"But how about visuals?" Haynes was still worrying, and to good purpose.
"Well, we have a black coating now that is ninety-nine percent absorptive, and I don't need ports or windows. At that, though, one percent reflection would be enough to give me away at a critical time. How'd it be to put a couple of the boys on that job? Have them put a decimal point after the ninety-nine and see how many nines they can tack on behind it?"
"That's a thought, Kinnison, and they have lots of time to work on it while the engineers are trying to fill your specifications as to a speedster. But you're right, dead right, in everything you have said. We—or rather, you—have got to out-think them; and it certainly is up to us to do everything that can be done to build the apparatus to put your thoughts into practice. And it is not at some vague time in the future that Boskone is going to start thinking seriously about you and what you have done. It is now; or even more probably, a week or so ago. In fact, if there were any way of learning the truth, I think we should find that they have begun acting already, instead of waiting until you abate the nuisance which is Prellin, the Kalonian. But you haven't said a word yet about the really big job you have in mind."
"I've been putting that off until the last." The Gray Lensman's voice held obscure puzzlement. "The fact is that I simply can't get a tooth into it—can't get a grip in it anywhere. I don't know enough about math or physics. Everything comes out negative for me; not only inertia, but also force, velocity, and even mass itself. Final results always contain an 'i', too, the square root of minus one. I can't get rid of it, and I don't see how it can be built into any kind of apparatus. It may not be workable at all, but before I give up the idea I would like to call a conference, if it's QX with you and the Council."
"Certainly it is QX with us. You're forgetting again, aren't you, that you're a Gray Lensman?" Haynes' voice held no reproof, he was positively beaming with a super-fatherly pride.
"Not exactly." Kinnison blushed, almost squirmed. "I'm just too much of a cub to be sticking my neck out so far, that's all. The idea may be—probably is—wilder than a Radeligian cateagle. The only kind of a conference that could even begin to handle it would cost a young fortune, and I don't want to spend that much money on my own responsibility."
"To date your ideas have worked out well enough so that the Council is backing you one hundred percent," the older man said, dryly. "Expense is no object." Then, his voice changing markedly, "Kim, have you any idea at all of the financial resources of the Patrol?"
"Very little, sir, if any, I'm afraid," Kinnison confessed.
"Here on Tellus alone we have an expendible reserve of over ten thousand million credits. With the restriction of government to its proper sphere and its concentration into our organization, resulting in the liberation of man-power into wealth-producing enterprise, and especially with the enormous growth of inter-world commerce, world-income increased to such a point that taxation could be reduced to a minimum; and the lower the taxes the more flourishing business became and the greater the income.