Amazing Stories, January, 1934
The Atom Smasher by P. Schuyler Miller
T HE student huddled back into his
corner of the hot, stuffy auditorium,
breathing heavily from his mad scurry
up the stairs. He was late. Paper No. 10 was
very nearly finished.
He stared at the tall young man who
was speaking, drawling softly in the way of
the South. He stared at the diagrams chalked
on the blackboard. Something tremendously
important was happening down there. That
man, only a few years older than he, had made
a tool to shatter atoms!
“It’s really quite simple,” he was
saying. Some startled, incredulous savant had
hurled a question at him. “It’s like a bucket
conveyor. The silk belts simply pick up the
charge and dump it on the spheres. The charge
builds up until leakage—brush discharge—
begins. With two oppositely charged spheres
like this, two feet in diameter, we got a million
and a half volts. We expect to make bigger
ones—to give ten million, twenty million,
whatever we need. The only thing that limits
you is the size of your spheres. We hope to be
able to get at the atomic nucleus that way.”0
Simple! There in the sultry lecture-
room the student crouched in his seat, staring
into the hot dark. He knew nothing of Paper
No. 11, or the supplementary papers that
followed. He was still sitting there when
everyone had left. He was dreaming—great
dreams.
* * * * * *
The tall old man threw a long leg over
the side of his autogyro and slid to the ground.
He steadied himself against its wing, stood
there looking out over his little mountain
valley. The chill wind from the melting
glaciers whipped his straggling hair and sparse
beard, and brought a mist of tears to his
piercing blue eyes. His lean, bronzed face
seemed to twitch with some deep-seated
emotion, as the shadow of the idly spinning
rotor-blades swept over it, slower, slower,
stopping. His face was grim and haggard in
the shadow.
Down from the sheer, green wall of the
glacier toppled a pillar of foam, wreathed with
shifting, ghostly rainbows, phantoms of the
drifting mist. Beside it, squat and gray,
huddled the power-house, with its tall steel
towers on the ledge behind it. Before it, at its
foot, a thread of crystal leapt from the
churning froth of the whirlpool and danced out
over the valley floor, out into the sunny
meadow, then back into the shadow of the
cliffs that narrowed and hemmed it in, and
sent it pent and raging down the gorge to the
sea.
At the foot of the slope, beside the
little stream, two ebon towers rose from
terraced bases, five hundred feet into the
Alaskan sunlight. Sleek and glossy the two
huge insulators loomed at the center of the
little upland valley, topping the low cliffs,
thrusting high their mighty twin spheres of
burnished metal, linked by a crystal shaft.
Dwarfed by the stature of the towers and
spheres, two big motors pressed against the
bases, like frightened chicks huddled at the
feet of some human giant. Like a flat gray
toad, a little, rude laboratory crouched under
the lee of the cliffs, facing the aurora. And,
above and beyond, the mountains loomed
along the horizon, like peering deities, staring
down into the snowy bowl as at a jewel of
 Amazing Stories
silver and emerald.
The old man turned from the great
thing in the valley and fumbled in the cockpit
of his battered plane. It was a queer thing he
drew out, a little, ugly cube of dull metal—
lead—with a little round stoppered aperture in
its side. He seemed very old and tired as he
stood there beside the hut, pressing his little
box against his heart. His life was in that box.
In the squat stone hut it was hot and
dark. One small bulb was lighted over his
instrument-board, his master controls. His
delicate, withered fingers danced over the
dials and keys, tugging at connections, tapping
at tubes, searching for the flaw that must not
exist.
It did not. Taking up his leaden box, he
went out again into the night. The shadow of
the western range was creeping about the base
of the two great towers, but the mighty
spheres that crowned them burned bravely in
the rays of the sinking summer sun. Under the
cliffs it was dark, and there was a stir of
stealthy life among the fallen boulders. The
little, timid creatures of the night were darting
forth. They had no fear of the tall old man, or
of his strange towers.
Slowly and painfully the old man crept
up the long ladder. He climbed out on the
floor of the big room, stood for a moment at
the edge of the shaft, catching his breath.
Deep within him, the dull, brutal gnawing had
started again, but he ignored it, beat it back as
he had for so many months, stalked across the
metal floor to the steel block at the end of the
crystal tube. Here were his instruments,
cunningly shielded. Here were controls,
duplicates of those in the stone hut. Here a
quarter of a billion volts of hurtling energy
would smash into the trembling atoms of a
gram of radium, would free the fires that
would free the world!
He fumbled with the heavy door of the
vault, pulled it open. From his cube of lead he
tumbled out a tiny capsule, a little sealed tube
2
of quartz, glowing faintly green in the half-
dark. He set it carefully in its little clip at the
focus of the electron stream, stood there
staring at it, remembering. His life was in that
little crystal capsule, and the life of Robert
Van de Graf, who eighty years before had
stood in a little college lecture-room and
startled the world of physics with a tool to
smash the atom. Eighty years—years of
growing poverty, while the malignant rays
from his tubes ate at his vitals, while the world
forgot. For Robert Van de Graf had failed, and
he—he the nameless student of that long-gone
day—would vindicate his memory! The old
man stumbled toward the hatch that opened
the way down into the blackness.
Far above the snowy bowl of the
mountains a lone aviator caught the last light
of the sinking sun on his glistening wings. He
stared down through the growing dark at the
wilderness beneath—rolling snow-dunes and
knife-edged scimitars of ice, black, jutting
snags of rock, treacherous crevasses—sheer
hell to the airman who should fall into its
clutches. There was a tiny fleck of soft, cold
green in it, there in the shadow of the western
peaks. He peered down through his night-
glasses and swooped low over the valley.
The reflected sunlight from the eastern
peaks cast a pale white lustre over the little
valley, the old man’s refuge. There was a
waterfall, a stream, a queer-shaped thing
beside it. There was an old-type autogyro, and
a tiny human form toiling up the long slope to
a flat, gray hut. It disappeared, and from the
valley rose a dull, soft mutter of motors, rising
to a steady drone, audible even above the rush
of the wind past the sleek curves of the
circling plane.
On and on droned the motors of the
old man, building up the charge. Now two soft
purple disks were taking form against the dark
oval of the shadowed valley, furry with
electric leakage. They cast a dim glow over
the little valley, showing two vague shafts
 The Atom Smasher
rising into the night, two stepped squares of
glossy black, the shifting glimmer of the
stream. Hovering like a great, noiseless eagle
above the snows, the aviator circled and
watched and waited.
The glow from the distant peaks faded.
The valley was dark save for the glow of the
great spheres and the spot of dull yellow that
marked the door of the stone hut. Then of a
sudden the two disks winked out and between
them sprang a thin shaft of vivid, violet flame,
spreading into a fan of flickering electric fires,
then gathering suddenly into a dazzling blue-
white ball where the second disc had been. On
its heels came the crash of shattered glass and
tearing metal, and a blinding glare of white
flame burst from the door of the little hut,
driving before it a blinded, stumbling thing
that staggered off into the dark. A second
burst of flame revealed the old man, his
ancient hands groping in eternal blackness,
tottering down the hill to the towering shaft of
the mighty machine. Then only flickering
crimson shadows scuttled among the rocks
around the burning hut.
Blind, agonized, the gaunt old man
dragged his tortured body up the last endless
yards of ladder, beside the softly whirring
silken belt, glimmering ever so faintly with a
soft light that he could never see. He toppled
forward on the steel floor of the great room
within the sphere and began to inch his way
over its cold, harsh surface toward the
looming casque of steel. His hands came up,
fumbled among the heavy cables, seized and
tore one loose with a sputter of fat, hot sparks
that shook his frail frame cruelly. He clutched
at the disc before the great steel door, the disc
that had failed to slip aside at his bidding, so
that a quarter of a billion volts crashed
through writhing conduits into the wrecked
control-board of the little stone laboratory.
Stiffly it slid down, revealing the glowing
mite of radium within. Sick and faint, the old
man sank face down upon the cold steel floor,
3
beside the open vault. Far below the motors
droned their song, piling up the charge, up and
up and up. ...
Something, some voice from nowhere,
whispered to the circling flyer. His stubby
craft split the starry heavens, zooming up into
the frosty night, up and up and up, until the
valley was a speck against the starlit snows,
then the wraith of a memory, and then was
gone.
Out of the heart of the snows hurtled a
pillar of seething flame, star-white, blinding,
leaping out into Space! Out of the little upland
valley burst an awful, beating wave of
thunderous sound, seizing the little fleeing
plane and throwing it mile on shrieking mile
into the gaping skies, until its pilot gasped in
the thinning air and with the fierce strength of
speeding life threw his controls into a
screaming dive toward the burning snows!
That sight seared itself forever into his
memory. The bowl of the circling ranges was
alive with leaping, cavorting shadows,
capering in fiendish glee about the flaming
shaft that hurled itself three thousand feet into
the night! Out of the heavens came the wild
winds of the world, battling, clashing, tearing
the air to tattered shreds and flinging them
into Space! Out of the holocaust at the
valley’s heart stabbed the cruel rays of chaos,
battering at molecule and atom, crushing
them, shattering them, bursting their crowded
nuclei and freeing raw, new-born hydrogen
that in an instant flamed into fierce crimson
fire, burning in great leaping tongues from
every crag and every ice-spire of all that great
hollow in the hills, sending huge lurid plumes
and streamers of destruction up from the
flaming peaks, freeing such a hell as earth had
never known! Out of the darkening heavens
rushed the curtains of the aurora, cackling
wildly with unearthly glee, and out of the
splitting skies burst the mutter and mad
laughter of the storm.
A week later, native hunters found a
 Amazing Stories
raving human beast who had seen Judgment.
In a month they returned to the outposts of the
white men, telling of a land of burning
mountains where the old gods battled and the
rivers blazed. Six months, and out of the south
came an army of ‘seekers’ for the actual truth.
The peaks no longer burned. They
climbed their outer flanks, stood on their
crumbling summits, riddled by the gutting
rays. Far away, at the heart of a desert waste
of dead, gray dust, a pool of white fire still
blazed in the night. Day after day, week after
week, they were smothered by the ash of
atoms, that rose in great dense clouds about
them. And as they crept nearer and ever
4
nearer, the glow of the flaming pool waned
and died, until, when at last they stood at the
lip of the little valley that had been, only the
dull red glow of heaving molten rock
remained for them to see.
They never dared to try what he had
tried. They never even knew his name. But a
great gateway had been cut through the
mountains in that desolate land, and on either
side of its broad approach towers an ebon
shaft, topped with a golden ball. Men stare at
them, and look out across the gray domain of
death, and they shudder and turn away as they
remember the man who smashed the atom.