MICROCOSMIC GOD


MICROCOSMIC GOD

by Theodore Sturgeon

Here is a story about a man who had too much power, and a man who took too
much, but don’t worry; I’m not going political on you. The man who had the
power was named James Kidder and the other was his banker.
Kidder was quite a guy. He was a scientist and he lived on a small island off the
New England coast all by him-self. He wasn’t the dwarfed little gnome of a mad
scientist you read about. His hobby wasn’t personal profit, and he wasn’t a
megalomaniac with a Russian name and no scruples. He wasn’t insidious, and he
wasn’t even partic-ularly subversive. He kept his hair cut and his nails clean and
lived and thought like a reasonable human being. He was slightly on the baby-
faced side; he was inclined to be a hermit; he was short and plump and-brilliant.
His spe-cialty was biochemistry, and he was always called Mr. Kidder. Not “Dr.”
Not “Professor.” Just Mr. Kidder.
He was an odd sort of apple and always had been. He had never graduated from
any college or university be-cause he found them too slow for him, and too rigid
in their approach to education. He couldn’t get used to the idea that perhaps his
professors knew what they were talk-ing about. That went for his texts, too. He
was always ask-ing questions, and didn’t mind very much when they were
embarrassing. He considered Gregor Mendel a bungling liar, Darwin an amusing
philosopher, and Luther Burbank a sensationalist. He never opened his mouth
without leav-ing his victim feeling breathless. If he was talking to some-one who
had knowledge, he went in there and got it, leav-ing his victim breathless. If he
was talking to someone whose knowledge was already in his possession, he only
asked repeatedly, “How do you know?” His most delect-able pleasure was cutting
a fanatical eugenicist into conversational ribbons. So people left him alone and
never, never asked him to tea. He was polite, but not politic.
He had a little money of his own, and with it he leased the island and built himself
a laboratory. Now I’ve men-tioned that he was a biochemist. But being what he
was, he couldn’t keep his nose in his own field. It wasn’t too remarkable when he
made an intellectual excursion wide enough to perfect a method of crystallizing
Vitamin B1 profitably by the ton-if anyone wanted it by the ton. He got a lot of

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money for it. He bought his island outright and put eight hundred men to work on
an acre and a half of his ground, adding to his laboratory and building equipment.
He got to messing around with sisal fiber, found out how to fuse it, and boomed
the banana industry by producing a practically unbreakable cord from the stuff.
You remember the popularizing demonstration he put on at Niagara, don’t you?
That business of running a line of the new cord from bank to bank over the rapids
and suspending a ten-ton truck from the middle of it by razor edges resting on the
cord? That’s why ships now moor themselves with what looks like heaving line,
no thicker than a lead pencil, that can be coiled on reels like garden hose. Kidder
made cigarette money out of that, too. ‘He went out and bought himself a
cyclotron with part of it.
After that money wasn’t money any more. It was large numbers in little books.
Kidder used little amounts of it to have food and equipment sent out to him, but
after a while that stopped, too. His bank dispatched a messenger by seaplane to
find out if Kidder was still alive. The man returned two days later in a bemused
state, having been amazed something awesome at the things he’d seen out there.
Kidder was alive, all right, and he was turning out a surplus of good food in an
astonishingly simplified syn-thetic form. The bank wrote immediately and wanted
to know if Mr. Kidder, in his own interest, was willing to release the secret of his
dirtless farming. Kidder replied that he would be glad to, and enclosed the
formulas. In a P.S. he said that he hadn’t sent the information ashore because he
hadn’t realized anyone would be interested. That from a man who was responsible
for the greatest sociological change in the second half of the twentieth century-
factory farming. It made him richer; I mean it made his bank richer. He didn’t
give a rap.
Kidder didn’t really get started until about eight months after the messenger’s
visit. For a biochemist who couldn’t even be called ”Doctor” he did pretty well.
Here is a par-tial list of the things that he turned out:
A commercially feasible plan for making an aluminum alloy stronger than the best
steel so that it could be used as a structural metal. . .
An exhibition gadget he called a light pump, which worked on the theory that
light is a form of matter and therefore subject to physical and electromagnetic
laws. Seal a room with a single source, beam a cylindrical vibratory magnetic
field to it from the pump, and the light will be led down it. Now pass the light

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through Kidder’s “lens”-a ring which perpetuates an electric field along the lines
of a high-speed iris-typo camera shutter. Below this is the heart of the light pump-
a ninety-eight-per-cent efficient light absorber, crystalline, which, in a sense, loses
the light in its internal facets. The effect of darkening the room with this apparatus
is slight but measurable. Pardon my layman’s language, but that’s the general idea.
Synthetic chlorophyll-by the barrel.
An airplane propeller efficient at eight times sonic speed.
A cheap goo you brush on over old paint, let harden, and then peel off like strips
of cloth. The old paint comes with it. That one made friends fast.
A self-sustaining atomic disintegration of uranium’s iso-tope 238, which is two
hundred times as plentiful as the old stand-by, U-235.
That will do for the present. If I may repeat myself; for a biochemist who couldn’t
even be called “Doctor,” he did pretty well.
Kidder was apparently unconscious of the fact that he held power enough on his
little island to become master of the world. His mind simply didn’t run to things
like that. As long as he was left alone with his experiments, he was well content to
leave the rest of the world to its own clumsy and primitive devices. He couldn’t be
reached except by a radiophone of his own design, and the only counterpart was
locked in a vault of his Boston bank. Only one man could operate it. The
extraordinarily sensitive transmitter would respond only to Conant’s own body
vibrations. Kidder had instructed Conant that he was not to be disturbed except by
messages of the greatest moment. His ideas and patents, what Conant could pry
out of him, were released under pseudonyms known only to Conant- Kidder didn’t
care.
The result, of course, was an infiltration of the most astonishing advancements
since the dawn of civilization. The nation profited-the world profited. But most of
all, the bank profited. It began to get a little oversize. It began getting its fingers
into other pies. It grew more fingers and had to bake more figurative pies. Before
many years had passed, it was so big that, using Kidder’s many weapons, it almost
matched Kidder in power.
Almost.
Now stand by while I squelch those fellows in the lower left-hand corner who’ve
been saying all this while that Kidder’s slightly improbable; that no man could
ever per-fect himself in so many ways in so many sciences.

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Well, you’re right. Kidder was a genius-granted. But his genius was not creative.
He was, to the core, a student. He applied what he knew, what he saw, and what
he was taught. When first he began working in his new laboratory on his island he
reasoned something like this:
“Everything I know is what I have been taught by the sayings and writings of
people who have studied the say-ings and writings of people who have-and so on.
Once in a while someone stumbles on something new and he or someone cleverer
uses the idea and disseminates it. But for each one that finds something really
new, a couple of million gather and pass on information that is already current. I’d
know more if I could get the jump on evolu-tionary trends. It takes too long to
wait for the accidents that increase man’s knowledge-my knowledge. If I had
ambition enough now to figure out how to travel ahead in time, I could skim the
surface of the future and just dip down when I saw something interesting. But
time isn’t that way. It can’t be left behind or tossed ahead. What else is left?
“Well, there’s the proposition of speeding intellectual evolution so that I can
observe what it cooks up. That seems a bit inefficient. It would involve more labor
to discipline human minds to that extent than it would to simply apply myself
along those lines. But I can’t apply myself that way. No man can.
“I’m licked. I can’t speed myself up, and I can’t speed other men’s minds up. Isn’t
there an alternative? There must be-somewhere, somehow, there’s got to be an
answer.”
So it was on this, and not on eugenics, or light pumps, or botany, or atomic
physics, that James Kidder applied himself. For a practical man he found the
problem slightly on the metaphysical side; but he attacked it with typical
thoroughness, using his own peculiar brand of logic. Day after day he wandered
over the island, throwing shells im-potently at sea gulls and swearing richly. Then
came a time when he sat indoors and brooded. And only then did he get feverishly
to work.
He worked in his own field, biochemistry, and concen-trated mainly on two things-
genetics and animal metab-olism. He learned, and filed away in his insatiable
mind, many things having nothing to do with the problem at hand, and very little
of what he wanted. But he piled that little on what little he knew or guessed, and
in time had quite a collection of known factors to work with. His approach was
characteristically unorthodox. He did things on the order of multiplying apples by

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pears, and balancing equations by adding log V-i to one side and °° to the other.
He made mistakes, but only one of a kind, and later, only one of a species. He
spent so many hours at his microscope that he had quit work for two days to get
rid of a hallucination that his heart was pumping his own blood through the mike.
He did nothing by trial and error because he disapproved of the method as sloppy.
And he got results. He was lucky to begin with and even luckier when he
formularized the law of probability and reduced it to such low terms that he knew
almost to the item what experiments not to try. When the cloudy, viscous
semifluid on the watch glass began to move itself he knew he was on ‘the right
track. When it began to seek food on its own he began to be excited. When it
divided and, in a few hours, redivided, and each part grew and divided again, he
was triumphant, for he had created life.
He nursed his brain children and sweated and strained over them, and he designed
baths of various vibrations for them, and inoculated and dosed and sprayed them.
Each move he made taught him the next And out of his tanks and tubes and
incubators came amoebalike creatures, and then ciliated animalcules, and more
and more rapidly he produced animals with eye spots, nerve cysts, and then-
victory of victories-a real blastopod, possessed of many cells instead of one. More
slowly he developed a gastropod, but once he had it, it was not too difficult for
him to give it organs, each with a specified function, each inheritable.
Then came cultured molluskilke things, and creatures with more and more
perfected gills. The day that a non-descript thing wriggled up an inclined board
out of a tank, threw flaps over its gills and feebly breathed air, Kidder quit work
and went to the other end of the island and got disgustingly drunk. Hangover and
all, he was soon back in the lab, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, tearing into
his problem.
He turned into a scientific byway and ran down his other great triumph-
accelerated metabolism. He extracted and refined the stimulating factors in
alcohol, cocoa, heroin, and Mother Nature’s prize dope runner, cannabis indica.
Like the scientist who, in analyzing the various clotting agents for blood
treatments, found that oxalic acid and oxalic acid alone was, the active factor,
Kidder isolated the accelerators and decelerators, the stimulants and soporifics, in
every substance that ever undermined a man’s morality and/or caused a “noble
experiment.” In ‘the process he found one thing he needed badly-a colorless elixir

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that made sleep the unnecessary and avoidable waster of time it should be. Then
and there he went on a twenty-four-hour shift.
He artificially synthesized the substances he had isolated, and in doing so
sloughed away a great many useless components. He pursued the subject along
the lines of radiations and vibrations. He discovered something in the longer reds
which, when projected through a vessel full of air vibrating in the supersonics, and
then polarized, speeded up the heartbeat of small animals twenty to one.
They ate twenty times as much, grew twenty times as fast, and-died twenty times
sooner than they should have.
Kidder built a huge hermetically sealed room. Above it was another room, the
same length and breadth but not quite as high. This was his control chamber. The
large room was divided into four sealed sections, each with its individual
miniature cranes and derricks-handling ma-chinery of all kinds. There were also
trapdoors fitted with air locks leading from the upper to the lower room.
By this time the other laboratory had produced a warm-blooded, snake-skinned
quadruped with an astonishingly rapid life cycle-a generation every eight days, a
life span of about fifteen. Like the echidna, it was oviparous and mammalian. Its
period of gestation was six hours; the eggs hatched in three; the young reached
sexual maturity in another four days. Each female laid four eggs and lived just
long enough to care for the young after they hatched. The male generally died two
or three hours after mating. The creatures were highly adaptable. They were
small- not more than three inches long, two inches to the shoul-der from the
ground. Their forepaws had three digits and a triple-jointed, opposed thumb. They
were attuned to life in an atmosphere, with a large ammonia content. Kidder bred
four of the creatures and put one group in each section of the sealed room.
Then he was ready. With his controlled atmospheres he varied temperatures,
oxygen content, humidity. He killed them off like flies with excesses of, for
instance, carbon dioxide, and the survivors bred their physical resistance into the
next generation. Periodically he would switch the eggs from one sealed section to
another to keep the strains varied. And rapidly, under these controlled conditions,
the creatures began to evolve.
This, then, was the answer to his problem. He couldn’t speed up mankind’s
intellectual advancement enough to have it teach him the things his incredible
mind yearned for. He couldn’t speed himself up. So he created a new race-a race

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which would develop and evolve so fast that it would surpass the civilization of
man; and from them he would learn.
They were completely in Kidder’s power. Earth’s normal atmosphere would
poison them, as he took care to demonstrate to every fourth generation. They
would make no attempt to escape from him. They would live their lives and
progress and make their little trial-and-error experi-ments hundreds of times faster
than man did. They had the edge on man, for they had Kidder to guide them. It
took man six thousand years really to discover science, three hundred to put it to
work. It took Kidder’s creatures two hundred days to equal man’s mental
attainments. And from then on-Kidder’s spasmodic output made the late, great
Tom Edison look like a home handicrafter.
He called them Neoterics, and he teased them into working for him. Kidder was
inventive in an ideological way; that is, he could dream up impossible
propositions providing he didn’t have to work them out. For example, he wanted
the Neoterics to figure out for themselves how to build shelters out of porous
material. He created the need for such shelters by subjecting one of the sections to
a high-pressure rainstorm which flattened the inhabitants. The Neoterics promptly
devised waterproof shelters out of the thin waterproof material he piled in one
corner.
Kidder immediately blew down the flimsy structures with a blast of cold air. They
built them up again so that they resisted both wind and rain. Kidder lowered the
tempera-ture so abruptly that they could not adjust their bodies to it. They heated
their shelters with tiny braziers. Kidder promptly turned up the beat until they
began to roast to death. After a few deaths, one of their bright boys fig-ured out
how to build a strong insulant house by using three-ply rubberoid, with the middle
layer perforated thou-sands of times to create tiny air pockets.
Using such tactics, Kidder forced them to develop a highly advanced little culture.
He caused a drought in one section and a liquid surplus in another, and then
opened the partition between them. Quite a spectacular war was fought, and
Kidder’s notebooks filled with information about military tactics and weapons.
Then there was the vaccine they developed against the common cold-the reason
why that affliction has been absolutely stamped out in the world today, for it was
one of the things that Co-nant, the bank president, got hold of. He spoke to Kidder
over the radiophone one winter afternoon with a voice so hoarse from laryngitis

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that Kidder sent him a vial of vac-cine and told him briskly not to ever call him
again in such a disgustingly inaudible state. Conant had it analyzed and again
Kidder’s accounts and the bank’s swelled.
At first, Kidder merely supplied the materials he thought they might need, but
when they developed an intelligence equal to the task of fabricating their own
from the ele-ments at hand, he gave each section a stock of raw mate-rials. The
process for really strong aluminum was devel-oped when he built in a huge
plunger in one of the sec-tions, which reached from wall to wall and was designed
to descend at the rate of four inches a day until it crushed whatever was at the
bottom. The Neoterics, in self-defense, used what strong material they had in hand
to stop the inexorable death that threatened them. But Kidder had seen to it that
they had nothing but aluminum oxide and a scattering of other elements, plus
plenty of electric power. At first they ran up dozens of aluminum pillars; when
these were crushed and twisted they tried shaping them so that the soft metal
would take more weight. When that failed they quickly built stronger ones; and
when the plunger was halted, Kidder removed one of the pillars and analyzed it. It
was hardened aluminum, stronger and tougher than molybdenum steel.
Experience taught Kidder that he had to make certain changes to increase his
power over the Neoterics before they got too ingenious. There were things that
could be done with atomic power that he was curious about; but he was not
willing to trust his little superscientists with a thing like that unless they could be
trusted to use it strictly ac-cording to Hoyle. So he instituted a rule of fear. The
most trivial departure from what he chose to consider the right way of doing
things resulted in instant death of half a tribe. if he was trying to develop a Diesel-
type power plant, for instance, that would operate without a flywheel, and a bright
young Neoteric used any of the materials for architectural purposes, half the tribe
immediately died. Of course, they had developed a written language; it was Kid-
der’s own. The teletype in a glass-enclosed area in a corner of each section was a
shrine. Any directions that were given on it were obeyed, or else. . . . After this
innovation, Kidder’s work was much simpler. There was no need for any
indirection. Anything he wanted done was done. No matter how impossible his
commands, three or four gen-erations of Neoterics could find a way to carry them
out.
This quotation is from a paper that one of Kidder’s highspeed telescopic cameras

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discovered being circulated among the younger Neoterics. It is translated from the
highly simplified script of the Neoterics.
“These edicts shall be followed by each Neoteric upon pain of death, which
punishment will be inflicted by the tribe upon the individual to protect the tribe
against him.
Priority of interest and tribal and individual effort is to be given the commands
that appear on the word machine.
“Any misdirection of material or power, or use thereof for any other purpose than
the carrying out of the ma-chine’s commands, unless no command appears, shall
be punishable by death.
“Any information regarding the problem at hand, or ideas or experiments which
might conceivably bear upon it, are to become the property of the tribe.
“Any individual failing to cooperate in the tribal effort, or who can be termed
guilty of not expending his full efforts in the work, or the suspicion thereof shall
be subject to the death penalty.”
Such are the results of complete domination. This paper impressed Kidder as
much as it did because it was com-pletely spontaneous. It was the Neoterics’ own
creed, de-veloped by them for their own greatest good.
And so at last Kidder had his fulfillment. Crouched in the upper room, going from
telescope to telescope, running off slowed-down films from his high speed
cameras, he found himself possessed of a tractable, dynamic source of
information. Housed in the great square building with its four half-acre sections
was a new, world, to which he was god.

Conant’s mind was similar to Kidder’s in that its approach to any problem was
along the shortest distance between any two points, regardless of whether that ap-
proach was along the line of most or least resistance. His rise to the bank
presidency was a history of ruthless moves whose only justification was that they
got him what he wanted. Like an over-efficient general, he would never vanquish
an enemy through sheer force of numbers alone. He would also skillfully flank his
enemy, not on one side, but on both. Innocent bystanders were creatures deserving
no consideration.
The time he took over a certain thousand-acre property, for instance, from a man
named Grady, he was not satis-fied with only the title to the land. Grady was an

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airport owner-had been all his life, and his father before him. Conant exerted
every kind of pressure on the man and found him unshakable. Finally judicious
persuasion led the city officials to dig a sewer right across the middle of the field,
quite efficiently wrecking Grady’s business. Knowing that this would supply
Grady, who was a wealthy man, with motive for revenge, Conant took over
Grady’s bank at half again its value and caused it to fold up. Grady lost every cent
he had and ended his life in an asylum. Conant was very proud of his tactics.
Like many another who had had Mammon by the tail, Conant did not know when
to let go. His vast organiza-tion yielded him more money and power than any
other concern in history, and yet he was not satisfied. Conant and money were like
Kidder and knowledge. Conant’s pyramided enterprises were to him what the
Neoterics were to Kidder. Each had made his private world, each used it for his
instruction and profit. Kidder, though, dis-turbed nobody but his Neoterics. Even
so, Conant was not wholly villainous. He was a shrewd man, and had discovered
early the value of pleasing people. No man can rob successfully over a period of
years without pleasing the people he robs. The technique for doing this is highly
involved, but master it and you can start your own mint.
Conant’s one great fear was that Kidder would some day take an interest in world
events and begin to become opinionated. Good heavens-the potential power he
had! A little matter like swinging an election could be managed by a man like
Kidder as easily as turning over in bed.
The only thing he could do was to call him periodically and see if there was
anything that Kidder needed to keep himself busy. Kidder appreciated this.
Conant, once in a while, would suggest something to Kidder that intrigued him,
something that would keep him deep in his hermit-age for a few weeks. The light
pump was one of the re-sults of Conant’s imagination. Conant bet him it couldn’t
be done. Kidder did it.
One afternoon Kidder answered the squeal of the radiophone’s signal. Swearing-
mildly, he shut off the film he was watching and crossed the compound to the old
laboratory. He went to the radiophone, threw a switch. The squealing stopped.
“Well?”
“Hello,” said Conant. “Busy?”
“Not very,” said Kidder. He was delighted with the pictures his camera had
caught, showing the skillful work of a gang of Neoterics synthesizing rubber out

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of pure sulphur. He would rather have liked to tell Conant about it, but somehow
he had never got around to telling Conant about the Neoterics, and he didn’t see
why he should start now.
Conant said, “Er . . . Kidder, I was down at the club the other day and a bunch of
us were filling up an evening with loose talk. Something came up which might
interest you.”
“What?”
“Couple of the utilities boys there. You know the power setup in this country,
don’t you? Thirty per cent atomic, the rest hydroelectric, Diesel and steam?”
“I hadn’t known,” said Kidder, who was as innocent as a babe of current events.
“Well, we were arguing about what chance a new power source would have. One
of the men there said it would be smarter to produce a new power and then talk
about it Another one waived that; said he couldn’t name that new power, but he
could describe it. Said it would have to have everything that present power
sources have, plus one or two more things. It could be cheaper, for instance. It
could be more efficient. It might supercede the others by being, easier to carry
from the power plant to the consumer. See what I mean? Any one of these factors
might prove a new source of power competitive to the others. What I’d like to see
is a new power with all of these factors. What do you think of it?”
“Not’ impossible.”
“Think not?”
“I’ll try it.”
“Keep me posted.” Conant’s transmitter clicked off. The switch was a little piece
of false front that Kidder had built into the set, which was something that Conant
didn’t know. The set switched itself off when Conant moved from it. After the
switch’s sharp crack, Kidder heard the banker mutter, “If he does it, I’m all set. If
he doesn’t, at least the crazy fool will keep himself busy on the island.”
Kidder eyed the radiophone, for an instant with raised eyebrow; and then
shrugged them down again with his shoulders. It was quite evident that Conant
had something up his sleeve, but Kidder wasn’t worried. Who on earth would
want to disturb him? He wasn’t bothering anybody. He went back to the
Neoterics’ building, full of the new power idea.
Eleven days later Kidder called Conant and gave spe-cific instructions on how to
equip his receiver with a fac-simile set which would enable Kidder to send written

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mat-ter over the air. As soon as, this was done and Kidder in-formed, the
biochemist for once in his life spoke at some length.
“Conant-you implied that a new power source that would be cheaper, more
efficient and more easily trans-mitted than any now in use did not exist. You
might be interested in the little generator I have just set up.
“It has power, Conant-unbelievable power. Broadcast. A beautiful little tight
beam. Here-catch this on the fac-simile recorder.” Kidder slipped a sheet of paper
under the clips of his transmitter and it appeared on Conant’s set. “Here’s the
wiring diagram for a power receiver. Now listen. The beam is so tight, so highly
directional, that not three-thousandths of one per cent of the power would be lost
in a, two-thousand-mile transmission. The power sys-tem is closed. That is, any
drain on the beam returns a signal along it to the transmitter, which automatically
steps up to increase the power output. It has a limit, but it’s way up. And
something else. This little gadget of mine can send out eight different beams with
a total horsepower output of around eight thousand per minute per beam. From
each beam you can draw enough power to turn the page of a book or fly a
superstratosphere plane. Hold on-I haven’t finished yet. Each beam, as I told you
before, returns a signal from receiver to transmitter. This not only controls the
power output of the beam, but directs it. Once contact is made, the beam will
never let go. It will follow the receiver anywhere. You can power land, air or
water vehicles with it, as well as any stationary plant. Like it?”
Conant, who was a banker and not a scientist, wiped his shining pate with the
back of his hand and said, “I’ve never known you to steer me wrong yet, Kidder.
How about the cost of this thing?”
“High.” said Kidder promptly. “As high as an atomic plant. But there are no high-
tension lines, no wires, no pipelines, no nothing. The receivers are little more com-
plicated than a radio set. Transmitter is-well, that’s quite a job.”
“Didn’t take you long,” said Conant.
“No,” said Kidder, “it didn’t, did it?” It was, the lifework of nearly twelve
hundred highly cultured people, but Kid-der wasn’t going into that. “Of course,
the one I have here’s just a model.”
Conant’s voice was strained. “A-model? And it de-livers-”
“Over sixty-thousand horsepower,” said Kidder gleefully. “Good heavens! In a
full sized machine-why, one trans-mitter would be enough to-” The possibilities

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of the thing choked Conant for a moment. “How is it fueled?”
“It isn’t,” said Kidder. “I won’t begin to explain it I’ve tapped a source of power
of unimaginable force. It’s-well, big. So big that it can’t be misused.”
“What?” snapped Conant. “What do you mean by that?” Kidder cocked an
eyebrow. Conant had something up his sleeve, then. At this second indication of
it, Kidder, the least suspicious of men, began to put himself on guard. “I mean just
what I say,” he said evenly. “Don’t try too hard to understand me-I barely savvy it
myself. But the source of this power is a monstrous resultant caused by the un-
balance of two previously equalized forces. Those equalized forces are cosmic in
quantity. Actually, the forces are those which make suns, crush atoms the way
they crushed those that compose the companion of Sirius. It’s not anything you
can fool with.”
“I don’t-” said Conant, and his voice ended puzzledly.
“I’ll give you a parallel of it,” said Kidder. “Suppose you take two rods, one in
each hand. Place their tips together and push. As long as your pressure is directly
along their long axes, the pressure is equalized; right and left hands cancel each
other. Now I come along; I put out one finger and touch the rods ever so lightly
where they come to-gether. They snap out of line violently; you break a couple of
knuckles. The resultant force is at right angles to the original forces you exerted.
My power transmitter is on the same principle. It takes an infinitesimal amount of
energy to throw those forces out of line. Easy enough when you know how to do
it. The important question is whether or not you can control the resultant when
you get it. I can.”
“I-see.” Conant indulged in a four-second gloat. “Heaven help the utility
companies. I don’t intend to. Kidder-I want a full-size power transmitter.”
Kidder clucked into the radiophone. “Ambitious, aren’t you? I haven’t a staff out
here, Conant-you know that. And I can’t be expected to build four or five
thousand tons of apparatus myself.”
“I’ll have five hundred engineers and laborers out there in forty-eight hours.”
“You will not. Why bother me with it? I’m quite happy here, Conant, and one of
the reasons is that I’ve got no one to get in my hair.”
“Oh, now, Kidder-don’t be like that-I’ll pay you-”
“You haven’t got that much money,” said Kidder briskly. He flipped the switch on
his set. His switch worked.

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Conant was furious. He shouted into the phone several times, then began to lean
on the signal button. On his island, Kidder let the thing squeal and went back to
his projection room. He was sorry he had sent the diagram of the receiver to
Conant. It would have been interesting to power a plane or a car with the model
transmitter he had taken from the Neoterics. But if Conant was going to be that
way about it-well, anyway, the receiver would be no good without the transmitter.
Any radio engineer would understand the diagram, but not the beam which
activated it. And Conant wouldn’t get his beam.
Pity he didn’t know Conant well enough.

Kidder’s days were endless sorties into learning. He never slept, nor did his
Neoterics. He ate regularly every five hours, exercised for half an hour in every
twelve. He did not keep track of time, for it meant nothing to him. Had he wanted
to know the date, or the year, even, he knew he could get it from Conant. He
didn’t care, that’s all. The time that was not spent in observation was used in
developing new problems for the Neoterics. His thoughts just now ran to defense.
The idea was born in his con-versation with Conant; now the idea was primary, its
motivation something of no importance. The Neoterics were working on a
vibration field of quasi-electrical nature. Kidder could see little practical value in
such a thing- an invisible wall which would kill any living thing which touched it.
But still-the idea was intriguing.
He stretched and moved away from the telescope in the upper room through
which he had been watching his crea-tions at work. He was profoundly happy
here in the large control room. Leaving it to go to the old laboratory for a bite to
eat was a thing he hated, to do. He felt like bidding it good-by each time he
walked across the compound, and saying a glad hello when he returned. A little
amused at himself, he went out.
There was a black blob-a distant power boat-a few miles off the island, toward the
mainland. Kidder stopped and stared distastefully at it. A white petal of spray was
affixed to each side of the black body-it was coming toward him. He snorted,
thinking of the time a yachtload of silly fools had landed out of curiosity one
afternoon, spewed themselves over his beloved island, peppered him with lame-
brained questions, and thrown his nervous equilibrium out for days. Lord, how he
hated people!

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The thought of unpleasantness bred two more thoughts that played half-
consciously with his mind as he crossed the compound and entered the old
laboratory. One was that perhaps it might be wise to surround his buildings with a
field of force of some kind and post warnings for tres-passers. The other thought
was of Conant and the vague uneasiness the man had been sending to him through
the radiophone these last weeks. His suggestion, two days ago, that a power plant
be built on the island-horrible idea!

Conant rose from a laboratory bench as Kidder walked in.
They looked at each other wordlessly for a long moment Kidder hadn’t seen the
bank president in years. The man’s presence, he found, made his scalp crawl.
“Hello,” said Conant genially. “You’re looking fit.”
Kidder grunted. Conant eased his unwieldy body back onto the bench and said,
“Just to save you the energy of asking questions, Mr. Kidder, I arrived two hours
ago on, a small boat. Rotten way to travel. I wanted to be a sur-prise to you; my
two men rowed me the last couple of miles. You’re not very well equipped here
for defense, are you? Why, anyone could slip up on you the way I did.”
“Who’d want to?” growled Kidder. The man’s voice edged annoyingly into his
brain. He spoke too loudly for such a small room; at least, Kidder’s hermit’s ears
felt that way. Kidder shrugged and went about preparing a light meal for himself.
“Well,” drawled the banker. “I ‘might want to.” He drew out a Dow-metal cigar
case. “Mind if I smoke?”
“I do,” said Kidder sharply.
Conant laughed easily and put the cigars away. “I might,” he said, “want to urge
you to let me build that power station on this island.”
“Radiophone work?”
“Oh, yes. But now that I’m here you can’t switch me off. Now-how about it?”
“I haven’t changed my mind.”
“Oh, but you should, Kidder, you should. Think of it- think of the good it would
do for the masses of people that are now paying exorbitant power bills!”
“I hate the masses! Why do you have to build here?”
“Oh, that. It’s an ideal location. You own the island; work could begin here
without causing any comment whatsoever. The plant would spring full-fledged on
the power markets of the country, having been built in secret. The island can be

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made impregnable.”
“I don’t want to be bothered.”
“We wouldn’t bother you. We’d build on the north end of the island-a mile and a
quarter from you and your work. Ah-by the way-where’s the model of the power
transmitter?”
Kidder, with his mouth full of synthesized food, waved a hand at a small table on
which stood the model, a four-foot, amazingly intricate device of plastic and steel
and tiny coils.
Conant rose and went over to look at it. “Actually works, eh?” He sighed deeply
and said, “Kidder, I really hate to do this, but I want to build that plant rather
badly.
“Carson! Robbins!”
Two bull-necked individuals stepped out from their hiding places in the corners of
the room. One idly dangled a revolver by its trigger guard. Kidder looked blankly
from one to the other of them.
“These gentlemen will follow my orders implicitly, Kid-der. In half an hour a
party will land here-engineers, contractors. They will start surveying the north end
of the island for the construction of the power plant. These boys here feel about
the same way I do as far as you are con-cerned. Do we proceed with your
cooperation or without it? It’s immaterial to me whether or not you are left alive
to continue your work. My engineers can duplicate your model.”
Kidder said nothing. He had stopped chewing when he saw the gunmen, and only
now remembered to swallow. He sat crouched over his plate without moving or
speaking.
Conant broke the silence by walking to the door. “Robbins-can you carry that
model there?” The big man put his gun away, lifted the model gently, and nodded.
“Take it down to the beach and meet the other boat. Tell Mr. Johansen, the
engineer, that this is the model he is to work from.” Robbins went out. Conant
turned to Kidder.
“There’s no need for us to anger ourselves,” he said oilily. “I think you are
stubborn, but I don’t hold it against you. I know how you feel. You’ll be left
alone: you have my promise. But I mean to go ahead on this job, and a small thing
like your life can’t stand in my way.”
Kidder said, “Get out of here.” There were two swollen veins throbbing at his

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temples. His voice was low, and it shook.
“Very well. Good day, Mr. Kidder. Oh-by the way-you’re a clever devil.” No one
had ever referred to the scholastic Mr. Kidder that way before. “I realize the pos-
sibility of your blasting us off the island. I wouldn’t do it if I were you. I’m
willing to give you what you want-privacy. I want the same thing in return. If
anything happens to me while I’m here, the island will be bombed by someone
who is working for me; I’ll admit they might fail.
If they do, the United States government will take a hand. You wouldn’t want
that, would you? That’s rather a big thing for one man to fight. The same thing
goes if the plant is sabotaged in any way after I go back to the mainland.
You might be killed. You will most certainly be bothered interminably. Thanks
for your . . . er. . . cooperation.” The banker smirked and walked out, followed by
his taci-turn gorilla.
Kidder sat there for a long time without moving. Then he shook his head, rested it
in his palms. He was badly frightened; not so much because his life was in danger,
but because his privacy and his work-his world-were threat-ened. He was hurt and
bewildered. He wasn’t a business-man. He couldn’t handle men. All his life he
had run away from human beings and what they represented to him. He was like a
frightened child when men closed in on him.
Cooling a little, he wondered vaguely what would hap-pen when the power plant
opened. Certainly, the govern-ment would be interested. Unless-unless by then
Conant was the government. That plant was an unimaginable source of power,
and not only the kind of power that turned wheels. He rose and went back to the
world that was home to him, a world where his motives were under-stood, and
where there were those who could help him.
Back at the Neoterics’ building, he escaped yet again from the world of men into
his work.

Kidder called Conant the following week, much to the banker’s surprise. His two
days on the island had got the work well under way, and he had left with the
arrival of a shipload of laborers and material. He kept in close touch by radio with
Johansen, the engineer in charge. It had been a blind job for Johansen and all the
rest of the crew on the island. Only the bank’s infinite resources could have hired
such a man, or the picked gang with him.

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Johansen’s first reaction when he saw the model had been ecstatic. He wanted to
tell his friends about this mar-vel; but the only radio set available was beamed to
Conant’s private office in the bank, and Conant’s armed guards, one to every two
workers, had strict orders to destroy any other radio transmitter on sight. About
that time he realized that he was a prisoner on the island. His instant anger
subsided when he reflected that being a prisoner at fifty thousand dollars a week
wasn’t too bad; Two of the laborers and an engineer thought differently, and got
disgruntled a couple of days after they arrived. They disappeared one night- the
same night that five shots were fired down on the beach. No questions were asked,
and there was no more trouble.
Conant covered his surprise at Kidder’s call and was as offensively jovial as ever.
“Well, now! Anything I can do for you?”
“Yes,” said Kidder. His voice was low, completely with-out expression. “I want
you to issue a warning to your men not to pass the white line I have drawn five
hundred yards north of my buildings, right across the island.”
“Warning? Why, my dear fellow, they have orders that you are not to be disturbed
on any account.”
“You’ve ordered them. All right. Now warn them. I have an electric field
surrounding my laboratories that will kill anything living which penetrates it. I
don’t want to have murder on my conscience. There will be no deaths unless there
are trespassers. You’ll inform your workers?”
“Oh, now, Kidder,” the banker expostulated. “That was totally unnecessary. You
won’t be bothered. Why-” but he found he was talking into a dead mike. He knew
better than to call back. He called Johansen instead and told him about it.
Johansen didn’t like the sound of it, but he re-peated the message and signed off.
Conant liked that man. He was, for a moment, a little sorry that Johansen would
never reach the mainland alive.
But that Kidder-he was beginning to be a problem. As long as his weapons were
strictly defensive he was no real menace. But he would have to be taken care of
when the plant was operating. Conant couldn’t afford to have genius around him
unless it was unquestionably on his side. The power transmitter and Conant’s
highly ambitious plans would be safe as long as Kidder was left to himself. Kidder
knew that he could, for the time being, expect more sym-pathetic treatment from
Conant than he could from a horde of government investigators.

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Kidder only left his own enclosure once after the work began on the north end of
the island, and it took all of his unskilled diplomacy to do it. Knowing the source
of the plant’s power, knowing what could happen if it were mis-used, he asked
Conant’s permission to inspect the great transmitter when it was nearly finished.
Insuring his own life by refusing to report back to Conant until he was safe within
his own laboratory again, he turned off his shield and walked up to the north end.
He saw an awe-inspiring sight. The four-foot model was duplicated nearly a
hundred times as large. Inside a mas-sive three-hundred-foot tower a space was
packed nearly solid with the same bewildering maze of coils and bars that the
Neoterics had built so delicately into their machine. At the top was a globe of
polished golden alloy, the trans-mitting antenna. From it would stream thousands
of tight beams of force, which could be tapped to any degree by corresponding
thousands of receivers placed anywhere at any distance. Kidder learned that the
receivers had already been built, but his informant, Johansen, knew little about
that end of it and was saying less. Kidder checked over every detail of the
structure, and when he was through he shook Johansen’s hand admiringly.
“I didn’t want this thing here,” he said shyly, “and I don’t. But I will say that it’s a
pleasure to see this kind of work.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet the man that invented it”, Kidder beamed. “I didn’t invent
it,” he said. “Maybe someday I’ll show you who did. I-well, good-by.” He turned
before he had a chance to say too much and marched off down the path.
“Shall I?” said a voice at Johansen’s side. One of Conant’s guards had his gun out.
Johansen knocked the man’s arm down. “No.” He scratched his head. “So that’s
the mysterious menace from the other end of the island. Eh! Why, he’s a hell of a
nice little feller!”

Built on the ruins of Denver, which was destroyed in the great Battle of the
Rockies during the Western War, stands the most beautiful city in the world-our
nation’s capital, New Washington. In a circular room deep in the heart of the
White House, the president, three army men and a civilian sat. Under the
president’s desk a dictaphone unostentatiously recorded every word that was said.
Two thousand and more miles away, Conant hung over a radio receiver, tuned to
receive the signals of the tiny transmitter in the civilian’s side pocket.
One of the officers spoke.

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“Mr. President, the ‘impossible claims’ made for this gentleman’s product are
absolutely true. He has proved beyond doubt each item on his prospectus.”
The president glanced at the civilian, back at the officer. “I won’t wait for your
report,” he said. “Tell me-what happened?”
Another of the army men mopped his face with a khaki bandanna. “I can’t ask you
to believe us, Mr. President, but it’s true all the same. Mr. Wright here has in his
suit-case three or four dozen small . . . er . . . bombs-”
“They’re not bombs,” said Wright casually.
“All right. They’re not bombs. Mr. Wright smashed two of them on an anvil with
a sledge hammer. There was no result. He put two more in an electric furnace.
They burned away like so much tin and cardboard. We dropped one down the
barrel of a field piece and fired it. Still nothing.” He paused and looked at the third
officer, who picked up the account:
“We really got started then. We flew to the proving grounds, dropped one of the
objects and flew to thirty thousand feet. From there, with a small hand detonator
no bigger than your fist, Mr. Wright set the thing off. I’ve never seen anything
like it. Forty acres of land came straight up at us, breaking up as it came. The
concussion was terrific-you must have felt it here, four hundred miles away.”
The president nodded. “I did. Seismographs on the other side of the Earth picked
it up.”
“The crater it left was a quarter of a mile deep at the center. Why, one plane load
of those things could demolish any city! There isn’t even any necessity for
accuracy!”
“You haven’t heard anything yet,” another officer broke in. “Mr. Wright’s
automobile is powered by a small plant similar to the others. He demonstrated it to
us. We could find no fuel tank of any kind, or any other driving mech-anism. But
with a power plant no bigger than six cubic inches, that car, carrying enough
weight to give it traction, outpulled an army tank!”
“And the other test!” said the third excitedly. “He put one of the objects into a
replica of a treasury vault. The walls were twelve feet thick, super-reinforced
concrete. He controlled it from over a hundred yards away. He . . . he burst that
vault! It wasn’t an explosion-it was as if some incredibly powerful expansive
force inside filled it and flattened the walls from inside. They cracked and split
and powdered, and the steel girders and rods came twisting and shearing out

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like. . . like-whew! After that he insisted on seeing you. We knew it wasn’t usual,
but he said he has more to say and would say it only in your presence.”
The president said gravely, “What is it, Mr. Wright?”
Wright rose, picked up his suitcase, opened it and took out a small cube, about
eight inches on a side, made of some light-absorbent red material. Four men edged
ner-vously away from it.
“These gentlemen,” he began, “have seen only part of the things this device can
do. I’m going to demonstrate to you the delicacy of control that is possible with
it.” He made an adjustment with a tiny knob on the side of the cube, set it on the
edge of the president’s desk.
“You have asked me more than once if this is my invention or if I am representing
someone. The latter is true. It might also interest you to know that the man who
controls this cube is right now several thousand miles from here. He and he alone,
can prevent it from detonating now that I-” He pulled his detonator out of the
suitcase and pressed a button- “have done this. It will explode the way the one we
dropped from the plane did, completely destroying this city and everything in it, in
just four hours. It will also explode-” He stepped back and threw a tiny switch on
his detonator-”if any moving object comes within three feet of it or if anyone
leaves this room but me-it can be compensated for that. If, after I leave, I am
molested, it will detonate as soon as a hand is laid on me. No bullets can kill me
fast enough to prevent me from setting it off.”
The three army men were silent. One of them swiped nervously at the beads of
cold sweat on his forehead. The others did not move. The president said evenly:
“What’s your proposition?”
“A very reasonable one. My employer does not work in the open, for obvious
reasons. All he wants is your agree-ment to carry out his orders; to appoint the
cabinet mem-bers he chooses, to throw your influence in any way he dictates. The
public-Congress--anyone else--need never know anything about it. I might add
that if you agree to this proposal, this ‘bomb,’ as you call it, will not go off.
But you can be sure that thousands of them are planted all over the country. You
will never know when you are near one. If you disobey, it beams instant
annihilation for you and everyone else within three or four square miles.
“In three hours and fifty minutes-that will be at pre-cisely seven o’clock-there is a
commercial radio program on Station RPRS. You will cause the announcer, after

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his station identification, to say ‘Agreed.’ It will pass unnoticed by all but my
employer. There is no use in having me fol-lowed; my work is done. I shall never
see nor contact my employer again. That is all. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”
Wright closed his suitcase with a businesslike snap, bowed, and left the room.
Four men sat staring at the little red cube.
“Do you think he can do all he says?” asked the president.
The three nodded mutely. The president reached for his phone.
There was an eavesdropper to all of the foregoing Conant, squatting behind his
great desk in the vault, where he had his sanctum sanctorum, knew nothing of it.
But beside him was the compact bulk of Kidder’s radiophone. His presence
switched it on, and Kidder, on his island, blessed the day he had thought of the
device. He had been meaning to call Conant all morning, but was very hesitant.
His meeting with the young engineer Johansen had im-pressed him strongly. The
man was such a thorough scien-tist, possessed of such complete delight in the
work he did, that for the first time in his life Kidder found himself actually
wanting to see someone again. But he feared for Johansen’s life if he brought him
to the laboratory, for Johansen’s work was done on the island, and Conant would
most certainly have the engineer killed if he heard of his visit, fearing that Kidder
would influence him to sabotage the great transmitter. And if Kidder went to the
power plant he would probably be shot on sight.
All one day Kidder wrangled with himself, and finally determined to call Conant.
Fortunately he gave no signal, but turned up the volume on the receiver when the
little red light told him that Conant’s transmitter was function-ing. Curious, he
heard everything that occurred in the president’s chamber three thousand miles
away. Horrified, he realized what Conant’s engineers had done. Built into tiny
containers were tens of thousands of power receivers. They had no power of their
own, but, by remote control, could draw on any or all of the billions of
horsepower the huge plant on the island was broadcasting.
Kidder stood in front of his receiver, speechless. There was nothing he could do.
If he devised some means of destroying the power plant, the government would
cer-tainly step in and take over the island, and then what would happen to him and
his precious Neoterics?
Another sound grated out of the receiver-a commercial radio program. A few bars
of music, a man’s voice adver-tising stratoline fares on the installment plan, a

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short silence, then:
“Station RPRS, voice of the nation’s Capital, District of South Colorado.”
The three-second pause was interminable.
“The time is exactly . .. er . . . agreed. The time is exactly seven P.M., Mountain
Standard Time.”
Then came a half-insane chuckle. Kidder had difficulty believing it was Conant. A
phone clicked. The banker’s voice:
“Bill? All set. Get out there with your squadron and bomb up the island. Keep
away from the plant, but cut the rest of it to ribbons. Do it quick and get out of
there.”
Almost hysterical with fear, Kidder rushed about the room and then shot out the
door and across the compound. There were five hundred innocent workmen in
barracks a quarter mile from the plant Conant didn’t need them now, and he didn’t
need Kidder. The only safety for anyone was in the plant itself, and Kidder
wouldn’t leave his Neoterics to be bombed. He flung himself up the stairs and to
the nearest teletype. He banged out, “Get me a defense. I want an impenetrable
shield. Urgent!”
The words ripped out from under his fingers in the func-tional script of the
Neoterics. Kidder didn’t think of what he wrote, didn’t really visualize the thing
he ordered. But he had done what he could. He’d have to leave them now, get to
the barracks; warn those men. He ran up the path toward the plant, flung himself
over the white line that marked death to those who crossed it.
A squadron of nine clip-winged, mosquito-nosed planes rose out of a cover on the
mainland. There was no sound from the engines, for there were no engines. Each
plane was powered with a tiny receiver and drew its unmarked, light-absorbent
wings through the air with power from the island. In a matter of minutes they
raised the island. The squadron leader spoke briskly into a microphone.
“Take the barracks first. Clean ‘em up. Then work south.”
Johansen was alone on a small hill near the center of the island. He carried a
camera, and though he knew pretty well that his chances of ever getting ashore
again were practically nonexistent, he liked angle shots of his tower, and took
innumerable pictures. The first he knew of the planes was when he heard their
whining dive over the barracks. He stood transfixed, saw a shower of bombs
hurtle down and turn the barracks into a smashed ruin of broken wood, metal and

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bodies. The picture of Kidder’s earnest face flashed into his mind. Poor little guy-
if they ever bombed his end of the island he would-But his tower! Were they
going to bomb the plant?
He watched, utterly appalled, as the planes flew out to sea, cut back and dove
again. They seemed to be working south. At the third dive he was sure of it. Not
knowing what he could do, he nevertheless turned and ran toward Kidder’s place.
He rounded a turn in the trail and collided violently with the little biochemist.
Kidder’s face was scarlet with exertion, and he was the most terrified-looking
object Johanson had ever seen.
Kidder waved a hand northward. “Conant!” he screamed over the uproar. “It’s
Conant! He’s going to kill us all!”
“The plant?” said Johansen, turning pale.
“It’s safe. He won’t touch that! But. . . my place . . what about all those men?”
“Too late!” shouted Johansen.
“Maybe I can-Come on!” called Kidder, and was off down the trail, heading south.
Johansen pounded after him. Kidder’s little short legs became a blur as the
squadron swooped overhead, laying its eggs in the spot where they had met.
As they burst out of the woods, Johansen put on a spurt, caught up with the
scientist and knocked him sprawling not six feet from the white line.
“Wh. . . wh-”
“Don’t go any farther, you fool! Your own damned force field--it’ll kill you!”
“Force field? But-I came through it on the way up- Here. Wait. If I can-” Kidder
began hunting furiously about in the grass. In a few seconds he ran up to the line,
clutching a large grasshopper in his hand. He tossed if over. It lay still.
“See?” said Johansen. “It-”
“Look! It jumped. Come on! I don’t know what- went wrong, unless the Neoterics
shut if off. They generated that field-I didn’t.”
“Nec---huh?”
“Never mind,” snapped the biochemist, and ran.
They pounded gasping up the steps and into the Neo-terics’ control room. Kidder
clapped his eyes to a telescope and shrieked in glee. “They’ve done it! They’ve
done it!”

“My little people! The Neoterics! They’ve made the im-penetrable shield! Don’t

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you see-it cut through the lines of force that start up the field out there. Their
generator is still throwing it up, but the vibrations can’t get out! They’re safe!
They’re safe!” And the overwrought hermit began to cry. Johansen looked at him
pityingly and shook his head.
“Sure, your little men are all right. But we aren’t,” he added as the floor shook to
the detonation of a bomb.

Johansen closed his eyes, got a grip on himself and let his curiosity overcome his
fear. He stepped to the binoc-ular telescope, gazed down it. There was nothing
there but a curved sheet of gray material. He had never seen a gray quite like that.
It was absolutey neutral. It didn’t seem soft and it didn’t seem hard, and to look at
it made his brain reel. He looked up.
Kidder was pounding the keys of a teletype, watching the blank yellow tape
anxiously.
“I’m not getting through to them,” he whimpered. “I don’t know. What’s the mat-
Oh, of course!”
“What?”
“The shield is absolutely impenetrable! The teletype im-pulses can’t get through
or I could get them to extend the screen over the building-over the whole island!
There’s nothing those people can’t do!”
“He’s crazy,” Johansen muttered. “Poor little-”
The teletype began clicking sharply. Kidder dove at it, practically embraced it. He
read off the tape as it came out. Johansen saw the characters, but they meant
nothing to him.
“Almighty,” Kidder read falteringly, “pray have mercy on us and be forbearing
until we have said our say. With-out orders we have lowered the screen you
ordered us to raise. We are lost, O great one. Our screen is truly impen-etrable,
and so cut off your words on the word machine. We have never, in the memory of
any Neoteric, been with-out your word before. Forgive us our action. We will
eagerly await your answer.”
Kidder’s fingers danced over the keys. “You can look now,” he gasped. “Go on-
the telescope!”
Johansen, trying to ignore the whine of sure death from above, looked.
He saw what looked like land-fantastic fields under cultivation, a settlement of

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some sort, factories, and-beings. Everything moved with incredible rapidity. He
couldn’t see one of the inhabitants except as darting pinky--white streaks.
Fascinated, he stared for a long minute. A sound behind him made him whirl. It
was Kidder, rubbing his hands together briskly. There was a broad smile on his
face.
“They did it,” he said happily. “You see?”
Johansen didn’t see until he began to realize that there was a dead silence outside.
He ran to a window. It was night outside--the blackest night-when it should have
been dusk. “What happened?”
“The Neoterics,” said Kidder, and laughed like a child. “My friends downstairs
there. They threw up the impen-etrable shield over the whole island. We can’t be
touched now!”
And at Johansen’s amazed questions, he launched into a description of the race of
beings below them.

Outside the shell, things happened. Nine airplanes sud-denly went dead-stick.
Nine pilots glided downward, pow-erless, and some fell into the sea, and some
struck the miraculous gray shell that loomed in place of an island; slid off and
sank.
And ashore, a man named Wright sat in a car, half dead with fear, while
government men surrounded him, ap-proached cautiously, daring instant death
from a non-dead source.
In a room deep in the White House, a high-ranking army officer shrieked, “I can’t
stand it any more! I can’t!” and leaped up, snatched a red cube off the president’s
desk, ground it to ineffectual litter under his shining boots.
And in a few days they took a broken old man away from the bank and put him in
an asylum, where he died within a week.
The shield, you see, was truly impenetrable. The power plant was untouched and
sent out its beams; but the beams could not get out, and anything powered from
the plant went dead. The story never became public, although for some years there
was heightened naval activity off the New England coast. The navy, so the story
went, had a new target range out there-a great hemi-ovoid of gray-material. They
bombed it and shelled it and rayed it and blasted all around it, but never even
dented its smooth surface.

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Kidder and Johansen let it stay there. They were happy enough with their
researches and their Neoterics. They did not hear or feel the shelling, for, the
shield was truly im-penetrable. They synthesized their food and their light and air
from materials at hand, and they simply didn’t care. They were the only survivors
of the bombing, with the exception of three poor maimed devils who died soon
afterward.
All this happened many years ago, and Kidder and Johansen may be alive today,
and they may be dead. But that doesn’t matter too much. The important thing is
that the great gray shell will bear watching. Men die, but races live. Some day the
Neoterics, after innumerable genera-tions of inconceivable advancement, will take
down their shield and come forth. When I think of that I feel frightened.




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