Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) by Operation: Outer Space Read Free Book Online

his helmet and gloomily
explained his mission. He introduced Cochrane and Babs, verifying in the
process that the dark man was the Jones he had come to see. A physics
laboratory high in the fastnesses of the Lunar Apennines is an odd place
for a psychiatrist to introduce himself on professional business. But
Holden only explained unhappily that Dabney had sent them to learn about
his discovery and arrange for a public-relations job to make it known.
    Cochrane saw Jones' expression flicker sarcastically just once during
Holden's explanation. Otherwise he was poker-faced.
    "I was explaining the discovery to these two," he observed.
    "Shoot it," said Cochrane to West. It was reasonable to ask West for an
explanation, because he would translate everything into televisable
terms.
    West said briskly—exactly as if before a television camera—that Mr.
Dabney had started from the well-known fact that the properties of space
are modified by energy fields. Magnetic and gravitational and
electrostatic fields rotate polarized light or bend light or do this or
that as the case may be. But all previous modifications of the constants
of space had been in essentially spherical fields. All previous fields
had extended in all directions, increasing in intensity as the square of
the distance ...
    "Cut," said Cochrane.
    West automatically abandoned his professional delivery. He placidly
re-addressed himself to his beer.
    "How about it, Jones?" asked Cochrane. "Dabney's got a variation? What
is it?"
    "It's a field of force that doesn't spread out. You set up two plates
and establish this field between them," said Jones curtly. "It's
circularly polarized and it doesn't expand. It's like a searchlight beam
or a microwave beam, and it stays the same size like a pipe. In that
field—or pipe—radiation travels faster than it does outside. The
properties of space are changed between the plates. Therefore the speed
of all radiation. That's all."
    Cochrane meditatively seated himself. He approved of this Jones, whose
eyebrows practically met in the middle of his forehead. He was not more
polite than politeness required. He did not express employer-like
rapture at the mention of his employer's name.
    "But what can be done with it?" asked Cochrane practically.
    "Nothing," said Jones succinctly. "It changes the properties of space,
but that's all. Can you think of any use for a faster-than-light
radiation-pipe? I can't."
    Cochrane cocked an eye at Jamison, who could extrapolate at the drop of
an equation. But Jamison shook his head.
    "Communication between planets," he said morosely, "when we get to them.
Chats between sweethearts on Earth and Pluto. Broadcasts to the stars
when we find that another one's set up a similar plate and is ready to
chat with us. There's nothing else."
    Cochrane waved his hand. It is good policy to put a specialist in his
place, occasionally.
    "Demonstration?" he asked Jones.
    "There are plates across the crater out yonder," said Jones without
emotion. "Twenty miles clear reach. I can send a message across and get
it relayed twice and back through two angles in about five per cent of
the time radiation ought to take."
    Cochrane said with benign cynicism:
    "Jamison, you work by guessing where you can go. Jones works by guessing
where he is. But this is a public relations job. I don't know where we
are or where we can go, but I know where we want to take this thing."
    Jones looked at him. Not hostilely, but with the detached interest of a
man accustomed to nearly exact science, when he watches somebody work in
one of the least precise of them all.
    Holden said:
    "You mean you've worked out some sort of production."
    "No production," said Cochrane blandly. "It isn't necessary. A straight
public-relations set-up. We concoct a story and then let it leak out. We
make it so good that even the people who don't believe it can't help
spreading it." He nodded at Jamison. "Right now, Jamison, we want a
theory that the sending of radiation