Theodore Sturgeon - Microcosmic God

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MICROCOSMIC GOD

by Theodore Sturgeon

Here is a story about a man who had too much power, and a man who took too

much, but don’t worry; I’m not going political on you. The man who had the

power was named James Kidder and the other was his banker.

Kidder was quite a guy. He was a scientist and he lived on a small island off the

New England coast all by him-self. He wasn’t the dwarfed little gnome of a mad

scientist you read about. His hobby wasn’t personal profit, and he wasn’t a

megalomaniac with a Russian name and no scruples. He wasn’t insidious, and he

wasn’t even partic-ularly subversive. He kept his hair cut and his nails clean and

lived and thought like a reasonable human being. He was slightly on the baby-

faced side; he was inclined to be a hermit; he was short and plump and-brilliant.

His spe-cialty was biochemistry, and he was always called Mr. Kidder. Not “Dr.”

Not “Professor.” Just Mr. Kidder.

He was an odd sort of apple and always had been. He had never graduated from

any college or university be-cause he found them too slow for him, and too rigid

in their approach to education. He couldn’t get used to the idea that perhaps his

professors knew what they were talk-ing about. That went for his texts, too. He

was always ask-ing questions, and didn’t mind very much when they were

embarrassing. He considered Gregor Mendel a bungling liar, Darwin an amusing

philosopher, and Luther Burbank a sensationalist. He never opened his mouth

without leav-ing his victim feeling breathless. If he was talking to some-one who

had knowledge, he went in there and got it, leav-ing his victim breathless. If he

was talking to someone whose knowledge was already in his possession, he only

asked repeatedly, “How do you know?” His most delect-able pleasure was cutting

a fanatical eugenicist into conversational ribbons. So people left him alone and

never, never asked him to tea. He was polite, but not politic.

He had a little money of his own, and with it he leased the island and built himself

a laboratory. Now I’ve men-tioned that he was a biochemist. But being what he

was, he couldn’t keep his nose in his own field. It wasn’t too remarkable when he

made an intellectual excursion wide enough to perfect a method of crystallizing

Vitamin B1 profitably by the ton-if anyone wanted it by the ton. He got a lot of

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MICROCOSMIC GOD

money for it. He bought his island outright and put eight hundred men to work on

an acre and a half of his ground, adding to his laboratory and building equipment.

He got to messing around with sisal fiber, found out how to fuse it, and boomed

the banana industry by producing a practically unbreakable cord from the stuff.

You remember the popularizing demonstration he put on at Niagara, don’t you?

That business of running a line of the new cord from bank to bank over the rapids

and suspending a ten-ton truck from the middle of it by razor edges resting on the

cord? That’s why ships now moor themselves with what looks like heaving line,

no thicker than a lead pencil, that can be coiled on reels like garden hose. Kidder

made cigarette money out of that, too. ‘He went out and bought himself a

cyclotron with part of it.

After that money wasn’t money any more. It was large numbers in little books.

Kidder used little amounts of it to have food and equipment sent out to him, but

after a while that stopped, too. His bank dispatched a messenger by seaplane to

find out if Kidder was still alive. The man returned two days later in a bemused

state, having been amazed something awesome at the things he’d seen out there.

Kidder was alive, all right, and he was turning out a surplus of good food in an

astonishingly simplified syn-thetic form. The bank wrote immediately and wanted

to know if Mr. Kidder, in his own interest, was willing to release the secret of his

dirtless farming. Kidder replied that he would be glad to, and enclosed the

formulas. In a P.S. he said that he hadn’t sent the information ashore because he

hadn’t realized anyone would be interested. That from a man who was responsible

for the greatest sociological change in the second half of the twentieth century-

factory farming. It made him richer; I mean it made his bank richer. He didn’t

give a rap.

Kidder didn’t really get started until about eight months after the messenger’s

visit. For a biochemist who couldn’t even be called ”Doctor” he did pretty well.

Here is a par-tial list of the things that he turned out:

A commercially feasible plan for making an aluminum alloy stronger than the best

steel so that it could be used as a structural metal. . .

An exhibition gadget he called a light pump, which worked on the theory that

light is a form of matter and therefore subject to physical and electromagnetic

laws. Seal a room with a single source, beam a cylindrical vibratory magnetic

field to it from the pump, and the light will be led down it. Now pass the light

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MICROCOSMIC GOD

through Kidder’s “lens”-a ring which perpetuates an electric field along the lines

of a high-speed iris-typo camera shutter. Below this is the heart of the light pump-

a ninety-eight-per-cent efficient light absorber, crystalline, which, in a sense, loses

the light in its internal facets. The effect of darkening the room with this apparatus

is slight but measurable. Pardon my layman’s language, but that’s the general idea.

Synthetic chlorophyll-by the barrel.

An airplane propeller efficient at eight times sonic speed.

A cheap goo you brush on over old paint, let harden, and then peel off like strips

of cloth. The old paint comes with it. That one made friends fast.

A self-sustaining atomic disintegration of uranium’s iso-tope 238, which is two

hundred times as plentiful as the old stand-by, U-235.

That will do for the present. If I may repeat myself; for a biochemist who couldn’t

even be called “Doctor,” he did pretty well.

Kidder was apparently unconscious of the fact that he held power enough on his

little island to become master of the world. His mind simply didn’t run to things

like that. As long as he was left alone with his experiments, he was well content to

leave the rest of the world to its own clumsy and primitive devices. He couldn’t be

reached except by a radiophone of his own design, and the only counterpart was

locked in a vault of his Boston bank. Only one man could operate it. The

extraordinarily sensitive transmitter would respond only to Conant’s own body

vibrations. Kidder had instructed Conant that he was not to be disturbed except by

messages of the greatest moment. His ideas and patents, what Conant could pry

out of him, were released under pseudonyms known only to Conant- Kidder didn’t

care.

The result, of course, was an infiltration of the most astonishing advancements

since the dawn of civilization. The nation profited-the world profited. But most of

all, the bank profited. It began to get a little oversize. It began getting its fingers

into other pies. It grew more fingers and had to bake more figurative pies. Before

many years had passed, it was so big that, using Kidder’s many weapons, it almost

matched Kidder in power.

Almost.

Now stand by while I squelch those fellows in the lower left-hand corner who’ve

been saying all this while that Kidder’s slightly improbable; that no man could

ever per-fect himself in so many ways in so many sciences.

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