“Well, Henry, I’ve got some hot irons in the fire—and I’ve sort of lost interest in rockets. I liked working with you fine. We did a lot together. In fact, eight years is the longest I’ve ever held one job. But I’ve got a notion to strike out on my own now. I’ve got a couple bankers putting up the cash for me to set up and develop my gadget.”
This wouldn’t be the first time unknowing financiers had been taken by a likely looking gadget they didn’t understand, Enright knew. And it was a hundred-to-one anyway that, providing it did work, O’Neil would be taken to the cleaners by the money boys. “You mean you finally got an antigravity gadget to work?” he’d asked with tongue in cheek.
“Naw, not yet, Henry. I got all the groundwork done and the plans laid out. The patents are being held up until I can show that it works, and I need more equipment and money to do that. If it don’t, work, I’ve got some more ideas that will.”
In three years, Bill O’Neil’s ideas had changed the course of history and put Henry Enright out of a job. But Enright didn’t realize that at the time.
He’d read about the O’Neil Drive when it was first announced by the new Western Space Craft Associates, Inc. He didn’t understand it exactly. In fact, nobody seemed to understand much about it. The theorists were busy regrouping their ideas and concepts of Maxwell’s electromagnetic laws and Einsteinian physics. There were those mathematicians, mostly nondimensional analysts, who took the attitude of having known it all the time.
However, most of the experts and authorities seemed to agree on one point. They could not understand how Bill O’Neil had done it. There was a great tendency among them to feel that O’Neil had stumbled onto it by blind luck. After all, he had had no formal training in the elements of high math, theoretical physics, nuclear and sub-nuclear physics, spatiophysics, electromagnetics, and unified field theory. Yet he had founded the new science of gravities and had put it to practical use.
The O’Neil Drive was just as baffling as the way O’Neil had developed it. It was large and required a tremendous energy source, but it could drive a ship out of the Earth’s powerful gravity field. The power source was extremely complicated and approached an unbelievable ninety-nine per cent efficiency. The actual drive unit itself was as deceptively simple in appearance and construction as an electrical transformer. It didn’t look like it could work, but it did.
And, most amazing of all, Bill O’Neil was in control of his company. He had matched wits with the financial brains of the world and had come out of the game one-up. His patents were so basic and his drive unit so indispensable that he also became “Mister Space Travel.” When he landed the Venture on the Moon, the entire Solar System became his plaything, lock, stock, and barrel. Rockets were no longer the only way, they were not even the best way, so they were abandoned.
It did not happen overnight, but when rocketry collapsed, it did so with a bang. Enright remembered the day with bitterness. He had just successfully completed the development tests at Devil’s Head on the first catalyst monopropellant unit. He had advanced the science of rocketry, and he had been elated that day.