Islands of Space | Page 8

said Fuller. "But stop springing new gadgets on me, will
you?"
"I'll try not to," Arcot laughed. "Anyway, let's get on to the main power
plant. Remember that our condenser coil is a gadget for storing energy
in space; we are therefore obliged to supply it with energy to store. Just
forming the drive field alone will require two times ten to the
twenty-seventh ergs, or the energy of about two and a half tons of
matter. That means a whale of a lot of lead wire will have to be fed into
our conversion generators; it would take several hours to charge the
coils. We'd better have two big chargers to do the job.
"The controls we can figure out later. How about it? Any suggestions?"
"Sounds okay to me," said Morey, and the others agreed.
"Good enough. Now, as far as air and water go, we can use the standard
spacecraft apparatus, Fuller, so you can figure that in any way you want
to."
"We'll need a lab, too," Wade put in. "And a machine shop with plenty
of spare parts--everything we can possibly think of. Remember, we
may want to build some things out in space."
"Right. And I wonder--" Arcot looked thoughtful. "How about the
invisibility apparatus? It may prove useful, and it won't cost much.
Let's put that in, too."
The apparatus he mentioned was simply a high-frequency oscillator
tube of extreme power which caused vibrations approaching light
frequency to be set up in the molecules of the ship. As a result, the ship
became transparent, since light could easily pass through the vibrating

molecules.
There was only one difficulty; the ship was invisible, all right, but it
became a radio sender and could easily be detected by a directional
radio. However, if the secret were unknown, it was a very effective
method of disappearing. And, since the frequency was so high, a
special detector was required to pick it up.
"Is that all you need?" asked Fuller.
"Nope," said Arcot, leaning back in his chair. "Now comes the kicker. I
suggest that we make the hull of foot-thick lux metal and line it on the
inside with relux wherever we want it to be opaque. And we want relux
shutters on the windows. Lux is too doggone transparent; if we came
too close to a hot star, we'd be badly burned."
Fuller looked almost goggle-eyed. "A--foot--of--lux! Good Lord, Arcot!
This ship would weigh a quarter of a million tons! That stuff is dense!"
"Sure," agreed Arcot, "but we'll need the protection. With a ship like
that, you could run through a planetoid without hurting the hull. We'll
make the relux inner wall about an inch thick, with a vacuum between
them for protection in a warm atmosphere. And if some tremendous
force did manage to crack the outer wall, we wouldn't be left without
protection."
"Okay, you're the boss," Fuller said resignedly. "It's going to have to be
a big ship, though. I figure a length of about two hundred feet and a
diameter of around thirty feet. The interior I'll furnish with aluminum;
it'll be cheaper and lighter. How about an observatory?"
"Put it in the rear of the ship," Wade suggested. "We'll mount one of
the Nigran telectroscopes."
"Control room in the bow, of course," Morey chipped in.
"I've got you," Fuller said. "I'll work the thing out and give you a cost
estimate and drawings."

"Fine," said Arcot, standing up. "Meanwhile, the rest of us will work
out our little exhibition to impress Mr. Morey and Dad. Come on, lads,
let's get back to the lab."

III
It was two weeks before Dr. Robert Arcot and his old friend Arthur
Morey, president of Transcontinental Airways, were invited to see what
their sons had been working on.
The demonstration was to take place in the radiation labs in the
basements of the Transcontinental building. Arcot, Wade, Morey, and
Fuller had brought the equipment in from the country place in Vermont
and set it up in one of the heavily-lined, vault-like chambers that were
used for radiation experiments.
The two older men were seated before a huge eighty-inch
three-dimensional television screen several floors above the level
where the actual demonstration was going on.
"There can't be anyone in the room, because of radiation burns,"
explained Arcot, junior. "We could have surrounded the thing with
relux, but then you couldn't have seen what's going on.
"I'm not going to explain anything beforehand; like magic, they'll be
more astounding before the explanation is given."
He touched a switch. The cameras began to operate, and the screen
sprang into life.
The screen showed a heavy table on which was mounted a small
projector that looked something like a searchlight with several heavy
cables running into it. In