Dorothy simply whistled—a long, low whistle highly eloquent of incredulity.
"Maintenance of temperature? Time? Power? Control?" Crane, the imperturbable, picked out unerringly the four key factors of the stupendous feat.
"Your first three objections can be taken care of easily enough," Seaton replied positively. "No loss of temperature is possible through a zone of force—our own discovery. We can stop time with a stasis—we learned that from watching those four-dimensional folks work. The power of cosmic radiation is practically infinite and eternal—we learned how to use that from the pure intellectuals. Control is the sticker, since it calls for computations and calculations at present impossible; but I believe that when we get our mechanical brain done, it will be able to work out even such a problem as that."
"What d'you mean, mechanical brain?" demanded Dorothy.
"The thing that is going to run our sixth-order projector," Seaton explained. "You see, it'll be altogether too big and too complicated to be controlled manually, and thought—human thought, at least—is on one band of the sixth order. Therefore the logical thing to do is to build an artificial brain capable of thinking on all bands of the order instead of only one, to handle the whole projector. See?"
"No," declared Dorothy promptly, "but maybe I will, though, when I see it work. What's next on the program?"
"Well, it's going to be quite a job to build that brain and we'd better be getting at it, since without it there'll be no Skylark Four—"
"Dick, I object!" Dorothy protested vigorously. "The Skylark of Space was a nice name—"
"Sure, you'd think so, since you named her yourself," interrupted Seaton in turn, with his disarming grin.
"Keep still a minute, Dickie, and let me finish. Skylark Two was pretty bad, but I stood it; and by gritting my teeth all out of shape I did manage to keep from squawking about Skylark Three, but I certainly am not going to stand for Skylark Four. Why, just think of giving a name like that to such a wonderful thing as she is going to be—as different as can be from anything that has ever been dreamed of before—just as though she were going to be simply one more of a long series of cup-challenging motor boats or something! Why, it's—it's just too perfectly idiotic for words!"