Into the Green Prism Read online

  I was almost dumbfounded. What Ramon had told me—and now I realized it was all true—came as something of a shock. I was convinced that the Manabis could never have worked under a lens with the properties of the lenses which Ramon had made, and all the smug satisfaction I had felt because my friend had solved the riddle had been ruthlessly destroyed by his words. The lenses had been so astonishing in their magnifying powers, that I had overlooked their shortcomings. Now I was fully aware of them.

  "Possibly," I ventured after a time, "the Manabis may have treated the lenses in some way. Isn't it possible that Manabinite might be changed by heating or tempering or something? I have always understood that glass may be greatly altered by annealing."

  Ramon shook his head. "I have tried," he declared, "but without any result. Moreover, I have compared the fragments of lenses found here with the crude materials. As far as I can determine, the two are identical in every way. No, I must look farther for the answer. And, do you know, I have a feeling, a hunch, as you would call it, that the answer is not so far off. Do you remember those fragments we found which so greatly puzzled me? Those pieces with angular surfaces where there should have been curves? I have been racking my brains, trying to figure out what they were, what they meant, and I believe that therein lies the key to the whole matter."

  "I remember them well," I told him. "But to me they appeared more like natural crystalline forms than hand-made. But whatever you do must be done very soon, my friend. The rainy season is not far off, and when the rains set in, this locality is no place for civilized human beings,"

  "If I have not completed my work by then, I shall continue my experiments in the United States," he declared, as he disappeared in his laboratory.

  Three days later, Ramon dashed from his workshop, wild-eyed, dishevelled, gasping for breath. Never before had I seen him in such a state. He seemed frightened, terrified, and for a brief moment I thought he had gone raving mad. But his first words were reassuring. "I have found it!" he fairly yelled. "It's marvelous, astounding, miraculous! And by accident, by chance, I came upon it! It was last night," he continued, striving to control himself and speak intelligibly. "Last night I dropped the lens just before retiring. It broke—splintered; you remember I told you the Manabinite had a peculiar cleavage. Disgusted, discouraged, I gathered up the splinters—they would be bad things to tread upon with bare feet, and throwing the smaller fragments aside, I laid the largest piece upon my table and went to bed, I arose this morning, remembered the accident of last night, and glanced ruefully towards the spot where I had placed the remains of all my labors. Santa Maria! how I stared, speechless, startled, even terrified. The Manabinite had vanished, and in its place I saw a monster, a huge, a gigantic insect; an enormous bug! His great cold eyes seemed fixed upon me balefully, his hairy legs seemed poised, tensed, ready to spring. I could scarcely believe my eyes. Never had mortal eyes gazed upon such a creature. Cautiously, grasping a stout stick, my curiosity overcoming my first fright, I stepped towards the table the better to examine the giant insect. Then the incredible happened! The huge insect vanished before my eyes, disappeared completely, instantly, and in his place, just where I had left it, was the piece of Manabinite! I rubbed my eyes, speechless, unbelieving, fearing I had gone mad! Then as I gazed, I noticed a minute dark speck beside the shattered lens. I bent close to examine it. Then I understood. Then like a flash all was clear. The wonder of wonders. The tiny speck was an insect, a minute thrips, the liliputian counterpart of the giant bug I had seen. I stepped back, gazing fixedly at the lump of green mineral. One, two, three steps. As though dissolved in air, the Manabinite vanished and there, once more, was the ugly, horrible, giant insect! It was impossible, incredible, but true. Chance, accident, fate, perhaps the good God Himself, had produced the results I had labored in vain to achieve. The shattered bit of Manabinite had taken on the form that enabled it to project a stupendously magnified image of an object near it. And, most marvelous, most wonderful of all, in doing so, it became itself invisible! Come with me, amigo, come to my laboratory and see for yourself. Observe the miracle, the wonder of it! I have not dared to touch it."

  Amazed, hardly able to grasp the meaning of his words, I hurried with Ramon to his laboratory.

  All he had related had not prepared me for the amazing, unbelievable thing I saw. As I entered, my eyes turned to his writing table. Resting upon it was a roughly angular piece of Manabinite. Then, as my friend led me to one side, my eyes still fixed upon the green material, I gasped, stared, for as far as I could see the table top was bare; the Manabinite had vanished as if by-magic. Ramon's voice brought me to my senses.

  "Que lastima!" ("What a misfortune") he cried, "The thrips has gone, you cannot see the ogre that greeted me. But wait. Keep your eyes focussed as they are."

  Hurrying forward, he reached toward the table, and, as though conjured from the air, a huge, gleaming golden ball lay upon the table before my amazed eyes!

  Instantly I recognized it. It was one of the almost microscopic gold beads, but appearing the size of a football, its chased design, every detail of its surface, clearly defined. But of the fragment of Manabinite that produced this miracle, there was no visible trace. Still keeping my eyes upon the glorious golden ball, I stepped forward, extended my hand, and touched the hard, glass-like surface of the Manabinite! Still without removing my gaze, I moved slowly to one side. Like a flash the gold ball had vanished, and beneath my fingers was the green, semi-transparent piece of mineral! I gasped, and sank into Ramon's chair. It was too much, too startling, too utterly incredible for my brain to assimilate.

  Ramon was wild with excitement, mad with delight. He fairly danced; he chattered in Spanish, he babbled in English.

  "Do you not understand, amigo mio?" he cried. '"Do you not grasp the reason for this miracle? Do you not realize what a discovery this is?"

  I shook my head. "I realize it is so," I replied. "But why, how, by what uncanny means this miracle, as you call it, is brought about, is beyond me."

  "There are many things, many phenomena which I myself do not as yet understand," he confessed. "But already—pronto, in a flash—I have grasped much, have understood much. It is the action of a prism, not of a lens. By the merest chance, by its natural cleavage, this bit of Manabinite assumed a prismatic form. By another chance—or guided by Fate or God—I placed this prism upon my table in such a position that a tiny thrips—an humble, despised plant-louse, came into its refractive field. Otherwise, my dear friend, I never would have known; I should have thrown the broken lens aside, and never would we have solved the mystery or witnessed this miracle. But how the miracle is accomplished, why the crystal itself vanishes when it magnifies an object, what becomes of its color, what the optical principles and laws that govern it may, be— these are all unsolved mysteries, matters to be worked out. And they are all new, wonderful, revolutionary. But now the matter is simple. I shall make more prisms, shall improve them, shall polish the surfaces, and shall devote myself to determining all the secrets of the astounding material and its properties. But we now know how the Manabis performed their wonderful feats of carving and of handiwork. And the puzzle of those bits of Manabinite with angular surfaces, is solved. They, too, were fragments of prisms. But—" his face fell and an expression so lugubrious swept across his features that I laughed. "But," he lamented, "my discovery—our discovery, will be of no value to the world, although it should be of the greatest. There is no more Manabinite besides the negligible quantity in our possession."

  CHAPTER V

  But if Professor Amador was pessimistic in regard to the benefit his discovery might prove to the world, his interest in the remarkable material and its even more remarkable properties was not abated. In fact it was vastly increased, and for days, and nights, he worked feverishly in his laboratory, appearing only for his meals, which he gulped down hurriedly.

  "Now that I have the key to the optical peculiarities of Manabinite," he declared, a few days after
his amazing demonstration, "I have definite lines upon which to work. You thought that fragment of the mineral gave astounding results, but that was merely a crude, an accidentally formed prism. I shall make a real one, a cut, ground and polished prism, mathematically constructed from the data obtainable from that fragment. Then, amigo mio, we shall see what we shall see."

  And when, after the most intensive work, Ramon produced his beautifully finished Manabinite prism, it proved as much superior to the prismatic fragment as a high-powered microscope objective is superior to a twenty-five cent reading-glass.

  Viewed through it, the tiny golden beads appeared as two-foot spheres of gleaming intricately-engraved metal. Innumerable beautifully-chased designs, which had been hitherto invisible, could be traced between the grooves of the coarser carving, and, as I studied these, I became convinced that they formed inscriptions in some unknown form of glyphs. The sculptured designs upon the lapis-lazuli idol proved to be of the same character, but words cannot express the marvelous beauty and incredibly fine work upon this. What the amount of the magnifying power of the prism was, I cannot say precisely, but I should judge it to have been roughly about five hundred diameters. But unlike a powerful lens of the conventional type, the prism possessed a tremendous depth of focus and a very wide field. Objects were sharp and clear when placed anywhere from a few inches to several yards from the prism, and their magnified images were as perfect when the observer was yards from the prism as when he was within a few inches of it.

  Indeed, there was no effect of gazing into a lens. The magnified image appeared like the real thing, actually and physically enlarged, an illusion that was due largely, no doubt, to the amazing property of the Manabinite losing its visible color and seeming to vanish completely when viewed from a certain angle. I mentioned these matters to Ramon, who smiled knowingly.

  "Not being familiar with the laws of physics and optics," he replied, "you cannot differentiate between the two. From a technical and scientific viewpoint Manabinite possesses no peculiarities worth mentioning; its optical qualities, in fact, are no better than ordinary crystal—"

  "Nonsense," I interrupted. "Could you make any crystal prism or lens to approach, not to mention equal, this of Manabinite?"

  Ramon shook his head. "I could not; neither could anyone else. But that is not because of the optical peculiarities of the mineral. If you will allow me to explain, possibly I may make my meaning clear, my friend. As I said, Manabinite has no unusual optical qualities. But it does possess the most remarkable, amazing and hitherto unknown physical peculiarities. I have convinced myself that the apparent magnification that you witness is not what you and I at first thought it. Magnification, in the ordinary sense, of the term and as brought about by lenses, is due to the refraction of light rays, so bent, or rather so altered, in their angles of incidence, by passing through the lens, that they project an image of larger size. Moreover, a lens, if the curvatures are reversed, will reduce the image of an object. But my most exhaustive tests with Manabinite prove that reversing the prism, or even the lens from the material, will not project a reduced image.

  "In fact, you may test this for yourself. Viewed from the opposite direction, the prism appears as an almost opaque mass of green mineral and nothing is visible through it. No, amigo mio, the magnified image projected by Manabinite is not produced by the alteration of light rays, or more properly speaking, light waves, but by means of some other form of vibratory waves. For some unknown and undeterminable reason, Manabinite, when formed into a certain combination of angles or facets, absorbs the vibratory waves or the movements of electrons present in the matter within the sphere of its influence, and throws them off at an entirely different vibratory speed, or a distinct electronic motion. It—"

  "That all sounds very learned, but also very complicated and somewhat contradictory and abstruse," I remarked. "Do you—"

  "Pardon me for interrupting your question," he continued. "I shall try to make my meaning clear by some comparisons. You are, perhaps, slightly familiar with the practice or the theory of 'stepping-up' electrical voltage."

  I assented.

  "And you, as a radio enthusiast, must understand the principles of so-called amplification."

  "Yes," I agreed.

  "Very well," he proceeded. "I might compare the Manabinite prism—if it may be called such, to a transformer or an amplifier. Just as the amplifying units of a radio receiving set pick up the inaudible vibratory waves—which as you know are merely ether movements—and emit them as vastly increased sound waves in air, so the Manabinite prism I have made picks up visible light waves and throws them off tremendously increased."

  I shook my head hopelessly. "Perhaps I am unusually dense," I confessed, "but I cannot understand how a light wave—which is very distinct from an electromagnetic wave, can be increased by physical means."

  Professor Amador snorted and muttered some Spanish expletive. "It is fortunate that I am a very patient man," he declared, his merry smile proving that he was by no means as out of patience with my stupidity as his words implied. "As you know perfectly well, or as any man of your intelligence, education and scientific training should know, the so-called electro-magnetic waves, the light, even the heat waves are all closely related, if not identical, the only differences between them lying in the speed of their vibrations or their so-called 'wave-lengths.' If you heat a piece of metal, you produce heat waves emanating from it which will burn your fingers, but which you cannot detect by sight. If you heat it more, until it becomes red-hot, you transform the invisible heat rays to light rays which are visible. And it is merely a matter of heating it still further until you produce, or rather transform the red rays, to light rays at the opposite end of the spectrum—the violet rays. Our poor eyesight does not permit us to 'tune in' on any light rays below red or above violet, yet we know that there is a long range of light-waves at both ends of the spectrum, among them the infra-red, the ultra-violet, the Roentgen, etc. We really know very little about these, and we know still less about various other waves, the vibratory waves that produce scent, for example, the waves that guide various birds, mammals, reptiles and even insects from place to place, the sound waves beyond the range of the human ear, etc. But we do know that all of the waves first mentioned are merely the result of the ether moving or shifting about. By crowding more than the normal quota of electrons into any object, or by forcing some of the normal quota out, we produce various waves—heat, light, radio, X-rays and what not. And my experiments and my exhaustive calculations have proved, to my own satisfaction at least, that Manabinite, when in the form I have made, has the power of altering the normal movements of electrons in objects placed in a certain relation to it and of reforming these electrons to produce a greatly enlarged replica of the object. Also, I know that in so doing, the Manabinite itself is reduced to electronic movements and actually becomes a portion, an integral part of the increased object."

  "But," I objected, "you infer that the object itself is enlarged, and that what we look upon as an image, a product of light and shade, is a bona fide object, the same object increased in size! Why, man alive, in that case, we could touch and handle the magnified edition of the object. Utter nonsense, Ramon, that is absolutely impossible!"

  He laughed. "Nothing is impossible," he declared. "A few years ago many matters that are everyday affairs to us would have been deemed impossible.

  "We can and do transmit pictures—visible moving reproductions of people and other things—for hundreds and thousands of miles through space—by means of television apparatus. You may see a miniature man or woman on the screen of your television receiver. But that does not mean that the actual person has been transported bodily and reduced in size. The original at the transmitting end is still intact, living and unaffected.

  And neither can you touch, handle or feel the image before you. Is the result brought about by Manabinite any more remarkable, any more impossible?"

  I had to admit that it was
not. And yet, somehow, I could not grasp it. I could not quite conceive of a bit of semi-transparent mineral capable of accomplishing such seeming miracles. I had to have another look, and I took an even greater interest in the prism than before. But I could see Ramon's point, when he demonstrated it to me. By very simple diagrams and equations he proved that it would contradict and upset all recognized and established optical laws for a lens to magnify to such an extent and yet have such a depth of focus and such a wide field. I learned that the relationship between magnification, focal-plane, depth of focus, field, and the size and form of a lens, were all fixed, unalterable and could be most accurately worked out. And, when I raised the objection that the established laws had been fixed on the basis of materials with certain refractive powers—thus thinking I was showing a great deal of cleverness and knowledge—my friend quickly proved that the refractive index of Manabinite had been calculated and proven by himself, and that, working from it, it would still be impossible to account for the remarkable features of the case on a basis of optics. Moreover, by sketching a plan of the prism-like mass he had made, and then bringing optical laws to bear upon it, he convinced me that it would be utterly impossible for such a form to serve the purpose of a lens.