The Gods Themselves Read Free Page A

chaired by anyone but Hallam. As a matter of fact, Kantrowitsch died five months later and the only personality with sufficient prestige to keep Hallam in the shade was removed.
    The meeting was extraordinarily fruitless until Hallam announced his Great Insight, but in the version as reconstructed by Lamont, the real turning point came during the luncheon break. At that time, McFarland, who is not credited with any remarks in the official records, although he was listed as an attendee, said "You know, what we need is a little bit of fantasy here. Suppose—"
    He was speaking to Diderick van Klemens, and Van Klemens reported it sketchily in a kind of personal shorthand in his own notes. Long before Lamont had succeeded in tracking that down, Van Klemens was dead, and though his notes convinced Lamont himself, he had to admit they would not make a convincing story without further corroboration. What's more, there was no way of proving that Hallam had overheard the remark. Lamont would have been willing to bet a fortune that Hallam was within earshot, but that willingness was not satisfactory proof either.
    And then, suppose Lamont could prove it. It might hurt Hallam's egregious pride, but it couldn't really shake his position. It would be argued that to McFarland, the remark was only fantasy. It was Hallam who accepted it as something more. It was Hallam who was willing to stand up in front of the group and say it officially and risk the derision that might be his. McFarland would surely never have dreamed of placing himself on official record with his "little bit of fantasy."
    Lamont might have counter-argued that McFarland was a well-known nuclear physicist with a reputation to lose, while Hallam was a young radiochemist who could say anything he pleased in nuclear physics and, as an outsider, get away with it.
    In any case, this is what Hallam said, according to the official transcript:
    "Gentlemen, we are getting nowhere. I am therefore going to make a suggestion, not because it necessarily makes sense, but because it represents less nonsense than anything else I've heard. . . . We are faced with a substance, plutonium-186, that cannot exist at all, let alone as an even momentarily stable substance, if the natural laws of the Universe have any validity at all. It follows, then, that since it does indubitably exist and did exist as a stable substance to begin with, it must have existed, at least to begin with, in a place or at a time or under circumstances where the natural laws of the Universe were other than they are. To put it bluntly, the substance we are studying did not originate in our Universe at all, but in another—an alternate Universe—a parallel Universe. Call it what you want.
    "Once here—and I don't pretend to know how it got across—it was stable still and I suggest that this was because it carried the laws of its own Universe with it. The fact that it slowly became radioactive and? then ever more radioactive may mean that the laws of our own Universe slowly soaked into its substance, if you know what I mean.
    "I point out that at the same time that the plutonium-186 appeared, a sample of tungsten, made up of several stable isotopes, including tungsten-186, disappeared. It may have slipped over into the parallel Universe. After all, it is logical to suppose that it is simpler for an exchange of mass to take place than for a one-way transfer to do so. In the parallel Universe, tungsten-186 may be as anomalous as plutonium-186 is here. It may begin as a stable substance and slowly become increasingly radioactive. It may serve as an energy source there just as plutonium-186 would here."
    The audience must have been listening with considerable astonishment for there is no record of interruption, at least until the sentence last recorded above, at which time Hallam seemed to have paused to catch his breath and perhaps to wonder at his own temerity.
    Someone from the audience (presumably Antoine-Jerome Lapin,