Read Ebook: Deutsche Charaktere und Begebenheiten by Wassermann Jakob

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 110 lines and 2346 words, and 3 pages

The doctor considered that. The same pattern again--a psychotic denial of identity and a fear of pain at the dimly-grasped concept of return. Pollard turned to the sheets of notes on his desk. James Forrest Carroll had been a brilliant theorist and excellent from the practical standpoint too.

Thirty-three years old and in perfect health, his enjoyment of life was basically sound and he was about as stable as any physicist in the long list of scientific and technical men known to the Solar System's scientists.

Yesterday he had been brilliant--working on a problem that had stumped the technicians for thirty years. Today he was not quite bright, denying his brilliance with a vicious refusal to help. He remembered nothing of his work, obviously.

"You know what the Lawson Radiation is?"

"No," came the instant reply but a slight twinge of pain-syndrome crossed his face.

"You do not want to remember because you think you will have to go back to the Lawson Lab?"

"I--don't know it--" faltered James Forrest Carroll. It was obviously a lie.

"If I promise that you will never be asked about it?"

"No," said Carroll uneasily. Then with the first burst of real intelligence he had shown since his stumbling body had been picked up by the Terran Police, Carroll added, "You cannot stop me from thinking about it."

"Then you do know it?"

Carroll relapsed instantly. "No," he said sullenly.

Dr. Pollard nodded. "Tomorrow?" he pleaded.

"Why?"

Pollard knew that the wish to aid Carroll would fall on deaf ears. Carroll did not care to be helped. There were other ways.

"Because I must do my job or I shall be released," said Pollard. "You must permit me to try, at least. Will you?"

"I--yes."

"Good. No one will know that I am not trying hard. But we'll make it look good?"

"Yes."

"Do you know where your home is?" asked Pollard with his mental fingers crossed.

"No."

Pollard sighed.

"Then you stay here. Miss Farragut will show you a quiet room where you can sleep. Tomorrow we'll find your home from the files. Then you can go home."

Pollard got out of there. He knew that Carroll would not leave--could not leave. He prescribed a husky sedative to be put in Carroll's last drink of water for the night and went home himself, his mind humming with speculation.

The conference was composed of Pollard, Majors, and most of the other key men in the Lawson Laboratory. Pollard spoke first.

"James Carroll is a victim of a rather deep-seated amnesia," he said. "Amnesia is, of course, a mechanism of the mind set up to avoid some bitter reality. In Carroll's case, not only is the amnesia passive--some warning agency in Carroll's amnesiac mind warns him that regaining his true identity will result in great pain.

"It is something concerned with his work. We'd like to know what about the study of the Lawson Radiation could produce such a painful reality."

"We all get a bit fed up at times," remarked Tom Jackwell. "It's heartbreaking to sit daily and try things that never do anything."

"We are like an aborigine, born on an isolated island three hundred yards in diameter who has just discovered that certain blackish rocks tend to attract one another and point north. Amusing for a time, but what is it good for and what ungodly mechanism causes it?" said Majors with a shrug.

"Just what is the latest theory on the Lawson Radiation?" asked Pollard.

"You guess," said John Majors ruefully. "We've had too many theories already. The Lawson Radiation is a strange creation out of Bo?tes by Arcturus, and borne like Zephyr on the wind.

"Certain elemental minerals, when in contact with other minerals, produce a pulsing radiofrequency current which can be detected after more amplification than the human mind can contemplate sensibly.

"The frequency output depends upon the type of minerals used, and it is completely random so far as any consistent pattern goes. Some elemental minerals are no good, some are excellent."

"You've made determinant charts?"

"Naturally. But there's no determinant. After I said elemental minerals, I should have said that this was the original premise. Now we have a detector working with helium gas surrounding a block of lead bromide.

"Lead and helium are no good, helium and bromine equally poor. Lead and bromide are no good--as long as it lasts. Now don't ask me if the combination of the elements interferes. One good detector operates so wonderfully all the time, that a bit of yellow phosphorus is forming phosphorus pentoxid because it is suspended in an atmosphere of pure oxygen."

"No apparent determining factors, hey?"

"None. You might as well pick out the elements with six-letter names. The periodic chart looks like the scatter-pattern of an open-choke shotgun. Water works fine when it is contained in a glass vessel, but in anything else we know of--no dice."

"You seem to have covered a multitude of things," said Dr. Pollard approvingly.

"We've had a corps of brilliant, imaginative technicians working on the theory and practise for thirty years. Every one of them has come up with a number of elemental detecting combinations. We're now working on four and five element permutations.

"With and without plain and complex electrostatic and magnetic fields--and mixtures of both. We've gone logically as far as we can under a system that demands that we try everything. In each set of permutations, we cover all. You know our motto."

Majors finished with a slight laugh. He pointed to the end of the conference room, where, lettered on the wall above the blackboard was--

LEAVE NO TURN UNSTONED!

"Where does it come from?" asked Pollard innocently.

"Take a fifteen-degree angle from the middle of Bo?tes. Maybe Arcturus for all we know. Somewhere within fifteen degrees of an arbitrary point up there. A total conic solid angle of thirty degrees will encompass all but wisps of the stuff that filter through once in a year or so."

"And the velocity of propagation?"

"That's the simplest thing to check. The pulses from the Lawson Radiation follow random patterns. A segment printed along a time-scale can be matched to another segment of the same radiation taken from the other side of the solar system.

"It's never perfect enough to do more than approximate the answer, but we've got to get a lot more dispersion than the breadth of the orbit of the planet Pluto before we can detect any time-delay--and if we go too far the synchronization of our test equipment gets more and more difficult. You guess."

Pollard thought for a moment. "I can't hope to know all the angles," he said. "This is sufficient until I have to know more about it. Now tell me what might drive a man into instability?"

"You tell us," laughed Majors shortly. His laugh was not genuine for he felt the loss of Carroll deeply.

"Is there any insoluble dilemma in this at all?"

"Not that we know of."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet