Dear Bill:
Enclosed is the itemized inventory of the furnishings of the late Dr.
Edward Price's estate. As you requested, I personally examined the
laboratory. Candidly, Bill, you needed a psychiatrist for the job, not
a graduate physicist. Dr. Price was undoubtedly an inventive genius a
decade ago when he was still active in General Electronics, but his lab
was an embarrassing example of senile clutter.
You had an idea, Bill, that before he died Price might have been
playing around with a new invention which the estate could develop and
patent. I found a score of gadgets in the lab, none of them finished
and none of them built for any functional purpose that I could discover.
Only two seemed to be completed. One resembled a small, portable radio.
It was a plastic case with two knobs and a two-inch speaker grid. There
was no cord outlet. The machine may have been powered by batteries, for
I heard a faint humming when I turned the knobs. Nothing else. Dr.
Price had left a handwritten card on the box. He intended to call it
a Semantic-Translator, but he had noted that the word combination was
awkward for commercial exploitation, and I suppose he held up a patent
application until he could think of a catchier name. One sentence on
that card would have amused you, Bill. Price wrote, "Should wholesale
for about three-fifty per unit." Even in his dotage, he had an eye for
profit.
The Semantic-Translator--whatever that may mean--might have had
possibilities. I fully intended to take it back with me to General
Electronics and examine it thoroughly.
The second device, which Price had labeled a Transpositor, was large
and rather fragile. It was a hollow cylinder of very small wires,
perhaps a foot in diameter, fastened to an open-faced console crowded
with a weird conglomeration of vacuum tubes, telescopic lenses and
mirrors. The cylinder of wires was so delicate that the motion of my
body in the laboratory caused it to quiver. Standing in front of the
wire coil were two brass rods. A kind of shovel-like chute was fixed to
one rod (Price called it the shipping board). Attached to the second
rod was a long-handled pair of tongs which he called the grapple.
The Transpositor was, I think, an outgrowth of Price's investigation
of the relationship between light and matter. You may recall, Bill,
the brilliant technical papers he wrote on that subject when he was
still working in the laboratories of General Electronics. At the time
Price was considered something of a pioneer. He believed that light and
matter were different forms of the same basic element; he said that
eventually science would learn how to change one into the other.
I seriously believe that the Transpositor was meant to do precisely
that. In other words, Price had expected to transpose the atomic
structure of solid matter into light, and later to reconstruct the
original matter again. Now don't assume, Bill, that Price was wandering
around in a senile delusion of fourth dimensional nonsense. The theory
may be sound. Our present knowledge of the physical world makes the
basic structure of matter more of a mystery than it has ever been.
Not that I think Price achieved the miracle. Even in his most
brilliant and productive period he could not have done it. As yet
our accumulation of data is too incomplete for such an experiment. I
believe that Price created no more than a very realistic illusion with
his arrangement of lenses and mirrors.