Man Who Sold the Moon / Orphans of the Sky (14 page)

Erickson pulled out of his funk to some extent. “I suppose so,” he agreed. “Anyhow, maybe we could work out some techniques for carrying a lot of experiments simultaneously.”

Harper slapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the ol’ fight. Besides—we may not need to finish the research, or anything like it, to find a satisfactory fuel. The way I see it, there are probably a dozen, maybe a hundred, right answers. We may run across one of them any day. Anyhow, since you’re willing to give me a hand with it in your off-watch time, I’m game to peck away at it till hell freezes.”

Lentz puttered around the plant and the administration center for several days, until he was known to everyone by sight. He made himself pleasant and asked questions. He was soon regarded as a harmless nuisance, to be tolerated because he was a friend of the superintendent. He even poked his nose into the commercial power end of the plant, and had the radiation-to-electric-power sequence explained to him in detail. This alone would have been sufficient to disarm any suspicion that he might be a psychiatrist, for the staff psychiatrists paid no attention to the hard-bitten technicians of the power-conversion unit. There was no need to; mental instability on their part could not affect the pile, nor were they subject to the man-killing strain of social responsibility. Theirs was simply a job personally dangerous, a type of strain strong men have been inured to since the jungle.

In due course he got around to the unit of the radiation laboratory set aside for Calvin Harper’s use. He rang the bell and waited. Harper answered the door, his anti-radiation helmet shoved back from his face like some grotesque sunbonnet. “What is it?” he asked. “Oh—it’s you, Doctor Lentz. Did you want to see me?”

“Why, yes, and no,” the older man answered, “I was just looking around the experimental station and wondered what you do in here. Will I be in the way?”

“Not at all. Come in. Gus!”

Erickson got up from where he had been fussing over the power leads to their trigger—a modified betatron rather than a resonant accelerator. “Hello.”

“Gus, this is Doctor Lentz—Gus Erickson.”

“We’ve met,” said Erickson, pulling off his gauntlet to shake hands. He had had a couple of drinks with Lentz in town and considered him a “nice old duck.” “You’re just between shows, but stick around and we’ll start another run—not that there is much to see.”

While Erickson continued with the set-up, Harper conducted Lentz around the laboratory, explaining the line of research they were conducting, as happy as a father showing off twins. The psychiatrist listened with one ear and made appropriate comments while he studied the young scientist for signs of the instability he had noted to be recorded against him.

“You see,” Harper explained, oblivious to the interest in himself, “we are testing radioactive materials to see if we can produce disintegration of the sort that takes place in the pile, but in a minute, almost microscopic, mass. If we are successful, we can use the breeder pile to make a safe, convenient atomic fuel for rockets—or for anything else.” He went on to explain their schedule of experimentation.

“I see,” Lentz observed politely. “What element are you examining now?”

Harper told him. “But it’s not a case of examining one element—we’ve finished Isotope II of this element with negative results. Our schedule calls next for running the same test on Isotope V. Like this.” He hauled out a lead capsule, and showed the label to Lentz. He hurried away to the shield around the target of the betatron, left open by Erickson. Lentz saw that he had opened the capsule, and was performing some operation on it with a long pair of tongs in a gingerly manner, having first lowered his helmet. Then he closed and clamped the target shield.

“Okay, Gus?” he called out. “Ready to roll?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Erickson assured him, coming around from behind the ponderous apparatus, and rejoining them. They crowded behind a thick metal and concrete shield that cut them off from direct sight of the set-up.

“Will I need to put on armor?” inquired Lentz.

“No,” Erickson reassured him, “we wear it because we are around the stuff day in and day out. You just stay behind the shield and you’ll be all right.”

Erickson glanced at Harper, who nodded, and fixed his eyes on a panel of instruments mounted behind the shield. Lentz saw Erickson press a push button at the top of the board, then heard a series of relays click on the far side of the shield. There was a short moment of silence.

The floor slapped his feet like some incredible bastinado. The concussion that beat on his ears was so intense that it paralyzed the auditory nerve almost before it could be recorded as sound. The air-conducted concussion wave flailed every inch of his body with a single, stinging, numbing blow. As he picked himself up, he found he was trembling uncontrollably and realized, for the first time, that he was getting old.

Harper was seated on the floor and had commenced to bleed from the nose. Erickson had gotten up, his cheek was cut. He touched a hand to the wound, then stood there, regarding the blood on his fingers with a puzzled expression on his face.

“Are you hurt?” Lentz inquired inanely. “What happened?”

Harper cut in. “Gus, we’ve done it! We’ve done it! Isotope V has turned the trick!”

Erickson looked still more bemused. “Five?” he said stupidly, “—but that wasn’t Five, that was Isotope II. I put it in myself.”

“You
put it in?
I
put it in! It was Five, I tell you!”

They stood staring at each other, still confused by the explosion, and each a little annoyed at the bone-headed stupidity the other displayed in the face of the obvious. Lentz diffidently interceded.

“Wait a minute, boys,” he suggested, “maybe there’s a reason—Gus, you placed a quantity of the second isotope in the receiver?”

“Why, yes, certainly. I wasn’t satisfied with the last run, and I wanted to check it.”

Lentz nodded. “It’s my fault, gentlemen,” he admitted ruefully. “I came in, disturbed your routine, and both of you charged the receiver. I know Harper did, for I saw him do it—with Isotype V. I’m sorry.”

Understanding broke over Harper’s face, and he slapped the older man on the shoulder. “Don’t be sorry,” he laughed. “You can come around to our lab and help us make mistakes anytime you feel in the mood—Can’t he, Gus? This is the answer, Doctor Lentz, this is it!”

“But,” the psychiatrist pointed out, “you don’t know which isotope blew up.”

“Nor care,” Harper supplemented. “Maybe it was both, taken together. But we
will
know—this business is cracked now; we’ll soon have it open.” He gazed happily around at the wreckage.

In spite of Superintendent King’s anxiety, Lentz refused to be hurried in passing judgment on the situation. Consequently, when he did present himself at King’s office, and announced that he was ready to report, King was pleasantly surprised as well as relieved. “Well, I’m delighted,” he said. “Sit down, Doctor, sit down. Have a cigar. What do we do about it?”

But Lentz stuck to his perennial cigarette, and refused to be hurried. “I must have some information first: how important,” he demanded, “is the power from your plant?”

King understood the implication at once. “If you are thinking about shutting down the plant for more than a limited period, it can’t be done.”

“Why not? If the figures supplied me are correct, your power output is less than thirteen percent of the total power used in the country.”

“Yes, that is true, but we also supply another thirteen percent second hand through the plutonium we breed here—and you haven’t analyzed the items that make up the balance. A lot of it is domestic power which householders get from sunscreens located on their roofs. Another big slice is power for the moving roadways—that’s sunpower again. The portion we provide here directly or indirectly is the main power source for most of the heavy industries—steel, plastics, lithics, all kinds of manufacturing and processing. You might as well cut the heart out of a man—”

“But the food industry isn’t basically dependent on you?” Lentz persisted.

“No . . . Food isn’t basically a power industry—although we do supply a certain percentage of the power used in processing. I see your point, and will go on, and concede that transportation, that is to say, distribution of food, could get along without us. But good heavens, Doctor, you can’t stop atomic power without causing the biggest panic this country has ever seen. It’s the keystone of our whole industrial system.”

“The country has lived through panics before, and we got past the oil shortage safely.”

“Yes—because sunpower and atomic power came along to take the place of oil. You don’t realize what this would mean, Doctor. It would be worse than a war; in a system like ours, one thing depends on another. If you cut off the heavy industries all at once, everything else stops, too.”

“Nevertheless, you had better dump the pile.” The uranium in the pile was molten, its temperature being greater than twenty-four hundred degrees centigrade. The pile could be dumped into a group of small containers, when it was desired to shut it down. The mass into any one container would be too small to maintain progressive atomic disintegration.

King glanced involuntarily at the glass-enclosed relay mounted on his office wall, by which he, as well as the engineer on duty, could dump the pile, if need be. “But I couldn’t do that . . . or rather, if I did, the plant wouldn’t stay shut down. The directors would simply replace me with someone who
would
operate it.

“You’re right, of course.” Lentz silently considered the situation for some time, then said, “Superintendent, will you order a car to fly me back to Chicago?”

“You’re going, Doctor?”

“Yes.” He took the cigarette holder from his face, and, for once, the smile of Olympian detachment was gone completely. His entire manner was sober, even tragic. “Short of shutting down the plant, there is no solution to your problem—none whatsoever!

“I owe you a full explanation,” he continued, presently. “You are confronted here with recurring instances of situational psychoneurosis. Roughly, the symptoms manifest themselves as anxiety neurosis, or some form of hysteria. The partial amnesia of your secretary, Steinke, is a good example of the latter. He might be cured with shock technique, but it would hardly be a kindness, as he has achieved a stable adjustment which puts him beyond the reach of the strain he could not stand.

“That other young fellow, Harper, whose blowup was the immediate cause of you sending for me, is an anxiety case. When the cause of the anxiety was eliminated from his matrix, he at once regained full sanity. But keep a close watch on his friend, Erickson—

“However, it is the cause, and prevention, of situational psychoneurosis we are concerned with here, rather than the forms in which it is manifested. In plain language, psychoneurosis situational simply refers to the common fact that, if you put a man in a situation that worries him more than he can stand, in time he blows up, one way or another.

“That is precisely the situation here. You take sensitive, intelligent young men, impress them with the fact that a single slip on their part, or even some fortuitous circumstance beyond their control, will result in the death of God knows how many other people, and then expect them to remain sane. It’s ridiculous—impossible!”

“But good heavens, Doctor!—there must be some answer—There must!” He got up and paced around the room. Lentz noted, with pity, that King himself was riding the ragged edge of the very condition they were discussing.

“No,” he said slowly. “No . . . let me explain. You don’t dare entrust control to less sensitive, less socially conscious men. You might as well turn the controls over to a mindless idiot. And to psychoneurosis situational there are but two cures. The first obtains when the psychosis results from a misevaluation of environment. That cure calls for semantic readjustment. One assists the patient to evaluate correctly his environment. The worry disappears because there never was a real reason for worry in the situation itself, but simply in the wrong meaning the patient’s mind had assigned to it.

“The second case is when the patient has correctly evaluated the situation, and rightly finds in it cause for extreme worry. His worry is perfectly sane and proper, but he cannot stand up under it indefinitely; it drives him crazy. The only possible cure is to change the situation. I have stayed here long enough to assure myself that such is the condition here. You engineers have correctly evaluated the public danger of this thing, and it will, with dreadful certainty, drive all of you crazy!

“The only possible solution is to dump the pile—and leave it dumped.”

King had continued his nervous pacing of the floor, as if the walls of the room itself were the cage of his dilemma. Now he stopped and appealed once more to the psychiatrist. “Isn’t there
anything
I can do?”

“Nothing to cure. To alleviate—well, possibly.”

“How?”

“Situational psychosis results from adrenalin exhaustion. When a man is placed under a nervous strain, his adrenal glands increase their secretion to help compensate for the strain. If the strain is too great and lasts too long, the adrenals aren’t equal to the task, and he cracks. That is what you have here. Adrenalin therapy might stave off a mental breakdown, but it most assuredly would hasten a physical breakdown. But that would be safer from a viewpoint of public welfare—even though it assumes that physicists are expendable!

“Another thing occurs to me: If you selected any new watch engineers from the membership of churches that practice the confessional, it would increase the length of their usefulness.

King was plainly surprised. “I don’t follow you.”

“The patient unloads most of his worry on his confessor, who is not himself actually confronted by the situation, and can stand it. That is simply an ameliorative, however. I am convinced that in this situation, eventual insanity is inevitable. But there is a lot of good sense in the confessional,” he mused. “It fills a basic human need. I think that is why the early psychoanalysts were so surprisingly successful, for all their limited knowledge.” He fell silent for a while, then added, “If you will be so kind as to order a stratocab for me—”