Islands of Space | Page 3

Fuller's eyes narrowed. He knew Arcot was kidding, but he also knew
how far Arcot would go when he was kidding--and this sounded like he
meant it. Fuller said: "Look, teacher, a man named Einstein said that
the velocity of light was tops over two hundred years ago, and nobody's
come up with any counter evidence yet. Has the Lord instituted a new
speed law?"
"Oh, no," said Wade, waving his pipe in a grand gesture of importance.
"Arcot just decided he didn't like that law and made a new one
himself."
"Now wait a minute!" said Fuller. "The velocity of light is a property of
space!"
Arcot's bantering smile was gone. "Now you've got it, Fuller. The
velocity of light, just as Einstein said, is a property of space. What
happens if we change space?"
Fuller blinked. "Change space? How?"

Arcot pointed toward a glass of water sitting nearby. "Why do things
look distorted through the water? Because the light rays are bent. Why
are they bent? Because as each wave front moves from air to water, it
slows down. The electromagnetic and gravitational fields between those
atoms are strong enough to increase the curvature of the space between
them. Now, what happens if we reverse that effect?"
"Oh," said Fuller softly. "I get it. By changing the curvature of the
space surrounding you, you could get any velocity you wanted. But
what about acceleration? It would take years to reach those velocities at
any acceleration a man could stand."
Arcot shook his head. "Take a look at the glass of water again. What
happens when the light comes out of the water? It speeds up again
instantaneously. By changing the space around a spaceship, you
instantaneously change the velocity of the ship to a comparable
velocity in that space. And since every particle is accelerated at the
same rate, you wouldn't feel it, any more than you'd feel the
acceleration due to gravity in free fall."
Fuller nodded slowly. Then, suddenly, a light gleamed in his eyes. "I
suppose you've figured out where you're going to get the energy to
power a ship like that?"
"He has," said Morey. "Uncle Arcot isn't the type to forget a little detail
like that."
"Okay, give," said Fuller.
Arcot grinned and lit up his own pipe, joining Wade in an attempt to
fill the room with impenetrable fog.
"All right," Arcot began, "we needed two things: a tremendous source
of power and a way to store it.
"For the first, ordinary atomic energy wouldn't do. It's not controllable
enough and uranium isn't something we could carry by the ton. So I
began working with high-density currents.

"At the temperature of liquid helium, near absolute zero, lead becomes
a nearly perfect conductor. Back in nineteen twenty, physicists had
succeeded in making a current flow for four hours in a closed circuit. It
was just a ring of lead, but the resistance was so low that the current
kept on flowing. They even managed to get six hundred amperes
through a piece of lead wire no bigger than a pencil lead.
"I don't know why they didn't go on from there, but they didn't.
Possibly it was because they didn't have the insulation necessary to
keep down the corona effect; in a high-density current, the electrons
tend to push each other sideways out of the wire.
"At any rate, I tried it, using lux metal as an insulator around the wire."
"Hold it!" Fuller interrupted. "What, may I ask, is lux metal?"
"That was Wade's idea," Arcot grinned. "You remember those two
substances we found in the Nigran ships during the war?"
"Sure," said Fuller. "One was transparent and the other was a perfect
reflector. You said they were made of light--photons so greatly
condensed that they were held together by their gravitational fields."
"Right. We called them light-metal. But Wade said that was too
confusing. With a specific gravity of 103.5, light-metal was certainly
not a light metal! So Wade coined a couple of words. Lux is the Latin
for light, so he named the transparent one lux and the reflecting one
relux."
"It sounds peculiar," Fuller observed, "but so does every coined word
when you first hear it. Go on with your story."
Arcot relit his pipe and went on. "I put a current of ten thousand amps
through a little piece of lead wire, and that gave me a current density of
10^{10} amps per square inch.
"Then I started jacking up the voltage, and modified the thing with a
double-polarity field somewhat similar to the molecular motion field

except that it works on a sub-nucleonic level. As a result, about half of
the lead fed into the chamber became contraterrene lead! The atoms
just turned themselves inside out, so to speak, giving