Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 2 (1926-02).djvu/30

ates the atom. Do they revolve in orbits? My answer is yes, and I have given proof of my theory. When I determined this in my tests, I worked to one end—the discovery of what would happen by changing their orbits or halting their revolutions. The force that actuates them, that actuates all matter, is electric, the term we have chosen for the very fluid of life itself. Man thinks he has accomplished much with his devices for the harnessing of this vital fluid, but he is only at the threshold.

"I harnessed it in a new way. As you tune in with your radio set to the broadcasting waves of the air, I finally tuned in to the wave length, the period of revolution of the electron. Your set receives, mine controls. My theory is simple. Knowing the period of the electron, I meet it with an impulse, halt its revolution, halt the system of electrons whose flow makes up the atom, and the atom breaks down. So matter is changed. So life will be changed."

Blandon stared at him as he finished. Here was the man who had changed the world overnight. He dismissed the miracles of research in a few words. "So matter is changed," he said. "So life will be changed." Blandon could see the change, but not as Thorsby saw it. He saw rapine and destruction, the tearing down of a hard-won civilization, where super-science would drive man back to the lowest primitive, where tooth and claw would be the law as in the days when the ice-sheet first left the world. Thorsby gave him no chance to begin his arguments.

"Would you care to see an experiment?" The scientist pushed back his chair and lifted his plate from the table. "You can spare me this plate, daughter?" he asked Hilda humorously. She nodded. "Come with me, and I will show you." Blandon followed him to the laboratory with its heavy oaken door.

It might have been the show room of a shop dealing in radio instruments. Coils, tubes, bulbs, electrical appliances of all descriptions lay on a heavy table which stretched across one side of the room. In one corner was a motor. One wall was covered with transformers, so Blandon judged them to be, though of a new type. At one end of the table was a glistening control board. Wattmeters, ammeters, switches and long, dull-glowing tubes were fastened to it. A few feet away, connected by heavy wires, was a queer grid arrangement. It might have been a miniature copy of the common electric heater, with four coils at its center. The protecting wire cage did not extend to the edges of the reflector bowl, but was supported on four vulcanite posts. The cage itself was a cone, ending in four glistening points.

Thorsby led the way to the switchboard. He placed a small iron stand directly before the miniature heater, so Blandon called it for want of a better name, and about two feet away.

"I will not attempt to explain my system," Thorsby said. "However, it is an amplification of the original Hertzian theory. I will now destroy the things that are on this plate, one at a time, in part, and then the whole. It is a question of intensity, and my force may be directed to any point. Stand behind me, please."

As he talked, Thorsby threw in a switch. The tubes on the control board leaped info a vivid light. There was a slight humming in the transmitter, which Blandon now recognized the heater to be. At its base was a vulcanite handle. Thorsby grasped this.

"A feature of this force is that its range may be determined absolutely. This impulse will not act beyond three feet, therefore the room is safe. Watch!"