IT WAS going to be a bad day. Hank Merry knew that, before his feet hit the floor that morning. Hank was too practical a man to believe in psychic emanations, but he knew the crawly feeling of Trouble Coming Up when it met him at dawn, and this day felt like Trouble. He just didn’t know how much trouble, was all.
First, he’d overslept — an old failing of his that even modern twenty-first century technology couldn’t seem to beat. His alarm blew a tube during the night and failed to ring. The fancy multiple-mirror contraption rigged outside his fourteenth-story window also failed (the sun didn’t come out that day); and his call-signal went blinking on the lab switchboard over in Jersey for thirty-five minutes before an answering servo got a circuit free to key in his emergency wake-up call. So when the metallic taped voice from the lab finally blared out cheerfully from the telephone speaker: GOOD MORNING DOCTOR MERRY IT IS SEVEN O’CLOCK AND PLEASE THROW YOUR CUTOFF SWITCH AT ONCE OR I WILL BE LOCKED ON THIS MESSAGE FOR THE REST OF THE DAY it was really 7:45, and his regular 7:30 TV session on the mathematics of wavicle conversions was already three blackboards deep in symbols, and he was so lost it would take him two hours over library tapes that night to catch up. And at that, he would still get an absentee mark for failing to flash his check-in signal to the prof before the session began.
With one eye on the wall screen Hank tossed a breakfast pak into the crisper to heat, and pulled the day’s fresh shirt and trousers from the shelf of disposables in the corner. He was usually quite skilled at shaving, watching the TV brain session and cooking breakfast all at the same time; but today he lost the professor’s line of reasoning, then jammed his shaver halfway through his shave. He swore at it and fiddled for ten minutes to get it running again, forgetting his breakfast until the toast was scorched, the eggs hard-boiled and the cereal very crisp indeed. He ate them sourly as the TV session progressed, doodling circuit diagrams on a handy scratch pad at the same time.
He remembered now what was waiting for him at the lab that day. Aside from the maze of wires, tubes, transistors, transmogrifiers and activated Hunyadi plates that were always part of his day, there would be a crew of frantic technicians waiting to tell him that the circuits he’d set up yesterday hadn’t worked. He already knew this, because at eleven o’clock the night before, as he dozed off to sleep, it had dawned on him that he had totally ignored the effects of feedback in one of the critical loops. This meant that when the boys ran a test charge through it after he left the lab, the whole circuit probably went up in a cloud of smoke.
A bad day. He just didn’t know yet how bad.
By nine o’clock the TV session was over and Hank’s aircar was waiting on the building roof. The sky was overcast with the peculiar gray-white you saw when the city’s weather shield was catching a heavy snowfall, and he was re-routed as far south as Atlantic City District because of the low-flying traffic congestion. He stared down at the sprawling East Coast city below as the little aircar finally swung north again toward its destination: the big new Telcom Laboratories building just west of Newark District. Something caught his eye: the high-rising office buildings being erected on the concrete footings that spanned the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey. Great, bare steel girders, half-finished buildings, and not a sign of a work crew or welding flare on any of them. Another bottleneck, Hank thought grimly. No steel. Only a trickle from the mills these days, and that seemed to go to South America or Singapore or some place. Of course, sooner or later there was bound to be steel again, and soon even Manhattan District (still fighting to remain an island in the face of the ever-rising metropolitan congestion) would be indistinguishable from the rest of the tight, sky-scraping city that stretched from Maine to Virginia and from the tip of Long Island to the Alleghenies.
Finally Hank Merry’s aircar set him down on the laboratory roof, only two hours late, and handed him an automatic receipt for his fare, which had already been charged against his bank account. In the big central dispatching room, the green blinking light on the call board showed that McEvoy hadn’t checked in yet … might not be in all day in fact. Probably more conferences down in Washington District, Hank thought gloomily.
The chief seemed to spend most of his time down there these days, walking the tightrope for government funds and trying for the hundredth time to reassure the Joint Conference Committee on Interplanetary Resources that Hank Merry’s transmatter really did have a chance of a breakthrough, if he could just get a prototype model built for testing. Of course, Hank suspected that even McEvoy had his private doubts; Hank’s approach was radical, and so many other attempts in the last ten years had failed. Sometimes Hank himself wondered if his whole approach to matter-transmission didn’t have a hole in it big enough to throw a cat through — one reason that he was working and worrying at the lab from twelve to fifteen hours every day and spending another six hours studying anything and everything that might fill in some of the holes in his knowledge of physics, mathematics and engineering.
Because somebody had to build a practical, working transmatter, and do it soon. There was no question about that.
The elevator let him off in one of the sub-basement rooms where his brain-child — this awkward machine he had been building for the last eighteen months — was under construction. Already its circuits and components filled half a dozen rooms, winding through corridors and covering two full floors of lab space. It reminded Hank of a house he had once seen as a child which contained a huge pipeorgan, with the pipes filling basement and attic, packed into the walls and buried between the floors, so that when you pressed one key of the organ the whole house shook. Aside from his machine, there was a whole warehouse full of giant generators down below, standing ready for the day that the staggering amount of power he knew the finished machine would require in a full-scale test would be demanded.
Such a simple thing, in theory. To take a single cubic centimeter of solid matter at Point A, decompose it into its component sub-atomic wavicles, transmit them like radio waves to a receiver at Point B and there reassemble them in their original order, shape and relationship, atom to atom. If you could do it with a few grams of steel, you could do it with millions of tons of ore from the deserts of Mars, eventually. Such a simple thing, matter-transmission … yet so very elusive when you actually tried to do it.
The whole future economy of an overcrowded and slowly starving Earth hung in the balance while laboratories all over the world labored to find the secret.
In the main workroom a couple of long-faced technicians met Hank Merry at the door with the long-faced tale he had been expecting. Not just one day’s circuitry burned out; the idiots had hooked it up to an activated Hunyadi plate during the test, fusing the delicate sheaves of silver mesh in the plate and cooking five hundred gallons of a very special colloidal protein suspension into baked custard….
Hank Merry sighed and dug in for the day.