nd my
knowledge of the improvement which had made the Hadley rocket motor a
practicability came from first hand knowledge and not from an interview.
That was several years before but I knew that he never forgot an
acquaintance, let alone a friend, and while I had left him to take up
other work our parting had been pleasant, and I looked forward with real
pleasure to seeing him again.

* * * * *

Jim Carpenter, the stormy petrel of modern science! The eternal
iconoclast: the perpetual opponent! He was probably as deeply versed in
the theory of electricity and physical chemistry as any man alive, but
it pleased him to pose as a "practical" man who knew next to nothing of
theory and who despised the little he did know. His great delight was to
experimentally smash the most beautifully constructed theories which
were advanced and taught in the colleges and universities of the world,
and when he couldn't smash them by experimental evidence, to attack them
from the standpoint of philosophical reasoning and to twist around the
data on which they were built and make it prove, or seem to prove, the
exact opposite of what was generally accepted.

No one questioned his ability. When the ill-fated Hadley had first
constructed the rocket motor which bears his name it was Jim Carpenter
who made it practical. Hadley had tried to disintegrate lead in order to
get his back thrust from the atomic energy which it contained and proved
by apparently unimpeachable mathematics that lead was the only substance
which could be used. Jim Carpenter had snorted through the pages of the
electrical journals and had turned out a modification of Hadley's
invention which disintegrated aluminum. The main difference in
performance was that, while Hadley's original motor would not develop
enough power to lift itself from the ground, Carpenter's modification
produced twenty times the horsepower per pound of weight of any
previously known generator of power and changed the rocket ship from a
wild dream to an everyday commonplace.

* * * * *

When Hadley later constructed his space flyer and proposed to visit the
moon, it was Jim Carpenter who ridiculed the idea of the attempt being
successful. He proposed the novel and weird idea that the path to space
was not open, but that the earth and the atmosphere were enclosed in a
hollow sphere of impenetrable substance through which Hadley's space
f