Fantastic Stories Presents the Fantastic Universe Super Pack. Roger Dee

Lee; do you need anything else to convince you that this isn’t a weapon project?” Pitov asked.

      “No, now that you mention it. I don’t. You know, I don’t believe I’ve had to show an identity card the whole time I’ve been here.”

      “I don’t believe I have an identity card,” Pitov said. “Think of that.”

      The lights blazed everywhere around them, but mostly about the rocket that towered above everything else, so thick that it seemed squat. The gantry-cranes had been hauled away, now, and it stood alone, but it was still wreathed in thick electric cables. They were pouring enough current into that thing to light half the street-lights in Buenos Aires; when the cables were blown free by separation charges at the blastoff, the generators powered by the rocket-engines had better be able to take over, because if the magnetic field collapsed and that fifty-kilo chunk of negative-proton matter came in contact with natural positive-proton matter, an old-fashioned H-bomb would be a firecracker to what would happen. Just one hundred kilos of pure, two-hundred proof MC2.

      The driver took them around the rocket, dodging assorted trucks and mobile machinery that were being hurried out of the way. The countdown was just beyond two hours five minutes. The jeep stopped at the edge of a crowd around three more trucks, and Doctor Eugenio Galvez, the director of the Institute, left the crowd and approached at an awkward half-run as they got down.

      “Is everything checked, gentlemen?” he wanted to know.

      “It was this afternoon at 1730,” Pitov told him. “And nobody’s been burning my telephone to report anything different. Are the balloons and the drone planes ready?”

      “The Air Force just finished checking; they’re ready. Captain Urquiola flew one of the planes over the course and made a guidance-tape; that’s been duplicated and all the planes are equipped with copies.”

      “How’s the wind?” Richardson asked.

      “Still steady. We won’t have any trouble about fallout or with the balloons.”

      “Then we’d better go back to the bunker and make sure everybody there is on the job.”

      The loudspeaker was counting down to Two Hours One Minute.

      “Could you spare a few minutes to talk to the press?” Eugenio Galvez asked. “And perhaps say a few words for telecast? This last is most important; we can’t explain too many times the purpose of this experiment. There is still much hostility, arising from fear that we are testing a nuclear weapon.”

      The press and telecast services were well represented; there were close to a hundred correspondents, from all over South America, from South Africa and Australia, even one from Ceylon. They had three trucks, with mobile telecast pickups, and when they saw who was approaching, they released the two rocketry experts they had been quizzing and pounced on the new victims.

      Was there any possibility that negative-proton matter might be used as a weapon?

      “Anything can be used as a weapon; you could stab a man to death with that lead pencil you’re using,” Pitov replied. “But I doubt if negamatter will ever be so used. We’re certainly not working on weapons design here. We started, six years ago, with the ability to produce negative protons, reverse-spin neutrons, and positrons, and the theoretical possibility of assembling them into negamatter. We have just gotten a fifty kilogramme mass of nega-iron assembled. In those six years, we had to invent all our techniques, and design all our equipment. If we’d been insane enough to want to build a nuclear weapon, after what we went through up North, we could have done so from memory, and designed a better—which is to say a worse—one from memory in a few days.”

      “Yes, and building a negamatter bomb for military purposes would be like digging a fifty foot shaft to get a rock to bash somebody’s head in, when you could do the job better with the shovel you’re digging with,” Richardson added. “The time, money, energy and work we put in on this thing would be ample to construct twenty thermonuclear bombs. And that’s only a small part of it.” He went on to tell them about the magnetic bottle inside the rocket’s warhead, mentioning how much electric current was needed to keep up the magnetic field that insulated the negamatter from contact with posimatter.

      “Then what was the purpose of this experiment, Doctor Richardson?”

      “Oh, we were just trying to find out a few basic facts about natural structure. Long ago, it was realized that the nucleonic particles—protons, neutrons, mesons and so on—must have structure of their own. Since we started constructing negative-proton matter, we’ve found out a few things about nucleonic structure. Some rather odd things, including fractions of Planck’s constant.”

      A couple of the correspondents—a man from La Prensa, and an Australian—whistled softly. The others looked blank. Pitov took over:

      “You see, gentlemen, most of what we learned, we learned from putting negamatter atoms together. We annihilated a few of them—over there in that little concrete building, we have one of the most massive steel vaults in the world, where we do that—but we assembled millions of them for every one we annihilated, and that chunk of nega-iron inside the magnetic bottle kept growing. And when you have a piece of negamatter you don’t want, you can’t just throw it out on the scrap-pile. We might have rocketed it into escape velocity and let it blow up in space, away from the Moon or any of the artificial satellites, but why waste it? So we’re going to have the rocket eject it, and when it falls, we can see, by our telemetered instruments, just what happens.”

      “Well, won’t it be annihilated by contact with atmosphere?” somebody asked.

      “That’s one of the things we want to find out,” Pitov said. “We estimate about twenty percent loss from contact with atmosphere, but the mass that actually lands on the target area should be about forty kilos. It should be something of a spectacle, coming down.”

      “You say you had to assemble it, after creating the negative protons and neutrons and the positrons. Doesn’t any of this sort of matter exist in nature?”

      The man who asked that knew better himself. He just wanted the answer on the record.

      “Oh no; not on this planet, and probably not in the Galaxy. There may be whole galaxies composed of nothing but negamatter. There may even be isolated stars and planetary systems inside our Galaxy composed of negamatter, though I think that very improbable. But when negamatter and posimatter come into contact with one another, the result is immediate mutual annihilation.”

      They managed to get away from the press, and returned as far as the bunkers, a mile and a half away. Before they went inside, Richardson glanced up at the sky, fixing the location of a few of the more conspicuous stars in his mind. There were almost a hundred men and women inside, each at his or her instruments—view-screens, radar indicators, detection instruments of a dozen kinds. The reporters and telecast people arrived shortly afterward, and Eugenio Galvez took them in tow. While Richardson and Pitov were making their last-minute rounds, the countdown progressed past minus one hour, and at minus twenty minutes all the overhead lights went off and the small instrument operators’ lights came on.

      Pitov turned on a couple of view-screens, one from a pickup on the roof of the bunker and another from the launching-pad. They sat down side by side and waited. Richardson got his pipe out and began loading it. The loudspeaker was saying: “Minus two minutes, one fifty nine, fifty eight, fifty seven—”

      He let his mind drift away from the test, back to the world that had been smashed around his ears in the autumn of 1969. He was doing that so often, now, when he should be thinking about—

      “Two seconds, one second. FIRING!”

      It was a second later that his eyes focussed on the left hand view-screen. Red and yellow flames were gushing out at the bottom of the rocket, and it was beginning to tremble. Then the upper jets, the ones that furnished power for the generators, began firing. He looked anxiously at the meters; the generators were building up power. Finally, when he was sure that the rocket would be blasting off anyhow, the separator-charges fired