II
"Very well," said Halsey quietly. "But first I suppose I ought to explain just a little about the basic idea under this whole proposition. You see that table there—we regard it as motionless. As a matter of fact, it is full of nothing but motion, so tremendously rapid that we are unconscious of it. That wall yonder is nothing but a continuous series of vibrations, of inconceivable rapidity. This floor is full of force, of energy. It's all around us—energy, force, motion.
"In your studies in physics, gentlemen, you learned that heat and motion are convertible. And you learned about the resultant of power—which always, so far as any accepted law of physics goes, is in ratio to the distance through which applied.
"Now, what I've done," said Halsey—John Rawn frowned and coughed heavily, but no one noticed him, and Halsey himself was unconscious of using the first personal pronoun—"is just to cut off all need of considering the distance through which force is applied. Now, I don't know whether I can make it entirely plain to you, except by physical demonstration, but what I've done here is to carry further the idea of wireless telegraphy. We have here, to use an understandable figure of speech, a receiver which is the equivalent of a sounding-board—a sounding-board in tune to the vibrations of the second or free current of electricity.
"Gentlemen, our idea was, in terms, that of harnessing up molecular activity. If we have done that, we have, of course, tapped the one exhaustless reservoir of power."
III
The president of the railway had grown yet paler; but he nodded wisely, and Halsey went on:
"There isn't any miracle in science that ought to cause us any wonder. It took science a long time to learn that heat and motion are interchangeable. I strike a cold piece of iron with a moving hammer, and the iron gets hot. It was cold before, and there hasn't been any fire near it. That's just as wonderful a thing—although we all accept it without question—as all that I've got here on the table before you. If I can stop some of the free energy that is vibrating all around us, I'm going to get either motion or heat out of it, and that's simple. We have gone far enough to know that this little receiver here, gentlemen, will arrest the free current of electricity, force, energy, whatever you care to call it, that's in the air and which can be multiplied and transmitted through the air. Why and how it does that, I can't just tell, myself. No one has ever been able to explain everything about the magnetic needle, but we use it just the same. We don't so much care what it is if we can use it."
"Not a damned bit!" growled the G.T.M. "But can we? Why don't you get busy with that fan?"
Halsey rose and went over to the electric fan and snipped off a length of the wire, so that the fan stood free and unattached on its shelf. The loose wire he now busied himself in attaching to the fan and in turn to the little model on the table.