The Ultimate Image

by P. Schuyler Miller

Imagine an invaded nation squatting down behind a perfectly reflecting wall. They can't see out, but nothing can get in. Enemy shells bounce off into the enemy lines. Death rays flash back into the faces of those who sent them. Radio is garbled by all kinds of curious echoes and reflections, making communication impossible. Electrical and magnetic apparatus would be subject to strange disturbances. And gravitation—how would it affect that? Would every outside object be attracted to the mirror, or would it be repelled by a kind of negative gravity, lifting it into space, to the moon, the planets, to the very stars? I wish now that I'd known at least a fraction of what Bill did, and had been able to read what he read in these few sheets of neatly written paper. I can only guess, from what Dampier said and from what I saw. What his zone really was—what it could do—I do not know.

I tried to pay attention to what he was doing. The real vitals of his apparatus were in the big insulated block. The thousands of amperes he was drawing from the high-tension lines were merely the kicker that kept the real engine turning. Atomic energy, Bill had guessed. Probably he was right.

The loops and coils above the platform determined the shape that the zone would take. According to how they were set, Dampier explained, he could get any geometrically continuous form—a disc, a paraboloid, anything that geometry can describe. What he was going to make was a sphere.

I'm not at all sure that I'm getting the order of things right. I gathered that the zone must be built up and strengthened little by little; first impermeable to the simplest forms of energy, like light and heat, and then to the more and more complex ones, until at some critical point the whole thing became absolute. The machine that created it had to be outside, otherwise the zone itself would keep any power from getting through. On the other hand, it might be powered by one of those super-batteries that Dampier had in the grip of his solenoid-gun. With a set-up like that, you could dig a hole and pull it in after you, so to speak. What I wondered was how you get out?

I asked Dampier that one. "There would be no way," he told me. "Once the zone is complete, it is unchangeable—absolute. You would be inside, to us here, but I think that to yourself it would seem that it is we who are inside—that you are in a world all of your own, with its own laws, its own science. They can be worked out, these laws. They are in the equations that Monsieur Porter is reading; but they are very strange and complex. In war, a closed zone would be used only as a trap for the enemy."

"Wait a minute," I objected. "You mean to say that once you've made this thing you can't unmake it?"

"That is right," he nodded. "Once the zone is complete it is a bubble—a nothingness—entirely apart from our Space and Time. The forces build up very rapidly, exponentially, but until the very instant of completion, even if it is one little billionth of a second before that moment, the zone will collapse if the power which builds it is shut off. Never in practice would one go so far. Long before it is complete, such a zone will repel all things that can be directed against it, while the balance of power still remains in the hands of him who has created it. To make it—that is nothing. To destroy it is impossible. But to hold it so in the delicate balance between destruction and completion; that is the triumph of Pierre Dampier! I have calculated it all from the equations. See—here at these red lines each needle must stop. If they go beyond—zut! In the space of a thinking the zone is complete! Beyond control!"

He straightened up, his wirey mop of hair bobbing at my shoulder. "Now, please, if you will watch and remember. The loops are set, so, for the sphere—little, like the apple of the eye. Now I press the first switch, and the second and then the others, three, and four, and five. Now I turn the dials, so, a little at a time. A minute now, while the zone builds, and then you will call Monsieur Porter and show him that this is not all sunshine and honeysuckers that he reads."

The big machine began to hum a deep-throated drone that deepened and strengthened until I could feel it shaking the floor under my feet with each colossal pulse of energy. I wondered about the sympathetic vibrations you read about in the Sunday supplements. Might it not shake the walls down around our ears? But Dampier didn't seem worried. And then I forgot it, for a shadow was beginning to form in the space between the coils.

That's all it was at first—a shadow, the size of a big red polished apple. I could hardly be sure it was there, but there was something queer about the way light acted that showed me where it was. Things behind it disappeared, smothered out by something that wasn't really darkness; and then suddenly it began to shine.