_Call who?_ the physicist wondered, and then forgot about it. He wanted
desperately to dig into the sky car. He wanted to find out where the
engineer had packed five tons of equipment. He wanted to see what made
the wheels go around. No doubt the thing could be returned to its
owners without calling in the police. The thing was probably recorded
in the precisely kept engineering notebook of the physicist's alter ego.
* * * * *
The pilot model was not completely out of sight before Thomas had
the power cowls off, and the whole model stripped of its servicing
doors. They had done an excellent job of design; the sky car without
its servicing panels was but a skeleton frame, with every line, every
connection, and every control rod open for easy servicing.
And it was then and there that the physicist understood what the
engineer had been doing.
Instead of the low-voltage high-current supply lines, with their
attendant heavy busbars, thin pipes ran about the sky car. Seamless
aluminum tubing carried the energizing current. Or, rather the space
inside of the tubing carried it. At the generator end, a ten megawatt
microwave generator supplied high power at ultra high frequency. At the
terminus, rectifiers brought the ultra high frequency down to direct
current for operation of the force-field generators.
Thomas nodded. It was not the final tenth of one percent job. It
was not direct current. The diagravitic force was not constant. It
operated only seven tenths of the time, and was turned off and on
fifteen or twenty million million times per second. Nothing short of
high-definition test equipment would ever tell the difference, however.
Gone were the massive electromagnetic deflection field coils. In their
place was a set of seventy kilovolt electrostatic plates.
Missing entirely were the variable-speed motor generators. In their
place was a simple crystalline formation under permanent magnetic
stress. "Artificial radio-activated crystals," muttered Thomas. "Good
for a couple of years."
But the feed lines. _The feed lines._ The current carrying ability
of space itself--not the metallic conductor--did the trick. Using
the ultra high frequency bands, the busbars had been replaced with
cylindrical wave guides. The depth of penetration was measured in
microns at those frequencies--and as long as the guides were properly
designed, they offered little loss in power. The current went down the
wave guides by virtue of the magnetic fields created throughout the
guides--magnetic fields generated in the space inside of the tubular
guides.
The generator itself was one of the new crystal microwave generators
and the rectifiers at the receiving end were of the same ilk.
And the five tons of equipment had vanished in a puff of tubular
guides, electrostatic plates, and intermittent operation.
Thomas hit a snag for a moment. The engineer had answered
his challenge. So he'd come up with the answer to the
five-ton-per-fifty-pound answer--and had gone further. Thomas knew
that there was no apparent limit to the maximum power or lift. It
merely set a fifty pound minimum--actually it was 49.87 pounds by
measurement--under which limit no amount of tinkering would produce the
effect.
He smiled. There must be something beyond. After all, small stones
moved quietly in natural poltergeist manifestation; they would be able
to reproduce that eventually. But for now, the engineer was willing to
accept the limitation whereas the physicist would not.
He knew now. And he'd leave the sky car until the engineer returned.
Let _him_ beef up the control force. It was _his_ baby.
Thomas put the panels back on the sky car and stood off to admire it.
It was a neat job, just what the public wanted. The urge to get in and
drive was a most compelling one, and Thomas succumbed. He sat for a
moment, inspecting the dashboard until he had the pattern well set.
Then he snapped on the power, took the wheel and pulled back gently.
The sky car lifted its nose slightly, and as Thomas pressed the foot
pedal, it took off on a side-line straight into the sky. He leveled
off at a thousand feet and he did some scurrying back and forth in
midair. It did handle a little sloppy but not enough to make the
physicist uncomfortable. Yet it wouldn't stand any hedge-hopping or
bridge-undercutting without a prayer on the part of the driver. Butter
the controls a bit and you could thread a needle with it on the first
try.
Yes, the engineer had done it again--all of which made Thomas chuckle.
A bit more of this and the engineer would have such an income that he'd
no longer worry himself into engineering. Then--
Thomas turned the sky car and drove across the city toward Dr.
Hamilton's place. He landed on the psychiatrist's lawn and startled the
doctor out of a week's growth.
"I've won," he told the doctor.
"Good," laughed Hamilton. "Mind if I ask which you are today--and how
do you know you've won?"
"I'm Thomas Lionel, Ph.D. And the engineer has worked himself out of a
job."
"Interesting. But how?"
"He dropped me a mess of cockeyed data, remember? Well, I unraveled
it into a most interesting field of science. From it I handed him a
slab full of theories and experiments that are just inefficient enough
to make him fume. He's come up with several things that make money in
vatfuls."
"That, I know and understand. Go on."
"Remember, I am his ideal personality, I am a physicist, a type of
person he has always wanted to be. He couldn't be a physicist because
of financial reasons and so he went into the engineering field to
bolster up his bank account. That was eminently practical. But now
that the worry about the bankroll is over, he can turn to theoretical
physics and physical research. That's me--and I've won!"
"Suppose he, himself, takes the gradual retreat from engineering into
physical research?"
"Um--I don't think he's capable of it. He's been too well conditioned."
"Might well be," admitted the doctor. "Well, as I said before, I'm just
a referee. Both of you are well adjusted and good, worthy additions to
society. Either one of you that wins will be a credit to civilization."
"You're a great help," laughed Thomas. "But I don't mind. This is my
round, and it's my game. He's licked himself."
"I'll tell him that when I see him," said Dr. Hamilton. "But there is
one thing that I must know. I want to know what makes that little
tungsten box work."
"I cast the tungsten in--"
"I don't care how you made it," said Hamilton flatly, "unless it has a
definite bearing on how it works."
"I made it of tungsten because the engineer would rip it apart if it
weren't too tough," grinned Thomas. "Being of tungsten it doesn't
matter how it works excepting it would have been more efficient if I'd
made it of silver."
"Look, Thomas, stay on the subject. I want to know what's with the
works."