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  Wonder Story Annual

  1952

  Vol. 1, No. 3

  Custom eBook created by

  Jerry eBooks

  July 2016

  Death of a Bootstrap

  SCIENCE-FICTION is, in a small way, akin to scientific method: it often predicts certain results as a logical extension of known phenomena. The difference lies in that the scientist, having predicted his results, goes on to achieve them experimentally; or, failing that, modifies his predictions and starts all over again. While science-fiction, having predicted—or “extrapolated, as any stf addict will insist the process be called—simply sits back and lets our wonderful, terrible; ever-changing human situation prove it right or wrong.

  Science-fiction writers are a forward-looking bunch, and their predictions are usually founded on a proposed scientific addition to the present set-up . . . a new gadget, a new technique, the final realization of space flight with all its attendant problems of colonization, interplanetary politics, interstellar warfare. It is the “bootstrap” process: we invent X, and shortly thereafter our society finds itself based in part on X. But such is not the case with DEATH OF IRON.

  It is based upon the subtraction of X . . .

  Which, in this case, is iron. Fix your mind, please, on the degree to which our civilization is based on iron . . . from can-openers to sky-scrapers, needles to ocean-liners, from steam-shovels to printing-presses to guns to zippers. . .

  Now read the story. —The Editor

  I

  The Girl

  RAYMOND LECLAIR, contemplating the incredible results of his tests, decided that the blame must be placed not on science but on fallible human nature. He checked over the operations once more, searching for the source of the error which must somehow have crept into his formulas, but it continued to elude him.

  In reality he was very little disturbed, but there are certain phenomena which impinge on the routine of every scientist, which require a special terminology to account for them. This was one of these cases; Leclair searched his memory for the proper words as he gathered his working papers together, left the foundry, mounted a stone stairway and pushed open the door of the material-testing laboratory.

  It was a large room with white walls and a tiled floor, littered with various machines and pieces of apparatus. It was already nearly noon, but the dull October sky shed only a feeble light through the windows and surfaces of steel and brass reflecting the glare of the electric lights.

  In one corner of the room a tall, thin young man with a long, horsey face was bent attentively over a testing stand watching some machine through thick glasses. Leclair, extending toward him the graph which was the result of his investigations, began a laborious explanation . . . Pierre Selevine, always rude when at work, pushed away the extended paper without replying.

  With eyes fixed on the needle that was registering his results he attached a weight whose pressure, multiplied through a system of levers, was crushing some mass of heated material. His fingers moved with precision over the polished shafts, regulating the application of the heat or the speed of rotation of the moving parts. Understanding that it was useless to interrupt at present, Leclair stepped aside.

  The melancholy light threw a sad and aged expression onto the faces of the pair.

  Through the windows the ruddy orb of a sun, deprived of all strength by shrouding veils of mist and smoke, was barely visible. Under its gloomy inspection an industrial city was engaged in its daily tasks. From the window through which Leclair was surveying the scene, he could catch a confused view of the habitations of the workmen, a fragment of the river and of the factories of the city of Denain, arranged in neat cubistic patterns of building and chimney.

  The Escaut River glided past docks encumbered with the merchandise of the world and beneath a tracery of bridges and cranes. Imprisoned by dams, stained with oil and coal-dust the water seemed to be made of solid metal. Only for an instant would its surface be troubled by the passage of some tug dragging its long train of laden barges, rolling the water away from their prows in sparkling ripples. In the distance the horizon was hidden by an agglomeration of buildings dominated by blast furnaces.

  Sensitive as he was to delicate forms and colors Leclair detested this corner of the earth which had been rendered so ugly by the industry of man. A confused rumbling went up from it night and day, a rumbling that was produced by mighty machines in factories where thousands labored, of thundering hoofs and groaning wheels and bridges that vibrated under the weight of passing trains.

  Muscular workmen toiled in the mines and at the banks of the river. Others hammered the softened metal in the light of its own fires; lineal descendants of the men of an earlier age who poured the molten bronze from crucibles of stone, they continued man’s conquest of inanimate nature, forging the tools which gave to one feeble animal his dominion over all the rest. After this victory over all the beasts of earth, man still fought here, forcing rebellious metal to his service at the price of toil and torment.

  LECLAIR was absorbed in the contemplation of the scene when someone called his name softly. Turning, he saw Fanny, the girl who polished the gauges of the testing laboratory. Seated behind a grinding machine, she beckoned to him. She was from Waes, a daughter of the laboring classes, somewhat frail and with a certain grace. She admired this young man, so elegant in his sober and well-tailored clothes, so different from the gross workmen among whom her lot was cast.

  Leclair stepped over to her, and to pass the time, asked for news of Laval, her lover, a mechanic from Paris, who beat her and was in the habit of exploiting her.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Oh, Julien!” she said, “I’m off him for good.”

  Leaning toward the engineer, she regarded him laguidly through half-closed lashes. Her lips seemed to offer themselves . . . With a start she recoiled; the door had opened suddenly behind her and in came Pillot, the electrician, dirty from head to foot, late and in a hurry, as was usual with him. He covered the ten kilometers that separated his home from the factory of Morain and Co., by bicycle and lived in a perpetual horror of rain. After the usual lamentations about the state of the roads, he went grumblingly about his tasks.

  Selevine, having finished what he was doing, drew a short pipe from his pocket, filled and lit it, and without a word, came over to shake Leclair’s hand. Then, noticing for the first time the graphs in which Leclair had expressed the results of his tests on the high-speed steels, he seized them eagerly, reading these cabalistic documents as an ordinary man might a newspaper. They told a tale of overworked metal, of the labor of interior forces, and finally of the crystallization and dry fracture of the material at a point where it should have been sound. His face exhibited an increasing astonishment.

  “What in the world have you done?” he demanded, “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor I,” replied Leclair. “Your formula must be defective.”

  “You’re joking! Why, only a few days ago we got the most wonderful results. There must be an error in calculations.”

  “But I assure you . . .” protested Leclair.

  “Oh, well, never mind. It isn’t important. We’ll take another sample, that’s all. Anybody can make a mistake. I just finished my experiment with a mixup as bad as yours. You know I’ve been studying natural steel alloys for some time. Their properties are not very well known. Some of them have an enormous amount of tensile strength but they are unstable and nervous; under a shock they break like glass. Very little use in industry, of course,
but they offer an interesting field of research. I had succeeded in producing a ductile high-carbon steel, but after a little time its cohesion seems to have been spontaneously destroyed. Queer, isn’t it?”

  “But how do you explain it?”

  “I have been trying to interpret the phenomenom by calculation. It’s a tough job. Yesterday, I was at it late, working over this formula, burying myself neck-deep in mathematical analysis. For a moment I thought I had discovered something. I stopped working and went over to the window to get a breath of fresh air. My room looks out over the Essel Forge shop. As I stood there I could see the men hammering the metal amid the flames, and for some reason the spectacle filled me with a kind of exultation. It seemed to me that I was just at the edge of translating into comprehensibility one of the most profound secrets of the material universe; that I was about to express all the transformations of iron in a single formula . . .”

  He stopped as though a little ashamed of his enthusiasm, his eyes roaming about the room.

  “Where was I? Oh, yes—I turned back to the table. When I had worked out the results of all the formulas, simplified their products, I found I had for a solution—a mathematical expression that could not be expressed by any material result and which was inherently absurd. I could have wept with rage. Every time I try to solve certain problems of metallurgy I run into the impossible . . . Do you know, there are crystalline equilibriums in metal that are quite unpredictable, very much like the reactions of living matter.”

  An old workman, clad in the blue jumper of a mechanic, shuffled into the laboratory and approaching Selevine, informed him that a new lot of metal was ready to be examined.

  The two engineers went toward the foundry, which was located beyond the workshops. Passing along a gallery which ran around the building at a height of twenty feet above the generators below, they stepped suddenly into a deafening chorus of sounds. Beneath their feet in the blue artificial day of the arc-lights, electric motors whirled in their carapaces of steel. Dynamos added their heavy monotonous note to the din, and traveling cranes rumbled about them.

  IT WAS a harmony of swift, precise movement, of the extention and retraction of driving rods in feline gestures, of the calculated mad interlocking of gears, of rapidly-moving cams and pinions. The machines toiled with the metal all around; a mighty knife sliced it into sections, a hundred lathes peeled the sections like so many fruits; the files bit it with their fine hard teeth; the grinding wheels shaped it amid a display of burning sparks, silvery-shining drills bored to its heart, saws tore at it. Modified in form and substance the steel cried out with a thousand voices—some raucous, some sonorous, shrill squeals and shrieks of agony. Then, out-sounding all the rest, came the heavy beat of a trip-hammer on a plate.

  They encountered the superintendent of the factory.

  “Well, how about my test figures?” he asked.

  Leclair hesitated, and then promised: “You’ll get them by the end of the week, Monsieur Lefevre.”

  As they reached the foundry a puddler came to assure them that the steel was ready.

  The converters, of the old type, with crucibles, were subterranean, and were heated by gas-jets, the flow of which was regulated from above the ground. Lids of refractory earths half-closed the vents from whose mouths there now escaped puffs of suffocating heat.

  Right before one of these openings a foundryman, clothed in his tabard of leather and wet gloves, plunged in a long-handled pair of tongs and drew forth a crucible of the metal, whose burning white changed to a rose color as it struck the outer air. With another tool he skillfully skimmed the floating scum from the pot, and turning out a glob of rapidly hardening metal, dropped it beneath a hammer which struck it flat in a shower of sparks. The glowing blade of metal, tempered in icy water, was seized by the jaws of two gigantic pincers and broken in half. Selevine, examining the grain of the fracture, declared the fusion of the metal satisfactory.

  Through drawn lashes he contemplated the white hot steel, making several observations about the heat-treatment of the other batches in the converters. He went to and fro in the narrow place without seeming in the least affected by the heat, experiencing a singular pleasure in breathing the superheated air, halting here and there to examine samples of the batches under treatment. His companion, who had gone outside, heard the noon bell ring without seeing him reappear, and without waiting any longer left the factory with the last groups of workmen.

  There was a special canteen for the engineers at the side of the shop, but Leclair preferred to take his lunch outside the premises in a little restaurant where Selevine and Pillot frequently joined him. Today he was alone in the stall reserved for guests of importance.

  A waitress brought him a plate-lunch of plentiful size, which Leclair finished with rapidity.

  Sniffing the odor of his lukewarm coffee mingled with that of his cigarette, he abandoned himself to vague reveries. The incidents of the morning passed in review before his mind, and he considered unhappily the prospect of having to repeat his task.

  Once more he regretted having left Morocco and wondered if he had not interpreted the promises of Morain, his employer, in a manner too favorable to himself, But the chance had been too good to be missed. At thirty an engineer should be on the road to success; and the head of the steel company had certainly been generous.

  Aside from practical considerations there was the presence of Mme. Morain at Denain to keep him there. He recalled the grey eyes and delicate profile of Renée Morain and all his evil humor disappeared.

  One o’clock. Near him the steelworkers in blouses and overalls, their heavy muscles rippling under dirty skins, were consuming their lunches, washing them down with draughts of cider or wine.

  Leclair went out, A single ray of sunlight, striking athwart two clouds, gilded the side of the street which, always deserted at mealtimes, was now beginning to fill up again. A group of workmen emerged from a wineshop, saluting the engineer awkwardly. At the comer ahead he saw Pillot get out of a car, and made a detour to avoid being bored by his conversation. It took him down a street where a group of working girls went, clothed in gray—bare-headed, youth in them triumphing over the effects of labor. One of them, in whom he recognized Fanny, turned toward him with a clear peal of laughter.

  The young man turned away, annoyed. He could not understand how he had come to be caught in a provoking flirtation with her, and recalled with a certain repugnance how they had stood in the angle of the passage that led to his part of the factory. As she leaned to him he had felt the lithe young body under the sordid grey clothes and had kissed her full on the lips. It was dark there; neither of them had seen the approach of Selevine, who stood regarding them with a smile. Leclair, irritated, had questioned the Russian.

  “Well, what do you want to butt in for?”

  Selevine had shrugged his shoulders.

  “Perhaps you didn’t know that girl has a lover?”

  “And what of it?”

  Since that revelation Leclair had avoided the company of the young working-girl. Seeing her there in the street, laughing and gay, he wondered how much truth Selevine’s innuendo had contained. A mere lie, perhaps.

  II

  First Trouble

  FOR eight months, Leclair had been working under Selevine’s orders at the factory of Morain and Co.

  His principal duty was that of testing the high-speed steels which were the specialty of the firm. He performed this task well, but without enthusiasm and with a regularity that had become a trifle mechanical.

  His chief, on the other hand, took a passionate and irregular interest in his work. He was in bad health and was subject to violent fits of depression; but he was interested in what he did and for days would let it keep him even from eating and speaking. Then all at once, his humor would change without any reasonable cause.

  Selevine was also interested in mathematical physics, and took a certain mystical pleasure in the material with which he labored. Taking Leclair
into the foundry he would show him by what substances incorporated in the fluid masses and by what methods of heat-treatment the different types of steel were produced.

  There, amid the mystery of ingenuous combinations, the radiant body of the metal was altered. The Fire-god reigned.

  Fire took all the diverse forms of which it is capable; appeared in tongues of purple, in ruby-colored vapors, in gems, in wild dream-flowers.

  It expanded throughout the irons as they fused, pierced the heart of every blast-furnace and slept in the cold blocks of steel, ready to waken under a shock.

  At the gesture of the foundryman, naked beneath his leather tabard, a retort would turn over. A jet of violently-driven air, suddenly released into the mass, sent long golden flames tipped with purple rushing from the mouth of the vessel amid a terrible roaring; vaporized jets of lava, sulphur-yellow, emerald-green and striped with violent vapors, dashed forth to break in showers of twinkling stars.

  The steel was refined in electric furnaces girdled with brass. Tremendous accumulations of energy were gathered in these pockets of silica and refractory brick. Then, with the current, shut off, the electrodes were lifted out by systems of automatic counterweights and the steel poured out in little brooks whose whiteness struck the eye with blinding brilliance.

  Samples were taken from the cooled ingots. The microscope revealed their crystalline structure. Under the object-glass of that instrument could be distinguished the curious designs of the material-mosaics and carpet-patterns with interweaving lines. The hard, fracture steels gave a delicate pale blue field starred with tiny white grains; the mild steels had delicate waterings with shell-like patterns like those in silk or mother-of-pearl; others were graven with tiny hieroglyphics. Only Selevine could read correctly these inscriptions that told the story of the inner life of matter.