The Star Read Free Page B

I’ll swear that I never said a word.
    ‘The Aussies, as you may know, have always been pretty hot on scientific research, and they had one team working on fast reactors—those house-broken atomic bombs which are so much more compact than the old uranium piles. The head of the group was a bright but rather impetuous young nuclear physicist I’ll call Dr Cavor. That, of course, wasn’t his real name, but it’s a very appropriate one. You’ll all recollect, I’m sure, the scientist Cavor in Wells’s First Men in the Moon , and the wonderful gravity-screening material Cavorite he discovered?
    ‘I’m afraid dear old Wells didn’t go into the question of Cavorite very thoroughly. As he put it, it was opaque to gravity just as a sheet of metal is opaque to light. Anything placed above a horizontal sheet of Cavorite, therefore, became weightless and floated up into space.
    ‘Well, it isn’t as simple as that. Weight represents energy—an enormous amount of it—which can’t just be destroyed without any fuss. You’d have to put a terrific amount of work into even a small object in order to make it weightless. Antigravity screens of the Cavorite type, therefore, are quite impossible—they’re in the same class as perpetual motion.’
    ‘Three of my friends have made perpetual-motion machines,’ began our unwanted visitor rather stuffily. Harry didn’t let him get any further: he just steamed on and ignored the interruption.
    ‘Now, our Australian Dr Cavor wasn’t searching for antigravity, or anything like it. In pure science, you can be pretty sure that nothing fundamental is ever discovered by anyone who’s actually looking for it—that’s half the fun of the game. Dr Cavor was interested in producing atomic power: what he found was antigravity. And it was quite some time before he realised that was what he’d discovered.
    ‘What happened, I gather, was this: the reactor was of a novel and rather daring design, and there was quite a possibility that it might blow up when the last pieces of fissile material were inserted. So it was assembled by remote control in one of Australia’s numerous convenient deserts, all the final operations being observed through TV sets.
    ‘Well, there was no explosion—which would have caused a nasty radioactive mess and wasted a lot of money, but wouldn’t have damaged anything except a lot of reputations. What actually happened was much more unexpected, and much more difficult to explain.
    ‘When the last piece of enriched uranium was inserted, the control rods pulled out, and the reactor brought up to criticality—everything went dead. The meters in the remote-control room, two miles from the reactor, all dropped back to zero. The TV screen went blank. Cavor and his colleagues waited for the bang, but there wasn’t one. They looked at each other for a moment with many wild surmises: then, without a word, they climbed up out of the buried control chamber.
    ‘The reactor building was completely unchanged: it sat out there in the desert, a commonplace cube of brick holding a million pounds’ worth of fissile material and several years of careful design and development. Cavor wasted no time: he grabbed the jeep, switched on a portable Geiger counter, and hurried off to see what had happened.
    ‘He recovered consciousness in hospital a couple of hours later. There was little wrong with him apart from a bad headache, which was nothing to the one his experiment was going to give him during the next few days. It seemed that when he got to within twenty feet of the reactor, his jeep had hit something with a terrific crash. Cavor had got tangled in the steering wheel and had a nice collection of bruises; the Geiger counter, oddly enough, was quite undamaged and was still clucking away quietly to itself, detecting no more than the normal cosmic-ray background.
    ‘Seen from a distance, it had looked a perfectly normal sort of accident that might have been caused by the jeep