A Thousand Degrees Below Zero Read online

  CHAPTER IV.

  Teddy threw himself out of the machine and rushed up the steps. Evelynopened the door before he could ring, and his beaming face told herthe news he had to give even without his enthusiastic, "It worked!"

  "The steam plume has stopped?" asked the professor anxiously.

  "Absolutely," said Teddy cheerfully. "Not a sign of steam except fromtwo or three puddles of hot water that were cooling off when we left toget back to the fort. The commandant was setting his men to work withthe navy-yard men when I started here."

  "Tell me about this, won't you?" said the reporter briskly. "I'll catchthe devil from the city editor for missing out on that part of it, butif you'll give me the full story----"

  "What's your paper?"

  The reporter told him.

  "That's all right," said Teddy easily. "They were calling extras ofthat paper as I came uptown. The professor has told you the theory ofthe thing?"

  "No," said Evelyn. "He was starting to, but the black flyer appearedand shot down the other a?roplane, and father was so much upset that hecouldn't go into details. Was the pilot of the a?roplane killed?"

  Teddy nodded.

  "Frozen, poor chap. He never knew what struck him."

  "What did happen?" asked the reporter again. "You people seem to takethis so much as a matter of course, and no one else can do anything butguess."

  "The professor knows more about low temperatures than any other manin the world," explained Teddy. "It's only natural that he should befairly certain of his facts."

  He smiled at the professor as the old man made a deprecating gesture.

  "Father is much upset," said Evelyn. "I think it would be best if Teddyexplained. Will that be all right?"

  "Only, in your account of the matter," said Teddy decidedly, "theprofessor must be given credit for the whole thing. It's his work, andhe's entitled to it."

  "No, no," protested the professor. "Teddy did a great deal."

  Evelyn pressed his arm, and he obediently was quiet. The two youngpeople smiled at him.

  "You see how I am ruled," said the professor in mock tragedy. "Mydaughter----"

  "Is going to see that you rest a while," said Evelyn, with a twinklein her eyes. "Teddy, you go and explain the whole thing while I takefather out and discipline him."

  With a laugh, she led the old man away. Teddy smiled.

  "We aren't accustomed to reporters," he said, "or I suspect we'd actdifferently. Miss Hawkins is a most capable physicist, and helps herfather immensely. The three of us work together so much that----Well,come along to the laboratory."

  The two went to the rear of the house. On the way they passed througha long room full of glass cabinets in which odd bits of metal workglittered brightly.

  "The professor's hobby," said Teddy, with a nod toward the cases."Antique jewelry and ancient metal work. He's probably better informedon low temperatures than any one else I know of, but I really believehe's as much of an authority on that, too. This is Phoenician, andthat's early Greek. These are Egyptian in this case. This way."

  He opened a small door and they were in the laboratory.

  "I'm afraid I'll have to lecture a bit," said Teddy. "Here's how theprofessor used to work out what was taking place out in the harbor."

  He showed an intricate combination of silvered globes, tubes, and halfa dozen thermometers.

  "You see," Teddy began, "the water in the harbor was at a certaintemperature. At this time of the year it would be around 52?Fahrenheit. The professor knew that fact, and then the fact that a hugemass of it was turned into ice. When you turn water into ice you haveto take a lot of heat out of it, and that heat has to go somewhere.When water freezes normally in winter that heat goes into the air,which is cold. In this case the air was considerably warmer than theice, and was as a matter of fact, undoubtedly radiating heat into theice, instead of taking it away. The heat that would have to be takenfrom say ten pounds of water at 52? to make it freeze, if put intoanother smaller quantity of water would turn the smaller quantity ofwater into steam. You see?"

  "The steam plume!" exclaimed the reporter.

  "Of course," said Teddy. "We measure heat by calories usually. That'sthe amount of heat required to raise a pound of water one degreeFahrenheit. Suppose you have a mass of water. To make it freeze youhave to take twenty thousand calories of heat out of it. Suppose youtake that heat out. You've got to do something with it. Suppose you putit into another smaller mass of water. It will make that second mass ofwater hot, so hot that it will turn into steam at a high temperature."

  "Then Varrhus," said the reporter thoughtfully, "was taking the heatfrom a big bunch of water and putting it into a small bunch, and thesmall bunch went up in steam. Is that right?"

  "Precisely." Teddy turned to a file on which hung a number of sheetsof paper covered with figures. "Here are the professor's calculations.We could only figure approximately, but we knew the size and depthof the ice cake, very nearly the temperature of the water that hadbeen frozen, and naturally it was not hard to estimate the number ofcalories that had had to be taken out of the harbor water to makethe ice cake. To check up, we figured out how much water that numberof calories would turn into steam. The professor appealed to thegovernment scientists who had watched the cake from the first. He foundthat from the size of the plume and the other means of checking itsvolume, he had come within ten per cent of calculating the amount ofwater that had actually poured out in the shape of steam."

  "But--but that's amazing!" said the reporter.

  "It was good work," Teddy said in some satisfaction. "Then we knewwhat Varrhus had done, and it remained to find out how he'd done it.Nothing like that had ever happened before. He couldn't very wellhave an engine working there in the water. The professor took to hismathematics again. Assume that I have a stove here that will make itjust so warm at a distance of five feet. I'm leaving warm air out ofconsideration now and only thinking of radiated heat. If I put mythermometer ten feet away how much heat will I get?"

  "Half as much?" asked the reporter.

  "One-quarter as much," said Teddy. "Or three times away I'll getone-ninth as much, or four times away I'll get one-sixteenth as much.You see? If I want to make the ends of an iron bar hot, and I can onlyheat the middle, the middle has to be red-hot or white-hot to make theends even warm. If I have to make the middle of a bar red-hot to havethe ends warm, you see in order to make the ends cold the middle wouldhave to be very cold indeed."

  "Y-yes, I understand."

  "Well, the professor worked on that principle. He knew the temperatureof the edges, and he knew the size of the ice cake. It was easy tofigure what the temperature must be in the middle. It worked out towithin two degrees of absolute zero!"

  "What's that?"

  "There isn't any limit to high temperatures. You can go up two thousanddegrees, three thousand, four, or five. Some things almost certainlyproduce a temperature of as much as eight thousand degrees. But hightemperatures are produced by putting more heat in--by stuffing thething with calories. I make an iron bar red-hot by putting calories in.I make it cold by taking calories out."

  "Well?"

  "If you keep that up you reach the point where there aren't any morecalories left to take out. When you get to that point you have atemperature of 425? Centigrade, or one thousand and seventy-eightdegrees Fahrenheit below zero. That's absolute zero."

  Teddy spoke quite casually, but the reporter blinked.

  "Rather chilly, then."

  "Rather," Teddy agreed. "But our calculations told us that Varrhus hadreached and was using a temperature within two degrees of that in thecenter of his ice cake. And right next to that temperature he had avery high one, as evidenced by the plume of steam."

  "I can't see how you got anywhere," said the reporter hopelessly. "I'mall mixed up."

  "It's very simple," said Teddy cheerfully. "On one side of a wall theman had what amounted to a thousand and some odd degrees below zero. Onthe other he had probably as mu
ch above zero. Evelyn--Miss Hawkins, youknow--made the suggestion that solved the problem. She showed us this."

  Teddy picked up what seemed to be a square bit of opaque glass.

  "Smoked glass?"

  "Yes, and no." Teddy smiled. "You can't see through it, can you?"

  "No."

  "Come around to this side and look."

  The reporter made an exclamation of astonishment.

  "It's clear glass!"

  "It's a piece of glass on which a thin film of platinum has beendeposited. It lets light through in one direction, but not in theother. Evelyn suggested that Varrhus had something which did the samething with heat. It would let heat through in one direction, but not inthe other. Of course if it would take all the heat from the air on oneside and wouldn't let any come back from the other----"

  "It would be cold?"

  "On one side. The glass looks black because it lets the light gothrough and lets none come back. The surface, we have assumed, would bealmost infinitely cold because it would let heat go through and wouldlet none come back. We decided that Varrhus had made a hollow bomb ofsome shape or other, composed of this hypothetical material. Heat fromthe outside would be radiated into the interior because the surfaceabsorbed heat like this glass absorbs light. It would act as a surfaceat more than a thousand below zero. Because something had to be donewith the heat that would come in, Varrhus made the bomb hollow and lefttwo openings in it. The inside of the bomb is intensely hot from theheat that has been taken out of the surrounding water. The hole at thebottom radiates a beam of heat straight downward which melts a verysmall quantity of ice and lets the water flow into the bomb, where itis turned into steam. Naturally, it flows out of the other hole at thetop. There you have the whole thing."

  "And you stopped it----"

  "By dropping a T. N. T. bomb down the steam shaft. It went off and blewthe cold bomb to bits. The iceberg will break up and melt now."

  The reporter stood up.

  "I'd like to thank you for this, but it's too big," he saidfeverishly. "Man, just wait till I wave this before the city editor'seyes!" He rushed out of the house.

  The newspapers that afternoon had frantic headlines announcing thedestruction of the steam plume and the fact that noticeable signsof melting had begun to show themselves on the ice cake. Smallercaptions told of the dynamiting that had begun and of the destructionof the Yokohama and Folkestone bergs by soldiers acting on cabledinstructions. The Straits of Gibraltar were cleared by salvos firedfrom the heavy guns on the Rock at the three great plumes of steam.The world congratulated itself on the speedy nullification of themenace to its democratic governments. It did not neglect, however,to rush detachments of men with trench mortars and hand bombs to itsreservoirs, prepared to destroy any possible cold bombs on their firstappearance. The aviation forces, too, made themselves ready to fightthe black flyer on its next appearance, despite the mysterious means bywhich it had killed the American pilot.

  This state of affairs lasted for possibly a week, when, within threehours of each other, the papers found two occasions to issue extras.The first extra announced the death by heart failure of ProfessorHawkins, who had been found by his daughter, dead in his laboratory,holding in his hands an antique silver bracelet he had just opened atthe clasp. The second, three hours later, announced the formation of anice cake in the Narrows which grew in size even more rapidly than theoriginal one, and was entirely unattended by the steam plume which gaveTeddy Gerrod an opportunity to destroy the first. Within three hoursthe Narrows were closed, and the ice floe was creeping up toward NewYork.

  In rapid succession came the news that Norfolk harbor was frozenover and Hampton Roads closed, that Charleston was blocked, thenJacksonville. The next morning delayed cablegrams declared that thePanama Canal was a mass of ice, and almost simultaneously the Straitsof Gibraltar were again admitted to be firmly locked.