CHAPTER 5
THE BUILDING OF THE TIME-CAR
It is not my intention to relate here the details of the work that occupied our attention in the following weeks. It has been dealt with at length in two technical treatises by Lantin and myself. The theoretical side of our work has been very fully discussed in those two books, but the concrete details are purposely slurred over. The most valuable part of our achievement, the time-wave itself, is hardly mentioned in them.
There is a reason for this, and that reason is the firm intention of Dr. Lantin and myself not to impart any information that would enable anyone to duplicate our own experiment. Thus it is of necessity that parts of this present record are vague and indefinite.
I may say, though, unquestionably, that without the notes that were left us by Cannell, we could never have achieved the success we did achieve. Those notes, brief and unsatisfactory as they were, were yet enough to set our feet on the right path, in our quest of the time-traveling secret. To us, then, the problem was one of accelerating electronic activity, and all our experiments were directed toward that goal.
Fortunately, Lantin had virtually a free hand at the Foundation, and we were able to use the matchless resources of its great laboratories to further our quest. Working constantly together and maintaining complete secrecy regarding the object of our experiments, we sought for some force capable of controlling the movement and speed of electrons, at will.
The weeks dragged by, and we seemed no nearer success than ever. And at the Foundation, some curiosity was being evinced regarding our work, which ill-fitted with our desires. We had made trial of every form of vibration, it seemed, and all without success, for none affected the electronic movement in the way we wished. In the end, it was by a combination of electro-magnetic waves and light rays that we finally achieved success.
I say "we," but it was Lantin's triumph. He had the inspiration to combine high-frequency Hertzian vibrations and light-rays, merging the two dissimilar vibrations into a single wave, which we called "the time wave" and which had power to affect the very electronic structure of matter, all electronic movement within its radius being stimulated and accelerated by it. And with it, we proved the correctness of Cannell's theory, for when we turned the wave upon small objects on the laboratory table, they vanished, reappearing a few seconds later, having been driven into the future for those few seconds by the force of the time-wave.
By reversing the action of the wave, the electronic movement was reversed also, and thus the basis of our needs was found and we had a force that could sweep all things in its radius into past or future at will. Then it was that Lantin began to speak of a car, a car containing a time-wave projector powerful enough to convey the car and all its occupants into past or future. It was vitally necessary, he thought, that such a car should be able to move in space, as well as time, and to acquire this power we had recourse to a discovery accidentally made in the course of our experiments.
In our efforts to change the movement of electrons, we had found that when a stream of them was shot out in a concentrated ray, in any one direction, it produced an invisible but powerful repulsion. It was on this fact that Lantin relied to move our car in space, directing electron-streams toward the ground to raise and hold us in space, and directing other rays obliquely down toward earth, to move the car from side to side in any direction.