Angry Moon

Chapter 15a

    “Okay, cut the power,” said Ben, his breath puffing around him in the cold night air.

     Eddie did so, and felt full weight return to his body. The prototype mass dampener was gently smoking in the headlights of the transit van, but no worse than it had the first time, in Martinique, despite having had a thousand times more energy fed into it. Frank was right, he now knew. No matter how much energy you fed into it, most of it just went elsewhere.

     “Twenty metres!” called out Stuart, grinning with excitement as he came running back across the grassy field behind the main building of Wilson's Defence Contractors. “We've extended its area of effect nearly tenfold, and still exactly a seventy six percent reduction in mass.”

     The machine and the truck containing the largest portable generator they could find had been set up beside a football field. The football field itself was muddy with slushy, half melted snow and heavily churned up by the studded football boots that ran across it every Thursday and Saturday as the staff tried to keep fit despite having jobs that mainly involved sitting down. The ground around the edge of the pitch was fairly solid, but Eddie had still worried that the van might get bogged down in the waterlogged ground. When he'd voiced his concerns, though, Ben had just laughed and said that, if that happened, they'd reduce the van’s mass by three quarters and just lift it out. Eddie had glanced around at the others. None of them had seemed worried. They must have driven the van across the field many times before and knew it was solid enough to take it.

     Behind them, the four storey building had a great many large, plate glass windows. Many of them were still occupied despite the late hour and contained faces looking curiously out at them. Ben had said that most of them knew nothing about the alien spaceship or what the top scientists were really working on. What were they thinking about the small group of people standing in the middle of a field in the middle of the night? Could they possibly deduce what they were doing just by watching them? None of the others seemed to think so, and so he'd shrugged and put it out of his mind.

     They had had to keep moving the pair of scales with its five kilo weight further and further away from the van’s headlights to find the edge of the mass dampener’s new area of effect every time they upped the power, until they were finally giving it every watt the generator was capable of producing. “The radius increases in proportion with the cube of the power input,” said James. “Pretty much what he expected. If we could feed even more power into it, would the area just keep growing?”

     “The transformers would blow...” began Ben, wrapping his arms around his body against the cold. He hadn't brought a coat, because it wasn't that cold and there wasn't any wind. The cold had gradually seeped in, though, and now he was wishing he’d wrapped up like the others.

     “Yes, I know,” snapped James impatiently. “But if you put in larger transformers, replaced all the cabling to carry a heavier current...”

     “Then I’m guessing yes,” replied the older man. “There doesn’t seem to be a limit to the area of effect.”

     “I still can’t believe this is actually possible,” said Eddie, though. “There has to be something in the laws of nature to forbid it, right? I mean, the mass dampener could be used to generate limitless free energy, and you just can’t do that.” He looked around at the others as if daring them to contradict him. “You reduce the mass of an object, lift it up into the air, then allow it to return to full mass. You can extract energy from it as it falls again. Where does that energy come from? If you use some of that energy to power the mass dampener and lift another mass-dampened object, you've got a perpetual motion machine.” In physics, the discovery that a theory allowed a perpetual motion machine to be built was taken as absolute proof that the theory was false. Nature never gave away free lunches.