Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 (12 page)

 
          
"A
difference of a hundred and thirty degrees, say," quickly computed
Darragh.

 
          
"Zero
would be like the most endurable summer heat to them," Brenda elaborated,
"and a hundred below would be only a bracing tingle of frost. You see how
this sort of temperature-comfort for them would rule out Mars as too warm,
Jupiter as too cold."

 
          
"The
explosion-ray would be too hot, though," Darragh said again.

 
          
She
shook her head emphatically, and he relished the dance of golden sparkle in her
hair. "No, Mark. The explosion-ray isn't hot at all. It doesn't effect
explosion by heat. In fact, it's quite cold."

           
"That doesn't make sense!"
he argued.

           
"It will if you'll let me
finish. It simply changes the type of the water in whatever substance it
encounters
!.
It changes ordinary water into H
₂
0."

 
          
He
stared at her until she laughed aloud. "You look as if you'd suddenly
swallowed a pebble."

 
          
"I
won't swallow that one, Brenda. Listen, I know we're primitive and untaught and
all those things Orrin Lyle charges us with down yonder in South America, but
we have schools and a few books and so on. My own father was a teacher. And
what's all this about changing water into H
₂
OP Water
is
H
,0
, I've
always heard."

 
          
"You've
never heard the whole story," she insisted, still smiling. "Let me
give you a little lesson in molecular science."

 
          
She
got up and crossed to the bookshelf. From it she selected a volume with faded
brown covers, and turned around again. "Now what are you goggling
about?"

 
          
"I
just watched you when you walked," he told her.
 
"Brenda, I was wrong in hesitating
when you asked me if
 
you were the prettiest girl I'd ever
seen. You are; it's just
 
soaking through to me."

 
          
"Oh,"
she laughed, "you're- looking at me through love-colored glasses. Let's
stick to chemistry for a moment." Coming back, she sat down and opened the
book. "This is the old
Handbook of
Chemistry and Physics,
compiled in the earlier part of the twentieth
century by Hodgman and Lange for use as a reference book by students in
laboratory courses."

 
          
"And
what does it say?" prompted Darragh.

           
"It says, ampng other basic
facts in science, that normal water, the kind we see around us in rain and
pools and so on —the kind we drink and wash in—is H
₂
0 merely in
proportion."

 
          
"Isn't
that what I was just arguing?" Darragh asked, mystified.

 
          
"Not at all.
You know what molecules are, don't you?"

           
"Certainly I know what molecules
are," he replied, somewhat huffily.

           
"All right.
A normal water molecule, made up of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, gathers them
in a special way. Not just two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen—naturally it
forms from sixteen hydrogen atoms and eight oxygens."

 
          
"Is
that what the book says?" he demanded "
Then .
.."

           
"Then the ordinary molecule of
water isn't just three atoms; it doesn't look like a shamrock. It looks more
like a raspberry. Quit sticking your big pale eyes out at me, Mark, and try to
understand. The book knows what it's talking about."

 
          
"Of
course it does, and so do you. Let me make a few notes."

 
          
He
fumbled for his belt pouch under the robe, and got out scraps of paper and his
hammered lead pencil. He poised the paper on his knee. "Now," he
said, "you say that this ray somehow rearranges the atom—breaks up the
complex molecules of water into smaller, simpler ones. But the proportions are
the same—two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen. What's the big
difference?"

 
          
"In
the boiling points," replied Brenda. "It's far lower for the true H
₂
0.
Human science never really made sure, but Cold-Creature science did. We can
work it out pretty well by consideration of other known facts."

 
          
She
turned pages in the brown book for a moment.

           
"Set down these figures,"
she directed him. "At the top of the column, put normal water—H
₂
0,
with the boiling point at one hundred degrees Centigrade."

 
          
"Boiling
point one hundred," Darragh said after her writing.

 
          
"Now
let's take another hydrogen-containing liquid compound, hydrogen telluride.
Boiling point is zero degrees Centigrade."

 
          
"I'm
not acquainted with hydrogen telluride," confessed Darragh, writing.

 
          
"Neither
am I particularly. I'm just quoting from what it says here in Hodgman and
Lange. Got it down on your list?"
"Right.
H
₂
Te, boiling point zero."

 
          
"Next in the column, hydrogen selenide—minus forty-two degrees
Centigrade."

 
          
He
looked over her shoulder for the chemical symbol, and jotted it down. "H
₂
Se
boils at minus 24.
Ready for another here."

 
          
"And
hydrogen sulphide," continued Brenda, her slim forefinger traveling down
the page.
"Boiling point, minus sixty.
Now then,
what have you got there?"

 
         
Darragh
showed her his succession of figures:

 
          
H
₁₆
O
_g
.................................  boils at 100 degrees

           
" 0
"-42
"-60

 
          
"All
right so far," pronounced Brenda. "Now we can progress on to
hypothetical H
₂
0. It's not in the book but we can work it out
roughly by comparing the weights of atoms in relation to each other."

 
          
"Maybe
you can," he smiled ruefully, "but I can't."

           
"Then let me." She took
the paper, leafed
,-
through the book to a table of
atomic weights, and quickly scribbled several of them below Darragh's figures:

 
          
Tellurium
weighs 127.5
          
 
Selenium
" 79.2
          
 
Sulphur            
"        32.06

 
          
'And
one more," she said.
"Here it is.
^!

 
 
         
Oxygen
weighs 16.00

 
 
          
Leaning
close to her, Darragh felt her smooth cheek brush his rough one.

 
          
"In
other words," he tried to sum up, "the boiling point varies inversely
with the atomic weight."

 
          
"Well,
yes, in a general sort of way,
I
can
remember my father and Orrin's father going over these same figures. Of course
it's not quite as simple as that."

 
          
Darragh
had taken the pencil from her. Quickly he did
a
couple of problems in division.

 
          
"Well,
Selenium's weight goes one
¹
' and six-tenths times into Tellurium's
weight," he computed. "In other words, that diminishment procures a
drop in boiling point of forty-two degrees. But sulphur is less than half of
Selenium, as regards atomic weight, and that gives us a reduction in boiling
point of only eighteen degrees."

 
          
"
Which is why we have to be loose in our estimates.
In any
case, we can only guess, in the long run of the boiling point of true H
₂
0—simple
water. We generally figure it to be minus 100."

 
          
"Whew!"
whistled Darragh. "That would be minus 212 degrees Fahrenheit—colder than
liquid air."

 
          
But
Brenda smiled dissent and shook her blonde head. "Not quite that frigid.
You forget that Zero degrees Centigrade equals plus thirty-two Fahrenheit. So
the boiling point of simple water is about 148 degrees below zero, in
Fahrenheit figures."

 
          
"Which
is colder than would suit me," said Darragh, and shivered involuntarily.
"So that's what the water is that flows just outside the valve entrance to
this prison, or zoo, or whatever you call it." He turned and looked into
her eyes. "Brenda, I'm going to get you out of here."

 
          
"Yes,"
she said, rapt and confident in the same breath. "We'll have to travel
light. . ."

 
          
"Mighty
fight indeed," he nodded. "Just these books of yours, to help us line
up.
more
knowledge against the Cold People. Wait till
they look at you and listen to you, down on the Orinoco."

 
          
"Wait
till we get there, Mark. We were talking about the simple water flowing
outside. It's boiling, you notice—so it flows somewhere above that 148 degrees
below Zero. They keep supplying it by ray action on ice and frost in their
tunnels and so on. There won't be any escape out that way."

 
          
"No.
Listen, I wish we could take the explosive ray along." Darragh's eyes
snapped with eagerness. "The way you tell me about it, the ray works by
breaking normal water down into this stuff that boils at such a low
temperature."

 
          
"Right,"
she said. "And that low-boiling simple water turns into steam at once—and
explodes. A living body, a tree or animal, or any other object with lots of
water in it. . ."

 
          
"Would
just fly into a cloud of particles," finished Darragh for her.
"That's what happened to most of the human race fifty years ago."

 
          
He
rose to his feet. Folding the notes, he pushed them under his robe and into the
pouch at his girdle.

 
          
"Thanks
for the lecture, Brenda," he smiled. "This information is going to
interest my chiefs and iit'11 help them." He chuckled as he remembered
something. "I remember spying on that outpost colony, down on the shore of
Haiti. I was trying to think of solutions, but a damned mosquito kept plugging
its bill into me. I wished it would go bite a Cold Creature instead."

 
          
"It
wouldn't get any blood from a Cold Creature," she said, quite soberly.
"It ought to take a special breed of mosquito to work on one."