Unto Him That Hath Read Online Free PDF

because our most strenuous efforts have kept an airtight net. Dr. Morley, will you sum up what the laboratories keyed to your section have discovered?"
    "Just a minute," another man asked. Mike didn't know him, but he could guess that he must be from the President's office, from the looks directed his way. "How do we know this wasn't meant for us to find? Can we say it was a genuine plane?"
    Custer stood up. "It was an actual war-plane, and one that had seen combat. Nothing we have short of an H-bomb could have ruined the plastic bubble, as it was first found. Nothing could have killed every cell in the
    pilot's body, to our current knowledge. The notice pasted inside the handbook, recommending action if forced down in enemy territory, confirms the desperation of those using the plane. We don't know whom they were fighting—or what—but this was no fake. It was a die-stamped job, mostly—and that means mass production. They've got war up there, and it's something we'd better forget, if we want to stay sane. All right, Dr. Morley."
    Morley shook himself, and began reciting what they knew. The capacitors—big and little—were just that; the piece they had recovered from Mike's single bombing had proved it. But it was impossible for such capacitors to exist. Capacitors carried a charge according to the product of the plate area and number, times the dielectric constant of insulation, all divided by the thickness of the dielectric.
    Size, number of plates, and thickness could only be altered within limits. So in the future, they had apparently found a material with a nearly infinite dielectric constant! He tried to explain how impossible that was, but Mike lost track of some of that. Anyhow, they now knew that this dielectric was a thin smear of a lacquer-like substance, the same as their insulation, and would stand up under a voltage that exceeded anything imaginable for such a thin substance—several million volts.
    "Naturally, it's completely self-healing when cut or punctured," he added. "It seals a cut instantly, or you'd get a short through the air around your condenser. I am informed it's composed of helium, lithium, argon, fluorine, bismuth and carbon. I have no idea of how they managed to make a compound out of inert gases.
    And I have even less idea of how they polymerized the stuff. We don't know why it works, how it is made, nor how to duplicate its properties. It is completely outside all our knowledge."
    Other accounts began to come in, of equally impossible things. Copper could not be alloyed with nitrogen— without forming a compound—but it had been handled that way. No alloy of simple tungsten and boron could stand up under a temperature of over 6000 degrees Centigrade, without pitting. Bolts that held their nuts on by magnetostriction couldn't have those nuts removed by a tool that was nothing but vinyl acetate.
    Mike listened, trying to picture it all. The trouble was that men were only barbarians. Columbus had known that iron would sink, and had built his ships of wood. But if he'd been given a metal ship, his time couldn't have cast the plates for more such ships. DaVinci had conceived the helicopter, but it took centuries to develop the steels and alloys, with their heat treatments and other processing; he had had no power adequate in his time, and he couldn't have understood the ignition system of an engine if he'd found one. Men of the old stone age couldn't make rifles.
    The chemists were the last, with their glum report on nonmetals that were completely pure but behaved like metals, paints that carried heat one way much better than the other, but couldn't be analyzed at all, and a host of other things.
    There was only one weakly cheerful note. The head chemist of DuPont stood up, and he seemed almost too modest as he announced it. The trick glue that served to weld metals together could not only be duplicated already, but could be made in tanker lots at a reasonable figure. It was much simpler