When the atoms failed

by Jr. John W. Campbell

"But man discovered other ways of releasing his energies and converting it into electricity in a way that did not exist in nature. Manifestly it is possible to do the same with the energy of matter, and I have done it.

"The object of this trip, Dave, is exploration. I am going to the other planets, and I want you to come along. I believe I am prepared for any trouble we may meet there. That machine gun shoots bullets loaded with a bit of matter that will explode on impact. There is only a dust grain of it there, but it is as violent as ten tons of dynamite. If I exploded the entire shell, remember I would get the equivalent of thirty-five thousand tons of dynamite—which is manifestly unsafe. There are also a series of projectors around the car that project heat rays. These rays are capable of volatilizing anything that will absorb them. The projectors of all the rays have a separate generator unit directly connected. The unit is built right into the projector, but controlled from here. They are small, but tremendously more powerful than any power plant the Earth has ever seen before—each one can far outdo the great million and a half horse power station in San Francisco. They can develop in the neighborhood of fifty million horsepower each!"

"Lord, Steve, I'm no scientist, and when you speak glibly of power sources millions, billions of times more powerful than coal, I'm not only lost, I'm scared. And you have a couple dozen of those fifty-million-horse-power-generators around this ship. What would happen if they got short-circuited or something?"

"If they did, which I don't believe they will, they would either explode the entire ship, and incidentally make the Earth at least stagger in its orbit, or fuse it instantaneously and so destroy themselves. I might add that we would not survive the calamity."

"No, I rather guessed that. But, Steve, here in the utter cold and utter vacuum of space I should think that it would be hard to heat the ship. How do you do it?"

"The first thing to do in any explanation is to point out that space is neither empty nor cold. In the second place, a vacuum couldn't be either hot or cold. Temperature is a condition of matter, and if there is no matter, there can be no temperature. But space is quite full—about one atom per cubic inch. There is so much matter between us and the fixed stars that we can actually detect the spectrum of space superposed on the spectrum of the star. The light that the stars send us across the intervening spaces comes to us laden with a message of the contents of space—and tells of millions of tons of calcium and sodium. Even the tiny volume of our solar system contains in its free space about 125,000,000,000 grams of matter. That doesn't mean much to an astronomer—but when you remember that every gram of that can furnish as much energy as 10,000,000,000 grams of coal, we see that it isn't so little! And as space does have matter, it can have a temperature, and does. It has a temperature of about 15,000 degrees. Most of the atoms of that space have escaped from the surface of stars and have a temperature about the same as that of the surface of the stars. So you see that space utterly cold—is hotter than anything on Earth! The only difficulty is that it takes a whale of a lot of space to contain enough atoms to weigh a gram, and so the average concentration of heat is so low that we can say that space is cold. Similarly a block of ice may contain far more heat than a piece of red-hot iron. Nevertheless; I would prefer to sit on the ice."

"Quite so, I see your point, and I believe I'd prefer the ice myself. But that's interesting! Space isn't empty, it's not cold, in fact it is unusually hot!"

"Now we've started this let's finish it, Dave. It is hot, but not unusually hot—if anything it is unusually cold! The usual, or average temperature of all the matter in the universe is about one million degrees, so space at 15,000 is really far below the average, and so we can say that it is unusually cold. The temperature of the interior of the stars is uniformly forty million degrees, which brings the average up. But it is the unthinkably great quantities of matter in interstellar space that brings the average down. Remember that the nearest star is four and a half light years from us, and between the stars there is such a vast space in which the matter is thinly distributed that the few pinpoint concentrations of matter have to be extremely hot if they are to bring the average up any appreciable amount. But here and there in this vast space there are a few tiny bits of matter that have cooled down to terrifically frigid temperatures—temperatures within a few degrees of absolute zero, only two or three hundred degrees above; spots of matter so cold that hydrogen and oxygen can unite; so cold that this compound can even condense to a liquid; so cold that life can exist. We call those pinpoints planets.

"In the interstellar range of temperatures we have everywhere from absolute zero to forty million above. Life can exist between the temperatures absolute, of about two hundred and three hundred and twenty—a range of one hundred degrees in a range of forty million. That means that the temperature of this planet must be maintained with an allowable inaccuracy of one part in four hundred thousand! Do you see what the chances of a planet's having a 'habitable' temperature are?

"But we are near my laboratory now, Dave, and I want to introduce you to Wright, my laboratory assistant, a brilliant student, and an uncannily clever artisan. He made Bartholemew, as I call the mathematics machine, and most of the parts of this ship. He had heat rays to work with, and had iridium metal as his material, and plenty of any element. He had a fine time working out the best alloy, and the best treatment. The shell of the car is made of an alloy of tungsten, iridium and cobalt. It is exceedingly tough, very strong, and very hard. It will scratch glass, is stronger than steel, and is as ductile and malleable as copper—if you have sufficient force. Iridium used to sell for about 250 dollars an ounce, but these powers allow me to transmute it, which renders it cheap for me. After this, sodium metal will be cheaper than sodium compounds!"