Page:Fantastic Universe (1956-10; vol. 8, no. 3).djvu/83

Rh If you don't take it at the right speed and inclination, you're for it. I've seen a ship pulled in half that way. Torn across like a piece of paper by the opposing gravities. You can imagine what it would do to flesh and blood."

"In a sense," Jaguers added, "it's like cracking the sound barrier with the air pushed ahead into a solid wall. Until we learnt how to do it."

Professor Graut's voice broke the speculative silence.

"You've got that gadget of yours with you, Walstab?"

"Yes. It's had a local testing, as you know. I can't claim anything for it really, until there's a chance for long range."

Dr. Walstab drew from a plastic case a circular object about the size of a small dinner plate, and placed it gently on the granite desk. Its depth of some four inches appeared to be made up of an intricate pattern of spirals, laced with small silver-shining bulbs. From a slightly raised boss at its center a number of filaments radiated like the main cables of a spider-web, each, terminating in a tiny red sucker-disc.

"Perhaps you had better explain to the others," Grant smiled. "In broad terms only, of course. I might say, gentlemen, that this invention of Dr. Walstab's, which he called an I.G.—short for Ideagraphometer—is likely to be of the greatest assistance in maintaining our contacts in outer space, if it functions as the doctor hopes. Over to you, Walstab."

"Putting it briefly then," Walstab told them, "I.G. is a machine for picking up mind pictures. It is compounded—I am speaking quite roughly—of ores ranging from uranium, kasolite, curite, and so on, to the black Australian davidite. All ores give out rays. If you like, wavelengths. By compounding certain such rays, after some years of careful experiment, I have—I hope and believe—found a wavelength that is not, frankly speaking, of tiie physical and three-dimensional, but enters into the economy of the mind itself. Possibly, even of the soul. It remains to be proved."

"You plug it in?" the Ace Commander said, in an unbelieving voice. "Or has the thing a battery inside it?"

"Neither the one nor the other. I've already explained that I.G. is—to put it simply—other dimensional. It is a matter, Ace, of vibrations, operating on their own inherent source of power. Dr. Walstab looked around him with suddenly dreaming eyes. "The creative power, gentlemen."

Again fell a little silence, broken only by the sibilant orchestration coming from the cosmar screen. It seemed to Professor Graut that a new and strange note had joined them—a note uncomfortably suggestive of urgency, even disaster, in some cosmic pocket of space, and he frowned and stared at the pulsing visual background.