Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/241

 or strips," Kestner went on, "Strasser seems to have secured a compound annularization of the explosive by twisting infinitely small hollow tubes of it into spirals and then spiraling this into coils and then still again spiraling the result, the same as big cables are made by twisting small wires together and then again twisting the twist, ad infinitum. The wires, in this case, were like extremely small bed-springs prodigiously prolonged and finally combined so as to produce the greatest fiber attenuation possible. So combustion, instead of being like the sound-crack you get when you smite twelve keys of a piano, was more like the trickle of sound when you run your finger along their face."

"I believe I get it now," admitted Wilsnach.

"But there's another kink to this, which I can't make very plain. It depends on the fact that an explosive, in vacuo, loses its effectiveness. And Strasser seems to have adapted this to his granularization process, for chemical analysis showed our people that periodically along his row of detonating units he had produced a semi-vacuum. They think this in some way tends to retard the full force of the explosion and helps to give the pushing power I spoke of. And that's about all we know."