Man Who Sold the Moon / Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein Page A

power for cloudy days and night shifts.”
    She blinked her big blue eyes at him. “Archie, does your head ever ache?”
    Twenty minutes later he was back at his desk, deep in the preliminary calculations, while Mary Lou threw together a scratch breakfast.
    He looked up. “Never mind the creative cookery, Dr. Martin.”
    She turned around and brandished the skillet at him. “To hear is to obey, my Lord. However, Archie, you are an over-educated Neanderthal, with no feeling for the higher things of life.”
    “I won’t argue the point. But take a gander at this. I’ve got the answer—a screen that vibrates all down the scale.”
    “No foolin’, Archie?”
    “No foolin’, kid. It was already implied in our earlier experiments, but we were so busy trying to build a screen that wouldn’t vibrate at random, we missed it. I ran into something else, too.”
    “Tell mamma!”
    “We can build screens to radiate in the infrared just as easily as cold light screens. Get it? Heating units of any convenient size or shape, economical and with no high wattage or extreme temperatures to make ’em fire hazards or dangerous to children. As I see it, we can design these screens to, one—” he ticked the points off on his fingers— “take power from the Sun at nearly one-hundred-percent efficiency; two, deliver it as cold light; or three, as heat; or four, as electrical power. We can bank ’em in series to get any required voltage; we can bank in parallel to get any required current, and the power is absolutely free, except for the installation costs.”
    She stood and watched him in silence for several seconds before speaking. “All that from trying to make a cheaper light. Come eat your breakfast, Steinmetz. You men can’t do your work on mush.”
    They ate in silence, each busy with new thoughts. Finally Douglas spoke. “Mary Lou, do you realize just how big a thing this is?”
    “I’ve been thinking about it.”
    “It’s enormous. Look, the power that can be tapped is incredible. The Sun pours over two hundred and thirty trillion horsepower onto the Earth all the time and we use almost none of it.”
    “As much as that, Archie?”
    “I didn’t believe my own figures when I worked it out, so I looked it up in Richardson’s Astronomy. Why, we could recover more than twenty thousand horsepower in any city block. Do you know what that means? Free power! Riches for everybody! It’s the greatest thing since the steam engine.” He stopped suddenly, noticing her glum face. “What’s the matter, kid, am I wrong someplace?”
    She fiddled with her fork before replying. “No, Archie—you’re not wrong. I’ve been thinking about it, too. Decentralized cities, labor-saving machinery for everybody, luxuries—it’s all possible, but I’ve a feeling that we’re staring right into a mess of trouble. Did you ever hear of ‘Breakages Ltd.’?”
    “What is it, a salvage concern?”
    “Not by a long sight. You ought to read something besides the ‘Proceedings of the American Society of Physical Engineers.’ George Bernard Shaw, for instance. It’s from the preface of Back to Methuselah, and is a sardonic way of describing the combined power of corporate industry to resist any change that might threaten their dividends. You threaten the whole industrial set-up, son, and you’re in danger right where you’re sitting. What do you think happened to atomic power?”
    He pushed back his chair. “Oh, surely not. You’re just tired and jumpy. Industry welcomes invention. Why, all the big corporations have their research departments, with some of the best minds in the country working in them. And they are in atomics up to their necks.”
    “Sure—and any bright young inventor can get a job with them. And then he’s a kept man—the inventions belong to the corporation, and only those that fit into the pattern of the powers-that-be ever see light. The rest are shelved. Do you really think that they’d let a