Chapter XII: Negative Matter

For an instant their gaze held.

"Now," asked Carroll, "what is the Lawson Radiation?"

"Should I know?" she queried by way of reply.

"I think so."

"Why?"

"As an emissary, you should."

She laughed. "I'm still giving no evidence, James. I cannot. I am human."

He looked down at her, and the recollection of her kiss was strong. "There are times," he said ruminatively, "when you most certainly are!"

She let her eyes drop. Then she raised them again. "I know very little about it," she told him. "And practically nothing but what you've told me. A lot about alien mathematics and sciences. I think that somewhere in the maze of data there will be the answer you seek."

"And that," he replied, "may be either a chance statement based upon good prediction or the remark of an alien who knows where the body is hidden but will say nothing more than, 'Getting warmer'."

"So what do we do?" she asked. "Shall we let this simmer down to the old unanswerable argument as to my mental status or shall we forget that and take to real investigation?"

"Investigation," he said. "You're a darned good librarian, Rhine. You tabulate and I'll try to juggle it out."

Rhine went to the draftman's table and sat down.

"I've maintained all along that the Lawson Radiation was the by-product of faster-than-light travel," he said. "Ignoring the argument of aliens and such, we have good evidence at present. There is a body of negative mass approaching Terra. This negative mass is approaching Terra at a velocity not only exceeding the velocity of light but traveling several hundred times the velocity of light."

He paused. Then he sat down--hard.

"What's the matter?" she asked, seeing the look of consternation on his face.

"The photographs," he said bleakly.

"Yes?"

"Can a rifle bullet traveling faster than sound be heard before it arrives?" he asked enigmatically.

"No."

"Then a body traveling faster than light cannot be seen before it arrives! Those pictures show a region of the sky and a few stellar catastrophes that took place years ago when the light left there unless--"

"Unless what?"

"Unless the telescope made of the teleport mirror effect utilizes a type of radiation that propagates faster than light."

Rhine nodded. "If celestial bodies can travel faster than light," she said, "it stands to reason that some form of energy can travel faster than light also. After all, matter is one form of energy."

Carroll smiled quietly. "This is negative matter," he said. "And so far as I have been able to calculate, the only thing that can avoid the Einstein increase in mass with increase in energy would be some object having negative mass. But negative mass is as meaningless a term as negative energy."

"A gentleman by the name of Dirac got the Nobel Prize for postulating states of negative kinetic energy," said Rhine.

"The positron," nodded Carroll.

"Then it must make sense."

"It does. A normal body possessing energy tends to dissipate that energy by transferring the excess to other bodies possessing less than it does. A body possessing negative energy would demand that energy be applied to it in order for it to acquire a state of energy equilibrium.

"The positron, according to Dirac, is a state of negative kinetic energy which is satisfied only when the energy of an electron is applied to it. In the process known as 'pair-production', where hard gamma strikes matter and releases an electron and a positron, it is actually a case of separating the electron from its positron, leaving in effect a 'hole' in the level of energy.

"It is a man whose bills are not paid but are merely covered by written and certified checks. Send away one check and you have a debit in the man's account. The positron is satisfied very quickly, however, since there is a large excess of free electrons to fall into place.

"These cancel the positron--and that process produces hard gamma rays again--of the same energy content as required to cause the 'pair production' in the first place. About one million electron volts plus," he added.

She hesitated a moment.

"Now--about this negative mass," she said.

"Simple," he said. "Very simple. A negative mass is the only thing that can exceed the speed of light. Similarly negative energy is the only kind that can propagate in excess of light. So now let's juggle equations until we can reproduce the same."

Rhine nodded, picked up a pencil and then looked at him expectantly.

"Put down," he said with a smile, "the first equation that ever told the truth about the relationship between mass and energy. Energy 'E' equals Mass 'M' times the squared speed of light, 'C^2'."

"And from there?"

"And from there we start juggling until we find out how to introduce the negative factor. And I do not mean by dividing by the square root of minus one," he told her.

* * * * *

Doctor Pollard looked up at the man who stood before his desk. "Mr. Galloway," he said, "You may believe yourself normally right but you are ethically wrong."

"Morals and ethics be hanged!" snarled Rhine's brother. "That nut has kidnaped my sister again."

"Not without her aid," smiled Pollard.

"Aid be hanged too!" shouted Kingston Galloway. "He tried to kill her once and he may try again."

"Look," said Pollard quietly. "There are times when personality and identity mean nothing. I think well of my life, as much as you think of yours. Yet I'd feel less than human if I permitted myself and my ideas to stand in the way of civilization."

"Stop talking like a superior being and come down to facts," yelled Kingston Galloway.

"I am. James Forrest Carroll is the only man on earth who can save Terra from certain destruction. Your sister can be of help to him."

"How?" demanded Kingston.

"Rita is an excellent librarian. She has the ability to recall facts and figures beyond most people. She has almost an eidetic memory. Whether Carroll is sane or completely schizophrenic-paranoid, his statements and his theories are solid when based upon his own line of reason.

"That his line of reason does not agree with heretofore known physical facts is of no consequence since several of the unsound, unscientific, un-factual reasonings have produced things that work. Unsound as they may seem, they are not unreasonable--excepting to us who can not reason that way."

"Get to the point."

"Whether Carroll urges Rita to display a horde of facts because he thinks they come from an alien mind in a human body, or whether he understands the truth--that they are merely repeats of his own statements made when he does not recall them--the fact remains that Rita is his tabulator, his encyclopedia of fact, his memory. She and she alone can put down concurrently things he has reasoned out, once when himself and next when he is--un-sane."

"But she's in danger!"

"So are we all," replied Pollard easily. "And Rita herself knows the danger. And," he added with a snort of derision, "of what good is your so-called moral integrity going to do you a year from today if James Forrest Carroll is stopped from preventing the calamity due to erase Sol from existence in a month?"

"He's a madman. How can you believe that this danger really exists?"

"The danger is what drove him mad."

"And made him believe that Rita and I are aliens?"

"Merely manifestations of the hallucination."

Kingston Galloway growled in his throat. "I ought to kill you," he snarled. "Not only have you left my sister unprotected, but you've condoned her kidnaping and now you sit there and tell me that the fate of the world lies in the mind of a lunatic."

Pollard smiled. "There have been many historic times when civilization was nearly torn down by a madman. Let history record once when civilization was saved by one."

"At my sister's expense!" Kingston stormed, barely able to control his rage.

* * * * *

Pollard shook his head. Then he said patiently, "James Forrest Carroll was driven mad by this knowledge of inescapable doom, because his subconscious mind knew that the answer was hidden in the realm of physics termed 'unreasonable' to the true physicist.

"Once James Forrest Carroll has succeeded in removing this menace he will know that amnesia and mental retreat are not necessary for the preservation of his sanity. There will undoubtedly be evidences, too, to support the 'unreasonable' physics in terms of what we know to be true. Thus Carroll will be completely self-justified and will be returned to normal."

"You talk a lot about self-justification," snarled Kingston.

"Everybody is self-justified," said Pollard. "Sanity is when the self-justification of the individual is, within certain limits, similar to the self-justification of the average human being. Insanity is when the self-justification of the individual lies outside of reasonable limits. Once Carroll's self-justification--which is one more way of saying his 'viewpoint'--is reasonably similar to others, sanity will return."

"And in the meantime, what about Rita?"

"Rita is at worst a good soldier," said Pollard. "At best, she alone will realize the full truth. But just remember neither morals nor ethics mean a thing to a civilization that has just perished before a nova. And I have more than a little respect for the morals and ethics of both Carroll and your sister under any circumstances."

"But she's my sister and he's--"

"Shut up. You're talking like a fool. They're doing nothing wrong. Stop them and you'll destroy the earth. Perhaps if you'd left him alone--them alone--Carroll might not have identified you with his hallucinatory aliens."

"Yeah? And just what is an alien?" demanded Kingston.

"An alien," smiled Pollard, "is any man who does not think as you do!"

"Bah!" cried Kingston, turning on his heel. He left the office swearing eternal vengeance.

An hour later, Majors came bursting into Pollard's office. "Pollard!" he exclaimed. "Listen! That wildman Kingston Galloway has just collected a gang of his cohorts, friends and buddies and they've all taken off like wildmen. They're heading for Wisconsin!"

"The stupid idiot!" exploded Pollard, coming out of his chair. "Come on!"

* * * * *

Rhinegallis clasped Carroll's arm tightly as she stood beside him and looked at the almost-vibrant blackness that seemed to shimmer in the encircling wire mounted on the wall. Carroll was too busy to pay attention to her clasp.

He was busy adjusting knobs on a haywire equipment on the bench beside him. The shimmering blackness flared briefly at one side, turned milky for an instant near the top--and then a pinprick of utter--nothingness--appeared to one side of the circle.

Carroll adjusted knobs, brought the spot of sheer black into the center of the artificial plate and then expanded it. It was noticeable only because it--as a circle of utter no-response--was less energetic than the misty background.

"That," he said, "is it."

"The negative mass?"

He nodded. "Is the 'fence' ready?"

"Checked."

"Now's as good a time as any," he said laconically. He left the vantage-point and went to another panel in the laboratory and began to throw switches.

Five miles from Carroll's home a ten mile circle of wire came to life. Set on insulators mounted on trees in a rough circle, the area ten miles in diameter shimmered with a thin, misty film of energy--the same energy as that of the teleport.

It thickened as Carroll adjusted the driving gear, thickened and became more positive until it was as shiningly opaque as the teleport screen-mirror. Trees in the circle, cut clean at the surface of the mirror fell, impelled by gravity into the screen. Then above the perfect plane of energy was nothing.

The trimmed trees fell helter-skelter into a deep gorge from a smaller teleport plane twenty miles to the north.

Then the perfect plane bowed downward into a shallow paraboloid of revolution. As it went down the up-thrusting trees were trimmed off and the matter in them converted into energy. A minute but perfect sphere appeared atop a pillar of energy not far from the rim of the paraboloid.

Down went the center of the paraboloid, down into the bowels of the earth, and the sphere of stored energy grew rapidly. Down went the center, deep, until a perfect parabolic reflector ten miles in diameter and twelve miles deep resulted. The cubic mile after cubic mile of earth, rock, water, and forest were stored as energy in the sphere, now a full three feet in diameter.

A landslide started near the rim, and earth rumbled forward down the side of the depression, disappearing as it touched the outside of the energy-shell that was Carroll's reflector. The rim of trees that supported the energizing ring fell into the widening inverted funnel but its job was over. The mirror was stable, held by the energy contained in the perfect sphere on the column near its edge.

The rumbling stopped as stability came. The roar, all of it sheer physical sound from tortured earth, died and left a hollow vacancy in comparison.

Then Carroll took a small set of levers and manipulated them like a man flying a drone airplane. The sphere of energy left the column and was driven over the gaping maw of the mighty reflector. Down it dropped until it was at the exact focus of the paraboloid. There it compressed to almost a point.

"This," said Carroll, "is it!"

He reached for the master switch just as a flashing bolt of coruscating energy dazzled across the room, searing his arm.

"King!" screamed Rhinegallis. "Don't!"