The Gods Themselves

It was a remarkably satisfactory achievement for the young man. Pump Station One was lacking in the glisten of the later stations but it was the granddaddy of them all, of the entire chain that girdled the planet now even though the entire technology was only a couple of decades old. No major technological advance had ever caught hold so rapidly and so entirely and why not? It meant free energy without limit and without problems. It was the Santa Claus and the Aladdin's lamp of the whole world.

Lament had taken the job in order to deal with problems of the highest theoretical abstraction and yet he found himself interested in the amazing story of the development of the Electron Pump. It had never been written up in its entirety by someone who truly understood the theoretical principles (in so far as they could be understood) and who had some ability in translating the complexities for the general public. To be sure, Hallam himself had written a number of articles for the popular media, but these did not represent a connected, reasoned history -something Lament yearned to supply.

He used Hallam's articles to begin with, other reminiscences in published form-the official documents so to speak-carrying them through to Hallam's world-shaking remark, the Great Insight, as it was often called (invariably with capital letters).

Afterward, of course, when Lament had experienced his disillusionment, he began digging deeper, and the question arose in his mind as to whether Hallam's great remark had really been Hallam's. It had been advanced at the seminar which marked the true beginning of the Electron Pump and yet, as it turned out, it was extraordinarily difficult to get the details of that seminar and quite impossible to get the voice recordings.

Eventually, Lamont began to suspect that the dimness of the footprints left on the sands of time by that seminar was not entirely accidental. Putting several items ingeniously together, it began to seem that there was a reasonable chance that John F. X. McFarland had said something very nearly like the crucial statement Hallam had made-and had done so before Hallam.

He went to see McFarland, who was featured not at all in the official accounts, and who was now doing upper-atmosphere research, with particular reference to the Solar wind. It was not a top-echelon job, but it had its perquisites, and it had more than a little to do with Pump effects. McFarland had clearly avoided suffering the fate of oblivion that had overtaken Denison.

He was polite enough to Lament and willing to. talk on any subject except the events of that seminar. That he simply didn't remember.

Lamont insisted, quoted the evidence he had gathered.

McFarland took out a pipe, filled it, inspected its contents thoroughly, and said, with a queer intentness. "I don't choose to remember, because it doesn't matter; it really doesn't. Suppose I laid claim to having said something. No one would believe it. I would look like an idiot and a megalomaniac one."

"And Hallam would see to it that you were retired?"

"I'm not saying that, but I don't see that it would do me any good. What's the difference, anyway?"

"A matter of historical truth!" said Lamont

"Oh, bull. The historical truth is that Hallam never let go. He drove everyone into investigating, whether they wanted to or not. Without him, that tungsten would eventually have exploded with I don't know how many casualties. There might never have been another sample, and we might never have had the Pump. Hallam deserves the credit for it, even if he doesn't deserve the credit, and if that doesn't make sense, I can't help it, because history doesn't make sense."

Lament wasn't satisfied with that, but he had to make it do, for McFarland would simply say no more.

Historical truth!

One piece of historical truth that seemed beyond question was that it was the radioactivity that pulled "Hallam's tungsten" (this is what it was called as a matter of historical custom) into the big time. It didn't matter whether it was or was not tungsten; whether it had or had not been tampered with; even whether it was or was not an impossible isotope. Everything was swallowed up in the amazement of something, anything, which showed a constantly increasing intensity of radioactivity under circumstances that ruled out the existence of any type of radioactive breakdown, in any number of steps, then known.

After a while, Kantrowitsch muttered, "We'd better spread it out. If we keep it in sizable lumps it will vaporize or explode or both and contaminate half the city."

So it was powdered and scattered, and mixed with ordinary tungsten at first and then, when the tungsten grew radioactive in its turn, it was mixed with graphite, which had a lower cross-section to the radiation.