Part 1

THE ULTIMATE IMAGE

By P. SCHUYLER MILLER

_The Magnificent Defense Unit of Dampier._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Comet December 40. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"Mike!"

It was Bill Porter's voice. I put one hand on the balustrade and vaulted into the garden. From behind a mass of shrubbery came sounds of a struggle, and Bill's voice rose again.

"Mike, you ape! Step on it!"

I plowed through where someone had gone before. Bill, his shirtfront awry, his coat-tails torn and muddy, was grappling with a snarling, kicking little man about half his size. As I burst out of the shrubbery, Bill kicked his legs from under him and they went down in the newly spaded earth, Bill on top. Bill Porter weighs a good two hundred pounds. The struggle ended then and there.

Bill sat up, one fist clenched in the little man's shirt front. He glared at me out of a rapidly closing eye.

"Where in blue blazes have you been?" he demanded. "D'you think I _like_ wrestling with wildcats?"

I looked him over. "Didn't make out so well, did you? Lucky he wasn't any bigger, or I _would_ have had to help you. Why pick on a little guy like that? What's he done that you don't like?"

He pointed. Light from the reception hall fell through the bushes in irregular patches. In one of them, half buried in the scuffed-up dirt, I caught the glint of polished metal.

"Pick it up," Bill said.

It was a gun, bigger than the largest six-shooter ever toted by a Hollywood buckaroo. It had a massive stock and the thickest barrel I had ever seen. The whole look of the thing was crazy, like something out of another world.

Bill had been scrambling around in the dirt. I saw that blood was oozing from a gash in his neck. Before I could speak he held up a piece of gleaming metal.

"Take a look at that," he said grimly. "That's what he wanted to pump into the Ambassador. Only I got it instead--in the neck. Now will you give me a hand with this he-cat before he comes to and starts trying to skin me alive?"

I took the thing. It was a steel bolt or arrow of the kind once used in cross-bows, sharpened to a needle point with six razor-edged vanes running back to the hilt. I slipped it into the chubby muzzle of the gun. It was a perfect fit.

"That," Bill told me, "is a solenoid-gun--one that works. You've seen a metal core pop out of an electric coil when the juice is snapped on. It's a common laboratory stunt. Well, it's grown up and had pups, and this is one of the nastiest of them. No noise at all--and does that dart travel! It would go through a man like cheese even if he's as thick as His Magnificence yonder."

Through the open doors of the reception hall I could see the broad Teutonic back of Herr Wilhelm Friedrich Nebel, Ambassador from the newly stabilized Middle-European Confederacy. Half the stuffed shirts in Washington were crowded around him, trying to make themselves heard over the blare of the band and I recognized three of the President's own private bodyguards. I knew that there were Secret Service men posted all over the grounds to forestall this very thing, yet in spite of them this little man with the outlandish gun had crept within fifty feet of his goal. Had he picked them off, one by one, with his silent darts?

The man was stirring. Bill had him now in a grip that would take more than wildcat tactics to break. I parted the bushes so that a shaft of light fell on his face. Surely I knew that forked beard, those piercing black eyes, the shock of bristling hair. Suddenly I remembered. "Bill! It's Dampier!"

Pierre Dampier, France's greatest physicist, the confrere of Einstein and Heisenberg and Poincare, who had dropped out of sight so mysteriously five years before. Dampier here, in Washington, sniping at the Middle-European Ambassador with an electric gun!

The little man was staring at me with those beady eyes. For a moment I thought he would deny it. Then his face changed. The fury, the madness went out of it and were replaced by a great weariness that made him seem years older. He slumped in Bill's grasp, then stiffened proudly.

"Yes, gentlemen," he admitted. "Pierre Dampier, at your service."

This was no ordinary assassination. Big as the news was, Dampier made it bigger. And news was what Bill and I were here for.

"Bill," I said, "this is our story. No one else even suspects it. Are you going to turn him over to the police or do we get the whole yarn, ourselves, first?"

He nodded. "You're right," he agreed. "We'll never get it if we let him go now. Washington has a way of hushing those things up." He turned to the little Frenchman. "Monsieur Dampier we are newspaper men, we two. There's a reason for what you tried to do tonight, a good reason, or you wouldn't have attempted it. Will you tell us that reason, and let us explain to the world why the great Pierre Dampier has chosen to play the role of a common murderer?"

Dampier stiffened. The forked beard was thrust stiffly forward and the thin shoulders squared in spite of Bill's numbing grip. "I am no murderer!" he hissed. "Wilhelm Nebel is the enemy of my country and of yours--of the world! I stood in his way, and I was crushed. I rose again, and he has found me and tried to grind me under his accursed heel! He will kill me, if I do not kill him first. I implore you, Monsieur, let me go! Let me finish what I have begun. The world will be better for it, and"--a whimsical smile twisted his thin lips--"it will be a greater _coup_ for you, will it not?"

Bill was studying him. "We can't do that," he replied, "even if we wanted to. Herr Nebel is our country's guest. But this I will do. Give me your word that you will make no further attempt on Herr Nebel's life for twenty-four hours, tell us why you have done this thing, and I'll let you go. I'll give you one hour's start, and then I'll tell the police the whole story. Is it a bargain?"

Dampier bowed his head. "You have my word, Monsieur. I will tell you everything. But when you have heard what I will say, perhaps you will not wish to call your police. Shall we go to my laboratory? We can talk more freely there."

Bill's grip tightened. "Wait! This garden was guarded. Have you killed those men? Because if you have all bets are off!"

The little Frenchman smiled. "But no, Monsieur. I have no quarrel with your countrymen. There are other missiles for this little toy of mine--hollow needles filled with a certain rare drug like the 'mercy bullets' of your American sportsmen. They will sleep soundly for some hours yet, and have what you call the big hangover when they awaken but that is all. Shall we go now? It is late, and I have much to tell you."

The whole idea looked screwy to me. Even now I'm not sure that it wasn't. But when Bill Porter makes up his mind, it would take Gabriel's trumpet to change it. He was quite capable of plumping one of Dampier's little needles into me and going off with the Frenchman alone.

"I'll get the car," I said. "Let's get out of here before someone stumbles over a corpse and yells for the cops."

We were somewhere in the middle of Maryland before Bill let me slow down. He must have had a talk with Dampier while I was getting the car, for the little Frenchman never peeped until we swung into a narrow dirt road somewhere north of Frederick. He called the next turn, and the next, until I began to suspect that he was running us around in circles. At last we pulled up before a deserted farm-house, set back from the road behind a dilapidated picket fence. Bill nudged me. Silhouetted against the stars were the towers of a high-tension line. Dampier was either stealing or buying power in a big way.

Now a French gentleman's word is supposed to be about as good as Finland's credit, but we were taking no chances. I remembered that wicked little dart with its razor-edged barbs, and I felt pretty sure that Bill hadn't forgotten it either. We lined up, one on each side of him, and marched across the weed-grown lawn to the rickety side porch. There was a Yale lock on the door, and as Dampier swung it open I saw that it was backed with steel armor-plate. Outside the house might look like the poorer section of Bilded Road, but inside it was built like a fortress. Six-inch concrete walls, steel doors, indirect lighting and ventilation--it looked as though Monsieur Pierre Dampier had been expecting to stand a pretty heavy siege.

A winding stair went down through the floor into a basement room that ran under the entire house. Dampier led the way, Bill followed, and I came last. Probably our science editor could have made something of what Dampier had in that buried room. I couldn't. I wouldn't even have known where to begin photographing it, if the Leica hadn't been back on the terrace at the Embassy where I'd dropped it to vault over the rail into Bill's little shambles, and the Graflex somewhere in the back of the car.

To begin with, he was drawing more current than any ten men I'd ever seen, and I've covered some of the atom-busting at M.I.T. and the lightning shop at Pittsfield. It all went into two huge buss-bars, that ran across to a kind of cage of interlacing copper loops, standing in the center of the room. They were hung from jointed supports that rose above an insulated block or platform of bakelite, with most of the bulkier apparatus inside out of sight, but I had a hunch that whatever was going to happen would take place in, at, and around those spidery coils.

One corner of the room was a kind of office with a desk and books, and a couple of ancient chairs. Dampier waved Bill and me into them and began to pace up and down in front of us like an expectant father. The wild glint had come back into his eyes, but I've seen enough of scientists to know that that isn't necessarily fatal. Most scientists are half nuts anyway. Bill and I never agreed on that point.

You see, before Bill became a demon reporter, he was the white hope of American science. That's how I met him, trying to cover something I couldn't understand and didn't much want to. He fixed my story up for me, and chiseled in on the season's juiciest murder scandal in return. I came down with a bad case of busted cranium, as a result of following his hunches a little too far, and he wrote my scoop for me. After that it stuck. I claimed then they should have made him science editor, but old Medford is our owner's nephew or something, and besides he's pretty good. Anyway, Bill wouldn't take a desk job. It seems he'd always wanted to feel the pulse of Life--

Dampier's English was good. He'd been educated in England and the United States. But when he got excited he fairly surpassed himself and became heart-breakingly colloquial. Where most foreigners would have broken down into their mother-tongue, he relapsed into gutter slang or worse. I've left that out. It doesn't read as well as it sounds, and besides, nice old ladies like to read these magazines. If only they knew the truth--the real inside truth about some of the yarns that have been told in these pages! I've seen the originals--things that a newspaper wouldn't print for fear of being laughed out of a year's circulation--and with proofs! They happen, believe me. Only I'd never been in one before.

Dampier began with true professional dignity. "Gentlemen," he said, "you have treated me honorably. I shall do the same to you. I shall tell you all! When I am finished, judge then if I have done right to assassinate this monster of the devil!

"Monsieur Crandall recognized in me that Pierre Dampier who vanished from the world of science five years ago. It was Wilhelm Nebel who made me to flee like the wild goose. Nebel--the chief of munitions, the millionaire, the so great diplomat, whose hands reach out to every country, regardless of boundaries or the hatred of races. Even in France I was not safe! The finger of Nebel was in the pie of our government. He twisted it--poof! Spies of the police investigate me. They ask questions. They give me the degrees. But I tell them nothing. They can find nothing. It is all here--here in the grey material!" He tapped his bristling skull. "And when they have gone, I take my books, my papers, what money I can get, and take it on the lam to these United States!"

He stopped for breath and glared at us triumphantly. "I scram," he repeated. "I vanish from the sight of men. Here I am Leon the retired hair-dresser, the man with the big radio. Pierre Dampier is forgotten. But not by the accursed Nebel!

"Here in America is a free country where only the dogs, the automobiles, the husbands must have licenses. There are no foolish papers to carry about, no questions to answer to the police. I can hide like a rat in the mousecheese, and be safe. But not from this son-of-an-unpardonableness Nebel! His men are everywhere. He sees everything. Only here I can protect myself. Here I can kill before I am killed!

"But I see in your eye that I am beating about the gas-works, Monsieur. What is it that the old man Dampier has wrested from Nature, that is of so great value to the famous Nebel? What is the secret for which he has lammed himself here to hide like a flea in the chemise of your charming Maryland? Why is he willing to sail down the great river, to fry on the heated seat, so long as Nebel shall die? I will tell you, gentlemen!"

He drew himself up to every inch of his five feet two. He thrust out a pipe-stem arm and pointed an accusing finger at the mechanism that squatted in the middle of the floor.

"There, gentlemen, is the weapon that will make France supreme! The instrument of defense that makes offense impossible! The weapon that will end war!"

We looked at him, and at it, and at each other. It didn't look like the sort of thing you'd lug out on a battlefield to chase the enemy away. It had even less resemblance to the kind of fortress that I'd heard France was building along the Middle-European border. I began to wonder if, after all, that glint in Dampier's eyes was the holy light of pure science.

"What is it?" Bill asked.

The little Frenchman's chest pushed out until his vest-buttons creaked. Then he zipped forward, his rat's eyes darting from side to side, and hissed in our ears:

"_It is total reflection!_"

That left me cold, but it didn't Bill. I could see that he had a glimmering of an understanding of what went on, but he was puzzled as to the why, what and how. "How d'you mean?" he asked. "We have total internal reflection in prisms. That's no weapon--or defense either, unless you're figuring on Nebel's crowd developing a death-ray or something like that for the next war."

Dampier chuckled. It was about as self-satisfied a chuckle as I've heard. "Death-rays--maybe. I do not care. Bullets, shells, bombs, I tell you nothing, _nothing_ can break through the barrier of total reflection! And it is a weapon as well, to turn the enemy's own strength against him."

Bill was sitting up straight in his chair. "Tell me about it," he said softly.

Dampier wriggled and seemed to settle down like a statue on his two spread legs. Only from the waist up was he alive, talking volubly with both hands and that wagging beard.

"It is simple," he explained. "From the beginning of time, what has been the first defense of mankind? It is the wall, the barrier which the enemy cannot climb, cannot break, cannot penetrate with their weapons. A wall of thorns against the beasts of the darkness. A boulder rolled in the mouth of a cave. Walls of sharpened stakes, of earth and stone, of human flesh and blood! Walls of fire laid down by giant guns. Walls of poisonous vapors through which no living thing can pass. Always a wall, stronger and stronger, but never perfect. I, Pierre Dampier, have made the perfect wall!

"Look, Monsieur--you have spoken of the reflecting prism. All light that falls on it at the proper angle is diverted, turned back. Walls of steel and concrete, such as I have here about me, will repel the bullets of powerful rifles, the shells of small guns, like the little balls of ping-pong. All these things will protect me from the weapons of my enemies--but they are not perfect. They are not total reflection!

"Look you, again. Always there is some ray that will be of the improper angle, the too great or too small wavelength. Always there is some shell that will batter its way through my walls and kill me. But if I can find a mirror that will turn back all rays, a wall from which all projectiles will rebound, a shield against all the many forces of Nature and of man--then, Monsieur, I have the perfect defense and the perfect weapon!

"See this little mirror in my hand. I flash in your eyes a beam of light--so. You are blinded, no? And if this is not light, but a ray of death that you have hurled against my mirror, it kills _you_--is it not so? If it is a bullet that you shoot at me, it recoils and strikes you down. If it is a bomb, it is thrown back into your trenches, to kill your men. If it is a great force of pressure or attraction, it is diverted, reversed, and it strikes at you while I am safe behind my perfect wall."

Bill was on his feet with that mulish look he has when he's sure he's right. "It's impossible!" he snapped. "No metal can reflect all wavelengths. No substance can resist a force greater than those which created it and hold it together. As for magnetism, gravitation, they're space-warp forces. _Things_ can't stop them. Sorry we're not in the market for Sunday features today, and I rather doubt that Herr Nebel is. You've got brains--I'll grant you that. You have some energy source in the handle of that little gun of yours that would turn industry up on its tail overnight. I haven't the slightest doubt in the world that you may have blasted the atom wide open and made it sit up and beg. But there's no substance, known or unknown, that will do what you claim, and there never will be. If you have no objections, Monsieur, we will be on our way, and in exactly one hour I will call the police. Au revoir, Monsieur."

Dampier was hopping from one foot to the other like a hen on ice. "No, no, no, Monsieur!" he cried. "You have not heard all! You must lend another ear! There is no substance that will reflect all things; that is true. Only a fool would believe it. But what of a wall that has no substance--that has no existence in what we call reality but that is as fixed and unshakable as the roots of the universe--a wall, a discontinuity _of Space itself_?"

Bill stopped halfway up the stairs. "Say that again," he demanded.

The little Frenchman's hands went winging out in hopeless resignation. "There are no words! One does not explain the theories of Dirac and Schroedinger in words. There are symbols--the logic of symbols--that can be translated at last into reality that men can see, but there are no words for the things that are born and live only here, in the head, in the think-box. It is here, in these symbols, on these sheets of paper. It is there, in that apparatus which you see. But it is not in words."

Bill wasn't being stopped now. He lives words. "You mean," he said, "that you've hit on a condition of Space--maybe a discontinuity of some kind--that has the property of absolute total reflection? It will reflect all radiations one hundred per cent. Any material body will bounce off without making the slightest impression. Every force exerted on it is turned back on itself--even space-forces like gravitation and magnetism. And you can create that condition at will. Is that what you mean?"

Dampier's black eyes fairly spit sparks. "That is it, Monsieur," he cried. "You have said it with a full mouth! My wall, my zone as I have called it, will reflect completely all things, although it is itself a nothing, without existence in our universe. It lives in the symbols of mathematics, and I have just this day completed the apparatus which will give these symbols reality--which will create the zone as I desire it, in any shape or size. I will show you, and you will believe. And then we shall see about Herr Wilhelm Nebel and his makers of wars!"

Bill frowned. "Dampier, give me those equations. I've got to puzzle this thing out for myself, follow your argument through on paper. Is there any place where I can be quiet?"

"But of course, Monsieur. There, in the room for thermal work, everything will be perfectly quiet. Here are the papers, and while you read, I shall show Monsieur Crandall the working of the works."

But Bill didn't hear that last. The heavy door of the constant temperature room had closed behind him and insulated him from the world.

I couldn't do much but stand and watch Dampier as he bustled about, tuning up his crazy-looking machine. He talked a blue streak as he worked, but most of it went right over my head. I'm no Bill Porter. I did begin to see why Nebel, if he was behind the world's armaments racket as Dampier claimed, might be pretty anxious to get hold of such a thing before the little Frenchman began peddling it to his best customers. In the right hands it might make war very unfashionable.

Imagine an invaded nation squatting down behind a perfectly reflecting wall. They can't see out, but nothing can get in. Enemy shells bounce off into the enemy lines. Death rays flash back into the faces of those who sent them. Radio is garbled by all kinds of curious echoes and reflections, making communication impossible. Electrical and magnetic apparatus would be subject to strange disturbances. And gravitation--how would it affect that? Would every outside object be attracted to the mirror, or would it be repelled by a kind of negative gravity, lifting it into space, to the moon, the planets, to the very stars? I wish now that I'd known at least a fraction of what Bill did, and had been able to read what he read in these few sheets of neatly written paper. I can only guess, from what Dampier said and from what I saw. What his zone really was--what it could do--I do not know.

I tried to pay attention to what he was doing. The real vitals of his apparatus were in the big insulated block. The thousands of amperes he was drawing from the high-tension lines were merely the kicker that kept the real engine turning. Atomic energy, Bill had guessed. Probably he was right.

The loops and coils above the platform determined the shape that the zone would take. According to how they were set, Dampier explained, he could get any geometrically continuous form--a disc, a paraboloid, anything that geometry can describe. What he was going to make was a sphere.

I'm not at all sure that I'm getting the order of things right. I gathered that the zone must be built up and strengthened little by little; first impermeable to the simplest forms of energy, like light and heat, and then to the more and more complex ones, until at some critical point the whole thing became absolute. The machine that created it had to be outside, otherwise the zone itself would keep any power from getting through. On the other hand, it might be powered by one of those super-batteries that Dampier had in the grip of his solenoid-gun. With a set-up like that, you could dig a hole and pull it in after you, so to speak. What I wondered was how you get out?

I asked Dampier that one. "There would be no way," he told me. "Once the zone is complete, it is unchangeable--absolute. You would be inside, to us here, but I think that to yourself it would seem that it is we who are inside--that you are in a world all of your own, with its own laws, its own science. They can be worked out, these laws. They are in the equations that Monsieur Porter is reading; but they are very strange and complex. In war, a closed zone would be used only as a trap for the enemy."

"Wait a minute," I objected. "You mean to say that once you've made this thing you can't unmake it?"