"There are ninety-two different types of atoms, but if you have half a dozen men all doing exactly the same thing, can you call them 'a man'? They have found more than six different kinds of lead, two different kinds of chlorine, several different kinds of argon, and many of the other elements are really averages of several kinds of atoms, all of which do exactly the same thing, but have different weights. They are called isotopes. We say the atomic weight of chlorine is 35.457, but really there is no atom that has that weight. They have weights of 35 and 37, and are jumbled together so that the average is 35.457. Really there are over a hundred different kinds of atoms. In my work on this ship I found it made quite a difference which kind of chlorine atom I had."
"Well, how does this machine work, and what do you mean by saying that a machine invented it?"
"Dave, you know that for a number of years the greatest advances in physics have been made along the lines of mathematical work in atomic structure. Einstein was the greatest of the mathematicians, and so the greatest of the atomicists. Now as you well know, I never was too good at mathematics but I did love atomic structure, and I had some ideas, but I needed someone to work out the mathematics of the theory for me.
"You remember that back in 1929 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology they had a machine they called the integraph, an electrical machine that could do calculus too complex for Einstein himself to work out, and problems it would take Einstein months to solve, the machine could solve in a few minutes. It could actually do mathematics beyond the scope of the human brain. The calculus is a wonderful tool with which man can dig out knowledge, but he has to keep making his shovel bigger and bigger to dig deeper and deeper into the field of science. Toward the end of this decade, things got so the tail was wagging the dog to a considerable extent, the shovel was bigger than the man—we couldn't handle the tool. When that happened in the world once before they made a still bigger shovel, and hitched it to an electric motor. All the integraph did was to hitch the calculus to an electric motor—and then things began to happen.
"I developed that machine further in my laboratory, and carried it far beyond the original plans. I can do with it a type of mathematics that was never before possible, and that mathematics, on that machine, has done something no man ever did. It has found the secret of the atom, and released for us atomic energy. But that wasn't all, the machine kept working at those great long equations, reducing the number of variables, changing, differentiating, integrating, and then I saw where it was leading! I was scared when I saw what those equations meant. I was afraid that the machine had made an error, I was deathly afraid to test that last equation, the equation which the machine was absolutely unable to change. It had been working with the equations of matter, and now it had reached the ultimate, definitive equation of all matter! This final equation gave explicit instructions to the understanding; it told just how to completely destroy matter! It told how to release such terrific energy, I was afraid to try it. The equations of atomic energy I had tested and found good, I had succeeded in releasing the energy of atoms.
"But the energy of matter has been known for many years; simple arithmetic can calculate the energy in one gram of matter. One gram is the equivalent of about ten drops of water and that much matter contains 900,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs of energy, all this in ten drops of water! Mass is just as truly a measure of energy as ergs, as foot-pounds or as kilo-watt hours. You might buy your electricity by the pound. If you had five hundred million dollars or so, you could buy a pound. You have heard of atomic energy, of how terrifically powerful it is. It is just about one million times as great as the energy of coal. But that titanic energy is as little compared to the energy of matter itself, as the strength of an ant is compared to my strength. Material energy is ten thousand million times as great as the energy of coal. Perhaps now you can see why I was afraid to try out those equations. One gram of matter could explode as violently as seven thousand tons of dynamite!
"But the machine was right. I succeeded in releasing that awful energy. I happened to release it as a heat ray, and the apparatus had been pointed in the direction of an open window luckily. Beyond that was just sand. The window was volatilized instantly, and the sand was melted to a great mass of fused quartz. It is there, and will be there for centuries, a two-mile streak of melted sand fifty feet broad! It makes a wonderful road of six foot thick glass! The machine showed me a thousand ways to apply it. I am driving this ship by means of an interesting bit of apparatus that the calculating machine designed. You remember Einstein's general relativity theory said that mass, gravity, bent space; but as it didn't fall in, as it would if attracted and not resisting, it must be that it is elastic. The field theory that he brought out back in 1929 showed that gravity and electrostatic fields were at least similar. I found, with the aid of my machine, that they were very closely related. I charge the walls of my ship strongly negative, then I have a piece of apparatus here that will distort that electrostatic field so it cuts off gravity—and the ship has no weight. The propulsion is simple also. I told you that space was elastic. I have a projector, or series of projectors all around the ship which will throw a beam of a ray which tends to bend space toward it. The space resists, and since the mountain won't come to Mahomet, Mahomet goes to the mountain—and the ship sails along nicely.
"The only theoretical limit to my speed is, of course, the velocity of light. At that speed any body would have infinite mass, and as you can't produce an infinite force, you certainly can't go any faster, and you can't go that fast in fact. If I accelerated one of the little five gram bullets I use in that machine gun to the speed of an alpha particle such as radium shoots off, not a very high speed in space, it would require as much energy to get it up to that speed, 10,000 miles a second, as five thousand fast freights, each a thousand tons apiece, would require to get up a speed of a mile a minute. You see that there is no possibility of getting up any speed like that even with material energy—it is too expensive even with that cheap energy—for it costs just as much to slow down again!
"The interesting thing about this energy is that scientists have known about it for a good many years, and while hundreds of people told about atomic energy, no one outside of the scientists ever spoke of the far greater energy of matter. The scientists said that the sun used that energy to maintain its heat—forty million degrees on the interior of the sun. They said man could never duplicate that temperature nor that pressure that prevails at the interior of the sun. They therefore said that man would never be able to release that energy. But the sun had to raise thousands of tons of water, and blow that vapor many miles, and do a lot of other complicated things before there was any lightning. Man would never be able to reproduce those conditions, and he would never be able to make lightning. Besides, if he did, what good would his electricity do him; it would be so wild, and so useless.