together. And that is where the secret of life lies.
"I said there were ninety-two kinds of atoms—the chemical elements. There are really many more, because every element has a number of isotopes—other atoms' with the same general chemical properties, but which differ physically because the weight and structure of their nuclei are different. The deuterium in heavy water is a double-weight isotope of hydrogen. Lead has more than sixteen different isotopes. Every element has them. Some of them are radioactive. And some of them are—alive.
"Bill, with his new kind of mathematics, worked out a set of equations that described what we know about the inside of an atom. Any atom. A sort of general atom. They show why bromine vapor is brown, and chlorine green, and iodine violet—why mercury is liquid, and carbon diamond-hard or soft as graphite. They show why platinum is inert and oxygen active as the devil. And they show that for every chemical element there exists a single, unique isotope whose properties set it apart from every other atom—a living isotope!"
She waved her hand at the array of crowding apparatus. "This means nothing to you," she said. "There's no reason why you should try to understand it. One thing is all you need to know—in the heart of that little crystal cube we are duplicating the contorted, unstable fields of force that make an atom live. The atoms at the center of the block are strained and twisted to the breaking point, and bombarded with powerful short rays until they have absorbed vast quantities of energy. Where it goes we don't know. Not even Bill's equations can tell us. But somehow its presence and its release means—life.
"Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, in a way it is. But if Bill is wrong—if it all turns out to be moonshine and
Dunlop stared at her. She meant it. There was danger in this thing—big danger. But to her and Bill Bishop it meant less than nothing, compared to their chance to prove their theory to the world. He shrugged.
"I'm still single," he told her. "Besides, I never did like running. What comes next?"
Her laugh pealed out. "I'm glad! And—you can't run now. It's too late. Look."
-
"THE crystal cube swam in a haze of violet light—light that beat out of it in a blinding storm of radiation pitched at the very edge of visibility. Strange things were happening in that little block of space—colossal things! Vast forces of the kind that molded stars were warping and buckling its atoms until a queer, shimmering halo of mirage surrounded it, through which the walls beyond seemed oddly twisted. Almost he could see the mighty twisting lines of intra-atomic force that converged on that pin-point of tortured space, and feel the cataract of surging energy that beat into its hell of shuddering atoms!
A grey moth drifted aimlessly down out of the shadowed ceiling. The violet midst fell on its dusty wings and Frank saw them blaze with cold green light. Its wavering flight bent upward, circling the haloed quartz like a tiny, glowing comet. Closer it swung and closer—then an atom of blinding light burnt its image into his dazzled retinas. A crash like the crack of a thousand lightnings split his ears. The room reeled and he was crouching against the concrete wall, the girl sheltered in his arms, while Bishop, his mouth shouting words that Dunlop could not hear, rushed toward them through a storm of dancing lights.
Half an hour later Frank was still sitting on the bottom step of the little stair, while Bill and the girl checked and re-checked every tiny detail of their apparatus. The reek of burnt copper was in the air and thin curls of bluish smoke were rising from the massive cables. As Dunlop stared, he heard again the mutter of the great transformers, like the ominous distant thunder of disapproving gods.
He went to them. Marge's face was white, her dark eyes troubled. "It's like a warning," she pleaded. "You've gone farther than any man has ever gone—seen things happen that no man has ever seen—but there is more beyond that. More than you or anyone dreams! Let's be careful. We're learned a lot. Wait until we know just a little more—until we're surer of ourselves and what we're doing."
Bill laughed—a nervous bark. "We can't stop now. You told Frank that. We don't dare. There is a zone of disruption bordering the region of greatest strain, where our fields converge. If we tip our balance ever so little in the wrong direction, we'll go pfft! like that moth! Only the moth never got past the weakest fringe of what is really there! No—we'll go on all right. We have to!"
The rise of the slim black needles on their dials was slower—the sweeping purple curve of the recorder pen was changing, flattening, reaching equilibrium. Somewhere in that holocaust of battling forces a balance had been reached—a check on the vast, straining, cosmic energies that were the stuff of life!
A minute passed and another. Bill's eyes were glued on that levelling curve. Beside him, the girl was a tense arc of eager beauty. His hand hovered above the master switch—swooped down. Twin arcs of blue-white electric flame blazed across the poles. The tang of ozone was in the air. Then Marge's hard heels went click-clicking across the floor. Bill Bishop padded after her, Frank following them.
-
THE quartz was white hot. Bill pulled on a robe of stiff leaded cloth, slipped a hood with weird dark goggles over his head. He motioned to them to step back as he pulled away the lead sheathing.
It was a mere shell, the inside melted away by the fierce heat released when those warring forces reached stalemate. Marge tugged at Dunlop's sleeve. She pulled forward a tall leaden screen on little wheels. It had a window of thick, dark glass. Cheek to cheek, the scent of her hair in his nostrils, they watched Bill Bishop's every move.
He had on thick leaded mittens with loose gauntlets. Lifting the cube from its setting, he carried it over to the bench under the stairs, beside them. A strange contraption stood there, with a disc of frosted glass on which flecks of greenish light flashed intermittently. As Bill sat down the cube, a veritable blizzard of green fire swept over the milky disc.
"Look at the ray-counter," Marge whispered. "That quartz is giving off enough hard radiation for a gram of radium!"
Bishop was holding the cube close to the strange apparatus. Frank saw that the first fury of green fire was dying, the sparks of emerald light becoming fewer. Bill's voice sounded strangely loud with the thunder of the generators stilled.
"There's something queer here. No radioactive element I know anything about has so short a life." He shrugged. "Well—next time we'll be on the lookout for it. You can come out now—it's safe."
He pushed back his goggles with one clumsy glove and squinted at the cube. There was a tiny hollow at its center, a ghostly bubble in the clear crystal, its walls dewed with shining metallic droplets. Frank bent close to it. The shining dew was condensing into a tiny pool of bright liquid metal, no bigger than the head of an old-fashioned glass-headed pin. It was in constant motion, trembling and quivering with a kind of nervous energy.
"It's mercury," Bishop volunteered. "Quicksilver. Marge—will you get the mortar?"
She brought a huge steel cylinder, scoured until it shone, and a stubby pestle. Dropping the cube inside, Bill steadied it with one gloved hand and chipped gingerly at it with the other. Tiny flakes of quartz began to pile up in the bottom of the mortar, like shavings of clear ice. Soon there was only a roughly spherical lump the size of a walnut. Bill emptied the mortar and dusted it with a fine brush. He struck a harder blow, and another. The third blow found some strain in the crystal. There was a sharp report and he stood looking down at a heap of glittering quartz dust.
With a steel spatula Bill carefully ladled out the fragments of shattered quartz, dumping them in a heap on the table. Marge brought him a small evaporating dish and a thin-edged horn spoon, and as the tiny droplet of quivering metal appeared at the bottom of the mortar, he scooped it up and transferred it to the dish. A few glittering spicules of crystal glinted on its surface—quartz-dust, atom-fine—but he brushed them gently aside. Breathlessly they watched the shining surface. Every light and object in the laboratory was reflected in twisted miniature. It was like a tiny metallic eye staring unwinkingly up at them from the bottom of the white dish—an eye through which stared the intelligence of a life alien to everything man had ever experienced—metallic life!
Bishop stretched out his hand to pick up the little dish—and stopped!
-
THE tiny globule was changed—dulling—scumming over with a skin of steel-grey crystals. Across its middle a hair-thin line appeared—broadened and deepened to a fissure that cleft the drop in two symmetrical halves. And with uncanny speed those halves were splitting, separating, dividing again and again into a myriad of infinitesimal grains of metallic sand—into a shimmering dust of metallic molecules which had lost their dull greyness and were alive again with the glistening sheen of metallic mercury.
He looked up at Bill. There was a gleam of triumph in the scientist's eyes, and his lips were curved in a satisfied little smile. He was right and all world of science with its smug experts was wrong. And he liked the feeling.
