Unto Him That Hath Read Online Free PDF Page B

than they had thought. And it could be made to glue anything.
    The glue formed an open-ended chain molecule, and it would glue any element which was not attached at the end. The sample had contained all elements except iron, so it had worked on iron only. But he could provide one which contained only nitrogen, and which would glue all metals, although it didn't harm plants or animal substances. It was probably the greatest stride in a thousand years of sticking things together. Spread the glue, add the polymerizing fluid, and wait five minutes.
    The assistant to the Secretary of Defense nodded. "A remarkable piece of work, doctor—it'll probably win you top honors in the field for the year. But since we're equipped to weld and rivet, and not to pressurize joints for five minutes, I suspect it won't help production for quite some time. Mr. Dane, what do you think?"
    Mike grinned sourly. "It'd slow us up now. But you might spread a batch of it over the enemy by plane, and follow with the polymerizer. That might glue him down for a few days."
    A few smiled, but nobody laughed.
    Custer summed it up. "A gun would do Pithecanthropus no good. He couldn't use it without bullets—arrows wouldn't work. And if he knew about bullets, he still couldn't build a forge to melt his lead. Marconi couldn't have found out a thing about radar—and couldn't have built modern tubes if he'd had full instructions. Show Faraday twenty kilowatts going into an antenna and apparently nothing coming out, and he'd have given up physics to teach Latin the rest of his life!
    "In the last fifty years, science has quintupled itself. In the next hundred, we can't imagine what it will be. Maybe they tailor the electron rings to make that transformer work, but I can't examine such things, and couldn't duplicate it in any event. Probably the men who designed it couldn't build one with our crude equipment. Unto him that hath, unto him shall be given. And we're still have-notsl"
    He paused, watching their faces. Then he grimaced. "We don't even gain theoretical knowledge from it. We might think it proves the future is invariable, since getting this has made no change in our science. But it proves nothing.
    We can't change ourselves-but a man from that future might decide to come back and take over the world with some of their heavy armament that history shows doesn't exist now. In that case, the future might be changed—or he might be unable to do it. ... Our report, except perhaps for the metal glue, is—perfect failure, with a recommendation that nothing be done about it!"
    There were no dissenters. Words spilled across the table, but they all boiled down to the same things as Custer had said.
    Mike and Custer caught a plane back together. Mike was wondering whether they hadn't changed the future, after all. Pan-Asia was rumored to be past the Rhine, and the Alliance was behind schedule, in many ways because of this useless effort. The language in the handbook for the Enigma had been English—but would English even be used in the future toward which they headed now?
    What kind of a world could exist that would make such a concentration of destruction as the Enigma a mass-production affair? What could the men be like, and the scientists who would lose such things on the world, or the fighting men who knew the stupidity of war and still could not stop it?
    Or had they thought that such weapons would stop it? Every improvement made in killing power had brought with it the idea that war would grow too horrible, and peace would come. Yet each move had only made the horror worse. It was a vicious cycle that could only be broken by an explosion —and one which apparently lay far in the future.
    He shrugged it off, and turned to Custer, who had remained in the assembly chamber longer than he had. "What happens to the Enigma?"
    "We seal it up, and give it to a museum when the fracas is over."
    Lock it up in a museum—and taunt and mock the men who would waste their