"Yes, but not much. A factor of a hundred. You'll see in a minute that it's not enough to matter at this stage of the game."
Lee nodded and the physicist went on. "Well, anyway, you can check out our math in the report we'll issue later this month. But it turns out that the only possible energy source for this gadget is total annihilation of the gas particles into energy."
"Total annihilation? How?"
"That's a good question. I don't think we'll be able to answer it until we can start taking the damned machine apart." He flicked a new graph on the screen. "But, we can calculate how long the thing has been running, on the basis of the fuel it's used up, and the energy rates we've assumed...."
A slow wave of astonishment crept through the small room as, one by one, they grasped the significance of the curving lines on the graph.
"That's right," Richards said. "Unless our rough calculations are completely off the beam, which I doubt, the damned thing has been operating continuously for something like ten-to-the-fifth or ten-to-the-sixth Earth years."
A hundred thousand to a million years.
The rest of the meeting was quiet and orderly. They were all subdued by Richards' report. It's been running continuously for a million years, Lee kept thinking. A million years.
He listened automatically as the other department heads made their reports.
Ray Kurtzman was first. His report was actually a combined discussion of the work that his engineering group, and Dr. Kulaki's electronics people, had been jointly undertaking. They had tried to determine (for the nth time) just what sort of power was being beamed by the antennas atop the machine's towers. No luck. The machinery was using power, the antennas were broadcasting something, but whatever it was could not be detected by any instrument the Kurtzman and Kulaki had applied to the problem.