The mass spectrographer said eventually, “Well, it isn’t tungsten.”

Hallam’s broad and humorless face wrinkled into a harsh smile. “All right. Well tell that to Bright-boy Denison. I want a report and—”

“But wait awhile, Dr. Hallam. I’m telling you it’s not tungsten, but that doesn’t mean I know what it is.”

“What do you mean you don’t know what it is.”

“I mean the results are ridiculous.” The technician thought a while. “Impossible, actually. The charge-mass ratio is all wrong.”

“All wrong in what way?”

“Too high. It just can’t be.”

“Well, then,” said Hallam and, regardless of the motive that was driving him, his next remark set him on the road to the Nobel Prize and, it might even be argued, a deserved one, “get the frequency of its characteristic x-radiation and figure out the charge. Don’t just sit around and talk about something being impossible.”

It was a troubled technician who came into Hallam’s office a few days later.

Hallam ignored the trouble on the other’s face—he was never sensitive—and said, “Did you find—” He then cast a troubled look of his own at Denison, sitting at the desk in his own lab and shut the door. “Did you find the nuclear charge?”

“Yes, but it’s wrong.”

“All right, Tracy. Do it over.”

“I did it over a dozen times. It’s wrong.”

“If you made the measurement, that’s it; Don’t argue with the facts.”

Tracy rubbed his ear and said, “I’ve got to, Doc. If I take the measurements seriously, then what you’ve given me is plutonium-186.”

“Plutonium-186? Plutonium-186?”

“The charge is +94. The mass is 186.”

“But that’s impossible. There’s no such isotope. There can’t be.”

“That’s what I’m saying to you. But those are the measurements.”

“But a situation like that leaves the nucleus over fifty neutrons short. You can’t have plutonium-186. You couldn’t squeeze ninety-four protons into one nucleus with only ninety-two neutrons and expect it to hang together for even a trillion-trillionth of a second.”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Doc,” said Tracy, patiently.

And then Hallam stopped to think. It was tungsten he was missing and one of its isotopes, tungsten-186, was stable. Tungsten-186 had 74 protons and 112 neutrons in its nucleus. Could something have turned twenty neutrons into twenty protons? Surely that was impossible.

“Are there any signs of radioactivity?” asked Hallam, groping somehow for a road out of the maze.

“I thought of that,” said the technician. “It’s stable. Absolutely stable.”

“Then it can’t be plutonium-186.”

“I keep telling you, Doc.”

Hallam said, hopelessly, “Well, give me the stuff.” Alone once more, he sat and looked at the bottle in stupefaction. The most nearly stable isotope of plutonium was plutonium-240, where 146 neutrons were needed to make the 94 protons stick together with some semblance of partial stability.

What could he do now? It was beyond him and he was sorry he had started. After all, he had real work begging to be done, and this thing—this mystery—had nothing to do with him. Tracy had made some stupid mistake or the mass spectrometer was out of whack, or— Well, what of it? Forget the whole thing! Except that Hallam couldn’t do that. Sooner or later, Denison would be bound to stop by and, with that irritating half-smile of his, ask after the tungsten. Then what could Hallam say? Could he say, “It isn’t tungsten, just as I told you.”

Surely Denison would ask, “Oh, and what is it, then?” and nothing imaginable could have made Hallam expose himself to the kind of derision that would follow any claim that it was plutonium-186. He had to find out what it was, and he had to do it himself. Clearly, he couldn’t trust anyone.

So about two weeks later he entered Tracy’s laboratory in what can fairly be described as a first-class fury.

“Hey, didn’t you tell me that stuff was non-radioactive?”

“What stuff?” said Tracy automatically, before he remembered.

“That stuff you called plutonium-186,” said Hallam.

“Oh. Well it was stable.”

“About as stable as your mental state. If you call this non-radioactive, you belong in a plumber’s shop.”

Tracy frowned. “Okay, Doc. Pass it over and let’s try.” And then he said, “Beats me! It is radioactive. Not much, but it is. I don’t see how I could have missed that.”

“And how far can I trust your crap about plutonium-186?”

The matter had Hallam by the throat now. The mystery had become so exasperating as to be a personal affront. Whoever had switched bottles, or switched contents, must either have switched again or have devised a metal for the specific purpose of making a fool of him. In either case, he was ready to pull the world apart to solve the matter if he had to—and if he could.

He had his stubbornness, and an intensity that could not easily be brushed aside, and he went straight to G. C. Kantrowitsch, who was then in the final year of his own rather remarkable career. Kantrowitsch’s aid was difficult to enlist but, once enlisted, it quickly caught fire.

Two days later, in fact, he was storming into Hallam’s office in a blaze of excitement. “Have you been handling this thing with your hands?”

“Not much,” said Hallam.

“Well, don’t If you’ve got any more, don’t. It’s emitting positrons.”

“Oh?”

“The most energetic positrons I’ve ever seen.... And your figures on its radioactivity are too low.”

“Too low?”

“Distinctly. And what bothers me is that every measurement I take is just a trifle higher than the one before.”

Bronowski came across an apple in the capacious pocket of his jacket and bit into it. “Okay, you’ve seen Hallam and been kicked out as expected. What next?”

“I haven’t quite decided. But whatever it is, it’s going to dump him on his fat behind. I saw him once before, you know; years ago, when I first came here; when I thought he was a great man. A great man— He’s the greatest villain in the history of science. He’s rewritten the history of the Pump, you know, rewritten it here—” Lamont tapped his temple. “He believes his own fantasy and fights for it with a diseased fury. He’s a pygmy with only one talent, the ability to convince others he’s a giant.”

Lamont looked up at Bronowski’s wide and placid face, wreathed now in amusement, and forced a laugh. “Oh, well, that doesn’t do any good, and I’ve told it all to you before anyway.”

“Many times,” agreed Bronowski.

“But it just gravels me to have the whole world—”

Peter Lament had been two years old when Hallam had picked up his altered tungsten for the first time. When he was twenty-five, he joined Pump Station One with the print on his own doctoral dissertation still fresh and accepted a simultaneous appointment on the Physics faculty of the university.

It was a remarkably satisfactory achievement for the young man. Pump Station One was lacking in the glisten of the later stations but it was the granddaddy of them all, of the entire chain that girdled the planet now even though the entire technology was only a couple of decades old. No major technological advance had ever caught hold so rapidly and so entirely and why not? It meant free energy without limit and without problems. It was the Santa Claus and the Aladdin’s lamp of the whole world.

Lament had taken the job in order to deal with problems of the highest theoretical abstraction and yet he found himself interested in the amazing story of the development of the Electron Pump. It had never been written up in its entirety by someone who truly understood the theoretical principles (in so far as they could be understood) and who had some ability in translating the complexities for the general public. To be sure, Hallam himself had written a number of articles for the popular media, but these did not represent a connected, reasoned history — something Lament yearned to supply.