Pete watched it with his jaw sagging until his head began to spin. "No wires?"
"Strictly no wires," said Charlie glumly. "No nothing." He closed the box with a click. "This is one of their children's toys, and theoretically, it can't work. Among other things, it takes null-gravity to operate."
Pete sat down, rubbing his chin. "Yes," he said. "I'm beginning to see. They're teaching you this?"
Tommy said, "They're trying to. He's been working for weeks with their top mathematicians, him and a dozen others. How many computers have you burned out, Charlie?"
"Four. There's a differential factor, and we can't spot it. They have the equations, all right. It's a matter of translating them into constants that make sense. But we haven't cracked the differential."
"And if you do, then what?"
Charlie took a deep breath. "We'll have inter-dimensional control, a practical, utilizable transmatter. We'll have null-gravity, which means the greatest advance in power utilization since fire was discovered. It might give us the opening to a concept of time travel that makes some kind of sense. And power! If there's an energy differential of any magnitude—" He shook his head sadly.
"We'll also know the time-differential," said Tommy hopefully, "and how long the Grdznth gestation period will be."
"It's a fair exchange," said Charlie. "We keep them until the girls have their babies. They teach us the ABC's of space, mass and dimension."
Pete nodded. "That is, if you can make the people put up with them for another six months or so."