Time after time some essential entity, his dignity outraged and his touchy ego infuriated by some real or fancied insult, stalked off in high dudgeon to return to his own planet; only to be coaxed or bullied, or even mentally man-handled by Kinnison or Worsel, or both, into returning to his task.
Nor were those insults all, or even mostly, imaginary. Quarreling and bickering were incessant, violent flare-ups and passionate scenes of denunciation and vituperation were of almost hourly occurrence. Each of those minds had been accustomed to world-wide adulation, to the unquestioned acceptance as gospel of his every idea or pronouncement, and to have to submit his work to the scrutiny and to the unwor-shipful criticisms of lesser minds—actually to have to give way, at times, to those inferior mentalities—was a situation quite definitely intolerable.
But at length most of them began to work together, “as they appreciated the fact that the problem before them was one which none of them singly had been able even partially to solve; and Kinnison let the others, the most fanatically non-cooperative, go home. Then progress began—and none too soon. The Gray Lensman had lost twenty five pounds in weight, and even the iron-thewed Worsel was a wreck. He could not fly, he declared, because his wings buckled in the middle; he could not crawl, because his belly-plates clashed against his back-bone!
And finally the thing was done; reduced to a set of equations which could be written upon a single sheet of paper. It is true that those equations would have been meaningless to almost anyone then alive, since they were based upon a system of mathematics which had been brought into existence at that very meeting, but Kinnison had taken care of that.
No Medonian had been allowed in the Conference—the admittance of one to membership would have caused a massed exodus of the high-strung, temperamental maniacs working so furiously there—but the Tellurian Lensman had had recorded every act, almost every thought, of every one of those geniuses. Those records had been studied for weeks, not only by Wise of Medon and his staff, but also by a corps of the less brilliant, but infinitely better balanced scientists of the Patrol proper.
“Now you fellows can really get to work.” Kinnison heaved a sigh of profound relief as the last member of the Conference figuratively shook the dust of Medon off his robe as he departed homeward. “I’m going to sleep for a week. Call me, will you, when you get the model done?”
This was sheerest exaggeration, of course, for nothing could have kept the Lensman from watching the construction of that first apparatus. He watched the erection of a spherical shell of loosely latticed truss-work some twenty feet in diameter. He watched the installation, at its six cardinal points, of atomic exciters, each capable of transforming ten thousand pounds per hour of substance into pure energy. He knew that those exciters were driving their intake screens at a ratio of at least twenty thousand to one; that energy equivalent to the annihilation of at least six hundred thousand tons per hour of material was being hurled into the center of that web from the six small mechanisms which were in fact super-Bergenholms. Nor is that word adequate to describe them; their fabrication would have been utterly impossible without Medonian conductors and insulation.
He watched the construction of a conveyor and a chute, and looked on intently while a hundred thousand tons of refuse—rocks, sand, concrete, scrap iron, loose metal, debris of all kinds—were dropped into that innocuous-appearing sphere, only to vanish as though they had never existed.
“But we ought to be able to see it by this time, I should think!” Kinnison protested once.
“Not yet, Kim,” Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke informed him. “Just forming the vortex—microscopic yet. I haven’t the faintest idea of what is going in there; but, man, dear man, am I glad I’m here to help make it go on!”
“But when?” demanded the Lensman. “How soon will you know whether it’s going to work or not? I’ve got to do a flit.”
“You can flit any time—now, if you like,” the technician told him, brutally. “We don’t need you any more—you’ve done your bit. It’s working now. If it wasn’t, do you think we could pack all that stuff into that little space? We’ll have it done long before you’ll need it”
“But I want to see it work, you big lug!” Kinnison retorted, [only half playfully.
“Come back in three-four days—maybe a week; but don’t expect to see anything but a hole.”
“That’s exactly what I want to see, a hole in space,” and that was precisely what, a few days later, the Lensman did see.
The spherical framework was unchanged, the machines were still carrying easily their incredible working load. Material—any and all kinds of stuff—was still disappearing; instantaneously, invisibly, quietly, with no flash or fury to mark its passing.
But at the center of that massive sphere there now hung poised a . . . a something. Or was it a nothing? Mathematically, it was a sphere, or rather a negasphere, about the size of a baseball; but the eye, while it could see something, could not perceive it analytically. Nor could the mind envision it in three dimensions, for it was not essentially three-dimensional in nature. Light sank into the thing, whatever it was, and vanished. The peering eye could see nothing whatever of shape or of texture; the mind behind the eye reeled away before infinite vistas of nothingness.
Kinnison hurled his extra-sensory perception into it and jerked back, almost stunned. It was neither darkness nor blackness, he decided, after he recovered enough poise to think coherently. It was worse than that—worse than anything imaginable—an infinitely vast and yet non-existent realm of the total absence of everything whatever . . . ABSOLUTE NEGATION!
“That’s it, I guess,” the Lensman said then. “Might as well stop feeding it now.”
“We would have to stop soon, in any case,” Wise replied, “for our available waste material is becoming scarce. It will take the substance of a fairly large planet to produce that which you require. You have, perhaps, a planet in mind which is to be used for the purpose?”
“Better than that I have in mind the material of just such a planet, but already broken up into sizes convenient for handling.”
“Oh, the asteroid belt!” Thorndyke exclaimed. “Fine! Kill two birds with one stone, huh?
Build this thing and at the same time clear out the menaces to inert interplanetary navigation?
But how about the miners?”
“All covered. The ones actually in development will be let alone. They’re not menaces, anyway, as they all have broadcasters. The tramp miners we send—at Patrol expense and grubstake—to some other system to do their mining. But there’s one more point before we flit.
Are you sure you can shift to the second stage without an accident?”
“Positive. Build another one around it, mount new Bergs, exciters, and screens on it, and let this one, machines and all, go in to feed the kitty—whatever it is.”
“QX. Let’s go, fellows!”
Two huge Tellurian freighters were at hand; and, holding the small framework between them in a net of tractors and pressors, they set off blithely toward Sol. They took a couple of hours for the journey—there was no hurry, and in the handling of this particular freight caution was decidedly of the essence.
Arrived at destination, the crews tackled with zest and zeal this new game. Tractors lashed out, seizing chunks of iron . . .
“Pick out the little ones, men,” cautioned Kinnison. “Nothing over about ten feet in section-dimension will go into this frame. Better wait for the second frame before you try to handle the big ones.”
“We can cut ‘em up,” Thorndyke suggested. “What’ve we got these shear-planes for?”
“QX if you like. Just so you keep the kitty fed.”
“We’ll feed her!” and the game went on.
Chunks of debris—some rock, but mostly solid meteoric nickel-iron—shot toward the vessels and the ravening sphere, becoming inertialess as they entered a wide-flung zone. Pressors seized them avidly, pushing them through the interstices of the framework, holding them against the voracious screen. As they touched the screen they disappeared; no matter how fast they were driven the screen ate them away, silently and unspectacularly, as fast as they could be thrown against it. A weird spectacle indeed, to see a jagged fragment of solid iron, having a mass of thousands of tons, drive against that screen and disappear! For it vanished, utterly, along a geometrically perfect spherical surface. From the opposite side the eye could see the mirror sheen of the metal at the surface of disintegration; it was as though the material were being shoved out of our familiar three-dimensional space into another universe—which, as a matter of cold fact, may have been the case.
For not even the men who were doing the work made any pretense of understanding what was happening to that iron. Indeed, the only entities who did have any comprehension of the phenomenon—the forty-odd geniuses whose mathematical wizardry had made it possible—thought of it and discussed it, not in the limited, three-dimensional symbols of every- day existence, but only in the language of high mathematics; a language in which few indeed are able really and readily to think.